Time for a list. Haven’t done many of late. And this is one of those days when little revelations seem to pop into my head. Not enough for a whole blog item on each of them … well, maybe … but enough for a list.

I hope I’m not repeating too many of these. I’m headed toward “gold fish swimming around bowl” status — where everything seems new every time I take a lap.

OK. Here’s a bonus one up front. In this country, Thursday is the end of the work week. So “TGI Fridays” would have been incorporated, here, as “TGI Thursdays”.

Ten more random thoughts about Abu Dhabi and/or the UAE.

1. We have a running battle with ants. Pursuing I-don’t-know-what in the Teeny Apartment. Yet just outside the patio door … are about 1,000 dates that have fallen out of the palm trees. Dates are almost pure sugar. Lying there on the ground. Yet ants want to invade my house. Bread crumbs are that much better?

2.  When you’ve been living in 110 Fahrenheit for a month, highs of 100 seem like a gift from heaven.

3. There are plenty of fat cats in Abu Dhabi … but not in the literal sense. Cats here almost all have the “lean and hungry look” the Bard wrote about. The strays, anyway. I have no idea what they live on.

4. Which leads us to … I have yet to see (“touch wood,” as the Brits would say)  a mouse or a rat in this country. Abu Dhabi is a city with overheated garbage in dumpsters on every corner, with rotting sugar-packed dates lying on the ground. So that’s what the cats are living on, apparently.

5. Speaking of “dumpster” (which I believe is a trademarked name, though it has entered the vernacular just as have kleenex and band-aid) … the Brits call them “skips.” Yes. They have no idea what a dumpster is. In England, bums go skip-diving.

6. Deep in the UAE desert, the country plans to store — 300 feet below ground — enough water to keep the country’s population alive for three months. Engineers will “inject” desalinated water into the ground, and a pipeline will enable it to be pumped to Abu Dhabi in case of emergency — like, say, war, or a huge oil spill that knocks out desalination plants (which provide 98 percent of the country’s water) off line.

7. You may not take a photo of an Emirati at Emirates Palace hotel without asking permission. Groups of five or more people may not enter the hotel without prior authorization from hotel officials.

8.  I don’t know what they do to bananas en route to stores here, but the greenest bananas invariably are about to turn to mush because of the heat and because they have been beaten with baseball bats. Buying bananas — a sucker’s game.

9. It is not possible to get out of a Lebanese restaurant in this country without overeating.

10. Speed limits in the city generally top out at about 60 miles per hour, and traffic is horrendous, yet Lamborghini has a dealership in the middle of Abu Dhabi.

And one bonus one …

11. We are closer to Kabul, Afghanistan … and Mogadishu, Somalia, than we are to Beirut,  Lebanon.