New Companions and New Art

As Felicity promised, here are screenshots of the companions we chose as prizes for our birthday flute contest. PepsiSummer rode out to the mountains to pick them up this morning.

I chose to complete Ophelia's companion set with a prancing premium white foal. (Eventually I may replace the duck with a premium duck. Sorry, Duckweed.)

Also note the fancy new letter art that our wonderful buddy Xylyl created for our horses' profiles.  Before now, we've used border lines to indicate the horse's owner (*'s for me, ='s for Felicity, ~'s for Julie, and ^'s for Lily), but this is probably too subtle for anyone but us to notice, much less remember. Now it will be easy to tell who a horse belongs to. Thank you, Xylyl!

Felicity chose to give Galileo a premium zebra foal, and I think she looks great with Murky the Turkey. The foal came with the randomly-generated name "Blue." It's kind of an odd name for a zebra, but she kept it since Galileo has the blue theme going on.

You may have noticed the new rump art on Galileo. Xylyl has also created that for us, and isn't it cool? We've had the Pepsi-logo-surrounded-by-sun-rays idea for a long time, and thanks to our buddy, it's finally become a reality! She patiently put it on all of our horses with red- and/or blue-themed tack. Eventually, she will recolor it to coordinate with other tack colors as well. It's quite an undertaking to put rump art on so many of somebody else's horses, most of whom already had rump art that first had to be removed. We're so grateful Xylyl has the skill and patience to help us out with this big project! <3

Check out Skyrocket, who rocks the new art especially well:

Getting back to the companion prizes, Lily chose a premium musk ox calf for Zephyr. She's calling her Gusty. =) The musk ox calf is one of my favorite companions too. HI2 made them so irresistibly cute!

Like Ophelia, Zephyr is still displaying our old rainbow star rump art, which we bought from a different buddy. We've enjoyed it, but we think the stallions are all happy to be getting something less girly. (Sorry boys, but you do all have female owners...)

Julie chose to pick out a set of companions for the mighty Napoleon. This is fitting, since Napoleon is himself a birthday pony - he was caught on Mom's birthday. Julie went with a silver and white theme. Nicker the foal and Chatter the bunny look about how I anticipated. However, I was expecting Brassy the chinchilla to about half his size, so I had a good laugh when I first saw him in all his big, chubby glory. 

Felicity and Arion fluted what I think is PepsiSummer's first Estonian Native Horse this morning while they were still in the mountains.

Just look at that endurance stat! Maybe that's why he was stuck up. It's a shame that four of his other stats were so unimpressive.

That's all the HI2 news I have for you today, but before I go, I'll share some fun fall photos with you. The first few are from Mom's visit to Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park back in October.

So much yellow!

Dandling orbs o' flowers

Is it just me, or do two of the gourds look like birds?

A perpetually ineffective scarecrow

Imagine trying to carve one of these monsters!

The highlight of the "Michigan Farm" area

Finally, Mom took this photo from the backyard yesterday afternoon:

They let Mom tromp across fallen leaves towards them and - as you can see - they watched but did not run away, not even when she started talking to them. They continued hanging out there even after Mom tromped back into the house. The deer in our neighborhood are incredibly tame. XD