A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Back to a little more normal. A weak weather system came through last night, but it looks like if there's any remaining snow it will fall on higher terrain or in trace amounts here. Today, we get partly then mostly cloudy skies with temps rising into the mid- or even upper 30s before dropping back into the 20s overnight. Winds remain from the northwest.Oh, and yeah: Whatever it was like where you were first thing yesterday morning, it was worse on Mt. Washington. (Hit the top tweet for the full picture.)Sky, mountains, and two birds...
Today's daybreak photo comes from Kevin Rose in Tunbridge, looking across snow-covered ridges to a white-etched Killington in the blue distance, the sky aglow above.
And after those pileated acrobatics the other day, West Norwich's Cynthia Crawford sends in this chickadee, reaching for a drink from an icicle.
Remember that troublesome Sumatra chicken from Monday? You totally get why they'd be full of themselves, thanks to this pic from Jen Thygesen of a rooster raised by her son, Keenan, in Tunbridge.
Progressives (mostly) prevail in Hartford, Swanson unseats Davis in Woodstock, Layton wins in Norwich, Harkay holds onto seat in Thetford (which also passed its town budget despite a move to vote it down so there'd be more time to consider it), voters in Windsor, Strafford, and Randolph okay cannabis dispensaries... The Valley News has done yeoman's work rounding up Town Meeting voting throughout the Vermont side of the Upper Valley. Results are in for most towns and school districts, available through the link. No word from Fair Haven VT yet on whether Murfee the spaniel was unseated as pet mayor.“This is when I feel like an old mom. I can hear the mother in me saying, ‘Guys, what are you thinking?’” That's Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin, talking to the Union Leader's Damien Fisher about plans to crack down on off-campus partiers. Officials, she says, plan to track them down and start issuing fines both to hosts and their landlords. The town, of course, is on edge over the spike. “I suspect when this is done, you’re going to see more than 200 positive cases,” Griffin says. “We’re all trying to keep the community calm.”Local electrical engineer launches maple cooperative for small-scale producers. Cory Krieg works at Fujifilm Dimatix in Leb and lives in Bethel, where he taps 300 trees. Small sugarers produce too little to interest the big producers but too much to bottle, market, and sell themselves, so he's launched Maple Farmers—"Uniting Small Farms to Preserve Tradition"—and has taken on marketing (and a web presence) for members. “A lot of the people I am working with don’t even have email,” he tells Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen. “Working collectively, we’re all marketing under one online store,” Chippers bought by Ohio company. In a blog post yesterday, owner Mundy Wilson Piper announced the sale of the 35-year-old company to The Davey Tree Expert Company, the 9th largest employee-owned firm in the US. Davey, headquartered in Kent, OH, has more than 10,000 employees across the US and Canada. The sale, Piper says, will allow her to (mostly) retire while making employee ownership possible for Chippers' nearly 100 employees. Davey, she writes, "is committed to keeping every Chippers employee as part of the company at the same rates of pay and benefits." More at the link.SPONSORED: Final HACTC Virtual Town Hall is tomorrow at 7PM. Online application opens March 5th. Many high school juniors and seniors across the Upper Valley spend half-days engaged in hands-on learning at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center (HACTC), focusing on program-specific curriculum in their area of interest. Hit the maroon link for more information about HACTC program offerings and for virtual Town Hall login information. The online application deadline is March 19. Sponsored by the HACTC.Sununu will nominate his legal counsel, Hanover High graduate John Formella, as attorney general today. Sununu announced his plan yesterday to name Formella to replace Gordon MacDonald, who was sworn in last week as the state's new Supreme Court chief justice. Formella, reports the AP, worked on the state’s Doorway program for substance abuse treatment, criminal justice reform initiatives, and the legalities of fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The Executive Council is expected to take up the nomination on March 24.NH to open mass vaccination site at Loudon this weekend. The three-day event at the NH Motor Speedway will be by appointment and use the newly approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine, meaning people who get it will require just the one shot. Health officials will reach out to people whose first doses are scheduled in April and offer a slot at Loudon, instead, reports NHPR's Alli Fam. The state is hoping to vaccinate 10,000 people there over the weekend.NH House member derails committee hearing with "deviant sexuality" comment about LGBTQ people. The moment came as the criminal justice committee was examining a bill to bar using a victim's perceived gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation as a defense in a manslaughter case. As soon as Manchester Republican Dick Marston used the words, GOP chair Daryl Abbas gaveled him down, reports the Monitor's Ethan DeWitt. Marston persisted, and Abbas ordered the hearing adjourned. It's unclear when the bill will be taken up again.NH's US Attorney submits resignation. As did his counterpart in VT recently, Scott Murray will step down this weekend to make way for a new choice by the Biden administration, reports NHPR's Todd Bookman. Murray was named to the post by President Trump in 2017. Before taking that job, he served four terms as Merrimack County Attorney.VT expands vaccine eligibility to teachers, school staff, child care workers. The announcement came at a press conference yesterday, after growing evidence that hybrid and remote learning are exacting a high toll on students. School workers—as well as police and prison staff—can start signing up next Monday, and the state expects to finish vaccinating them by early April, Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen reports. People with high-risk conditions 55 and older can also sign up starting Monday, and those 16 and older on March 15. They won't need to bring medical proof, healthy secy Mark Levine said.“When you lose your income, you lose everything. All your things, everything that you have done in your life you’ll lose." In one of a series of "Virus in Vermont" articles, VTDigger's Ellie French talks to three people who lost their jobs and have been hit hard by the pandemic. The former construction worker, former lawyer, and former restaurant worker she interviews are scraping by in their own ways, but what they all have in common is struggling with the state's unemployment system, especially over missing or late checks.VT reports major Covid outbreak at Northern State. It had placed the state's largest prison on lockdown last week after finding 22 cases; now the total has risen to 137 among inmates and staff, interim Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker announced last night. "Northern State is now being treated like a hospital." The state yesterday included prison workers in the next round of vaccine eligibility; they can start signing up Monday. “I’m angry,” a prisoners rights advocate tweeted last night. “Prisoners do not have a lobby. They do have a ton of medical conditions that make them susceptible to serious illness.”
"We’re a source of information. If we can’t produce that in this time when people want the information so badly, we can forget about it; it’s over.” That's Seven Days publisher Paula Routly talking to the Daily Beast's Sophia June about the weekly paper's efforts to avoid going under in the pandemic. June profiles four alternative weeklies—the three others are the Cleveland Scene, Seattle's The Stranger, and the Austin Chronicle—and how they sidestepped "total annihilation." Seven Days deputy publisher Cathy Resmer pretty much sums it up: “Alt-weeklies tend to be scrappy,” she says.Maybe you first heard Rossini's aria "Largo al Factotum" in an opera house. But more likely? From Sylvester the cat. That's the "Figaro, Figaro" aria, and in a Twitter thread that is just plain going to eat your morning, sorry about that, animator Vincent Alexander runs through the classical music we all learned from old cartoons. There's Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" performed by Bugs Bunny, Smetana's "Dance of the Comedians" in the Road Runner cartoons, Popeye conducting Franz von Suppé's "Poet and Peasant Overture"... And a heap more. Who knew we were so well educated?
And the numbers...
Dartmouth now reports 138 active cases among students(up 16) and 2 among faculty/staff. There are 141 students and 4 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 146 students and 7 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 242 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 75,803. There were no new deaths, leaving the total at 1,170. Meanwhile, 88 people are hospitalized (down 2). The current active caseload stands at 2,274 (down 89). The state reports 218 active cases in Grafton County (down 19), 37 in Sullivan (down 5), and 168 in Merrimack (up 5). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Hanover has 104 active cases, Claremont has 12 (down 3), Newport has 6 (down 1), Lebanon has 5 (down 1), and Sunapee has 5 (down 1). Haverhill, Piermont, Orford, Canaan, Enfield, Grantham, Plainfield, Cornish, Charlestown, Springfield, Grafton, New London, and Wilmot have 1-4 each.
VT reported 70 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 15,372. It added 1 death to reach 206 all told. Meanwhile, 23 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 1). Windsor County gained 3 cases to stand at 1,056 for the pandemic, with 63 over the past 14 days. Orange County added 2 additional cases and stands at 514 cumulatively, with 38 cases over the past 14 days.
News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:
Today at 3 pm, the Upper Valley Music Center and HopStop pair up to host an interactive workshop for young children and their caretakers, "Making Music Together." They encourage you to bring something that makes noise when you shake it, as well as your own rhythm section—some wooden spoons, sticks, whatever you can find.
At 5 pm, Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center hosts former UNH and Ohio Wesleyan President Mark Huddleston, who'll be delivering the Perkins Bass Distinguished Lecture on "The Burden of Student Debt." He'll delve into the finer points of the $1.6 trillion in student loan debt: Who owes what? What has contributed to the sharp rise in borrowing? Is permanent relief needed? What public policy options are available and appropriate?
Also at 5 pm, Dartmouth's new national literary mag, Meetinghouse, hosts the next in its series of online readings, with Washington State short-story writer Becky Mandelbaum, Washington DC writer (and Meetinghouse contributing editor) Jordan McDonald, and DC-area writer and grad student Alyssa Freeman-Moser.
Finally, at 7 pm it's this month's series of First Wednesdays lectures from Vermont Humanities. Tonight, there's everything from Middlebury prof Jane Chaplin on the place of women in the ancient Roman world to Dartmouth prof Richard Wright on the history of US immigration policy to St. Michael's prof Nathaniel Lewis on the wildness of the West in the American imagination to art historian Carol Berry on Van Gogh. And lots more. All free, but you'll need to register.
Peter Ostroushko, who grew up in the Ukrainian community in Minneapolis, picked up his dad's mandolin at the age of 3, and went on to become a musical legend and 40-year-regular on
A Prairie Home Companion
, died last week. He was 67. He played "heartbreakingly beautiful songs performed with understated grace,"
Vintage Guitar
magazine once wrote, and here's an example:
back in 2004.
(Thanks, HM!)
See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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