Animals everywhere!
Animals everywhere! I received lots of new bugs and spiders from various places this week, they are now listed on the website but I haven’t got all the photos sorted yet. Hopefully I will get it done today. I am staying in and have a huge list of things to be done. Only problem is that I’m not sure the day will be long enough!
I have some lovely new creatures, a few I am keeping for breeding like the Armoured Bush crickets. I have just the one pair and they are spectacular, the female is huge but I don’t really know much about breeding them. I think they may need special conditions like cool and warm periods, which isn’t likely to happen in my bug room. I will certainly take some photos of them today and hopefully get a picture on the blog. I must admit that I failed in my attempts to upload a photo to the blog last week so I may have to wait for my hubby to get in and sort it out for me. I am trying to get to grips with technology but it takes a while for me to get the hang of it. My brain has never been good at that sort of thing. There are still changes going on with my website. I don’t like the new special offers section, it shows a red special offer price but it doesn’t say ‘special offer’ or have the original price showing until you click on it. Hopefully my website guy will find time to sort it out for me. He has been incredibly busy, I’m sure he will look into it when he can. I also need him to sort out the dates on the tarantula special offers as I cannot set a time limit on the offers at the moment. When everything is sorted I intend to run some 24 hour ‘super cheap offers’ as I did some time ago. It was really popular but I need it to switch off automatically or I will get in a total muddle. Honestly I know I never have any spare time but things seem to have escalated recently due to continued family difficulties and I have less time than ever. It’s a good job I am such a manic person, I don’t like to be bored but a sit down once in a while would be good. I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to our trip to Cyprus next month.
It has been another busy week for sales which is super and I have a couple of people coming to collect their orders this weekend which is always good. The weather hasn’t been too bad, way too cold for me but in real terms it hasn’t been a cold winter in this area. Hopefully it will start warming up properly soon as spring approaches. My concern is that I may run out of heat packs for my parcels. I was counting them up yesterday and realised that I am really very low on them. I certainly don’t want to order more at this time of year. They are pretty expensive and I need to order a large amount due to the weight and high postal charges on them. Talking of postal charges – I assume that the Special Delivery charges will go up next month, it has already been announced that first and second class letters are going up. I have no intention of putting up my postal rates, I just hope the increases are small. Thankfully when the weather warms up and I no longer need to put a heat pack in each box, the postage will be considerably less for me. I wish I could be like Amazon and provide free delivery but I make nothing on the postage I charge and I would soon be bankrupt if I had to cover it.
I haven’t managed to add much care information to the website this week but I have been working on the tarantula pages and tidying things up. I have decided to once again put the sizing information on each and every tarantula species and the much need phrase “all spiders are unsexed unless stated”. This info is on the tarantula section but I will now put it back in the information for each species. Hopefully it will stop people asking me to send a female, I would if I could but sadly I can’t. I don’t sex them, can’t sex them so it is a 50/50 chance (unless it is a large specimen and I am always happy to give it my best guess).
Anyway I must get on with the ‘list’, it is extensive and whatever happens today I am going in the gym. I haven’t been in since Monday, that shows you how hard I have been working this week! I fed all my larger tarantulas yesterday and didn’t find one missing. You might think that’s a good thing but when I tell you I found a tarantula walking across my office floor one evening this week you will realise why I am perplexed. Where did it come from? I can only imagine it is one of my Cyprus Star tarantulas and is much smaller than the others due to spending the winter in my relatively cool office. It is a slightly different colour but looks similar in build, time will tell, for now I have put it in a box marked “no idea?”.