stuff done: Friday-Thursday

1. Brief visit with Mom, upon the occasion of her taking Dottie back home to NJ.

2. Removed air conditioner from window for the winter. Also put away my box fan for the winter; this involves taping a plastic garbage bag over it to keep out the worst of the dust, and then lifting it on top of my bedroom closet.

( more items under the cut )

Next week will be a little crowded because I am covering Miss Cactus's Monday shift in payment for her covering my Tuesday shift this week.

We got mildly chewed out by our supervisors for that swap, btw. See, they'd approved our previous attempt at shift swapping because the days we traded (Tuesday for Thursday) were within the same week, so we kept our overall hours-worked at the same number. But we had to rejigger that because it turned out Miss Cactus needed to be at the office on Thursday for a training session, and our next attempt had us swapping days between two different weeks... which would normally have kicked Miss Cactus into overtime. And we are not authorized to give people overtime hours. Oops.

(Coincidentally, Miss Cactus is not actually getting overtime because she's not working this Saturday, which means I will be staffing the office entirely on my own for eight hours. That should be interesting. But neither of us was thinking about that when we arranged the swap, and we should have been.)

what is it about Peter Parker being somebody else's kid?

Random question that is obviously unrelated to anything, really, I swear:

Can anyone explain to me the appeal of stories in which Peter Parker is the biological son of and/or raised by people other than his canon family?

Like, I absolutely get the appeal of people mentoring Peter. That lands squarely in the found-family trope, which is one of my personal favorites. And I can see the appeal of giving a loving family to characters whose backstories involve unhappy stints in foster care (Matt Murdock gets adopted, Scott Summers gets adopted, etcetera). But while Peter is an orphan, he already has a loving (and reasonably healthy) family. Ben is vital to his origin story, and May is awesome. So why do so many people want to give Peter a different background that there is an entire subgenre ('superfamily,' I think?) wherein he is the biological and/or adopted child of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, to say nothing of stories that attach him to a variety of other characters/ships?

I would really love to hear the perspective of someone who is into this trope, because it makes no sense to me on either a plot or emotional level, and I would like to at least get an intellectual understanding of its appeal.

Please help?

dead mice, yet again

One month exactly (...okay, minus two hours) after my last dead mouse, I had another one. This one was in the cupboard under my kitchen sink.

Coincidentally, I had just reset that trap this afternoon, since I'd accidentally set it off while getting a rag and some steel wool out from the cupboard in order to do some serious cleaning of my stove. The piece of Snickers bar fell apart as it fell off, so when I reset the trap I only used about half of what had previously been there. I think smaller candy pieces make more effective bait, honestly.

( cut for description of animal death )

...

I am so tired of mice.