Daybreak Monday 6/1/20

RABBIT RABBIT, UPPER VALLEY!

To start June off, we get one more day of cooler-than-normal weather. Generally sunny today—cloudier after noon—and there's a weak disturbance moving through that may produce some showers this afternoon and evening. Winds from the northwest, fairly calm in the morning but picking up in the afternoon. Highs barely cresting 60, down to about 40 tonight.  What do geese look like when they land? Well, photographer Jim Block happened to catch a pair as they descended on Mascoma Lake. He also caught a crow's blue eye, American redstarts along the rail trail, an appraising blue jay at Kilowatt Park in Wilder, a memorable closeup of a wary Canada goose along the Mascoma River Greenway, an iridescent common grackle, and a pile of other birds in this compendium of his mid-May wanderings.Oh, okay... Time to do some catching up.

Looks like Kmart's going to close after all. The VN's John Lippman noticed job listings for part-time cashiers and customer service workers at the West Leb location with "store closing" appended. Company spokesmen declined to comment. The West Leb store is the last of K-Mart's locations in NH, VT, and ME, and one of only two in all of New England. The burning question: What are they going to call Kmart Plaza once it's gone? (VN, sub reqd)"Skin color is not reasonable suspicion." Local photographer Kata Sasvari was in Hanover on Saturday documenting the peaceful protest there over the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and other black men and boys at the hands of police. Protests also took place in Burlington, Montpelier, Middlebury, Brattleboro, and Manchester, NH.Locals talk about what it's like to have Covid. Randolph's Bob and Kathy Eddy, Lyme's Rebecca Lovejoy, Elizue Gomes Santos (who's from Nashua but was at DHMC), and Dartmouth student Ben McLean (yeah, the one with the pug who got the first confirmed US dog case) all spoke to the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr about their experiences. They're better now, but all say it was harrowing. "I want people to understand that it’s not like the flu,” says Lovejoy.Visually loud and incredibly close. Richard Neugass has made a hobby of minutely detailed flower photographs, and sent some in to About Norwich blogger Demo Sofronas the other day. They're a riot of color. And a few pics of what looks like some serious hard work by a pileated. SPONSORED: What if the entire Upper Valley made music at once? We can’t get together in person to make music as we'd like, but we know you’re singing and playing at home. At noon on Saturday, June 6, as the Sing & Play Festival ends, the Upper Valley Music Center invites everyone to go outside—stand on your porch or in the street or by a window—and sing & play! Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join, regardless of where you are in the world. If you'd like, document it to share on social media using #UVMCAllTogetherNow. Our goal is a moment of communal music making so we can remember: We’re all in this together. Sponsored by the Upper Valley Music Center.Leb board allows DHMC to go ahead with construction; traffic assessment district proposed. The city's planning board last week gave the hospital the go-ahead to begin building its new $130 million patient tower before making traffic, pedestrian, and bike improvements, as D-H had originally pledged to do. Instead, city manager Shaun Mulholland has proposed a new district to charge the hospital and other developers along Rt. 120 for needed traffic improvements. That move will require city council approval. (VN)Dartmouth sued for charging full tuition amid pandemic shutdown. The class-action suit, brought last week in NH federal district court by a Florida parent, alleges that students did not receive the same education remotely as they would have had they been on campus, and argues that Dartmouth was in breach of contract by charging full tuition. The college “does not merely sell credit hours and diplomas as one would sell widgets. It sells an experience,” the suit says. Over 90 such class actions have been filed around the country, The Dartmouth's Abigail Mihaly reports.Out-of-staters eyeing Upper Valley real estate. Last year, 229 people from Missouri checked out the NH & VT listings on Sotheby Four Seasons' website during the first five months of the year. This year, 2,828 did, reports the VN's Lippman. Interest from other states—WA, MA, CA, NJ—jumped, too. Covid is one reason. So is the interest in making remote working permanent, says Alan DiStasio, COO at Four Seasons in Hanover. "People are saying, ‘If I can work from home two to three to five days a week, maybe I don’t have to live so close to the office.’” Overall, local realtors say, demand for homes remains strong.Also strong: Demand for bicycles. After they opened The Gear Hub in Randolph early in March, Rob Leeson and Robin Crandall were nervous about whether they'd ordered too much inventory, given the pandemic. Now they're pretty much out of new bikes and are having trouble getting new ones. “It’s been first-come, first-served because the manufacturers are out of stock,” Leeson tells VTDigger's Anne Wallace Allen. And people are pulling old bikes out, too. “We’ve cleaned quite a bit of hay and dust from a lot of bikes; that’s been the majority of our service,” Leeson says.And, it turns out, pools. “From the minute we open the doors in the morning till we close at night we are mobbed,” the owner of pool stores in Concord and Manchester tells NH Business Review. With the coming of warm weather and most people staying home for the summer, demand has surged around the state — to the point where pool dealers have no more inventory. “We can’t sell anymore right now; everything we had in stock or could get through our distributors is gone," says one.NH state agencies anticipate huge revenue drop. The projections, which come from the Department of Revenue Administration, the Liquor Commission, the Lottery Commission, and other agencies that collect taxes and fees, suggest the state could see revenues $500 million below what it had expected by mid-2021. That will affect everything from spending on general government operations to schools and roads and highways. NH Business Review's Phil Sletten has the details.“Vermont businesses can’t survive...just by Vermonters buying and trading with other Vermonters.” That's Tom Torti, CEO of the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, fretting about the impact of the closed border between the US and Canada. Visitors from the north spend roughly $60 million on lodging, $30 million in restaurants and the same in retail stores in Vermont, the state reports, and as summer gets underway in earnest, local business leaders worry an extended border closing could be devastating. But Montreal is Canada's Covid-19 epicenter, and state officials are wary."We add our egg yolks, we add our fire, and we whisk like a madman!" Bill Buford, the New Yorker writer with the crazed glint in his eye who at long last just started publishing his pieces on French cooking, has made a video with his sons Frederick and George on "how to not mess up a sauce béarnaise." Not many ingredients—eggs, vinegar, shallots, lots of butter—but my, is it finicky. Frederick, known as Fredo, directed the video: You might have seen him last summer when he was here as a clown in Circus Smirkus. 

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Let's head east a ways today... The Hungarian Roma group Kalyi Jag was founded in 1978, starting out in workers' houses and dance halls to bring traditional gypsy music to a broader audience. Over the decades they've come to command an international audience.

a Romani lullaby they wrote.

Dear tiny daughter,All the gold jewels in the world,Dear tiny daughter.

See you tomorrow.

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