I had an emotionally draining day yesterday and a night of poor sleep, so my plan for this morning was to take a short, quick walk to try to get ahead of things for a change. On my walks lately I’ve been playing a lot of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, but I’ve also been keeping Pokémon Go going in the background. Today they seem to be fully launching the ability to fight Team Rocket in the game.
I had a Team Rocket encounter the other day, but I forgot to get good screenshots to post about it. Today I realized how you can identify pokestops that have Team Rocket encounters (they’ve got a shadow-y thing going on) and I thought it would be fun to capture some video of the encounter to try to turn into a short Let’s Play.
So when I spotted a shadow pokestop a short distance off of my normal walking route I headed over there. I started my phone recording and activated the encounter. Based on my previous encounter the other day I had expected the fight to be a cakewalk so I didn’t pick my Pokémon very carefully and ended up with an all water team. Well, the Team Rocket grunt had a grass-type team and wiped the floor with me. I started the rematch with pokemon with better type-effectiveness against grass, but then I had some weird lag issues where the pokemon models weren’t loading into the fight screen, so I ended up losing before I could even try to attack. So I abandoned that fight and resumed my walk to Alton Baker Park.
I figured that there are a lot of pokestops in the park so odds were good that I’d find another one, but the only one I saw that had the shadow effect was over in a part of the park I don’t normally go to on my morning walk, but I was invested enough that I decided to change up my normal walk and head over there.
However, by the time I arrived that pokestop wasn’t shadowy anymore! There was another one in a different part of the park I rarely go to, so I decided to trek over there. I finally had my encounter, and I recorded it so hopefully I’ll be able to make a video to post later today.
Then I walked back over to the part of the park I normally visit (ironically enough Team Rocket had taken over one of those stops in the mean time) so I could do a wizarding challenge in Wizards Unite to complete my daily quest.
With all of the false starts and side trips chasing Team Rocket it was much later in the morning than I had hoped by that point, and I was feeling a bit frazzled because my plan to get ahead of schedule had fallen apart. I was tempted to skip the mindfulness practice I’ve been trying to do every time I visit a park, but then I realized that I’m trying to make it a habit so I should do it even when I don’t want to, and the whole reason I’m doing this mindfulness stuff is to help me get a better handle unpleasant emotions, so I sat on a bench and attended to my breathing for a few minutes. While it didn’t completely settle my emotions I think it did help a little.