Christmas Greetings!

Greetings and Happy Holidays to all of our friends and family!! We hope that you are enjoying a special time with all of your loved ones. In recent years we have enjoyed making our own Christmas cards but this year we've tried this new venue! It's free and it's fun. Instead of spending money on the purchase of cards and postage we made a small business loan through KIVA. This is a nonprofit group that helps individuals and families (primarily in poorer countries) start their own businesses. These are generally people that would be ineligible for loans from banks. We're really excited to find out what our "Christmas Card money" can do!

If you are interested in finding out about the organization click on the icon below, in the right column on this page. If you would like to find out about the family that we sponsored you can read about them below and then also on the KIVA website. Remember, you didn't get a Christmas card in the mail this year but, in a round about way, you helped us give a great gift! We'll be posting updates on them in the future, if possible.

We send our warmest wishes and we hope for peace in the coming days.
Merry Christmas with love
from
René, Ahna, Selena and Xavier

A Thoroughly BISHOP Thanksgiving

It was a quiet Thanksgiving day at the Bishop residence in my hometown Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. There was no extended family, no long extensive tables nor elbows in the stomach at "eat time." Grandma only opened the oven 2 times to look at the turkey. The food was excellent!!

Selena and her cousins Kathryn, Jeffrey and Kyle

Selena and Grandpa Bishop

(Kathryn's hand in motion) Grandpa, Jim and Grandma

After the food the desserts and the dishes, we settled down with the computers to create a FUN house (below). We laughed so hard at our images that we almost cried. Grandma thought it was one of the best recent inventions.

Here is one of the best photos of the day, it is of Jim. What a hair-do!
However, voted the very best photo of all in our FUN HOUSE is that of Alice Bishop.



Here is a great charicature of Grandpa. We call him "super-grandpa"! Ahna is in the background in her usual overalls!

Who can resist such a cute guy??
Here's super-grandma, again!

And now for a photo of Selena, Ahna and Kathryn. We felt like aliens but we laughed so hard!!

And now for some more photos from our Thanksgiving FUN house!!!

Kyle
Jeffrey
Kyle and Jeffrey
Selena and Kathryn
Kyle
Grandma and Grandpa
Selena and Kathryn
Kathryn
Jeffrey still has long eyelashes!
BYE!!!

"Houdini Ferret" by reporter Selena Jara

For the last few months the Jara household has been waking up to the scratching and scrambling of a ferret as she knocks over everything she can possibly find. However, at night Selena Jara, the oldest child who keeps the ferrets in her room, has made sure that the door of the cage in locked and closed, but the ferret continues to get out.

In order to find out just exactly how the ferret is getting out I have launched an investigation to find out how. We started by going into Selena’s messy room. There are four ferrets that live in the big cage that takes up one whole wall of Selena’s room. Kit, Sky, Blackey, and Foxy are seemingly innocent pets that merely live in the cage all day long. However, the smallest and perhaps youngest ferret, Foxy, is the one who is escaping all these nights. First we looked around the cage for possible escape routes.

One choice of escape is the front door that we took from the other, smaller cage that we took apart when building the new one. It serves as two doors in one and swings out from the cage. Sometimes the door will shift out from the center and then go far to one side where the ferret would merely have to climb up the cage and slip through the opening to get out. Another way is through the back of the cage where the bars are very large and measure 4 mms wide and 4 mms long. Foxie’s head is at least five mms wide and 2 mms tall and with a lot of adjusting of her body she was able to escape through the back once in our presence but that proved a bad idea when her back half got stuck, so we eliminated that idea.

The way that Foxy gets out is still a mystery even now. Although the front door is still a very real possibility there is still no guarantee that this is so since we have yet to see her try to get out this way. I will keep surveying Foxy to see which way she actually gets out and report again next month.