Chocolate Surprise

To Lily's relief, we made it through May without being very tempted to add any more horses to the herd. On June 1, Julie and Melancholy broke us out of that pattern with the flute. 

We're always half-expecting flaxen chestnuts to be Belgians. Nope.

Such a handsome boy! His bird catcher spots are the perfect touch to his sleek goldenness, if you ask me. And of course you can't ignore those stats: +5/6 and +76. Very nice indeed. But... *sighs* I suppose we've got to be strong. Our buddy Gem offered to put him up for sale in her ranch store, so our tentative plan is to take her up on that. 

This would be a lot easier if he wasn't so good looking!

Lily logged on to a welcome surprise this morning, two wild horses on Palm Isle! (It's such a tiny island. We've never seen more than one wild here at a time before!) The Calabrese below was standing near Pepsi when she poofed there, but she apparently got spooked and ran behind the palm trees when Pepsi got on Onyx.

Ooh, such a beautiful color! If her persona had been more interesting, she'd have been a Millennium Fields candidate.

The second Palm Isle wild was hanging out farther north in plain sight.

Cute. What's not to like about shaggy Doles? I think this particular one would make a good Goji or Jujube.

Later on, we logged on again to meet up with Gem. She'd messaged to say she had something for us. But before I get to that, I'd better back up.

Last week, one of our buddies (not Gem) wrote Pepsi a letter, which I happened to read first. She'd caught a +81 Shire mare and wanted to know if we were interested. Well, yeah, of course we were interested... in seeing her, at least. So we visited the buddy's ranch and found her. 

After that I visited the BBB in our nearest library to check out the avatar for seal brown Shires. She gets one of those super dark (blacker than many black) avatars, plus the dramatically white legs, hooves, and muzzle of all HI2's Shire avatars. 

She was certainly an excellent horse! Had we not already been in possession of two great Shires, we'd have sent back an enthusiastic yes! 

Icing, Lily's 16.2 hand +89 mahogany bay mare

Tinsel, Julie's 19.1 hand +70 stallion

Neither of these horses is seal brown, though, and neither has her blaze. We don't have any horses with seal brown sabino avatars either.

So, I replied to the buddy that we'd be interested in buying the Shire, but that we'd be cool with it if she found another buyer too. A few days passed. No online overlap with the buddy. No letter from the buddy. I visited the buddy's ranch while waiting for Gem to come online and saw that the Shire was gone. We figured she'd found another home. Not going to lie, we were all a bit bummed out. Even though June is young, we were all rather eager for a new mare for Lily so that everything is even again (both the number of mares and stallions and the number of horses per sister). 

Then Gem came online. You've probably figured out what that mystery thing is that she had for us. Yep, the Shire. Gem and I are both buddies with the Shire's owner, so she had given her to Gem to give to me. 

So now we have our third Shire, and an endearingly huge and good-natured one at that! When we introduced her to Icing, the two hit it off! (This is a rarity for Icing. Only two other horses have made it into her exclusive circle of friends to date.) Because she and Icing got along so well, it only seems right that she join Lily's collection of horses. 

Lily has already chosen her name: Ganache. Yum. XD