Yearning for twelve hour shifts

I picked up my wife from the airport yesterday. She was full of complaints about one thing or another, so I pretty well just shut up and let her run on. One of the joys of being a husband is listening to your wife, and though we might have long, funny, rambling late night talks about everything under the sun, every now and then she comes home and lets the frustrations of her day wash over me.

She's been away in Sydney for a couple of meetings, having to stay overnight in some hotel. "The pillows were toooo soft," she moaned. "Poor Kerri," I replied gently, "It must have been awful!"

I took the opportunity to look at the cab rank. It's a five car rank at the airport, with a commissionaire for the busy times. The rank was empty, but there were a couple of cabs in the feeder, and of course the cab parking area was chockers. This time of day and week there are people racing to get planes out of Canberra, and the planes arriving are full of passengers who, like my wife, have been out of town on business.

I figured, as we drove past, that the commissionaire had ducked inside to take care of urgent personal business and so the switch that controls the lights to summon more cabs from the feeder had gone unpunched. In such situations cabbies are supposed to use their own initiative and move up onto the rank without being summoned. Not like cabbies to sit still when there is work to be had.

But that's what I'm doing now. It's been over five weeks since I submitted my request for a police check and until it arrives, there's nothing I can do. It will be a minimum of three and a maximum of ten days before I can start work after I receive it. As it stands, next Friday is my earliest possible start date.

I am so frustrated by this. It's not just a matter of wanting the money so I can start making plans for my next trip, I also want to start work. Looking forward to it. At any one time one cab in seven is off the road because there aren't enough drivers, one bit of the government is harassing the cab company to improve service, and another bit is sitting on its hands.

Maybe I'll change my tune after my first week of getting up before dawn and driving around town for ten or twelve hours. It might take the edge off my enthusiasm a trifle. But dammit, I want to have the chance to see for myself.

I drove my wife home, listening to her describe the shortcomings of the conference venue, the speakers, the delegates, the work that was piling up in her absence, the way the plane home had been delayed by headwinds, and bounced around in the air...

I poured her a drink when she got home, made dinner (sliced chicken thigh fillets in honey mustard sauce with mushrooms fried golden in olive oil with a touch of cognac, served on rice with peas), and gave her a backrub.

OK, dear reader, it's my turn. I've had a good old whinge and bitch about things to you; where's my dinner and backrub, hey?

(no subject)

I'm a little nettled. I spent some time doing a review of Dunedin for TripConnect, hit the Return key and very probably lost the lot. I thought, too late, I should have copied the text.

Final day at the Lifeline Bookfair tomorrow. Bags for $10 about lunchtime. I'll stock up on books for BookCrossing. I saw a few copies of Miss Smilla's Feeling For snow there. Not a popular book, but one that has become a bit of a trademark for me.

Last NaNoWriMo we had a meeting to kick off the month, and I left five copies in The Pancake Parlour in Civic, all bought a few weeks previously at the bookfair.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I'm thinking very hard about science fiction. I'm pursuing a SF theme this year, and I'm trying to predict trends. Kind of like my grandparents in 1956 trying to imagine what 2006 would be like, I suppose. I've read any number of SF novels since then that have been spectacularly or hilariously wrong. I especially liked Arthur C Clarke's story about a writer on a trip to a Martian colony who brought along a typewriter.

In days gone by, I'd see SF as a writer's best attempt to predict the future, and to write about it. More recently I've realised that this is a preposterous view. SF usually deals with a possible future. Or even an impossible one. I'd hate to rule out faster than light travel, or time travel, because they produce such wonderful stories, but I'd have to say that neither seem at all likely.

Then again, it doesn't matter. A great number of people in today's world believe in things which cold reason would say are most unlikely.

Which is one reason why I don't buy lottery tickets. Sure, the ship comes in every week for some lucky person, but it's like the population of Australia spaced out evenly along the coast of the continent, waiting for their ship.

So I'm not going to be terribly concerned when my predictions don't come to pass. In fact, I'd be astonished if one of the cornerstones of my future world had anything like a real-life equivalent.

My solution to the growing energy crisis is real "franistan" stuff. Nice to have, but unlikely ever to exist. Still, I can create a world around it.

Not sure that I've got a plot to go with the setting. Perhaps it's about time to read "No Plot? No Problem!" in preparation for the effort.