These informal reports, filed every couple weeks by Sensei (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 kitchen is our present area of concentration. The architectural ceiling required a lot of very careful drywall mudding work. We're just about finished now, and ready to paint. The Kitchen Committee decided to go with the same "moon glow" white that we've applied throughout the rest of the building, though it will be a notch glossier than the rest.

A contractor for the kitchen's beautifully designed maple cabinets has been chosen, and we're closing in on a decision for the floor material (tile or vinyl, that is the question). This means that we should have the kitchen pretty much assembled in about two months. It will include a tilt brazier, which will make it unnecessary for kitchen workers to schlep barrel-size pots of hot soup. The water for tea and other cooking will no longer be heated on the stoves, but rather in a different area in a 10-gallon hot-water boiler. The stoves will have electronic ignition, so we will not be wasting gas and overheating the kitchen at the same time. In general this kitchen is going to be much safer than our present facility, and considerably more energy efficient as well. Special thanks to Maia Meyer, our kitchen designer from South Africa, who will soon need to return to her native soil.

The oak flooring is now laid in both the large dining room and the chair-zazen/multipurpose room, as well as in the corridor that connects the two. That leaves just the main entrance, in the center of the building, to finish. This area will have some tile in addition to wood, providing a layout that will make it possible to remove shoes without stepping in the water that might be tracked in on snowy or rainy days.

We're picking up the pace on the installation of doors in the dormitory wing. These solid-core doors are very heavy, and therefore not easy to install well. A new staff person, Nhat Noen (a chosen Zen name-get it?) with extensive remodeling experience will be leading this effort.

We've made some important changes to the venting of the bathrooms and shower rooms. The architects had the vents terminating within the soffits, which works in ordinary situations. But during sesshin our use of baths and shower rooms will be concentrated into short periods of time, putting a lot of moisture into the air near the building, where it would condense onto the cold wood during the winter. This, we believe, would have led to big trouble in years to come, so we modified the whole system, adding vent caps that will blow the moisture away from the building.

The very high-tech heating system is ready to go now that John Pulleyn, Lou Kubicka, and some others recently spent several hours with the contractor learning how to operate it. Controlled by a computer in the kitchen office there, it will give us the air exchange and circulation required to mitigate the ever-mutating microbes that might be borne by participants coming from all the ten directions.

As the weather grew colder last fall, we decided to postpone the application of the third and final coat of exterior stucco until the spring, when the mixing of its color might be supervised by architect, aesthete, and longtime Zen Center member Gerardo Gally, leader of our Mexico City affiliate Sangha. We're looking to get a subtle reddish coloration that will bring the appearance of the façade to "another level."

South of the Creek -- The snowstorms of Western New York vied with al Qaeda for coverage in the nation's news last week, but Chapin Mill got only about a tenth of Buffalo's seven feet of snow. Caretaker Trueman remains on a state of high alert, however, with his snowplow in full readiness.

Meanwhile, we are poised to begin drinking Rochester water at Chapin Mill. Having learned last year that our local community, of Genesee County, had finalized a deal to get water from Monroe County, last summer we had our own pipe laid from the building site to Seven Springs Road. A couple months ago the water main from Monroe County was installed on Seven Springs Road, and the two lines connected. With clouds, too, usually stretching from Rochester to Chapin Mill, our cloud-water connection is complete.

Before the snows of late-December arrived, the leaves that had been clogging the creek near the Mill House were removed, as were the dead branches and debris on its banks.

Thanks again to Lou Kubicka for his draft of most of this report.