I love good guys

Recently, when I'm at the office quite late, I turn on Pokémon Go and prop my phone by my monitor, and... my avatar walks. Through some odd malfunction of GPS, she walks out of the building, pauses, walks back in, pauses, and repeats. (She's blithely oblivious to the fact that we're not on the ground floor, of course.) This never happens elsewhere: only my desk at work.

Over many hours, my avatar sometimes even racks up a tiny fraction of a kilometer! (Not enough so that it's cheating, I hope. Just enough that it's amusing that she's really pacing, impatient for us to get out and catch pokémon. Her world and mine...)

To delight me when I finally did get home tonight, a 10K egg hatched an awesome aerodactyl. I haven't even seen a wild one yet!

This Labor Day weekend, I traveled to the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, the largest urban wildlife refuge in the US.

It's beautiful, good for hiking and learning, and free to the public. I'm sorry to report that some amenities have fallen into disrepair, but I'm happy to have seen assorted lizards, birds, ground squirrels, and the century plant (Agave americana) in bloom, with its towering, tree-like stalks. At other times of the year, I would have also seen (and smelled) the reclaimed salt ponds turning pink with brine shrimp.

I counted 9 pokéstops and 3 gyms in the refuge. I took 2 of the gyms for Team Valor; the one in the parking lot promptly reverted to Team Mystic, but my magmar held the top-of-a-hill dry-uplands-habitat gym overnight. I didn't make it as far as the third gym, out on a spur in the marshes.

On arrival, I caught a rhyhorn and saw a squirtle nearby. Starting up the main hill, I caught a second rhyhorn. My hopes rose high for rare or new-to-me pokémon! Unfortunately, that was the last of the rhyhorns, and I never saw the squirtle spawn. Perhaps because the refuge is very much "urban," it seems to count in Pokémon Go as part of the same spawn biome as the cities in the surrounding region. Nothing unusual seems to be triggered by the "wildlife refuge" keyword. I caught lots of pidgies and rattatas; some spearows, ekans and weedles; one each of evee, magikarp, and ponyta. And of course a pikachu got away!