September 16
My knee still hurt when I woke up, and I had trouble getting into a position where I could get up. My leg really didn't want to straighten out, and I had to be careful when I got out of bed to not put too much weight on it, just in case it decided that it didn't want to support me.
When I was out of bed, I started flexing it a little bit at a time to work the stiffness out of the joint, and then I experimented with how much weight it could carry. So I figured out that I could stand in a normal position but after I stayed still for a while it started to get a little painful, and I'd have to shift my weight but that wasn't so bad. And I could walk, and it hardly hurt if I didn't put much weight on that hoof and then got right back off it again.
I didn't think it was serious enough that I should see a doctor, but I would want to pay attention to it and see—if it didn't start feeling better in a couple of days, or started feeling a lot worse, I'd want to.
Putting on my flight vest would be difficult if not impossible, and I'd have trouble using my airplane radio, too, which limited where I could fly. So it was kind of tempting to just get back in bed and sleep in some but that was a bad habit to get into, and I could fly around campus. It would be a little bit boring to just be flying circles, but there were lots of ways I could make it more interesting.
So I limped down the hallway and glided down the stairs and went out to Pebble Beach. I had a really sloppy launch, ‘cause I forgot to consider my leg, and I almost clipped the railing, but I cleared it and then after that I was two stories up so I had a little time to catch myself.
I glided down the hill, zagging around a couple of trees, and I remembered to keep about ten feet above the sidewalk just in case some person come by—I didn’t want to accidentally crash into anyone.
I climbed over Hoben—the lights in Cedric and Leon’s room were out, or else I would have waved—and then flew over the Fac Man building and the little park where we practiced fighting, then came back around and went over Crissy and Severn, then followed the hill up, going above the top of the Dow Science building before I turned back towards the central part of campus. I knew that there were some houses behind it that were college houses, but I didn’t know which ones. And then I cut along the second floor of Trowbridge, right by Meghan and Amy’s room. There weren’t any lights on in their room either, so I guess they weren’t up yet.
I did a few more laps that way, and then after I’d gone down the side of Trowbridge—coming close enough that my feathers almost touched the bricks—I decided that I’d had enough fun for one day and landed back on Pebble Beach, reminding myself that I needed to not put weight on my right foreleg.
When I got to the bathroom there wasn't anybody in the shower and I considered if I should wait but I decided not to, and went right in. After I'd gotten clean, I made the water as hot as I could stand and held my leg up in it because I thought that might help make it feel better, and it sort of worked, until it cooled down again.
I was out of the bathroom before Kat showed up to take her shower, and when I got back to our room Peggy had just woke up. So I packed up my saddlebags while I was waiting for her to get dressed; that way I'd be able to go right to class after breakfast.
She saw that I was still limping and I promised her that I was all right, nothing was broken and in a couple of days it would be fine, and she said that I'd better be. And then she said that she could carry my saddlebags for me and that was really nice of her, but I said I'd be fine 'cause I had three more legs and two wings besides.
Well, Christine and Sean asked about my leg, too, so I had to tell them how I'd gotten hurt and then Christine said that I lived in a fishing village with sailing ships, and I said that was true. So she asked if there were any ponies with wooden legs, and I said that I didn't know any although there was an earth pony on the Sea Star who'd lost a hoof when she got tangled up in some rigging. It was important to make sure that you stayed clear of all the lines on a ship.
So Peggy wanted to know if she had a fake hoof or anything like that and I said that she wore a special shoe on that leg, and she walked kind of funny, 'cause it couldn't bend like a real hoof.
Sitting around for breakfast hadn't helped my leg, and both Christine and Peggy offered to take my tray back for me and I wanted to do it myself but I let them.
I flew across the quad and over Olds-Upton, and landed right in front of Dow Science, then went inside and walked up the stairs to physics. I had to kind of slow down on the steps—they were tricky enough with four good legs. But I'd left early enough to still have to wait a little bit for the next class to get out.
Professor Brown started explaining to us the Ideal Gas Theorem, and how there was an absolute zero which you couldn't go below, and that was the bottom of the Kelvin temperature scale, which was the one that scientists used. I wasn't too happy about having to learn another way to measure, but luckily it was based on the metric Celsius scale, it just started a different way. So all you had to do was add 273.15 and you had Kelvins.
Then he warned us that the ideal gasses and their equations only applied to some gasses at really low pressures and if we were working with actual gasses we had to put in what he said was a fudge factor, which was the letter Z, and there were tables that showed what they were.
Then he showed us Van der Waals Equation of State which he said was really useful to anybody who was building or making things, and my ears perked up 'cause that was the kind of thing that I most needed to know. Making ideal clouds wasn't the same as making real clouds. And it was how gas molecules sometimes when they were in a space together tried to keep together and not get away, so when they bounced off the walls of their container they wouldn't have as much energy.
What I really liked was that even when he was explaining stuff that was still pretty basic, he was giving us equations for everything as he went, like how we would calculate the force pushing down on a piston that was squishing our ideal gas.
He worked through equations to figure out how much work you were doing changing argon from an initial pressure and volume to a smaller volume with more pressure, and he showed us two different ways to do it, and then shaded in under the graphs to show us where work was done, and taught us that if you put a circle on the integral that means it's a closed path where you start and end at the same point.
He finished the class by telling us about heat, and what it did to our ideal systems, and then he said that next time we'd get to learn how heat and work are the same thing. Then he gave us some homework, where we would figure out how much work was being done when we changed the pressure or the volume of different ideal gasses.
I wanted to fly down the stairs but there were too many people for me to try it, and I didn't really feel like waiting, so as much as I didn't like it, I took the elevator because it was only one floor so it wouldn't be that bad. And when it started moving I popped my wings out and had to shift around 'cause it changed my balance when the floor dropped.
I flew back to the dorm and took my physics stuff out of my saddlebags and set them on my desk then put my math things in my bag so that I wouldn't forget them. Then since I had time I started to work on my physics homework.
It was pretty basic so far, but we were just getting started. The calculations in it were pretty straightforward, too.
I didn't have enough time before lunch to get it all done, but it was mostly done and that meant I wasn't going to have to do it over the weekend, which was nice.
Peggy had some stretchy bandage that she said might help my knee—she said that she'd bought it from Walgreen's, and I thought it wouldn't hurt to try, so she wrapped it up and then used clever metal clips with teeth to hold it in place. Sean said that all I needed now was a bloodstained bandage around my head and I'd look like a real war hero, and I said that I didn't really want to look like a war hero.
Then we talked about when we were going to go to the game. Peggy had checked the weather and said it was going to be pretty warm so we probably wouldn't need any blankets or anything, but maybe it would be smart to bring sweatshirts. And she said that we could stop for beer on our way there, but if we did we might want to eat dinner on the road instead of at the dining hall, since it was going to be an hour drive and she was fairly sure that the game started at seven.
So everyone agreed that was a good idea, but nobody could agree on where we should eat dinner. I wanted Taco Bell food but nobody else did.
Peggy said we'd all meet up in our room after class and if we hadn't figured it out by then we'd just go to Jimmy John's because it was the closest.
Me and Sean walked to math together, and he said that if I changed my vote to Burger King, he'd be in my debt, and I said I'd think about it.
Professor Pampena said that you could compute area using vectors, then drew a pentagon on the markerboard. I thought that was kind of a dumb way to figure it out, because there was a formula for that (although I couldn’t remember what it was). We had to figure out an a-prime to make it work, and he showed us on the graph where it went and then let us figure out what it was on our own. And when he wrote out the equation, he told us that was called a determinant. And depending on how you counted your angles, you could get a negative answer, but you just ignored the negative sign. That was a good thing to remember, though, 'cause if I was doing lots of calculating I might forget and then I'd get a very wrong answer.
He said we'd had fun in our two dimensions and now we were going to move back to three again. So determinants in space could find volumes and that was very useful. And when he started writing it on the marker board it made a lovely equation that he said we should learn because it was helpful for lots of things.
Next, he told us about cross product, which could be drawn the same way as the determinants, and drawn in a matrix the same way and then the same formula applied to it, and what the right-hand rule said about it, which was moving your right hand and fingers so that it pointed to vectors A and B and which direction your thumb pointed was which way the cross-product vector pointed.
Well, that wasn't very helpful for me, since I didn't have a thumb or fingers to point with, and he gave us another problem to try and figure out and I got it wrong 'cause I lost track of where my thumb was supposed to be. Sean said it was because human fingers couldn't actually bend backwards, and that's why I'd made a mistake.
The last thing he taught us was how we could use cross product and dot product together to figure out the area of a box in space, and that was really neat, because the equation was really simple and easy to remember. And then it got even simpler, when he showed us how the determinant equaled a dot product and cross product of A, B, and C.
And we got lots of fun calculating homework, which Sean didn't seem too enthusiastic about at all. But I was looking forward to it.
When we left class, I said that I'd decided in class that since he helped me get my cloud rope, I owed him a favor, so I would change my vote, and he said that I was awesome.
I spent the afternoon first finishing my physics homework, then I did my math, and after that I still had a little bit of time so I wrote in my journal, and then when it was close to five, I opened the door so that people could just come right in, including Peggy who wasn't back yet.
Well, she got back first and she had Christine with her and she said that they'd gone and bought beer to save time, and she said that she hoped I didn't mind, and I said it was okay. They'd bought Oberon and also some Edmund Fitzgerald porter.
We had to wait a little bit for Sean to show up, then we all went down to Cobalt. I sat in the back with Christine and Peggy asked us where we wanted to go for dinner, and all three of us said Burger King, which wasn't what Christine had said before either. So I asked her if Sean had bribed her and she said yes but she wouldn't tell me what it was.
So we went through the drive-through, and I got a veggie burger which wasn't very good and had too much sauce on it, and also a side salad which Christine had to hold so I could eat.
We had to take the 131 Highway all the way through Grand Rapids, and the college that we were going to was called Rockford University, and it wasn't any bigger than Kalamazoo College.
The football stadium was on the far side of campus, and we parked in a lot for visitors and Sean opened the trunk to get the cooler out which had the beer. And I reminded Peggy that she wasn't supposed to have any or else I would have to drive home.
We had to buy tickets to get in, and then there was a whole set of benches just for us—they kept the visitors and the residents apart from each other in case of fights, I guess.
There wasn't a lot to do before the game except talk and look at the cheerleaders, who were mostly trying to entertain their audience. And everyone except Peggy had a beer. She'd brought soft drinks for herself.
It wasn't all that long before the football teams came out, and our players were wearing black while the other team had purple. It took me a little while to find Cedric and Leon, but I did, and after they'd talked a little bit among themselves they all sat down on benches and Cedric turned around and waved at us.
The game was really fun to watch. Since we were seeing it for real, there weren't any slow-motion replays, and you kind of had to pay close attention and sometimes it wasn't real clear who had the ball. I thought Leon was really good at catching the football, and he was pretty good at running, too. He weaved all over the field and when the quarterback had a clear shot, he'd catch the football and sometimes he could run with it, too; other times he got tackled right away.
And I also got to see Cedric's sack, which was impressive. Right after Rockford stepped back to throw the football, Cedric went through their line and got their quarterback in the side, and I don't think he saw it coming because he was looking down the field for someone to catch the ball but nobody was clear.
At halftime, their marching band came out and made patterns in the field and played a couple of songs, then the cheerleaders tried to bring up the team spirit, because they were losing by eleven points.
I asked Peggy if she thought I could be a cheerleader, and she said that I might make a good cheerleader. She said that she thought if they tossed me I could go a lot higher, and she asked if we had pony cheerleaders, and I said that I'd seen some before but usually it was just a few ponies, not a whole team of them.
The cheering up didn't help Rockford, 'cause they only scored one more touchdown and they didn't kick the ball between the goal. Cedric made another sack, and by the end of the game Kalamazoo had won by thirty-six points, and there weren't too many people left in the benches towards the end of the game, because they were so far behind that there was almost no chance of them making a comeback. Even the cheerleaders weren't all that peppy at the end, although they did get excited when one of Rockford's players tackled Leon just short of the goal line.
I wanted to wait for Cedric and Leon so that I could congratulate them, but Peggy said that after the game they had to go to the locker room and shower and get changed and it would be a while before they came out again, and she really didn't want to stay all that much longer.
Peggy made us all stop in the bathroom before we went home because she said she didn't want to hear us complaining every five miles about how we had to pee because of all the beer we'd had.
It was a little bit after midnight when we finally got home, and Peggy was the only one who wasn't tired by then. My voice was hoarse from all the shouting and cheering I'd done, and my knee ached from all the sitting, plus I had to pee again.
Christine said that we could hang out in her lounge for a little while if we wanted, and finish the rest of the beer. So she parked down in their parking lot and Peggy took the beer that was left out of the cooler and put it back in its cardboard box so it was easier to carry, and then we went up to Christine's room.
We all had to take turns in the bathroom, and then I got in the papasan chair and curled up and I thought about having another beer but I didn't.
We talked about the game and complained about our classes and everyone but me took turns playing Mario Kart. I could have if I'd wanted to but I wasn't good at it because the buttons were too small for me and I didn't mind watching.
After Peggy had had her second turn she asked if I was ready to go home or if I was happy in the papasan, and I was happy where I was. So she decided that we'd have a sleepover in Christine's room. Christine brought out a blanket for her, and she laid on the couch, and I stayed on the papasan.