GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Remember that warm front? Well, it's here. But only for the day—long enough to drive temps into the upper 50s this afternoon. However, there's also a cold front following close behind, and with it a chance or likelihood of rain all afternoon and night. Partly cloudy first then getting cloudier, winds from the south. Low in the low or mid 40s tonight."Nothing screams spring like...
"...tulips and lambs," writes Jenn Megyesi of Fat Rooster Farm. "These are bottle lambs from a ewe that had quadruplets. It’s hard on the mom and the babies to raise four, so I gave her a break."
...or like spring melt that can still freeze, in this case en-robing branches over the stream by Kedron Valley Stables in S. Woodstock, from Debbi Franklin.
Dartmouth dining students vote to unionize. In all, reports The Dartmouth, 52 students took part in the election, less than a third of those eligible. The vote was unanimous. In response, vice president of campus services and institutional projects Josh Keniston said in a statement, “Dartmouth believes this election was fair and took place under a framework that allowed for participation by students from as many terms as possible. We respect the students’ choice."Croydon will get a revote on its school budget. Speaking of low-turnout elections, you may remember that earlier this month, a relative handful of town meeting voters cut the school budget from $1.7 million to $800K. After an outraged response from townspeople who hadn't been there, reports Darren Marcy in the Valley News, the school board has scheduled a new vote for May 7 at YMCA Camp Coniston. For the revote to stick, at least 50 percent of the town’s 565 registered voters must attend. Marcy reports more residents were at Tuesday's school board meeting than at the original town meeting."My dad is actually Ukrainian and my mom is Russian." {Palm to forehead} That was my mistake. But Hanover High language teacher Yuliya Ballou writes that there were other personal details that got mixed up in the VTDigger story linked to in yesterday's Daybreak; they've now been corrected (at the maroon link above). Meanwhile, she adds, "there are so many layers to this," and recommends this article in The White River Valley Herald (which should be out from behind the paywall by tomorrow).SPONSORED: What does a mathematician look like? Artist and math teacher Tracy Gillespie was looking into the history of calculating pi when she realized that all the mathematicians looked the same. She decided to create a series of portraits of contemporary mathematicians from under-represented groups. See her exhibit Mathematicians Made Visible and meet the artist this First Friday, April 1, 5:30-7:00 PM at the Long River Gallery, 49 S. Main Street, White River Junction. Sponsored by Long River Gallery."What about James Beard? I don't know James Beard, you know?" That's Randolph Thai chef Nisachon Morgan talking to WCAX's Elissa Borden about her husband, Steven—a former instructor at the New England Culinary Institute—bringing her the news that she and their restaurant, Saap, had suddenly landed in the running for an ultra-prestigious James Beard Award. Borden profiles the two, who, since Saap has been named a finalist for best restaurant in the Northeast, will head to Chicago for the awards festivities in June.Pretty soon, you'll be able to ride all the way from Lebanon right to Concord. On Friday, the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail handed over $110K to NHDOT to turn a .6-mile stretch of old rail track into trail—and bring it to the Concord city line. It took four years to raise the funds, reports Brackett Lyons in the Monitor, but even more important, the addition of that short stretch of trail will allow it to link up to a proposed Merrimack River Greenway trail, which would add another six miles through downtown Concord.Want to get your hands dirty this summer? Nope, not gardening. Archeology. On his Granite Geek blog, David Brooks writes about one of the longest-running citizen science projects in NH, a field program in which archeologists oversee volunteers (who pay a small sum for the privilege) who "very, very carefully scrape and shovel and sift through some dirt on the banks of the Suncook River." The site's in Bear Brook State Park at what was probably a seasonal camp hundreds and possibly thousands of years ago.Oh, man! Crash scatters "thousands of nails" across NH highway. It happened early yesterday morning on I-293 in Manchester, according to the NH State Police's Facebook page. "Troopers arrived to find a pickup truck on its side and a utility trailer off into the woods. The crash had caused a tree to fall across the right hand travel lane....This crash also caused an extensive debris field consisting of thousands of nails, tools and construction equipment that had been strewn across both southbound travel lanes." The highway was closed for an hour as crews cleaned up. (If you don't do FB, here's an alternative.)NH changes how it reports Covid hospitalizations; hospitals object. Rather than the number of patients who test positive for Covid, it will now report the number of patients being treated with Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, or both, writes Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. The state hospital association's Vanessa Stafford says this undercounts the burden hospitals face with patients still too sick to be discharged. “The total number of people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 is one of the most important metrics in monitoring the severity of illness and the prevalence of COVID-19 in the state,” she says.USDA regulation change may help small organic dairy farmers in VT, NH. Though as always, the proof's in the implementation. The change has long been sought by Vermont officials and dairy farmers, writes Emma Cotton in VTDigger: It closes a loophole that allowed operations to raise cows conventionally, then shift them to organic later in life, thus saving money. Dave Chapman, who runs E. Thetford's Long Wind Farm as well as the bi-national Real Organic Project, says, “They passed what appears to be a good regulation," but cautions that'll only hold true if it's enforced.Mike Pieciak heads back to his day job. You probably paid no attention to VT's commissioner of financial regulation before the pandemic. Then Gov. Phil Scott asked him to head the state's Covid-related modeling efforts, which put him front and center during the administration's regular press conferences. Now, writes Colin Flanders in a Seven Days profile, Pieciak is turning his attention back to finance: cryptocurrency regs, cyber-security and the like. First tapped for the post by Democrat Peter Shumlin, he's made a name as a non-partisan, straightforward public servant—and isn't averse to elected office.A Burlington startup aims to take on Amazon with a shop-local site. Our trajectory toward e-commerce ubiquity doesn’t appear to be reversing course, like, ever. Which isn’t great for locally owned businesses. But as Seven Days’ Ken Picard writes, a Burlington entrepreneur wants to make it easier for people to buy online from retailers in their community. In 2020, Bill Calfee founded Myti, a unique shopping platform that he hopes can even maintain some of the charm of browsing a local boutique—with “a button that enables customers to communicate with the shopkeepers via live video chat.” These award-winning photos show a world in conflict—and some bright spots too. The World Press Photo Foundation just announced the 2022 contest winners: photojournalists from 23 countries across every region of the globe. The judges praised their courage, understandably, as many of the images document humanity’s darker side: war, the climate crisis, poverty, pandemic. Still, some inspire, like the photo essay of an Argentinian girl who refused to cut her hair until school resumed in-person classes, or an indigenous Australian tribe’s ancient means of controlling wildfires.Sure, sure, they're great at herding sheep. But this could very well be the highest and best use for border collies.
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At 7 pm, the Norwich Bookstore hosts an online event with historical novelist Kate Quinn. Quinn's new book, The Diamond Eye, is based on the life of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian-born history student and pole vaulter who became a renowned Red Army sniper during WWII—and, in 1942, was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to tour the US, where a chunk of Quinn's novel is set.
Also at 7, jazz quartet Sunday Table sets up at Still North Books & Bar in Hanover for a couple of hours—and in addition to entertaining, will be collecting donations for Global Empowerment Mission's Ukraine relief efforts. The ensemble, which explores both old and new songs from the American Songbook, features a quartet of DHMC staffers who first came together for Sunday jam sessions: Jason Pettus on keyboard and melodion; Tom Davis on guitar, Eric Bronstein on bass, and vocalist Grace Crummer.
And also at 7 and continuing the Ukraine thread, the Etna Library hosts a Zoom talk on Russia's invasion of Ukraine with Dartmouth history prof Udi Greenberg and two students from Ukraine, Zhenia Dubrova and Marta Hulievska. They'll be talking about the causes, costs, and possible outcomes of the war.
Meanwhile, also at 7 but very far from war, the VT Ski & Snowboard Museum hosts five women Olympic cross-country skiers for an online conversation on the history of women's competitive skiing, occasioned by the new book, Trail to Gold. The panelists include Trina Hosmer, who skied with the UVM men's team in the '60s (because there was on women's team); Middlebury grad Sue (Long) Wemyss, who skied in the '84 Sarajevo Olympics and now teaches at Great Glen in NH; and multiple-time Olympians Nancy Fiddler, Leslie Thompson Hall, and Laura Wilson Todd.
And at 7:30 pm the Hop presents the first of two nights of performances of The Medium, by the NYC-based experimental theater troupe SITI Company. The production, which just closed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was first staged in 1993: It explores and rejiggers media visionary Marshall McLuhan's thoughts and predictions on technology and its impact on human communication. There's a conversation with the artists after tonight's show.
Though it takes its inspiration from traditional Japanese music, the all-women band Mitsune is based in Berlin, has members who come from Japan, Germany, Australia, and Greece, and happily uses traditional acoustic instruments—mostly the three-stringed
shamisen—
to play around with a repertoire that also pulls from the Middle East, blues, folk, and rock. Last month, t
which means "in between" in Japanese and explores "the feeling of being in limbo, of getting lost and fitting pieces together," as Kopp puts it.
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 and writers who want you to 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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