Daybreak Monday 2/12/24

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Partly sunny, calm. For the rest of today, we get a day not unlike yesterday, with a mix of sun and clouds, temps getting up toward 40, and calm winds from the west. There's a cold front headed this way that will bring temperatures for the week back to winter, but of course, all eyes are really on this storm coming up from the south, with a slight chance that snow will begin around dawn, but more likely a bit later tomorrow morning. Lows tonight in the upper 20s.About that storm... The models have been teasing us for days, with predicted amounts for the region creeping up then dropping again. The real snow will be to the south, with right now it looking like most of the Upper Valley is in line for just an inch or two. Still, the weather folks say they have "lower than normal confidence in whether the current track continues to trend southward, stabilizes, or shifts back north." Here's where predictions stand for the moment:

Shadows. Two very different takes on the absence of light in the midst of light to start us off this week:

Three Tomatoes, servers at odds over tip sharing. The Valley News's Jim Kenyon details a case before the NH Dept of Labor, brought by a longtime server. It involves the restaurant's longstanding practice of requiring servers to share a portion of their tips with other workers, like bartenders and bussers. Under NH law, Kenyon writes, mandatory tip sharing is illegal. In November, the state ordered Three Tomatoes to pay $20K to employees, and it recently paid out more. "We realized we were wrong," said its general manager. Several servers, though, are pursuing the matter; Kenyon gives the details.Leaders of men's basketball union effort at Dartmouth envision "Ivy League Players Association". On Saturday, the AP's Jimmy Golen caught up with Romeo Myrthil and Cade Haskins after the Big Green's 77-59 loss to Harvard on the road to talk about the aftermath of last week's decision by a National Labor Relations Board official that the team's players have the right to form a union. They told him they've been bombarded with interest from other athletes at Dartmouth and around the Ivies. The players intend to hold a March 5 union election. The college is seeking a full NLRB review of the decision.Mapping Lebanon's cemeteries, honoring forgotten graves. Fran Hanchett, a former president of the Lebanon Historical Society and the first female city historian, died last fall. And as Liz Sauchelli writes in the VN, beyond her official roles she played an outsized role in documenting, preserving, and marking the graves of its residents—especially Civil War and Revolutionary War vets whose stones were often ill-maintained or even non-existent. The city's maintenance manager, Patrick McCarthy, estimates that over the years Hanchett found over 100 unrecognized gravesites; 85 of them now have markers.From the stage at Woodstock Union High to New York standup to a Bridgewater woolen mill: How Collen Doyle built a comedy destination in his home town. It began with a quest to escape the relentlessness of NYC's performing scene, which led Doyle to a Pentangle Arts production a decade ago. There, writes Marion Umpleby in the VN, where he realized, "It doesn’t matter where I perform comedy, my love of comedy will be the same.” That same year, he opened the Woolen Mill Comedy Club—and not only has it built a regular audience, Umpleby reports, but it's drawing big-city talent.It was a near thing, but ice-in's been declared on Winnipesaukee. That just means that most of the lake is covered, and it happened on Friday, reports David Brooks in the Monitor—the latest date on record. It does not mean that the usual wintertime markers are happening: There's no ice runway at Alton Bay this year, the second year in a row without one, and though the annual Ice Fishing Derby took place this weekend, officials told participants to wear inflatable life vests. Also, Brooks reports, contractors can't get to island homes to do repairs, though they're doing good business hauling ATVs from the water.NH House backs off on fees for public records requests. You may remember there's been a to-do over a bill that passed the chamber letting state and local governments charge $25 per hour for requests that take more than 10 hours to fulfill. Well, the Globe's Amanda Gokee and Steven Porter wrote in Friday's Morning Report newsletter (no paywall), last Thursday the chamber sent the measure back to committee for some changes, propelled by a public outcry. Transparency advocates argue the fees would make it hard for people and groups without resources to get at public records.And speaking of taking a second look: VT lawmakers took a step Friday to tweak Act 127 and let towns postpone votes on school budgets. The measure would replace the 5 percent cap on tax increases for towns hit by Act 127's revamp of the student weighting formula, instead giving them a rebate on their homestead tax rate. As Kevin McCallum writes in Seven Days, the new approach at least is linear: the lower a district budget, the lower the tax rate. But even some Democrats are unhappy. “This is a non-solution to a problem we are pretending to address,” said Randolph Center's Jay Hooper.70-80 percent. Uh oh. Fairbanks Museum meteorologist Mark Breen has spent some time running the numbers on historic cloud cover over the region on April 8, and looking at records back to the 1890s, that's the average for the date. Which matters, of course, because that's the day we get the first solar eclipse visible in VT since 1932 (far southern NH had one in 1959)—and the last until 2079. Breen talks that and more over with VT Public's Jenn Jarecki: like, what makes for a solar eclipse, when you want to wear eclipse glasses (and the very brief period when you don't), and looking forward to midday twilight.The Monday Vordle. With a word from Friday's Daybreak.

And some music to start us off for the week:I'm not 100 percent certain about this, but it’s a fair bet no one had ever written a song about a Nordic Combined skier until Fairlee's Lance Mills penned one about Tara Geraghty-Moats, who'd have been a solid bet to make the Women's Nordic Combined Olympics team in 2026—if the Olympics allowed women to compete in Nordic Combined (which pairs ski jumping with xc skiing). So Geraghty-Moats is over in Nove Mesto na Morave, Czech Republic, competing in the biathlon world championships. Mills, a former teacher who chairs Fairlee's selectboard, has been working for years on an album of his songs; it's just out. Here's his ode to Geraghty-Moats, "West Fairlee Falcon".See you tomorrow.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt   Associate writer: Jonea Gurwitt   Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                                                                  About Michael

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