June 27
I woke up a little bit before Meghan's alarm but not too much. I'd just woken up enough to snuggle against her and close my eyes again when her alarm started sounding and I had to move to let her roll over and turn it off.
She mumbled that she didn't want to go to work and held her portable telephone against her chest, where she could turn it off the next time that her alarm sounded.
I wouldn't have minded if she didn't; we could have found something to do together, I'm sure. She got up the second time her alarm sounded, though, and I got up with her and offered to brush her hair when she got out of the shower.
So she went off to the bathroom and I stayed in her bedroom and after a little bit I was wishing that I had thought to pee before she went in the shower and I probably could have gone in but I thought she might mind so I just waited until she had gotten out of the bathroom.
Then she asked what we did if we were working a storm or something and had to pee and I said that as long as we weren't over a town we just did.
Then I brushed her hair for her and when I was done she went to her closet and showed me some clothes and asked me what I thought she should wear today and I'm kinda not a real good judge of that but I thought the colors of the white blouse and light blue dress looked really nice together and she said that they were pretty new.
We ate breakfast together—she had little shredded wheat cubes but hers had frosting on one side and it made them really sweet—then when she was done we talked a little bit until her friend who had a car came by to take her to work.
I went back to my apartment and got my flight gear, and when I asked for permission, Dori said that I could fly north 'cause it was clear out there, so I went along Douglas Street and past the dirt mines and the park with the island where we'd gone on Saturday and all the way over Plainwell and then because it was a really nice day out, I went even further north until I was at an even smaller town which I found on the map later and it was called Martin.
Off to the west, just across the 131 Highway, there was a long paved strip with taxiways around it that I thought was an airport but when I flew over that way to investigate I saw that instead of having a tower and airplane hangars it had benches on either side and I didn't think that landing and taking off was a spectator sport so I went down until I could see the sign and it said it was the US 131 Motorsports Park.
I wasn't sure what that meant. I flew around it and there wasn't anyone there and I couldn't figure out what it was for, although the nice dark strip of road made a pretty good thermal that I rode partway back up to my flight altitude.
I'd flown a bit further than I meant to, and when I turned around and saw how far away Kalamazoo had gotten, I decided not to do any tricks but just use thermals and gliding. I wished I'd thought to put a can of anchovies in my vest pocket; they'd have been a good snack.
I could have followed the 131 Highway back, but it wasn't as direct as Douglas Street, so I angled across it and went back the same way I'd come, only changing my path once the top of the Stetson Bell Tower was visible, and I angled just a little bit west of it so that I'd arrive more or less right over my apartment.
The only drawback to the tree in front of my apartment was that I had to go below its crown and then back up to the balcony, but it did give me a chance to check my mailbox which I hadn't done on Saturday or Sunday because I'd been with Meghan, and I had a couple of new letters. One of them was from Aquamarine and I wanted to open it right away, but I didn't want to drip sweat on it, so I took off my flight gear and ate a can of anchovies and took a shower and then I opened her letter.
She said that Jenny had told her about a special festival in Bay City which had lots of what humans called tall ships, because of their masts, and there was even going to be a Viking ship there and the way she described it it sounded like it would be a lot of fun, and she said that if I could go I was welcome to come along.
Well, I thought it would be a lot of fun. Those sounded a lot like the kind of ships I was used to, but they were probably bigger 'cause they were for humans. Maybe even as big as the ships that Aric and I had seen on our trip.
She also was kind of jealous of my trip with Aric, and said that she hadn't seen as much of Earth as she'd hoped to yet, and her professor had tried to get her to go with him on a trip to Costa Rica, which is a country between North America and South America, but that her assistants had said that she couldn't go because there were potential problems with vaccines.
I hoped that wouldn't be an issue before we went to see Gusty in Stratford.
So I wrote her a letter back saying that I would love to come to see the tall ships, and I asked if I could bring a friend, too, if Meghan didn't have plans for the weekend.
I was kind of sad that I hadn't gotten a letter back from anypony else yet but maybe since they were further away it would take longer for a letter to arrive.
I must have missed my mail delivery, 'cause when I went down to put the letter to Aquamarine in the mailbox there was a postcard in there that told me how Comcast had a special deal on premium TV channels but I didn't even have a television to watch premium channels on.
Their postcard didn't have a mailing address but it did have a telephone number and so I called them to tell them that I didn't have a TV and the man who I talked to was very confused by that, then he wanted to know why I had called if I didn't, and I said it was so that he wouldn't have to send me any more postcards. Then he just hung up without thanking me and I was going to call back but I think he would have hung up on me again.
I went out on my balcony and started to read Ezra. At first, the birds got scared off but then the bold ones started to come back, and they'd stay as long as I didn't move too much or turn a page. It was nice to listen to them eating and chirping happily while I was reading.
Pastor Liz was right; I liked the first part where the Israelites came back and got to rebuild their temple and altar because God told the Persian king to have them return to their homes. But then their enemies got a new Persian king to make them stop, and they had to until there was another Persian king who saw that the first one had said that they could and so he let them keep working until they had finished it and celebrated Passover there.
That was the problem with changing kings so often, I thought. Princess Celestia would never tell somepony to build something and then change her mind and tell them to stop and then change her mind again and tell them to start again.
This had all happened a long time ago, though, and so maybe now it was better and people didn't do that any more. Maybe they kept better track of the things that they were doing so if they had a new king they could keep on working on their important projects. Otherwise it seems like a lot of people would be putting a lot of effort into things only to find a few years later that the new king wanted to do something else.
Then partway through it changed so that it was the words of Ezra himself saying how he came back to Jerusalem. He had to send messengers to find Levites, because he had forgotten to bring them with him, and then after he'd found some and got back to Jerusalem, he found out that the people there before him had married the wrong people which was against God's rules, and he was so ashamed he couldn't even look at God when he told Him.
And it was kind of strange how they all agreed that they'd been bad but they didn't do anything about it right away because it was raining, but eventually they sent away their wives and children so that God wouldn't be mad at them.
It didn't say where they had gone, and the next book which was called Nehemiah didn't, either. At least not in the first chapter and I thought about reading all of it but my stomach was getting a bit growly and so I decided I would have dinner first and then maybe read Nehemiah.
Of course, as soon as I looked at the food I had I started to have a craving for the alfalfa I didn't have, but that would make it taste that much better when it finally arrived.
So I filled my bowl with vegetables and had that for dinner, and I also had some unflavored oats out of a cardboard can and when I was done I turned on my computer to see if Aric had sent me any computer letters or Facebook telegrams over the weekend.
He had sent a pretty long computer letter about how his internship had started late so he was already behind. He told me that the first play that they were putting on was only in a month and it was called Fiddler on the Roof and it was for children, and he was in charge of the lights and so he'd had to spend the whole week learning what the theatre had for lighting instruments and what their control board could do and I thought about how even at Kalamazoo College, the two theatres I'd been in had completely different controls and catwalks and stages and I guess you would have to do different things for different shapes of theatre.
He'd never really gone into that much detail about how he decided what lights needed to go where, but it was probably kind of like clouds, in that what worked in one place might not work in another and you had to know before you wasted a lot of effort putting the wrong clouds somewhere.
I don't know why it came to mind, but after I'd written him a letter back saying what I'd been doing I remembered how the weather lady had invited me to come to the television studio and I never had, and so I thought I should send her a computer letter to let her know that I was still interested and to apologize for not having done it sooner, and I had to dig through my notebooks until I found her computer mail address.
Then I turned off the computer and went back outside and I thought about how nice it would be to sleep outside on the balcony so I got my pillow off the futon and put it out on the balcony, and it was pretty nice although the wood floor was kind of uncomfortable, and I kept on waking up so I finally went back inside and curled up in the papasan chair and fell asleep there.