July 23
Aric woke me up when he came in, and I thought I'd pretend to still be asleep just for the fun of it.
He sat down on the bed (and that would have woken me up if I hadn't heard him open the bedroom door) and whispered that he knew I was awake 'cause my ears had given me away.
I told him that my ears moved when I slept, too.
(I was pretty sure that they did. How would I hear stuff if they didn't?)
He told me that I was a silly pony and kissed me and said how much he'd missed me, and how happy he was that I was here, and I nuzzled his cheek and then put my head on his chest and fell back asleep.
In the morning, I woke up before him and I couldn't decide if I should get out of bed or just stay cuddled up with him. I didn't know what time he got home last night, and I didn't want to be rude and interrupt his sleep, even though he probably wouldn't be mad if I woke him up.
But I finally decided to let him sleep in at least some, and a little bit of extra time in bed wouldn't hurt me any. Tomorrow I wouldn't be getting home until late, anyway, so it might be nice to have had some extra sleep.
I still wound up waking him up, 'cause I got kind of antsy after a while. I wanted to be flying around or having sex or doing something, and I was getting a little bit hungry, too.
He was still kind of sleepy, so I got on top of him.
Well, that woke him all the way up, and after we were done he put his pants on and went to the bathroom, and when he got back he got dressed the rest of the way and asked if I wanted to eat breakfast at home or go to a restaurant. He said that he was thinking either Denny's or the IHOP, which was the International House of Pancakes.
I thought that IHOP sounded the best, 'cause I hadn't had pancakes in a while. So we got in Winston and drove out to the restaurant.
On our way out there, we passed a big building that had lots of tall pipes on the roof and it said Caterpillar on the front and I wanted to know what it was for—I thought maybe it was a butterfly hatchery, although I couldn't imagine what the pipes were for unless that was how the butterflies got out. He laughed and said that they made engines for big things like trains and ships.
The IHOP was in the middle of a parking lot and surrounded by hotels, and it was obvious to me that whoever had designed this area had only thought of cars and not about how ugly it all was. Even the grass around some of the parking lots didn't look too healthy. I guess a lot of human shopping areas are like that. Even the Farmer's Market is on concrete, not a proper grassy square.
Maybe cars don't like grass very much.
When I looked at the menu, I was kind of tempted by their waffles, but then I decided that I'd come for pancakes, so that was what I'd have. And they had a lot of different kinds. I didn't know what a Rooty-Tooty was, so I finally chose the harvest grain and nut pancakes, and Aric ordered the bacon temptation omelet.
While we waited for our food, I asked him how he liked Lafayette, and he said that he'd made a new friend who had a special kind of truck that climbed on rocks, and that there was a big park near Attica for that, called The Badlands.
Then he told me that he wished I'd been there to help him put in the clutch, and I said that I wished I had too, because it sounded like it was fun, and he said it wasn't as fun as I thought.
I wanted to know if he'd gone to The Badlands, and he said that he had and it had been fun but really stupid because Winston wasn't meant to go off-road like that and that was why he'd had to put a new clutch in it. And he said that in retrospect, he was lucky that was the only thing that he'd broken, but he'd had to be winched out of a mudhole before he got too far in, and that was also what had broken the clutch.
He said that he liked Kalamazoo better than Lafayette and couldn't wait to get back in the fall. But he told me that the theatre was pretty nice and that they had some newer equipment than Kalamazoo College did, and so it was good practice for him to work there, and it also was still close to Michigan and not a really big city, 'cause he didn't like really big cities.
I told him about my train ride here and how I'd flown around the Willis Tower, and then our breakfast came and I shared a pancake with him and he let me have a little piece of his omelet.
While we ate, I told him about my neighbors, Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity, and how we'd been hunting for Pokemons around the neighborhood. And I told him about all the storms I'd been in, and he said that he wished that I had a video of that. So then I thought that maybe I could get a camera like the one Gates had, and wear that. I'm sure that Mister Salvatore would know where to get one, and I could figure out some way to attach it to me. I suppose I could use a helmet, but I didn't really like wearing them. Maybe I could wear it on a yoke or something like that.
We went back to his house after breakfast so that I could meet all of his new housemates. He said that by now they ought to be awake, although he couldn't promise it for sure.
Luckily, everyone was awake when we got back, and he introduced me to Felicity and Richard and Chris and Autumn and we spent more of the afternoon than I had thought we would just sitting around and talking about stuff. So I guess that I wasn't going to get to tour Lafayette after all.
But that was okay. All of his housemates were really interested into talking to me, and they had all sorts of questions about Equestria, and Richard said that he'd seen a unicorn in Orange is the New Black, and I said that I knew her and we were friends and I'd been on a train trip with her to Washington and California and Colorado and everywhere in between, and Richard said that I should have gotten her autograph.
Everyone just sort of had snack food for dinner, and when it got close to time to go to the theatre, Aric went and changed into his blacks, which was just all black clothes. Theatre people wear them so they can't be seen.
We got in Winston and drove to the theatre, which was right near the train station. The road had a section of tracks running down the center, and I asked why they were there, and Aric told me that he'd wondered the same thing and it was because back in the olden days, it had been a big deal to cities to have the railroad go to them, and that there were small towns which had failed because the train went somewhere else. Lafayette had wanted to be important, so the mayor had said that the railroad could put the tracks wherever they wanted, and the railroad had decided right down the middle of the street was a good place for them.
He said that they'd been in use until the nineties, when they'd moved the tracks to the river.
We went in the back, and it took a little while to get up to the light booth, 'cause everyone we saw wanted to meet me and he said that we were lucky that most of the actors and actresses were already in the dressing rooms getting ready for the show, because otherwise I would have been mobbed with kids.
Aric got me a chair so that I could sit and have a good view of the show, and he said that the sound in the theatre wasn't all that good, so I might have a hard time hearing some of the dialogue from where I was. He said that he'd been told that it was better before they remodeled the light booth and put in glass windows, and that they hadn't thought to make the windows so that they could open.
Then he said that he had to get ready, and he kissed me and then sat down in his chair and put on a headset and announced that he was going to run a light test.
Pretty soon, he was turning on and off all the different lights, and midway through he stopped and wrote something down and I knew that there had been a problem. Sure enough, when he'd finished he got out of his chair and went over to a long blue cabinet and turned a switch on and off, then went back to the light board and tried again.
He said that one of the Fresnels was out and he was going to go fix it if he could and said I might as well come along, but I had to promise not to fall off the catwalks, and I said that I wouldn't.
Their light shop was through a door and behind the light booth, and he opened up a gray cabinet and got out a little box that had a new bulb in it, and then he climbed up a ladder and opened a hatch in the roof. I flew up after him, and he helped pull me through, 'cause the opening wasn't wide enough for my wingspan.
I was glad that I was shorter and had four legs, 'cause Aric had to crouch to get past beams and pipes, but I could mostly just step under them.
When we got out to the light that was bad, Aric unplugged it from its socket, and then reached down and pulled a metal frame off the front that had a colored gel in it. He said that might fall out when he opened the front, and he didn't want to have to go down and get it back.
Then he lifted a latch, and the lens of the Fresnel swung open and he had to lie down on his belly and reach around to get the light bulb out. He set that out of the way and then put the new one in—it had a little plastic cover because you weren't supposed to touch the glass with your hands—and then plugged it back in and it came on.
He said that he'd left the circuit live, so that he'd know if it was fixed before he got back to the light booth.
Then he closed the lens and put the gel back in, and we went back to the light booth.
We had a while to wait before the show started: he tested the spotlight, and then told the stage manager that he was done with the light check.
I kinda thought that maybe we should talk about our relationship, but I didn't want to distract him from his job so I decided that I'd wait until later. And I could see that he was sort of tense, too, and maybe for the same reason or maybe he was just a little nervous about getting everything right.
He said that he should have brought playing cards or something, and I told him that I missed Durak and that was one thing that I was looking forward to doing again when school started again.
We had to be quiet when the auditorium opened and people started to come in, and I could see him beginning to focus on the show. He went back to his light board and checked his notebook one more time, and he told me that he couldn't believe that the spotlight operator was so late but he could run it if he had to.
It was maybe ten minutes before the show was supposed to start when his spotlight operator, who was named James, finally arrived, and apologized for being late, and Aric said that it was okay, at least he was here now. And then he introduced me and said that I was a friend from back in college.
James said that guests weren't supposed to be up in the light booth, and Aric said that it was okay in my case because I was into theatre and I even knew the unicorn who was on Orange is the New Black, and then James asked me if that was true. Well, it was at least half-true (and I didn't want to get in trouble), so I nodded and I said that I was going to see her in Stratford soon, 'cause she was also Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
After that he smiled and said that it was good to meet me and he hoped that I enjoyed the show, then he put on his headset and the two of them got ready.
Aric had been right; it was hard to hear much of the dialogue especially since some of the kids were kind of quiet, but when they sang, it came through the glass pretty clearly. And I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but it was kind of a story about traditions and the Tevye wanting to marry his daughter to someone that she didn't actually want to marry, because she loved someone else. And Tevye finally says it's okay, and she marries the man she loves.
I snuck a look at Aric every now and then, because it was interesting to see how serious he was when he was working the controls. I could tell that he'd practiced it a lot, because he was always looking intently at the stage and sometimes I'd see him move his hands towards the controls even before he radioed to the stage manager that he was standing by, which meant that he knew where his light cues were supposed to be even before he was told.
James was the same way—he sat on a stool when he wasn't needed, and Aric only had to tell him once that there was a cue coming, and even then I think that James was about to get up and back to position.
When the show was over, we had to wait until everyone was out of the auditorium before he could turn off the light board and leave. He said that was the other bad thing about the way it was set up. He said that some theatres had the house lights controlled on stage, so that the stage manager could turn them on and off, but that here he had to stay and do it all himself.
So I could see why he'd come home late last night.
He said that if we wanted to, we could go to the Lafayette Brewing Company and hang out, 'cause after the show that was where the actors and techies went to hang out. Then he said that it wouldn't be as crowded as he'd heard it usually was, since all the actors had been kids, and they weren't allowed at the bar.
So we went and we each had a couple of beers and talked with the other theatre people. He introduced me to the stage manager, who was called Sheila, and I didn't tell her that I'd watched the show from the light booth. I didn't see James there—Sheila said he had been but he'd left a little while ago. And Felicity was there, too, and she came over and sat with us and shared a couple of her fried pickles with me.
I kinda wanted dinner, but they were closing soon and wouldn't make any for us. Aric said it was because Indiana had dumb laws about alcohol, and that we could stop somewhere else for a snack.
I didn't want anything too fancy, and I said that we might as well just get something at home, and he said we could do that, too.
Back at his house, he had some Triscuits, and I had a couple of them and some carrots, and we each had one more beer and then we went to bed. When he got undressed he said that he was sorry that he hadn't been as much fun in the morning, but he'd make it up to me now, and he did.
7592151
It's also slang for what's basically foreplay in my area of the world.
My cousin used to work there. It's a pretty sweet place to get a tour, though the Cat bulldozer factory in Peoria is better.
The play sounds like it could be Fiddler on the Roof
As for working on the car, Aric is right. It's not as much fun as you'd think. To clean off car skunge
1 Ordinary hand soap is more or less useless
2 If you don't have mechanic's soap, dish soap is probably your best bet. Shampoo is better than nothing -but not a LOT better.
3 A lot will come off on the towel. Use a paper towel or your girlfriend will spend the rest of your relationship explaining why you should have.
7592345
Interesting.
One bit of unique Michigan slang is saying that someone has a date with Miss Michigan.
7592399
I thought it was funny when you'd occasionally see puffs of diesel smoke up through those chimneys, which I assume was when they were test-running and engine.
7592473
It is. I guess I forgot to actually say that in the chapter.
Dawn is about the best that I've found. Or of course any of the mechanic's soaps. If you're doing it as a job, the pumice stuff gets old fast; it works, but leaves your hands raw after a while.
This is why all the towels in my house are dark colors.
7592474
Also amusingly, you somehow managed to quadruple post.
7592400 Yes. Dallas Cowboys suck.
I did a little research bthe closest Waffle House is only a mere 70 miles away. Austin Texas traffic really sucks.
I hate the -ING internet. To be fair, the internet had a bad attitude to me 1st. It kept sending me error messages so I kept resending, not realizing it had already posted.
The thing I hate the most is that it keeps showing me that I'm a slack twisted idiot lacking the basic life skills of a 5 year old. Enlightenment is good, but I could have lived my whole life and died happy without that one.
Could you please delete the extras? I'd try, but with my luck I'd delete your whole story and possibly take down the website.
7592548
Mission accomplished!
7592548 In other news today, the entire internet on the East Coast went down for over an hour when a pony site had some unexpected reactions to the deletion of several comments....
Tradition! (the most famous scene out of Fiddler on the Roof, or maybe second)
7592400
if you let magic behave like electricity and add runes you can re-create pretty much all of our technology, although with a much larger emphasis on analog tech (but that may just be me, analog is fascinating).
I was more making an argument about magic not being on the electromagnetic spectrum. I don't think you can get really far with this and I was using speed of light as an example of a limitation. Other models such as quantum phenomenon and admitting that they have a different understanding (ie greater) gets you a lot further. Using speed of light as an example, quantum entanglement creates paradoxes with faster than light communication which could be used to argue faster than light communication and saying that they have a greater understanding of physics also solves the problem (i.e. we only believe that you can't go faster than light and they know that this isn't true)
I haven't and I'm not quite entirely sure what it is. I assume it's a story of yours, but my internet isn't being cooperative.
Please introduce a Pokemon fan who will correct Silver Glow's plural form of Pokemon from Pokemons to Pokemon
7592672 Porkymans.
I keep wondering if they ever did a special of Fiddler On the Roof where theres a pipe organ at a wedding, and Topol goes to the organist who is playing far too quietly, Press the pedal or you will kill us all. And the organist responds with a few bars of the Queen track from Topols Other movie.
7592437
That thing reminds me of Good Omens.
7592493
If it had a cassette drive, it wasn't a Model II. The Model II
trs-80.com/images/computer-model2x300.gif
was aimed solely at the business "workstation" market, and had almost nothing in common with the Model I ; the M-II had a single 8" floppy drive built-in, a detachable keyboard, and no cassette port, not even as an option.
Yours was probably the Model III:
trs-80.com/images/computer-model3x300.gif
which was an updated version of the original Model I. (Mostly, it just combined the computer, expansion interface, and two floppy drives into a single case, rather than having them as separate devices connected by ribbon cables, although it did speed up the cassette data rate to 1500 bits-per-second (!) and increased the floppy-disk capacity to a whopping 178K. ) Or, if it had a white case instead of silver, it was the Model IV, which was the last of that particular line.
Believe it or not, I still have that old Model I. (And my old VIC-20, and my old Commodore-64, and...)
..are you sure about that? MS-DOS 3.0 came out in 1984, and the Compaq Portable III (your "lunchbox" machine) came out in 1987; it seems odd that they'd be shipping MS-DOS 2 with it... (Especially since they would have needed 3.x to support the 40Mb hard drive in the "deluxe" model anyway...)
It definitely depends on the local market, I think. Most of the Pizza Huts here in Austin are of the delivery-only (or delivery/carryout-only) type; I only know of a couple that are actual sit-down places.
I expect the issue of whether or not they serve beer at particular locations is dictated by the local market conditions, too -- and very likely has a lot to do with the state liquor laws, and whether or not the local franchise owner thinks it's worth dealing with the hassle of getting the right licenses for it. (Actually, I don't know if the sit-down location nearest to me serves beer or not, since (a) I never go there, and (b) I don't like beer anyway. )
7592542
You're in Austin? Geez, if you want beer with your pizza, there are far better places to go here in Austin than Pizza Hut... There's Conan's, Double Dave's, Mellow Mushroom...
(And there's a Waffle House on Ben White Blvd., down by 183 and 71; that's hardly "70 miles" from Austin... )
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
Ok, Earth definitely needs large industrial butterfly factories that spew out colourful swarms instead of smoke.
New Conversation Topic: Go!
I got the new Allo app for my Android phone yesterday. During the setup process it introduced me to it's AI assistant, and one of the cute little features is to set up a daily subscription to poetry.
Before reading this fic, I'd have blown right past the feature, instead I signed up for it, and the first thing it sent me was a poem by Emily Dickenson.
This, my friends, is the power of Tangential Learning in action! My life is now more enriched and full thanks to a silly little story about a silly little show on a silly little website.
7592172
The one on the right I assume?
7591105
Earnestly knocks on door...
"Ah, good morning Sir, may I ask if you've considered letting the East Horse into you life?"
7593266
As long as they're not the pretty white ones that lay eggs on my broccoli and kale plants!
By the way; if I haven't mentioned this before, kudos to the Admiral* for the in-depth knowledge these stories reveal.
*What every Sailor Biscuit wants to be.
7592493
Well, the definition of "telegram" is "a transmission of written messages by signal, wire or broadcast" so she is technically correct (which is the best kind of correct) by calling them that, it doesn't really matter that she doesn't use the common vernacular term of "text/texting".
Meanwhile "skyscraper" is proper terminology for tall buildings. She even said "I think they are called" back when "skyscratcher" was first used.
I don't think she'd be too embarrassed about being corrected though.
Not entierly wrong, some car really don't.
But really, it's mainly the opposite: grass don't like car and it don't take long to transform a grass patch into a slippery mud patch.
still no relationship talks ?!
i wonder how they end
Whew! Relationship talk: Averted. Clever little pony.
7592656
It's the second part of the CSI/OPP series, which starts with Celestia Sleeps In (in which Celestia accidentally makes first contact), continues in Onto the Pony Planet (which has 28 chapters so far), and has a collection of side stories in Pony Planet: Side Stories. There's some more, but these are the core stories.
Wearing a GoPro in the middle of a thunderstorm... Yeah, that's sounds pretty darn dangerous. If nothing else, I'm worried about what it'd do to Silver's aerodynamics.
In any case, it's nice to see Aric again, and quite nice to see him in his element. This looks like it's going to be a fun visit.
Ah I am curious as to how that relationship talk will go...
I think its funny how Silver says "Pokemons"
7593258 Nope. San Antonio
This is actually where modern ninja outfits come from. Actors playing them would wear black and blend in with Stagehands.
7593451
Sailor Biscuits... now with super magical girl transformation sequences!
Does that mean Admiral Biscuits would upgrade to super saiyan screamy ones?
7592542
At least they're not the Lions.
7592638
I'm enough of a Luddite that two of my IT friends won't go computer shopping with me at all, and they say that I have problems that they've never heard of. One of my Windows laptops somehow doesn't have Solitare or Minesweeper, and this one every now and then forgets what the monitor's resolution is.
7592656
Which I do, sometimes (to explain a couple of things that are firmly ensconced in canon but are otherwise a little bit too far advanced for the time period I like to set my stories in)
Maybe it has both kinds of properties--sometimes it behaves like electricity and sometimes it doesn't. Like photons sometimes acting like a wave and sometimes like a particle. And maybe that would be a good reason why humans (in this 'verse) have trouble understanding it.
7592672
Never.
7592772
Somehow that reminds me of a movie I've never seen.
7592829
Now I'm just picturing the Speed: the Wedding, where if the organist stops playing for ten seconds the church explodes.
7593000
If you stay on it for too long, all your music becomes Best of Queen.
7593234
Must have been a Model I, then. Because it had external floppy drives, and a separate monitor (which was a Zenith TV with no channel dials).
About 95% sure. I'd have to boot it up to know for sure, and I have to find the boot disk before I can--the BIOS battery doesn't work very well any more, so if it's left unplugged for more than a week or so, it forgets it has an operating system.
7593259
7593266
i.huffpost.com/gen/2098538/thumbs/o-MONARCH-BUTTERFLIES-MEXICO-570.jpg?1
I agree. I wonder if it would be possible to build such a thing?
7593268
That's totally awesome!
7593381
Good guess, but no--diagonally across the intersection.
Turns out that you can't see the front of the correct house from Street View, because of the trees.
So sometime when I have a week or so of free time, then.
7593451
Thanks! Lafayette was pretty easy, since I used to live there.
7593654
I really need to get in the habit of calling them telephone telegrams. I've managed to train myself to answer the telephone "Ahoy, ahoy."
She wouldn't be embarrassed about being corrected, but darn it, it's just too cute to correct.
7593751
Get enough earth ponies on the project, and you'll have grass that will stand up to cars driving on it.
7593823
7594399
SG: I think we should talk about our relationship
Aric: I think we should have sex.
SG: That sounds more fun.
7594801
Given that ponies already have atrocious aerodynamics, it can't make it much worse.
Lafayette's a nice place to visit. I wasn't much of a fan of living there.
7594895
Aric's a cool dude.
Gotta catch 'em all!
7599324
I did know that.
So it's reasonable to say that theatre techies are the original ninjas.
7608470
I dunno, but if I ever do transform into a magical girl, I'll be sure to let you know.