Cup of Tea, Anyone?

The fun continues on HI3!

We've encountered more non-equine wildlife, including:

bear cub

black panther

boar 

(these look a lot like the tiny decay biome ponies from a distance)

polar bear

wolf pup

The day after finding our chestnut Finnhorse mare, who was swiftly named Talvi (winter in Finnish),

we experienced another first on the game. 

Here is the special horse, "Teatime." We found her in a fairly small patch of taiga bog. Bog horses tend to be stout and short-legged, and this mare fits that mold well. This first view of her flatters her er... figure a little...

...but as you can see from a full-on side view, she's... ok, I'm just going to say it...

... a sausage with legs.

Understandably, her speed stat is by far her lowest, but her other stats rally to give her a respectable stat total in the 800's. 

Big deal, Felicity, you may be thinking. Sausage-like horses are nothing I haven't seen before. And there's nothing that spectacular about her metrics or personality either. True, true. We weren't impressed either until riding her.

Walk: normal. Trot: normal. Canter: wait, what is this? Why are we gliding?

Turns out that Teatime does not canter. A side view revealed that instead, she paces! 

For anybody who doesn't know, the pace is a two-beat gait where the legs on the same side of the horse move in tandem. (I think of it as the opposite of trot, where diagonal legs move in tandem.) On Teatime, the pacing action is so rapid and awkward that it amuses us to no end. I have no idea how smooth or bumpy it is to ride a real horse at the pace, but for Teatime, it is incredibly smooth. As in, you conceivably could enjoy a cup of tea while riding and not make a mess.

We know it's ridiculously soon to be considering another horse after just finding Talvi, especially one whose appearance, stats, and persona are not extraordinary. The pacing is pretty entertaining, though, so we're keeping her around for now and letting her use one of our precious infinitum amulets. 

Dangerous, we know.

While delivering a letter yesterday, she and Pepsi had to cross some salt flats, which is when I discovered something else interesting. We'd heard horses travel faster on this terrain but had never given much thought about what that would look like until Teatime started doing something that was definitely not a pace at her non-sprint max speed.

A side view revealed that she can gallop!

I figured out later that she can also gallop when you ask her to sprint (Perhaps all HI3 horses do this?), but she still won't ever canter. XD 

As we've been doing for weeks now, we're taking every rideable equine we catch for a short ride just to double check that it's not gaited before selling it. You'll be sure to hear about it if and when we find any more! 

If any of the too-small-to-ride ponies we catch happen to be gaited, we'll never know! Maybe someday we'll invest in one of these cool pony carts. 

Aw!

For now, our focus is on training Bethany's Starfleet and my Gryffindor, and it's turning out to be a huge, highly expensive undertaking. To fund it, we're delivering a lot of letters, and en route catching wilds, solving riddle posts, and picking up special findables (pots of gold, mother horse stones, etc.) I've noticed that Gryff is getting a bit faster already. It's going to be fun to see how much of a difference all the training has on him and Starfleet.

 

Ringing in 2020

Happy New Year! Welcome to the 2020's!

It was interesting to have Christmas and New Year's Day on Wednesdays this time around. Mom says it felt like several weeks condensed into two for her, since she would go to work a day or two, then be home for a few, then go back...

It was great. We're all bummed about everything going back to normal on Monday. It's hard not to feel let down this time of year, but we can only hope there will be lots of bright spots in the bleak winter months ahead.

As we enjoy one last holiday-ish weekend, we're also looking back fondly on the holiday season we had.

Here's what Mom's view was like on Christmas morning: warm (I think it hit 50 degrees!) and green.

As usual, presents galore were piled around the tree downstairs!

Mom deemed this her prettiest present. We have video evidence that this particular roll of rocking horse wrapping paper has been around since the 90's! The last remnant, which sat in the bottom of the bin for years, was finally used.

Here are Mom's gifts!

The gel pack looking things are reusable hand warmers. It hasn't been bitterly cold enough for Mom to try them out yet, fortunately. Most of the other items have been put to good use already, though.

And here are a few more gifts from another family Christmas gathering a few days later:

The "pasture bedtime" pj pants made their debut on New Year's Eve. =)

A new year means a new Girl of the Year doll from American Girl. 

Goodbye, Blaire Wilson, and hello Joss Kendrick.

I've never heard this name before in my life and at first thought I'd read it wrong. I wonder if it's short for Jocelyn or something?

After a doll that looked a lot like Felicity in 2019, 2020's looks a lot like me! However, she also seems to be about as different from me personality-wise as Blaire was from Felicity. Joss is a competitive, spunky surfer from Southern California who also decides to dabble in cheerleading. *Tries to imagine self succeeding at either activity...* Nope. Not in this lifetime, even with two fully functioning ears. (Joss does all this while rocking a hopefully waterproof hearing aid... unless she leaves it on the beach while she surfs?) I'll stick to horseback riding, thanks. 

Not the most attractive cheerleading outfit out there, but it does look realistic.

Joss's surfing bulldog, Murph, is a cutie. I love his? her? wrinkles, little tongue, and the brown and white diagonal socks.

Speaking of cute animals, on HI3, our silver bay Hotblood has lucked out! We did not lasso any superior equines by the end on 2019, so we have officially added him to the herd. We have named him "Fireside," since he is the color of a smoldering fire and was found near a volcano. 

That's not to say we have been suffering from any lack of cool horses. Felicity found an even taller horse than "Arabian Dancer" this morning: a 19.3 hand stallion appropriately named "Mountain."

Surprisingly, this behemoth is tied with Windfall as the fastest wild we've ever caught.

We found our shortest wild so far back on the 29th, a tiny 7.1 hand stallion named "Lincoln."

And finally, this afternoon, Windfall and I witnessed another exciting first for us on the game. We were doing some aimless wandering in a rainforest after delivering a letter when I spotted a chestnut wild horse up on a ridge. When I lassoed it, text appeared on screen about about it being a "lucky find." (This is a fairly new feature to the game: that occasionally one can catch a purebred horse in the wild, a "lucky find.")

Here she is!

Not that I'm an expert, but she does seem to have more ideal conformation than any of our Grades. XD She also has the highest stat total of any horse we've ever caught! 1016! 

She's also very brave (slightly braver than Gryff, even) and very playful! Aw!

Extremely curious to find out what breed she is, we teleported back to the nearest club and had it determined. She is *drumroll* a Riding Finnhorse! =^) I'm not sure what she was doing hanging out in the rainforest, but we sure are glad she was! <3