Daybreak Monday 6/8/20

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Sunny, kinda perfect. High pressure's settling in for the next few days, and it's going to keep skies clear today, temps rising almost 30 degrees from an early-morning low in the mid-40s to the low-mid 70s this afternoon. Breezes from the northwest, some clouds overnight, lows in the high 40s. Oh, okay... Time to get to work.

The Lebanon Diner is going out of business. On their Facebook page Saturday, owners Andy Hill and Karen Liot Hill announced that the diner they've run for eight years "will not survive the COVID-19 shutdown." "Together," they write, "we have celebrated births, weddings, graduations, and other major life accomplishments. We have mourned losses, comforted each other during difficult times, and provided smiles and encouragement. The Diner has been a place of meaningful connections, and we thank you for being part of our family for the past eight years."Whippi Dip looking for new owner, Dunkin' closes Main St. West Leb location. The VN's John Lippman reports that Crystal Johnson, co-owner of Whippi Dip, the iconic Fairlee ice cream/burger stand, is looking for a new owner after a lease/purchase agreement with someone else fell through Memorial Day Weekend. It hasn't opened yet, and “a motivated person could have it open by the Fourth of July," Johnson says. Meanwhile, the Main St. Dunkin' has shut its doors, and is "consolidating operations" with its sister franchise on 12A.Fatal crash in Bethel closes I-89 both directions. The crash occurred in the northbound lanes near Exit 3 around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, when a car driven by Jakim Brewster Hopkins of Brooklyn, NY "contacted the rear" of a car driven by Patrica Carluccio of Bedford, MA. Carluccio's car rolled across the median into the southbound lanes; Hopkins' rolled as well, and he was ejected. "It is believed that Hopkins was traveling well above the posted speed limit and had been driving erratically," the state police report says. Hopkins died; Carluccio was taken to Gifford and released with no injuries.It's definitely going to be harder to tuck this one under your arm. Ever since the pandemic began in March, the WRJ United Methodist Church has been taking food donations and making them available to anyone, via a set of totes sitting out front—which were stolen at one point. As of yesterday, thanks to volunteers and COVER Home Repair, the church is sporting a fully stocked, six-shelves-plus-refrigerator permanent Sharing & Caring Food Pantry. "Our motto remains: Give what you can, take what you need!" they say.SPONSORED: Remember that free session on creating a will and other essential legal documents? Time to sign up! Everything in Order, the local company that helps people create wills and health & financial documents, is hosting a free information session via Zoom, June 11th at 3 pm. Started by the Upper Valley's Allegra Lubrano, EIO invites anyone interested in learning more about these basic legal documents to join the free session. If you haven’t signed up yet, RSVP by clicking the maroon link. Spots are filling quickly. Everything in Order makes it ridiculously easy and insanely cheap for you to get everything in order today.“It's a family here. I love this building. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else." That's Liz Staples, owner of Nature Calls/Bonkers in the Powerhouse Mall, talking to Lippman about the sense of community store owners there feel—and the dire circumstances they currently face. All 10 independent retailers in the mall—of the 21 storefronts all told—are women, and they and the other businesses in the mall are struggling, even though mall owners Hans Copeland and Romer Holleran have given them relief on rent. “If we don’t get people to come out and support us, we won’t have a mall,” says one.SoRo rally draws hundreds. Organizers estimated some 600 people showed up to the Black Lives Matter and anti-police-violence vigil on the South Royalton green Saturday evening; another 75 people were drawn to a similar rally in Canaan earlier in the day. “It’s going to take all of us. God bless you. It’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK," Vermont Law School dean Shirley Jefferson told the crowd, some of whom "diverted" from  Randolph event that was postponed to next weekend. The VN's Anna Merriman has a recap.The return of indoor dining (in the lucky counties) and the general state of play in NH. With announcements coming every few days on what's allowed and what's not, NHPR rounds up where things stand. Lodging reopened Friday, as did all activities on beaches, including sunbathing and building sand castles. Day camps reopen June 22 and overnight camps June 28 (with precautions). And restaurants in all but the four hard-hit southern-tier counties can reopen June 15 for indoor dining as long as tables are 6 feet apart.What to make of NH's coronavirus numbers. The Concord Monitor's David Brooks has been taking a weekly look at the state's progress via four metrics—when they're met consistently, he says, "then we’ll have a good argument for considering the pandemic to be under control." In his roundup as of Friday's stats, the state's still got a ways to go on two—a sustained two-week running average drop and fewer than 4 new cases per day per 100K people—but is getting close on number of case tests per day and is there on a relatively low percentage of positive test results.NH House pioneers new definition of "aisle." Sure, a standoff between House Dems and Republicans has imperiled the resumption of in-person legislating this week. But if it does resume, reports InDepthNH's Garry Rayno, all legislators will be given a mask and plastic shield, plus there'll be separate seating sections for those who cannot medically wear a mask but can use a shield and for those who refuse to wear either. These last "will be separated from other lawmakers by a plastic barrier and have their own bathrooms."All of the counties bordering VT in NY and NH are okay for cross-border travel starting today. So is most of ME and a few counties in RI. On Friday, Gov. Phil Scott lifted the two-week quarantine requirement on Vermonters returning or visitors arriving from counties in northeastern states with fewer than 400 active Covid cases per million. In practical terms, what does that mean? The state's Agency of Commerce and Community Development has a color-coded map, at the link, which it will be updating each Monday by 5 pm. How you can do some risk-assessment of your own. The state's 400-cases metric is "a relatively safe number in terms of the low transmissibility. It looked similar to Vermont’s disease prevalence,” finance commissioner Michael Pieciak explained Friday. But as VTDigger's Erin Petenko notes, there are more fine-grained ways to determine how counties throughout the region are doing. She's got a searchable set of county-by-county tables on two-week case trends and trends in retail and recreation mobility (as a proxy for social distancing).Food-scrap ban deadline approaching. The moment's finally here: Vermont's Act 148, passed in 2012, comes for home food waste July 1. The Agency of Natural Resources says "it has no plans to deploy agents to root through residential trash bags," according to the Free Press. Still, you can watch what you buy, get a compost bin for your backyard (bonus: if you compost your own fruit/vegetable scraps, meat and dairy can legally go in the trash), and, of course, take the whole mess to the composting bins at the transfer station. If you do, get rid of those little plastic food stickers first, would ya?That was some serious rainbow action Saturday evening, wasn't it? Sarah Robinson caught it from a hilltop in Norwich. Thanks, Sarah!And for another take entirely... William Daugherty sent his drone up from Plainfield to catch the high drama of the roiling ink-dark clouds, the sun starting to break through to the west, and the far-off hills emerging into the sun. At a quick glance, as he comments, it looks like a stormy seascape.Meanwhile, here's Quechee Gorge from a few weeks back. Photographer Kate Seymour's been out paying attention to the landscape, and back in early May the Ottauquechee was full and rushing and bursting with light and shadows."The world is green... Green shade. Green light. Green ceiling. Green floor." And also, tiny green caterpillars and dazzling green moths as big as Ted Levin's hand. The writer and naturalist is still keeping track of his patch of Thetford landscape, and in yesterday's dispatch he spies a red-winged blackbird, which launches him into the less-obvious origins of other birds' names, with a quick jaunt from "goose" into "caveman taxonomy" and bitterns leading him back 2,000 years to Pliny the Elder.

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Let's slip into the week with Grace Potter, who called together Jackson Browne, Marcus King, and the indie pop duo Lucius to

on Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" Friday's night.

(Thanks, JF!)

I don't know where we're goingBut if the going gets roughWe've got eachotherAnd for now, that's enough

See you tomorrow.

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