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// September 20 [Racing Cars] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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September 20

Aric was really tired and after we'd had sex he kind of rolled back over and by the time I was out of bed and at the window he was almost asleep again. He'd pulled up the covers and he told me to have a good day and then when I went and got sunflower seeds out of the feeder he didn't throw anything at me again.

I was a little frustrated—Aric seemed kinda distant but he said that everything was okay, and I wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He might have just been tired, though. He'd told me that he hadn't gotten back to Kalamazoo until early Monday morning, so that might be why.

I flew low back towards campus, and I went by Jeff's house so I could see the birds and my bird feeder. I wondered if some of them ate out of both different feeders but I didn’t think they would—a lot of birds have pretty small territories.

So I circled around and watched them for a bit, and some of the sparrows must have forgotten who I was already and maybe thought I was a hawk or something, 'cause they took off for the trees chirping in alarm when I went overhead. And that was kind of sad.

When I got back to Trowbridge, I landed on the boardwalk and went in the back then got my flight gear together really quietly so I wouldn't bother Peggy. She was really cute; she was lying on her side and had her arms around her pillow and was hugging it.

I wasn't going to fly for too long and I thought about leaving my camelback behind but the one time I did I'd wish I had it, so I filled it up in the bathroom and got the rest of the way dressed then went back outside.

I told the airplane directors that I was going to fly over downtown but stay low, and the grumpy man said that I could, so I got some altitude as I went over the quad, so I was high enough to clear cars and trucks and wires. When I went by Hoben, I waved at Cedric and Leon's room, and then I turned down Academy so that I could fly downtown.

I decided that I was going to do a couple of laps around downtown and race some cars because that was fun. But the cars didn't know that they were playing the game so I had to wait for the signal lights to be red and then had to time it so I would get to them when they turned green, because it would be cheating to get a head start.

I beat a yellow truck that said Ryder but it wasn't much of a contest—the truck wasn't very fast. Then I raced a green Fiesta through the rest of downtown, until it turned towards the 94 Highway after crossing the river, and then I turned around and went back west. I kept pace with a Lexus that was pretty quick. Instead of slowly accelerating from the signal light, he would jump ahead and roar to the next one to get there faster than anyone else, and he made it through one just as it was changing from yellow to red and I couldn't catch him.

I cut across Westnedge Avenue to try again, and I heard a horn honk behind me and it was a blue Dodge Challenger like Peggy's mom had, and when we got to the next traffic light he stuck his head out the window and asked if I was racing and I said that I was, so he waited at the next light until I had caught up.

He made the tires spin and smoke and that actually gave me a bit of an advantage because he wasn't moving anywhere, and I was ahead when I got to the next traffic signal, which was green, but then he passed me and I couldn't catch up.

Then he turned into the parking lot for the Water Street Coffee Shop, and when I landed next to him I was breathing pretty hard from the race, and he said I'd done really well, 'cause I only had one horsepower and he had 375.

When I went back to campus, I didn't race any cars, 'cause I'd tired myself out a little bit. And I was glad that I'd thought to bring the camelback, 'cause I was pretty thirsty, so I sipped at it while I glided.

I landed and went up to our room to get undressed, and Peggy was still sleeping, but she'd rolled over the other way. And I hung my vest over my chair so that it would dry off some, then I went to the shower. I was glad I'd cooled down on the flight back or else I'd have been dripping sweat in our room and the hallway.

I got lucky again and there wasn't anybody in the shower, but maybe that was because it was a little bit earlier than I usually took my shower, and I was just finishing when Ruth came in the bathroom.

Peggy was awake when I came back to our room and she said that she wanted breakfast more than a shower and if we hurried to breakfast and back she hoped that there wouldn't be a line, so even though I was a little damp and un-preened, we went to breakfast and the waffle-maker was working, which was nice.

When we were back at our room after breakfast, Peggy helped me put my mane back, and then I put on my lab coat and strapped my safety glasses over my head and I couldn't fly with the coat on but I didn't know if Lisa would be willing to help me so it was smarter to wear it to class.

It was really weird wearing my saddlebags over it, 'cause the girth strap dug into one of the buttons and pushed it into my belly and I didn't like that but there wasn't any good way to avoid it.

Our lab was lots of fun: we had to heat up and chill closed bottles of gas and record the pressure that was on the gauge, and observe the results. I had to let Lisa do a lot of the work that hooves weren't good for, but I took all the notes and I did what I could. It turned out that I could grab the pressure bottle when it was hotter than she could, because the side of my hooves weren't as sensitive as her hands.

For a bonus, Professor Brown also had a special bottle for each pair which was full of mystery gas, and after we'd gotten practice with the other bottles we got to experiment with that and he had a chart of different gasses that it could be and we were supposed to figure out which one we had by matching it up with different temperatures and pressures that were on the chart, which meant that we had to be pretty precise. But when we were done, both Lisa and I agreed that our mystery bottle had neon in it.

I stopped at the Mail Hut on my way to lunch to see if I'd gotten anything, and I had a letter from my sister, which made me feel kinda guilty, 'cause I hadn't sent her one in a long time, so I put it in my saddlebags with my astronomy books and then I decided that I'd sit with Cedric and Leon and Trevor.

Well, I got to lunch a little earlier than they did, so after I'd gotten my food and sat down at the table I took out the letter and opened it up and started to read it, 'cause I was curious what she had to say.

She told me how things were back in Chonamare, and said that I'd missed the leading end of a hurricane coming through, which had made landfall further south and the ponies down there had set up a counterstorm to push it back out to sea but then it had decided to come back and nopony was ready for it. She said that half the fishing boats had been bashed open on the rocks but luckily everypony had stayed in port so nopony had to be rescued, and the boats got hauled ashore and most of them had been fixed again and were back out in the ocean where they belonged except for a couple of dories which had been smashed to bits.

And said that she'd heard that an Equestrian weather team had been sent to Earth to help fight storms and she wondered if I'd met them. She said that she would have rather had them stay in Equestria where they could be helpful because she was sure that Earth had so much technology that storms weren't an issue, and I snorted when I read that, 'cause I thought about some of the storms I'd flown in.

Then she said that she hoped that I had a good birthday, whether her letter got to me before or after, and said now that I was gone Cloud Climber had the latest birthday and they'd just celebrated down at the pub.

Cedric saw the envelope on the table and I guess it looked kind of funny because the address was in English but the return address was in Equestrian so he asked who it was from and I told him and he said it was nice of her to think of me and write a letter like that.

Leon said that Cedric had all the letters that Aquamarine had sent him in a little box and he admitted that it was true and he'd put an effort into improving his handwriting because she could write better with her mouth than he could with his hands and he thought that was unfair.

I really wanted to know if they'd done more than just write letters to each other but I didn't think he'd tell me if they had, and I wasn't sure that she would, either.

It was funny, 'cause usually Cedric and Leon were pretty jokey but this time he looked kind of serious and Leon didn't say much. So I asked Leon when Cedric went to get more food, and he said that Cedric was his teammate and friend and that they laughed around about things that didn't matter but not the things that really did, and that made a lot of sense to me.

I still hadn't figured out who I wanted to be friends with in Astronomy class, so I sat kind of in the center and watched people as they came in. There was a short girl with long blonde hair that looked friendly and I think she was a freshman because I hadn't seen her before, and there was also a boy who'd taken pictures of me when I was rolling around in the snow last winter and he seemed kind of shy but if he'd taken pictures of me then he must be interested. He liked to sit in the back, though, and I didn't like being that far away from the professor.

Professor Miller went back to talking about planets and their orbits, and she explained how hard it was to find planets that were around other stars despite how easy it seemed in science-fiction, and she showed us a picture of Sirius, which was the brightest star in the human sky, and showed us a little spot next to it and asked everyone if it was a planet, and we thought maybe it was but it was actually another star that was farther away, and that the problem with finding them was that planets were too close to their star to easily find, which was part of the reason why humans hadn't found any earlier. For us, unicorns had used magic and that had been more successful, but only for close stars: we'd had no idea if there were planets at farther stars or not and nopony had figured out how to find them if there were.

Then she showed us how to use scientific notation, which was a way of making big numbers smaller, and instead of the easy formula she'd taught us before she expanded it back out with new variables and that made the equations a lot bulkier. And then she had to explain how significant digits worked because with numbers this big they only had to be reasonably close. And she said that we had to do it without calculators and that made a lot of people upset but I didn't mind. We did that all the time with our weather wheels, especially since our observations weren't all that precise to begin with.

But she had to explain it more, because a lot of the people in the class really didn't quite understand.

Which brought us back to her question about how far away planets were from stars, and it wasn't figured out by distance, but angles instead, and that was really interesting. And it was trigonometry, which was fun, so I was looking forward to that. I wish that we'd had a lab where we could look for planets.

She taught us the small angle formula, and how the angles were measured in radians and not degrees and then she simplified the formula with AUs and parsecs and arc seconds which was useful with really small angles that were used in astronomy. And she showed us how to calculate how close in arc seconds a planet orbiting Sirius would be, and that was the end of the class, and she said it was our last day to not have homework.

When I got back to our room the first thing I did was write a letter to my sister telling her about all the things that I'd done on my last vacation and when I'd finished Peggy asked me about it so I told her how my sister had sent me a letter for my birthday and she wanted to know when that was and I wasn't sure because humans have a different calendar but I figured that it was this Friday and she was mad that I hadn't told her sooner and she said that we had to have a party to celebrate.

I didn't want that because we hadn't had a party for anybody else's birthday and I didn't want everyone to feel like they had to go to the trouble, especially since I wasn't sure it was the exact same date anyway, but she insisted and said that we'd have a party in the lounge because our room wasn't big enough.

So at dinner that was all that anyone wanted to talk about, especially since there hadn't been a special dinner at all. And they were confused about how I didn't know any ponies who had birthdays in the fall or winter, and I said that ponies weren't born then because of the estrus season and then I kind of had to explain how a mare couldn't get pregnant in the late fall or all of winter, at least not where I lived, but further south some ponies stayed fertile longer.

I guess it was weird for them because they could get pregnant whenever they wanted to.

And Sean was kind of embarrassed about the conversation, and so he tried to ignore us and eat his dinner and he said that there were things that men were not supposed to know at all, things that were supposed to be secret, and Christine said that even if he hadn't learned it in health class she had told him pretty much everything about her estrus cycles and he said that he had made an effort to forget them, and then he said that he'd really rather talk about anything else and he would even admit that light sabers were cooler than phasers if only she would change the subject.

She said that she would never let him forget that he had said that, and then said that she thought the Chicago Cubs were going to make the World Series this year and everyone laughed at that except for me because I didn't know who the Chicago Cubs were or what a World Series was.

Sean wanted to go over math homework after dinner, and then Peggy and Christine wanted to plan out what they were going to do for me, so we both left a little bit early and I got my homework and took it to his room and we went through the problems and this time we'd both gotten all the same answers, which was nice. He said that I should have skipped the hard problem and just put something in Equestrian math, but I told him that that wasn't right, and if I skipped problems that were hard I'd never get good at math, and he said that a lot of what we learned in school didn't really have an application in real life, but I thought that he was wrong. Maybe humans had gotten lazy because they had computers to think for them, but when I figured out weather schedules, all I had was tables and formulas and my weather wheel.

We stayed in his room a little bit late because I was sure that Peggy and Christine were still planning, and he asked when I was going to tie a cloud to a tree which was something that I should do, and I said maybe I could do it over the weekend if the weather cooperated.

It was kind of late when I got back to my room, and I still had to write down what I'd learned in the lab today, which I should have done sooner, so I got out all our notes and started working on them. Me and Lisa would have to meet sometime to get final results for our work, and we'd agreed to figure out a time tomorrow after class, but that was no excuse to not do the work before our meeting.

I was still working on it when Peggy came back and she wouldn't tell me what they'd decided just that I'd like it. And I asked if we were going to go skydiving, and she said that wasn't what they'd planned because that would take more than a couple of days to arrange and she wasn't sure who'd want to anyways. I said that Meghan didn't, and Peggy smiled and said that she was an adrenaline junkie and would be happy to skydive with me. So that made me really happy 'cause it was one of the last things on my bucket list.

I spent the rest of the evening with my lab work and writing in my journal and I'd meant to read another book in the Bible but hadn't had time, and when I went to bed it was a little bit later than I would have liked.