Dipsy and MicroMini

Star and Gryff's slow but steady training continues, as have our many letter deliveries. We haven't had to cross any vast bodies of water to deliver any lately, which is fortunate. (Swimming is mind-numbingly slow and boring, and we have not invested in a kayak yet.)

We have stumbled upon quite a few more wild horses too, and two of them are definitely worth mentioning.

First, here is "Dipsy," a Grade Pleasure Horse stallion we found in the savanna:

Don't let the dorky name throw you. He is huge, and he easily surpasses Windfall and Mountain as the fastest horse we have ever caught.

His back legs may be set back a bit farther back than normal, but this guy sure can gallop! 

As much as we like him, the rest of his stats aren't so great (especially intelligence - yikes!), and his personality is just ok. So, we tried to resign ourselves to resisting his charms.

Horse #2 is "MicroMini," a Grade European Hotblood stallion from the rainforest:

Predictably, he is nowhere near as big and fast as a savanna horse. He's not exactly micro-mini, but he is mini in comparison: only 13.2 hands and less than half Dipsy's weight.

His genetic stats are 900 exactly, and he's a grulla (I'd call him grullo since he's a he, but whatever, HI3) with a two-tone mane and tail. Sound familiar?

Gabriella may have been bigger and fancier, but MicroMini has a more likable personality and is way smarter. XD

As you can see, he isn't so tiny compared to Pepsi that riding him is out of the question.

Whew, he doesn't have a weird head carriage like Gabriella. However, Pepsi is a bit big for him. If you view them from the front or back, there's an awkward space between his sides and Pepsi's legs too, which is disappointing.

So, now you see our dilemma. We all love duns, and this particular one is very cute with a solid personality. It would seem ungrateful not to keep him after HI3 gave us a second shot at a fairly high-statted grulla, one of the rarer types of dun, just because he's small. However, if you compare his metrics to Dipsy's, Dipsy is superior in most categories despite his lower genetic stats, plus Pepsi doesn't look awkward riding him. But then again, maybe MicroMini would be a great pony cart puller... if we ever get one. 

You know what Lily's saying already, right? That we shouldn't even be entertaining thoughts of keeping either one, since we already are keeping Talvi as our January horse and tentatively have Teatime on deck for February. She's all for only adding one horse a month unless we'd happen to find multiple amazing ones. I know that's smart, though I personally think lucky finds should be bonuses and not necessarily count as a horse of the month. It's just hard being patient, since it's becoming more and more clear that Talvi is going to be Lily's and Fireside is going to be Felicity's. I am fond of Teatime, but if we do keep her, she would probably go to Julie, since I already have an awesome brown buckskin. *Goes to pet Starfleet.*

I will leave you with a few fun screenshots from our travels over the last few weeks.

In honor of Valentine's Day coming up, here is Cloudburst chilling in a pink stream.

Very punny.

It's a long way down! We did manage to navigate our way both to the pony down below and the pot of gold in the upper right.

Whenever we come across ranches that have horses out on display, it's fun to go in for a closer look. So far no ranch owners have showed up while we're trespassing. XD This particular pony was quite cute... and made Fireside look like he's all legs.

Aw, a mountain lion cub! You can also see the unfortunate leg-side gap between Pepsi and MicroMini pretty well here.

We've finally seen a panda! They don't seem to be nearly as common as some of the other non-equine wildlife.

Cup of Tea, Anyone?

The fun continues on HI3!

We've encountered more non-equine wildlife, including:

bear cub

black panther

boar 

(these look a lot like the tiny decay biome ponies from a distance)

polar bear

wolf pup

The day after finding our chestnut Finnhorse mare, who was swiftly named Talvi (winter in Finnish),

we experienced another first on the game. 

Here is the special horse, "Teatime." We found her in a fairly small patch of taiga bog. Bog horses tend to be stout and short-legged, and this mare fits that mold well. This first view of her flatters her er... figure a little...

...but as you can see from a full-on side view, she's... ok, I'm just going to say it...

... a sausage with legs.

Understandably, her speed stat is by far her lowest, but her other stats rally to give her a respectable stat total in the 800's. 

Big deal, Felicity, you may be thinking. Sausage-like horses are nothing I haven't seen before. And there's nothing that spectacular about her metrics or personality either. True, true. We weren't impressed either until riding her.

Walk: normal. Trot: normal. Canter: wait, what is this? Why are we gliding?

Turns out that Teatime does not canter. A side view revealed that instead, she paces! 

For anybody who doesn't know, the pace is a two-beat gait where the legs on the same side of the horse move in tandem. (I think of it as the opposite of trot, where diagonal legs move in tandem.) On Teatime, the pacing action is so rapid and awkward that it amuses us to no end. I have no idea how smooth or bumpy it is to ride a real horse at the pace, but for Teatime, it is incredibly smooth. As in, you conceivably could enjoy a cup of tea while riding and not make a mess.

We know it's ridiculously soon to be considering another horse after just finding Talvi, especially one whose appearance, stats, and persona are not extraordinary. The pacing is pretty entertaining, though, so we're keeping her around for now and letting her use one of our precious infinitum amulets. 

Dangerous, we know.

While delivering a letter yesterday, she and Pepsi had to cross some salt flats, which is when I discovered something else interesting. We'd heard horses travel faster on this terrain but had never given much thought about what that would look like until Teatime started doing something that was definitely not a pace at her non-sprint max speed.

A side view revealed that she can gallop!

I figured out later that she can also gallop when you ask her to sprint (Perhaps all HI3 horses do this?), but she still won't ever canter. XD 

As we've been doing for weeks now, we're taking every rideable equine we catch for a short ride just to double check that it's not gaited before selling it. You'll be sure to hear about it if and when we find any more! 

If any of the too-small-to-ride ponies we catch happen to be gaited, we'll never know! Maybe someday we'll invest in one of these cool pony carts. 

Aw!

For now, our focus is on training Bethany's Starfleet and my Gryffindor, and it's turning out to be a huge, highly expensive undertaking. To fund it, we're delivering a lot of letters, and en route catching wilds, solving riddle posts, and picking up special findables (pots of gold, mother horse stones, etc.) I've noticed that Gryff is getting a bit faster already. It's going to be fun to see how much of a difference all the training has on him and Starfleet.

 

Ringing in 2020

Happy New Year! Welcome to the 2020's!

It was interesting to have Christmas and New Year's Day on Wednesdays this time around. Mom says it felt like several weeks condensed into two for her, since she would go to work a day or two, then be home for a few, then go back...

It was great. We're all bummed about everything going back to normal on Monday. It's hard not to feel let down this time of year, but we can only hope there will be lots of bright spots in the bleak winter months ahead.

As we enjoy one last holiday-ish weekend, we're also looking back fondly on the holiday season we had.

Here's what Mom's view was like on Christmas morning: warm (I think it hit 50 degrees!) and green.

As usual, presents galore were piled around the tree downstairs!

Mom deemed this her prettiest present. We have video evidence that this particular roll of rocking horse wrapping paper has been around since the 90's! The last remnant, which sat in the bottom of the bin for years, was finally used.

Here are Mom's gifts!

The gel pack looking things are reusable hand warmers. It hasn't been bitterly cold enough for Mom to try them out yet, fortunately. Most of the other items have been put to good use already, though.

And here are a few more gifts from another family Christmas gathering a few days later:

The "pasture bedtime" pj pants made their debut on New Year's Eve. =)

A new year means a new Girl of the Year doll from American Girl. 

Goodbye, Blaire Wilson, and hello Joss Kendrick.

I've never heard this name before in my life and at first thought I'd read it wrong. I wonder if it's short for Jocelyn or something?

After a doll that looked a lot like Felicity in 2019, 2020's looks a lot like me! However, she also seems to be about as different from me personality-wise as Blaire was from Felicity. Joss is a competitive, spunky surfer from Southern California who also decides to dabble in cheerleading. *Tries to imagine self succeeding at either activity...* Nope. Not in this lifetime, even with two fully functioning ears. (Joss does all this while rocking a hopefully waterproof hearing aid... unless she leaves it on the beach while she surfs?) I'll stick to horseback riding, thanks. 

Not the most attractive cheerleading outfit out there, but it does look realistic.

Joss's surfing bulldog, Murph, is a cutie. I love his? her? wrinkles, little tongue, and the brown and white diagonal socks.

Speaking of cute animals, on HI3, our silver bay Hotblood has lucked out! We did not lasso any superior equines by the end on 2019, so we have officially added him to the herd. We have named him "Fireside," since he is the color of a smoldering fire and was found near a volcano. 

That's not to say we have been suffering from any lack of cool horses. Felicity found an even taller horse than "Arabian Dancer" this morning: a 19.3 hand stallion appropriately named "Mountain."

Surprisingly, this behemoth is tied with Windfall as the fastest wild we've ever caught.

We found our shortest wild so far back on the 29th, a tiny 7.1 hand stallion named "Lincoln."

And finally, this afternoon, Windfall and I witnessed another exciting first for us on the game. We were doing some aimless wandering in a rainforest after delivering a letter when I spotted a chestnut wild horse up on a ridge. When I lassoed it, text appeared on screen about about it being a "lucky find." (This is a fairly new feature to the game: that occasionally one can catch a purebred horse in the wild, a "lucky find.")

Here she is!

Not that I'm an expert, but she does seem to have more ideal conformation than any of our Grades. XD She also has the highest stat total of any horse we've ever caught! 1016! 

She's also very brave (slightly braver than Gryff, even) and very playful! Aw!

Extremely curious to find out what breed she is, we teleported back to the nearest club and had it determined. She is *drumroll* a Riding Finnhorse! =^) I'm not sure what she was doing hanging out in the rainforest, but we sure are glad she was! <3

Whale on Land and Moose in Lake

It took some time, but I eventually convinced my sisters to part with Vice Versa, the oversized palomino pony, since his stat total didn't make 900 and his personality wasn't stellar. 900 seems to be a pretty good benchmark, since so far we don't find them very often.

I am pushing for this to become our unofficial policy: that unless a wild has an awesome personality and is exceptionally cute/good looking, we will not consider keeping it unless its stat total is over 900. So far, my sisters seem to be on board with me.

Not long after parting with Vice Versa, we found another interesting stallion, this time in the savanna at dusk. Check him out!

He's a huge 18-hander, his conformation seems pretty normal, he has a cool facial marking, and his stats are over 900! Nice!

However, he is skittish and ornery like Vice Versa, only his "ornery" is even more extreme. We found this out when Pepsi tacked him up and rode him. He bucked poor Pepsi off every few minutes. She is impervious to injury, thank goodness, but Julie and Bethany agreed with me that of all the negative personality traits a horse can have on this game, being ornery enough to buck Pepsi off is our least favorite. Felicity was unwilling to agree yet, since we haven't had much experience with extremely stubborn ones or extreme leader ones to know how annoying they are, but I don't really see how they can be worse. Getting thrown off is not only embarrassingly obvious to any nearby players but also quite inconvenient, as you are too far from the horse to do a 1-key remount and have to walk back over to it.

As you may have noticed from the above screenshots, White Walker is a tobiano. His spots are even more minimal than Cloud's, though, and are best viewed from above:

It sort of looks like a whale that's blown a little cloud of warm air from its blowhole.

Sadly, you wouldn't even know he's a tobiano when Pepsi rides him. Saddle pads and blankets almost totally cover the whale.

For being 18 hands, he doesn't actually seem that enormous when Pepsi rides him. It's nothing like when she rode our tallest wild to date, this 19.1 hand bog horse:

Pepsi looks tiny on this maneless giant, who was amusingly named "Arabian Dancer!" XD

This leads me to the second half of what I think our policy should be when deciding whether or not to keep a horse. Even if the horse's stats are over 900, personality and appearance should still be very important in our deliberations. We can be a little more forgiving with over 900's than with under 900's, but no extreme orneries unless everything else is amazing. Infinitum amulets are way too expensive to be used lightly! 

So, what about Heat Wave, the lazy silver bay Hotblood? We have kept him around and given him our last infinitum amulet to halt his aging, but we still aren't 100% sure about him. We're waiting to see if another wild that we like even more comes along before the end of the year before we totally commit. (If it was just up to me, we'd have sold him already so that we can keep our entire focus on our original four, but it's not just up to me.)

*Sighs* He is cute. I'll give him that. XD He seems small after White Walker, though.

It used to be that the only animals on HI3 were equines and rabbits, but that recently changed. HI3 is now home to a variety of other critters that are specific to the different biomes. The prey animals flee if you approach on horseback or on foot, but the large predators stand their ground and turn to face you. 

So far, we've encountered:

cheetah

deer

elk

fox (and yes, that's White Walker's head)

mountain lion

brown wolf

dark wolf

tiger

snow tiger

moose

We are happy to have them all on the game, even though so far they serve no purpose other than looking cool. The only downside is that from a distance, it's easy to confuse the larger ones for wild horses, leading to lots of unfruitful veering off from our intended course.