Yarn-bombing, sort of

At work, our Human Resources Department is concerned with many things, including ergonomics.  One of the things we can request for our desks is a wrist support for our keyboards and also our mouse pads.  The latest wrist supports are fabric with beads of some sort inside, so they're like bean bags.  Very comfortable!  Both of my wrist supports are black fabric.  I have a friend at work, LT, and one of hers is black and the other is grey, and she is jealous of my matching wrist supports.  I offered to swap my black one for her grey one, but she said that she didn't want to take my wrist support.  So one day last week, after she left for the day, I swapped mine for hers.  The next day she swapped them back when I was at lunch.  I thought that we could go on  and on this way, but I wanted to out-do her.  I had an inspiration and decided that I would yarn-bomb her wrist supports!  Ok, yarn-bombing is really textile graffitti - you're supposed to wrap your knitting around a light post, or a tree, or a railing, etc. - something public.  Wrapping LT's wrist supports isn't truly yarn-bombing, but at least they match now, as you can see:



And green is her favorite color, so I hope she likes this.  I'll find out tomorrow.

Fathers and daughters

I've been thinking about my Dad a lot lately, as I usually do this time of year, because his birthday was July18th (he passed away in 2000).  My Dad was a very intelligent, creative, well-read man, and his family and home were very important to him.  I always knew that my Dad loved and supported me, because he always let me know that.  I like to think that I've inherited a lot of his good qualities.  I don't like to think that I've inherited some of his not-so-good qualities, but I know I have.  For instance, he had very little patience with stupidity, and neither do I (but more about work another day).  He had a very sarcastic sense of humor, and sometimes what he said intending to be funny wasn't heard that way.  That has happened to me, too.    

For two of my friends, how we are like our fathers has also been coming up in the last few weeks.  Sadly, my friend CH's dad is in hospice.  I have been spending a lot of time with her at the hospital, and she has been telling stories about growing up with her dad.  I've always known that she is a lot like her dad, but hearing more stories about him from her childhood really underscores the ways that she is just like her dad.  I have another friend who's relationship is breaking up, partly because of some issues involving the ways that she is just like her dad.  For my friends, it's a crisis that is bringing up the ways that we are like our fathers.  For all of us, it is so much easier to see our father's issues and see how it caused them problems, than it is to see our own issues.  But we all are working on resolving our issues, with a lot of help from our friends.