GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Heads up: Daybreak will publish through Friday this week, then take next week off for recharging and family.Clouds again. Though there's high pressure moving in, so while the day will be mostly cloudy, it'll get less mostly cloudy as it wears on. Highs today will be about the same as yesterday, but the lows tonight won't be much above 10.Before there was snow on the ground... Photographer Jim Block was out in the Upper Valley documenting stick season. The highlight was an intensely charismatic red fox, but he also got beautiful views along the Northern Rail Trail, at Canaan's Bear Pond Natural Area, and photos throughout the region that'll make you see its patterns (and its skies) in a new light.Power situation improves, though many still without. Hartford remains hardest hit, with almost 300 customers still without electricity as of this morning; 267 remain in Norwich, 141 in Pomfret, 89 in Thetford, 72 in Hartland, and dozens in surrounding towns. Thanks to a small army of hard-working line crews, some from as far as ME and Quebec, It's a far cry better than yesterday morning, which began with over 5,000 outages in Upper Valley towns served by GMP. We get the honor of being the region "where the weather system hit the hardest,” a GMP exec tells Patrick Adrian for his roundup in the Valley News.“I actually like the quiet." That was Barnard's Becky Brettell talking to VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein yesterday in Woodstock. Brettell, who lives in Barnard, had been without power for three days. The Woodstock Rec Center opened for residents to warm up and grab showers, and over at the Norman Williams Public Library, joked librarian Kathy Beaird, so many people showed up just to hang out that "we call ourselves a dry bar." Over at the Yankee Bookshop, Weinstein reports, tourists "flooded inside to browse the shelves and charge their phones" once it opened on Saturday.Dartmouth Coach struck by bullet near New Haven. The incident happened mid-morning on Friday, reports John Lippman in the VN, as the NYC-bound bus was passing through the city on I-91. The bullet hit the bus “at the tip-top, right along the roof line of the windshield” and “came to rest on the floor, near the front of the bus,” Dartmouth Coach VP Ben Blunt tells Lippman. There were reports at the time of a shootout between cars in the northbound lanes of the highway. CT State Police interviewed the driver and passengers, who then transferred to another bus and got to the city some two hours late.SPONSORED: Make "Shop Local" easy! For the second year, Woodsville Guaranty Savings Bank and the Upper Valley Business Alliance are promoting shopping locally over the holidays with the Upper Valley Holiday Wish Books. The Wish Books feature over $700 in discounts and deals from restaurants, services, and shops all over the Upper Valley. You can preview and order at the burgundy link: Books are $15 each, with discounts for additional books. Proceeds support the workforce and economic development programs of the UVBA. Makes a great stocking stuffer! Sponsored by the UV Business Alliance.A second chance at a stable life. Five years ago, Mickey Wiles founded Working Fields to serve people who “have a lot to overcome” in finding a job. Wiles, who himself experienced substance abuse and incarceration, spoke with VTDigger’s Auditi Guha about the agency, based in Burlington and expanding in the Upper Valley, which finds jobs for people turning their lives around. Lisa Goodrich, from Springfield, had past substance abuse and an arrest record that made employment tough. Now, she's been steadily employed for more than a year and recently won a national Staffing Employee All-Star award.Planned Claremont arts center takes a step forward. That's thanks to a $50K grant from T-Mobile, reports Patrick O'Grady in the VN; in addition, the city council last week approved an application for a $400,000 Community Development Block Grant from the feds. The money goes to renovating a long-vacant building on Opera House Square into a new home for the West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts. The first phase, founder Melissa Richmond tells O'Grady, will create a 90-seat performance area and a separate commercial kitchen.Twin states move in opposite directions on hate crimes. The FBI last week released new figures on hate crimes reported by law enforcement around the country. NH saw a small overall rise, from 19 in 2020 to 34 in 2021; 14 of those were anti-Black, seven anti-Jewish, and seven based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In VT, the numbers fell from 60 total in 2020 to 39 in 2021; 23 of last year's incidents were aimed at Black people, 4 at gay men. Three were reported as anti-White.NH tried out new ballot-counting machines in November. They still need some work, says secy of state. The machines are manufactured by VotingWorks, a nonprofit that uses open-source software for vote-counting. They're being considered to replace the state's aging AccuVote machines, and were tested in three towns during the general election, reports NHPR's Jeongyoon Han. While they performed well on accuracy, Secretary of State David Scanlan said yesterday there were hardware hiccups that need fixing, including felt-tip marker streaks on the scanner as ballots were fed in.Live in VT and have trouble getting cellphone service? You are so not alone. That's what Anne Wallace Allen reported in Seven Days on Friday, in the wake of new maps of service coverage released by the state's Department of Public Service. The department tested the state's six providers by driving Vermont's public roads; it found that AT&T ranked first for reliability, followed by FirstNet, USCellular, T-Mobile, VTel, and finally Verizon, which clocked in at 26 percent reliability, Allen reports. In this region, the most problematic areas are around Pomfret and Barnard, and Thetford to W. Fairlee and Vershire.Glitches, errors, poor design plague VT's inmate grievance system. State pledges to overhaul it. The problems are highlighted in a report released by state Auditor Doug Hoffer. In fact, reports Derek Brouwer in Seven Days, the system is so flawed that auditors couldn't even track how many prisoners' grievances had been filed, let alone how they'd been handled. Yesterday, Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml said that the system needs "modernization and investment" and would switch to fully electronic records (it's been paper-based) early next year.Basic questions continue to dog OneCare Vermont as state board considers budget. As Kristen Fountain writes in VTDigger, this is nothing new—but Fountain, a former Valley News reporter who now covers health care for Digger, tackles the thankless task of explaining not just what OneCare does, but why it's at loggerheads with new members of the Green Mountain Care Board. New board chair Owen Foster has proposed cutting OneCare's budget by the equivalent of its top five executives’ 2022 salary bonuses, arguing that the organization remains frustratingly opaque about its effectiveness.Why does hair turn gray? Why is the sky blue? What's the largest flower in the world? And just what is a blue moon, anyway? You know who can tell you? The Library of Congress. They've got a site called "Everyday Mysteries," which answers all sorts of odd and not-so-odd science questions. Like, it turns out that in theory it should be possible to fry an egg on a sidewalk. But eggs start to firm up at 158°F, while concrete sidewalks only get to about 145°F or so. Still, Oatman, AZ hosts an annual Solar Egg Frying Contest on July 4th: 15 minutes to fry an egg using the sun. Magnifying glasses allowed.Feets of Athletic Endurance? The World Cup is over and there’s nothing left to look forward to. But wait! Alex Laybourne over at TheCoolist is offering up 32 weird sports. Which qualify? The ones that “make you scratch your head and wonder what the person inventing it was thinking.” Yeeesss. Like competitive toe wrestling. Or extreme ironing: haul your board, carabiners, and dress shirts up a sheer cliff and, well, press on. Prefer a safer sport? Competitive weird face-making might be for you. Or maybe not. “Interestingly, the people who see the most success in gurning are those who are missing teeth.” The Tuesday Vordle. With a fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
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At 7:30 this evening, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy bring their big band swing, jump blues, and consummate showmanship to the Lebanon Opera House, part of their Wild and Swingin’ Holiday Party tour. "Drawing on a rich catalogue of wintertime classics (and originals from the band’s two full-length holiday albums)," LOH writes, "the show is jam-packed with fun BBVD 'jump blues' arrangements of songs like Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, Frosty the Snowman, and Run, Run Rudolph." As of last night, there were a few seats left in the balcony.
And the Tuesday poem...
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
— "To Know the Dark" by
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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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