GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Heat wave! Well, upper 20s, anyway, though wind chills—even with a south wind—could still be uncomfortable. Still, those winds are bringing in warmer air, while a low pressure system adds in clouds, though we should also get some sun throughout the day. Only into the upper teens tonight.And you thought it was cold here... Up on Mt. Washington it was -30 yesterday morning, with wind chills somewhere in the -70s. In fact it was so cold that when one of the staff headed out for some spaghetti for breakfast... Oh, you'll just have to see for yourself. (On FB, but you don't need an account.)Moosilauke aglow. Meanwhile, lower down, the view from Thetford Hill as the sun settled late yesterday afternoon, by Rebecca Lafave.New Leb housing for grad students may be tough for grad students to snag. There are 309 units going up just south of DHMC, Lauren Azrin writes in The Dartmouth, with some construction scheduled to be done soon and the rest this summer. Grad students get first dibs, but, one points out, “the priority window is January to May, and most [first-year graduate] students don’t know that they’re going to even come to Dartmouth until April.” Also, he tells Azrin, they're expensive on a grad student's stipend.Meanwhile, developers propose 204 middle-income units across the road. The four-building project on Mt. Support Road would be aimed at residents earning 60 percent of the area’s median income, the Valley News's John Lippman reports. “We’re targeting nurses, we’re targeting technicians, we’re targeting police officers, all of those,” Manchester-based developer Dick Anagnost told the Lebanon Planning Board. He and Ken Braverman, a developer based in Burlington, told the board a three-member family could expect to pay $1,200 per month in rent.It's going to be a while before the E. Thetford-Lyme bridge gets fixed, and it just keeps deteriorating. The pics alone in Nick Clark's piece in Sidenote are enough to give you pause before driving across. NH says "supply chain" issues kept it from getting bids, but Clark talks to Thetford structural engineer Nick Fabrikant, who believes that the extensive deterioration plus a tough rehab process because the bridge is on the National Register of Historic Places is keeping contractors away. He argues the whole thing needs to be replaced. Plus a little primer on double span parker-truss bridges.As Dartmouth cases surge, college cuts restrictions. It had already decided to begin the term on time and to stick with in-person classes, shut down its quarantine housing, told students who tested positive to isolate in their rooms—even with roommates—and given students the option to withdraw for the term with a full refund if they did so by this past Monday. Now, sit-down dining has started up again. Students and faculty, writes Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger, are navigating it as best they can. Meanwhile, The Dartmouth reports, at least 11 percent of the undergrad population has tested positive in the last week.Upper Valleyites show up in the darndest places. Like, here's Gardening Guy Henry Homeyer in Subaru's Drive magazine. He's one of six Subaru-owning "community champions" they highlight—in Henry's case (second item), for organizing the monthly Senior Lunch at Cornish Town Hall, as well as Neighbor to Neighbor, a group of volunteers who help the elderly or disabled. As for gardening: “I think beauty is an essential human need. Just like food, air and water, we need beauty as well. So, by growing flowers – and plants overall – we’re creating beauty.” Oh, he drives a 2019 Crosstrek.(Thanks, AC!)The biggest environmental shift in Earth's history. That's how Dartmouth Earth scientist Sarah Slotznick describes what's known as the Great Oxygenation Event, which took place around 2.3 billion years ago—a billion years before the first plants and animals appeared. In recent years, the notion that the GOE was preceded by smaller "whiffs" of oxygen has been taking hold. But in a new paper, Slotznick and her team argue that the signs of earlier oxygen are a mirage, and that the GOE in fact happened (relatively) in one go. Rahul Rao summarizes it all in Popular Science.Mental health crisis phone line, mobile units go online in NH with little fanfare. The call center, with trained mental health staff who can dispatch a mobile crisis response team if needed, started up Jan. 1; it's aimed at helping keep people in crisis out of the emergency room, reports Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. “I think that this is a real turning point for us as a state," says Ken Norton, executive director of NAMI-NH. Each of the state's 10 community mental health centers is deploying a team. The 24-hour phone and text line is 1-833-710-6477; there's also a chat option at https://www.nh988.com/.
As temps drop, some fire safety advice. With the deadly Bronx fire thought to be tied to a faulty space heater fresh on people's minds, NHPR's Casey McDermott notes that NH data shows that heating equipment is a leading cause of fires in the state. She offers experts' safety advice on space heaters, fireplaces and wood stoves (and ash buckets)—and, of course, smoke alarms. State fire marshal Sean Toomey says, "I need to remind myself, even as state fire marshal, to make sure I check them in my own home periodically.”VT numbers still delayed, but hospitalizations rising. At a press conference yesterday, state officials said 8,200 people tested Jan. 6 and 7 waited days for their results after the reporting system failed as multiple IT systems "tried to reach the same database," reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko. The state expects to update its dashboard tomorrow with about 40,000 lab results from Jan. 7-10. Officials also announced that at 10 am today, residents can sign up for free rapid tests—two kits per household, as part of a pilot program with NIH and Amazon—to be delivered to homes; they'll make the link available at the main health department webpage or its testing page.A new VT pension reform plan—this time, maybe, with legs. You might recall that last year, an initial House proposal was pulled within days after a backlash from labor unions. Now, a task force of legislators and labor reps has come up with a new plan that, VTDigger's Lola Duffort writes, "has significant momentum behind it." It calls for some benefit reductions and higher contributions from state employees and teachers, and for a one-time $200 million contribution from the state as well as 50 percent of general-fund surpluses to help pay down the pension system's debts.American cheese: No longer "the butt of a global joke." Can't believe I missed this last month. In Food & Wine, David Landsel notes that a lot of Americans might not be aware of just how good cheeses here have gotten, but "Old World producers have been paying attention"—and investing. Landsel surveys "the top 50 U.S. cheesemakers" alphabeticallly—and, no surprise, Vermont (sorry, NH) figures prominently in the list. Consider Bardwell, Jasper Hill, Lazy Lady, Parish Hill, Shelburne Farms, Reading's Spring Brook Farm, Vermont Shepherd Creamery, and Von Trapp all come in for attention.“It’s very clear they want challenging courses, they want to push the athletes to the limits.” That's Thetford's John Morton, former Olympic biathlete and prominent trail designer, talking to the AP's Martha Bellisle for her story on the dangers of manmade snow to Nordic racers. Amazingly, the international federation tracks downhill injuries but provides no data for Nordic events. Since manmade snow is basically just ice, though, tight curves on downhills are becoming a concern. "When it is manmade snow, it is scary because instead of sliding on snow you’re sliding on ice,” says Jessie Diggins.Nature Photography of the Year to send your spirit soaring. Like the pink-footed geese in Norwegian photographer Terje Kolaas’ overall-winning image—not just a photo of their incredible multitudes but among them, on the wing—which the judges praised for its “novel perspective.” The same (and more) can be said of the 30 magnificent images in My Modern Met’s preview of 2021’s prize-winners. Arizona photographer Lea Lee Inoue took home the portfolio award for her intimate series focused on a family of round-tailed ground squirrels, showing “that these animals think, feel, and have emotions too.”When this penguin breaks away from the crowd… it really breaks away from the crowd. And once again, nature delivers a cautionary tale by way of aerial footage of a waddle of penguins racing along the water’s edge of some vast sheet of ice. See what can happen when you ditch your friends just to run on up ahead? How can you be sure the ground won’t, you know, break like a cracker and carry you out to sea? The video's a couple years old, but so much fun to see the little guy snap into action-hero mode...
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Today at noon, the Haven winds up its 40th Anniversary online lecture series on issues important to people who care about or are in poverty, with former longtime executive Sara Kobylenski. She'll be talking about "Finding Hope and Discovering Possibility: The Haven as Ever Steady and Ever Changing."
At 12:30, Hood Museum curators Jami Powell and Michael Hartman will lead an in-person tour of the new This Land exhibition. It's walk-in—no registration required—but per Dartmouth regs, masks, vaccination required.
At 5:30 pm, Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center and Dartmouth Women in Law and Politics are hosting an online panel on abortion rights and the future of reproductive rights in light of the Supreme Court's Texas ruling last year and its consideration of a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Panelists are Rutgers Law co-dean Kimberly Mutcherson and Florida State/Harvard Law prof and abortion-law historian Mary Ziegler.
At 6 pm, the North Branch Nature Center hosts an online presentation by Brattleboro-based naturalist Patti Smith on the decade she's spent following a single beaver clan on a brook in southeastern VT. Stories, photos, videos...and side excursions into the moose and other wildlife drawn to the habitat the beavers have created.
At 7 this evening, the Howe hosts an online discussion with Herman Tavani, a visiting scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. He'll be looking at the ethical issues raised by the convergence of information technology, biotech, and nanotechnology, discussing everything from privacy and informed consent to autonomy and property rights questions involving the ownership of genetic information that resides in databases.
Also at 7, the St. J Athenaeum kicks off a series of six talks by VT-based writers on how to move your written manuscript toward publication. These are not manuscript workshops, they say, but presentations on the resources you'll need and what the publishing world looks like at the moment. You can only sign up for one, so choose carefully! Tonight, it's Reeve Lindbergh talking about memoirs and history; down the road, presenters include Bill Schubart on fiction, Doreen Lyons on cookbooks and food books, and Archer and Margot Mayor on mysteries.
If you've wandered around the French Quarter in New Orleans anytime in the last few decades, you may have stopped for a few minutes to listen to a jazz clarinetist named Doreen Ketchens (though odds are good you never caught her name).
What you might not have picked up on is that she's a
renowned
jazz clarinetist who's performed for four presidents, at US embassies around the world, and in some pretty darn stately venues. Like, for instance,
with the Louisiana Philharmonic a few years ago.
(Thanks, TL!)
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.
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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