September 18 [Cloverdale]
September 18
I snuggled up against Meghan when I woke up, and since it was a Sunday she didn't have her alarm set at all, so I waited until she was starting to wake up and then I kissed and nuzzled her the rest of the way awake, and I was going to get out of bed and go flying but then she started to rub my neck, and so I started teasing her with my wing, and she said that since we had the opportunity right now we'd better use it, and I agreed with her. I didn't have to go flying right away.
While we were cuddling in bed after, Meghan re-wrapped my knee, 'cause I'd gotten a bit too enthusiastic and the little metal clips had come off and then the whole bandage had gotten unwrapped and so I'd just pushed it aside and luckily neither of us had rolled on the metal teeth.
Meghan said that she could stay in bed with me all day, and I said that I could, too, but I wanted to go flying and she had homework that she had to do, so we finally got out of bed.
I kissed Meghan goodbye and she opened the door and let me out into the hall, and then I went upstairs to get my flight gear. My knee felt a lot better; I could put my weight on it and it only hurt a little bit. I thought I'd keep it wrapped for the rest of the day but tomorrow I probably wouldn't need it any more.
I had to be quiet when I was in our room 'cause Peggy was still sleeping, so I put on my radio and watch and flight vest and tossed the rest of the gear on my back, then I went back out and to the bathroom so I could fill up my camelback. And then I thought that I should have had a snack before I left, so after I'd gotten the rest of the way dressed I went back to our room and ate some hay. I thought that I ought to buy some oatmeal packets because with my electric kettle I could make that for breakfast, too, and that would be pretty good.
While I was walking down to Pebble Beach, I started to think about which direction I wanted to fly today, and I decided that I'd go northeast, 'cause that was the one direction that I'd never gone too far in. There was a big lake that was a good flight target, plus there was also a road that went that way.
I'd have to stay low for a while longer than I usually did, but that was okay. So I called the airplane directors and Dori gave me permission and asked if I could stay low until I got to the golf course on the M43 road, and I told her I would. I didn't know exactly where that was but golf courses were really easy to spot from the air, so I knew that I would find it.
So I took off from the boardwalk and after I cleared the railing, I didn't have to put any effort into gaining altitude at all because the hill fell away from me, and I went around the south end of Hoben and over the parking lot and railroad tracks, then turned a bit north to go over Main Street as it went through Kalamazoo and then I started to climb a little bit. And when I crossed over the Kalamazoo River I was about three hundred feet up and I thought I'd stay there until I saw the golf course and then I could decide how fast I wanted to climb.
Of course, flying lower means you don't see as much, so I didn't see it until I'd passed by the hospital, and then I felt kind of stupid for not remembering that it was almost across the road from Meijer. So it was okay to climb some, and I started to get more altitude, and I was at eight hundred feet when I passed over the golf course.
Pretty soon I saw Gull Lake, too, and I turned to cut the corner on the M43 road because it turned before it got to the lake.
It went straight north for a while and then made a couple of zig-zags as it went around the top of the lake before it kind of straightened out again. And I went past a big cluster of buildings that had circling roads around them, and I wasn't sure what that was supposed to be. I was a little too high up to read the signs that were in front of it, and I didn't feel like diving down to see.
All the clouds above me were breaking up and so I decided that I'd climb a bit higher and play with one before they all went away, and they were a little higher than I'd thought but I found a straggler that was lower than the rest.
It took me a few minutes of flying to catch up to it, and when I finally did it was in pretty sorry shape, so I went around it a couple of times and kind of condensed it down into a smaller, thicker cloud, and I pushed it down some and then sat on top and looked around at the ground slowly drifting by under me. I'd kind of kept an eye on where I was so that I wouldn't get lost, and I had my watch to lead me back to Kalamazoo if I did lose my position, but the cloud wasn't moving all that fast and I wasn't more than three or four miles off of the M43 road, and if I flew slightly northwest, I'd intersect it again.
I let the cloud carry me along for a sixth of an hour, then I jumped back off and headed north again. I couldn't quite see where the road was in front of me but I could make a pretty good guess where it probably was. There was a cluster of lakes and I thought that the road probably went between them, so I picked a spot on the northwestern shore of the lake and flew in that direction.
I looked back every now and then to see how my cloud was doing. I'd given it a little bit of new life by compacting it down and riding on it, but it was definitely thinning out, and unless I flew back and brought it some new water, it was going to fade out like all of its brothers had. But maybe it would be one of the last clouds in my part of the sky, and maybe someone on the ground would look up at it and wonder why it was the last one.
My guess about where the road was had been correct, and I followed it all the way to the next town which was Cloverdale, then turned back around. I couldn't see my cloud at all, which meant that either it had drifted out of my sight or it had finally evaporated completely.
When I was flying back I heard a couple of airplanes talking on the radio so I made sure to tell them where I was, and when I got to Gull Lake, instead of following the road, I went over the lake and made my turn there, and I started descending, too. And even though the wind was against me, I mostly glided down.
I called Dori just to let her know that I was back in her territory, and then I followed the road as it dipped down by the river, and when I got there I changed to following the railroad tracks instead.
I followed them through downtown and then when the tracks turned I kept going straight until I was over the cemetery, and I angled off to fly by Aric's house and see if he was home, but he wasn't. Only not-Winston was in the the driveway, so I circled back to campus and landed on the boardwalk again.
Peggy wasn't in our room, and when I went into the bathroom to take a shower she wasn't there, either. So I guess I wasn't going to get my knee wrapped back up again, because I didn't think that I could do it by myself.
I'd almost finished my shower when I heard the bathroom door open and then there was a knock on the stall door so I opened it to see who wanted to get in and it was Ruth and she kinda jumped back because she hadn't expected me to open the door, 'cause probably none of the other girls would have done it.
So I told her that I was almost done, and then I rinsed out my mane and tail and shook off and let her have her turn.
When I got to the dining hall they had brunch out and none of my good friends were at their tables, which was disappointing. So I sat at my usual table but in Christine's seat so that I could see if anyone I knew came in to eat. I thought that I'd probably missed everyone who wanted breakfast and was too early for anyone who wanted to eat lunch.
I'd almost finished up eating when Ruth came in, and she waved at me and I waved back and I hoped that when she got her food she'd come and sit with me but she didn't, and so I ate the rest of my scrambled eggs and then took my tray back and then went back outside.
It was kind of strange not having anything to do in the afternoon and not knowing where any of my friends were, and it felt a little bit lonely even though there were a few people out on the quad, and so I went back to my room to see if Peggy was there but she wasn’t.
So I picked up my Bible and I went back outside 'cause it was a nice day, and I found a tree with a nice, big crotch in it where I could sit comfortably and read. And I read Zephaniah, who had also gotten a message from God about how He was going to destroy Jerusalem because they had been bad, and then all of Jerusalem's enemies, and then He was going to take everyone who was good and give them back what they'd lost. I wondered since this must have taken place earlier if Zephaniah had told everyone what God had told him and if they'd listened.
And since Zephaniah was short, I read Haggai, too, and God told him to tell the people to rebuild His house because they hadn't done that yet, and God was mad at them and made their crops go bad. So Haggai told them and they all got together and started rebuilding His house. And then after a couple of months when they had rebuilt His house, He said that he would bless them from that day forth, and he would destroy their enemies.
I closed my Bible and flew back to our room, but Peggy still wasn't there. My portable telephone was blinking, though, so I checked and saw that Sean had sent me a telephone telegram saying that he was done with the math homework and that we could meet in his room if we wanted to go over it together.
So I put my math notebook and homework in my saddlebags and my portable telephone too and I flew down to Hoben and went to his room but when I knocked on the door a complete stranger answered it and she didn't know where Sean was or who he was, so I guess he had gotten a different room and I didn't know where it was. So I went up to the lounge and sat on one of the couches and sent him another telegram to find out where he lived now.
He told me he was in Harmon which was the next dorm over, and he said that he was in room 374, which was on the top floor right by the stairs, and he thought that he'd told me that he had a new room but he must have forgotten.
I went out and around to the front door of Harmon which I had never been in before, and then I found the stairs and flew up to the top and just like he said he was right next to them and had a pretty good view from his room.
I borrowed his roommate's chair and we put both of our homeworks on the desk and looked over them and we'd mostly gotten the same answers, which was good, but on the fourth problem we hadn't, and since we weren't sure who was right, we both re-did it and it turned out I'd made a dumb mistake, so I was glad that we'd decided to compare.
And then he decided that since neither of us had any other plans for the afternoon, we'd work together on coming up with a couple of problems in Equestrian notation that I could demonstrate how to solve with my weather wheel.
That turned into a bigger project than I'd expected, 'cause he wanted me to explain what I was doing and what all the symbols meant, but that was good practice 'cause I was sure that the professor would want to know, too. And so I filled a couple of sheets of paper with Equestrian calculus and showed him how the weather wheel worked, and we decided that we'd try to meet with the professor after class tomorrow to show him.
So by the time we were done it was getting close to dinnertime, and I could have stayed at his room but I thought that maybe Peggy was back now and she might be missing me, so I told him that I'd see him at dinner and flew back down the stairs and then up the quad to Trowbridge.
Peggy was in our room, and she said that she'd been at the library most of the afternoon, looking at pictures of art for her art appreciation class. She said that she'd taken the class because she thought it would be easy and because she liked art but she was having second thoughts now, since she thought the professor was a little bit weird. She told me that Rebekka had said she was good but Rebekka was a little bit weird, too, so maybe she should have taken that into account when she'd picked the class.
But she needed it to graduate, so she said she was going to have to tough it out and maybe by the end of class she'd find herself appreciating art more.
Dinner wasn't anything special, but it was nice to eat a meal with everyone again. I said that we needed a new friend to fill the empty spot at the table where Joe used to fit, and Christine said that people weren't like pets, where you could just get a new one after you flushed the old one down the toilet, and I had no idea what she was talking about, but Sean and Peggy thought it was funny.
Then Peggy said that freshmen were intimidated by seniors, especially this early in the year, but maybe we could try to lure some lost freshman to the table and I said that sounded kind of predatory, and Christine grinned and said that was the point. And then she asked if me and Sean had had fun with math, and I wish I'd had our problems with us, because I could have showed them what we'd done, but I'd left them in my room. Sean had a pen so he tried to recreate one of the problems on his napkin but he had trouble with the symbols and when I tried to write them out the pen tore through the napkin.
After we were done eating and talking, me and Peggy went back to our room, and since we'd both gotten done with all our homework, we left the door open in case anybody wanted to stop by, and at first nobody did, but then after a while Ruth came in and sat on the bed and asked us what color we thought she should make her hair next, and she had a really pretty maroon dye that both Peggy and me agreed would look really nice on her.
She said that everyone had picked that color, so she went off to the bathroom to put it in her hair.
Peggy and I talked for a while, until it got towards bedtime, and I'd forgotten about how Ruth was going to dye her hair and I saw the maroon streaks all over the bathroom sink and it looked like somebody had gotten in a bad fight in the bathroom. And I thought it was kind of rude to have left the sink looking like that, but when I scrubbed at it a little bit with my towel it wouldn't come off at all, so maybe she'd tried to clean it up and it wouldn't come off.
I thought that whoever cleaned our bathroom was going to be really mad about that.
So when I got back to our room I told Peggy about it and she went to look and she thought the same thing, and she said that maybe nail polish remover would take it off, so she got a bottle of it and went into the bathroom and then she came back into our room and said it had worked and she was going to go give it to Ruth so she could clean up her mess.
She was a little less angry when she came back, even though she still had the bottle with her, because she said that Ruth wasn't there because she'd walked to Walgreen's to buy her own bottle of nail polish remover, since she'd run out before she got the sink clean.
She stayed up after I went to bed, so that she could look at her Facebook, but she turned off the lights in the room so that I could sleep.
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That's a weird way to say "10 minutes." Any reason that she thinks of time that way? I can't recall her thinking of time like this in the past, although it is very possible I have missed something.
Idunno, if you think about it 1/6th hour is no weirder than 1/4 hour. It's just what you are used to.
This chapter reminded me of my life in my 20s except my roommates were always working on cars & leaving the parts everywhere.
Also, another fun fact about college dorms. You've got a LOT of kids who are away from mommy & daddy for the 1st time & using the chance to Raise Hell. You haven't lived until you've tried to exist in a dorm where someone has thrown up all over every toilet in the place & it won't get cleaned until Monday.
Are we having fun yet? Any more fun & I'll either cry or go postal.
7737364
Admiral Biscuit's ponies generally have a base-12 numeral system, so they probably use sixths fairly often.
Ah the pain of a suite mate that screws up the bathroom and is not present to clean up their mess...been there.
7737532
B 52 taking off. At 1:45 you can see as the wings begin to bow upward as they gain lift from the increase of speed.
B 52 flyover. Second pass with bomb bay doors open. The B 52 has a distinctive whining sound from its eight engines as it passes by. I heard them alot from my time in Minot AFB and Andersen AFB.
(warning: icky story about girl stuff below)
I share a bathroom with someone at college. The girl I share my bathroom with is the nicest yet dumbest person ever. She once got paint on the wall by trying to hang a drying halloween costume on one of the wall racks. She then decided that the best thing to do was to hang that costume on our second rack, thus covering two walls with red paint. I dunno how she didn't realize that putting the dress on the second rack would just put more paint on the walls. I honestly thought it was a bunch of period blood at first and freaked out. Though Silver wouldn't think maroon dye = period blood I'm bet some of the human girls might've thought that....
The WeatherWheel is a duodecimal circular slideruler.
Am I the only one who misread the chapter title as "Cloverfield" and thought Silver Glow was going to watch that movie? Now I'm curious what the pony perspective on it would be.
Looking through my music today and I realized this matched up pretty close to the story:
https://soundcloud.com/michael-kaeshammer/late-night-train
Pretty easy; Silver just needs to sit there
and look adorable. (Wait, that's redundant.)7737494
Isnt that the Back To The Future Experience?
As for chapter, Silvers pretty much covered all the points within a short distance f the college now trying to fill in the slots frther out?
Depends what maths homework is like, I really dislike it when they say, this is what we will use this year, and we will tell you how to do it next year. Isnt that the point of starting with simple foundations and building up, you get better long term results than throwing together prefrab resting on the ground? Turns out the solution to trig calculus is the exponential series and complex numbers.
I wonder if the Weather Wheel is a Circular Slide Rule? but can do vectors easily being Angular measurement by design? there should be a wind shear rotation with height and speed , or is that only on rotating planets?
Next time, Ruth should stick her head in a plastic bag, to keep the dye in?
Silver isn't being ambitious enough. Friends should be like the heas of an hydra: cut one and two more come forth to replace it...
7737513
they won't make you black out, but they can still simulate it with blacking or redding out parts of the screen and capping the turnrate of the jet at a realistic value or at certain G limits (like they do IRL)
7735840
That is an interesting question. It's usually acceptable to wear customs of celebrities and politicians, so someone going around dressed like a Princess would probably be weird but fine. On the other hand dressing up like your OC might come off as a bit rude. It's an interesting question... and it might get totally derailed of Sliver is the one who suggests one of her friends dress up like Celestia. I wonder if you could order a magical wig that does the blowing hair, that would be cool.
"How offensive is it for a human to wear a Celestia costume?" IRL Muslims are forbidden to dress as Mohamad (I remember a case where a foreign teacher got in trouble for calling a teddy bear Mohamad (trouble = several years in prison + calls for her execution for blasphemy)). The only clue is ICR anyone dressed as Celestia in either Nightmare Night episode. On the other hand, nobody gives Diamond Tiara grief for wearing a crown.
I'd say we're in Head Canon territory
It was mentioned last chapter, but I really do want someone to introduce Silver to Numberphile.
I keep imagining Dr. James Grime's reaction to Equestrian calculus.
7738815
Granted, probably not so literal--but it's still a logical conclusion.
Consider what's mentioned in Revelations: the disparity in the fates of those condemned vs those judged worthy. Those condemned get thrown into a volcanic pit.
But what does happen to those who succeed? At worst, they'd simply join the ranks of other angels. At best....?
Regardless, we can't forget, God isn't human. We'd be stupid to complain that He should adhere to "human norms" on childrearing. But even if that were a valid argument, being a parent doesn't mean we're supposed to coddle our children from cradle to adulthood. At some point, children have to develop maturity as we grow. It means we have to take responsibility for our own actions and start making wiser choices.
I don't mean to start a religious fight, although I'm a little afraid that this might start one...but Silver is approaching the bible without any of the cultural filters that most humans get, Christian or not, before they're exposed to it. With Silver reading the OT bit by bit, I'm struck by how many times God has threatened to flatten cities and smite people. I would imagine that especially for a pony, this would seem like the behavior of a bully. I know Silver's getting guidance from Liz on all of this, but still, I'm surprised she doesn't comment on it more.
Maybe she'll say something about it if she picks up on the contrast in tone between the old and new testaments.
Fortunately I never had at appreciation, but this is my overall response to some GEs.
Shouldn't this be "a little bit less angry"?
Oh man God is a diiiiick.
7740488
Yeah, that sounds like it would make more sense in context.
7739491 I'm impressed that she's reading it at all. She's still making a lot of silly (and humorous!) mistakes, but by the time she's done, she'll probably have a better understanding of the Bible than a few of my fellow Christians have. She'll certainly have a fair understanding of human behavior at least, which might make her something of an expert among her fellow Equestrians.
7737364
She's said that before; she's extrapolating from half hours and quarter hours. Plus she thinks in base-12, and the clock is in base-12 (sort of), so it's pretty logical to think that way to her.
7737413
In my house in college, it was a garage full of cars (with a few parts inside) and a basement full of computers, 'cause that's mostly what my roommate did. Somewhere, I've got a picture of my truck with all the sheet metal forward of the cab torn off and scattered across the lawn. Also a picture of the sketchiest engine hoist ever conceived, since it mostly involved rope and wood.
Amazingly, that never happened while I was in college (not every toilet, anyway). I do remember when one of my suitemates passed out while hugging the toilet; that was pretty funny.
7737451
Yeah, I think we all have. I mostly got lucky, though, and rarely had to deal with that.
Also, those B-52s are loud, smoky beasts!
7737712
One of the girls I lived with for a while after college had written inspirational quotes all over the walls of her room in gold paint. Luckily, I was subleasing, so I didn't have to worry about what the landlord was going to think about that.
This same girl one day, she's making her own candles at home by melting down old ones on the stove and pouring the wax into new containers. So far so good, right? Well, she's also adding popcorn kernels. So I said, 'won't they get hot and pop, sending hot wax everywhere?' And she says, 'I hope so.'
The moral, I think, is that girls are weird and crazy.
7737799
Yes, it is. A really fancy one, because not only does it have the math scales on it, but it also has helpful weather formulas.
7737870
You're probably not the only one who misread the chapter title. As for the movie, I haven't seen it so I can't say for sure, but from reading the Wikipedia page on it it doesn't sound like something she'd like all that much, but that would depend more on how the characters behave in the movie rather than the overall plot.
7737911
Pegasuses love sitting in tree-crotches.
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/9/9a/Rainbow_Dash_it_was_me_S1E14.png
7737962
That's how ponies get you. They look cute, and you don't find out about REDACTED until it's too late.
They should have rebuilt His house faster after He gave them Jerusalem back, rather than futz around on their farms.
7738007
It's kind of an instinct for her to explore her territory so she knows what's there.
That is the best way to do it, I think. Otherwise later on when you need the theory you don't have it, just a bunch of formulas that (as far as you know) come from nothing.
That is exactly what it is. It's also got helpful weather formulas printed on it, too.
As the old proverb goes, build a man a fire and you keep him warm for a day, but set a man on fire and you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
7738312
"I found two new friends to replace Joe."
7738369
I suppose they could also build delays into the controls, to simulate the pilot's reduced effectiveness.
My brother has gotten to do hypoxia training, which sounds like it would be kind of fun. Non-military, too, which is really cool. I don't know if all commercial pilots have to do it, but he did because he works in flight testing for prototype aircraft and spacecraft.
7738614
Yeah, I almost wonder if it would be one of those things were none of her friends would even consider it because they'd worry that it would insult her to pretend to be a pony, while she wouldn't have any problem with it.
Related: in my improv class in college, the teacher split us up into groups and we had to come up with a group name, and we finally settled on Three Black Guys and Two White Guys. The teacher was horrified, and I said that one of the black guys had suggested it.
7738757
"How offensive is it for a human to wear a Celestia costume?" IRL Muslims are forbidden to dress as Mohamad (I remember a case where a foreign teacher got in trouble for calling a teddy bear Mohamad (trouble = several years in prison + calls for her execution for blasphemy)). The only clue is ICR anyone dressed as Celestia in either Nightmare Night episode. On the other hand, nobody gives Diamond Tiara grief for wearing a crown.
I'd say we're in Head Canon territory
Celestia isn't venerated as a religious leader, so I don't think the same would quite apply. I don't think that anybody has pretended to be her in primary canon (Luna did in one of the comics, though, even painting her coat), but I don't think that she would get mad if anybody did.
Also in canon, Pinkie Pie has a Fluttershy suit. Granted, that raises more questions than it answers, but still. . .
derpicdn.net/img/2013/10/21/453444/medium.png
7738904
Fear not; it will happen! (Eventually)
7738974
Who knows? Sit on clouds all day playing harps? (hey, Silver Glow's halfway there
)
That was one thing that my religion professor brought up a time or two--we can't really know the mind of God because He isn't human, so what He thinks and feels is beyond our understanding.
There was a discussion much like that in an episode of House, which ended with one of the doctors saying that penguins might as well speculate about nuclear physics. We don't know and we can't know . . . although maybe when we succeed, we do find out.
7739491
Well . . . she also knows that you follow the rules that the leader of the herd establishes for the good of the herd, and if you don't obey them, you might be cast out or your whole herd might be wiped out. So in some respects, she understands some of the concepts better than modern people, because she's from a world that is literally full of pony-eating monsters.
She will notice that. Of course, if she knows a decent amount of Equestrian history, she'll know that Celestia also seems to have mellowed out some from her Luna-banishing days.
Somebody a while back mentioned in a comment that God had never created people before, so He didn't know what they would do, and He was learning from us as much as we were learning from Him, and I think that argument could be made.
7740194
My art appreciation teacher told us that the Egyptians built the pyramids the way they did because they were 'visually interesting.' I've always thought they would have been more visually interesting if the point faced down, but I suspect that even with the help of ancient aliens(TM), that was beyond the Egyptians.
7740488
Yes, it should. Oops.
7742561
I'm impressed by how much of it I didn't know, and I probably should have, since my dad was a pastor.
She's figured out that people are really bad at following rules.
That's a major theme in the Old Testament.
7737921
Maybe one of the side effects of ponies on Earth would be the resurrection of train travel in the US. When I was a kid, we took two long-distance Amtrak trips, and both of those were really awesome.
7759126
Speaking of Numberphile since Silver Glow likes to play Durak she might be interested in The Best (and Worst) Ways to Shuffle Cards
Otherwise known as ten minutes.
8143956
Silly Silver and her Equestrian measures.
8333870
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud
9359096
I woke up to find blood all over the bathtub. Apparently my roommate cut his toe or something. I had to clean up. How are you?
11349469
Happy that I don't have roommates
Whenever there's blood around the house, it's probably mine.
That's probably the weirdest way I've heard anyone say ten minutes, but the great thing about base-60 is that it works, and you can.
11701350
It's not the only time that Silver uses non-standard measurements; she sometimes uses the metric prefixes nobody really uses (deci- and deca-) and I think she's occasionally mixed metric and imperial when it suited her (i.e., 'it's a mile and a kilometer away.') She tends to favor whatever units or divisions get her as close as possible to what she's measuring, unless class or other training requires he to use a specific set.