while sipping tea

"But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines--Bronko's gnawed nails, the down on Brigd's cheeks--and also the gestures, the utensils that this person or that is handling--the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler--so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling the butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, "Ah, that's the butter-curler one!" thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler."

-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

1.  If the inhabitants of Flat 40 were characters in a novel, I'd be the cup-of-tea one.
2.  What's a butter curler, and why on earth would you need one?