//------------------------------// // July 27 [Makers] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// July 27 I was a little bit stiff when I woke up and so when I got out of bed I did some stretches to help loosen up my muscles. I should have gone outside; the floor in my apartment is wood and it's kind of slippery underhoof sometimes. Not as bad as the bathtub was before I got the mat, but it's easier to do deep stretches when you can really dig your hooves into something. I learned that from an earth pony. It was a nice day outside, and I thought that I'd start with a short flight to warm up my wings, then do some trotting, and fly back home for lunch. Then I thought I'd go and see the makers and find out if they could come up with some kind of harness for my GoPro. While I ate breakfast, I considered whether I wanted to wear my camera or not. It was going to be an easy flight, so even if it slipped off I could catch it, and even if I had to land to adjust it that wasn't a big deal. So I put on my camelback and my vest and then I sat on my rump and pulled the camera-holder over my head. It was kind of stretchy, so it gripped pretty well. If I was going to turn the camera on, I would have to take it back off, 'cause I couldn't use my hooves on the buttons. Since it was just for practice right now, I left it off. Nobody would want to watch a movie of me flying to the nature center anyways. I flew low, so that I didn't have to bother the airplane directors, and went straight to their pasture and dropped in at the far end, away from the deer. Deer didn't like new things, and ran off into the woods whenever something scared them. My GoPro had stayed on all the way over here, so now it was time to see what it would do when I was trotting. I did an easy lap to warm up—I hadn't been doing as much legwork as I ought to have, mostly because I didn't like cantering and galloping on sidewalks. With how close the nature center was, though, that really wasn't a good excuse. I picked up speed a little bit on the second lap, and when I was on the straight leg that went to the high point, I went to a full-out gallop. That turned out to be a little much for the GoPro, and I felt it begin to slide up my head, until the strap got caught on my ears, which was really annoying, and I had to stop and pull it back down. Which told me all I needed to know about the head-mount: it was okay for gentle use, but in a storm, it would be gone by the time the first big wind gust hit, and I'd never find it again. So I didn't go any faster than a canter after that, and my GoPro stayed on my head where it belonged. When I started to get tired, I made one last trot around the path, and on the uphill side I changed into a canter even though my legs were starting to get tired, just so when I reached the peak I could let my wings take over. It wasn't quite as fun as doing it at a full gallop, but it was close. I kept up my speed as I climbed above the trees, and then I peaked out at about two hundred feet and dropped my nose down to keep my speed up, and then just for the fun of it I went to the first road as fast as I could, until I angled across Westnedge. Douglas Avenue swings by really close to it for some reason. I followed Douglas Avenue until it angled east, and I went west to get back to my apartment. I decided that I'd pamper myself with a bath, and started filling up the bathtub before I took off my equipment. It felt weird to take off the GoPro harness; the way it had been squeezing down on my head made it feel like my head got bigger when I took it off, and it kind of tangled up my mane some. It felt really good to lie in the bathtub, even though I couldn't stretch out my wings over the water unless I turned sideways and scrunched myself up against the edge. The bath would have been nicer with some bath salts, too. I wonder if humans have those? I'd have to ask Meghan. When I felt fully relaxed, I got out and drained the bathtub and shook myself off and went into the bedroom to have lunch. As I was eating, I looked at the bag of birdseed that was supposed to go to Aric's. I'd had trouble with the last one, and I didn't want to risk dropping it on somebody below me on my way over to his house, which meant that the sensible thing to do would be carry it on my back. There was a way that earth ponies lifted heavy things up onto their backs, and I kinda knew what it was because I'd seen them do it plenty of times, but it wasn't anything that I'd ever tried, and even when I got partway under it, I had trouble lifting my head up to slide it down. I'd never thought that earth ponies had strong necks, too. I could use my wings to shift it a little bit side-to-side, and that got it centered, and that was about when I started to think how I was going to get down the stairs and open the door at the bottom. Flying off the balcony wasn't an option; with it crosswise on my back, I couldn't really use my wings. Then I got the bright idea to slide it further back to clear them, and I could sort of bend my legs and hop it back which worked pretty well once I got the hang of it. I'm sure Aquamarine would have been laughing if she'd seen me. That idea didn't even make it over the balcony railing. As soon as I started to lift off, the weight back there pushed my rump down, and I just managed to level out before it slid all the way off. But I wasn't going to lift off, not with it unsecure. So I had no choice but to resort to walking down the stairs with it pressing against my neck, and then when I opened the door hop it back until it was centered on my back. After that, it didn't give me any more trouble. Every now and then it wanted to shift, but I could use my wings to get it back. When I was finally in his backyard, I dropped it off my back (gently, so the bag wouldn't break) and opened the garage door, then I gripped it in my forelegs and flew it in and set it on the bench. Then I thought about the mouse—or mice—and how it would be better off in a metal container where they couldn't get to it. There were some metal boxes with tools in them, and I suppose I could have filled them with seed, but I would have had to empty out the bag into them, and it would be really inconvenient when I needed to fill the bird feeder again. I could have put them in the cab of not-Winston, but I didn't feel like taking it back out of the garage. Then I saw his icebox, tucked away in a corner, and it was big enough. So I got it down and opened the lid and jammed the birdseed bag into it, and when the lid was closed again I was satisfied that would stop the mouse. I flew back home and got my GoPro, then flew over to the building where the makers worked. It took a little bit of searching to find it, because I couldn't quite remember how Peggy had gotten there, and a lot of buildings look kinda the same from the air. I found it eventually, though, and landed outside. There were a bunch of cars parked around it, so I went inside. Karen was there, and a couple of boys that I remembered from before but I didn't remember their names at all, which made me feel kinda bad. Well, they were happy to see me and it turned out that they made the rope for tying up a cloud. I'd kind of forgotten about that, and of course they wanted me to try right away, but I didn't have my flight gear (I'd stayed low so I didn't need it) and there weren't any clouds in the sky anyway. When I told them that I wanted a harness so that I could fasten my GoPro well enough to use it in a thunderstorm, they got really enthusiastic, and Karen went into a little side room and brought out a harness like the one I'd tried on at Best Buy. I told her how it wouldn't work, and she said that she'd make it work, and all we had to do was figure out how to adapt it to me. So I stood there while she fitted it on me and took measurements with her tape—one of the boys who was called Conner wrote down all her measurements—and then she got some pins and bunched up the harness and it was a little bit better but still didn't fit right. She and Conner debated about that a little bit, and then they sketched out something that they thought might fit better. Karen went back into the side room and brought out a roll of narrow cloth, like what the bottom part of my camelback straps were made of, and started building a harness around me, and then I thought to tell her that I would be wearing a camelback when I wore the GoPro. So that made things different, because they had to account for those straps, too, but then she thought that it might make it easier, because they could put buckles on my camelback straps and then all it would need was a loop around my back. I didn't have my camelback, but they had a backpack that was kind of similar, so I put that on and she made some more measurements and once she had something she thought would work, she had me move my head around to see how I got in and out, and before too long she said that she knew what to make. She told me to come back Friday afternoon, and we'd do a final fitting, and hopefully there would be some clouds then so that I could use my rope. I flew back home, and out of the corner of my eye I was starting to see clouds off to the west, and if I'd had my flight gear, I would have turned around and gone back so that I could wrangle a cloud. Before I ate dinner, I checked the weather on the computer. I'd been thinking of flying south all the way to the 80 and 90 Highway; that was about 37 miles each way, which was just a little bit longer than my flight to Grand Rapids had been. The forecast said that there was about a 50% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow, though, and I didn't want to tire myself out with a long flight if I was needed for weather patrol, so I thought that maybe it would be smart to check the weather again in the morning and then decide what I wanted to do. After I'd eaten, I sat down on my papasan and read more of Isaiah. He said that once God got done being mad at the Israelites, he was going to be mad at the Assyrians, and then He was going to strike down Babylon and the Philistines and Moab and then Damascus and Cush . . . it sounded like He was mad at everyone for not following his rules. Isaiah even said that God was going to devastate the Earth, even though He'd promised not to do that anymore after the flood. That was kind of worrying, because He'd even made a rainbow to remind Noah and Noah's children of His promise. I thought that maybe as long as He kept sending rainbows, that meant that it wasn't time for Him to lay waste to the Earth yet. That was something that I could ask Liz about. She would know. When I read a little bit further, Isaiah also said that God was going to do good things for the Israelites who followed His rules, so maybe things weren't as bad as I thought that they were going to be. And I had to remember that what the Bible said was a long time ago, so maybe all the things that Isaiah had said had already happened and I was just reading about it afterwards. And I did know from reading that sometimes even a wise, faithful man didn't know everything that God did. It would have been so much simpler if God had written the Bible Himself. I should have finished Isaiah, but I felt like taking an evening flight around the neighborhood. So I put on my flight gear and took off, making a big oval that went over Western Michigan's campus and downtown. I was yawning by the time that I got back to my apartment, so as soon as I got out of my flight gear, I lay down on the futon and fell asleep.