GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Welcome back to New England... We're into a changeable weather pattern now. The air's moving fast high above us, and there's a "vigorous" cold front barreling down on us from the Great Lakes. So it's likely to get showery today, especially in the afternoon, and there's a slight chance of an afternoon thunderstorm. Still, not bad on the temps: climbing above 70 by noon before dropping back into the high 40s overnight. Han Fusion opens in Hanover, joins two other new businesses. The restaurant, which is owned by Dartmouth's German Studies Department administrator Wadeane Kunz, opened on Tuesday in the downstairs space once occupied by the Orient. It serves Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Japanese food. It makes Hanover's third recently opened business, along with upscale clothier J. McLaughlin and CBD, yoga supplies and jewelry retailer AroMed Essentials. Still North Books & Bar is slated for later this fall.Lebanon/Claremont ranks 2nd in the country for business startups in "micropolitan" areas. That's according to Nate Shivar, a small-business marketing consultant in Atlanta who decided to look at Census data on cities "to see if there were any places in America that hit a sweet spot between being small & self-contained and being a popular place to start a new business." The latest numbers he could get were from 2015-16. 1st place goes to Bozeman, MT, 3rd to Key West. Concord NH is #10.Prosper Valley School may be turned into administrative offices. The VN's Nora Doyle-Burr reports that Mary Beth Banios, who runs the Windsor Central Supervisory Union, has recommended that the Pomfret elementary school be used to house pre-K classes along with the district's the Essential Early Education program; speech, language and occupational therapy; and early childhood director. The school was closed last year because of mold problems. Mt. Ascutney gets a lift. A T-bar, to be precise. Commercial skiing ended almost a decade ago, but today the all-volunteer nonprofit Ascutney Outdoors — which now owns the mountain along with the town of W. Windsor — is pouring the final concrete for a T-bar donated by a ski area near Quebec City. It should be ready for inspection by the end of October, and open for skiers willing to fork over the grand sum of $15 this winter. Assuming snow, of course. Lacking scraps, Vermont Technical College will shut down its anaerobic digester in Randolph. The digester, which was built to turn food scraps into energy, was the first in the state to go through the permitting process. It went online in 2014 in anticipation of a robust distribution system for residential food scraps, given the 2012 law banning food waste from landfills by 2020. That hasn't happened, and the digester's had trouble securing enough food scraps to run at full capacity. Here's a little burst of morning sun for a gloomy day... It's a glorious shot from a hill overlooking Gold Shaw Farm in Peacham yesterday morning.New Hampshire gets a budget. Three months after Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the original Dem-passed plan, the House and Senate voted yesterday to approve a two-year, $13 billion compromise package. Sununu will sign it. Vermont turns out to be surprisingly fertile ground for evangelical churches. Sure, yeah, the most godless state in the union, but in evangelicals' eyes that's opportunity, not destiny, says Chelsea Edgar in Seven Days. At least 28 Baptist-affiliated churches have started up since 2011, ever since "mission-minded evangelicals [began] coming to Vermont to search for the chinks in its gospel-proof armor." She looks at SoRo's Cornerstone Church and its "everyman" pastor, Marty Bascom, at WRJ's fast-growing Riverbank Church, and at "church-planting" efforts all over the state.Yo beer lovers! The Alchemist is out with a new, limited-time brew. Honey Bunch "was created to highlight local honey sourced from Vermont solar farms growing bee-friendly plants near their solar panels," says the Burlington Free Press. It's selling at The Alchemist's retail shop in Stowe, and $3 from every sale is going to the Vermont Public Interest Research Group to "support pollinator-friendly solar farms."Yo antenna-loving TV viewers! WCAX is moving to a new frequency. The Burlington-based CBS affiliate is being required by the FCC — along with about 1,000 other stations around the country — to make way for wireless internet. The changeover will happen on Oct. 24, and it means you'll have to rescan your TV. If you use cable or satellite, no need to do anything.VT cartoonist-laureate makes it into Merriam-Webster. That would be Alison Bechdel, who in a 1985 "Dykes to Watch Out For" strip created what's as of this month officially dictionary-recognized as the Bechdel Test for fiction: "One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man." She tells Seven Days that the honor demonstrates "Stigler's law of eponymy, which states that no scientific discovery is named after its actual discoverer." Her friend Liz Wallace thought up the Bechdel Test for movies.If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:
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This versatile, effervescent, and very popular Cape Breton band moves easily among reels, jigs and ballads, from the straight-ahead rhythms of traditional Cape Breton dance tunes to more contemporary, world-music-inflected original work. Starts at 7:30.
Colombia has the second-largest population of African descent in Latin America, and this dance troupe, founded in Medellín in 1997, gives expression to both of those identities. Its piece, "City of Others," is kinetic, exuberant, angry — after all, says founder Rafael Palacios, it was “created from our personal experiences of racism and oppression in our daily lives in Medellín.” At 7:30 tonight and tomorrow.
The play dates to 20 years ago, but its issues of race and political correctness are still current. It takes place on a Vermont college campus that bears more than a passing resemblance to Middlebury, and though the script is as much a pointed inquiry as it is an exploration of character, discussion on the way home won't be boring. At 7:30 tonight, runs thru Sunday this week and next.
Open mic hosted by Trifolium, the local fiddle and folk band made up of Justin Park (guitar, mandolin, vocals), Chloe Powell (cello, fiddle) and Andy Mueller (guitar, mandolin, fiddle). Food at 5, music at 5:30.
The 2012 Hanover High grad was captain of the school's championship Quiz Bowl team, and then helped coach its successor after he graduated from college, so there's no question he knows what he's doing. On WPTZ at 7.
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