GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Quieter and warmer. But don't get too used to it. There's weather coming tomorrow, but for today we get some dramatic warming—from low 20s first thing to high 50s or low 60s mid-afternoon—as winds from the south bring in warmer air. There'll be some breezes, but nothing like yesterday, and we get pretty much full-on sun most of the day. Upper 30s tonight. (Note: as of first thing this am, the Weather Service's site appears to be down.)Nighttime geometry. Jeremy Merritt was out in the full moonlight late last week near the Hanover-Lyme border, and looked up to see two brightly illuminated contrails criss-cross the lunar halo just below the moon itself."There go the tires!" Yesterday afternoon, a smoking white Volvo pulled into the lot behind the Ledyard Bank in Norwich, where the engine compartment caught fire. A fire engine was on the scene within a few minutes (the station's nearby), and quickly put out the blaze; no one was hurt. "The high winds made it worse," says Fire Chief Alex Northern. "They caused the fire to escalate much quicker." The UV Trails Alliance's Kaitie Eddington (and her colleagues) had ringside seats, and here's Kaitie's video of the moment the car's tires exploded...and her own nervous laughter. "It was really surprising!" she writes."He was one of the best people in the world at taking care of people in their most vulnerable situations.” That's Alex Mackay describing Sean McManamy, his lifelong friend from their days growing up together in Hanover, guiding him down an Alaska mountain they had dropped onto to ski down. McManamy, 38, was a heli-skiing guide: He died in a helicopter crash Saturday in Alaska. "Regardless of weather, regardless of terrain, regardless of challenges, Sean was an outdoor kid,” his mom, Barbara Fildes, tells the Valley News's Anna Merriman for a profile and appreciation of McManamy. "I am endlessly curious about how people make the magic of their craft happen." That's Amanda Rafuse, the host of the brand new CATV show SPARK, explaining in an email how she came to be involved in a series about the arts in the Upper Valley. She's an arts consultant and theater artist (formerly at Northern Stage), and as Susan Apel explains in Artful, has already pulled together a remarkable lineup: NS's Eric Love, Susan herself, LOH's Joe Clifford, the Upper Valley Music Center's Katie Kitchel, actor Gordon Clapp, AVA director Heidi Reynolds... Susan's got directions on how to find it all.Food truck becomes budding restaurateurs' test kitchen. That's the idea behind the conversion of theBox, the Tuck School project to manage a food truck in the Upper Valley, into a new-restaurant incubator. The idea, writes the Valley News's John Lippman, comes from Lou's owner Jarrett Berke, who now owns the truck. “There are chefs who are looking to go off on their own and are incredibly skilled and passionate but may lack capital and some business skills,” he tells Lippman. “Then you have the Tuckies, who can’t cook, but they have business skills and the acumen that can help a restaurant.”Upper Valley firms land most of NH's new NASA grants. Though in truth, six of the nine projects funded in the state by the space agency's latest round of small-business grants are at Creare; another is at Meriden's RAPA Technologies, run by former Creare engineer Marc Ramsey. According to NH Business Review's Bob Sanders, the Creare efforts include a balloon drone system for Venus, a nuclear generator for spacecraft, and a miniature vacuum pump to help analyze other planets' atmospheres. RAPA's is focused on a cooling system for spacesuits. As if they weren't cool already.Costumania shuts its doors; Piecemeal Pies to open new ones. After 32 years in retail, first working for his uncle's tuxedo shop, then gradually building the costume emporium that now sits in the Colonial Plaza, Mark Young is going out of business. “I never thought I’d have to hang up one of those signs in my life,” he tells the VN's Lippman. But online competition and the pandemic, he says, were the final straws. Meanwhile, Lippman writes, after delaying his plans for a year, Piecemeal Pies owner Justin Barrett hopes to open the Stowe outpost of his WRJ mainstay in June.As lakes and rivers open up again, hooded mergansers are back... It's the fifth week of March (with April on deck), and the woods are awake again, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast. Canada geese are headed north (and squabbling over nesting territory), springtails (also known as snowfleas) are massing on the water, and eastern newts are migrating back to vernal pools. Their lifecycles are pretty cool: start in the water, become red efts on land, head back to the water as adults...unless their vernal pool dries out, in which case they just become land-based again."Robins have perfect posture." Thetford writer and naturalist Ted Levin was standing at a window Sunday when 100 or so robins—actually, he counted up to 111, but there was "too much action to be an accurate statistician"—landed in his yard, just a brief layover. "They don't lean like a dove or a junco, eyeing the ground around them," he writes. "Robins are sturdy and straight, like a hawk on a limb, studying the pasture beyond their toes."April 17: "The sleighs have passed all day." That would be because there was a foot of new snow at Ebeneezer Brown's farm in Norwich in 1875. In the middle of sugaring season. The Norwich Historical Society has a new page up with some old sap-time photos and excerpts from Brown's farm diary: first new maple sugar of the season April 1, sugared off April 29. "We have made a noble lot of nice sugar. Some four or five hundred pounds," Brown wrote.NH state parks starting to reopen. The snow's gone or disappearing from roads and parking areas, writes the Monitor's David Brooks, and Bear Brook, Pawtuckaway, Monadnock, and Odiorne are already open for the season. They'll be subject to the same regs as last year: You'll need to make a day reservation to park. Most White Mountain National Forest campgrounds won't open until May. Also returning this year: the shuttle from Cannon Mtn. for Franconia Notch hikers, who are prohibited from parking on I-93.Grafton, Coos counties lead NH in vaccinations. About one in five residents of the two northern counties has been fully vaccinated, reports NHPR's Casey McDermott, and neighboring Carroll County isn't far behind. Part of the reason is sheer numbers: They're the least populated counties in the state. But, McDermott points out, they also tend to have an older population, meaning more of their residents qualified earlier—though Hillsborough County is moving slower even among older residents.Half of VT's recent cases are in people under 30. With the state's Covid case numbers rising, it now ranks 11th highest in the country in case rate per 100,000 residents, reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko. The 254 new cases reported Friday were the highest for the entire pandemic; they were followed by Sunday's report of 240 cases, which would have set a record were it not for Friday. On the bright side, Petenko writes, the VT health department reports that 35 percent of the population has gotten at least a single vaccine shot, putting it 7th in the nation.Don't look for house-buying in VT to get easier in 2021. In fact, St. Albans realtor Leigh Horton tells VPR's Mitch Wertlieb, "the buyer pool is so large right now it's far surpassing everything that's on the market." Many are out-of-staters: In 2020, she says, 10 percent of her buyers were from out of state. Now, over 80 percent of them are. And they tend to have greater financial resources than in-state buyers—which may be one reason inventory is so low, as Vermonters hold off on trying to move in a tough buying market. First tornado in two years touches down in VT. In Middlebury on Friday afternoon, to be precise. It traveled a mile, uprooted trees, flipped a car on its side, and separated an attached garage from its home. Weather conditions and the state's terrain make tornadoes rare, writes the Free Press's Elizabeth Murray. The state's had 46 confirmed tornadoes since the Weather Service began recording data in the '50s."Let's make a contest... You come after me." Remember last week's ostrich chasing the bicyclists? Well, that quote's by a skier in Romania in video posted earlier this month, talking to a brown bear (the country's home to 60 percent of Europe's brown bears) that had wandered onto the slopes and, clearly to the guy's surprise, begun following him. The bear was game to play... and somehow, the skier managed to film it all. (Thanks, BH!)Now, if the Ever Given had just been able to do this... Not that this container ship is actually floating in air, mind you. But a guy walking along the coast in Cornwall got a photo of what's called a "superior mirage," more common in the Arctic, in which an air inversion puts cold air along the ocean surface and warm air above it, and because the cold air at the surface bent light downward, it appeared to the photographer's eyes (and to his camera) that the ship was miraculously airborne. (Thanks, SO!)
Back to the numbers...
Dartmouth sees a post-spring-break spike, with 35 active cases among students (up 25) and 1 among faculty/staff. There are 9 students and 3 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 34 students and 6 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 389 new cases Friday, 401 Saturday, 301 Sunday, and 272 yesterday, for a cumulative total of 83,340. There were 8 deaths over the last four days; they now stand at 1,237. Meanwhile, 73 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 9), and the current active caseload stands at 2,785 (down 71). The state reports 132 active cases in Grafton County (up 22), 39 in Sullivan (up 7), and 214 in Merrimack (up 2). In town-by-town numbers, the state says that Hanover has 33 active cases (up 20), Claremont has 15 (up 6), Lebanon has 13 (up 6), New London has 9 (down 2), and Newport has 6 (up at least 2). Haverhill, Rumney, Piermont, Canaan, Enfield, Plainfield, Grantham, Grafton, Springfield, Wilmot, Cornish, Charlestown, Unity, Sunapee, and Newbury have 1-4 each. Orford and Lyme,are off the list.
VT reported 254 new cases Friday (its highest single-day total of the pandemic), 123 Saturday, 240 Sunday, and 137 yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 19,002. It reported 2 new deaths, which now total 225. Meanwhile, 25 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (no change). Windsor County gained 26 cases over the last four days and stands at 1,172 for the pandemic, with 69 over the past 14 days, while Orange County added 3 new cases and is at 545 cumulatively, with 12 cases in the past 14 days. And just to catch up on town-by-town numbers reported at the end of last week, Hartford added 7 cases over the week before, Bradford gained 4, Springfield added 2, and Killington, Pomfret, Royalton, Tunbridge, and Windsor each added 1.
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At 6 this evening, the Lebanon Opera House goes back on location for a streamed house concert with Michael Glabicki, the frontman for Pittsburgh jam band Rusted Root, and the band's longtime guitarist and backing vocalist, Dirk Miller. “It’s completely improvisational, to the point where we surprise ourselves a lot," Glabicki says of their work together. "We have a great time with it and the audience seems to enjoy the musical exploration too.” Free, but you'll need to register.
In case you missed him before, this evening at 6:30 writer and climber Ty Gagne will be hosted by the Antrim NH public library talking about his book, The Last Traverse. It's about two friends who, in February, 2008, set out to do the Franconia Ridge hike: up Falling Waters, across Little Haystack, Lincoln, and Lafayette, then back down via Greenleaf. It didn't go well. Gagne will talk about the hike and the remarkable search-and-rescue efforts to find them amid the dangers of the winter Whites.
when more than was lost has been found has been foundand having is giving and giving is living-but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing-it's spring(all our night becomes day)o,it's spring!all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the skyall the little fish climb through the mind of the seaall the mountains are dancing;are dancing)
— From "when faces called flowers float out of the ground" by e.e. cummings (jumping the gun a little,
).
Enjoy the day out there! See you tomorrow.
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