GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Let's bask. That was quite a moon last night, eh? We could see it thanks to high pressure building across the entire eastern US, which is bringing us a second day of sunshine today, pretty much constant throughout the sunlit hours. Highs in the mid-20s, back into the teens tonight. Clouds will begin filtering back in after dark, ahead of weak low pressure arriving tomorrow."I looked up and saw that the Sheetrock had cracked, and then I looked down and saw that the floor had sunk." Wilder-based Vermod, which makes energy-efficient modular homes, is facing a rising number of complaints, writes Seven Days' Molly Walsh. "We build a high-performance home. That is the only thing we do here in this company," responds Steve Davis, Vermod's founder and owner, but Walsh notes that the VT AG's office has received complaints, and in another half-dozen interviews "concerns about sagging floors, cracking drywall and moisture problems cropped up repeatedly."Tonight's the night Hartford gets to hear about new pool possibilities — and their price tag. The town's Parks and Rec Commission and members of the Pool Advisory Committee are meeting to go over a draft report on the engineering and design of a new pool to replace the Sherman Manning Pool, which was shuttered in 2017. Last year, the advisory committee recommended replacing rather than repairing it (actually, them — there's a big one and a little one). Town hall at 5:30.Barnard voters opt to merge schools with Woodstock-centered district. After initially rejecting the idea, residents on Tuesday reversed themselves and approved, by 119-85, the idea of joining what is now called the Windsor Central Unified District, which currently includes Bridgewater, Pomfret, Plymouth, Reading, Killington, and Woodstock. The deal's not done, though: Voters in those towns have to weigh in on Town Meeting Day. (VN)
Randolph loses another café. After just 10 months in business, Green Light Café owner Josh Mather announced last week that "I have decided that I can no longer keep the Green Light operating." The Green Light was an unusual collaboration with the Friends of the Kimball Public Library, which made the café its bookshop, lining its shelves with used books for sale. More iffy news for Randolph: Vermont Technical College to downsize there. “We need to expand in Williston and we need to contract in Randolph Center,” college president Pat Moulton told Vermont State Colleges trustees recently. While VTC is bursting at the seams in its Williston facilities, writes VTDigger's Lola Duffort, the college is looking at selling off its Enterprise Center in Randolph and intends to sell, lease, or decommission its anaerobic digester. "Larks and ravens" vs. "Ladies and gents": Contra-dancing grapples with de-gendering. Ethan Weinstein's up with an intriguing piece in Junction Mag on the language battles roiling the contra world. "You can’t look at dance in any way separate from the society in which it exists," says veteran caller David Millstone, a regular at the Tracy Hall dance in Norwich. "Dance is a reflection of the surrounding culture. It fills the needs of that culture.” Weinstein covers the history of contra-dancing in the region and notes that despite the controversy, "the Norwich dances show no sign of losing popularity.""A lot of people think of the Arctic as being a faraway place, but the loss of ice is affecting people now -- it's changing peoples' lives." That's Dartmouth prof Don Perovich, a contributor to the Code Red NOAA report that came out Tuesday reporting that the Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and emitting greenhouse gases from melting permafrost. Meanwhile, his colleague Erich Osterberg told PBS News Hour, "If this were an annual health check-up, I think we'd have to say that the Arctic is chronically sick and getting worse."Things look to get tense on charter schools in Concord tomorrow. The Fiscal Committee, the joint House-Senate panel that approves money transfers to state departments, is meeting again. You may remember that at its last gathering, it opted not to deploy $46 million in federal funding to boost charters in the state. Tomorrow, education commissioner Frank Edelblut sits down with the committee to convince its Democratic majority to put the funds to use. The Monitor's Ethan DeWitt runs through the debate.NH Episcopal Church hopes to make it easier to become a priest. The problem: People past their schooling years are enmeshed in jobs and family and often can't afford to spend three years in seminary. So the NH diocese will offer a certificate program next year allowing students to go to in-person trainings nine weekends a year, but do the rest of their coursework at home.Vermont's "climate solutions caucus" readies plans for next session. VPR's Henry Epp talks to Bradford state Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, who's in the caucus and has been part of the public forums it's been holding around the state. "We have had aspirational goals in statute for many years, and unfortunately, those greenhouse gas reduction goals have been blown through time and time again, because there is really nothing in statute that requires that we sit down and do the hard work of figuring out how to do that," she says."How do we keep our sisters and sons and aunts and neighbors safe when they are actively using drugs?" Over the past year, Kate O'Neill has covered the opioid crisis in Vermont for Seven Days from an unusually personal vantage point — her sister died in the fall of 2018 after a decade's struggle with opioid use. Now O'Neill sums up what she learned during her year of writing and reporting. In the end, she says, it comes down to how to answer the question that now haunts her: "What if instead of focusing solely on helping her get sober, I had talked openly with her about how to protect herself when she was not?"A little far afield, but this is just too cool not to show you. It's a slow-moving 360-degree panorama from the Dix Mountain Beckhorn summit in the Adirondacks, snow underfoot, with embedded links to views from the mountains you see off in the distance. If you can't be there yourself, nice to have someone with tech chops... (Thanks, JF!)
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OH NO! THE MUDROOM'S SOLD OUT! SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?
. The local singer/songwriter is there Thursday evenings now, doing mellow rock covers as well as his own stuff, and the taps will be flowing. 6-9.
Max Nash-Howe, a UVM grad student who interned with the Upper Valley Land Trust, spent weeks on the mountain inventorying forest types and unique natural communities. He'll be presenting what he found and making recommendations for managing the UVLT's land there. UVLT staff will also be there to answer questions. 7 pm, Fairlee town offices.
The Co-op's got a class tonight on breaking out of the cranberry-sauce rut by cooking with the "tart little gems" without using gelatin or sugar. They're playing it close to the vest on just what that means, though. At the Co-op Learning Center in the Lebanon Co-op, starts at 5:30.
In the gym at SAU #88 in Lebanon, runs 7:30-9:00.
Whatever you do, enjoy this day! See you tomorrow.
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