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.