Ramadan is Here

I took a little break from blogging for a couple of weeks which is probably pretty obvious :)  The ironic part about it is that I have had more free time in the past two weeks than the rest of the year because it is now Ramadan which means a 36 hour work week instead of 48 hrs.  And that makes a HUGE difference.

Ramadan has given us even more quality time together :)

Well Ramadan means more than just a reduced work week, it’s the Muslim’s holy time and they fast (no eating or drinking) from dawn until dusk every day for a month.  For more info on Ramadan you can look at some of my post from last year.

Ramadan (like all Islamic calendar months) starts with the first "sighting" of a crescent moon; I took this photo from our apartment parking lot

The government puts up all sorts of lighting decorations around the city for Ramadan

These are the Ramadan decorations in Emirates Mall (Dubai) that a coworker sent me

I have been filling up all of my extra free time hours with tons of projects.  I bought curtains, rods, and pillows from the IKEA as-is section for over half-off because they had been used as displays.  So we installed the curtain rod and I shortened the curtain to put it over our bed and made decorative pillows for our bed out of the remainder of the fabric.  I made another “reclaimed school desk wood” hook rack to put our bags on by the front door.  We raised my desk and hung my wooden frame and a magnetic board (also 1/2 off from Ikea).  We also did a deep clean of the apartment because it looks like we’ll be staying for another year :)  I’ve also tailored some of my clothes and my favorite project of all so far, I made a ruffled skirt that I can wear to work.

You can see the new hook rack on the bottom (you can also see the homemade dress form that I conned Paul into helping me make...it deserves its own post, so hopefully I'll get to that someday soon)

Raised desk, mounted wooden frame, and installed magnet board

So it’s not like I have been completely slacking, just on the blogging :)