MADE IT TO FRIDAY, UPPER VALLEY!
It'll be warmer and a little wetter. We've got this system passing by today (don't get used to anything the next few days), bringing drizzle and maybe freezing drizzle first thing this morning, then ending, though clouds will linger until later. Breezy wind from the south, shifting to the west eventually, and highs will climb into the mid 40s by around noon. Down into the 20s tonight, but sunny tomorrow. Next system due Sunday.That Second Grant cabin fire? No, it wasn't a bunch of drunk students. It was a hunting party made up of Colin Van Ostern, the former NH Executive Councillor who gave NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner a scare at the polls last year, along with former Dyn exec Cory Von Wallenstein, a judge, and a few others. It was about 10 degrees out late at night when Von Wallenstein got up to use the outhouse at the Hell Gate Gorge cabin, noticed flames at the base of the chimney, and roused the others. The lone fire extinguisher wasn't adequate and the Dead Diamond River was down a steep embankment. Amy Klobuchar will be back in town tomorrow. She'll be doing a town hall at Colby-Sawyer at 12:30, and then another one at the Spark! Community Center in Lebanon at 3 pm. VT education board approves plan for Barnard to join Windsor Central school district; will go to voters Dec. 10. Townspeople had already rejected one merger plan to join in with Killington, Pomfret, Woodstock, Bridgewater, Plymouth and Reading. But now school officials have renegotiated the agreement, including what VTDigger's Lola Duffort calls "some of the most stringent and nuanced protections against school closure in the state" to allay Barnard's concerns. All those shots in Canaan yesterday evening? It was the police department conducting low-light training at the Fish & Game Club. Quite the pic.Voters in Claremont approve special ed trust fund. You'll remember they held a special school district meeting yesterday to decide on how to spend $1.3 million in unanticipated money from the state. They approved the school board's proposal to spend half on expanding special ed programs, and the rest to allay taxes.Gas prices at Thanksgiving will be highest in five years. Though we're talking pennies. That's the find-the-cheapest-pumps app GasBuddy's projection. But what's cool, actually, is the map that goes along with the story, which shows what you may have experienced: the farther south you go in Vermont, the cheaper the gas. Lowest prices are around Brattleboro and Bellows Falls. And here's their NH map, where you can play around and find spots (like around Warner) where you'll find lower prices.Get ready for some bigger numbers on NH highway exit signs. The state DOT is supporting a proposal to number highway exits based on mileage markers, rather than numbering them sequentially. This would bring them in line with federal standards set a decade ago. Most states have already complied. AP says that NH and DE are the sole holdouts, which is a surprise to anyone familiar with I-91 or 89 in VT. Vermont "will eventually" make the transition, says AOT spokesperson Amy Tatko, though who knows when. Transportation officials are "discussing" timing with the feds.Federal judge wants NH Supremes to clarify voter residency law before he rules. After a daylong hearing yesterday on the suit brought by the ACLU and state Democratic Party, Judge Joseph Laplante said he wants the state supreme court to certify certain aspects of the new law — most likely, NHPR says, how it affects a person’s obligations regarding car registration and licensing. He also wanted to know why the state's been so slow issuing guidance to town clerks. “Why the drip, drip, drip of information to the clerk in Hanover?” he asked the state's attorneys.Jake Burton Carpenter, snowboarding pioneer, dies at 65. Carpenter, who founded Burton Snowboards in 1977 and pretty much created the sport, had been diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2011, and learned recently that it had returned. "He was our founder, the soul of snowboarding, the one who gave us the sport we all love so much," Burton co-CEO John Lacy wrote in an email to staff yesterday. "Ride on Jake.""Most women feel more comfortable shooting around other women.” That's Kristen Walters of Irasburg, VT, co-president of the sole Vermont chapter of Well Armed Women, up in the Northeast Kingdom. Its 25 members have been meeting monthly for the past year to practice firearm safety, hone skills and techniques, and help one another get comfortable handling guns. "We're not turning out marksmen," says one member.VT coders help eligible residents expunge criminal records. Back in May, the legislature passed and Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill expanding the nonviolent offenses that people can seek to purge from their criminal records. Now Code for BTV, a satellite "brigade" of Code for America, has created a Chrome extension that helps attorneys streamline the expungement process by searching the state database and generating petitions for prosecutors and the courts to consider. "Walking my chickens down the road feels the most Vermont thing I've done in a while." They'd been visiting the neighbor, and it was time to go home. A video to end the week...
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IT'S AN EVENT-GOING EVENING OUT THERE!
Some of the finest choral singers in the state, performing the world premiere of "Voices of the Silenced," a piece commissioned by the Chorale from Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen. Each movement represents a different community voice -- Leb resident Marjorie Moorhead's poem about living with AIDS, a refugee exiled in Spain, the father of a son with Down syndrome, someone imprisoned for following the Bahá’í faith. 7:30 at the First Congregational Church.
"Since the early zeros," wrote
New York Music Daily
a few years back, "singer Rebecca Hall and her multi-instrumentalist husband Ken Anderson have been working the darker corners of the folk milieu." Hall's the sweet-voiced lyricist, Anderson composes and crafts lush harmonies, and the two know what they're doing. For the history-minded among you,
Warning: It contains images of serious snow. 7:30 pm.
. I tell you this because Martin Scorcese's "haunting masterpiece" (
WSJ
) about mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) and the fate of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) has a totally local connection. The book on which it's based, former homicide prosecutor and Delaware deputy AG Charles Brandt's
I Heard You Paint Houses
, was published in 2004 by
, a small independent publisher founded by a group of locals and now based in Hanover. 5:30 at the Nugget, 6:35 in Lebanon.
If you're in the mood for something a little more innocent, Sharon Academy's doing Seussical at the Chandler.
The plot's mostly built on
Horton Hears a Who
, but odds are pretty good you'll recognize other characters, too. There's this cat, for instance... Tonight and tomorrow at 7.
We'll just let the band call it: "Nerds who got off the internet and left their D&D playthroughs to play music for everyone and then try to call it art." Starts at 10.
Go have a great weekend. See you Monday.
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