GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cold front coming through! "Cold" is relative, of course, but the result is a chance of showers all day, along with a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon. Highs today in the low or mid-80s, dropping to the low 60s overnight as dry air works in behind the front.The quiet of daybreak. Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was out Saturday morning along the Ottauquechee, taking in the early-morning serenity, when the clouds turned almost lilac. "This color lasted a few seconds and then was gone," she writes. Good thing she was there.Upper Valley schools confront teacher, staff shortage. The Springfield, VT schools have 36 open positions, reports John Lippman in the Valley News, while the Dresden schools list 30, Lebanon 23, and Windsor Central 17. In part, it's that paraeducator positions don't pay well; in part, says Dresden Superintendent Jay Badams, "What we’ve seen is that teachers over the past 18 months have faced the most stress in their careers and some of them who may have planned on retirement in two or three years reassessed their plans." Some districts are starting to advertise abroad.Dartmouth delays workers' return. In a community email Saturday, the college's chief human resources officer, Scot Bemis, announced that employees who've been working off campus and don't deal directly with students will continue working remotely until Oct. 4. They'd originally been asked to come back at the beginning of September. In addition, vaccinated employees working on campus will begin getting tested for Covid once a week, rather than once a month—with the college starting to provide at-home testing kits over the next few weeks.Reading road cracks. There's "alligator" cracking. Block cracking. Edge cracking. Longitudinal cracks. Transverse cracks, slippage cracks... In a Sidenote article as Thetford prepared for a survey of the state of its roads—and need for road repairs—Li Shen offers a fascinating illustrated guide to what's happening to the roads around here, and not just in Thetford. Crack patterns, she writes, give a clue to what caused them, from overloading by high-tonnage vehicles to road edges being undermined to poor construction to poor bonding between the asphalt layer and its under-pavement. "It was literally coming up an inch a minute." A decade on from Tropical Storm Irene's devastating tour through Vermont, the Valley News looks back at what happened in a couple of towns. Jim Kenyon revisits the Riverside Mobile Home Park in Woodstock, the homes destroyed, and the cleanup effort there. And in South Royalton, Claire Potter offers a blow-by-blow account of the White River's rampage over Hurricane Flats farm and what it took farmer Geo Honigford to recover and rebuild."Despite the fact that it’s in plain view, many people are not aware of all of the arts in their community. I wanted to get the word out." If you've read Daybreak for a while, you know that some of the region's most consistently adventurous exploration of the arts scene is by Susan Apel, on her Artful blog. In its newsletter, the NH Business Committee for the Arts interviews Susan about her writing, how she came to it (she was a law professor at VLS for 36 years), and why she does it. "I would love to open my newspaper and see a daily arts section that filled as many pages as the sports section," she says.Speaking of arts and interviews... Northern Woodlands talks to Lyme's Harvey Brotman, who was managing an inn in Colorado when he got interested in blacksmithing, moved to the Upper Valley in the mid-'70s and opened a forge and blacksmithing school, and then, after a blood vessel disorder made ironworking impossible, switched to fine woodworking. "Every piece of wood is different. Iron is pretty much all the same," he says. He talks about what he loved about ironworking, the challenges of woodworking and making furniture—and why his account at Baker Lumber is under his dog's name.In NH, 25 house offers in two years, outbid on all but one. The housing market, reports Ethan DeWitt in New Hampshire Bulletin, is pricing out middle-income buyers. Low inventory, people with means—some from out of state—swooping in... It all means, DeWitt writes, that these days, "the magic number in many parts of the state is $300,000. Try to buy a home for any less than that and you will likely struggle to find a home and be outbid on it if you do." However, DeWitt writes the market may be turning slightly: Realtors report fewer out-of-staters calling and dropping numbers showing up to open houses.Molly Gray ties the knot on the family farm in Newbury. VT's lieutenant governor on Saturday married Michael Palm, a pilot for Republic Airways she'd met through mutual friends. The setting was Four Corners Farm, the vegetable and fruit farm—if you've been to local farmers' markets, you know their strawberries—her parents established in 1978. Her office's press release adds, "The Lt. Governor will retain her surname and will continue to be addressed as 'Lt. Governor Molly Gray.'"Kinetic sheep art. Ben Jackson is a sheep farmer in New South Wales, which is on lockdown. Unable to get to Brisbane to be with his aunt before she died of cancer, he was out feeding his sheep when an idea struck him -- he could turn them into living art. A heart, to be exact, filmed by a drone. He laid down feed to get the shape he wanted—though it took several tries before he got a video to send to the funeral. “The first time I tried it looked like the shit emoji, I tell you, and whilst my Aunty Deb had a good sense of humour, that wasn’t exactly what I was going for,” he told The Guardian. (Thanks, TL!)Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
Though it's French and used to be Italian, Corsica—like pretty much every Mediterranean island—has been traversed, invaded, visited, and adopted by people from all around Europe and North Africa. So musicians there have deep veins to explore, and L'Alba, a six-member band based on the island, does this with gusto.
with a trance-like desert blues vibe that seems just the thing for slipping into the week.
See you tomorrow.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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