Daybreak Wednesday 8/19/20

SO GREAT TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Patchy fog first thing, then clouds, then sun... There's high pressure moving in, though (you've gotta love this) there's a "final lobe of vorticity" associated with the low pressure that mostly left us yesterday. It won't have any real impact around here, though. Highs in the mid-70s, winds from the northwest, and temps bumping 50 (or, my word, even below) overnight.It's peak sunflower. Quechee's Lisa Lacasse was over at the sunflower "house" (really more of a maze, she says) at Billings Farm the other day. If you haven't been, she's got pics of the paths and more varieties of sunflowers than you knew existed. Time to get out there!

And speaking of numbers...

One recount sidestepped, another on its way in VT House primaries.

Results were made official yesterday, and in the Barnard-W. Hartford race to replace Randall Szott, Heather Surprenant defeated Havah Walther by just 33 votes; Walther has decided not to challenge the results, reports

VTDigger

. But things were much closer in the Windsor-area district where Zach Ralph is retiring: Mt. Ascutney School Board Chair Elizabeth Burrows leads Hartland moderator Jennifer Grant by just 6 votes, and Grant has filed for a recount.

D-H asks remote workers to keep it up for rest of year.

Roughly 5,000 employees in the hospital system have been working from home since the pandemic hit. They were initially slated to return to their offices Sept. 5, but in an email yesterday, D-H vice president Brenda Blair told them that caution over case loads and the daunting logistics of handling so many people returning to the workplace have led the hospital to continue limiting on-site staff.

(VN)

Can high bailiffs really be relevant to criminal justice reform? Last week Bobby Sand, Windsor County's former chief prosecutor, won the Democratic nomination for high bailiff in the county; he's unopposed in the general. He's running for the obscure position (the high bailiff can arrest a sheriff) to press for reform. “I don’t think it’s law enforcement’s fault that we have dumped responses onto them that are not within their wheelhouse,” says Sand, “but I think it is our collective obligation to figure out how to divest them of that role by creating other appropriate citizen-based responses.”"Befriend a rattlesnake; be kind to a weasel..." Writer and naturalist Ted Levin is still musing about blacklegged (deer) ticks—which, he says, "ought to be the white-footed mouse tick—the cute, bug-eyed, soulful-looking rodent is the most competent reservoir host of Lyme disease." And when white-footed mice multiply, especially after a mast year, owls, foxes, snakes and others are there to eat them. One biologist calculates that a three-foot male timber rattlesnake removes more than 6,000 blacklegged ticks from its neighborhood each summer via the mice it eats. So..."This semester, we are obliged to protect not just ourselves, but the townspeople who, year after year, welcome us into this beautiful place with open arms." That's Middlebury College student Henry Ganey—who happens to be from Middlebury—reflecting in the college newspaper on locals' apprehension and students' responsibility this year to earn the town's trust by taking the necessary steps to protect it from Covid-19. "There are more of us returning to the area in the coming weeks," he points out, "than Vermont has Covid-19 cases." "I'm afraid that a lot of these decisions were based on, 'If we don't bring our students back to campus, we're going to close.'" That's a Northern Vermont U official talking to Seven Days' Derek Brouwer and Andrea Suozzo about the decisions by colleges throughout Vermont to forge ahead with a return to school. Brouwer and Suozzo take an extended look at what campuses are planning, delving into testing plans and how they intend to prevent spread. Neighbors remain dubious. "I'm sort of dumbstruck at this point," one Burlington resident tells them. "We are essentially a city and a university of guinea pigs,"  This was not in the Airbnb manual! On Sunday, the Wilmington, VT PD got a call from an Airbnb owner in town saying that a bear had entered the property and the renter had locked herself in the bedroom. Arriving police saw a sow and two cubs skedaddling for the woods. There was no damage inside—but there were two bags of garbage, as well as a torn bag of garbage out in the woods. VT Fish & Wildlife is taking the opportunity to remind people that "garbage can be detected by bears from great distances” and not to keep it lying around... even if you're just renting.How a bird-killing housecat named George helped save birds. He belonged to Nancy Brennan's husband, and around their home in Duxbury, VT laid waste to avian life with abandon. Until Brennan got the idea of sewing him a brightly colored collar, taking advantage of songbirds' sensitivity to bright colors. The carcasses stopped showing up at the door. Which is how Birdbesafe cat collars were born, and now keep Brennan and her husband in cat food. Seven Days' Margaret Grayson has the story.Vermonters spend more on health care and the growth is faster than in other states. In a report released yesterday, state auditor Doug Hoffer writes that "current health care cost and expenditure trends were economically unsustainable before this pandemic and are even more unsustainable today.” They are rising faster than rents, utility bills, and state spending, notes the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. The auditor's report suggests consolidation of hospitals and services may be driving the trend.Scott proposes using unexpected July revenue boost to help close VT budget deficit. The state faces a $180 million shortfall, and at a press conference yesterday, the governor and members of his administration presented a budget that would by and large keep spending steady. It would boost spending on roads and broadband, and $2 million on stimulus payments to Vermonters who did not receive federal stimulus checks in the spring.VT plans to spend federal relief funds to expand school-age child care. $12 million, in fact. With an estimated 10,000+ K-6 students needing care while their parents work, the Scott administration announced yesterday it plans to relax regulations for in-home providers, streamline the process for creating new centers, and set up some 73 new child care hubs scattered around the state. “We know we need more child care capacity. And we need it quickly,” Scott said at his press conference.Vermont's small cheesemakers adjust. One key to survival, says Norwich's Jeremy Stephenson, who directs Spring Brook Farm's cheese program and is president of the American Cheese Society, appears to be the ability to get pre-packaged cheese into bigger markets. This is the route taken by Randolph Center's Neighborly Farms of Vermont. Though as Seven Days' Jordan Barry and Melissa Pasanen point out in an extended look at a variety of cheesemakers, small outfits that have been able to adjust quickly and sell by mail order, curbside, and at farmers markets are making a go of it, too. Well, yeah, Calvin Coolidge in Plymouth. And sure, Mikaela Shiffrin in Lyme and Aerosmith's Joe Perry in Pomfret. But Wolfgang Köhler in Enfield? The Pudding is an intriguing three-year-old effort to pursue journalism through visual essays, often involving large datasets. They've built a map of the US using the most "Wikipedia'd" person (determined by median pageviews) somehow connected to a town or city. It's a pretty wild ride through the famous and the obscure. Just zoom in to the Upper Valley...or wander wherever your fancy takes you. Oh, and, umm, Hanover? Care to explain? 

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The Rogers Family is a set of triplets, a pair of twins, and two "singles" who've become YouTube sensations for their lively, inventive, and tightly choreographed covers crowded around a single grand piano. They all went to Chamblee High School outside Atlanta, and though they've scattered now, they apparently still get to use its stage (and piano, amazingly enough).

by the Jackson Five. (

Thanks, HB!)

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