How can I carry on with the ridiculous blog topic I had planned to write for today when the world is in such a painful, chaotic, desperate place right now? Today is my social media day (M, W, F only (might talk about that more later, might not)) and already I have nearly been brought to tears twice. But I feel like I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said better by someone else. I don't really want to add to the cacophony of voices (legitimately) shouting out in anger and sorrow and despair and fear. I'm not sure that would be helpful to anyone. But maybe my little bit of nonsense will bring a smile to someone during an otherwise trying day, so... I'll stick with it as planned.
Last week I talked about one of my 2026 challenges and this week I'm going to tell you about another one, but it requires a little bit of backstory. Somewhere around August I discovered a little app called Pikmin Bloom. It's a Nintendo/Niantic game that's built on the same engine as Pokemon Go. Essentially, it gamifies walking.
When it comes to exercise, there's basically one form of it that I like: walking. I started taking long walks sometime in 2019, but I had fallen off dramatically in my walk-taking frequency over the past couple of years. In August I stumbled across a mention of Pikmin Bloom somewhere on the internet (probably Reddit) and whoever was talking about it said it helped them to get more active via taking daily walks and so I decided to check it out. As I leveled up and learned how the game works, I became a tad obsessed with it. I roped Pat (husband, if you're just meeting me) into playing it with me, and then Saren (oldest adult child) and their boyfriend. I wrote this poem about it on my fridge.
I won't bore you with all the mechanics of gameplay. All you really need to know is that taking more steps means getting more stuff and some of the stuff that you get comes in the form of little guys called pikmin, who walk around with you (in your phone). The more they walk with you, the more your friendship with them grows and when it gets to a certain point, they will go off to get a gift and that gift is a little something or other that they will decorate themselves with, dependent on where you found them. For instance, a pikmin with a decor type of "grocery" which you originally found in a grocery store, might one day like you enough to put a bit of banana on his head. Sounds amazing, right?!
Anyway, given my obsession with this game, I decided to tie it in to some of my challenges for the year. One of them concerns my art business, HaikuCat Creations. The amount of sales I make is pretty modest and that's totally fine for me right now, but I do want to grow somewhat. It just so happens that there's a pikmin decor that pikmin found near a post office can get. Soooo... I decided to make my art business goal that I would get at least one of each type of post office decor (there are 7 total) only from making a sale in my shop and then going to the post office to drop off the package. No trying to get a post office pikmin in any other way. 7 sales might seem very, very modest indeed, but it might take more trips than that because I might get repeats and I need to get at least one of each kind. Also, for the first part of this year, I will be finishing up my last semester at ASU Online, so I don't know how much energy I will have to devote to making art and putting it up in my shop during that time.
Anyway, all that said, I got my first one yesterday!
(You have to walk 1000 steps with the seedling to make the pikmin grow enough to pluck it out.)
I also wanted to share some more runners-up for my weekly Ordinary Beauty photo of the week for last week. From now on, I'll share the winner plus runners up from the previous week at the end of each blog post (the plan is to blog every Friday), but for this week, I'm still in the middle of it, so it's last week I'm still focused on here. Honorable Mentions:
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| Lemon Tree in the Sky |
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| Sidewalk Colors |
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| Gambling |
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| Artsy School |
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