Daybreak Wednesday 10/6/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Remember that high pressure? Well, it's arriving. The result is going to be a nice period of warmer temps and generally dry conditions. Today's the transition. It'll start out foggy in the usual spots, then cloudy, and then get sunny over the course of the morning. Highs today around 70, lows tonight in the lower 40s, barely any wind to speak of.Mist rising, sun breaking through... Parting morning mists are one of the gifts of this season. As you can see from:

Just in case you're wondering... From 7 am until noon today, Leb police and firefighters, along with their counterparts from surrounding towns, are going to be doing a training exercise up by the airport. So if you notice swarms of "personnel and emergency vehicles," as the city puts it, that's why. All roads, businesses, and the airport will remain open.SPONSORED: Healthy volunteers, ages 18-45, needed for research study. This is a clinical research study at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to test a new, live oral polio vaccine in healthy adults. We have wiped out 99 percent of polio from the world. We need a new, effective, safe vaccine to take us all the way. Compensation is provided. To learn more, please email [email protected], call (603) 650-1383, or click on the maroon link. Sponsored by DHMC.“We have always known Filippo to be one of a kind.” That's Hopkins Center director Mary Lou Aleskie heaping praise on Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra music director Filippo Ciabatti. Ciabatti just took the college division prize from The American Prize in Conducting, which is devoted to drawing attention to excellence in classical music conducting and performance around the country. Ciabatti tells Dartmouth News he’s delighted by the orchestra’s performers, most of whom are not music majors. “Yet they are able to achieve incredible musical results,” he says. “It is a privilege making music with them.”Enthusiasms: A "short burst of a novel." If you dropped by Daybreak last Wednesday, you'll remember that today's the day for a new weekly feature, a rotating cast of locals who've got stuff they really want you to know about. Today it's novelist, short story writer, and essayist Peter Orner, who's been re-reading Shirley Hazzard, the great Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and, hmm, essayist. Orner's especially taken by Hazzard's first novel, The Evening of the Holiday. "I've not finished re-reading it and I've found myself, this week, rationing out the pages," he writes; "Hazzard is that good."As nonprofits adapt to pandemic, so does fundraising. Case in point, writes Liz Sauchelli in the VN: Good Beginnings. The 35-year-old organization, which helps new moms, shifted to online mentoring instead of home visits and "social strolling" on the Lebanon Mall, since "the normal playground and the ways they usually would meet people weren’t happening anymore," in the words of director Karen Morton. Next week, Sauchelli reports, a group of local women who organize non-profit fundraisers are holding a "pop-up block party" where people can drop off diapers, gift cards, gas cards, and other items.Tangled NH court case in the making? School boards are starting to get petitioned to hold special meetings on mask mandates, reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson. Most of the petitions come from a template pushed by a nonprofit in Windham devoted to "government accountability and parental rights," and statewide groups fighting mask and vaccine mandates are encouraging members to show up at the meetings in support. However, Gibson reports, some school boards are denying the requests, and some school attorneys say voters don't have the right to overrule the boards on certain policy issues.Is dry-land sled-dog racing an oxymoron? Here's hoping not, because as New England winters change, it's likely to become more common, writes Benjamin Domaingue in the Concord Monitor. Winter racing has been moving north as reliable snow has become problematic to the south, and racers have found themselves competing with snowmobiles for trails. “The further north the snow goes, the further north the snow machines and the ATVs go,” says the head of the state mushers' association. The problem, says one musher: dry-land rigs just aren't that much fun.Do not—repeat, not—put these on your bucket list. The website Eat This, Not That, which purports to promote healthy eating, has just come out with "The Unhealthiest Restaurant in Every State." It's like a guide to the infinite depths of the American culinary imagination—restaurants that specialize in frying everything in beef tallow, burgers topped with peanut butter, two-foot-long hot dogs... NH's winner: KC's Rib Shack in Manchester, which serves its Feedbag Shovel on...a shovel. In VT, the crown goes to Burlington's Handy's Lunch and its five-layers-of-meat-and-cheese Chuck Norris. "If we are in a bathtub that is overflowing with....carbon emissions, we have to do several things simultaneously." Bradford state rep Sarah Copeland Hanzas illustrates the tension at the heart of VT's efforts to curb the impact of climate change. As Grace Benninghoff and Emma Cotton write in VT Digger, the state's Climate Action Plan is due to the legislature by Dec. 1. Some worry it will focus too heavily on emissions reduction and too little on adaptation—infrastructure investments to protect local communities. Urging a balanced approach, one drafter reminds us that “the impacts that we know will be exacerbated over the next several decades…are already here.”VT hopes daily antigen testing can keep kids in school. The idea is that, rather than send schoolkids who've been exposed to a Covid case home, they could go to school each day as long as they're not symptomatic, writes Erin Petenko in VTDigger; after seven days of negative results, they'd be in the clear. The problem, Education Secy Dan French says: “The major bottleneck for implementing testing will be staffing." The model is already in place in MA, UT, and individual school districts in OH, GA, and other states."Lazy Lady" busy making some of the finest goat cheese anywhere. Artisan cheesemaking peers of Laini Fondiller regard her as a legend. One recalls her first taste of Fondiller’s work as “probably better than anything I’d had [from France].” Melissa Pasanen writes in Seven Days about how the dairy farmer and founder of Lazy Lady Farm in Westfield, VT has quietly—over the last three decades—become one of the most influential makers of European-style goat cheese, at least this side of the Atlantic. On-farm cheesemaking was nearly obsolete in the US until Fondiller started milking her first goat.Now you can put your money where your, er, money is. For the last few years, the US Mint has been designing and creating one-dollar coins highlighting "American Innovation," with the eventual aim of a coin for each state. It's Vermont's turn, and WPTZ's got a pic: a young woman snowboarder pulling a trick in front of a backdrop of conifers and ski trails. The coin honors the state's—and, in particular, Jake Burton's—contribution to the sport. It's due out next year. NH's coin, featuring Ralph Baer's first-ever in-home video game, debuted in June.Canadian north-south expedition reaches asphalt. Ever since March, we've been dipping in occasionally as a team of adventurers attempts to ski, paddle, and bike 4,700 miles from the Canadian Arctic to southern Ontario. Well, the ski part's long done and they made it through the canoe portion—but just barely: The winds were so fierce, they had to batten down for days, going through precious rations. Then they had a bear of an unplanned portage—and a chase by a muskox. But now, reports Martin Walsh on Explorers Web, they've made it to pavement and bicycles. Only 2,400 miles to go.Trash cans, sure. Bird feeders, of course. But a GoPro? Bears can figure out plenty of human-made objects. Now it looks like we can add video to the mix. A couple of weeks ago, a guy named Dylan Schilt, who lives in Wyoming, was out in the mountains bow hunting. He stumbled on a GoPro that he'd lost some months before. He got home, charged it up... and found himself (give it a few seconds) staring at the snout of a black bear that had somehow managed to turn it on while trying to figure out just what it was. Link goes to Facebook (which you can see without logging in, just hit "not now"). Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:

There's no way to slap a label on Hazmat Modine. For over two decades now, the NYC-based band has been mingling honky tonk, klezmer, jug-band blues, and jazz, playing with the likes of everyone from Kronos Quartet to Natalie Merchant, and forging its own sound out of, say, a sousaphone, guitar, banjo, and founder Wade Schuman's blowtorch of a harmonica (or maybe "blowtorch" should describe his singing voice?). Whatever, they're still going strong. Here they are a couple of weeks ago in their backyard in Harlem, with "Bahamut."See you tomorrow.

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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                                 About Michael

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