Daybreak Tuesday, 1/27/26

A sunny morning, nice and cold; clouds later. High pressure’s slowly moving in after the storm, but after a brisk start to the day, we’re looking at highs at best in the mid teens. We may see a snow shower late this afternoon as some weak disturbances wander through, but it’s at best a chance. As skies clear again overnight, we’ll drop solidly into the minuses.

Okay, everybody get in line! With the snow falling yesterday, writes Tom Monego from E. Thetford, it sure as heck looked like there was a queue for the bird feeder.

Lots of slide-offs in the storm, including plow trucks. The WRJ truck-rescue service Sabil & Sons was busy yesterday, reports the Valley News’s Sofia Langlois, including with a Norwich plow truck that got stuck at the foot of Willey Hill Road and a box truck in Bethel that went over some guardrails. A Royalton town truck also went off the road. In NH, 13 accidents “required a full or partial lane closure on state highways, with about half of these closures being in the Upper Valley. ‘For a storm of this magnitude, that’s actually really good. It just goes to show that people are staying off the roads,’” said NHDOT’s Jen Lane. Langlois checks in around the region.

At Pellegrino’s Italian Market in downtown Lebanon: “For me the big news item is the deli.” So writes Susan Apel in her latest Artful post about her visit to the new market, deli, and garden center. There are lots of food options, but watching a steady stream of people order from the deli, Susan and her husband couldn’t resist. “The caprese sandwich is, like others I saw being passed over the counter, enormous—at least two servings—with fresh mozzarella, large leaves of aromatic basil, sliced tomato, olive oil and balsamic glaze on award-worthy ciabatta that was pillowy with a delicately crunchy crust…. Reader, it was perfection.” Dang, shouldn’t’a finished breakfast…

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Born in NH, spreading local news far and wide. You may be aware of the Granite State News Collaborative, the up-by-the-bootstraps news-sharing effort that lets players like the VN, the Monitor, NHPR, and a variety of other NH newsrooms share their work with one another. It was getting unwieldy—as Monitor publisher Steve Leone tells NiemanLab’s Sarah Scire, “A sign of success can be when something becomes unusable”—until a self-taught developer named Johnny Bassett developed software to make it dead easy to find and share stories. His effort’s called Plucky, and it’s gone national, with networks in MN, WA, and elsewhere using it. Here’s NH’s.

With quiet changes, USPS likely to slow things down in VT (and NH). The big one, reports VTDigger’s Erin Petenko, ends evening collection of mail more than 50 miles away from regional mail centers. Or to put it in plain English, the Springfield MA regional facility will now get mail only once a day, in the morning; afterward, it’ll sit overnight at the post office—though around here we’re lucky, because the WRJ Local Processing Center may still get it. Even so, “For first-class mail, USPS has shifted many parts of Vermont from a two-day service standard to a three-day service standard,” Petenko writes. Also, be forewarned: It may take a day for them to postmark your mail, so take that into account with ballots and taxes.

Everything you might want to know about when the VT National Guard gets called to duty. As always with VT Public’s Brave Little State, it begins with a user’s question: “Who controls the deployment of the Vermont National Guard if orders from the federal government and the state are in conflict?” And also as always with BLS, you’ll come away both more entertained and knowing more than you thought possible. Sabine Poux and Josh Crane tackle the history of the Guard (think state militias at the time of the Revolution); the big three statutes controlling who controls the Guard; times when governors and presidents have been at loggerheads; and lots more.

The ideal skeleton position: “‘a sack of potatoes’—loose and still.” We’re talking the sled, of course. Before the whole world is once again in thrall to the (pick your adjective: thrilling, terrifying, just plain nuts) winter Olympic sport of skeleton, what if you give it a try yourself? Bob Witowski did, and on SnowBrains he describes his skeleton runs at the Whistler Olympic Sliding Center. It’s one of just three Olympic-level sliding tracks in North America; another is in Lake Placid, where you can also try a run. Witowski traces the history of sliding sports and describes his own experience—face down, head first, flying downhill at 60 mph on “luge’s more primal cousin.” 

The Tuesday Crossword. It’s time for Dartmouth librarian and puzzle hotshot Laura Braunstein’s Tuesday “mini,” a short little brain diversion for your morning.

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

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HEADS UP

In Lyme Center, Charlie Berger and “The World’s Greatest Endurance Athletes: the Dogs of the Itarod”. Berger, a large-animal and experienced Iditarod and Yukon Quest veterinarian who lives in Thetford, will give a 45-minute slide presentation and Q&A about sled dogs and his experiences with them. 1 pm in the Lyme Center Academy building. No link.

Heat pumps, battery backup, induction ranges, EV snowblowers… Klaus Keller, Erica Ko, and Pi Smith of the Thetford Energy Committee are hosting an Upper Valley-wide zoom “Ask Your Neighbor” session from 7-8:30 pm this evening. They’ll talk over both specific technologies and questions about cost, pitfalls, and more. Link takes you to the Zoom page.

Historian Frank Dikötter and “Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity”. Dikötter, who has made China his specialty, dug deep into Central Party archives and uses them in his 2024 book of the same title to piece together its rise. He finds violence “and a willingness to inflict it,” along with maneuvering for power, at the heart of its growth. He also argues that funding from Moscow was key. He’ll be in California, but there’ll be a crowd at 7:30 pm in Carson Hall L01 or you can watch it on Zoom.

The Tuesday Poem.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

— Wu Men (1183 - 1260), translated by Stephen Mitchell

See you tomorrow.

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