GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Back to mostly sunny, rising temps. That's thanks to a ridge of high pressure building into the region aloft that's expected to stick around into Friday. Calm winds, temps reaching into the low 40s, more sun than clouds until tonight—and tonight's clouds will keep the lows from dropping beyond the low 30s or upper 20s. Very slight chance of flurries toward dawn.Out on the branches: a spot of color and an unexpected visitor to the bird-feeder.
The first is this brilliant little cardinal in Thetford, from Diahann Tanke;
And the second is a hermit thrush, which is unexpected because they don't tend to winter over in these parts, checking things out in Hanover, from Skip Jenkyn and Laurie Greenberg.
VT considers moving on from Newbury facility. Despite the state's victory in the VT Supreme Court as it sought the right to build a six-bed secure facility for juvenile offenders, reports Kevin McCallum in Seven Days, DCF commissioner Chris Winters told legislators last week, “We have to reevaluate what we’re doing in Newbury." Facing legal pushback from the town and its citizens, the agency began looking at other possibilities and "is eyeing private land in South Burlington or a piece of public land in Vergennes for [a] secure 15-bed facility," McCallum writes, though the state retains the right to move ahead in Newbury.Lebanon opts to convert city-owned lots into housing for city, school employees, hopes to encourage other developers. At its meeting last night, the city council voted unanimously to designate five lots—on Barrows Street, Hanover Street Extension, Seminary Hill, and South Main Street—as suitable for redevelopment, reports WMUR's Ross Ketschke. The plan, as Patrick Adrian wrote in the Valley News yesterday, is for the city "to provide the land and money to build the homes," which would then be sold to buyers "at affordable borrowing rates, allowing the city to recoup its investment." "All this will be public, so you can see what the cost of developing the project is so hopefully this will encourage others to build," Mulholland tells Ketschke.Thetford police seek public help, video in gunshot incident at intersection of Routes 5, 113. The report came in yesterday afternoon at about 3:25 and involved vehicles including a "full-sized" truck, the Thetford Police Department says in a press release. The vehicles were gone by the time officers arrived; the department is asking anyone who lives along 5 or 113 within two miles of the intersection has video that might have captured a truck between 3 and 4 pm to get in touch. (Note: do not click on any links in the FB comments!)SPONSORED: Great teachers and leaders are the heart of great schools. Are you an educator or thinking of becoming an educator? Learn about opportunities at UVEI's online information session on Monday, 2/12 at 6:00 pm. UVEI offers licensure and masters degree programs in teaching, school leadership, and literacy; and we would love to talk with you. Register for the info session at the burgundy link above, or visit our website to learn more about our work. Sponsored by the Upper Valley Educators Institute.Appeals court decision on DHMC firing "came out of the blue." If you shied away yesterday from wading through the decision reinstating fired DHMC fertility doctor Misty Porter's wrongful termination case against the hospital, the VN's Frances Mize has a helpful rundown. The three-judge panel found that an earlier court ruling dismissing Porter's claims should instead have allowed a jury to decide them. Porter's attorney, Geoffrey Vitt, tells Mize that the 100-page decision's "painstaking" explanation of fine-grained details "in my experience, it’s—I don’t want to say unprecedented—but it’s certainly unusual."On the flanks of Mt. Moosilauke, simulated combat, moving soldiers and supplies through deep snow—and mutual care in deep cold. In January, two NH Army National Guard platoons were dropped off by the Glencliff Trail for two days of cold-weather combat training. In a public affairs recap published Sunday, Sgt. Kelly Boyer writes, "With snow coming up waist-deep in some spots, each platoon had to work together to make their way [for many miles] through the rugged terrain"—dealing with, among other things, frozen water bottles and just sleeping bags for shelter. (h/t to the JO's Alex Nuti-de Biasi.)Valentines for vets. 103 of them, in fact. That's how many a group of women brought together in Norwich by Becky Munsterer Sabky made last Friday for patients at the White River Junction VA, she tells Demo Sofronas for his About Norwich blog. Sabky began the annual project some 15 years ago, and this year, 18 women showed up to craft cards. They'll go on vets' meal trays at the hospital around Valentine's Day. Oh, and there was just one key rule: No glitter.SPONSORED: Take a break from the busy pace of life with music for cello and piano. This Sunday, February 11, at 3 pm, Upper Valley Music Center faculty members Ben Kulp, cello, and Chenyu Wang, piano, perform an eclectic and thoughtful program of chamber music. The concert (featuring music by Arvo Pärt, Messiaen, Ed Sheeran, Samuel Barber, and Charlie Chaplin) gives you a chance to slow down, contemplate, and ultimately celebrate life with beautiful music. Sponsored by Upper Valley Music Center.Fathers and sons. The Lost Pilot, a collection of poems by James Tate published in 1967, contains the inscription, for my father, 1922-1944. Essayist Peter Orner came across a copy at the Norwich dump a while back, and the other day—for the first time since he found it—he opened it to read the title poem, about Tate's father, who never returned from what was supposed to be his final mission over Germany. "That’s a poem in itself, isn’t it?" he writes of the dedication. "A father dead at twenty-two." It leads, in this week's Enthusiasms, to a meditation on the poem, on fathers, and on sons' yearning.“The whole surface of the Earth is in a tug of a war..." That's Dartmouth postdoc Joanmarie Del Vecchio on research into the give and take between Arctic permafrost and the rivers that run through it. It matters, she and her co-authors write in a new study, because frozen permafrost keeps rivers to smaller areas and shallower valleys—and permafrost that's thawing doesn't. In fact, writes Dartmouth News' Morgan Kelly, each 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, which causes more flowing polar water to eat away at the soil, "could release as much carbon as 35 million cars emit in a year."NH lawmakers move forward on protecting covered bridges. Last week, reports Hadley Barndollar in NH Bulletin, a bill to allow towns to install video monitoring of covered bridges that could help identify vehicles that damage them won unanimous and bipartisan support in committee. Democrat Barry Faulkner's measure is co-sponsored by Plainfield Republican Margaret Drye, who has a companion bill that would establish fines for damaging covered wooden bridges—or even exceeding the weight limit. No one quoted in Barndollar's article has a bad thing to say about covered bridges.Getting an accurate count of the homeless depends on counting people without shelter—and in VT that's getting harder. As Carly Berlin reports for VT Public and VTDigger, the state's so-called point-in-time count over the last two years has given it the second-highest homeless rate per capita in the country—and that's in part because the state also did a better job than any other at keeping people sheltered, and therefore findable and countable. But as the pandemic era motel program winds down, more people have moved outdoors. Which, Berlin notes, "could impact the public’s understanding of the problem — and the state’s attempts to combat it."Are we dating the same man in central Vermont? That’s not me asking. It’s women in, well, central Vermont who belong to a private FB group started last summer. Seven Days' Hannah Feuer writes about the group—one of more than 200 similar ones—which she likens to “Yelp for dating.” Their hope is to crowdsource women’s cautions about particular men and help keep other women safe. In reality, writes Feuer, operating one is complex. As one skeptical member notes, nasty comments abound. “It's the nature of people to go on to complain about things and not to praise.” And, of course, the men can't reply.Flaco the owl celebrates a cage-free year. NYC rats are not happy, but Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl sprung from his cage in Central Park Zoo last February, is embracing his freedom. In the NYT (gift link), Ed Shanahan writes about Flaco’s adventures and the vast number of followers who track his welfare. Hatched in captivity, he lived in the zoo until a not-yet-identified person cut through his cage. Initial worries about his ability to fend for himself have eased, as Flaco learned that Central Park offers the best meals and the towers of Manhattan safe perches. With stunning photos and delightful quotes, including kind words from NYC resident Big Bird. (Thanks, JA!)The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 5 pm, the Royalton Library in S. Royalton launches a February film series screening four of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. Today, it's Barbie; over the next three Thursdays, they'll do Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, and American Fiction. There'll also be a movie at the circulation desk for younger audiences, in case parents with children in tow want to see the main attraction.
Also at 5 and running until 6:30 pm, the Hood Museum throws its Winter Opening celebration, with live music, refreshments, information about upcoming programs, and "an evening of in-gallery exploration."
This evening at 6, the Museum of the White Mountains presents a lecture, available via Zoom, by author and former US Forest Service naturalist David Govatski, "Protecting the Headwater Forests of the White Mountains: Case Studies". Govatski, who among other things is co-author of Forests for the People – The Story of the Eastern National Forests, will talk about the history of forest protection in the White Mountains, and will take a look at early preservation efforts including Crawford Notch, the Pike Tract in Benton, and Mad River Notch in Waterville Valley.
At 6:30 pm, NHPR reporter Laura Chooljian will be at AVA Gallery in Lebanon for a public talk about her podcast series The 13th Step. If Chooljian's name is familiar, it should be: She led the investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against recovery-center CEO Eric Spofford, and was one of the targets of vandalism aimed at NHPR staff as a result. That all led to her far-reaching look in The 13th Step at a culture of sexual misconduct in American substance use disorder treatment and recovery communities. She'll be talking about it all: the investigation, the vandalism, how the podcast came about, and the questions it raises.
Yesterday it was the housewarming. This evening at 7, the Lebanon Opera House is back open for business with a screening of Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, with live piano accompaniment by composer and frequent silent-film musical companion Bob Merrill. Shot over several weeks in the Sierra Nevada, making use of hundreds of extras—many of them brought in by train from Sacramento—the film contains two legendary Chaplin scenes: the dance of the rolls (audiences in some theaters at the time demanded the film be stopped, rewound, and the scene played again) and Chaplin's shoe-leather meal with Mack Swain (it was actually licorice).
Also at 7, the Parish Players launch their annual Ten Minute Play Festival. Each year for the past 16 years, the scrappy theater company atop Thetford Hill pulls together an evening of short plays—"Comedy, Absurdity, Mystery, Suspense! Original ten-minute plays from across the nation!"—with a director and cast for each. Among the offerings this Thurs-Sun and next: "A vengeful, philandering professor; an attractive young woman from post-World-War II Paris; a terrorized writer; a desperate soul in a house of worship. A couple of high-school boys and a Baby Think It Over doll (what could possibly go wrong?)." Runs through Feb. 18.
And also at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts Kyle Singh, poet, translator, and scholar of the philosophy of physics at Dartmouth. His collection is That Which is Everlasting.
At 7:30 pm, the Flying Goose Pub in New London hosts singer-songwriter Mark Erelli. The Melrose, Mass.-based musician is well known on the Boston-area circuit, and a few years ago discovered that he has an inherited retinal disease and was slowly going blind. His 2023 album, Lay Your Darkness Down, sprang from the questions his condition brought up: "Does diminished eyesight correlate with lesser insight? Does your songwriting change when your perception of the world around you changes?"
And anytime, you can check out JAM's highlights for the week, including: Chodus, Coffin Flop, The Y Lie, and Dylan Patrick Ward & The Lovable Losers at the Main Street Museum's "These Go to Eleven" band series last month; a 2022 conversation between the Hood's Isadora Italia and South African Nomusa Makhubu about the latter's exhibit, "Embodied: Artist as Medium" and its effort to reimagine denigrating depictions of African women; and author and Dartmouth prof Jeff Sharlet at the Howe last fall, talking about his deeply reported book on the American divide, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
And to get you up and out of your chair for the day...
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram was just 11 when he played his first paying blues gig in his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, at a juke joint called Red's. He didn't have a lot to draw from in the way of a hard-lived life: As he told NPR a few years ago, "I would say at that point in my life, I didn't lose my woman. [Though] me and my mom did go through a little, you know, 'situation,' as they put it. That may have put the blues in my life." It also launched a career that put his first album atop the charts, won him a Grammy at 23 (two years ago), has taken him all over the world, and has won him broad acclaim for his melding of delta blues, rock, gospel, and hip-hop. His newest album,
Live in London
, was recorded there last year.
, live at The Garage.
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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