Snowstorm!
January 21
The first thing I did when I got up was press my muzzle against our window so that I could look at the fresh blanket of snow.
Sadly, there was no fresh blanket of snow. The ground was as barren and snow-free as it had been yesterday. That was really disappointing; our climate professor had promised that there would be, and there wasn't. So the human weatherpeople had gotten it wrong.
I started my morning trotting routine with a little less enthusiasm than before. I'd so been looking forward to new snow, and there wasn't any. Dumb unpredictable human weather.
Still, it wanted to snow. The clouds overhead were gravid with it, and I guess it's not the humans' fault that they can't make it fall when they want it to. We'd have been reprimanded for not starting a snowfall on bare ground before sunup, so even if there wasn't a fresh blanket on the ground you could see it coming down.
It's hard to see your duties going unfilled, and I wasn't even halfway done with my route before I felt the need to get up there. There wasn't much that only one pegasus could do to get a storm of this magnitude going, and maybe here on Earth, I couldn't do anything at all, but I could look. I knew that the clouds would be low enough for me to fly up to them, although I wasn't supposed to fly around inside them, because an airplane might also be in there.
I almost galloped back to the dorm room and hastily put on my flying outfit. I used the radio to ask the airplane for clearance while I was still on my way back out of the dorm, and they grudgingly gave it to me. The man who I was talking on the radio doesn't seem all that friendly. Maybe he's not a morning person either.
There are a few early-risers on campus, and I saw two of them pointing up at me as I angled into the sky.
As eager as I was, I took the proper precautions around the cloud. I didn't fly right in; I looked all around me to make certain that there weren't any airplanes sneaking up, and I listened for any airplane noises. The one I'd flown in before had been really loud, and the one I'd seen at the airport when I got my pilot's license wasn't as loud but it was buzzy like a bee, so I was sure I would hear them if they were close.
Then I zipped up a few dozen more feet, and I was in it.
There's no way to properly describe the joy of being in a cloud, of being a small part of the weather. It's surely the same feeling an earth pony gets feeling the good soil under her hooves, or a unicorn feels channeling a spell through her horn. It's a feeling of joy and wonder and power all wrapped up in one. It's the feeling of the air currents caressing your coat and the delicate dewdrops collecting on your feathers, of the strange shifting of sound in the moisture-laden air.
I was one with the cloud. I knew the cloud, and it knew me. Already the snow was forming in it, just as the weatherpeople had promised.
I dove back out of the cloud, and once I was in clear air I let myself drift down as if I were a snowflake.
By the time I was out of the shower and on my way to poetry class, the snow had begun. The old snowpiles, dirty and melted, had a thin fresh layer on them, but everywhere else, the sparse snow was melting as soon as it touched the ground.
That would change quickly, I knew.
I was a bit distracted during poetry class; I kept turning my head to see the snow falling by the window. It was getting progressively thicker and heavier. I imagined so much of it falling that it would cover the window, but that was impossible; poetry class was on the second floor.
Professor Hillberry was prepared for the weather. He read aloud The Snow, which I liked very much—Emily Dickinson understood watching a snowfall. I imagine that she sat at her desk, which was probably very much like mine, and watched the snowfall through her window, blanketing the slumbering land.
I don't think she would like playing in it, though. Not as much as pegasuses did. But maybe she would. Maybe she'd want to soar in the clouds and feel the fresh flakes as they were born inside the cloud.
By the time class was out, it was already fetlock deep. People put on hats or put up the hoods on their jackets and leaned into the snow, but not me. I soared gleefully into the air and darted around in the snowflakes, then skimmed back down to earth, trailing my hooves through the fresh powder.
Then I landed on the flat half of the front lawn and rolled in the snow, letting it dust my coat. Once I was well-covered, I stood back up and shook some of it out of my mane, flicked a little bit from my tail, and nodded politely to the student who was pointing his portable telephone in my direction. He was probably so amazed at seeing somepony actually play in the snow that he forgot how to use it. He was pushing at the screen when I turned away to go to the dining hall.
I shook myself the rest of the way off before I went in. It's not polite to be dripping all over when you're inside.
I kind of rushed through lunch, because I wanted to get back outside again. Rather than spend a lot of time choosing what to eat, I just had a salad and some dark bread.
As the afternoon went by, the snow got deeper, and my classmates began playing in the snow. Some of them rode sleds and saucers down the hill, to the detriment of people attempting to cross between Olds-Upton and the dining hall, while others packed up handfuls of snow and threw them at each other.
I tried my luck with a sled, which was a lot of fun. I was told that I was supposed to sit down on it, but it was easier to be on all four hooves and use my wings for balance—plus, that made it easier to soar free when the sled went off-course.
Peggy joined us, along with Sean and Christine and Aric and Brianna and Keith and a few other people I don't know all that well (like James and Elisabeth). They all came and went as the day went on, because they had to go to classes, but I didn't because I don't have any classes in the afternoon.
After dinner (with lots of hot chocolate), we went back outside and played some more. The snow was still coming down, although not as heavy as it had been before. I sledded some more, and then Peggy made a snowman while I made a snowpony.
We were super-soggy by the time we got back to the dorm. Her boots were too short, so when she went through deep snow, it fell over her boottops. I was soaked to my skin, but it had been totally worth it.
She started getting out of her wet clothes as soon as she went into the room. I, of course, didn't have to do that at all, and I'd shaken most of the loose snow off myself while I was still outside, and she thought that was sort of unfair because she had wet socks and cold feet.
I took the first shower, since she was still taking off her clothes (although I offered to wait). Then I read a chapter of The Last Unicorn while she had her turn in the shower. It would have been nice to share but we were told that humans don't like that, so I hadn't asked her. Maybe I would one day, and maybe they just didn't share because they'd never thought of it.
Before I went to bed, I took one last look outside. The snow was still coming down.
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If you wanted to see snow, Silver Glow, you should have attended Michigan Tech.
Now I'm hoping that someone will show Silver Glow the pictures this fellow was taking.
I know a lot of people who complain about snow and living in a snowy country, but I have to agree with Silver Glow here: snowstrom are awesome!
7040520
Huskies represent!
7040555
Those stupid Geico commercials.
7040568 yeah I have a friend who's birthday I will never forget. April 15. What a day
Missing an it. I have added one for clarity.
7040568 At least now it's super easy. Computerized _everything._
7040520
Kalamazoo got some good snowfalls. Lake Effect FTW. But we had nothing on you guys. I heard that Michigan Tech has tunnels so that you can get to your classes in the wintertime, and exit doors on the second floor of all the buildings for when the snow gets deep.
7040548
Actually, he was taking a video, and she will be seeing it.
7040552
I love a good snowstorm. Cleaning up after it, less so.
7040672
Oops; correction made. Thanks!
7040716
I've always thought that one of the reasons I'm pretty good at Googling stuff is because I used to have to do it the hard way, with a paper card catalog. I got really good at figuring out creative ways to find what I was actually looking for.
That and finding stuff on microfilm. Ugh. I don't miss those days.
7040797 Don't talk to me about microfilm/fiche.
7040789 Not me. I went to college somewhere warmer. But somehow I know three people who attended the school.
Since I'm from Illinois but now live in Texas, this chapter kind of makes me miss snow.
...Just a little.
Now that was adorable :)
7040751 Yeah, I used "racism" as more of a short hand.
This makes sense to me--it was my original understanding, to a degree. It was the "Unicorns are greedy" dig that made me pause, it seemed a little more heated than the other jabs did. The problem of text on a page can struggle to convey tone of voice that softens the blow of that breed of humor.
That video will make Equestria / Earth relations get even better when the Earth goes Daaww
Liked the pegasus culture with their love of weather.
We see the resistance to cold and how easy it is for pegasi to shed water. Yea
Still think that pegasi should be treated like a helicopter with no floor height requirement. IE just the restricted space requirements, no flight plans unless going over 10k ft and or long distance, and no getting on the radio for permission unless you are close enough to an airport to possibly interfere with them. It looks like the university might be close enough to the air port for the last reason but duno. The FAA has a habit of whipping out the banhammer and then waiting 10-20 years to loosen the rules to just is whats needed. Anyways this has been debated enough.
7040789
No, the tunnels are regular steam tunnels closed to the public, like at most schools. No second floor doors, either. There are some older houses in the UP that have such things, but no public buildings. MTU does have a lot of heavy equipment (front-end loaders and dump trucks) for handling snow removal, though.
7040789
I guess we've just seen the birth of a new internet meme about the abominable snow pony, she'll hit the big time for all of 5 minutes before some cat doing something cute comes alone.
Silvers apparent tribalism against unicorn's is interesting. I wonder if human racism will come up at some point and if she'll be called out on her own bigotry. She might find is impossible to understand why you'd treat someone differently based on their coat colour but that there are significant differences between the tribes, it not like unicorns can fly or she can do magic.
Science tid bit.
Silver acted as a catalyst for the ice nucleus to form around her wings. Once the ice started to form the supercooled water (liquid water that's below freezing) instantly froze and turned to ice crystals and began forming snow.
I love this image of Silver looking over her shoulder in case there were any aeroplanes following her that she'd just somehow not noticed.
I wonder will people blame the pegasus for the snowstorm if it's a particularly bad one (especially when there's video of her enjoying the snow!). Most people don't really get how weather works, and even if the meteorologists had a pretty good idea how much snow they were going to get anyway, pictures of a pegasus flying into the cloud right before the snowstorm might easily rile up any suspicions about "magic" that are already there...
7040623
If I were in her situation I would be a bit curious.
And now I still await to see if she CAN bring clouds down or not. Because this chapter did not still show if her weather manipulation worked on Earth. For all we know, she just FELT it will start snow soon or such and it just did, instead of her magic causing it
That went well. I'm sure the climate science class will be very interested to hear about Silver's firsthoof experience. A shame we didn't get confirmation on tangibility, but we do know that she can hit cloud altitude on Earth. I wasn't sure about that.
Definitely looking forward to Silver's reaction to the video as well. That will probably raise all kinds of questions on her part.
I wonder if they will cancel classes. My senior year we got a whole bunch of time off from school due to snow. I used it to write my thesis.
My city is somewhat notorious for shutting down whenever it snows.
7040731
A calm, congenial, friendly discussion about politics? Sure.
An argument about politics, generating giant walls of text full of hatred and insults? Absolutely not. If it must happen (it shouldn't), it belongs in a private space where it won't suck people in and devolve the entire comments section into a flame war.
7041718 Nah, midwestern colleges don't cancel classes for anything. I remember having ice on my eyelashes.
7041804
I'm glad I went to school on the East Coast.
7040857 It's just not Christmas without snow.
7041931
That's partly why I go back up north for Christmas.
7041804
7041889
Also true. Trudging through knee-deep snow was more common than one might expect back in IL. But here in Houston, we once got half an inch of the stuff... schools and businesses, including the university where I work, just shut down.
They aren't equipped to handle it down here. No snow plows; no salt trucks; nothing!
7040789 Considering you are living near the great lakes and thus gat wetter and heavier snow, it is perfectly understandable.
And yeah, shovelling snow is tiresome.
7040623
Does doing it for showmanship count?
7041953 Oh how I wish I could. My job has blackout dates on all major holidays.
My copy of "The Last Unicorn" is autographed by Peter S. Beagle.
We had a chat at the last Anthrocon I was able to attend.
7040731 If trickle-down economics has been so bad, then please provide me some examples throughout not just recent times, but other times in history, and back it up with some evidence. And what kind of economic system would take its place if you were to somehow get rid of it?
Also, how would you know my lifespan thus far? How do you know that I'm young? How do you know anything about the presumed human on this side of the conversation? I'm interested in that.
7043257
The fallacy of trickle down economy is the assumption the rich will expend the extra money in:
"for what? it works just fine (for the company) right now". 
; when the rich ones make an investment, it's in order to gain even more money, not for repairing roads or giving your children a better education.
- Creating more Jobs, when it's the Market demand what actually makes necessary those jobs ; kinda difficult when the middle class has even less money to spend).
- Increasing wages
- Building infraestructures. Yeah right
7040857
It gets tiresome after a while, but there's nothing quite like it. I love driving in the snow, although this year I didn't have any cars set up for it, since my Grand Marquis is dead.
7040866
7041108
That's more or less what she's got--no minimums over K'zoo (isn't it supposed to be 500' or 1000' minimum altitude over a city, in general?). She may or may not be inside K'zoo airport's control space--the college is 5.4 miles by road, presumably a bit less as the crow flies.
She doesn't have to ask for permission if she stays below 500' in unrestricted airspace (since there shouldn't be any airplanes down there); the reason they want her to radio for clearance all other times is more for the protection of other pilots, who aren't likely to be on the lookout for a pegasus flying around.
I actually think that this is a topic which ought to be explored in more depth in a PoE story, with someone who's more familiar with the rules and regulations.
7041158
That's what we had at K, as well. Of course, 'closed to the public' was a relative thing; one prybar and you were into the steam tunnels. A couple of the other utility tunnels were harder to get into, but we managed.
7041411
Ponies are basically cats, so I'd say she'll have more than five minutes of internet fame.
That's the big difference. Most human discrimination (racism, sexism, religionism [is there actually a word for this besides 'religious discrimination?], etc.) isn't based on actual differences between two groups of people. In the pony world, it's different, as you noted; only pegasi can fly, only unicorns can use casting magic (probably), and only earth ponies can do whatever it is they do. So if anything, she'd be confused by the human concept of racism . . . but she might also tone down some of her tribalism, too.
7041541
Hey, they can be sneaky, as far as she knows.
Possibly, especially once it's more generally known that pegasi can control the weather (it's one thing for her to tell her climate science professor she can, but he's not really going to believe her until she actually brings a cloud in). I've noticed, though, that as long as the weather stays what you're used to, you don't really think that there's something wrong with it, unless you're super paranoid. When I lived in Kalamazoo, lake-effect snowstorms of 6" to a foot were very common; now that I'm more on the southeast side of the state, we don't get as much, and people think that four inches is a lot all at once.
7041639
She didn't actually start the storm, although she probably could have exerted enough effort on that one cloud to get it to start right away.
7041668
Depends on the altitude of the clouds. She's legally limited to an altitude of 10k feet (about 3k meters), so unless she cheats she can't get up to the higher clouds anyway.
I don't know if there's any fanon of how high a pegasus can fly. IRL, though, there are birds which can hit 30,000 feet. Rüppell's vultures are probably the champions; they fly up to 37.000 feet. If Silver Glow can hit that kind of altitude, there are lots of clouds she could bring down.
7041718
K College famously never did. The majority of the students lived on campus, and the sum total of the campus was about ten city blocks, maybe less. For the city in general, you needed more than a foot of snow in one storm before they started to run into problems.
7041931
Last two years we haven't had any. It's kind of depressing.
Christmas 2014, my brother and his wife were visiting from San Diego, and lots of the locals were going on about how Michigan wasn't usually this warm in the winter and how she'd have to expect most winters to be snowy and cold. Then she'd calmly mention she'd grown up in Edmonton, AB, and that would end the conversation.
7042008
I'd have to say yes. And then I'd grudgingly have to raise my hand and be counted; I took the ACT a second time in hopes of getting the high score in my school (I didn't; I had to settle for second-highest [but I got a better score than our salutatorian]).
7042711
I have that with my part-time job as well. Usually, I can get Christmas off, but this year I could not. Had to settle on celebrating it mid-January.
The only thing I remember of winter time when I was in college, was walking 10 blocks from my parked car to the university, in 0 degree Chicago winter, with the biting icy wind against me, and my eyelashes being frozen solid by the time I got indoors.
Sounds like Silver is having a much better time of it.
7055430 Sounds similar to my experience with Chicago-style winters when I was in the US Navy 'boot camp' (The Navy calls it Recruit Training) at Great Lakes Recruit Training Command just north of Chicago. This was back in 1995-1996, and it got so cold a couple of times the Navy was forced to bus us to the chow hall because temps had fallen to -20 degrees F and 30-40 mph winds. It reinforced my skewed sense of cold, right alongside Alaskan winters with temps of -60 degrees F but dead calm. Even today, if the local temps wherever I'm at don't start to match those standards then it's not really cold. 40-50 degrees F is just chilly, but unless the mud puddles are frozen then it's not cold.
One hopes he wasn't strategically positioned behind her mid-tail flick when he took the picture.
7045135 This year we didn't get much snow in Maine but last winter we got a huge amount, more than the northern part of the state normally gets, that and it was below zero for a month!
edits:
The first thing I did when I got up was press my --- was pressed
on bare ground before sunup --- the bare
over her boottops. I was soaked to --- boot tops
I took the first shower, since --- remove comma
Um... Silver Glow, is it really a good idea to meddle in the humans' weather? You might give their weather
poniespeople some trouble with their forecast.7277798 It Michigan. There wrong anyway.
7341111 7277798 Same here in this part of Oregon, one minute it's all sunshine and rainbows and in the next hour it's pouring so hard your back yard turns to a swamp.
7045102
That reminds me of the mantra: "If it's not nailed down, it's mine--If I can pry it loose, it's not "nailed down"!"
College kids and their crowbars!
7045124
I'll have to look again,
(edit--nevermind 
)
but I thought the conversation with the FAA folks in the earlier chapters limited her to just 1,000 feetThere are a couple of good stories by Grey Pegasus, 30kfeet & Stratosphere that touch upon this.
7055430
We Michiganders usually don't get the winter winds that you get in Chicago. Usually.
But I've had my hair freeze in the cold before.
7067227
It's funny what you get used to. I see on Ice Road Truckers they're running with their windows down in -20 weather sometimes, 'cause they're accustomed to it. When we were in Florida one Thanksgiving, all the locals were bundled up in parkas, and we were wearing t-shirts. We went to Hooters and asked to sit on the patio and the waitress looked at us like we were crazy.
7081366
You can assume that he got some of those pictures.
7108589
I don't mind lots of snow, but I hate it when it's cold and there's no snow.