GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Warmer... and then really colder. There are these persistent south/southwest winds out there, and for today they'll make a difference. We'll be getting into the low 30s by mid-afternoon, with partly sunny skies all day. Temps will drop only slightly for the first part of the evening, but at some point the coldest Arctic air mass of the season moves in. There's a chance of snow squalls and high wind gusts ahead of it, but the big event is the cold: It'll be close to 0 by the time we wake up, and getting colder from there.What's going on? In the Boston Globe (possible paywall), Amanda Gokee—who has left NH Bulletin to help launch a two-person Globe team covering New Hampshire—writes that warmer air has moved in over the North Pole, causing the jet stream to bulge south. What's coming is "a piece of really true Siberian Arctic air," says Francis Tarasiewicz of the Mt. Washington Observatory. Speaking of which, they're expecting ambient temps of -35 to -50 up top, with a wind chill as low as -101. "There’s definitely an excited buzz up here," he says.As for us mere mortals... If you've lived in these parts for more than a decade, you'll remember weeks when temps didn't rise above 0 and nighttimes were in the -20 or lower range. But even a day or two of extreme cold isn't to be trifled with. Burgundy link goes to NH's emergency page on extreme cold, with tips on how to recognize hypothermia and frostbite, how to dress for cold, and prepping your car in case you break down (extra clothes, blankets...). Here's Vermont Public's page, which adds tips on keeping animals warm and on heating your home.So it's probably a good time for flowers. Though not in the ground. "These may not be regular scenery at this time of year," writes Janice Fischel, "but they sure made me smile when I spotted them at the Hanover Co-op. A sign of hope on cold days..."Thetford town manager to become Hartford's public works director. Two years into his three-year contract, Bryan Gazda told Thetford town employees on Tuesday that he'll be moving on in 90 days to take up the Hartford post, which has been filled on an interim basis since Hannah Tyler left last March. "It was a very hard decision to leave Thetford," Gazda writes Sidenote's Li Shen in an email. If Thetford can't find a replacement before Gazda leaves, Shen writes, governance "reverts de facto to a Selectboard-style form of governance until the office of Town Manager is filled.""Uber with a van": Windsor helps pilot microtransit program. It's one of six towns around the state chosen by VTrans last year to test out free ride-hailing services, each using a different model. Windsor's is the MicroMoo van, operated by Southeast VT Transit, and in the Valley News, Frances Mize talks to users about the possibilities it's opened up in their lives. The van—soon to be joined by an all-wheel-drive companion—operates within Windsor town lines Mon-Fri. It's "much more flexible [than fixed transit lines]," says SVT's CEO. "It expands the number of people who can use public transport.”SPONSORED: Hop Film presents Bad Axe! In the rural hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan—a small community not unlike our own—at the start of the pandemic, Asian American filmmaker David Siev documents his family's struggles to keep their restaurant afloat in his latest film: Bad Axe. What unfolds is a warm, uplifting portrait of a close-knit Asian-Mexican-American family fighting to keep its restaurant alive in the face of a pandemic and a community fractured by racism. Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7 pm in the Loew Auditorium. Live Q&A with the director after the film. Sponsored by the Hopkins Center. "Trust your taste buds." In this week's "What Are You Having...", Susan Apel talks to Lindsay Smith, the woman behind the Lebanon Co-op's cooking education classes. They're ever-popular, and the former Peace Corps volunteer and farmers market manager strives not just to offer practical skills—like how to handle a knife—but, as Susan writes, to "transport you (culinarily) to places around the planet." She's also full of advice, like, "Please stop sautéing your onions and garlic at the same time." As for what she'd eat herself? Well, she says, it's "more of an idea rather than a straight recipe."Willing Hands already keeps about a million pounds of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere each year. Now it says it wants to double that. That million-pound figure comes from an analysis by Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Department, which looked at the impact of the nonprofit's work to keep excess food out of landfills and from rotting unharvested in fields. Yesterday, the group announced it's creating an advisory committee to look both at finding new ways to keep food from going to waste and at steps it can take to reduce its own direct emissions. Press release at the link.Medicaid "unwind" could leave tens of thousands in region without coverage. During the pandemic, writes Nora Doyle-Burr in the VN, people who lost their jobs or were already on Medicaid were covered. As of April 1, though, they will need to show that their income meets the thresholds to qualify—leaving more than 72,000 NH residents and tense of thousands of Vermonters "vulnerable to losing their coverage because they have not yet completed paperwork," Doyle-Burr reports. Both states, she writes, are working to notify beneficiaries and help them find other coverage if they need it.Here's something you probably didn't know you needed to worry about: NH's status as a "charging desert" could cost it tourist dollars. The state has about half the number of public EV chargers as either VT or ME, and Energy News Network's Lisa Prevost writes that tourist-dependent businesses—like the state's ski areas—are worried EV drivers from MA, Quebec, and other nearby sources of visitors will bypass it. They're backing legislation to make chargers less costly to own. "If we don’t keep up, we’re not going to be a place that EV drivers are going to want to go to,” says one.“It’s like telling a pregnant woman, ‘Cross your legs and wait.'” That's Lakes Region Mental Health Center CEO Maggie Pritchard's way of illustrating the long waits people in crisis sometimes face in NH: for a psychiatric bed so they can leave the emergency room, a mobile crisis team, even a counseling appointment. In NH Bulletin, Annmarie Timmins reports that the most acute need is for staff: The state's 10 community mental health centers have 340 clinical vacancies among them, and are asking Gov. Sununu and the legislature for some $26-$28 million to boost wages, which lag national averages. And in Covid news...
NH hasn't updated its dashboard in a week. Meanwhile, the state hospital association reported 95 people hospitalized with Covid yesterday, virtually unchanged from 97 a week ago.
And in VT, writes VTDigger's Erin Petenko, the state continues to report "low" community levels of Covid, though the CDC reports "high" levels in Rutland County and "medium" in the rest of the counties on the western side of the state. Hospital admissions rose to 48 over the past week, compared to 41 last week.
More on that post-fight death in Alburgh, VT Tuesday night. A 25-second video, reports Seven Days' Alison Novak, shows men and women and at least one student athlete "throwing punches and pushing each other on the basketball court" as well as two men in a fistfight. Russell Giroux, 60, sought medical attention afterward, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. As the districts involved grapple with the aftermath, Novak writes, one superintendent is asking statewide education officials to respond to a "recent spate of spectator misconduct" in VT. WCAX aired the video last night."Before the games, there's a lot of 'zero tolerance for this' and 'zero tolerance for that.' And then they go and tolerate this." VT high schools have also been dealing with a spate of racist incidents over the past year and a half, and Seven Days' Novak sat down to talk with Black players on two girls' basketball teams, at Rice Memorial and Burlington High, about their experiences. They explain why their teams are refusing to play with Champlain Valley Union, their trepidation about biased refs, and their belief that the official response so far has been inadequate.“She's 15 and a little bit grumpy about being yanked out of the car every hour for a stop.” Glenn McRae is talking about Sophie, who has achieved a distinction few Vermonters have: she’s visited every town in the state. Even more impressive, she’s peed in darn near every one of the 252 locales. Fortunately, as a dog—a shih tzu, to be precise—Sophie has easier access to facilities than the rest of us. Rachel Hellman profiles Sophie and her drivers, Burlington’s McRae and wife Hollie Shaner-McRae, in Seven Days.“Inky brown, sweet and salty, funky and fishy, peppery and piquant.” A surprising description for a best seller from the condiment aisle, but Worcestershire sauce earned a spicy $950 million worldwide last year. Its popularity, writes Matthew Zuras on Epicurious, is due in no small part to the brilliant marketing of originators Lea and Perrins, pharmacists who, in 1823, “apparently thought it was reasonable to start fermenting fish sauce in the back of their shop.” The recipe was a secret for years, but no one cared. What else can you add to a squab pot pie à l'Anglaise, a Bloody Mary, and meatballs?You don't see a blue spiral in the sky every night. But there it was the night of Jan. 18 above Hawaii, captured on video by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera on Mauna Kea as it appeared, expanded, and then faded. Turns out, it was frozen rocket fuel ejected by the second stage of a SpaceX rocket lifting a satellite into orbit, which was then illuminated by sunlight. "'Space X spirals' are becoming commonplace over the Pacific where Falcon 9 rocket stages are often deorbitted," Spaceweather.com writes. But listen, if you see one of those over Franconia Notch...The Thursday Vordle. With a fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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At 4:30 today, both in-person and online, historian and author Heather Ann Thompson and documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson will discuss the 1971 Attica prison uprising and its continuing relevance today. Thompson's 2016 book on Attica, Blood in the Water, won both the Bancroft and the Pulitzer prizes for history; Nelson has both a Peabody Award and a MacArthur fellowship to his name, and his 2021 documentary, Attica, was nominated for Best Documentary at last year's Academy Awards. In Filene Auditorium and livestreamed.
Today at 4:45, Dartmouth's English department hosts a reading by short story writer and essayist Peter Orner and literary journalist Jeff Sharlet, part of the Cleopatra Mathis Poetry and Prose Series. Orner and Sharlet, who also teach writing at the college, are nationally known and highly regarded practitioners of the art and craft of writing—Orner's most recent essay collection, Still No Word From You, has been building steam across the country; Sharlet is a contributing editor at Harper's and Rolling Stone whose 2008 book, The Family, became a Netflix mini-series and whose latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is due out in March. In-person in the Sanborn Library.
This evening at 6:30, the Norwich Historical Society and the town Recreation Department present a Zoomed discussion on keeping chickens—a topic that may be interesting to people living well outside the town's bounds. Information on chicken coops, chicken breeds, and keeping chickens healthy in winter, plus local families sharing tips and stories (and photos) about keeping their flocks and a discussion of the important role laying hens had in the household economies of early Norwich. By donation, 20 percent of which goes to Health Care & Rehabilitation Services.
At 7 this evening, the Norwich Bookstore hosts novelist Wendy Willis Baldwin, reading from and talking about her debut novel, The Sisters We Were. Inspired in part by her own and her sister's lives, Baldwin's novel recounts the story of Pearl and Ruby, one a chronic runner, the other chronically overweight, both with a mother in prison, and what happens when the runner's long-buried rage boils over.
Tonight at 8 (doors at 7), Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover presents the first of a monthly First Thursday residency by Zach Nugent, S. Royalton native, Grateful Dead channeler, and renowned guitarist. He'll be "mixing classic covers and originals with stories from the road for an intimate night of music," Sawtooth promises.
And anytime, you can check out what JAM's highlighting this week, including: US Sen. Peter Welch's "town hall" meeting at the Briggs Opera House last month; the statewide NH ski jumping meet at Storrs Hill last Friday night; and the adoptable cats and dog featured by Windsor's Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society—Mowgli, Phoebe, Sputnik, and Jake.
And to start us off today...
Even if you didn't know you were listening to Opetaia Foa'i, odds are decent you've heard him before: He helped co-write the songs that form the soundtrack to Disney's
Moana
. Born in Western Samoa and now living in New Zealand, Foa'i is better known in music circles as the founding force behind Te Vaka, a group of pan-Polynesian musicians and dancers that's brought vibrant South Pacific drumming, harmonies, and dance to the rest of the world for a quarter-century.
with his kids, master percussionist Matatia and singer and dancer Olivia.
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.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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