GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, still chilly. High pressure began pushing into the region last night, and though we're not exactly talking shirtsleeve weather, it should be a bit more pleasant out than yesterday: highs around 20, plenty of sunshine, winds from the northwest—nowhere near as strong as the last two days, but still dropping wind chills into the minuses. It'll be partly cloudy tonight, lows either side of 0.Window art. "I live in Sharon in the early 19th century farmhouse where I grew up," writes Joyce Amsden. "On mornings, with temps down around 15 degrees or less, I often wake to elaborate frost formations and have been photographing them for over a decade. Window Frost forms when warm, moist air condenses on a pane of glass that is exposed to below freezing temperatures. Scratches, smudges and irregularities greatly influence how the ice crystals nucleate and grow." And the results? Remarkable. Kind of like those elaborately marbled endsheets in 19th century books.Also remarkable... The aerial views of construction progress on the new downtown Lebanon fire station that drone photographer William Daugherty captured last week.A citizen's guide to Hartford candidates. Ally Tufenkjian, who served for a time on the town's selectboard and stepped down a year ago, isn't done with town matters. "Since I've lived here, I've heard folks lament about how hard it is to find info about local candidates, and as a candidate myself once, I understand the frustration from both angles," she writes. So she did something: She's put together an unofficial voter's guide to selectboard and other candidates, with bios and their answers to questions she and a friend narrowed down after crowdsourcing suggestions. What spirited volunteers can do...Hanover draws from within for new police chief. Town Manager Rob Houseman yesterday announced that James Martin, who for the last four years has served as captain and HPD's second-in-command, will take over the top spot, replacing Charlie Dennis, who left at the end of last year. Before arriving in Hanover, Martin was a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—deployed both to the Sandy Hook shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing. His experience "managing high-stakes law enforcement operations will be an asset," the town's release says.In wake of December flooding, Powerhouse Mall sees changes. The damage was caused by a mechanical failure, and large sections of flooring had to be torn up and replaced. But that's not the only change, writes Elle Muller in the Valley News. The popular toy/nature-goods store Bonkers/Nature Calls closed last month after longtime owner Liz Staples opted to retire (here's her farewell); Country Kids Clothing's Liz Joyce is also planning to retire and is looking for a new owner. Lemon Tree, Muller reports, is still closed in the wake of the flooding but plans to reopen.Killington will sit out this year's World Cup. In a press release yesterday, reports VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor, the resort announced that it will close its Superstar Express Quad on April 13 in order to begin work on replacing it with a six-passenger high-speed lift. Work on the World Cup trail and on the new lift is scheduled to last until December—after the annual Thanksgiving weekend Women's World Cup race. So this year's race is moving to Copper Mountain in Colorado. “The race is expected to return to Killington Thanksgiving weekend 2026,” Killington says.From 5 to 6: The Five Colleges Book Sale by the numbers. It's raised over $2 million since its inception in 1962, Susan Apel learned, and last year managed 40,000 books displayed on 220 tables. The sale is gearing up (it'll be at Lebanon High School April 18-20) and in Artful, Susan talks to organizing chair Natalie Golden about the history (it started out in one room and each of the five colleges it supports got $335 for scholarships to students from NH or VT). Now, it uses the gym, cafeteria, three classrooms, and a hallway at Leb High. Oh, and that "6" up above? They're adding a VT or NH school.Taking a break from life with an audiobook... while working on a jigsaw puzzle. That's the new pastime the Norman Williams Public Library's Liza Bernard has discovered. It started one day this winter when she needed a break from chores: "So I got out a devilish 500-piece puzzle of Van Gogh’s Stairway at Auvers, downloaded Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and escaped into words and ideas, colors and shapes," she writes in this week's Enthusiasms. Now she's got a dedicated table by a window and the wood stove, and takes things chapter by chapter, piece by piece...Dartmouth Cancer Center's food pantry scales up. "It’s really hard for people in Northern New England to ask for help," the DCC's Deborah Scribner tells Liz Sauchelli in the VN. "We want to take that element away so they don’t have to ask." Scribner launched the pantry in 2022, and now, Sauchelli reports, it's averaging 20 orders a day—some via an app—just moved into newly expanded space, spends about $30,000 per month on groceries, though it also gets food donations, and offers meal kits. “The last thing you want to think about after a day of treatment is what’s for dinner,” says its manager.Tree cavities are "prime real estate." It seems like everyone uses them. Eighty-five species of North American birds are cavity nesters, writes Mary Holland in her latest Naturally Curious post, including chickadees, wrens, nuthatches, woodpeckers, owls and some ducks. Fishers, raccoons, squirrels, opossums and porcupines all raise their young in them. And "snakes, frogs, salamanders and all kinds of invertebrates find food, shelter and egg-incubating conditions inside tree cavities."161 mph winds? Ho hum. Remember those winds on Monday? Well, up on Mt. Washington, there were sustained winds of 125-135 mph, with one gust hitting 161 mph. "Our indoor barograph is literally off the chart due to the high winds acting as suction out of our doors," the Mt. Washington Observatory wrote yesterday on its FB page. But here's the thing: That gust would only rank 19th on its list since 1935. "To reach into our top 10 daily peak gusts, we would have to reach 170 mph."Ayotte's revenue projections run into GOP skepticism in the NH House. The governor based her first budget in part on an expectation of a comeback in state business taxes. But looking at the numbers, NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt finds that the new administration's numbers are $527 million higher than those being used by the House Ways and Means Committee. “We’re just not as optimistic as the governor is with growth," says the committee's chair. The difference, DeWitt writes, "could lead House lawmakers to recommend cutting some spending from her budget."VT, NH go opposite directions on transgender sports ban.
East of the river, reports NHPR's Annmarie Timmins, the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association has "told districts they must comply with a recent executive order from President Trump forbidding transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams." The association, which governs sports in the state's public schools, has suspended an earlier rule that stated it would be "fundamentally unjust" to bar a student based on "public gender identity."
In VT, meanwhile, the state Agency of Education and the Human Rights Commission, Seven Days' Alison Novak wrote last week, "have asserted that they will uphold the protections for LGBTQ students enshrined in state law. And the Vermont Principals' Association, the body that governs school sports, said it has no plans to change its guidelines allowing student athletes to play on teams that align with their gender identity."
Feds charge Zajko with firearms violations involving guns tied to border patrol shooting. Michelle Zajko, the former VT resident currently being held on misdemeanor charges in Maryland, "allegedly provided a false address when buying three firearms from the Last Frontier gun store" in Mount Tabor, VT, a year ago, report VTDigger's Alan J. Keays and Peter D'Auria. According to charging documents filed yesterday in federal court in Burlington, two of those guns have been traced to Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, the two people involved in the Jan. 20 shootout that killed a border patrol agent. Keays and D'Auria fill in more details about the case being constructed.Don't you wish you worked on software that helps beverage distributors? Because that's what the Colchester, VT-based company Vermont Information Processing does, and it's about to be sold to the private equity firm Warburg Pincus for $1 billion. And here's the thing: It's employee-owned. The result, writes Anne Wallace Allen in Seven Days, is that somewhere around 300 employees look to take home $1 million each out of the deal, while another 50 or so will be $10 million richer. "It’s money that for many of us literally represents a change in our social status," says one employee.An estimated 1 septillion (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). It’s a safe bet that no one has ever counted the exact number of snowflakes that fall in a year. Still, even without some of those zeroes, it’s astonishing that every one is different. That, writes Janet Loehrke in USA Today, is because each ice crystal takes a different path down to the ground, and along the way becomes a unique flake. Pressure, humidity, temperature: all play a role. The graphics explain it nicely, including how a flake moves from faceting through branching and eventually to what is technically termed “falling white fluff.”And how do you photograph one of these pieces of fluff? As it happens, after yesterday's Snowflake Bentley item, Thetford's Doug Miller sent along this photo of Bentley and his camera, from a 1941 book called Winter In Vermont, by Charles Edward Crane. So now we know. Thanks, Doug!
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Fleece vests, sweatshirts, head-warming beanies... Strong Rabbit has updated the Daybreak page to keep up with the changing weather. Plus, of course, the usual: t-shirts, long-sleeved tees, the Daybreak jigsaw, those perfect hand-fitting coffee/tea mugs, and as always, "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Check it all out at the link!
Stewart, who ran the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability under President Biden, will be talking AI, space, new technologies, and more with government prof Daryl Press and Dickey Center director Victoria Holt. 4:30 pm, 41 Haldeman and livestreamed.
Co-hosted by the Federalist Society of Dartmouth and the Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller Center associate director Herschel Nachlis, government prof and Ethics Institute director Sonu Bedi, and government prof Russ Muirhead will talk over how the current Trump administration might reshape the judiciary and judicial system from case law to appointments. 4:45 pm in Hinman Forum and online.
. The Goshen NH-area author and illustrator of graphic memoirs
Honor Girl
and
Lost Soul Be at Peace
, two YA mysteries, and last year's adult novel
Rainbow Black
, will kick off the Plainfield libraries' Local Author Series for 2025. 6 pm.
Lockridge is one of the co-founders of Big Heavy World, the Burlington-based, volunteer-staffed "music office" that serves as a hub for Vermont music and musicians, with a recording studio, online music shop, referral network, and more. He'll be talking about "historic and current examples of how the arts can invite changemaking and community building for those who are still finding their voice." Online, 7 pm.
And to bring us into the day...
None of the original members remain, but as a group The Seldom Scene remains a bluegrass legend. And next month, 54 years on, their latest iteration is releasing a new album,
Remains to Be Scene
, on Smithsonian Folkways—their first since the death last year of founding member Ben Eldridge.
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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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