Daybreak Thursday, 3/5/26

More clouds than sun, weather arriving tonight. It’ll be misleadingly calm out there today, with temps climbing pretty quickly to above the 40-degree line, light winds, and a somewhat cloudy day getting cloudier as the day goes on. That’s because up above, there’s some complex dynamics between a weak system coming through and an area of high pressure over Quebec that’s trying to push this way. The result looks to be a mix of rain, sleet, and snow, possibly starting up this evening and likely during the overnight hours. Lows tonight in the upper 20s.

Windows at play. Ice crystals and snow can be so photogenic!

It’s time for Dear Daybreak! In this week’s collection of photos and writing from readers, we start with Bob Walker’s photo from a ski trek up Piermont Mountain of a raccoon stirring from its winter’s rest, then move on to VINS’s Alden Smith reflecting on what the new eagle cams have shown him—and his mix of hope and trepidation for what they might have in store; Samantha Milnes’ poem about a milkweed pod in winter along a bank of the Ompompanoosuc; and Ken Davis’s recollection of how his life as a writer has been shaped, in part, by the great NYT reporter and Thetford resident Christopher Wren, who died recently.

This time, Mt. Views school district voters approve new middle/high school bond. And it wasn’t especially close, with voters in the district’s various towns giving it a 1,648 to 1,047 nod of approval. As the VT Standard notes, school officials gathered for the vote counting “breathed a huge sigh of relief” as the results were tallied for the $111.9 million bond proposal “that MVSD officials had crafted with conditions that would save taxpayers $15 million dollars versus the $99 million rebuild bond” that was rejected two years ago. It’s not a done deal: It only takes effect if the legislature separates the cost of capital projects from calculations of per-pupil spending.

In other town meeting results… Voters in Pomfret approved a 1% local-option tax on food, alcohol, and lodging; Newbury approved the appointment of one and possibly two constables; voters in Fairlee approved the creation of a conservation commission after decades of effort by backers of the idea; Grantham school voters approved an “open enrollment” policy that effectively bars students from elsewhere from enrolling in the village school; Hartland approved using $50K of the town’s funds to demolish the old N. Hartland School building; and Randolph voters rejected the Kimball Public Library’s budget after the budget as printed contained an error related to staff salaries (more on that tomorrow). Those and more at the Valley News’s town meeting page.

SPONSORED: Limited tickets remain to see Lucius at Lebanon Opera House! The Grammy-nominated indie-pop band comes to LOH on Thursday, March 19 at 7:30 PM for an intimate evening of songs, stories, and spellbinding harmonies. They've collaborated with everyone from Jeff Tweedy and Joni Mitchell to Mumford & Sons and Brandi Carlile. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.

Dartmouth is moving “faster and more aggressively” than other campuses to embrace AI, but it’s creating turbulence. That’s the conclusion of a Globe article ten days ago by Aidan Ryan and Diti Kohli (sorry, paywall) that looks at the college’s deal with Anthropic for thousands of “Claude for Education” licenses, AI use in classes, and the mental-health chatbot Evergreen. Some professors, the pair write, “are unnerved by the incursion of AI and how Dartmouth might be giving into pressure from tech companies…without fully understanding the long-term ramifications.” Others argue that students and faculty are ready to try to figure out how best to use the technology.

This box truck delivers nearly 10 tons of food a week. And one of the guys at the wheel is Tim Sevigny, who helps make the group’s 80 deliveries a week. “Some larger sites have staff to meet Tim and help roll hand carts stacked with bins of vegetables back and forth from the truck to a kitchen or storage room,” writes Anna Cloutier in a blog post. “Smaller sites, like a food shelf, may have a few volunteers…At some sites, the food goes directly into the hands of neighbors.” On Fridays, on his way down to Claremont, he’ll deliver directly to homes: “I giggled at the negotiations that sometimes go over convincing folks to try a new vegetable, like the beautiful baby eggplant or lovely bright green kale,” says board president Stacey Chiocchio, who rode along.

NH’s Libertarian Party: “It is morally legitimate” to kill a politician who could introduce an income tax to New Hampshire. That bit of online rhetoric came in an X post from a party account Tuesday, reports NHPR, and was aimed at former Exec Council member Andru Volinsky, who has proposed a 3 percent income tax to pay for public education. “...Volinsky is threatening the forced conscription of millions of hours of labor,” the account argued. Volinsky responded, “I expected to debate the terms of the school funding plan…I did not expect to have the libertarians threaten to kill me.” The NH AG’s office says it “is aware of the reported social media post.”

NH Exec Council confirms new Public Utilities Commission chair. Christopher Ellms, nominated by Gov. Kelly Ayotte in January, has been deputy commissioner of the state’s Department of Energy since 2021, got the nod 4-1 on the five-member council, reports Molly Rains in NH Bulletin. The lone dissenter was Democrat Karen Liot Hill, who argued that Ellms’ tenure at the DOE and work on former Gov. Chris Sununu’s campaign could pose bureaucratic and political conflicts of interest. Ellms told the council, “I’m somebody who can see the forest through the trees, who can make those decisions based on what’s going to serve the public interest.”

Most school budgets pass in VT. As VT Public’s Peter Hirschfeld reports, of the 112 school budget votes held on or before Town Meeting Day, 82 percent passed. “The 19 rejections are slightly higher than historic norms,” he adds, “but far from the one-third of budgets that went down in 2024.” On average, proposed budgets were up 4.2 percent this year, though because of the quirks of VT school funding, that’s likely to translate into a 10 percent jump in property tax bills overall. Most of the rejections were in what Hirschfeld calls “low-spending districts [with] frugal local electorates,” raising concerns about the equity gap between high- and low-spending districts.

A retiree on a budget—and a regular at some of the world’s best restaurants. “He’s not even a food influencer … but this guy is awesome.” So says the chef at Kiln restaurant (two Michelin stars) in San Francisco about Michael Grepo. The retired federal employee, writes Sara Deseran in SF Standard, lives frugally in a rent-controlled apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the US, eating tofu and kale at home so that he can dine often—10, 15, 50 visits, by public transit, to his favorites in the Bay Area and other cities—at restaurants that charge upwards of $300 for dinner. He records voice notes, brings the chefs presents, and gets treated like royalty.

A fine and powdery run. You may remember backcountry skier Andrew Drummond’s Tuckerman jaunt from a few weeks back. On Tuesday, this time with GoPro in place, he headed down the run known as Chute Variation South. Winter skiing on Mt. Washington is for people with the training, equipment, and experience—like Drummond—to know what they’re doing; the big crowds won’t show up until spring. Which is good, because right now the slopes are iffy. You can check the avalanche forecast every day on the Mt. Washington Avalanche Center’s site.

The Thursday Crossword. Today, it’s puzzle constructor Laura Braunstein’s “midi”—slightly longer and harder than her Tuesday minis, but it pairs perfectly with breakfast. And if you’d like to catch up on past puzzles, you can do that here.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosts former NH State Sen. Jeb Bradley. Bradley, a Republican from Wolfeboro, spent 32 years in office—in both the state and US House, and then for 15 years in the state Senate, where he finished out his career as Senate president. He and his wife have also climbed all NH 4,000-footers in a single winter. He’ll be sitting down with Dartmouth government prof (and Democratic state Rep.) Russ Muirhead as part of the “Law and Democracy: The United States at 250” series. 5 pm at Rockefeller Center and online.

The Rumney Sessions at Fable Farm in Barnard bring in the Quincy Saul Research & Development Band. Brothers Quincy and Lukas Saul, joined by Pete Michelinie, continue the weekly music series with “an evening of originals and what they call intergalactic traditionals.” Doors and food at 5:30 pm, music 6-ish.

Hanover’s Howe Library hosts Britton Mann for “Theory, Diagnosis, and Treatment in Traditional East Asian Medicine”. The Lebanon-based Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist and frequent consultant with local physicians will talk over how traditional east Asian medicine thinks about the body, diagnoses trouble, and approaches healing. 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room as well as livestreamed.

At the Norwich Bookstore, the Julia Spencer-Fleming & Paula Munier event, originally scheduled for this evening, has been re-scheduled to next Wednesday, March 11th at 7pm. Both authors will be celebrating their newest mystery novels, At Midnight Comes the Cry and The Snow Lies Deep.

Standup Comedy Boot Camp performance at Artistree. All this week, local standup comedian Vicki Ferentinos (who has her own show coming up on Saturday) has been teaching a standup workshop, and tonight at 7 in the Grange Theater, class members will showcase what they’ve learned for an actual audience.

And for today...

Paris-based percussionist Adélaïde Ferrière and pianist Sarah Tysman—who’s the pianist for the Zurich Opera—perform Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre” rearranged by Ferrière for piano and… marimba.

See you tomorrow.

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