Several days after we brought home Ladyluck, Mom won her family's NCAA men's basketball pool for the second year in a row! Coincidence? Maybe, but I like to think it was Lady. =)
Way to go, Gators! Florida was way behind Houston when we all went to bed. We figured it was a done deal that Mom would be mailing Hoops (the Beanie Baby trophy) to her cousin in Oregon. Imagine our surprise when we woke up the next day to victory!
As you can see, Mom somehow managed to come out on top of multiple other Florida brackets. Every family member could make up to 2 brackets, and there were 34 total this year. Mom knows next to nothing about basketball, but Google and lucky guesses have served her well, ha ha.
Now if only she could come up with more imaginative bracket names. Maybe next year.
Yay for another whole year to spend with Hoops. <3 He's currently hanging out in Mom's home office with Mukluk, Ramsey, and Juneau, the beanies she's collected to commemorate prior basketball pool wins. Time to add an alligator now! =)
Some other fun things have happened since Ladyluck's arrival on Star Stable too.
Tigertin managed to be the only competitor entered in the Silversong Pony Championship one evening.
This really had us scratching our heads, because previously in cases like this, the game has auto added at least one other invisible entrant with a really fast time so that we have no chance of winning. (This often seems to be "Daisy Coyoteclover" on our server...)
Not this time, though.
We'll take it!
The days of sparse competition groups are over for now, because the Equestrian Festival has returned to the game! There's extra incentive to participate in championships while it's going on: free travel to the championships, a new batch of championship participation ribbons to work towards, and bonus tokens and Jorvik shillings that can be earned once a day for each championship.
Appropriately, Clara started off the festival on our fancy new warmblood, Ladyluck. Some of these early-in-the-festival races get amusingly crowded, necessitating the game to split participants into multiple groups. I think the max is 20 per group?
Lady quickly raced her way to level 15! The last sparkle came while they were about to start the New Hillcrest Championship.
Clara herself finally progressed to level 21 thanks to the festival quests! She'd been stalled at 20 for quite some time.
The Dutch Warmbloods have been out in force since the bazaar! We're by far not the only ones who chose the chestnut, either. Little did we know, but it seems to be every bit as popular as the dapple gray on our server now. Oh well, it's popular for good reason!
Most of the others we've seen being ridden around have been male, which we find interesting.
This particular player rode her twinning stallion up close to Lady and stuck close to us for a while without saying a word. I wonder if she was taking screenshots as well?
The festival quests and races seem to be carbon copies of last year's so far. (Fine with us - they're fun.) There are some changes to keep things interesting, though. We have two new sets of clothing and tack to purchase via Spring Tokens: buttercup yellow and purple plaid this year, which we'll gladly work for.
Also, the Jorvik Stables Championship has gotten some updates that make it more challenging.
Competitors now have to navigate slippery black GED waste, chickens, rolling cheese, rolling barrels, and some additional jumps. We found it sufficiently interesting and difficult as it was (that paddock full of moving riders and horses - yikes!), but we can still make it through, so no major complaints.
Also new this year: hunting for "spring treasure." They remind me of the essence in HI3, or the floating gold nuggets from Camp Western, but they are less abundant and have to be clicked on to be claimed.
There doesn't seem to be much point to this, since you can't do much with them other than exchange them for spring tokens, which we are earning plenty of other ways. They are fun to find floating around anyway.
We're really glad we chose to buy a Dutchie at the bazaar rather than holding out for the special pinto festival-only ones. They're full price, 950 star coins, so we'd never have purchased one.
So handsome, but alas, so pricy
A blue horse named "Bluetooth." Love it!
We paused the "keep the box of fireworks away from Sabine" quest to participate in a Moorland championship. Hence, the clunky box came along for the whole ride.
Clara and Evie won!
Awkward post-champ screenshot, and another 5 star name:
"Zebracake" for the brindle pinto Selle. <3
This persistent bug cracks us up every time
a quartet cantering in place
Sadly, all future Star Stable screenshots will be coming from "The Big Mac," not Mom's faithful MacBook, Milton. SSO's support for Milton's pre-13 operating system ends with the update next Wednesday. What a bummer that a fully-functioning, 7-year old laptop is already so obsolete (in SSO's eyes, anyway), but I guess that's life. Thank goodness for The Big Mac!
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