• 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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June 20 [Meijer Monday]

June 20

I woke up nice and early and felt pretty energetic. The first thing on my mind was to fly, so after I used the bathroom stretched out and put on my flight gear and I went in the kitchen to get a glass of water, and that's when I remembered that there wasn't any food in there.

The only thing in the electric icebox was a half-empty beer that smelled off, so I poured it out and set the bottle with the rest by the sink. Every other Wednesday, a truck would come by and pick up all the things that could be recycled and reused, or I could take the bottles back myself and get ten cents each for them.

I thought it would be easier to just give them to the truck.

So I figured that I could fly and shop. Meijer is open all the time. Many human stores are like that, because humans are usually so busy that they can't go to the market during the day.

That was nice, though, because I would never have to worry about what time was the right time to go to the store—I could go whenever I wanted to, and they had so much food there that I thought they'd probably never run out of it.

It was a little weird to put my saddlebags over my flight vest, and I had to really tug on the girth strap to make sure it was tight, then I had to pull some wrinkles out of the vest so it wouldn't chafe my skin, but I finally got it settled like I wanted it to be, and got permission to fly.

The weather was perfect, and the skies were clear, and even though I was a little bit out of practice at flying 'cause I hadn't hardly done any over the last couple of weeks, I made really good time to Meijer.

I hadn't ever been to this one, so when I landed I discovered that the doors were closed and I had to go in a different entrance, but that turned out to be more convenient since the other entrance was right by the food.

Carts were pretty inconvenient. I could push them on my hind hooves, but after I'd gone a few aisles my hips were starting to hurt a little bit from the position, and I was thinking that maybe I would have been smarter to get a basket.

There weren't too many people in the store, but there were lots of boxes out everywhere, and a weird wet swishing sound that turned out to be some kind of big blue machine called Tennant that had spinny brushes on the front. There were two of them, and each one had an operator, and right behind that a third man carrying a mop was picking up the water that the Tennants missed.

It kind of reminded me of the orange snowplow trucks, 'cause they usually seemed to work in pairs, too, with one in front and another one following behind.

Lots of people were opening the boxes and putting things on shelves, and they were really helpful. At the end of each aisle, they had a sign that said what was there, but they only had room to list three things and there were lots more than three things down each aisle.

Just the same, I found anchovies and oatmeal and even sunflower seeds and then in the front was the fresh fruit and vegetable stands which looked a lot like the markets I was used to except that there weren't any farmers by their stands to tell me about their produce.

I also found out when I got to the checkout counter that I was supposed to have put the fruit and vegetables into a bag and write a number on it which said what it was.

They also had a separate set of aisles that had flowers in little bouquets or even dirt-filled pots, but most of them didn't look very good. Still, I got some chrysanthemums to snack on; I thought they'd be good for dinner, even if there was a lot of stem and not so much flower and they were kind of pricey.

I could have gotten more, but my saddlebags weren't all that big, so I could only take what would fit into them. And I wound up loading them badly, and was off-balance for the whole flight back, and I mentally kicked myself for not thinking that the cans of anchovies were kind of heavy, but I was worried that they'd crush my fresh vegetables and flowers. And it wasn't all that long a flight anyway.

When I got home I put my food away and then took off my saddlebags and flight gear and was about to take a shower when I thought how much nicer it would be to take a bath and really relax, but that didn't work out because the valve that closed the bathtub drain didn't work at all no matter how much I jiggled it, so I had to settle for a shower after all.

Making the stove work was a real challenge. There were knobs at the back that controlled the burners and I turned one of them on and it started making a hissing noise and pretty soon it smelled like farts in the kitchen but that was all. Then I remembered how on Aric's stove you had to turn it a certain way to make the flame, so I tried that and found the place where it made the clicking noise and pretty soon it went up with a whoosh and so did a lot of fur on my fetlock, 'cause I was reaching over the flame.

Well, I thought that was just about the dumbest arrangement ever, and I guess I should have seen it coming. I put my foreleg under cold water until it went numb, then filled the kettle and put it on the stove and while I waited for it to boil, I unrolled some toilet paper and wrapped it around my leg and wished that I'd had something a little bit stronger. It started to dissolve as soon as I touched it with my lips.

I didn't worry about it too much, though, and when the water boiled I turned off the stove before I took the kettle off, 'cause at least that kept the flames away from me, and I made a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and sat out on the balcony to eat it.

I hadn't gotten any of the coffee crystals, so I rinsed out my bowl with some of the hot water from the kettle and put it next to the sink to dry, and then I took my Bible and went back out to the balcony. I'd decided that I was going to make some good progress through it and then I would go to the library and start reading about World War I.

First, they said how the King David was doing good things—even if it was fighting the other tribes, because I guess that was what all the kings did. The Bible even said that spring was the season when kings went out to fight. But then David counted his soldiers and that was a bad thing, so God got mad and punished the Israelites with a plague, and then King David felt bad and God felt bad, so King David said that he should be the one to be punished, not his men, and God told him to build an altar, so he did, and then God had His angel stop the plague and David decided to build a house for God.

And since King David had been fighting, he had his son, Solomon build the house instead, and gave him gold and silver and so much copper that it couldn't even be counted, and told everyone to help build the house for the Lord, and Solomon did and when King David got old, he made Solomon the new king of Israel.

Then there were chapters and chapters about what the different tribes all did, and I guess even without cutie marks, humans had some kind of destiny based on their tribe, and they even had a tribe who became the musicians, and I think that was important. A town without songs isn't much of a town at all. The fisherponies had their songs and the sailors had songs and even the thatcher sometimes sang when she worked, and she said that her mother had taught her a song for reeds when she was a filly.

It wasn't until I got to the part about Jehoshaphat that I realized these were the same kings that I'd already read about before, but the story was a little bit different and had some other details that hadn't been mentioned before, and they also left out some stuff that they'd said in the earlier book. I probably should have noticed that sooner, but it had been a really long time since I'd read the Bible. So it was good to read it again. And it hadn't said before that God got so mad at Jehoshaphat for making friends with Ahaziah that He wrecked Jehoshaphat's whole fleet of trading ships.

I wondered if maybe God sometimes got mad at the lake freighters, and that was why so many of them sank. But Pastor Liz had told me that God didn't act like that any more. So then I got to thinking about it more, and maybe the storms just happened. Even with weatherponies, we couldn't stop them all, and we couldn't do anything about the ones far out to sea. It would be something to ask Liz about next time I saw her.

Almost as if the wind was listening to my thoughts, it picked up and flipped a couple pages in the Bible. It would have been a fine day for sailing: the sky was clear and the winds were brisk.

I had just gotten to the part where Jehoram's bowls fell out and nobody cared because nobody liked him, when I saw Sienna turn into the driveway, so I went back inside and pretty soon Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn came up and asked me how my vacation had been and how I was liking my apartment and before I could tell them much about it, Miss Cherilyn saw my toilet-paper bandage and asked me if I'd gotten hurt on the trip.

So I told her how dumb my stove was and Mister Salvatore went in and looked at it then he took a little notebook out of his pocket and wrote something down on it and Miss Cherilyn said that maybe I should get an electric kettle 'cause than I wouldn't have to use the stove to boil water and it might be safer for me.

Well, I didn't want them to go to all that trouble, and I'd already gone shopping once today and didn't feel like going again, but she made me promise not to use the stove and said they'd get me one and see what they could do about getting me a different stove that wasn't a danger to me, and she also wanted to get a look at my leg, and she used her pocket telephone to take pictures of it which I thought was really silly. And she said that I ought to see a doctor just in case, and maybe I could get something that would make it hurt less. She said that there was stuff for humans but didn't know what I should use.

I didn't know either, 'cause I was normally smart enough not to stick my hoof in fire.

They reminded me that they were there for anything I needed, any time of the day, and then Mister Salvatore went outside muttering something about stoves and Miss Cherilyn said that they'd been a little bit worried sometimes when I was on my trip 'cause I'd gone so far away that they didn't know where I was all the time and maybe next time I wanted to go off somewhere remote I could do them the favor of telling them where just in case.

Then when I folded my ears down she said she wasn't mad and I could go wherever I wanted to, but just in case it would be nice to know where I was.

Mister Salvatore came back with a small pouch that had a red cross on it and he got out some gauze cloth and put it on my leg and then said that I might as well keep the whole kit, then he changed his mind and took all the little packets of pills out of it and said he was going to have to check which ones were okay for me.

We had a little snack of fresh vegetables and I offered them some flowers too but they didn't want any so I ate those. And I promised that I'd make a list of things that I needed for my apartment as I thought of them and I said that I was going to get a bird feeder next time I went to Meijer with someone who had a car. Miss Cherilyn offered to go today, but I still didn't want to go a second time.

I hugged them again when they left, and then I turned on my computer and saw that Aric had put up some pictures of his new apartment, and also some of his new friends that he was living with. There was a blonde man named Richard and a bald man named Chris and a blonde girl named Autumn and a brunette named Felicity. Two of them, Richard and Felicity, worked at the same theatre, and the other two didn't.

Autumn sounded kind of like a pony name. I didn't know that humans ever got named for seasons.

Facebook has its own instant telegram system, and there was a green dot by his name, so we had a little chat about how his drive had been (he got there a lot later than he'd planned to) and how his new room was and I told him about Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn coming over and how I'd burned myself on the stove, and he reminded me that if I needed to, I could also ask Angela to help me cook, because she was still at the house. And it was nice to talk to him on the computer but I would have liked it better if he had still been here.

He had to go to a meeting, and when he was done I had some dinner and then decided that I ought to visit Meghan, so I flew over to her house and I couldn't remember which door was hers, so I flew around the back and knocked on her windowframe and when she opened her curtains she was really surprised to see me and she opened her window and told me to come around to the porch.

So I did, and she opened up the door and I made myself remember which one it was, and then we went up to her apartment.

I told her about my vacation and how I'd burned my leg, and she told me about her job, and then she put on her lounging clothes and we sat on the bed and watched Harry Potter together. I felt bad for Harry and his friends, because Mrs. Umbridge was really mean and stupid and petty.

And it had a really sad ending, too. Meghan said it was her favorite book, though, because it had two of her most favorite scenes, both when Fred and George do their final prank (that was in the movie but Meghan said it was better in the book) and also the scene when Dumbledore got arrested and told Mrs. Umbridge that she thought he was going to surrender peacefully when he really had no intention of that.

She went to the bathroom and then I had a turn, and when I came back to her room she'd taken off her lounging clothes and when I opened the door she held her hands to cover herself then when she saw it was just me she laughed and said that I'd been gone for too long.

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I didn't ask, and she folded back the covers on her bed and got in and laid on her back so that I could get comfortable. She picked up my burned leg and kissed the bandage and said that maybe that would help me feel better, then she kissed my forehead and put her hand over my back and I draped my wing over her stomach and we fell asleep like that.

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