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// January 13 [Weather] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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January 13

When I got up this morning, I was super-excited! I could fly now as part of my morning routine, which is much better exercise than just trotting around the neighborhood (although it's good to work your legs, too—some pegasuses that mostly do cloud duty don't do much on their hooves).

I decided that I would fly first. Sometimes humans flip a coin when they want to make a choice, but that doesn't work so well for ponies. Most pegasi close their eyes and look out to see what the first kind of bird they spot is. I always chose between singing birds and raptors, even though a lot of pegasuses that live near the seashore pick between 'ducky' birds that float on the water or ones that don't. (Some foals call the three main kinds of birds 'hawky' birds, 'ducky' birds, and 'tweety' birds.)

Since I wanted to fly, though, I didn't pick a bird. I just put on my vest and my blinky light that runs on batteries, and I put my altimeter on my foreleg and made sure to set the pressure on it.

One thing that I don't like about living in a dorm is that it's all enclosed and has its own heat, which is really a bit hotter than I'd like. Peggy doesn't like for the window to be open, because that lets the heat outside and is wasteful, and besides she gets too cold if it's open.

But I can't really get a sense for the air inside the room, so it was a surprise when I went outside and I could tell by the feel of the air that a storm was coming. I couldn't tell what, yet, since I was still on the ground, and conditions on the ground can be very different than conditions up in the air.

The whole sky is like a layer cake. Things have their own level, and there are changes from level to level. That's why it's important to know where all the clouds belong. Too high or too low, and they won't do what you want them to do. They might dissipate, or blow away, or make the wrong kind of weather if they're put in the wrong place. (There are more factors than that.)

My radio has a strap that attaches it to my foreleg, too, opposite my altimeter, and I can hold it up to talk to it. So I got my flight clearance from the airplane directors and took off into the morning sky.

One fun thing about morning flights is that the sky gets lighter the higher you get, 'cause planets are round. If the weather's right, you can watch Celestia raise the sun above the horizon, and then dive down to a lower altitude and watch it again, or if you dive at just the right speed, it looks like it's stationary on the horizon. It was too cloudy to do that, though. Off to the west there were big banks of clouds, which is the storm that's moving in.

It felt to me like it was either going to be sleet or ice, depending on how high the clouds were. It was cold on the ground, but as I flew up a bit higher, it got above freezing.

I was looking forward to it: I hadn't seen any good weather since I got here. It had been mostly clear or overcast with high clouds. Everything on the ground was looking kind of dingy, and could use some freshening up.  Nopony likes dirty snow, which is why we usually try to put down a few centimeters every week through the winter.

The Climate Science professor mentioned that there was a winter storm warning. Then he asked the class if they knew what climate conditions caused ice storms, and I raised my hoof right away, but he didn't call on me at first.

It was only after the third student mangled the explanation that he finally called on me, and I told him all about ice storms and he seemed kind of surprised I'd know about it at all, since we ponies don't have doppler radar or radiosonde balloons.

I told him that for humans it was all observational, and that we've been flying in clouds for thousands of years, so we know all about them, how they work, and how to make them work for us. According to the class book, humans haven't worked directly inside clouds for more than a hundred years or so, so of course they don't know very much about them.

Then he thought he was being tricky and mentioned that there's a great lake off to the west (which I know about because I saw the map of Michigan, and it's got big lakes all around it).

Bodies of water have a big effect on the weather. They cool down and warm up more slowly than the land, and cause weather inland of them that can be difficult to control. I told him that storms need two things to work, energy and moisture (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's just the basics); lakes and oceans are a good source of both. That's why hurricanes don't form over land, and slow down when they make landfall.

I asked him how much ice coverage there was on the lake, and I think that was the moment that he started to take me seriously.

He said he wanted to talk to me during his office hours tomorrow, which is a great honor. He's been granted a doctorate, which is the highest achievement a human student can get, and I don't have any scholastic achievements at all.

In philosophy, we discussed more of Plato's forms and things, and the system of government which Plato felt was best. In a lot of ways, it sounded like Equestrian society, so it's pretty obvious that we have a very smart system, and this is just the very foundation of the class. I can't wait to see how some of the other philosophers like Karl Marx or Jean Paul Sartre have refined Plato's system to reach the perfect system.

Since we had been talking about my job in climate class, I thought it would be a good idea to continue that in Equestrian class.

I learned a lot about human jobs! One of the things that's important to know about language is that words have meanings beyond themselves, which is why actual conversations are more important than just speaking words out of a book (although that's very useful for beginners). So, as a result, I had to ask lots of questions about some jobs to figure out what they might be called in Equestria. One student worked at a park that's called a 'golf course,' where people pay to hit a small ball into a small hole which is very far away.

We'd all sort of worked out a schedule for dinner, and everyone started to arrive at about the same time, even though we had never talked about what time to eat. And I liked that, because that meant that we could have interesting conversations and tell each other how our days had been. But it had also been nice when someone had arrived first because they could tell you if there was any food that was really good or not as tasty as it looked.