GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
A bit warmer, faint chance of snow. There's an "Alberta Clipper" moving through—a low pressure system out of the western provinces—but whatever snow does fall will most likely be to our north. After a very cold start to the day, highs will hit the mid-30s, but winds from the south will add to wind chills. There's new arctic air coming in, so the overnight low in the mid-20s is just a way-station to tomorrow's teens.It doesn't look like this any more. But boy, the pre-storm black ice on the river on Sunday looked remarkable. And, as captured by photographer Kata Sasvari and her drone, quite magical as the sun set and the moon rose.About those snowfall amounts... "As a climate scientist and snow lover, I always wondered, 'Why don't they just put those spotter snowfall data on a map?' Well, they finally did (a year or so ago)," writes Dartmouth Earth Sciences prof Erich Osterberg. He sends a much better link than the two I included yesterday—the slider at the top lets you see snowfall amounts as long as 72 hours ago, sometimes the data includes elevation... and you can go check out, say, the Sierra if you feel like it (for recent snowfall, not total depth).About that bridge... "It is Sayre—not Sayre’s—Bridge," Thetford's Sally Duston writes about the damaged covered bridge in town. "There were two brothers who had a mill business there (called, yes - Sayre Brothers!! 1883 to around 1911). And they didn’t own the bridge—just used the waterfall. In reality, it has been called the Center (first, Centre) Bridge more commonly, but it shows up on bridge lists as some version of Sayre. So we stuck with that for the new signs." As Sharon Harkay's photo of a sign damaged in the accident attests.About that cardinal... Writer and naturalist Ted Levin checks in on yesterday's photo to say, "Awesome looking bird! But . . . it's a leucistic cardinal, not an albino. Albinos have absolutely no trace of color. Leucistic animals are very, very pale with patches of color. There have been sightings of leucistic red-tailed hawks in Norwich-Thetford-Haverhill-Plainfield off and on for 40+ years, which I guess means the recessive genes are in our UV population.""They are not only the front line; they are the last line separating the sick from the dead." "They" are the staff putting in brutal days in DHMC's ICU, and they, like ICU medical director Jeffrey Munson, are tired, frustrated, and sad, Munson writes. Instead of handing out Covid advice, though, he's written something else: "I want to say out loud what I am willing to do." Which is, basically, to take care of the sick no matter who they are. "No one deserves what COVID does," he writes. "And for those who cannot survive, I will do everything I can to ensure that they do not suffer, and I will grieve their loss."Feds charge Springfield man with bank robbery, suspected in string of armed robberies. The specific charge against Samuel Colby, 39, relates to the Jan. 8 robbery of the 802 Credit Union in Springfield, according to a press release yesterday from the VT US Attorney's Office. Colby is a suspect in five robberies that took place in Springfield and Westminster Jan. 6-14, including at the Allen Brothers Farm Market in Westminster, the Circle K on Missing Link Road in Springfield earlier that day, and the People’s United Bank on Main Street in Springfield last week.SPONSORED: This Upper Valley artisan made food history! Blake Hill Preserves co-owner Vicky Allard shares her excitement after winning three US Good Food Awards. “These awards are very meaningful to us," she says. "The winners are selected through rigorous taste testing as being some of the most delicious artisan products made in the US today in a sustainable and socially responsible way.” With over 2,000 entries from across the country, this year’s winners represent the forefront of American craft food. Check out our THREE Winners across THREE Categories! Sponsored by Blake Hill Preserves.A quarter century after Leb began facing the music on sewer contamination, it's in the clear. The problem, writes Claire Potter in the Valley News, was overflow through combined stormwater/sewage pipes dumping millions of gallons a year of contaminated water into area rivers. The EPA first acted in 1996 and issued a consent decree in 2009. Now, $71 million later and with the city still paying off its debts, the decree's been lifted. Even so, the city faces an estimated $25 million more in repairs and upgrades to its water and sewer system, including pipes that date to the 1930s.Go inside the breathtaking “Bank Barn” home in Woodstock. It manages to be both deeply familiar—in the box shape of a typical VT barn, built into a hillside—and entirely original. Seven Days’ Amy Lilly gives it a close-up, reading like a warm invitation into the masterfully designed home of Marc and Lana Reuss. No ordinary farm building, it features full-length windows wrapping around most of the first floor, flooding the living space with natural light. Builders had to install the 16,000-lb. steel floating staircase by crane. Down to the home’s smallest detail, it’s a work of art. And yes, there are photos."I’m a 24-year-old straight male and I’m unattractive, and I’m/pregnant, and I'm a big fat liar, so I’m at a loss, Dan..." That's from a poem by Hannes Bajohr, built from Dan Savage's venerable sexual-advice column, "Savage Love." Bajohr's got a playful sense of humor, and the machine-generated poems in his collection Blanks pull from an array of sources—including, Rena Mosteirin writes in this week's Enthusiasms, sentences in Grimm's Fairy Tales with the word "kill." "Poetry is everywhere," Rena writes. "After reading this book, you might start to see poems in every text you encounter."“The set is a nightmare. I mean, I like a challenge, but, my goodness.” David Stern is a veteran set designer, the founder of the new southern VT theater company Wild Goose Players—and director of Food & Shelter, a new play by former NHPR reporter and playwright/tv-scriptwriter Sean Hurley that premieres in Putney Friday. The play centers on a couple who find themselves in a cabin in the snow-covered woods "with more secrets than a Chinese puzzle box," writes Jim Lowe in the Rutland Herald. It's complex, magical realist, and funny, Stern tells him. "It's the best original script I've ever seen." Do you really save energy by turning down the thermostat at night? Granite Geeker David Brooks wanted a definitive answer, after seeing strong arguments both ways: overnight savings vs furnaces burning less efficiently as they heat the house back up. So he turned to Alexis Abramson, an engineer, energy expert, and dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School. She doesn't hesitate. "Whenever you set the thermostat lower, you are saving energy—no matter what," she tells Brooks. Who delves into why that's so—and why heat pumps and electric heating are the future.Flush with federal cash, VT's Phil Scott proposes $7.7 billion budget. In the first step of the budget process, the governor yesterday laid out proposals for boosting housing, expanding broadband, funding infrastructure, building climate change resiliency, and cutting taxes for a variety of Vermonters, including military veterans, nurses, and child care workers. As VTDigger's Lola Duffort writes, Scott's proposals still have the legislature to contend with. But even so, Senate Pres. Becca Balint said at a press conference, "It’s incredible to be able to sit and listen to a budget address that isn’t about cuts." Metarhizium anisopliae to the rescue? It's an entomopathogenic fungus, which is a fancy way of saying that if you're an insect, you don't want it inside you. Cheryl Sullivan, an entomologist at UVM, is experimenting to see if it and similar fungi might be effective against winter ticks, the scourge of VT and NH moose populations. One local strain killed 89 percent of tick larvae within three weeks. "It is nice to know that when moose are faced with swarms of miniature vampires, they might be helped in the battle by microscopic vampire hunters," writes Rachel Sargent Mirus in Northern Woodlands.
Major climate shifts helped trigger social and political tumult. A recent revolution in climate science technology, writes Woodstock journalist Jacques Leslie for Yale Environment 360 (here via Wired), has allowed scientists to pinpoint with much greater precision when climate disruptions—caused, say, by volcanoes or prolonged droughts—occurred. And historians are correlating those dates: An Alaskan volcano's eruption in 43 BCE, for instance, lines up with the end of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom, and may have "hastened the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire," Leslie writes.“My dream is the world’s most powerful T-shirt cannon.” From Jimmy Kimmel’s lips to Mark Rober’s ears to stupefying reality. Remember Rober, the squirrel obstacle-course guy? Well, he’s at it again, this time to design a projectile launcher that can send a T-shirt not just into the crowd but to the farthest deck of an NFL stadium. Because that’s what Jimmy Kimmel wants. Swapping gunpowder for compressed air to power his cannon, Rober leans on the troubleshooting genius of a 12-year-old named Anthony, and what they come up with could probably send a T-shirt into orbit.
And the numbers...
Dartmouth's cases have fallen slightly. The college's dashboard last night reported 578 active undergrad cases (+45 since last Thursday), 58 among grad and professional students (-43), and 61 among faculty/staff (-18). There have been 1,037 combined new cases among students over the previous seven days, as well as 134 among faculty/staff. 489 students are isolating on campus, 147 are isolating off-campus, and 80 faculty/staff are in isolation.
NH reported 2,177 new cases Friday, 2,901 Saturday, 5,511 Sunday (yes, a record by a long shot), 2,800 Monday, and 1,785 yesterday, bringing its total to 250,581. There were 34 deaths reported over that time, bringing the total to 2,085. The state reports 20,045 active cases (-2,705 since its Thursday numbers) and 409 (-23) hospitalizations. NH tallies 1,342 (-124) active cases in Grafton County, 520 (-12) in Sullivan, and 2,106 (-301) in Merrimack. In town-by-town numbers, the state says Hanover has 484 (+47), Claremont has 190 (+25), Lebanon has 152 (-25), New London has 94 (-15), Newport has 89 (+10), Haverhill has 62 (+7), Sunapee has 52 (-7), Grantham has 50 (-35), Canaan has 48 (-4), Charlestown has 43 (-2), Enfield has 41 (-19), Plainfield has 35 (-6), Newbury has 21 (-1), Orford has 19 (+1), Grafton has 17 (-1), Rumney has 15 (-8), Warren has 11 (-3), Springfield has 9 (-4), Cornish has 9 (-3), Wilmot has 9 (+4), Lyme has 7 (-12), Croydon has 6 (-2), Piermont has 5 (-5), Wentworth has 5 (-3), and Dorchester, Orange, and Unity have 1-4 each.
VT reported 2,373 cases last Friday, 1,784 Saturday, 2,217 Sunday, 806 Monday, and 715 yesterday,bringing its total to 92,198. There have been 9 deaths reported since Friday, with the total now at 499. As of yesterday, 116 people with confirmed cases were hospitalized (+25 since Friday), with 26 of them (-2) in the ICU. Windsor County has had 382 new cases added since Friday, for a total of 6,179 for the pandemic and 871 new cases over the past two weeks; Orange County gained 134 cases, with 396 over the past two weeks for a total of 2,640. In town-by-town numbers reported late last week, Hartford added 177 new cases over the week before, Springfield +161, Randolph +65, Windsor +61, Thetford +54, Woodstock +44, Norwich +42, Bradford +40, Bethel +38, Killington and Hartland +36, Royalton +34, Cavendish +27, Fairlee +26, Chelsea +25, Newbury +21, Weathersfield +19, Tunbridge +15, Vershire +12, Sharon +11, Bridgewater and Corinth +9, Strafford and W. Windsor +7, Reading +6, Barnard +5, W. Fairlee +3, and Pomfret +2. Overall, there was a one-week gain of 992 cases in VT's Upper Valley towns, far above the previous week's 524.
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At noon today, the VT Historical Society's winter speaker series hosts U of Minnesota history prof Jean M. O'Brien for an online lecture, "Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England." In her book of the same title, O'Brien, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe tribe, writes about her exhaustive research into local histories in New England published from the 1820s to the 1880s and their preoccupation with asserting the civilizing influence of Anglo-European settlers and the disappearance of Native Americans from the scene.
As of yesterday afternoon there were just a few places left for today's 5:30 pm online movement workshop with Urban Bush Women, who are prepping for their Hop performances this weekend. You'll need to call the box office at 603.646.2422 to see if there are any spots.
At 6 pm, it's Dartmouth's annual MLK Celebration keynote event, with Dr. Robert S. Harvey, a writer, public scholar, and superintendent of East Harlem Scholars Academies, a community-based network of public charter schools.
You may remember an item last month about Calais writer Rowan Jacobsen and his latest book,Truffle Hound. This evening at 6, the North Branch Nature Center hosts Jacobsen online for a deep dive into truffles, their role in the forest ecosystem, their place in culinary lore and tradition, and, of course, their place on the plate.
At 6:30 this evening, the Hartland Public Library is hosting a virtual cooking class with the Korean Spirit Culture Promotion Project, focused on how to make Japchae (noodles with vegetables) and on the health benefits of traditional Korean meals. You'll need to register in advance—and the library will send you a list of ingredients and the recipe. Scroll down for the listing.
At 7 pm, the Norwich Bookstore hosts an online conversation with two VT writers, poet and short-fiction writer Rebecca Starks and short-story writer Genevieve Plunkett. Starks' latest collection, Fetch, Muse, is a book-length set of poems that revolve around adopting, living with, and ultimately giving up a dog. Plunkett's Prepare Her deals with young women at critical points in their lives.
You tend to associate the ukulele with the southern Pacific, not the Canadian far north, but it's the instrument of choice for Aasiva, the stage name of Nunavut-based singer-songwriter Colleen Nakashuk. She's been having a moment in her home province lately, and the reason she's in this slot today is her song, "Play in the Snow." Here she is a couple of years ago on the CBC show q, live on stage in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, which is not only the smallest provincial capital (by population) in the country, but the only one not connected to other places by a highway.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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