GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny eventually, cooler. There's some low pressure moving through and with it a slight chance of light showers for a bit, but then we get mostly sunny skies and breezes from the northwest taking temps down a notch from yesterday's highs: mid-70s today. Still good sleeping weather tonight, with lows getting to either side of 50.Hey, and while we're looking up... Mercury is at its brightest this week, and if you go out about 45 minutes before sunrise you may get a chance to see five planets lined up from the east-northeast toward the south, in their order from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This particular configuration, Stephanie Pappas notes in LiveScience, hasn’t occurred since 1864. She's got advice on how to find them and what to look for.Playing with fire. It's been a decade since Barre, VT put on the first RockFire as a fundraiser to help preserve its abandoned quarry lands, with music, art installations, and fire performances. The 11th edition was this past weekend and Grantham photographer and graphic designer Josh Trudell was there—especially for the nighttime cool-stuff-you-can-do-with-fire showcase. He sends along a small portfolio of what he saw.Haven forced to stop offering hot food to go at food shelf after Hartford ZBA ruling. At a hearing earlier this month, reports the Valley News's Liz Sauchelli, the town's Zoning Board of Adjustment decided that the organization's permitted food-related activities do not cover cooking on site or heating up prepared foods. The move comes after questions were raised by town officials—as part of a review of the Haven's zoning permissions—about the difference between repackaging donated food and actually preparing food to distribute. The issue will come before the Planning Commission July 11."Emergency" staffing change at Springfield state prison leads to 12-hour shifts. In a move that the head of the state employees' union calls "cruel and inhumane," the VT Dept of Corrections yesterday ordered staff at the Southern State Correctional Facility to switch from five 8-hour shifts a week to five 12-hour shifts, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein. Though the state didn't go into specifics on staffing issues at the prison, a spokesperson said there is a 20-25-percent vacancy rate among security staff statewide.SPONSORED: You can improve someone's life right now! Hearts You Hold is a VT-based nonprofit that supports immigrants, migrants, and refugees in a concrete way. We believe that only the individuals themselves know what they want/need and that it is critical to take the time to ask them. Currently, there are many requests waiting to be funded, from clothing to bicycles to computers. Some are from folks in VT and NH, others from people all over the US. Hit the link above, pick an item (or more) to fund, and make a difference now! Sponsored by Hearts You Hold.For Woodstock victim, media attention "was antithetical to the life [he] lived." In the Valley News's regular "A Life" yesterday, John Lippman went far beyond the headlines to write about Dieter Seier, who was shot and killed in Woodstock on June 14, and the quiet life he built in Cornish Flat. He was “a one-man contractor-carpenter-painter-electrician-artist-craftsman," his brother-in-law says, who taught himself everything from silk screening to glasswork and took on design and production jobs for local arts organizations. He may have led an "obscure life," Lippman writes. "But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a full life."Canaan's Meetinghouse Readings come full circle. It's been 33 years since William Craig began the popular series at the 1793 meetinghouse in town. Craig stepped down in 2012 and was replaced by Phil Pochoda—who in turn stepped down last year. Now Craig's back at the mic, and the series has announced its lineup for this summer, starting July 7 with poet Bianca Stone and novelist Steve Almond. They'll be followed by poet Matthew Olzmann and novelist Ernest Hebert, then by poet Justin Bigos and Penobscot short story writer (and Dartmouth grad) Morgan Talty.Faced with soaring food prices, Woodstock mobile home park residents set out to grow their own. “People who live on $1,500 or $1,600 a month can’t spend four bucks on a head of lettuce,” retired optometrist Al Pristaw tells the VN's Frances Mize. So this spring, Pristaw set out to revive a project he'd launched after Tropical Storm Irene, enlisting the help of brothers Daniel and Josh Putnam to build eight garden beds, with funding help from Sustainable Woodstock and the Ben & Jerry's Foundation. Now, Mize writes, the planting's done and residents "wait and watch for the first signs of the bounty to come."Prepping for divisiveness, region's educators suggest how to overcome it. With the 2024 elections looming, the UV Educators Institute brought together teachers and others to ask what schools can do to remain "places where there is trust as well as accountability to democratic norms.” They came up with three recommendations for area schools: set common expectations for discussion; prepare students for discussion and encourage collaboration among teachers who can "support student learning"; and respond to hate speech but remain curious about "what pulls an individual toward ideas that are dangerous."Sununu signs measure barring state, local cooperation in enforcing federal firearms laws. The bill, backed by firearms rights groups opposed to federal gun regs, will keep state police and local law enforcement from cooperating with FBI or BATF investigations of such rules as the Trump administration's ban on "bump stocks" or proposed Biden administration rules targeting "ghost guns," writes NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt. "This bill will ensure that New Hampshire’s law enforcement efforts will be on our own state firearms laws," the governor wrote in his signing message on Friday....And vetoes bill to create new rules for siting landfills. The measure would have required companies to place landfills "far enough away from water bodies so that contaminated groundwater would take more than five years to seep into them," reports NHPR's Mara Hoplamazian, but Sununu argued Friday that current regs requiring 200 feet of distance are enough. The measure had bipartisan support, but opponents argued it was aimed specifically at a proposed Casella landfill in Dalton, NH.Think the VSP is getting frustrated? Last night around 11:30, state police responded to the first incidence in an annual ritual: tractor-trailers getting stuck on Route 108, the narrow and windy Smuggler's Notch Road, which is off-limits to them. The Notch, the VSP wrote in its press release, is blocked "DUE TO A COMMERCIAL VEHICLE DISREGARDING ALL OF THE SIGNAGE AND BECOMING STUCK IN THE ROCKS." The FL driver told police he was just following his GPS despite the warning signs, WCAX reports. It took about three hours for work crews to clear the truck.Just sayin'... Okay, look, it's fine that the Upper Valley is off the beaten track. Those cars with CT plates doing 90 to get to the mountains or the ski areas? Good riddance. But seriously, if you're going to list 45 places to stop on "your ultimate Vermont road trip," as something called Crazy Family Adventure just did (via MSN), can't you come up with more in central VT than that "small and picturesque place off of Route 100" called Woodstock? A fine town—in fact, the site writes, it "might just be one of the best tourist destinations in the state"—but what are the Montshire and the Vermontasaurus, chopped liver?Certain things you can never unsee. Like the ring of green bell pepper, salami, and American cheese that tops Altoona-style pizza—born, writes Atlas Obscura's Alex Mayyasi, "as a quirk on the menu of the Altoona Hotel" in the central PA city. And Altoona's not alone. Mayyasi delves into regional pizza quirks, from the curlicues of cold cheese that top Ohio Valley-style pizza around Steubenville to Rhode Island's "red strips" to the Quad Cities' (IA/IL) taco pizza to the gigantic, sold-by-the-pound Colorado-style pizza. "You could imagine thunder and lightning cracking along the edges of this thing," Mayyasi writes.The Tuesday Vordle. Go for it!
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Today through Thursday, Sustainable Woodstock is running a free online screening of Babushkas of Chernobyl, Holly Morris and Anne Bogart's documentary about the roughly 100 people, mostly old women, who were evacuated after the nuclear disaster but then decided to walk back home, let themselves through the barbed wire the government had put up around the irradiated "exclusion zone," and live there. These are women who survived Stalin's purges and the Nazi invasion, so it's probably not surprising that, as one says, "Starvation is what scares me, not radiation.”
If you've ever been curious about what the inside of the gatehouse at the Union Village Dam in Thetford looks like, this is your chance. At 2 pm today, Union Village Park rangers will give a tour of the dam, talk about its history and purpose, and show visitors around the inside of the gatehouse. Parking on top of the dam across from the gatehouse.
At 6 this evening, online, Northshire Books hosts Pulitzer-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks talking about her new novel, Horse, with NPR journalist Jacki Lyden. Based in part on the famed antebellum Kentucky racehorse Lexington—“A horse so fast that the mass-produced stopwatch was manufactured so his fans could clock times in races that regularly drew more than twenty thousand spectators," Brooks writes—it explores not just horse-racing, but race, both pre- and post-Civil-War, as well as art, archives, and bones.
This evening at 6:30, the Howe Library and Northern Stage continue their collaboration, with a talk at the Howe (both in-person and via Zoom) by the theater company's tech side about designing and building sets, props, lighting and all the other sides to a production that are crucial to the way it looks and feels but, if working properly, you might not even notice.
And the Tuesday poem...
A noiseless patient spider,I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.And you O my soul where you stand,Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
— "A Noiseless Patient Spider,"
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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.
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