Grieving California

Why? I don't want to move. I want to live in CA, in the Bay Area, until I die. Yesterday we got the "all systems go" to move. I was so excited...for about an hour. Then we made the list of all the things we need to do before we can put our house up for sale. That took a good chunk of excitement out of me. By the evening, I was mad we were moving. It occurred to me today, after I had another episode of anger and frustration, that I'm going through the stages of grief in my head about leaving here. How unexpected is that? I thought I would always live here and I love it here and I have never wanted to leave. In order to live what we consider a comfortable lifestyle (getting a yard and a decent 4 bedroom house), we have to leave. And I keep going back to being mad, even angry, about moving. What are those stages of grief, anyway? 1 - Denial 2 - Anger 3 - Bargaining 4 - Depression 5 - Acceptance I'm at #3. I called Nathan today and told him this: "I am not moving. This is where I want to be. We qualify for a loan that would let us buy a house for $XXX,000, so just (do something I won't put on my blog for the world to see to get the) rest of the money we need to buy that house down the street (even though it's small and a total fixer upper) since it will keep us here in CA, and I promise I'll not complain about living in a 3 bedroom house that's not a ton bigger than the condo. I promise." As you can imagine, it was a no-go. #4's going to suck, so I hope it comes quickly and doesn't last long so I can get on with my dang life. It might even be here now. Hopefully, Depression won't show up at our door with five suitcases. An overnight bag will be sufficient, thankyouverymuch. I need to pack up literally half of our things to put in storage (before we can even think about showing the condo) but I can't bring myself to even go through the closets and throw things away right now.