Caribbean Disturbance, Cecilia Speaks Spanish, TOAD HUNTERS return!

HURRICANES AND WEATHER
First of all, Centerpoint has completed the main pass at restoring power. Here is an excerpt from the web site:
As of 9 p.m. last night, 18 days after Hurricane Ike passed through the area, CenterPoint Energy concluded its emergency operations plan, having restored power throughout its system, meeting the company’s initial projection to have service restored to its customers within two to three weeks. Restoration work continues for about 4,600 isolated cases including customers needing customer-owned equipment repairs. Many of the remaining outages involve customers unable to receive electric service due to damaged electrical equipment or flooding.

“I’d like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding during one of the most challenging restoration efforts in the history of our company,” said Tom Standish, group president of Regulated Operations. “Hurricane Ike mowed down 50-foot-tall trees and caused massive damage to the company’s 27,000-plus miles of distribution electric wires. With the help of more than 11,000 mutual assistance workers from all over the country and our own dedicated workforce, we reinstalled tens of thousands of feet of power lines that took us decades to build.”
Crews are continuing to respond to individual customer outage calls. Some of these outage cases are not expected to be resolved soon because the structure was severely damaged or destroyed. Over 93 percent or 2.15 million of the company’s 2.26 million customers lost power as a result of Hurricane Ike’s 110 mile-per-hour hurricane force winds.

Standish said that over the next few weeks the company will continue to maintain a mutual assistance workforce of about 3,000 to help the company’s own employees make long-term repairs on lines that received temporary fixes during the restoration process.

Those are the main points. From now on, if you have trouble with your power, call 713-207-2222.

Pressures have fallen in the western Caribbean and there is an area of disturbed weather. Will keep an eye on it. The latest a hurricane ever hit Texas was October 15, 1989. That was a storm named Jerry.

Our high pressure will begin sliding eastward on Friday...western trough will send a couple cold fronts toward us, but they probably won't make it as they glance off to the northeast. I do think our temperatures and humidity levels will increase and look for some thunderstorms starting the middle of next week. It was nice and cool this morning. I caught a chill walking Sarah to school. Conroe had a low of 49!

SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I told you I would give you a link so you could hear me speak Spanish. Well here it is:
http://www.radiobilingue.org/audio/ednl/mp3/ednl_081002_02.mp3

You will have to open the file and play it. Thanks to my friend Raul Feliciano Sanchez for doing the story about benefits of bilingualism. From that interview I am taking the word for knowledge or cognition -- conocimiento, pronounced coh-no-see-me-ein-tow. With conocimiento, any problem can be solved.

There is still widespread belief that bilingualism can cause more harm than good.
Here is some research that refutes that:
The idea that bilingualism causes cognitive damage to children is no longer held by researchers, but it lingers in popular belief. More recent reserach has compared the performance of "real" bilingual children, those with roughly equal language skills, with that of monolingual children and found the former group to have superior performance, especially in metalinguistic ability. There is now data suggesting that even language minority students in bilingual education programs who are in the process of learning English can benefit from some of the advantages of bilingualism. These studies contradict the argument that bilingualism in itself might cause cognitive confusion in the child, and support the idea that bilingualism can lead to higher levels of metalinguistic awareness and cognitive ability.

This came from: Hakuta, K. (1986). Cognitive development of bilingual children No. ER3). U.S.; Connecticut.

So, now that you know all of this, you should be highly motivated to purchase our award winning DVD, recognized by Dr. Toy as a Top 10 Educational Product of 2008? You can help all the youngsters in your world have fun while reaping the benefits of language learning!!! Order through http://www.frankandpaco.com/, Ventura's Educational Supply, Dolo Publications, Carlex Inc., The Curious Mind Store, amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and barnesandnoble.com.

AND MORE
We have a new episode of TOAD HUNTERS! Check it out!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLCeJhwLGeQ. There are now 14 episodes on youtube.com. You can see them, by going to youtube.com and doing a search for TOAD HUNTERS. Share this link with all the toad lovers you know.

Our new fence is almost in place!!! I'll have photos in tomorrow's blog!

Be safe!
Cecilia Sinclair
Wonder Weather Woman