Thursday This n That

I've been answering political polls on the phone lately.  Okay, so the first one, I picked up the phone and shouted WHAT? because that same number had come up on our caller ID three times that day.  But the young man was very nice and just doing his job and clearly sounded terrified.  Live poll takers this year must be really taking some shit.  There's a job I definitely would not want. 

Speaking of political crap, I stopped using Pandora until after next Tuesday.  I don't mind the ads for the most part.  When I'm in the groove, I can easily ignore them.  But the political ads on Pandora are obnoxious and throw me right the hell out of my writing.  I got the same one three times during a two hour writing session.  That's when I closed the damn website and went to the CDs I have ripped onto my computer.  Yesterday, I loaded a couple more CDs and built a playlist.  Works for me.

My playlist for this WIP: Foo Fighters, Bush, Lit, Blink 182, Stone Sour, Better Than Ezra, All American Rejects, Breaking Benjamin, Evanescence, Fuel.  For some reason, I like harsh music when I'm writing about murder.  I pick 'angry girl' music for dystopian and pop/folk (Mumford and Sons, Lumineers, etc.) when I do urban fantasy.

A couple of days ago, we noticed buzzards hanging out off the edge of the yard again.  After we pinpointed their activity, I went down.  Within about twenty feet I could tell by the smell what was so attractive to the vultures.  I tucked my shirt up over my mouth and proceeded.  It was a raccoon.  We assume it was the raccoon we'd seen out during the day last week.  He had been moving slow, but after I did some research into daytime raccoon sightings and symptoms for the major diseases, I wasn't worried.  Raccoons do sometimes come out during the day and raccoons with rabies or distemper lose their appetites.  This bugger was munching away at the deer corn.  He also wasn't staggering or drooling.  So, not a big deal.  But he must've had something wrong because we have a dead raccoon.  The vulture activity is over now, which I guess means the carcass is gone. Ah, life in the woods.

What's on your this n that radar today?