Daybreak Monday 4/27/20

HECKUVA START TO THE WEEK, EH, UPPER VALLEY?

This? Just a temporary setback... You could let spring weather in New England break your heart, but let's just hang onto Saturday's sunshine and warmth as a harbinger. Today's blip we get to blame on a storm system from the Ohio Valley. Wet snow above 1000 feet, but lower down we get a mix of rain and snow until a bit later this morning, then rain likely the rest of today and tonight. Temps at best in the low 40s.It's spring, and the cataracts are flowing by the Willard Covered Bridges. Actually, technically, the Willard Bridge is the easternmost of two covered bridges that carry Mill Street in N. Hartland across the Ottauquechee; it was built around 1870. The bridge on the other side of the tiny island in the middle of the river was built in 2001. Whatever you want to call them, they're cool, and with the river in full spring flow, William Daugherty got his drone out yesterday morning for a flyover.Let's play catch-up!

Cornish, Tunbridge fairs still weighing options as others are cancelled. Last week, the Chelsea Flea Market and Bradford Fair joined the Norwich Fair in announcing cancellations, as the Quechee Balloon Fest decided to postpone until September. Meanwhile, leaders at both the Cornish and Tunbridge fairs are still unsure of their plans—in part because they haven't yet met to discuss them. “It’s perilous,” Meriden resident Steve Taylor told the VN's Anna Merriman about the Cornish Fair, noting how reliant local clubs and vendors are on revenue from the fair. “I’m just worried.”Also weighing plans: Dartmouth, which remains undecided on whether to take federal bailout funds. It's entitled to nearly $3.5 million under the CARES Act, but hasn't yet signed the document required to get the money. Nor have Brown or Columbia, while Cornell has accepted the aid and promised to use all of it for emergency student aid. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn have all said they won't accept it. The Dartmouth has the details.Anichini files for bankruptcy. The Tunbridge company, with a retail store in Quechee, sources its linens in Italy, counts the hotel industry as its largest customer, and relies on visitors from arund the world at its store. "We could have weathered any of these challenges, possibly more,” owner Susan Dollenmaier wrote to the VN's John Lippman. “But to fight on many fronts while dealing with COVID-19 was more than a little company can bear.” Farther down in the same column, Lippman also highlights West Leb Feed & Supply's move to sell Silo hand sanitizer, with the proceeds going to furloughed restaurant workers from Salt Hill Pub, Jesse’s and Molly’s, Lui Lui, Three Tomatoes and Enfield House of Pizza."Good enough for the quarantine!" That was a home baker on the other end of the phone line with Barb Alpern, who's one of King Arthur Flour's ace team of baking advisors. As you can imagine, they've been slammed over the past six weeks, dispensing advice and comfort and, in this case, dispensation to use liquid milk instead of dry milk powder in a recipe. In the third Daybreak Interview, Barb talks about what it's been like talking to America as it breaks out the flour and wonders how to deal without yeast. And what it's like to go from 20,000 interactions to over 50,000 in just a few weeks.Lebanon Farmers Market to open as planned... but with changes. The popular market will take over all of Colburn Park starting Thursday, May 14, in order to provide plenty of space between vendors. It's extended its hours from 3 pm to 7 pm, will be limiting the numbers of people who can enter at any one time, is requiring face coverings to get in, will have no public restrooms but will have hand sanitizer available at the entrance, and is asking shoppers to "adopt a CSA-pickup mindset: Purchase goods and return home without lingering." "LOCAL BUSINESSES that pay RENT for commercial space, how is your building's owner helping (if at all) through this?" That's an intriguing little Facebook poll posted late yesterday by Trail Break's Topher Lyons. So far, 10 are paying full rent while partially operating, six are paying full rent while closed, three have had their rent cut up to 50 percent, two have seen it cut more than 50 percent...Milk bottle shortage still a concern for local dairies. Strafford Organic Creamery's has eased somewhat from the other week, when, as you'll recall, co-owner Amy Huyffer took to Facebook to plead for customers to return their glass bottles before they had to start dumping milk. But McNamara is facing a “huge pinch on bottles,” Liz McNamara tells the VN's Tim Camerato. “We are having trouble getting bottles back and are having to use up our stock of bottles that we have." You can return cleaned bottles at both the Co-op and Hannaford's. Also of note: Both dairies are seeing business grow from people interested in buying local.

That trend is also affecting NH farms. "It took a pandemic for people to determine that local food is essential,” Jeremiah Vernon, of Vernon Family Farm in Newfields, tells NH Business Review. As in VT, small producers are seeing a jump in retail business, which in some cases has offset the loss of restaurant clients. Same for fishermen and fishmongers. But dairy operations that sell to the big cooperatives, unlike Strafford or McNamara, are facing hard times.Nashua Telegraph goes online, latest NH newspaper to retrench in face of crisis. The paper announced yesterday that all weekday editions will be online-only starting today. It's the first New Hampshire paper "to make the transition to what some experts see as inevitable for some local dailies," writes InDepthNH's Nancy West, "but it likely won’t be the last." She runs down belt-tightening at other newspapers, but also notes a bright spot: As of last night, the VN had raised $131,764 from readers.Two VT utilities say "Never mind" to federal aid. Green Mountain Power and Vermont Gas Systems had requested $12.5 million in crisis-related federal small business loans, but after new guidelines said large, well-capitalized businesses should not qualify, withdrew from the PPP, reports VPR. The two companies are owned by Noverco, a multi-billion dollar Quebec-based holding company. In its letter to the Public Utilities Commission on the move, GMP wrote that it has "experienced significant load reductions in the commercial and industrial sector, lower monthly sales, and increased accounts receivable due to this crisis.”Vermont's slight "turn of the spigot." Gov. Phil Scott on Friday announced a modicum of re-opening to allow outdoor businesses to operate with five or fewer employees; interior construction on uninhabited buildings and manufacturing likewise; outdoor retail operations like garden centers to have up to 10 total people between staff and customers, and farmers markets to open May 1. Vermont Business Mag has the details, and also an intriguing chart comparing mobility data for VT, NH, and ME (as a stand-in for social distancing) showing the greatest success through April in VT. Private planes to Mayo Clinic, state police as couriers to Cambridge... How Vermont built its testing capacity. In the early days of the pandemic, the state faced brutal shortages of supplies: machines, swabs, reagents reagents (the chemicals needed to run tests). At one point, a privately owned air company stepped in to fly test samples to the Mayo Clinic for 10 days, and Gov. Phil Scott tapped the state police to run samples down to a clinic in Cambridge for testing. Now the state has built up its own testing capacity—yet for the moment is seeing less demand (and fewer positives). The challenge will be to test as broadly as needed, write VTDigger's Katie Jickling and Elizabeth Gribkoff in their in-depth look at the state of play.

Uh, hey bud? A refill? All this talk of bears brought an early-April photo taken a while back by Kenwood Foster in New London. He got it at 3 am after he'd been awakened by the sound of the BBQ tumbling down the stairs off the sun porch deck. "It apparently," he writes, "was partially blocking the bird feeder, which I had not yet taken in." The bear was right there, looking sheepish but miffed.Newly installed boiler at CRREL leaks heating oil into CT River. A security officer discovered the leak on Saturday, but not before 350 gallons had found their way into a floor drain that led to the river. The spill has been contained by a boom across the river (which is blocking boat traffic, not that you'd want to be out in this today anyway), and is being cleaned up.Lyme-E. Thetford bridge takes its place on the National Register of Historic Places. The current bridge was built by the WPA in 1937, the VN's Liz Sauchelli writes, after floods the year before took out its predecessor. It is the longest two-span Parker truss bridge still being used in New Hampshire, and is 86 percent owned by that state, 14 percent by Vermont. “It was smaller pieces of steel that were then put together on-site with riveting machines,” architect Frank Barrett says. “Piece by piece, they assembled this big tinker toy across the river until it was self-supporting. To me, it’s very expressive.”"She found poetry everywhere: birds at the feeder, flowers in the garden, the detritus of the past, the call of the whippoorwill, walks in the woods, hikes up Mount Kearsarge, swims in Eagle Pond." That's former Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride in The National Book Review, talking about poet Jane Kenyon in a review of a new "best of" collection. Kenyon and her husband, Donald Hall, moved into Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot in 1975, living there together until she died 25 years ago last week. Hall died in 2018. Pride knew both of them and weaves fond recollection into an encounter with her poems and what he calls "the blossoming of her work.""Hot, hairy, heavy breathers tend to be tick magnets." That's Dr. Kaitlyn Morse, founder of a nonprofit called BeBop Labs in Salisbury, NH. In an intriguing Union Leader story. Over the past two years, BeBop has been crowdsourcing ticks from citizen scientist volunteers across NH, testing them for diseases. Black-legged ticks (also known as deer ticks) are, of course, the ones to worry about, and it turns out they have two "high seasons": March to May and again in the fall. It also turns out that location matters: a higher percentage of ticks in some counties carry Lyme than in others.News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

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