How doth the busy little bee improve each shining hour...

That is because the bee is working so hard.  And, alas, so am I.  The company my husband works for offered a house instead of the townhouse we now occupy.  The cons are that there are no trees on the yard, and I will once again have to grow a new flower garden! Oh, it is a sad, hilly yard.  Two of the pros are that we get an extra bedroom, and a small year-round sunroom. But the most important thing is the light. It is the light which sold me.  The house is filled with light in the kitchen and dining room, and of course, so is the sunroom, and the basement's rooms are also fairly large and bright, the windows being larger.
So I have been packing, and then unpacking again.  The new place is about two blocks away.  Once again, my library goes into boxes.  So many boxes.  I wonder what it would be like to stay in the same house all one's life.  Never to have to shift a favourite thing, except when the whim takes me.  My poor library. This time, most of my bookcases will reside in the basement, as there is no room which has a  wall long enough to accommodate them.  I have reserved one bookcase for the upstairs living room, which is filled with some of my most recent reading choices. Both the living room and the family room do not have enough wall space, so the best thing is to keep them all together downstairs.  Dear book friends, you are not banished, but my little study just has no space either, having only enough room for my writing armoire, a day bed and a reading chair.
I sometimes think that the new "open space" concept is not very friendly to home libraries at all, and may be contributing to their demise.  Quiet reading is difficult when there are hardly any private reading spaces.

The travelling we did this summer already seems like quite a while ago .... sigh.  But I plan to print out my favourite pictures and frame them, just for the new place. I think I will put up a few more pics to remind myself of the fun we had.

 

The drive from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields is always spectacular.

 A rainy afternoon at Lake Louise. This view is from the hotel.  We had a look at the little shops inside, and I found a gorgeous moonstone necklace in one of them.. (So I got my birthday gift early, as there was no other way to justify an extravagance like that!)

 

 The mountains of Kananaskis country.  While I always swear that I if I had to pick the best from the Alberta Parks, I would pick Jasper, I do think that next year, we should spend a week down "south". Many cowboy movies have been made in Kananaskis country and I think it would be found to spend some more time exploring and enjoying this scenery.