GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly cloudy, definitely warmer. There’s a decent chance, depending on where you are, that you’ll see temps above freezing today for the first time in weeks, with highs reaching toward the mid 30s. Meanwhile, last night’s clipper passed through quickly, leaving us mostly with clouds in the sky and snow on the ground, though the mountains will probably see some reinvigorated showers later today—and there’s a slight chance we’ll get a shower or two—thanks to moist air flowing in from the Gulf of Maine. Lows tonight a relatively balmy mid-teens.
Life on the Connecticut. Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean there’s nothing happening on the water.
In Piermont, Thomas Nash noticed a trio of coyotes trotting along the frozen surface.
And from the bridge between West Leb and WRJ the other day, Elizabeth Borowsky spotted ducks. A lot of them. “I don’t think the picture does justice to the number,” she writes. “There were over 500!”
And speaking of that bridge, Stateline Sports has moved. It opened its doors in its new location on Mechanic Street in Lebanon yesterday—prompting several commenters on its FB announcement (at the burgundy link) to wonder if it can still be called Stateline if it’s no longer right by the state line. Tracy Pelletier, an early employee who bought the 43-year-old store last September, announced the move (to the former Lebanon Plumbing Supply) not long after. “It gives us a little bit more space, (and,) I’d say, a much nicer customer experience,” he said at the time.
Haverhill town clerk resigns—with just a month to go before town elections. Carole Brooks-Broer was elected to the post in 2024, and the office already had one vacancy, writes Alex Nuti-de Biasi in the Journal Opinion newsletter, after the deputy town clerk resigned last year. “A recent cancer diagnosis for a family member prompted Brooks-Broer's resignation,” he writes, “but she told the Journal Opinion that a strained relationship with the selectboard did not help. Selectboard members said during their meeting [Monday] they were confident that town and school elections would go smoothly next month.”
SPONSORED: Celebrate the Year of the Horse with the Hood Museum!
Join us for our Lunar New Year Celebration this Saturday, February 14, 1:00–3:00 pm. Enjoy artmaking activities and a curated reading nook or join a spotlight talk featuring horses in the exhibition Nurturing Nationhood: Artistic Constructions of America, 1790–1940. This is a free, drop-in program for all ages and visitors. Refreshments and snacks will be provided! Sponsored by the Hood Museum.
Hanover midwife turns to GoFundMe to survive face-off with insurance company. As of last Friday, writes Clare Shanahan in the Valley News, Katherine Bramhall and Gentle Landing Birth Center had $300 in the bank and $60K owed it by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which for nearly a year and a half has been denying insurance claims after it switched to a digital billing platform. When Bramhall got a bill for “overpaid” reimbursements, she took to social media and GoFundMe, which so far has brought in some $13,000. It’s also brought in a flood from other independent providers “who are just going, ‘Us too, us too, us too, us too,'” Bramhall says.
Last year, Bramhall was named one of Nexstar Media’s “Remarkable Women” after being chosen by the Burlington area’s ABC22/Fox44. “In this model of care, women come in with so many questions. In an out-of-hospital birth setting, what a provider has is the luxury of time,” she said back then.
Hartford will help pioneer new Vermont “home catalog” initiative. It’s part of an effort called 802 Homes, aimed at making it easier to build new housing: State officials “are drafting 10 home designs that will be available for free to property owners and developers — and would get a fast-track through local permitting,” reports Carly Berlin for VT Public. The idea is not only to offer free home plans, but to assure prospective homeowners that if they choose one of them, they’ll get their permit. Hartford, Essex Junction, and Manchester “will vet the designs locally and work with state officials to iron out a streamlined local approval process,” Berlin reports. The state hopes the catalogue will be in place by the end of the year.
SPONSORED: Big stunts, perfect timing and live music. Buster Keaton’s The General, one of the great comedies of the silent film era, comes alive at the Hop this Sunday in a must-see big-screen experience. Inspired by the real-life Great Locomotive Chase during the American Civil War, this epic, action-filled film will be presented in 35mm with live accompaniment by Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton, so you can experience it just as audiences once did. Sponsored by the Hop.
Windsor sheriff had troubled tenure in multiple police departments. In the VN, Alex Ebrahimi reports on documents “recently obtained from Claremont Police” on Ryan Palmer’s hitch as a police officer there—some two decades before he was charged by the VT State Police with sexual misconduct. In Claremont, he faced both unsatisfactory performance evaluations, Ebrahimi writes, and three internal affairs investigations for violating department policy; he ultimately resigned, though with a positive referral. He then had a brief tenure with the Canaan PD and several issues arise during his time as a police officer in Windsor. Ebrahimi details what happened.
Dartmouth study has some bad news on the bacteria-fighting front. It turns out, researchers are reporting, that DNA molecules called plasmids, which are essentially parasites, have the ability to force their host bacteria to latch onto neighboring bacteria with tubes—which make it easy for plasmids to move from one cell to another but also create bacterial clusters that can resist antibiotics, even if the individual cells aren’t resistant. “These are scary findings,” biology prof Carey Nadell tells Dartmouth News’s Morgan Kelly. PhD candidate James Winans tells Kelly that while the tubes confer resistance, they also make bacterial cells “sluggish and slow.”
“Should March Town Meetings wade into state, national or world issues?” It’s a yearly debate in VT, writes VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor. This year, for instance, several towns will consider asking the legislature to pass a bill launching universal health care in the state; Hartford voters will decide whether to pledge “to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, colonialism, and military occupation,” as Thetford did last year. O’Connor focuses on Newfane, where some townspeople vigorously support taking a stand. Others, as one puts it, “doubt very much that any decision in Washington, D.C., is predicated on a vote at Newfane’s Town Meeting.”
Two Vermonters snag the state’s first Olympic medals of these games. Cross-country skier Ben Ogden, who grew up in tiny Landgrove and began his racing career in the Bill Koch League, became the first American man after Bill Koch himself to win a cross-country medal by taking silver yesterday in the sprint classic. It’s been 50 years since Koch brought home gold: “First I wept, then I have been smiling and chuckling ever since,” Koch tells VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor. Later in the day, Ogden’s fellow UVM grad, Paula Moltzan, who now lives in Waitsfield, won bronze with teammate Jackie Wiles in the women’s Alpine combined event.
Here’s Ogden’s race, which has to be some of the most exhausting sub-four-minutes in sport—and also features a dominating performance by Norwegian great and gold medal winner Johannes Klaebo.
And here’s Moltzan and Wiles, with Wiles skiing the downhill and Moltzan delivering an edge-of-your-seat slalom run to give them the bronze.
No medals here… but maybe Flexible Flyer bragging rights? Brothers David and Derek Grout couldn’t resist going vintage on what they believe is the longest sled run in Massachusetts, two miles down Shamrock Blvd. in Pittsfield State Forest (about a 2.5-hour drive from here, if you’re interested). There are longer ones in the region, of course, like the four miles people used to do from tree line down the Mt. Washington Auto Road (until it was prohibited, except maybe for Observatory staff), or the Sherburne trail from the base of Tuckerman’s to the AMC’s Pinkham Notch facility.
The “hidden wonder of the world” through close-up, macro, and micro photography. PetaPixel’s Matt Growcoot highlights the winners of this year’s Close-Up Photographer of the Year awards. Australian Ross Gudgeon won top billing for an image that could so easily be taken for a rose-tinted forest or a Japanese painted silk. It is, in fact, the inside of a cauliflower soft coral, shot in Indonesia using an underwater probe. Note also Valeria Zvereva’s layered, flowing lamellar mushroom, and Paul Kenny’s peacock-rich copper plate. You can see all top 100 here.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak. If you’re new to Daybreak, this is much like Wordle, only it’s no random five-letter word. It’s a random five-letter word that happened to be in Daybreak yesterday.
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HEADS UP
A chance to explore Revolution Reconsidered: History, Myth, and Propaganda at the Hood Museum with a guide. Co-curator Elizabeth Rice Mattison will give an introduction to the exhibit that looks at the American Revolution beginning with Dartmouth's role in the Revolutionary era and traces “the reappearance and repurposing of Revolutionary imagery to the present day.” 12:30 pm.
Michelle Arnosky Sherburne on the history of the Underground Railroad in Vermont. Sherburne is the publisher of the Journal Opinion (which is based in Bradford, VT) as well as the author of Abolition & the Underground Railroad in Vermont. She’ll be talking about it all at the New Suns Community Center in N. Thetford as part of Thetford’s 250th commemoration.
Valley Improv at Sawtooth. A night of off-the-cuff comedy in Hanover. 8 pm.
And for today...
This isn’t quite music, though you get a nice earful of Carmen. Instead, in keeping with today’s sort-of theme, it’s synchronized skating, which isn’t an Olympic sport (yet) but does have to be seen to be believed. Here’s the gold-medal winning turn less than two weeks ago at the US Synchronized Skating International Classic, held in Norwood, MA, by the 14-18-year-old skaters of Northbrook, IL-based Teams Elite.
See you tomorrow.
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