GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny again. A weak disturbance up high skittered through last night, which is why the day starts only partly sunny, but the clouds will be gone by this afternoon. Meanwhile, there's some warmer air moving in from the south for the day, bringing us temps in the low or mid-40s. Calm winds from the southwest, only down to about freezing tonight.But then, clouds can be pretty great. A few days ago, Windsor's Steve Giroux planted himself on the banks of the Connecticut—first at the Cornish boat access, then on River Road in Plainfield—and created this mesmerizing time-lapse video of the river flowing south, the clouds scudding by above, and Ascutney in several moods as the light plays across it.Former Dartmouth student charged with shooting out menorah lights last year. A Grafton County grand jury charged Carlos Wilcox, 20, of the Bronx, with a Class B felony of criminal mischief, reports John Lippman in the Valley News. Wilcox, who is no longer enrolled at the college, is alleged to have damaged the menorah set up on the Dartmouth green last Dec. 15. Hanover police say they did not have enough the evidence to characterize the vandalism as a hate crime. “Certainly if this was a hate crime, it would have been so charged,” Chief Charles Dennis told Lippman last week.Are towns' ash borer plans enough? That's the question Nick Clark and Li Shen ask of Thetford in Sidenote, but it could apply everywhere. With the destructive invader sighted in Hartford, it's just a matter of not-very-much time before it's everywhere. Though Thetford has some money in a fund set aside to take down dying ash trees in the town right-of-way, Clark and Shen point out it can cost as much as $3,500 for a licensed arborist to take down a single tree—which would let the town deal with eight trees right now. Along the way, the two go into detail on why the ash borer's arrival is such bad news for our forests.Claremont, Newport chiefs struggle with police shortages. “We often get close to being full-staffed, and then something happens and it goes away,” Claremont Police Chief Mark Chase told the city council last week. Of 25 positions for officers in the city, reports Patrick Adrian in the Eagle Times, 21 are filled, but only 15-16 officers are an active duty. Newport, meanwhile is short five full-time officers. “Our officers are working longer hours by themselves and they are taking on higher caseloads, so their caseloads are piling up," says Chief Brent Wilmot.SPONSORED: Parents/guardians of high school sophomores, learn about HACTC opportunities available to students. The Hartford Area Career and Technology Center will hold a Virtual Town Hall on December 14 at 7 pm to share information and answer admissions questions from prospective students and their families. Click the maroon link for more information about HACTC program offerings and to join the Town Hall meeting. The online application for the 2022-2023 school year opens December 17. The student application deadline is January 21, 2022. Sponsored by the HACTC.“That red building.” That's how farmer/restaurateur John Lombard describes the building at Woodstock's Peace Field Farm that may or may not ever hold an 80-seat farm-to-table restaurant. It's embroiled in legal maneuvering, but in the meantime, the VN's John Lippman pinpoints the plans for the Central Street building Lombard and Peace Field owner John Holland just bought: Lombard plans to open Decant Wine Shop (motto: “Real Wine for Real People”), to be managed by Kevin Ring, former beverage director and sommelier at Barnard's Twin Farms. Lippman talks to Lombard about the farm and its pigs.In the US, states' polices decades ago affect mortality rates now. In a new study, researchers led by Dartmouth's Jonathan Skinner and Ellen Meara first tallied the differing mortality rates at midlife among states, then began looking for causes. They initially focused on "deaths of despair," reports Dartmouth News' Amy Olson. but these accounted for only a fraction. They also discarded differences in education. In the end, they concluded, state public health and social policies in the '80s and '90s—taxes on cigarettes, the earned income tax credit, expanding Medicaid to pregnant mothers—made the difference.Central NH to get safe house for human trafficking victims next year. It will be the first of its kind in the state, writes Cassidy Jensen in the Concord Monitor, focused on "victims of trafficking and exploitation, who often have complex needs that often can’t be met by existing services." In a 2020 report, an NH task force confirmed 30 victims of trafficking in the state that year, of whom 16 were victims of sex trafficking and 13 were victims of labor trafficking, Jensen reports. The safe house will focus on the basics—security, shelter, and food—then mental health, education, and job training for six women initially."If you want the paper to continue, we need you to step up and help put out the paper." When Ray Small moved to Hardwick, VT a few years ago to run the Hardwick Gazette, it was losing money. Slowly it gained traction—until the pandemic hit. It went all-online, and now Small has put the Gazette's building up for sale, in hopes that the proceeds will help the paper continue. But the key to survival, he tells VPR's Mary Engisch, is "having the communities in essence cover themselves," he says, with residents choosing topics and the paper "still holding the line on editorial content" and covering the basics.“At first I was not happy about the move, but now I tell my mother I cannot go back to a crowded place.” Originally, Hazar Mansour, Hussam Alhallak, and their family, which fled the Syrian civil war as refugees, had hoped to go to Los Angeles. Instead, they wound up in Rutland. But there, writes Woodstock Union High School's Alec Smail for the "Underground Workshop" series of stories by student journalists on VTDigger, they've found work and, over time, begun to feel at home. Their advice for Afghan refugees? “Learn the language and make connections with the people here,” says Mansour.“An oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport.” It's not nice to laugh at other people's misfortune. But when the "people" is a self-important Michelin-starred restaurant and the misfortune is an entertaining wallop of a review, it's so hard not to. In The Everwhereist, Geraldine DeRuiter describes with unabashed glee and the sharpest of boning knives a four-and-a-half-hour, 27-course dining... experience... at Bros, a restaurant in Lecce, Italy. “'These are made with rancid ricotta,' the server said. 'I’m… I’m sorry, did you say rancid? You mean… fermented? Aged?' 'No. Rancid.'" And so much more.What larceny lurks in a beaver's heart? Let's just say that when you were stringing lights, you never dreamed of this. Originally from a Facebook group called "Oh Canada," via Don McCabe in the Norwich ListServ Extension group.
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“We’ve still got about 6,000 songs. So if it feels good and there’s nothing to stop the flow, once we get on tour, maybe we pull up in some little town somewhere and set up and record.” That's Robert Plant, who's many years and even more miles on from Led Zeppelin, talking about continuing his collaboration with bluegrass-country legend Alison Krauss. In one of the more unlikely alliances in rock/country history, the two cut what turned out to be a multiple-Grammy-winning album together in 2007. Then they waited 14 years to release another. It just came out last month.
from Raise the Roof.
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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