A sunny start to the month
A sunny start to the month, hopefully the bramble and other food plants will begin to grow again soon. The recent snow has killed off a lot of the bramble in my area and all the little stick insects are hatching out at once. I have quite a few 'fat' Hissing cockroaches so I expect to have babies soon. It amazes me that they are kept warm all year round, I have lights on during the day and yet they only seem to produce young in the Spring. I have sold the last of the Tok-Tokkie beetles and sure enough there are larvae of various sizes in the substrate. They are similar to mealworms, it would be good to see them complete their lifecycle as I know very little about them. I bought in several species of millipedes this week, most have been captive bred but some are a little small to offer for sale at the moment so I will probably hold onto them until they have grown a bit. I have also bought in a few new spiders.
Work has again been very busy, I do feel like I live my life on a treadmill that never stops. It is not just work, there have been quite a few problems with my family and friends over the last few weeks. Mostly things that I cannot really put in my blog! Hopefully they will settle down soon, hubby says I take on too much but what can I say, I have a lot of people in my life as well as all the animals. I put a note on my website last Friday because I was inundated with emails and many of them were impossible to answer quickly. It is so much easier when people ring, I can talk much faster than I can type and I can often carry on a phone conversation when I am seeing to the animals out in the bug house. This is basically what I put but my hubby thought it looked 'stroppy' so I took it off. I didn't mean it to be stroppy but I don't like to ignore people. I'm not talking about reasonable requests for information, sizes of spiders etc. I'm talking about "how do I get into breeding spiders", "my child would like to keep bugs, which one should he start with", I bought a tarantula from another supplier and I think it's sick, what do you think?" etc. Anyway it did serve its purpose as I have had lots of people call this week and it does indeed make life easier. Most of the time the people who apologise for disturbing me are the very people that I do want to hear from! I certainly don't want to put anyone off buying from me. It is so hard to be diplomatic when writing things, it is so much easier to convey genuine emotion in a conversation. I don't regret my decision to call a halt to people visiting my bug house, it was too much pressure. I tried several times to write some polite points about calling on me but it never read the right way. Ages ago I asked customers for their opinions on how I could convey my message about visitors and several people came back to me with "just put no time wasters". It is a strange thing working from home and of course it does impact on the whole family. At the present time our entire dining room has been taken over by cardboard boxes. They finally arrived this week but goodness knows where I am going to put them all. I had to buy in bulk, to keep the price down but I think I now have enough to keep me going for about six months worth of orders. I am often asked why I don't sell more equipment but the simple answer is that I live in a bungalow and have nowhere to store it!
I have just had a most interesting email appear from a friend and fellow bug person. He has sent me a link to http://urlspy.co.uk/www.virginiacheeseman.co.uk. This site appears to say that my business is worth a fortune! If that's the case they or anyone else can have it, they can take my name too (I'm sure I could come up with a far nicer one). I'm away dreaming now, holidays, relaxation in the sun, paying someone to do the housework, garden etc.- bliss. However on a more serious note and something that I have often thought about is advertising. I do get a large number of hits per month and surely there must be a way of making money from advertising on my website. The trouble is I have no idea where to start and neither does anyone else that I have spoken to. Does anyone reading this have any ideas? I would be very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction. I like the bit that says 'value per visitor 6p', that's more like it!
Well I am sitting here surrounded by a pile of paperwork so I had better get a move on and stop dreaming.