Snowed in.

Ignore the "post time" -- I haven't left the house for close to 48 hours and don't recall when I last hit "refresh" on the "new post" page. There's at least 12 inhes of snow on the ground from the last two days and only now -- Sunday about one o'clock -- is there enough sun to make shadows fall on anything. Snow's starting to fall off the branches of the trees -- those that it didn't make snap and come crashing down in the night, anyway.

Don't want to keep reading. Had enough on Iran and Al Jazeera for one week. Want to do something else. No idea what.

Little kitten. Did I write about her? I don't remember. Got a new one. Little bobtailed black and white furball. She yowled all night the other night and I tried to catch her once but she got away (this before it started snowing). I tried again and managed to back her into the entrance to the fallout shelter. Grabbed her as she ran out, sustaining a deep bite to my hand and some "average" cratches on my forearm. Petted her and put her in my bedroom away from the other cats with her own food, water, and litterbox. She yowled all night again while hiding under furniture so chased her down and put her in the crate and put the crate out in the car so I wouldn't have to hear her -- this was the night it snowed so much. Of course, this time she managed to bite straight through my thumbnail. Twice during the blizzard my conscience got the better of me and I went running out in my bathrobe to fetch the cat only to have to put her out again two hours later when she would just not stop whining.

Then yesterday I figured out I just can't handle this at all and put the crate, with her in it and the door wide open, complete with food and water out the back door. Here's your chance for freedom -- she took off a few minutes later, only to return maybe half an hour after that, not wanting to burrow through the snow drifts. Still yowling, but now cold and wet and miserable, too. I brought her in AGAIN and she remains indoors now. She still whines at night but less, and not in the "I'M DYING!!!" way, so I guess progress is being made. Picked her up twice yesterday and she hissed and swatted at me but didn't do the whole "life or death rip his hand to shreds" thing that she did twice before.

I honestly don't know whether this is a kitten I can "tame" enough ever to make a pet but at least if she has to go back out she's not going out unfixed.

I want to go out and do something. Like I said I'm up to my eyeballs in Iran and *need* to get away from it just for a bit. I should return books to the library but the downtown one is super-creepy, I suspect doubly so with this weather being what it is. The one I checked the books out from is across town and I want to avoid going cross-town 'til the snow's more gone than it is right now.

Tempted to go out walking but am terrified of icy sidewalks. 2006 has so far been by far the least catastrophic year I've had since I moved to Albuquerque. I'd like to keep it that way and keep things moving in that general direction.

First year here (2004), I have a stalker attach himself to me like a leech, my tyres get slashed at work, I keep dropping doughballs as a coworker gets murdered on break, my life gets threatened several times from several different people, I finally test positive for HIV, and then suddely get told a week later I'd tested *false* positive. It was the best ending to the worst year ever I could possibly have hoped for.

Second year (2005), I get out of working graveyard, then go back to working nights after witnessing DPS's 1950s-style bar raids, then get thrown in jail, with all the fun and adventure that entails, *and* see people I know disapear and people known by people I know murder or be murdered. The violence still happens, but it's one step further removed from me, which (as long as it's happening anyway) is not a bad thing.

Third year (2006) -- no jail, no HIV, no serious threats of bodily harm, no murders and no disapearances, just some crazy weather and a few stupid purchases on credit. Near the end of the year, the people at KUNM think to give me a microphone to take out into the wide world -- ironically at the exact moment my existence becomes completely and totally unnewsworthy. The pendulum would seem to have swung however tentatively into the "net positive" area.

I got fed up with the "feedback loop" nature of the stories coming out of the bars -- they went in cycles and metacycles and wound up being utterly predictable: the crazy street pusher will come back in half an hour and try to cause a scene when you won't let him in, we'll get "surprise" inspected three weeks from now, someone will disappear six weeks from now and turn up in another state two months from now, and then all the bars will get raided the month after Pride but we'll stay open 'cause we've got "feelers" out everywhere in *all* the bars. I really do not need to stick around for another year of more of the same.

So in a year I've gone from staring down crackheads who say they've got guns at a bar late at night to not wanting to walk to the mailbox or dumpster 'cause I'm afraid I'll slip and fall.

On the other hand I've gone from struggling to get stories about the bars covered to trying to cover "the US versus Iran" on my own. A year ago it was "this drag queen disapeared", and now it's "who's gonna start the next middle east conflagration?". Maybe I'm just finding challnges more worthy of my time. Who knows? I *do* miss feeling "in the middle" of it.

No work tomorrow. Being Monday there *should* be a News Department meeting and I'll be free to work there with the telephones that can record interviews. Hopefully that will happen. I don't know -- everything's shut down strangely with holidays and all.