Off Topic With Ashley

I realised after a minute or two that snooze alarm probably wasn’t a good idea. I had to be ready to leave in half an hour, and sleep isn’t as productive as — say — not sleeping.

I made a coffee as the first order of business, because I knew I’d be pretty much useless without it. The second order of business was sitting down and drinking the coffee, which took about a quarter of an hour in conjunction with catching up on the last four hours of news. By the time I had a shower and packed my backpack I was already ten minutes late.

The plan was to meet Brendan at Boondall Wetlands where we’d spend time taking photos of trees and rocks and things. Feeling an artistic streak I’d mentioned on the phone a few days prior that we should catch up to take photos, and this five o’clock start was the culmination of these things. Unfortunately my lack of preparedness had me fifteen minutes late by the time I even reached the Entertainment Centre.

I arrived at the deserted wetlands to find a single bike chained up to the wheelbender — charmingly aesthetic although almost completely useless in its function as a bike lock-up device — so I chained mine up next to it and turned around to find Brendan emerging from the  with his giant backpack. I mumbled something incongruous and slapped at a mosquito that had brushed up against my arm.

We set off along the Billai Dha-gun Track with a black cloud of biting insects flying along with us. It was an almost comical game of “see who can flail the most to escape the mosquitoes”, but in the end we both lost. I ended up with welts all up my legs from the little shits, and the sandflies also came out later to add to the injury. It was a good photographic exercise though and I got at least one good shot.

We left pretty quickly and I decided to head out to Sandgate because I wanted to take photos of lots of things. On the way I noticed the bike was making an odd noise, and on inspection of the rear wheel it turned out to be missing a spoke. The wheel was slightly bent, and the bike was un-rideable.

We stopped on the side of the road (and took some more photos) while I worked out what I wanted to do. Amongst the low-grade panic I managed to pop the lens out of my glasses, and it clattered to the ground with the sound that only the most expensive of plastics can make when falling on gravel. While trying to pop it back in, the screw fell out and at that point I gave up and stuck the useless components in the front pocket of my backpack to deal with later.

It was lucky the cycleway essentially followed the Shorncliffe train line so there was minimal pushing the bike home required. Unfortunately by the time we had reached the station it had ticked past seven o’clock which is the magic point at which bikes are no longer allowed on trains, so I had to lock it up and leave it at the station while I caught the train home for help.

On the way I was accosted by a jolly man in a high visibility vest who loaned me his multi-tool when he saw I was trying to fix my stupid glasses with a butter knife. His name was Bruce and I’m disappointed looking back over my blog archives that I didn’t write about his birthday party the other weekend so I can’t link mischievously to it instead of explaining explicitly that we’re actually friends rather than that other thing I wrote.

I got home, had two naps, delegated the bicycle pick-up to my parents who were heading out to Deagon in the car, fixed my glasses and applied lotion to my mosquito bites. Life isn’t so bad after all.