Speedy September Steeds

We're soaking in some late summer weather while we can. I feel like September is sort of the fall equivalent of May, at least living in the Midwest. If you don't think too much about what's coming after it, it's generally a pretty nice month. 

Art Prize is back in downtown Grand Rapids for the next few weeks, and so far the weather has been fantastic. You'll probably be seeing some photos of our favorite entries in a coming post, after Mom's had a chance to appreciate more of it in person and we've gone through her photos. =) 

We've been having lots of fun on HI3 lately as well. 

Yay, 3 years and still going strong!

As usual, we've spent lots of our HI3 time wandering around in a variety of biomes, delivering mail and making frequent detours to follow horsey sense. 

Maral on a mission

Taffeta happily pacing away

Mango observing an alpine pony awkwardly backed into a pine. 

Itchy rear, perhaps? XD

Here are some close-ups of our first year 3 noteworthy wilds!

And now for this post's stars, the speedy steeds that have given Mango some serious competition. Neither comes from a biome we expected.

The first: a tall, dark fjord highlands mare.

The title of the random song that came on... XD 

I think she wants us to keep her.

Wow: gorgeous, impressive speed, and a great personality to boot! <3 Yes, you definitely belong to us!

Speedy steed #2 was hanging out on a rainforest jumping course. We found him mere minutes after the slate grulla and could hardly believe our good fortune!

He's also very tall, and even slightly faster than the grulla!

He's skittish and doesn't turn as well as the grulla, but he's soo handsome! I dare say he is destined to become part of the herd as well.

Wouldn't you know, this all happened right after Bethany had decided to give Mango a preventative checkup and was riding him around. 

Mango's speedy, but not as speedy as either of these two. He's so brave, though, and Bethany noticed today how cute he looks from the back (lanky, tall white stockings, distinct dapples and eel stripe), and that he has eyes of different colors... 

*Sighs* Sorry, Lily. This may be a killer month for our mobia and horse slot situations.

Mango

Happy Labor Day!

We've been enjoying the long weekend, even if it has been cool and cloudy. We couldn't quite bring ourselves to put on long pants yet, but we should have!

We're re-listening to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on audiobook, sometimes while playing HI3. Great times. Coincidentally, American Girl is now selling Hogwarts-themed merch. Cring-worthy expensive, naturally, but so, so cool! Sure would be fun for acting out all our Harry Potter-themed fantasies. And for Halloween, of course, when we're not impersonating various Disney princesses.

In said fantasies with our cousins (Haylee, Zoe, Amber, and Autumn), we have all Hogwarts houses represented. Sometimes my sisters and I imagine we are all Hufflepuffs, because it's Mom's favorite and we all live together. Most of the time, though, we split up into the houses we share the strongest affinity towards. That puts fearless Felicity in Gryffindor, bookworms Bethany and Julie in Ravenclaw, and me in Hufflepuff. (You'd assume I'd be in Ravenclaw like Bethany and Julie, right? Since I'm probably the best student of us all, just saying, but I feel like it's more because I work so hard than that I'm particularly bright or interested in the subject matter... unless it's music or art. Hence the Hufflepuff.)

Anyway, back to the HI3 happenings. We searched out more wonderland wilds, and again we struck out with finding any clear-cut keepers. A few were quite interesting in appearance, though:

Flashdance was the most tempting of the lot, since he was tall and had a high turning speed of 71.98 deg/second, but he was also very skittish, so we passed.

While out on a savanna mail run, we found our second ever pale zebra!

She is larger and darker than our first pale zebra mare, 13.1-hand blonde striped Peppermint:

Unlike Peppermint, she was extremely ornery, so we decided she could move on. My sisters considered keeping her to breed with a dilute, non-ornery stallion in hopes of getting some cool, non-brown, non-ornery hebra foals, but I talked them out of it, thankfully. The last thing we should be doing is adding more challenging-to-ride zebra-horse hybrids to the herd, when we haven't even trained our current ones yet!

We did try her out. And got bucked off. Since we didn't want to just trader her, we instead listed her briefly in the auctions, and she sold for our minimum bid, the cost of the auction. No money made, but at least she has a chance at staying in the game with someone who will appreciate her.

A couple of other nice-looking wilds graced us with their presence, but none of them had personalities to match:

The most tempting wild to keep from the weekend was instead this fairly unattractive bald guy from the gravel desert:

Brave, speedy, and a decent turner. Unfortunately, as we were taking Mango for a test ride, he managed to give himself a black eye out of the blue. This made us less keen on keeping him.

He does definitely look better with hair.

Not this one, though. It accentuates his awkward neck.

I think this is overdoing it a bit, ha ha.

Hmm, we'll see. He may get lucky depending on how the rest of this month goes.