Live in Abu Dhabi long enough, and you lose the “sense of weather” that might serve you well in most of the rest of the world.

Waking up, this morning, looking out the window … and it’s quite dark, even at 8 a.m.

Let’s run down what that might mean, in Abu Dhabi.

1. A sand storm. Wind has come up, and picked up so much particulate matter that it is blocking the sun. Sand storm is by far the most likely explanation for a dark sky.

2. Fog has set in, and the darkness is exacerbated by air pollution caught up in it. (Which generally is called smog.)  The UAE gets more than a little fog, this time of year. Causes chain-reaction accidents on the freeway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

3. My watch has broken. It’s actually just after daybreak.

A dark sky … “hey, those are clouds and it might rain” ranks no better than No. 4 on the “what’s going on?” list here.

In point of fact, those were rain clouds.

Not powerful rain clouds; we don’t get those in Abu Dhabi. At almost 4.5 years here, I’ve seen a cloudburst exactly once. You know, the sort of precipitation that floods roads and clogs storm drains. Once.

(Allegedly, we get 2.25 inches of rain here, per year, but I don’t believe it. I’d say it’s more like 1.00. And I am convinced that natives of Abu Dhabi who have not traveled have never seen a whole day of rain, which you can expect, a few days a year in Los Angeles.)

These rain clouds gave us a little rain. How exotic!

When it got a wee bit darker, I took a close look at the window, and I could see a bit of spatter on the window.

Then I looked down at the street, several floors below … and the street was completely wet!

Cars were running windshield wipers, and not just to move the dirt off their windows.

I was so impressed by this that I spent about five minutes looking for a camera, so I could take a picture of “rain, in Abu Dhabi.”

But I don’t have a smart phone, and I couldn’t find a camera, and by the time I was told where they were … it had stopped raining. Or drizzling. Or leaking tiny bits of water, which is probably more like what happened.

No photo op.

When I got out of the car, at The National, a drop of rain struck my arm. It set me to thinking about the last time I was hit by rain, in the UAE … and I couldn’t remember when that might have happened.

A year ago? Two?

Rain is so rare that people who drive here never take wet roads into account. Like L.A., but far worse. The National often does how to drive in the rain stories whenever we get enough to create a puddle somewhere.

Thing about this place is … it isn’t a desert just right here. It’s desert 100-200 miles in every direction. It’s not like storms from somewhere else can leak over to Abu Dhabi, which is pretty much on the doorstep of the Empty Quarter, one of the driest deserts in the world.

And it’s a big desert, too, at 250,000 square miles. Which is almost the size of Texas.

But once in a while it does rain. Hard to accept, at first blush. But it does happen. Like solar eclipses.