These informal reports, filed every couple weeks by Roshi (and e-mailed to interested members), are meant to provide snapshots of what's happening at Chapin Mill, plus the who, how, when, and where of it.

The upstairs oak floors are now finished. That is, they now have an oil finish on them and are ready for seating. They have drawn many remarks about how rich and warm the color now is.

Downstairs, in the exercise room/temporary zendo, we are making good progress on the installation of the wood floor. It is a "sprung" floor (i.e., one with a slight resilience to it) of our own design: the underlying two-by-four wood "sleepers" reston pads of half-inch-thick closed-cell PVC foam. The sleepers are broken rather than continuous sothat the floor can expand and contract as atmospheric conditions change. Without being so spongy as to be a "silly" floor, it has the right amount of "give" for heavy exercise or dance. Even for kinhin (walking meditation), the floor will absorb some heel shock, making for less skeletal wear and tear.

Yesterday our much-awaited kitchen cabinets arrived, delivered by cabinetmaker Philip Brown. Before they can be installed, the kitchen baseboards need to be caulked and in place.which can't happen until the fire doors between the kitchen anddining room are installed. "In this game," Lou remarked, "you have to do first things first."

We have also moved ahead with the Japanese bath rooms, with the sub-floor plumbing now ready. The recessed areas where the soaking tubs will go are being dug and we are probably within two weeks of the ready to pour the concrete floor.

Finding good plumbers here is very difficult; it's spring, and with a lot of work out there, it's definitely not a buyer's market. But we did get the exceptionally talented man who plumbed most of the building to do the pipes for a couple of urinals, which will give us even more flexibility at kinhin time. We are also ready to finish the upstairs bathrooms, with Helen Fuller having taken on the task of finding the right tile for those floors, as well as spearheading the selection process for all of the carpeting that goes in the building. This past month we lost our talented remodeler Nhat Noen, who felt the need to help his daughter, out-of-state. As a result, we concluded that it was necessary to postpone the first sesshin at Chapin Mill from June to July. On the bright side, help has arrived in the persons of two new volunteers. Juan Schlaepfer, a Mexican national who spent much of his life working with the International Red Cross in conflict areas of the world, is working on the zendo flooring with our veteran Zbyszek Pluta, from Poland. John Dobrzanski is giving us important help with wood finishing, and Zen Center member Doug Seivert, who used to have his own residential heating business, has provided a great deal of valuable advice and hands-on work in that area as well as in plumbing.

Next week: A milestone: the major planting of trees and bushes in front of the building!

South of the Creek -- Two sizeable overdue projects have been completed this spring: A crew of staff and other volunteers devoted a day to extensively pruning the orchard, behind the farmhouse. And the overgrown honeysuckle hedge between the farmhouse and vegetable-and-flower gardens was pruned down from its height of twenty feet to two feet, then cleared away.

The most visible work still lying before us is the massive clean-up of limbs downed by two winter storms, which left debris along the driveway, in the swimming area of the pond, and in the big field.

Spring has been running warm and cold this year, but with enough blasts of warm to prompt a robust blooming of flowers and trees at Chapin Mill-during the week of April sesshin.