A Perfectly Beautiful Spring Day in St. Louis...In January??

Yesterday it was 66 in St. Louis.  Being under-employed, I had a chance to take a stroll to the nearby park with my three grandkids to do nothing more pressing than to see if the two girls could bounce me off the middle of the seesaw and which of them could make it past me down the slide without paying the Dema Kiss Toll.  There was lots of laughing and enjoying the warm sun on cheeks turned skyward and the warm breeze tousling their toddler hair.
Just in case you forgot, yesterday was January 31st.  And just in case you happen to live somewhere in the Southern climes and don't know what St. Louis weather is usually like in January, it's definitely not . like . this.  In fact it usually involves a horrendous ice storm about the second week in January that culminates in 6 weeks of trying to salt the four inches of ice in the alley so that Tim can get his car out of the garage.  The whole afternoon while I was having a great time with the kids, I had this niggling sci-fi disaster movie kind of feeling going on in my head.  Everyone's enjoying the lack of winter around here, but it's SO out of the ordinary that it's frightening to me in that polar-ice-cap-melting-and-losing-Florida-under-the-raised-ocean-levels kind of way.  The migration patterns of the birds at the lake are all out of whack, the Snow Geese are still flying formations over the lake in odd directions and way later than usual; Monday I actually saw some flying back North again.  All of our bulbs are up, the crocuses are blooming, I saw a robin today, there are a ton of bugs flying around everywhere and the cherry trees in the next block are blooming. In January.  Not in May. This is unprecedented and yet I don't hear anyone else raising the alarm.

So what does this have to do with a sailing blog?  Apart from the fact that I love sailing and I can't think of any way I would rather spend my remaining years with my best friend, the whole plan has the one benefit of living greener with a small footprint and, even though I doubt it's possible, of paying back in some small way the damage that my generation did by being so self-absorbed.  I look at the planet now and it makes me hurt deeply. All I can hope is that she'll have mercy on us and let us pass through the plastic-strewn waters without tossing us to the bottom in one of the new mega-hurricanes.  I think I'll go dig out my sunscreen a little early this year...