Six ante meridiem. The new cellphone alarm melody that I chose upon the evening before last is unnervingly peppy. Today we had planned to go for a bigger bicycle ride; inland and away from the beach into a part of the Vasse region that I am unfamiliar with. We broke our fast on toast and jam (homemade and bought from a little old lady at the local Vasse community markets last Saturday who tried her best not complain about how the authorities had recently told her that she had to stop producing jams and caked for sale unless she met the standards of a commercial kitchen) and saddled up for the ride.
Our route kept us away from most of the early morning traffic and we discovered a new source of farm-direct eggs (four dollars for a dozen at an honesty-box roadside stall out along Kaloorup Road). The most significant discovery we made on our ride was the Ambergate Nature Reserve: 75 hectares of natural bush land, a small isolated remnant of what the whole plain used to be covered in. There is a short bush walk that winds its way through the reserve so we will go back in the future to have a better look and explore the area.
I just finished reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and found it to be a surprisingly good piece of science-fiction considering it was first published in 1895. I have moved on to a biography about Japan’s emperor Hirohito (b. 1901; d. 1989) who was also a marine biologist and published several papers, a lot of which seem to concern hydroids, whatever those are. I’ll read on and see how far from objective the author can lean.
