…12/23-09: Santa Claus is wearing red

30º in ABQ; 85% humidity at 6A…lots of people at the River of Lights last night; GAQ; overnight moisture at The Beach; Santa Fe will not raise its minimum wage; parts of I-25 & I-40 are icy; snow fell in the NE Heights; are pit bulls being returned to people who are using them for fights?; heavy snow fell in the Four Corners & Cuba; Brad prepared Guacamole; $10K in valuable coins dropped into a Salvation Army kettle; multiple accidents from the snow have closed parts of I-25, I-40 & US 285; Silver City APT house fire; 50 H1N1 deaths in NM;

comic climbing; no CTI Admits; traffic lights not working near the Frontier restaurant; snow started again around noon; some of us were told that we could leave, but I stayed until the end of my shift: then I took my regular buses to the NE Heights, and arrived home by 5P;

rain for Nashville & St. Louis; NM snow mentioned on the ABC AM News; snow for Omaha, the Twin Cities & Chicago; N Plains snow, tricky traveling along parts of I-10, 1-35, I-80, I-90 & I-94; OK, KS T’storms; N New England snow; Dallas storms; SE US twisters; temps from the 10s to the 70s;

people think the economy is worse than a year ago; COBRA coverage will be extended for fifteen months to the unemployed; Blackberry users find their E-mail function was not working; real men wear pink; twenty vehicle pileup near Flagstaff blamed on snowy conditions; the CO ‘balloon boy’ parents get sent to jail; new homes sales fall in November; UT man wanting to get a massage by a woman, instead gets a gun pointed at him by a man at the meeting place; white vs. icy holidays; five people being held hostage at Wytheville, VA post office; John Kerry’s wife has breast cancer; volunteers vaccinated the homeless against the swine flu; Phoenix ‘holiday house’ decorated with 100K lights; Amtrak train struck a tree near Redding, CA, causing a 7½ hour delay; are AIG execs still getting bonuses?; gift cards from Blue Cross & Blue Shield to help pay INS premiums or health care, such as medicines; New England church will not have to sell its Tiffany window; DE pediatrician accused of molesting his patients; another weird: former Louisiana worker killed two fellow employees, and wounded another person; otters on a plane delay takeoff;

Ford may sell its Volvo car line to China; the fuselage broke apart, the oxygen masks dropped in front of passengers as a jet slid off the runway in Jamaica: the good news is that there were no fatalities, but 89 people suffered injuries; Santa is followed on FaceBook; cold weather with snow spreads across Europe, shutting parts of the Autobahn; Soyuz has reached the INTL Space Station; more people in the UK are buying quilted toilet paper; son legally reunited with his father in Brazil; oil is $76.35 per barrel; gold is $1,095.80 per ounce;