Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! This is my first blog of 2016, I do hope that everyone had a great Christmas and I for one am now looking forward to the spring (10 weeks and 2 days – but who’s counting). It has been a very mild winter so far but today we have frost and the temperature has dropped considerably, as you all know by now I hate the cold.
The bugs are all doing well, I have been sorting things out in the bug room over the festive break. I had a very good breeding year in 2015, I did especially well with scorpions and now have several species as juveniles. I have cleaned out and set up new colonies of many of my cockroach species. I will be gradually restocking in January as orders start to increase once Christmas is over. Honestly, I might as well give up in November and December, sales are always terrible but I still have to care for and maintain my menagerie. I am having a rethink on what to do next winter, a long holiday sounds good but I can’t afford it!
Much as I moan about technology, I certainly can’t live without it. This week we had a major power cut for the entire afternoon on Tuesday, thank goodness I had just finished packing all my parcels. Without power I had no computer, no lights and no phones (even my mobile is run through the wi-fi as the signal is weak here). I was extremely glad that I had sorted the orders and that the weather was so mild. In colder weather I would have been panicking about the heating in my bug room but I just closed the doors and everything was fine. Yesterday our broadband was switched over from Plusnet to BT, it was supposed to take 30 minutes but ended up being several hours, I was going nuts as I couldn’t access my customer records to process the orders that I had and I didn’t even have my Spotify music! I was so relieved when it finally came back to life late morning (of course it was hubby’s fault for organising the switch over on my first week back to work). We had to do something about our broadband, it is so slow and there are no plans to install fibre optic cables here in the foreseeable future. I went to the pub with a friend last night and the landlord assured me that we are not in the countryside, as a Londoner it certainly feels like it to me. When I lived next to Heathrow we didn’t have any power cuts and the broadband was super fast! Hopefully the switch will mean a faster connection. We even got a new Sky box this week (another essential in my life).
No New Year’s resolutions for me (they never last for more than a couple of weeks anyway) but I have decided to post orders on Tuesdays and Thursdays and give myself Monday to sort everything out from the weekend. Since my husband changed jobs and is off at the weekends it has become more and more difficult and antisocial for me to work every Sunday. To send out orders on a Monday I had no choice as the paperwork needed to be done and the animals needed sorting out in advance of posting. Time will tell if this works out ok, I am still concerned about not s