Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good Christmas. We had a very nice time at our son's house and even stayed over until Boxing day. A rare treat as I don't like to leave the animals (the dog came with us). All the bugs are doing well, I have certainly had more time to tend to them all and having them indoors this Christmas has made a huge difference. I can simply pop in and out of the bug room rather than finding appropriate shoes and jacket to traipse down to the bug house at the bottom of the garden. It has made me realise that I must stop both buying and holding onto so much stock. Although stocks seem low now (I was actively trying to cut down before Christmas) I actually feel that I have just about the right number of bugs and spiders to care for. I will be restocking in January but I think I need to take care as I often find myself overwhelmed by the daily needs of the animals and have little time for anything else. Obviously I get paid nothing for this time, I do need to sell them! The trouble is that whatever I have, people always want something else, that's just life. We will see how it goes. 

My world seems to revolve around taking care of animals (and people). I am once again looking after my nephew's cat and next month I will have my son's cat here as they are going on holiday. On the day after Boxing day I went to visit my nephew's family and found a real, live turkey standing outside someone's house. I knocked on the door but there was no answer, I knocked on the neighbours doors but nobody knew anything about the turkey. I later checked and the bird was still there, apparently trying to get into the garage. That evening the bird was perched on a fence beside the garage, looking very sorry for himself. I couldn't just leave him there (everyone else apparently could). I decided I would have to catch him and take him to Tiggywinkles wildlife centre. After a row with my daughter and husband my husband caved in and drove me round to where the turkey was. The home owners had now returned and seemed unaware of their guest. The guy was very sweet and said he'd like to help but he was a bit scared of the 'huge' bird. My hubby refused to get out of the car! The bird was still high up on the fence so I climbed on some bricks and tried to tempt him down. He seemed to want to climb on my shoulder but I couldn't have taken the weight. Eventually I dragged him off the fence and just about managed to stay on my feet. I then sat with a giant turkey on my lap as my hubby drove straight to Tiggywinkles. Somehow he thought it was up the motorway so we had a long detour to get there and really weren't talking when we arrived. I couldn't believe it when Tiggywinkles wouldn't take him as he wasn't a "wild animal". We then drove all the way home and I put him in the shed for the night. I rang everywhere I could think of the next day but nobody wanted him, except to eat!! I could go on forever but trying to cut things short we actually found that he was owned my daughter's friend's dad. He was collected from us on Saturday night. I was so relieved as he would have needed a very large, secure run and I seriously didn't want a pet turkey, however cute he was. I now have huge purple bruises on the tops of my legs (I did take photos but I will spare you) from having a monster sized chicken trampling all over me on the hour long car journey but at least I am assured he was an escaped pet and will not be eaten! 

My hubby bought me an iPad Air for Christmas, it's brilliant. I can now Google to my heart's content, wherever I am. I have learnt loads about turkeys, did you know that the red floppy bits on their heads are called snoods and they have a dangly bit of 'hair' on their fronts called a beard? I hope that I may be able to take more photos and actually do something with them on the iPad, they just seem to disappear into cyberspace on my desk computer. I may even get my Facebook sorted out (perhaps). 

Just before Christmas I ordered in some more heat packs for my parcels and now have 72 hour ones for foreign orders. I only had 40 hour ones before. The usual 30 hour packs are fine for the UK but I would rather use the longer lasting ones for outside the UK. I will need to charge extra for these as they are a lot more costly. Hopefully I will get the pricing sorted over the weekend. I thought that people would wait until the warmer weather before ordering goods to be sent abroad but I seem to have a steady flow of European orders so I thought the packs would be a good idea. I am always surprised and very pleased that almost all of my orders arrive in good condition even in the coldest weather. Clearly the parcels are with people and people don't like getting cold. 

Now that it is the new year, we can start looking forward to the Spring (must count how many days it is in my diary - or will that depress me?). I hate the cold and wet but at least the weather is still quite mild and there's no snow forecast here in Buckinghamshire. 

I went to tea at a friend's house a few days ago and found a really apt joke in my cracker:
What do you call just married spiders? Newly webs (well I liked it) 

Happy New Year - must get on, as you can imagine I have plenty of correspondence to catch up on today as it is my 'official' day back.