Tropical Update/Prospect for Storms/La Cucaracha Visits the Wiggles

HURRICANES AND WEATHER
Claudette made landfall early this morning. Meanwhile, Ana is now just an open tropical wave near the Dominican Republic. National Hurricane Center says that it has less than a 30% chance of redeveloping in the next 2 days. Will keep an eye on it. Bill has become the first hurricane of the season and could pass by Bermuda as a major hurricane on Friday.

In the central Pacific, Guillermo has weakened to a tropical storm and is not a threat to Hawaii.

In the US on Tuesday, look for some severe storms in the south central US. Ridge over eastern ridge will shift eastward with a trough moving in from the west over the next few days. In the meantime, it will be very hot and humid over the eastern US. Look for mild weather along the west coast of California and the north central plains. Highs will be in the 90s in the south and in the 100s in the southwest.

Houston will be hot and humid on Tuesday with scattered showers and thunderstorms mainly in the afternoon.

SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY
Let's do cockroach or cucaracha, pronounced coo-cah-RAH-chah. I recently heard someone sing a song called La Cucaracha...find out about it in the AND MORE section.

The animal we have in our award winning Let's Learn Spanish with Frank & Paco, Volume 1, is a dog named Max. You can see him and the 45 kids in the video by ordering your own copy today...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, go to http://www.frankypaco.com/.

AND MORE
August 18th is the anniversary of the last major hurricane to hit Houston (Alicia back in 1983). Remember that Ike was not officially a "major" hurricane with the wind officially set at 110 mph at landfall (1 mph short of major status). Anyway, Alicia was much smaller in size than Ike, but it's path across downtown Houston caused plenty of damage--thousands of downtown windows were broken and thousands of trees were knocked down.

When we saw The Wiggles show 2 weeks ago, I was perplexed when a performer named Fernando was invited to come on stage and sing La Cucharacha. He and his family were sitting in the front seat. I finally figured out that this is Fernando Moguels, who had a part in The Woogles DVD Hoop-Dee-Do. La Cucharacha means cockroach and I ran into a very active one in the garage last night. I was dancing La Cucharacha and then some, trying to get away from it. Sarah asked me if it was dead and I said, no honey, it is anything but. To myself I said, the only good roach is a dead roach. Eeeekkkk....they creep me out.

On that skin crawling note, I'll say goodnight. Have a terrific Tuesday!
Cecilia Sinclair
Wonder Weather Woman