Day + 501 : Busy preparing for the coming of my sister-in-law’s family

I am fine today.

My wife’s sister and her three children will come to visit us from Miri, Sarawak tomorrow for about two weeks. She is the closest family member to my wife. When I first started to work in Miri in 1993, my wife and I stayed at her house for quite sometimes. After that, both families purchased a semi-detached single storey house next to each other. Since then we stayed as next door neighbour until my wife and I moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1997.

One thing that we need to settle is to prepare room for them to sleep. Though we are now staying in a two and a half storey link house, there is still not enough room to accommodate so many occupants, considering my mother-in-law, a maid, a niece and a nephew are staying with us now. This makes a total of existing occupants of 10 people.

The top half storey of my house is an open hall without any partitioning. It is not really suitable to be used as a bed room, but we couldn’t find a better place than this at the moment. So a few days ago, my wife decided to tidy up the place so that someone can sleep there.

After a few days of hard work, she could not finish the job because the place has almost become a huge “rubbish dump site” :-( My mother-in-law wants to keep everything because she thought that everything is useful and that we might need it later. With this mindset, everything becomes too “sayang (valuable)” to throw away, so the best thing to do is to “dump” it to the top floor.

This afternoon, my wife asked me to help her to complete the last part of the clearing job. I came across over 30 empty biscuit and milk powder tins there :-( Who needs so many of them? Considering the amount of space that the tins occupy, certainly we did not make full use of our house, and this is just one of the examples.

A big house is not necessarily good for those who like to keep everything, as sooner or later the house will become a “rubbish dump site”. We just hope that my mother-in-law would not be too angry seeing us disposing so many valuable items these few days.

See you next post :-)