August Trifecta

Wow, we are making up for lost time in capturing +6/6 wild horses on HI2! Ever since Murphy was kind enough to grace us with his presence back on 7/11, the tides seem to have turned. We have now found 3 +6/6 wild horses in August!

First Felicity and Gromit found the POA mare on the 12th, 

We still have her. I sure hope we can find her a good home!

then Bethany and Jenga found the Nokota stallion on the 16th,

He's not going anywhere!

and last night Fanta and I found this beauty, an Irish Draught mare!

I fluted her near those two kittens on Windy Pines isle, but naturally she moved so that the kittens weren't in her screenshot. ;^) I admired her avatar for a little bit, but not for that long because that red dot to the north made me nervous! Oh, how lucky Pal would be if it is a +6/6 mare, I thought. Turns out it was not only his lucky day but mine as well! I have wanted a horse with the Best Friend persona ever since I found out it existed!

Here's a closer look:

I think she and Pal, my Irish Draught stallion, will get along great! What a great pair they make!

She and Pepsi look quite lovely together as well.

Earlier in the week, Bethany found an adoptable stallion that could have made it 4 new +6/6 horses in our possession this month. It took major self-control for us to leave him in the H.S. for someone else, let me tell you! It seemed so sad that his owner, who had captured him in the wild and kept him for 498 days, decided not to keep him after all that time! If we didn't already have a Spanish Barb in the herd, my wonderful Fortunado, I don't think we'd have been able to resist him!

He was gone when we checked back later. I wonder who his lucky new owner is?

Our New Nokota

We recently found two overo Nokota stallions on HI2! Better still, one of the two is +6/6! We couldn't believe our good fortune! Truly the +6/6 wild stallion drought is over. Thanks, Murphy!

Can you guess which one of these handsome fellows is the +6/6?

Is it this red roan overo?

or is it this dun overo?

It's...




the...




red roan overo! 

Bethany and Jenga lured him with the magic flute on Bend Isle last Sunday, the 16th.

He is a keeper for sure! As much as we love our other two Nokotas, Ravine and Zesty, it will be really fun to have a Nokota in a color other than primitive dun! And with spots besides! Since Bethany and I were the ones who needed our 20th horses to be stallions, and since she has claimed Murphy as hers, this Nokota gets to be mine!

He is our first horse to have this type of pinto avatar, with the white patches from underneath rather than the top. More HI2 pinto avatars seem to be the reverse, with the white on top. Here is Halley to serve as an example:

Unrelated side note: this non-fluted wild (an American White) appeared out of thin air seconds before the screenshot!
I love it when you actually see it happen. =^)

If you're wondering about the other Nokota, the dun overo, he is +4/6 and +39. He was also coincidentally the only blue-eyed horse we found during the entire length of this who-can-find-the-most-blue-eyed-wilds contest in the new club we're in. Obviously, we didn't win, but I'm glad we at least had a horse to enter! I'm thinking we will put him in the humane society rather than auctioning him. As good-looking as he is, I think his odds of being adopted are pretty high.

Thanks, buddy!

In other news, this weekend we went kind of crazy with rump art. It all started with Bethany complimenting one of our club mates on her cool starburst-esque profile art, which she also had on all of her horses' rumps. Then she offered to make rump art similar to hers for us! We were all on board with that and asked for her to create it in rainbow shades. Who doesn't like rainbows, right? I assumed, "oh, cool, we'll put it on a few of our mares that it looks especially nice on." Well, instead, the clubbie ended up convincing us not only to put it on all of the mares (except for Flora, who already had lovely rump art from her previous owner), but all of the stallions as well! (It may not be especially manly, but when the stallions are all owned by girls, why not, right?) Here's what it looks like:

Aw, it suits you really well, Quasar!

Pretty spiffy, huh? 

Bulb Isle Beauty

We spent this week of HI2 on the Leaf Isles, which are home to many adorable wild ponies. Our timing was not great for finding said wild ponies, but Gromit and I did flute one great one on Bulb Isle early on Wednesday morning. Take a look!

A buckskin spotted blanket POA! 8^D

I am a huge fan of appaloosa spotting, so already I was pleased. Then I discovered....

...that she is is +6/6 and +79!!! The problem: she is so little and light: only 11.2 hands and 500 lbs. This is too little to realistically fit PepsiSummer, who is modeled after our mom. (She's not a huge adult, at ~100 lbs and not quite 5ft 4in, but still... in our minds, it's been a stretch with the 600+ lb, 12 handers as it is.)

Of course, all HI2 horse avatars are the same size, so the adult avatars look fine on anything from teensy Shetlands to gigantic Shires. It's been more the principle of the thing to us, and we're still not ready to throw it out the window.

*Sighs* We seem to appeal to the extremes when it comes to POA's. First Julie lucked out and found Xenon, our max height 6/6 POA stallion. The second 6/6 POA, which I find, is minimum height and weight for the breed.

What to do? Bethany suggested we turn PepsiSummer into a kid version of Mom so that we don't have to discriminate against great little ponies. That might be kind of weird, though, since we've had an adult avatar for so long. No, I'm thinking that as hard as it will be for me to do it, we should try to find another home for this pretty POA. I hope it won't be too hard. I'm thinking we'll wait until she reaches 1000 exp so that she can be ridden bareback, then list her in the auctions. It's at times like these that I really wish we had a horse store on our ranch.

We Love Ponies

First of all, I wish you a very happy birthday, Bethany! <3 Bethany will be going onto HI2 later on today to use our flute, but I'm here to talk about some of the other things that have happened on HI2 since our last post.

Last night, Flare, my chestnut Gelderland stallion, and I went to use the flute on Brown Isle and guess who showed up? That's right, a chestnut Gelderland stallion! Granted, chestnut is a fairly common Gelderland coat color, but it's still quite the coincidence, isn't it? =^)

Why, hello there!

The wild Gelderland

Flare

In other news, you may recall that back on 7/11 we added Murphy the Camargue stallion to the herd. For the first time in who knows how long, our stallions outnumbered our mares!

Well, this didn't last. Since then, two more petite mares have joined the ranks. 

The first mare is the result of more of Bethany's shameless livery stalking. There Bethany was, clicking happily through the adoptable horses, when she found her:

A beautiful bay Mongolian mare! Not only have we caught a great one (love you, Poinsettia), but now we find another one in the livery?! Oh, the coincidences of HI2!

Poinsettia

Bethany called us all over to admire the little Poinsettia look-alike. She may be smaller, redder, and have slightly different markings, but there's still quite the strong resemblance between the two, I'd say. To our credit, we did not adopt her right away, deliberately letting some time pass to give others a chance at adopting her. When we came back later and found she was still there, we took it as a sign that she was meant for us! Felicity will be keeping her, and she has named her "Burgundy" after her rich dark red coat.

The second mare is not all that impressive at first glance, but don't let her appearance fool you! She is one talented pony! Normally we avoid spending big bucks on equines as elite as her, as we have more than enough success finding horses as it is and prefer to save our money for other things. But, our buddy was trying super hard to sell her with no bites whatsoever. We didn't have any Dartmoors, and this one is such a cutie... In the end we couldn't resist. 

This mare gets to be mine! Am I lucky or what? 

Her name will not remain "Dart." Nor will it be any of her other former names: "Pippy Longstockings," "Wish," or "Orchideous." (They are socks, not stockings, Windy has already claimed the letter "W," and "Orchideous" sounds more like the name of a villain to me than a cute pony.) I thought I might try to name her after a beverage since our Exmoor is named "Dasani." She does look a bit like iced tea, but I'm not sure about calling a horse Lipton or Nestea, and her personality is too even-keel to be a Snapple. Fanta, perhaps? There are varieties that are brownish in color...