A new chapter in my life!
A new chapter in my life! You may have seen on my Facebook page that our wonderful daughter is now a mummy herself. It is all so exciting! Of course, I am already Nanna to Bob (my son’s son) and now I have another beautiful grandson called Milo. I will be pretty busy over the next few weeks in my new Mum/Nanna duties. I would never be able to go on holiday if it were not for Georgie looking after everything so it is only fair that I spend time looking after her now.
Thankfully Spring is just around the corner (almost - only 26 days to go). The garden is already coming to life with flowers and my pond is absolutely full of frogspawn. If you live near enough and would like some, you are very welcome. No, I won’t be posting it J. I just hate the cold, in my ideal world the temperature would never dip below 20c.
Everything in my bug room is doing well. I bought a crazy number of scorpions at the SEAS exhibition at the end of January, sadly all wild caught but hopefully I will be successful in breeding them! I’m so pleased that there seems to be a lot more interest in scorpions these days. I have always liked them but now others are liking them too. I think Tim Baxter has a lot to do with it, he is the scorpion man, very knowledgeable and always happy to share his knowledge with others. He is doing a great job of breeding many interesting species. I enjoy seeing him at bug shows to pick his brains.
My shelves are overflowing with tarantulas, so much so that I have decided to have a good look through them and sort out the “bed blockers” as I’ve decided to call them J. I spend a crazy amount of time feeding all my spiders each week and I would very much like to cut this down a bit. I will be gradually reducing the price of some tarantulas but not my best sellers. The nice, plodding spiders such as Brachypelmas and Grammostolas are very much in demand but even some of those are taking up too much space in their large Exo Terra vivariums. The biggest problem in my bug room is the lack of space! If I had a shop everyone would see how beautiful some of the less known species are but I think they just get overlooked on my website. I am always happy to send a photo, you just need to ask.
There is always something exciting happening in my bug room, only yesterday I discovered that one of my mated female tarantulas has an egg sac and every week, on feeding day I get excited looking at my scorpion collection. I must admit that I certainly haven’t yet mastered the art of being able to tell if a scorpion is pregnant or just overweight J and of course there is always the sort of excitement that I could do without! I was busy packing up orders this week when I realised that one of my Giant Vinegaroons had knocked it’s lid off during the night and was missing. Really not what I needed! I spent ages searching the floor and I was just in the middle of moving everything off of the floor when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. It was the twitching antennae of the Vinegaroon and she was sitting happily watching me, right next to where she had escaped. She clearly hadn’t gone very far and simply walked out into view. It didn’t occur to me to check the shelf properly as I was positive that she would go down to the floor – lesson learnt! No animals could escape the room as it is completely sealed but there are many, many places for creatures to hide and it is such a pain searching for them. The occasional cricket, hissing cockroach or millipede I can live with but my Vinegaroons are far too special to leave out. She is now in a new box with a clip-on lid J
Lastly, my master plan continues to go well. I have stopped selling live foods, it was way too time consuming, both keeping and packing them and I am looking at ways to further cut down on my workload. I looked up the meaning of streamling recently and I would say it completely sums up what I am trying to achieve “when you streamline something, you're simplifying it to make it more efficient or profitable” J I have been deliberating for months over delivery charges and decided that I really don’t want to charge more than £10, even though, especially in the colder months with heat packs, I am very often spending above that. I decided instead that I would increase the minimum spend set on my website from £20 to £25. I am often asked why I have a minimum spend and it is quite simply because there is only one of me and it takes ages to pack my precious bugs. I very, very rarely have any problems in the post, which is extremely important to me. Quite often, the lower value orders are the ones that take the most time to pack. I’m very happy with my decision that I made last year, to concentrate on arachnids (long lived, easy to pack) and cut down on fiddly bugs (fun but more time consuming and less profitable). I am currently looking at Assassin bugs, are they worth keeping, we will see …..