October 10
I woke up and nuzzled Meghan, and when she opened her eyes and looked at me and asked what time it was, and I said that I didn't know, but the sun wasn't quite up yet, and I thought that I could go flying and then come back and take a shower with her. Which was a new idea, but I thought that it might work.
And she thought so, too, so we kissed and then I left her room and went down the hall to my room. I had to be really quiet so I wouldn't wake up Peggy, and it was a little hard to see, because the lights in the hallway had taken away all my night vision.
I stuffed everything in my saddlebags, 'cause I was gonna go to Meijer and get my shampoo and conditioner, and then I went out in the hallway to get dressed.
Dori gave me permission to fly to Meijer, as long as I stayed under a thousand feet until I got to the 131 Highway, and I said that I would. And then I took off and flew kinda low until I’d passed Jeff’s house—I think I was a little bit too early to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity.
Since I was already flying low, I went over Aric’s house, too, but there weren’t any lights on. Then I climbed up and flew parallel to Main Street until I crossed over Drake, and then I angled across the road, ‘cause Meijer would be on the north side.
There wasn’t any point in climbing higher, since it wasn’t even a mile past the 131 Highway, so I stayed at about 500 feet until I got close enough to see their parking lot, and came in for a landing on one of the little parking lot islands.
It was still pretty early, so there weren’t a lot of people there, which was nice.
I thought about getting a new kind of shampoo, because there were so many different smells and colors of it, but then I decided that I liked the kind I’d been using, and it was on the very bottom shelf which was convenient.
So I got as many bottles as I thought would fit in my saddlebags, and carried the basket up front. There were little kiosks at both ends that let you tally up your purchases by yourself, but I didn’t know how to use them, and I had to look until I found a normal sales stand that was open.
I put my bottles right in my saddlebags and he took the basket from me and wiped off the handle, and then I went back outside and looked for cars, and since there weren’t any, I flew off right from the entrance.
I landed back on the boardwalk and went upstairs to my dorm room first, because Peggy kind of depended on me to wake her up in the morning. And then I remembered that I was supposed to have woken her up sooner so we could go trotting together, and I felt bad about that.
So I took off my flight gear and then I nuzzled her back and I said that it was time to get up for the shower, and I told her I was sorry I'd forgotten that we were supposed to go trotting this morning.
And she said that was okay, but she'd been a little bit worried about me when I'd disappeared all weekend, and I put my ears down and said that I was really sorry and I should have stopped by and checked in with her, and she said just a telephone telegram would have been fine; I didn't have to come all the way back and tell her face-to-face.
I said I'd try to do better, and she asked if I'd had a fun weekend, and I nodded and said that I'd tell her about it later, because I was supposed to go to Meghan's room for a shower, and she was probably waiting for me, and that meant that I was giving up my turn in the bathroom.
When I got to Meghan's, I knocked really quietly on the door so that I wouldn't wake Amy up if she was still asleep, and Meghan was kind of surprised by how much lather I had on me, and I said that I'd kind of hurried, so I wouldn't be late for the shower, 'cause I didn't know what her morning routine was.
She said that Amy went to her first class a little bit late, which was why she stayed up late studying a lot of the time. So it was free now, and she'd already picked out her clothes, so we went into the bathroom and she turned on the shower and I hopped in before it had even started to warm up, so that I could cool off a little bit and rinse some of the lather off.
Meghan said that she didn't think that our plan of relaxing after mid-terms at the hotel was going to work out after all, because the trip to Indianapolis had cost more than she'd expected, and it turned out that the hotel in town was more expensive than she'd thought, and she was a bit reluctant to put more on her credit card. And I said that was okay; I thought that she'd kind of gotten her weekend with the weather ponies, and she said that she sort of had. It hadn't been a full day, but we would probably have gotten bored in a hotel room anyways.
And I thought that we could do something else fun instead, and she thought so, too.
I helped her dry off and she put on her robe, and we went back to her room to finish getting ready, in case anyone else wanted to use the bathroom. Then we groomed each other and went off to breakfast.
I said that was a pretty good way to start the morning, and she thought so too. I wish I'd thought of it sooner.
Somebody had broken the waffle-maker over the weekend, but I was still in a pretty cheery mood. And me and Meghan told everyone about everything we'd seen at ArtPrize, and Meghan could show some of the art on her portable telephone, even though she hadn't taken pictures of it.
I hadn't remembered to put my physics things in my saddlebags, or even have them with me, so I had to leave breakfast a little bit early and go back to my room and get them. And Peggy went with me, 'cause she said she'd forgotten something in her bag, too, but it turned out that wasn't true, and she'd just wanted to ask me more questions about the weekend.
So I told her some of the stuff I hadn't said at breakfast, and she kind of darted around for a bit before finally asking if the three of us had all had sex together, and I said that we hadn't and I didn't know if we would or not because I still wasn't sure how everyone felt about it, but I thought that Aric and Meghan had had a lot of fun together, and I'd had fun, too, except when they'd both picked on me.
I wasn't sure if it was faster to go out the back and fly off the boardwalk, or out the front and fly from there, so I went out the front and took off and flew over Dewing, and then dove down to land on the sidewalk behind a cluster of students, and I was so late that people were already going into class when I got there.
Professor Brown started teaching us how to figure out spontaneous change, which was something that I knew about from weather work. If you calculated really badly, you could push out clouds and then just watch them vanish into thin air. It was pretty rare for that to happen, because the tables were really good, but sometimes a new supervisor who thought she knew everything wouldn't check the tables before calculating a weather order.
It was more common with feral weather, and sometimes we got coastal clouds like that, but we didn't worry too much about them because they mostly stayed out over the ocean, in the marine layer, or if they came inland they didn't go too far.
So we had to learn the equilibrium state first, before we could learn whether it would change, and he gave us the formulas for that. And he told us that the equilibrium point was where the entropy was the highest, which made sense.
And he went through all the equations, and and it was kinda like rolling a cart down between a pair of hills, 'cause it wanted to eventually stop at the lowest point, since that's where it had the least potential energy. So if any of our ideal gasses were at a place where they could get more entropy, they wanted to, but once they got there, they'd stay there and be stable.
After class, I met with Lisa and we went over the lab work one more time, just to make sure that there weren't any mistakes on it. And that didn't take too long, since we'd already discussed it before, so all we had to do was make sure that she hadn't accidentally typed a wrong thing.
And I didn't have any homework, which was nice, but that was because of the mid-term, which I hadn't studied for at all.
I thought it was a pretty nice day outside, so I found a tree and flew up into its branches and then got my book out and I thought I'd start by just looking through it at the headings of each section, and seeing if I could remember the formulas, because that would be a quick way to figure out what I needed to study more and what I already knew.
It didn't take too long before I needed a little break, so I looked away from the book and studied the leaves on the tree. I knew that on Earth the leaves fell off on their own, but I wondered if maybe I could help. They weren't ready yet—the trees had started turning, and a few leaves were already falling, but it looked to me like it would be a few more weeks before they were actually ready to fall. If Aquamarine was here, I bet she could tell me exactly.
I stayed up in the tree until lunch, and I was pretty confident that I knew most of what I'd have to for the mid-term, and also that I needed to be really careful with my formulas. There were almost always little letters or words on top or bottom, and those were very important, and I'd forgotten about them a couple of times.
It always seemed to be a little bit harder to get out of a tree than it was to get in it, and I had to wiggle around a little bit to get in a good position where I could drop out from the branches, then I flew to our dorm room and put away my physics stuff and got my things for math class.
I had a salad for lunch and I wanted some fish but they didn’t have any at all. And Reese said that he had a test in the afternoon and so we all wished him good luck. Anna said that she had one too, but she thought it would be pretty easy, because it was in her first-year seminar. Everyone else agreed that those were kind of easy classes, and Peggy asked what it was about, and she said it was about monsters. Reese said he’d wanted to get in that class, too, but all the slots had been filled.
I would have liked to take it, but I couldn’t because it was for freshmen.
Professor Pampena was gonna teach us about minimum and maximum when the variables weren't independent, which were called Lagrange multipliers, and that applied to thermodynamics as well, which was nice. And he showed us a picture of a hyperbola that was on a circular contour plot that looked kind of like a record, and what we were trying to figure out was where the circle only touched the hyperbola at two points.
We had to add a third variable to make it work, and then we had to put it in a matrix, and lambda could equal positive or negative two, so we had to solve for both, and only one would give us a proper answer. And we also wouldn't know if it was a minimum or maximum, just that it was a critical point; we had to do more math to find out. We couldn't use a second derivative test.
Then he gave us a problem where we had to figure out a golden pyramid where we knew the size of the base and the volume but we had to figure out how to have the minimum surface area. And it turned out that the best solution was to have all three sides the same, which I'd kind of thought from the beginning, but it was really neat to see how his complicated equation with lots of points and lines and variables and square roots all simplified so nicely at the end.
He didn’t give us any homework, either, but we still went back to Sean’s room so that we could study, and we spent all afternoon quizzing each other on all the different formulas and, then Sean found a place on the internet that had sample questions that you could figure out, so that was good practice. You had to go to a different page to get the answers, to keep us from cheating.
It was a little bit different than having Professor Pampena grade it, though, because when you got an answer wrong the computer didn’t know and so it couldn’t tell you what mistake you’d made. So there were a couple of problems that we had to review carefully to see what had gone wrong.
By the time we were done, I was feeling pretty good about the math test at least, as long as I didn’t get confused about how to make my matrixes.
So I flew back to my room, and I practiced drawing some of the math alphabet a little bit, because my mouthwriting wasn’t that good, and then I had time to write in my journal before dinner, too.
They didn’t have a very good dinner, and Christine said that they probably wouldn’t have good food until Friday, ‘cause it was Homecoming, and sometimes alumnis liked to eat at the dining hall. Sean thought that if they wanted the real experience, they ought to have leftovers.
Reese said that his high school had had a big parade for Homecoming, and he asked if Kalamazoo College had one, too. Peggy said that they didn’t but a lot of people went streaking, and sometimes some of the alumnis would, too. She said that supposedly two years ago the CEO of Stryker had streaked the quad.
Me and Peggy went back to our dorm room together, and I got out my thermodynamics notes and studied until it was time to leave for Durak, then I put my flight gear in my saddlebags and nuzzled Peggy and told her that I was going to spend the night at Aric's house.
She asked me when the last time I'd stayed at the dorm on a Monday night, and I couldn't remember. But I’d wanted to be sure she knew so she wouldn’t worry.
So I went down to the boardwalk and flew across the quad, and instead of following the street, I climbed high enough to go over Hoben, and stayed above the trees all the way to Westnedge.
I dropped in behind Fourth Coast, and I went in the side door instead of the front. And I got my drink and went upstairs, and I was a little bit early. Maybe I shouldn't have taken a shortcut.
Since no one else was there, I pushed our two tables together, then sat down at the end next to the wall where I could see who was coming upstairs. And I kind of felt like a princess, with the long table stretching out in front of me.
Kennith and Seth arrived first, and they sat midways down the table, across from each other. And then Aric arrived and he sat next to me, and a whole cluster of people came after him, so we started to play.
I did well all night long, and so did Aric. Alex had a really bad night; he ended one game with what looked like half of the cards still in his hand, and I thought that Keith was kind of mean to be smiling so much as he put the last cards in his hand on the table one at a time.
We stopped a little bit earlier than we normally did, because almost everyone had big tests. Aric didn't, because theatre classes don't have mid-terms.
Anna and Reese wanted to ride back to college in Winston, so we all crowded together in the cab and he dropped them off at their dorm, and when we got to the corner of Dartmouth street I slid over to his side before he even said that I could drive.
I was getting pretty good at driving Winston. I got all the correct gears with the shifter and only slipped off the stick once, and if I thought I could reach the control pedals I would see if I could drive it all by myself.
After I'd guided Winston into the driveway, he shut it off and I got out his side so I didn't have to slide across, and we went in through the kitchen door.
David and Angela were in the living room, watching a movie, and we waved at them, and Aric said that I would probably enjoy the movie they were watching which was called Labyrinth, but I said that I had lab in the morning and wanted to fly and also had to study some more tomorrow, and maybe we could watch it later. Plus they'd already watched part of it and it wouldn't be polite to ask them to start again, or wait until we got caught up.
I think that Aric was kind of eager to go upstairs too because he hadn't gotten any sex all weekend long and was feeling kind of lonely. So as soon as he'd closed the door in his room, I hopped up on the bed and flicked my tail off to the side, and it didn't take him very long to get undressed and get in bed with me.