GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Reminder: No Daybreak tomorrow or Friday. Time for the basics: friends, family, and pie. You, too, could use a break, I’m guessing.
Cloudy, warm, chance of showers. The air that surged in from the south yesterday, along with the warm front that came through last night, will boost temps into the low or mid 50s today before a cold front follows along tonight into tomorrow, dropping things back to normal over the next few days. Slight chance of drizzle all day, rising to a chance of rain later tonight. Lows in the mid-to-low 30s or below.
Life in the trees.
For starters, there’s Larry Morin’s fantastic photo of his stare-off with a barred owl in Plainfield. “As curious of me as I was of him/her,” he writes.
And then Corlan Johnson’s brief video of a pileated woodpecker going to town on the grapes hanging off a tree in the Dan & Whit’s parking lot in Norwich.
Life on the ground. The driver of a Frito-Lay snack truck hit a tractor-trailer on I-89 in Lebanon yesterday morning at mile marker 53.4—right at commute time. The truck flipped on its side, “spilling bags of chips in the roadway,” writes Valley News photographer Jennifer Hauck, who caught a splendid photo of it being righted. The cab caught fire—here’s WMUR with a photo sent in by a passerby. The driver was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The southbound highway was closed for a couple of hours until around 8:40 am.
Pellegrino’s Farmer’s Market and Italian Deli opens in downtown Lebanon. The market, with meats, cheeses, pasta, produce, and a made-to-order menu of hot and cold dishes, once again brings a place to shop for food—albeit in a specialty shop—to downtown Leb, which has lacked one since the Village Marketplace closed in 2018, writes Marion Umpleby in the VN. The deli is helmed by chef Matteo Buck, who is originally from northern Italy and worked at the Pellegrinos’ Enfield market before it closed. Meanwhile Umpleby reports, an 11-stall food court in the same building next to the fire station is stalled, as is an apartment complex slated to go on top.
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For middle-grade readers, two “realistic portraits of challenging times.” In this week’s Enthusiasms, Liza Bernard points to Jacqueline Woodson Remember Us, about a 12-year-old girl growing up in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section in the 1970s, when it was beset by arson; and Daniel Nayeri’s The Teacher of Nomad Land, which just won a National Book Award and focuses on a 13-year-old in Iran during WWII who sets out, like his father, to teach nomad tribes—before running into a Jewish boy hiding from a Nazi spy. Both, Liza writes, “place the reader in a unique locale and illustrate the thoughtfulness and resilience of youth.”
Something to think about for shopping this weekend. It’s not just Black Friday, but Small Business Saturday, and in addition to all the great local shops in towns around the region, Revolution’s Kim Souza points out in her newsletter that there are “many options for purchasing preloved items”—and not just in the WRJ and Hanover Revolution(s). In WRJ there’s Rue & Ren, The Collection, Gear Again, RePlay Arts, The COVER Store, Vermont Salvage, Second Hand Rose, and Steven Thomas, Inc.; LISTEN, Pink Alligator, KIS Thrift, the Vintage Home Center are down the road or just across the river; and the VT Antique Mall, Woodstock Consignment, Mahshu and Encore in Quechee and Woodstock. “One day,” she says, “we'll publish a full Re-Use of the Upper Valley map.”
“Cows are like dogs. They can’t exactly tell us what’s going on with them.” But now, Dunford writes in an intriguing VN piece, they sorta can. That’s due to an experiment by UNH Extension at N. Haverhill’s Grafton County Farm and two other publicly owned farms, in which sensors inside a “bolus”—a large pill swallowed by a cow—send a “non-harmful, low-frequency signal to nearby antennas.” That data’s interpreted and passed on to a farmer, who gets info on temperature, movement, and, hence, a cow’s digestive health. “I’m not super set on having computers run everything,” says herdsman Ben White. “But it’s like another set of eyes.”
NH’s federally designated Disability Rights Center launches investigation into state’s disability care system. The move comes after William Skipworth’s blockbuster three-part NH Bulletin series on abuse, neglect, and exploitation within that system. The DRC, Skipworth now reports, “has statutory legal authority to conduct investigations into suspected abuse and neglect against people with disabilities” as long as it can show probable cause—which, center attorney Francesca Broderick tells him, the series provides. The goal, she says, is to see if there are patterns “that we can point to in terms of systems failing,” and then make recommendations.
NH AG: Chain of events that landed judicial staffer $50K payout broke no laws, though “human resources best practices were not followed.” The Justice Department launched a review after NHPR’s Todd Bookman last month broke the story about a maneuver that allowed Dianne Martin—former chief of staff to Supreme Court Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald—to take roughly $50,000 in unused sick and vacation time through a two-day layoff. Yesterday, Bookman reports, AG John Formella announced that “there is no reasonable suspicion to believe that further investigation would uncover actionable criminal conduct.” His full statement is here.
New England-wide effort to boost heat pumps gets under way, with NH—but not VT. Though as it happens, the New England Heat Pump Accelerator’s lead program implementer is the Vermont Energy Investment Corp., which oversees Efficiency Vermont—which already has a highly successful heat-pump program. The accelerator formally launched last week, with the other five New England states aiming to “get more heat pumps into more homes through a combination of financial incentives, educational outreach, and workforce development,” writes Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus. It hopes to see the installation of 580,000 more residential heat pumps region-wide.
How on earth do you do this? The photo atop Auditi Guha’s VTDigger story about a crash in Waitsfield is a little mind-boggling: a 2016 3-series BMW lodged in a building, its rear half hanging in the air. On Sunday, the driver—a US Dept. of Homeland Security employee who is now facing a DUI charge—went off the road, hit the deck of a building, then “sped over the side of the building, missing a large elm tree, before launching into [the] second building,” where the car remained embedded. “This person threaded the needle,” says the owner of one of the buildings.
Looking (way) back into deep space. Sophisticated equipment that peers into space has brought us miraculous images in astonishing detail. But how far into space can we see with the naked eye? According to Ethan Siegel in Big Think, Uranus is the farthest Solar System object; its light takes two hours and 40 minutes to reach us. That’s nothing compared to the 2,615 years it takes for the light from Deneb, in the Southern Triangle, to be visible on Earth. And V762 Cassiopeiae’s light started traveling to us 16,300 years ago, around the time humans started populating North America. Siegel takes us on a tour—through space and earthly time. Grab the Hubble and we can see 7.5 billion light-years away, to a time before Earth existed.
And this just looks like it could have come from space. But it didn’t: It’s a lenticular cloud that formed over Mt. Washington yesterday morning… appearing for all the world like it was about to suck the mountain right into the sky. At the burgundy link, observatory technician Colby Morris’s photo, taken as he was on the way to work, on MWOBS’s Facebook page. And here is WBZ meteorologist Eric Fisher explaining what was going on.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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STUFF TO DO — If eating isn’t the only thing on your mind this long weekend…
For one thing, there are turkey trots all over tomorrow: The annual Norwich trot; the annual Zack’s Place trot in Woodstock; and farther afield in both Vermont and New Hampshire.
Friday
The 29th annual Pods for the Pulpit Crafts Fair starts up at 10 am Friday at Tracy Hall in Norwich. Sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the UV as a fundraiser this year for the Haven, it brings together over 30 ace craftspeople and a stunning array of goods, from clothing to etchings to paintings to jewelry. Runs 10-4 Friday, 10-3 Saturday.
Contra dance in Weathersfield. Legendary caller Dudley Laufman with an open band led by Naomi Morse & Rivkah Valley (fiddle), Mary Cay Brass (piano), and Emmet McGowan (drums). No special clothing, footwear, or experience required. “You're welcome to dance, listen, sit or chat,” they say. 6 pm, Weathersfield Center Meetinghouse.
Saturday
No Strings Marionette Company with “Jack and the Beanstalk” at the Chandler in Randolph. Three magic beans, Jack, Marmalade the cow, the giant Blunderbore, and fine, handcrafted marionettes. 3 pm Saturday, no admission charge (but donations are welcome to support the Chandler’s youth programming).
In Wilmot, a staged reading of The Book of Liz by Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of the new Flat & Center Theater Company (it’s a pun on "front and center" using the names of the two villages in town, Wilmot Flat and Wilmot Center). Directed by theater veteran Wende Shoer, the reading centers on a woman who runs from a cloistered community (the Squeamish, famous for their cheeseballs) to find herself, returns, and discovers what she actually meant to the community. 7 pm in Wilmot’s newly restored town hall, 9 N. Wilmot Road. No link.
And for today...
You should probably get to know North Carolina banjo phenom Murphy Campbell now, at the start of her career, because odds are good you’ll be hearing more about her. As RootsWorld’s Chris Nickson writes, “Campbell is a powerhouse on the banjo, not flashy or virtuoso, but with a natural feel for this music. It courses through her veins. She possesses a great, rare talent – and maybe the ambition to push it along.” Here’s “Shady Grove,” with Campbell first introducing the banjo she’s playing.
Have a fine Thanksgiving however you spend it, and a reinvigorating few days. See you Monday for CoffeeBreak.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
