It's raining!

We got quite a surprise today. It rained at about 1:30 this afternoon! I noticed the sky getting dark...then the rumble of thunder...I grabbed my camera and got outside just as conditions went from a sprinkle to a full-on downpour. The clouds were very low, and moving incredibly fast--I could see them being pierced by a tall building across Khaled bin al Waleed street. Winds were gusting very high; high enough that a chair at the side of our building flew out into the parking lot and hit a car! Trees were whipping around and I could see fierce gusts of rain and wind whipping down the street. The gutters and streets were flooded. I felt right at home, back in the middle of a typical Florida afternoon storm!

Apparently the UAE gets about 6 to 10 cm of rainfall yearly. After today we should be at least halfway there...

happy housewarming!

This has been a pretty party-full weekend. We had our own housewarming party last night! We think it went fairly well...we didn't really run out of anything, lots of people came, and everyone seemed to have a fairly good time. The last guests did not leave until after 3am, so it was a pretty late night!

I had to do some last-minute shopping for decorations and such, and I was also lucky enough to find some household things that I actually liked in the stores. Maybe it was just that the seasonal stock and end-of-range sale stuff this summer was not to my taste...or maybe after a couple months off from house shopping I don't feel so burnt out on it all...but I like a lot more of the things on offer right now than I did when I was out every day trying to find the "least offensive to the eye" furnishings. I got some new curtains for my sanctuary, some cushions for the couches to match the ones from the souk in Sharjah, and some nice candleholders and accessories. We also borrowed a drill and managed to hang one of our divider/curtain thingys that we bought at IKEA months ago...we tried to hang both but encountered problems drilling into the solid concrete seems to comprise our ceiling and all our walls. As it is, to be honest, I am not really 100% convinced the one we did manage to hang will not fall down at some point. But at least it held up for the party!

So between shopping for the house, shopping for the food, shopping for the drinks, uploading music to our computer and figuring out how to set up iTunes to be our DJ for the evening, cleaning, decorating, rearranging the furniture and preparing our buffet I was pretty busy this week! By the time the party was set to start I was almost ready to go to bed for a nap! But, we had a good time and it was all worth it in the end. Bigger parties like this one actually may not be as common here as we are used to. Michael said more than one person commented during the night that smaller dinner parties are more the norm. Both types have their charms but every once and a while it is fun to get everyone you know together and have them meet each other!

I've created an online gallery from some of the pictures we took...you can view it by clicking here.

Hallowe'en party

This evening, our friend Rachel hosted a Hallowe'en party. It was a relatively small gathering...a dinner party rather than a big event. I got to meet some more people from the PI and FINALLY see Rachel's apartment and her two new kittens, who are very tiny and VERY cute!

I didn't know about the party until a couple days before, so it was a bit of a last-minute scramble for me to get a costume. I ended up improvising an "American Tribal Bellydance Lite" costume from some things I brought from home and a few pieces of fabric I bought in Sharjah. Michael wore his biking gear and went as Lance Armstrong.

Here are a couple photos of my costume, and a group photo from the party. You can see my new sanctuary curtains in the background of my photos!