One and a third geological ages ago, either my boyfriend's grandmother or his friend's wife had a butter-keeper: the lid has a bowl that fits upside-down into cup, you have some water in the cup, you put butter in the bowl, and lo, room-temperature butter that's slightly cleaner than leaving it on the counter all the time. I've been wanting one since and remembered to put it on a gift list my mother asked for before last Yule. She found one for my birthday and sent it in the box from the store, with her usual inability to pack such that the lid, chattering against the bowl on its journey, arrived in three pieces (shh).
Meanwhile, when I went to France in May my assignment for my sister was a butter dish on a pedestal. (I have no idea what she meant.) I bought her one, not what she had in mind but she liked it, and it arrived entire because both the shopkeeper and I know how to ship.
Meanwhile, my mother had been harping that the one piece she needed to complete the yellow Florentine pattern Depression glass set she and Granny had been trying to complete for years--for my lifetime, I am sure--was the butter dish lid. She had the base but needed the domed lid. I timidly ventured into eBay a-looking. In the 1.75 years since I broke my favorite ornament, it has never come up for bid, though I could have bought dozens of the Kurt Adler Polonaise Boot with Presents. So I added a search for this thing. It came up once before and my maximum bid didn't even meet the seller's reserve price, which I thought was ridiculous, since the final bid was ten times the starting price. Another came up a few weeks ago and zounds, I won it.
I dislike auctions in general: they are too close to gambling. But I got the thing for my mother, although, as my sister pointed out when I bitched about the first auction, what's the point, because it will live in a cupboard so crowded that nothing on display can be seen, and she doesn't appreciate nice gestures anyway, and it came from a gas station to begin with. I had the seller (who frayed my nerves by never responding to my emails telling him I had sent payment, that I would like to know when he received payment and shipped the item) ship it to her, and he did, and I told her a package would arrive that was her Christmas present and she could open it either now or on the proper day.
She opened it yesterday. She left me voicemail sounding not particularly enthused, which is unfortunate considering how much she worried this particular bone.
So now we all have a goddamn butter dish and can get off each other's backs.
I will be so glad when the street construction is done. We've had pounding that shook Formigny, so sturdy a little brick house that even the Wolf couldn't blow it down, and I figured it was a good thing the masons would start their work after that was done. The other morning the Trojan Rabbit rumbled along the street before we even got up, a wheeled behemoth or maybe a conveyor-belted one, not that I got up to see. Remember how in "Jurassic Park," they know the Tyrannosaurus Rex is coming because the Jello wiggles? Or perhaps a more highfalutin example is the opening scene in "Richard III" when Henry VI is supping at his war table and notices the wine is a-tremble moments before Richard's tank comes through the wall. Anyway, that's been our house.
The most beautiful noise in the whole wide world is that of a washing machine deciding, after stopping midcycle and not starting again despite being rebalanced and having its drum jiggled and eventually having its clothes removed and wrung out and dumped into a plastic bag-lined hamper ready to go to a laundromat and its lid closed and its dial turned and pulled again (just in case), to run.