author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today's special: The December 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up (meant to have it up last week, but, y'know, see below) and some ill-advised cookery! But first: the state of Chez LeBoeuf-Little.

I posted the full saga to my Patreon, in the free-for-everyone Monday Muse posts that serve as a sort of extra blogging vehicle, but here's the tl;dr gist: I got well and truly exposed to COVID. For reals, yo. The closest people in the chain of contagion to me were all responsible, careful people, but the world is full of people who are irresponsible and careless and also environments where one has no individual control over who breathes breaths with you. Also the world is full of bad luck and shitty circumstances that affect the careful and the careless alike. So I am passing no negative judgment whatsoever upon anyone involved when I say that, for certain, I was in close contact with someone who tested positive shortly thereafter.

I lucked out--all my subsequent tests came up negative. I'm willing to draw the cautious conclusions from this that 1. masks help a lot (I was masked and so were they), and 2. so do vaccines ("Vaccination does significantly reduce transmission from vaccinated breakthrough cases but does not completely eliminate it." -Tara C. Smith, Kent State University epidemiologist) So mask yo'self and get jabbed, why don't you?!

Also: Appropriate COVID testing gives the info needed to make informed choices! I am even more pissed at someone who wasn't involved, that being the person who used to be in one of my social circles, who flounced out of said circle, declaring that she would never get vaccinated, never wear a mask, and never let anyone "stick a swab up [her] nose" (!!!) so it follows that if she'd been the one who came to our gathering infected, none of the rest of us would have known in anywhere near as timely a manner because of her virulent (indeed) anti-testing stance. Anti-TESTING! I just can't even. (She's a parent! Presumably she's had her kids tested for strep throat once or twice! That too involves sticking swabs in orifices! And the swab goes farther down your throat for strep, gag hack arrgh, than it goes up your nostrils for COVID tests! We are past the era of swabbing the frontal lobe via the nostril! I've been tested four times now, and they barely ever reached the bridge of my nose!) But, y'know, that selfish jerk self-selected out of that social circle, so she wasn't there to infect us and obstruct our attempts at contact tracing. So I guess I gotta be grateful to her for being forthright and honest about her anti-social views.

And because the person who came down with symptoms was not a selfish jerk with anti-social views, they 1. got tested and 2. let the rest of us know. (And 3. they had been vaxxed to the max, which--see above--probably helped prevent their passing it along, and certainly helped keep them home and out of the hospital. And they tell me they're recovering well.) John and I got the alert and made the choice to quasi-isolate until PCR tests 5 days after exposure came back negative. So I am grateful for caring, responsible friends, for free-and-easy drive-up PCR testing, that both John and I work from home, and that the various people I had to inform on a last-minute basis that "I can't come in and do the thing, I've been exposed to COVID" were extremely understanding.

Honestly, that it took this long for me to get a confirmed exposure is a glaring neon sign that I'm 1. lucky as hell, and 2. privileged like woah. I am surrounded by responsible people, I can work from home, I do have access to good, free testing and good, affordable masks (McGuckin, y'all - just picked up a couple N95s. Size small). I'm grateful, and I realize things could have gone very, very differently, especially if any of the above weren't true.

Nevertheless, good fortune notwithstanding, there was some aggravation and emotional toll which delayed a few things on the writing front. But yes, at this time, I have released all of the December 2021 Friday Fictionettes. They are as follows:

December 3: "Burning Bright" (ebook, audio) In which supernatural security methods find their failure state, but also get debugged. There are borders for a reason.

December 10: "Symbiosis" (ebook, audio) In which we need each other, though we may not know it. The Field of Gears was off-limits, especially to a sickly half-grown like Laurel.

December 17: "Incognito" (ebook, audio) In which some play-testing happens. "It is said that the Goddess of Mercy walks among us in humble guise, the better to judge the hearts of Her people. Beware, lest She judge you harshly."

December 24: "Across Great Distances" (ebook, audio) In which a secret is betrayed and another is vouchsafed. Mehtai shouldn't have answered. She knew it even then.

The Fictionette Freebie for December 2021 is "Across Great Distances." You can download it if you so choose without any need to part with fiat currency. But if you like it well enough that you'd like to read or listen to something of its general length and weirdness, and by me, every week, and the existing freebie archives going back to August 2015 just aren't enough for you, or maybe you just wanna be one of the cool kids who gets to read/listen the very moment a new fictionette drops--which is darn well gonna be every first-through-fourth Friday from now on, just like it says on the tin, because I'm about to get ALL CAUGHT UP this week--the how-to-do-that info awaits you over here.

Now, at the top of this post I promised you some ill-advised cookery action, and ill-advised cookery action you are gonna get. Because as soon as I got that last negative test result back, I went the hell to McGuckin and I bought a whole bunch of bits and bobs that various home fix-it projects were waiting on. A new multicooker was not on my shopping list, but I've been needing a new multicooker for a while, so when I saw the 8-quart Instant Pot Duo on the end-cap on my way from, oh, split rings and snap hooks, I think it was, to where they keep the acetone... well, reader, I bought it.

And I had this recipe for Dal Makhani waiting for me patiently in a saved browser session, and I hadn't made myself dal of any stripe since the Fagor LUX Multicooker stopped working, so I was super hype for dal. Only I didn't have any whole black gram in the house. All I had was red lentils. So I swapped in red lentils. And, reader, that was a mistake, because black gram takes more time to cook than red lentils do, as I should have figured from seeing it thrown into the same pressure cooker session with red kidney beans. By the time my red beans were soft enough, my lentils were beyond mushy. They had become the broth.

Which, as it turns out, was perfectly tasty and I would do it again. (Although probably not it exactly. Probably I'd let the kidney beans pressure-cook alone for half an hour, then add the red lentils for an additional pressure-cook session.) But before I did it again, I'd try laying in the actual ingredients as called for in the recipe, and actually following the recipe as written. It's not like I can't get all the right ingredients. It's not like India's Grocery isn't right there. I might be heading there this very Friday, actually, because at some point I acquired a packet of frozen shaved beef (thanks, Wild Pastures!) and I know exactly what to do with it.