GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
After last night's atmospherics... That cold front is barging eastward, leaving us with mostly cloudy skies, a chance of showers all day and night, winds from the south, and highs only in the lower 70s (and upper 50s tonight). Of more than passing interest, there's also an area of low pressure setting up high overhead, which among other things will help to keep Hurricane Larry well out to sea as it makes its way northward up the coast. Young 'uns...
Though in the case of the loon chicks Ian Clark has been following, not so young anymore. They're ten weeks now, and after being away for a while, Ian got a chance to catch up with them. They're teens—feeding themselves but also pestering their parents for food, he writes on his blog.
Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, Erin Tunnicliffe managed to catch a monarch butterfly just after it emerged from its chrysalis. "It took 24 hours to perform its pre-flight check before taking off" Monday morning, she writes. "Cue Joni Mitchell’s 'Urge For Going.'"
"Kind of a madhouse." That's DHMC CEO Joanne Conroy describing the crowd when she went to get her blood drawn last week. In the Valley News, Nora Doyle-Burr reports that staffing shortages at the region's hospitals have become "precipitous" in recent months, especially in nursing but also in janitorial services, tech, and other sectors. Hospitals are rescheduling procedures multiple times, limiting bed availability, and taking other steps to manage demand. The shortage "is literally the most serious challenge (facing) Vermont hospitals,” says the head of the state hospital association.Dartmouth prof lands $1.2 million grant to study bacteria for biofuels. Last week it was NASA. This week, the Department of Energy is funding work at four institutions led by Dartmouth Engineering Prof. Daniel Olson to understand the metabolisms of C. thermocellum and similar bacteria to serve as a platform for creating fuel and other chemicals. "Biofuels made from cellulose are one of the few options available for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the heavy-duty transportation sector," he explains. "Bacteria that natively consume cellulose are good candidates for producing cellulosic biofuels."SPONSORED: Harpoon BBQ Fest and Flannel 5K are back in person this year at the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor, VT! Harpoon BBQ Fest is BACK and we’re gearing up to celebrate the best way we know how—with beer, live music, and New England's best BBQ! Join us at the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor on Saturday, Sept. 11 and Sunday, Sept. 12. And pack your running shoes! The Harpoon Flannel 5K is on Sunday 9/12 to raise funds for Friends of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. Sponsored by Harpoon Brewery.D-H lands grant to launch singing workshops for people with Parkinson's. The $6,000 award, which comes from the NEA and the NH arts council, will fund a series of workshops in singing, movement and breathing exercises, and vocal warmups for people with Parkinson’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and other respiratory or voice issues. The idea, says Angelynne Hinson, a voice teacher from Portsmouth, is for "individuals with speech and breathing problems to take control of their vocal issues and regain confidence.” And, she adds, "to have fun." Upper Valley Arts Alliance merges with Upper Valley Business Alliance. The Arts Alliance, an all-volunteer group dedicated to supporting the region's arts scene, has been struggling in recent years. "We did a lot of evaluating on whether to close entirely," writes longtime leader Joanne Wise. Instead, arts orgs in both states urged it to keep going. That's when the UVBA offered its organizational support. "UVBA has staff and an interest in promoting the arts in the Upper Valley," says its director, Tracy Hutchins. "The arts are a large part of what makes the Upper Valley a great place to live and work."“I hate to say it, but it’s a ‘build it and they will come’ kind of thing.” That's new Claremont Opera House director Andrew Pinard talking to the VN's Alex Hanson about the opera house's efforts to revitalize itself. A lot of its programming, Pinard tells him, had "become predictable." Now a new movie screen is about to go in and Pinard's working with local arts organizations to expand programming. And a new Claremont Creative Center in the former Claremont National Bank building next door is in the works to house the W. Claremont Center for Music and the Arts.Now, that's a sunnie! On Monday, a New Hampshire State Parks lifeguard at Hampton Beach was out on a rescue board and managed to get a shot of a huge ocean sunfish just off his bow. The thing looks for all the world like a shark, but it's not. It's weirder. Not only does the dorsal fin flop, but they "look like a huge fish that has had its back end hacked off," Hampton marine biologist Ellen Goethel wrote in a 2019 column, as more people were noticing them off the NH coast. Seacoastonline reruns it—with Monday's pic.And guess what's just loved the wet weather. Yep. Poison ivy. “I constantly hear customers saying, ‘I’ve lived here 30 years and I’ve never seen it, but this year it’s everywhere,’” Greenfield NH poison ivy removal expert Helaine Hughes tells the Union Leader's Jason Schreiber. It's looking especially lush this year, he writes, especially along the sides of roads that are mowed regularly and the edges of streams where the soil was disturbed by this summer’s heavy rains.Looking behind the numbers at NH's Covid recovery. The personal finance site WalletHub is just out with a study saying NH ranks 5th in the country for quickest recovery (second only to Maine in New England). But in NH Bulletin, Annmarie Timmins points out that many of the state's Covid numbers—hospitalizations, daily case rate, lagging vaccination rate—"suggest all is not well." And the state's low unemployment numbers, she writes, "mask a troubling increase in the number of people who haven’t returned to work and stopped looking, often because they can’t find child care."NH lawmakers will try to point the state in Texas' direction on abortion. Back in 2020, when Democrats controlled the legislature, a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy never made it out of the House. Now, writes Timmins, several GOP legislators plan to reintroduce it, hoping for a more favorable political climate—at least in the statehouse. Abortion defenders have vowed to fight it, and a spokesman for Gov. Chris Sununu said, "The governor would not sign a bill further restricting abortions or overturning Roe. v. Wade."VT schools have seen 81 Covid cases so far this school year. The state education department has begun publishing a weekly school-by-school breakdown of cases among students and staff, reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko. Though she notes that the data only gets reported "when the Covid-positive individual was physically present in a school building, at a school-related event or on the bus while infectious." The cases include one in the past seven days at Hartford Middle School. VT officials recommend school mask requirements at least until Oct. 4. The state's initial guidance, issued in August, had suggested schools could dispense with mask requirements for vaccinated people if over 80 percent of the eligible student body was vaccinated, writes Petenko in VTDigger. Now, education secretary Dan French said at a press conference yesterday, “There is quite a bit of virus activity in our community, so we should not be surprised to see it show up in our schools, as well.” Schools will begin surveillance testing next week.Shoe. Other foot. Remember how, in the first pandemic go-round, Vermont officials used to put up case-rate maps of the country detailing where it was safe to travel to or from? Well, Chicago's been issuing regular travel advisories, and for a while, Vermont was the only state it was safe for unvaccinated travelers to visit. No longer. On Tuesday, the city's health department announced VT's made it onto the warning list. Looking to build direct, online sales, Green Slice expands in Bolton. The plant-based veggie-dog and deli-slice company has bought a warehouse there, reports Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen. Run out of her Richmond, VT home by Véronique Beittel, who makes use of her family's food business in Belgium for manufacturing, the startup has had success getting its products sold nationwide through the Albertson's chain, and recently cut a deal with Shaw's to expand in the northeast. But Beittel tells Allen that distributing through big chains comes with headaches—hence the online expansion plans.
Remembering Elka Schumann, "free spirit" and soul of Bread & Puppet. Seven Days’ Sally Pollak spoke to friends and family of Elka Schumann to shape a moving tribute to the steady, grounding force behind Bread and Puppet, the VT mainstay founded by her husband, Peter. Behind the shows’ hallmark “painted bedsheets and supersize papier-mâché,” Elka made sure the business ran and that every painter and puppeteer was taken care of. She “made it possible for Peter to pursue his vision," says a friend. Elka now lies in a “memorial village” with fellow artists on her beloved farm in Glover, where her memory thrives and the show goes on. What happens when a word is held up to a mirror? In more than a few instances, that word means one thing and exactly its opposite. Judith Herman at Mental Floss enlightens us to the contradictory life of the contronym, a word that, depending on how it’s used, can be its own antonym. Take “cleave,” for instance, which can mean “to cling to or adhere”—but also “to split or sever.” Or, say, when you've “weathered” a year in quarantine, you withstood it; but if you were weathered by it, that solitary time wore you right down. (Thanks, ML!)
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With music starting at 6 (and food and drink at 5:30) Feast & Field in Barnard brings in fiddler and singer Ida Mae Specker and her old-timey Terrible Mountain String Band (Ida Mae and her sister Lila were born at the foot of Terrible Mountain in Andover, VT).
This evening at 7, Phoenix Books hosts the artists and editors behind The Most Costly Journey: Stories of Migrant Farmworkers in Vermont Drawn by New England Cartoonists. The book tells the first-person stories of migrant farmworkers in the state, as drawn by a constellation of prominent cartoonists, all part of a mental health outreach project that initially distributed the stories as individual Spanish-language comics and now brings them all together in one place. Online, no cost to register.
Also at 7, the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum hosts extreme-skiing pioneer Dan Egan (13 Warren Miller films, named "one of the most influential skiers of our time" by Powder mag, and author of Thirty Years in a White Haze: Dan Egan's Story of Worldwide Adventure and the Evolution of Extreme Skiing.") Egan, who lives in NH, will no doubt be talking about his decades of on-the-edge adventures, including being pinned down in a storm on Russia's Mt. Elbrus that claimed 15 lives, one of them a member of his team. Online, no cost to register.
Yeah, okay, it's been banging around in my head for the last few minutes, too.
live on the Sudbury, Ontario television show
Let's Sing Out
in 1966. (Skip ahead to the 1-minute mark, unless you're hankering for a full blast of '60s folk spirit).
See you tomorrow.
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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