Cabman's Shelter

So this is the new normal.

I'm back at work. It is a little strange; we have a skeleton crew of about a dozen rattling around a campus that normally holds 200-300. In some of our buildings there is only one person coming in (we have dozens more working from home).

For me, it really hasn't changed much. We are on a common schedule because we don't want to play with the biometric palm scanners on the time clocks (yeah, I realized a while back that was a problem just waiting to hit). I'm on full time at the moment, too. Since I'm alone in my little shop, I'm not even masked most of the day.

Basically, it is lonelier days and longer ones. And then I can't go out in the evenings. But I've been tired enough I haven't missed that.

(It's not that I need the work. That is, I don't need it now. I'd be happy enough staying safe, and even without unemployment I could keep the sabbatical going for a while longer. In the future, though, I'd like to have a job to come back to, and saying, "Yes, sir, how high do you want me to jump?" is a way to see to it that I get asked back when, as we hope, we open for business again.)

***

Got no writing done. Well, did get one thing done; I realized in my push to blow through text I was choosing weaker scenes because they were easier to write. Well, sitting back, I do need to show some of the things I skipped over.

So I'm mostly picking up some background stuff. This is the London Flat scenes, and the revised version made this a good place to pick up on the Black Cab as well. So I've been reading up on the TX4 and the new electrics replacing them and various other things.

And once again; sure, all I'm doing now is reading up via Google and Wikipedia and why couldn't my reader do that and cut out the middleman? Thing is -- I already knew about Black Cabs, and The Knowledge, and I chatted with a guy who was studying up for his exam when I was briefly in London myself.

See, that's the first step of knowledge. I just answered a question on Quora about whether the CMBR was ever visible. I did a quick bit of reading up on Wikipedia. But, you see, I already knew the general nature of the answer and what to type in for the search terms. What I wanted was the age and temperature at Recombination -- the moment when the young universe became transparent.

(About 300,000 years from the Big Bang and 3,000 K, if you are wondering.)

My best guess is actually the stuff in the outline is enough to bring me to about the right page count and general balance. But I am wanting to add the Black Cab Chase I thought about a while back, and a visit to Angel (a slightly-faked name for a well-known council estate aka "Project") that just recently took my imagination.

The latest Rivers of London on my reading table (okay, on my Kindle) is doing something with a particularly bizarre Council Estate as well. Nice when things work out. Although I have a feeling Penny won't get further than the Elephant and Castle tube station on this particular adventure.