Orlovs and Christmas

After all the build up, Christmas has come and gone yet again. It was a picture-perfect white one here this year! It snowed all morning long. 

In the week leading up to the big day, we were hoping we'd find our December horse on Horse Isle 2. It was hard not to adopt this one, let me tell you! If she'd been an overo, I don't think we'd have been able to resist.

We have been sticking to the snowy isles for most of December, which limits the possible breeds of wild horses we can find. Even so, we found it quite interesting that went through a 3-day streak of fluting grey Orlov Trotters. 

Orlov #1 from 12/20:

Orlov #2 from 12/21:

Orlov #3 from 12/22:

I switched from Esker to Tchaikovsky, the white grey Orlov stallion we caught last December, for a screenshot too.

Orlov #3 is... have you guessed it yet? A +6/6er! Just our luck, right? HI2 seems to love giving us duplicate greys. =^)

She is quite a bit smaller than 17.1 hand Tchaikovsky, as you can see below. And of course, being a mare, her beautiful long mane is visible. 

I have a feeling she'll be sticking around despite her strong resemblance to Tchai. <3

Catching these Orlovs made me want to see photos of real ones, and a Google image search brings up some beauties - you should check them out! In addition to trotting races, it appears they also can do well in dressage. One more thing worth noting is that a screenshot of Tchai himself comes up if you scroll down far enough. =) You're famous, buddy!

Our Christmas flute was not so impressive:

Oh well, at least he's cute. We found two meteorites, so we have nothing to complain about!

Careful, Icing! It's still steaming. XD

That's it for Christmas-related HI2 news. I'll share a few more photos from the big day before I go, though.

The tree:

We dared put it upstairs this year. Nala left it alone!
This would never have happened last year. =)

One of Mom's prettiest presents from this year:

Mom was the lucky recipient of quite the spread of gifts this year! Wow! 

Gifts of special note: the thing with the huge dog face on it is a beach towel, the black square in the back is a heated seat cushion, and the thing with the hedgehogs on it is a cross-stitch kit with text in both English and Russian on the packaging. XD Also, that's totally the same Westie on the doll t-shirt as was on the one I faux-designed.

Norbert the stuffed elephant had an especially merry Christmas. He got to meet the final 3 members of his Floppalots family! =)

In order of how they were opened, meet the lion, pony, and turtle!

They join Norbert and his buddies Eleanor the bunny and Poppy the puppy. (Mom bought Poppy herself this summer.)

 

Welcome home, guys! <3

Christmas Is Coming!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas here. Snow's been falling on and off since Thursday, and it looks like it's here to stay. 

We also noticed that a deer (a white-tailed one, not a reindeer, but still...) must have admired our outdoor Christmas decorations and visited our front porch. Check out the trail of little cloven hoof prints. =)

Since the snow and deer tracks put us into a Christmasy mood, we decided to visit the clothing design part of American Girl's website. They have a holiday-themed section, so we each tried our hand at creating a holiday dress. Because the polar bear is so cute, we mutually agreed that he had to be included on all of the dresses. 

Bethany's:

Felicity's:

mine (Julie's):

Lily's

We weren't ready to be done so soon, so we each designed an animal-themed t-shirt too.

Bethany's:

Felicity's:

mine (Julie's):

Lily's:

Ha ha, if cute animals are ever high fashion, you know who to call. 

No new horses to report on HI2, but we have finally finished putting the letter art from our buddy on all of the horses' profiles. If only it was that easy to write our descriptions for each horse. We're still way behind on that...

Before I go, here is an amusing flute screenshot from this past week. Horse overlapping a building? That's a first. XD

In case you were wondering, it was a pretty blue roan Grade Horse mare.

Random Number Fun

One of my favorite things about HI2 is its randomly generated wild horses. It's great fun to go looking for them and see what you find. However, since we only have two open horse slots right now, we haven't gone on any serious wild horse hunting expeditions lately.

We decided to entertain ourselves by each generating a random horse from the BBB instead. How? Google's random number generator!

Right now there are 136 horse breeds on HI2. (Holiday Colors shouldn't really count, but oh well.) So, I will change the Max to 136 and hit Generate.

The 92nd horse breed on the list is...



(Yes, I made this list. You're welcome. ;^))

The Mulassier!

In the BBB, if you look at the list of coat colors for a particular breed, it helpfully tells you at the bottom how many are possible. 

There are 45 possibilities for the Mulassier. So I'll set the random generator's Max to 45 and hit Generate again.

The 26th coat color for the Mulassier is...

Red Dun! <3 I will now select Red Dun and see my random horse!

Aw, he's quite handsome! =)

My sisters repeated the same process to see random BBB horses of their own.

Bethany's: 116, 15

palomino tobiano Shetland Pony stallion

Felicity's: 58, 156

red roan splashed white Grade Pony mare

Julie's: 46, 9

light dapple grey Fell Pony stallion

Such cute ponies! XD

It would be fun to use this method to decide what kind of horses to draw in a picture, or to determine what the equine characters in a story should look like...

Or my sisters and I could use this as another way to have some friendly competitions with each other. (Whoever generates the prettiest horse, smallest horse, largest horse, horse with the rarest coat color, etc. could get a prize of some sort... And if somebody was to get "Holiday Colors," they could really win big!)

Oh, the possibilities!

I'm not sure how it happened, but it's somehow already December. Even more remarkably, my sisters and I have so far managed to keep our New Year's resolution to only add a maximum of one horse per month to our herd. 

My sisters know all too well that this means we could still hypothetically add a horse yet this month. Bethany spotted a 6/6er in the livery this morning who was very tempting.

I bet he didn't last long in the livery at all! What a great horse! (Too bad his stripe doesn't show, though.)

Felicity looked wistfully at this one:

I bet she didn't last long in the livery either! <3 Patience, sisters. The month is young.