gothic butterfly

I found this amazing, velvety black butterfly outside our front door and had to share!  I'm always finding weird and amazing insects, and although butterflies are just arthropods like cockroaches (my least favorite insect!), I have a certain affinity to them and their metamorphic cycle.

modern gothic kitchen

Anyone who has ever visited my house knows my obsession with with the black/red/grey/white color scheme.  It's in my paintings, in my clothes, and in my house.  It's a mix of modernity and darkness, and it appeals to my gothic sense, but not in a tacky-velvety-sort-of-way (I'm not anti-velvet, I've just compulsively hated the feel of it since I was a child).  Don't get me wrong, I love dark victorian-style furniture, I just believe that in my house, it would look as out of place as a peacock among hens.  If I had an obscenely large house, or even just fancy baseboards, then I would probably have chosen a victorian theme, but my house is small and simple, and I'm content with being stylish in a minimalistic sense.

Recently we had our dreadful white kitchen cupboards re-painted.  I say dreadful because you can literally see every speck of dirt on anything white, and since Costa Rica's dirt/dust has a mind of its own, my white cupboards turned the color of a coffee addicts' teeth.  It was silly and frivolous of me to splurge on a paint job because of our impending move, but I wanted to enjoy just a few months of real color.

I kept the old handles :-)