November 19
Meghan woke me up in the middle of the night when she started moving around, 'cause she was cold. The temperature had dropped in the night, and while it had been comfortable with the blankets we'd had when we went to bed last night, it wasn't enough now. And it didn't help that the window was open, either, so I got out of bed and closed it, and then I got back in and huddled up against Meghan.
She put her arm around my barrel and pulled me in close, and said that she wished she knew where the thermostat for the house was, because then she could go and make it warmer. I didn't know, either, and even if I had, I didn't know how to work it. Meghan said it was really simple, and she said that it was probably downstairs somewhere, but she wasn't sure it was worth getting out of bed just to find it. And she said that I was plenty warm and now that there wasn't an arctic wind blowing through the window, she'd warm up pretty quickly.
And I guess she did, 'cause she was a bit restless at first as she was trying to get warm, and then she fell asleep again. And I thought that I could get up and go looking for the thermostat and figure out how to work it, but then I decided that she'd probably get cold again if I left the bed, and I didn't really want to anyways.
It didn't take me that long to fall asleep again, and when I woke up in the morning, she was still asleep and still had her arm pretty tight around my barrel. So I turned my head and nuzzled her cheek until she woke up, and then when she let go of me, I stuck my head over the side of the bed and nosed around in her duffel bag until I found her sweatshirt. I liked it when she went without clothes, but I didn't want her to be cold, either.
She managed to put it on without getting too much out from under the covers, and then she asked if I was getting up and leaving, and I shook my head. I guess that I was picking up some human habits, 'cause I didn't really want to leave the bed for good just yet. But the little filly in me did want to see if it had snowed overnight and if I'd be greeted by a blanket of white in the morning, so I got out of bed and looked out the window.
I guess Meghan wanted to know, too, 'cause she asked me what I saw, and I said that there was just rain outside, and no sign of snow. And she was kind of disappointed in that.
All of our moving around woke Aric up, and pretty soon the three of us were all having sex which was a bit different 'cause both of them were trying to stay as much under the covers as they could, so they wouldn't get cold.
Meghan put on her pants before going to the bathroom, and Aric went downstairs to close more windows and make the furnace warm up the house, and I knew when he did it 'cause I could hear some clicking noises from downstairs and then pretty soon warm air started to come out of the vents in the floor. Our dorm room doesn't get warm like that; it's got a radiator filled with hot water, which all comes from pipes that are kept underneath the sidewalks.
Meghan was already in the shower when I went to the bathroom, and Aric joined us last, and we stayed until the hot water started to run out, and then they got out and left the bathroom door closed to dry off, even though it was crowded, 'cause all the steam kept the bathroom warmer than the rest of the house.
When we got back to his room, I looked out the window and the rain had turned to snow. There wasn't any sticking on the ground, 'cause it was still warm and wet, but I wanted to go out and play in the falling snow, so I pushed the window open and flew out and started flying around in it.
It wasn't good, fluffy snow, probably ‘cause it had just changed—they were big, wet flakes, but it was still the first snowfall of the season and that was exciting. It was very strange that it had been seventy degrees yesterday and now it was thirty and snowing. I think humans would do a lot better to have proper weather ponies managing their weather so that this doesn't happen, unless they like the sudden changes.
I didn't fly too far, 'cause I didn't want to abandon Aric and Meghan, and I still had to groom myself, although I could wait until I got back to campus to do that. And when I circled back to his house, the bedroom window was closed, which I guess I should have expected, so I hovered right up beside it and knocked on the wall, and when Meghan turned around and saw me, I made lifting motions with my hooves so she'd open the window, and she pulled up her sweatshirt instead which wasn't what I wanted, although it was nice to see.
Then she came over and actually opened the window, and I didn't try to make a graceful entrance, but just got my forehooves over the sill and let them pull me the rest of the way in.
The ends of my mane and tail were frozen, and I had a lot of snow in my feathers and on my back, 'cause I couldn't shake it off while I was flying, so I went back into the bathroom, 'cause I didn't want to drip on Aric's floor, and I got back in the shower and shook off as much as I could, and Meghan came in with a towel and dried me off some.
Aric started Winston and made us coffee to drink, and he said that he was going to be studying and working on homework all day, and Meghan was, too. I was going to study some and also play with Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity.
So once we'd drunk our coffee and Winston was warmed up, we got our things and Aric dropped us off on campus. It was a little bit late for a proper breakfast, but me and Meghan went anyway, and had a quick meal so that we wouldn't be hungry all day, and then she kissed me and said she was going to go study, and I said that I was going to fly first, 'cause my little flight around Aric's had only made me want to fly more.
I put on my flight gear, which was still wet from last night, and then I went outside and called the airplane directors. The grumpy man gave me permission to fly, and he wasn't too happy that I was just going to stay over Kalamazoo, until I promised to stay under a thousand feet, and then he said it was okay, and he'd warn me if there were any helicopters coming.
I didn't want to fly over downtown this time, so instead I went south, and kind of flew the same route that had gotten me lost in the fog. And in the daytime, even with the snow blocking some of my visibility, it was kind of hard to believe that I'd managed to fly that far off-course without knowing it. From now on, I was going to remember to at least wear my watch whenever I went flying, 'cause it wasn't too hard to put on, and as long as I remembered to look at the distance and bearing to the nearest airport, I could get back to where I had been.
I went all the way down to the 94 Highway, and I'd picked up a lot of ice and snow and wanted to shake it off, but I couldn't do that very well when I was flying, so when I turned around, I landed at the far end of a golf course, even though the golfers didn't like it when I did that. But there weren't any of them out there today. I don't think you'd want to play a game with a small, white ball when it was snowing, 'cause you'd never find it after you hit it. And I landed right next to one of the little flags that marked the holes, and shook off and when I flew back into the air, I felt a lot lighter.
The snow was starting to stick to things, and it was making the city look a lot prettier. There was some stuff that it just melted right off, like the roads, but houses and trees and lawns were getting covered, and it had started to turn to lighter, fluffier snow, which was nice.
I took off again and nobody yelled at me even though I stayed low over the whole golf course until I got towards their resort house at the front, and then I climbed up until I was a few hundred feet up and made my way back to campus.
When I landed on the balcony, I shook off and stomped my hooves to knock all the snow off my legs, then I went inside and got undressed in our room. Peggy wasn't there, so she must have been in the art shop working on her project, and I thought that maybe if I had time I'd see if I could find her. I wasn't exactly sure where the art shop was, though, except that it was in the Fine Arts building.
I got together all my notes for thermodynamics and I called Crystal Dawn and then went over to her room, and we studied together until it was lunch time. She had a really nice room on the corner of the top floor of Hoben, and it had windows on two sides, so you had a really good view from her room. And I was kind of jealous of it, but I did like my room, too.
It was kind of distracting, though, because I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye and wanted to look closer and had to remind myself to focus on studying. I guess we could have pulled down the shades, although it would have been darker and gloomier in her room.
We studied until lunch, and I thought she was doing pretty well, especially for having started out so late, and she asked if we could do one more study session, and I thought that we could tomorrow. I didn't think that today would be any good, 'cause I didn't know how long it would take to hunt Pokemons, and I was gonna study more astronomy with Anna this afternoon anyways.
I went right to lunch, and there weren't very many people in the dining hall. I guess almost everyone was out studying or maybe playing in the snow. Anna and Reese were there, and so I talked to them, and we agreed to meet in my room to study astronomy, because Anna had been smart and had brought her things with her, and I hadn't been smart and had left mine in my room.
We were just getting ready to leave when Peggy arrived, and she had paint spots all over her arms and her clothes. She showed us a little movie of her catapult working—she said that she hadn't put the glitter in it yet because she didn't want to make a mess, and she also was using a wad of paper with a bunch of pennies in it so it weighed as much as an egg, because that meant she didn't have to clean that up, either. She said she had lost some pennies, but she didn't care because they weren't worth anything.
And it was really neat to watch—instead of having a stop-bar in the middle like most catapults did, its was on the base, so it would swing through a half-circle, and it slammed the paper down hard enough to tear it open and send some pennies flying off. She said that an egg didn't stand a chance.
Reese was a little confused about what the purpose of it was, and she said that it was supposed to be visually interesting, and there was nothing more visually interesting than making a mess. Reese said that it reminded him of the Rube Goldberg machine in the OK Go movie, and I didn't know what that was so he showed me on his portable telephone.
It was neat to see, but I didn't understand what the point of it was, and he said that that was the point, and I still didn't get it, until he explained that the machines were supposed to perform a very simple task in a very complicated manner. It seemed kind of silly to me, but it was fun to watch. And I guess that was the visually interesting part.
Me and Anna went outside and we didn't go to my room right away, 'cause there was snow on the quad and it was still snowing. So I started to play in the snow and roll around in it and she took off her backpack and made a snow angel, then she started making snowballs and throwing them at me, and I scooped some up with my wings and flung it at her, and that was a lot harder for her to dodge. But I had to be closer, so it was a good trade-off.
If the snowclouds had been lower, I could have flown up and gotten one and brought it back down, but I was having lots of fun playing down on the ground.
There wasn't enough snow on the ground yet and so after a little while, my hooves had started to make the snow muddy, and we decided that we needed to study anyway, so she used her hands to dust the snow off her clothes, and I shook myself off, and we went up to my room.
The two of us sat on my bed and we reviewed all the cards again, to make sure that we both knew everything that might be on the test. And then Anna thought that we might have pictures on the test, too, because astronomy was an observational science, and that was a lot harder to study, because even though we had our textbooks, the pictures had captions under them that said what they were, and even if we covered them, you could make a good guess about what it must be from where it was in the book.
But maybe that didn't matter, because it was just important to associate the picture with what it showed, and make sure that we knew all the details from it. So we looked through all the pictures in the book a couple of times, until Peggy came back and said that if I still wanted to, it was time to go meet Caleb and Lindy and Trinity.
She got dressed in her snow clothes, and when she was ready, she called Jeff to tell him that we were coming over. She said that way they'd be ready for when we got there, which was pretty smart of her to think of, although I wouldn't have minded waiting outside in the snow while they got their snow clothes on.
It was still snowing, and also a little bit foggy, which was really fun. We walked on the road, because it was clearer than the sidewalks, although I didn't like it as much because there was gritty salt on the road that kept poking at my frogs, and I finally said that I was going to walk on the sidewalk instead 'cause I'd rather be in snow than on sharp salt. And at first, I still had a little bit of pain in my left hind hoof, until I figured out that somehow a little bit of salt had gotten stuck between my frog and hoof wall, and I had to bend around and get it out, and it was a lot better after that.
I guess the salt doesn't bother people, because they've got shoes on when they walk in the snow. I bet if they had to walk around without shoes they'd grind the salt more finely.
When we got over to Jeff's house, Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were playing in the backyard, and I just flew over the fence, but Peggy had to go around to the gate to get in. It wasn't as strong a fence as the one behind her house, so she couldn't climb over it because she'd break it if she tried.
We all played in the snow for a little while—they were trying to make a snowman even though the snow wasn't very good for it, and I saw pretty quickly that they were also spending more time throwing snow at each other than working together, but they were having fun so that was what mattered. And Peggy helped them focus, 'cause Caleb would do what she told him to, instead of throwing snowballs.
So we did get a snowman made, although it didn't look much like a man, or a woman for that matter. But it was almost as tall as my head, and they stuck some branches in it for arms, and then Jeff gave them some prunes that they could use for eyes and a mouth, and a carrot for a nose. Peggy said that coal was the traditional thing to use for eyes and mouth, but these days most people didn't have coal any more. She said that only big power plants bought it any more, but it used to be that houses were heated with it, and people would get it delivered by the truckload and shovel it into their furnace.
Jeff brought us all hot chocolate so we could warm up some, and then he gave the kids their portable telephones and we all went out looking for Pokemons.
We split up a little bit, because Caleb and Peggy walked in the street and I walked on the sidewalk carrying Trinity, and Lindy walked with us. But they all worked as a team to find the Pokemons, and it didn't take them too long to find the first one, which was in the front lawn of a house. It was called an Articuno, which was pretty rare. It reminded me of a cockatrice, sort of, so I wasn't sure that it was safe to catch, but Lindy said that the Pokemons couldn't hurt them. It was pretty clever, though, and only Caleb was actually able to catch it.
Later, when we were close to Main Street, they also found a Vulpix, which was a cute fox-like thing, but he wasn't as crafty as a real fox, and all three of them caught him.
My legs were getting tired from carrying around Trinity, so she walked for a while, and we went onto campus and found a few more Pokemons which were pretty common ones that they already had. And up by Harmon, Trinity said that someone had put out a lure, but it hadn't attracted anything too exciting for them. They waited a little bit to see if something new would show up, but it didn't, and they were starting to get a little bit chilly from not moving around, even though they were wearing their snow clothes.
So we walked back to their house, and when we got to the top of the hill, I let Trinity get back on me, and ride ponyback the rest of the way back to her house. And Jeff had more hot chocolate, and he invited us to come in, so we sat at his kitchen table and drank hot chocolate, and he thanked me and Peggy for taking the kids around the neighborhood and said that he'd miss us. He said that we were always welcome at his house.
Me and Peggy hugged everyone before we left, 'cause neither of us knew when the next time we'd see them was, although I was determined that I'd visit them more before I went back to Equestria.
We had a few minutes back in our dorm to warm up, and Peggy said that I was making her feel cold, because on the way back home, I'd gathered some snow on my back. I explained how my undercoat kept the heat in, and if the snow was sticking to me and not melting, it meant that my coat was doing its job.
It was still snowing, and the ground was getting pretty well-covered. There were people on sleds and plastic trays who were sliding down the hill from the chapel, and they crashed a lot, but they didn't seem to mind—they'd get back up and brush themselves off and then go back up the hill to try again. Peggy said that she'd snowboarded it one winter but it wasn't all that much fun, because it wasn't much of a hill, and you had to be careful crossing the sidewalk, because it wasn't very good for the snowboard to go across it.
She said that one spring, a bunch of seniors had built a giant slip-and-slide on the hill, which was a plastic sheet that got covered with water, so you'd slide down it. And she said that had been a fun Saturday.
They had a pretty decent dinner, and they had scrod fillets to eat, which made me happy.
Everyone said that they hadn't gotten as much studying done as they'd wanted to, although I thought I was almost ready. I told Sean that we should study math one more time tomorrow, and told Anna that we should study some more astronomy, and that way it would all be fresh in my head for the finals, especially since I was studying with Crystal Dawn again tomorrow, and maybe thermodynamics with Lisa too.
And then we said that we'd all meet in Christine's room around eight, and get ready to go to the showers.
I didn't really have anything that I had to do before that, so I went with Peggy back to our room, and while she was studying, I was writing in my journal. And then I got started on a letter to my sister, too, 'cause I hadn't written her in a while. She'd probably been really busy with the late summer and fall storms; that was when you got hurricanes on the coast and even if they weren't coming towards your weather territory, they often spawned other storms that did, plus all the waves that came out of the storm meant that there were sometimes more rescue patrols. So I told her about what I'd been doing, and it felt really strange to be writing in Equestrian. I was out of practice at it, and I wondered if it would be possible if I stayed on Earth long enough, I'd completely forget how.
Before we went to Christine's, Peggy said that she wondered if she should put on a swimming underwear instead of her normal underwear, and I asked her what the point was if she was going to be taking it off anyway. And she said that she wasn't sure if she was going to take off her panties this time either, but I said that she should because it would be more relaxing, and she'd get used to it pretty quickly, and I said that if anyone tried anything bad I'd kick them. She decided she wanted to change anyways, but instead of wearing swimming underwear, she was going to wear a different set of normal underwear.
And we both remembered to take our towels, too, and then we went down to Christine's room. Sean and Meghan were already there, but it was a little while before Anna and Reese came, and it smelled like they'd been drinking a little bit, and Reese said he'd had to work up his courage a little bit and that was why.
Christine went to her bedroom and brought out the sign from last time, which she had kept in case we needed it again, and then all of us went over to Sean's dorm together.
She taped the sign to the door again, and then we went into the showers, and Christine went around and turned them on to let them warm up and start filling the room with steam, and then people started to get undressed.
Anna and Reese were kind of hesitant, and Christine said that if they were uncomfortable they could just wear their underwear and take it off later, and then Anna said that they hadn't known that that was an option, and so they'd made sure that they wouldn't wimp out by not wearing any, which Peggy thought was really funny. And I said that I should have suggested that to her.
Christine said she wasn't going to get out-nakeded by a pair of freshmen, and took off her underwear and went into the shower, and that kind of got everyone moving again. Sean was still wearing his, until Christine asked if she had to start explaining why Star Wars was better than Star Trek would ever be, and then Reese said that she should talk about Firefly instead, because Mal had actually been naked in one episode. And that was one that I hadn't seen.
So he took off his underwear, and Meghan finished getting undressed, too, and she went in the showers. Reese and Anna were really taking their time with getting their clothes off, and it was funny how Reese had taken off his shirt but not his pants, while Anna had done the opposite, 'cause her shirt was long enough to cover some of her legs.
Peggy decided that she wasn't going to be the last one wearing any clothes, so she took off her underwear and went into the showers, too, and that just left Reese and Anna standing by the bench, and they sort of waited until we weren't looking over in their direction before they joined us.
It was a little uncomfortable for everyone at first, until Christine started a water fight but holding her thumb over the nozzle of her shower so that she could make it spray in different directions, and pretty soon everyone was doing that. And Peggy went over and changed one of the showers so it was only making cold water and tried to spray people with that, until she miscalculated and got herself when she moved her thumb too far, and pretty soon everyone was laughing and giggling and having a good time.
The best part was that there was an unlimited supply of hot water, so we didn't have to hurry and finish up. We could play around as long as we wanted to.
Everyone was a lot more relaxed when we got done, and since the room was still nice and steamy, nobody hurried getting dressed. Both Anna and Reese said that once you got used to it it was a nice way to relax, and I said that I thought humans were dumb for not doing it more often, especially since the college had such nice big showers in some of the dorms.
Me and Meghan had to stop back at Trowbridge so that she could get clothes for tomorrow and I could get the Kama Sutra, and then we walked to Aric's house. It was really peaceful 'cause the snow kind of muted sounds, almost like fog would, and it was also brighter, since the snow was reflecting the street lights.
When we got there, Aric wasn't home, and I realized that I should have gone to the theatre, to see if Winston was there in the parking lot.
The key to his house was still under the mat, so we let ourselves in, and we went up to his room.
I got Meghan undressed and then she put her sweatshirt back on so she wouldn't get cold while we were looking through the Kama Sutra.
Most of the positions weren't too good for just two girls, but it gave us ideas for when Aric showed up.
She said we should get started without him, 'cause she was horny now, and she didn't think that Aric would mind if we were already having sex when he arrived.
We didn't get to find out, ' cause we were done and snuggling and talking when he finally came home, and after he'd gotten undressed, Meghan said that he'd arrived too late, and was gonna have to go to bed without sex.
But she was kidding, and it turned out well for Aric, 'cause we'd already had our pleasure, so we just focused on making him happy.