look what came in the mail...

and

a project is in the offing...

decisions, decisions...

so, as I posted over on AT on Friday (Advice on Creating a Cozy Outdoor Entertaining Area for the Holidays?), I am hoping to make my large outdoor space more cozy for the winter (which is rather amusing since we are still hitting over 80 degrees Fahrenheit during the day).  I want to install some curtains outside to enclose the patio, and I purchased the Janette curtains from IKEA that are pictured below when home in September.  I fell in love with them when I saw them featured over at Trapped in North Jersey a few months ago.  I seriously love the way those curtains look in that dining room.

I just got around to purchasing curtain rods to hang the darn things and now I am starting to second-guess the idea.  I picked these for the riot of color and pattern (too much of Saudi is just desert beige) but now I am not certain.  Are they too patterned?  Should outdoor curtains be white and billowy instead?  Also, I want to create an inexpensive outdoor carpet using a  dropcloth or tablecloth, but I am not sure how to make that work with these curtains.  Can I mix in another pattern or is that crazy talk?  Would stripes work? Or do I have to stick with a plain color for the "rug"?

oh the agony of design indecision!

Happy Birthday Marines!

Tonight we celebrated the 237th Birthday of the United States Marine Corps.  It was a lovely night, especially because for one of the couples at my table it was their first USMC Birthday Ball, and viewing the pomp and circumstance through their eyes was delightful.  I had a wonderful night with my own favorite Marine (retired), and I believe a good time was had by all :)

VOTE, because you can...

Today of all days, I am proud to be an American. Regardless of party affiliation, irrespective of which candidate you support, today I applaud you for exercising your right to vote. I've spent too many years in my life living in countries where gender or ethnicity determines participation in elections to do anything but celebrate our great nation for the basic fact that every citizen, for one brief and shining moment, is indeed created equal. 

VOTE, because people fought and suffered and died to give you the right to do so.  
VOTE, because there is no more personally empowering moment than to do so.
VOTE, because around the world, too many can only dream of the freedom to do so.

down the rabbit hole...

We're just finishing up a 10 day holiday here for Eid (I took a brief 5 day trip to Dublin in the middle of it) which was admittedly a welcome respite.  Work has been crazy and I am in the middle of bidding on my next assignment (no, I have no idea yet where I'll be going) which has only added to the chaos.  Brad travelled home for Eid to see family, and I was supposed to use some of the time off to tidy the house and generally deal with the stuff that seems to just breed in dark corners.

I hosted one stop of a Halloween house crawl here and so my living room is immaculate which is so soothing to walk into that I can't even explain it.  Of course, it got that way by stowing stuff in other rooms, and now instead of dealing with that situation, I find myself wandering down the rabbit hole that is the internet, following random posts and pictures and threads and sites.  Seriously, my laptop is just a portal into an unbelievably wonderful world that seems designed to simply suck time from me.

Nothing life altering here, except that in my wanderings online I found this picture from Elle Decor:

which speaks to my desire to do something different with the glass door cabinet I inherited from an elderly neighbor that I use to store my DVDs.  I wrote about cabinet over on Apartment Therapy a couple of years ago, and have always been on the lookout for another solution with more color and pattern.

Now of course I'm scouring the internet for inexpensive fabric or paper that can give me that same feel without spending a fortune.  And so the trip down the rabbit hole continues...

edited to add:
Here is another picture of the inspiration cabinet with a less chaotic background.  I really really like it...