Daybreak Monday 6/26/23

HEY, WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

A chance then a likelihood of showers, mostly cloudy. This is what things are going to look like for the next few days: showers off and on, maybe a thunderstorm, occasional interludes of sunshine. Temps today will be getting into the upper 70s, with winds this morning shifting to come from the southeast. Which, for those of you to the north who've been under wildfire smoke from Canada, is good news: The wind should be clearing things out over the course of the morning. Mid 60s tonight.A vibrant launch to the week. This is one startlingly green luna moth Jenn Megyesi found in S. Royalton, isn't it?"How many times do you want to see the same little flower doodles that your children drew? Well, Jess always did." Jess is Jessica Morehouse, the 34-year-old mother of three girls whose body was found at the Casella processing center in WRJ back in January. In the Valley News, Frances Mize talks to her family and friends about the ease with which she made friends, her struggle with addiction, and the circumstances of her death. She'd been trying to get clean—but police believe she'd been sleeping in a dumpster behind LISTEN in WRJ, using the cardboard inside to keep warm.Golf & Ski Warehouse sold. The business, which began with a single West Leb store in 1989 and grew to include three more in NH and ME, was bought last week by Worldwide Golf Shops, a large chain based in Santa Ana, CA, reports Justin Campfield in the VN. "I came to realize that maybe this is the right time,” says Scott Peters, who founded the store along with his wife and brother. Worldwide's CEO tells Campfield they plan to make few changes. “We love the business they built and are doing everything we can not to mess it up," he says. "The people are phenomenal, so we are excited.”"Heaven." I don't know how you feel about breakfast, but Dave Celone just had one at wit & grit.—the breakfast and lunch spot in Randolph—and he's pretty darn enthusiastic. "This might have been the best breakfast burrito I’ve had—and I’ve had dozens, or more accurately, dozens of dozens," he writes on his Upper Valley VT/NH Musings blog. His son's pile of tater tots with trimmings sounds pretty darn great, too. The Celones also wandered by other spots in Randolph. And Dave offers a tiny disquisition on the nickname "Slab City."Twin Pines: Tenants' union claims are "unfounded and erroneous." Late last week, the housing nonprofit responded to the press release sent out by the Upper Valley Tenants' Union after its surprise move to place four of its member on the Twin Pines board. In a weekend letter to the Valley News, TPHT director Andrew Winter notes that the four new members join five other tenants already on the board, and writes, "While we always have many work orders pending, claims of long-standing unaddressed issues were blatantly false and did not recognize daily hard work done by our property management team."Behind Riverfolk: a belief that "there is a place, a desire even, for people getting together to enjoy live music." Next month, the second Riverfolk festival takes over Northern Stage's outdoor theater on a Monday afternoon and evening. It turns out, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, that Mondays are a good day for live local music. She describes how the event came about, and the collaboration among retired Coast Guard officer Chris Balliau (he's in charge of logistics), Here in the Valley mainstays Jakob Breitbach and Jes Raymond, and singer-songwriter Tommy Crawford, with background on each.Lebanon's buying spree continues. Well, "spree" might be exaggerated—but to the three properties the city's purchased on Main Street in West Leb, you can probably add 160 Mechanic Street. It's that low-slung commercial building opposite where Slayton Hill Road hits Mechanic Street—and it happens to be in the way of a proposed roundabout for that intersection (which also includes the little dip of a road up toward Alice Peck Day). In the VN, Patrick Adrian writes that City Manager Shaun Mulholland has reached a $400K agreement to buy the property; the council will hold a hearing on a proposed bond next month.No online voter registration in NH this year. A bill creating an online portal for NH residents to register to vote died last week after GOP senators objected to funding added by the House to help towns replace aging voting machines. In negotiations last week, senators argued towns should pay for the machines themselves, reports Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. Replies one GOP state rep, "We’ll be going into (the) 2024 election with most likely the highest turnout that the state has ever seen with the largest population the state has ever seen with machines that are 30 years old, saying ‘Hey, just one more election.'”NH will require composting for big food-waste producers. It's part of the budget signed into law last week, the Boston Globe's Amanda Gokee reported on Friday (paywall), and is aimed at grocery stores, restaurants, and other businesses or organizations that generate a ton or more of food waste each week. The measure comes from New London Democrat Karen Ebel. The challenge, Gokee writes, is that NH does not have much of an infrastructure for keeping food waste out of landfills. Nor does the state know much about how many businesses will be affected. It's got until early 2025 to figure things out.It's summer. You want to hear music outdoors. Where you going to go? Well, around here, there's Feast & Field every Thursday in Barnard. It's one of the regular concerts on farms and at vineyards around VT, writes Erica Houskeeper on her Happy Vermont blog, including on Knoll Farm in Fayston, the Retreat Farm in Brattleboro, and kinda far afield but such a great name: Earth Sky Time at the base of Equinox Mountain in Manchester. Bonus: a really nice aerial view of Barnard's Fable Farm during a concert by Max Grudzinski.The Monday Vordle. With an excellent word from Friday's Daybreak. 

Heads Up

And to start us off this week...

Let's go back a ways. Here's the Montreal-based early-music ensemble Constantinople, started by brothers Kiya and Ziya Tabassian, with Italian tenor Marco Beasley on "Non val aqua al mio gran foco" by 14th-15th century composer Bartolomeo Tromboncino.See you tomorrow.

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

If you like Daybreak and would like to help it keep going and evolve, please hit the "Support" button below and I'll tell you more:

And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! Subscribe at no cost at:

Thank you!