Nearly Jobless (again...)

I've nearly come to the end of yet another contract. At this point I have about another 5 weeks left ahead of me before I am once again an unemployed bum. Although, technically, I won't be unemployed because I'm still casually employed doing stocktaking so I can start accepting shifts doing that again once my fulltime work has dried up. I would rather be working for National Parks than counting bottles of shampoo, but any employment is infinitely superior to homelessness. I even sort of enjoyed turning my brain off and robotically counting things when I was doing it last year.

I definitely won't miss the long drive to and from the caves when my contract finishes. I might miss spending the occasional quiet night in the secluded staff house at King Solomon Cave, though. I don't think I have blogged about staying at the staff house at King Sol yet. One reason for that is that when I am staying there I have no internet access. I also have no phone signal. That is both one of the best and one of the worst things about staying there - having nothing to distract you means you can have a nice early night, but after a couple of nights in seclusion I feel pretty out of the loop. The best thing about staying at the King Sol house is that it is only 2 min to work at King Sol and 10min to work at Marakoopa so I can have a nice relaxed morning and still be on time for work. Sometimes, though, the effort of packing and organising myself to stay there is more than its worth, so I haven't been staying there as often as I could be. The problem with staying there is that you have to take everything with you - food, water, bedding, work stuff, and something to keep you entertained. The kitchen is well stocked with cooking utensils and there is a bed and mattress to sleep on, but anything else you want you need to take with you. When I first started staying there it felt very isolated and creepy, but I'm getting used to it now and I usually quite enjoy my trips there.

The aforementioned King Sol House in its majestic surroundings.

What I am definitely going to miss most of all is the caves themselves. I'm going to miss being allowed to wander through them all the time, and I'm going to miss showing them to other people. I'm not going to miss some types of tourist, but 99.5% are lovely (sometimes 0.5% can really ruin your day) and I'm going to miss the exclamations when they enter King Solomon's Cave, or the spontaneous "Ooooh" you get when the lights go out and they see the glow worms, and the round of applause at the end of a tour that lets you know you've done your job well. I plan to really enjoy the next month or so at work and make the most of the time I have remaining to enjoy the caves in.

And then I intend to enjoy a little bit of unemployment, sleeping in, and slobbing around the house in my pjs ;)

Entally House

As well as my work at the caves, I have now taken on some shifts being the representative Parks employee working at Entally House. The work over at Entally is pretty boring as it is mostly being stationed at a desk, but I must admit that the surroundings are rather beautiful. For those that don't know, Entally House is a historic home built in 1819 (parts of it were anyway) with a lot of furnished rooms that you can wander through...

The Library

And a rather beautiful garden and greenhouse, currently containing a stunning display of begonias.

 There is also a rather lovely, but very naughty cat named Ginge. Ginge is allowed to ignore the "please do not sit on the antique furniture" signs and usually spends his days sleeping on one of the beds, but also sometimes tries to take his license a bit too far and has to be removed from his explorations of some of the furniture.

I think I'll probably quite enjoy spending a few days a week at Entally as long as I find ways to keep entertaining myself while being tethered to the phone and the front door. The best thing about it is that its less than 15min drive from home rather than the usual hour to the caves.

Tasmazia

Sorry its been quite a while since I blogged. I actually have a few different things I've been planning to blog about, but being full-time employed again I've found that I don't have as much free time.

Anyway, I'll be getting around to the rest of the blogging sometime (probably), but for now you can enjoy some photos from a recent excursion to Tasmazia. Mum, Dad, and I spent an enjoyable few hours playing around in the mazes and visiting the township of Lower Crackpot on Australia Day. It was a beautiful sunny day to be wandering around the mazes, and we all enjoyed it more than we expected. All 3 of us would quite happily go back, even with the $25 entry fee, and would all recommend it as a good place to spend an afternoon.

Enjoy some photos of Lower Crackpot and the mazes.

Mushrooms

 A few months ago I had an extremely unsuccessful attempt at growing mushrooms. It was quite disappointing as mushrooms are one of my favourite foods, and you all know that I love growing things. I had decided not to try the same kind of mushroom growing system again because it was quite expensive for an unsuccessful attempt. While I was shopping at a nursery in Hobart with a friend, however, I came across an entirely different sort of mushroom growing kit and after talking to the man that works there who guaranteed that mushrooms would grow, I decided to give it another go.

The kit came in a box like this:

 And inside the growing medium was covered in mushroom rhizome

 So I followed the instructions and after (im)patiently waiting the first baby mushroom finally appeared.

 Which grew into a full-sized portobello mushroom.

Which I then picked, cooked, and ate. I have to say, it was delicious! There are plenty of other baby mushrooms popping their heads up now, so I think that this experiment is going to prove quite successful.

Emma Employed

 I have successfully survived the training at Mole Creek Caves, and am now a fully fledged cave guide. I worked my first full solo shift today. I started taking tours jointly with the other newbie last week, did a couple of solo tours yesterday, and from today onwards I'm on the roster as just another member of the team and expected to be able to fulfill my job. So far, so good.

The team I'm working with all seem really lovely, and you honestly couldn't ask for a much better office. I mean, check out these photos (apologies for the extremely shoddy phone photos, but I can't play tourist when I'm the tour leader).

I think I'm going to enjoy working here for the next few months. My contract goes through until early May, so I've got a few months of work and steady income ahead of me which will be nice for a change. Its pretty exhausting working full time at the moment, but I think its starting to get easier now that I've got my head around most of the info that I'm supposed to know so that I can tell the tourists. It sure is nice not to be unemployed anymore, though :)

Platypus

Platypus' good side

One afternoon a few months ago I was lucky enough to spot a glimpse of a platypus in the river at Perth. Since then I have had many excursions to Perth hoping to see it again and hopefully get a photograph of it. Every time we've been there with our cameras armed and ready we haven't seen so much as a platypus shaped ripple. That is until the other day. I spent about an hour sitting beside the river, watching and waiting before I finally saw the platypus just before sunset. At first I was overjoyed to see it, but then I saw that the poor little thing had a huge skin lesion on one side of its face. Platypus in Tasmania have a fungal disease called mycormycosis spread by introduced frogs. I've read about the disease, but I didn't think it was as  widespread as it is, and I certainly didn't expect my platypus pal to have it. Its a horribly disfiguring disease and it is eventually fatal. I've decided not to upload the photos that actually show the lesion because they are quite depressing.

So I'm afraid that my story doesn't have a happy ending. I will have to continue to search for a healthy platypus to photograph.

Emma Underground

Almost two months ago, I applied for a position at the Mole Creek Karst National Park as a Cave Guide. I spoke to the recruiter on the phone the next day and later heard from my referee that they had also been contacted by the recruiter, but after that I heard nothing more about it. As over a month had passed, I thought that I must have missed out on the position and I was feeling more than a little downhearted. It turns out that I was right, I had missed out on the position, but last week another position came up and that one was offered to me. So, I start work on Monday.

Currently, I don't know all that much about caves, but I'm going to try to work on that over the next couple of days so that I feel a bit more prepared to start informing tourists about them. I have very little information on exactly what my duties are, which days I'll be working, or pretty much anything else about the job, but hopefully the blanks will be filled in for me on Monday. What I do know is that its a 4 month contract, so I'll hopefully be gainfully employed through the entire summer which takes a bit of the pressure off finding a more permanent source of income.

The other piece of information I have been given is that its a constant 9 degrees in the caves, despite whatever the weather is doing above ground. That seems like a pretty decent place to be spending the hot summer days to me :)

My new office

It intrigues me how people's attitudes towards jobs differs depending on their circumstances. When one of us unemployed bums that have been putting all our effort into trying to find work finally manages to land a job, we are over-the-moon extatic, but it usually only takes a month or two for the shinyness to wear off and we are just like everybody else, wishing we didn't have to go to work and longing for the weekend.  To an employement seeker, a job is like the Holy Grail - it is longed for and considered something to be fought for and prized if won. To most employed people, a job is just a necessary evil. Only a very select and lucky few people seem to have jobs that they enjoy after the novelty of being employed has worn off.