Daybreak Monday 5/18/20

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Call me a sucker, but there's just something about the words "a very quiet weather pattern in store for this week." Of course, we have to get past this morning, with a warm front stalled to our south, kept from getting closer by high pressure centered over Canada. If the models are right, this leaves us with some clouds for the first part of the morning and a slight chance of showers (more likely the farther south you are) and then it's clear sailing and sunny skies after that, temps nicely into the 60s. Low 40s tonight.Remember that dramatic little thunderstorm that came through late on Friday? Here's guessing Cam Cross won't forget it. His backyard camera happened to catch a very close-by lightning strike. It's at the 16-second mark: Don't blink. If you really want to see it, make a game of trying to pause the video right as the bolt hits. (Thanks, Cam!)"A dozen shades of green, names suited to Benjamin Moore paint chips: kelly green; forest green; avocado green; lime green, more yellow than green..." Writer and naturalist Ted Levin has been holed up at home, like many of us. Unlike many of us, however, he knows what he's looking at and what he's hearing when he's outside. So instead of traveling far and wide, he's taken to writing down field notes from his backyard: the thrushes and the warblers and the titmice and the turkeys. He's just started up a newsletter to collect his posts. Link takes you to yesterday's, but you can check out the whole archive, as well."The wasp went sailing through the air..." The mail the other day brought a gift from Hanover poet Nancy Lagomarsino, which, thankfully, she's letting me share. It's her description of a passing encounter with a lone mud dauber wasp. I wouldn't have thought twice. She did, and found in it... Well, just see for yourself. (Thanks, Nancy!)Re-opening continues, and so do the cases...

"Learning does not = protection/Love does not = protection/Like a building does." Doug Heavisides, the poet-principal of the Hartford Area Career & Technology Center, is back blogging. And pacing the floor at 3:30 am with Clarabelle, his dog, thinking about his students at home all day—the ones who are not safe there—and about his teammates, and their caring and love for their students, and his confidence that they "sooooo got this." Today's opening day for outside dining in New Hampshire. And in case you haven't been out and about in Leb or Hanover, on Friday blogger Susan Apel caught the preparations going on at Salt Hill, Three Tomatoes, and Lou's. Salt Hill's taken over the parking area outside, opposite Colburn Park. Three Tomatoes has laid claim to now-closed Court Street. And Lou's has a nice chunk of footage on Main Street. VA, towns change Memorial Day ceremonies, July 4 still in limbo. "For the first time in its history," the VN's Liz Sauchelli reports, the VA Medical Center in WRJ will not hold a public ceremony on its campus. Instead, there'll be a Facebook Live wreath-laying ceremony on May 30. Lebanon has cancelled its parade, with just a small American Legion honor guard laying wreaths. As for July 4, Sauchelli writes, Leb and Hartford are still trying to figure out what to do; W. Windsor has already gone ahead and cancelled.Leb expects to cut $800K from its budget, other towns considering options. With tax revenues highly uncertain, the city's cuts so far don't involve core services: instead, it's axing money for training, scanning of city documents, a winter-time test of treating roadways with a salt brine solution, and possibly summer rec programs, the VN's Tim Camerato reports. If more cuts need to be made, City Manager Shaun Mulholland tells him, they may involve personnel. Camerato rounds up the unsettled picture in Canaan, Norwich, and Hanover, as well.That's a heck of a stack of wood! Four Hanover High soccer players with time on their hands agreed to stack wood for a neighbor, former Dartmouth coach Whit Mitchell, and decided to donate their earnings to LISTEN. "Their hard work impressed [Mitchell] so much," Hanover coach Rob Grabill writes, "that he increased the donation, and after a hard day's work the foursome had earned $1,000 for LISTEN." More in Grabill's "letter to Daybreak.""You did not leave Covid-19 when you left the hospital."  Back when things were really dire in New York City, Drs. Clay Block and Hugh Huizenga were among a team of WRJ VA employees--physicians, nurses, even maintenance personnel—who volunteered to go help. In a new Daybreak interview, they talk over what it was like—caring for patients in a pandemic that has "outpaced our ability to learn how to best treat it," as Huizenga says, and on the streets of what seemed like an abandoned city. "You could almost cross every street without looking," says Block. And he was in Manhattan. Tele-health is here to stay, but not for everything. White River Family Practice only introduced telemedicine in mid-March, and now, Dr. Michael Lyons tells VTDigger's Katie Jickling, “I can’t envision when my daily practice wouldn’t be at least 30 percent tele-health. I never want to see it go away." Though docs report some tech hiccups and issues with getting patients online, Jickling writes they've also been able to see sides of their patients that might not have surfaced in an examining room. Still, Lyons says, there are certain things—“The touch and looking in their eyes, and making people feel like that’s going to help"—that screens can't replace.Need for workers is "especially acute" along 12A. The VN's John Lippman reports that Price Chopper, FedEx, Petco, BJ’s, Home Depot, Hannaford's and Advance Auto Parts are all looking to fill positions. So are Chipper's in Woodstock, which has 10 open positions, the USPS, and the Hanover Co-op. In some cases, the businesses are boosting their entry-level workforces to meet expanded or shifting needs; in others, they're trying to fill positions left vacant by employees reluctant to be on the front lines. In all, Lippman found 325 recent help-wanted ads on Indeed.com within 25 miles of Lebanon.It's your government, here's how to follow along. InDepthNH's Nancy West notes that the legislature plans to begin meeting in person again on June 11, but until then there are a bunch of committee and task force meetings that will be held virtually or over the phone, and they're open to the public. As she writes, above a roundup of what's happening and how to get access, "Please take time this week to participate in your government. It’s your business. Your money is being spent. Your future is being determined."Vermont unemployment system still struggling. Some people, writes VTDigger's Aidan Quigley, still haven't gotten any checks, despite waiting weeks—and in one case, at least, despite hearing directly from the labor commissioner's office. Others, he reports, began getting benefits then suddenly had them stop because of a glitch that sent the $600 federal benefit to some 8,000 recipients weeks before it was supposed to begin. "The department will withhold a portion of the benefits for the weeks of April 26 and May 30 to account for the error," Quigley writes.What Vermont's measuring. At his press conference on Friday, Gov. Phil Scott announced further incremental re-opening, including lodgings on May 22 for VT residents. He also outlined the metrics the state's following as it decides how to proceed: the percentage of visits to emergency care with either Covid-like illness or flu diagnosis; Case growth measured daily, over three and seven days, and by reproductive rate; the percent of tests that come back positive; and the state's inventory of occupied and unoccupied surgical and ICU beds.Vermonters seem to be mistaking poisonous false hellebore for ramps. The Northern New England Poison Center in Portland, ME, typically gets no more than 8 reports of false hellebore poisoning in all of ME, NH, and VT in a year. So far this year it's gotten 25, all but three in Vermont. "Are people just having more time on their hands, or are they going back to nature because of all the things that are happening?" the center's director muses to Seven Days. Most of those cases sent people to the hospital. The main thing: It shouldn't be pleated and should taste and smell like an onion.

The Dartmouth Political Times tackles the Upper Valley—and way beyond. DPT is a new, nonpartisan political journal put out by a hardy band of undergrads. They're also doing a weekly podcast, made more challenging by the fact that one interviewer, Madeline Gochee, is in California, and the other, Dhruv Uppal, is in Singapore, 15 hours ahead. On Friday, they talked to me about the pandemic in the Upper Valley. Before that it was Rine Uhm and Crystal An about their "Give Essential" platform matching donors with essential workers. And before that, econ prof Stefan Link about how the pandemic might affect globalization. You can find it all and more at the link. 

Notice how nicely the road tapers. Drone artist William Daugherty was in Thetford Center yesterday, flying over the Tucker Hill Road covered bridge and the Ompompanoosuc, placid in some spots, rushing madly in others It's not just Mink. Bear sightings have become common in neighborhoods near Boston Lot, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. Mink and her three cubs, of course, but two other sows with cubs have been spotted as well, according to Andrew Timmins, the bear project leader for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. “There’s bears spread all across the landscape there,” he says, adding that Mink's relocation in 2019 opened up space for other females—who may be her daughters.

Rindge, NH farm "a local version of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault" for heirloom dahlias. Sun Moon Farm grows heirloom bulbs to supply "avid home gardeners with delicate flower rarities," writes the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript's Abbe Hamilton. Unlike more commercially available dahlia bulbs, theirs are so delicate that they can only be harvested by hand. Many of the varieties grown by the farm, Hamilton writes, were popular 50 or more years ago—including White Aster, which became widely sought after in the 1880s.Want to become a musician's patron? Michael Arnowitt has a proposition for you. Over the years, the virtuoso composer and pianist (he now splits his time between Montpelier and Toronto) developed a dedicated international following for his witty, entertaining, and knowledge-expanding programs. He's discovered Patreon, and is hoping patrons will support him to the tune of $7 a creation. “In effect, you have become the record company executive, the performing arts center’s artistic director,” he tells the Rutland Herald's Jim Lowe. Among other things, he's doing a jazz version of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and creating a composition for jazz quartet and Indonesian gamelan orchestra. 

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