Did you hear the news last week?

The “Godzilla” of all El Niños is predicted for this winter. The National Oce-anic Atmospheric Admin-istration (NOAA) is fore-casting a very wet winter in the Southwest and in southern California.

That would be a wel-come change where some 75 percent of Arizona and 100 percent of California and Nevada are presently experiencing drought con-ditions. Through data stud-ied by the Southwest Cli-mate Change Network (SCCN) from 1895 through 2006, showed an average increase of 174 percent of rain from December through March in El Niño years.

But, the NOAA says there is no guarantee for above-average precipita-tion with the presence of El Niño.

What is an El Niño? It is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, as opposed to La Niña which is characterized by unusu-ally cold ocean tempera-tures in those same waters.

Bottom line is that it might be a wet winter or not. I’m betting it will be. My reason for this is the quail families seem to be larger this year. A wet win-ter should mean more food for them. Thus, that trans-lates into more babies.

It makes sense to me. A former Fort McDowell tribal president once told me to look for those kinds of things to predict the weather.

Incidentally, the all-time record for rainfall for one year in Fountain Hills is 26.38 inches in 1978. The average is 7.97 inches with March being the wettest month and June is the dri-est.

This year’s monsoon season has been spotty at best. On July 31, we had a heavy downpour that had runoff rushing down the streets in the business park. We recorded .60 inches in our rain gauge at The Times. Apparently the same was true in SunRidge Canyon in western Fountain Hills. Several men at the Men’s Club told me on the following Monday night that the water level in their pools raised about 1-1/2 inches from rains that af-ternoon.

Son Brent was talking to an advertiser on the Ave-nue of the Fountains and they said while it looked threatening, they hadn’t re-ceived any rain at all.

The official rainfall for that day was .03 inch recorded at the U.S. Weather Service station at Fountain Park.

The following Friday, August 7, when we had that beautiful double rainbow, we had .20 inches here at The Times office. Once again, the official total at Fountain Park was .03 inches.

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If my wife, Diane, is looking a little glum these days, it’s because she is having withdrawals from Gandma-itis.

Daughter Toni left Satu-turday for her house in Las Vegas after staying at our house for six weeks. Dur-ing that stay, we fell in love all over again with our grandson, Camden.

Her husband, Jason, works at home, so he could pretty much work from anywhere. They stayed at our house for 10 days while we went to New Jersey to see some more of our grand-kids.

Camden went from an infant to a little boy in those six weeks. He called me Pampa and Diane was Mam-ma.

Our next trip is in Sep-tember when we visit daughter Holly, husband Bruce, and their daughters Brooke and Addy. The girls will be sleeping with us in the RV.

It’s fun being a grand- parent.