Daybreak Thursday 6/11/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Those Great Lakes cold fronts! This one's weak, but dignified, making its stately way across the region today. Showery off and on, slight chance of thunderstorms pretty much all day, but it'll be warm: Temps will rise into the low 80s by late afternoon. Breezy, with some gustiness this afternoon, winds out of the south. Things will taper off overnight, with temps down into the 50s. Oh, summer. Here's a pic of Mascoma Lake from the other evening by Reed Bergwall. Calm water, lights across the lake, a sailboat at anchor silhouetted by the last light of the day glancing off the water. All those lazy evenings...What, the numbers again?

We're still in this thing. A pair of graphs yesterday brings it home. These were tweeted out by Howard Forman, a radiologist and public health and econ prof at Yale's School of Management. The first one shows the seven-day trend in cases for the US as a whole, with a nice downward angle. The next is the seven-day trend for the US but without NY, NJ, MA, and CT, which have all seen major drops in daily cases; absent those, the coronavirus in the rest of the country is unmistakably on the upswing.Hanover state rep steps down. Garret Muscatel, who graduates from Dartmouth this weekend, had already planned on giving up his seat in the NH House at the end of his term, but the state GOP challenged his residency after he left town in March when the college shut down. “From all indications, Rep. Muscatel moved out of his district in March to move back to California,” the state Republican chair wrote in a letter to the House speaker Monday. Muscatel stepped down the same day, saying “unexpected circumstances have made continuing to serve at a full capacity impossible.” (VN, sub reqd)Um, seriously. Gloves? Last Friday, there was a clog at Hartford's Bridge Street Pump Station. The crew discovered that someone had flushed "a large amount of food service gloves" down the toilet. "When items such as gloves, rags, flushable (not) wipes, sanitary products, and plastic are flushed, they create clogs that can ultimately cause sewage overflows into our rivers and lakes," the town writes. 

A generous Upper Valley helps VN stay afloat. In a letter to readers yesterday, publisher Dan McClory thanked them for responding to the paper's fundraising campaign: 1,535 people have donated more than $155,000. For comparison, its sister paper, the Concord Monitor, stands at around $39,000. "There is no single reason" for the VN's success, McClory wrote, then lauded its "tradition of journalistic excellence and loyal support from readers and advertisers." He could also have mentioned the UV's strong tradition of community involvement, rich network of roll-up-their-sleeves organizations, and deep well of civic-minded and generous residents at every income level. Deer photo-bombs Lyme pic. Jennifer Sargent recently put this up on the "u local New Hampshire" FB group: She was out taking photos of lupines when... Feast and Field to return, but with some differences. The popular Thursday-evening concert series will start up again a week from today (featuring Interplay Jazz), but with a 50-person limit and reservations required. The events will be held in Fable Farm Fermentory's apple orchard, across Royalton Turnpike from the usual venue. "I think it’s really important to our community that we offer this opportunity to come together to enjoy music and food and being outdoors," BarnArts executive director Linda Treash tells the VN's Liz Sauchelli.SPONSORED: Community solar for those who can’t do it at home. Is your home or business site not suitable for solar? Too shady or too small? Do you live in an apartment rental or condo? Norwich Solar Technologies is building new community solar arrays in the Upper Valley, offering the chance to go solar without the complications and cost of your own photovoltaic array. You sign up for clean energy from a certain number of panels, then get the credit on your electric bill. Open to GMP and Liberty Utilities residential and business customers. Sponsored by Norwich Solar Technologies. There's still snow on Mt. Washington, and east-facing terrain has reopened. In its last bulletin for the season, the Mt. Washington Avalanche Center says that spring ski conditions "remain in Tuckerman Ravine, despite the late date. Significant amounts of wind-loading through the winter and consistently below freezing temperatures have kept a significant amount of snow in east facing terrain." The Tuckerman Ravine Trail is closed, but the Pinkham Notch parking lot has reopened after its closure in March, as have spring-skiing sites such as Left Gully and Hillman’s Highway.NH Exec Council nixes first black nominee to state board of education in a decade. On a party-line vote with Democrats in the majority, the council voted to reject Gov. Chris Sununu's nomination of Ryan Terrell. Councilor Andru Volinsky argued that Terrell had shown no interest in schools previously, and said he would not “engage in the tokenism." Terrell has a business background and is currently a project manager at Evolve Salon Systems in Derry. “I am absolutely shocked that at this day and age you would be shooting down a candidate like that," Sununu said. NH committee recommends protective gear, active absentee-ballot registration efforts for Covid-era election. The panel, formed by Secretary of State Bill Gardner back in April, focused on encouraging absentee balloting, recommending that applications be distributed at places like "the local landfill, town/city offices, police stations, grocery stores and supermarkets," and that municipalities be reimbursed for the expense. It also recommended that all election workers and voters wear masks, though said it's uncertain how voters who show up on election day without a mask should be handled.VT schools will reopen in the fall. “We know more about this virus now and have the tools to help prevent the spread today that we didn’t have three months ago, which helps us prepare for this transition back to school," Gov. Phil Scott said at his press conference yesterday. Ed Secy Dan French said his agency will issue guidelines next week, but among the steps expected are daily temperature checks and verbal health screenings, while school employees will be required to wear masks and students will be "encouraged" to do so. "The thing was written as if we were expecting a flood. This was nothing like we'd ever envisioned." That's Peacham's Neil Monteith talking to Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar about the town's emergency management plan in the Covid era. So Peacham residents scrambled to set up a mutual aid group and draft plans for every eventuality they could think of. Some 150 such networks have sprung up around the state, Edgar writes in a deep look at those efforts. "In rural Vermont, that practice of mutual aid happens constantly and informally, without ideology or group affiliation. It's a necessary adaptation in a place with long, dark winters and Class 4 roads." Foundation offers every graduating senior in Vermont a free course at CCV. The McClure Foundation, which is based in Middlebury and focuses on equitable access to education, announced yesterday that it will cover will tuition and fees for any single course students choose to take at the Community College of Vermont in the fall. In addition, any student who registers will be assigned an advisor, a move to "connect students to supportive advisors who can help chart next steps in the context of today’s economic realities."In-person beer festivals may be shut down, but not the drive-thru variety. The Vermont Brewers Association is throwing a drive-thru beer event on Saturday afternoon in Waterbury. It's not quite the leisurely meander-and-taste experience Vermont craft aficionados have come to expect: You have to order and pay in advance, then drive up to each brewer's spot and open your trunk—though you can order a "mystery four-pack" with proceeds going to the association. Participating brewers include Tunbridge's Brocklebank, as well as Lawson's, Zero Gravity, Hermit Thrush and others.Chopsticks? Cutlery? And what do you do with the knife? Paula Madison grew up in Harlem in the 1960s, the daughter of a Chinese Jamaican mother and African Jamaican father who'd been brought up in British colonial ways. She learned early that even the choice of how to eat food in public was fraught. "Using chopsticks would have called too much attention to our 'otherness' — as though folks weren’t already wondering, 'Why’s that Chinese lady sitting with three Black kids?'" Madison writes about learning to navigate race and class through utensils in the Caribbean food and culture mag Island and Spice.

"The mind of a wolf... but the body of a Care Bear." BBC sportscaster Andrew Cotter's back with archival footage of Olive and a three-month-old, extremely frisky Mabel. "Olive wondering when this all might end..."

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the isolation version recorded back in April.

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