Hail Report/Artichoke Flowers/Route 66

HURRICANES AND WEATHER
The area of disturbed weather in the eastern Pacific became a tropical storm Blanca. Blanca, by the way, means white in Spanish. However, the storm is expected to move away from land.

Highs on Tuesday will be in the 90s and 100s across the southwest and Florida. It will be pleasant and mild along the west coast of California, the northern states and the northeast. Elsewhere, look for 80s. Note, the three areas where severe storms are possible.

Houston did NOT reach 100 today. And although the rain has failed to materialize, I do think there will be some thunderstorms tomorrow. High pressure moves east again by Wednesday and rain chances decrease. Then there could be some rain this weekend.

SPANISH WORD OF THE DAY
Let's do artichoke or alcachofa, pronounced ahl-cah-CHO-fah. Did you know that alcachofa's have purple flowers? See photo at right from the Albuquerque Botanical Garden.

I like to eat artichoke hearts and so does Sarah. But for our video, we picked more traditional things for kids to eat. It's fun to learn eating vocabulary from our award winning DVD, Let's Learn Spanish with Frank & Paco, Volume 1. Order today from www.frankandpaco.com/. You can also order from http://www.venturaes.com/, http://www.dololanguages.com/, http://www.carlexonline.com,%20www.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

As we left Edgewood this morning, we headed west on the historical Route 66 to Albuquerque. It passes very class to my sister's home. We enjoyed a pleasant morning at the Albuquerque Botanical Garden after dining at the The Owl Cafe. The Cafe is neat because there are lots of owls, especially near the front. They aren't live however. The Botanical Garden is a feast for the eyes which lots of native plants. There has been lots of rain lately in Albuquerque. In fact, sometimes, we had to walk around the mud. I enjoyed seeing some of the interesting plants including something called a chocolate plant, because it smells like chocolate...smells great and no calories. Don't know if it is edible. I did not know that artichokes make purple flowers. Once the plant gets old and if fully flowering, the choke (the heart that people like to eat) is no longer edible.

From there, we drove on to Los Alamos. We could see storms to the northwest and drove through some rain. My sister's home is actually in White Rock (which is where a lot of Los Alamos workers live). We found out later that we had missed a terrible hail storm in Los Alamos. And, yesterday, we drove through missed some rough weather in the Panhandle and the previous some in northwest Texas. Hope our luck holds out.

Hope you are having a great week whatever you are doing.

Cecilia Sinclair
Wonder Weather Woman