GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Look! Sun! Well, once it gets light and the fog clears, anyway. It'll be cold to start and won't get out of the low or mid 40s today, but hey: It's quiet, there's high pressure to the north, and the sky's looking mostly clear all day. Things start clouding over tonight, but even so, we'll be getting down into the upper 20s during the overnight hours.On the road. Literally.
And in Thetford, autumn leaves wreathe the way into the state park in Lisa Lacasse's photo.
One more I-91 South closure tonight.
The stretch between Wells River and Bradford (Exits 17 to 16) will be closed for bridge repairs between 6 pm tonight and 7 am tomorrow, VTrans says in a press release. "This is the final anticipated closure for bridge repairs," they write. "There will be no through traffic." As usual, the detour will run down Route 5.
Robert Stevenson has been the prison's health services administrator for Wellpath, the prison health contractor, since September. A review of his nursing records, reports Ethan Weinstein in
VTDigger
, shows he had his license revoked in NC, NM, and ND for diverting or wasting drugs, especially fentanyl. Stevenson tells Weinstein his record is irrelevant to his current position, which is administrative. The prison nurse who discovered and reported the record has been fired, Weinstein writes.
The current setup, with elementary schools in Fairlee and W. Fairlee, and middle and high schools in Orford, would likely see a $1.4 million budget increase, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the
Valley News
. So the board has begun looking at four other options: multi-age classrooms, closing one elementary school, dividing the two elementary schools along age lines, and paying tuition to other schools for students in grades 9-12. There will be two public forums this week, online tomorrow night and in W. Fairlee Thursday.
In Artful, Susan Apel serves up a quick roundup of Upper Valley restaurant news: Roma's Butchery in S. Royalton is serving lunch again (it had stopped for a while; the region's first Punjabi food truck, Taste of Punjab—it's the blue one you often see at Colburn Park—will be around for a little longer before it closes for the season; Trail Break is around for three more weeks in WRJ before it lights out for Quechee; the Ghost Light Café at Northern Stage is open until Nov. 10; Saap in Randolph is taking a break for a month; and more.
One fixture that's definitely leaving: Hanover's Christmas Market With a Difference. Coming up on Friday and Saturday, this year's market—with its trademark collection of handcrafted goods and vendors from all over the world—will be its last. Begun in 1987 by congregants at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College to give organizations and fair-trade nonprofits an outlet for goods, the market has seen declining numbers of vendors (many of whom now sell through their own websites), customers (who buy online), and volunteers, writes the VN's Liz Sauchelli. Its organizers reflect on its peak and its passing.Just a pile of leaves. Except somewhere in there, if you enlarge the pic in Northern Woodlands' "This Week in the Woods" and look really hard you'll see, just barely, a wood frog. They're the "most northern living frog, with a range extending into the Arctic Circle," writes Elise Tillinghast, and make it through the winter essentially by expelling water from their cells. Also out there as November starts: melting—okay, sorry, deliquescent—mushrooms, and a surprise appearance of strikingly colorful green stain fruiting bodies."Exquisite examples of evolution." So writes Li Shen in Sidenote, talking about bats: their ability to hunt in the dark, their extraordinary maneuverability, their role in keeping insects in check. But in northern New England, they've also come under intense pressure from habitat loss, White Nose Syndrome, wind turbines, and their own slowness to breed (females have only one or two pups a year), which has made it hard to recover from the assaults on their population. Li summarizes a recent presentation by bat biologist Jesse Mohr.In some ways, it's amazing that witch hazel survives. Unlike most other flowering shrubs, it flowers in the fall as temps are dropping, writes Mary Holland on her Naturally Curious blog. Since there are fewer bees and flies still out and about, this makes it tougher for pollen to get carried from one plant to the next—only 1 percent of flowers actually set fruit, and only a small percentage of those make it to maturity at the end of summer.At state biologists' check-in station, a snapshot of VT's moose hunt. Hunters are required to bring their prey by the state highway garage in Island Pond, where biologists gather all sorts of data on the health of the moose population, writes Frances Mize in the VN. Beset by winter ticks, their population is "teetering," says state biologist Nick Fortin. "If something else (besides the ticks) comes along and starts killing moose, it will all crash.” The state issued 180 permits this year in an attempt to keep the herd in the NEK thin and the number of hosts for ticks down.Transmission line that would run through NEK and western NH gets federal support. The proposed 211-mile Twin States Clean Energy Link, which could carry electricity in either direction between Canada and the US but is seen primarily as a way of getting Quebec hydropower to the US, is one of three interstate lines (the other two are out west) to get US DOE approval, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog. The line, which still faces regulatory hurdles, would run down the eastern side of VT to Lunenberg, then through NH to Monroe, with existing lines carrying power from there.Unlike the rest of New England, most Granite Staters come from out of state. Only 41 percent of New Hampshire's residents were born there, writes UNH demographer Ken Johnson in a new study of recent Census data. A full 53 percent were born elsewhere in the US and moved to NH, many from MA: 25 percent of NH's population is Massachusetts-born. Migrants from abroad accounted for 7 percent of arrivals in NH over the past two years. Because deaths in the state have exceeded births in each of the last six years, the state is increasingly dependent on migration in—and slowing migration out.So maybe it does make sense to legislate the official pronunciation of "Concord" and "New Hampshire"? That, at least, is the goal of a bill just filed by a Concord state rep to make it clear that it's "KON-kerd" not "Kon-KORD", David Brooks reports. Motivated by presidential candidates' mangling of the name, it's just meant to be a guide, says the bill's sponsor. Though as Brooks points out, "If the bill becomes law it will provide a guide but it probably won’t help a lot of people because it establishes pronunciations using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which few of us can read.""I think that the average funny person in New England is two times funnier than a person anywhere else in America." Late Night host Seth Meyers, who grew up in Bedford and went to Manchester West for high school, had a lot to say in his interview with NHPR's Rick Ganley before his return to the SNHU Arena Saturday for a solo show. Like: "My parents are better friends with a lot of my high school friends than I am now. And it's very ironic, because my parents would often say those people were a terrible influence on me, and now I feel the same. I don't like that they're hanging out with Greg Henrichon."Does a pup for otter 841 mean double trouble? You remember her—the otter with an attitude who’s been harassing Santa Cruz surfers and occasionally chomping on their boards for months. Now there are two, writes Abené Clayton in The Guardian. The scamp recently gave birth to a pup, who so far seems content to hang around on mom’s belly and watch her bring home dinner. The Fish and Wildlife Service is cautioning people to stay away: “Any attempts to approach from the water could be detrimental to the otter’s survival,” they write. And possibly the human’s, they might have added. The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Hey, so bundle up for trick-or-treating out there. But if you do decide to stay inside, Karaoke Bandstand'll be back at Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover from 7 to 10 tonight with a special Halloween edition they're calling SpookyKaraoke. Jakob Breitbach and his band, hundreds of songs to choose from, the words on a big screen, and a roomful of people singing along—in costume. Plus: warmth.
— "October" Section I, by Louise Glück,
.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
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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