4 Cheers for the First 30

Thanks to Lily and Nebula, PepsiSummer has now captured a total of 40 +6/6 wild equines on HI2! I don't think any of us thought it would take this long to get there, but that's okay. We've found many other wonderful horses along the way, that's for sure!

Way back in December 2015, I wrote a post about our first 30 +6/6 wilds: 4 Cheers for the First 30! I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast to that post here, so here it goes. 

First, here is the updated spreadsheet of them all:

Now for the compare and contrast part. The text gray italics is from the original 2015 post. My normal teal is for my new comments.

And here are some things we noticed that we found interesting:

• White gray has shown up more times than any other color so far, on 3 equines.
• Mahogany bay is now tied with white gray for our most common +6/6er color. We've caught 4 of each!

• Even after that long streak of 6 mares in a row, the tally of mares and stallions is still nearly even: 14 stallions and 16 mares.
• Thanks to a streak of 5 stallions in a row, the stallions have now overtaken the mares: 21 stallions and 19 mares! 7 of the last 10 +6/6ers we've caught have been stallions.

• The equine with the highest stat total is still Balderdash the New Forest Pony. 2nd place goes to her look-alike, Jessamine the NFP. 3rd goes to Vega the Furioso. Mare power!
• Still unchanged! Go mares!

• The equine with the highest stat total for its breed is also Balderdash with +110. 2nd goes to Vinca the Newfie with +104. 3rd goes to Della the Spotted Draft Horse with +98. The mares trump the stallions again!
• Balderdash and Vinca still reign supreme. A stallion is now tied with Della for third place, though: 20-Karat the French Trotter is also +98.

• Harbor Isle is still the 6/6 wild hotspot for us. We've captured 6 there!
• Make that 7 thanks to #40, our Percheron!

• We've captured at least one 6/6 wild on all of the terrain types except for snowy. Hmm, I guess it's time to visit those more often!
• We have since captured both Vita the Exmoor (Dasani's twin who now lives with Gem) and Tesseract the Orlov Trotter on snowy terrain!

• We captured...
• 9 6/6 horses in 2013,
• 12 6/6 horses in 2014, and
• 9 6/6 horses so far in 2015  10 6/6 horses in 2015
• 4 6/6 horses in 2016
• 4 6/6 horses in 2017
• only 1 6/6 horse so far in 2018... and it's already well into August. *sighs*

• We've still never captured a 6/6 horse in the month of December. Maybe this will be the year?
• Yep, 2015 was the year. We also found one in December of 2017.

• There's no clear leader in the 6/6 wild capture count. 
• Bethany: 7
• Felicity: 7
• Julie: 8
• Lily: 8
• I am the clear leader now! =^D
• Bethany: 8
• Felicity: 10
• Me (Julie): 12
• Lily: 10

• Flora is one lucky mount for Lily. Lily's found 5 of her 8 6/6 wilds while riding her.
• No more for Flora since, but then she does get ridden less and less as the herd expands...

• Bethany has never caught a 6/6 wild while riding the same horse. 
• No longer true! Bethany caught a second 6/6er (Tess) while riding Esker in December 2017.

• We've found 14 pony-height 6/6 wilds (less than 14.3 hands) and 16 horse-height 6/6 wilds (14.3 hands or greater). Wow, who'd have guessed it would turn out so close to even?
• It's still fairly close, but the horses are winning by more now: we've found 17 of pony height and 23 of horse height.

• The most common height for our 6/6 wilds has been 15.3 hands. We've found 5 of them with that height!
• No more 15.3-handers since. Thanks to our last 3 wilds, who are all 15 hands tall, we've now found 5 15-hand horses too!

• The average height of our 6/6 wilds is 14.1 hands. (Ha ha, Pepsi the Shetland drags it down with his 8.3 hand height.)
• The average height has only risen by one inch to 14.2 hands.

And now for your viewing pleasure, here are head shots of the 40 wonderful equines!

#1: Pepsi (retired to CandyNutmeg's ranch)

#2: Kestrel

#3: Grade Draft Horse (sold)

#4: Zephyr

#5: Mistral

#6: Vinca

#7: Palladium

#8: Myrrh (sold)

#9: Brio

#10: Jessamine

#11: Xenon

#12: Umber

#13: Napoleon

#14: Balderdash

#15: Zesty

#16: Dasani

#17: Vaquero

#18: Xanadu

#19: Della

#20: Windy

#21: Anya

#22: Tang

#23: Vega

#24: Murphy

#25: POA (sold)

#26: Brushfire

#27: Galena

#28: Edoras

#29: Xia

#30: Odette

#31: Vita (lives with GemStoneSilence)

#32: Donatello

#33: 20-Karat

#34: Iolite

#35: Doppler

#36: Xyris

#37: Araceli

#38: Lucchese

#39: Tesseract

#40: Percheron (name pending)

Bethany's (Pre-)Birthday Brownie

It's happened! It's finally happened!!!

Lily and Nebula headed out to Harbor Isle on my birthday eve and found him waiting there! Our long-awaited first +6/6 wild horse of 2018 is a big, dark brown...

 ...Percheron!

Awesome, our herd's first Percheron is a big teddy bear of a stallion with handsome markings! He was well worth the wait! <3 As you can probably guess, we are all really happy about this even though it doesn't help with our current not-enough-mares situation. I am so used to seeing livery Percherons in various shades of gray - especially porcelain gray - in the livery that his brownness seems extra special. 

That wasn't the end of the story on Harbor Isle, though. Lily found a second wild horse with a gorgeous avatar:

Too bad her stats weren't as nice as our Percheron's, but back-to-back +6/6ers? Yeah right, like that would ever happen to us. 

PepsiSummer was still on Harbor Isle when I logged in on Wednesday, my first triple-eight birthday (8/8/18). It was really early: 5:20 in the morning our time. Why was I up that early? Well, Mom may be slightly insane - she gets up that early every weekday morning, and I figured why not spend some one-on-one time with her on my birthday morning?

Okay, so it wasn't just about keeping Mom company. Sadly, our HI2 subscription was expiring in a few short hours, (On my birthday! Ugh, what horrible timing!) and I didn't want to risk getting caught up in other things and forgetting to flute my birthday wild horse!

Here she is in all her red and black glory:

A starless Furioso mare!

I think I have a good shot at winning the prettiest profile artwork, best personality, and highest stat prizes this year. Yes!

She's not a very good match at all to my birthday calendar horse, though. Oh well!

Some of the quotes on this calendar sure are clunkers. XD

Ophelia and I found two more wild horses on Harbor Isle. Maybe we should visit HI2 at 5:20 more often! The first one was yet another non-gray Percheron stallion.

He may be bigger than our Brownie, but his markings and stats aren't as nice. 

Oh, and in case, like me, you are wondering what the world "insouciant" means, the dictionary says it's an adjective that means "showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent." Now we know!

The second wild we found was this lovely dapple gray Danish Warmblood.

Aw, why strength stat, why? She's so pretty - one of the last horses you'd expect to be a class clown. =D

For anyone wondering, Mom does plan to treat us to a new yearly sub. Probably by our next post, PepsiSummer's name will be blue and she'll be aboard a horse once more. Until then, she's stuck on foot.

Despite the let down of our sub expiring, and despite that it wasn't on a weekend like Felicity's, Mom's, and Julie's, I still had a really good birthday. The weather was gorgeous, I had an awesome ride on Dune in the shady backyard with my sisters and their horses, and everybody was extra nice to me. I finished off the day up in Mom's room. We watched some equestrian YouTube videos on Milton, and then I fell asleep cuddled up with Wendy and Tripod. It doesn't get much better. <3