Daybreak Monday 2/28/22

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Sunny, cold. We started the day somewhere around 10 degrees and may not get out of the teens all day. If you were out early, those wind chills were fearsome, but they should get better as the day goes on. Winds from the northwest and very little in the way of clouds until late today, ahead of a system headed our way late tomorrow.Break up. River ice, that is. CATV's Chico Eastridge has put together a two-minute video of the ice flow on the White River through WRJ during that warm spell we had what seems like eons ago. Music by the late Jon Appleton.The highways might seem a little more crowded than usual Wednesday morning. That's because VT and some NH truckers and drivers joining the People's Convoy—the US version of the Canadian Freedom Convoy that brought Ottawa to a halt—will convene near Exit 18 in Lebanon that day. Organizers are planning supply drives and overpass flag waves, writes VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein. The version that began on the West Coast passed through Texas yesterday.Gas to energy project at Lebanon landfill due to start next year. It's been in the works for 13 years, writes Claire Potter in the Valley News, and will convert methane produced by organic waste in the landfill into electricity, which the city will then sell. The landfill "generates about 350 standard cubic feet of landfill gas each minute," Potter writes; the project's expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 3,500 tons a year.“Basically, we’re headed towards attempted murder. All right? That’s what it is.” Remember the campaign of calls and harassment—and, eventually, a bomb threat—that beset Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont in December? That quote is from the QAnon-affiliated leader of a group called Truth Seekers 88, which targeted the hospital after the wife of a Covid patient reached out over doctors' refusal to treat her husband with ivermectin. In The Washington Post (possible paywall), Joanna Slater runs down what happened.SPONSORED: Get the best discount on a Crossroad Farm CSA.  Today (February 28) is the last day to take advantage of our 7 percent discount.  Shares are available through discounted, pre-purchased credit in increments of $100. You can purchase as many shares as you like and redeem them all season at the home farm and greenhouses in Post Mills and at the Norwich farmstand. Your shares won't expire and can be used for what you'd like whenever you'd like! More details here. Sponsored by Crossroad Farm.More students, more special ed funding drive school budgets in NH towns. In the VN, Liz Sauchelli takes a look at proposed school budgets in Grantham, Cornish, Plainfield, Lyme, and the Mascoma Valley towns. All are seeing increases, in some cases because more students have shown up and high school tuition rates have jumped, in others because of special ed placements outside the district.From Dutch bulbs to the vase on your table, via Post Mills. For 36 years, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, Talking Well Farm's Mark Lansburgh has been growing tulips, lilies, and other cut flowers in his greenhouses from bulbs—"nature's best bio-computers," he calls them—imported from Holland. He does it all organically, and has navigated the shifting cut-flower market, which has seen retail consolidation, but also rising demand for locally grown flowers.For beavers and muskrats, when winter comes so do foxes and coyotes. The predators' sense of smell, writes Mary Holland on her Naturally Curious blog, is so good that "they rarely miss an opportunity to check out inhabited beaver or muskrat lodges in the winter, when frozen ponds and marshes allow them access." Beavers tend to be well-protected by frozen mud; muskrats use vegetation, which leaves them more vulnerable.First edition of first US novel by a Black woman returns to NH. Harriet Wilson, who was born in Milford in 1825, wrote Sketches From the Life of a Free Black in 1859 and sold it door to door. it was published in Boston, and had been forgotten until scholar Henry Louis Gates discovered it in 1982. A California librarian found a rare first edition in a family safe, reports WMUR, and decided it belonged where Wilson grew up; she hand-delivered it to the Black Heritage Trail of NH, which will display it in its Portsmouth headquarters.New NH energy efficiency law "stanches the bleeding" but doesn't "amount to a lot of progress.” The measure, signed late last week by Gov. Chris Sununu, was a bipartisan effort to reverse a controversial November ruling by the Public Utilities Commission cutting funding for energy efficiency programs. In NH Bulletin, Amanda Gokee writes that the measure restores key elements of NHSaves program that had been cut, but limits future growth.VT House votes to allow some Current Use participants to leave their land alone. At the moment, landowners are eligible only if they farm or log their land; the new measure, writes Emma Cotton in VTDigger, would let land with "specific, environmentally valuable" features be part of the program without being touched. The original Current Use law was created when "nobody was thinking about invasive species, climate change, increased flooding, carbon sequestration, carbon storage and the need for biodiversity,” said a backer before Friday's vote.Big plans for industrial hemp processing in St. J. The E.T. & H.K. Ide grain mill buildings, which sit between the tracks and the Passumpsic running through town, have been sold to a company that will use them to process hemp into fiber for building materials and other uses, reports Anne Wallace Allen in Seven Days. Zion Growers, owned by cousins who grew up in Barnet, also hopes to snag the former Vermont Marble Company building in Proctor.A photon's journey through the early universe. In a pink tutu. Xiaohan Wu's ballet interpreting her astronomy PhD thesis is one of this year's winners of the 14th annual "Dance Your PhD" competition hosted by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and Science mag, in which students and scholars... well, do exactly what the name suggests. The social sciences winner, from Croatia, uses a corps of dancers to explain "active learning." And though it didn't win, you do not want to miss Joana Ferreira's finger-snapping approach to treating low back pain.Hmm...Which brings up a thought...Hey, D-H and APD! What about "Dance Your Specialty"? If you get it together, this spot's yours!

Heads Up

It's quiet and peaceful out there in the sunshine, sure. But it's also Monday. So here's The Bangles with... do I even need to tell you?

In their

very

mid-'80s video.  And just as a bonus, here's audio of Prince—who wrote the song—

in SF in 1986.

See you tomorrow.

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

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