Well, I guess the problem is that the sale was way more successful than I had imagined it would be. I am sending out shipments as quickly as I can as soon as the animals have hatched to fill the orders. I am trying to go in chronological order, but in some cases, the earlier orders are tied up awaiting an animal or two. So I do fill some of the later orders that are ready to go.
But I can only pack so many boxes per day. I have already sent out a good number of orders last week, and have a bunch of them scheduled for Monday and Tuesday of next week. The Daytona Beach Expo is 8/16 - 8/17, so I have that to contend with as well. So I am also having to set up snakes and feed them all while this is going on. Sometime between now and next Friday I need to sex and label all of the animals I am intending to take to the show.
Bear in mind that with every order going out the door for that sale I ran, I have to search through the egg hatching containers to find the animals I am looking for, then sex them, put them in a deli cup and then label them. This is VERY time consuming.
I had wanted to make sure the animals have had their first shed before shipping them, but in some cases this just is not possible to do and keep the flow of animals going out at a reasonable pace.
So the game plan for next week is that I have 6 shipments scheduled to go out on Monday, and 8 on Tuesday. Several of these are rather large orders (for instance, one order on Monday will take 5 boxes!), which is why I had to keep the number of orders down. Wednesday and Thursday I will be packing up for Expo, and setup is on Friday. If I can squeeze the time in, I will try to arrange for resumed shipments the following Monday, but since we will not be getting back until late on Sunday, this may be pushing it a bit. Things are in enough chaos as it is getting back from a show without having to scramble to pack boxes the same time.
This past week I sent out 16 orders.
So to answer your question, Wes, in 99 percent of the time, the snakes were not even offered food. But in the orders going out this week, there were a few animals that I pulled that had already fed, simply because I needed them to fulfull the orders. I still have plenty of clutches that have not even begun to hatch out yet as well as LOTS of them in various stages of being between pipping and waiting to either be sent off or set up here.
I do not have a problem sending out animals that have taken a meal or two if that is what is needed to fill the orders. ALL of the orders SHOULD be shipped by the end of August.
Of course there is always the problem of Murphy's Law kicking me in the teeth as well that I have to contend with. I have a large number of orders awaiting Hypo Blood Reds. Yesterday I pulled down a clutch of 20 some babies that were the result of Hypo Blood Red being bred to a Blood Red het for Hypo. Not a danged one of them is a Hypo Blood Red! All are Blood Reds, of course, but this was rather disappointing. So all of those orders I had thought I could fill next week are still waiting on other clutches to hatch out. And there is not a danged thing I can do about it.
I have had several instances where my luck with the results has been disappointing, putting it mildly. Playing with the charts and predictor programs is fun and all, but being thrust into the reality of it can really open your eyes up. Sometimes it can be a sharp poke in the eye as well.
This is why I work with the numbers that I do. You CANNOT rely on luck to pull you through.
Does that answer your question?
