I'm in this place of mind, maybe it is work, maybe it is the friends I keep, where I feel people over-think things. For the most part this doesn't bother me -- hey go to town on your discussion of three inch washers -- but does kind of annoy me when I get asked to participate in the hyper analysis of such things. Yes, it's true that if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. But it is also true that a hammer is a damn good tool. If you have a nail, you should use a hammer. There are lots and lots of nails out there.

So with that as a prelude, I will regress in a bit of hyper analysis of our move to our new condo here in Beijing.

When I moved out of my parents house at 22 I was more mature than most boys my age yet much less experienced than most men my age. Everything I owned fit in the back of Livio's white Nissan pickup truck and we only got stopped once by the Highway Patrol on the way to Concord. Shortly thereafter I watched a movie called Sex, Lies, and Video Tape by a then relatively obscure director named Soderbergh. The thing I remember from that movie was the James Spader character being down to "one key". And he made it seemed cool. Another way of putting "one key" was saying he lived in his car. And friend's coaches. But I kind of like the concept and almost got down to one key myself a couple of times, most recently two years ago when I only had my house key and a bicycle key. But I digress. A related but more realistic goal I've kept is only having all you stuff fit into one truck for a one trip move. Yang and I have managed to keep up this tradition through our many moves.

Our first move was to move in together back in January 2000. I moved from my place in Oakland and she moved from her place in Fremont. All my stuff fitted into a blue ford econoline 300 plus the back of my ford escort. A year after that move our landlord wanted to raise our rent to meet his balloon payment mortgage so we moved to downtown san jose. i rented a uhaul and everything pretty much fit with some spill over into that econoline which refused to die. Another year passes and we find ourselves living out of a spare bedroom at Yang's brother's house with our stuff in storage. I'm still trying to remember why this seemed like a good idea. Yang was four months pregnant with Aidan and I remember her going to China for a month or two while I ate her sister in law's one burner cooking. We then moved to an upscale apartment complex in Fremont two months before Aidan was born. Everything still fitting into one truck. We stayed there for two years and then we packed up and moved to China. Not even a truck this time. Just took whatever baggage allowance we could get for free and that's what we took. It's called prioritization.

And now China. Three years in Chaowaimen (now for rent, btw).  Finally, where we will rest our heads tonight. Beijing, Lido area, Hairun complex. If you were counting -- and if you were I am seriously worried for you -- that's six moves in eight years. Did we fit everything into a single truck this time? You bet we did. Ok, ok, we hardly moved any furniture beyond the stand up piano as our new place came furnished.

Ok, so why did we move this time? Space and investment. We've been making RMB for a couple of years now and it has just been sitting the bank, not making any real interest. Not a ton of money, but a little. Mission One -> invest that money. Mission two, stop feeling like we are living in a closet with two nannies, grandparents, and two kids. In my spirit of not over thinking, I gave these tasks to Yang ("honey, do something with out money and find us a bigger place so I can go back to my happy, unworried, tethered self"). First, the space. Our old place was 127 square meters, our new one 243. That's 1367 square feet to 2615 for the meter impaired. Now, for the money. Currently a big chunk of it is spent with not a super rosy cash flow picture (see "for rent" above) but in terms of investment, pretty good. I did the simple math at lunch yesterday and comparing market prices with what we paid we are doing quite well. I will avoid being too direct, but my conservative estimate is we are up 5000RMB per square meter based on what we were about to pay for similar units in the same building.

I told Yang I would pick up the lunch check.