Out most of yesterday

Out most of yesterday so lots to catch up on today. It’s been another busy week, lots of creatures going out, thankfully making room for more animals to fill their empty cages. Spring officially starts tomorrow and everything seems to be in an amorous state. My two male Corn snakes are constantly thrashing around their vivarium but I’m not letting them near my females. It was lovely to have beautiful baby snakes but I had a nightmare trying to find homes, nobody wanted them, I’m definitely sticking with the bugs!

I bought some new plastic boxes from Wilko this week and now I just need the time to sort them out. They are longer, deeper boxes and much easier to manoeuvre. I bought one last year and it just sat on my office shelf unused for months. I recently rediscovered it, made some holes in the lid and set up a colony of Dubia cockroaches. The cockroaches are doing well and the box sits nicely on my shelving, it is a much better shape, smaller and therefore lighter. There is not a lot of space in my bug room and I often find the large, heavy boxes difficult to lift off of the shelves. The millipede and cockroach boxes can be very heavy indeed as they are full of soil and rotten wood. I bought another four (all with purple lids of course, my favourite colour), I will try and get them filled this weekend, probably with millipedes and perhaps some of my baby scorpions (their boxes too are full of heavy soil and wood).

I haven’t had much time for social media this week but when I glanced at my weekly stats for Facebook it made me laugh. My replies were way down (I think the message about contacting me via my website rather than Facebook is paying dividends), the time I take to reply was down, my posts were down but the amount of “Likes” I got was up – great! I certainly don’t want to put people off liking my page and commenting on posts, I just want to stop people firing off never ending questions that are almost always answered on my site. I still prefer the ‘old fashioned’ method of picking up the phone and talking! Sadly, it seems to be a dying way of communicating. Yes, clearly I am indeed getting old–er.

I managed to upload a photo to the blog last week without any help! It wasn’t a great picture of my beautiful pair of Armoured crickets. I will try to get a better shot and post it on my Facebook page. They are truly amazing creatures. I have named them Bubble and Squeak, he squeaks and she is bubble shaped. It would be great if I could breed them, fingers crossed. I tried to photograph them on red sand last week, I thought it was artistic but it turned out to just be very messy. The sand stuck to the crickets and they ended up with a red glow. I tried cleaning them with a child’s paint brush but it didn’t work so I tried washing them but then small droplets of water were visible in the photo so I gave up! Hopefully I will be blessed with more patience this weekend, unlikely though, my hubby is always saying how impatient I am (I tell him that I don’t have the time to be patient).

Once again my brilliant, smart and patient (he is so patient with me) web guy has been working on my website. I gave him a long list of improvements that I wanted to see and he went away to sort it (if I ever win that lottery I will reward him with more than praise and the small amount that he charges). I am still testing it but we think the tarantula special offers are finally sorted. This has been a constant issue since the site was upgraded a good couple of years ago now. It left me unable to discount a particular size of tarantula, I could only discount the species and for that reason I had to set up a separate ‘tarantula special offers’ page and this meant that sometimes the same spider was listed at two different prices on different pages of the website. Nobody ever complained but I felt very awkward if their order went through at the higher price and I did refund the difference if I spotted it. My guy has had to work hard to find a solution to the problem. Obviously if a site is set up selling clothing then it doesn’t matter what size the item is but with a live tarantula the larger sizes cost me considerably more money, time or quite often both and I generally need to charge more for them.

I do seem to be rambling on and talking of rambling I still need to walk Teddi, it is looking like rain out there. I just hope the Easter weekend is warm and sunny. My hubby’s birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year and we are planning a day out at a country fair. It is out in the open so I’m not going if it rains, think we might need a plan B just in case. No blog next week as it is Good Friday and due to the two Bank Holidays I can only post orders on Monday and Tuesday so please get your orders in quickly to avoid disappointment and waiting a week.

Photo this week is of a beautiful Haitian Brown tarantula - they just happen to be on special offer (hint hint)

Happy Easter Everyone