Miscellany

I finished painting! I'm quite pleased with the results:




The yellow changes throughout the day - it's brilliant in the early morning when the sun is shining, and mellow in the evening. these pictures were taken one of those supposedly-rare-but-surprisingly common rainy days, so it's pretty subdued.

I also bought some stuff at the global village to give my place some character: carved windows from nepal, an inlaid chest from Pakistan, and the coolest drawer/shelf combo from an Indian place located here in Dubai. A trip on Wednesday night morphed into a necessary return on Thursday, with Steve's Explorer toting home 4 inlaid chests and 2 marble pedestals. The stair-step cabinet came with its own set of challenges - they delivered it for free, but my lack of address or an accessible building resulted in multiple cell-phone conversations in which I attempted to give directions, and me running around in my flip-flops trying to flag down the truck....






In other news:
Last weekend was the Dubai Desert Classic, and I managed to attend on the day it neither thunderstormed or sandstormed, and sat on actual real grass, got a tan, and watched Tiger, Els, Fisher, and Norman golf.

The Burj Dubai is up to 102 stories.

Week Without Walls is fast approaching, with students and teachers heading off to Tanzania, India, Morocco, Vietnam, South Africa, and Thailand. We're busy making last-minute preparations and fielding questions about bombings and bird flu. And the kids are writing research papers...
I don't miss that one bit.

That's about it. Nothing too profound or exciting. But certain people (ahem, jenn) were giving me a hard time about pictures of my place. So there you go.