The cave, I find, is always more interesting in the spring. Mostly, with more run-off from melting snow and ice on the mountains and heavier, more persistent rains, the cave is a lot wetter - the dripstone is dripping, the flowstone is flowing, the stream bed is streaming, the rimstone dams are damming, and the sound of dripping, trickling water is everywhere.

     

     

     
While I was in snapping some of teh wetness, I also did several portraits of the last of the bats (the hibernating bat population being another thing that makes the cave more interesting in the early spring - and late fall). There are only a few pipstrelles left - the little browns have finished hibernating and the last of them left the cave for the summer a few days ago. Here are a couple of them:
 

Tags: nature studies, photo/graphic, speleological
humour: impressed

I've been a bit absent from here again, mostly due to the fact that the cave officially reopened yesterday. So Sean and I have both been kept busy shelving new inventory for the gift shop, replacing light bulbs in the cave, working on some new signage, getting the Panning for Gems sluice back in working order, mounting new tags for the artifacts, cleaning picnic tables, restocking fish food, making sure the bats haven't come down with "white nose syndrome", working on new school programs, etc.

Things should be slowing down slightly next week in terms of prep work, though we have to contend with a group of Girl Scouts tomorrow morning. Still, it's marginally more interesting than market research, I suppose...

Tags: social and personal, speleological
humour: busy

Okay, I suppose it's finally about time to explain the lengthy hiatus. Or start explaining it, anyway. The only problem is where to begin. Probably with where I am.

I find myself in my (deceased) parents' rather unwieldy house in the middle of Pennsylvania, living with Sean, and running a cave. Yeah, a cave.

How I got here? Well. Last December, I got an email from my brother letting me know that a cousin-once-removed had submitted a proposal for running the family business. All right, a bit about that first. In 1928, my grandfather acquired a cavern which he opened as a show cave on June 15, 1929 - a few months before the stock market crash. The business survived the Great Depression (barely) and has been in the family since, mostly being operated by my father and grandfather.

On my grandfather's death, the property was left to my father and my aunt and the business to my father. On his death, the business was left to my brother, my sister, and I - none of whom were all that interested in operating it. So, for the first couple of years, it was being run by my nephew. While he enjoyed it, he didn't really feel he had the aptitude for being a small business owner and, having got his teaching certification and so on, decided to try running the business (which is pretty seasonal anyway) while teaching. Which didn't work out.

So, last year, my brother and sister-in-law, assisted by my sister and brother-in-law, tried running the business from a distance, hiring a couple of part-time managers and so on. This was relatively okay, but with no on-site administration or oversight, the business was languishing. That was when the proposal from the cousin-once-removed (my aunt's grandson) arrived. Sadly, the proposal didn't quite live up to its title: it was more a list of demands for coming in and bailing the business out - and was grossly unrealistic (he was, for example, looking for more in his personal salary than was paid to the entire staff the previous year). At the same time, my siblings were a bit burnt out with trying to run the thing long-distance on top of their regular jobs and so on.

Meanwhile, there I was in hideous central Florida working on the lowest possible level of management at the Virgin Megastore under some of the worst managers the world has ever known. I was becoming increasingly disgusted by the crippling incompetence of my "superiors" and had been considering my foray into the retail trade as a temporary measure anyway, so I decided that relocating and trying my hand at the cave business would be better than trading the family legacy for a mess of pottage - especially as it looked extremely likely that the cousin in question would run the business into the ground in no time at all. If you know me, it should suffice to mention that he has an MBA. If you don't know me, then - briefly - this degree is evidently reserved exclusively for those who are totally unequipped to contend with anything more complex than a fork. Don't get me started on MBAs.

Fortunately, Sean (who was hating Florida even more than I was - and, yeah, he had been living there for close to a year at that point) was more than willing to join me on this minor adventure and has been working as our Business Manager. I totally would not have been able to do this without him - and it's about the first time we've fully collaborated on a project since we left the arts center in Waterford over ten years ago, so that's cool. We've decided to give it three to five years to see if we can grow the business enough to support the sort of "proposal" the cousin-once-removed had in mind, should he or anyone else want to take the thing on after our tenure. We'll see.

In the meantime, the cats are loving central PA. Favorite pastime? Chasing chipmunks into the house and tearing after the speedy little devils, bouncing off the walls, for a few hours. We'll find out soon enough how they adapt to snow...

Anyway, that's the tedious stuff out of the way - and quite enough for now. Adventures with bikers, Mennonites, nature photography, the Arts Conservatory of Central Pennsylvania, rural internet access, Russian tour guides, and so on can wait for future posts. I'll leave this with a few photo collages I put together as separators for the semi-revamped web site.


a few chambers and passages


a few shots of the grounds


a few speleothems


some local flora and fauna
There are more pics and stuff at the web site itself.

By the way, in the event that any of you even remember who I am at this stage, leave a comment with an update of what y'all have been up to - please.

More to follow...

Tags: business as usual, photo/graphic, social and personal, speleological
humour: quixotic