We're in the middle of moving (still!) and have been living in one hotel or another for the last three weeks or so. The room we're in now is large and comfortable, beautifully decorated, with a small but full kitchen, and the staff is tripping over themselves to take care of us. (We were here in December house-hunting and had some issues; they offered us a very nice discount on our next stay, so we said, "Great, we'll be here in Jan/Feb for at least three weeks...." [grin:])

Unfortunately, despite what the hotel chooses to call the room, it's a room, not a suite. A suite has separate rooms for the bedroom and living area, with a closeable door between them. As I type this, the bed is just a few steps past my right shoulder. I'm often up late at night, whether I stay up very late or get up very early, and it's difficult moving around and doing whatever in one room where my husband is just a short distance away trying to sleep so he can go to work the next morning.

I've been buying and reading a lot of e-books lately. Among their other virtues, e-books require a lot less light to read than paper books. I read on my laptop, and I don't need a separate lamp on when I'm reading an e-book, the way I would for a paper book. It's great to be able to read at 3am without bothering the spousal unit any more than absolutely necessary, and I've been catching up on a lot of good m/m. :)

Oh, and another reason, kind of funny. The condo we lived in before had this bouncy, mushy floor in the living area. It was the usual long, rectangular living/dining room, although we never had a table in the dining part. We had the standard couch and TV and recliner and couple of end/coffee tables, plus some shelves and a lot of books. A LOT. Like around a thousand or so.

Well, the living area was this big, open room, over a big, open garage. The smaller upstairs rooms around a hallway were fine, with stable, level floors. Our condo had some structural issues anyway -- the builder ran out of money halfway through construction and was taking every shortcut allowed and a few besides after that point, trying to get the units saleable -- so we figured it was just a matter of minimal studding in the livingroom floor, and no supporting walls below it because that was the garage. We grumbled, but nothing felt like it was going to actually fall through, so it never went beyond that.

After all our things had been packed up and moved out, though, we noticed that the floor was a lot more stable. o_O Huh. You think maybe, just maybe, the weight of a thousand or so books might've had something to do with the mushy, bouncy floor down there...? Apparently so. The upstairs rooms, which had several thousand more books, were all fine, but they were smaller, with a lot of wall support, as opposed to the much larger open span downstairs.

It also answered the question of how the heck we didn't notice how unstable the floor was before we bought the place -- it wasn't.

At least the e-books don't overload the floor joists. [wry smile:]

Angie