GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, warmer. The high pressure that was sitting over us is shifting eastward, and it's making room for winds from the southwest, which will heat things up today—but also bring in some clouds later, especially tonight, ahead of a front that's due in tomorrow. Getting into the low 80s today, low 60s tonight.Speaking of things headed our way.... Predicting space weather is even trickier than seeing around the corner down here on Earth. Still, on Saturday there was a sequence of solar flares "unlike anything we've seen in years," reports SpaceWeather.com, and a related set of coronal mass ejections will hit our magnetic field late tonight, possibly producing low-level geomagnetic storms and auroras. (Thanks, JF!) ...and of things that come in on the wind... You know life is getting back to normal when Brian Boland and the Post Mills Airport host a bunch of hot-air balloonists. This was not the annual festival—that's due in September—but this weekend a group of Boland's friends celebrated his 50th anniversary ballooning and the 50th birthday of the 1st balloon he ever built, which they pulled out of the museum and launched. "It was sort of a stealth informal balloon meet," Boland emails, though "it was kind of hard hiding 24 balloons in the sky."
Here some of them taking off, from Sherry Merrick;
Here's what one looked like as it and a few others descended on Houghton Hill, in Thetford, from Jim Zien;
And here's a remarkable image as even more floated low over a mirror-like Lake Fairlee early Saturday morning, from Kirsten Detrick.
Taco joint headed for former Skinny Pancake space in Hanover. The Valley News's John Lippman reports that Ramiro Bravo, a Pennsylvania restaurateur who already has three Tacos y Tequila restaurants elsewhere (two in PA, one outside Portland, ME), is hoping to open his fourth by August or September. It will feature "a mix of authentic and modern inspired Mexican cuisine" and "as many different tequilas as New Hampshire allows," he says. Also new, Lippman writes: a gun/tackle/archery shop in the former Costumania in W. Leb, and, eventually, a Sierra Trading Post in part of the old Kmart.SPONSORED: Today is Thetford Academy’s annual Day of Giving! TA’s springtime fundraiser celebrates student successes and community spirit. This year the event will focus on the concept of value (n. one's judgment of what is important in life, Oxford English Dictionary). We’re featuring TA’s five core values—caring, commitment, excellence, diversity, and cooperation—and sharing stories from our community that spotlight the value Thetford Academy holds in their lives. Join us on social media and follow #tavalues to hear these stories and find links to give. Sponsored by Thetford Academy.Norwich dairy couple sue VT State Colleges. The suit was filed Friday by Chris Gray and Laura Brown, who run the Norwich Farm Creamery and allege that Vermont Tech made "knowingly false" promises to support their cheese-making efforts under the 2015 partnership. The college was "not committed to the venture for the time needed to build out the business," the suit contends. The Grays also say they were not informed that the college had given the UV Land Trust an option to buy the farm property "free and clear of tenants." Details and full language of the suit in Chelsea Edgar's Seven Days coverage.Department of No Comment. A long VSP press release yesterday begins, "On May 21, 2021 at approximately 6:37 pm, the Vermont State Police received a report of a stolen Silloway Septic Truck from a location on East Randolph Road in Chelsea." A trooper eventually arrested Kevin Bent, originally from Randolph, at the East Randolph Baptist Church. Bent and a still-missing companion, Amanda Conant, have been charged with a string of thefts and burglaries in Pomfret, Granville, Barnard, and elsewhere dating back to May 10, and already had warrants dating to April.
"A well-kept secret.” That is how an official at the NH Tech Alliance describes the Upper Valley. It turns out, reports Michael Cousineau in a long profile of the region's tech/medical-research/biotech chops in the Union Leader, that "of 29 labor markets across the state, nowhere averages a bigger paycheck than the New Hampshire portion of the Lebanon area." Why? The confluence of medical, engineering, and entrepreneurial know-how clustered at and around Dartmouth, fueled by places like Norris Cotton, Tuck, Thayer, D-H, and the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center. (Thanks, DM!)But... "The single biggest impediment to us growing our attempts to find the next great way to prevent or cure cancer...is the lack of affordable housing." That's Norris Cotton director Steven Leach to Cousineau for a sidebar on the region's housing crunch (through Yahoo! News; no paywall). Tight inventory, town zoning ordinances that limit multi-family housing, soaring prices: "We draw young people here through new jobs at the hospital or education at the college and they can't stay here," says Meghan Butts, executive director of the Upper Valley Lake Sunapee Regional Planning Commission.And the food labor crunch isn't going away, either. In fact, Lippman writes in the VN, it's putting a crimp in local spots' hours. Dunk's, the new sports grill in Hanover, had to close for lunch four days after it opened; the Dirt Cowboy "was closed more days last week than it was open," Lippman writes. The Fort is closing early for dinner. Wicked Awesome BBQ's David MacInnis tells him, “Normally I’d need 15 to 20 people. Right now I have six”—and they include his wife and daughter. And over at Fore-U on 12A, Jennifer and Meredith Johnson are putting in 90- to 100-hour weeks to stay open as usual.The local origins of the "I'm not spying, I'm just bird watching" defense. Little-known fact, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast: The Wilson's warbler is named for Alexander Wilson, the Scottish-born illustrator who published the first ornithology of American birds, is sometimes known as "the father of American ornithology"...and was arrested in 1812 in Haverhill on suspicion of being a Canadian spy. Also out there in the woods this fourth week of May: a whole mess of yellow pollen, including from yellow birches; tiny spring azure butterflies; and black-throated blue warblers."The joke among river scientists is that topsoil is the Upper Valley’s biggest export." Aquatic wildlife isn't the only victim of "hydropeaking," the fluctuation in river flows caused by the way dams raise and then lower water levels. In Sidenote, Li Shen writes that farms up and down the Connecticut lose land when banks collapse after repeated drawdowns. The relicensing process for Great River Hydro's three dams, including Wilder, may help, Shen writes, though the impact won't really be known until changes at Wilder go into effect.Nothing ruins a good golf game like a lightning strike. But now, thanks in part to the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore, who grew up in WRJ, golfers at the Montcalm Golf Club in Enfield will get a horn blast when lightning is nearby. It's part of a solar-powered weather-tracking system built by a Florida company, WeatherSTEM, and Montcalm is the first golf course in New England to install one. Updated every few seconds, it gives not only the basics, but solar radiation, UV radiation, and other data—which is handy, Cantore says in a press release, because Montcalm essentially has its own weather conditions. End of federal unemployment benefits means no aid at all for almost 16K Granite Staters. In NH Bulletin, Annmarie Timmins notes that Gov. Chris Sununu's decision to end the state's use of federal unemployment benefits doesn't mean that just the $300 federal add-on to state benefits will disappear; it also means that 15,700 people—self-employed; gig workers; people who’ve left work for Covid-related reasons; and those who’ve maxed out on state unemployment—will get nothing after June 19. The move "will hurt the families who can least afford it," say NH Legal Assistance's Dawn McKinney.VT legislators pass $7.3 billion budget. Closing out the legislative session on Friday, they approved a measure that includes $150 million for broadband expansion, $190 million for affordable housing, $41 million to help homeless people in the transition from pandemic motels to more stable housing, and $120 million for clean-water programs. In a rundown on the legislature's final week, Seven Days' Kevin McCallum notes they also decided to require schools to test for PCBs and radon, and kept the state's incentive programs for workers relocating from out-of-state. "A rational, thoughtful, and caring Republican.” That, interestingly, is former VT Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman talking about the guy who beat him last election, Gov. Phil Scott. Zuckerman's quoted in a long profile of Scott by The Atlantic's Russell Berman, who writes that "no other state has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic better than Vermont," citing its Covid and vaccination numbers as well as the state of its finances. If few people outside the state know Scott, Berman writes, there's a reason: He has never appeared on cable news or a national Sunday show. (Thanks, SL!)Here's a turnaround! Apologies, this is just a tweet referring to a longer Wall St. Journal article that's behind a paywall, but still... There's a glut of hand sanitizer on retailers' shelves out there. So much so that Jeff Kozak, CEO of Shoreham, VT's WhistlePig Distillery, which like its compatriots made and donated hand sanitizer during the pandemic, now says that distributors have been asking him if he wants to buy extra sanitizer and turn it into whiskey.Sure, everyone knows what darkstep is. But kizomba antigas? It's Tuesday and there's poetry instead of music down below, so here's your rabbit-hole fix for the week: Every Noise at Once. It's an effort by a musical data guy named Glenn McDonald, now with Spotify, to map every music genre. There are over 1300 in there from literally all over the world, algorithmically organized (rock's basically in the center, more electronic stuff toward the top, folk, jazz, and classical toward the bottom). Click on a name for a 30-second sample; hit the arrow to get a similar map of artists in the genre. Go ahead, get lost in there.
Time to catch up in a big way...
Dartmouth reports 1 student case and 1 among faculty/staff. Two students and 2 faculty/staff members are in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 1 students and 3 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 127 new cases Friday, 109 Saturday, 79 Sunday, and 52 yesterday for a cumulative total of 98,349. There have been 3 new deaths since last Thursday, raising the total to 1,344, while 48 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 5). The current active caseload stands at 411 (down 675). The state reports 26 active cases in Grafton County (down 49), 15 in Sullivan (down 31), and 36 in Merrimack (down 63). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 7 active cases (down 15), Rumney has 7 (down 1), and Newport has 5. Haverhill, Hanover, Lebanon, Sunapee, New London, Newbury, and Unity have 1-4 each. Piermont, Warren, Orford, Lyme, Canaan, Plainfield, and Springfield are off the list.
VT reported 36 new cases Friday, 21 Saturday, 22 on Sunday, and 21 yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 24,127. There were no new deaths, which remain at 255, while 5 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 5 over the last four days). Windsor County gained 10 new cases in that time and stands at 1,466 for the pandemic, with 68 over the past 14 days, while Orange County added 5 new cases and stands at 814 cumulatively, with 32 cases in the past 14 days. In town-by-town numbers released last Friday, Hartford gained 16 cases over the week before; Springfield added 11; Bradford and Sharon gained 4 each; Woodstock added 3; Fairlee, Hartland, and Newbury each added 2; and Bethel, Cavendish, Royalton, and Weathersfield had 1 apiece.
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At noon today, the Norwich Public Library hosts Julia Lowell, an analyst at Vermont's Public Assets Institute (a Montpelier nonprofit focused on state policy research, especially on fiscal issues). She'll be online, talking about "The State of Working Vermont," a report the institute published at the turn of the year looking at VT's economy as the pandemic began and at the disparate impact of the past year on the economy and workforce.
All day today, Sustainable Woodstock and Pentangle Arts present two short films about human displacement.Homesick is director Koya Kamura's 2019 short-film debut, about a man who enters a fictional Fukushima's no-go zone two years after its nuclear disaster, in search of items left behind by people who were forced to evacuate. And Lowland Kids is non-fiction, Sandra Winther's 2019 documentary about a two teens, a brother and sister, who live with their wheelchair-bound uncle in a stilt house on Isle de Jean Charles, off the coast of Louisiana, as they face packing up to move before sea-level rise makes their home uninhabitable. At 7 pm this evening, there will be a live Q&A with Winther about her film and its protagonists.
This evening at 8, the Hop hosts the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble's spring concert. It's free and virtual, and includes a collaboration with the Flute Studio and three world premieres: 40 Days by composer Greg Brown, performed live over Zoom; a commission from composer and electronic musician Henry Vega, which use sounds recorded by the DCWE to create an electronic soundscape over which the ensemble performs; and a film collaboration between Brent Michael Davis and Josef Fairbanks, with the original score performed by the DCWE.
Finally, in case you missed the Dartmouth Opera Lab's remotely produced, virtual performance of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium last night, it's now available on YouTube...for a full year. It's the first full opera produced by the Opera Lab, a joint Hop/Music Department "incubator" aimed at making opera accessible and giving students a chance to perform. "With the pandemic in full swing," the Hop writes, "the cast created this opera remotely across many states: Vocal and character preparation took place over Zoom calls. A single set décor was replaced with identical set-elements to be integrated in their homes and dorm rooms. The vocal track was created remotely." There's also a short film about how the whole thing was put together.
I write, erase, rewrite,Erase again, and thenA poppy blooms.
—Hokushi, Edo Period (1603-1868)
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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