I like change. Big, dramatic, sweeping change. Those stress tests that advise you not to move, change jobs, divorce, completely change your schedule, end/start a relationship and/or try a new brand of kitty litter within a short period of time? To those I say pshaw!

Life is short. There are worlds to explore, most of which I'll never see. I want to visit as many of them as possible, without discomfiting those that I love. The latter keeps my feet grazing the ground instead of floating high above it.

This love of things new will come in handy, because my life is about to change big time. The last three days have spiraled into a whirlwind of unexpected, happy developments. I got a new job in a different city, signed a lease on an apartment and am giving my notice at this wretched place of employment Tuesday.

And it appears I've met someone, though that I won't yet blog about because I think it could be bad luck at this tender, fledgling stage.

What a difference a week makes.

The new job requires that I move about an hour north, from Colorado Springs to Denver. From a beautiful city I loved all my life that I've found has a conservative bent so severe my affection for it's withered. To what appears to be an up-and-comer heady with its own whirlwind-paced change.

Of course, I'm believing what best fits my picture of the future.

And I'm also trying to add sugar to the bittersweet, to ease the pain of leaving a city awash in treasured friends.

I stood with my dog on an overlook at the highest point of our neighborhood Friday night, looking over the western side of Colorado Springs. It's a windy, vacant residential lot, its edge steep and rocky, hidden from neighboring homes by an untamed tangle of bushes. Three or four trees hold tenaciously to its edge, their roots wound with clawlike determination around their rocky anchors, trunks twisted and contorted like spines with scoliosis by years of unrelenting wind.

I call it Wuthering Heights, and along with a lot of other people use it as a thinking place.

I will miss this little piece of solitude with its stunning nighttime view of Garden of the Gods, the light at the top of Pikes Peak, and densely scattered yardlamps glowing from hundreds of northwest city homes.

I thought about all that I'd hoped Colorado Springs would be, all she had not and all the memories – sad and happy – created here during the last three years.

Among my circle of Springs' friends, two marriages had failed, an affair sparked and died, several jobs were left or lost and new ones found, relationships bloomed - some dying, some thriving - and two of those closest to me have or will move out of state.

Most tragically of all, a friend plunged her car off a mountain road one gorgeous night last fall. The stranger with her died. Only later did we see that our 17-year friendship, and the friendships of several others, died in that canyon, too.

Through it all, three of us have stuck tightly together. My blonde night partners: gorgeous April and saucy Joani. These two deserve blog entries of their own, but Joani now is following the others who've moved far away. And April, damnit, refuses to go with me to Denver. Something about kids, family and jobs.

But I have to set those musings, and the tears that surely will come, on the back burner for now.

Challenges lie ahead in this next month.

Our new home is further from my son's father, who is a control freak and surely will explode at this news.

I took the job and signed the lease within an hour of one another so that I could not think too long and perhaps back out on the idea, and so that I can tell my ex, 'It's done. Now how are we going to deal with it?'

My son is not as fond of change as I; he's seen much of it in his 10 years. I fear the impact this may have on him, and my always tenuous relationship with his father. Those things have held me back from pursuing this move for a year.

But my son has had trouble making friends here, in part because he attends school far from his weekend home with me, and because I unwittingly chose a townhouse complex in which there are almost no other children. He's expressed his loneliness, which breaks my heart. In this new 700-unit apartment complex, children abound.

I believe my excitement about our new life will infect him, too. Maybe he'll even come to like change as much as I do.

There are friends waiting there for both of us to meet. I wonder – when I pause from writing the growing to-do moving list - who these people may be. I even try to envision them as they are now - drinking a cup of coffee, lounging by the clubhouse pool there, cuddling a child, hanging up on an obnoxious ex, enduring a bad date that has to go wrong so I can enter stage left.

More importantly, I wonder what they will bring to our lives, how deeply our bonds will grow, and what memories - both happy and sad - we'll make together.