Our home & beating the heat

I'll post more pictures later of our house - it's still empty with no furniture.  "Tomorrow" we keep hearing.  It's tough to get hard outside work done during Ramadan.  The temperatures range from 105-111 during the day and a lot of people are fasting (including not drinking water) from 4:30 a.m. until 7pm.  Unloading a container it hot and hard work - hard to do with no liquids.  So hopefully soon.  But camping out in our house is working okay.  We have the bare basics.

We often have an early dinner and head to the pool after dinner but before bedtime (cooler!).  Also, our pool doesn't have shade (yet - supposedly coming at some point), so it's difficult to be out there in the direct sun.  Here are some photos of our pool.  It's quite nice and has a cooler so it was almost refreshing when we first got here and with the temperature a few degrees cooler these past few days, it's quite nice.

I bought a few things to entertain us as it's hard to get out a whole lot between the heat and naps.

I bought a little play structure for the dining room.  And my big surprise purchase was an indoor trampoline.  We have a big playroom on the top floor.  I figured if it's going to be really hot until October and then again starting in May, it's good to have something really active for the girls to do inside.

Here is a picture of a view from one of the girls' bedrooms.  We have a mosque just a few hundred feet away so are able to hear the calls to prayers (especially the 4:30 a.m. one!) quite well!  It lasts for 3-5 minutes (which is a lot longer than I expected it to be) - so it's hard to miss.  If you really squint, you can see Jake's work between the 3rd and 4th minaret (on the right).

And lastly, here is the gate to our villa complex (oddly, we only go through this gate to get to the pool - our villa faces outside and is pretty open to the world):