Daybreak Monday 5/17/21

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

A lot like yesterday, though a bit warmer. We'll start out sunny and temps will climb quickly into the 60s and then low 70s. This afternoon, a "subtle" disturbance will pass by overhead, bringing a chance of showers and maybe thunder. Calm winds from the south this afternoon, upper 40s tonight.So much pink! The Japanese cherries are in blossom along Newbury, VT's streets, and it must be breathtaking in person, as Huntley Whitacre's photo from this weekend suggests.As Lebanon, Hanover embrace outdoor dining, Hartford sets up roadblocks. The problem is two-fold, John Lippman writes in the Valley News: Town manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis has told selectboard members that last year’s arrangements may have violated government regs; and the town is forging ahead with water and sewer repairs whose second phase in July or August will require Piecemeal Pies and the Tuckerbox to shut down outdoor dining. Jackie Oktay, who owns Tuckerbox with her husband, Vural, tells Lippman that on-street dining this summer is “a matter of survival.”Fairlee crash injures two, one critically. Just after midnight yesterday morning, a VT state trooper on Maurice Roberts Memorial Highway (that's the road running north from Lake Morey) was nearly struck by a pickup headed the other direction. The trooper tried to stop it but the truck took off, failed to negotiate a corner, and hit several trees. The driver, Jake St. Martin of Newbury, ran for the woods but was arrested. One passenger, from Hartford, was airlifted to DHMC with life-threatening injuries, according to a VSP news release; another sustained serious injuries, while a third was unharmed.In case you were wondering how dry it is out there: Brush fire gets out of control, burns by Route 4 in Killington. It broke out Saturday on South Mountain, behind the former Kokopelis Inn. Crews from area towns, including Barnard, Bethel, and Bridgewater responded, according to the Killington Police Department; they returned yesterday morning and spent the day dealing with hot spots. The Mountain Times writes the fire was "reportedly started by new owners of the land logging and burning brush despite a fire ban." $20 million to Dartmouth for STEM diversity. The money comes from alums Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe and John Donahoe (she directs the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford; he's CEO of Nike) and is aimed at boosting "the representation, success, and leadership of historically underrepresented groups," the college communications office wrote in its announcement yesterday. The money will support faculty recruiting and retention efforts in the arts and sciences as well as at Geisel and Thayer, and will expand a program aimed at increasing "historically underrepresented students" in the STEM fields.Lyme voters keep Old River Road public. At town meeting under a tent on Saturday, they opted narrowly to turn the entire width of the road—a 1,000-foot stretch of which was closed in 2015 after the Connecticut cut into it—into a "Class A" trail, which gives access to pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles. The alternative, writes Alex Hanson in the VN, would have kept the eastern side of that portion in town hands for a trail while returning the river side to landowners. “I don’t think we should be talking about privatizing long-standing public access to a beautiful spot,” one resident argued.Woodstock's Village Butcher set to reopen later this month with a new look. Alex and Cristy Beram, who bought the Elm Street mainstay from longtime owners George and Linda Racicot last year, are pandemic-era transplants from the Boston area. They're putting in a kitchen on the bottom floor so they can offer more prepared foods and baked goods, they've been sourcing local meats—longtime head butcher Josh Coyle is staying on—and employee Vicky Cook has created a house coffee blend through her business, Rooftop Roasters, reports Gareth Henderson on his Omni Reporter blog.Former future landfill has solar and composting in view...for now. Ever wonder how our solid waste actually gets handled? In Sidenote, Li Shen tells the story of the Greater Upper Valley Solid Waste Management District's plans for a landfill in Hartland—not far as the crow flies from the Lebanon landfill. Eleven towns belong to the group, and someday the Hartland site may be needed, but for now Lebanon is taking everyone's trash, while the landfill site houses a small composting operating and is slated for a small—but, depending on negotiations, possibly much bigger—solar array.Amid the free bed frames and yard sales: a free church. In what is surely the most intriguing listserv post of the week, the United Church of Thetford is looking for an organization to move into its North Thetford Church, which includes a sanctuary, a meeting area with stage, a commercial kitchen, and a few other rooms. Back in 2018, church members voted to divest themselves of two churches, and the following year transferred the old Timothy Frost Methodist Church in Thetford Center to the town, but the N. Thetford church has had no takers. Yet. (Sorry, no link.)A guide to the US health care system—in comic-book form. As you'd expect, it's the brainchild of Center for Cartoon Studies co-founder James Sturm, who has already put out guides to democracy and the country's mental health system. This time around, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr, Sturm, Sam Nakahira, who's in the school’s class of 2021, and Kazimir Lee, a 2016 graduate, worked with a team of Harvard students in fields as diverse as biology, mythology, and anthropology to put the guide together. They've raised money to print and distribute it, and an online version comes out in 6-8 weeks.There's speeding... and then there's speeding. 125 mph, to be precise. Unfortunately for Jeyson Lopez Gonzalez of Waltham, MA, a couple of NH state troopers were hanging out by Exit 11 on I-89 in Sutton as he blew past them near  midnight on Friday, heading north. He's charged with Reckless Operation and Reckless Conduct.NH, feds differ on cryptocurrency kiosks. In particular, Mark Hayward writes in the Union Leader, they've issued conflicting advice on the need to register ATMs that allow for the exchange of cash and cryptocurrency. In at least one case, the state banking department said no state license was needed, which came to light last week in the federal trial of Free Keene activist Ian Freeman and others on charges of money laundering for facilitating dollar-bitcoin exchanges, in part using virtual currency ATMs. (There may be a paywall.)“Moving here was eye-opening.” Michael Hennighan is a filmmaker who moved to Wilmington, VT during the pandemic, and what opened his eyes were his internet speeds, which he told the Southern VT Economy Summit late last week are "reliably slow." Others, for a panel on whether newcomers will stay, cited internet speeds, the lack of public transportation, and Vermont's relative lack of racial and ethnic diversity as challenges to keeping transplants in the state, reports VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor.VT's greenhouse gas emissions declining. Though slowly at best. The state's latest report, which uses data through 2017 and projections for 2018 and 2019, shows a 5.6 percent drop in overall emissions fro 2016-19, writes VTDigger's Katya Schwenk. Most of those reductions come from the state's electricity sector; transportation and heating, which now account for 70 percent of emissions—"and progress at cutting emissions in those sectors has been slow," Schwenk writes. Even with the decline, the state needs to cut emissions another 14 percent to reach the 2025 target set by the legislature last year.The oldest wild bird known to humans just had her 39th chick. Wisdom, an albatross who nests on Midway Atoll in the Pacific, was first tagged in 1956. Since Laysan Albatrosses don’t nest until five years at the earliest, she's at least 70, though she could be older, writes Elena Passarello in Audubon. And she's probably not alone: Early bands were aluminum, which often fell off, hardly surprising given that albatrosses spend 90 percent of their time at sea. The challenge in keeping track? "There are some half-million nests on a space roughly twice the size of Central Park," Passarello writes.

And over the weekend...

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The pandemic's had a transformative effect on a lot of artists who spent the past year looking inward and outward and rethinking their place in the world. So it was that Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin, the Chapel Hill-based folk and Americana duo who made an international name for themselves as Mandolin Orange, announced a few weeks ago that they've changed their name: It's now Watchhouse. And, of course, being musicians, they marked the moment with a new video, "Better Way," that sends them off in a decidedly less rootsy... okay, okay, out-and-out psychedelic, but in a 2021 way... direction. 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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