Daybreak Monday 10/26/20

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Lots of activity up there. Down here? Chance of showers all day. First, there's high pressure scooting off to the east today, followed by weak low pressure with some attendant warm air arriving from the southwest; that, too, will move through, followed by a cold front tonight. All we get to see, though, is showeriness through tonight, especially late in the day. Temps into the mid-40s, down to the high 30s or 40 overnight.That late afternoon light. Yeah, fall colors, yadda yadda. But then there's this moment when that honeyed end-of-day sunlight hits the leaves just so and your breath fails. Scribner Fauver captured it in Meriden on Saturday. No filters, just a straight shot from his phone. And still it shines through.Two Leb traffic headaches to be aware of today. The first will close the northbound lane over the bridge that leads to and from Main St. in old W. Leb on 12A. As the city and state prepare to replace the bridge, workers will be taking "geotechnical soundings." Somewhat less dire, Mt. Support Road near the hospital will also have one lane closed south of LaHaye Drive. ECFiber expands. The Valley News' John Lippman reports that the high-speed internet consortium plans to start building its network in Bradford, Corinth, Fairlee, W. Fairlee and Windsor next year—even though it hasn't completed its work in Hartford and Woodstock, two of its original towns. "We thought we could sensibly expand into [the new towns],” says board chair F. X. Flinn, without hampering work in the original towns. It's welcome news to the newbies: “The only high-speed around here is when somebody drives downhill without their brakes,” one Bradford resident tells Lippman.New owners bring new life to UV general stores. Cameron and Kathleen Gregory have moved up from Virginia to take over the Post Mills and Thetford Center stores owned by Cameron's late uncle, Mike Pomeroy, reports Lippman; Pomeroy's widow, Mary Dan, sold their third store, W. Fairlee's B&B Cash Market, to former manager Erin Cilley last month. Meanwhile, the Etna General Store, which closed in August, is being reopened by Aaron Stocking, who managed it when it was owned by Victor Dube. And over in Sharon, Maplefields is in the midst of renovating the Trading Post and hopes to open by year's end.Old pillow cases, mattress ticking, umbrellas...even porch furniture. All of this went into architect and artist Charles A. Platt's collages, his daughter tells blogger Susan Apel. "Much in this found art tradition," Apel writes, "evokes a kind of wonder at the otherwise mundane, and convinces the viewer that beauty and meaning are present in the everyday." Platt died in August, but a show at AVA Gallery that he'd worked on for years has just opened for scheduled visits and limited walk-ins."Peaceful spots are out there, but they are getting harder to find." Well, Bob Totz found one. On his Old Roads, Rivers and Rails blog, he writes about a hike he took (and photographed) with a friend earlier this month along Slide Brook, below Mt. Moosilauke. They headed to the beaver ponds between Moosilauke and Mt. Clough—and at the north end of one of the ponds found a small beach, rocks for sitting, and... "It was as if there was no one, no vehicles, no air traffic, or machines within hundreds of miles. It was SO QUIET!""It is too early to imagine the full practical implications of quantum time dilation." Heck, it's too early even to understand it. But Alexander Smith, who teaches physics at Dartmouth and St. Anselm, and a colleague have just published a thought experiment blending the quantum notion of superposition, in which an atom can occupy two places at once, with Einstein's idea of time dilation—the faster you travel, the slower time seems to pass. This has implications for atomic clocks, the new paper argues, and, says Smith, "offers a new possibility to test fundamental physics."Guns allowed, intimidation not. "We are not able to use any of our New Hampshire election laws to prohibit a voter from entering to vote if they have a firearm, and that includes if the polling place is a school,” Asst AG Nicholas Chong Yen told NH town clerks last week. It's nothing new, but the issue's come up as pollworkers fret over this year's highly charged election. On the VT side, guns are allowed inside polling places unless they're on school grounds. Chong Yen added that voter intimidation "is a felony offense, it is something that is reportable to our office that we can look at and prosecute.”NH Health Dept warns of restaurant exposure. The agency identified eight new restaurants and bars over the last few days where people who tested positive for Covid had visited. Five of those warnings were issued on Friday for bars and restaurants in Concord, Portsmouth, and Peterborough. Another three came on Saturday, for establishments in Concord, Portsmouth, and Lincoln.One bit of good news, now that it's cold out: Fire restrictions have been lifted in the Whites. National Forest officials had imposed rules back in September in response to the drought, restricting fires to fire rings and other designated spots in specific campgrounds and picnic areas. With the recent rains, those limits have now been rescinded.Study finds risky visits lower in VT than other northeastern states. That conclusion comes from GPS data studied by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which found that while traffic to gyms, salons, restaurants, and bars dropped across the region in April, visits to those locations were lower in Vermont than in other states and have been slower to rebuild. The study does not go into why results differ by state, but its lead author tells VTDigger's Ellie French that public policy, people’s attitudes toward regulation, and population density all play a role. Brattleboro Retreat lays off staff, cuts programs. The news came on Friday, when the struggling mental health facility announced it will cut 85 employees from its roster of 550, axe its its addiction treatment hub and addiction management program, and close two education programs. "We're the only provider of inpatient psychiatric care for children [and] adolescents," CEO Louis Josephson told VPR's Henry Epp. "We are focusing on that as our core mission, which it's been, really, since our inception 186 years ago." The Retreat can no longer afford to subsidize other programs, he said."Vermont’s COVID 'boom' may be in the zeitgeist right now, but the data to back that narrative up just doesn’t exist." VPR's Brave Little State went searching for numbers to back up the anecdotal reports of hordes moving to the state. They talked to pandemic-era transplants, to realtors—whose business is booming—and to a school superintendent in Windham County, where school populations are growing. But overall? Property transfer records are actually down from last year, school numbers won't be available until early next year, and the DMV apparently doesn't track licenses and plates for new Vermonters. "Strapped beside and behind Ashmore, where the front and rear passenger seats should have been, huge fuel tanks sloshed with gasoline." The rules for the Cannonball Run, writes Alex Palmer in GQ, are simple: Start from the Red Ball Garage on East 31st in Manhattan, get to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, CA as fast as four wheels can take you, and try not to get caught. The record had been 27 hours, 25 minutes. Then the pandemic cleared the highways. Cannonball fanatics saw their chance. Palmer dives into history, lore... and Fred Ashmore's run. I won't spoil what happened.

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Let's just ease into the week... Anoushka Shankar on sitar, British singer-songwriter-cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson, and Indian singer Shilpa Rao

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