September 26
When I woke up Peggy was still sleeping and so I went to the bathroom, and filled up my camelback, and when I came back she hadn't gotten up yet.
So I tugged the covers off her and shook her shoulder gently to wake her up, and she kind of reached for the blankets but I'd put them out of her reach. And then she opened her eyes and looked at me and then picked up her portable telephone and looked at, then she said I was evil.
I thought she was being mean, so I put my ears down and backed up and then she sat up in bed and said that she didn't mean it; she'd told me to wake her up and she'd just stayed on her computer too late and wasn't all the way awake yet.
Our dorm room didn't have a small coffee maker like a lot of the hotel rooms I'd been in, so I couldn't make coffee for her but she stretched and said that once we started trotting she'd wake up pretty quick.
She started getting out clothes and asked me what the weather was like outside, and I said that it was raining, and she looked out the window herself and saw that it was, and told me I was evil again, first for waking her up and then for making her go out in the rain. But this time I knew that she didn't mean it so it was okay.
When she was getting dressed she said that she'd always wondered about the people who exercised in the rain and now she knew that each one of them probably had a pegasus goading them on and I told her that she could go back to bed and be a lazy human and I'd fly on my own, and she said that she was just griping but once we got outside it would be fun.
She had some bottles of water that she wanted to put in my camelback so that she wouldn't have to carry them herself and I didn't mind. It wasn't much extra weight, and I thought that I kind of owed her a favor 'cause I'd gotten her up so early.
So we went out the front and to Academy Street, and then back into Aric's neighborhood. It felt a little bit weird for me to be trotting on cement, 'cause I'd been trying to not do it to keep my hooves from wearing down too much. And it took us a little bit before we figured out a pace that we both liked.
We hadn't gotten too far before the rain stopped, but we were both pretty wet by then. And as we got further into the neighborhood we started to see kids coming out of their houses and at first I thought that maybe they were coming to watch us but they were really waiting for the school bus.
I decided to turn towards my old apartment and maybe Caleb and Lindy and Trinity would be out waiting, and it would be nice to see them. And Peggy didn't ask why I crossed the street; she just stayed by my side.
All three of them were out in front of their house, and Caleb and Lindy were looking the other way because that was the way the bus came from, but Trinity was looking around and she saw us and waved, then she got their attention and they waved too.
We didn't have much time to talk but I nuzzled Lindy and Trinity and Peggy stretched out some and rubbed the backs of her legs. Then when the bus came we stayed out of its way and Trinity waved at both of us from the bus window as it left.
We went along Western's campus on the way back, and had to kind of zig-zag back and forth because none of the roads went straight but I knew what went where better than Peggy did. She was kind of curious about how far we'd gone but neither of us knew for sure. I thought it had been a couple of miles and she said maybe closer to three.
When we were back in our room she took off her shirt and used it to dry herself off some, then she got her shower things and we went to the bathroom together and we had to wait for Kat to get done, then I let her go first.
She was dressed when I got back to the room and so I put my shower basket away and while we were walking out of the building she said that trotting together had been fun and we should do it every Monday. And then when we got to the back door she said she'd race me to the dining hall, and I asked if she was sure, because I knew I'd beat her. And she told me that I had to keep my hooves on the ground, and I said that I wouldn't fly, and she started running.
I hadn't expected her to start so quick, so she was ahead of me around the corner of the building, but after that it was straight, and I switched to a canter and then a gallop and even with my saddlebags on I was leading by the time we got to the corner of Hicks, and I beat her to the front entrance by almost six seconds.
Humans have longer legs, but they don't seem to have as good a gait for running.
The waffle-maker was working, so me and Peggy both had waffles for breakfast and I got some fruit to go with them, too. Christine said that her fruit loops had all the vitamins and minerals that my actual fruit did, and that they were an important part of a balanced breakfast. Peggy said that the only part of them that was important was the box, and that was only if it had a maze on it or some game you could play.
And Sean asked why adult cereals didn't have adult games on them, and both Christine and Peggy thought that would be a really good idea.
When I was done with breakfast, I flew a lap around campus just to exercise my wings some and then I landed in front of the science building.
Professor Brown started by telling us about thermodynamic cycles because unlike math, sometimes you couldn't figure out every point on a graph, and if it was a repeating cycle it was best to figure out the parts that you could calculate and not always worry about the middle part. And I thought that the water cycle was kind of like that—maybe you couldn't figure out where all the clouds were all the time but it didn't always matter.
Then after he'd explained all that he started to talk about alchemical reactions, because a lot of time they changed temperature. And he said that you could buy little packs that got hot or cold which I thought was really interesting.
He started writing out alchemical math which I didn't know at all because humans have different symbols for alchemy, but even if I knew what they were I wouldn't know what they made because I'd never done any work like that before.
So it was really interesting but kind of confusing, although the way you figured it out using tables was pretty straightforward. And it turned out that there was a chart called a periodic table that said what all the different letters were for, which was something that I would have to memorize.
Since we hadn't over the weekend, me and Lisa sat in the lounge and went over our lab homework one more time. He had been nice and not given us any today because he said that he knew some of us were slackers and hadn't finished our labs yet and I felt really guilty about that because we'd had plenty of time but hadn't used it wisely.
Fortunately, there wasn't much more that we needed to do on ours. I saw a couple of mistakes, but they were probably from when Lisa typed it in and maybe she hadn't been paying enough attention, or else the computer had thought she meant something else. Mine did a lot when I talked to it.
When we were both satisfied, she said that she'd make the corrections and print it out again, and we'd turn it in tomorrow. And then I flew back to our dorm room to put away my books and get my math books, and I still had a little bit of time before lunch but not enough to do anything worthwhile, so I went down the hall to Ruth's room and sat on her bed and she drew little hearts on my hooves with a glitter marker.
There was a decent lunch, especially since everything at the salad bar was fresh. There had been a truck that had been backed up to the building earlier in the day and maybe that was the truck that brought fresh food. They had some nice leafy spinach, and so I got a bunch of that because they usually just had bad lettuce that wasn't even worth eating.
Christine was happy that they had a chocolate cream pie for dessert, until she discovered that it was still frozen, but she ate it anyway. And she said that she knew it was pre-made so all they had to do was put it out until it thawed and they couldn't even get that right.
And Peggy noticed my glittery hearts and asked if Rebekka had done that and I said it was Ruth and they were very pretty. And she said that she sometimes thought that Ruth acted like a kindergartner, and Sean said that there was a lot of that going around because his girlfriend sometimes pretended to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex and so she punched him in the shoulder.
Me and Sean went to math together, and Professor Pampena kept teaching us about the point on the wheel, and he explained how speed should be a vector, because it mattered not only how fast you were going but what direction you were going in, too. And he started by proving that at one point on each rotation, the point on the wheel didn't move at all, and at the very top the point was moving twice as fast as the wheel. It was kind of strange to think of how points on the wheel could move at different speeds but it didn't come apart.
There was a really neat formula for the length of an arch of a cycloid, because you had to measure it from zero to two pi, and Sean muttered that that was called tau and it would be easier to just say tau instead of two pi.
He told us about Kepler's second law and I knew who he was because we'd learned about him in astronomy, and how it told you how fast a planet moved on an orbit once you know what the orbit was. But he explained the math behind how it worked, which Professor Miller hadn't. I guess we didn't really need to know that for her class, but it was nice to know how he'd figured it out.
It was really windy outside when we left class, and Sean asked if there were ever any days where it was so windy that I could just hold out my wings and fly, and I said that sometimes that happened but that wasn't the kind of wind you wanted to fly in if you could help it, because you'd just get blown along and didn't have a whole lot of choice where you went, and then I told him about how a couple of months ago, a downdraft had made me crash-land on a roof.
We decided that we'd do our math homework together, so we went up to his room and I borrowed his roommate's chair again, and he asked if I minded listening to music because he usually did when he worked, and I didn't mind. It was a little distracting, because it was a woman I'd never heard before called Loreena McKennett, who had a very pretty voice, and I kept forgetting to do math because I was paying attention to her. So Sean finished up a lot before I did and then he started working on other homework.
But I finally got done and double-checked all my work, then we compared our answers, and either we'd gotten them all right or we'd both made the same mistakes.
We went to dinner together even though it was a bit early. Sean said that way we'd get all the good food, and he went to the dessert table before even picking dinner, and got a piece of chocolate cream cake, and he poked it with a fork to make sure that it was melted.
It felt a little bit weird to be done with my dinner before either Peggy or Christine showed up, and so me and Sean just talked and he didn't eat the pie because he said he was saving it for Christine, which was really nice of him.
I had to remind myself not to get more food, but watching them eat made me a little bit hungry again and I did get another salad.
We stayed at dinner until it was almost time to go to Durak, and I had to go back to my room first and empty out my saddlebags and put my flight gear inside them.
I flew over to Fourth Coast, and Kennith and Seth were already there but nobody else was, so we played a fast game with only three and that went a lot quicker than usual because it was a different strategy. You couldn't really hold on to cards and hope that they'd be useful later.
We hadn't quite finished when other people started showing up, and there were two new people. They were both freshmen, and one was Anna and she was the girl with the long blonde hair that was in my astronomy class. The other one was called Reese, and he looked kind of like Sean but with longer hair. When Malcolm asked him how he'd gotten his name, he said that his parents had really liked the Terminator movie, and they'd decided on Reese for a boy or Sarah for a girl and I thought it was strange to name someone after a character in a movie.
Seth said that Reese was named Kyle Reese, and he said that neither of his parents had liked the name Kyle, and anyway in the movie he had always just been called Reese.
So then everyone talked about their names while we played, and there were a lot of different reasons that people had gotten their names, just like ponies, but I thought that it was strange that people decided on names before the baby was even born.
We played until it was kinda late, and then me and Aric drove home. And when we got to Dartmouth Street, he stopped Winston and let me sit on his lap and drive the rest of the way, and he did let me shift but I wasn't very good at it because it had a slippery round knob on top that wasn't hoof-friendly at all, and nothing told you which gear you'd picked. Most of the other cars I'd been in had a little lighted letters and numbers so that you'd know.
But I did pretty well, and he thought so too, because even though he had to fix it for me once Winston didn't stall.
And then I turned in the driveway and he stopped the truck and shifted it into no gear, and said it was too bad it was cloudy because otherwise we could go out and look at stars. And I thought it was kind of late for that but it would be fun to just drive around some, and so I said that we should go looking for a little bit, so I got off of his lap and we drove north of town.
It never got less cloudy, so we didn't see any stars, but it was nice and relaxing and I leaned up against him and he put his arm around my withers when he didn't have to use it to pick gears. And then we decided that I'd try to pick the gears again and it was a little easier with me in the center, and after a little while I started to get it right almost all the time. It wouldn't let me put it into a really wrong gear, which helped.
And we had to stop on the side of the road by a big empty field because he'd had too much coffee and he told me not to look because there weren't any trees.
So it was really late when we got back home but we'd both had fun. And we went upstairs and I helped him get undressed and even though I was tired we didn't want to rush, so we took our time kissing and touching and nuzzling and then after he laid on his side and stroked my mane until I fell asleep.