HOW VERY NICE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Showery. There are actually two different systems, starting with moist air aloft that worked its way in to the region last night and is exiting east around now. Then comes an upper-level disturbance that will likely bring rain this afternoon and tonight before it, too, saunters off... making way for the next round. When it's not raining it'll be mostly cloudy except maybe mid-day, highs in the low or mid-60s. Down into the upper 40s tonight.Birds are back. Well, you knew that. But it also means the area's photographers are getting plenty of good shots.
In Lebanon, Gary Engler caught all sorts of songbirds out enjoying last week's snow, including this kinda grumpy-looking white-throated sparrow.
Etna photographer Jim Block got a broad-winged hawk in flight, a highly decorative tom turkey in his yard, and chickadees, juncos, a charismatic tufted titmouse, grackles, mergansers, and a flock of rapt birders, all in the wild.
And fliers of a different sort left this swirl of contrails in the sky over Lyndonville yesterday. "The Air National Guard doing maneuvers?" writes photographer Herb Swanson.
Former Hartford Grange burns. The fire was called in to the Hartford Fire Department around 3:30 yesterday morning, and it was a blaze, bringing crews from Hartford, Lebanon, Hanover and Norwich. Though overhead lines initially hampered firefighters until GMP was able to turn the power off, they were done a bit after 5 am, leaving behind nothing but charred pieces of lumber and roof panels, Anna Merriman writes in the Valley News. The building sits on the river side of Route 14 in Hartford Village, and the fire is under investigation; a 2004 fire in an adjacent building was declared arson. Photos by Kim Souza here.CHaD Hero plans to include in-person 5K. It's looking promising for costumed runners this fall... The annual fundraiser for the children's hospital, which last year was entirely virtual, has gotten the go-ahead to include an actual, all-in-one-place 5K run this September, though that part is contingent on CDC, state, local, Dartmouth, and D-HH guidelines at that time. Other distances and events will remain virtual. Registration doesn't open until 9 this morning, so the website may not be fully updated until then.SPONSORED: Will You Join Us? This spring, Willing Hands invites you to join us in finishing our Capital Campaign, an effort to build the infrastructure and staffing necessary to glean, grow, and recover more fresh food for local food shelves. If we raise $80,000, a generous donor will contribute an additional $40,000. Your support will make healthy food available to thousands of Upper Valley community members! Sponsored by Willing Hands.Dartmouth to hold vaccination clinics for employees, students, and their family members. The clinics, next Wednesday and Thursday, will likely include both the Pfizer and the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, Covid-19 task force chairs Lisa Adams and Josh Keniston said in an email yesterday. Appointments are available to dependents, partners, and household members of Dartmouth students, staff, and faculty who are 18 years old or older—regardless of state of residency. Deadline to sign up is 11:59 pm Thursday. One million. That's how many meals Everyone Eats, the VT effort that pairs people in need of food with restaurants that can make it, figures it will have served as of tomorrow. Almost a tenth of them—about 90,400—have been in the Upper Valley, Vital Communities says in a press release. It's also switching up restaurants, with Simon Pearce and Piecemeal Pies leaving, Newbury's Village Store, Bradford's Little Grille, and Randolph's Tacocat joining, and Maple Street Catering, Global Village Food, the Lake Morey Resort, the Moon and Stars arepa truck, and the Windsor Diner staying the course.$10 million. That's about how much more money NH state liquor stores expect to have raked in once their fiscal year ends in June, reports the NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt. The 7 percent increase in sales, state liquor commission chair Joseph Mollica told a state Senate committee Monday, came in part from pandemic-era buying by Granite Staters and growth in new customers. "Obviously, we’re seeing strong real estate sales in the state,” he said. “And those additional folks in the state are driving some of our business.”
At heart, NH's two cryptocurrency cases are simple. That, at least, is what two law profs tell David Brooks, who lays out the arguments in his Granite Geek blog. One, as you remember, involves a group in Keene who were charged by the FBI with failing to file legally required reports when they sold bitcoin for cash in amounts above $10K. The other involves LBRY, the peer-to-peer video-sharing platform based in Manchester, which the SEC is suing for creating the equivalent of stocks with its electronic credits. Dive in for the details!Yep, cases are down dramatically. It's been hard not to notice the VT numbers recently, with daily new cases in the double digits for over a week. In fact, state officials said at a press conference yesterday, the number of daily cases has dropped 61 percent since the start of the month, and cases are falling in every age group. And though vaccinations are also falling, reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko, the 3 percent drop is small compared to a national 9 percent decline. The state is planning several large vaccination efforts in coming weeks.“They could’ve at least had the respect to let their employees know what was going on!” That's a Brattleboro local venting about the news that Koffee Kup, the bakery with locations in Burlington and Brattleboro, shut its doors on Monday with no notice to its 247 employees. Its baked goods went to locations throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic, report VTDigger's Ellie French and Kevin O'Connor. An advisor to the private-equity firm that acquired a majority of Koffee Kup shares April 1 says that creditors delivered a default notice last Thursday and that Koffee Kup no longer has the capital to operate."All Americans Welcome, No Globalists Please." That, for a time, was on a Facebook post inviting people to a Friday night show at the St. J Brewery with The Patriot Band, reports Seven Days' Colin Flanders. It's since been deleted, but not before it drew hundreds of comments, many of them flaming the brewery for using a term that, as Flanders writes, "has come to be associated with anti-Semitism and far-right conspiracies." The brewery's owner has been silent on the controversy, but in the past has salted his personal Facebook page with criticism of "globalists," Flanders reports.Feds bust nonprofit exec behind effort to remake Marlboro College grounds. If you have a long memory, you may recall that Seth Andrew, a former Obama administration official who founded a charter school network called Democracy Prep, announced last spring that he intended to create a two-year associate degree program for low-income, first-generation students on the former Marlboro College campus. Yesterday, he was charged with wire fraud and money laundering in New York, reports Lola Duffort in VTDigger, for taking $218,000 from escrow accounts held by Democracy Prep.Coming up: a mountain biking trail running the length of Vermont. Unlike the Long Trail and Catamount Trail, the Velomont Trail will run through both forest and towns, connecting existing trails but adding new sections as well, writes Berne Broudy in Seven Days. It's the brainchild of a group called the Velomont Collective, working hand in hand with the Vermont Huts Association. "For me, it's always been about: How can we connect Vermont's unique communities?" says Velomont's executive director, Angus McCusker. First trail work starts this summer, and the whole effort will take about a decade.And in case you happen to get hungry out on the trails... Also in Seven Days (you may be sensing a theme to this week's "Staytripper" articles), Jordan Barry and Melissa Pasanen profile three trailside spots for mountain bikers to refuel. There's Mike's Tiki Bar in East Burke, which started as a parking lot in an old gravel pit by Kingdom Trails; the Stone Corral near Richmond Mountain Trails; and the Lookout Tavern, on Killington Road near the ski area.But if you get hungry on this mountain-bike ride... well, never mind, you'll probably never even get to take this mountain bike ride. Unless you go with someone who really knows his or her way, because the chances of getting lost in the 200 miles of tunnels that underlie Paris, of which the catacombs are just a tiny part, are pretty high. Antoni Villoni, a serious adrenaline junkie of a mountain biker, just did a GoPro tour at breakneck speed. If you're a graffiti fan, you'll definitely want to tag along.
And in the numbers...
Dartmouth reports 4 active cases among students (up 1) with 2 among faculty/staff (up 1). There are 3 students and 3 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 6 students and 7 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
Colby-Sawyer remains at 3 active cases among students and 1 faculty/staff case. All told, 4 people are in isolation and 4 in quarantine.
NH reported 273 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 94,203. There were 8 new deaths, bringing the total to 1,294, while 86 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (no change). The current active caseload stands at 2,611 (down 106). The state reports 166 active cases in Grafton County (down 15 over two days), 49 in Sullivan (down 13), and 215 in Merrimack (down 31). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 20 active cases (down 5), Lebanon has 10 (no change), Haverhill has 9 (no change), New London has 9 (up 1); Hanover has 6 (down 3), Newbury has 6 (up 1), and Charlestown has 5 (no change). Orford, Wentworth, Canaan, Enfield, Plainfield, Grantham, Springfield, Cornish, Croydon, Sunapee, Unity, and Wilmot have 1-4 each. Grafton is off the list.
VT reported 59 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 22,675. There was 1 new death, bringing the total to 245, while 19 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 3). Windsor County gained no new cases and remains at 1,320 for the pandemic, with 70 over the past 14 days, while Orange County added 5 new cases and stands at 718 cumulatively, with 76 cases in the past 14 days.
News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:
At 6 this evening, the VT Council on World Affairs hosts Olga Yurkova, a Ukrainian journalist and founder of the misinformation-debunking organization StopFake.org, and Wall St. Journal senior China correspondent Lingling Wei. They'll be talking about the role journalists play in international affairs, mistrust of the media in this country, the impact of disinformation, and what we can learn in the US from the disinformation and media suppression that are all too common around the world. Tix are not cheap: $30 for non-members.
This evening at 7, the Howe hosts writer and risk expert Ty Gagne reading from and talking about his 2020 book, The Last Traverse. It's about the remarkable and remarkably dangerous search-and-rescue effort to find two men who'd gone astray trying to do Franconia Ridge amid the February extremes of the winter Whites.
Also at 7, you can catch New Yorker writer (and former fiction editor) and author Bill Buford in a livestream from The Music Hall in Portsmouth. He'll be talking about Dirt, his follow-on to his by-now-legendary book Heat, which was about Italian cooking. In Dirt, Buford recounts his efforts to get to the bottom of French cooking, first with an eight-month apprenticeship in DC to the revered chef Michel Richard, and then almost five years in Lyon, France—wife and twin sons in tow—learning the ropes as an apprentice chef, baker, and all-around connoisseur of food minutiae. $5.
In a band? Solo musician? The River 93.9 is running a "Raw to Radio" contest that will give local musicians a chance to get one of their songs fully produced and two weeks of air time. You just need to post a video of the song performance, however raw it is, on their Facebook page. They'll choose a winner on May 7, polish it, and then start airing it. And if you don't have a song but want to get a sense of what local musicians of all stripes are up to, there are plenty of entries on the page to check out.
Christopher Tin's "Baba Yetu," whose lyrics are the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, was the first song composed for a video game (Civilization IV) ever to win a Grammy. It's become a hugely popular choral piece, and in 2018, South Africa's Stellenbosch University Choir took it to the 2018 Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, the huge annual Welsh music festival. Here's their performance, which swept the choir awards that year.See you tomorrow.
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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