It wasn’t the usual championship match. Still, the finale on Sunday, Oct. 18, offered promise for seasons to come. All the skaters wanted in on the last 2009 game, part of the Rock the Ink tattoo fest at the Convention Center. So instead of pitting any of the league’s four teams against each other, Duke City Derby created two new squads, which allowed all the derby girls to roll in. On that fateful day, team Good triumphed over Evil, 85-62.

Earlier this year the Rio Grande became a water lifeline for everyone living in the Albuquerque metro area. The San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project is intended to help alleviate the accelerating drain of the aquifer under the city. The water sources are blended together in the city’s reservoir tanks and sent out in hundreds of miles of pipes to a faucet near you.

There are a several things people can do to keep fecal matter and pharmaceuticals out of the surface, ground and river water. (Read the full story on recent discoveries in Albuquerque’s drinking water here).

Councilors had barely sat down when they were hit with bad news at their Monday, Oct. 19 meeting. Financial staff said the city is looking at a $12 million shortfall for the 2010 budget due to falling sales tax income and other revenues. The Council was told not to look to the Legislature for help because there just isn’t any money there, either. Come Dec. 1, when Mayor-Elect Richard Berry and the new Council take over, there will not be much of a honeymoon.

The morning after the municipal elections, as I was removing droopy “Romero for Mayor” signs from my front lawn while a steady drizzle soaked my jacket into a leaden metaphor for my soggy spirit, I got a cell phone call from a friend (actually, now a former friend) who was calling just to berate me.

Dateline: Gaza Strip—Two zebras at Gaza’s city zoo died of hunger earlier this year when they were neglected during a flare-up in the Israel-Hamas conflict, but they’ve finally been replaced—by a pair of painted donkeys. New zebras would have cost the zoo $40,000 apiece, so zookeepers simply used masking tape and women’s hair dye to paint stripes on two female donkeys. Zoo officials said the high cost of the animals was due largely to import restrictions placed by the Israelis. In addition to the two “zebras,” the zoo boasts an aging tiger, two monkeys, and an assortment of birds, rabbits and cats.

[Re: Letters, "Not So Simple," Oct. 15-21] Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim ... Don is changing the world, and very effectively.