GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
The weather's having a little trouble making up its mind. There's a lot going on up there, but the short version is that there's a system coming in from the west along with a warm front—but in these parts, cold air will stick around at the surface. The upshot is that we get cloudy skies, a chance of showers all day, and a likelihood of heavy rain tonight with a chance that freezing rain will mix in, along with maybe some thunder. Highs today in the mid 30s, a couple of degrees colder overnight.Which looks longer, the squirrel or the baguette? And it's one mighty self-congratulatory-looking squirrel, too, in the photos Jessica Brown sent in to Demo Sofronas's About Norwich newsletter.“We understood that no one could guarantee us we wouldn’t be shot along the way.” In this week's third installment of Upper Valley episodes from Dartmouth's "Tell Me a Story" podcasting class, Omala Snyder sits down with Ukrainian refugee Maria Ostrenko to talk about her escape from Kyiv with her young son early in the war—leaving Ostrenko's husband behind. The two eventually made it to Hanover, where Ostrenko's mother lives. “The woods around me,” she tells Snyder, “made me more calm.” Though she still calls her husband every day.Car missing in Plainfield barn fire found in Lebanon. Yesterday, the Leb PD announced in a press release, it got a call about a car matching the description of that Audi TT stored in Judith Belyea's barn that, in the aftermath of Sunday's early-morning fire, was nowhere to be found. Officers went to a house on Bank Street Extension, where the resident told them a friend had asked him to store the vehicle a few days before. Thomas Hamel, 30, was arrested for "falsifying physical evidence." In the Valley News, Plainfield police tell John Lippman that it's too early to say whether the fire and the now-found Audi are related."The only way to assure that this can never happen again is to never again teach with human skeletal remains unless you know exactly where they came from.” That's Jeremy DeSilva, chair of Dartmouth's anthropology department, explaining to The Dartmouth's Shena Han and Charlotte Hampton why the department axed classes on human bones in the wake of the discovery that teachers had unwittingly been using Native American remains. Han and Hampton tell the story behind the college's announcement last week, how members of the Native American community reacted, and what happens now.SPONSORED: A high-flying, dizzying dance show on ice! From April 13-15, the Hop brings the US premiere of Murmuration to the Upper Valley and Thompson Arena, as Canadian skating artists Le Patin Libre (or "Free Skate") transform into harmonious flocks of birds. With exhilarating choreography that exceeds what an individual mind can comprehend, the show is an adrenaline rush for the whole family! Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts.Enfield state rep was struck, kicked, strangled by DHMC patient. The VN's Nora Doyle-Burr spent yesterday digging into the news that Democratic Rep. Joshua Adjutant had resigned from the NH House. Adjutant, a DH security officer, was helping to restrain a psychiatric patient last week after staff reported the man “was becoming agitated and had threatened violence,” according to a court affidavit. The workers comp form Adjutant posted on social media said the assault left him with a concussion and “concern for aneurysm." He tells Doyle-Burr he's experiencing headaches and "emotional instability."What DHMC's Long Covid clinic has learned so far. For starters, infectious disease specialist Jeffrey Parsonnet and nurse practitioner Christina Martin tell the Boston Globe's Amanda Gokee (here via MSN), there's a lot they still don't know. But it seems clear, Parsonnet says, that "All of the symptoms stem from the brain and how it’s interpreting signals from the body." And 70-75 percent of the patients the clinic sees are women—possibly, Martin says, because of immunologic differences that seem overall to make men sicker with acute Covid, but make women more susceptible to long Covid.But hey, if you just want a synopsis of that interview... Gokee wrote about it yesterday in the new New Hampshire-focused newsletter from the Globe, Morning Report. Put together by Gokee and her colleague, Steven Porter, it debuted on Monday and is available to anyone, whether or not you subscribe to the paper. It's a quick, conversational read with links to NH-centric stories and beyond, both in the Globe and elsewhere. Welcome to the fray, you two!SPONSORED: Slow Food at Shaker Bridge Theatre April 6-23. A vacationing couple celebrates their anniversary at a Greek restaurant in Palm Springs—but will the marriage survive the service? As a needy waiter insinuates his way into their meal—and their lives—the couple examines their past and their future together. Playwright Wendy MacLeod brings us a tender comedy that delves deeply into what we hunger for. Sponsored by Shaker Bridge Theatre.Longing for the Upper Paleolithic. Charles Foster believes in immersion. For his book Being a Beast, he spent weeks sleeping underground like a badger. More recently, for Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, he went back to the forest. And stone tools. Then he moved to the farming days of the Neolithic, and then the Enlightenment. In this week's Enthusiasms, Howe librarian Jared Jenisch writes that Foster "regards this sequence as a radical narrowing of human being"—and that his book "offers up a mind-expanding meditation on the nature of the human, and its possibilities."Dartmouth names acting head football coach, says Teevens continues to recover. At a noon webinar yesterday for alums, parents, and the Friends of Dartmouth Football, Mike Harrity, the college's athletic director, announced that associate head coach Sammy McCorkle, who has spent 18 years working with sidelined head coach Buddy Teevens, will take over the lead role throughout spring practice. Of Teevens, the college said that he continues to recover after being struck by a pickup in Florida, but "school officials have not commented on the exact nature of his injuries," reports WMUR's Mike Cronin.The pipeline for patients leaving New Hampshire Hospital is jammed. And the reason, Michaela Towfighi writes in the Concord Monitor, is NH's housing shortage. In general, patients being discharged from the state's psychiatric hospital move to transitional housing, and from there back into the community. But with no housing to be had out there, people can't leave transitional programs—and so, Towfighi writes, "a backlog begins." Towfighi delves into the benefits of transitional housing, the desperate search for available psychiatric beds in the state, and the impact of the rental housing crisis.With a decade to go before NH's landfills fill, NH begins looking at keeping food waste out—but with no data to guide it. It's the only New England state beside ME that hasn't tried to address the issue, writes Beatrice Burack in NH Bulletin, though there are a couple of bills this session that might change that. The problem, Burack writes, is that the state "regulates and gathers data on where waste ends up, not where it comes from." So it has no idea how much waste high-volume food users like grocers, school districts, universities, hospitals, and prisons produce, let alone what to do about it.Safe in Montpelier, Afghan refugees try to plan a future. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Musa, a medical student who worked as an interpreter for U.S. forces, was able to escape to the States. But for a harrowing year, his wife, Suma, was forced to hide in Afghanistan, then Pakistan, waiting for her chance to join him. In VTDigger, Grace Benninghoff writes about hiding from a relentless Taliban, fleeing, and the challenges of building a new life. Musa hopes to work in medicine, but the cost is overwhelming. Suma wants to learn English and to go into nursing. Both want their families safely here with them. UVM settles with federal government on anti-semitism investigation. You may remember that in 2021, advocacy organizations on campus charged the university had failed to respond quickly or firmly to reports of harassment of Jewish students, which led last fall to an investigation by the US Dept of Education's civil rights office. Now, writes Rachel Hellman in Seven Days, the university has agreed to "make clear that discrimination and harassment based on identity is unacceptable, as well as provide anti-harassment training for the university’s senior leadership." Here's the feds' letter and here's the agreement.Ever wonder what it would be like to ride your bike through a 15-mile-long, completely empty tunnel? Way deep down under London's Thames River there’s a new, super cool, clean tunnel. But it won't be empty for long, because soon it's going to be... a sewer. For hundreds of years, London has struggled with waste flooding into the Thames when it rains. That’s about to come to a £5 billion end, when the new super sewer starts carrying sewage and rainwater under the river to a processing plant, instead of dumping it in the river. The BBC’s Jonah Fisher takes us along on his ride."The mountains don't care how much skill or experience you have." There's a reason this video has gone viral. Last month, a skier named Francis Zuber, from Bellingham, WA, was skiing the backcountry on Mt. Baker when he caught a flash of red. "I knew it was weird because we were out of bounds. Ski patrol wouldn't mark any terrain there," he later told KUOW. What it was, it turned out, was a snowboard—attached to a man, Ian Steger, who was buried headfirst in well over six feet of snow. Zuber's GoPro captured the whole rescue. Language alert, but heck, you would, too.The Wednesday Vordle. If you're new to Daybreak, this is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with a five-letter word chosen from an item in the previous day's Daybreak.
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Well, it's First Wednesday and VT Humanities does have lectures going on, but most of them are in-person in other parts of the state, including Dominican poet and Dartmouth Safety & Security head Keysi Montás,
Norwich's event is tomorrow, more on that then. However, there are two hybrid lectures tonight:
Down in Putney at 7 pm, Champlain College prof Michael Lange will talk about what maple sugaring means to VT, based on five years of hanging out—oh, sorry, research—among sugarmakers around the state. He'll be focused not on the mechanics, but on how and why maple has become so important to Vermont’s (and Vermonters') identity. Register for the livestream link.
Also at 7, veteran VT journalist Chris Graff will talk about how Vermont switched political identities, going from rock-ribbed Republican to overwhelmingly Democratic as the 20th century wore on. The interstates, IBM, reapportionment—all that and more figure into the story. Livestream at the link.
And let's just start the day with...
Israeli singer and actor (if you've watched
Fauda
, you've seen him) Idan Amedi and Brazilian-Greek singer Malu Kiriakopoulou,
In Hebrew and Greek.
. English isn't the translator's first language, but really, you can just let the song itself (and the sunlight, and the water) wash over you.
(Thanks, AFG)
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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