We don’t get much rain in Abu Dhabi. Or the UAE. But we’re supposed to get a little.

We’re about half way through the “rainy” season, with hardly a drop.

We keep having false alarms. “Rain likely.” “Rain possible.”

Our first year here, we can to associate dust storms with rain. Really. Seems like yin and yang, but …

It’s like the wind has to precede the rainstorm. But before the water arrives, a stiff breeze this time of year is sure to pick up all the dirt that has turned to dust, and whip it into big dark clouds of choking dust. A dust storm. Though not as big nor as dark as the dust storm that struck Dubai in the latest “Mission Impossible” movie.

But when we get dust storms in January of February, we have learned to think, “Rain! Maybe!”

Rain is so rare here that the locals actually take outings to go stand/sit in it. I am not making this up. They will go up into the mountains, or what passes for mountains here, up in the north of the country, and pitch a tent, and when the rain comes everyone runs outside and gets wet.

That’s what you do, I guess, when you get 2 inches a year.

Anyway, we’re supposed to get that, but we didn’t in 2011. Matter of fact, last time I can remember it raining in Abu Dhabi was the Friday of the HSBC golf tournament (the one Tiger almost won last weekend) … and that event has come and gone, and still no rain. One full week of nothing.

Apparently, many of the plants and animals who have learned to live on basically no water really need what little bit we get here to survive.

And then there is the topic of underground acquifers, and how the UAE is depleting theirs — which they should have been able to do in about an hour, given the population here and the lack of water.

The royals here, the ones who think about the future, already have predicted that the time is coming, and perhaps soon, when a gallon of water will cost more than a gallon of gas.

If anything ever happens to the UAE’s ability to make drinking water from big and electricity-draining desalination plants, this country will be in big trouble in a hurry.

Three inches of rain, instead of the normal two, won’t change that. But for a day or so we could make believe we live in a place where mositure sometimes just drops right out of the sky.