I'm sitting at the desk in my Master Artist cottage, fan whirring overhead. Out the window are scrub oaks and palmettoes. Sun is pouring down but the air's dry today. I've been writing all morning; after lunch I'll join my Associate Artists, the people I'm here to work with, and we'll workshop three more stories. At lunch I probably won't sit with them; I'll hang with the other two Master Artists, or their Associates, for the chance to hear how composers, performers, painters and photographers think. There's even a resident baby, a one-year-old who came with his painter mother, and who's very entertaining. Yesterday and the day before we had presentations so everyone could get familiar with each other's work, and we'll see again what's been produced two weeks from now, at the end of the residency. Everything here is done in the service of helping artists make art -- you could get the feeling that the work you're doing is actually valuable, if you weren't careful.

And for those of you wondering about Chiquita the Banana Spider, she's doing very well, thank you. I've done some research on banana spiders, and here's what I've learned: the other spider hanging in her web, every bit as ugly as she is but much smaller -- under an inch -- is her mate. Ramon, I'm calling him. Unlike a lot of spiders, banana spiders share their webs with the male of the species. Which brings up the question, where do non-banana spider males live, and how do they eat? And the other things hanging in the web are leftovers. Chiquita carefully wraps web threads around anything she and Ramon don't finish, so there'll be something for a rainy day. Which, by the way, we haven't had any of yet, though they say we will this weekend.

Joe has suggested I might have misidentified the birds I almost crashed the car because of, the other day. Luckily Lee Hyla's a bird watcher, and we're going to the Canaveral National Seashore over the weekend. So stay tuned for the resolution of this highly suspenseful question.