UPDATES!

Woo Hoo!

The internet connection has been fully restored to it's normal self. Yay!

That means, I've finally linked this blog to the NaNoWrimo Project I'm working on. The adrenaline rush is awesome, I tell ya... The link to the temporary blog I've set up for this November madness is right at the bottom of the sidebar at the right and somewhere above on this post.

The last five days have made me realise that this is an extremely daunting task. My characters actually had a small argument without even me knowing. Ha! Ha!

Time for some Non-NaNo stuff....
I had to go to the bank today to fight for my rights. In reality, I should have done it at least 3 weeks ago, but due to many other unavoidable obligations, I've been putting off this activity until today. Alas! It rained the whole morning... somewhere in between cats and dogs and a mild drizzle alternatively. I should have been sleeping instead of getting ready to go and errr... fight for my rights.
So, mom gave me a small umbrella to use when running from the car to the bank. Parking spaces are scarce in that part of town. Neither am I exactly in the mood to catch the flu now. Turns out I didn't have to fight for my rights at the bank after all. My request was processed immediately. All the dramatic speeches I practised in my head the past 3 weeks on the journey back and forth to work was just unnecessary drama.
When I reached home, I kind of shook the umbrella, to get rid of the excess water from the folds... and then I saw the words imprinted on the umbrella. I never knew umbrella had names. This little blue one apparently goes by the name Justin.
A long time ago, when I started believing that I had the ability to pull off a 300 page novel, I started my story with a character named Justin. For reasons I cannot remember, the name stood out amongst all other names. A plus factor was I didn't know any Justins personally back then.
Turns out, a few months later my whole family shifted to where we still live right now... (not the house, but the same town) and voila! we had our very own neighbourhood Justin there. I never spoke to the person (I must admit that I was an extremely anti social person at that point, besides, this person Justin was way older and we had nothing in common to talk about)
I remember though that he used to go around on his mountain bike, and play tennis in the evenings with his shoulder length hair flying in the wind - this I observed when I used to get down from the school bus after school in the evenings. He was dubbed our own local Andre Agassi. (When he still had the shoulder length hair!)
In a later revision of the novel that will never see daylight, I changed the name of my lead character. It had to be a name of someone I didn't know personally, or never will know personally. Of course now that the novel is dead, the name of the characters don't matter anymore.
I just can't believe that I am writing a post about a person I've never spoken to before and all because of an umbrella that shares the same name.

PS: This story was written somewhere in August but I didn't post it at that time...