Daybreak Friday 10/30/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Well, so here we are. Whatever that is falling from the sky will taper off this morning, the skies will clear, the sun will come out, the remaining birds will chirp... and even so it'll be a raw, cold day. The high might just get above 40, winds from the north. Thanks to high pressure over Ontario that's directing cold air into the region, we'll get down into the mid-teens overnight.Want to catch fall at its most eye-popping? Wait for rain and fog. You can see this in Sunapee photographer Ken Schuster's shot of a tree at Muster Field Farm in N. Sutton, NH. "Brilliant blue skies and splashy leaf colors draw leaf peepers to our neighborhood, but most pack their cameras when rain and fog take over," he writes. "In fact, wet or foggy weather is great for photography. Moisture intensifies leaf colors and darkens tree bark, and the overcast opens shadows to all the detail within."And here's Hanover from above. Jonathan Stallsmith sent his drone up from the United Church of Christ at Dartmouth (the white church down and across from Rollins Chapel) last week, ranging all over campus and town.Bridgewater lands $800K for wastewater treatment. The town's plant along the Ottauquechee is aging and its pumping station "has reached the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced before it becomes catastrophic," an engineer overseeing the project tells the Valley News' John Lippman. The money comes in the form of a grant and a loan from the US Dept. of Agriculture and is being matched by a bond approved by voters last year. The project will begin early next year.SPONSORED: What if you electrified everything in your life? Your cars, home heating system, lawn mower...everything! Would it cost more to live that way? Would it diminish your quality of life? You'd be surprised by how much you'd save every year if solar and other non-carbon energy sources powered everything—without requiring real lifestyle changes. Details on the new report from Rewiring America at the link. It might even mobilize you to take action! Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.Dartmouth has sent students home for violating Covid policies... but it won't say how many. Dean of the College Kathryn Lively tells The Dartmouth's Coalter Palmer that when a few students were sent home early on, they were “easily identified” and were “bullied online and targeted by members of the community.” So now it holds those numbers closely—in particular, Lively says, because some students are deciding to leave on their own. Says one student, "I think the world, the Upper Valley, the town are all watching to see how colleges...do as they attempt to reopen. And so I think not to divulge the number of removals that happen is also hiding information.”Yeah, sure, elections, but you know what really matters on Tuesday's ballot? Thetford's bond to fix Rte. 132. If you've driven the stretch between the Norwich line and Tucker Hill Road, you know it's beset by potholes, cracks, and other issues. “It’s one of the more complained-about things for taxpayers,” says  SB member Steve Tofel. So town officials are proposing a $4 million bond on its own separate ballot in Tuesday's election. They're acting now so that, if it's approved, work can get started next summer. (VN) Confused about the differences between how VT and NH calculate Covid case numbers when it comes to travel restrictions? You're not the only one. So Aurora Leute Drew, who's one of the moderators of the huge Upper Valley VT/NH Facebook group—and who also happens to be a lecturer at the Dartmouth Institute—has pulled together an explainer. One key difference: VT applies an algorithm to account for the fact that some people are infectious even though they haven't tested positive, so they're not just measuring active case counts. (You'll need to be a member of that FB group to see this.)"Everywhere you see the spread of germs for the last few thousand years, you see right behind it the spread of lies." That's backyard sugarer Nicholas Christakis of Norwich, who also directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale. He was on Fresh Air yesterday with Dave Davies (sitting in for Terry Gross) talking about his new book, Apollo's Arrow, on the coronavirus's lasting impact on the world. They get into the Swiss Cheese model (multiple lines of defense), national mismanagement of the response to the virus, and why we're probably going to be living in a masked world at least until 2022. (Thanks, JF!)New PAC to encourage BIPOC, LGBTQ candidates to run in New Hampshire. The group, the Our Moment PAC, was co-founded by Nashua Alderwoman Shoshanna Kelly, who in 2016 became one of the two first women of color to serve on the city's board. She tells NHPR's Rick Ganley that the effort isn't only about recruiting a diverse array of candidates for state and local office, but about trying to make it more feasible. For instance, she says, the $100/year salary for state legislators means "you're automatically leaving out voices who can't afford to give away their time for that much money."NH restaurants to start asking patrons for contact info tomorrow. At a press conference yesterday, state epidemiologist Benjamin Chan said the move will allow contact tracers to be in touch quickly with patrons who might have been exposed while dining—and idea proposed by the state's restaurant industry and immediately adopted by NH officials. VT opts for Wells River spot for new juvenile center. The 280-acre site, which is owned by Becket Family Services of Orford, was once home to a bed-and-breakfast inn. It would replace the state-run Woodside detention facility in Essex, and be run privately by Becket. “Woodside was really built as a correctional center. It was really a cold, hard, stark building and it really was not conducive to kids really advancing and getting their needs met,” Dept of Children and Families commissioner Sean Brown told legislators yesterday.UVM hospital network falls victim to nationwide cyberattack allegedly by Russian hackers. The attack cost the hospitals access to access to a web portal used for scheduling appointments and obtaining electronic medical records. As a result, UVM Medical Center and Central VT Medical Center in Berlin have postponed some procedures. UVM also lost the ability to report results of the Covid tests it performs. The FBI's investigating and the state and feds are working to assess the impact of the outages.Militia training site terrifies neighbors in West Pawlet. That's the headline on a long, in-depth story by an un-bylined team of VTDigger reporters about the palpable fear they've encountered around Slate Ridge, "a center for military-style training and 'professional gunfighting'" hard by the NY State line in southwestern VT. Locals have been intimidated by people associated with the facility and, Digger reports, "have invested in security systems, firearms, bulletproof vests and shades to cloak the sunny windows of their farmhouses." Local and state law enforcement say nothing so far has risen to a criminal level.Single-word addition to US Supreme Court opinion "doesn't go far enough," says VT's Secy of State. On Wednesday, Jim Condos took Justice Brett Kavanaugh to task for mistakenly writing in the Court's WI decision that VT had made no changes to its election rules this year. Condos pointed out that VT for the first time sent absentee ballots to all current voters and that it allowed clerks to begin processing those ballots before Election Day. But a slight wording fix that appeared afterward, Condos said yesterday, didn't make up for "the court’s total lack of regard for the voting rights of American citizens."Turns out that in a pinch, you can grill eggs. Or as Colleen Goodhue puts it in Junction mag, "u can grill eggs." Given how much she and several of the mag's other writers have been hiking and camping over the last few months, they've joined forces to compile some of their "tried and true alfresco meals." There's Molly Papow's ode to her cheddar sandwich on a bagel, Taylor Long's campfire nachos (don't stack, she says), of course s'mores (with Isaac Lorton's high-end chocolate twist)...Those gated stone-wall "caves" dug into cemetery hillsides in VT? Receiving vaults. And "the fact that many Vermonters have never heard of them illustrates how far we've strayed from the age-old custom of tending to our own dead," writes Ken Picard in Seven Days. Originally, they were used to store the bodies of people who died during the winter, when the ground was too frozen to dig. Now they're mostly used to store equipment, though some towns, like Randolph, have their own freestanding version. "They're an absolute necessity here in Vermont," says Randy Garner, president of Day Funeral Home there. The way you make me look at the face of the world. David Whyte's mother was Irish, his father from Yorkshire, where Whyte grew up. He's a poet and a fellow at Oxford's business school. Emergence mag has a remarkable, four-minute film of Whyte reciting two of his "Blessings" poems—for sound and light—against a backdrop of the Irish landscape filmed by Emmy-winner Andrew Hinton, set to music by Owen Ó Súilleabháin inspired by songs recorded in Ireland over a century ago. We're in tense times. This is grounding.

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And I think we

must

go into the weekend with this: Scary Pockets and musician and actor (

Perfect Harmony, Room 104

) Kenton Chen,

from two years ago tomorrow.

(Thanks, SM!)

See you Monday.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

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