Yes, I skipped a few weeks from the last 'weeknote' entry. The excuse of being busy doesn't really hold weight as we're always busy, but in this case we were perhaps a little crazier than usual. On Friday we held the exhibit for Sara's work. The paper cutting exhibit for what she'd been working on for the last eighty weeks or so. It was a great success, lots of people made the trip over one of the two bridges, and we rounded the evening off with a late and large dinner at Le Garage with the remainder of family and friends.

Sara's mum flew down, and as the invite promised, after two glasses of wine, they both sang the chipmunks version of Jingle Bells. Naz filmed it. So photos and movie to come. Photos of the night will be posted shortly. You have to see the completed prototype of the Backgammon set - it really is quite stupendous.

The Beta version of our site is live. We're updating content to it. Making the tweaks and kind of embarrassingly excited to get it live. It's like a exquisitely tailored suit, and the process of working with the Weightshift team has been equally as inspiring as it has been enjoyable. Working with people who care and love their craft is something we love to do, so the design and development of this site has been a treat for us.

It also looks like Christopher and Barbara Warnock might loan us their Chandler & Craftsman Press. It will require removing the large windows at the front of our space and fork-lifting it into the studio, but it will be worth it to have ready access to it. Cathy is going to flip. But I've not told her yet.

In other weekly news. I get to give a talk next week at Stanford for Arna Ionescu's class on design methods for projects we've worked on here at Central as well as out there in the 'real world'. I'm also thinking of sneaking in some other case studies that I gathered on such things as the insertion point case study for cut-and-paste from XEROX Parc and perhaps one on iteration. Helps to have a teaching father who researches such things.

The Future of Fish project wrapped up somewhat quietly. And a smaller team of us, including the Packard Foundation, Ashoka and two of us from Central are working on the transition of knowledge and research to a new partner. In December we make a final presentation to the Foundation and we hope sometime after that we're able to create some sort of solution story for the web site without undermining the future potential of what we developed. It is great to see that the state of marine wildlife is a growing topic of interest with the general public, which was very different when we started this project and 'fish' wasn't such a popular concern. Its great to see people like Kristofer Lofgren being recognized for their herculean efforts to create a sustainable and even thriving change in the industry. Not just for themselves, but for the industry.

Projects keep coming along. We're busy throughout the year and into next. Which is a satisfying feeling. We also decided to close the office for several weeks over the Holidays. Last year I believe we worked right through them. If we don't start making these decisions in the right way now, we'll find ourselves ten years down the line, overhearing staff asking us why the company gives so little holiday time. If we don't remember to take the time to feed ourselves, we'll have nothing to give to the projects when we work on them. However, if we keep moving the office around like we've been doing for the painting and the exhibition, I might actually evolve to being a very streamlined and organized person. Tough way to go through the process though.