Well, it was a tough week, but we made it through.  I've talked with a bunch of the folks who got laid off from Big Idea on Monday, and their attitudes are amazingly good.  Without exception (at least the ones I spoke to), they all appreciate the time they spent at Big Idea and the joy of working together toward the mission we framed way back on Clinton Street in Chicago.  What is even more encouraging is that the folks I've talked to seem ready to see what God has in store for them next.  One of them said watching me follow God into my new ministry has inspired them to move on in faith into their next chapter.

Is that cool or what?

The pain hasn't been isolated to Big Idea this week, of course.  Also on Monday, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson laid off 55 people.  Viacom laid off 850.  NBC/Universal laid off 500. A few weeks ago Focus on the Family let go 200.  So things are rough all over.  But faith grows in the rough patches.  So we'll have to watch carefully to see what new ministry is born out of all this disruption.

In other news… it's cold now in Chicago.  It got down to 5 degrees last night.  The puppets were shivering when we came into the office this morning.  Some of them haven't experienced winter before, so this is very new.  I recorded a new science film today with Dr. Schniffenhousen, and he couldn't stop complaining about the weather.  I told him to knock it off or he'd find himself on a boat back to Germany.  We also made a series of 30 second Christmas carol sing-alongs that will start playing next Monday on JellyTelly.  They're very weird.  (In a good way, I hope.)  So tune in and check them out.

We started signing people up a month ago, so "free month trials" are starting to expire.  We certainly hope you've seen enough value in what we're doing to go ahead and send a few bucks a month our way.  Either that, or Buck Denver is going to have do a Jerry Lewis-style telethon to keep this thing going, and I don't think that would be very pretty.

(We have a really cool Christmas special scheduled for the Sunday before Christmas, but we were having trouble getting the dub from the producer, so we started talking about what we'd do if the dub didn't show up.  We decided Buck Denver would have to improvise a half-hour Christmas special.  Live.  The more I thought about it, the more I actually wanted to see it!  Ha!  But hopefully we won't have to do that because this other Christmas special is really cute.)

I gotta go home now before it gets too cold to leave the building.  Happy Friday, everyone!