Pleasantly snowed in

The Nahurriyeh household is covered with holiday detritus. All around the living room, my son's arranged his new toys in piles: there the plastic guitar, there his extremely large pile of small plastic animals, there the box for Mommy's new slow-cooker, with an eye-hole cut so it can be a robot costume. The Christmas tree, in all its fiberoptic glory, is whirring away on the table, at the kiddo's request. The remains of Christmas dinner (which I posted about here if you want to see what we ate) are sitting in the fridge, waiting to be microwaved back to life.

Isk keeps asking where Santa Claus is, and announcing that it's Christmas, as if he can conjure it back just through desire.

Meanwhile, we are a little snowed in. The east coast got hit with a blizzard, decent amounts of snow but, around here at least, 70+ mph winds. My wife said the news called it a hurricane with snow last night, and had a picture of it with an eye and everything. Here is a picture of the view from my couch, out my French doors to the porch:

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Despite the frightful weather, this has been a lovely Christmas, not least because it was my first doing Yuletide. I received one story in regular Yuletide, and two more in Yuletide Madness. All three are great, if very different. More excitingly, they are in three different fandoms, which is part of the beauty of Yuletide: one can like everything all at once.

• Things Unknown and Longed for Still is a story about Sierra/Priya, my favorite Doll from Dollhouse. Without dodging precisely how awful her story is (Priya is the one Doll who is trafficked into the Dollhouse and made into a Doll without her consent, and the one who experiences it as the greatest violation of her autonomy, and is also most obviously subjected to sexual violence during the show), it's a moving portrait of who she was before she was a Doll, and who she became after, especially how her relationship with Victor/Anthony grew, fell apart, and built back up during the ten year gap in canon. Lots of points for the use of "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," which does lots of good intertextual things.
• Wondaland Interludes is a set of two little character vignettes in the world of Janelle Monae's Metropolis. The moment of Cindi Mayweather meeting Anthony Greendown, the lover for whom she will eventually lead the android uprising, is really lovely for the way it plays with the relationship between programming and personality, and the sense of what difference means to an android. The portrait of 6ix Savage is more sketchy, but I love the idea that he's got a history with Wondaland, and that he knew something was up with Cindi from the beginning, because who wouldn't?
• Nightmare: A Response is fic for Dar Williams's song Iowa. After a song about repression and the difficulty of love, the song ends with the narrator running to her lover, singing "I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see/You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me." This fic is a response to this line, from the perspective of the lover. It's just gorgeous, and just a reading against the grain of the song, and yet fits perfectly within it. Amazing that 200 words can do something that cool, but, then again, the song's only 290.

I am in the middle of compiling a recs list, but the one that everyone, no matter what, should read is Goodnight Room, which is Goodnight Moon apocafic. How good is it? Good enough that I brought it up on my computer and made my family read it during Christmas dinner. My brother called it "Goodnight Room, only 2001: A Space Odyssey."

Now, back to snowday activities with the family. I think I'll make soup.