16 Days and Counting

 We hit the road in 16 days. Time is flying. I think out of all of our moves, I am the least prepared going into this one. Just a little over two weeks before we go and we don't have a house in Florida yet. We are almost 1000 pounds over our max weight and haven't solved that problem yet either. We were (maybe still are) going to have a garage sale but nothing has been organized for it yet. I need to make arrangements to have my car shipped. I have done absolutely no cleaning or organizing within our current home. It's pretty ridiculous.

Even so, the closer we get to our move date, the more anxious and excited I am for it to finally get here. Once you know you're moving, especially a big coast to coast move like we're doing, your life is pretty much put on hold. It's hard to make plans. Every time I see something that I might like to buy for the house like new curtains or bathroom stuff or whatever, first I think, we're over our max weight and we don't need anything new and then I think, what if it doesn't fit/match/go with the new house?

After that, then I start fixating on all the stuff that I don't like about where we're currently living.

• My refrigerator barely functions and I hate it but if I let housing give us a new one (this one can't be fixed) then I have to take a smaller one. Stuff already falls out on our feet, this one is so full. My freezer melts stuff.
• The cable/internet here is horrible. 
• I hate the traffic. 
• All four of us have allergies so bad that it's like we constantly have the flu or a cold and none of us were like that before we moved here. 
• Both of my adjacent neighbors smoke and they do so outdoors (and really. If you do something or have a habit that you won't even do inside your own home, is it really something that you need to be doing at all?????) so that when I have my windows open, I can smell it and I truly hate that. Badly, severely hate that.
• I'm tired of all the barking dogs. 
• I'm tired of not being able to find a place to park at my own freaking house. 
• I'm tired of the beach being inconveniently far enough away that we've only been a handful of times in the three years we've lived here. Then, when you get there, there's no where to park and it's so crowded that you share towels with complete strangers. 
• I'm really tired of the traffic (did I already mention that?) and California drivers. Not every trip on the roads should be a competition of who can drive the fastest and the most reckless but it is.
• My carpet is an ugly poop brown color that housing probably picked out so that it would hide pet stains. 
• And we're crammed into 1500 sqft of poorly laid out space where about 200-300 sqft of that space is unusable. One room is an oversized closet laughably called a fourth bedroom. 
• A yard that takes ten seconds to mow because it's so small. If we had a riding lawn mower, five seconds. 
• Out of seven ceiling fans, only three of them work right. 
• Out of 3 toilets, only two of them are usable right now. 
• I'm tired of living in a neighborhood where we're packed in like sardines: no yards, no parking, and streets aren't wide enough. And for the privilege, we get to be treated like idiot, charity cases by Lincoln Management (base housing people).
• San Diego Unified School District. The schools here are atrocious. Terrible. Just horrible. I have a lot to compare them to and wow.

Then I think of the things I'm going to miss.

• The scenery. 
• The city. 
• Shopping. 
• Nearly perfect weather. 
• The canyon outside of my back fence (which is probably the source of our allergies but it gives us a modicum of privacy that we wouldn't otherwise have at all).
• Free utilities. We pay way too much rent for a place this size, but it comes with free electricity, water, sewer and trash. I like having my windows open with the AC running, bwahahahaha!
• Base housing doesn't care what size dog you have (one of my neighbors has a Great Dane. It's the size of a pony.) as long as it's not on the aggressive dog list i.e., pit bulls, dobermans, chow chows. They don't consider Boxers to be an aggressive breed which is about the only logical thing housing has ever done. 
• The things you only get in large cities:  Professional baseball, concerts, downtown, awesome restaurants, shopping (did I already mention that?), cultural stuff like museums and zoos, amusement parks.
• Bevmo and Paso Robles wine. We have a hard enough time finding wines from Paso Robles here. I seriously doubt we'll be able to find any at all in Florida. And Bevmo is just awesomesauce.
• The Pacific Time Zone. Weird, I know, but I like living in the Pacific Time Zone. The Central Time Zone sucks. 
• Miramar's Exchange. It's so nice. I'll miss MCAS Mirarmar in general. I love that base and it feels like home. The Mister has served eight of his 16 years at this base.
• Jennifer S. and her family even though I got to talk to and see more of them and her when we lived on opposite coasts. 

In my heart, the list of things that I'm not going to miss outweighs the things that I am going to miss and it makes it a bit easier to be going. Don't get me wrong, I'll miss California. I love it here and San Diego is the most fabulous city, but we've had a rough three years here and I think it'll do all of us good to be somewhere else for a while. We had really high expectations when we moved back here three years ago and I think we set ourselves up for disappointment before we even got here. Will we ever move back? Only time will tell. Who knows how we'll feel about things four years from now. Maybe we'll discover that Florida perfectly suits us and we'll buy a house and settle there for good. Maybe we'll find out that moving around for 20 years is in our blood and we'll be bitten by the moving bug and move somewhere totally new.