Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Near the end of May, the Field Museum’s newest rotating exhibition opened: the Pokémon Fossil Museum. (You probably figured that out from the title of the post.) Naturally, we avoided going immediately after opening due to potential crowding, opting to wait a month and visit on a weekday. That may have reduced the overall crowding at the museum; the exhibition still sold out for the day. The exhibition tickets were timed entries, we scheduled ours for mid-afternoon to avoid being rushed in our arrival or lunch.

Not having visited the Field Museum in over a decade, we knew we weren’t going to cover everything in a day, especially with a special exhibition included. We opted to precede our Pokémon exploration with a visit to the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet & SUE the T. rex, which segued pleasantly into the overlapping information at the Pokémon Fossil Museum.

But what is the Pokémon Fossil Museum? It’s an exhibit comparing special Pokémon, theoretically restored from fossils, to “ancient life from our world”. What can I say? Someone decided Pokémon should be educational, and they did a delightful job of it. Each Pokémon fossil on display was paired with something from our world, such as the combination of a Tyrantrum and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Pokémon world items were a blue background and our world had red, making it easy to distinguish between them; both included detailed explanations in English and Spanish. The T-Rex skull pictured is a replica of SUE’s, the most complete T-Rex ever found, who is housed in the Evolving Planet exhibit.

As we stepped into the special exhibition, we were each handed a Pokémon card… a reprint of an existing card, rather than a special promo one. Apparently a special promo card caused some problems at a previous location for this traveling exhibit. Each admission does get you access to the special Pokémon store across the hall, with a limit of 5 items, no repeats allowed, per admission. This includes an Excavator Pikachu plush that they seemed to have in remarkably large quantities, though everything in the store is “while supplies last.” (Some of the items are also available at the Pokémon Center.) For those of us that play Pokémon Go, there’s an Excavator Pikachu available in the game in and around the exhibit, as well as some themed stickers and themed Pokéstop/Gym images.

Sadly, due to time constraints, we did not see all of the regular exhibits or any other special exhibit that day, so I expect we’ll have to return to the Field Museum again soon to remedy that.

If you recall, back in April we visited three zoos – and two airports – in just over a week. The first zoo we visited had Fahlo bracelets at some of the stores, which was the first time I had heard of the organization. The concept sounded appealing, purchasing an accessory to digitally track an animal and supporting the conservation efforts, yet we managed to leave without acquiring any of their items.

And then we saw them again, at the airport, alongside Fahlo stuffed animals. And we knew, since we were flying on Southwest out of Chicago Midway, that we’d be coming past those same stores when we flew home a few days later. On our return a few days later, I acquired a soft hammerhead shark, though the tracking is for a tiger shark named Summer. Different animal types support different organizations; my new plush support Saving the Blue, which focuses on threatened marine organisms.

Each Fahlo object comes with a QR code to scan, which links you to the supported animal on their app, showing you where they’ve mostly recently been tracked and providing additional details, like how far they’ve traveled since the tracking began (March 9th, in her case) and their average speed. Summer has travelled over 2000 miles since acquiring her tracking tag!

More recently, in the app, there was an offer for a red panda bracelet, which tracks Ninamma, who lives in a protected forest in Nepal. Similar to Summer’s tracker, the app shows a dot for each date she’s been tracked dating back to December 20th. Compared to Summer’s relatively stable placement off the coast of northern Florida and southern Georgia for the past month, Ninamma’s map (in the app, not pictured here) looks chaotic… but has only covered 239 miles. Presumably there’s an advantage in distance to being aquatic. However, Nimanna’s updates periodically include new photos.

In both cases, there may be gaps in their tracking: Ninamma’s because of the mountainous terrain or dense canopy cover, and Summer’s when she’s moving in deep water. The optional notifications will notify you when there’s a new ping on the map for your sponsored animal. Well, a potentially delayed ping, to protect the animal based on standards set with the partnering conservation organizations.

I discovered both of these word games through Waffle, a letter-swapping daily game I’ve been playing on and off for a while now. I feel like I’m better at OneWordSearch than I am at Stackdown, though I like both enough to play almost daily.

OneWordSearch looks like a standard, small word search – it’s only a five by five grid. The catch is that there’s only one findable word at a given time, following the standard word search rules – vertical, horizontal, or diagonal, going either direction for each of those. When you clear that word, replacement letters fall in. That’s an important part to the strategy for this game, realizing that if you remove the fourth row, everything above it will drop and there will be a new row at the top. If you remove a column, that entire column is replaced. If you remove a diagonal, well, that shift is a little harder to plan for.

In this particular puzzle, the first word to find is “style”. When that cleared, the bottom letter of that first column became an ‘o’, creating “organ” in a diagonal. (You’ll see a partial word list in the next image.)

Why do you need a strategy for a word search? It’s scored! Specifically, it’s scored based on how long it takes to find all ten words in the puzzle. This screenshot was from a particularly good day – a full five stars, based on finding all ten words in under a minute. Some days, my brain gets stuck and a single word can take a minute on its own.

The clock doesn’t start until you find that first word. From there, it’s a race to find the next nine as they become available. I try to find the second possible word before I select the first one, and then wing it after that. Sometimes I see a possibility that’s waiting for a single letter and it takes a couple more found words to get there. Other times, the potential word gets split because of how the letters drop when something else is found.

In contrast, Stackdown is timed, but doesn’t score based on the time… which is good, cause the timer starts as soon as you open the page. Similar to OneWordSearch, only one valid word is available at a time, with more of the thirty tiles becoming available as letters are used. The scoring runs down from a starting five stars based on the number of hints you use, which are accessed by swiping the lightbulb near the bottom of the screen. These are crossword puzzle-style hints, so the degree of usefulness may vary depending on where your brain is at compared to the clue.

The strategy I’ve found for Stackdown is to look for letters that make vowels accessible. This particular puzzle starts with an E as one of its four available tiles, which would have been great if there had been an H in the next layer to simply make “fetch”. In fact, this particular day had many ‘e’s, I count six, all on the left side of the puzzle. The first word used two of them – clearing ‘f’ and ‘e’ make the ‘n’ available, followed by the ‘c’ and another ‘e’ to form “fence”.

What daily puzzles help keep your brain going?