Weather This Week/Hurricane Workshop Celebrity Sightings/Technology Recommendations

HURRICANES AND WEATHER
Hurricane Season (for the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico) begins Monday, June 1st. One thing you should know is that when the FCC change to digital occurs this month, you will no longer be able to use the traditional analog battery powered TVs during a hurricane. If it is TV you want, then you need to invest in a digital battery powered TV (from a place like Radio Shack). According to one of the weather celebrities at the Houston Galveston hurricane workshop, these will run you about $300, but the prices should be dropping. At a minimum, have a battery powered and/or hand-crack radio and plenty of batteries. Also, I would recommend that you invest in a way to charge your cell phone. There are lots of options here. Even when phone lines don't work, you can often text on your cell. And with Twitter now popular, texting is going to become even more important.

Very tropical across the southeast US on Monday with high humidity and lots of 80s and 90s. Cool spots will be the northeast, Rockies and west coast with highs primarily in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Severe weather is a threat from the central plains to Ohio.

Houston will be hot and humid on Monday (although it will more humid by mid-week). Look for some thunderstorms starting Tuesday and on and off Wednesday and then early Thursday. It will be drier but still warm by the end of the week and over the weekend.

SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY
Let's do celebrity or celebridad, pronounced seh-leh-bree-DAHD. Whom do I consider a weather celebridad? Find out in my AND MORE section.

We have 5 celebrities in our Award Winning series, Let's Learn Frank & Paco. They are Frank the Horse (a puppet who by the way has his own Facebook page) and Paco the Rooster as well as hosts Hannah, Megan and Christina. Go to our web site to see fun clips of all of them. And of course, you can order our award winning Volume 1 DVD, Let's Learn Spanish with Frank & Paco from www.frankandpaco.com/. You can also order from http://www.venturaes.com/, http://www.dololanguages.com/, http://www.carlexonline.com,www.thecuriousmindstore.com/, http://www.amazon.com/,http://www.bestbuy.com/, and http://www.barnesandnoble.com/. For our English as a Second Language (ESL) version, got to http://www.frankypaco.com/.

AND MORE
Saturday, the annual Houston-Galveston workshop was held at the George R. Brown Convention Center--this time on the 1st floor due to the expected number of attendees. There were about 2500 attendees, double the number from last year. I was the moderator for two sessions of "Ask Your TV Meteorologist" at the annual Houston-Galveston Hurricane Workshop. The chiefs of the 5 main English speaking stations answered audience questions in 2 one hour sessions. In the photo from left to right are Frank Billingsley of KPRC, Channel 2, Gene Norman of KHOU Channel 11, Tim Heller (with microphone) of KTRK Channel 13, Keith Monahan of CW Channel 39 and Dr. Jim Siebert of FOX 26. This was the 2nd year of offering this sort of workshop and it was very popular with the public...lots of folks seated and standing. All of the chiefs are friends of mine and I was so proud of their intelligent answers and the way they took turns. If you missed it this year, make sure you attend next year.

Other "weather celebrities" who stopped by included Bill Read, Director of the National Hurricane Center, Gene Hafele, head of the Houston National Weather Service office, Frank Brody, head of the NASA Space Flight Meteorology Group, and Lew Fincher, well known hurricane historian and industry hurricane preparation specialist. I also saw Kristi Powers, John Dawson and Mike Iscovitz of FOX 26 and their new weather reporting, state of the art weather equipment loaded H2.

I have been asked to share with you that St. Andrew Roman Catholic Church will hold its First Annual Mini Health Fair on Sunday, June 21, 2009 from 9 am to 2:30 pm. The church is located at 827 Sheldon Rd. in Channelview, TX 7530 281-452-9865. This chuch and its parishioners were adversely impacted by Hurricane Ike and continue to work hard to recover.

Have a great week everyone and remember...this is the time to be preparing your home and family for hurricane season.

Cecilia Sinclair
Wonder Weather Woman