Good morning folks on this quite sunny but cold Sunday morning, which happens to be Palm Sunday and the first day of calendar spring. The mercury reads 24 degrees but with a northerly breeze, it feels more like a raw 16 degrees. The rest of the day will be mostly sunny with a high around 43 degrees, about 3 degrees below normal. Sunset tonight is at 7:08 pm which is a little over 1 minute later than yesterday. Seasonable warm for mid-March returns on Monday under partly sunny skies, and it gets back to above slightly average warmth for the second half of the week with more rain in the forecast.

I hope your enjoying your first day of spring. Not only is Easter next weekend, we have only six weeks remaining until May Day, when the average high is 65 degrees in Albany and darkness doesn’t prevail until nearly 8:30. Spring’s warmth will be on us shortly. Probably in a little over a month with the mild spring, Albany will start to green up pretty well.

To clear up any confusion, there are 12 hours and 12 minutes of daylight in Albany on the Vernal Equinox, aka the first day of spring. The 12 hours of daylight and darkness occurs sometime before the Vernal Equinox, due to refraction because the sun appears as a ball of light so part of it appears on the horizon before the whole sun does. Equal day and night occurred in Albany on March 17, down closer the equator it occurs either in late February or early March.

Happy Birthday to the late Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers, the popular kids program on PBS, that I loved to watch. Will you be my neighbor, the program famously asked, as the train went through his wall to a magical community. Mr. Rogers was born today in 1928, and he passed away in 2003.

Happy Birthday also to the Grand Old Party, aka the Republican Party which was born today in 1854, providing a check on the once pro-slavery Democratic Party after the Whig Party stopped existing. With Donald Trump as their presumptive nominee for president and increased division in the GOP, it will be interesting to see how much of a future the party has.