Daybreak Thursday 1/7/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Mostly sunny. That bit of sun yesterday afternoon was pretty nice, eh? More today, though temps will just bump up toward freezing. A day ago, the weather folks were expecting a polar low to score a direct hit on Vermont tonight, but now it looks like it'll be a ways off east, over Maine, which means nighttime temps around here will be cold, but normal for January. Tonight, high teens.I am heartsick about what happened in Washington yesterday afternoon. As I think was true for most of us, it was hard to watch yet equally hard to turn to work. But from the beginning, Daybreak has been about our lives here: in the Upper Valley and in the extraordinary states of Vermont and New Hampshire. So today's newsletter will be as it always is—not out of blithe disregard for this sad national moment, but because there is both strength and solace at times of great turmoil in focusing on the places we live and love. Otter bathtubs? Just before the turn of the year, Jay Davis was out by Grant Brook in Lyme and saw something he'd never seen before: water-filled disks of ice, looking for all the world like someone had put them there. Flummoxed, he did some research. The consensus, he writes, is that they're "pieces of ice that form in very rare conditions, with just the right eddy-line and the perfect contrast in current speed/direction that allows the disks to spin and form circles as they rub against adjoining ice." I'm guessing they're new to most of us, too...And speaking of water... Tuesday's mention of Smith Pond in Enfield brought this photo of it as it looked last week from Greg Baker. The pond, he writes, "is a secret Grafton pond. Well, not so much a secret anymore since I partnered with Upper Valley Land Trust." The UVLT owns about 1000 acres around the pond, and NH Fish & Game holds another 5000 acres. But it's Baker's land, with trails, that lets you access the pond. Which makes him happy, he says, "as long as people respect the place.""The owl pulled me. I followed, hopelessly and helplessly afflicted by a wild, unscratchable itch." Great horned owls nest the entire length of the hemisphere, and naturalist and writer Ted Levin has seen them from Alaska to the Everglades, nesting in the Roosevelt elk pavilion at the Bronx Zoo, the canyons of W. Texas, and the Hanover sewage treatment plant. But he'd never encountered one on his home turf until yesterday. "A massive bird," he writes, "big and bold. A softball-sized head, sinister and expressive face punctuated by huge yellow eyes. Feathers for horns. Eats anything it wants."SPONSORED: For those interested in solar, Congress giveth, but Vermont taketh away...on Jan. 31st. Congress has just extended the 26 percent solar Investment tax credit by two years, while Vermont is cutting back on net-metering payments for new solar installations. January 31 is the deadline to submit a simple form to lock in the higher net metering rates and allow for 12 months to make a decision to go solar.  No commitment necessary, but wise to lock in the option to save money and allow time to research and make a smart decision. Hit the maroon link for more. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy. “The other day I saw a person walking downstairs and I was like, ‘Oh, human!’" Winter term classes at Dartmouth start today, though most students won't be returning to campus for another nine days. In the meantime, writes Griselda Chavez in The Dartmouth, 84 students have been living on an "apocalyptic" "ghost town" of a campus over the break. With common spaces closed, they've been meeting at Dartmouth Outing Club events and relying on frozen meals that they reheat—or on a community food pantry at the student health center. Sununu to re-nominate Gordon MacDonald as NH chief justice. The governor first chose MacDonald, currently the state's attorney general, in 2019, but Democrats who controlled the Executive Council at the time rejected the nomination. In the year and a half since then, Sununu has refused to nominate anyone else. But now that the GOP controls the Executive Council, reports the Monitor's Ethan DeWitt, Sununu has put MacDonald's name in again. Town meeting postponement measure passes NH Senate unanimously. The move, which extends procedures adopted for the November elections, would allow towns to postpone town meeting and to process absentee ballots before Town Meeting Day. "Certainly there are some people out there who might like a tweak here or a tweak there, but we did our best and I believe this is an important piece of legislation," says its sponsor, GOP Sen. Jim Grey.Meanwhile, yesterday was surely the first day ever the NH House had to be gaveled down for honking. The cacophony came as House members met in their cars in a UNH parking lot and elected GOP Rep. Sherman Packard as speaker. "The surreal moment kicked off what is likely to be one of the strangest years in New Hampshire legislative history," DeWitt writes. Especially since the House rejected a Democratic move that would have allowed them to meet remotely. DeWitt describes the scene.And in Montpelier... Both houses of the VT legislature convened—quietly, peacefully, and in the case of the House, remotely—to elect their leadership and pass rules allowing them to meet remotely when needed. "The Statehouse has been largely unused since last March," writes Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, "and it showed. Chairs removed from committee rooms were stacked up in hallways. The cafeteria remained dark. The building had a new feature: heat-sensing scanners that check people for fevers at the entrance."New Covid strain probably circulating in VT already, health officials warn. In a press conference yesterday, UVM Medical Center president Stephen Leffler said that while there have been no confirmed cases, “We should assume it’s already in Vermont.” The newly identified, far more contagious strain has been found in Saratoga Springs, NY, 30 miles from the border, notes VTDigger's Seamus McAvoy. Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said that current restaurant protocols might need to change: “It’s possible that what has been safe up until now could shift with this variant.” Scott's move last month to allow indoor high school sports is making health experts nervous. It came on Dec. 22 and extended only to practices, though some games are scheduled starting next week. But "the nature of those activities involve a lot of people breathing heavily near one another in an enclosed indoor space,” UVM med school prof Ben Lee tells VTDigger's Lola Duffort. Adds Dartmouth's Anne Sosin, who directs the Center for Global Health Equity, "I don’t see this as the time to increase or to take risks in this way.”

VT breweries hit by can shortage as they shift to out-of-state sales to stay afloat. As the pandemic shut down their taprooms and sales to restaurants, breweries around the state shifted production to cans, built on whatever out-of-state distribution networks they had, and beefed up online sales to get their beer to wholesalers and buyers' homes elsewhere. But as they package more beer in cans than they have in years past, reports VTDigger's James Finn, a national aluminum can shortage has forced some of them to cut production.  You know the cool Goldberg-esque ball machine at the Montshire? Okay, officially it's "Odyssey of the Spheres," a kinetic sculpture by George Rhoads. Anyway, they've missed having people be able to come in and gawk happily as the spheres go through their paces... so they've put a couple of minutes of it on YouTube. It's not the same as the real thing, but for now? It'll definitely do.Aerial photos, sure, anyone can do that. But aerial embroidery? Victoria Rose Richards ("autistic, queer, and happy," she says on her Instagram page) embroiders scenes-from-above of the British countryside. Richards, who has Asperger's, discovered embroidery while in college as a way to calm herself between classes. She uses a variety of stitches—French knots for trees and foliage, long satin stitches for fields and lakes—to create remarkable scenes of the rural landscapes around her hometown of Plymouth. "As I stared at the magpie battering itself against the glass I thought, suddenly, This means something. It’s an omen." Writer Helen MacDonald (H is for Hawk) was working at home when the magpie hit her window and she realized it wasn't fighting its reflection, it was trying to get inside. It flew off, then returned and started up again. She was rattled. Then a friend tweeted her about a Roma tradition that magpies approach humans when they want to collect stories. So MacDonald moved her chair closer to the window, put her arms on her knees, and told the magpie a story...

As for the numbers...

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Samuel Barber was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote his Adagio for Strings as part of a string quartet in 1936. It had its premiere two years later, as Europe was sliding toward war and the US faced enormous uncertainty about its future. It's become... well, pretty much everything, from America's "semi-official music for mourning," as NPR once put it, to a remix for dance club joy. Here's the Covid Cello Project with the time-honored version. (Thanks, CJ!)

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