Daybreak Thursday 12/17/20

AND A FINE MORNING TO YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Opens door, looks outside: Yep! Snow! How much you get depends very much on where you are, though—or, actually, where a very sharp snowfall gradient turns out to be and where the heavier snow is when it "pinwheels" off to the east, as the weather folks put it. Whatever. It'll be snowing into this afternoon (here's hoping) before everything comes to a halt. Highs in the low 20s today, down into the single digits tonight. Meanwhile, before there was snow on the ground... Etna photographer Jim Block spent a very fruitful first two weeks of December out and about. He photographed morning fog and early daylight in Enfield and flowing streams in Canaan and Grafton, turned a castoff car and buildings into art, caught a 22-degree halo around the moon, got birds and deer and sunrises, and came across what has to be one of the finest signs ever attached to a tree on a trail: "Matt Dustin stopped here — abruptly — Feb 2001."Speaking of xc skiing, now that snow's here: Working with the Friends of River Park (the riverfront stretch in old West Leb where you went for Trails + Trucks this summer), Lebanon Rec and Parks will groom two miles of trails in the park for skiing this winter. Rec director Paul Coats has been trying in recent years to expand xc skiing in the city and came up with the idea, which the Friends okayed in, like, a day. Public access will be from Route 10, with parking in the lay-by on the west side of the road and across the way in the Simple Energy parking lot. And it looks like the Upper Valley will get a second skating trail. The Mascoma Lake Skating Association, which has only been going for about a month, is aiming for a 2.5-3 mile groomed loop beginning and ending at Enfield's Lakeside Park, reports the Valley News's Greg Fennell. Organizers Joan Holcombe and Mary Reynolds are working with Ben Prime, of Newbury NH's Nordic Skater. He's planning "a meandering route that will challenge skaters and take advantage of Mascoma Lake’s few islands," Fennell writes.SPONSORED: Let the sun shine! Centralized power plants and aging transmission grids embody an old command-and-control approach to electricity. This antiquated model is yielding to new solar and wind resources that are becoming cheaper every day. To some, solar power fosters economic independence in home and community energy decisions. To others, solar is the tip of the spear in our existential fight against global warming. But for this new age to dawn, state policies and regulators need to change their approach. Hit the maroon link to learn more. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.Two hundred meals a night. That's how many LISTEN has been serving in WRJ since the pandemic began. The Haven, too, is busier than ever, of course. So is the Claremont Soup Kitchen and Food Pantry. They're all just part of a web of food shelves and services that have been keeping Upper Valleyites fed the last nine months. In Here in Hanover, Dian Parker profiles them—along with the Orford/Fairlee Food Shelf and the Upper Valley Land Trust's firewood assistance and food-growing partnership with Willing Hands.D-H to begin vaccinating workers today. In a video message late yesterday, president and CEO Joanne Conroy said, "If I could ask for a present for Christmas, it would be to receive the vaccine. Really, the people who have to receive the vaccine first are our frontline caregivers: our nurses, our environmental services people, our physicians that provide care to Covid patients in high-risk situations." Meanwhile, Gifford and Mt. Ascutney hospitals began vaccinating workers yesterday, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr.Two Norwich Selectboard members take aim at planning commission member. "This blog is not a gossip column," writes Chris Katucki on the Norwich Observer. But he notes that last week, SB chair Claudette Brochu took commission member Jeff Goodrich to task: "You’re constantly interrupting the [PC] Chair. I find your approach to be extremely aggressive, argumentative [and] misogynistic...I find it very disturbing," she said. She was seconded by SB member Roger Arnold. Goodrich responded, "I get interrupted all the time. I get talked over all the time.” 

Chickadees can remember the quality and location of each seed they hide away. And we're talking a thousand a day, over 80,000 a winter. As writer and naturalist Ted Levin puts it, a bird "with a very high IQ." Even more remarkable, the bird's hippocampus, its center of memory and emotion, grows in the fall and shrinks in the spring, Levin writes. "Fortunately, shrinkage doesn't affect a chickadee’s emotion or disposition—jovial (and tolerant) year-round. Worth the price of sunflower seeds. Untethered magic in the front yard always welcomed...particularly during a pandemic.""It was a mistake. I will not be resigning. I will stay on." That was Laconia School Board member and state Rep. Dawn Johnson during a Zoom meeting Tuesday night that drew 300 attendees after her Twitter link to an anti-semitic cartoon became public. Many of the people attending asked for her resignation, reports the Laconia Daily Sun's Rich Green. "I don’t accept the apology or that it was a mistake," said one speaker. "It’s not that easy to inadvertently publish hate articles.” Meanwhile, the GOP-led House Rules Committee yesterday blocked a bill to make hate speech a legislative ethics violation.VT and ME have detailed where the first Covid vaccine doses are going. NH has not. The reason, a spokesman for the Dept. of Health and Human Services tells the Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth, is “out of an abundance of caution for the security of the vaccine.” This is not an idle concern. Interpol has warned that internationally, "criminal organizations are planning to infiltrate or disrupt supply chains.” Still, the secrecy has left nursing home administrators and others at the head of the line uncertain when the vaccine will arrive.Over the past five years, some 30 police officers have been tagged by VT prosecutors as having credibility issues. Unlike in NH, which has it's so-far secret "Laurie List" of officers, the cases in VT are public but are kept prosecutor by prosecutor in so-called "Brady" or "Giglio" letters. VTDigger's Alan J. Keays went after them for a three-part series called "Tarnished Badge." He details some of the cases—overt racial profiling or racism, using drugs on duty, lying—and notes that no one is tracking the issue or the officers across the state's 14 counties. New community radio station to take the air in central VT. Well, new only in the sense that it used to be a college radio station. In an intriguing turn of events, Goddard College can no longer afford to meet the terms of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant that's kept its station on air. So WGDR is being transferred to the newly formed Central Vermont Community Radio, made up entirely of community volunteers. The station itself may wind up remaining on campus, but ownership and operations will be handed off to CVCR at the end of the year, reports Seven Days' Jordan Adams.Justice Department sues UVM Medical Center over abortion. The suit, filed yesterday, alleges that the hospital forces staff members with religious objections to abortions to participate in procedures anyway. It stems from a 2018 case in which a nurse, who believed she was assisting after a miscarriage, discovered it was an abortion, asked to be relieved, and was denied. In a statement before the lawsuit was filed, the hospital said it has been negotiating with the feds on the matter and had already strengthened its "opt-out policies and practices."So, where do you get frankincense and myrrh? Well, um, Colchester, VT. At least, that's where you can get the essential oils, thanks to former Somali refugee Mahdi Ismael Ibrahim, his wife, and his partner, who own and run Böswellness, "one of the world's only distilleries and suppliers of sustainable, fair-trade and certified-organic frankincense and myrrh products," writes Ken Picard in Seven Days. Ibrahim's brother, Idris, travels Somaliland buying from harvesters who gather the resins by hand.2020, man... Or as a commenter puts it, "Sheeps have street gangs now, 2020 is insane." See, the other day this sheep, a goat, and three lambs showed up in downtown Nevşehir, Turkey, and set about chasing people and storming the city hall. It was all caught on surveillance cameras. And they look so innocent at first! (Thanks, AFG!)Tree FM. I've tried this with three different desktop browsers and was only able to get audio in Chrome (though Safari on a phone is fine), but even so, you should know about it. People around the world have recorded the sounds of their home forests, and you can just wander aimlessly, from Hungary to New Zealand to Britain to Patagonia to the Panamanian rain forest to the Sierra, then sit back and let the soundscapes wash over you... Some pretty darn lush photos, too.

News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

Liam Robinson and Jean Rohe have flourishing careers as independent musicians. Robinson was part of the cast of

Warhorse

on Broadway, then went on to become the music director and vocal arranger for Anaïs Mitchell's

Hadestown

both off and on Broadway. Rohe is a singer-songwriter with her own band. Longtime friends, they hadn't performed together until one day a while back they were sitting at Robinson's kitchen table swapping harmonies...and suddenly they became the roots/Americana duo Robinson & Rohe.

(Thanks, JS!)

See you tomorrow.

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