Tag: 240822

Quality of Life 24/08/22

Tough times for beekeepers

According to New Hampshire beekeepers, bees are feeling the stressof climate change. In an Aug. 9 story reported by New Hampshire Public Radio, local beekeeper Lee Alexander said that warm weather, ample rain and sunshine this year have unexpectedly made conditions difficult for his bees. His bees produced so much honey that they ran out of room to store it, and started filling up the brood chambers, where young bees are supposed to develop. The NHPR story stated that changing weather conditions complicate bees’ lives in many other ways. “Winters can also pose problems,“ the story reported. “Mild winter temperatures can cause bees to leave their hive too soon, only to freeze to death during a cold snap. Extreme rain events can create too much moisture in a hive, leaving bees unable to dry off and at risk for hypothermia. Heavy rainfall or flooding can also wash away pollen, leaving bees without enough food.”

QOL score: -1

Comment: Bee well.

Crabgrass, we hardly knew ye

A recent article in Systematic Biology, “Molecular and Taxonomic Reevaluation of the Digitaria filiformis Complex (Poaceae), Including a Globally Extinct, Single-Site Endemic from New Hampshire, USA, and a New Species from Mexico,” hardly seems like a popular page-turner, but it highlights the role played by an extinct species of New Hampshire crabgrass. “In 1901, several peculiar specimens of crabgrass were discovered on the rocky slopes of Rock Rimmon in Manchester, New Hampshire,” the UNH College of Life Sciences and Agriculture wrote in an Aug. 14 press release. “Initially thought to belong to the species Digitaria filiformis, the slender, wiry plants with small, delicate spikelets were only known from this single location. But by 1931, they were last collected from the area, and the grass has not been observed since. Recently, UNH’s Albion R. Hodgdon Herbarium, which holds three of the last known remaining dried specimens of the grass, played a key role in identifyingthese plantsas their own unique species, Digitaria laeviglumis, commonly known as smooth crabgrass…. ”

QOL score: a belated -1

Comment: According to the press release, this marks the first documented plant extinction in New Hampshire.

Gold medals and belly rubs

In an Aug. 15 press release, the Golden Dog Adventure Co. in Barrington announced the conclusion of the 2024 Summer Doggy Olympics. Golden Dog, which hosted the event, wrote, “Over the course of two weeks, 23 canine athletes and their handlers competed in eighteen events hosted in 14 cities throughout New Hampshire.” Events included Howling, Agility, Pool Toy Retrieval, Ice Cream Licking, Obstacle Course, Nose Work, and Tricks. A Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Cody, “ a senior canine athlete who not only competed in the 2021 Summer Doggy Olympics, but at the age of 10, participated in seven competitions at this year’s games.”

QOL score: +1

Comment: Watch the closing ceremonies on YouTube. Search for “2024 Doggy Olympics Closing Ceremony.”

Last week’s QOL score: 76

Net change: -1

QOL this week: 75

What’s affecting your Quality of Life here in New Hampshire?

Let us know at [email protected].

Yaz turns 84

The Big Story – Happy Birthday, Yaz: We’ll start today with birthday greetings to Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski as he turns 84. His 1967 season is arguably the greatest season for carrying his team on his back since Joe DiMaggio in 1941.

My favorite Yaz stat has nothing to do with baseball, though. It’s that as a high school basketball player he set Long Island’s single-game scoring record by going for 60 one day. Not bad for a place that includes Julius Erving among its basketball alumni. So happy b-day, Captain Carl.

Sports 101: When Yaz went for those 60 points, whose LI scoring record did he break?

News Item – Mickey Gasper: The big day came for the catcher out of Merrimack when the Red Sox called him to the show last week. He immediately played in two games, walking twice in two AB’s to give him an impossible-to-top 1.000 on-base percentage.

News Item – Drake Maye: The Pats may have lost 14-13 to Philly, but there were encouraging signs of life from their rookie QB as he calmly led two scoring drives while going 6-11 for 47 yards and 15 more and a TD on four carries.

The Numbers:

3 –games out of the final wild card spot for the Sox as the week started.

300 – homer mark reached by Yankees slugger Aaron Judge last week.

… Of the Week Awards

Thumbs Up – Bayless Dumped By FS1: With his ratings tanking, repugnant talking head Skip Bayless is gone from his show on FS1.

Sports/Politics Note of the Week – Royce White: The former Iowa State hoopster won the GOP primary in Minnesota last week to let him face Dem Amy Klobuchar for her Senate seat.

Random Thoughts: How ridiculous was it to hear Kenley (Blood and Guts) Jansen telling Alex Cora he was “ready to get 4” during a win over Texas last week? Wow, like facing four guys instead of three is a herculean task.

A Little History – Closers in 1949: The Yankees went into their season-closing two-game series with the Red Sox trailing Boston by one game for the pennant. Starter Allie Reynolds got tagged with four runs in the third inning to send New York down 0-4. So with the season on the line Casey Stengel quick-triggered him for an unorthodox move that would give managers, media pundits and people like Jansen a stroke today.

He brought closer Joe Page to stem the potential season-ending rally. Which he did. And Casey not only did that, but he had Page keep going until the Sox got to him. Which they never did.

Leading old Joe to “close” out a crucial 5-4 Yankees win with an astonishing scoreless 6.2-inning, 1-hit, 5-strikeout effort to save the season. Especially since the Yanks won 5-3 the next day to steal the pennant from Boston

Again.

Sports 101 Answer: Before Yaz, the LI single game record was held by the greatest football player who ever lived, Jimmy Brown, who had 53 for Manhasset in the early 1950s.

Final Thought – The White Sox Race to be the Worst Ever: Longtime New York Met Ed Kranepool went on record last week saying he hopes the Chicago White Sox surpass the 40-120 record of his 1962 Mets for the worst single season ever in MLB history.

If you don’t who Kranepool is, he is sort of a New York legend in a weird way. He was a NYC high school phenom who made it to the Mets in their first year when he was 17. And then despite being nothing more than a journeyman first baseman his entire career, he somehow managed to last with the Mets for the next 18 years despite never driving in even 60 runs in a year. I would venture no one’s ever pulled off a feat like that without being traded at least once.

But sorry, Ed, I don’t want them to break your Mets’ record of futility. I’m a New Yorker at heart and that team, as bad as it was, was a historic, beloved team of distinction.

First, because their arrival as an expansion team brought baseball back to National League fans in NYC after they were abandoned by the Giants and Dodgers after 1957. Second, they lost in both lovable and comical how-did-they-do-that ways. And finally, they had the perfect ringleader at the center of all the chaos in legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel to explain all the lunacy as it unfolded in the entertaining fashion only he could.

In other words, they were perfect in their futility, while Chicago is just terrible and B-O-R-I-N-G. So it’ll be a loss for baseball history if the record falls from the Amazing Mets, at whom Stengel used to shout in anguish from the dugout, “Can’t anyone here play this game?!!!”

Email Dave Long at [email protected].

A ride on gravel

Rose Mountain Rumble ride benefits land conservation

Chirs Wells is the President and Executive Director of the Piscataquog Land Conservancy (PLC). The PLC is a private nonprofit land conservation organization that works to conserve the natural resources and scenic beauty of the Piscataquog, Souhegan and Nashua River valleys of southern New Hampshire. The Rose Mountain Rumble that takes place on Saturday, Aug. 24, is their annual “gravel ride” that helps raise funds for the PLC and awareness about land conservation. Registration is full but there is a waitlist. Visit plcnh.org for more information about the organization and rosemountainrumble.com for information about the gravel ride.

What is the Rose Mountain Rumble?

What people that are into it call a quote ‘gravel ride’ or a ‘gravel grinder.’ It’s in between, essentially, road biking and mountain biking. People are mostly riding bicycles that are a tweaked version of a road bike but they’re a little bit beefier, they’ve got a little bit different gearing, a little bit wider tires, and what they’re really made for, yes, you can ride them on pavement for sure, but their sweet spot is to be riding on dirt woods or woods road kind of environment. It’s turned into a real culture and a real scene. One of our organizers, Kris Henry, always likes to stress that this is not a race, this is a ride. The whole point of it is to get people on the back roads, dirt roads of south central New Hampshire, which is the area that we work in, to get out and experience these lightly traveled dirt roads, beautiful scenery, and be with a community of people.

How did the gravel ride get started?

We got started with this ride back in 2014…. It’s our 10th year since the first one but we missed one from Covid, so this is actually officially the ninth annual, so take your pick, it’s either the ninth or the 10th. The first year we had all of 30 people ride in it. We went from 30 to within a couple years we’re at 150 and have been ever since. We capped it intentionally to have it not be too big. Anyway, back in 2014 our organization was working on a land conservation project to conserve basically the whole top of Rose Mountain. It’s sort of a 2,000-footish small mountain in Lyndeborough and we had this opportunity to acquire the property and had to raise a decent amount of money to do it. At the time, somebody who was a longtime friend of the organization said, ‘Here’s an idea, maybe you could do a bike thing or something, you should talk to these people I know in Lyndeborough.’ Those people turned out to be a guy named Kris Henry who’s basically a custom bike builder … and then a couple, Doug Powers and his wife, Doria Harris, they are both avid cyclists…. We literally got together at Kris Henry’s bike building shop, his backyard of his house in Lyndeborough, and pretty quickly came up with the idea of doing a gravel ride in the area and whatever money we could spin off of it would benefit this land conservation area.

Can you expand on what the PLC does?

The PLC is a private, nonprofit land conservation organization; some people will shorten that to being ‘a land trust.’ We are the local land trust, basically, for greater Manchester, greater Nashua, 26 towns altogether. Just about all of them are in Hillsborough County; we have a couple that are in Merrimack. It’s a really diverse area. We’ve been around since 1970. As of today we hold land for conservation easements on … about 9,600 acres. Basically, what we do, we work on a purely voluntary basis with land owners that are interested in conserving their property or looking to sell their property to whoever but we know it’s of conservation value. Some of the lands and easements are straight up donations, some of them we’re paying full market value based on appraisal, and honestly sort of everything in between. The whole point of it is to conserve the property in an undeveloped state in perpetuity, i.e. forever. Once the land is protected, whether it’s through a conservation easement, which is essentially you’re taking the development rights off of a property but it remains in private or town ownership, or something that we own, either way we are then responsible forevermore to be monitoring that property at least annually to make sure that the boundaries are being respected, nothing bad is going on, and that the natural resource values are being protected on an ongoing basis. On some of the properties we own we have trail systems that we are maintaining and in some cases adding to. We’re trying to make some of our properties, where it’s appropriate, to be local recreational areas for people…. All of our lands are open to the public, that is lands we own outright. All of them are open to some level of recreation. Most of them are open to hunting and fishing to people that are into it. We try to have them open to as many activities as is reasonable and safe.

What’s the best way for someone to support PLC’s mission?

It’s kind of the classic answer from a nonprofit organization. One obvious and good way, and we definitely always need people to help us out, is to be a member. Make a contribution, be a member in the organization, support us financially. And/or, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, volunteer. We definitely need volunteers, especially for our property monitoring. We’ve got 80-plus people in any given year that are volunteer land monitors and they are often the people who are out there annually being our eyes and ears on the ground to check on these properties as we go along.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Rose Mountain Rumble. Photo by Gabriella Nissen.

News & Notes 24/08/22

Stepp re-nominated

According to a press release, Lindsey Stepp of Holderness was re-nominated by Gov. Chris Sununu and was confirmed by the New Hampshire Executive Council on Wednesday, Aug. 7, to continue serving as Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (NHDRA).

Stepp is the NHDRA’s first female Commissioner and she began her tenure as Commissioner in December 2017 after previously serving as Assistant Commissioner for nearly two years. Her new four-year term runs through Sept. 1, 2028.

In her role as Commissioner, Stepp leads the state’s tax agency, which is responsible for collecting in excess of $2.7 billion in annual revenue and ensuring equity in the $4.5 billion of property taxes collected by New Hampshire’s 234 municipalities; and directs a staff of more than 150 professionals that are charged with fairly and efficiently collecting taxes from the state’s citizens, businesses, utilities and hospitals, according to the release.

The marquee achievement under Stepp’s leadership to date has been the implementation of the Revenue Information Management System (RIMS) and the Granite Tax Connect (GTC) online user portal, which together modernized NHDRA’s entire information system and transformed the way New Hampshire taxpayers and tax preparers file and pay taxes through automation, integration and electronic filing.

Fire foam retrieval

According to a press release, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) in partnership with the New Hampshire State Fire Marshal has launched a statewide initiative to destroy hazardous per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in firefighting foam.

During an event at the New Hampshire Fire Academy’s Aircraft Rescue Training Facility in Concord, NHDES Commissioner Bob Scott announced details of the new Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) Take Back Program. AFFF is primarily used by fire departments to smother flammable liquid fires. Its high concentrations of PFAS compounds resist typical environmental degradation processes and cause long-term contamination of water, soil and air, according to the release.

The ban on the use of these “legacy foams” is possible because there are now PFAS-free foam alternatives available.

NHDES has contracted with Revive Environmental Technology to administer the collection and destruction of AFFF in the state. Following collection of the foam, Revive will consolidate the containers and ship them to its facility in Columbus, Ohio, where the foam will be treated with Revive’s PFAS Annihilator technology, originally developed by Battelle, which uses supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) to destroy the PFAS chemicals without generating harmful PFAS byproducts or transferring the PFAS elsewhere in the process.

The FAA doesn’t currently require airports like Manchester-Boston Regional Airport to transition to the new foam, but the airport is taking the initiative to switch over now in order to be a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly airport, according to the release.

New Hampshire’s AFFF Take Back Program is open to all New Hampshire fire departments, local governments, and government-owned airports. See des.nh.gov.

Ocean of hot sauce

According to a press release, the third annual New England Hot Sauce Fest, presented by The Spicy Shark on Saturday, July 27, at Smuttynose Brewery in Hampton, raised $17,942 for two Seacoast organizations dedicated to preserving ocean ecosystems, the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation and Seacoast Science Center.

In a statement, Jen Kennedy, Executive Director of Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, a Portsmouth-based nonprofit, said, “We’re so grateful to have been a part of this hugely successful event. We look forward to using the funds to expand our research on marine life and ensure a healthier ocean.”

RIP Bald Eagle

The New Hampshire Audubon Society (26 Audubon Way, Auburn, 224-9909, nhaudubon.org) announced on its website on Aug. 6 that its long-time ambassador bald eagle has died. “It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our cherished ambassador Bald Eagle,” the post read. “He was 36 years old and had been a vital part of our conservation and education programs for 25 years.” The bald eagle came to NH Audubon in 1999. He was found injured in upstate New York, which led to his left wing being amputated at the elbow. A metal band on his left leg “identified him as a nestling from Ontario, Canada, in 1988,” NH Audubon wrote. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website (fws.gov), bald eagles generally live 15 to 25 years in the wild.

Correction

In the Aug. 15 issue of the Hippo, a Q&A on page 6 with Kyle Dimick incorrectly described the injuries he suffered during a ski trip that led him to his invention. He had a concussion, as well as other injuries listed in the story, but not, as was initially stated in a press release about Dimick, a traumatic brain injury.

Go for a beginner wild mushroom walk at Prescott Farm Environmental Education Center in Laconia (928 White Oaks Road) on Saturday, Aug. 24, from 10 a.m. to noon. Led by experts from the New Hampshire Mushroom Co., this walk will take you along the farm’s scenic trails to search for, collect, identify and become familiar with different mushrooms. This event is for foragers 16 and older. $20 for members and $35 for nonmembers. Visit prescottfarm.org.

Tickets are on sale now for the NH Highland Games & Festival Sept. 20 through Sept. 22 at Loon Mountain in Lincoln. Special ticketed events at the festival include a whiskey tasting, a Cape Breton dinner and concert, Highland Brews & Bites and a Scotch Ale competition. See nhscot.org.

Talking Heads tribute act Start Making Sense will perform at The Range Live Music and Concert Venue in Mason (96 Old Turnpike Road, 878-1324, therangemason.com) on Saturday, Aug. 24, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $39 in advance, or $45 on the day of the show.

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