Daybreak Friday 8/14/20

WELL HELLOOO FRIDAY!

Stop me if you've heard this before. High pressure drifting slowly east will keep things mostly sunny (except for early-morning fog in the river valleys). There's the tiniest chance of sprinkles in the late afternoon as a weak cold front comes through, though it's more likely just to produce some clouds. Today, temps reaching the low 80s and then dropping to the low 60s overnight. Wind today shifting to the north.  It's haying season. And good as it smells on the ground, it's beautiful from high above. Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was in Pomfret on Wednesday putting her drone through its paces, and caught the peaceful, curved geometry of late summer. 

Last numbers for the week:

D-H begins study of fast Covid-testing method. It's collaborating with Cambridge, MA-based Sherlock Biosciences to test the reliability of that company's CRISPR-based method to detect the virus's genetic signature; Sherlock has received "emergency use authorization" from the FDA for the method. If it pans out, it could prove a much faster—results in one hour—alternative to the PCR tests most commonly in use right now.  ECFiber hopes to expand to trailer parks. In a story on the continued lack of broadband for some 70,000 Vermont addresses as the start of school approaches, VPR's John Dillon reports that the S. Royalton-based fiber district has asked the state for $1.2 million to expand service to 13 mobile home parks in six Upper Valley towns.“Obviously, people are suffering and struggling, and this is a really good way to get lower-income people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford this stellar internet,” say ECFiber's Chris Recchia. "Ticks move like zombies." That's writer and naturalist Ted Levin, who's been finding more and more of them around, and whose dogs just tested positive for Lyme. A black-legged tick specialist at Northern VT University tells him "there's been—and continues to be—a worldwide increase in ticks, which spread northward and into higher elevations" thanks straight-up to climate change. Some advice, he says: don't spray pesticide in your yard, which can kill spiders, which eat ticks.  "Six, ten, eighteen berries in the bottom of a pail always seems like a feeble beginning." Susan Apel's been out picking blueberries, one of the unconditional gifts of summer's second half. But take heart: Eventually, "you’ll be surprised to find your bucket half full. It’s easy after that." Her spot this year: Riverview Farm, which has the distinct advantage of being down the road from Mac's Maple, because as you surely know, "The physical exertion of picking berries in the hot sun demands a cold cone or dish of maple softserve."Jodi Picoult lands on USA Today list of "Women of the Century" for NH. Looking ahead to the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote, the newspaper chain gave its reporters the task of narrowing down all the "innovative, courageous, creative, trailblazing" women alive between 1920 and today to a list of 10 for each state. Those lists are now out. NH's includes novelist Picoult, Christa McAuliffe, Jeanne Shaheen, and Black Heritage Trail director JerriAnne Boggis. In VT: novelist Julia Alvarez, Madeleine Kunin, poet Daisy Turner, and Anaïs Mitchell, among others."When I think about art, I think about soil." Two Upper Valley writers—Vershire novelist Makenna Goodman and Strafford poet Jim Schley—talk about Goodman's debut novel, The Shame, in Seven Days. It's in part about back-to-the-land novice farmers, and draws from Goodman's observations of the land around us: the "dwindling" of old family farms and the "young, upwardly mobile, progressive, agrarian, environmentalist, utopian-thinking people moving to Vermont and starting their own businesses that were branded as green." Also, she explains why it's called "The Shame."NH issues protocols for dealing with Covid cases in schools. It will track all positive cases, clusters (three or more cases in a classroom) and outbreaks and publish the info on a website, Gov. Chris Sununu said yesterday. "Rumors can go very quickly through the system, so we want to make sure that the data that's been confirmed...is very available to the parents and communities out there,” he said. Individuals will stay home until they're cleared by public health officials; outbreaks may shift a school to remote learning.Vermont's handing out 300,000 face masks. They're going to the public and to first responders, and being distributed by town clerks or public safety agencies. Link takes you the contact person in your town who can get one to you.It's also handing out $3.2 million in downtown tax credits. And Quechee, Springfield, and Bridgewater get some. In Quechee, money's going toward facade repairs on the Parker House; in Bridgewater, to helping adapt the old village school into a child care and community center; and in Springfield, to transforming the Cotton Mill into multi-family and commercial space and, down the street, helping the Black River Innovation Campus turn the old high school into a business accelerator and live-work space. All projects at the link.An easy way to see how VT towns voted in the primary. VTDigger's got a set of color-coded maps showing which towns cast more Republican or Democratic ballots (hint: around here it's all blue) and how each town in the state voted for the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. Norwich gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Holcombe ran strongest in the Upper Valley and across to Rutland, and in a patch of towns around St. Albans.Using drones to paint the landscape in light. Reuben Wu is a visual artist and electronica musician, and a few years back got the idea to use lit drones to illuminate and annotate nighttime landscapes. His Lux Noctis series is part sci-fi, part landscape portraiture... and entirely cool.But whatever humans can do, nature does better. The other day, the McDonald Observatory in Texas posted an image of a jellyfish sprite—an enormous red sprite that flashed for a split second above a distant thunderstorm back in July. Words can't come close to describing it, except to say, "Wait. That happens here on Earth?" Sprites appear above thunderstorms and are associated with rare, positively charged cloud-to-ground lightning.  

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Let's go out swinging... and kinda wistful. Remember days like this? Pokey LaFarge and his band at the Bomb Door in St. Louis in 2014, doing “Central Time.”

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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