Butter Dish of Love

Favorite Thing About Blogging: Being my own boss. No one tells me what to say, when to say it, or how to shape my words. I can't ask for much more.

--Grace Bonney, creator of Design*Sponge, in an interview in Anthology magazine

I read this interview with Grace Bonney on the subway yesterday as I was going home, and I thought yeah! That is precisely what is so great about having a blog. No one can tell me that writing a blog post about a broken butter dish is dumb. Or that it's weird to take a photo of the butterdish in front of a cute Anthroplogie tea towel, with a bottle of Gorilla Glue beside it and Darth Vader mounted atop the dish. And so, as a celebration of the freedom that comes with having one's own blog, this is how I'm kicking things off.

There is, of course, a backstory.

Last weekend, I broke Robb's butter dish. For approximately the next 12 years, we will still have things that are "mine" and are "yours." We try to share, we really do, but until the very last pre-marital dish breaks, the modern brown ceramics are his, and the yellow plaid vintage set is mine. If you break your own dish, you have no one to blame but yourself. But when you break the other's dish, that's not so good. Alas, in a blurred moment of omelet making last Saturday, I managed to reach for a spatula, which knocked over a bottle of olive oil, which crashed down onto the butter dish and whacked it in half. I felt TERRIBLE.

To fix things, literally, I got out the gorilla glue later that day and managed to put the two pieces together. Robb walked into the kitchen as I was doing this and we started talking about how the butter dish wasn't all that great anyway--in fact, it really needed a handle. Anytime you picked up the lid to get at the butter, you'd inevitably get butter on the side of the dish or on your hand, and then the whole thing would become a big slick ceramic mess. Literally, butter fingers. (In fact, it's amazing that that is not how the butter dish broke!) Since we had the glue out anyway, Robb and I started digging around in our "long drawer" for possible toppers. (Now, we know that most people would call it a "junk drawer," but we love the weird stuff that's in our "long drawer"...fake mustaches, atomic fireballs, clothespins, Darth Vader...not junk!). It was between the clothespin and Darth Vader, but we weren't quite sure we wanted to commit Darth to a life of butter-dish toppery. I mean, once you glue him on, that's it! His versatility is GONE. We had several clothespins to spare, however. Plus it has a nice grip on the sides.

And now that the glue is dried, it's good and strong. See! We are not fooling around.

I feel that the story of the broken butter dish is one of true teamwork. Robb and I took lemons and made lemonade. Or rather, we took a kind of ugly butter dish and made it weird. But also functional. Anyway, it's a love story. Hence the tea towel backdrop.

And now for something really random, because it's my blog and I don't care! Here are some photos I took of trees. I feel like I should explain for the readers in California.

Dear Readers in California,

On the east coast, we have this thing called winter. During winter, all of the leaves fall off of the trees. (Ok, you know that, I'm being condescending now.) What you might not know is that, before the leaves grow back in the spring, these weird little nubbins grow on all of the branches. These nubbins will, in a few weeks, turn into buds, and the buds will turn into flowers, and then the air will smell wondrous and drunk with possibility and your skin will feel prettier and you won't feel so pissy, and then the leaves come in. So though it may feel cold like wintry death outside right now on the east coast, these nubbins are how the trees tell us that they are also sick of winter and that it will soon be spring. And when winter is over, that is the best feeling in the world. 

Love,

Liana