Daybreak Monday 12/7/20

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Hey! Sun! Well, partly, anyway, though it'll get cloudier as the day goes on. Also, some wind (from the northwest), but nothing like the last two days. High today only around 30. Cloudy overnight, low 20s.We get visitors from the north. "For the last week or so, a flock of Pine Grosbeaks have been enjoying the crabapple trees on Main St. in New London," Marc Beerman writes. They tend to stick to their breeding range, which is north of the Canadian border, and show up in these parts only when their search for food brings them farther south than normal. So Marc's been out with his camera. The males, he notes, are "a reddish pink with two white wing bars and pale gray highlights.  Females and 'immatures' are gray with burnt orange or yellow on the head and rump."Hanover Terrace outbreak rises to 68. “No one at this time is at significant risk for hospitalization, and the residents who we were the most concerned about earlier this week have improved,” temporary administrator Martha Ilsley told the Valley News on Saturday, though that quote disappeared from an update published last night. Altogether, 46 residents, 20 staff members, and two contract workers have been affected. The facility is now testing daily. Dartmouth lands $2.4 million to study Covid's impact on primary care. The money comes from the federal CARES Act, and was announced on Friday by NH's congressional delegation. It will go toward investigating "how COVID-19 has impacted primary and patient care in the nation, particularly the adoption of new health care delivery methods such as telehealth, as well as explain variations in the impact of COVID-19 on health care providers and the patients they serve." The aim is to guide policy in any future pandemics.Norwich's Brendan Rhim heads to Europe for 2021 bike-racing season. Visa permitting, the 24-year-old will take up with the Irish team EvoPro Racing and be working out of Belgium for the season. “I’m over-the-moon ecstatic to get the chance to race over there," he tells the VN's Greg Fennell. "The weather and terrain is a little similar to Vermont in certain areas of Belgium—lots of wind, cold snow. Miserable.” New café to take over Strafford Historical Society space, historical society to move into defunct café space. It's not quite as complex as it sounds. Phoebe Mix owns the post office building by the green in Strafford, whose annex the historical society's been using. But Mix is pulling together plans and permits for a breakfast/lunch café in the annex, the VN's John Lippman reports. So the society is headed down Justin Morrill Memorial Highway to S. Strafford, where it's been offered the old Masonic Lodge building—former home to a series of failed café efforts, including Hattie's and Cafe 232—for $1. SPONSORED: Just a few days left to bid in The Family Place’s online Gingerbread Festival Auction. Though you can’t join others in person this year, you can still support Upper Valley families—and find a wide array of fabulous items, including gift certificates to local businesses, gift baskets, artwork, home and garden items, sporting goods, fitness classes, staycation options, and more. But the clock is ticking: The auction ends Wednesday at 4:30 PM. Click this link to browse and bid. Sponsored by The Family Place.Want to track incoming vaccine doses? Benjy Renton, a senior at Middlebury who's emerged during the pandemic as a reliable and dogged consolidator of overlooked information, has launched a new dashboard using local news reports and press releases to track how many vaccine doses each state is being allocated—since the feds have cut way back on their initial rosy promises and have no readily available public data effort like it on their own. He updates regularly as new information's available.NH hospitals face Medicare fines. Every year, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services compare hospitals to their peers for readmissions within 30 days on a range of ailments, from heart failure to hip or knee replacement. Those that do worse get penalized, and this year 12 out of 13 of the NH hospitals examined fall into that category, reports the Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth. As he points out, the cuts in reimbursements "come at a rough time for the state’s hospitals, which have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue since the start of the pandemic."If there's a lesson in the pandemic, it's that the time is now to prepare for climate migrants. “Fourteen months ago, we wouldn’t have anticipated a population bump due to a pandemic," points out Kate McCarthy, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in VT, talking to NHPR's Outside/In. The Conservation Law Foundation's Elena Mihaly is even more pointed: "I don’t think Vermont has really faced the kind of development pressure that it may once other parts of our country become uninhabitable,” she says, arguing that infrastructure, housing, and land use planning are all vital, as is thinking about "the social issues that come with welcoming new people to Vermont." VT emerging as US saffron-growing center. Back in 2014, an Iranian entomologist named Arash Ghalehgolabbehbahani—he's "patient with people who try to pronounce his last name," writes Anne Wallace Allen in VTDigger—moved his work to UVM, where he realized the highly valuable crocus would tolerate the state's climate and soil admirably. He eventually met a plant scientist there named Margaret Skinner and now UVM runs a North American saffron research center. The state's largest grower, Newbury's Calabash Gardens, planted 120,000 corms (basically, bulbs) this fall.Supremes' deer-jacking reprimand leaves VT court unmoved. You may remember that back in October, the US Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by a VT hunter after game wardens in 2017 peered through his garage window to find evidence of illegal hunting. Still, three justices criticized the VT Supreme Court for upholding his conviction. Now the VT court has rejected the hunter's request for a rehearing, reports VTDigger's Alan Keays, arguing that given the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case, there is no "sound basis for us to consider defendant’s renewed motion for reargument."20 ski summits, three days, one mountain bike. Well, actually, two, since for most of her 62-hour quest to climb Vermont's ski mountains by bike, Heather Mason had a friend along. Mason lives in Niskayuna, NY, near Schenectady, and feeling trapped earlier this year, “I started thinking I needed something, I needed to do something big,” she tells Schenectady's Daily Gazette. So in September she headed out, riding up slopes or roads or paths to the summit of each—though her trek up Jay was more pushing and carrying than riding. “The biggest surprise was just how big and massive that mountain is," she says.Not your usual full moon photo. Nope, this one was taken Saturday evening from the International Space Station, with the moon appearing to hover just above the earth. 

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Rubber Soul

came out—grab your armrest!—55 years ago last week. In its honor, here's Walk Off the Earth, an indie pop band based just outside Toronto, doing "A History of the Beatles, 1962-1970." Nine years, 20 songs (in chronological order), six minutes and 37 seconds.

(Thanks, KB!)

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