GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Partly to mostly sunny, possible afternoon showers west. We see more sun than clouds at least through the morning pretty much everywhere in the Upper Valley. Clouds will start to roll in this afternoon on the Vermont side, with a chance of showers late. Temps today in the lower 40s, calm winds from the west. Down to around freezing tonight.From Newbury, VT to Plymouth, NH.... there's snow sliding off roofs. As one reader/photographer responding to yesterday's request for snow-cornice photos put it, "Ask and ye shall receive." As you'll see at the link, there are some mighty dramatic snow cornices/curls/roofslides out there. Thank you to everyone who contributed! If you want to add your snowverhang to the album, feel free to send it along.Meanwhile, in Newbury, NH... Photographer Jim Block was out recently photographing a flock of Bohemian waxwings. That is one photogenic bird..."Don't forget to laugh every day." Sometime last night, five small inspirational signs went up along Route 10 in Hanover, paralleling the former golf course. "Just be nice. It's free," says the first. "Get over it. Seriously," reads the last. The spur, says the person behind the civic-minded exploit, was a similar set of signs they saw overseas a few years back. "It made me so happy someone had done something so selfless to remind us not to get stuck in our own little worlds," they explain. "I've wanted to do this ever since I got back. I hope the police don't take them down too quickly."The power's still out in some places. Though it's nothing like yesterday.
Here's GMP's current outage map. Several hundred customers remain without power out in Hartland, Windsor, W. Windsor, and Springfield, more in towns to the south.
On the NH side, Eversource is down to dozens of households out in and around Claremont.NH Electric Cooperativealso reports abut 100 outages in the same area.
All in all, an Eversource NH official said in a statement, "With upwards of three feet of snow that in spots is like ‘gorilla glue’ on the road and more than 210 blocked roads statewide, our crews have been dealing with extremely difficult travel conditions to access areas of the electric system where there is damage.” Some customers are expected to be without power until Friday.
Turns out that yesterday morning's report in the
Valley News
was incomplete and relied on only one of the city's three wards. In official results, the four-way race for three seats yielded straight-out winners for two of the seats, with Kevin Schutz drawing 591 votes and Tia Winter at 574. A mere 14 votes behind, Jessica Satterly-Hall and John D'Entremont tied at 560 votes apiece for the third seat.
And how will this tie be handled?
Lebanon City Clerk Kristin Kenniston explains in an email, "The way it is resolved is for the School District Clerk to draw the name of the winning candidate, in essence, 'out of a hat.' The losing candidate can then request a recount, if they would like to do so." As of this morning, the school district's clerk, Brian Davis, had not responded to a query as to whether he'll be at the Lebanon City Council's 8 am official vote canvas. "If the School District Clerk cannot attend," Kenniston writes, "the School District will need to make their own arrangements to do the drawing."
SPONSORED: At Alice Peck Day, you’ll have more than a happy first day—you’ll have a happy and rewarding career. From the front lines to the back offices, Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital employees love what they do—and it shows in every step of a patient’s healthcare journey. Open positions include Physical Therapist, Occupational Therapist, Sleep Tech, and more. Join our friendly community hospital today! Sponsored by APD.As if some short-staffed towns don't have enough to contend with, now there's a subpoena from 3M. It went out to Claremont, Croydon, Grantham, Grafton, New London, Orford, Plainfield, and Sunapee—and 140 other NH municipalities, reports the VN's Frances Mize, as the chemical giant prepares to fight a lawsuit filed by the state over PFAS contamination of drinking water. The subpoenas were issued "based on 'alleged detection' of PFAS in or near transfer stations or wastewater management systems," Mize writes. Towns are objecting that they can't possibly comply with all the subpoena's demands.For Northern Woodlands, a gush of praise. On his Granite Geek blog, the Monitor's David Brooks zeroes in on a new series on forest carbon running in the magazine, which is published in Lyme and edited by Thetford's Elise Tillinghast. But it's his final paragraph that's most eye-catching. "How terrific is this magazine?" he writes. "It’s the only place I know where you can read poetry about the beauty of nature, science articles about ecology and biology, financial tips on owning a commercial sawmill, and tips on how to clean the spark arrestor on your chainsaw. A little bit of everything."Work continues on medical school building damaged by fire. The first four floors of Geisel Medical School's Remsen Medical Sciences Building are back open, reports Timothy Dean for Geisel News, after a Feb. 26 fire in a 7th floor lab forced the building to close. Fire inspectors have traced the fire to an electrical malfunction in equipment used for molecular biology research. “We are anticipating having some portions of Remsen 5 and 6 back online soon,” says Geisel's facilities director, Ben Jorgensen, but adds that the 7th floor still needs extensive remediation.SPONSORED: Osher at Dartmouth spring term registration is open! This term’s course catalog features over 50 courses, including a review of the history of U.S. intelligence, tips on creating your own garden, an exploration of Mt. Washington and the cog railway, and an examination of the story of the Enfield Shakers. You’ll find topics for every interest, including art, music, science, history, politics, poetry, movies, nature, and so much more. Visit osher.dartmouth.edu for more information. Join us today! Sponsored by Osher at Dartmouth.Goffstown sports dome deflates. Fortunately, the NH SportsDome in Goffstown, which can hold 200 people, was empty when it deflated early yesterday morning, and no one was hurt. The Goffstown Fire Department responded after a plow truck driver noticed the collapse, and the owner is investigating the cause. Speculation centers on the weight of Tuesday's heavy, wet snow, though WMUR's Troy Lynch reports that the owners had boosted the heat inside, hoping it would melt the falling snow.NH has handed public schools a license to "innovate." So far, none have gone for it. Based on a 2021 law, the state board of ed last month finalized rules aimed at letting regular public schools, not just charters, experiment with the way they operate, "from the length of the school day or school year to new graduation policies, staffing plans, or assessment procedures," writes Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. But for the moment, schools don't seem to be biting. “We didn’t get any applications, I’ll put it that way,” the board of ed's chair says. “Whether there are districts that are seriously considering it, I’m not sure.” In VT's state-funded hotel and motel rooms, bedbugs, plumbing problems, broken door locks. Last Friday, VTDigger's Lola Duffort published the results of her investigation into the pandemic program for housing homeless Vermonters. Yesterday, VT Public's Mary Engisch spoke to Duffort about the issues she found, including tenants' fears that a complaint could lead to retaliation by the motel owner. "The conversation has always been: Do we shut this program down?... And not: Do we make sure that the people who are relying on this for emergency housing are consistently getting safe and sanitary and dignified housing?" Duffort says.In search of "god-level" chocolate. Last year, Calais-based food and nature writer Rowan Jacobsen came out with a new podcast called "Obsessions: Wild Chocolate," in which he takes listeners along with him looking for rare varieties of cacao beans, from trees that were abandoned by the industry for higher-yielding varieties. In conversation with Seven Days' Susan Podhaizer, he talks about the chocolate itself—eating it can be "thrilling," he says—his adventures in the rain forest, and his obsession with cupuaçu, a fruit he discovered while in Brazil. Here's the podcast itself.Sports are about speed, height, depth, strength … and a life-changing millisecond, frozen in time. The Guardian pulls together “50 photographs that reshaped sport,” with the backstory behind the athletes, the photographers, and the circumstances. Ali and Liston in 1965, of course. But also an explosion at the 1955 Le Mans that killed 84 people—taken by a spectator—and footballer John Barnes fighting racism with his feet and the moment Mary Decker fell at the '84 Olympics. Moments of superhuman triumph and defeat, but perhaps more poignant, human triumph and defeat.The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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This evening at 7, the 2023 season of the Thetford Arthouse Cinema gets underway in the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy. The choice of films, writes organizer Arthur Kahn, "steers intentionally away from films, even great films, that most everyone has seen and seen again—and toward those wonderful films that many will be viewing for the first time." Tonight, it's Can You Ever Forgive Me?, featuring Melissa McCarthy's classic performance as the real-life writer and literary forger Lee Israel. After this week, films will be on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Also at 7 this evening, via Zoom, the Etna Library hosts thriller writer and WHDH Boston investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan, talking about her newest novel, The House Guest. It's a twisty-turny psychological thriller, with at its center a woman whose husband of eight years leaves her abruptly—at which point, the FBI comes calling.
Also at 7, down in Putney, Next Stage Arts brings in The Foreign Landers: multi-instrumentalists David (from South Carolina) and Tabitha (from Northern Ireland) Benedict, along with Nate Sabat on acoustic bass and Julian Pinelli on fiddle. They've got a new album out, Travelers Rest, named for the SC town where they now live, but also reflective of their search for home.
At 7:30 this evening, the Flying Goose in New London presents Aztec Two-Step 2.0, with original member Rex Fowler, his wife Dodie Pettit, and their bandmates. The original, of course, are folk/rock legends; co-founder Neal Shulman retired in 2018, the same year that Fowler and Pettit (a singer-songwriter and original Broadway cast member of Phantom of the Opera) married, after first meeting at a recording session nearly 40 years earlier.
And at 8 pm, Crowe's Pasture takes the stage at Hanover's Sawtooth Kitchen—the Boston-based duo of Monique Byrne and Andy Rogovin, with a mix of folk originals and covers.
Finally, any time, check out JAM's highlights for the week, including a look ahead at the jam-packed and buzzy White River Indie Film Festival, which gets going at the end of next week, as well as entire channels-worth of Irish music and stories, exiled Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad's speech at Dartmouth, and legendary baker Jeffrey Hamelman's talk to the Woodstock Historical Society about beekeeping and the history of beekeeping in VT.
And to start the day off right...
In the pantheon of lesser-known bands offering up unusual covers of rock classics, there's got to be a special nook for The Heimatdamisch, the Bavarian oompah band. Here's a fine example of why:
at a livestreamed concert in Bad Tölz, Germany, back in the heart of the pandemic.
(Thanks for your patience, SS!)
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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