Daybreak Tuesday 12/21/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Less sun, a tad more warmth. We'll have mostly cloudy skies this morning, though they'll break up as the day wears on. Temps getting up into the lower or mid 30s today, then dropping into the mid-teens tonight. Winds today from the southeast, shifting to the north later in the day.The Windsor moose. There's a pretty darn majestic one that's been wandering around town, and Tammy Willens happened by at just the right moment Sunday morning, after the snow. "I was lucky to have my zoom lens," she writes. "This allowed me to keep a safe distance while not disturbing him.."Flight maneuvers. Meanwhile, it's the fourth week of December and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast devotes this week's "This Week in the Woods" to another antlered creature: "aerial caribou"—though the photo's of an airborne white-tailed deer.Norwich Farm Foundation reaches deal to buy creamery and its land from VT Tech. The foundation, which was formed to try to keep Chris and Laura Gray and their Norwich Farm Creamery on the Turnpike Road property they'd been leasing from the technical college, made half a dozen offers in all, reports WCAX's Adam Sullivan. The two groups set the purchase price at a bit over $1 million, and the NFF is hoping to raise $1.75 million to buy the six-acre farm and fund operations. Chris Gray, who has been sourcing milk from Billings Farm, says the goal is to build a herd of 25 cows over the next few years.Dartmouth cancels relays. The annual track and field meet at Leverone Field House, which brings a couple thousand athletes to town, was to have been held Jan. 8 and 9. But in a press release yesterday, the athletics department announced the move as "part of Dartmouth's continuing effort to reduce the rate of COVID-19 transmission in its community." Interim Athletics Director Peter Roby noted in the release that many of the competitors who'd be on campus "have no attestation requirements concerning COVID-19."SPONSORED: Each year, the Upper Valley Humane Society provides a safe haven for hundreds of homeless animals. Thousands more receive services that keep loving families together. UVHS has over 60 animals in our care, including dogs whose families lost their housing and 10 cats whose owner is in hospice care. Tomorrow we welcome cats whose owner recently died of Covid. Where would they be without UVHS? Please consider a generous gift so every animal can have a HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS. More on ways to give at the maroon link or here. Sponsored by the Upper Valley Humane Society.Windsor opts for indoor mask "recommendation." The Selectboard first decided 3-2 to reject a mandate, reports the Valley News's Nora Doyle-Burr, then voted 4-1 for the recommendation. The move, Doyle-Burr writes, was an attempt to strike a balance between mask advocates—including from Mt. Ascutney Hospital—who argued they're vital for relieving the current surge and its impact on the health care system, and residents who opposed masks "due to discomfort and a sense that they infringe on people’s freedom." (Story available only in the "E-Edition" virtual print paper, subscribers only.)"Recovering Punk Rocker turned Information Maven." That was Meg Brazill's Twitter bio, and both sides of it were true. Brazill, who died a few days ago, spent five years in the techno-punk band Los Microwaves, which she helped found out in California, then went on to a career as an arts writer (partly at Seven Days) and then as director of communications at Woodstock's Norman Williams Public Library—where her creativity and "generosity of spirit," as one admirer put it Sunday on the Woodstock list, were abundant, not least in the success of Virtual Bookstock. Susan Apel has an appreciation.One quick snowy owl note. The owl up at Newmont Farm in Bradford may have been sighted first by Kyle Jones, but those fantastic photos of it peering out from amid silage tires were taken by Wayne Scott. Didn't mean to leave any mis-impression.A more diverse NH population reveals challenges—and opportunities. According to Michael Cousineau’s report in the Union Leader, NH saw the biggest decline of any state in under-18 residents. But within that data lies another trend: While there are 47K fewer white children since 2010, NH has in that time gained 17K minority children, concentrated largely in the Manchester/Nashua region. As student diversity grows, education advocates are urging schools to do more to increase faculty diversity, key to helping students feel “more comfortable and productive in the classroom.”"In the last two years, every deadly police shooting in New Hampshire has involved someone with a mental illness." With that, Concord Monitor reporter Teddy Rosenbluth introduces her detailed and moving series on deadly encounters between the police and people with mental illness. Overall, 19 of the 31 people killed by police in the last decade had indicators of mental illness. She looks at the stats, the toll on the families of people who were unable to get help, the toll on an officer who was on the other side of the gun, and training for police officers aimed at de-escalating crises.NH Exec Council will take up family planning grants again tomorrow. The contracts with three organizations—Planned Parenthood, Lovering Health Center, and Equality Health Center—to provide health services such as contraception and cancer screenings were rejected by the Council three months ago, and "nothing in the contracts appears to have changed," writes Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. Nor has the opposition of the one councillor Timmins could reach, Republican Ted Gatsas.“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want the civilization at a discount.” That was FDR in a letter to Congress eight decades ago as he tried to crack down on efforts by the ultra-rich to game the system. Since that time, write Norwich journalist James Bandler and his colleagues at ProPublica, nothing has changed. They dig into the records of three families—the Scripps, Mellons, and Mars—to detail how the wealthiest families shape tax policy and use "clever trusts and armies of lawyers and lobbyists to find ways not to pay."The backyard Hot Wheels racetrack to end them all. When you’ve got a toy car hobby, a piece of property, and lots of free time, you can do amazing things. And some people’s pandemic hobbies are clearly just better: This is a mind-bogglingly well-designed Hot Wheels course. The guy says it took four weeks to build, and who knows much longer to send a camera-rigged car all the way around it in a single take. Everything’s a zipping, looping, leaping display of sheer physics—and that's before the car boards a gondola up into the treetops.

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We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

From

“A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert

And because it's the solstice, you get music as well as poetry today: Charlestown NH's Dan & Faith Senie (with John Kirk on fiddle)

doing their new song, "Solstice."

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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                                 About Michael

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