Scientific Ink

Dunrie Greiling Ph.D., Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Travel

Great wrapping (packaging) extends the gift

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I can be a minimalist. There’s almost nothing I like better than organizing things for disposal. I like to give away books (to friends, to the library); I like to give away clothing I haven’t worn for a while. I love to reuse cardboard boxes that come in the mail – to organize items for travel, to use for a gift box – and then to recycle them. I resent “wasting” money on gift packaging, preferring to reuse what I’ve received. I love using leftover yarn as ribbon and I have used newspaper once or twice to wrap a gift even recently. Yet there is some packaging that I cannot bring myself to reuse or recycle.

It’s well-designed and carries sweet memories, and I can’t bear to part with it, even though I detest clutter.

I cannot part with….

Tiffany Boxes

Over the years, I’ve received a few Tiffany gifts. Great-Aunt Jane and Great-Uncle Chuck gave us crystal candleholders for our wedding, and I’ve thought of them and recalled our wedding day each time we use them. More recently, Delta Airlines has been giving Tiffany Gift Cards as an option for their Diamond Medallion members as a year-end perk. Smart choice: For the frequent business traveler, give the wife something sparkly to distract her from your absence.

Tiffany packages everything as a gift — the gift card has its flat box and white ribbon and then the item it purchases gets its own box and ribbon. Each step in the chain brings more white-ribbon-wrapped Robin’s egg blue boxes, a series of gift experiences. The boxes are lovely and I enjoy the whole experience, even though the boxes (especially the ones for the gift cards) become immediately useless. Reusing them seems out of the question. It would be such a let down – to receive something that’s not Tiffany in a Tiffany box! Yet, I have a difficult time tossing them. So they pile up, and I try to use them for special items, like the puff of our sweet cat Floyd‘s fur I found behind the couch, years after he passed away.

Stella & Dot Boxes

When you go to a Stella and Dot party (my neighbor had one, a colleague of mine at work had another), you can order jewelry and it will be delivered to your home. Like Tiffany, each item is packaged as a gift, and the items I’ve purchased have been for me, so a couple of gift boxes hang around after I start wearing the jewelry. The boxes are colorful and printed with nice patterns, and they have a couple of steps to open them (a paper case that slips off before you can open the box).

The Stella and Dot boxes sat around and I could not reuse them (again, it would be strange to give it without Stella and Dot inside). Eventually, I summoned the courage to pull them apart and recycle them. It took a while.

The box for Gerla Chocolates

In Turin, Gerla makes wonderful hazelnut-chocolates (gianduiotti) that Dave brings back from his trips to Italy. Similar to the Delta gift of a Tiffany gift card, I think this tradition started through the canny wisdom of his distributor colleague there – give a gift to keep the wife amused while the husband is in Italy. The Gerla boxes are a strange shape: kind of semi-rounded with squared edges. And I’ve taken to reusing them for knitting supply storage (needles, notions) because, again, I simply cannot toss them.

Wrapping for Gifts from Japan

The wrapping pinnacle is Japanese packaging – special bottles of sake and special cakes have made it home from Japan tucked in Dave’s luggage. Each item is perfectly wrapped in many layers. Typically a printed cloth or paper surrounds a lightweight perfectly fitted blonde-wood box surrounding another layer of insulation (or custom cut wood inserts) surrounding the present. Because neither we nor most of our gift recipients read Japanese, these items are easier to reuse. I use the paper or the cloth to line drawers or shelves and the boxes get repurposed for Christmas gift boxes.

Great Wrapping extends the Gift

When I encounter the wrapping, a decorative liner underneath my cosmetics in their drawer, knitting needles stuffed into a Gerla box, special treasures safely tucked inside Robin’s egg blue boxes, I remember the gift, the giver, and re-experience a positive feeling about the brand. Well done, Tiffany, Stella and Dot, and Gerla designers for attractive packaging that makes the gift last.

Travel off-season, a fall trip to Greece, part I

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I flew to Athens earlier this month, to meet a college friend who was on a business trip. She was speaking at a medical conference, and I came only for the sightseeing and the food. Her trip was a couple of days, constrained by work obligations on either side. I took the whole week, figuring if I was going to travel that far, I should make time to explore.

It wasn’t high season for tourism, yet everyone told us we had exceptional weather. So I think we lucked out – not too many crowds (though we heard many many languages other than Greek) yet shirtsleeve weather.

I spent most of the week in the Athens area, walking in the pedestrian areas near the Acropolis, visiting some of the more minor museums, saving the top of the Acropolis and the National Archaeological Museum for when my friend arrived later in the week.

The people I met in restaurants, stores, and on the street all had more than enough English to make my trip easy, and many positively beamed when I offered up the most basic conversational niceties in Greek, such as hello/goodbye (Yassas), good morning (Kalimera), or good evening (Kalispera).

And the welcome was almost infallibly gracious. For instance I saw a beautifully coiffed, expensively clothed businesswoman in Constitution Square stopped at the pedestrian streetlight help a pair of Asian tourists struggling with a map. She looked like she could have been going to the Parliament building across Syntagma Square to serve in some important government office, and there she was, helping a couple of disoriented tourists locate where they were on their map.

I experienced such a warm playful conversational spirit there – many of the really touristy street restaurants have barkers out front to engage passers by and invite them in, but honestly they seemed happy enough for a little repartee (“maybe later” was enough to disengage without rudeness on either side, and once “why not?” when parried with “I just ate!” made me and the barker laugh), so it wasn’t annoying but kind of fun.

I was humbled to hear all of the conversations in English by non-English speakers, German, Scandinavian, French tourists speaking in English to the Greeks in the restaurants and hotels, and the Greek staff responding in English.

Given that tourism is Greece’s #2 economic driver, after shipping, I expect that the spirit of welcome may be there year-round. Perhaps since I went in the off-season, I received more, as it was undiluted across a throng of other tourists.

I had a wonderful time and was in tears in the airport. I told the gate agent that I didn’t want to leave, and she looked at me sweetly and said I could always come back.

Surfing the web, not surfing the waves, in Hawaii

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We had a lovely, wonderful, amazing, restful trip to Hawaii in March.

The one thing I noticed, though, was that wireless internet was ubiquitous. Even at our sweet secluded little B&B near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (Hale Ohia).

I suppose the problem isn’t that there was wireless internet, the problem was that I was using it while I was on vacation.

I sometimes used it for recreation (goofing around on Ravelry.com looking for a pattern for the yarn I brought). We sometimes used it for vacation research – for instance, I used it to find a highlight on Kauai – the amazing quilt/fabric shop – Kapaia Stitchery. And we used it to keep up with local/current events (wait, was that an earthquake? OMG).

But we used a little too much to keep up with work. You might argue that some of it was in self-defense, we were clearing the email brush to prevent any stress conflagrations at the time of re-entry. Think of it as a back-burn or firebreak. Yet, that strikes me as the self-delusion of an email/work addict. And, to be fair, sometimes the strategy backfired – the email traffic might also ignite little stress events during the R&R, drawing us into the work mind we intended to leave at the office.

We both do client work and have folks who depend on us, which makes going incommunicado a challenge and a little bit scary. I do believe that setting things up so they succeed especially in my absence is a sign of good work. So, perhaps I didn’t trust myself enough to leave completely? I’ll have to keep trying and keep vacationing to solve this conundrum.

Do you find checking in on vacation restful or stressful? What’s your optimum prescription for rest and sanity with email on vacation?

Place of Refuge – Pu’uhonua o Honaunau

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On the Big Island in Hawaii is a national park called Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, or the Place of Refuge. The place is special, white sand, black lava stone walls, ki’i figures bearing their teeth at the wind and the water, tall palms swishing their fronds in the wind. There are usually a few sea turtles bobbing around in the waves and happily grazing algae. Sometimes one pulls itself out of the lapping waves for some warming sunshine.

In the park, there are some lava stone walls and platforms, some buildings and figures, but mostly it contains peace and beauty.

What’s important to know is that inside these walls was safety. Historically, the place of refuge provided an escape valve of sorts out of the strict rules of Hawaiian society. To my superficial understanding, that traditional culture had strong kapu – or what we might call taboos – protocol for who is allowed to do what where. Some sound social-caste-driven – commoners couldn’t touch the shadow of nobleman – others seem much more about alignment with ecological forces – letting land or fishing areas lie fallow to recover from harvesting pressure. There were also political struggles. Those who had transgressed the rules or been on the wrong side of a battle could reach one of these zones of…is it forgiveness? or maybe absolution?…and enter a process to be reincorporated into society.

A hut near the entrance holds the bones of priests, and it is their power, in my language perhaps the power of their intention, that gives this place its power of peace. The place is magical. Maybe it is the warm sun, the closeness of sea turtles, the graceful swaying of the palm fronds. Or maybe the years of peace and renewal in this spot has left an aura of deep calm.

While there are moments of transcendence and sublime beauty, life also contains moments of annoyance, small-minded prejudice, mistakes of inattention, bad luck, and bad intentions. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place where we can go and be forgiven?

Of course, the spell breaks when envisioning larger transgressions, or repeat offenders. And, while I cannot imagine setting this up for a larger society, this place does inspire me to create openness and forgiveness for myself, for the day to day departures from intention, misfires, and missed opportunities, for the ways in which I find myself lacking and lecture myself on doing ____ better, more often, or never again.

As I near my 40th Birthday, my goal is to carry that safe place around for myself and for those close to me. My meditation practice is the practice of building that space, and my meditation room is its physical manifestation.When I am calm and at peace, I create peace around me. When I let myself become disturbed, I disturb.

What is your place of refuge? How can it be extended to increase your own well-being and that of those around you? How do you nurture your hope?

Grateful for dial-up – the pleasure of not being connected (gratitude #41)

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So, this past weekend we went up north with some friends. It was a brief trip, much too short for the length of the drive, but it was nice to get away, get up north and relax.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Appreciate the scenery. Repeat.

In the summertime, we share DSL and a wireless router with the neighbors. But they locked their place up for the winter, shut down the DSL/wireless, and they won’t be back until the spring. We go year-round. I really love it when it is quiet and the winter woods especially are quiet.

I did have a bit of work to do, so I had to reinstate our old dial-up service, through Bruce Municipal Telecom. I discovered a few fun facts:

  • My space-age Macbook doesn’t even have a place to plug in a phone line, but
  • My husband’s Dell laptop did.
  • Neither of us had a thumb drive to transfer the file I’d painstakingly prepared to send to a co-worker for the Monday I’d be out.

I borrowed Dave’s laptop, recreated the spreadsheet on his computer, and dialed in to get stuff into Basecamp for my colleagues. Hooray for connectivity.

Yet, dial-up definitely put a damper on my online activities. Because I didn’t have connectivity, I let a few things go. I put off work email, Twitter, uploading photos to my flickr account, personal email, blogging, working with my MiUPA colleagues to set up the chapter meeting we had the Monday evening I returned, etc. I could answer some of the email on Tuesday morning during working hours, the MiUPA team is all-powerful and organized without constant input from me. I could upload the few photos I took late Monday. My twitter friends didn’t need instant reporting of my hikes and naps and the weather at Gillies Lake.

It all worked out just fine. So, even though I’ve loved having the wireless broadband up there, it is nice to disconnect for a while. A real vacation after all. A chance for downtime, not uploading.