• Published 25th Feb 2016
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Silver Glow's Journal - Admiral Biscuit



Silver Glow takes an opportunity to spend a year at an Earth college, where she'll learn about Earth culture and make new friends.

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April 10 [Unicorn Hitch]

April 10

I didn't sleep well, even though I was with Aquamarine. I kept on having nightmares that I was ground-bound forever in a pasture and I was the only smart pony in the herd, and all the rest of them ignored me. I couldn't go away, because I knew I wouldn't make it far on my own before some predator or a horny stallion got me.

I kept on waking up and I'd just snuggle into Aquamarine and watch her sleep for a little bit until my eyes got heavy again and I fell back asleep to another nightmare.

I don't think that Princess Luna's reach is quite this far.

When I finally woke up for the day, I didn't feel like I'd slept at all. Aquamarine wasn't in bed; she was on the floor stretching out and her getting up must have been what woke me. Jenny was stirring in bed, too. So we wound up all getting out of bed at about the same time.

One thing that was nice about the dorm was that there was more than one shower in the bathroom, which let us talk to Jenny even though she wanted to be in her own shower stall and not share with us. I said that I knew how to shower with humans but that didn't impress her.

When we'd gotten groomed and Jenny had gotten dressed, we went back to the Pavilion and got there in plenty of time to see the plowing competition. It was across the road from the main hall, and there was a long marked-out area in the dirt.

Pretty soon the horses came out and got hooked up to the plows—Aquamarine said that was one nice thing about human helpers; it was hard to put on your own harness and hook up to the plow. Most of the time a sister would help but every now and then you had to do it by yourself. Then the drivers took the reins and when they were told to, the horses started pulling and the men followed along, steering the plow.

Jenny was curious about how we steered our plows, so Aquamarine started describing how a pony plow worked, and how you set it to bite into the ground like you wanted to and how to make it go where you wanted, and it sounded really complicated. It wasn't something I'd ever thought about much: I just saw the earth ponies below me turning their fields.

I suppose they thought the same thing looking up at us moving around clouds, not really having any understanding of all the technical details.

Aquamarine had a good eye for it; she picked the winner before he was even announced. I couldn't see any real difference between the attempts. Some were squigglier than the others, but plants didn't care if they grew in neat rows or not, as far as I knew. Nothing I'd ever seen that had grown on its own had been in a row.

Aquamarine said that I didn't know the first thing about farming.

We went back inside and walked around for a bit, looking at all the different things that they had for sale, and Aquamarine got a flier for a camp that taught you how to drive horses and said that she thought that might be fun to do. Just the very idea bothered me . . . sure, pony coaches often had a driver, just because she had a higher vantage point and could see what was coming up before the team did, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

When we’d seen just about everything, I said I wanted to go see the horses again, so we went back into the stable area and started off at the perimeter.

All the stalls were the same, and they had tall fences around them so that the horses had to stay on their own, but some of the draft horses were so big that their heads went right over the barriers and they could greet the horse on the other side of them.

Different horses were handling their confinement in different ways. There were some who were asleep on their hooves, resting up for whatever was next, and others were looking around at the people milling about. There was an ex-stallion who kept grabbing a bucket in his teeth and banging it against the wall, and a pair of mares in side-by-side stalls who were both leaning up against the bars so that they would be as close to each other as they could get.

Around the back, there was a set of pens that had mules, who were a lot smaller than the horses but still huge. And right next to that was a washing room, but instead of shower heads it just had hoses and I bet none of them were hot water.

We'd seen in the center some people getting their horses ready, and then there was a stream of horses coming in from the arena, which meant it was almost time for the next competition to start, which was the unicorn hitch. So we headed back out of the stables and into the main area.

When they came in they were in a wedge formation. Aquamarine said that earth ponies called that the triangle, then Jenny asked her what they called four, and she said it was the square.

So I guessed that six were the rectangle, and she nodded. Then we took turns at guessing what eight would be called, which turned out to be the double square.

I wanted to know how far it would go, so I kept prompting her with more and more, and it wasn't until she said that a team of eighteen was called the greater long double squarangle that I realized she was making it up. (In my defense, the names of ship sails are like that.)

Overall, the competition was much the same as the six-horse formation we'd seen last night. They went around the arena and had to step in a certain way and go around orange cones and back up at the very end of it.

After that was finished, we got up and went to a store called Pizza House for lunch, which was also in the same nearby mall as Jimmy Johns and Menna's. They had a pizza which was called a Chicago deep dish that was made like a pie and it was really good. It filled me right up, even though I only had one slice and shared a second with Aquamarine. The whole pizza was more than the three of us could eat together, so we took what was left over with us.

As we were walking across the parking lot, we decided that we didn't want to go back to the show. I was tired and thought I could use a nap (and eating a filling meal when you're tired only makes it worse), and so we went back to their dorm room and I dozed off for a bit.

When I woke up, we ate a snack of leftover pizza and then started walking across campus in the direction of the train station, taking our time. We went to the Abrams Planetarium, which had displays about what the telescope at the observatory had seen, and there was a little section that talked about space exploration and all the special vehicles humans had made to explore it. There was also a picture of a space suit, which looked like a diving suit, and it was what human astronauts wore.

Right next to that was a door that was blocked, and there was a sign that said in big letters 'Coming soon: Ponies,' and there was a piece of paper next to it that said in smaller print how our two worlds had found each other, and it was a shame that it wasn't open yet.

Jenny had us pose by the sign and took our picture.

There were a lot of other rooms we didn't get to see because we'd come late and they were closing, but the security policeman said that the gift shop was open for a little while after the exhibits closed so we went there.

Their gift shop had astronaut ice cream, and Jenny said that we had to try it, so we bought it and tore it open and it was kind of disappointing that it was just a striped block that didn't look like ice cream at all. But she showed us how you broke off chunks and put them into your mouth and they turned into ice cream, and even though I thought she was pulling my tail I tried a piece and just like the strawberry in Aquamarine’s cereal at first it was super dry and didn't taste like anything and then all of a sudden it was like ice cream.

I wanted to know how it was made, and Jenny said it was called dehydration, which was where they sucked all the water out of something and I knew how that worked with sun-dried fruit but I didn't know that you could do it with ice cream. What stopped it from melting before it was all dehydrated? Jenny didn't know, but she asked her telephone and it told her.

I bet that would be popular with sailors. There's a lot of stuff you can't keep fresh on a ship, even with a crew of earth ponies.

We finally got to the bus station and Aquamarine and Jenny waited with me until the bus arrived. It was bigger and nicer-looking than the white buses that went around Kalamazoo, and there were little compartments underneath for luggage.

I sat right in the very front, where I could see out the big front windows. That was something you couldn't do on a train, which I thought made the bus a better way to travel. Plus it was cheaper than the train.

After a little bit of driving, though, I decided that the train was better. It was mostly smoother, and it was a bit roomier, and it smelled a little nicer, too, plus the bus took a stupid route. It went to Grand Rapids first, then Kalamazoo.

When it started to get dark out, there wasn't much more to see, so I took out my anthropology book and read my homework and I tried to take some notes but the bus was so unpredictably bouncy I thought I might wind up swallowing my pen by mistake, so I just read a little bit ahead in the book.

I couldn't have been happier when the bus finally stopped in Kalamazoo. I put on my flight gear right there in the parking lot and called the airplane directors. There was a man I'd never talked to before on the radio, and he didn't understand at first where I was departing from, but he finally figured it out, I think. I kept alert for other airplanes and helicopters too in case he hadn't gotten it right.

There was something comforting about being back at my own dorm room. I hung my saddlebags over the back of my chair and scratched at my coat where they'd been strapped down and then hugged Peggy. I would have liked to tell her about my weekend but she was deep in her math homework and I could see by the way she was gnawing on her pen that she was having some difficulty with it and I shouldn’t distract her.

After a little bit, I thought about doing something to get her attention like banging a bucket on the wall, but I didn't have a bucket, so I checked my computer mail instead, and then when there wasn't anything interesting there, I decided that I could write a letter to my sister about horses, but I wasn't really sure how to begin. Then I thought that maybe it would be better to write a poem because Conrad said I was pretty good at poems (even if I can't rhyme) so I worked on that for a bit and then helped Peggy check her homework, and then it was time for bed if I wanted to get up and fly in the morning.

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