Way Out in Timbuktoo

Murphy and I got lucky this week. (I sure didn't see that coming with Murphy, of all horses!) First, we fluted this Mangalarga Marchador mare:

We weren't so lucky as for her to have stellar stats to go with her stellar personality, but she was definitely special enough to retire to our ranch. Of the available rump art, I thought this leaf of Lorien (Lord of the Rings reference) looked best on her. In keeping with the leaf theme, I named her Liana after a kind of woody vine. I think Samoa, our Manga stallion retiree, is very pleased at this turn of events.

And now to the title event, our first visit to Timbuktoo Isle! Murphy and I were headed to Savanna Isle from the Plains Isle dock house, when out of the blue we found ourselves out in Timbuktoo instead. I knew little about the island, just that you can randomly end up there when you travel between islands, and that it is similar to Narner Isle in that it isn't on the map. 

As you can see, the island is shaped roughly like an X. It reminds me of an X chromosome. ;^)

The lone inhabitant of the island is the rowboat dude, MrWayfarer. I can't think about his name without that stupid Wayfair.com jingle playing in my head. 

As it turns out, you can only spend 15 minutes maximum on Timbuktoo before you are forcibly dragged back where you came from... I mean rescued. And if you want to go back early, MrWayfarer is game to row you there himself.

The island's sights didn't seem very unique to me. The marshy areas on the right arms of the X's were your typical marshy areas.

And the sandy left arms of the X are home to clusters of various rocks, which were sparkling with harvestable ore. Nothing I hadn't seen before, but we got to work and happily harvested it all.

We did see two unique things, though. The first was a meteorite, which as far as I know are usually limited only to the glacier isles. 

Our second unique find was this almost-hidden buried pirate treasure. I'm thinking it was just coincidence that it was so well-concealed, because the one other pirate treasure we found on the isle was out in plain sight. 

Once our 15 minutes were up, rescuers whisked Pepsi back to the Plains Isle dock house. I wonder if multiple players are ever stranded out in Timbuktoo at once, or if only one player can be there at a time? It didn't look like anybody had been there recently when we arrived.

My final piece of news is that the new APH stallion is named and tacked already! Meet Zenith in all his black, white, and blue glory. We tried various colors on him, but nothing looked as good as blue - I think we're all partial to blue on blue-eyed horses. So blue it was. We tried to jazz it up by going with blue and white rather than solid blue this time, at least.

Welcome to the herd, Zenith! <3

Girl of the Year 2017

The year of Lea Clark, her is-it-blond or is-it-brown? hair, and her rainforest-themed accessories have come and gone. But for us, the real question we wish we knew the answer to was how many sea turtles got sold in comparison to the $2-more-expensive margay cats and sloths?

                                    

I fear we will never know.

AG has introduced Gabriela McBride, dancer and poetry enthusiast, as their Girl of the Year for 2017. Finally! An African American! Felicity is quite pleased.

From her accessories, it looks like she's into multiple styles of dance rather than just ballet, which is a change of pace for AG too.

Her hair is really cool! Here's what it looks like down. It's probably a good thing it's dark brown and not black, though - we don't want Mom to go getting any ideas.

Coincidentally, Mom and her sisters have a Kelly doll with the same first name (spelled with two L's) who is similar in appearance to the AG Gabriela. This doll ended up causing a bunch of drama and pulled apart the original friend group at CMS Ranch, the Grand Champions-sized horse stable in the basement. I imagine this Gabriela has a much less divisive personality!

What the Kelly doll looked like new in package. We're too lazy to go take a photo of the actual Gabriella right now. ;^)

Gabriela has a cat named Maya. She's a cutie! I wonder if she's part Siamese or something to have those blue eyes?

Bethany is writing a post about our latest HI2 adventures that should be coming later on this weekend too, so make sure to stop back for that!

A Trio of +5/6 Wilds

PepsiSummer went on her first wild hunt of the new year this morning. She found three +5/6 horses in a row! That's definitely a first! Brushfire and I fluted the first one on Prairie, and then Felicity and Burgundy took over to check out the wild hotspots on Twin Rivers and found two more. Can you guess which of the three had +80 stats?

Was it...

A. This bay Sicilian mare

B. This piebald splashed white American Paint Horse stallion

C. This dark bay Dole mare 

Are you ready?

Oh, the suspense!

It wasn't A.

She's yet another +56 5/6er. Who'd ever have thought we'd find so many of these?  I love her markings, especially her birdcatcher spots. But she is a hermit, so I don't really think she'll be devastated to move on to another owner.

It wasn't C either.

Her stats only add up to +54. As pretty as she is, it's a relief. ;^) I doubt she'll mind moving on either, as skittish and antisocial as she is. And let's not forget we do already have a set of awesome Doles, Tang and Cloudberry.

It was B, the stallion! Of course!

His stats add up exactly to +80, and he's only 2 stat points shy of being +6/6. Since he's a Paint, one of our favorite breeds, and a very handsome one at that, I'm guessing he'll be staying as our Mr. January. (Unless, of course, some awesome 6/6er comes along in the next two weeks.) He has the same spotting pattern as our first Paint, Lysithea. Too bad he's not frame overo, the one Paint pinto pattern we are missing.

Lysithea <3

His avatar is rather familiar as well. 

The stallion

Quickstep, Felicity's black minimal tobiano Paso Fino

At least you can distinguish them by the hooves.

In case you were wondering, Felicity did keep wild hunting after catching +5/6 wild #3 to see if she could make it 4 in a row. No such luck. The 4th and final wild horse of the morning was a +2/6 black Danish Warmblood. XD

2016's Fantastic Four

Welcome to the first post of 2017! But before we look ahead, let's look back a little on 2016, shall we?

We added a whopping total of 22 equines (this could still climb to 23, if we keep Tchaikovsky) to our herd in 2016, believe it or not! This is pretty similar to the number we added in 2015, only in 2016, far fewer were wild equines that we caught ourselves. We had the lowest number of 6/6 wild captures of any year yet: only 4 (in comparison to 9 in 2013, 12 in 2014, and 10 in 2015). Clearly, we haven't been wild hunting nearly as often as we used to. *Sighs.* 

Here are the fantastic four:

Donatello: caught 1/26/16
+75
(Julie's)

Iolite: caught 5/20/16
+76
(Julie's)

20-Karat: caught 8/9/16
+98
(mine!)

Doppler: caught 11/10/16
+76
(? Probably will be Lily's or Bethany's even though I caught him...)

All stallions! We never would have predicted this back during that 6/6 stallion drought that spanned over a year. Wouldn't it be amusing if we had a year+ drought of 6/6 mares now? Anybody want to start making bets?

Anyway, to Lily's dismay, the livery, auction house, generous buddies, and ranch stores more than made up for our relative shortage of impressive wilds in 2016. XD I'm certainly not complaining. *Pats Wonderland, Lumos, and Quassia.*

Our Christmas present to ourselves on HI2 was to build another barn in place of our last windmill. Lily firmly insists that these 13-14 slots must last us until next Christmas. We're going to try hard - really hard - to only add 1 horse or pony per month at most. (Exceptions will only be made if multiple 6/6ers and/or high-stat 5/6ers are captured in the same month, which isn't likely if 2016 is any indication.) It will be our New Year's resolution. Here's hoping we'll have the willpower to keep it!

So far, HI2 has not tried to tempt us. The few wild horses we've caught have all had underwhelming stats. For the record, Gromit and I caught our first wild horse - or rather, pony - of 2017. Here she is!

She may have thought quite highly of herself, but we were not impressed.

On New Year's Day, Mom also opened her last round of Christmas gifts: this time from her Mom's side of the family.

Alas, still no doll stuff. I'm excited to see Wreck-It Ralph, though. And to see what Mom colors with the gray and brown colored pencils.

Christmas Recap

Hi again! Since we had extra time on this day-after-Christmas, I decided to post some real-life pics from Christmas at our house. It was a white one, for the record, even though it was well above freezing and rained in the evening. The snowpack we had from the big dumps of snow earlier in December hung on. And it's still making a valiant effort to hang on, even after temps in the 50's today!

The view of the slush from Mom's bedroom window this morning

Here is our tree on Christmas morning. It had to be in the basement this year to spare it from the whirlwind of destruction that is Nala.

The ones wrapped in brown paper on the right were from Santa

Mom's cutest present

Here are presents Mom got from her mom and sisters. Nothing specifically for us this year, but I dare say we'll have some fun with those plastic horses when Mom's not around. XD 

Worth noting: the fuzzy thing with penguins on it is a pair of pajama pants.
Also, the fox can be microwaved, so he's a heating pad and cuddly stuffed animal all in one!

And here's the haul from Mom's aunt, uncle, and cousin:

Notes:
- That gift card came in the snowman, which has a ribbon loop on it so it can be an ornament. =)
- The caramel corn is drizzled with a little chocolate. Such a good idea!
- The glass zebra belonged to Mom's grandma - she had it in her room when she was a girl and kept it the rest of her life. Mom's aunt spray painted the base sky blue, got it re-corded so that the light works again, and surprised Mom with it for Christmas. <3

Pretty cool, right?

Mom's going to try a longer light bulb so that the zebra lights more evenly, but for now there's a nice Christmas-y red one in the base. 

To conclude, here are two shots of the four of us and our cousins by the tree in our holiday best. 

Getting the top two rows of us to stand nicely was not easy.
Lots of falls into the tree and attempted face plants later, Mom managed to snap this.

Top row: Amber, me (Bethany), Hailey
Middle row: Autumn, Lily, and Felicity
Bottom row: Julie, Rosa, and Zoe

And one more, this time with the canines:

Christmas on HI2

The day is still young, but now may be the only time we have time to post, so here it goes.

First, we will share with you the screenshots of our Christmas morning flute on Snowflake Isle. Tinsel and I had the honors. It looks like the wild wanted to hide her dappled rump from the camera. XD

A lovely mare! Stats weren't great, though. *sighs* Oh well, maybe next year...

After catching the pretty Budyonny, we returned to Glacier Isle to auction her off. I noticed lots of trash around, a decent indicator that nobody's done much on the isle recently. So, I took Tinsel for a spin around Glacier Isle in search of buried pirate treasures. We found 3 of those and also 3 steaming meteorites! Two of the meteorites landed quite near each other, as you can see:

That's the extent of our HI2 Christmas so far. Only one of our buddies was online (it was 8:30 in the morning our time), and she didn't even respond to our "merry Christmas." I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she never saw it. XD

Christmas Eve was definitely more exciting. Late in the day, one of our buddies spotted a red chestnut sabino wild horse on Harbor Isle. Every time she tried to click on it to capture it, however, the game told her the horse was a figment of her imagination. Lily and Stromboli headed out to investigate, and they couldn't see any wild horse. When our buddy logged out and then back in, the horse had vanished for her too. Bizarre, right? My sisters and I are now referring to it as the phantom horse of Christmas Eve!

Our buddy was standing right by the horse, but it was obviously not there for us!

Most exciting of all was Gem's (totally unprompted, I promise, Lily!) Christmas gift to us! Gem dragged herself out of bed earlier than usual on a non-school day to get the gift to us on Christmas Eve morning! Not only that, but she then rode all the way out to the eastern mountains to get our gift to us! I think that deserves a round of applause!

And here is the gift! Or, rather, gifts!

A +5/6 Mulassier mare! =D She came to us just like this, already decked out in coordinating Christmas-y tack, rump art, and snowy white background. And then there's her adorable reindeer calf companion, Clarice. Going with the Christmas reindeer theme and her golden-orange and white coloring, Gem suggested we name her Vixen. We think it suits her perfectly!

I would rank Mulassiers right up there with Spotted Drafts in terms of most elegant Draft breed. It's about time we added one to the herd, and I'm so glad it's a mare - just look at that beautiful long mane! The white stocking on her cocked hind leg and the little ring of white on the diagonal coronet make us smile too. So cute! Thanks so much for thinking of us, Gem!

Here is Pepsi riding Vixen for the first time. In the tunnels, of all places, but Vixen was cool with it.

That's it for now! Merry Christmas from all of us!