January 7
Yesterday, they had a chef at the dining hall who would make omelets for you while you waited. I probably shouldn't have, but he asked me when I came in if I wanted one, and he was so nice I couldn't say no. He put lots of vegetables in it, and a little bit of cheese. And it was really tasty.
I regretted it when I was exercising this morning, though. It slowed me down. I think that maybe I should try to exercise before I eat, or else eat a smaller meal in the morning.
Until I'm sure where I'm allowed to fly, I'm keeping my hooves on the ground whenever I'm not in the central part of campus. Well, mostly. Surely short glides, no more than a pony-height above the ground are okay.
There is a nice neighborhood around the college where I can trot around and get my exercise. I've already met one nice man who trots—but humans call it jogging—in the morning as well. Also there is a lady who walks her dog. It's a very friendly dog; she says it's a veeshla.
We're still covering basic stuff in climate class. A lot of the other students are asking really dumb questions that they should have learned years ago. Maybe that's not fair because humans can't fly without machines, so they probably don't understand the atmosphere like I do. It's sort of frustrating, though, because it's foal's stuff.
But—I have to pay close attention, because the human names for clouds are very different. Some of them are very poetic, like stratocumulus.
Also humans sometimes make cirrus clouds with airplanes. The professor said that airplanes make contrails which turn into cirrus clouds. I wasn't sure why they wanted to make them with airplanes when there are more useful clouds that can be made, unless they didn't know how.
I wonder if the airplane I flew in made cirrus clouds? I wasn't looking out the back of it.
I heard one of the students in back say that cirrus clouds were also called 'mare's tails.' I thought that was a nice name for them, too.
In my philosophy class, we learned about how Socrates invented the scientific method, which is where you take a big problem and break it down into little parts, then investigate each of those little parts until you get the answer that you want. The professor said that that was one of Socrates' most important ideas, and I thought that made him pretty smart, but it turned out he chose to drink hemlock when it was given to him, which wasn't very smart at all, because hemlock is poisonous to humans too.
At lunch, I was still a little curious about that, and Aric, who also sometimes eats lunch with me now, said that people didn't always like new ideas and that was why Socrates had to drink hemlock. He also said that I ought to read a made-up story about Socrates called Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. He has a copy, and he's going to loan it to me tonight.
The students in Equestrian class did better today. The professor decided that it would be good practice for me to tell them about my dormitory room here on campus. I thought that was kind of boring since they're all pretty much the same, but then she told me that it was something that they could all picture easily, and that made sense. I hadn't thought of it that way.
It's not that interesting a room. There is a closet by the front door, and the walls are big bricks like in the transfer station. The floor is hard tile which is somewhat slippery underhoof, and the ceiling is also called tile, but it's much softer. It sits in little tracks and if I fly up too high I can knock it out by mistake and have to put it back where it belongs.
Both Peggy and I have dressers and beds and desks and a chair for our desks. We each have our own computer, and she has big pictures on her side of the room. I don't have any. I should ask her where she got them. It would liven up my side if I had some.
She also has a little electric icebox and a coffee maker.
There is a bathroom with a shower right next to our room, which is very convenient.
The other students live in similar rooms, but they are arranged differently. Some of them have a door right to the bathroom, which would be even more convenient, and some of them are called 'suites,' and they have several rooms which share a common room and a bathroom.
Before I went to dinner, I discovered that I had a letter on my computer from Mister Salvatore. He apologized for getting upset yesterday while we were talking to the man from the FAA, but he had thought that things were all taken care of, and then after the recent incident in France they had changed the rules but not told him about it.
For dinner, there was a special selection which they called Italian. It was mostly noodles and sauces. Christine said that they tried to be multi-cultural with dinner but sometimes they didn't do very well. I asked if they were going to have an Equestrian dinner, and Dan—who's short for a human—said that he hoped not, since humans couldn't eat hay. I don't know if he was joking or not, but I hadn't seen any hay with the salads yet so he was probably telling the truth.
Aric gave me the story about Socrates, and I told him that I probably wouldn't be able to read it for a day or two, because I needed to write a letter to Aquamarine and also read through more of the FAA book, as well as my regular coursework, and he said that that was okay.