treefroggirl

posted by Thomas on Nov 14

I am LONG overdue for this Meme…

RULES:

* Post at least five current addictions (with some details, please).
* Mention the person who started this meme (Being Brazen) and also the person who just tagged you – The Noble Savage.
* Type your post with the heading “Current addictions”.
* Tag at least two people and pass on the above rules.

1. Coffee

It’s a problem. Although today I am doing green tea but that is because we are out of milk and I am too lazy to go buy some. Started doing coffee at Uni. At first it was a necessary evil in order to stay awake when I was cramming- I had tried caffeine pills but had managed to give myself caffeine poisoning a couple of times. Not pleasant. Then I started to like the taste of coffee. If I let myself, I can have a pot or more a day.

2. Red Wine

When I was young, my parents would sometimes give us little glasses of wine on Christmas or Thanksgiving. I always gave mine to my sisters who happily gulped it down. (Portends of things to come.) It was vile. I used to think I didn’t like alcohol. Now I know that my parents just had really terrible taste. Luckily in the intervening years I have worked on my madre’s palate.

My problem with red wine is it is so easy to polish a bottle off in a night.

It’s a problem.

3. Ale

God bless the Sumerians.

Those of you that read this or my twitter feed or have been on the piss with me know that I can drink quite a few pints.

It’s a problem.

4. Sushi

I could eat sushi everyday. There is a restaurant in Old Town Pasadena (A’Float Sushi- is fantastic. Cheap yet still amazing) I would go to at least once a week when I worked there. When I walked in the door, one of the waiters always said “Hello, Miss Nicole.” The act of writing this is making me want to go get some sushi.

It’s a problem.

5. Torturing myself by looking at 1950’s inspired clothing I want to buy.

What Katie Did I could easily spend £500 right now there. I’ve wanted to go shopping for ages, but I have held myself back because I don’t want to drop the cash on a corset when I am the size I am at now. They also have a shop here in London, but I have controlled myself from visiting.

Candy Anthony Eveningwear and Bridal It’s probably a good thing I did not know about them when I was planning my wedding. What annoys me is this is exactly what I was looking for in the US and I couldn’t find anything. I have told myself when I turn 40 (years from now. well. two years. well year and eight months) that I am throwing myself a big stupid party and buying a bright scarlet dress from her and painting the town red.

ReVamp VintageBased in LA, they make designs for men and women based on styles from 1910-1950. I’ve never ordered from them, but they are on my clothing porn list.

Red Dress Shoppe When she had her brick and mortar shop in Pasadena and I was 30 pounds thinner, I spent a LOT of money here. Now she is only online.

Daddy-O’s See above about the money and weight. I have 20 dresses from there in my closet that I can’t fit in at the moment. Most of their stuff is from Stop Staring.

So. It’s clear I need to lay off the coffee, wine, beer and sushi so I can fit in the dresses I own and buy some new ones…

If you would like to do this meme, consider yourself tagged!

posted by Thomas on Sep 10

I had told Kelli about 37 days, a blog I love and knew she would dig it too. The author Patti Digh has written a book called “Life is a Verb” and through one of the rare times the stars are alligned is doing a reading in the U District in Seattle tonight. I say the stars are alligned because I will be in Seattle tonight.

Going to be lagged as all hell, but I don’t care. Chance to hang out with Kelli and to go to a book reading of an inspiring writer, speaker and coach.

posted by Thomas on Jul 23

Meme from Noble Savage

Not the easiest thing in the world to do. For example for ‘Your ex’ What I really wanted to say was, ‘The psycotic cocksucker still owes me 3 G’s,’ but that was a bit over the one word limit.

The rules are simple: one word answers to 40 questions.
Where is your cell phone? Bag
Your significant other? Lashed
Your hair? Long!
Your mother? Chatterbox
Your father? Schmuck
Your favorite time of day? Sunset
Your dream last night? None
Your favourite drink? Coffee
Your dream goal? Pulitzer
The room you’re in? Lounge
Your ex? Certifiable
Your fear? Sick
Where do you want to be in six years? Writing
What are you not? Rich
Your favourite meal? Sushi
One of your wish list items? Kelly (Hermès)
The last thing you did? surf
Where you grew up? Vegas
What are you wearing? comfortable
Your TV is? Off
Your pets? Adopted
Your computer? Necessary
Your life? Train
Your mood? Resigned
Missing someone? Yes
Your car? Sold
Something you’re not wearing? Socks
Favorite store? Borders
Your summer? Summer?
Your favourite colour? Red
When is the last time you laughed? Today
When is the last time you cried? Today
Your health? Okay
Your children? Unborn
Your future? Dunno
Your beliefs? Muppets
Young or old? Young
Your image? Reactionary
Your appearance? Sloppy
Would you live your life over again knowing what you know? Definitely

posted by Thomas on Jul 21

I want to volunteer for a once a week gig at Amnesty International. I’ve long respected Amnesty and even considered doing some volunteer work for them when I first arrived here, but they were asking for more hours than I could give. This position however would be perfect as it would be blogging events and would be on average one evening a week. They are asking for a writing sample in a blog style describing an event.

I’ve been looking at old entries to see if I have a jumping off place that I can use. I have tons of blogs where I get up on my high horse. All you know I have that. I don’t have so many that are talking about an event and the ones I do have are usually about how drunk I was.

Flipping through my archives has been an interesting experience.

1. Some of what I wrote doesn’t suck.
2. Some of what I wrote really sucks
3. My weight has shot up big time since I moved here and I’ve lost and gained the same ten pounds over the last couple of years.
4. I fall down, get stepped on, cut myself and cause general injury to myself a lot.
5. I whinge about not writing or that I am writing or wanting to write. A lot.
6. It seems that I lost a few readers that I had in the early days. Either that or they are lurking. I’m guessing they got a bit tired of the entries that really sucked or me talking about trying to lose weight or how I hurt myself or getting pissed or writing about all of the writing I’m not doing.
7. The moments where I could kill Stuart are very funny on paper.
8. I need to work on my 100 things about Nicole category and my blog roll.
9. I need to clean up the entries that came over from blogger because there are all these strange characters in them that make it difficult to read.
10. I blog a lot about things I need to do that I never get around to.

posted by Thomas on May 31

Great meme at Noble Savage that I snagged.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing.
The rules:
bold = what you’ve read
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
*= you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. *Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. *Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Mostly read. I took a upper division class at Uni.
24. *Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. *Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. *To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. *Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. *Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. *A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. *Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazie

What really sticks out for me, (besides there a ton of books that I need to read and a few I need to revisit because I haven’t looked at them for 15 years) is I really need to call on Mr. Dickens.

posted by Thomas on May 15

Little Red Boat posted a fun meme that I snagged. I however did not just use the G-word. . . I also used live.com. Sue me. It made a better story.

Meme away if you so desire. Do a search on your name and the phrase, ‘likes to’ and comedy will ensue. I would like to thank Ms. Richie for making my name what it is today.

Here’s mine. Nicole likes to:

Nicole likes to party. Anyone that reads this knows that I am one martini away from cirrhosis.
Nicole likes men. Yep.
Nicole likes guys who look like they have no blood in em. I don’t know about you, but this seems to be counterintuitive?
Nicole likes this boy named Brandon Chavez. Is it just me or do I sound like a complete slut?
Nicole likes men. Yeah. I am a big slut.
Nicole likes her men circumcised. I sound like a dumb slut.
Nicole likes to chow down. I’m recusing myself.
Nicole really likes cocaine. You know. . . never been interested. I’ve always been more of an oxycontin girl.
Nicole likes to take risks. Well obviously. I like to party and do coke with Brandon Chavez while sucking all of the blood out of his circumcised penis.

posted by Thomas on Apr 29

. . .that keeps leaving comments like, “I couldn’t understand some parts of this article xxx, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.” just really needs to get fucked because he is a lame-ass can of spam and I am TIRED of him.

DANIEL! MATE! WHOMEVER THE MOTHERFUCK YOU ARE! STEP OFF BITCH!

Why you ask is Nicole going bonkers?  *87% of her spam comments are from a Daniel person that says something like, ” I didn’t understand what you were saying about  BLAH-BLAH-BLAH (insert random blog post title here) but I will check and—– aghhhhh Nicole shoots herself in he head in the first case of self-inflicted spam-rage.

Spam-rage. I warn ya- It ain’t pretty. Had a friend that made a joke about the gooey jelly gunk surrounding the meat product that is spam. . . He called it after spam. I wonder what Daniel, that spamalishness spam-stud freak will find to say about after spam. . .”

Something tells me it would be. “I couldn’t understand portions of your article about after-spam but I need to look into it more. Happy Tuesday!**

**Those of you that don’t blog do not know the pain that those of us that do go through weeding out the BS from the 1% normal folks that are real actual living breathing creatures and not spiders. If you don’t know what I mean by spider, look it up. I’m too tired (drunk) to explain. . .

Until tomorrow. . . And– Happy Tuesday.

posted by Thomas on Nov 22

A random stranger from Meridian, MS sent me a couple of bucks via Pay Pal. Thanks much and Happy Turkey Day to you and your family!

posted by Thomas on Nov 3

Last year I signed up for NaNoWriMo but didn’t even try because the timing of my mom coming over to visit. You know me. My Indian name would be Many Excuses. NoNoWriMo is the snappy name for National Novel Writing Month and thousands of people sign up and try to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

This year I thought I would just do NaNoBloPo or National Blog Posting Month but a few moments ago I thought. . . oh hell. Why don’t I go for it. 50,000 words. Maybe 100 of them will be words that are part of well constructed sentences.

posted by Thomas on Oct 27

I was quickly eyeballing my comments making sure there wasn’t a real comment stuck in the spam before I deleted them all when for .0008 of a second my heart jumped.

I had a comment from Bill Nighy.

I adore Bill Nighy. I saw him eating at Circus once and luckily I wasn’t drunk so I didn’t go to his table and tell him how much I love him. I am sad to say I haven’t seen him on stage yet. My love is from his performance as the washed up rock star in Love Actually: “Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free.” As well as some smaller indie films. (Rent I Capture The Castle today. Is a lovely adaptation of the Dodie Smith novel. Then go read the novel for 101 Dalmations which I remember loving when I was ten. Much better than Walt Disney.)

So an actor I adore has left a comment on my stupid little blog!

I looked closer.

Bill Nighy | wwedivasws@gmail.com | bill-nighy.info | IP: 64.22.107.90

Hi there…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday

It was spam. Bill Nighy spam.

I love Bill but I think this is even odder spam than the Best Cat Litter Boxes.