Oops

First, the sad news.

We said goodbye to that adorable but rather small 6/6 Pony of the Americas today. We didn't really intend to sell her just yet - it was all an unfortunate mistake. I had just taken over playing after Julie had caught several wild horses on Amber Sands Isle. I was auctioning the wild horses off, and I accidentally clicked on the POA because we had left her tagged for sale. (We wanted anybody who happened to see her to know she was for sale, and we figured we'd never be careless enough to auction her by mistake. Ha! If there's a way to screw up, I generally will find it! Lesson learned!) Since I thought I was selling a random low-stat wild, I didn't have any minimum bid on her. I was pretty bummed, let me tell you!

I guess it worked out okay, because it was a fairly active time of day for auctions, and people did at least bid. If that foreign bidder had gotten her, I'd have felt absolutely horrible. She had just made it to 500 experience points, which was a nice number for somebody else to start with. She went for $35k to a player who bid multiple times for her - I'm hoping that means she really wanted her. I congratulated her on the win afterwards and casually rode up to her on that stretch of grass where people like to gather on Plains Isle. She was riding the pony - a good sign, I think. 

Here's one last look at her:

Goodbye and good luck, little POA! <3

On to something more happy!

The club we're in is having a contest to see who can put the most experience on a horse adopted from the livery by the end of September. (To make it fair, the horse must have 0 experience points when adopted, and a player must agree to put all the experience on it herself/himself.) We figured hey, why not? Even though we think our odds of winning anything are pretty slim, it sounded like a fun challenge anyway. And it was an excuse to treat some lucky livery horse to lots of attention!

Of course, when the contest started and we were looking for our livery horse, we couldn't find a single one, mare or stallion, with very impressive stats. So, we ended up agreeing on a big lug of a Holsteiner. Our reasoning: he was a he, he had only one negative stat, and his one white foot was pretty cute. XD

Here he is a week later, all decked out in our fancy competition tack with the companions we happened to have on hand to give him, a platypus and some fireflies:

As you can see, in the week or so we've had him, we've managed to put some experience on him beyond the few points he gets automatically every day at our ranch. When we are online and see people are competing in the bonus arena of the day, which isn't as often as we thought, we head over for a few rounds. Those points are coming mostly in sad little trickles of 6's, though. Getting last place after last place in Group II is pretty dull, but we're hoping that as he gets more training it won't always be the case! Maybe we should invest in some premium companions for him? I don't know how much of a difference this actually makes, but most other competitors have them...