A bike!

 So I bought a bike! It's nothing fancy, but I think it is super cute. And it has a basket! It's a Ruby Belle retro bike, and looks like one of those semi-annoying fixed-gear numbers that only really works on superflat areas like Ocracoke, but it does indeed have gears.

 I rode around town for about an hour and a half after getting it, exploring various routes. I managed to find the coffee shop up in Lyneham that we went to the other day, and various other paths around town.

This may not be interesting to people in cities with reasonable biking culture, but this is still pretty novel to me: there are covered, locked bike cages all over the place, including one in the apartment complex. A perfect secure location to leave my bike at night without worrying about rust and rain and theft and stuff.

One of my stops on my grand exploration of the town was to investigate the weird brown patches we saw in the satellite view of the athletic fields next door to our complex: 

 They are in deed just weird brown patches in the middle. Any guesses as to what these may be, anyone?

Another thing that I have yet to identify is the massive drifts of this white, snow-like substance that the air is FULL of and collects in on the ground so that it quite literally looks like it's been snowing. It's light and kind of looks like Polyfill. Pollen of some sort, probably?

In other news: I am annoyed with Speech Pathology Australia, or rather with my debit card's ability to interact with them, because they're trying to process my application fee and my card keeps getting declined. I KNOW that it's not inherently something wrong with using my card in Australia, because I literally just used it to buy a bike today in Australia. I hope I can figure it out before too long.

Last night Travis and I went to Tu Do, the delicious Vietnamese place in the O'Connor shops just next door, where I discovered a vegetarian dish that I like quite a bit-- I'd mostly been disappointed with the veggie options there this summer/winter. (It's Bun Cha Gio, for those who know/care-- it was essentially vermicelli rice noodles with lettuce and chopped up spring rolls, with fish sauce.)

Now I am off to the grocery store (just next door) to figure out something delicious for dinner!