September 14
I woke up just before Meghan's alarm clock, and we snuggled until she said that she had to get up, and we both had to be kind of quiet because Amy was still sleeping in her bed.
We kissed goodbye, and she went into the shower and I went back to my room and quietly got dressed in my flight gear, 'cause Peggy was sleeping, too. And then I went out to Pebble Beach and called the airplane directors and said that I was flying to the Nature Center again, and she gave me permission if I stayed low.
This time when I came around to land in the pasture, I stayed close to the river and didn't spook the deer. And when I was going around the trail, I made sure to walk on the northern side of the trail, so they wouldn't get scared. On the third time around, they were gone, so either they'd gotten done eating or something else had scared them off.
By the time landed back at campus, I was pretty well lathered, and when I went in the bathroom Kat was already in the shower so I went to our room to get out of my flight gear.
Peggy was awake but still in bed, looking at her portable telephone. So I nuzzled her, and then said that I was going to the shower and if she wanted to take one before breakfast she could join me, and she thanked me for offering but she'd wait until after breakfast.
There weren't waffles or omelets this morning; they just had the basic breakfast food that they always had. And when I'd gotten some scrambled eggs and fruit and a small bowl of shredded wheat cubes I asked if they'd ever had a special breakfast like they had special dinners sometimes and Christine said that they hadn't and she hoped that they never did because changing a morning breakfast routine only led to a day of regret.
Sean agreed, and he said that he liked having mostly the same thing for breakfast. And he said that there were occasional changes, but it mostly stayed the same menu every morning and he thought that was for the best, too.
Now that everyone in class knew that we had to wait for another class to leave, there wasn't as much of a line outside the classroom, and I hadn't been standing around for very long before the class before ours ended and everyone left. Once the door was clear, we went in, and I sat in the same seat I had before.
When Lisa sat next to me, I thought about how I knew two Lisas, and maybe I should give them an extra name to tell them apart. But I guess when I was talking to one of them about the other, it wouldn't be confusing, probably.
Professor Brown started off by telling us the four laws of thermodynamics, and I thought it was really funny that the first was numbered zero. Then we learned about the different types of system, which were open, closed, and isolated. And that was important to know when you did calculations, because if you were wrong about what it was, the math wouldn't work or it would give you a wrong result. And then he said that there usually weren't a lot of variables, and explained how it was important to know if your system was homogenous or heterogenous, and I knew about that because when you had a clump of clouds it was all cloud, but when you started putting them in the sky then they became a mixed system and so you had to think about that when you were doing your calculations.
Humans probably didn't have standard tables for that but we did.
He also said that if you had a system with only one component like water, you needed the number of moles, the phase, and two variables, but it didn't matter which two. And I had to ask him what a mole was, 'cause I didn't think he was talking about the kind that make little dirt tunnels when they're looking for worms.
One student in the class snickered when I asked, but Professor Brown said that the mole was a measure of quantity, and he could explain after class more specifically exactly what the quantity was.
Then we learned about it going from one equilibrium state to another and how you had to know the path you took to get there, because some kinds of paths were reversible and it worked both ways and other paths it didn't, or it couldn't without a lot of extra work added into the system. Which was something weatherponies knew all about, 'cause the cloud-pushers always wound up flying their tails off whenever someone in the weather office made a mistake. And there were a lot of definitions that we needed to know, so I paid lots of attention to those.
After class was over, he told me out in the hallway what a mole was, and what Avogadro's number was, and he said that it must be difficult for me to use units I wasn't familiar with at all, and I admitted that it was. But I was figuring them out, and I knew that a lot of times it didn't matter anyways as long as you kept measuring the same thing throughout the entire equation. I could invent a heat scale called Silvers and assign my values however I wanted, and as long as I kept the scale constant I could use it in equations.
When I went to lunch, I looked around for Cedric and Leon and Trevor but I didn't see them, so I got my food and went to our usual table. Sean and Christine were involved in an argument about Star Trek and Star Wars, so I sat next to Peggy and we talked about snowboarding. She said that it wouldn't be too long before there was snow in the mountains in Colorado and it had been a little weird to her how when she'd come to Kalamazoo it had taken so long before there was any snowfall, even though she'd kind of known to expect it. And she said that she'd heard that it was going to be a snowy year, and then she wanted to know if I could bring a snowcloud down and make just a little patch of snow on the grass.
I wasn't sure if that would work, but it would be interesting to try.
When Sean and Christine had settled their debate, we walked to math class together, and he asked if I had my calculator with me, and I said that I had it and my weather wheel.
Professor Pampena started us out by reminding us about what vectors were, just in case anybody had forgotten over the summer, and what symbols used to draw and define them. It wasn't the same as we did it in Equestria, but the basic concept was the same.
As I was drawing out the letters with hats, I got to thinking how Cayenne probably knew this, too, and lots of other ponies did, and maybe there was an Earth-math club back in Equestria which would be pretty fun.
He gave us a problem to start, which made me happy. It was more fun to be challenged while you were learning instead of just sitting and being talked to. And it was a really easy problem, so I didn't even have to write anything down to solve it, then he reminded us how to add vectors together, and that was pretty easy too, but he drew a picture on the markerboard anyway just so that everyone understood what he was doing.
He said that when you multiplied vectors together, that was called a dot product, 'cause he used a dot to say that he was multiplying, and that gave a scalar. And he showed us how it worked geometrically, and then he proved it first and by the time he was done he'd filled the entire markerboard with his equations and then he had to wait until everyone had finished writing it down before he could erase the board and continue on.
What I thought was really nice was while he was done explaining it he told us what we could use it for, and that was something that some of my teachers had never done, and sometimes it was hard to pay attention to something when you didn't know it would be the foundation of something else later on. It was a lot easier to just go out and shove around clouds without really understanding how you got them to do exactly what you wanted.
So we could use them to compute lengths and angles, and he drew another problem and I worked it out before he was done explaining it. It was pretty basic, though; there wasn't any number bigger than two in the coordinates.
And then he gave us another question, where we had to figure out what a set of points made, like a plane or a sphere and that was pretty basic, too, and most people figured it out. It was a little bit discouraging that class was starting out so simple, but it was smarter to start out simply and make sure that everyone understood before moving on to more complicated things.
Class went by a lot quicker than I thought it would, and after we'd solved that problem and discussed it a little bit for people who had got it wrong, Professor Pampena said that we were done and we'd continue with where we'd left off on Friday.
I had time to write in my journal and also to read Jonah, which I really liked. God told him to go prophesy against Nineveh because they'd made Him mad but Jonah didn't want to so he got on a boat and fled instead. And then after he'd been at sea for a while a terrible storm came up and when the crew found out it was Jonah's fault, they threw him overboard. The storm stopped and a huge fish swallowed Jonah.
When he was inside the fish, he asked God to forgive him, and so God had the fish vomit him onto dry land, so he went to Nineveh like he was supposed to, and everyone there believed him, and they changed their ways and so God forgave them too.
Jonah was mad about that, and he sat outside and sulked and God grew up a plant to shade him then the next day he had a worm eat it, and Jonah was mad about that, too, but I think that God was right and Jonah should have been happy that God had forgiven him and let him out of the fish, and that everyone in Nineveh had changed their ways and God had forgiven them, too.
At dinner, me and Sean were talking about math and science, and he laughed when I said that I didn't know what a mole was, so I asked if anyone had a piece of paper and a pen, and when Christine gave them to me, I drew out the same equation that we'd done in calculus but I used Equestrian math symbols, and asked him to solve it, 'cause I knew he'd gotten it correct in class.
Well, of course he couldn't, and then he passed the paper around and nobody else could make any sense of it, either. Christine said that Aba looked like a monkey fucking a coconut, and I guess it kind of did. It wasn't my fault—the unicorns had decided to use their symbols for math and now we were stuck with them.
So then I solved it for him and turned it into human numbers and moved things around so that they were in the human order, too, and he said that wasn't fair, so I stuck out my tongue at him. And I thought it would be funny to translate one problem on my first math paper and then work it out in Equestrian and translate my answer back. I think that Professor Pampena would like that.
I left dinner a little early than I would have just so that I wouldn't be late, and I got my lab coat and I could have put it on I guess but it wasn't very comfortable so I just draped it across my back and then I went down to the parking lot to wait, 'cause I knew that they'd be there pretty soon.
Well, we had to go all the way into Parchment and the road the seamstress lived on was called Random Road, which I thought was pretty funny. She lived in a little red house on the north side of the road, and Miss Cherilyn knocked and pretty soon a heavy woman came to the door and she was really excited to see me 'cause I was the first pony she'd ever seen up close, and she said that her name was Christina.
She led us down into her basement and it was kind of crowded with everyone there and her piles of fabric for sewing and she also had some dress forms but of course they were shaped like a person and not a pony, and they were only the torso, which I thought was weird.
She had to take lots of measurements and a couple of times I saw Mister Salvatore get tense 'cause I guess he didn't like her getting that close to me and measuring around under my barrel and everything so I don't think he'd like going to the salon with me very much either.
And then I had to do it again but this time with the coat on and she pinned parts of it in place and she had me move around a little bit to see how I moved, 'cause it's no good making clothes that you can't move around in.
She trimmed some of it of and re-pinned it and then I had to try again, and eventually she was happy with how it was fitting, and she said that she'd give Mister Salvatore a call when she was done sewing it up, and he reminded her that I needed it for Tuesday.
When we were back in Sienna, I asked if we could stop somewhere to buy scrunchies for my mane, 'cause I was supposed to have it pulled back and we drove a little bit out of our way to go to a Dollar General and they didn't have all that many but I found one that I liked and Miss Cherilyn said I ought to get a couple because scrunchies had a way of going missing, so I picked out a couple more.
On our way back to campus, Mister Salvatore said that he was still negotiating with the tornado team but so far he didn't have anything to report. He said that they had a bunch of things already planned and he wasn't sure if there was any way he could change the schedule but he wasn't going to give up yet; maybe we'd just have to go meet them.
I was really happy he was putting that much effort into it—he could have just said no—and I would have hugged him but he was driving.
He let me out behind Trowbridge and that was when I got my chance. He stopped Sienna and opened the sliding door to let me out and so I just wrapped my hooves around him and then I let go and hopped out of the van and went inside.
This time, I got together my flight gear, but while I did, I was thinking about Peggy and I wondered if it bothered her that if I kept up this schedule I'd never be sleeping in our room and she'd be roommates with an empty bed, and I didn't think that was fair to her. So I had to figure something out, but by the time I got to Aric's I hadn't thought of anything. I could have Aric or Meghan come to my room sometimes but I wasn't sure that Peggy would like that if it became a regular thing.
I didn't have to come up with an answer right away, but it would be smart to think about it now.
I let myself in with the key that was under the mat, cause I could see through the front window that everyone was sitting on the couch watching a movie. It was called pi, and it was kind of about math the main character was trying to figure out a number that everyone thought explained everything and then he drilled a hole in his head because he thought it would let the numbers get out of his head. I didn't like that very much, and when we went upstairs Aric said that David had picked the movie and he liked strange movies and strange bands and Aric wasn't sure if he was a genius or just plain crazy.
I wasn't sure either. But he was nice, and I liked both him and Angela.
And I'd never asked David if he had a Prince Albert. I should have done that while we were sitting on the couch, because I think that would have made Aric a little uncomfortable and that would have been funny.
We snuggled and talked in bed for a little while, and he reminded me that he had to go back to Lafayette this weekend to finish things up there and so I'd have to survive without him for the weekend, and I said that I was going to Rockford to watch the football team play, and we probably wouldn't get back until late anyway.
He said that we'd better make tonight last until Monday, and I thought that was a good idea, too.