DaveAndAnastasia

I mean, if they paid us like we lived in San Francisco, we could afford to stay in San Diego (we want to see my family more than 2-3 times a year, and PRGs at least once a year*). However, no one seemed willing to do this. New job is going pretty well three months in, and both PRG and I are fully remote (and I mostly work with people in Eastern time anyway). So that's fine. One time thing. * If flying from 'Murrica to Russia becomes possible again. If it's third-country meetups or workarounds to get into Russia (and as long as I'm working for a defense contractor, I think the latter is likely PRG traveling alone or with mini-Dave but without me) indefinitely, I think it'll probably be every other year, but want to make a third-country meetup this summer happen because it'll have been five years. Mini-Dave still has one living great-grandparent in Russia who we'd like to get to see him in person at least once, but that'll take going to Russia (if she were fifteen years younger, would be easier to convince to go outside of Russia than PRG's mom).

So since my last check-in here, we've - Visited the Raleigh area between Christmas and New Years (mini-Dave was informed that Santa knew we would be flying early Christmas morning and so stopped at our place on Christmas Eve) to evaluate potential relocation (we want a house with a yard, to be closer to my family, to save money, and we don't really have close friends or family out here). Parents drove up from Florida to meet us after Christmas morning with my brother and his wife and kid (even more mini than mini-Dave) and so got there the next day. Saw many houses (generally accompanied by papa-Dave while mini-Dave got some grandma time), checked out things to do for mini-Dave (children's museums, indoor playgrounds, parks). Had a good time, really liked the area, and concluded we could in fact get a nice many (2*2) - bedroom house with almost twice the square footage of our townhouse in a good school district for less than we paid for our townhouse. Found a couple places we really liked, though as the one we liked the most had the highest list price, we wanted to see what we could get for our place before making any offers. - Talked to realtor we used to buy our place about selling, concluded we could probably get $many00,000. Did a bunch of touch up work and minor repairs, got pictures taken. Realtor suggested we could raise listing price based on interest levels. Got multiple offers for $many many 0,000, and accepted one after just one weekend with our place on the market. - Made an offer for the place we liked the most (still on the market, yay), but ended up needing to slightly revise that upward to get the place (which we did). - Made all sorts of arrangements with movers, car rental places, hotels, and such to get ready to move - So now after almost many (2*2*2*2 + 2*2*2 - 1) years in San Diego, I'm leaving. With as much as I moved around between middle school and two years after college, I never really expected to be in city that long, to be honest.