So, yesterday Eileen and I were hunting Pokemon. Parked on Nicollet Island, walked across the bridge to St. Anthony Main and turned right along the  walking path. We were immediately hailed by a frantic looking young guy in a bike helmet sputtering, "Wait! Don't go that way! WASPS!!" At first I thought it was somebody who had accidentally encountered a nest of some kind.  Scary, but it happens. Turns out it was much much worse than that. This guy had stopped at a picnic table by the bike path for a little picnic lunch when a few yellow jackets started going after his banana. One stung him on the leg, another on the back of his neck. He looked up from his lunch and realized that a HUGE SWARM OF WASPS had descended on the picnic table and was MOVING INTO HIS BACKPACK as he sat there!!  He ran for it, and they didn't follow. But there were literally hundreds of them swarming the picnic table, the backpack, and his bike. He had a long branch in his hand and seemed to think that he could chase them off or maybe rescue his backpack with it... but that really didn't seem like a good plan. We talked him out of attacking them with a stick, and suggested that what he needed was wasp spray. The guy wouldn't leave the area because he felt responsible for warning everybody that came near. And sure enough, as he was talking to us a jogger came along and got a little too close to the table, then looked alarmed and started swatting at the air, then turned around and ran. 

Eileen and I weren't sure what to do to help. We walked a ways upstream and attacked a gym while trying to think of someplace to buy wasp spray. Really, St. Anthony Main isn't the best place to look for useful stores, so we would have to walk back to our car. We headed back to Wasp Central to ask him if we should do that and saw that reinforcements had arrived. The poor guy couldn't get to his phone (we hadn't realized this, but it was in his backpack!) but a passerby had thought to call .... well who DO you call in this situation? 911? Animal Control? 

It turns out that the right call is the Park Department. Amazingly enough, a truck had showed up already and a guy in a Park Department vest was bravely emptying a can of wasp spray at the picnic table. Then he pulled out a long telescoping pole with a kind of double hook on the end, snagged the backpack, pulled it out and tossed it out of the way. Then he did the same thing with the bike. The spray didn't seem terribly lethal, but I think it slowed the wasps down considerably. There were still some buzzing around the backpack for a little while, but they eventually emerged and sort of staggered away (only flying). I asked the park guy if this happens often and he said (sounding a little shaken), "First time I've heard of." But they did seem to have the right equipment for the job, so kudos to the Minneapolis Park Department.

 Happened yesterday or the day before, actually. Time to head out and see what's new in my local hunting grounds. The Silph Road Nest Atlas shows Shuckles at Lyndale Farmstead and Girafirags at Lake Harriet. 

Two days ago a sneaky little Pokemon update that supposedly just fixed a couple of minor bugs (ha!) tweaked the base stats and Combat Power calculation of pretty much all the Pokemon. My beatiful double-grass Vileplume is nerfed. :-(   But my beloved Rhydon, FightQuake, is suddenly a beast! I have renamed him "SnorlaxKiller."
But wait, there's more!

The Thanksgiving Event started this evening: 7 days of double XP and Stardust!  But wait, there's more!

The new ingame tracking system went live at the same time. Not sure if it's an improvement or not, but it's different and will be fun to play with. But wait, there's more!

The elusive  Ditto Pokemon is now loose in the wild! I haven't seen it myself, but it's all over the Internets. It disguises itself as something harmless like a Pidgie or Rattata, but when you catch it, it transforms into a purple blob. Wow!

If only the real-life weather weren't drizzly half-frozen mess I'd be out there right now.

Just had my first Festival of Evolution. Cracked open a Lucky Egg (which doubles earned XP for 30 minutes) and started frantically evolving baby Pokemon. I evolved about 40 critters. Mostly worthless Urban Vermin, but also got a few evolutions that I had been saving up for on more valuable critters. The star of the show was a duck that unexpectedly evolved into the most powerful battle Pokie in my menagerie.

But the real payoff for this was the XP. Normally you get 500 XP for evolving a Pokie. Double, it really adds up! I leveled up from 14 to 15. Then to 16. And ended up at Level 17!

Yes, I am lucky enough to have a Pokemon spawn site in my house! It's not a particularly active or interesting spawn site, yielding mostly Urban Vermin (pigeons, rats, and worms). But now and then something unusual pops up. Yay!

So, who else is playing Pokemon Go, besides lydy and eileenlufkin?  When you post about Pokemon, could I trouble you to use a tag so I can find those posts easier? Now that I've been drawn into The Game I'm going back and looking for lydy's very interesting posts on the subject and wishing they were tagged.

I'm Level 14, but my progress has been so haphazard that I don't have enough powerful critters to do any fighting. If I ever manage to evolve my Dratini or Charmander I might consider it. I'm mostly having fun collecting. So far, my go-to hunting ground is Lake Harriet. The Roseway has possibly the highest density of Pokestops in the Twin Cities, and the lakeshore has tons of water creatures (including the elusive Dratini). There also seem to be a lot of Clefairies around the Rose Garden afer dark. Lately, anyway. Eileen and I couldn't find any trace of fairies during the last full moon, but now they are all over the place. When I came back from South Dakota with a cute little baby Rock Rhino, eileenlufkin took me to Loring Park to find more. Sure enough, they are quite common over there, although I have never seen one any place else in the Cities.