Bathing Elephant--Thursday, 3/22/18
Yep, can't get enough of this red cardigan and brown pants. This time I wore it with a navy top and a scarf that incorporated all these colors in small quantities.
Outfit cost per wear (OCPW): $19.80
We were lucky to hit the elephant area in the morning when they were being brought inside for their baths. This girl had been very well-trained to respond to a zookeeper's signals to sit, stand, roll over, lift her trunk, etc., so that the other zookeeper could spray her with water. She seemed to really enjoy the process.
 |
| Cincinnati Zoo |
A Bundle of Roses--Friday, 3/23/18
This outfit becomes increasingly casual as you move from the bling necklace and sorta-dressy blouse at the top to the jeans and smoking slippers at the bottom.
OCPW: $18.04
I love how this photo turned out--when you have a gorgeous and perfectly cooperative subject, it's so easy.
 |
| Los Angeles Arboretum |
In other news...The combination of the onset of actual spring (i.e., high temperatures reaching 60 F) and the introduction of quests finally has really revived our recently-somewhat-lagging Pokemon Go obsession. There are two kinds of quests (called "research" because ostensibly you are helping a professor with his work).
Regular quests are triggered when you spin a Pokestop, and they offer a small reward (e.g., balls, potions, revives, berries, stardust, spawn a Pokemon for you to catch) in exchange for completing a small task (e.g., catch x Pokemon of y type, play a raid, win a gym battle, spin z pokestops). It may seem dumb that this makes the game more interesting, but it really does. I mean, come on, anything that makes you happy to catch Pidgeys (for the "catch 3 Pidgeys or Murkrows" quest) and so on is pretty much brilliant. It adds just a bit of direction to how you play, and it gives you a chance to get extra stuff (always good). Last weekend, for example, Robert and I purposely sought out opportunities to battle gyms and raids for quest purposes, and one of my quests ("use a supereffective special attack in 7 gym battles") definitely required some strategizing to complete efficiently.
Each day that you complete 1 or more regular quests, you get a stamp. Once you collect 7 stamps, you get a "research breakthrough" that rewards you with more desirable rewards and spawns a legendary Pokemon for you to catch (and it will not flee! if you keep trying, you will eventually catch it). Since the only other way to get legendaries is to win a super hard raid that requires 12+ top level players AND to get lucky enough to catch it (my success rate so far is about 1 in 3), this is a huge development for the game. So far, I've gotten 2 research breakthroughs, and both times I've gotten Moltres as my legendary. I'm guessing they will rotate the legendary Pokemon perhaps once a month or something.
The second kind of research is special research--which is like the main quest line of a Skyrim type game. The current quest is helping the professor find a Pokemon called Mew. There are 8 stages to the quest, with 3 tasks per stage, and these are more difficult and more varied than the regular quests. You get experience for each task you complete, and a nice set of loot for each stage you complete. Once you complete all the stages, you get to catch Mew. Again, not only is it fun to get cool stuff, it definitely provides an extra oomph of motivation to do the various aspects of the game--walk more, catch more, catch more, battle more--while helping guide your next move.
This evening, after a series of rather annoying events caused running a couple of errands to take longer than it should, and both of us were feeling irritated, we were driving home on an unusual route due the the frustrating nonsense. And in that exact time and place, a Ditto (a not very common Pokemon that looks like another Pokemon then reveals itself after it's been caught) had appeared at the side of the road in the guise of a Pidgey, and I caught it. And it was the last of 3 tasks needed to pass the current stage of the special research quest! But contrary to our usual practice, in which I play both of our phones while Robert drives, he'd been distracted when we got in the car outside the unexpectedly closed restaurant and hadn't given me his phone. So we circled back to the location, afraid that in the time that took, the Ditto-Pidgey would have de-spawned (each Pokemon only exists to be caught for a given amount of time--something like 15 min, or 30 min, or an hour, depending on what you read; no one knows for sure). But it hadn't! So I caught that one too. And it pretty much saved our evening.
Pokemon Go quests: I am a fan.
No comments:
Post a Comment