A Mysterious Lucky Find

This Saturday, we're in a low spot on our roller coaster ride of the winter to spring transition: it's currently 18 degrees with a thin layer of snow on the ground. It also ranks super low on our scale of Saturday awesomeness because we lose an hour overnight. The transition from EST to daylight saving time sucks.

Last Saturday, March 5, was drastically different. It ranked way higher on the scale of Saturday awesomeness. Not only because it made it into the 60's here for the first time in months (kind of freaky, but we rolled with it), but also because we lassoed our first lucky find of 2022!

Can you guess which of these wild horses was the lucky find?

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

G.

H.

Have you made your guess?

Are you sure?

Alright!

The answer is G.! (All of the others were cool grades we caught in February and early March.)

Since we already have a Capricorn in the herd, we immediately changed his name to Pisces to minimize any confusion. ;^)

He has a rather low genetic stat total for a lucky find, and he's not an especially agile guy for a warmblood either.

He's also skittish, so despite his appearance, I don't think he will be bummed out that we rarely compete. We were so relieved that he isn't ornery enough to buck! 

Here is Pepsi riding him for the first time:

We really like the stage of grey he is in, with those faint dapples on his hind end, so he also received an infinitum amulet on his lasso date. We're guessing he has 2 copies of the grey gene, because he is only 6.6 years old and already very pale. 

Because it's super cute, here's what he looked like as a "sooty ebony black" newborn:

And here he is as a 4-year-old. (Not a particularly attractive stage in the greying process.)

The expert labeled him "Westphalian Horse," but he doesn't really look like one of those. 

We've seen other players talk about re-identifying horses that come up as "Westphalian" in the past, so we suspected this guy was actually something else. 

We looked through all the breeds mentioned in the "Allowed Purebreeding" list on the Westphalian Horse page next, but none of these were a great fit either.

Stumped, we re-identified him under "Best main breed match (Skip sub breeds)" and... *drumroll* Orlov Trotter came up. That's definitely not what we were expecting, but it explains why he is not a fantastic jumper...

Mystery solved, but I wish we had just left it alone. Talk about incredibly unfortunate timing... 

It is fun how much he looks like Tchaikovsky and Tesseract, our HI2 Orlovs, though:

This post has plenty of white, in honor of this being our last post of official winter. We're now going to add in some green and orange in honor of St. Patrick's Day coming up next week. Enjoy these fun shots of Mom's chia pet's progress. 

Here's the photo on the box:

And here's what we actually got:

You're only supposed to spread seeds on the inside of the pod, but the recommended quantity on the instructions ended up being way more than would fit, so Mom ended up covering the whole pod... and still had too many.

Sadly, the seeds she put on Grogu's head did not sprout. (Too dry up there, apparently, despite twice daily misting.) Not that you could really tell after awhile, as he ended up totally hidden by the foliage anyway. It's not looking so great now - starting to grow some mold - so guess it's time to start over and try just seeding the proper areas. XD)