GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Clouding up, snow likely this afternoon. Yesterday's high pressure has moved out and there's moisture from a low off the coast on its way. So we'll see clouds thickening over the course of the day, with a chance and then a likelihood of snow this afternoon (maybe mixed with a little rain), then more snow this evening. Possibly an inch all told. Temps today will get into the mid-30s with winds from the south, then fall into the mid-20s tonight.Sometimes, you just need a view. You don't get to see this very often. Woodchucks prefer it underground, but every so often—to escape a predator or get at some tidbit or, maybe, just to check out the surroundings—they'll climb a tree. Still, writes Karin Bonnett from E. Thetford, "I've never seen this before!"Fourth time's the charm: Leb voters approve school renovations. In a 955-533 vote, thus passing the 60-percent-approval mark needed to make it stick, they agreed to a $14.34 million bond to renovate Lebanon High School and the Hanover Street School, report Claire Potter and Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News. In previous tries over the last few years, majorities had favored improvements, but not by enough to meet the 60 percent threshold needed for bonds. Voters yesterday also recommended axing the school resource officer.Nando Jaramillo is up to more than making arepas. If you've been at area farmers markets or at Cedar Circle Farm on weekends over the past few years, you've seen his Moon and Stars food van. Set up in S. Royalton, he's selling arepas throughout the region now. But the native Colombian is after more than just an arepa market—he's trying to create a market for heirloom corn varieties (and is growing corn himself at Cedar Circle), writes Melissa Pasanen in Seven Days. "We're eating better arepas here in Vermont than in a lot of places in Colombia," he says, "because it's good corn, and it's grown in a decent way."SPONSORED: The war on Ukraine—another reason to get off fossil fuels. What's funding Putin's war machine? That's right, fossil fuels. As we all feel more pain at the pump and at the electric meter, will rapidly rising fuel prices drive faster adoption of electric vehicles and affordably priced renewable fuels? Only time will tell. Hit the maroon link to better understand how energy is being used as a political weapon in this devastating conflagration, and how it might just help accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels. Solaflect Energy is your home energy-management partner! Sponsored by Solaflect Energy."The things that exiles can never say to their children." Events in Ukraine have reminded poet and Left Bank Books owner Rena Mosteirin of her encounter with the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who was born in what is now Lviv in 1945 and exiled to western Poland a few years later, eventually winding up in the US. In this week's Enthusiasms, Rena takes up one of Zagajewski's most famous works, "To Go to Lvov," and its personal resonance for her as the daughter of two immigrants. "What war takes away, poets can reconstruct with language," she writes.Lyme voters go their own way on town positions, tax relief for elderly. The VN's Jim Kenyon was at Lyme Town Meeting yesterday, which was in-person. The roughly 125 people who showed up approved the selectboard's proposed budget, but also decided to disagree with the board on its move to make three town positions appointed rather than elected, and boosted tax relief to elderly people with household incomes of $50,000 or less. "Voters left their rubber stamps at home," Kenyon writes. "Town Meeting is the ultimate citizen legislature. It’s the one day of the year that voters are truly in charge."
NH school board races stirring attention "not seen in recent memory." NHPR's Sarah Gibson reports that all over the state, pandemic fault lines over masking and mitigation measures and political fault lines over social and racial concerns are showing up. In some districts, including Haverhill, Sunapee, and Exeter, groups have formed to argue that parents have been left out of school policy-making. Gibson dives into the Exeter-area turmoil, where groups on both sides are engaging in "organizing and spending one might expect from traditionally partisan races."Ping pong on a tv set? It could happen! At least, that's what Ralph Baer figured one day in 1966 while sitting at a bus stop. Yesterday was the 100th birthday of the German-born, New Hampshire-based video game pioneer, and on his Granite Geek blog David Brooks lays out all that he and his Nashua-based team accomplished, including the first multiplayer television video game system, which they nicknamed “The Brown Box.”NH domestic violence task force finds lack of legal resources, judicial accountability. The task force was created last year after a domestic violence shooting incident in which the victim, who survived, had been denied a restraining order against her assailant. the report, issued yesterday, found that the volume of cases is far outrunning the number of advocates available to help victims, writes Damien Fisher in InDepthNH. In addition, says its chair, Supreme Court Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, “More could be done [to] make courts more accountable and transparent."Covid hospitalizations in NH drop dramatically. There were 52 people hospitalized statewide as of yesterday, compared to 433 in mid-January, and just 19 of them are in the six hospitals in the Upper Valley and southwestern part of the state, reports NH Bulletin's Annmarie Timmins. “All metrics are improving, including daily case counts, test positivity, and hospitalizations,” says DHMC's Dr. Michael Calderwood. “We will need to watch the numbers closely, understanding that cases could potentially rise again. However, we have no indication of that at this time.”
VT's Covid case decline has "slowed," is expected to remain low. Citing the latest report from the state, VTDigger's Erin Petenko writes that "Vermont’s once-shocking drop after the Omicron variant wave may be leveling off"—though she points out that the 50 percent drop over the three weeks leading up to yesterday is still robust. The state has lowest hospitalization rate in the country, but the eighth highest case rate in the nation—though that may be because many other states are seeing big drops in testing, Petenko writes.Wisconsin-based organic dairy co-op offers hope for farmers dropped by Horizon last year. Organic Valley, which is farmer-owned, announced yesterday that it's reaching out to 80 farms in VT, NH, ME, and NY that were told Horizon would no longer buy their milk. So far, reports VPR's Howard Weiss-Tisman, 10 farms in New England have signed new contracts. “A cooperative owned by small family farms is the perfect fit for us. It gives us the chance to keep doing what we love," Corinth farmer George Osgood said in an Organic Valley press release.Gun bill compromise gets key VT senators' okay. The move was an attempt to climb back from Gov. Phil Scott's veto of a measure that, among other things, aimed to close the so-called "Charleston loophole" under federal law that allows gun sales to proceed if a background check takes longer than three days. The legislature's extended timeline was too long, Scott had argued, and proposed a seven-day wait instead, which is what the compromise bill accepts. The new measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee 4-1 and is now expected to move on to the floor, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein.Big VT spending package heads to guv's desk. Ordinarily, writes Lola Duffort in VTDigger, budget adjustment packages tinker around the edges. But with a deep well of federal aid and the state economy still facing pandemic-related concerns, legislators have approved a $367 million package that funds a variety of significant programs. They include extending the motel-housing program for the homeless; retention and recruitment efforts focused on low-wage workers who deliver care to people in assisted living, substance abuse programs, and the like; and new investments in expanding shelter capacity.Eat the tea leaves? Centuries before it was sipped, tea was a meal. Mortared together with basil, citrus peel, ginger, and lots of other stuff into a gritty, thin gruel—no, of course it wasn’t very good. But in China, where tea trees grew wild, that’s largely how tea was consumed…until around 700 CE. As Miranda Brown writes in Atlas Obscura, a man named Lu Yu transformed how the world got its caffeine: His book on how to brew tea (in a strangely particular way) fell into the hands of the wealthy elite and the beverage went mainstream. Though in some pockets of the East, tea soups and salads survive today.What if a room full of clocks all tick-tocked in total harmony? It might sound something like these 100 metronomes, each randomly set in motion, ultimately achieving synchronization—something you can clearly see (and hear) is happening while scarcely believing it is. The Ikeguchi Laboratory in Japan has been experimenting with these clicking pendulums, showing how different circumstances can influence their transference of energy. Here, the metronomes are set up on a hanging platform, which absorbs their chaotic forces until every last one of them, amazingly, is marching in unison.
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At 5:30 today, VINS hosts U of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy for a virtual presentation on declining biodiversity and simple steps that each of us can take—starting in our own backyards—to help reverse those trends. Despite the vast scale of the problems, he argues, they don't need to be inevitable.
This evening at 6, DHMC presents two docs and a nutritionist to talk online about the links between food and health. Drs. Auden McClure and Richard Rothstein, and dietitian/nutritionist Rima Itani Al-Nimr will go over recent research on how food can prevent disease and will also debunk common nutrition myths. No cost, but you'll need to register.
At 7 pm, if you happen to have a cookbook or food-related manuscript sitting in your desk drawer and are trying to figure out how to get it out in the world, the St. J Athenaeum presents the third in its online series on the resources you'll need to navigate the publishing world. Tonight, it's author Doreen Lyon (Recipes from a Maple Queen) advising you on what comes next.
Also at 7, the Woodstock History Center hosts the Hanover Conservancy's Adair Mulligan—who for 20 years was conservation director at the Connecticut River Joint Commissions—giving a virtual armchair tour of the Connecticut, its history, natural history, and impact on the communities up and down its banks.
A while back, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter was asked by
Rolling Stone
to name the song he was most proud of. “Let it be known there is a fountain/ That was not made by the hands of men,” he responded. That's a line from “Ripple,” one of his many collaborations with Jerry Garcia that produced their historic 1970 albums
Workingmen's Dead
and
American Beauty
(which is where you'll find "Ripple"). “That’s pretty much my favorite line I ever wrote, that’s ever popped into my head," he told his interviewer. A few years back,
that includes Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Jimmy Buffett, David Crosby, and a host of other stellar musicians from around the globe.
(Thanks, DM!)
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 and writers who want you to 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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