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.