Thanks to Kate, and our secret Elf friend Basil, Clearlefties past and present brought their significant others to The Mesmerist bar in the centre of Brighton on Thursday. A merry night was had by all.
Besides that, it's been staff review week, and a great chance to spend proper time with folk appreciating their awesomeness and talking about how to make this an even better place to work.
Meanwhile business continues apace.
Graham has been working on Charity Job and also deserves big congratulations for passing his driving test first time on Monday.
Rich started out doing what seemed to be a classic bit of information architecture for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which actually lead to a fairly novel solution. (I'm intrigued to know more.)
Kate got overexcited about our Secret Santa, and was beavering away on the VAT return.
Ant continues to settle in with us, and we are mighty glad to have him around. This week he has been learning more about digital publishing, including going along to the EDO event earlier in the week. He has also been thinking about other kinds of conferences we might bring in next year when Ampersand goes on sabbatical - some are close to our core business, others are more 'passion projects' - subjects dear to the hearts of 'lefties and our friends which we could make interesting events out of.
Andy P surprised us all with a table football table for 68 Middle St and started to draft a Brighton Digital World Cup for 2014 (more info coming soon). In his day job be has been working with Bevan on design concepts for Age UK in between honing his git skills fixing our borked blog - apologies for last weekend's outage.
Boxman has been plotting Skillswaps for next year, which he tells us include solarpunk, futurism, the psychology of entrepreneurship and holacracy. Profound stuff.
Tessa continues to work on improving our building - this week she has been resolving some central heating issues, testing the new AC in the Auditorium and ordering a new projector. And iterating on our refuse management process.
Jon wrapped up his involvement with Code for America while Anna continues to develop, test and deploy to CfA's git repo.
Viv has been working on the next version of Silverback with Andy B and writing few words on what's coming for UX in 2014 for Web Designer Magazine.
Andy B has been putting the finishing touches to the UX London website - watch this space as we hope to announce a stellar line up for next year's event very soon.
All that and a party too! Hope you are feeling festive, and see you next week.