GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cloudy, a bit warmer. And, during the day at least, dry, with highs getting into the upper 50s and light winds from the southeast. Rain will be moving in sometime tonight, though. Lows in the mid-40s.“There is a soaring sense of excitement and discovery when ascending over familiar landscapes.” And Caleb Kenna would know. The Middlebury-based photographer has made a name for himself with his drone photos—you may remember his work in the NYT of Vermont in summer and winter. Now he's trained his lens on the Connecticut River, and in a photo spread in the Dartmouth Alumni Mag makes the landscape most of us only get to see from ground level look... well, amazing. Definitely check out the additional photos.D-H clinics stop taking new primary care patients—for now, anyway. The freeze on new patients, writes Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News, stems from an increase in demand from new Upper Valley residents, the hospital system's ongoing workforce shortage, and a backlog of patients who'd delayed care earlier in the pandemic, according to chief clinical officer Ed Merrens. “It won’t be forever,” he tells Doyle-Burr—more like a “short-term thing on the order of months.” The freeze includes clinics at DHMC, in Lyme, and in southwestern VT, but APD and Mt. Ascutney both have room for new primary care patients.“Right now, it’s housing, housing and housing." That's Hanover planning director Robert Houseman, talking to the VN's Darren Marcy about the results so far of the town's ongoing survey of residents as it begins a new master plan process. The town is seeking public input as it sets out on the first revision of its plan in 15 years. The survey asks respondents to weigh in on everything from issues that adversely affect quality of life to the town's most pressing needs. The committee in charge has also created a slick "virtual meeting room" that allows you to walk through key data and see past public meetings.SPONSORED: Apply to join the Willing Hands Board of Directors. Are you looking for a meaningful way to build food equity in our community? Please consider applying to join the Willing Hands Board of Directors. We are looking for dedicated, creative, and compassionate people who want to help guide Willing Hands as we work to end hunger and reduce food waste in the Upper Valley. Previous board experience not required. Sponsored by Willing Hands.How fast reconnection occurs in collisionless plasmas. Okay, okay, bear with me. That's the subject of a new paper by a team led by Dartmouth physicist Yi-Hsin Liu—who also helps lead a team for a NASA mission to understand Earth's magnetosphere. Solar flares are triggered by magnetic reconnection, and for over half a century scientists have been trying to understand it—and in particular a variety, known as "fast reconnection," that releases energy at a consistent speed. The new theory uses the same magnetic effect that senses when a cellphone flip cover is closed.Sunapee's Lake Queen finally takes to the water. If you've been reading Daybreak over the last year, you'll remember the refurbished Mississippi River boat's epic journey from Missouri up to Sunapee—the one that got hung up by paperwork and road construction. It's been in dry dock the last few months, but on Sunday, Tim and Peter Fenton's Sunapee Cruises launched it, gussied up and ready to ply the lake's waters. WMUR has the footage.With Covid hospitalizations continuing to rise in NH, Monitor brings back its Covid tracker. For this week, anyway. The newspaper retired it six weeks ago after 20 months of keeping track, but now, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, even if things aren't as bad as they were last winter they're still not good. Because of the case-level uncertainty introduced by so much at-home testing (which throws numbers and positivity percentages into doubt), he's focusing on hospitalizations, which have been following the same pattern as a year ago. Most recent hard numbers down below.If you go in the store, I don’t care what it is you buy, it’s outrageous.” A NH man speaks plainly about rising food prices, one of a handful of factors contributing to growing food insecurity in the state, reports NHPR’s Paul Cuno-Booth. Although NH has the nation’s lowest rate of food insecurity, it still amounts to tens of thousands of Granite Staters who are unable to afford or access the food they and their families need to live active, healthy lives. Local food banks are managing increased traffic, but 2019 data showed that only about 30 percent of eligible households had enrolled in SNAP benefits.Information on Concord couple's murders remains scarce. There's really not much else to add, but the Monitor's Cassidy Jensen does her best. Law enforcement officials, led by the Concord PD and the AG's office, are saying very little—not even talking about how many police officers have been detailed to the 10-day-old case. "Authorities are circumspect in the details because we are limited by rules of professional conduct and the requirements to protect the integrity of the investigation,” says Associate Attorney General Jeff Strelzin.“Currently there are no indications that there is a danger to the public.” A version of that phrase has appeared several times in New Hampshire police press releases over the past couple of weeks, and it's just popped up again: The police department in Bow is seeking the public's help identifying a woman whose body was found in the Merrimack River last Thursday. They've issued a forensic artist's sketch.Local ed taxes in VT headed for big changes. That's because the legislature is moving toward revising the formula for how much local education tax rates generate for school budgets, reports VPR's Peter Hirschfeld. The complex bill essentially resets state funding to account for differences in how much it "costs" to educate children from families living in poverty or who are learning English or who attend small schools. The changes in student weighting will shift state funding to lower-income and more rural communities and require more in the way of local taxes from more affluent communities. “I don’t want to hedge about how disruptive this will be for all of our communities,” says a state rep.Scott vetoes pension reform plan. As Seven Days' Kevin McCallum explains, the bill would cut the state's unfunded pension liability by some $300 million over time as cut unfunded health benefit costs by using a combination of lower cost-of-living adjustments for retirees, higher employee contributions, and lump-sum payments now by the state. Scott, however, argued yesterday that it lacks structural changes needed to prevent future unfunded liabilities—in particular a 401K option. The original bill passed both chambers unanimously, so even Scott expects the legislature to override his veto.If you fly out of Burlington, changes are coming. This is an article by Seven Days' 7D Brand Studio, which means it was bought and paid for by BTV itself... but it's also pretty interesting. Like, the airport was built for propeller planes with 30 to 50 passengers, which its acting director says "is the root of its current challenges." So they're building a new terminal that adds a new security station, in hopes of cutting wait times that recently have been stretching 45 minutes, as well as a second floor and new jet bridge—because two of the airport's current bridges are too low to reach modern jets. Plus a bunch of cosmetic upgrades."You take the key out, lights still turn on. The interior’s completely destroyed." It began when a guy in Cornwall, CT noticed that the headlights on his mother-in-law's car were on. He went out to investigate and found a black bear in the front seat. “I went down and saw fog all over the window, and sure enough, there was a bear in there,” he tells CT station WFSB. “Wow, I see bears all the time but never in the car.” It eventually ran off—but the car, he says, "is going to be toast. Via WCAX.“The insanity of the English language is precisely the quality that makes it great for word puzzles.” That’s author A.J. Jacobs, known for his memoir-esque books exploring curious obsessions, like The Year of Living Biblically. LitHub has an excerpt from his newest, The Puzzler, a deep dive into the world of word puzzles, hoping to understand just what makes them so addictive. If the Times’ Spelling Bee is your jam, this is for you—but you’re just skimming the surface of an entire subculture of anagram artists. At the National Puzzlers’ League annual convention, no word is safe from rearranging.Which should get you in the right frame of mind for today's Vordle. Have at it!
And the numbers...
On Friday, Dartmouth reported there had been 346 active cases during the previous 7 days, a substantial drop from the 541 reported last Tuesday. The college says 174 undergrads (-120), 61 grad and professional students (-70), and 111 faculty/staff (-5) had active cases over the previous week. Updated figures tomorrow.
NH cases continue to rise overall, with a 7-day average now of 384 new cases per day, versus 354 last Thursday. The state reported 494 new cases Friday, 411 Saturday, 372 Sunday, and 270 yesterday, bringing it to 311,144 in all. There were 2 deaths reported during that time; the total stands at 2,481. Under the state's rubric of counting only people actively being treated for Covid in hospitals, it reports 18 hospitalizations (-4 since Thursday). The NH State Hospital Association reports 104 inpatients with confirmed or suspected cases (-10 since Thursday but +9 since Sunday) and another 39 Covid-recovering patients. Meanwhile, the state reports 234 active cases in Grafton County (-74 since Thursday), 106 in Sullivan (-16), and 202 (+2) in Merrimack. In town-by-town numbers, it says Hanover has 78 (-100); Lebanon 65 (+26); Claremont 41 (+4); Plainfield 16 (-4); Canaan 11 (+6); Enfield 12 (-1); Charlestown 10 (-3); Grantham 9 (-7); Newport 9 (-4); Sunapee 7 (no change); New London 8 (+3); Haverhill 6 (+at least 2); and Orford, Rumney, Lyme, Grafton, Springfield, Cornish, Croydon, Newbury and Unity 1-4 each. Piermont is off the list.
VT's case numbers are holding roughly steady. The state reported 430 cases Friday, 323 Saturday, 294 Sunday, and 98 yesterday, bringing it to 124,523 total and a 7-day daily average of 331 compared to 328 on Thursday. There were 5 deaths during that time; they stand at 639 all told. Hospitalizations are basically steady, too: As of yesterday, 66 people with confirmed cases were hospitalized (+2), with 9 in the ICU (+1). Windsor County added 102 cases since Thursday and 282 over the past two weeks, for 9,354 overall, while Orange County gained 37 since Thursday and 130 in the past two weeks and stands at 4,277 overall.
Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
For the last 16 years, Dartmouth's Thayer School has hosted a competition for undergrad and grad students from all over the US and Canada to design and build a Formula-style hybrid or all-electric racecar—and then put it to the test on a track. It's been two years since the last one was held, but it's back and things start in earnest today at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, when 18 teams (with 14 all-electric and 4 hybrid cars) start showing them off, but the main events are really tomorrow, with the acceleration and autocross events, and Thursday, with the endurance event.
Today at 4:30, Dartmouth's Dickey Center hosts Carter Malkasian, who chairs the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, lecturing on "The American War in Afghanistan: A History"—which also happens to be the title of his prize-winning book on the subject. His talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Tina Dooley-Jones, former Mission Chief for USAID in Afghanistan. In-person in 041 Haldeman or via livestream.
At 7 this evening, the Norwich Bookstore hosts writer Julie Metz online, talking about her new memoir, Eva & Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind. After the death of her mother, Eve, in 2006, Metz discovered a book hidden in her mother's dresser drawer: It was a keepsake book from 1938 through 1940, filled with good wishes from childhood friends and family to a 10-year-old Eva—Metz's first clue to her mother's past as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, which launched her search to reconstruct the life her mother had never talked about.
Also at 7, Here in the Valley's Tuesday Jukebox is back, both in-person and livestreamed, with singer-songwriter Dylan Patrick Ward joining fiddler and host Jakob Breitbach. Ward "writes darkly comical, highly specific and nicely melodic songs about outsiders, oddballs, aliens, snowmen and love," Breitbach writes.
And anytime this week you can check out CATV's lineup suggestions, including: NH state Rep. Mary Hakken-Phillips joining her colleague Russell Muirhead and VT Reps. Jim Masland and Becca White to talk about pandemic legislating and the challenges facing freshmen legislators and those hoping to work across partisan divides; The Dartmouth Sings' show-stealing numbers at a seven-college a cappella concert in Brattleboro; the Co-op's Lindsay Smith shows you how to make a power-green shakshuka; and a replay of Chico Eastridge's SUCH Wow show before a live and highly participatory audience at the Briggs—"Local people reenact and reinterpret things from the Internet."
It's May, it's May, the month of yes you mayThe time for every frivolous whim, proper or im-It's wild, it's gay, a blot in every wayThe birds and bees with all of their vast, amorous past
Gaze at the human race aghast.
— From "The Lusty Month of May," lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner (and, of course, music by Frederick Loewe). Pat yourself on the back if you can name the musical without looking it up.
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 and writers who want you to 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.
Want to catch up on Daybreak music?
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! You can subscribe at:
Thank you!