erinptah | Yuletide mostly-cheer

It started snowing on the night before Christmas, and kept going on-and-off ever since, so everything outside the window is carpeted with perfect winter scenery. Seeing as I don't have anywhere to go, this has been great.

I got an absolutely heartwarming Yuletide fic, a new take on "Ozma decides to spend some time in Tip form", featuring some quality Worried Dorothy and Protective Aunt Em:

Homecoming (6127 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Oz - L. Frank Baum
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dorothy Gale/Princess Ozma
Characters: Princess Ozma, Dorothy Gale, Aunt Em
Additional Tags: Comfort, Genderqueer Character, genderqueer character misread as male, mentions of past emotional / physical abuse, aunt em has a bunch of unexamined gender and class biases
Summary:

A nice young person with experience on a farm comes to help Aunt Em with the chores for a celebration.
Meanwhile, Ozma isn't in the Palace, and Dorothy goes looking for them.

More rec posts to come. I've been churning my way through all the promising-looking fandoms, trying to read everything in-the-moment instead of letting it disappear into marked For Later.

...with the exception of a bunch of Locked Tomb fics, because I'm still only 80% through Harrow the Ninth (the second novel), and any time I've looked at post-Harrow writing for more than 5 seconds I've been spoiled for something. (Fortunately, there are So Many wild and unpredictable twists that it's turned out I was still unspoiled for most of them.)

On less fandom-y notes:

Half my family is being scrupulous and careful about COVID restrictions, and the other half is...not. I don't know what to say. They've already had two scares (notable COVID-like symptoms that ended up testing negative), you'd think that would make them more cautious, not less. The hospitals are full of people who thought "oh, nothing bad will happen to me." And by "full" I mean record-breaking cases, record-breaking deaths, "lining up beds in the hallways because all the rooms are occupied" full.

This Week In Virology had a good discussion of the new COVID variant that's developed in the UK, including a breakdown of why it's not likely to be more vaccine-resistant than any other variant. There is a serious chance it's more transmissible, but even if that's true, it's not so transmissible that it can overcome all the usual measures -- keeping distances, wearing masks, washing hands.

So we just have to stay serious about doing those.