My SL Horses!



Dulcie with Star, a white female Palomino Amaretto

I don't ride horses in real life, but I thought it would be fun to buy some horses in Second Life.  I had no idea the marketplace for them is so big.  Not only can you buy a horses to ride, you can buy ones that breed, too!  It seems horses is a big SL business.  They are sold, auctioned, and housed.  The most popular are the Amarettos. 

I began to shop for just the right horse, but I didn't realize how much was involved.  These horses have stats, information about parentage, eye color, need to be fed, kept happy by riding, and age.  A horse has to be at least 7 days to breed but no older than 120 days.  Afater 120 days, the horse will no longer breed, but you can keep it as a pet. Along with a male and female horse, unless you buy a bundle which looks like a hay bale but turns into a horse in 3 days after it is "born," you also need to buy food and  a barn or stable to keep the horse. Optional purchases include snacks, a salt lick to make it happy, aphrodesiacs if your horses aren't mating as quickly as you'd like, saddles and bridles, etc.  It can be quite costly to keep them.  Male horses are a bit more expensive to buy because there are fewer of them born. 

Now if you really want to get into horsing, there are sims you can ride them, groups you can join, and lots of cowgirl outfits and other western clothing for you to wear.  I took a few shots of myself with one of my horses wearing some of my new cowgirl outfits.  Yeere Hah!

Reality Can be the Perfect Fantasy

My daughter just celebrated her fifth birthday at the end of October. Her party was at a farm because she loves horses. It wasn't the best day weather-wise, but she and her little friends all got to take pony rides, feed baby animals, and listen to animated chickens sing the birthday song (she even got up and did a chicken dance). Just a week earlier, she had been thrilled to lose her first baby tooth and receive a dollar bill from the tooth fairy (inflation has caused the TF to increase her allowances). She was also busy this week with a Halloween party in her Kindergarten class where she dressed up as, what else, a horse. She also went back one day to her pre-school for a Halloween parade and then ended the week with trick-or-treating in the horse costume for yet another time. It was fun seeing her get all excited, although I do have to admit it was a bit exhausting for me.

Besides her birthday party at the farm, my daughter also went on a field trip with her school the day before to another farm where she said the kids got to pick pumpkins and even milk cows. She told me her cow didn't give her any milk, but she still enjoyed trying to get some. My daughter has a way with words already, but I guess it's in the genes. I showed her my farm in Farmville on Facebook, and she was so excited when one of my friends gave us a horse. But then she wanted to ride it, and I had to explain that, while you could do that in Second Life and some other games you can't do that in all games.

Next year, my daughter informed me, after she'd asked if there were anymore new gifts that I hadn't shown her, that she wants her sixth birthday party in Disney World. Will it cost too much, she wants to know, to fly her whole class there? And can we just please look at their party room?

Well, I have to say, I am tempted by the idea. I've taken out some books from the library and even showed Holly around a replica of Disney World in Second Life. She wanted to go in Cinderella's castle but was disappointed when all that she saw there were shops. She got bored, so I told her to wait for the real thing. Sometimes reality is more interesting than fantasy, but often a mixture of both can be the best combination. I can't wait until next year.