2017's Lucky Dozen

Happy New Year! It's started out bitterly cold and snowy here. We're finally getting some sunshine today, which is a welcome change of pace, even if it is still only 7 degrees.

It's official: we made it through 2017 without adding more than 12 horses to our HI2 herd. Way to go, us! Let's look back at the lucky dozen.

Mr. January:

Zenith
+5/6, +80
mine

Miss February:

Blush

+5/6, +84
Julie's

Miss March: 

Ganache

+5/6, +81
Lily's

Miss April:

Promise
+6/6, +83
Bethany's

Miss May:

Caraway
5/6, +81
mine

Mr. June: 

(This just seems wrong, but oh well. XD)

Xyris
+6/6, +69
Lily's

Mr. July

Cheeto
+5/6, +76
mine

Miss August:

Araceli
+6/6, +80
Julie's

Mr. September:

Lucchese
+6/6, +81
Lily's

Miss October:

Sassafras
+5/6, +80
Bethany's

Mr. November:

Krypton
+5/6, +76
Bethany's

Miss December:

Tesseract
+6/6, +59
?

Yep, we decided to keep the Orlov mare as our last horse of the year. Even though her stats aren't very high, we tend to make exceptions for +6/6ers. Because she is from Ice Cube Isle and is also the 4th +6/6 horse we found in 2017, we named her Tesseract. (In geometry, a tesseract is the 4-D analog of a cube. Tesseract is to cube as cube is to square.) It's hard to tell in this screenshot, but she is the first horse to get to wear the purple embroidered saddle blanket. 

Thanks to Tesseract, we found the same number of +6/6 horses in 2017 as we did in 2016: 4. 2016's were all stallions: Donatello, Iolite, 20-Karat, and Doppler. This year we found an even 2 stallions and 2 mares, and we are all happy about that!

Our final fluted horse of 2017 was obviously not an amazing, high-stat one. I think he still deserves mentioning, though. Pal and Julie fluted the huge, handsome Draftie on Blizzard Isle.

We didn't give or receive any Christmas gifts on HI2 this December, but we did decide to buy a belated gift for ourselves in January. We decided to demolish the premium carrot patch on our ranch isle (sorry, carrot-loving horses) and build our first diamond barn in its place.

From:

To:

In celebration of having slots to spare again, we went wild hunting for a bit. To our surprise, we were quite successful! We found 4 horses and then fluted a 5th.

Here is our first wild capture of 2018:

She's the same breed as our Christmas flute, and her stats are pretty good: she's +5/6 and +47. Not a bad way to start off the new year at all!

Our 2nd wild of the new year was also +5/6:

Sicilians are so cute on this game. <3

Our first flute of 2018 was also a chestnut:

What perfect markings!

If these guys are any indication of how our 2018 is going to go, I think we are in for a year of some great horses. =)