Guy from news side came over late in the shift tonight and said, “What happens to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix if it rains?”

We figured it was a rhetorical question. It doesn’t rain in Abu Dhabi, and it definitely doesn’t rain in November. I mean, it could, but it doesn’t.

But the news guy apparently had been outside and sniffed the air, because a few hours later …

It was raining. Well, kind of.

Fat drops. Splat! Splat! Wind gusting. The ground almost wet.

You know how anyone from Los Angeles never really believes it will rain on them? Same deal here, except 10 times as much. “Rain? Three times a year, hard and fast. And odds are strong I will be inside when it happens.” Because the rain is hard and fast, when it’s real rain. A strong storm front comes through, and the water can come down hard. But the fronts are in a hurry. And then we get flooding because the ground is rock hard, but a day later everything is bone dry again.

We were on our way to getting vaguely wet when we flagged a cab. The Pakistani kid behind the wheel was almost giddy. Rain can do that, to people who live in the desert. “It is too cold for people to be out! It’s like England!” he blurted.

He thought we were from England. Most of the non-European expats assume all English speakers to be English. I suppose they are usually right.

Anyway, it seems reasonable to expect that people might go out and stand in the rain, those few occasions when it does. Especially when none has fallen since, oh, March. But the taxi driver said no one was on the street.

Funny thing, about rain here. If we get a dust storm (and we had a bit of one, late last night), the odds of some trace of rain in the next 24 hours go up dramatically. And if we have rain, and wind, the odds of a dust storm picking up anew are very high. They clearly are related weather conditions.

So, on our short ride home,  the giddy driver was gleefully running his windshield wiper, and all the dusty cars were getting dirty, and the roads were almost wet enough to create the mother of all oil slicks … and we even saw some lightning over to the west, in the direction of Qatar.

The rain is over already. What little bit we had, and it probably wasn’t enough to measure.

And the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix? The Formula One guys race in the rain. Not that they have any reason to worry. They don’t even need to bring their rain tires.

Our 10-day forecast? Not a trace of rain ahead. As usual, too much sun is the biggest concern, with the high on Sunday forecast at 91 degrees.