Hi Luna Roaches Tribe! I hope you're enjoying your summer to the fullest and get to spend some quality time at the beach or outdoors. Summers are hard on me. I am not a Summer person. I suffer from "polymorphic light eruption" also known as Sun allergy and more than 10 minutes outside results in week-long itchy rashes for me. Ironic really, given that I've chosen Florida to spend my life! Chris however lives for this weather. I am still convinced that he was a Lizard in another Life because, why else would you enjoy 100F and freeze when it's 75F inside? LOL
We post a lot about our everyday life here at Luna Roaches but Chris's daily life differs vastly from mine. I get up, go into my office, make sure all of the orders we need to ship that day are in the right boxes with bags and egg crates, and then it's all Chris while I work at my other full-time job as Process Operations Analyst. I deal with the day-to-day front-end operations at Luna Roaches. But let's talk about Chris!
Chris gets up in the morning with an amazingly sunny attitude! He is about as much of a morning person as a human being is capable of being. He does all of his normal stuff, comes into my office, and picks up the boxes for the orders that need to go out. From there it's much of a mystery until everything magically arrives in my office!
Just kidding! When Chris arrives at the Barn, its total silence. That is until he turns on the lights and at this point, if you close your eyes really hard, you can imagine you're somewhere in the perfect vacation spot near a waterfall from the moving sounds of the roaches that suddenly erupts. He sets up the barn which consists of getting organized, putting the bins in place, and getting ready to shake out and count since he breaks down everything daily to clean it. He goes through some random bins at this point to spot check for any invaders, checks random roaches, and simply to say Good Morning ;)
He puts on some groovy tunes, grabs a bin, and starts separating the roaches from the frazz. He cleans them, wipes the bins on the inside to make sure the roaches can't climb out, sterilizes the egg crates, and inspects some roaches from that bin under the microscope to assure they are healthy, and that there are no mites or other possible issues. From there on its work work work: Separating by size, shaking them out, hand counting, and marking the bin as used so we can be aware during his rotation of the barn when that bin was last used. This repeats until he fills all of the orders for that day. Its marking boxes (if you have ever seen the little handwritten numbers on your shipping boxes on the flap, that is where Chris marks what is/goes in the box), bagging them up, cleaning up the barn, and turning on the roombas. He brings the boxes back to me in my office where I make it all look pretty and close them up. At that point, Chris heads to the Post office to drop them off and stays for a quick chat with the Post employees that he's become friends with. Upon his return, he preps food if it's food day or water if it's water day for 260 some bins of roaches. In short, we have LONG days! They get even longer when we have to split bins or thoroughly clean the barns.
And there you have it, a day in the life of Chris! :)
Cheers,
Mel & Chris
Nice to see the rundown of Chris' day, and sorry you have to deal with a sun allergy of all things here in Florida, Mel! I have a question based on your post. As a relatively new keeper of a colony, I have not once cleaned the bin. I thought the babies liked the frazz? How often should I clean it and put fresh stuff in? How often should I swap out egg cartons ?