The Waler and an Effective Rock

Hello, all. Felicity here. I know I usually type in green, but I'm making an exception for this post. I'll explain why later on.

First for the HI2 news. With the July update on the 7th came a new breed, the Waler! My first impression of them was Wow, these horses have solid legs and feet! Nothing delicate about those babies! They also seem to have quite short, upright necks, fairly small heads, and small eyes. They've grown more harmonious to my eyes the more I've gazed upon them to make this post, though. 

HI2's Walers come in a wide range of solid colors, including rarities like mushroom and silver. Here we have mushroom:

And here is a chocolate silver:

Sooty palomino and dun are extra cool on Walers because they come in more sooty and less sooty varieties. Here are the two versions of sooty palomino:

According to Wikipedia, when real-life Walers were used in the Australian cavalry, only solid-colored non-gray horses were selected. HI2 has opted to exclude gray Walers also, which is a bummer, but they have included some roans and tobianos! Yay!

Like those two sooties, roan Walers come in more and less extreme versions of roan. Here is honey roan as an example:

Tobiano Walers display one of the three cool spotting patterns. My personal favorite is the first, but they are all lovely. Here is what they look like on seal:

Two noteworthy days came and went last week: 7/11 and a Friday the 13th. We were hoping for some nice mare flutes to commemorate them.

Bethany and Promise's 7/11 flute by the mini playground on Dumbbell was, well, promising...

Wow, what a gorgeous gray! She would've made a stupendous 7-Eleven to go with our 7Up.

Why, conformation stat, why? *Sighs*

Friday's flute was not the tiny 0/6er that Lily and Vixen predicted, but instead a big blond Suffolk with fairly decent stats.

Aw! It's a shame for Quassia's sake those stats don't add up higher.

And now to explain the orange. You probably haven't noticed, but we only have one horse in our herd that wears exclusively orange tack: Solitaire. All the other horses who wear orange have at least one other color going on in their tack with the orange. 

We've steered clear from solid orange out of respect for Mom: she has disliked the color orange ever since she was little. So why the orange text?

Well, first off, Mom very recently changed the background on Milton, her laptop, to this:

Not orange. I know. Stay with me.

This rock was on the ground near one of the lighthouses Mom visited last summer. Mom probably figured, oh, why not use the photo as Milton's background for a while? I've been daydreaming up new stuff for my stories lately. It fits.

Little did she know that it would trigger a streak of her remembering her dreams... and set the stage for a doozy of a nightmare that would make her seriously reconsider her orange aversion. 

It all started as a fairly typical, boring dream for Mom. She was outdoors in a crowd of people donning either yellow or orange shirts, and she - shocker - chose to put on a yellow one. She soon realized that the people were gearing up to play team games of some sort, at which point she was like, nope, not happening, and started looking for escape routes. 

I'm going to let mom's journal take it from here. (You asked for it, Mom, leaving that Word document open.) Disclaimer: I've rated this dream retelling PG13 for scariness. Read at your own risk.

"The dream made one of those strange, nonsensical shifts, but as usual my dream self just went with it.

I was a princess. The details were hazy, but from what I’ve deduced from later events, I think I was the last living member of the royal family left. The kingdom was now being ruled by a non-royal middle-aged dude.

I was still trying to get away from crowds. My wanderings outdoors in the bright sunshine didn’t last long, however. A woman I overheard in passing told her companion (with a knowing glance at me) that royals tend to have quite short lifespans. She went on to say that one now-deceased young princess had even carved a bust of herself out of stone to adorn her grave before she died.

Right on cue, I came upon – what else? – a graveyard. Not just any graveyard, but the royal graveyard, which was inexplicably located inside a large, dimly-lit tunnel. Through the gloom, I made out the shapes of large headstones, and sure enough, one had a roughly-hewn stone bust perched on top.

My dream self was not about to enter or even linger near this tunnel of death, but as you’ve probably guessed by now, it was already too late. Just before I made it past the tunnel, a huge, dark-clothed, axe-wielding man appeared out of the shadows. We’re talking a medieval-looking jumbo axe here, and I knew I was the target, so I ran.

My surroundings became indoor ones then – probably a bustling castle or palace. I booked it down long hallways, wove my way through throngs of people, and went through random doors - anything I could think of to escape the axe man. I ended up in a bedroom with tons of stuffed animals jammed under the bed. I moved out a few larger ones and crawled under, pulling them back in front of me to hide myself. It was a really stupid hiding place. Even in the dream I knew that, but it was too late to come up with anything else. Two young women entered the room and knew I was there immediately. I started to crawl out, but they seemed to be on my side and told me I’d better stay hidden.

The dream skipped ahead then. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t have to experience being caught, but somehow I was. I was not swiftly axed upon capture, though, because in the next “scene” I was still very much alive. 

It was my execution day, and everybody present in the castle or palace or whatever it was seemed okay with it, or at least resigned to it. I was not tied up or in chains, nor did I seem to have been previously harmed in any way physically. I just started walking up a big stone spiral staircase towards my doom, a tall, stern woman following behind and watching my every move to make sure I didn't try to escape. I was utterly terrified but determined to keep my head high and carry myself like a princess all the way until the end. I understood like never before how Harry Potter felt as he walked to his presumed doom near the end of book 7.

Once I’d reached the top of the stairs, I surveyed with horror an assortment of large wood and metal contraptions that I assumed were instruments of torture. Past them was a platform displaying a deluxe white, satin-lined coffin surrounded by tons of pale flowers. Lots of people were also present in the expansive room, including the gleeful new ruler, who was eager to get on with the execution. My death sentence, I swiftly learned, was lethal injection. This was probably way quicker than many of the other possibilities, but I was still petrified.

Without preamble, men started closing in, one with a syringe. But then, just when it seemed like it was all over, two young women came on the scene, both of them dressed in all orange, including fancy floor-length orange skirts and large orange hats. I’m not sure if they were the same women from the stuffed animal scene or not, but I knew immediately from the looks they gave me that they were there to try to save me. I think they were posing as members of a kingdom-wide feminist movement that dresses in orange? At any rate, they claimed that they were the ones who should get to execute me. 

Their plan seemed obvious to me: they were going to inject me with something that wasn’t lethal and fake my death. My mind raced. How quickly did the real stuff work? Would the fake stuff do anything, or would I need to feign suffering and collapsing? Would I be able to make a believable show of it if I had to?

I didn’t have long to consider. I tried to resist, but someone held me still while one of the women injected me in the arm…

…and then I woke up to my alarm going off: exceedingly happy to be alive and safe, mildly disappointed that I didn’t get to find out what happened, and a quite a bit fonder of the color orange."

So there you have it! Maybe Mom will go out and buy an orange shirt now? Or at least a pair of orange socks?