Shiny Swarm

Well, I may as well post about this so be random and silly.
More shiny Pokémon. Lots of them.
Last month I started exploring the ultra wormhole in Ultra Sun, looking for legendaries.
Basically, the further you go in the wormhole the more likely you are to find shinies.

So I found a shiny Swellow. And named her Imelda since I'd rewatched a bit of Coco that day.


And the next day I found a shiny Lombre (named Piper from another movie I'd seen earlier that day).


And the day after I found two more shiny Swellow.
I have my own flock of shiny Swellow. This is the first time I've found more than one of a shiny Pokemon. It's also the first time I've found two shinies in one day.
The first one I found that day was female. So I named her Socorro. That's Mama Coco's real name. (Coco is her nickname). Hey, I had Imelda. Might as well name my second one after her daughter. I'd watched some Coco earlier that day too.
And the third Swellow I found was male. Can you guess what I named him? Hector. So I have my happy family of shiny Swellow. Hector, Imelda, and Coco.
My fluffy feathery babies.

As if that wasn't enough, a couple weeks later I found a shiny Clamperl on my Omega Ruby, through Pokéradar.

His name is Chinook (because of a documentary I'd watched earlier). I evolved him into a shiny Gorebyss.


You think I'd be sick of shinies by that point. But I thought I'd try to find a shiny legendary, since I was having so much luck in the wormhole. So when I arrived at Ho-Oh, I saved the game and spent a little time every now and then resetting and waiting to see if a shiny would appear.
And on my birthday, a shiny Ho-Oh did appear.

I named him Jin, which means gold in Chinese.
I could stretch it and say that it had to do with something I watched that day (a documentary about an Olympic gold medalist). But honestly that was the name I had in mind beforehand.

And last night I found another shiny in the wormhole. A shiny Sigilyph.

I tried to find a name that had to do with the day, but I gave up quickly because it was late and I had to work in the morning (the fact that I spend my time right before bed on a work night flying through an ultra wormhole probably says a lot of weird stuff about me). So I just named her Sekhmet after an Egyptian goddess.

I'm still hunting out the legendaries in the wormhole, so we'll see if I continue to find shinies in the depth of outer space.

Month One Complete!

Hey, I finished my first month of my new job~
Aaah, man I love this so much more than my last job XD . I do miss the scenery and the horses. But we were the neglected corner of the park, and got treated like garbage. The others there were used to it, so not much was done about it @_@ We couldn't even get a new broom to sweep the barn.

I'm still reading about our zoo animals every night. And I will be doing so for a very long time to come. But I've got a pretty firm base of knowledge about a lot of our animals now, so I can talk to people and tell them cool stuff.
I've always been a huge animal lover, and I keep getting surprised that some people don't know stuff that I've known for as long as I can remember.
Hey, some people know animals. Other people know cars (people have been amazed about my level of ignorance when it comes to cars. Like when I failed to correctly state the maker of my own car).

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I could be doing this job for a very long time. Up until now I've been in school. And then working for Mom, and doing the seasonal job last summer.
It's hard to know how to react to a long-term job.
But this is the kind of job I've always wanted (I do hope to be able to do more hands-on stuff with the animals but I'd better settle in more before I pursue that).
I want to stick around here for a very long time. But the thought of this long-term job sometimes gives me random thoughts like "what if I never get to spend Christmas morning with my family again? @_@ " (because we don't close for holidays - they will be very busy for us, and I probably won't get them off).

Anyway, so far I'm loving this job. I get to see awesome animals do awesome and adorable stuff. And I get to talk to a ton of really cool people~

I'll post photos sometimes. Here's the fishing cat playing with his ball~

Progress

Still plugging away at Evva's story.
I've been able to write more recently, and I'm hoping that as I continue to settle in, I'll find more time for writing.
I've been doing at least a little writing every day. I was surprised to find out that I'm almost half done with my first rewrite.

I keep worrying about future revisions, because no one else really knows anything about this story. There aren't any comments on what needs fixing. I know there are some places on the internet where you can look for critique partners, but those are kind of hit and miss. Some people are pretty cruddy writers, or aren't good at critiques.

But a couple have read Katani's story all the way through, and a couple others have asked to read it. It's just family so far, but they said it was very well written, so hopefully that's a good sign.
Too bad it's so ridiculously hard to get dragon stories published XD Dragons have been so overdone. At one event I went to, one author said "forget about trying to publish dragon and mermaid stories."
Ouch. I may not have any mermaid stories, but I have a lot of dragon stories.

Feeling Grown-Up?

I forgot to post on my birthday yesterday.
I had the day off, and mostly hung around being lazy, which was nice. Heheh.
I ate far too much chocolate.

For the last several birthdays, I've always been amazed that I was already in my mid twenties. I never felt that different than most of my previous birthdays.

But this birthday does feel a little different. I think It's because I have an actually long-term normal job. No more school, or crazy short-term jobs or working for Mom. It feels more adult.
I still don't feel that different, but it seems like I should feel different.
I wonder when I'll actually feel like an adult. Maybe when I get married?


Except I've still never even found a boyfriend @_@

Stealing my Thoughts

Don't you hate it when famous people steal your ideas?
It means that you can't ever use those ideas without people thinking that you got them from so-and-so-famous-movie.

For example, back in middle school, I wrote a story where there's this city With massive trees that have staircases running up through the center of them. Dragons live at the top of the trees.
Then a little movie called Avatar came out.


And a few years ago, I had an idea for a story.
One of the characters was a spirit. He was the hero of a story that use to be famous. But that was a long time ago. And no one's around anymore who really remembers that story. Which means that the spirit is about to disappear, since his story is almost lost.
Then Coco comes out.

Hell.

When I saw When Marnie was There, I thought it would be fun to write about a character who meets an ancestor.


Well, I probably won't be doing that any time soon. If at all. It seems kind of pointless considering how much I love the way Coco did the same thing.

Top Ten Disney Movies

If you were to ask me what my favorite Disney movie was, I would say Lion King, Pocahontas, and Beauty and the Beast.




Except that's not really true. Those are my three favorite traditionally animated musicals. I say those just because it's easier than going into more depth.
If you count traditionally animated non-musicals, then you'd have to add Atlantis and Treasure Planet.



And then if you add digital animation, then Frozen and Big Hero Six jump into the mix.


Plus Finding Nemo, from Pixar.


I love many others. These are all animations, since I'm a sucker for them, but there are plenty of awesome live action ones too.

This was all relevant a few months ago.
But now if you'd ask, I'll say that my favorite Disney movie is Coco.


(It takes a lot of self control to not fill my blog with Hector gifs)

>:/

So there are two times in Evva's story where I called her Ashlyn by accident.
Excuse me while I go flip a table.

It's not like Evva and Ashlyn have anything in common. @_@
I started it back when I was in the midst of my grad project, so I'd gotten used to writing about Ashlyn, I guess.

Movie Time with Mom

I was watching a TV series with Mom, which was based off of a famous book. I won't reveal it here, just to avoid spoilers for anyone else.
I haven't read the book yet, so I didn't really know how the TV series would unfold.
Mom knew I wasn't that familiar with the story.

We meet this one girl, and after a while Mom says, "Oh, she's the one that tries to help him, and then they kill her."
And I say, "why would you tell me that?"
"Oh, sorry."
She's not very considerate about spoilers XP

Also, both of us read the new Dan Brown book, Origin. She read it a couple months before I did.
And when I was about half way through, I asked her if my predictions about the bad guy were correct.
But she'd already forgotten the end @_@

Week One

So, I'm through my first week at the zoo~
I don't think I've really processed that I'm actually working there? And this job was pretty much made for me @_@ The only thing missing is that I don't get to do hands-on stuff with the animals (though I'll see if I can do something about that XD).

Everything looks awesome. Except I need to know everything about the zoo, and all of the animals in it. I knew some beforehand. But I have so much to learn. I've been spending every evening looking up new info on at least a couple different animals. I need to be able to answer any questions people might have.
I'm always finding stuff to study anyway, but now that amount feels kind of overwhelming, and I'll have to do this for a while. It's hardest to keep the numbers straight. How much the animals weigh, how much they're fed, how old they can live, ex.
Plus this gives me less time to study for my stories. And I've barely had any writing time this week. Just a few paragraphs (or a few lines) a day. Not enough to get absorbed into it. But I'll get more done on my days off.

It's awesome getting to talk to people and kids about animals. And watch animals.

When I started on Wednesday, I was stunned to learn that the zoo recently got wolves. Three Mexican Gray wolves.
I have never seen a full-blooded wolf. I've always wanted to see one, but I figured I'd have to visit Yellowstone or something.
But here they were. Three beautiful Mexican gray wolves.
Since I'm still in Coco mania, the fact that they're Mexican makes me very happy. I knew they had wolves in the south, but I didn't know they were a separate species.
They're a small wolf. And they're the most endangered of the wolves. At one point, there were only 7 left. Now there are about 300 (100 in the wild). Better, but still not great.

Edit: here's a (bad) picture of one of them.


So, Mexican gray wolves are now my favorite wolf~

We also have a pair of snow leopards! I keep calling them clouded leopards, and confusing the hell out of people @_@
Stop it, Tara!
Edit: here's a photo of the female being adorable



Heeey, I just watched Coco win the Oscars for best animated picture and best song!
I'm so weird. I wanted to go up and hug all of them.

Imaginary Friends

Scishow recently did a video about imaginary friends


It got me thinking. What's the difference between imaginary friends, and characters in the stories that you write?
I mean, I'll imagine conversations between my characters. Sometimes I'll think of how I'd interact with my characters. And I also think up how I'll interact with characters from other movies or shows or books.
If I'm alone in my room, sometimes I'll even act out a couple lines just for fun.

Does that count as having imaginary friends?