//------------------------------//
// May 27 [Firefly] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

 May 27 

It was another beautiful day outside, which I knew because Meghan had forgotten to close her curtains all the way. I don't know why she likes to close them anyway, unless the light bothers her in the morning; Aric never closes his.

She woke up right before her alarm went off. She'd reached up and had just started brushing my mane, then she had to stop and make it stop. The longer she ignored it the louder it got, which I thought was pretty clever. If I ever needed an alarm to wake me up in the morning, I'd want one that did that.

Since she never liked to get up the first time the alarm sounded, I tried to take the opportunity to use her as a pillow, but this time she was too quick for me and rolled all the way over to face me. I pushed at her a little bit, but she didn't want to give, so I let her have victory this time.

She hugged me against her and closed her eyes. I could feel the square block of her telephone right against my ribs, and ten minutes later it started to vibrate right before the alarm.

When she picked it up to look at it, I was in the way, so she turned onto her back and this time I was ready and claimed my spot, which got her to laugh. And we stayed like that until the alarm went off again, and then it was time for me to go if I wanted to fly, so I kissed her goodbye and took to the sky.

Dori was directing the airplanes, and she gave me a big block of clearance again, which was really nice of her. It was the same wedge I usually got, between Stadium Drive and Main Street, and I used all of it to my advantage. I went all the way up to the highest altitude I was allowed, and made a big circle of my territory. I could have flown down and moved off the hawk I saw circling if I'd wanted to, but I let him have his space instead.

I did a few wing rolls on my way back to campus, just for the fun of it, then came around in little arc above the Trowbridge parking lot, and I landed on the outside boardwalk between the two wings. It was called Pebble Beach, because the roof had rocks in it. Lots of flat roofs had rocks on them, actually. That was something I'd noticed while I was flying.

Not only did going in from the doors there save me time—I had to go up one less flight of stairs—but unlike all the other doors into the building, this one didn't have a little slot to see my card; I could just open it and go in.

I was a little late; Peggy was dressed except for buttoning her shirt when I got back to the room. I stripped off my flight gear and put it away, then went into the bathroom and waited for my turn in the shower.

I got a little bit greedy at breakfast, 'cause first the chef who sometimes made omelets was there and so I got one with a bunch of vegetables and two kinds of cheese, then I saw that the waffle-maker was working again, and I made myself a waffle, too. I was sorry I'd had so much food later, but I enjoyed eating it.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee moved away from fractals and started talking the statistics of chaotic attractors. I would have been happy if we'd stuck with fractals for the rest of the year. And at first it was kind of a repeat of what we'd had before, with bifurcated lines. But then he started to tell us more about how chaotic orbits worked.

He told us that there was a way to do it on computers, where you made little boxes and the iterates would fall into the boxes, and then you would know where the most were landing. Then he said that you wanted a large number like a million, and I thought it would take forever to calculate that all out.

Then he told us that we could derive some systems ourselves, and my ears perked up. He told us about the Birkhoff theorem, where we could sometimes use a function on a function to get the invariant density. That could give us a general idea of how things were going to work, even when you didn't know exactly how they were.

A lot of what he taught us seemed like it would be really useful for weather work, especially things like Markov maps. I thought that they could relate to things like atmospheric humidity, or pressure—because there were always times when you knew something wouldn't happen or it would, but there was a lot of stuff in the middle where you didn't always know, so you made your best guess and sometimes you needed to get a couple more mares in the sky, or push some of the clouds back into reserve.

I was kind of distracted during lunch, because I was playing with some of the equations. We'd never learned math this good in Equestria, and it looked like it would be really helpful. Plus I didn't want to have too much to eat anyway, since I'd had a lot for breakfast.

Professor Amy told us a little more about agriculture, but this time it was about how specific cultures had treated it, and other things that they had done. And she also talked about how different crops had come from different places, like when Europe had discovered North America, they had suddenly discovered a lot of new crops that nobody had ever heard of before, like tomatoes and potatoes and corn. And some of those went on to become staple parts of their cultures—she reminded us how potatoes had been important to the Irish, and then asked people to imagine Italian food without tomatoes.

Then while I was waiting to show my essay to Professor Amy, a girl named Lynn who I barely knew stopped at my desk and said that she'd been thinking during class today with all the talk of agriculture moving from one place to another and did I know that Europeans had brought horses to the New World (which is what they called America, even though it was as old as all the other continents). And then she said that wasn't the funny part; the funny part was that horses had already lived in the New World, but they'd gone extinct and the Europeans didn't know until Darwin's friends were sorting bones and couldn't find any transitional equine fossils.

I wasn't sure what to make of that.

My essay was a lot better, but still needed some work. I guess Professor Amy saw that I was looking a bit discouraged when she told me that, 'cause she said that most students just hand in something mediocre and never bother to ask for help or guidance on the assignment, and she said that this attempt was a lot better than my first, and there really wasn't all that much that needed to be improved upon.

I went back to my room and I was about to get back into the World War 1 book when I thought that maybe I should have a gift for Aquamarine, so I thought I would make her a dreamcatcher. I figured she'd like it.

Peggy helped me make it, and we were having so much fun that we made a second one, too. As we were finishing up, I knew who I wanted to give it to, but it needed one more thing before it was perfect, so I hung it unfinished next to my bed.

She asked me what time Aquamarine was coming tomorrow, and I told her when the train would come in, but not to worry about it because Aric and I were going to go to the station to pick her up together, and then he was going to drop us off on campus.

She said she'd thought Aquamarine was going to come tonight, and I said I'd wished she was, but the train schedules were kind of dumb, and the bus was also dumb because it went to Grand Rapids first, rather than coming straight to Kalamazoo.

We went to dinner together, and Peggy got a big bowl of mashed potatoes and when we sat down she said that the first person to talk about politics tonight was going to get a new hat.

Then Joe said that soup would be better, because if it was a choice between being blown up or having soup in our hair, the soup was more fun every time. And that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but Joe said it was an ancient Chinese proverb. Then Sean told him that was from Firefly, and he said that they spoke Chinese in Firefly so it counted.

It turned out that Firefly was a television movie series, and since I'd never seen it, everyone agreed that I had to watch it, so after dinner we all went to Christine's room and had a little party where we watched several of the movies. We watched the first two in order, and then Sean said that now that I knew the characters and the ship he was going to change to one of his favorites so that we could see how they got Serenity. Christine said that I should watch them in order, and he asked her if that was why she showed me the Star Wars movies in series order, and changed to a different movie disk.

That one was my favorite of them all. It was kind of sad in parts, but it had a really happy ending, and a good moral that people should stick together.

I would have liked to watch more, but it was getting late and I'd told Aric that I was coming over so that we could pick up Aquamarine later, And then they did manage to talk me into watching one more anyway, which was about Jayne becoming a local hero for accidentally dropping money on the town below.

I felt really bad that it was so late when I got to Aric's house, and he asked me if I had been doing more math, but I admitted that I had been watching Firefly movies instead.

He said that was a really good excuse. Then he asked me what my favorite one was so far and I told him that I had really liked the one where the ship broke because the catalyzer was bad, and he said that was one of his favorite episodes.

Then he said that if I didn't mind staying up a bit longer we could watch Objects in Space in his room, because he didn't have a movie disk but he had them right on his computer. So we went upstairs and sat on his bed, which was still in front of the window.

I liked that one, too, because they had learned how important it was to stick together (except for Jayne). I did feel kind of bad for Early, though. He was supposed to be bad, but he was sort of nice sometimes. I hoped he'd be okay in the end.

I was really tired, so I promised Aric I'd make it up to him in the morning, and I said it was his fault anyway, and he agreed that it was. He got undressed and lay on his back and let me curl up with my head tucked against his chest.