DC salary - so David Chadwick can pay rent, eat, etc. suspended indefinitely as of December 2012. See note below at 3-20-13.

April 2012 appeal for support. which raised about $2000 a month for that year, enough to keep us going.

5-22-13 - A reminder - while going through things here in Fort Worth and getting the home ready to sell, scanning a ton of material from Crooked Cucumber Archives backlog and backing it up redundantly - to work with and process into shinning form on cuke.com later. That next step will take time and can be done wherever there's electricity nearby. Thanks Warren Lynn for focused, intelligent, diligent work. See 2013 Scans. A CCA gold star is awarded.

5-07-13 - Yesterday mentioned all the PDF scans that are being made and posted. This is all part of the ongoing for years task of processing the backlog of material in the Crooked Cucumber archives so that it's available to whomever wishes to see it. There is also ongling progress in improving the digital archive of Shunryu Suzuki lecture audio, film, and photos as found on shunryusuzuki.com. One bird at a time as Annie Lamott says.

5-06-13 -There are so many PDF scans this year of notes, interviews, photos, relevant material to go onto cuke already that we might have to increase the volume that go up daily or it will take years. Thinking about posting a bunch and then just introducing them little by little on What's New. And then there's integrating them into the site. Off to Fort Worth tomorrow with so much more to scan that it's being checked in as baggage. In the past one had to go to an archive to look for material but now it can all go on the Internet. In time I think artificial intelligence will organize it better. Planning for that would free me up to do more creative things - like finger painting and humming with the moon. - dc

4-10-13 - In Texas now for another week. Going through stuff in mother's house but still working daily on cuke stuff. Itching to post more new material but Crooked Cucumber Archives work includes lots of maintenance and busy work. Got a sort of virus that must deal with. It's not crippling, just a nuisance. Got it from downloading new version of Audacity (program to deal with audio). Mistake made was to download it from an unknown source. Must be careful when downloading and also even then, don't just hit Next to hurry the download - make sure not to leave a check oking a search engine or other program not wanted.

3-20-13 - DC salary - so David Chadwick can pay rent, eat, etc. suspended indefinitely as of December 2012. See note below.

Living expenses for time spent in Texas [see Ahdel] Dec. 2012 and 2013 covered by Ahdel's estate so that the Cucumber Archives account balance has increased and is only being used to cover expenses directly related to this work such as storage, online, and computer costs.

Am on a trip to West Texas now but still putting in time on this work.

3-05-13 - Have been in Fort Worth with mother Ahdel for almost three months now. She's in hospice care with not long to go. Have continued to work on cuke and the the Suzuki archives at home and in the nursing home. Check out Shunryu Suzuki dot com for its vastly improved New Search Form and Compact List of lectures. Lots of backlog to keep going through on the oral history and new work to attend to.

12-10-12 - Today just prep for flying to Fort Worth on Wednesday, namely getting a new laptop up and loaded with all the programs I use. The so-called new Netbook was too slow for Windows 7 and I was forced to upgrade. After much consultation with kind comrades and research and five hours in Apple and MS stores, got a ASUS X202-E with Windows 8, a cut-rate little guy that runs faster than I'm used to. - dc

12-09-12 - Concentrating on organizing new archive storage, looking for best work to take to Fort Worth including backlog for the oral history, some tapes to digitize, and material to scan. Leaving in three days. Also researching new laptop. Netbook with Windows 7 is to slow. Looking at Ultrabooks. Need it light to go in small backpack but fast and strong enough to handle Windows 7. Don't want Windows 8. A Mac that runs Windows would be good but too expensive. Got a little bit of new Suzuki Roshi lecture material to go up soon. - dc

12-01-12 - Just eleven days till I go to Fort Worth. Concentrating on organizing new office-storage focusing on isolating material not yet presented on cuke, the backlog - doing work here I can't do there. Minimizing time on cuke till then. Hope to get the storage shelves all secured today so can get into going through stuff. Already found Stan White's art which Kaz Tanahashi wants to have photographed for a book.  And Niels Holm art was in the same suitcase. Aim to get both scanned and up on cuke. It's mainly notes and tapes of interviews and conversations with no copies that I'll be looking for. - dc

11-23-12 - Cuke report: Got 19 days till fly to Texas to hang with mother Ahdel in the same home we moved to when I was 12. No am going to concentrate on doing what I can't do there - go through stuff here and material in new archive storage room big enough to move things around. Set aside notes, interviews, etc not on cuke, tapes not transcribed and digitized, photos not scanned - to backup here then take with me in the continuing struggle to get backlog entered here.

Photographer, sculptor, artist, craftsman Bill Schwob came to Thanksgiving Dinner and dropped off an envelope with negatives of all Rinsoin (Shunryu Suzuki home temple) photos including scrapbooks and pictures on walls and buildings and a photo show he had of the place at SFZC years ago. He let them keep all those mounted prints which are in storage. Also included were negatives of Nona Ransom's photos and Raymond Rimmer's negatives of shots of those scrapbooks done in '94. Bill did his when he was over there. Most the scrapbook photos are in Suzuki photo archive on shunryusuzuki.com. I'd forgotten I'd left all that with Bill for safe keeping.

Will be looking for someone who can scan negatives for preservation ad to get with Suzuki photo archive the images not there.

11-13-12 - See November 2012 Fundraising Drive Notes

10-21-12 - Shunryu Suzuki dot com has been totally reorganized (thanks to Peter Ford), is more complete, user friendly, and versatile. That's the whole lecture transcript and audio, video, and photo archive - in progress - lots has been added and there's to do with no end in sight.

Cuke dot com is the oral and written history with selective focus on the lectures - and a bunch of other stuff that's caught our eye and which will be more and more moved to another site that's in development. Stay tuned. - dc

10-11-12 - I'm going to be making a Work in Progress presentation to members of the IHS, Institute for Historical Studies, in Oakland on October 21st at 2pm titled The Legacy of Shunryu Suzuki. Here's the notice sent out to members. I'm going to emphasize that this work is going on through the contributions of many people. If you're interested in attending, please contact me. - DC.

The IHS is an organization of independent historians and has been a fiscal sponsor for this work for over a decade. Here's their website.

9-26-12 - Working on a total redo of shunryusuzuki.com to be unveiled soon. - dc

9-16-12 - Adding more transcripts not previously included in the archive.

A key goal of this Crooked Cucumber archive work is to get these materials as complete and well presented as possible and then to get them duplicated and printed up on acid free paper by people all over the world. Archiving only extends the life of something a little longer. One way I see it is moving a ball toward a goal that keeps moving away till it turns into a cliff. - dc

9-08-12 - Making progress with audio of a number of previously untranscribed or partially transcribed Shunryu Suzuki lectures thanks to volunteers. See Work in Progress.

Setting up scanner David Cohen brought to get six or so Suzuki lectures into the digital archive. Scan then do OCR optical character recognition or just get them transcribed onto disc then to cuke.com and shunrysuzuki.com.

Thanks to Robert Barrer, Bill Hackenberg, CM (Sword of Monju) who've already started and Clare Hollander who's ready to start.

Spent some hours recently going through boxes of stuff in archive storage with an eye to better organization - setting aside what material such as interviews and notes, photos, and lectures are to be entered into the digital archive, what should be saved, what tossed - with an eye of getting through the backlog.

Organizing stuff from our tiny hall closet, stuff all piled now in our tiny living room on our square walnut table masterfully built by Niels Holm. Better make some headway before Katrinka comes home from work. It's been piled there for three days now with me always finding something else to do. Moving toward perfection.

8-28-12 - Immediate goals for this work are to keep organizing the archive materials with an eye to setting aside interviews, notes, photos, etc to be entered here onto cuke and other work to be done such as tapes to be digitized and transcribed then entered. Wish to get this stage of the work done quickly as funds are dwindling and I realize I must devote a block of time to fundraising soon. Other tasks such as transcribing interviews, work on web presentation of Suzuki lectures, index and maps for Crooked Cucumber (with volunteers and poorly paid semi volunteers) and daily posts will continue.

6-20-12 - Little sick recently, sleeping more, naps. Here are the things I want to get to right away: Go on TechSoup and order some more audio software for work on the Suzuki audio, communicate with three audio engineers doing this work to get their work as it's done on shunryusuzuki.com so it can be compared to the original and critiqued - first step in developing open source way to work with the audio, get to the CDs of Suzuki lecture audio brought with me to Texas to try to sort out some problems for the SFZC Suzuki lecture blog, get going on the substantial transcribing I've got to do, raise some money to pay for other transcribing, go over the Crooked Cucumber Index Ray just finished, get more done on Suzuki lecture transcribing, there's more and more but I'll stop listing here.

5-24-12 - What DC did yesterday. Since I'm encouraging people to donate to this work now operating under the name of Crooked Cucumber Archives, I like to throw in an occasional report on how I'm spending my time. Read it and weep.

Zazen, make tea, clean up dishes, solitaire, BBC and other Internet news, email took about an hour - one with Dan Kaplan who's working on transcribing Brit Pyland's interview, the most interesting one being with Nona Ransom's godson, get cuke ready to upload - anniversary of Suzuki coming to America so put up chapter 10 of Crooked Cucumber, the beginning of the US part, on the Notes on CC section - no notes yet, just occasionally getting the chapters up on the left side of a table. Right side waiting. Uploaded that and  link to the article on a good death then remembered a conversation with Suzuki and his wife Mitsu about death and put that in Brief Memories. Decided to consolidate my Brief Memories onto one page and that led to other busy work with that section and got to organizing pages relating to me and all the links and eliminated two of these hub pages so that there's only one main link page for me and all that took a couple of hours. I do this sort of work periodically because cuke grows organically and gets all spread out and labyrinthic and needs to have some of the tentacles reigned in from time to time. Then I did a broken link check and found a zillion of them in the excerpts-articles section and then couldn't find it and discovered it had been accidentally moved into the fauna-ahimsa folder. Oh lord. That happens when I'm working fast and the cursor inadvertently picks up a file or folder and drops it somewhere. Problem when that happens is the links can get changed and if I don't get it back in the right place in the right way, all the links can be bad. I should have just erased it and downloaded it back to its rightful place in my computer from the server, but I did it all wrong and uploaded the broken link folder to the server after I thought I had it right so that I had to spend a couple of hours fixing all the bad links. Had to do something more rewarding. Remembered I'd seen an unfinished brief memory of Suzuki about him dissing the moon landing so wrote that up quickly and got that all ready to upload today. I'd been trying to get hold of Judy Gilbert who lives in Crestone and is working on transcribing Suzuki lectures made more understandable thanks to AW's audio work. She also got the wheels in motion to get him some new audio software from TechSoup which provides software to non profits for super cheap. Haven't been able to find her for a week so called Paul Shippee and asked him to go chec on her and emailed Edgar in Munich to see if he could work on some of those lectures and got onto the TechSoup website and got as far as I could with that then called their customer support and that took an hour then doing the next step took half an hour but it was returned as unacceptable so I redid the request and had to make a PDF of it and I never do that these days and don't have the capability on this Netbook so I downloaded Nitro Pro and got a PDF of the request off to TechSoup and that took another hour. Waiting for the response now. Had a phone conversation last night with Charlie Wilson who's digitizing Reb Anderson's old lecture tapes and talked to him about things we could do with Suzuki and Baker tapes and audio equipment I could loan/give him so we agreed to get together in Berkeley at his recording studio. Discovered I'd ripped the mic up on the delicate headset I use. Wonder if I can fix that. There was more. That's all I can remember now.

5-05-12 - Getting ready to leave tonight for 11 day drive to Crestone Colorado for the changing of the abbots at Crestone Mt. Zen Center. Richard Baker steps down and Dan Welch steps up. Will keep up with cuke and fundraising drive for Crooked Cucumber Archives which has so far brought in enough kind donations to keep the lights on here through the summer. Thanks to all. See DONATE and Do-it (for goals etc).