Daybreak Tuesday 6/30/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

On the ground, it's going to look a lot like yesterday. Up in the air, too: That low-pressure system's taken a liking to us. "Waves of moisture" will be rotating around it, which means it's likely to be raining off and on all day, with a chance of thunderstorms especially in the afternoon. Winds out of the northeast, temps getting into the mid-70s, and only dropping into the low/mid 60s overnight.In the reeds. That's where Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was recently—literally, not metaphorically. Taken by their reflection on still water, she was taking photos and thinking that it would look even better if one of the dragonflies flitting around happened into the frame... which, right then, one did. In the fen. Remember last week's item about the lady slipper orchids in the Cobb Forest in Strafford? They'll be around for a few more days, but in case you're not able to make it there, here's what they looked like on Sunday. 

In the weeds...

Seeing cases graphically. A reader asked yesterday if I'd provide bar graphs of case rates and related information. I'm afraid bogging down in metrics even deeper than I already do is beyond my bandwidth, but if you're in the visuals camp, you can keep track of the daily positive-test trends on the Johns Hopkins site. NH is here, and VT is here. (Thanks, TG!)Dartmouth lays out fall plans. In an email to students, faculty, and staff yesterday, the college said that the fall term will begin Sept. 14, with half of students allowed on campus each term. All returning students will be required to quarantine for two weeks after arriving and to take a mandatory virus test; students who don't want to do that can enroll in remote learning. Masks will be required in common spaces and large gatherings are prohibited; students who don't comply will be asked to leave campus. Undergrads will also leave as soon as fall classes end and take exams remotely. FAQs here.VLS won't have students back at all. At least, not for the fall. In a press release yesterday, Vermont Law School announced it will hold all fall classes online and offer a "January start" to first-year law students. "While Vermont is presently a low-risk state, the pandemic is continuing to rage in parts of the country where many VLS students live," the school explained. "This is a contributing factor to the decision. It could make travel more challenging and perhaps difficult for students to come to campus or return home."Red Logan Clinic looking for full-time dentist as volunteers dwindle. The free clinic in downtown WRJ depends on dental students to work under the supervision of about a dozen retired dentists. But some of those have been reluctant to return during the pandemic, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. As a result, the clinic is seeing fewer than a third of the patients it had before the pandemic, says Dr. Bob Alvarenga, the clinic's dental director, and he expects it to take up to six months to recruit a full-time supervising dentist.Green, blue & white: The colors of the Upper Valley? Greg Stone is what his partner fondly calls a "flag nerd." He grew up in Fairlee and now lives in Lyme, and likes to design flags. A while back he tried to change the Vermont state flag "due it's just a terrible design," but didn't have any luck. Now he's going public with his second new flag idea: an Upper Valley flag. "No matter which side of the river people live on, residents of the Upper Valley live their lives in both states," he notes, and feel closer to nearby towns across the river than to their state capitals. Why those colors? He explains at the link.You list-makers: Fame awaits! The world is divided, and those of you who scrawl shopping lists and to-do lists and laundry lists and emails-to-write lists and then leave them strewn around the house know who you are. Blogger Susan Apel is one of them (though I wouldn't presume to know about the strewing part), and in her latest Artful post she notes that Glover VT's whimsical Museum of Everyday Life is planning a list/note exhibition, hard on the heels of its knots exhibition, and is looking for accessions.  Forget humdrum cider vinegar... Try apple balsamic. Writing for the Vermont Almanac, Virginia Barlow profiles Vershire's Side Hill Cider Mill and its owner, Neil Hochstedler, who's happened onto a line of cider vinegar he's only found produced two other places: Ireland and MA. Balsamic cider vinegar begins with boiling apple juice to a sweet syrup, which is then blended with cider vinegar and aged in wooden barrels. Hochstedler, a machinist, uses modified aquarium pumps to aerate and a converted carpet steamer to shrink the sleeves on the bottle caps.red birds in the trees/hopping springtails (not fleas)/skunk smell in the breeze? That's Elise Tillinghast's summary of the latest "this week" Northern Woodlands post. We're on the cusp of July, and this week in the woods there's a lot! Scarlet tanagers are out, partridgeberry is blooming and so are flowering raspberries. Skunks are definitely around, and so are the butterflies known as silver-spotted skippers. As for those springtails, you probably know them as snow fleas and they never went away. Like, not anytime in the last 390 million years, it appears. Are you an NH small business that's innovated through the pandemic? The NH News Collaborative's Kelly Burch is working on a series about how small businesses are coping, and is looking for Upper Valley firms (on the east side of the river) that are evolving to stay afloat. Form at the link.Never mind drought, what about floods? The Brooklyn-based First Street Foundation has just released a new, comprehensive report on flood risk for each state, county, and city, based on a model developed by a consortium of university researchers around the country. The model will also feed a flood-risk app for each parcel in the country that will be tied into Realtor.com. In the meantime, the report finds many more properties at risk than FEMA's current model: 64,900 properties in NH at substantial risk of flooding (more than double FEMA's figure) and 39,700 in VT, almost 27,000 more than FEMA shows. Many details and datasets at the link. “We’re seeing a 20 percent rise in failures." That's Robert Tardiff, who runs NH's Subsurface Systems Bureau, talking to the Monitor's David Brooks about things you really don't want to fail: septic systems. The news in the story is that more people using sinks and flushing toilets throughout the day, along with lots more cleanser use, is straining systems. But along the way, Tardiff via Brooks offers a primer in how your septic system works, how they're designed, and why you really want to keep those bacteria happy.NH Senate passes "red flag" bill, sends it off for likely veto. The measure would allow relatives or police to petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from someone deemed a risk to themselves or others, and had already passed the House. Senators voted along party lines, 14-10, in favor. Gov. Chris Sununu has said he "doesn’t support any changes to New Hampshire gun laws," the AP's Holly Ramer writes.VT Secy of State's office gets seven times as many requests for absentee ballots as in 2018. And early voting for the Aug. 11 primary just started yesterday. “I think we’re going to have a strong turnout compared to usual,” Secy of State Jim Condos tells VTDigger's Kit Norton. His office began sending out postcards last week inviting all active registered voters to request a primary ballot, but you can also go here to check your status and request a ballot. Invisible Man began in a Vermont barn. Ralph Ellison was 31 at the time, on leave from the Merchant Marine because of illness, and he decided to recuperate on the farm of a couple he'd met in Harlem, John and Amelie Bates. Their place was—and still is, though it's their grandson's now—in Fayston, by Mt. Ellen. Sitting in the barn, Ellison said in a later interview, “I wrote the first sentence of what later became Invisible Man: ‘I am an invisible man.’ And I played with that, started to reject it, but it intrigued me and I began to put other things with it. Pretty soon I had a novel going.” VPR's Anna Van Dine has more.Don't watch this if you get vertigo. Back in 1929 and 1930, as NYC's Chrysler Building was on its way to becoming the tallest skyscraper in the world (a title it held for only a year until the Empire State Building was finished), a crew from Fox Movietone News filmed the roughnecks building it. As Aeon says, they were "less comfortable delivering canned lines for the cameras than they were sitting atop beams hundreds of feet high." In case you've wondered how those huge art-deco eagles got there, it involved a lot of banging.

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Reading Deeper

It is noon in the living roomWe are rowing through a blueThat is a feeling mostly The way drifting greenlyUnder real trees Is a feeling near holy

-- From "Still Life with Invisible Canoe" by Idra Novey

(Thanks, ML!)

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