Oh FFS next Monday is a federal holiday, which means yet another long weekend. The last time I worked five days in a row was . . . I have to look at my calendar to see when that was. At least this week that's because this is my short week on my 9/80 schedule, so Friday is my day off but my kid will still be in school. (Not that he won't whine about it, because that's apparently what we're doing now, but never mind.)

I am looking at my calendar now, and indeed:

• Week after next: Day off Friday


• Next week: Holiday Monday


• This week: Day off Friday


• Last week: Snow day Monday, kid home in quarantine Thursday-Friday


• Last week of December: Holiday Friday


• Third week of December: Holidays Thursday-Friday


• Second full week of December: Half day Wednesday to get the kid his second dose of the vaccine


• First full week of December: Day off Friday


• End of November/beginning of December: Yes, that week I worked a full week.

So granted in a normal four-week month I work two five-day weeks and two four-day weeks; this year I will not have a full week in all of December and January.

( Over ChristmasCollapse )

( Of course New Year's DayCollapse )

( A third four-day weekend in a row:Collapse )

( This morning all three of us tested negativeCollapse )

Meanwhile I have accomplished many other items of being a competent and productive adult:

• We've arranged to have some work done on the house and had signed the estimates and returned them to the contractor - and now I've also paid him the deposits required by those contracts. (Okay we were a little late on that, oops.)


• I ordered some hardware with which to adapt the KN94 masks the prince doesn't like so they will fit the way his fabric masks do in the hope he will be prepared to use them instead. (A fabric mask he will wear is better than a better mask he won't; still I'd like to find a way to get him using the masks that work better.)


• I placed an order with a British foods website so in a week or so we should have some honest-to-god Cadbury instant hot chocolate in the house for the first time since who knows when (I don't know why Cadbury's drinking chocolate (add hot milk) is readily available in this country but their instant hot chocolate (add hot water) is not, but the latter is what I want, because mixing the former with powdered milk and then adding hot water is a vaguely viable workaround but I've never got the ratio exactly how I want it) after having the tab open on my phone for literally months and months).


• I am experiencing a fandom Renaissance, which is great because I've missed fandom!, but less great because while I was experiencing my own personal fandom Dark Ages apparently everyone migrated to Other Places and thank god for those of you I know in person because otherwise I wouldn't have a way back in. I'm learning how to use Tumblr (just as it's apparently collapsing; nice timing, self) and I'm on Discord now as well, but speaking of Discord, where the servers at? I got on the Yuletide one in time for this year's Yuletide and I'm on the Bujold one as well. Where else are folks congregating where I could slip in and lurk until I have the hang of the place, as one used to do back in the days of bulletin boards? (I'm not new! It just feels a little bit that way.)

My Yuletide this year was an embarrassment of riches:

Man, What Are You Doing Here? (2754 words) by Bevita
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Piano Man - Billy Joel (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Davy (Piano Man), Paul (Piano Man), John (Piano Man), Waitress (Piano Man), Businessman (Piano Man), Bill (Piano Man), Old Man (Piano Man)
Additional Tags: Gay Bar, Gay Male Character, everyone is gay except the pianist and the waitress, oblivious straight guy, No Smut, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Drinking, Bisexual Male Character
Summary:

"No, I mean, what are you doing here?"

(delightful!)

The Gershwin Medley (3915 words) by VirginiaPlain64
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Piano Man - Billy Joel (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Bill/John (Piano Man), bill/waitress
Characters: Bill (Piano Man), John (Piano Man), Waitress (Piano Man), Businessman (Piano Man), Paul (Piano Man), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Angst, Singing, Drug Use, Drinking, Pre-Slash, Male Homosexuality, 1970s, Period-Typical Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

John wants to be more than a friend.

(brilliant!, and deserves a lot more attention than it seems to be getting)

Bright Lights, Big Dreams (1058 words) by karrenia_rune
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Piano Man - Billy Joel (Song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: John at the Bar, Original Characters
Additional Tags: i could be a movie star, Gift Fic, Yuletide Treat

(charming!)

The Old Crowd (1894 words) by tannne
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Piano Man - Billy Joel (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Davy/Paul (Piano Man)
Characters: Bill (Piano Man), Paul (Piano Man), Davy (Piano Man)
Additional Tags: Twenty Years Later, Yuletide Treat, Yuletide Madness
Summary:

After years Bill once again went to 'Gramps', the bar he used to play the piano every 2nd Saturday of the month more than 20 years ago. By chance he met some old friends and they started to catch up with each other.

(lovely!)

---

I myself wrote "Life's Little Quirks," a Princess Bride story whose title I'm not bananas about but I'm pleased very much with the story itself, and so was my recipient, which is the main thing, and so have been a pleasant sufficiency of others. :-) Hooray Yuletide!

Life's Little Quirks (6583 words) by Fox
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Princess Bride (1987)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Buttercup/Westley (Princess Bride)
Characters: Inigo Montoya, Westley (Princess Bride), Buttercup (Princess Bride), Fezzik (Princess Bride), Prince Humperdinck (Princess Bride), The King (Princess Bride), The Queen (Princess Bride)
Summary:

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

We have that insulating plastic wrap on our fireplace, because that part of our house doesn't need to be any draftier than it is. So the other day my brilliant idea was that after I wrap the kid's presents from Santa (in different paper than the ones from us, of course), I will additionally wrap them in Saran Wrap.

He's unlikely to get it, because he barely notices the plastic wrap on the fireplace, but I love it.

I dreamed I had to drive a friendly acquaintance from the curling club to the ER because he couldn't breathe. Like, he was breathing, but only very shallow because his lungs were full of crud and he couldn't breathe properly, much less well. Took him to the ER, went and took care of some other things (?!), came back to find he was going to be admitted, and on the big triage board thing that I have no idea if they have in real emergency rooms (I think I may have seen one one of the times I took my mom in?) he was marked "admit" and also "condition not really that serious," which, given the seriousness of his condition, made one boggle at how badly everyone else must be doing. I also had to notify his wife at some point that this was what was happening to him.

When I woke up I remembered that the curler in question was the skip of the team I was on when my dad was first diagnosed and I went into a tailspin of inability to focus on anything else (including, some days, even my own needs) and really struggled to meet external responsibilities like work and rehearsals and teammates.

So here we are within eyesight of the third lap of the COVID pandemic, and Christmas is coming and it's hard for me to care, and my dad's birthday is tomorrow. So that dream sounds about right.

IT IS POSTED AND I POSTED IT

bring me the finest muffins, bagels, etc.

[closing about a zillion reference tabs]

A long time ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I started watching Avengers: Infinity War (even before we all started staying home all the time, I was out of the movies-in-theaters habit because baby, and then toddler and little kid), and about fifteen or twenty minutes in I had to turn it off — late March 2020 was not the time for me to watch a movie about the random elimination of half the population of everywhere.

Today I got my booster shot, and I finally watched the film, and (a) I was right to wait, and (b) I switched over to Endgame, and can I just say in the first two minutes my heart was in my throat, and I have never been as relieved watching a movie as I was when they didn’t show me Hawkeye’s wife and children disintegrating.

You guys, I had a moment of COMPLETE TRIUMPH in the Yuletide draft today. One of those lightning strikes. I'd forgotten how great that feels.

[off turning metaphorical handsprings]
[because there isn't room in here for real ones]
[plus I'd hurt myself badly]

We had the prince's 5th birthday party on Saturday, though it's a week and a half until the actual day. His birthday is always too close to Thanksgiving to make scheduling a birthday party convenient. When he turned 1, obviously he didn't care, and when he turned 2 likewise, and when he turned 3 we thought a good habit to get in was to have half- birthday parties, because his friends will almost all always be busy around his actual birthday but what a good plan to have a routine expected event around Memorial Day before they all break up for the summer every year, only by the time he was turning 3 1/2 there was a plague on and that idea was right out, and when he turned 4, likewise. But this past summer things around here were easing up to the point that outdoor gatherings were feeling okay, and he's been to a couple of birthday parties and is not at all interested in half-birthdays; he's been talking about his friends coming to his birthday party for months. So we were on the hook.

We were intending to do a thing the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but then an evite arrived for a birthday party that day for his classmate whose birthday is two days earlier than the prince's, and Himself and I said curses, we have been pipped at the post, and we hurried up and evited everyone to our neighborhood park a week earlier than that, which was two days ago.

Everyone had fun. There were two tiny bits of drama to do with a little girl who always feels big feelings insisting on being the last in line to hit the pinata and then the thing being broken by someone earlier in the line than she was, but it all turned out okay. We neglected to beg people not to bring presents, so the prince got a haul of stuff that excited him but dismayed us a bit. :-P (A couple of other parents helped me load the presents into the trunk when it started to drizzle just a bit, and when we returned from being out of sight about 90 seconds later the daughter of one of them was distraught because in that minute and a half she had happened to look for her dad and couldn't find him, and that was the last episode of tears I was aware of.) Our local grocery store does cupcake cakes, where they glue two dozen cupcakes to a board with icing and then slap enough icing over the top of them to smooth out and decorate, so we had a solar system cupcake cake and didn't have to bring forks or a knife to the park, which was a winner. (The big-feelings little girl with the pinata drama happened to get a giant crag of icing including the rings of Saturn when Himself broke off a cupcake for her, which made her even happier than she'd been upset half an hour earlier.) I have some good pictures of the prince being delighted at the sight of his cake, at his friends singing Happy Birthday to him, etc. All the other parents gave us big thumbs up. We managed to get rid of almost all of the goodie bags* (though not of enough of the cupcakes, alas).

A parenting win, all in all, but an inexplicably exhausting one.

( * scene from as we were packing up to get out of thereCollapse )

Hello! First of all! I'm so happy you're here, and I'm so happy to be back!

I can't sustain that kind of exclamation point usage much longer, but I really am excited; I haven't done Yuletide for the past few years because I had a baby in 2016 and haven't had the bandwidth to focus on anything but my family and my day job pretty much since then. (I had previously done Yuletides from 2004–2010—I'm Fox over there also—and then skipped 2011 and 2012 for other family-related reasons, and then was back for 2013–2015 before punking out when I had an infant, so I am both a grizzled veteran and a slightly anxious dewy-eyed rookie, all in one. Let's have a great time together!)

The fellow fan and Yuletider who knows me best is ellen_fremedon, who has agreed that you can ping her if you need insider info.

Nowthen. Here are my usual bullet points on Things I Don't Especially Like In My Fiction:

• RPF
  
• character bashing, which I define more or less as giving characters negative traits that are not evident in the text—making nice people mean, mainly, because all the rest is just variations on that (making thoughtful people selfish, for example; it's all the same) (I used to say "making smart people stupid" as another example, but the older I get, the more I leave that kind of thinking behind, I think)

That's it. Those are the DNWs. I can also say ( the following things about my requests:Collapse )
Have a great time and happy Yuletide!