Daybreak Thursday 2/17/22

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Headlong into the 50s! There's all sorts of stuff up there—winds from the south, sub-tropical moisture, an approaching cold front—and the result is New England weather at its head-snapping best. We start the day in the low 40s, rise into the mid-50s, face a chance of rain today building to a certainty tonight—with the potential for snow melt and rain combining to create minor ice jams and flooding. Add in some decent wind gusts and, around daybreak tomorrow, a sharp drop in temps, and things get even more interesting.Street art. Well, actually, boot prints on a crosswalk in Hanover. But as Jane Masters noticed, there's fine art in there. Or a satellite photo. Or ancient drawings...And since we're on a roll... Or, to be more precise, the snow is (or was). Conditions have to be just right for snow rollers—or snow donuts, or snownuts, or snow bales—to form (it involves two distinct layers of snow) and we, apparently, have been blessed with them recently. Or at least, New Hampshire has. Here are rollers from:

Orange East schools to require vaccines for employees. The deadline is March 7 for the roughly 800 teachers, staff, and volunteers who work in the Bradford, Newbury, E. Corinth, Wells River, and Thetford schools, reports the Valley News's Nora Doyle-Burr. Employees can apply for a religious or medical exemption, but the supervisory union board nixed a proposal for a "philosophical" exemption, which Thetford rep Charlie Buttrey called "just loosey-goosey." OESU joins Windsor Southeast and several other VT districts in imposing a mandate. NH districts are barred from enacting them.SPONSORED: In a health emergency, you need to be seen as quickly as possible by highly trained medical professionals. Our hospital is located just 1.5 miles from exits 18 and 19 off interstate 89. We offer short wait times to care, friendly staff, and emergency-medicine trained providers. The same emergency physicians who provide care at APD also provide care at DHMC. We don’t want you to experience an emergency, but we are always here for you when you do. Sponsored by APD.Thetford, police union reach collective bargaining agreement. Negotiations have been going on for over a year, reports Nick Clark in Sidenote; this one will last through 2025. It institutes a standard 2-percent yearly cost-of-living increase; preserves 12-hour shifts for officers hired before 2021 but allows later hires to be assigned 10-hour shifts; boosts the town's share of health benefits; and requires that officers wear body cams in compliance with state mandates. Oh, it also reimburses officers who launder their own uniforms $25/week.Dartmouth's plans for Garipay housing take shape. In a town hall meeting with students last week, college officials laid out plans for an apartment-style housing complex out Lyme Road aimed at juniors and seniors interested in more "independent" living, with four-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and possibly studio apartments. VP Josh Keniston said that of some 1,000 responses to a student survey, “a couple hundred” students have expressed interest in living there, reports Parker O'Hara in The Dartmouth.Randolph's Lindsay Haupt wanted to meet people with kids the same age as hers. So she and her husband built a rec center. Haupt is a physical therapist at Gifford, her husband Keegan is a contractor, and along with a lot of help from the community, including high school students and local businesses, they built the 6,000-square-foot Motio Recreation from the ground up. WCAX's Christina Guessferd profiles the community effort behind it—and its evolution since it opened in March, 2020, into a community center for Randolph and surrounding towns.Remember the Lake Queen? Sure you do! That's the refurbished Mississippi River boat that was bought by Sunapee Cruises and got hung up by paperwork and road construction on its odyssey from Missouri up to Sunapee last summer. It rolled into town in June and on Tuesday finally got as close to the water as you can get without going in it: With some careful choreography and the Sunapee police out in force to handle traffic, it traveled along Routes 103B and 11, onto Main Street, and finally to dry dock at Sunapee Harbor for some final construction. Dolan Real Estate has the aerial footage."With brilliant physicality, they hurtle full-bodied through moments both joyful and somber..." It's fair to say that Seven Days' Jordan Adams liked Artistree's production of I Do! I Do!, with Lyn Philistine and Christopher Sutton, the married couple who play the show's two characters. The mid-60s musical, by the team that created The Fantasticks, traces the ups and downs of a long marriage, all set in the master bedroom between 1898 and 1948. "More than an amusing diversion,"Adams writes, "the musical offers couples and singles alike a timely examination of love and what it takes to sustain it."Will we see a Twin State black market in Trefoils? Boston's NBC10 reports that the Girl Scouts of the Green and White Mountains are facing a supply shortage of the popular cookie—along with Samoas, S'mores, and the new Adventurefuls. Same deal with their counterpart in central and western Mass., after the bakery that supplies both ran into staffing problems during the pandemic. With less inventory on hand, girl scout troop leaders are fretting they'll raise less for camps, trips, and other activities.Concord: "So full of excitement and adventure that it's mispronounced by millions." They make it KHAN-CORD, the Monitor's Ray Duckler notes in his lighthearted and only slightly wounded look at the whole Massachusetts-woman-wins-five-nights-in-NH-on-The-Price-Is-Right national hootfest. That woman, Catherine Graham, has been a good sport, Duckler writes, though she's mentioned other destinations that might have been nice. "I get it why a lot of people are talking about this. I was very shocked,” says the operations manager at the Hotel Concord, where Graham will be staying this fall.Think potholes are bad now? Just wait a few years. Over in Hampton, NH, the public works director tells NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian, a crew might typically be out a few days a week. Last week, he says, they had "three to four crews out on a full-time basis all day long." The problem? More frequent freeze-thaw cycles and more rain in winter, driven by climate change. “As the soil has more moisture in it, it's weaker," says UNH engineering prof Jo Sias. "And the weaker underlying soil means the pavement doesn't have the support that it's designed to have.”"Keep saving, keep saving... So when something comes open, OK, you have that extra money if you have to overbid.” That's Claremont Savings Bank's Brandy Blackinton's advice to prospective homebuyers in NH's tough market. The median home price in the state is now around $400K, writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin—and in January, 706 homes were added to inventory statewide, compared to 1,083 two years before. There's no telling when this will end. "A healthy market would take six months to sell all [available] houses," DeWitt writes. "Currently, New Hampshire sellers would take only 26 days." VT says, Yep, patients wait too long. A state investigation launched last year following a Seven Days story detailing long wait times for appointments at UVM Medical Center has confirmed the problem, writes Colin Flanders in Seven Days. The average across all specialties is 60 days, but if you need a dermatologist it could be 141 days. At UVM Med Center, the average wait for an appointment was 100 days, compared to half that at DHMC. Hospital execs yesterday criticized the study, which used "secret shoppers" and was done during the Omicron wave, which they contend may have skewed results.Is your name Karen? A Vermonter wants to help. Kaomi Mitchell, who lives in Colchester, used to be Karen Mitchell, but she got tired of the derogatory use of her name as a meme for self-righteous women. So last month, reports Ken Picard in Seven Days, she launched TheRealKaren.com, which is "dedicated to telling the stories of inspiring real people named Karen and promoting literature with positive characters named Karen." The whole phenomenon, which has subjected masses of women to ridicule simply because of their name, is "a lesson in how we manufacture hate," Mitchell tells Picard.Hey, a person can dream, right? Four new long-distance hiking trails have opened in the past couple of years around the world. There's the Michinoku Coastal Trail, writes Rebecca McPhee for Explorer's Web, stretching 600 miles over clifftops and through tiny fishing villages along Japan's Tohoku coast. And Australia's Grampians Peak Trail (which includes Mt. Difficult). And the Walk of Peace Trail through Slovenia and Italy, following a WWI front from the Alps to the Adriatic. Or, closer to home, you could tramp the perimeter of Prince Edward Island in "a month of longish day hikes" on The Island Walk.

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"You know, I meet a lot of young groups, and I say, 'I can't read music. Or write it.' And they go, 'What??!!'" That's because writing songs is "here," Paul McCartney says, using both hands to point to his temples, "it's not on a bit of paper." And then, in an excerpt from his series of interviews with record producer Rick Rubin for the Hulu series McCartney 3,2,1, he gives a quick lesson in writing a song, starting with a simple three-finger chord at middle C and building from there. Once you get to six chords, he says, "you don't need more than that." And proceeds to demonstrate. Melodically.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.

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                                 About Michael

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