I hate this weather!

I hate this weather! Snow, ice and freezing temperatures have made this last week very difficult for everyone. It has been an absolute nightmare for my business. I continued to post out orders until yesterday, most orders have arrived ok but a few have been delayed and I cannot take the stress of it all. I aim to, and do my best to ensure that every animal that I send out arrives well and healthy but this weather is making things too risky. Royal Mail removed their 'next day delivery' guarantee on Wednesday and I may have to cease sending orders until they reinstate the guarantee. I really don't know at the moment, I am praying for better weather next week. It sounds like a good idea to just hang onto orders until the weather improves but that means more work for me as everything will pile up and I only have two weeks left to post before Christmas anyway. Oh woo is me!

On a more cheerful note, the bugs all seem happy tucked up in their warm log cabin. I was really excited to see that one of my Tail-less Whip scorpions is carrying around tiny babies and another two look very pregnant. I haven't bred these in years, I would love to get a colony going, they are fascinating creatures and very friendly, as arachnids go. I bought a number of pregnant females earlier this year but they all died within a week. It was a real tragedy, I think they had recently been imported and had become terribly dehydrated, it was very sad indeed. I am really chuffed to have babies at last. I also have baby Barking Birdeating spiders, they have just moulted into spiderlings and are running all around their tank, I re-housed them yesterday. I did a lot of re-housing and rearranging in the bug house yesterday as I couldn't pack and post as I generally do on a Thursday. I am hoping that people will make the effort to call and collect orders before Christmas. It is so much less stressful for me (except when people turn up ages late and don't bother to ring), it is always less stressful for the animals and there is no postage to pay.

Now that it is December I have started sending out Christmas cards. I have come across a small problem, my cards are quite big and don't always fit into some of the boxes that I use. Sorry if your card arrives a bit squashed, perhaps next year I will get proper folded cards, rather than printed post cards (but they were much more expensive).

I am always changing things around on the website, hopefully improving the site. I have on occasion had people confused by a message that they have seen after ordering. The message said that an item was 'out of stock', I think this message was only visible if the 'back' button was pressed after ordering but it is difficult for me to know as I cannot see it unless I actually order from my own website. My husband has changed the words so I hope it is now clear that the item has gone out of stock because the last one has been purchased. I think we put something along the lines of 'you have just purchased the last one'. Hopefully this will work because I have had a few people put through a second order assuming that the first had not gone through. For a larger business this is probably not a problem but as I often only have a couple of each spider, they go out of stock frequently. It is very important to me that everything on the site is actually in stock. I hate ordering from a website, only to find that half the things are not available. I never put anything on my website that I don't physically have in my possession. People promise allsorts but until it arrives here with me I never risk listing it.

Let's all hope the weather improves over the weekend, wrap up warm and take care. Hopefully my thermal vests will arrive today, believe me I need them!