GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Yep. Rain. But hey, we got a very fine weekend, didn't we? Now there's a low pressure system moving through that brought us the rain we woke up to and will keep it going at least through the morning, probably into the afternoon, and possibly all day. Highs today only in the upper 40s, low 40s tonight. Winds today from the east.So look, while we're sitting inside.... Photographer Jim Block revisits those stunning mid-October days, with views from the Welch-Dickey loop in Thornton, NH; the foliage around Canaan, Hanover, and Dorchester; mountain views from Sugar Hill; and lots of other scenery all around the Upper Valley, from New London clear over to Reading and Woodstock.“Living outdoors probably isn’t their first choice.” That's a VTrans official talking to the Valley News's Jim Kenyon about a homeless encampment on state property in Hartford. Advocates had built small shelters on remote land around town—without the owners' knowledge—and the town has moved to dismantle them. Kenyon explores the issue from all sides: Keith Gokey, who lost his cabin; town residents who've been pushing for the encampments to be cleared; advocates who think the town is just pushing the problem to other towns; and town officials who see no choice but to clear the structures.CATV launches podcast series, readies audio booth for community members. Under new executive director Samantha Davidson Green, the venerable public-access video organization is striking out into new territory. It's already begun turning the Briggs in WRJ into a community media hub and opened its channels to content from around the region. Now, it's running ongoing series—Norwich Bookstore talks, the Spark arts conversations, Hanover Rotary speakers—as podcasts, and is turning space in the Briggs into a booth for potential podcasters to learn the ropes and refine their talents.SPONSORED: Dartmouth Skiway—One week left for the best prices of the season! Early bird special ends 10/31. Lessons, passes, and season leases are also on sale now. Sponsored by the Dartmouth Skiway.Labor shortages hit Upper Valley general stores. In the VN, John Lippman writes that small-town mainstays are being forced to curtail hours or shut down for a day as they struggle with finding employees. They're closing on Sundays in Plainfield and N. Haverhill—or if an employee's out sick, as in Post Mills a couple of weeks ago. Or, more commonly, they're closing earlier in the day than usual, as at Wing's in Fairlee. Dan & Whit's, meanwhile, is down to one cashier lane and, says owner Dan Fraser, "Quite often we are having to close the deli counter at 3 p.m. three or four days a week because we don’t have anyone.""Operating at an efficiency that would send any Six Sigma Blackbelt directly to nirvana." That's how small-town developer and small-town/urban revitalization blogger Jonah Richard describes the logging crew at work in the lot behind the old post office on Main Street in Fairlee, which he's turning into apartments. "Six Sigma" is a process much loved by manufacturers designed to reduce mistakes to near-zero. Richard describes—and, more importantly, photographs—the "four guys working four pieces of heavy machinery" as they work the woodlot. Scroll down to item II under "2 Things from Me."Pizza, wine... and trust. On her Artful blog, Susan Apel writes about a small group of local artists who've been meeting for the past 19 years at AVA Gallery to talk shop and, more importantly, to scrutinize and critique one another's work. They broaden one another's horizons and inspire one another to improve and change "in ways that might (dare we hope?) lend themselves to other life endeavors: constancy, trust, a cooperative spirit, a recognition that observing others’ challenges, and possibly helping to meet them, is a way to grow oneself," she writes.VT Law School can conceal murals. Just catching up on last week's news, in case you didn't see it... A federal judge sided with VLS in its bid to hide artist Sam Kerson's 1993 "The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave," which for years has drawn the ire of students and faculty. Kerson had objected that the move would violate the federal Visual Artists Rights Act, but a US district court judge ruled that the murals "will have the same status as a portrait or bust that is removed from public exhibition and placed in storage." Kerson will appeal, reports Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar.“There’s no Utopia at the end of the tunnel. All we can do is stimulate conversation and hopefully make [NH] a better place.” In NH Business Review, Michael Kitch talks to Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Movement that brought a few thousand "liberty-minded" migrants to the state. Sorens now runs St. Anselm's Center for Ethics and Society, and though he's got regrets about some directions the movement has taken—he envisioned footholds in both major political parties—its close ally, the Liberty Alliance, has "become the dominant bloc within the House Republican caucus," Kitch writes."No other state has an Executive Council as powerful as New Hampshire’s; with just three votes, the council can override the governor on nearly everything." The Union Leader once described the Exec Council as "the most powerful office in Concord that is least known by the public," writes Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. But with several controversial decisions—most recently, defunding family planning centers and its rejection of $27 million in federal vaccine aid—the Council has definitely emerged from whatever obscurity it once occupied. Timmins profiles its powers and history.VT's Amish community is small but growing...and now has roots in the larger community around them. In an impossible-to-summarize episode of Brave Little State, VPR's Elodie Reed traces the evolution of the Amish families around Brownington, up north of Lake Willoughby. It started six years ago with three families looking for land to grow watermelons—"Yep, it would need to be kind of a south slope," they told one local—and has grown to 17 or 18 families in Orleans County. Their roadside stands have "turned into little hubs for the community"—and after one Amish family's baby was born with serious medical issues, the larger community has turned out in force at a series of fundraisers.After 89 days of rehab, bald eagle flies again. Over the past few years, Berlin VT farmer Buzz Ferver has noticed an eagle scavenging his chickens' scrap pile, but this summer, he tells VTDigger's Riley Robinson, it couldn't hop the fence to get there. “He tried like six times and couldn’t get over, and that’s when I knew he was hurt." Fish & Wildlife took the bird to VINS, which found it had injured its left shoulder. On Wednesday, the bird was brought back to Ferver's farm and released. Robinson has the back-story, video has the bird and Fish & Wildlife's Doug Morin on bald eagles' comeback in the state.Not quite ready to engage with anything serious on a rainy Monday? Me, neither. So here's a project called "Blossom," by ambient musician and software engineer Alex Bainter. It's pretty simple: Click. You'll catch on fast.
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Today at 10:10 am, Dartmouth's Russian Department and Jewish Studies program host folk-cabaret singer, songwriter, 2019 Grammy nominee, and scholar Psoy Korolenko (Pavel Lion), with "Lullabaykas and Ballalaykas: Ballads and Lullabies in Slavic, European, Jewish, and Brazilian Folklore." It'll be in-person, in Room 104 at the Black Family Visual Arts Center. (Thanks, AW!)
And anytime on CATV, you can catch policy analyst Julia Gelatt's OSHER talk on finding balance in US immigration policy, "Dance with the Trees & the Absent Forest" from the Junction Dance Festival, and the NH Exec Council's Oct. 13 meeting, the one at which its members got into it with Gov. Chris Sununu before opting to reject federal vaccine funds.
It's Monday. So the day seems right for a to-do list. But not just any to-do list...it's the Felice Brothers' to-do list. Reviewers have long found echoes of Dylan in the upstate NY band, anchored by brothers Ian and James Felice, here with drummer Will Lawrence and bassist Jesske Hume. You could definitely call them idiosyncratic, but they come at the world with their own edgy, off-kilter slant,
...Buy a spinach-colored dinner jacketDefy all natural laws...
See you tomorrow.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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