GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Hot and humid, storms possible. There's this mass of warm, humid air that's taken up residence and it'll bring back memories. Temps getting up to around 90, and the highest dewpoints seem to be, why, right around here! But there's also a "broken line" of weather headed our way, which could bring some rain and thunder, especially around noon. Chances end by dinnertime.Stella's reopening this morning. If you make a habit of looking at help wanted ads, you might have seen a notice for a pizza chef for Stella's earlier this month. Yesterday, as ArtfulEdge blogger Susan Apel reports, owner Robert Coyle made it official: the Lyme restaurant's re-opening today after a year's hiatus. “Keeping in mind that one must walk before they run, we will be opening the doors to the first piece of the full vision...at 7 am with our new cafe," he wrote on the Lyme list. Coffee, pastries, lunch and pizza at first, restaurant eventually.Boy, that's a lot of rocks! Aerial photos of the repair work on 12A in Plainfield. William Daugherty sent up his drone and took a bunch of still photos of the progress crews are making. They're on Facebook, let me know if you can't get to them. Bill McKibben weighs in on the Dartmouth biomass-plant controversy. Okay, not really. But you can bet his piece in The New Yorker on Friday is going to be getting a serious airing as opponents organize against the college's plan to build a new wood-chip-burning power plant. The problem, he writes: "For all intents and purposes, in the short term, wood is just another fossil fuel, and in climate terms the short term is mostly what matters." Cutting trees down to burn them, he argues, puts way more carbon into the atmosphere than letting them continue to grow. (Thanks for the tip, JT and LM!)Bradford VT company creates dodging, weaving robot for military and police training. Remember the ESPN piece last week about Dartmouth's football program? The company that makes those robotic tackle dummies got its start at the Dartmouth Regional Tech Center in Leb and is now in Bradford, where it's developing a robot for live-fire training. VTDigger has a profile.Maybe we should just call it "the Claremont primary?" Longtime NH political writer James Pindell has an intriguing piece in NH Magazine arguing that the true bellwether for Democratic presidential candidates is Claremont – and that candidates know it: They've visited the city more than they've visited some states. Why? The once Democratic city voted for Trump in 2016, and as Pindell points out, "The number one item that Democrats say they want is a candidate who can beat Trump, and candidates who do well in Claremont can argue that they can compete against Trump in similar places."Toddler foxes. In a Leb backyard. Sure, some of them will grow up to do their level best to get to your chickens, but in the meantime, they're pretty darn cute.“Politics is war. People gotta get that in their head.” That's Paul Mirski, the former GOP state rep. from Enfield, dismissing redistricting reform in New Hampshire. The Monitor's Ethan DeWitt has a long piece looking at the options – do not make the mistake of thinking this is boring, it's the guts of politics – now that Sununu vetoed a measure to create a bipartisan commission. The upshot: Both Dems and Republicans think they should try again.Alleged embezzlement from VT Democratic Party was worse than first thought. Earlier this month, the party announced that a former employee had embezzled about $3,000. Turns out it was more like $18,500. The allegations involve former Barre city councilor Brandon Batham, who was director of party operations until he resigned under pressure a month ago. Eyes on rocks, ironing boards in the trees... NH Associate Press writer Holly Ramer snagged an interview with Philip Carcia, the guy who in July set a record for climbing each of the state's 4,000-footers in less than a year. Carcia's only the second person to accomplish the feat, and unlike Sue Johnston, who was the first, he didn't totally enjoy it. Even at the very end, he says, "I was still paying dues. I was still walking on those trails not feeling like I should be puffing my chest out, but feeling genuinely small.” And, as the header suggests, hallucinating.So yeah, Vermont and Subarus... This is too great. Yesterday, a Reddit user posted to the VT sub-reddit: "We visited your lovely and amazingly beautiful state last week. I have one question, what is with all the Subaru cars? I saw more Subaru cars in that week then I ever seen. It made me curious." One answer: "They let you in without one?" Another counts Subarus w/VT plates on the 2-mile drive to work. The record? 35. A thoroughly entertaining thread, with a detour into Volvos and Saabs, which used to rule the road.ITS MONDAY. GOT PLANS?You could go hear Mae Louise Fowler Nicoli and her sisters talk about growing up poor in backwoods Lyme in the '30s-'50s. Last year, Nicoli published The Poorwoods, about her childhood as one of one of the eight Fowler sisters back in the woods of Whipple Hill Road in Lyme. Nicoli (and six of her sisters) will be talking about and signing the book at the Orford Social Library starting at 7.Or maybe you just need to go hide out from the world and watch a young Spider-Man save it. A bare two months after half the universe was destroyed as the Avengers films came to an end, Spider-Man: Far From Home hit the screens. "Things got pretty gargantuan during the...buildup to saving the entire universe in 'Endgame,'" said Bob Mondello in his NPR review. "The stakes this time turn out to be considerably lower, and your friendly neighborhood Spider-Teen is arguably just the guy to bring things down to Earth and reestablish a human scale." At Woodstock Town Hall at 7:30.Have a fine start to your week. See you tomorrow.
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