Now is the winter of our snowless, 50-degree contentment

This Chicago “winter” with snowless, 50-degree days in January has me as giddy as a Cubs fan after a three-game winning streak in April. Surely, nothing can derail my unbridled joy and confident expectations for more of the same.

My winter hat collection has gone into hibernation. I'm still wearing baseball caps most days, and have yet to break out anything more drastic than my DEFCON 3 cap — a herringbone newsboy cap that is more about style than warmth, especially since its ear flaps have remained in the upright position.

My heavy-duty, green aviator's cap is still lost in the bottom of our winter clothes hamper, and I might as well put my unworn, genuine Chinese rabbit-fur hat on display in a glass case next to an unopened jug of snow melt as a reminder of how cold and nasty our winters used to be.

Friends bought an expensive snowblower this fall, and I'm tempted to throw them a thank-you party for appeasing Old Man Winter. At the very least, I should bring them a dish of my wife's corn stuffing, which I think was an old Aztec maize recipe folks used to bring families who sacrificed a virgin to the harvest God.

I'm just about to rummage through my shorts drawer when Bob “Buzz Kill” Ellsworth, the assistant director of emergency management for McHenry County, applies a damper to my meteorological euphoria with news of an upcoming Severe Weather Spotters Class. What, pray tell, is severe weather? Do we really need a class to teach us that all we need to defeat January's weather is an SPF-50 sunscreen?

“It's basically a course about what to look for,” Ellsworth says ominously. Sensing that I'm not ready to abandon my weather high, Ellsworth pipes up with some bad news.

“We've had tornadoes in January,” he says, before preceding to add season-by-season weather woes to my blissfully short memory.

“Last summer, we had those power outages and high winds,” he says, hoping to jog my memories.

When the thermometer hits 50 degrees on a January day as golfers meander idyllic fairways and shovelers remain simply idle, it's difficult to comprehend the words “severe” and “weather” in the same sentence. But even though the suburbs have enjoyed a winter much milder than those in Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, lots of folks are gearing up for severe weather.

“Last year, we needed two classes,” notes Ellsworth, who says 275 people got trained as severe-weather spotters in 2010. This year's free, two-and-a-half-hour training classes are at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Feb. 9 at the McHenry County College Conference Center in Crystal Lake. Weather-watcher-wannabes must register at mcemaevents.com or by phone at (815) 338-6400.

One of the scheduled speakers is Jim Allsopp, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service. He's been a part of those annual Fermilab/WGN-TV Tornado and Severe Weather Seminars with Tom Skilling every spring.

If flakes start falling or winds start whipping, the civilian suburban weather-watchers spring to life, utilizing everything from binoculars to ham radios.

“We'll have 10 to 15 out in the county and another 30 from home,” Ellsworth says of his county's trained volunteers. “Some spot from their homes and others go out in their vehicles.”

The county even has designated spots for watchers who want to track storms and stay safe. Similar training and weather-watch efforts take place in DuPage, Lake, Cook and Kane counties. Volunteers can phone their county's emergency service department or visit http://skywarn.org to find out more about local groups.

“They don't just get to go out there willy-nilly,” Ellsworth says of the civilian weather-spotters. “We send them out with someone who has been trained.”

Safety is at the heart of the suburban classes, and volunteers are not driving into tornadoes in armored vehicles like those storm-chasers on TV shows.

“We don't usually get the events they show on TV. Most of the time, it's pretty boring,” Ellsworth says.

A continuation of our boring winter is fine by me. This mild weather might have given me heat stroke, but I really don't envision breaking out my snow shovel until next November, when I'm cleaning up piles of ticker tape from the Cubs World Series Championship parade.