GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny, unseasonably warm. We’re pretty much at the point in winter when highs in the upper 30s or even 40, which is what we’re looking at today, seem downright balmy, as opposed to how those same temps felt in the fall. Especially when we get a calm day like today. Lows tonight in the low 20s, but clouds start to build in overnight and at some point winds will shift around to come from the south, so we’re facing more warmth tomorrow.
Visitors. From up north.
Snow buntings breed up on the Arctic tundra, but head this direction for the winter, and the other day, Erica Faughnan happened on hundreds of them (or 187, anyway, by her count) feeding on seeds in a Bradford, VT pumpkin patch. “Made for a very Vermont-looking scene,” she writes.
Meanwhile, “Looks like an irruption of finches here in Lyndonville,” writes Herb Swanson, only mildly tongue in cheek.
It’s time again for Dear Daybreak! Kicking off this year of weekly photos, anecdotes, and more from Daybreak readers, we’ve got Robin Osborne’s almost surreal photo of an iced-over E. Thetford field; Virginia Barlow’s little readiness lesson if you’re ever in a grocery-store parking lot and can’t wait to tear into one of your purchases; Dave Celone’s poetic reflection on a windstorm’s aftermath; and Jon Kaplan on the audience’s genial response when things went awry at a pre-holiday screening of White Christmas in Randolph’s Playhouse. If you’ve got something to share, please send it in.
A quick start-of-year Upper Valley rundown. In Artful, Susan Apel puts several items on our radar, some of which you know about, some you may not. In WRJ, for instance, Long River Gallery has closed until mid-month for renovations under its new owners, while longtime Oodles owner Sally Wright Bacon has put her store up for sale. Meanwhile, in Hanover, Red Kite Candy is expanding its candy-bar selection, and bringing in mango ice cream (along with ice cream pints and cakes). And Plainfield’s Riverview Farm is changing hands (Paul and Nancy Franklin are handing it off to the next generation, their nephew Clay and his wife, Carma).
A bit more on yesterday’s Wheeler Professional Park fire. The VN’s Alex Ebrahimi writes that several businesses had their offices in Building 2, which was destroyed by the early-morning blaze. Among them were The Richards Group insurance agency—IT and facilities head Mike Squires, who was on site several hours after the fire, had no comment—and investment advisor Steven Burnett. Lebanon fire chief Jim Wheatley reiterated to Ebrahimi what he told Eric Francis as fire crews were on the scene in the early hours: “It’s nothing suspicious. It’s going to take a little bit before we come up with anything because of the extent of the damage.”
School bus carrying students rolls into ditch in Newbury, VT. It happened Tuesday afternoon, reports NBC5’s Michael Cusanelli, when the driver “drove too close to the edge of the roadway, causing the bus to sink into the right-side ditch and partially overturn on its passenger side.” There were 21 students on board; none were hurt, Cusanelli says, but a paraprofessional suffered minor injuries. Alex Nuti-de Biasi’s Journal Opinion newsletter has a helpful photo of what it looked like. The bus had minor damage, but was pulled back onto the roadway.
Kimball Union Academy lands $10 million gift for new athletic center. The money—”the largest capital gift commitment in the Academy’s history,” the school writes in its press release—comes from Phillip H. Morse, who spent a post-grad year in 1960 at the private boarding and day school in Meriden. He went on to become a partner and vice chairman of the Boston Red Sox. “During my time at Kimball Union, athletics was at the heart of my experience,” Morse says. “The coaches, teammates, and mentors I had there shaped me in lasting ways.”
One reality behind push for improved Woodstock Union wastewater system: a sewage backup. It happened right before the holidays, reports Polly Mikula in the Mountain Times, when 70-year-old clay-pipe waste lines turned out to be so full of roots that sewage first backed into the girls’ locker room—during a basketball game—then into the boys’ locker room, then a custodial closet, then the steam tunnels. “It was catastrophic, it really was,” buildings and grounds director Joe Rigoli tells Mikula. Since the pipes are fragile they couldn’t be removed safely; a contractor used high-pressure water to clear enough space to get things flowing again. For now.
40 years ago, Concord High School teacher Christa McAuliffe was supposed to go to space. McAuliffe rocketed to celebrity status after the announcement that she would join the Challenger space shuttle mission as the first teacher in space. Celebration, of course, gave way to tragedy when the shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all seven on board. At the link, the first of a several-part NHPR series remembering McAuliffe: Former WOKQ radio reporter Roger Wood recalling events as he reported from Cape Canaveral in 1986, describing the anticipation—weather kept pushing the launch back—and the disaster. This one you need to listen to.
On party-line school funding vote, NH House tells state courts to “stay out of the legislative lane.” That line came yesterday from Haverhill GOP Rep. Rick Ladd, as the legislature’s GOP majority got its first chance to respond to a series of rulings holding that the money the state uses to support public schools is unconstitutionally low and directing the legislature to fix the funding formula. Yesterday’s bill, reports NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt, would have required an immediate increase in school spending by the state. It failed 190-155. The GOP leadership in both chambers says they’re working on ways to address the court rulings.
You may never have thought about cybersecurity for water systems. But New Hampshire has. Small public systems around the country have been subject to attack, and NH is especially vulnerable, writes Jule Pattison-Gordon in Governing, what with lots of small systems that may be volunteer-run or, if they have staff, no one with IT knowledge. When the state began evaluating them, it discovered a host of issues: "Security only existed through obscurity,” says the state’s chief information security officer, Ken Weeks. Now, the state’s contracted with a nonprofit to work with small systems—including the one that cools the Seabrook nuclear reactor.
For VT’s craft brewers, “an inflection point.” So writes Seven Days’ Jordan Barry about the state’s craft beer industry, a national standout that’s now entering a period of uncertainty. Challenges include declining beer consumption, especially among younger drinkers; fewer Canadian tourists; higher costs for cans and ingredients due to tariffs; and a crowded distribution market. Brewers are responding by focusing on flagship beers, taproom experiences, and new products (think nonalcoholic) to adapt to shifting consumer tastes and economic pressures. Barry surveys the scene, including at the Alchemist, Fiddlehead, and two non-alc embracers: Switchback and Zero Gravity.
Snowy landscapes, cold-weather fashions, and ice yachting: winter at the Library of Congress. A peek inside the digitized “winter” collection of the LOC reveals hundreds of frozen images from far afield and years ago. Among them: a photo of Senior Lt. Georgii Iakovlevich Sedov’s expedition to the Arctic in 1912-1913 (he didn’t make it, his team did); “Home Sweet Home,” an etching of Civil War soldiers in a winter camp; Alfred Stieglitz’s “Snapshot--from my window, New York” from 1907; and a stunning, snow-blanketed “Ammonoosuc turnpike, winter, White Mountains,” from 1900.
The Thursday Crossword. It’s the “midi,” the slightly longer of Dartmouth librarian Laura Braunstein’s two weekly puzzles. Her “mini” runs on Tuesdays. She’s just getting started, so it’s easy to catch up if you haven’t done so already.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Dickey Center hosts “The U.S. confrontation with Venezuela”. Ambassador Peter DeShazo, a former career US diplomat, Dartmouth grad, and visiting professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies, will be talking with Dickey Center director Victoria Holt about US-Venezuelan relations leading up to the removal of Nicolás Maduro, “potential scenarios for future governance in Venezuela, and what this confrontation signifies for U.S. relations with Latin America.” 5:15 pm in Haldeman 41 (no tix required, but seats are first-come, first-served) as well as livestreamed. (At publication time, the Dartmouth events site was being balky: If the direct link above doesn’t work, go here and scroll down.)
Lyme, Canaan, and Plainfield libraries host “American Art at 250: Masterworks of a Nation”, online. The first of three monthly talks with cultural and art historian Jane Oneail: “From the luminous landscapes of the Hudson River School to the bold innovations of Abstract Expressionism, this program showcases the diverse voices and revolutionary spirits that have shaped American art across two and a half centuries. Discover how American artists have continuously redefined not only our visual culture, but art itself on the world stage.” 6:30 pm, register at the link.
Hop Film screens Bugonia. We’ll just let the Hop summarize it, shall we? “A conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps a Big Pharma CEO (Emma Stone) he suspects is an alien in Yorgos Lanthimos's dark satire… an acerbic, claustrophobic and wickedly funny meditation on obsession, power and the despair of a collapsing world.” 7 pm in Spaulding Auditorium.
And for today...
The French bassist and DJ Gambeat (Jean Michel Dercourt) has had a long and fruitful musical relationship with the Spanish-French musician Manu Chao, not least during their rail tour through Colombia in the early 1990s, during its longlasting civil war. Here they are, celebrating that friendship over the decades and the continents with “Où tu veux on y va” (“wherever you want, we’ll go”), with plenty of scenes from Bamako, Mali.
See you tomorrow.
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