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// March 7 [weathermaking] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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March 7

I woke up in the morning still on top of my bed and feeling like I'd been put in a barrel and rolled down a hill.

I dragged my tail out of bed and went to the bathroom and thought about whether or not a trot around the neighborhood would benefit me any, or if I would be better off just taking a long hot shower to loosen up my muscles.

Exercise won out, but I cut my routine really short, not even leaving the main part of campus. I didn't think I could manage anything more than that. And then I did take a long, hot shower, which almost relaxed me enough to fall asleep in there.

I probably should have arranged a time this morning to meet up with Gates, but I hadn't, and besides most of our stuff was still in the trunk of Cobalt. I guessed Peggy felt about the same as I did, so I wasn't going to wake her up for that. Gates could wait.

Of course, I wound up running into him on my way to breakfast. So then I had to apologize for leaving the gear where I couldn't get at it, but he said that was okay, and he asked how the helmet had worked. I bowed my head and showed him that there weren't any cuts on my ear this time.

I told him that I'd used up five batteries and memory cards. Since we weren't sure how long the camera would run, we'd changed them at mealtimes. And I told him about the video Peggy had taken with her telephone. I said I'd get it to him tomorrow morning for sure.

Everyone at breakfast wanted to know how my weekend had gone, so I told them all about it, and I thought that I ought to make sure to let the makers know how well the magnet bindings had worked: we hadn't had to try and switch to the other ones, and once I'd learned to fly over the grates that were there for people to scrape their boots off on, I hadn't had any trouble with them.

When I got to climate science class, it turned out that everyone had decided that they wanted to work on my project, and the professor cancelled his normal lesson to let me help instruct.

I guess I hadn't been as clear in my computer letter as I ought to have been. At first I thought people were just dumb when it came to stuff like this, but everyone had problems with the same things.

So I spent the class explaining weather targets and water budget and how teams were set up, and how to make calculations from there. It was actually a learning experience for me, too, since as far as I knew, nopony had ever had to set up a system from scratch like that. When a new area is settled, a couple of weather teams are assigned, and then they build from that—but it wasn't something that had been done in my lifetime. I only had the vaguest idea of how it worked, because there was a weather book at our station that gave the history of all the weather teams who had served in our zone and I read through it when I was off-duty.

A couple of towns I knew right away what they'd need (weather-wise, they'd been pretty similar to some towns in our district), and so all of us together worked out what kind of teams would need to put the weather in place.

One thing I hadn't thought to mention was the supporting pegasuses. Not everypony is in the sky; the weather factory needs to be staffed, and there's a lot of hoofwork into getting the supplies where they're needed. While it wasn't really something to consider for the assignment, I summarized how the cloudmaking and delivery process worked.

I was able to compare it a little bit with the snow machines that they had at the ski resort, which actually helped out. I'm glad I got a chance to see how one worked, even if they hadn't let me fly in the snow it was spitting out.

I also learned that it isn't as easy to write on a markerboard as I thought it would be. Teachers must practice that.

About half the students stayed after class, because they wanted clarifications. I think everybody would have if they hadn't had to go to other classes. It made me feel important—even the professor was taking notes as I answered questions.

When I finally had to go to get to philosophy, I was thinking that maybe I could set aside an afternoon to go more in-depth about how the Equestrian weather system worked. I certainly would have been able to do more calculations if I’d had my weather wheel in class, and I thought that maybe they'd be interested in how that worked, too.

We started on our final philosopher, who was named Karl Marx and who had a beard much like Walt Whitman's. I had been prepared to be disappointed in what he thought, so I was pleasantly surprised when it sounded like he actually had some really good ideas.

He started off by saying how man (and ponies!) are better than animals, because we produce beyond what we need for our immediate survival. That was unarguably true. And then he said that what also set us apart was that we imagined things beforehand, and then made it happen.

I couldn't argue with that: as recently as climate class, I'd been doing just that, imagining weather for a continent that the professor had made up. None of it was any more real than a printed map and figures on the markerboard, but it already sort of existed in my imagination. And if it had been real, the calculations I'd made would have been a good starting point for its weather.

He also had something in common with Sartre; he said that man shapes the world and the world shapes man, but he took it a step farther and said that as the world changes, man changes as well, constantly growing and changing to suit the changing world.

I hadn't really thought of it, but while we had a lot of traditions and did a lot of things the same way we always had, there was new stuff, too. When my granddam was a foal, there were no steam locomotives, so nopony knew how to drive them or build them or fix them when they broke. Now there were ponies who did.

And the human world must have been changing like that, too. Sean knew how to fix computers, and Aric knew how to fix Winston, but there must have been a time on Earth when there weren't computers or trucks, and then nobody would have been able to work with them.

I was glad that we were ending with a philosopher who was smart. Although I was a bit skittish after the others, and I wondered if maybe Marx would wind up saying dumb things too.

By the time Equestrian class came around, I was ready for a nap and not at my best. Luckily, it didn't take all that much effort on my part to fall back into speaking Equestrian. Meghan was curious how my weekend had gone, and so were Becky and Lisa, so I told them about it, too. Then they told me that tomorrow was Michigan's primary, and after they explained it to me, I said that I wanted to go.

Meghan reminded me that I couldn't vote (Becky couldn't either, because she didn't live in Michigan, and I guessed that Peggy probably couldn't either), but that was okay; I thought it would be interesting to see.

Meghan still didn't want to use an Uber-car, but the college was making vans available to get to the voting places, and we decided to meet up and go in one of them.

Even though I was pretty tired, I went to Durak and had a lot of fun. I didn't lose any times, and after it was over, Aric and I went to his house.

I was really tired, and it turned out he was too—he said that he'd spent the weekend helping David move a radio console from Kalamazoo to Paducah, and the weather had been really bad part of the way back, so we wound up just snuggling for a little while and then we both fell asleep.