Tar Tales, Part II: Crikey! It's Angry!

If you know me, you know how I handle particularly tough problems. I consider them carefully from all angles, develop a detailed plan of attack, assemble the materials I’ll need to proceed… and then shove it all into a corner of my room and ignore it for months. Not until a distant date, when forced by some elaborate chain of reasoning (I need to do this so that I can do that in order to do some third thing with a deadline), after just enough dust has accumulated on the materials to set me sneezing, do I pick them up again and actually deal with the problem.

This approach isn’t entirely without benefits: sometimes I learn things in the intervening months that improve my eventual approach to the problem. But more often than not, when the solution ends up taking much less effort than I’d feared, it just leaves me feeling sheepish that I spent six weeks putting off five hours of work.

What does all this have to do with the Lars? Well, what problem could be tougher—or bigger, or more likely to break loose and terrorize the county—than an angry feral Tyranitar falling into my care?

Tar Tales, Part I: Beware, Beware the Monster Fair

A year after I graduated from college—having both free time and disposable income for the first time in my life—I decided to get a new Pokémon. The income, part-time bookstore wages, wasn’t terribly high, so rather than hit up the fancy shops at Tysons Corner or pay the exorbitant fee to capture one from Shenandoah National Park (the nearest patch of public land where interesting ‘mons could be found), I turned to Craigslist first. Surely someone on there had a recently laid Egg they’d part with for a smile and the assurance of a good home.

Nope. Even those sellers knew their stuff—the pickings were either Pidgeys for a pittance or purebred Piplups for not much less than what the Tysons dealers were charging. With Pokémon, as with anything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch—especially in Northern Virginia.

I did, however, find an advertisement for a breeder’s fair out in Manassas. Kind of a haul, but there might be some deals there. I’d at least come away with a better sense of the market, of how much those Piplups were really worth.

And so, one hot August afternoon, I found myself inching down I-66 among the weekend traffic, headed for that huge park beside Bull Run.

Adventures in Moisture Management, or How Not to Store Your Gear

So the friend I stayed with up in Redmond has a nifty little place by the shores of Lake Sammamish:

It's in a pretty nice neighborhood (if a bit crowded for my tastes), and there's a huge park a mile or so up the road with just about everything one could ask for: playgrounds, sports fields, historic buildings, a birdwatching trail, a leash-free area for dogs (they briefly coincide, which leads to some interesting interactions), a velodrome, and even a climbing wall:

Which I... erm... can't quite get up in my sneakers. Yeah. That's it. Totally the shoes' fault.

All in all, the place was quite lovely for my first month and a half there:

But as September drew to a close, the days grew overcast. To the east, the Cascade Range hid itself in a heavy haze. Clouds rolled in from the Pacific, clustering above us like schoolchildren after a summer apart.

And then, at the stroke of midnight on October 1, the rain began.