Daybreak Monday 11/2/20

WELCOME TO A WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

There's a slight chance of snow when you get up this morning. Later in the week we're due warm weather, but right now a cold front's moving through from the west and temps won't get beyond the mid-30s today. Windy with some serious gusts throughout the day, mostly cloudy, then a new disturbance may bring snow again tonight. Elevation matters: totals won't amount to much in the eastern valleys, but there could be some inches in the Greens.Just stopping by. Fox sparrows don't spend much time around here, if at all—usually just a day or two as they're migrating. So Etna photographer Jim Block lucked out in Friday's snow when a pair he'd spotted the day before stuck around, and he was able to catch them nicely set off against the blanket of white. They were gone the next morning. “When there is adversity, there is opportunity." Bryan Smith, longtime manager of International DVD and Poster in Hanover, is taking over the store and moving it into the old Morano Gelato spot. He talked to the Valley News' John Lippman for a roundup of pandemic-era "bold moves." Lippman also notes Red Kite Candy's retail move into Hanover, Gnomon Copy's move out of the basement and next to Hanover's Bank of America branch, the Nostalgia Café's opening by the gorge in Quechee, and a new toy store that was scheduled to open yesterday in Glen Road Plaza.DIY contact tracing. The VN's Nora Doyle-Burr notes that as case counts rise in NH, official contact tracers are falling behind. As you saw on Friday, restaurants are now taking names and contact info for all patrons. The state has also brought in 30 members of the National Guard to help out. But when cases involve schools, it's increasingly on them to do the work, deploying nurses, school officials—and, in the case of the Lyme school, two physician parents—to notify people who might have been exposed. "I cannot unsee what I saw." Hanover's Tim Van Leer had picked up a desk for his son, Jake, down in Concord and was headed home on I-89 last week when, in Sutton, he became the first person on the scene of a pickup truck that had left the highway and hit a tree. "He saw the side air bags—alerting him of the possible, horrible scope of the accident—and started running. He saw the glass and the door and the blood," writes Monitor columnist Ray Duckler. The driver was dead, Van Leer later found out. But there was also a passenger who was flown to DHMC, and Van Leer desperately wants to hear how she's doing. So... we won't need someone to tell us we dropped spaghetti sauce on our shirt? A group of Dartmouth and Microsoft researchers have developed a fabric that senses shifts in electrical charge to identify items touching it. They created a "smart tablecloth" that was able to identify everything from an avocado to a water glass. It was even able to able to distinguish among water, milk, apple cider and soda. But perhaps the most intriguing line in the press release: "The system can even assist with cooking by making recipe suggestions and giving preparation instructions." Umm...Dartmouth "sits on Western Abenaki land, which is, to this day, unceded." In other words, it was never Gov. John Wentworth's to give away to Eleazer Wheelock. That, and much more, is in Meaghan Powers' reflection on the history of the college's relations with Indigenous people in a special issue of The Dartmouth, from its rapid veer away from its founding purpose—by 1800, it had only graduated three Native students—to its more recent commitment to returning to its roots: These days, there are at least 80 different tribes, tribal nations, or Indigenous communities represented in each incoming class. Does an eagle look fiercer when it's wearing camo? On Saturday, NH State Police responded to a call of an injured eagle on I-93 near Canterbury. When they got there, the eagle was resting comfortably in the back of a passersby's car, with a jacket keeping it warm and a dreamcatcher overhead...Mt. Sunapee Ski Area master plan calls for expansion into West Bowl. The idea's actually been in the resort's sights for a while, and was approved in 2016 by the Executive Council but never carried out. Now, under Vail Resorts' new ownership, the plan calls for adding 105 acres of glades and ski terrain, as well as a new lodge and chairlift—but notes that the existing permit to take water from Lake Sunapee would cover any new snowmaking needs.Water-level fight threatens VT's Green River Reservoir. The fight over the much-loved destination for paddlers and campers involves a set-to between the state's Agency of Natural Resources and Morrisville Water & Light, the small municipal utility that runs the dam and uses a winter drawdown to supplement its power supply. It wants to pull more water out than ANR will allow—and, VPR's John Dillon reports, "if it’s not financially possible to operate the dam, the utility has threatened to take it down, which would drain the reservoir." The legal wrangling continues.When UPS swag aims for the heart. Max Finn lives in Jericho, VT. The son of VPR CEO Scott Finn, he's 14, autistic, and really into the package deliveries from Kipp Youngman, a local UPS driver. In fact, for the last several Halloweens, Max has dressed as a UPS driver—in a costume made by his mom, Wendy Radcliff. Youngman hoped he could give Max a regulation uniform, but that's against company policy. So he did the next best thing last week, dropping off a UPS vest, winter hat, and gloves. Says Radcliff: “There are small acts of kindness that people can do that really make a difference.”"It’s hard to think of another brewery that has so quickly gone from overhyped beer geek bait to a brand shoppers...can buy while popping into a corner store to get chips and a few rolls of Charmin." That would be Waitsfield's Lawson's Finest Liquids—and all, VinePair's Aaron Goldfarb writes, without losing its geek cred. He traces the brewery's development from Sean Lawson's homebrew hobby while he was monitoring forest ecosystem health to... well, what it is now. Part of the secret: “From the beginning, we’ve been fanatical about getting beer to customers as fresh as possible,” says Lawson.Michelin-Man-meets-Navy-diver-circa-1945. Nope, not a Halloween costume. That's what WA State ag department workers wore about 10 days ago when they took out the first Asian giant hornet nest—you know them as "murder hornets"—in the US. They found the suits on Amazon, made by a mysterious Chinese company, for $170 apiece, reports Wired's Megan Molteni. Fortunately, they didn't have to put them to the test: Temps a week ago Saturday were in the 30s, making the hornets sluggish when they got shop-vacced out of the nest and into a container. The bad news? There's at least one other nest around.

So, to start the week...

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The Kanneh-Mason Family is seven sibs from Nottingham, England. You may have noticed cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason back in 2018, when he played at Harry and Meghan's wedding, but all seven have caught the public's eye since then. We'll let them take us into the week with their version of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," from an album they'll be releasing this week. (Also, if you want more, Sheku and his sister Isata will be on VPR's "Carnegie Hall Live" tonight at 8 playing Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, and more.)

See you tomorrow. 

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

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