Christmas haul: two Yuletide gifts, one case of COVID

Other people get candy or toys in their stockings, I got the Omicron variant. Lucky me.

…seriously, though, it was the better kind of COVID experience. No hospital, no breathing problems, no need for any of the expensive treatments that are in short supply. I just canceled holiday plans, spent a few days sleeping a lot, had a friend drop off some chicken soup, and used over-the-counter fever/cough/etc meds to keep the symptoms in check.

Over a week of doing that, my immune system wrestled it steadily down from “thoroughly miserable” to “minor sniffles.”

And if you’ve been hearing people on the news panic about how Booster Shots Wear Off In Weeks And Then Omicron Can Kill Us All…listen, I didn’t even have a booster. Probably could’ve had milder symptoms if I did? But even un-boosted, the two regular Pfizer doses I got back in summer had the virus handled.

(The cat helped, I’m sure. He was very fierce at it. Scared it right off.)

I had almost wrestled my Marked For Later list down to 5 pages when Yuletide dropped, and now it’s overflowing. At least reading has been easy for most of the COVID recovery period, so I’ve had time to start making a dent again.

I got 2 gifts!

A delightful comedy about Gideon, Harrow, and associates having low-stakes adventures, with Earth artifacts and attempted wrestling:

fifteen percent concentrated power of will (9120 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series – Tamsyn Muir
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Characters: Gideon Nav, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Coronabeth Tridentarius, Judith Deuteros, Camilla Hect
Additional Tags: 5 things (kind of), gideon nav: personal trainer
Summary:

Teaching someone to do a push-up is a love language, when that person is very annoying.

And a treat about Dorothy learning some finer details of Oz magic:

A Long Winter in Oz (14928 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Oz – L. Frank Baum
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dorothy Gale & Glinda the Good, Dorothy Gale/Princess Ozma
Characters: Dorothy Gale, Glinda the Good
Additional Tags: Magic, Friendship, Minor Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, no canon character deaths, Romance is a minor element, Worldbuilding
Summary:

Dorothy decides that she ought to learn about magic properly and there just so happens to be a long winter approaching.