GANZ just announced a Pet of the Month Club (story featured in Webkinz Insider), which will start in October. Every month, a different Webkinz will be featured. If you buy and register or just register the Pet of the Month during its particular month, you will get extra gifts—exclusive items not offered anywhere else. If the pet you are attempting to register is about to become a Pet of the Month, a message will pop up asking you if you want to register the animal at that time.
I can see the traders rubbing their hands with glee right now!
I wonder if Ganz is doing this to move some of their slower-moving pets. The new ones always get snapped up right away.
The October pet has already been announced: it's the frog (not the tree frog, the bullfrog, or the spotted frog). If it's a marketing ploy, I can see why they'd start with the frog; they're rather top-heavy with them!
Move It, Move It, Move It
Everything Old is New Again
or REDECORATING ON THE CHEAP
THEY call them "nesting urges." This phrase is used to describe the need some women have to redecorate. As you can tell if you watch HGTV with any regularity, redecorating doesn't come cheap. Even on Decorating Cents it will cost you at least $500.
Redecorating in Webkinz World will cost you Kinzcash, but at least it can be recouped by judicious visits to Quizzy's, daily tasks, and certain dexterity at the arcade. (Buying trading cards helps, too!)
When you buy a Webkinz, you also get a room and a certain amount of Kinzcash to furnish the room. You can start with paint or wallpaper and even pick a different floor. A bed is recommended because it is advised you leave your Webkinz pet asleep when you log off. A bathtub is also suggested, as it's one of the easiest ways to increase a pet's health and happiness.
For minimal Webkinz coverage, you can buy things in the Kids Theme, which are the cheapest, and start housekeeping in one room. But if you earn Kinzcash and then peruse the W Shop other than to buy groceries or take a look at other members' rooms, you'll soon have a hankering to decorate...or redecorate...or re-imagine your Webkinz living space.
The problem with this is when you adopt a new Webkinz, a new room is just added...wherever. Where if you purchase a room, you can place it anywhere you like. Did you want your pets' rooms around a central hall that led to a kitchen, living room, and yard? Tough luck; your new koala's room just was placed where you planned the hall to be.
I'd wanted my exercise room and game room to be in a wing by itself, but Gaudior's room ended up next to the exercise room (and that was a tiny room; it didn't need a door in the wall!) and Pablito's place was placed next to the game room.
However, there is a perk that comes after you adopt ten Webkinz. (Actually, there are two: first you get the choice of a "super bed." These come in various styles, including a dragon bed where smoke comes out of the dragon's nostrils, a bed that looks like Cinderella's coach, a movie bed with film reels for a headboard, and the bed I chose: a book bed with a bookcase headboard and the bedclothes in the style of open pages of a book.) On the eleventh Webkinz, they no longer give you a room; instead, you get extra Kinzcash to purchase a room and put it anywhere you want.
Gibson's adoption meant that I could redecorate. I lined the "common rooms" along the yard, kitchen and dining room on one side, living room and conservatory on the other, with a den off the living room. The tiny "winter retreat" room I placed at the end of the garden became a deck, and I now plan to put some rooms on the other side of the yard.
I placed a park on the opposite side of the complex (next to the cats' room, so they can prowl at night LOL), and next to that placed a little cafe. I understand from the Insider group that there are multiple Christmas trees and some other decorations given out at Christmas, so I'm planning a big "Forever Christmas" room there. (I figure I can use some of the gingerbread/red-and-green trimmed things that are part of the Sweets Theme as part of the room as well.)
At least I don't need the $50,000.00 decorating budgets they constantly use on Designers Challenge to get the nesting urge out of my system!
The Open Door
IT had been a bad couple of weeks.
Our budgie Pigwidgeon had died on May 14. Over the summer of 2006 he'd begun developing black marks on his beak and claws, and his beak began to grow rapidly. He also had a black growth on one leg and under his lower beak. Budgies are disposed to cancer and I'm pretty sure it is what he had. The vet, however, thought it might be a liver problem and gave me special liver food for him, but he never got a chance to eat it. I came home the afternoon of the 14th and found he had passed over the Rainbow Bridge.
Since we'd talked to Jerry in April we had been looking occasionally for Webkinz at Hallmark shops, but at that point the stores were cleaned out of them. If they had critters left, they were tree frogs. Sorry to be a "mammal snob," but I'm not much of an amphibian person. :-) I had cruised the website to see what they offered, and of all the different animals I really wanted the white terrier, but nary a terrier did we find.
James had worked one day last weekend and was off today. About mid-afternoon he phoned me and said, "I'm at Hobbytown. They have pugs and tree frogs. Do you want a pug?"
I'm not much of a pug person, either, although Kristi and Kelly's two pugs are quite appealing. But it was a temptation: "Oh, why not? Sure."
Once home from work I found this little fellow on my computer desk. James had also bought himself a pug (I guess neither of us are tree frog people), which he had named "Shahak."
I took a literary track and named mine "Weenie" after Eloise's little pug, except that to tell the pugs apart I put a ribbon on mine and called it a girl.
With the code attached to Weenie's leg, I entered the Webkinz world.
