GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Well, yuck. Air flowing in from the southeast will warm temps up into the 50s even as a front moving through today brings us rain off and on all day, then a certainty tonight—along with a chance of a thunderstorm in the evening. Even better? Gusts getting into the 20-30 mph range this afternoon and toward 40 mph tonight; there's a warning of possible power outages. Arctic air follows right behind, so temps overnight will drop back into more normal range, low in the mid-20s.Deer have a sense of humor. The proof, Skip Stanger writes from Etna, is in the message one left on his pumpkin. Every year, his family puts up painted pumpkins for Halloween, then leaves them in the yard afterward. Here's what one of those pumpkins looked like before a deer started scraping away at it to get to the inside flesh, and here's what it looked like afterward.Dan & Whit's goes national. "It was like, we're going to have to lock the front door because we have zero help," an emotional Dan Fraser told CBS Evening News correspondent Steve Hartman for a segment of Hartman's "On the Road" series. Hartman came to town after catching wind of the onslaught of townspeople who've stepped up to staff the cash registers, stock shelves, and make sandwiches behind the deli counter to keep the store running in the face of the labor shortage. The writeup is fine; the video's better.Lying around for good. Meanwhile, a few miles away, the Annals of Creative Fundraising (yep, just made it up) have a new entry. Today is Day 6 of Suzanne Stofflet's 50-day "Hammocking for the Haven" effort. "I wondered if people would enjoy watching an old lady freeze her *ss off daily, and even pay to egg her on," she wrote just before starting her venture: 15 minutes a day in her hammock, whatever the conditions outside. Turns out, they would. The first five days have brought in close to $3,500, she says. Maroon link takes you to her Facebook page, with photos; here's Rose Terami's Valley News story. NH state trooper shoots, wounds suicidal Walpole man. The incident occurred early Saturday morning, after the trooper and a Walpole police officer responded to a report of a man experiencing a mental health crisis. A brief confrontation ensued, and the trooper fired his gun. Neither officer was wearing a body cam. The AG's office is investigating, the third time this year it's been called in to examine a police shooting, reports the Union Leader. In crisis? Call 1-800-273-TALK or text 741741.Massage chair self-combusts, shuts parts of Mall of New Hampshire. Fortunately, no one was in the chair at the time, since it happened sometime around 1:25 am yesterday, which is when fire crews were called in. The mall's sprinkler system kept the fire isolated, and none of the security guards on duty at the time were injured. There was smoke damage throughout the mall and though retail stores were allowed to open, restaurants remained closed.The luckiest woman in NH? So... If you were told about a woman who repeatedly won the electronic version of the NH Lottery's scratch-tickets—taking in over $62K in 2019—would you be suspicious? Several people were, and one of them took his questions to NHPR. In a two-part series, Todd Bookman looks into the saga of "Lady Luck." What he discovers is... a lesson in probability and statistics. Or as a lottery employee put it in a doc Bookman got through a public records request, "She is a net-gain positive for the house.” Warning: Guys and Dolls earworm.Liberty Utilities asks NH Public Utilities Commission to halt efficiency decision. In a Friday filing with the commission, the utility wrote that the PUC's highly controversial ruling ending the state's efficiency plan and cutting funding raises legal and policy issues, and that its order "will cause irreparable harm" if they're not resolved. In the ruling's aftermath, "Liberty expects costs for gas customers to increase by $4.4 million in 2022," writes NH Bulletin's Amanda Gokee. "The company estimates that costs for electric customers will swell by $8.3 million as a result of the decision.""It is a major big deal." In just the first of five years of federal largesse under the new infrastructure law, Vermont is due $63 million for water projects, reports VTDigger's Emma Cotton. The money will go in part to addressing contaminants in drinking water, including lead and PFAS chemicals, projects in mobile home parks and other communities that have failing water and septic systems, and sewer upgrades—including, potentially, creating centralized wastewater systems in the state's smaller villages. NH, meanwhile, is due $72.6 million, the AP reports.200. That, reports Modern Farmer, is about the number of saffron farmers in Vermont these days. They include Calabash Gardens in Newbury, which gets a shoutout in Sophia F. Gottfried's story tracing the evolution of the industry in the state. "While the vast majority of the world’s saffron is grown in Iran and Spain," she writes, "a burgeoning community of Vermont farmers are finding that the crop grows extraordinarily well in their climate, too." Saffron-harvesting, says Stowe farmer Brian Leven, is “fast and furious. I’ll pick flowers early in the morning and a few hours later, more flowers are ready to pick.”"A sense of what the earliest days of our planet looked like." That's how Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, labels a remarkable 30-second drone flyover of the lava flow from the Cumbra Vieja volcano on La Palma, in the Canary Islands.
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Let's start the week with an ending. Friday evening in Lebanon, the bands in the final Anonymous Coffeehouse of 2021—Green Heron, Crowes Pasture, and Dan and the Dinosaurs—
That's Monique Byrne (Crowes Pasture, from Boston) and Betsy Heron (Green Heron, NH Seacoast) on vocals in this video from Chad Finer.
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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