Daybreak Tuesday 3/16/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

High pressure building in. And nothing forecast to come out of the sky for days. We'll start out cold and sunny but get up almost to 40 by late afternoon under gathering clouds. Winds shifting to come from the southwest, down to the teens tonight. The IRS sure is getting sneaky. John Stephens was doing his taxes the other day at home in Norwich when he glanced up and noticed a barred owl perched at his window, staring in. "I wondered if maybe the IRS had developed a new stealth audit technology," he writes. Turns out his taxes were boring, and after three minutes of a staring contest, the owl took off.Colby-Sawyer goes fully remote. In a notice to faculty and staff yesterday, the college noted that after a "mass testing event" on Friday revealed a sudden spike in cases—57 at last report—the campus is shifting to a "modified stay-in-place phase." It took effect yesterday at 5 pm. Classes will be entirely remote, with few exceptions students must stay on campus, and students may only enter their own residence halls. Norwich dairy's fate in the air as residents rally to raise funds, VTC seeks highest bidder. The technical college has put the land and buildings where Norwich Farm Creamery is set up on the market for a combined $2.2 million. Town residents have raised $155K in pledges in their bid to help the creamery's Chris Gray and Laura Brown stay in place, reports Katy Savage in VTDigger, and so far have been rebuffed in their efforts to buy. "We have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers, the state of Vermont and its students to maximize the proceeds of the sale,” says VTC President Pat Moulton.Mass. man found dead on Moosilauke. Roy Sanford, 66, of Plymouth, MA, had planned an up and back hike via the Glencliff Trail on Sunday; when he hadn't returned by Sunday evening, his family alerted the state police. Conservation officers reached the south peak Sunday night in blizzard conditions without finding him, and had to turn around. Yesterday afternoon, searchers found footprints on the Gorge Brook Trail and followed them to Sanford's body. "It appears that weather conditions played a major contributing factor in this hiking incident," writes Jeffrey Hastings on Patch.com. Judge rules Windsor principal was fired, not just placed on leave. The ruling in US District Court yesterday gives a lift to former Windsor School principal Tiffany Riley's lawsuit claiming she was "unjustly fired for Facebook posts she made that were seen as critical of the Black Lives Matter movement," writes the Valley News's John Gregg. Riley has sued the school district for flouting due process, violating her First Amendment rights, and breach of contract. The judge's ruling did not touch on her defamation claim or her argument that it was her Facebook posts that got her fired."I can resist the snack aisle in the grocery store all day, but once the Cape Cod chips are out of the bag and on the table, it’s game over." This, local real estate developer Jonah Richard writes in his new blog about small-town development, Bricks & Mortar, is why communities are better off keeping Dollar General stores out. Richard grew up in Fairlee, and he uses the Dollar General there as an example, arguing that it's lowered the quality of available jobs, siphoned off dollars that could go to local businesses, and cut the town's per-acre property tax rate. He includes advice on how towns can avoid that fate.Leb rec department pitches playing fields behind planned Target. The 20 acres on the river side of the former Kmart i West Leb sit at the confluence of the Connecticut and Mascoma rivers and are conserved. With the city facing a shortage of playing fields, Rec Director Paul Coats is proposing to turn part of the land into three fields and a 40-car parking lot, reports the VN's Tim Camerato. The city's Conservation Commission is "skeptical," Camerato writes."Reverse tracks." You know how out in the woods right now you see these odd clumps of snow standing out, often in lines? Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast says they're there because the weight of feet or hooves or paws compacted the snow and made it less prone to melting than the surrounding snow. A sure sign of spring. So are pussy willow catkins, the slow emergence of vernal pools, and the male bluebirds that have started showing up. It's the third week of March and there's plenty to notice out there, Elise writes.VT's unemployment rate is low, but it's "a misleading indicator." Retired UVM economist Art Woolf digs into the just-released January figures and points out that employment numbers in the state have been static for the last five months. The private sector has 20,000 fewer jobs than pre-Covid, with more than half the loss in the hospitality sector, while both state and local governments have shed jobs, mostly at state colleges and in public K-12 education. There may be hope for the economy, he writes, as vaccinations continue, state restrictions relax, and new federal relief money arrives.As Diggins wins World Cup, Sophie Caldwell Hamilton retires. The Peru, VT native, former Dartmouth skier, and two-time Olympian ended her career in isolation after a positive Covid test, though she's tested negative twice since then. Even so, writes James Biggam in the Rutland Herald, she "still radiated grace and gratitude while hanging up her skis at the professional level." Biggam has a profile and long interview with Caldwell Hamilton—whose uncle is Leb lawyer Tim Caldwell, a four-time Olympian—about her career and plans.UVM researcher and colleagues find bad news for the planet in 55-year-old ice core. The sample of subglacial sediment was pulled from a mile below the Greenland ice sheet at a US base in 1966, and stayed frozen until Drew Christ and some UVM colleagues melted it in 2019 to study its contents. They found plants. In a study published yesterday, they conclude that the ice sheet, far from being the permanent fixture scientists thought, is unstable—and may melt faster than most models suggest, putting catastrophic sea-level rise closer than we think. Atlas Obscura's Gemma Tarlach details the findings.You suppose the Hood or Baker Library could pull this off with one of the Orozco panels? It was a while ago, but it's still striking: To mark its reopening after 10 years of renovations, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum in 2013 pulled together a flash mob in a shopping center in the southern Dutch city of Breda to reenact its most famous painting, Rembrandt's "The Night Watch"—or, more officially, "The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch." I'd totally go hang out at Hanover Park or Baker-Berry in hopes of seeing something like this.You know: The sun's all warm...your eyelids get heavy...and then you just have to take a nap. On a skylight. Even when you're a fox.

And the numbers...

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Consider the earnestness of pavementits dark elegant sheen after rain,its insistence on leading yousomewhere 

A river is less opinionatedless predictableit never argues with gravityits history is a series of delicate negotiations withtime and geography

Wet your feet all you wantHeraclitus says,it's never the river you remember;a road repeats itself incessantlyobsessed with its own small truth 

Where you arrive finally depends onhow you get there,by river or by roadFrom "Rivers/Roads" by Michael Crummey

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