[FLUSH]

21 January 2004

It was an early morning that I awoke as I will be visiting my grandparents house again to clean the house up and to prepare the necessary arrangement for the open house the following day. There wasn’t much to clean this time as many of the cleaning was done previously. This was more of making the place more sparkling and more tidy, making sure all was in proper order before the big day. It’s a custom to many who celebrate Chinese New Year to clean the house before the day as cleaning or sweeping is prohibited on the actual day itself in which many believe that cleaning will clean up the luck in the house. Being a Christian, this custom does not affect us much and if it does, who is going to clean the house after everything has been done at the end of the day? Definitely not the wind or an army of ants that comes to clean up the pieces of crumbs left on the floor. However, there was more leave to clean and more branches to prune that eventually ended up as a bonfire. We had a taste of what was going to be serve the following day and also some leftover “Buak Keluak” that began to taste even more better after many times of heating up. Can’t wait for Thursday to come. At the struck of midnight, firecrackers were everywhere in the neighbourhood going from colourful splashes in the cloudy skies to noisy red cracker that could deafened the ears and made everyone jumped out from their beds.