Saturday, April 24, 2010

Not Feng Shui - Square One With An Equation Twist

Three consecutive years and a stunning new record!(well at least for me it is...)  After a year living in this house my family and I are moving again and I don't think there's not gonna be an end to the 'Not Feng Shui' series for my blog.  If any of you who are reading this don't know what I'm talking about, you can check out 'Not Feng Shui - A True Blue Story, Seriously! Part-1'.

But here's a quick review.  2 years ago, my family and I moved from a small, old, shabby and lousy apartment to a bigger newer apartment far away from town just to ram ourselves into lots of spiritual trouble without knowing that we would at first.  Then after a year, after knowing that, we moved to a double-storey terraced house to get ourselves away from the uneasiness.  Now, it's been almost a year since we lived in this house and unfortunately, although not as bad as the haunted apartment before, my family still feel spooked.

At first, things were fine.  The psychic said the house and the land the house was on were fine.  Feng Shui, nothing bad except for the house facing straight at a Void and Emptiness degree.  My room was smaller but I could live with that.  But my family, especially my brother and mother, were still complaining about having numbness and swelling in the lower part of the legs.  At first we thought it was just an effect of the ground.  Unlike apartments(2nd floor and above), houses are built directly on the ground.  Sometimes, the ground can be too cool. And for some people, stepping on the cool ground can cause leg discomfort.  So for that, we wore slippers whenever we were downstairs.  But after all that, my brother's and mother's legs were still the same.  It got worse when they climbed up the stairs.

From my observation, their condition was pretty odd.  Sometimes, their legs were okey.  Sometimes, they're just thick.  They even tried experimenting on them.  From their experiment, their legs were okey when they spend more time outdoors or after they wake up in the morning.  And the strangest part was only my brother and mom were complaining about their legs.  My brother also often said that he felt weak.  For that, mom always told him that he worked to long on his computer.  But hey, I work whole day on my computer too.  I feel tired too but after a meal and a night's sleep, I'm charged and back in strength.  Besides the leg discomfort, my mom also claimed to have heard noises like footsteps and things-placement noises around the house day and night just to see nothing and no one there.  Freeky!  So as usual, we suspected that some 'unseen company' was at work again so we turned to the psychic again.

The psychic was unavailable at that time so we consulted the other psychic who knew the psychic we know and he said that the house we were living in, although not haunted, get visits from spirits often.  It's like they pass our house as if it were a public path - like how humans consider the sidewalk public.  He also said that the house was too big for the 4 of us.  Most of the house wasn't occupied most of the time and when there are empty places, spirit activity is more probable because spirits like empty, quiet and dark places.   When I heard that, it reminded me of a few occasions when the corner of my eyes actually caught sight of some wispy figures around the house.  Those wispy figures looked like smoke and I couldn't really identify if there were far or near.  I knew what I saw but I just couldn't be too sure.

The psychic then told us that to make out house 'private', we have to burn some joss-sticks stuck in an orange and some hell notes at each corner of the house.  We did what he told but the results were minimal.  Legs, still swollen and brother, still weak.  Some time after putting the joss-sticks and oranges, my brother claimed that he saw a figure in his room in the middle of the night.  He then decided to sleep in the bigger bedroom with my parents but for his first night sleeping in the bigger bedroom, my dad tried to sleep in his room to see if the figure would show up.  Well the figure didn't show up but in the middle of the night, he was awakened by a slap on his thigh.  He woke up just to see no one there.  I seemed like a dream and yet it felt so real!  We had to do something about this because it is definitely not good to sleep in a room with a ghost hanging out in the next room so again we turned to the psychic.  The psychic then confirmed that there WAS some activity in my brother's room at night.  He also included that it was a bored Iban spirit which hung out at my brother's room just to ease its boredom.  And to keep him out of my brother's room for good, the psychic told us to hang a net-like pattern with red string over the window.  He said doing that would make the spirit to give up getting into the room and finally leave.  We did what the psychic said and for the first night and the following nights with the string upon the window, my family had soundless nights' sleeps.

Besides that whole spiritual problem, we were also running short of cash.  The rental for this house was 800 bucks per month but our family income was running low.  Since the psychic said the house was too big for the 4 of us and, of course we realized that from the start, we were paying the rent not just for shelter but more empty space to clean up plus a whole lot of spirit disturbances.  And on top of that, out landlord was a stingy scrooge and he often gave us an impression that we were not to damage the house.  From what he told my parents, he bought this house by loaning a big sum from the bank and he's actually using the rental we pay to pay the house loan.  We just think it wasn't worth paying.

So we brought up out objectives again and rearranged out mission which we kinda forgot about.  The reason why we rented this house was because we wanted to get away from the haunted apartment.  And then wherever we move to from there is temporary.  So it seems that it's about time we got ourselves a real home.  So it's that time again - house hunting time!  We hunted online as well as offline but luck just wasn't on our side this time.  So many hunts and they were all fruitless.

Desperate, we turned to our last resort which was to go back to the cramped, shabby, old apartment where we so wanted to get away from.  That apartment was owned by the state government.  We haven't surrendered it to them yet and we still had the right to go back and live there although it had been abandoned for 2 years.  For my family it was the reason why we moved out of it in the first place despite it's cheap rental and now we are actually going back to square one?!  Well for me, it wasn't a bad idea considering that the current mental and physical health situation of my family now was way worse than it was when we were living there just that compared to living here, we had to tolerate leaks and dirty walls.

We all knew it was the best bet.  But this time we ain't moving back to see those leaks and black moss on the walls.  It's about time it went through some serious renovation that it should have gone through 15 years ago.  So my parents arranged for the renovations, and of course, we also picked a good date to start the renovations.  At first, we thought it was gonna burn another hole in out pockets but after getting the price quotation from the contractor, it cost less than renting this house for 4 months.  And come to think of it, we've been paying 800 to live in this house for about a year!  

Now, at the time of typing this post, that shabby apartment looks better than what we could have ever imagined before.  It was totally occupiable!  Going back to square one isn't so bad if it were the square one of a different equation.  Ha ha...  All is good but there is still one thing that can't be changed about this apartment which is its size.  It was obvious that it couldn't accommodate the couch and some few pieces of furniture we bought since we moved to a bigger place.  So my mom decided to sell those bulk before moving back to the apartment.  That sales fetched us about 2000+ bucks which was about the same amount we spent on the renovations.  After doing the math we actually realized we got some home improvement for almost free!  Not bad!  Not bad at all!

For the sake of this 'Not Feng Shui' series, I decided to include this part because what's a Feng Shui related story without Feng Shui in it, right?  Hehe...  Before the renovations, I managed to do check out the Feng Shui of the apartment to see how it affected us in the first place and how it would affect us if we were to live there again after the renovations.  It wasn't facing any void directions and after plotting the Flying Stars chart, it turned out its Feng Shui wasn't THAT bad at all.  Our lousy feeling of living there and desire to move out of that place that we had in the first place were probably caused by the impression we got when we saw the damages of that apartment.  Maybe living there could be better now that it has been renovated with a new coat of paint.  Well in terms of Feng Shui, this is what is called Sheng Qi.