Feathered Houseguests and a Reading

Last night we were putting up some Halloween decorations when we found these 2 house guests sleeping on the front porch. We have a beautiful little birdhouse set up for them just a few feet away, but apparently they prefer to sleep out in the open... It was hard to tell, but I think they may be Carolina wrens. Margarite was able to get the camera within 2 feet of them, take photos with the flash on, and they slept right through it. Hope they were more alert if any predators prowled around later in the night!



In book news, a couple of exciting developments lately.

Several weeks ago we had an artists' book reading at the UNC art library. 4 of us read from and discussed our work -- Beth Grabowski, Susan Leeb, Lisa Beth Robinson and myself. It was a multimedia presentation, as we had a camera and laptop hooked up to a projector for the whole event. Beth and Lisa Beth used the camera to show their work on a large screen so the audience could easily see details of their books. I read from the Googled English Frontier Deedbook. While I read phrases from the project, I did Google searches on the spot to see if they still fit the project's criteria. The results were interesting, but I'll leave them a mystery if you weren't there...

The reading was part of the Book + Art series we've been doing in collaboration with the good folks at Duke. Special thanks to Heather at the art library for letting us take the rough idea for the event and run with it! And thanks to David Parisi and his colleagues in AMLISS for making it a complete success.

I know some photos were taken -- I'll track them down and post them here soon.

On the home front, we're finishing the studio space in fits and starts. We're down to painting and arranging the furniture. Painting is a much bigger deal than expected -- especially with the very high ceilings in there. We made huge progress today and plan to make more tomorrow. Here's a 'before' photo, when we had it all cleared out and prepped for painting. Hopefully we'll be in a position to post some 'after' photos soon!