Epplejeck broke my heart in December. When I ordered my fleecey neck rugs from them I also tried to order a set of these absofreakinglutely gorgeous navy sparkle boots

but after I placed my order they emailed me and said they were out of stock and weren’t sure when they’d be getting more.

I’m not a quitter though, so I’ve gone back to their website at least twice a week to check stock. Since one does not just casually pop onto a website, check a single item, and then pop back out (at least I don’t), naturally this has also meant that I’ve spent a lot of time perusing the rest of their site, which… is always dangerous. Once you start wandering into danger zone categories like breeches and gloves (for some people that might be saddle pads), you know trouble is looming on the horizon.

And the thing about Epplejeck in particular, being a lower to mid-budget European shop, is that they have A LOT OF FUN STUFF. Not just brands we can’t get here, but things that are maybe a bit more out there or less conventional than most of what you see here. For instance, Epplejeck even has “Theme shops” – there’s a unicorn shop, a leopard shop, an orange shop (they’re Dutch, after all), etc. Shops by discipline (a cross country shop, you say?), shops by horse type (got a foal or a Friesian?)… it’s pretty darn thorough.

There’s also (are you ready for this?) a glitter shop. I feel attacked.

It took me many visits to the site, stalking those boots, to actually fall that deep into it where I discovered any of this. But once I did, well… it spiraled. There isn’t a ton of stuff in the glitter shop, but if you search the site for “glitter” you get over a thousand results. I also discovered that they like the word “glitz” and “shine” to describe glitter. Yeah, I fell deep into the rabbit hole. In my defense, they also make just about everydamnthing with glitter. Like literally all of it. In any color you want. Also, things you put in your cart on that site stay there for a long dang time, so what started with just tossing these sparkle tights in the cart to sit there and wait until the boots came into stock

seemed to spiral a bit more with every visit. Especially when things were 20% off. They love a good sale, something we have in common.

The tights soon found themselves joined by navy glitter gloves

And then I reasoned my way into a glittery navy helmet for dressage. (ride along with me on my reasoning: I always do dressage in navy and white, but the only navy helmet I have left is my daily use MyPS which has been scraped under enough tree branches by now that it’s starting to look a little roughed up, thus I clearly needed a nicer-looking navy helmet for the dressage phase. Why are you laughing at me. Stop laughing. That’s rude.)

Anyway, that’s how I found myself with three navy glitter items in my cart, none of which are the brushing boots that have been the actual purpose of this quest all along since they still aren’t in stock.

And because I’m truly a great friend I shared the site with Hillary, who is buying a few things for her new little guy. And, ya know, I just casually threw it out there that if she wanted some things we could order together and split the cost of shipping. Win-win. And then there was a coupon code. Nothing was expensive at all to start with (I swear Europe has way better “cheap stuff” than we do). OKAY UNIVERSE, YOU CAN STOP TRYING TO SELL IT TO ME I’M ALREADY SOLD.

Plus my anxiety has been a bit high lately anyway so I needed a little hit of dopamine. Sweet sweet sparkly dopamine.

We’ll see how long it takes to get here. I was pretty pleased with my first order from them, and interested to see the quality of these items. Of course, I’m STILL stalking their website, checking back all the time to see if those sparkly boots are in stock. So far no luck but you can bet I’m gonna jump on it ASAP if/when they ever do reappear. I’m sure by then my cart will have mysteriously re-filled itself again, too… weird how that happens.