WE MEET AGAIN, UPPER VALLEY!
A warm front trailing more humid air moved into the region overnight, and there's maritime air flowing our way as well. The result? Any overnight rain should be tapering off but it'll remain cloudy this morning. There's a slight chance chance of rain later this morning and through the evening, though we might actually see some sky around mid day. Claremont shooter brings neighborhood to a standstill for much of yesterday. After firing hundreds of rounds at police starting early in the morning, 55-year-old Michael Burns was taken into custody when police used a tactical vehicle sporting a battering ram to get into his building. It's unclear what touched off the incident. No one was hurt.Town of Hartford Informational page on Facebook to shut down. Sherry Brown began the page a few years back as an informal place for people to talk about events and community issues. She announced yesterday that she's tired of the vitriol that's overtaken it recently. "I receive multiple complaints per day on the content members post," she writes. "I read posts that discourage me from continuing as administrator of this page." So she's shutting the page down in a week. Judging from the comments, a lot of people depend on it to keep up.Just a reminder from VTrans that Rt. 244 in Fairlee will be closed through the weekend. The state's doing culvert work near where it comes into Route 5. They'll be shutting that section of road from 6 this evening until 6 Monday morning.Windsor County, UV create underpinnings for renaissance. That's the upshot of a long profile in Vermont Business Magazine. It touches on signs of hope in Springfield, the rebirth of WRJ, the region's struggles with housing, and a bunch more. The takeaway: Towns have to build piece by piece. Kevin Geiger of the Two-Rivers Ottauquechee planning commission points to Samurai Soul Food in Fairlee: "The town didn't sit there and say, ‘Oh let's put in a new restaurant so people will drive here.’ People stop because of the restaurant,” he says. Yes, I know: Fairlee's in Orange County.Speaking of Springfield, the former CEO of Springfield Hospital is suing its board. In a complaint filed in federal court on Wednesday, Timothy Ford alleges that he was forced out of his position in December by a couple of board members who came to his office and demanded he resign. He also says the consulting group the hospital's been using to help it steer through its financial struggles have brought it closer to the edge.Okay, this seems like the right moment for a striking photo from yesterday morning of a hot-air balloon over Quechee Gorge. Right?New Netflix series The Family features local writer Jeff Sharlet's work. Sharlet, who teaches nonfiction writing at Dartmouth, wrote two books about "The Family," an intensely secretive fundamentalist Christian group that's operated among the DC power elite since the Eisenhower Administration. This is, by the way, not fiction. Nor is it in the past. “It’s not hyperbole in any way to say that the Trump Administration is the most fundamentalist administration in American history,” Sharlet tells the VN.CRREL to partner with UVM. You know this already, but just in case: That's the US Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover. It's struck a deal to let UVM students conduct math, science and engineering research in its labs. Which gives Seven Days a chance to remind us just how cool the place is: 26 deep-freeze rooms, from a small lab that stays as minus 40 degrees F, to the largest refrigerated warehouse in the United States. Remember how NHPR is launching a new podcast about Lyme Disease? It debuted yesterday. The first episode of Patient Zero starts where it all started: with Polly Murray, an artist in Lyme, CT, who in the early 1970s saw a series of doctors, none of whom could figure out what her grab-bag of symptoms meant. GMP is warning about a new scam. It got a flood of calls yesterday from people who'd gotten calls from someone claiming to be from GMP and threatening to cut off power within 30 minutes if they didn't pay their bill immediately. "We would never do that," the company says. VT asks for meeting with feds to talk about importing drugs from Canada. Last year, the state enacted a law requiring it to seek approval for a drug importation program. In July, the Trump administration encouraged states to submit proposals to do just that. Federal law restricts which drugs -- like insulin -- can be imported, however. “These parameters mean that some of the highest cost drugs that are driving health care premium increases in our system may not be candidates," state Health Care Reform Director Ena Backus told reporters yesterday. Now this is a hobby! When he was 21, Ron Evans didn't go to Woodstock. As in, the 3 Days of Peace & Music. He stayed home to work. But his parents drove to Canada, and along the way gave a VW bus-full of concertgoers some cash for gas. They got a program in return, which they gave to Evans. Who now lives in Clarendon, VT, and for the last 26 years has been chasing down the musicians in the program to get their autographs. He started with Arlo Guthrie in 1993, and since then has snagged The Band, Richie Havens, Grace Slick... This winter alone, he and his wife drove 12,000 miles hunting up signatures.AND SPEAKING OF MUSIC...Slide guitar master John Emil will be at Seven Stars Arts in Sharon. Emil, who grew up in Miami, is both an accomplished blues guitarist -- lap steel, pedal steel, bottleneck dobro -- and a composer of background and incidental music for television. "Emil starts off low-key," an interviewer once wrote of his version of "Baby Please Don't Go"..."before building up to a frenzied flurry of liquid-mercury twists and turns...ducking down various alleys and avenues within the familiar chord changes to the point that it sounds like several guitarists playing at once." Starts at 7:30.And Hayley Reardon will be doing Pentangle's Music by the River in Woodstock. Reardon was just 16 in 2012 when the Boston Globe pointed her out as "a confident, radiant teenage singer-songwriter who is now helping to pen the next chapter of the Boston folk scene." Her songwriting is narrative, personal, and social -- she was an anti-bullying advocate in her early days -- and her presence both intimate and sparkling. Starts at 5:30, and there'll be pizza, beer, wine, and sweets from Worthy Kitchen. Have a lovely day out there today. See you Monday.
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