GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sun, then increasing clouds and a chance of showers. A low pressure system slowly making its way through the region is going to keep things unsettled today. We'll start with mostly sunny skies, but more clouds will move in this afternoon, with a chance of rain late in the day and evening. Highs today will struggle to reach 60; lows around 40.Looking out. Because nothing says fall quite like getting some elevation.
Here's the view toward Ascutney from the fire tower atop Smarts Mountain yesterday morning, from Garret Heaton. As he writes: "Glorious."
Here's the view on the way to Lucia's Overlook in Pillsbury State Forest in Washington, NH, from Jill Wilson.
And here's a panorama atop Mt. Hunger Sunday morning in Worcester, VT, looking toward NH.
And looking up. Because Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is nearing Earth and according to the NYT's Katrina Miller (gift link), it's going to be at its brightest this evening, though it'll be visible for the rest of the month. The visitor from the Oort Cloud was only first detected in early 2023, so no one's quite sure how bright it will turn out to be. If the clouds allow, find a dark location just after sunset tonight and look low in the sky toward where the sun set (binoculars may help, but, obviously, wait until the sun's really gone). The comet will be higher in the sky in coming days, but also a bit fainter.Dartmouth fires family giving coordinator after learning of guilty plea on child porn charges. Marc Jacques actually signed onto a plea deal with the NH US Attorney's Office back in March, but didn't notify the college, reports Annabelle Zhang in The Dartmouth; according to college spokesperson Kathryn Kennedy, the HR department didn't learn of it until Sept. 18, and Jacques was fired the next day. Jacques first began working for the college as a contract employee for a temp agency—several months after the feds found “'apparent' child sexual abuse material" in a search of his home, Zhang writes.Fairlee, Lyme, Thetford locals reflect as highway and bridge due to reopen. The Bradford-Fairlee stretch of I-91 South is slated to reopen early next month, and as you know, the Lyme-E. Thetford bridge is expected to start carrying traffic again Nov. 15. In the Valley News, Emma Roth-Wells checks in with business owners in the three most-affected towns. In E. Thetford, Bonnie Huggett tells her, “I couldn’t believe one bridge like that would take so many customers away." Cedar Circle also saw a drop in customers, but a partnership with the Lyme Country Store helped. Meanwhile, upriver, Fairlee saw increased traffic from both closures: a boon to stores and the diner, a pain for others.SPONSORED: An evening with the fabulous “little orchestra” Pink Martini at Lebanon Opera House on Sunday, October 20. Featuring lead singer China Forbes and a dozen musicians, Pink Martini’s upbeat multilingual repertoire effortlessly zigzags between classical, jazz, and pop. According to bandleader/pianist Thomas Lauderdale, “Pink Martini is a rollicking around-the-world musical adventure. If the United Nations had a house band in 1962, hopefully we’d be that band.” Get your tickets now—there aren't many left! Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.Looking for a book with cozy fall vibes? Then the Yankee Bookshop's Kari Meutsch has a recommendation—a witch romance. In this week's Enthusiasms, she singles out D.L. Soria's The Cottage Around the Corner, set in a normal small town with things like farmers markets and small businesses and local politics and selectboard meetings—and a young witch named Charlie Sparrow who's trying to save her family shop from the "the flashy and powerful mages" who've moved to town and are trying to horn in on the spell business. Only there's one of them who's caught her eye...From a crayon doodle on the back of a menu to full-blown album. A few weeks ago, Demo Sofronas—who works as a school crossing guard as well as writing his About Norwich blog—got into a conversation with Lisa Piccirillo as she was heading to Marion Cross. The songwriter, Tricksters band member, and music teacher gave him a postcard about the debut next week of her new album, RADIATE (you heard a sample on Monday); Demo invited her to explain just how the album came about and talk about her Oct. 18 release party, which she does on his latest blog post.At Dartmouth, accelerating work on vaccines and on "how to turn vaccines into vaccination." That's the focus of the Dartmouth International Vaccine Initiative, which recently got a $1 million grant from the Byrne Foundation to bring teams from a variety of disciplines together, writes Dartmouth News's Harini Barath. Among the efforts: stabilizing coronavirus spike proteins to use as vaccine antigens; advice on how to use Operation Warp Speed as a model; developing a Covid-19 nasal vaccine; and finding a way to create a flu vaccine that works against current and emerging strains.
SPONSORED: Free silent films with live organ accompaniment! On Friday, Oct. 25, gear up for Halloween with TWO classic silent films with live organ! Legendary Boston-based organist Peter Krasinski improvises a soundtrack in real time for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney, and Buster Keaton's 1921 short The Haunted House—a great option for younger children. No tickets required: Come as you are or in costume. At the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College in Hanover—shows at 6:30pm (The Haunted House) and 7:00pm (Hunchback). Sponsored by CCDC.Out there in the woods this week, garter snakes and lady beetles getting ready for winter. You hope those lady beetles (you may know them as ladybugs) are out in the woods, anyway, because if they're gathering in the corners of your house, Elise Tillinghast writes in this week's "This Week in the Woods", they're probably invasive “Halloween” or Asian lady beetles, which can get noxious if you try to remove them. Native lady beetles, on the other hand, are "quietly living their lives" in the fields and the woods. Meanwhile, snakes are happy to share a hibernaculum with other species—as long as it's warm.NH's Black Mountain ski area sold; alpine and xc resorts gear up. Black, considered the state's oldest ski area still in operation, has been owned by the Fichera family since 1995. But at a packed community meeting on Saturday, Indy Pass managing director Erik Mogensen announced that Indy Pass and its owner, Entabeni Systems, have bought it, with an eye to running it for a year then turning it into a community-owned coop. Meanwhile, writes NH Business Review's Paul Briand, pretty much everyone out there—Sunapee, Whaleback, Gunstock, Jackson, Great Glen...—is boosting snowmaking.In NH free speech case over transgender athletes, a legal "jump ball." The federal court case stems from a Sept. 17 girls soccer game in Bow, when a small group of parents wore pink armbands to protest the presence of a transgender player—Parker Tirrell—on the visiting Plymouth team. They were served no trespassing orders. Yesterday, a US District Court judge allowed one to return to his daughter's games as long as he doesn't protest. But the larger free speech questions remain, writes Ethan DeWitt in a helpful explainer in NH Bulletin. Including: "Are school districts allowed to restrict the speech of parents who protest against transgender athletes’ participation in sports?" For VT's Clean Heat Standard, a "murky" future. If you've struggled to understand it, you're not the only one. But Canary Media's Carrie Klein is up with a useful synopsis. The policy is aimed at dinging VT's fossil fuel suppliers for their emissions and helping residents pay for cleaner heating sources. Last week, though, the PUC—charged with coming up with the details—essentially said that a key piece of the law, creating a credit market for fossil fuel suppliers, is a lost cause and urged moving to a fee-based approach. There's a lot more to come: The PUC's rules are due in January—and then lawmakers vote.In St. J, new eateries in seasoned spots. Seven Days' Suzanne Podhaizer takes us to two new restaurants guided by experienced foodies. In May, Boule Bakery owners DJ and Katey McLaughlin opened Birches in the former Kingdom Table. They're developing a menu filled with local ingredients and dishes like seafood burgers and citrus-glazed trout. In June, The Buttery, owned by Maggie Gray and Gavin Wynkoop-Fischer, moved into the former Cosmic Cup Café spot—with natural wines, specialty pantry items, and a café with coffee and tea from Vermont suppliers. An evening menu is in the works. All in a day's work: Turning 3,000 pounds of peanuts into 400 jars of peanut butter. That's what Adriana Munch and Christopher Rossi do every Thursday at the Food Venture Center in Hardwick, VT as they produce Green Mountain Peanut Butter for grocery shelves across New England—and for the Skinny Pancake's locations, writes Natalie Bankmann in a profile for UVM's Community News Service. Munch, who grew up in Costa Rica, dry roasts and double blends her peanuts, which she brings in from Georgia—and hopes to move her growing business into its own kitchen soon.Yikes! I missed the Notch's lone stuckage of the year! It happened Sept. 26, when a tour bus somehow made it through the chicanes meant to keep big vehicles from entering Smugglers Notch on Route 108. It got stuck. In foliage season. You can imagine. But as WCAX's Sophia Thomas reports at the burgundy link, other than that the chicanes are working—that's been the only incident so far. It's the lowest number on record, and VTrans officials are pretty happy. The one bummer, Corey Dockser reported for VT Public last week: Revenues are way down for the Stowe Rotary's Stuck Truck Raffle.You could spend nine hours climbing a 14,700-foot tall Swiss alp and then climb back down. Or you could just fly down. Johannes Grasser, a wingsuit daredevil, chose the second option—after he and his climbing buddy spent the night at 12,634 feet in a remote alpine shelter. And since Grasser happened to be toting a pair of GoPro Minis on his helmet, we get to see (and hear) his 21,843-foot flight, which hit speeds of 111 miles per hour. It's breathtaking.
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We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
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Zaidi will be in conversation with Melody Burkins, who directs the college's Institute of Arctic Studies, and Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vp at the League of Conservation Voters, on "Meeting the Climate Moment: Rebuilding our Middle Class & Accelerating American Manufacturing and Innovation." 6:30 in Haldeman 41.
The two award-winning writers like to write short. They'll be reading from—and talking about—their new collections: Pokrass, who's founding editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series, from her selection of flash stories and prose poems,
First Law of Holes
; and Friedman, who lives in Lebanon, from
Broken Signals
, with prose poems and micro stories of 300 words or less. 7 pm.
Tapper, who lives in Bolton, VT, is a forester and a writer (including a column in
Northern Woodlands
). His debut book "walks us through the fragile and resilient community that is a forest," the publicity runs, arguing that tending an ecosystem is hard and complicated work, and that "bittersweet acts--like loving deer and hunting them, loving trees and felling them--can be expressions of compassion." 7 pm.
Rescheduled from a few weeks ago, I'll be talking local media, the challenges and opportunities it faces, and why it all matters. 7 pm in the Center at Eastman's Draper Room.
. They're becoming regulars!
And let's head into the day with...
Ska. Sort of. Jaune Toujours is a Belgian band that as a reviewer wrote recently, isn't "West-Indian-wannabe or pastiche, [it] just celebrates the great fun and usefulness of the rhythm in its own distinctive way." They sing in both French and English, and
just
dropped a new album.
ciascuno ha un pazzo nelle manica" or "Sunday: Everyone has a fool up their sleeve".
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, writers, and librarians who think you should 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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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