Oh Give Me a Home

And San Francisco becomes a possibility again. No, really.

Such angst, trying to figure out where to live. There's Boston, where Mr LSG (my husband; name clouded to protect the innocent) family and our friends are. We lived there for 10 years, got married there, bought our first house there. There's San Francisco, where my brother and sister-in-law are and the biotech and computer industries are. Then there's Austin, where our best-man, his wife and 2 sons live. Oh yeah, and London, where we are now. "That's quite a list," you say. "They're all great cities," you add.

Well -- Boston is a no-brainer, easy to move to, easy to settle in, built-in friends and support network and family close by.
Austin is HOT. I hate heat. London is, for all it's greatness (diversity, foreign culture, hipness), isolated from the family and friends by the mere fact that it is a foreign country and is on the other side of the Atlantic. I am not sure why, but that is a big psychological barrier to our family and friends, forgetting the exchange rate for the moment. When we moved here, I immediately fell pregnant and so decided that getting a job I would have to quit in 6 months was a no-no, the unforseen consequence of which is that I have no non-mummy friends. We also did not forsee that it would take 2 years to build up a group of friends, and that since we found most of those friends in the Expat community (foreign nationals, most of them here on short tours of duty like us) that they would leave us sooner rather than later. Upshot? As a stay-at-home-mom, I'm lonely, isolated and discouraged.

Which leaves San Francisco. Ah, San Francisco. I've always wanted to live there, since graduating from university and thinking I might try for my Masters or Doctorate. Mr LSG has the same desire. We've visited quite a few times, drinking in the west coast attitude and the wonderful weather. So now that Mr LSG has an opportunity popping up in San Francisco with his company, and we've decided that we need to leave London, it seems perfect. But. Is it a good idea to move to San Francisco, where my brother and his wife live, or should we focus on Boston where our entire post-college life was?

This is hard.