The Karenlocke is going well but has taken an interesting turn.

The team was feeling very cohesive and we got through the 6th gym while remaining deathless, but I knew I was going to be forced to drop someone once we reached the Frost Cavern because I’d be able to get Glaceon then from the Eevee I’d had in the PC since before the 2nd gym, but I wasn’t really letting myself think about it. And then I ended up encountering one of my top 28 favorite Pokémon and another surprisingly likable monster.

So I’ve ended up having to replace half of my team and am currently just working on training them up. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take before we get everyone up to the 7th gym’s level cap, and I’m just hoping we don’t run into something really scary in the Battle Chateau after I have to box some of them to prevent them from going over the level cap.

I actually saw a cicada attack a juvenile blue jay today. I am SO tired of these bugs.

Just found what I think is a spider bite on me. Hoping it won’t be too harmful.

I am distraught at the return of the severe heat and there once again being no end or decline in sight.

The Paldea League setup doesn’t make any sense. If the “Top Champion” is “the strongest of the region's Champion-ranked Trainers”, then why don’t those who beat her get the title of Top Champion rather than just Champion? Is the team she uses at the Pokémon League headquarters not her strongest team?

I’m planning on spending as much time outside as I possibly can when the weather gets cool enough for the bugs to be gone and the fall/winter birds are finally here. It makes me sad that I can’t be outside with the summer birds, but I’m not willing to get stung by wasps or bitten by mosquitos.

I recently came up with a list of my top six (like a Pokémon team) favorite birds that are native to where I live, and all of them except for my #1 favorite will unfortunately be leaving come fall. Purple martins, indigo buntings, blue grosbeaks, tree swallows, and cerulean warblers are only here during spring/summer, but my beloved blue jays are here year-round.

I wish I didn’t keep running out of space in these feeds and having to put the rest of what I wanted to say here in the comments instead, but here we go again:

I’m going to do a new kind of Nuzlocke I invented called a Karenlocke, inspired by Elite Four Karen’s iconic quote that “Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites.”

It has the traditional Nuzlocke rules of only the first encounter per area being catchable, any Pokémon that faint being dead, and leveling past the next gym leader’s Pokémon not being allowed, but I also came up with these additional rules:

- To embrace the randomness of Nuzlockes, guaranteed encounters aren’t catchable/don’t count as encounters, and I have to go straight for the grass/its equivalent when I reach a new area.

- If the first encounter ends up being a horde, I take that as RNG telling me that I’m not meant to get a Pokémon from that area.

- And, as the name of the Karenlocke implies, the Pokémon on my team have to be the ones I like the best—not because they’re strong or useful but just because I like their designs the best.

More Karenlocke rules in the comments:

There’s a white-breasted nuthatch in my backyard right now that won’t stop laughing like a madman, and I’m getting a bit concerned.

I got two new birds today, so now I’m up to 127 species on my Life List—the same number as our Johto Pokédex.

Just realized something about Sableye: From FireRed and LeafGreen onward, almost every single dex entry it’s had has basically just said that it eats gemstones (which I find to be disappointing and boring), but the original Ruby and Sapphire dex entries didn’t say anything about that and did say some really interesting things about Sableye that I wish later games hadn’t scrapped.

I’ll put the dex entries and my thoughts on them in the comments because I ran out of space here:

I was recently able to narrow down my list of my top favorite Pokémon to six. I think that’s pretty great because that’s the exact number you can have on a team, and it just worked out naturally without me trying to hit that number. My prior list has 28 Pokémon on it, because that’s just how many it felt right to add to the list, but I recently realized that I like exactly 6 of them more than all the others: Articuno, Suicune, Sableye, Altaria, Absol, and Dialga.

My prior list was mainly made up of Pokémon from Gens 5-8, with 17 of the 28 being from those gens, so it also kind of surprised me that my top favorites ended up being from Gens 1-4. But, despite them all being at least 18 years old, I couldn’t find any game where they’re all obtainable without transferring from other games, so that’s kind of sad. Ultra Sun gets the closest, but you still have to trade Entei in from another game to be able to get Suicune.

My day started out really surprisingly well for me and then quickly turned awful because I saw a news headline that made my blood boil. And now I’ve been crying for I don’t know how long.

It’s strange how my purple martins seem to have gone from singing in the morning in the spring to singing in the afternoon in the summer.

I’m really looking forward to when it cools down enough for the bugs to be gone and me to be able to step outside without anxiously looking around for wasps that are about to swoop down on me. (As soon as I typed that I looked up and saw a wasp at the window.)

I’m currently shiny-hunting Staryu at Hano Beach, and I think this is the closest I’ve come to doing something in the spirit of summer. I hate this season. At least the forecast shows that it is supposed to start cooling down as soon as August comes (but I don’t trust it).

Well, another app has completely quit working because of my phone being too old. The saga continues.

I’m really holding on for August when things will hopefully get colder and quieter. I have to believe July is the only month where every day and night is hot, loud, and miserable.

I think that Indian peacocks are really beautiful even without their tail feathers, although it’s probably the tail feathers that made them famous. It feels weird to say that a bird that has its own emoji 🦚 and is the official national bird of the most-populated country on Earth is “underrated” in any way, but I was surprised by how rare pictures of peacocks that’ve dropped their tail feathers are online, even though they do it every year. I was able to find some photos, though, and I love the way they look without their tails or with them just growing back in. I think that, without the distraction of the tail, it’s easier to see how beautiful the metallic blue plumage that they have on their heads, necks, and breasts year-round is. And it’s that blue that I love the most.

I don’t think I’m gonna survive this heat wave. The “extreme heat warning” from the national weather service lasts for five days, but the 10-day forecast doesn’t look any different after that point.

I can’t sleep and am also frustrated because I’m dealing with a problem that I can’t even do anything about for several days at least. Having to wait to even find out how bad the situation might be really sucks. Maybe it’s just because I’m sleep-deprived that I can’t focus on anything else.

This month was always going to be the worst one of the year with the heat, explosives, and bugs, but I didn’t expect these personal issues to pop up as well.