Lady In Red......

Last week I told you that I received this fabric for a gift and I wanted to make a dress for Eid which is the holiday that immediately follows Ramadan.  My goal is to use the fabric on the left.  It's a little too flowery for me, but it will be fine for here.  We will go visiting lots of friends of the hospital and I want to make a dress.  Some will wear pretty crazy dresses (like the prom for us) and others will wear more of traditional type dress.  Anyway, I need a style that is conservative enough for visiting families here but also fun and I don't want it to look like crap on me.  Silky fabric can be tricky for women with hips!  I knwo most people don't set out with the goal of getting a dress that looks bogus when they put it on, but I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, can you help me come up with a style that might work well for me? It needs to be long. It can be sleeveless and then I can wear a sweater or something with it. Otherwise it can have sleeves to be a bit more conservative. I'm not trying to look like a woman in a jean jumper, though --you know what I mean, right?!

I was looking through some dresses at this website.  What do you think?  Could any of them be made long?

I looked at Banana Republic, too for dresses and found a few I like. Some of the short dresses I could make long and some of the long dresses aren't so bad.

Help me! I need your clothing design help.  It's so fun having a tailor who can make a dress just from the picture.  You can't imagine how inexpensive it is here either.  I can't wait to show you the two dresses I dropped off last week to get made.   I found them in Lebanon when I was there but they were way too expensive. I am getting them made for less than 1/4th of the price. It's fun going to the fabric store and then finding designs you like.

Give me your comments or suggestions of places to look.

Visiting Oman....

On Saturday we went to visit our friend and her family.  Our friend works with us and is one of eleven children.  They live in Oman which is just a 5 minute drive to the border.  We love visiting with their family and playing games with the kids.  When we came back from the States this summer we brought side walk chalk and a few other things for them to play with. It's become a tradition to "do" something with them when we go over.  The past two weekends we have played UNO together.  This game works with people who don't speak the same language so it was a good one for all of us.  As you can see from the above picture, Trey loves to tell us when he has Uno (only 1 card left). 

 This is the wonderful mama in the middle. She is a special woman and has a great personality for handling 11 children around her all the time.   In her arms is the youngest and newest member of the family.  Shama is between 4 and 5 months old.

They always make fabulous food.  They stuffed chickens and put them down in a fire pit on hot coals.  Along with it, we had hummus, tabbouleh, french fries, pickles and pita.  Yummy!

It's that time.......

Ramadan starts today in the UAE.  It is always during the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and it is a time when Muslims worldwide abstain from food, drink and other physical needs during daylight hours.  It is a holy month of worship for Muslims and a time for them to purify the soul, refocus one's relationship with Allah and practice self-sacrifice and charity.   Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam which are central duties required of all Muslims regardless of where they live.

So before the sun rises, the families will have Suhoor. This is their morning meal before the fasting begins.  Then to end their fast in the evening (which will be around 7:10pm to start) then have the Iftar.  Your days fasting is broken with prayer and then the Iftar meal which many have with their big families.  Many people will eat a date when the call to prayer goes off then go pray.  Then they have their big meal.

A lot of food is consumed during Ramadan ---despite the fact that fasting happens all day long.  The hours of life will change.  People will stay up extremely late, sleep in or take a long nap after work until they can eat dinner.  It's extremely hot and tiring on a normal day--but without water, it would be pretty hard.  After the Iftar, people stay up until all hours of the night.  Malls are open until midnight or later.

Look at these pictures from the grocery store. There are more in these packages than you get at Costco or Sam's Club.  Who needs this many mini-donut mixes?! And Tang. I love that stuff!

Labor law says that employees should only work 6 hour days during Ramadan.  Usually we work the normal work day but then the law requires that our work pay us extra for working a normal work day during Ramadan (even if we aren't Muslim).  So starting tomorrow, we are working Ramadan Hours!! Woop woop!

 Dates are a big thing here.  There are date palms EVERYWHERE.  Now is the season for dates.  They are coming out now and everybody serves them to you fresh off of their tree when you visit homes.  At the grocery store they had many different kinds that you could purchase the other day.  There are 100's of different kinds of dates. 

I'll update more on Ramadan as we go. Hopefully we'll get invited for an Iftar meal to a friends home.

All you need is love......

One project that I have been working on here at Oasis has been to redecorate our guest houses. We have 2 guest houses that just needed a little love and care. A few splashes of paint, some lamps, rugs and a few pieces of furniture would do. One of the guest houses is a fabulous space. It has an upstairs and downstairs (rare here) and a living room on both floors.   Sorry this is just an AFTER. I wish I had the BEFORE.  It's pretty different.

Lots of windows for natural light and a great space for gardens outside. What guest wouldn't want to stay there?  We already had furniture in the house so we just needed to take what we had and make it look good.  Our aim was to make it feel like a home, not a frugal guest house.

This is the upstairs living room. The furniture was originally downstairs but we decided it would be best up.  I love this burnt orange/reddish color.

One of the many bathroom redo's.  I think this house has 5 bathrooms. They love colored bathrooms here. Baby blue, puke pink and tan with flowers.  When one piece of the bathroom breaks, such as the toilet, it's hard to find the right color to replace it so then we end up with 6 different shades of blue in a bathroom. We decided to replace all of the bathrooms with all white --tiles, toilet, sink and tub.  I love a white bathroom.

Trey's photography work is displayed all around the house.

I don't know why, but I love this cabinet for the linen closet.  In these houses, there are no built in closets, so you have to buy them.  This closet up close has a nice texture to it (but a funny smell from the stain).  It filled in a nice empty space well.

Catch me ridin' dirty......

We're off to a friends house tonight so I decided to make a summer 

dessert that I make once every 2 years or so.    

Dirt Pudding

1 (14 ounce) bag Oreo cookies

2 (3 1/2 ounce) packages vanilla instant pudding

3 cups milk

1 cup powdered sugar

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese

1/4 cup butter 

1 (12 ounce) container Cool Whip

Directions:

1. Break up cookies, put 1/2 on bottom of preferred dish and save other 1/2 for topping.
2. Mix pudding and milk together, set aside.
3. Mix sugar, cream cheese and butter.
4. Add sugar mixture to pudding; fold in cool whip.
5. Pour onto cookies, top with remaining cookies.
6. Let it refrigerate for at least a half hour.

Don't forget the gummy worms!

I need to find a fake flower to put inside the pot.   

I saw a recipe where they put it 

in the back of a toy dump truck.  Next time.

We're going to have a Mexcan Bunco night at our house in late August. 

We're already coming up with crafty ideas. I'll fill you in as we go!

If you have never played Bunco with a group of friends, get yourself

off your tuches (1 point for me--good use of a Yiddish word)

and go buy it.  There's always a reason to have a party and celebrate. 

Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream.........

 

It's always been my dream to own an Inn.  Not a Bed and Breakfast, an Inn.

An Inn seems more sophisticated and they tend to come with history and

unique architecture.  A Bed and Breakfast can be a real gamble in my mind.

Again, this is all my own opinion and it's coming from a girl who has not stayed

in very many B & B's or Inn's......but I'm having an Anne of Green Gables moment 

here and I'm sticking to it. 

It will have a patio where you can eat breakfast and gardens where 

I can pick flowers to put in your rooms.

And I'll be sure that you have a writing desk for sending a postcard to your mum and

some type of "wing" chair to sit on.

And you will definitely be served an AMAZING breakfast. I can guarantee that.

And even though this doesn't show it, it will have a big front porch with rocking chairs 

where you'll sit and enjoy your afternoon tea.

You'll continue to hear about "my inn".  I need to come up with a name.  The Dragonfly Inn from Gilmore Girls is pretty great, but I can't steal that.  So I need to get the creative juices flowing......or maybe I need to find an investor first:) I could try to strike oil in my backyard here. 

After all, I live in the Gulf!

The first amendment wasn't written for nothin'.........

Blogging is fun, but reading the comments you leave is even more fun!  Whether you are reading this post through the blog or Facebook, I want to hear your voice.  Holla' at your girl.   I want to know who reads. 

Last night we had some friends over from church.  We made pizza and tried to take artsy pictures of them so that you would think that they tasted really good and maybe it will make you want to fly over here and visit us.  The truth is that it did taste really good.  And I promise that if you come to visit us, I'll make you pizza. You want anchovies and corn?  Fine, I'll make it. But first you have to fly over here.

We made b-b-q chicken, buffalo chicken and veggie. 

And then like all good church friends, we got competitive

and played a bunch of rounds of Pass the Pigs.  That game always makes me laugh and actually I'm not that competitive, I just pretend to be. I rolled my pigs with gusto.