Saturday 22 December 2007

Christmas time, Pet supplies and wine

Stress level today: 4 grey hairs

Its been a busy week even without Christmas rearing its glittery bonce. We're holding our breath for the sudden slump in sales as the last posting date goes whooshing by. So far people still seem keen on spending even though theres no hope of getting anything until after Christmas. I'm definately not one to stand in the way of peoples festive fiscal frivolity. We are having a sweep stake on the number of orders we will recieve on Christmas day. I'm going for an optomistic 2.
On the home front stress levels are definately rising despite frequent dampening down with alcoholic beverages. Several christmas presents have still not arrived despite being ordered a week and a half ago from a well known Brazillian river named website. I hope our service isn't that bad when we get that big! Oh well theres still Christmas Eve for them to arrive, be wrapped and distributed. It will give Karl something to do when the Post Office shuts.
If Christmas isn't stressfull enough I still haven't written the essay for my Post graduate diploma due in on the 6th January. The ignoring it and hope it will go away tactic so far hasn't worked but I have started carrying the thing around with me hoping that it will guilt me into action so some words may appear soon on a page near here!
Happier news - we've decided on a christmas present for our baby (www.ardentpets.co.uk). We are having our first big New Year sale starting on Christmas day so lots of new people can be introduced to the Ardent Pets experience. Come back next week to see how we get on!

Wednesday 19 December 2007

One small blog for me, One giant blog for mankind

This is my first ever blog so here it goes

Stress level today: 2 grey hairs

In February we took a big life changing decision and decided to set up our own internet petshop. My husband, Karl handed in his notice for his reasonably paid office job and started working from home (Well from our very small spare room to be exact). So it is left to me to be the main breadwinner with my not very well paid job as a veterinary nurse.So www.ArdentPets.co.uk was born. It looks very impressive considering it is just one man in a poky spare room on the edge of nuneaton. It was lots of fun to start with, I wrote some fantastically informative pet advice pages in the hope they may educate the world, I then woke up and wrote some nice articles on pet care in the hope that someone might read them before the information goes out of date. It was my job to source the products which I had great fun doing.Finding items from the everyday to the bizarre. Where else could you buy decoy herons and hamster harnesses with this level of service?Then the excitement waned and we realised what we hade done. I decided to ignore the potential to lose everything we have and set about helping Karl write the 500 plus descriptions for all the exciting pet items I had found.Ten months on our baby has grown impressively. It is doing well enough to support itself but not quite well enough to support its hard working mum and dad. I am starting a blog to cover the ups and downs of the next few months where we are either going to loose it all or have a fantastic website that will look after us when we are old and prematurely grey. Come back soon to find out how were getting on!