Daybreak Friday 4/24/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

There was so much promise in yesterday's sunshine, wasn't there? But today, we get a low pressure system scooting across to the south, which will be responsible for any light rain we get over the course of the day. Mostly, it will be cloudy, though things should ease up late in the afternoon. The cold air mass of the last few days is still sitting on top of us, too, and it probably won't get above 50 today. Down to freezing tonight... but copious sunshine tomorrow.The sun sets beyond Mt. Ascutney. With part of Plainfield laid out below. A drone still from the other evening, by William Daugherty.And heading toward the weekend...

Resident, staff member test positive at Grafton County Nursing Home. The resident "is doing very well," County Commissioner Linda Lauer tells the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. It's unclear, she adds, whether the illness was passed along by the staff member. "With all the precautions that the nursing home has been taking, we did not anticipate this.” Other residents are being tested.Co-op decides not to implement one-way aisles. In an open letter yesterday, interim general manager Paul Guidone wrote that, after study by a team of employees, the Co-op's leadership has decided that imposing one-way aisles "would degrade the customer experience rather than improve it." Given the stores' space constraints and layouts, only the Lebanon store could manage them, and as shoppers migrated there that would "put even more pressure on the store, its shoppers, and its employees, degrading our current social-distancing efforts. We envision an environment with one-way aisles that is chaotic, unwelcoming, and less safe, not more."Four Ivies have now backed away from federal stimulus aid. In the face of public blowback against universities with well-funded endowments accepting money from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, a part of the CARES Act that was set aside for higher ed institutions, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn have all announced they won't take the money.“As the weather gets nicer … getting out for a half-hour a day, even if your pants are on inside out." That's Caroline Christie, a clinical social worker at CHaD, in the first of a new web series launched by DHMC experts on child psychology, stress, psychiatry, anxiety, and geriatrics to help people cope with the pandemic. The first focused on parents of infants through sixth graders, and it ran Wednesday (you can see the archived version here). The rest will stream live on the D-H Facebook page at noon on Wednesdays. Not everyone gets to finish a marathon with a police escort. Or, for that matter, run past fire stations in Hartford and Hanover greeting them with lights and sirens. But that's what Matt and Hailey Swett did last Sunday (Matt's deputy fire chief in Norwich), since they couldn't be in Boston Monday running the Marathon. With the prestige race postponed until September, the VN's Greg Fennell talked to a set of Upper Valley runners about how they're adjusting.1,500 gallons. That's how much hand sanitizer Silo Distillery estimates it made in the first month of its effort to put its distilling chops to use in fighting the coronavirus epidemic, Colleen Goodhue reports in Junction Mag. They sell some in bulk to hospitals and essential service-providers, and give the rest away to first responders and people who stop by the store in Windsor. And they've been running flat out. Head distiller Erin Bell tells Goodhue they’ve made business decisions in a week that would normally take six months. “It feels like it’s been a year,” she says."Nothing wrenches the mind away from the pandemic quite like realizing you may have stepped between a mother bear and her cubs." Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard' has a new piece about Mink, her cubs, and her "pandemic lessons." Marquard lives in West Leb, and has been lucky enough over the years to see—and photograph—Mink cutting through his yard from time to time. He turns his most recent encounter with her cubs into a lesson in changing human behavior—and notes in passing that deputy Hanover fire chief Michael Hinsley says there are “11 distinct female bears of breeding age” in the "sidewalk district" of Hanover.Speaking of bears, turns out they like take-out pizza. Enfield House of Pizza got these pics (on its FB page) of a mother bear with three cubs stashed up a tree doing her best to figure out the new bear-proof lid on their dumpster last night. New, because when she visited the night before it hadn't been there...First the tour, now the senior thesis. Which is literally on the house. You may remember that last fall, Strafford's Quinn Tomashow and her band, Over Under, toured the country, starting and ending at Windsor Station. That was part of her senior thesis at Hampshire, which included shooting footage with a Super 8 camera and making camera-less film at workshops along the way. Unable to screen the results at school, she's showing it to a (very) limited audience tonight and tomorrow night, who'll sit in their cars as it's projected on the side of her house. (VN)"It looks like they mashed together, like, five different websites from 2001.” That's an unemployed restaurant server telling NHPR's Todd Bookman about NH's online filing system for unemployment benefits. “I could not imagine my own mother trying to use that website,” she adds. “It would be a nightmare.” Despite plenty of hiccups, though, Bookman finds that the filers he's talked to are cutting state workers a lot of slack. "It is not their fault, it's nobody’s fault," says one. "We are all dealing with this horrible pandemic.”Pressure's growing to close NH campgrounds. The NH Municipal Association wrote Gov. Chris Sununu early in the week. "The opening of campgrounds in the state has been the single biggest concern we have heard about from cities and towns in the last two weeks," it said. The Conway Selectboard followed up Wednesday. “We are observing many violations of your orders regarding quarantining and sheltering in place," they wrote. And in an online petition, one campground worker wrote, "I just think if the locals cannot go out to eat, cannot hike, cannot fish and cannot be together, why should we invite people from other states to come here?”But, but, but... "There’s a small but important group of people who are very interested in the debate over whether the state should close down campgrounds," writes the Monitor's David Brooks. "The short-term essential workers who are already there." Though most campgrounds haven't yet opened, there are some open year-round, and utility workers, traveling nurses, and other essential workers are already staying there. If they're forced to shut down, says an owner, "I don’t know what happens to [them]. I don’t know where they go, I don’t know what they do with their trailers.”VT House, 150 members strong, tries to get the hang of Zoom to pass legislation. Yesterday, they approved a series of relief bills to address the pandemic that had already cleared the Senate. The House held practice sessions and one-on-one trainings to prepare, "but it was still slow-going on game day," Seven Days' Kevin McCallum writes. Some forgot to unmute themselves to get the Speaker's attention. The House clerk had the unenviable task of tallying the votes. But at least they were well dressed: Speaker Mitzi Johnson refused to waive the chamber's jacket-and-tie rule.Elementary school art teacher sends supplies to 200 students, including 24-packs of crayons. "I wanted more than just the eight or the 16," says Arista Alanis, who teaches at Johnson Elementary School. "Call me spoiled." Also in the "emergency art kits": drawing paper, colored pencils, an eraser and sharpener, a watercolor set, an oil and pastel set, markers, and origami paper. Her colleagues, the town postmaster, and her neighbor's heated garage all helped. "It really took the whole town to bring this together," she tells Seven Days' Margaret Grayson. "Art is so important, especially in times like this."What would he have done without the publishing company Corona Books? British digital printmaker Phil Shaw's latest artwork, Shelf Isolation, collects a set of book titles—with the book spines themselves designed by him on his computer—in sly bookshelf order, starting at the top left. He posted it on Instagram the other day, and it's gone viral. (At the link, which takes you to his dealer's page, you want the first image in the carousel). (Thanks, ARG!)

Fire destroys 240-year-old home in Meriden. It seems to have begun as a wood chip smoldering in the chimney of Margaret Gibson's farmhouse on Colby Hill Road, which then spread to the roof. Gibson escaped unharmed after a passerby alerted her to smoke coming from the roof, but fire crews from Cornish, Lebanon, Windsor, Plainfield, Meriden, Grantham, Hartford, Ascutney, and Norwich were unable to rescue the house, built in 1780. (VN)"If you look at the fabrics from [the 18th century]...it will blow your mind to realize how much work went into them and how skilled these workers were." Kate Smith, of Eaton Hill Textile Works in Marshfield, talks to blogger Susan Apel about her work. Which, among other places, you can see on faithful reproductions in the front parlor at Mount Vernon. It took Smith a decade-and-a-half to learn to reproduce fabrics like harateen, vermicelli, cheney, and watered moreen—made, she points out, "in a world where EVERYTHING was done by hand without electricity or running water."40,000 cans of Green Giant corn. Entire truckloads of snack nuts. 18,000 pounds of toilet paper. A whole industry is centered around stealing unattended freight trailers from truck stops (drivers sometimes leave them behind in order to get an engine serviced or head home for the weekend). The thieves usually don't know what they're going to get (though it's hard to believe the recent toilet paper heist was just by chance) but the average value of a theft is $148,000. Dylan Taylor-Lehman goes deep in Narratively.

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