GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
First fog, then maybe some sun, then maybe rain, then could it be? snow. The day starts with freezing fog early in spots and we'll see more clouds than sky through the morning. This afternoon, clouds will pile in ahead of a storm arriving from the southwest (the direction, not the region). Given that temps will be in the mid 30s around then, we might see a little rain at first. Snow should arrive around dusk or a bit later and remain with us overnight, heavy at times. Totals expected in the 4"-8" range. Upper 20s tonight.Expected snow totals...
And just to get us in the mood... The break-of-day scene the other morning across Cummins Pond at Green's in Dorchester, from Jay Davis.Hartford police say woman whose body was found at Casella facility was from WRJ. In an interview yesterday, acting Chief Connie Kelley told the Valley News, "It appears that she was transported by a truck that had been unloading dumpsters,” Acting Chief Connie Kelley. The police say they have a tentative identification of the woman, who appears to be in her late 20s or early 30s, but are awaiting confirmation from the state medical examiner's office.Lyme, Norwich nordic skiers tear up the courses, head to junior worlds. In all, four locals will be representing the US at world championships in Whistler, BC and Kazakhstan. They're Norwich's Hannah Chipman, a biathlete who skies for Dartmouth, and Caleb Zuckerman, a Hanover High junior who does Nordic Combined (xc skiing and ski jumping); and Lyme's Evan Nichols, a Nordic Combined skier who just earned a team sprint gold at the World University Games in Lake Placid, and Jack Lange, a freshman at Dartmouth who just turned in a "standout week of racing" at US Senior Nationals, write Jay Davis and Hilary McNamee in the Ford Sayre newsletter.SPONSORED: Put pain in the past with APD Orthopaedics. Make a resolution to move past pain this year. APD Orthopaedics is ready to help you with your hand, hip, knee, shoulder, ankle, or wrist injuries. We have openings for anterior approach hip replacements in early 2023. Contact information, providers, and more at the burgundy link. Sponsored by APD.So, what are you having fresh-baked from the King Arthur oven? That's the question Artful's Susan Apel poses to King Arthur baking instructor Jonathan Frishtick. The lawyer-turned-carpenter-turned-mapper-turned-baking-teacher specializes in pizza, bagels, bialys, challah, and yeast-based baking of all sorts, and in the classroom is a font of both knowledge and advice—including to bake the same recipe multiple times so you can learn its ins and outs. As for what he'd eat? It reminds him of growing up in Queens with a boisterous and close-knit family.At the Hood: A "richer, more nuanced understanding" of complicated worlds. That's the museum's director, John Stomberg, talking about a set of exhibitions at the Hood that offer a fresh look at some familiar—and not so familiar—art. In the Times Argus, Mary Gow writes about what's on at the museum at the moment, including Historical Imagery (on exhibit through Nov. 12), which considers how art shapes our interpretation of and beliefs about our country’s history; and Constructing the Ideal Soldier, on exhibit 'til Feb. 26.Cut from a pond, a few magic moments. It's possible you've noticed some ice slides appear as if out of nowhere at the Marion Cross School in Norwich or the two elementary schools in Lebanon. But as Margie Menza and Demo Sofronas make clear on Demo's About Norwich blog, it wasn't exactly out of nowhere. It took some 20 people, including principals Greg Bagnato (MCS) and Katie Roach (Mt. Leb), a day of cutting, hauling, toting, and placing ice blocks to get things done. Demo's got the photos to prove it.SPONSORED: Upper Valley Baroque is back for Season Two! Upper Valley Baroque will present "The Italian Baroque Concerto", an exciting program of six intimate, elegant concertos that include solo Baroque instruments. UVB's professional chamber orchestra is directed by Filippo Ciabatti. Tickets are still available for Saturday, Jan. 28 at 7:00 pm, at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon. Sponsored by Upper Valley Baroque.A ski hill "by the community, for the community." That's Lebanon's Storrs Hill, which—along with the Lebanon Outing Club—is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year (the first ski jump came along two years later). The outing club is holding a celebration all weekend (more on that tomorrow), and in the VN, Liz Sauchelli talks with club volunteers—including city councilor Erling Heistad, whose father founded the club—about the hill's place in the hearts of Upper Valleyites, and why it's felt like home to generations of skiers.And in Covid news...
In NH, the state yesterday reported 138 new cases, continuing decline over the past week, with an average now of 171 cases per day for the week between Jan. 12 and Jan. 18, down 33 percent from the week before. Meanwhile, the state hospital association reported 144 people hospitalized with Covid yesterday, down 164 a week ago.
And in VT, writes VTDigger's Erin Petenko, the state continues to report "low" community levels of Covid. In particular, hospitalizations continue to drop—31 in the past week, versus 40 last week and 67 the week before. As of yesterday there were 35 Covid patients in hospitals around the state, compared to 27 last Wednesday. While positive test results are holding steady, Petenko notes three indicators are rising: the first school and child-care outbreaks since the winter holidays, a slight rise in long-term-care facilities, and rising viral samples from wastewater testing in Chittenden and Bennington counties.
“No one wants you to go plow a puddle.” For small-scale snow plow businesses, this has been a depressing winter. NHDOT feels a little differently, reports NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian, since they've had trouble filling jobs, but for the people who depend on plowing people's driveways to make a living, tonight's storm is going to feel like a blessing. Hoplamazian talks to Harold Davis, a Concord-area plow guy who just went into business for himself, bought a new plow a few months ago—and then has mostly had to let it sit. "You can't count on snow plowing. Like, you can't,” he says, dejectedly.Teasing apart NH's revenue sources. Revenue Commissioner Lindsey Stepp met with lawmakers earlier this month to go over where the money they'll be spending comes from, reports Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin, and it comes down to smokers, eaters, businesses, and homebuyers. The biggest tax generators are a pair of business taxes, Stepp said; collections have been rising. So have revenues from restaurants. Meanwhile, more than half of tobacco taxes are paid by out-of-staters, and that revenue's been falling. So far, the real estate transfer tax has held steady, but Stepp expects revenues to fall.As VT towns consider the "blessing and curse" of short-term rentals, they're dipping their toes into regulation. About three-quarters of VT's short-term rental owners had only one or two such properties, Rachel Hellman writes in Seven Days, and many of them rely heavily on that income. Yet towns like Woodstock, Killington, and Morrisville have grown wary of the rentals' impact on neighborhood life and on housing for locals. So far, only a handful of towns, like Woodstock and Morrisville, have taken steps to actually regulate short-term rentals; more are trying to understand their scope before acting.Well, it's the thought that counts. On Tuesday, Hartford state Sen. Becca White organized a sleeveless day in the Vermont statehouse in solidarity with Missouri legislators; the House there has just passed a dress code requiring women to wear a blazer or cardigan on the chamber's floor. White's gesture went off fine in the Senate, but House members ran into a problem, writes VTDigger's Sarah Mearhoff: Their dress code requires "business professional attire" on the floor. Four went sleeveless anyway; others wore jackets, then took them off for a photo op. They're sorting the code out now.Killington, Dartmouth are "most filmed" locations in VT, NH. So, this is pretty fun. A blog called HawaiianIslands.com categorized IMDb data to identify the top locations in the US with film credits (not including movie studios), then ranked them by state to come up with the most popular filming location in each. Tops in the US: Griffith Park, in Los Angeles. The Killington Ski Resort takes the honors for VT. In NH, it's Dartmouth, in line with Yale for CT, Princeton for NJ, and Brown for RI. Elsewhere? The Old Cowtown Museum for KS, and, charmingly, Buckskin Joe Frontier Town & Railway for CO.Use it in a sentence. The next time you scoff at a contemporary addition to the dictionary (laggy, anyone?), spare a thought for the people of the early 1900s. It was a boom time for slang terms, according to Mental Floss, which is out with a rundown of their favorites. Some of them deserve to be revived: againster is particularly descriptive. And bosher. And flivver (“a cheap car or plane”). The origins of napoo (French, mangled by British soldiers) are not happy, but the word itself is a delight. Tow it away, AAA … this flivver is napoo!The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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At 5:30 today, Sustainable Woodstock offers an online dive into the ways in which last year's Inflation Reduction Act can make it easier to go electric at home and on the road. Matt Christie, who directs an energy consulting company, will talk about the rebates and other programs in the legislation that affect home upgrades, heat pumps, and EV purchases.
At 6:30 at the Lyme Congregational Church, Northern Woodlands magazine hosts a free concert by composer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Cosgrove. Cosgrove, who's a wanderer officially based in Vermont, has carved out a career writing music that connects place and sound. "I don’t think of my pieces as ‘rendering places in music,’ but more as responding to places musically,” he told Harvard Magazine a decade ago. “Writing music just happens to be the way I process the world.” In between his pieces this evening, he'll be talking about his creative process and music composition generally.
Also at 6:30, Interplay Jazz hosts its monthly jam session at Upper Valley Music Center in downtown Lebanon. Instrumentalists start up at 6:30, vocalists at 7:30—and the jam is open to anyone, either to participate or just to listen. Details on how things work at the link.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts two editors and two local contributors to Volume III of the Vermont Almanac.Norwich writer Edith Forbes and Hartford farmer Chuck Wooster will join editors Virginia Barlow and Patrick White to read from and talk about the latest edition and its record of a year's worth of life in the woods, fields, and towns of the Green Mountain State.
At 7:30 this evening, the Shaker Bridge Theater in Enfield launches its run (through Feb. 5) of The Niceties. Eleanor Burgess's two-character play is set in the last year of the Obama presidency, but treats issues that remain fresh now, as a black student and her white professor at an elite northeastern university meet to talk over the student's paper on the American Revolution—and, soon enough, discrimination, the nature of expertise, and who gets to write history.
And whenever it suits you, check out what JAM is highlighting this week, including an interview of Walpole-based filmmaker Ken Burns on Brattleboro community television about how he started, how he deals with fame, and his philosophy—"How do we share this sense of us—and not 'them'?"; VT Gov. Phil Scott's inaugural address earlier this month; and last week's four-author reading at JAM with essayist and fiction writer Peter Orner, poet and Dartmouth prof Vievee Francis, and others. (Note: if you missed that reading live and want to see it, skip to the 7:30 mark, which is when things actually get going.)
And to get us going for the day...
We'll turn to Amythyst Kiah, the rising folk star whose commanding presence, guitar and banjo chops, powerhouse voice, and deeply researched knowledge of roots music have made her an established presence on the old-time circuit.
written at a low ebb in her life.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
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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