Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit

Rating: teen
Tags: Sex, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Human, Romance, Original Character, Other
Length: 986231

Silver Glow takes an opportunity to spend a year at an Earth college, where she'll learn about Earth culture and make new friends.

Now that Earth and Equestria have made contact, lots of ponies dream of visiting Earth, and while tourist visas are hard to come by, a few lucky students each year can participate in a foreign-exchange program.

Silver Glow is one of those lucky ponies.

She thought she was prepared for Earth, but can you ever be fully prepared for a truly foreign exchange?

Link to the dramaturge

Published 2016-02-25 22:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2017-03-08 04:04:57 UTC

January 1 [First Day on Earth]

December 32
January 1

Earth is so big! We went to the transport building and then went through the portal and on the other side we had to do all kinds of paperwork and inspections and stuff. It was pretty intense and sometimes kind of boring.

There were ponies that helped with a lot of the process, but also some humans in offices. I didn't think they were that tall until the ~~stallion~~ man in one of the interview rooms got up from his desk. It made me kind of nervous.

I heard that one of the girls broke down.

We'd gone through most of the stuff earlier, so it didn't take too long. But I was getting impatient, 'cause here I was in a new world and all I was getting to see was the inside of a building with ugly brick walls. Not even any flowers to brighten it up or make it smell nicer.

There was a fake tree in one of the offices. I'm no Earth Pony, but I could keep a miniature tree alive.

When we finally got done with all of that, we had a light lunch in their cafeteria. I was assigned to a pair of humans, a ~~mare~~ woman and man. It's hard to remember human terms! They're going to travel with me until I get to the school, because we have to go on an airplane since there aren't any portals near the school where I'm going.

The ~~ma~~ woman is called Cherilyn, and the man is named Salvatore. I think they have second names, because one of the other humans called the woman Miss Sarkisian once. I didn't ask; we'd been told it was impolite to address humans by any name other than what they'd introduced themselves as, or you could add a 'Miss' or 'Mister' to be respectful.

They were very helpful. They helped me carry my bags outside—outside!—to a weird metal wagon they called a 'van.' Aquamarine joined me, 'cause we're going to almost the same place. There were a lot of vans in a little concrete yard behind the building, and other types of vehicles as well.

I didn't know that all the different kinds of vehicles had names. They all had cutie marks on their fronts and backs, and a little badge that told you what they were named. Ours was “Econoline.”

They helped me fasten myself into the seat. There were a couple of special seats for ponies in the van, and belts to hold us in place. All our luggage got loaded into the back, and then a man started up the van and drove it out of the courtyard.

We went along a winding road for a little bit, and then got to a bigger road with more vehicles on it. I thought that I'd be bored with the trip, but there was just so much to take in! Like, the roads had signs on them so that you'd know where you were, and there were other, bigger signs that pointed to restaurants and stuff. I even saw a Taco Bell: it looked just like the ones I'd seen in pictures.

I didn't really get a look at the airplane station until we'd finally arrived. The driver stopped Econoline in front of a long glass wall with glass doors in it. Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore helped me with my bags, and Aquamarine's two humans helped her with hers. Then we went inside.

We went through a special area that was fenced-off from where all the people were. I was getting kind of nervous seeing that many of them around, and I could tell that Aquamarine was as well.

There was a lot more boring stuff we had to do before we were allowed to get on the airplane.

I didn't like it from the moment I set hoof in it. The windows were tiny, and it smelled funny, and then when it flew. . . .

The less said about that the better. Miss Chestnut said that we should make notes on our experiences, what we liked and what we didn't, and so that the next ponies who come will have a better time. No airplanes! It was like an out-of-control train that made my ears hurt. If it hadn't been for Aquamarine and Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore, I think I would have been galloping up and down the aisle in panic.

By the end of it, my wings were sore.

The airplane station on the other end was just as big and confusing as the first one had been. We got our bags and then went outside where there was another van waiting for us. This one was smaller and rounder and named Sienna.

It took us to Aquamarine's school first. It took a while before we were away from all the buildings around the airplane station; maybe an hour. Then we'd drive through places with small forests or big open fields, and occasionally there would be a road that led to a town.

Her school was like a city, it was so big. We nuzzled each other and promised to keep in touch once we knew what our addresses were, and then she was swallowed up in all the people.

We went back to the highway—that's what Mister Salvatore said it was called—and drove for over an hour until we got to my school. I guess we're farther apart than it looked on the map.

I tried to make sense of all the things we were passing, but it just blurred together. I was totally disoriented by all the traveling; it was hard to imagine that only a day ago, I'd been saying goodbye to my family at the train station.

I perked back up once we got off the highway, though. Highways are for going long distances between places, and they don't go through towns like other roads. We sort of surged forward a bit at a time, frequently stopping for signals. Like trains, vehicles have to be told when it's safe to go.

My school is smaller than Aquamarine's. It's sort of at the top of a hill, but there are so many trees that it will be hard to see the city when they've leafed out.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had a packet of stuff that I'd need, like a plastic key with my picture on it which I needed in order to get things, as well as a normal key for my room.

They showed me how to use the telephone and left a little card with their telephone numbers on them, in case I needed to call them.

There was a note on my bed from my new roommate. She said that she was looking forward to meeting me when she got back from break.

I hadn't thought I'd write this much! But there was so much new stuff to see; I hardly covered any of it. I'm looking forward to meeting my new roommate. But now I'm going to get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day.

Human toilets are weird.

My roommate!

My roommate!

My new roommate is awesome! She's really friendly and was just as eager to see me as I was to see her.

She got to the room just after lunchtime. I hadn't gone to the dining hall, 'cause by then I was starting to worry that maybe she wouldn't show up or something . . . I know, dumb. I thought about calling my human assistants, but I didn't want to bother them, they've probably got all sorts of stuff that they have to do.

One of the mares that gave us a bunch of pointers worked as a facilitator in Equestria, and it sounded like she worked a lot to make sure that the humans had a good experience. It's a little bit harder for ponies 'cause we don't have telephones.

So I'd gotten most of my stuff put away and was starting to pace the room nervously, when I heard keys rattling outside and a ~~girl's~~ woman's voice talking, then the doorknob turned and she came into the room.

She was shorter than any of the humans we'd met at the facility, but still more than a head taller than me. I thought she was really fat, but it turns out that she was wearing a padded jacket and was a lot thinner under it.

Her name is Peggy. She has a dark brown mane that falls below her shoulders and brown eyes that have little lines around them when she smiles or laughs, which is a lot. She's also got large ~~udders~~ breasts which I think I remember were a sign of beauty on a human woman.

There was a brief moment of awkwardness, like neither of us could believe this was actually happening, and then I reached out my hoof like we'd been told was a greeting (just like a hoofshake but the human will hold onto your hoof or pastern) and she leaned over and wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug.

I told her that if I'd known we were going to be hugging I would have stood up on my hind legs, and so we tried again and it worked out much better.

She took off her coat and pulled her suitcase which has little wheels into the room and then we introduced ourselves properly.

I'd kinda gotten a little background from her; that was part of the matching process we had to do beforehoof. Of course in the moment, I couldn't remember anything except that she came from a region called Colorado that was all mountains, which is probably why they thought she'd be a good match with a pegasus.

Peggy smelled nice, too. We'd been warned that humans liked different smells than ponies, and I'd kind of worried about that. What if she smelled like a pig or a bear? Humans are omnivores after all.

I think it would be smart to let all the new exchange students meet with the outgoing group. There's some overlap of times; it has to do with how the portals operate. I bet we could learn more from that than from a slideshow.

She had a lot of clothes in her suitcase, and she put them away while we talked. She was happy that she could use my half of the closet. I was only using a couple of drawers in my dresser, and I told her she could use the rest of that, too. I couldn't reach the top drawers unless I flew anyway.

Which was something she really wanted to see, so I flew up to the ceiling for her. It felt good to stretch out my wings.

Then she was unpacked and sat down on her bed, so I stretched out on mine, and we just talked about what our homes were like for a little bit. Mostly me—she had a lot of questions, and I got the impression that their briefings hadn't been as detailed as ours, or else there had been a lot of details left out of our materials and I was going to find out later how different things really were.

We probably could have kept talking forever, but her portable telephone rang and she read the telegram on it and then said that it was dinner time.

I'd completely forgotten about the time, but when she mentioned it, I all of a sudden remembered that I was starving. All I'd had to eat was the snack bouquet that had been on my desk.

One of the many many things in my packet was a table of times that the dining hall was open. I think they called it Saga, and then there was a little restaurant under it called Quad Stop that was open later but cost actual bits to eat at. I started to look for it, but Peggy said that she'd buy us a pizza, if I could eat pizza. I wasn't sure if I could, but her little telephone was very clever and showed all the different things that came on a pizza, and we finally agreed on what to have on our pizza.

We got back to talking again, and then it finally arrived—it was delivered in a vehicle, which seemed like a very complicated way to get food when we could have just walked over to the dining hall and gotten some there.

She gave the driver some bills, which is what they call their money. Bills and coins. All the bills look the same, except they have numbers on them, while the coins are all different sizes so you know what's what.

She told me to stay up in the room, so I did, but I watched as she got the pizza from the delieveryperson because I want to know how it works so that I can get my own sometime.

It was very good, although a little bit undersalted, and there was more cheese on it than I thought there would be, and fewer vegetables. But Peggy had also gotten a salad for me, and while it wasn't very fresh, it was still good. She also let me eat the pepper that came with the pizza.

The two of us talked until it was very late—she finally looked at the clock and apologized for keeping me up all night, but she said that the night before had been a holiday and she had stayed up late and that was why she had been so late in arriving. I told her that I didn't mind.

Peggy ~~undressed~~ changed into her sleeping clothes, which was a t-shirt and panties (I had to look that up). I hadn't believed that humans wore clothes all the time, but there it was in front of me.

I should have written this last night—I probably forgot some stuff—but I was exhausted. Obviously, Peggy was too; she's still asleep even though the sun is already up.

January 3 [Breakfast at the Dining Hall]

January 3

I kinda couldn't decide if I should go eat breakfast at the dining hall without Peggy but it would be rude to wake her up, and I was both hungry and curious to see it. So I tore a page out of one of my class notebooks and left a note for her, in case she woke up when I'm gone.

The dining hall isn't very far from my dormitory—actually, nothing on campus is. Once I was outside, I flew up to the top of the bell tower. I'm not supposed to fly too high because airplanes can hit me. Mister Salvatore said that they were working on a solution for that. He said it was okay if I stayed below five hundred feet. I'm not completely sure what that distance is; human measurements are weird, but it's surely higher than a building.

Anyway, that was a nice height to survey campus. Most of the buildings surround a central courtyard called the quad, but there are some others across a brick street. They're all different sizes, but most of them are pretty big, and they all have names. Some of them are only for classes and other ones are dormitories, like where I live. I had a map of the campus, which said what they all were, and now that I'd seen them from the air it would be easier to make sense of the map.

I guess everybody is a late riser? There weren't many humans around, although I could see all the way down to a big street that was between the college and the town and there were a bunch of vehicles driving around on the roads.

The dining hall itself is guarded by an older woman who sits at a podium and runs your plastic card through a little machine. The dorms have those too. The swiper machines, not the older woman guard. Although they have rays (it's spelled RA, but pronounced ray) to help out residents, sort of like Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn can assist me.

She helped me take my card off the lanyard that keeps it around my neck and welcomed me to the dining hall. She said that the staff inside would be able to answer any questions, or I could go right to her, and she also assured me that everything was marked as to if it was vegetarian or not, which was good. There were lots of unfamiliar smells and I couldn't always tell by looking what the food was. Sometimes even the name wasn't too helpful.

There were open trays of hot food near the entrance, and then other tables that had cold food on them. I looked over the whole selection before I made my choice. It's wasteful to take more food than you can eat, although we were told that a lot of humans do that and nobody would be mad at me if I didn't finish what was on my plate.

It was weird seeing all that meat just sitting out there, like it was waiting to be picked apart by scavengers. I went to a griffon camp once and they had a similar setup, although the camp cooks kept the pony food upwind of the meat.

I wound up with some scrambled eggs—not too many, 'cause eggs make me fart—fruit (they had lots of fresh fruit even though it's the middle of the winter), bread, and because I wanted to experiment, a little bit of a cereal called 'Froot Loops.' I wanted to have some ansjos too, but I couldn't find any. I'm not sure of the human name for them, but I would have known them by the scent.

There were a bunch of different rooms where you could sit and eat. One of them had a noisy music-movie playing too loud, but it also looked over the courtyard. Another room had benches which would have been more comfortable, but it was darker inside and I didn't like that.

I finally chose the room near the food trays, because it had big windows that looked out over the back of campus, and since the dining hall was on the second floor and the hill fell away behind it, it was like being on a cloud.

I'd almost finished with my breakfast when a woman asked if she could sit with me. She had red-orange hair, and blue-grey eyes. Her breakfast was just Froot Loops, which I'd decided were too sugary for me. Good for a quick burst of energy, but not as sustaining as fruits and grains. Human metabolism is different, though.

Her name is Christine, and she was friends with Action Shot, who is the pony who studied here last year.

We didn't talk for too long, 'cause I wanted to get back to my room before Peggy woke up. She said last night that she was going to show me around campus today, and it will be nice to have a tour guide. There's only so much that can be learned from the little map I got.

Peggy was awake when I got back from breakfast. She said that we could tour the campus after lunch 'cause she wasn't a morning person, and that she was going to take a shower, so I decided to write this in my journal. She says that when she comes back, she's going to show me how to make a Facebook on her computer. She says that that's important to have.

January 4 [Tour of Campus]

January 4
Classes start today!

Wow, yesterday wound up being pretty intense. After showing me how to make a Facebook, Peggy got dressed again. (I thought the fuzzy pants she put on after the shower were okay but she said that she couldn't wear lounge pants outside. I'm not sure why. Humans—people—have funny rules about clothes. She also had to put on a bra, even though ~~nopony~~ no person could see it under her shirt.)

I'd sort of gotten the hang of a Facebook when it was time for lunch. She took a picture of me with her telephone, and made it my profile picture. The Facebook didn't believe my name was Silver Glow until she checked the 'pony' box. I guess humans aren't named Silver Glow.

Her other name is Theisen. She showed me how to accept a friend request, and that was what it said she was called.

She said that there wasn't much variety for lunch, because not a lot of people ate it on the weekend. They had lots of salad stuff, though, so I had a big salad and a couple pieces of bread which was chewy and didn't taste like anything. She showed me how the pop fountain worked and I tried a little bit of Coke, which was too sweet and made my nose tickle.

Peggy said I'd get used to it, but I don't know if I want to.

Christine joined us for lunch, along with a man named Joe. Even if lunch had been underwhelming, I had started the day knowing no~~pony~~ people except Peggy, and now I knew two more. That was pretty exciting. Joe said that he is going to school to be a teacher, and that he wants to teach school in Asia. (That's a continent on Earth. You can tell because it starts with an A—that's how they name continents. One of them is so tall, it has a north and south half.)

We toured the campus in the afternoon. Christine came along with us. We couldn't go into classrooms 'cause it wasn't a school day, but we looked through the windows at them. On the hill in front of the Fine Arts building there was a giant silver sculpture that Christine said was called "Sisyphus," but all the students said it looked like two crabs fucking. Then her face got really red and she put her hands over her mouth and it was kind of cute to see.

It took us all afternoon to tour the school; we got stopped by a lot of people that wanted to meet me. One of the professors was in his office and he called me in and we talked for a little bit. Even though I don't have any classes with him this quarter, he told me that if I had any trouble with my coursework to stop by and talk to him. I thought that was very nice of him.

The dining hall was even more crowded for dinner. There was a line to the podium, and a different lady was guarding the dining hall this time. She wasn't as friendly-looking as the morning sentry had been. Probably because there were so many people trying to get in all at once. She was a little impatient that I had trouble taking my picture card off its lanyard.

Lots more food this time, too. I can't even describe it all. I got a plate of noodles and stir-fry, a salad, some peanut butter cookies that Peggy recommended and a fried portabella mushroom.

I'd been skeptical at breakfast about meals being a social affair, since there were so few people, but there was quite a group of us gathered together for dinner. It was a little bit slow going, 'cause I had to be introduced to everyone who was already there, and then more people joined us and other people left.

When we went back to the dorm, Peggy left the door open and some of our neighbors came by and visited us. I learned how to play Euchre and did pretty well. Me and Peggy lost, but only by seven points, which is not bad for a first time. Ruth, one of the girls who lives in the same hall as us, said that we might get skunked, but I didn't see any skunks around.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted, but Peggy still seemed pretty fresh. I think humans operate on a different schedule than ponies.

I checked my Facebook and found out that a Christine Gekker had asked to be my friend. I was confused at first, because her picture was of a Jedi (that's what Peggy said it was). She said that it was the Christine I knew, and that Christine really liked Star Wars which is why her avatar (which is what her picture is called) was a Jedi. Then I got ready for bed, and Peggy put on her fuzzy lounge pants and headphones and did stuff on her computer while I went to bed.

So that was how my last free day went.

My first class today is a climate science class, then I have Introduction to Western Philosophy, and in the afternoon I'll be helping a language professor who's teaching classes in Equestrian. Plus my very own computer is supposed to arrive in the afternoon, so I'll have to be at my dorm room to receive it. We had some training on them back in Equestria, but apparently it can be complicated to set one up. There are a bunch of things that have to be done to make it work right.

January 5 [First day of Class]

January 5

What an interesting first day of classes!

I got to my climate science class early, to make sure I got a good seat. Sometimes professors bring in clouds and stuff, and it's good to have a front seat where you can see them really well. I didn't think there would be any today, 'cause first days are usually reserved for passing out books and the class syllabus, as well as to go over lab safety.

Runaway lightning clouds are a danger to everypony.

They do things a little differently on Earth, though. You get your books before class starts, rather than have the teacher give them out. Peggy said I was lucky that someone else had done that for me, since the bookstore charges too much for the books.

Anyway, since I was early, I started looking through the book until the professor showed up. The beginning was kinda basic; really, foal's stuff. Types of cloud, the water cycle, fronts and prevailing winds and atmospheric convection, that kind of thing.

Something really funny happened when he was reading the attendance, though. He went through it alphabetically, and he read off the name “Crystal Dawn,” and looked right at me when he said it. Then a girl in the middle of the class with curly brown hair raised her hand and he was really surprised.

Also we didn't go over lab safety at all. Maybe that comes later.

Philosophy class will be fun. We have a lot of books for that class, 'cause we're covering ten different philosophers. I'm looking forward to it: it will give me an insight into how humans think. And philosophers are the ultimate thinkers. They have ~~cutie marks~~ a talent just for thinking. How wonderful would that be?

We have stories about wise ponies, like The Good King, who learned important lessons that maybe weren't as obvious as they should have been.

The class syllabus says that we are going to discuss one philosopher a week for the length of the course. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Rene Descartes, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Karl Marx. The first three are Greek, and then the rest of them aren't. I'm not entirely sure how humans count years, but there's a big gap between Socrates and Rene Descartes. It will be interesting to learn why.

I had time before my Equestrian class to have lunch in the dining hall, so I did. Joe was there, but not Christine, and I also saw Rebekka who lives down the hall from us. She always has kind of a dreamy look in her eyes.

The professor of Equestrian is an older woman who wore strange earrings that looked like slugs, complete with eyestalks. Not many ponies wear earrings, and not very many would think of wearing slugs.

She told me that I would be helping out with an advanced class, where the students were only supposed to speak Equestrian.

Of course they were all excited to see me, but their pronunciations! They were trying hard, but they kept mangling words. It took five minutes to get them all to pronounce terripae correctly, and it's best not to reflect on what they did with my name. Ugh.

Still, it was nice, and they got better as the class went on. They had just had a month-long break to celebrate Winter, and the professor said that they were all out of practice.

I was in a pretty good mood when class got over, especially since instead of rushing off, a bunch of the students stayed after to talk to me. They were all happy that I was there, and asked all sorts of questions about my home and how I liked it at Kalamazoo College and how was it different than an Equestrian university.

We probably could have stayed discussing things for hours, but I knew I had to get back to my dormitory room to get my new computer. They were important to have, and I didn't want to miss my appointment with the computer installer.

The man who installed it was named Mark. He had spikey hair (it's difficult to tell humans apart because they cover most of their bodies with clothes which they change all the time, and their skin color and mane color isn't very diverse so you have to pick up on more subtle clues like face shape and manestyle).

It's different than Peggy's. Her computer folds up, but mine is too big and it had lots of separate pieces. It's voice activated for most things, but it still has a button board that I have to use sometimes. The buttons are small and can't be pushed by hoof, although I can poke them with a pen held in my mouth. He told me that I would have to train the voice activation and that it would get better the more I used it.

He showed me how to turn it on, and then how to navigate around and open programs that can do things for me. The computer has a mailbox that lets me get letters from other people or ponies, and we had to set that up, and he also showed me how to get to Facebook. I could make bookmarks, so that the computer would remember what I wanted and it was quicker than having to put in the whole address to get the program.

I didn't get much time to work with it. Not long after he left, Peggy came back from her classes, and then we went to dinner together. The same sentry was at the podium, and she still insisted on seeing my plastic badge before I could go in. I can see how it would be difficult to know everyperson who is in line, but I am the only pony. It seems like that would be easy to remember.

January 6 [Poetry Class]

January 6

Tuesdays are slow days for me. I only have one actual class, which is poetry. I like poetry; it's like a song that you make up the music to yourself. A lot of ponies write poetry, so I should do very well.

Our teacher is called Conrad Hillberry, which I think is a type of grapes that humans grow. He's old; he might be the oldest human I've ever seen, but he has a nice friendly face.

There are a lot of different kinds of poetry, too. Some of it has a very strict structure or meter, and other types are more free-form.

We don't have a proper book for this class, because the instructor said that a lot of the poems would be online, which means I have to see it on my computer. However, my helpers got me several of the books which he recommended in his syllabus. We were encouraged to do that so that we could keep the books when we went back home, and it will be nice when I'm back in Equestria to be able to read them whenever I want. Plus there are a lot more poems which we won't be reading for the class at all in the books.

I have the afternoon free. I don't know what I'll do with all that free time in the future, but for today I got to spend it with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn. They came and picked me up in Sienna, and we went to the airplane station. I had a meeting with a man who works for the FAA. (Humans like to make abbreviations for things because that makes them sound more important.)

It was just like a class lecture, but not as fun. Mostly he and Mister Salvatore talked, and I listened to what they had to say. Then he showed me a big chart of restricted airspace, where I wouldn't be allowed to fly at all, and he also gave me a big book of rules. Before I am allowed to fly any higher than buildings, I have to read all the rules and take a test.

Mister Salvatore protested, saying that ultralights and powered parachutes don't have to follow all those requirements, to which he said that those weren't the same, and anyway they did have rules that they had to follow, too. Then they got into a bit of an argument whether I could be considered an experimental aircraft or a helicopter, and just when they started to get a bit shouty, Miss Cherilyn said that if anything, I ought to be classed as an ornithopter.

That got him to shut up for a minute, and he sort of changed his tune. Well, first he said that ornithopters didn't actually exist, and Mister Salvatore got a smug look on his face and just pointed at me.

So he came up with a compromise. He said that I was still limited to a thousand feet max, couldn't fly in controlled airspace of any type until I read the book and passed their tests, and that I had to wear a high-visibility vest with a beacon if I was going to fly anywhere off-campus. He said that the campus police could come to their own decision about where and how high I could fly on campus, but reiterated that it was not to be above a thousand feet regardless of what they said.

I was kinda disappointed by that, but rules are important for everypony's safety. Sometimes for weather patrols, we have to wear identifying vests if we're assisting in other pegasuses' patrol territory, just so that everypony can keep track of who's who. That's especially important during Winter Wrap-Up, because so many nomadic pegasi come along to help. It makes things more efficient.

And when I read the book and pass the test, I'll be able to fly wherever I want to, so I was going to do that as quickly as I could.

They offered to buy me dinner before they dropped me off on campus, and they asked what I liked. I told them that I had pizza the night that Peggy arrived and that it was really good, even though there weren't enough vegetables on it, and so we went to a little restaurant called Bilbo's. It was right near another university which was called Western Michigan, and I found out that their mascot was a bronco, which is a kind of wild horse that they have on Earth.

Their pizza was better than the one Peggy had ordered. We talked about how things had been going so far, and I said that it had been great and told them a little bit about my classes and the people I'd met so far. Mister Salvatore had a beer with his dinner, and when he was halfway done with it he looked over at me and asked if I had ever had beer before, and then Miss Cherilyn gave him a dirty look and he just shrugged and said that he was curious. That was very strange. Then they had a whispered discussion about me drinking which they obviously didn't mean for me to hear but it was hard not to (human ears might not be as sensitive as pony ears; for one, they can't move, and for two they're not very big).

Miss Cherilyn said that I probably shouldn't drink beer, and she wasn't sure if I was old enough anyway. I said that I was and then they had a little more of a debate, and she finally said that I could have it if I wanted to, but that I should be responsible. Then she said that I ought to be careful if I wanted to drink at parties because sometimes men put roofies in drinks and did bad things.

I assured her that I would be careful, and that I was aware that drinking and flying and landing on roofs uninvited was not smart. So they decided that I could have one, and Mister Salvatore suggested that I ought to have an Oberon because that is the most important beer in Kalamazoo, and he said that we had driven right by the brewery on our way into town.

When we were done with dinner, we went back to campus and they dropped me off, and just as I was leaving Miss Cherilyn remembered that she had Aquamarine's telephone number and address, so that I could write to her. She said that there were a couple of other ponies that lived not too far from us, and once she had their telephone numbers and address, she would let me have them if I wanted to call them or write to them.

I probably should have done that last night, but I started reading the book the FAA man had given me, and after a while I got real tired and decided to go to bed.

January 7 [Socrates]

January 7

Yesterday, they had a chef at the dining hall who would make omelets for you while you waited. I probably shouldn't have, but he asked me when I came in if I wanted one, and he was so nice I couldn't say no. He put lots of vegetables in it, and a little bit of cheese. And it was really tasty.

I regretted it when I was exercising this morning, though. It slowed me down. I think that maybe I should try to exercise before I eat, or else eat a smaller meal in the morning.

Until I'm sure where I'm allowed to fly, I'm keeping my hooves on the ground whenever I'm not in the central part of campus. Well, mostly. Surely short glides, no more than a pony-height above the ground are okay.

There is a nice neighborhood around the college where I can trot around and get my exercise. I've already met one nice man who trots—but humans call it jogging—in the morning as well. Also there is a lady who walks her dog. It's a very friendly dog; she says it's a veeshla.

We're still covering basic stuff in climate class. ~~A lot of the other students are asking really dumb questions that they should have learned years ago.~~ Maybe that's not fair because humans can't fly without machines, so they probably don't understand the atmosphere like I do. It's sort of frustrating, though, because it's foal's stuff.

But—I have to pay close attention, because the human names for clouds are very different. Some of them are very poetic, like stratocumulus.

Also humans sometimes make cirrus clouds with airplanes. The professor said that airplanes make contrails which turn into cirrus clouds. I wasn't sure why they wanted to make them with airplanes when there are more useful clouds that can be made, unless they didn't know how.

I wonder if the airplane I flew in made cirrus clouds? I wasn't looking out the back of it.

I heard one of the students in back say that cirrus clouds were also called 'mare's tails.' I thought that was a nice name for them, too.

In my philosophy class, we learned about how Socrates invented the scientific method, which is where you take a big problem and break it down into little parts, then investigate each of those little parts until you get the answer that you want. The professor said that that was one of Socrates' most important ideas, and I thought that made him pretty smart, but it turned out he chose to drink hemlock when it was given to him, which wasn't very smart at all, because hemlock is poisonous to humans too.

At lunch, I was still a little curious about that, and Aric, who also sometimes eats lunch with me now, said that people didn't always like new ideas and that was why Socrates had to drink hemlock. He also said that I ought to read a made-up story about Socrates called Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. He has a copy, and he's going to loan it to me tonight.

The students in Equestrian class did better today. The professor decided that it would be good practice for me to tell them about my dormitory room here on campus. I thought that was kind of boring since they're all pretty much the same, but then she told me that it was something that they could all picture easily, and that made sense. I hadn't thought of it that way.

It's not that interesting a room. There is a closet by the front door, and the walls are big bricks like in the transfer station. The floor is hard tile which is somewhat slippery underhoof, and the ceiling is also called tile, but it's much softer. It sits in little tracks and if I fly up too high I can knock it out by mistake and have to put it back where it belongs.

Both Peggy and I have dressers and beds and desks and a chair for our desks. We each have our own computer, and she has big pictures on her side of the room. I don't have any. I should ask her where she got them. It would liven up my side if I had some.

She also has a little electric icebox and a coffee maker.

There is a bathroom with a shower right next to our room, which is very convenient.

The other students live in similar rooms, but they are arranged differently. Some of them have a door right to the bathroom, which would be even more convenient, and some of them are called 'suites,' and they have several rooms which share a common room and a bathroom.

Before I went to dinner, I discovered that I had a letter on my computer from Mister Salvatore. He apologized for getting upset yesterday while we were talking to the man from the FAA, but he had thought that things were all taken care of, and then after the recent incident in France they had changed the rules but not told him about it.

For dinner, there was a special selection which they called Italian. It was mostly noodles and sauces. Christine said that they tried to be multi-cultural with dinner but sometimes they didn't do very well. I asked if they were going to have an Equestrian dinner, and Dan—who's short for a human—said that he hoped not, since humans couldn't eat hay. I don't know if he was joking or not, but I hadn't seen any hay with the salads yet so he was probably telling the truth.

Aric gave me the story about Socrates, and I told him that I probably wouldn't be able to read it for a day or two, because I needed to write a letter to Aquamarine and also read through more of the FAA book, as well as my regular coursework, and he said that that was okay.

January 8 [Walt Whitman]

January 8

I had Coco Puffs for breakfast. I was kind of wary of them, since they look like rabbit droppings, but they were chocolatey. They also had too much sugar. Humans really like sugar. Their breakfasts are full of sugar, and their favorite drinks are full of sugar and bubbles. I'm not sure which cereals they have that I can trust.

I got to poetry class early, because I was eager to learn about human poets. When the professor came in, he was all bundled up because of the cold.

It's weird how humans have to wear clothes to adapt to the cold; you'd think that they'd just want to live somewhere warmer where they didn't have to dress up as much. But maybe there are too many of them: we were told that the world has over seven billion humans on it, which is a number so large I can't even imagine it.

When he took his coat and hat and scarf and hand-socks off, he told us that we'd be starting with Walt Whitman, who has a beard like Starswirl.

Our first poem was Leaves of Grass.

(I'm sure that humans can't eat grass. There hasn't been any at the dining hall, and since it's winter, there isn't any fresh grass to be had outside.)

It's a long poem, and I really liked it. It made me long for spring or summer, when the grass is fresh and tasty, and I can roll around in it if I want to.

Professor Hillberry started reading it aloud, and then had all the class read a part of it. Not the whole thing; it was too long for that, and we would have spent all class reading.

Poetry is meant to be read aloud and shared as a community, like a song.

I had trouble with some of the words, because Walt Whitman lived a long time ago, so he said things that I didn't know, but I tried my very best. I wanted to do his words justice, and feel what he felt when he looked at the grass.

There was some snickering at my expense when the poem talked about shod horses walking on granite, but I couldn't be upset.

We didn't make it through the whole poem, because it was too long for one class. Professor Hillberry talked about it after every~~person~~one had had a turn reading a few lines.

Then he explained some of Walt Whitman's life, and when he had written different poems, and we read part of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. It was sad, but I thought it was also a bit hopeful. He was upset that his friend Abraham Lincoln had died, but he took his solace in nature. When sad things happen, it's good to look beyond yourself and out at the whole world.

Earth ponies put their dead in the ground so that new life may spring forth, and unicorns build cairns and monuments, while pegasuses prefer to be set free in the sky. I hadn't really though about it before, but maybe it's because earth ponies like to feel connected to the land, while we'd rather be free of such notions.

On my way home from class, I mailed my letter to Aquamarine. There is a little boxy building which is inside the same building as the dining hall, which is called the Mail Hut. There are boxes that you can get your mail from, and also a little window like at a telegram office where you can give the mail-worker anything that you want to mail. And if he has any big packages that don't fit in your little mailbox, he will give it to you.

Then I went downstairs which is where the student bookstore is. They sold posters for the walls of our dorm rooms, books for classes, pens and pencils and paper, and gifts which have the college seal on them.

The posters were all rolled up, but there was a display like a giant book where you could flip through them. I found one of the Wonderbolts and thought that would look nice on my wall. When I took it up to the counter, the man there said that I could have it for free if I signed one for him 'cause I looked a lot like Misty Fly.

It's odd that he thought that; her coat is a greyish olive, while mine is blue, but I guess if my eyesight wasn't very good, I could confuse the Wonderbolts uniform for her coat color. Our manecolors are kinda similar, and so is our eye color.

Maybe humans don't notice things like coat color.

So I signed a poster for him, and he was really happy, and now I have something that I can put on my wall that will remind me of home.

I didn't feel right not actually buying something, so I asked him what posters were most popular with other students, and he said that the Bob Marley (who is a singer) and the Pink Floyd album covers on girls were the two most popular.

I studied them both, and finally decided that the girls was more interesting, especially since one of them had cows painted on her back and that reminded me of Walt Whitman.

Since I didn't have anything else to do for the afternoon, I hung the posters by my bed, and then read all of Leaves of Grass. I had to look up a bunch of words in my dictionary, and make a few guesses here and there, but I understood most of it.

My favorite part was right at the end:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I kept thinking about the poem at dinner—the song of poetry is a window right into the soul. Maybe humans can't fly, but Mister Whitman knew what it was like to fly, and after dinner was over and I was walking back to the dorm with Peggy, I flew up to the roof of our dorm and perched right on the ridge, where I could see the campus spread out below me, and the city below that.

I thought about how Peggy and all the other people I knew so far couldn't really understand the freedom to fly where you want to without having to suffer through a crowded train car with wings, and I thought about how they have to build bridges or take boats or swim whenever they come to water, and it's no obstacle to me.

I thought about sounding a barbaric yawp, staking my territory, but I didn't. It didn't feel right.

Humans are very much like Earth ponies, and they care about what is theirs. We drift around like dandelion fluff, wanting for nothing. We need claim no territory, for the vastness of the sky is our home, and the clouds are our bed.

January 9 [Climate Science is Still Boring]

January 9

~~Weather~~ Climate Science class is still boring. There aren't going to be any practical labs, although we will go on a field trip and watch people observe the weather.

Observation is important; it's part of quality control. Clouds ought to do what they're told, and weather teams should get it right. Nopony is happy when they don't, and it messes things up when they aren't, because there is a plan which needs to be followed for everypony's benefit. But it's boring. It's just a bunch of mostly unicorn-designed instruments that verify that the precipitation is falling as it should and the winds are what they are supposed to be. It's a reaction to an event.

I know that humans can predict the weather, even without being able to properly control it. Computers like mine but bigger and smarter make the predictions (before that it was the responsibility of meteorologists and before that it was old wives and farmer's almanacs). They can make clouds with airplanes and they can seed clouds with airplanes, but they can't move the clouds they want where they are needed.

They're kind of like foals in that regard. They do things, but from what I've learned so far, they don't really understand what they're doing. It's like a foal following her mother; they get the biggest cues, but miss the small ones.

I guess it's because they've been stuck on the ground until recently, they never really had the chance to understand what was going on above their heads.

It's kind of strange to think about. People have had balloons for hundreds of years, and then they invented other kinds of flying devices like airplanes and helicopters and stuff, which are all more advanced than what any pony could produce. Most of our complex flying machines are helped along by passive pegasus magic or unicorn enchantments.

They've even gone so far as to have books of rules and men in suits that work at airplane stations to make sure that the rules are followed . . . but they don't really understand all the workings of the sky. I guess because they have to be constrained in their machines, they can't feel the way that the air moves, like an invisible sea. (That's why ship crews always like to have some pegasuses as crew members; not only can they fly around and help spot stuff, but because the sea moves like the air, and a pegasus's instincts let her understand what's happening and how to safely get through it.)

I have to bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut in class. I remind myself that if an earth pony were attending a class on flowers presented by a pegasus, she would know things that her classmates simply did not understand. I know that you stick seeds in the ground and then food grows, but not much more than that. I can predict that if I plant a cucumber seed, a cucumber plant will grow from it, but I have no sense for the soil where it will prosper.

It was nice to get out of class and be outside for a little bit before my philosophy class. It's a little too hot in the classrooms because humans don't like to be cold.

We finished up learning about Socrates. I was disappointed that it got over with so quickly, but part of the reason was that although he had laid the foundations of philosophy and science, none of his writings have survived to the modern age, so nobody knows if what his friends said that he said was actually completely true.

One of the students in class thought it was odd that people would not have kept better care of his words, and the professor explained that widespread literacy was not all that common until very recently. I raised my hoof and explained how in Equestria, mandatory school education had been reserved for unicorns in big cities until a few generations ago, although anypony could go to school if they wanted to. I wanted to talk more about that, because my mom had strong opinions about mandatory schooling, but the professor said that we needed to move on.

There should be a place on campus where students can discuss things like this. Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus have famous forums where ponies can gather and discuss things, and even my hometown has one, although it is now more often used for recreation than public debate. Maybe when the weather is nicer people gather on the quad, and they just don't do it in the wintertime.

In Equestrian class, I suggested that each student ought to keep a journal to practice writing in Equestrian. The teacher thought that was a great idea, and so they're going to do that. One entry per week; that doesn’t seem like too much.

She said before class that she tries to role-play to keep things interesting. So the class pretended that they were at an Equestrian market trying to buy things for dinner. Even I was struggling for some of it, because we don't really use very many names for different pieces of meat, and eventually the teacher said that they should stick to vegetables and fruits, and that confused a lot of them who didn't know very many kinds of vegetables.

Then we decided that a more general market would be better—what the humans call a 'flea market,' where anything could be bought or sold. That got us using a lot more vocabulary, and I played along even though sometimes they'd pretend that they were buying something that nopony would be selling at a market.

The book that Aric gave me has many other stories besides the one about Socrates. I have a weekend ahead of me, and humans have chosen to take weekends off, so I don't have any classes to attend. I think I'll read more of his book, along with the FAA book. I can't do it today, though, until later, because Peggy said that she was going to take me shopping. I'm out of mane and tail shampoo, and she said it was cheaper at the market called Meijer than the student bookstore or the West Main Party Store that is within trotting distance or the Walgreens that is at the base of campus.

I learned from Silverberg's made-up story that Socrates asked lots of questions. Some of them seemed silly, but they were important to understand things. Pizarro also questioned things, but he wasn't as good at getting to the essence of a question as Socrates. But I really liked Pizarro's dedication, and sometimes his sort of abrupt method was the best method. Sometimes you had to do things without thinking about them too much.

Meijer

Meijer

After lunch, Christine followed us back to the parking lot where Peggy keeps her car, which I have not seen before. It was called Cobalt, and it was smaller and sleeker than Sienna.

I wanted to get a close look at it, because I never got a chance to get a good look at Econoline or Sienna. It has rubber tires and black wheels with shiny discs behind them that Peggy said were the brakes. She said that it had shiny wheels like Sienna that it wore in the summertime but right now it had winter tires on it so it wouldn't slip in the snow.

She said it was considered an economy car—all vehicles which are small are called cars. The parking lot is full of them, and a lot of them look like their owners have abandoned them. They're just covered in snow, like a hibernating animal.

It only had two doors, so it was difficult to get into. Christine said that she would sit in the back, and squeezed herself behind the seat, then let me get in.

This seat was not made for a pony. Peggy helped me adjust it into a sorta comfortable position and put on the seat belt, then she went around and got the car started. I didn't like the seat belt too much because it just tangled around me and I didn't think it was doing anything and Peggy agreed, but she said that I should have it on today and then she'd think about whether I really needed to wear it.

It has a built-in record player that started playing as soon as Peggy turned the key. She asked if the music was all right, and I told her that I had never heard it before. She said it was a singer named Adele.

It took a little while to warm up. She said that she couldn't go until the windshield was clear of fog, but I didn't see any fog at all, only condensation on the glass.

The main street that runs up campus is made out of bricks, and it is very bumpy. Peggy said that they were always fixing it throughout the spring and summer, and I wanted to know why they didn't just replace it with a new street if it was always in need of repair.

Christine said that it was part of the character of the campus, and it also helped keep people driving more slowly.

We drove for maybe ten minutes, first through the downtown, then up a big hill and past a whole bunch of houses. Then we got to businesses on both sides of the road, and finally turned into a big parking lot in front of a huge store that said Meijer on the front in big letters.

Halfway to the store, I started to wonder how we were going to find the car again. Peggy said it wasn't a problem, because she could click a button and it would flash its lights and honk its horn, and she demonstrated it for me.

When we got inside . . .

I can't even properly describe it.

It was like a whole city had been turned into a market, and then a roof had been put over the whole thing. There were shelves as far as the eye could see, and they were completely loaded with things. On one side was fresh food, and on the other there was a counter with jewelry and a big aisle leading to the back that had more shelves in the center. Big signs hung from the ceiling to tell you where things were because otherwise you could have gotten lost.

There was so much to take in and so many smells and sounds that I stood there trembling like a scared filly, until Christine finally reached out and touched my shoulder.

I knew I would be okay if I stayed close to them.

The floor was slippery, and I had to be careful of my footing. I wanted to look at all the fresh food they had: normally, the markets only have winter crops and late fall crops available, along with not-so-fresh pasture grasses. Earth ponies can keep food good for a long time, but not forever. My granddam said that sometimes when she was a filly they'd run short in the wintertime and had to scratch through the snow to find enough to eat and it was those years that her mother and father argued about why they hadn't wintered further south.

Christine and Peggy had a wheeled basket that was called a shopping cart, and they went through the food and bought some beer and wine and they asked me if there was any kind that I wanted so I stuck my hooves over the edge of the open icebox so I could see what they had.

All the different beer had names, and I didn't know what any of it was, until I found some Oberon. Then they got some snack food—all of it had names, too. Doritos and Little Debbies and Entemans. The Doritos came in a shiny bag, while the others were in rectangular boxes like a bakery box.

We had to go all the way to the back of the store to get to the shampoo, and they agreed that instead of walking down the main pathway, we could go through the clothing area because it had carpet that gave me better footing.

There were so many clothes. Any tailor I know couldn't make this many in her whole lifetime. I asked Peggy where they all came from, and she said that there were mostly made in foreign countries.

We got back to the beauty supplies, and there was a whole aisle devoted to shampoo that was all different colors and smells. I know a lot of mares are vain, but humans only have hair on their heads and a few other places, so I wasn't sure why they'd be so interested in such a variety. Plus they had shelves of hair dyes, but they were mostly plain colors like brown and black and blonde.

There wasn't any pony to help me choose. Back in Equestria, a spa pony would bring samples and let you sniff them and try them out, and recommend what would work best for your manestyle and coat, but there wasn't any~~person~~body here to help.

I looked up and down the shelves trying to find something that would be appealing to me and then I found a bottle called Mane and Tail Shampoo, and it was even on the bottom shelf where it would be easy for a pony to reach, so that's what I got.

It seemed like a lot of store to have just bought those few things. Christine said that normally they'd get more, but since they had just come back from their homes, neither of them really needed much.

There were lots of little stands where you could buy your purchases which probably makes the market more efficient. Peggy put the things we were buying on a little belt that drove them along to the salesperson (for the human version of things you usually change pony to person). She passed them by a device that Christine said was a bar code reader, and a computer tallied up all the items.

When it was my turn, I had to show her my passport before she could sell me beer. She got a kind of funny look on her face because she couldn't read it at all, and she had to call over another man and they decided it was okay. She apologized but said that there were rules about who could buy beer.

I used my plastic card which is like my student badge but instead of having my picture on it it has a silver eagle. There was a pen on a string that you had to use to sign your name, and the salesperson gave me a dirty look when I held it in my mouth to sign my name.

Peggy pushed the cart in the parking lot and when she got close to where Cobalt was she pushed the button again and it honked and I turned my ears in that direction and I knew about where it was.

Her little control could also make Cobalt unlatch its trunk, and she put everything in that while me and Christine were getting in Cobalt.

When we got back to the dorm, Peggy said that she was going to take a nap because she wanted to go to a party later, and asked if I wanted to go, too.

I probably should have said yes, but I was still stressed out from Meijer, so I said that I would rather read some more and then go to bed early unless it was very rude to turn down the invitation. She said it was fine if I didn't want to.

Aric will probably want his book back by Monday, so if I am going to read more of it, I should do it now. There are two stories that look particularly interesting; one is called Bears Discover Fire, and the other is called Boobs (which is another name for breasts).

January 10 [Laundry and Star Wars]

January 10

When I got up in the morning, Peggy wasn't in her bed and it didn't look like it had been slept in at all. Sometimes parties run late—she probably stayed there rather than come all the way home.

I had breakfast with Christine, and then Aric showed up and asked me how I had liked the story. I told him that it was very good and that I had also read Boobs. He got a kind of funny look on his face, and Christine just laughed and accused him of corrupting me.

I don't see how it would corrupt me. I know it's made-up; humans don't really turn into wolves when the moon is full. If they did, somepony would have told me, right?

Since I wasn't sure, I asked, and both Christine and Aric agreed that humans don't turn into wolves, that it's just mythology which is a kind of made-up story.

We were on the topic of made-up stories, and Christine was wearing a shirt that had a picture of a man in a beard holding a light-sword that looked similar to the picture which she had on her Facebook. I asked her about that mythology and she got a little gleam in her eyes and said that I hadn't seen Star Wars and she was going to have to show it to me and if I wasn't doing anything tonight, I could come over to her dorm room and she'd let me watch one of the movies with her.

So I said that was a good idea. I'd learned that humans love watching movies and I was eager to have the opportunity so soon. They had made thousands of them, so I wouldn't get a chance to see them all.

After breakfast, I went trotting around the neighborhood, and when I was good and lathered I rolled around in the snow in a little triangle of land between two roads. The snow there is nice and fairly untouched, and I didn't shake myself off when I was done, 'cause some of the snow would melt and cool me off a little bit.

When I got back to the dorm, I was eager to try out my new mane and tail shampoo, but I had to wait because Ruth was in there and humans don't like sharing showers. Her hair is a pinkish-red right now, and Peggy said that she dyes it different colors, but I didn't see any of those colors at Meijer so she must get them somewhere else.

Ruth came out of the shower with a bundle of clothes in one hand and a basket full of shower supplies in the other. She was wearing a white robe and had her towel knotted around her hair. It must be inconvenient to have to carry around clothes all the time. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that.

Peggy came back when I was sitting on my bed, preening my wings. She looked kind of bedraggled and smelled like smoke and beer and sweaty people. She grabbed up her shower supplies and went into the bathroom.

When she came out, she looked and smelled much better. She put on panties and her lounge pants and a heavy shirt that said 'Old Navy' and then got the basket where she put her clothes after she had worn them and said she was going to go do laundry and wondered if I wanted to come along.

I've never seen laundry done, so I thought it would be fun.

Down in the basement of the dorm is a small room with machines that wash your clothes. There were lots of other clothes in the room, and a few bicycles as well. Peggy said people leave their bikes in the laundry room even though they're not supposed to. And she said that a lot of times they got abandoned there, and at the end of the year, someone would come and take away all the abandoned bicycles and then give them to people who needed a bicycle.

She started the washing machines, and showed me how to add detergent then let me do it on the second one. While they filled with water, she sorted her clothes into two piles, and put one in each machine.

Then she said that we should go back to the room until the clothes were done washing and she could put them in the dryer.

So we spent most of the afternoon relaxing and looking at Facebook (I got more friends!), and we also went back down to the laundry room to put the clothes in the dryer, which is kind of like a tumbling oven, and when we got them out later they were warm and soft.

After dinner I went to Christine's room. She lives in a suite, which has four rooms and its own bathroom and a lounge where people can gather, and I really liked it.

There was a big round chair she called a papasan that I stretched out in, and she sat on a couch. I liked the papasan because it was kind of like a cloud.

It was a really exciting movie. I didn't understand the whole story, but there was a princess who was trying to help her people and an evil Darth who was doing bad things like blowing up planets. Humans can't really blow up planets.

There were a couple of smart machines which Christine said were called robots or droids. One of them was very polite and the other one only talked in little beeps.

It's amazing that humans can make all that stuff up. I think that they're all very lonely because there aren't any other smart creatures on their planet. We don't always get along with our fellow species, but I think Equestria would be very sad without them.

~~Except for dragons~~ Dragons have their place, too. We wouldn't have good metals for trains and stuff if it weren't for the dragonforges.

She said that there were more movies, and a new one was playing at a movie theater but it wouldn't be for much longer. So we decided that since there were five more movies, we could watch one of them each night, and then go to the movie theater next Saturday night.

I'm a little bit worried about it cutting into my coursework, but I think it's as important to learn about human customs as schoolwork (and besides the sometimes confusing terminology, ~~cloud class~~ Climate Science is really easy).

January 11 [Plato's Cave]

January 11

This morning at breakfast, Sean (who I don't think I have mentioned before) found out that Christine had watched a Star Wars movie with me last night and got mad because he said that Star Trek was the better series and they argued about that.

It was good-natured arguing, though, like which hoofball team has the better forward, not mean arguing. I said that I hadn't known about Star Trek and offered to go over to his room and watch one of the Star Trek movies, just to be fair to both sides. I don't want either of them to be mad at me!

He generously decided that it would be best for me to see all the Star Wars movies first so that I would be prepared to watch the one at the theater, and he could show me the Star Trek movies later.

I should write out a list of all the new friends that I'm making, just to keep track of them.

Humans name their clouds in Latin, which is an important language that nobody speaks unless they're talking about scientific things. They place great importance in the height of clouds, which is part of the cloud's name. I don't think that they understand that while the nature of the cloud might change somewhat due to its altitude, it doesn't change the fundamental makeup of it. It's almost like they decided the appearance of clouds first and their function later.

I was a bit confused by the system, because humans measure distance in both feet and meters and can't seem to agree on which is better. I think it's dumb to have two kinds of measurement for height and that their President ought to proclaim which is the best. Feet make more sense, since humans have them and can get an approximation that way like we used to do with hooves (well, the earth ponies did), but then when you get into really long distances they get too big too fast. That's why the pegasus mathematicians came up with counting by twelves instead of fours, and then the unicorns claimed it was all their idea all along because they hate the idea that they're not the most clever tribe of ponies in everything.

Meters count by tens, but each one is longer. And humans count by tens anyways, since they have ten fingers. Plus you can put a Latin word in front of them like kilo or centi, and that makes them longer or shorter, depending on what they need.

I'd seen some interesting clouds on my way to class, and I wanted to bring one in so that everyone could look at it up close, but I'm still not supposed to fly up to them, because although I've read the FAA book, I haven't taken the test to prove that I know what it says.

Over the weekend, I had sent a computer message to Mister Salvatore to tell him that I was ready to take the test. He replied that he had gotten the message and was arranging things. I hope it gets done soon. I can't do a proper exercise regimen in the limited air space I'm allowed.

After class was over, I flew around the quad a little bit, just to keep my wings in shape. There were lots of trees that I could fly around, and I could fly up the hill and then glide back down while staying low enough that I didn't have to worry about being hit by an airplane, although it wasn't as good exercise as I could get on a proper flight, even if I did laps around the quad.

We started philosophy class by talking about when Plato lived. He was a student of Socrates, and he's the one who wrote down most of the stuff that we know about Socrates.

He separated the world into the forms and things. The forms are the ideal version, and the things are what we can actually see and touch. So the papasan chair in Christine's room is a thing, and according to Plato there is a 'really real' world that is made up of forms, including I guess an ideal papasan chair. I'd like to sit on that chair.

The important thing is that there is one archetype in the 'really real' world, and everything we see is a copy of that.

That kind of makes sense? It's hard to wrap my head around, but I think it's like clouds or snowflakes: the weather factory makes a prototype—which is the archetype—and then the weather ponies make copies of it to distribute over Equestria.

Even then, things like clouds are constantly shifting and changing, because once the base clouds are taken out of the weather factory, they start to react to the environmental conditions and change from their ideal form to their un-ideal 'thingness.'

The professor showed us a drawing of a cave, which illustrated Plato's philosophy, and explained how prisoners that are chained in the cave can only see the shadows of people on the wall and believe that these shadows are reality, until one of them escapes and goes outside and sees what the world is really like.

I'm not sure how they wouldn't know what it was like from before they were prisoners, unless they had never been outside. I know some animals are born in caves and don't come out until they are old enough. So maybe humans are too, and maybe if they were made prisoners when they were young, they would only know what the inside of the cave was like.

I was inspired by the Star Wars movie and the thought of seeing another one of them tonight, so in Equestrian class we started by talking about the last play I had seen, which was about a rebellious earth pony who didn't listen to what her friends told her and she finally went into the forest where she shouldn't have and got eaten by a timberwolf. It's a very important to listen to what the older and wiser members of your band have to say. They didn't get old and wise by being stupid.

A couple of them told stories they know, like about a chicken who gets hit by an acorn and thinks the sky is falling (chickens are dumb; they can hardly remember how to fly) and a fox who outsmarts a crow and a tiny hippo who has his toy train stolen by a raven.

It kind of reminded me of being a filly again, and having my mother tell me bedtime stories. Those are important because they can help guide your dreams.

I wonder if Princess Luna can still see my dreams?

It was kind of late when the Star Wars movie—which is called The Empire Strikes Back—was finally over. I was worried about how it ended; if everyone had stayed together they'd be better off. Sometimes you have to go off on your own, but it's safer to be in a group.

Christine lives way down at the bottom of the hill, and my dorm is all the way at the top. I could have walked, but after watching the movie I was thinking about flying, so I took off (being mindful to not fly too high) and flew over top of everything until I got to my dorm room. I knocked on the window until Peggy looked up and she was surprised when she saw me there. It was really funny. Then I landed and went in the normal way.

January 12 [Pilot's License!]

January 12

I got my pilot's license today!

After poetry class (we’re reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow now and he’s kind of like Walt Whitman), Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn picked me up in Sienna and we went back out to a different airplane station where a new FAA person named Mister Vogt and a man named Mark that was called a flight instructor were waiting for us.

The airplane station was a small place, smaller than the one in Kalamazoo and much smaller than the ones that we had taken the airplane from when I first got to Earth. And instead of being one big building that was all connected and branched off everywhere, there were several little buildings on the airport.

They started off by testing me on subjects in the book, to be sure that I understood all the rules. Then they gave me a radio, which is sort of like a telephone, and had me demonstrate that I could make it work on the frequencies they told me to use, and that I could talk on it properly. There is a funny version of the alphabet that they use where they give all the letters names like Juliet or Charlie or Delta, and I had to recite that for them, too.

Then we got back in the van and drove over to a building called the FBO, and they took me out behind it to a large open area that was near the roads where the airplanes fly from. He said that they were called runways, because airplanes run along them until they are going fast enough to fly. (The Wonderbolts have a similar runway on a mesa-top at their training grounds. I’ve seen pictures of it.)

Mister Salvatore gave me a special bright-colored vest I have to wear whenever I want to fly higher than buildings. He also gave me a flashing light on it that is very bright and annoying. I don't like either (the vest clashes with my coat), but I understand why I need them. Sometimes on night weather patrols, the weatherponies have to carry crystal lamps so that they can all see each other. Other airplanes have flashing lights or are painted bright colors so that they don’t bump into each other by mistake.

I bet if I’d had a yellow coat, I wouldn't have had to have the vest.

Then Mister Salvatore gave me a small altimeter that he said was used by skydivers, which are a kind of people who jump out of airplanes. I wonder if there are any of them around Kalamazoo? Flying up in an airplane wouldn’t be fun, but jumping out would be, and maybe it could go where I’m not allowed to.

He showed how to reset the altimeter—he reminded me that air pressure changes with altitude, but it also changes depending on the weather, so the instrument has to be reset every time. He didn’t need to tell me about atmospheric pressure; every pegasus knows about it.

I strapped it to my foreleg, where I could look down and see it easily, and then the instructor told me to walk out to the helipad—which was marked with a big 'H' inside a circle—and use the radio to ask for permission to fly a lap around the airplane station, reporting to the control tower what I was doing.

The FAA inspector reminded him that I needed a call sign, and there was a bit of discussion, and then we decided on “Pegasus 1.”

So I did what he told me to do. The book had said how a helicopter was supposed to take off and fly around the airplane station, and I followed the instructions to the letter. I kept checking my altimeter to make sure that I was at the right height, and I told the control tower what I was doing so that they would know.

I could hear some other pilots talking on the radio as well, and I had to wait my turn. As a result, my downwind leg was longer than I meant it to be, but it is very important to not change course until after you have told the control tower you intend to do so. The book had said that, and it was because unless you said you were doing something else, everyone would assume that you were still doing the thing that you had been doing.

When I finally flew down for the landing, the flight instructor came up and crouched down and reached out his hand and gave me a hoofshake. He said that in his experience, I was qualified to fly.

After that, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, certifying that I had flown for more than twenty hours, and that at least fifteen of those hours had been with a qualified flight instructor. He said that an adult pegasus pony counted as a qualified flight instructor.

Then he and the FAA man signed off on some papers, and I was qualified to fly! They gave me a temporary license, which says right at the top ‘Ornithopter Pilot License,’ and under that, Silver Glow. Plus it’s got a bunch of stuff like my birthday and address and age and weight.

There are a few rules I have to follow, though, or else they’ll take it away. I can only fly above trees in what they call VFR (which means a certain visibility distance) conditions, and only during the day. I have to wear my vest or carry the flashing light. I am not allowed to carry any passengers, or fly above ten thousand feet (which is three thousand meters), and I can't fly in Class A airspace.

He also explained that I could not land on the roofs of buildings off campus unless it was an emergency or I had gotten permission first. Then he gave me a second map that had several buildings circled in red where I was not to fly. And that was it!

The FAA man was still a bit grumpy, but he shook my hoof and congratulated me anyway. I don't think he wanted me to pass the test, but I couldn't think of why he wouldn't.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and Mister Mark were really happy and so was I and I celebrated by making another flight around the airplane station (I got permission first). Mister Mark gave me a card with his phone number on it and said that I could call him whenever I wanted to. Then he gave me a big hug and congratulated me again. I could tell that he was pretty proud of himself, too. I bet I’m the first pegasus who he’s helped become a pilot.

Then we got back in Sienna and they asked me if I wanted to have dinner with them but I was too excited to want to sit down and eat, so they took me back to campus and I told Peggy and she called a bunch of our friends and pretty soon we had a gathered up a little group.

We decided that this called for celebration, and it was still light enough that I could have a quick flight, so I put on my vest and we went out to the quad and I flew up and did some stunts in the air and by the time I landed there were a bunch of other students who were watching me zip around.

We all went to dinner together, and then afterwards everyone went to Christine's room, and we crowded around her TV and watched Return of the Jedi. I had to share the papasan with Peggy because there were more of us than there were seats, and it took a little bit of cleverness to figure out how to both fit on it and be comfortable.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Georg, who made sure I didn't screw up any of the pilot's license stuff too badly (although as is my wont, I made a bunch of last-second changes).

January 13 [Weather]

January 13

When I got up this morning, I was super-excited! I could fly now as part of my morning routine, which is much better exercise than just trotting around the neighborhood (although it's good to work your legs, too—some pegasuses that mostly do cloud duty don't do much on their hooves).

I decided that I would fly first. Sometimes humans flip a coin when they want to make a choice, but that doesn't work so well for ponies. Most pegasi close their eyes and look out to see what the first kind of bird they spot is. I always chose between singing birds and raptors, even though a lot of pegasuses that live near the seashore pick between 'ducky' birds that float on the water or ones that don't. (Some foals call the three main kinds of birds 'hawky' birds, 'ducky' birds, and 'tweety' birds.)

Since I wanted to fly, though, I didn't pick a bird. I just put on my vest and my blinky light that runs on batteries, and I put my altimeter on my foreleg and made sure to set the pressure on it.

One thing that I don't like about living in a dorm is that it's all enclosed and has its own heat, which is really a bit hotter than I'd like. Peggy doesn't like for the window to be open, because that lets the heat outside and is wasteful, and besides she gets too cold if it's open.

But I can't really get a sense for the air inside the room, so it was a surprise when I went outside and I could tell by the feel of the air that a storm was coming. I couldn't tell what, yet, since I was still on the ground, and conditions on the ground can be very different than conditions up in the air.

The whole sky is like a layer cake. Things have their own level, and there are changes from level to level. That's why it's important to know where all the clouds belong. Too high or too low, and they won't do what you want them to do. They might dissipate, or blow away, or make the wrong kind of weather if they're put in the wrong place. (There are more factors than that.)

My radio has a strap that attaches it to my foreleg, too, opposite my altimeter, and I can hold it up to talk to it. So I got my flight clearance from the airplane directors and took off into the morning sky.

One fun thing about morning flights is that the sky gets lighter the higher you get, 'cause planets are round. If the weather's right, you can watch Celestia raise the sun above the horizon, and then dive down to a lower altitude and watch it again, or if you dive at just the right speed, it looks like it's stationary on the horizon. It was too cloudy to do that, though. Off to the west there were big banks of clouds, which is the storm that's moving in.

It felt to me like it was either going to be sleet or ice, depending on how high the clouds were. It was cold on the ground, but as I flew up a bit higher, it got above freezing.

I was looking forward to it: I hadn't seen any good weather since I got here. It had been mostly clear or overcast with high clouds. Everything on the ground was looking kind of dingy, and could use some freshening up. Nopony likes dirty snow, which is why we usually try to put down a few centimeters every week through the winter.

The Climate Science professor mentioned that there was a winter storm warning. Then he asked the class if they knew what climate conditions caused ice storms, and I raised my hoof right away, but he didn't call on me at first.

It was only after the third student mangled the explanation that he finally called on me, and I told him all about ice storms and he seemed kind of surprised I'd know about it at all, since we ponies don't have doppler radar or radiosonde balloons.

I told him that for humans it was all observational, and that we've been flying in clouds for thousands of years, so we know all about them, how they work, and how to make them work for us. According to the class book, humans haven't worked directly inside clouds for more than a hundred years or so, so of course they don't know very much about them.

Then he thought he was being tricky and mentioned that there's a great lake off to the west (which I know about because I saw the map of Michigan, and it's got big lakes all around it).

Bodies of water have a big effect on the weather. They cool down and warm up more slowly than the land, and cause weather inland of them that can be difficult to control. I told him that storms need two things to work, energy and moisture (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's just the basics); lakes and oceans are a good source of both. That's why hurricanes don't form over land, and slow down when they make landfall.

I asked him how much ice coverage there was on the lake, and I think that was the moment that he started to take me seriously.

He said he wanted to talk to me during his office hours tomorrow, which is a great honor. He's been granted a doctorate, which is the highest achievement a human student can get, and I don't have any scholastic achievements at all.

In philosophy, we discussed more of Plato's forms and things, and the system of government which Plato felt was best. In a lot of ways, it sounded like Equestrian society, so it's pretty obvious that we have a very smart system, and this is just the very foundation of the class. I can't wait to see how some of the other philosophers like Karl Marx or Jean Paul Sartre have refined Plato's system to reach the perfect system.

Since we had been talking about my job in climate class, I thought it would be a good idea to continue that in Equestrian class.

I learned a lot about human jobs! One of the things that's important to know about language is that words have meanings beyond themselves, which is why actual conversations are more important than just speaking words out of a book (although that's very useful for beginners). So, as a result, I had to ask lots of questions about some jobs to figure out what they might be called in Equestria. One student worked at a park that's called a 'golf course,' where people pay to hit a small ball into a small hole which is very far away.

We'd all sort of worked out a schedule for dinner, and everyone started to arrive at about the same time, even though we had never talked about what time to eat. And I liked that, because that meant that we could have interesting conversations and tell each other how our days had been. But it had also been nice when someone had arrived first because they could tell you if there was any food that was really good or not as tasty as it looked.

January 14 [Longfellow]

January 14

Mister Longfellow is very much like Mister Whitman, but I kinda like Longfellow a bit more. Leaves of Grass was very nice to read, but it was a bit long for a poem. Although there are some poets who like to write epic poems that are as long as a story, and those are nice for winter days.

That's more of an earth pony thing, though. A lot of them don't have much to do in the wintertime, because all the crops are in and the days are short.

Anyways, today in class we read two different poems. The first one was about him shooting an arrow into the air. Humans don't have to be as careful about that, because there aren't any flying humans that they could hit by mistake.

It's kind of a metaphor, though. He's talking about how he doesn't really know where the things he says go. Words have a power beyond just their appearance on the page or the sounds that they make in the air, and you don't always know just how far they'll go. Like, one of my cousins (sorta distant, and I don't really know her but my dam says she's my cousin) got inspired by something one of the Wonderbolts said and is now a personal guard to Princess Celestia. I think it was Spitfire who said it, but I don't know what it was.

I guess I kind of got inspired by hearing about how Princess Twilight had discovered a whole new world of people, and just thinking of the possibilities of it . . . I started to read everything I could about it, and now here I am! So maybe Princess Twilight's arrow wound up (unintentionally) lodged in my breast.

It's funny sometimes to think about how one thing leads to another, and when you're in the present, you don't really consider it. Right now, I'm sitting in my room writing in my journal by my little silver desk lamp with the bendy neck while Peggy is still sleeping. She's so cute when she sleeps.

There had been a special meeting at school, and once we were all in the school coliseum, our headmistress stepped up to the podium and announced that Princess Twilight had found a new world. There was a moment of dead silence as it sank in, and then there was all sorts of cheering and I remember all I was thinking about at the time was if Stormbreaker liked me or not. Turns out it was 'not.'

It was only later that it sunk in, and then I started reading everything about this new world I could get my hooves on, and—

Well, anyway, the point is that now I'm here, and I never could have imagined the chain of circumstances that led up to this point.

The second poem we read was The Wreck of the Hesperus. I think Professor Hillberry chose it because of the ice storm. It made it easier to imagine the struggle.

People were struggling this morning. There was a glittering coat of ice on everything. It was beautiful to see, and no bother to me at all, but humans were moving slowly and falling down a lot. I hadn't really thought about how much of a hinderance having only two legs must be. Sometimes I see Peggy or the other students writing or doing other clever stuff with their hands while I have to clumsily poke at my computer's buttonboard whenever it doesn't listen to my voice, and I get a bit jealous. I wasn't jealous this morning. For walking around on the ice, four legs is better.

A couple of my friends were playing around this morning. Well, it kind of started out after breakfast. Christine and I went out of the dining hall together, and she saw that I was flying above the ground while her feet were slipping on the ice. She wondered if it would be possible for me to pull her along on the sidewalk, and I thought that sounded like it would be interesting, so she grabbed my tail and I pulled her behind me all the way to the Olds-Upton building.

Then Aric and another friend called Meghan who I knew from Equestrian class and he knew her from bell choir (I don't know what that is, but that's what he said) with Aric saw how much fun we were having and had to join in. I flew slow, because they had trouble staying on their feet at first, then sped up when they got used to it.

Pretty soon I'd zipped a bunch of my friends around campus like that and even a few other people who I didn't really know that thought it looked like we were having fun.

I was kind of curious if I could actually lift any of them up, but the rules say I'm not supposed to carry any passengers when I fly, so I didn't. I don't think dragging them along the ground counts as flying, although perhaps I should ask Mister Mark to be sure. I don't want to break any rules.

After poetry class, I was hoping that we could play some more, but the college workers—who are collectively called Fac Man—had put down salt that melted all the ice. Some of their sidewalks have steam-filled tunnels under them and didn't need any salt at all to make the ice melt.

By the afternoon, the sun had come out and the temperature was rising, so all the ice on the trees melted,. Everybody seemed to like it better, but I missed the ice and the bejeweled world it had given us, at least briefly.

Weather is like that. It's an arrow or a song that we give to other ponies, and then they make the most of it. Whether it's sticking their tongue out to capture a fat snowflake, or sitting in their living room with their family listening to the rain drum off their roof, or the gleeful shouts when they see fresh snowfall, we sing our song and know not where it lands.

January 15 [Friday]

January 15

After yesterday's ice storm, this morning was quite uneventful. It was above freezing by sunup, and the air was full of the sounds of meltwater rushing off roofs. I'm a bit confused about the human calendar; winter is supposed to last until March 20. I know humans don't control it as well as we do, but to miss by over sixty days? That's a sixth of their year.

I asked the professor about it, and he said that it was typical for Kalamazoo to have thawing cycles like this. Humans, it turns out, define their seasons simply by the length of the day, switching on the equinoxes and solstices. That would be like having summer start on the day of the Summer Sun Celebration, and was kind of silly. The climate lagged a bit behind.

We continued our conversation from before after class today. I think the two of us sort of got off on the wrong hoof right from the get-go. He assumed that I was taking the class because I wanted to know the facts, when the truth was I wanted to know how humans named their weather. A good foundation is necessary to understand anything. It would be like a writer who doesn't know the most basic parts of speech.

He thought that we didn't have a rigorous understanding of the climate and of weather. He said that he had been reflecting on what we talked about before, and he thought he understood where the misunderstanding had come from: back in the old days, humans thought of anything that they didn't really understand as witchcraft or magic, and only later did they really understand what was going on. He'd assumed that our weather control was like that—that we just pushed around clouds not really knowing why it worked.

Really, it was just different approaches. We pegasuses started off with experimentation, and eventually that became a rigid science. We'd try something and see what happened. It must have been an exciting and dangerous time to be alive! So much of it is lost to history; by the time the Sisters became stewards of the unicorn throne, we were already pretty good at it, and have spent centuries since refining our art.

Humans took the opposite tack: they observed what had happened, and then figured out how to explain it. That's why they name their clouds for their appearance and their function was tacked on later, rather than the way we do it. The intent of the cloud is known before it's put into the sky; what form it takes is the logical result of what it does.

Incidentally, that's why we were the first to develop complex math—there's a lot of energy involved in the atmosphere, and a lot of calculations required to get things right. Even now, pegasus-founded universities have the best mathematicians. (Unicorns like to pretend that they're unicorn universities, 'cause they're on the ground, but how else were we going to attract other ponies?)

He still doesn't believe that we can actually work with clouds. I'll have to bring one in to show him. It's really difficult to wrangle them after they've fully-formed, though. They're big and diaphanous.

We wrapped up Plato today. A lot of what he said in The Republic could be applied to pony culture. The division of labor is an important point: while unicorns can manipulate the weather, earth ponies can cast with potions, and pegasuses can grow crops, it's not in our nature. Our society is better when everypony sets herself to the tasks which she is best equipped for.

A boy in class asked the professor if Plato's Republic could be said to justify the caste system, and the professor said that she didn't think so. She rejected the idea that a person is born into a role, and I had to agree with that. Despite the expected roles, there are occasionally pegasuses who are good with plants or animals, and it's that unexpected cross of talents which makes our society function so well. Everypony knows that earth ponies make the best leaders (not counting alicorns, of course), but if there weren't pegasi who were also good at it, our cloud cities would be leaderless.

It's very important to let ponies use their skills properly. Some parents desperately want their daughters to follow in their hoofsteps, even to the point of denying what a pony's cutie mark really means.

I thought about bringing up sports in Equestrian class, especially since I now know about a few humans sports like golf and water skiing and hockey (there are very many hockey teams in Michigan), but decided to focus the first part of the class on how the unified Equestrian alphabet came to be, and why the unicorns are stubborn and don't use it all the time. And that wasn't as good a topic as I'd thought, because people kind of got confused by it and I guess I didn't know enough about the unicorn alphabet to really teach it.

There is a little mail hut near the dining hall. I checked it on the way from dinner, and discovered that I got a return letter from Aquamarine. This left me with a bit of a dilemma—I had already promised that I would go over to Christine's room and watch the last Star Wars movie, and I'd also then had to reschedule that a bit so that I could watch an important human event on the television (which is a small flat screen that can show movies or current events, sometimes right when they're happening).

In America, they have a political system which they call democracy where every four years they all get together and decide on who's going to be their leader for the next four years. Earth ponies do this, too, although rather than have it take place at a set time, they wait until they have lost confidence in their current leaders and then decide if somepony is more qualified. We pegasuses like to see deeds first, rather than a lot of hot air, and that's how we choose. Unicorns—who are sometimes the most backwards tribe—think bloodlines are important, and take great pains to keep track of who birthed who and use that to determine who sits on the Nobles' Council.

It’s kind of a mash-up between our system and the earth pony system. Each candidate will not only talk about his or her deeds, but also what they intend to do if they are elected.

They have a very clever process to winnow down the candidates; there are two major tribes (Democratic and Republican), and each tribe puts up a number of candidates, which are winnowed down in a series of debates until the very best pair remain. Their debates are shown on television, so that all voters can make an educated choice.

Tonight it is the Republicans' turn, and then in a few days, the Democrats will have their turn.

January 16 [The Force Awakens]

January 16

I had a lot to think about this morning.

I didn't really understand a lot of the presidential candidate debate. There were very many issues which were raised that we never learned about in Equestria. To hear some of the candidates talk, America is on the brink of collapse, and the current president didn't do anything to stop it for eight years. But he was re-elected four years ago; does that mean that even if he wasn't qualified, his opponents were less qualified? Or maybe something happened in the last four years that he didn't respond well to. Sometimes a pony will overlook something that she shouldn't have, and only later we realize that she hadn't been thinking ahead like she should have been, so we need to pick a new pony to lead us.

I suppose humans probably have a much better grasp of the nuances of their society. It’s very complicated to balance the wants and needs of a whole nation fairly. I don't think I could do it.

The other thing that struck me as odd was that there were two moderators who asked all the questions, despite there being a large audience there. Traditionally in the forums, any passer-by could ask questions. I hope that they have those debates later. It’s nice to know what the common ~~pony~~ person thinks.

I was disappointed that a lot of the candidates seemed pretty confrontational. There was a lot of posturing and puffery going on. That's one of the problems with this type of system—it can turn into a popularity contest. ~~It's funny to think of, but in that regard the unicorns have the purest system, since it only matters who your dam was, not what you've done or say you'll do.~~ No political system is perfect. We figure out the flaws and try to address them as well as we can.

The debate was something to ponder while I did my morning exercise. Plato’s system, as wise as it is, can run into problems when citizens don’t recognize what they’re good at and try something they’re not good at. At least we have cutie marks to help guide us; the poor humans must be blundering along blindly, never quite sure if they’ve found their niche.

It was warm again, and there were patches where all the snow had melted. Even the little triangle of land where I like to cool off after my morning jog had pretty sparse snow coverage, and I wound up getting my coat all muddy before I realized how thin the snow was. That was annoying. I hate having dirt in my coat. I don't know how the earth ponies put up with it.

I took a nice relaxing shower—I would have spent a bit more time, but Brianna was waiting her turn, and it wouldn't be nice to make her wait. She's really tall and skinny and has long blonde hair which comes all the way down below her rump. She'd already gotten almost completely undressed before I came out of the shower and I noticed that she had a big scar on her right side just above her panties. I wasn't sure if it was polite to ask about it, so I kept my mouth shut. But I was really curious. Humans fight a lot, so maybe she was in a fight.

After I preened and groomed, I read Aquamarine's letter, which I should have done earlier. She said that it was really crowded on her campus, and she didn't like that too much. But there was a lot of open land to the south, which is where a lot of her classes will take place. Humans, she said, don't have magic to work on plants but they do have chemicals to get rid of pests. They're learning about those. She said it's a very difficult balance to not have unintended consequences with the chemicals. They can hurt beneficial animals, and if too much is applied, they can poison everyone’s drinking water, and they can also cause plants to grow where they shouldn't.

Her dorm room had bothered her for the first couple of days, because it was so high up. I'm on the third floor, which is the top floor of my dorm; on her campus, the dorms are almost as tall as skyscratchers and she's on the eighth floor. Once she got used to it, though, she started to like the view. She said that there are trains which go by all the time. Some of them are freight trains pulled by black locomotives with red noses, and there's a long silvery one called an Amtrak that carries passengers.

I wrote her back about all the friends I'd made already and how my classes were going and that I was officially allowed to fly pretty much wherever I wanted to as long as I got permission from the airplane directors and wore my flight gear.

In the afternoon while we were waiting to go to the theater to watch Star Wars, a few girls from our hall gathered in our room and we played some more Euchre and talked for a bit. Ruth was there; she's dyed her hair blue now. She said she did it because she liked my coat color. Christine came over along with Joe, who I've only been seeing at meals. Aric showed up, and he came with Sean. I thought that was odd, since Sean thought Star Trek was better, but he said that he really liked a lot of science fiction movies.

We all crowded into Cobalt and went to the theater. It's right next to a shopping mall (it's called Maple Hill, although there aren't any maples or hills there), which is even bigger than Meijer. How many things can be sold? I really want to visit it and find out! Humans really like having a lot of stuff.

There were little kiosks where we got our tickets, and then we went into a lobby where there were lots of people milling around, and a stand where you could buy popcorn and candy and bubbly pop drinks. I didn't really want anything, but Aric said that no theater experience was complete without having overpriced food in a giant bucket and bought some popcorn to share.

I got mauled by a few ~~foals~~ children who wanted to pet me or touch my wings and that started to make me nervous so Christine and Peggy kind of closed around me and ushered me to the theater. They picked what they said were the best seats. They weren't all that comfortable for me, mostly because the cushion was so soft I sank in and was worried that I might have trouble getting out.

Right before the movie started, there were a bunch of advertisements. I was hoping there would be newsreels, but there weren't any. I guess because televisions can show news right when it's happening, there's no need to have them in the theater.

The movie was a lot more intense than the other ones had been. A lot of it was the setting—the screen was huge, and the sound was loud enough to make my seat shake. But it was totally worth it for the flight scenes. I really felt like I was flying during them, and even accidentally hit Christine and Aric with my wings a couple of times.

Everyone was all hyped-up when it was over, even though most of them had seen it before (Aric hadn't, and of course I hadn't either).

When we got back to campus, nobody really wanted to go to bed right away, so we went to Christine's room. Sean and Christine got in an argument about Star Wars vs. Star Trek again, and I took my favorite spot on the papasan and just listened to them until I finally drifted off to sleep.

I didn't mean to, and I hope Christine didn't think it was rude. When I woke up the next morning, Joe was asleep on the couch, and nobody else was anywhere to be seen. I went down the little hallway to the bedrooms, but all the doors were closed. I knocked lightly on Christine’s door (I could smell which one it was), but she didn’t answer.

I probably should have stayed, but I wanted to get my exercise in before going to breakfast.

Author's Note

I actually got the debate wrong by one day. It actually took place on January 14.

January 17 [A Day Flying]

January 17

Christine and Sean came to breakfast together, and he was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing the night before, but she was wearing new clothes. They also smelled like each other—they must have worked out their disagreement between Star Wars and Star Trek the fun way.

I didn't have anything planned for the day, so I thought I'd go flying. It was a perfect day for it, a little bit chilly but perfectly clear. It would be my first chance to really stretch my wings.

Pegasus magic doesn't work as well on Earth. We don't know why, but our scientists are working on it (on the other hoof, human electronics don't work very well in Equestria). So I knew that I wouldn't have the same endurance I had back home. Still, as long as I didn't overexert myself, I'd be fine, and it would be a good chance to see just how far I could fly before getting tired.

Just the same, I asked Peggy if she had any plans for the day. I didn't know if she had been planning to spend the day with me, and it would be rude to just fly off without telling her where I was going.

She said that she was just going to do laundry and hang out with the friends who lived down the hall, and told me to have fun and be careful. I put on my vest and my light, and made sure that I had my map and spare batteries in my vest pocket. Then I strapped on my light and radio, and I was ready to go!

I glided down the stairs—it's kind of fun to make the turns at the landings, but I have to watch out for people coming up the stairs—and then walked out the front door.

As soon as I was outside, I flew up to our window and waved at Peggy, then took to the sky. I used the radio to get clearance from the airplane directors when I was at the level of the bell tower. Before they answered, the bells started ringing, and I almost jumped out of my skin! I'd forgotten that they sometimes ring them on Sunday morning.

Once I got my flight clearance, I went up higher and surveyed the area. I knew it pretty well from the map, but things always look different the first time you're looking down on them from above. It takes a little bit to get used to.

In Equestria, the easiest thing to do would be follow roads or follow railroad tracks. Rivers are also a good thing to follow, but there isn't one next to campus. There's a little creek, but it's hard to see because it's so small, and it gets hidden by the trees a lot, and when it goes under the road it gets lost.

There were roads—lots of roads. I could probably follow the main roads and not get lost, but then I spotted the railroad tracks at the base of campus, and that was an even better path to follow.

They ran sort of diagonally, then turned into the center of town. There was a big brick railroad station, which also had a lot of buses at it. Some of them were silver and blue with a big greyhound on them; the others were white and had numbers on the roof.

I continued to follow the tracks to a crossing, which was a good waypoint, and then a river. There was a big dirt field next to the river, so I landed there and checked the map. I could go further east if I wanted to, or I could follow the river north or south.

East felt like the best direction to me. If I was ever going to fly out to visit Aquamarine, that would be the direction I would be going. From looking at the maps, it was a safe bet that these tracks would go to East Lansing eventually, so it was a good idea to get familiar with them and what was around them.

I tried to keep my altitude at about five thousand feet. That was plenty high enough to get a good view of the city and pick out the landmarks. It's actually easier on Earth, because there are tall buildings and big towers that stick well above the trees, and most towns have water towers with the town's name painted on them. When I turned in a slow circle, I could see six of them (although only one was close enough to read). But they were good waypoints, even if I couldn't read them, 'cause they weren't all the same shape or color.

I probably could have gone further if I'd wanted to, but I decided that when I got to Augusta I was going to turn around. The last thing I wanted was to completely exhaust myself, and have to walk back to campus, especially since I couldn't very well walk back along the railroad tracks. That's dangerous! A train could come along and run me over, and Earth trains are much bigger than Equestrian trains.

A long freight train passed me on my way back. I heard it honking its horn off in the distance, and after about ten minutes, it overtook me. Even at my height, I could smell the acrid smoke of its exhaust, and it hung in the air for a long time. Our trains make a little bit more smoke, but it doesn't smell as bad. Maybe it's just because I'm not used to it.

It looked like a giant snake, undulating along through the trees. Even when it had gotten quite a lead on me, I could occasionally see it as it passed by open fields.

Unexpectedly, I caught up to it again on the outskirts of Kalamazoo. It was stopped at a red signal just short of a crossroad, and I wondered what it was waiting for.

The tracks go through a ravine, while the road for cars goes up and over them. Just on the other side of that road, I saw a fast silver train going the other way—what Aquamarine called an Amtrak, and I figured that was what the freight train was waiting for.

I still had some energy left, so when I got back to the center of Kalamazoo, I followed a road that went north. It passed through a kind of run-down neighborhood for a while, and then curved out into open fields. Strangely, as I kept flying, the smell of mint suddenly filled my nostrils, and it got more intense as I kept flying.

The road curved to the west, and while I might follow it one day, it was getting late, so I turned around and headed back for campus. It's a highway, so I could follow it for quite a while if I wanted to.

Kalamazoo College's bell tower is a great landmark. Even when the trees are leafed out, it will be impossible to miss. I flew a direct course, circling over the center of campus to my landing spot.

Peggy was still in the room, wearing her lounging pants and a t-shirt, so she probably hadn't been out all day. After I put away my flight clothes and took a shower, she got dressed and we went to dinner together.

By the time we got back to the room, I was tired, but it was the good kind of tired. The kind of tired you get after an honest day's work. Peggy started working on an essay that she said was due tomorrow, and I went to bed even though it was still kind of early. All that flying had worn me out some, but now I had a good idea of how long my pegasus magic would last and with practice I ought to be able to get better endurance.

My Friends ❤

My Friends ❤

These are all the new friends I've made after only two weeks!

Peggy, who's my roommate and from Colorado. She's not a morning person at all. She's sort of taking the lead in teaching me stuff about Earth college: the stuff I don't learn in class. That's important, because if we just wanted book learning, there'd be no point in the exchanges at all; we could just send books back and forth.

Christine, who is the first person I met at the dining hall (besides the nice old lady who watches the entrance). Christine has long orange-red hair and big canine teeth and likes Star Wars.

Joe, who is friends with Christine. He has a goatee and blonde hair and when he graduates he's going to teach school in Asia. He's usually pretty quiet—of all my friends who eat together, he's the quietest.

Sean, who has short blonde hair and a round face, and wears jeans and t-shirts. He likes Star Trek as much as Christine likes Star Wars. He's going to college for computers. He told me once that if I have a problem with mine, he can fix it.

Aric, who's tall and likes to wear plain white t-shirts. He's pretty talkative, and sometimes he eats with us and other times he eats with someone else. He lives in Michigan all the time, not just for college.

Ruth, who lives down the hall and dyes her hair different colors. Ruth has a weird obsession with pants. She made a daisy chain of pants out of construction paper and hung it around her room.

Rebekka, who's very quiet and wears long loose skirts that go all the way to the floor. She is an artist and always has a dreamy look in her eyes. Peggy told me that sometimes people on drugs have that kind of look, but Rebekka is just like that all the time.

Kat, who's Rebekka's roommate. She's quiet and wears glasses but she's really nice.

Brianna lives down the hall from us too. She's very tall and skinny. I thought she was a boy when I first saw her, just because she was so tall. I didn't know girls could get that tall, too. She's studying biology, and last year was in the rainforest in Brazil.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, the two people who rode with me from the airplane station to college and helped me get my ornithopter license and will take me places when Peggy isn't available or when I need to go somewhere she doesn't want to go.

Aquamarine, of course. Although technically I made friends with her before I got to Earth.

There are a bunch of other people that sit with us sometimes, like Kennith and Seth (Seth has a tattoo on his left bicep, which is sort of like a cutie mark but it doesn’t appear on its own), and James and Elizabeth who are so in love that they’re going to get married. Andy, who is very strange, and Nancy who has a lisp. I really want to get to know some of them better, but they mostly like to sit in the darkest, most confined room in the dining hall, and I’m just not comfortable eating there.

I’m gonna leave a couple of blank pages after this one, so I can add in more friends when I make them!

January 18 [Durak]

January 18

I was really sore when I woke up, probably because I'd gotten the first real exercise since I got to Earth. Just trotting around the neighborhood isn't a good way to exercise completely, but it's better than nothing.

I decided in climate science class that since I could mostly fly unrestricted now, I was going to get a cloud and bring it in. It's one thing to talk about them, but totally different to be touching them, feeling what makes them work. I'll keep an eye on the sky every morning, and when I see the right kind of formation, I'll go up and get one.

Surely one won't be missed.

Philosophy class started with Aristotle today. He's Socrates and Plato's successor, and he refined their philosophy.

The textbook also mentioned that he made other contributions to society, including some of his descriptions of animals which weren't rediscovered until a much later date. I get the feeling that something happened to humans not all that long after Socrates was around. It's probably why their calendars count down and then back up again.

Anyway, one of the things that the book mentioned was that Aristotle discovered octopuses have a hectocotyl arm, which is basically a penis arm. I don't know why they would have that (or why he would have studied it), but I'm never shaking hooves with an octopus.

I wouldn't have known what a hectocotylus was, but when I came across the word in the textbook and even Peggy didn't know what it meant, she told me about Google Search, which is something my computer can do. Now every time I come across a troublesome word, I can look it up! That's really amazing, and it will help me learn more English.

Rather than invent an imaginary cave full of prisoners who don't know what outside is, he assumed that everyone knew and agreed on what virtues are. That's one thing that humans and ponies can agree on—it's probably universal. You can't have a society if everypony, or everyperson, is only looking out for themselves. That kind of shortsightedness never pays off.

At lunch today, Aric stopped by my table on his way to the dark room (that's what I'm going to call it from now on) and asked if I wanted to come out and play cards tonight at a coffee shop. He said that they did it every Monday night.

That sounded like a lot of fun to me. I'm getting pretty good at euchre, and games are a good way to bond and make friends. I'm more used to physical games, but I don't think I'll be challenging anybody to a sky-race anytime soon.

He said he'd come by my room and get me when it was time to go, and I could bring Peggy if she wanted to come.

I spent the rest of the day looking forward to that, even though Peggy decided that she didn't want to go unless I really wanted her to, and I would have liked it if she'd wanted to but I didn't want to have her do something that she didn't want to. And I didn't really mind going alone; Aric is the kind of person who I can trust, I think. Even if he likes eating in the dark room.

Aric came and got me at seven. I thought we were going to walk, but he wanted to drive his truck, which he called Winston, even though it says Chevrolet in big white letters across the tailboard.

It was not a very nice truck. Where all the other cars I've been in so far were clean and sleek inside and out, this one was scratched and dented and rusted, and the seat was torn, and the front glass was cracked, and when he started it it was noisy and smelly.

He said that they don't build them like they used to. I can see why they don't!

Still, it got us there. It looked more difficult to control than any of the other cars I've ridden in; there was a lever he constantly had to move, and it had twice as many foot-pedals as Cobalt, which he was also using all the time.

He bought a mint mocha, which sounded pretty good (I love mint), so I got one too. They put whipped cream on it that stuck to my muzzle when I tried to drink it, and I had to lick it off.

Upstairs, a lot of his friends were already sitting around a big table, waiting for us. Keith, who I vaguely know, explained the rules for me. Malcolm helped explain, along with Aric. They called the game Durak, which is pronounced drock. It's kind of like euchre; it has a trump suit, but otherwise it's very different. Instead of a winner, the game has one loser, and that's the person (or pony, as it turned out) who still has cards when nobody else does.

If cards get beaten, either by a higher-value card or by a trump, they're discarded. If they don't, the person whose turn it is has to pick up all the cards, and the turn moves to the next person.

I lost the first game, and I would have lost the second except that I got lucky and was able to play my last cards on somebody else's turn. They weren't very good cards. Then Aric suggested that I should hold trump cards until late in the game, and that was a better strategy. Aric lost the last hand we played, but I think he did it on purpose. I know that there's an element of luck to games like this, but he did very well in the first two games, and he was doing much better than I was in the last hand, but all of a sudden his fortune reversed for no reason I could determine.

A couple of other people didn't feel like walking and wanted to ride back in Aric's truck. It's not as practical as Cobalt, since it only has one seat in the front and then behind that it's just open space. I offered to walk with the rest of them back to campus, but he said we'd all fit if we crowded in.

When we all got in, though, I could tell by his face that he wasn't so sure of his decision after all. I had to sit on Keith's lap, and he wrapped his arms around my barrel, while I braced on the dashboard of the truck. James and Elizabeth shared the center part of the seat, with James right next to Aric.

I hadn't realized it was so late until I got back to the dorm room, and Peggy was already in bed with the lights out. I'm going to be sleepy in the morning, and if I go again maybe I'll leave a little bit sooner.

Author's Note

One of the things you learn when you do research is that you haven't always done things to the right way. Case in point: I had to look up the spelling of durak, and when I skimmed the Wikipedia article on the game, I learned that how we played it wasn't exactly according to the rules. We used two decks (since there were usually a lot of us), rather than one deck of 36 cards.

January 19 [Hope is the thing with feathers]

January 19

Hope is the thing with feathers.

We started poetry with Emily Dickinson today. She didn't publish very many poems in her lifetime, but after she died they were discovered and people loved them very much.

She was a sad, lonely person, and I wonder if she would have been happier if she had given her poems to the world while she was still alive. I think she would have been.

It made me think of my journal—would I want it published? How would I feel if I knew other people were reading it? What would they think of me? Would they like me, or would they think I'm vain for writing so much about me? Maybe I should put other things in the journal, too, and that way it's not just about me.

But journals are supposed to be personal, aren't they? So I should just put what I want in it and I guess if somebody else reads it and they don't like it that's okay.

Some ponies think that elders don't have a sense of humor. That they're set in their ways, and don't want to change. And maybe that's true. Maybe they often think of the springs gone by and lament their lost youth . . . but I don't think that Professor Hillberry's opening poem was chosen at random. He looked right at me when he announced it, and there was a twinkle in his eye.

I read the whole poem aloud, even though he hadn't asked me. It was short, and beautiful.

The class just flew by as we read and discussed her poems, both the hopeful and the mournful. Most of her poems were short—all the ones we read were. Just a brief image, almost like a painting of words, but enough for me to see it in my mind.

I had an extra spring in my step after class. Poetry always cheers me up, even when it's a little bit sad.

I decided to try something a bit different for lunch. I thought of how Emily Dickinson had been scared to publish her poems and had missed an opportunity to touch people with her words while she was still alive (and what if nobody had ever found them?) and even if it was a bit presumptuous of me to compare myself with her, I was going to try eating in the dark room, as long as somebody I knew was there.

I admit, when I was on the threshold, I had second thoughts, and I almost hoped that I wouldn't see anyone, but Keith was there.

I thought I didn't know him very well, then I cursed myself for being a silly filly, and carried my tray over to the table and sat down across from him.

He was a little surprised at first, and he wasn't the only one. While we were eating, a few more people who had played cards last night came and sat down, and a couple of others besides. Each one of them kind of hesitated when they saw me sitting there, and I started to get a bit nervous, like maybe I was supposed to be invited to sit at their table and Keith had just been too polite to tell me.

Then I got mad at myself for being nervous. They were all nice and friendly last night, except for some of the stuff they said during the game, but that wasn't meant to be taken seriously. We said kind of mean things sometimes when we were playing games but we never really meant them.

I didn't stick around for very long after I'd finished my meal, though. I probably could have stayed and chatted with them, but the room was beginning to crowd in on me. Maybe humans like it when it's dark and confined, but I don't. We learned that humans used to live in caves, and maybe dark room reminded them of their ancestor's caves.

Otherwise, I don't know why they'd make a room without any decent windows. There are a couple, but they aren't enough to really brighten it up.

Between that and staying up past my bedtime last night, I thought I might as well take a nap.

Peggy wasn't in the room, and it was nice and quiet in the rest of the dorm as well. On weekends and after dinner, people have their doors open and usually want to be social, but usually during the day, there isn't much going on in the dorms.

When I woke up, Peggy was sitting at her desk, doing her homework. It was a little strange to see her with a notebook and pencil, rather than her computer.

According to the clock, it would be over an hour until dinnertime, so I could wash my sheets and then put them in the dryer so that they would be ready when I was done with dinner. I had to borrow Peggy's soap, because I didn't have any.

I ate dinner at the usual table. Tonight they had Chinese food, and the rice was very good, as were the spring rolls.

When I'd finished my meal, Christine put a small cookie on my tray, She said it was called a fortune cookie, because there was a fortune inside, and she broke hers open to show me.

It wasn't as easy for me to open, and I finally settled on crushing it underhoof, and then extracting the paper. Christine thought that was hilarious.

It said 'You find beauty in ordinary things,' which I thought was really appropriate.

She asked what it had said, and I said I thought that I should keep it to myself, but she said it isn't fun that way. So I told her, and she added 'in bed.' Then she explained how you're supposed to add 'in bed' to every fortune, which made hers read 'You will witness a special ceremony in bed.'

If the fortune was supposed to say that these things happened in bed, why didn't they just put it on the paper? Besides, why would I have to be in bed to see beauty in ordinary things? Couldn't I go outside and look at a cloud or a sunrise or the stars above?

When I got back to the dorm room, though, I experimented. Maybe I ought to give the fortune cookie the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was wiser than I was.

I picked the most ordinary thing in my room. That was actually harder than I thought it would be. While the function of many of the things is the same as it would be in Equestria, the form isn't. Still, I'd gotten used to it during the few weeks this has been my home, and some of the wonder at the mundane has worn off.

My desk was as ordinary as anything, and I stood in the middle of the room and examined it, then I sat in bed and did the same. It didn't look any different.

Then, in order to reverse the experiment, I looked at Peggy's laundry basket, which has a lacy black bra hanging over the edge of it.

I tried to focus on the basket, since that was plain and ordinary. It's made out of plastic rather than wicker, but otherwise it's very plain. However, my eye kept being drawn to the bra and how intricate it was. I hadn't really paid them that much attention, especially since she covered hers up with a shirt right after putting it on, and usually threw them right in the basket once she was done wearing them.

Upon closer examination, it was a beautifully crafted piece of clothing, with intricate lacework and tiny little clasps on the back, something that would be the envy of every dressmaker on Equestria. Yet, to her it was so ordinary that rather than proudly wear it where everyone could see, she covered it up with a shirt.

I still wasn't totally convinced, though. I would have asked Peggy, but she wasn't back before I went to sleep. In bed.

Author's Note

Hope is the thing with Feathers

January 20 [Hump Day]

January 20

There's a storm coming. I can feel it. The sky is clear now, but it won't be for too long. The barometric pressure is dropping.

The human weatherpeople can feel it, too. The professor mentioned it at the beginning of class, and said that he wished that we were going to the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids today, because if we had, we could see how they prepared for a lake-effect storm. They had a big responsibility, because people can't control the weather so they have to tell everyone what to expect so that they can get ready, and they aren't always right.

Then we moved on to talking about different types of snow. There are lots of different kinds, and how it appears when it lands on the ground depends on a lot of factors. A lot of ponies don’t know that sometimes snow is made up of individual crystals, and sometimes they’re all bunched together, depending on the atmospheric conditions.

We always like to start off the year with big flakes, and then follow that with a heavy snow to blanket and insulate the ground. It helps out animals who burrow in the ground—as strange as it seems, snow is a very good insulator. It's because it has a lot of air in it, since the legs on the flakes keep them a little bit apart. But if you make them too big they insulate really well at first, until new snow falls on them and squishes them down into slush or ice, and if you're really careless you can wind up drowning animals in their burrows.

Humans can't control what kind of snow falls, of course, although it turns out they can make it at ground level. There are places called ski resorts which make their own snow when there isn't enough falling from the sky, and it's something that I'd like to see some day.

All they're lacking is a way to get it all up to the sky, and then they'd be all set. We've got similar devices to start snowstorms and to put snow in clouds, if we need to. All precipitation needs an ice nucleus in order to start forming (although the dewpoint is really important, too). Maybe they could figure out how to put their snow machines up on clouds, or hang them from balloons or airplanes.

Like everyone else, I kept on looking out the window for the snow, but it wasn't supposed to start until tomorrow.

By the time class was over, the sky was almost completely overcast, and the temperature had dropped a little bit. I thought about grabbing a cloud and bringing it to the professor’s office, but I think I’ll wait. I’d rather have one that the whole class can enjoy, and it’ll be easier if it’s a bit colder out. Plus I'm not sure about cutting a cloud out of a sky full of them. It might be easier to get one that's on its own. I don't know how well Earth clouds stick together.

I learned that Wednesdays are called ‘hump day.’ I thought that had something to do with camels, but it doesn’t. People view the first half of the week as a hill to be climbed, and the second half as the downside of that hill; therefore, the ‘hump’ of the week is Wednesday.

I guess that makes sense; their calendars start on Sunday and end on Saturday, which means that a weekend is both the beginning of the week and the end of the week. They keep their weeks pretty close to the lunar cycles, but not their months, which have an arbitrary number of days in them. It's kind of confusing because not all months have the same number of days.

Before Equestrian class started, I overheard one of the students mention that there had been a Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, and I'd missed it, because I was flying. I'd meant to keep up with them . . . so much for that. Maybe there will be something about it in the student newspaper. Or I could ask around, and see what people thought.

For once, class kind of crawled by a bit. The teacher thinks it's important every now and then to have tests, and I don't get to take them (I would have had a perfect score).

It was a two-part test, and it took up all of the class. She gave them a portion of Clover the Clever's speech to the Second Unity Council and had them translate it into English, and after that they had to translate a passage from The Last Unicorn into Equestrian.

I'll have to read the book. Humans have had limited knowledge of unicorns and pegasi for thousands of years, despite never having seen one before we arrived. I don't understand how that could be; we had no concept of humans until fairly recently. There are minotaurs in Equestria which are kind of similar, but not really. And I've heard that there are monkeys which are like small furry humans with tails, but I'd never seen one.

Of course, most of the stuff they knew was wrong. Except that you can catch a unicorn with a golden bridle. That probably works; a lot of unicorns are greedy and like shiny things.

Before I went to dinner, I went to the library to see if they had the book. My badge can also be used as a library card (which is something humans have; we don't need cards to prove who we are).

There were so many books! The library has three floors, and all of them have shelf upon shelf of books. They were not organized in any system which I could fathom, so I had to turn to a library page—who is a librarian's apprentice—to help me. Their system was so complicated that they had a computer that just kept track of what books they had and where they were. It said that the book was PZ4.B3657, which is a silly way to keep track of books. Who can remember that?

This is what happens when accountants get their hooves on a well-organized system. It becomes unworkable, and pretty soon you need librarians and their apprentices to find just one book.

I didn't have time to read all of it before dinner, but I started it.

Sean asked me when I wanted to come over and watch Star Trek. I should do that. I don't want to be a bad friend. Christine hit him in the shoulder when he asked, but I could tell she wasn't being serious. She also asked him if he was going to show me the movies, or the TV series. He said that we'd just have to wait and see; it was going to be a surprise.

Author's Note

No cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.

--The Last Unicorn

Pre-read by reprovedhawk, who's willing to help me out with climate science stuff.

January 22 [Feral Cloud]

January 22

Humans don't like leaving snow on the pathways and roads. When I got up to exercise, there were people pushing roaring red machines which flung the snow off the pathways and onto the grassy lawns. There were also some humans using more traditional shovels, pushing and scraping it out of the way.

The main pathway (which Peggy says is called a 'sidewalk' because it's beside the road) up the hill was clear and dry. All the steam that they ran under the sidewalk made it warm enough that the snow melted right off.

Obviously, they weren't smart enough to extend this property to all the cement, because the rest of the sidewalks on my route weren't very clear at all. Or maybe they just don't have enough steam for all of it.

One of the things I find most appealing about the route I normally take is how confusing it is. I hadn't appreciated that at first; I'd just started trotting along through a neighborhood with nice homes.

Roads have names, and they have little green signs at all the corners that tell you what the name of the road is. It takes a bit of getting used to; the sign doesn't tell you what road you're on, but what one you're about to cross. When I thought about it, though, it made a lot of sense to do it that way. The pilot of the car would see the upcoming street and know if she was supposed to follow it, or keep on going the way she was going. (Is the word for cars 'pilots' like for ships and airplanes, or 'drivers' like for trains? I'll have to ask Peggy.)

Anyway, I discovered that Academy Street makes a lot of weird turns. You trot to the top of campus and a little bit beyond, and then you have to make a left onto Academy. You follow that around a curve (which is where the little triangle of grass I like rolling around in is), and then you have to make another left turn to stay on Academy St. After that it continues straight westward, until it ends at Dartmouth.

I normally loop around Grove, but this time I thought I'd take Dartmouth all the way out to the main street. Peggy had pointed out a little store there where cars can eat gas and people can buy food.

I was nearly to the main street when I saw Winston (Aric's truck) sitting in the driveway of an ugly house with peeling paint. I thought about knocking, but then decided against it, since there weren't any lights on in the house, and many people aren't early risers. It's because they like to stay up until late in the night and then sleep past the sunrise.

There was another similar truck in the driveway, although it looked a bit rougher than Winston. I wonder if he got both of them from the same place. I wouldn't have gone back a second time.

I wasn't paying enough attention when I got to the main street, and I got a faceful of slushy snow that a big orange truck with blinking lights threw up at me. The snow was heavy, wet, and salty. I'd actually started flying after it before I remembered that we weren't supposed to do that—in fact, we were supposed to stay well clear of vehicles that were moving. I could have caught it, though; it wasn't moving very fast. And then I could have told the pilot what I thought of him pushing a bunch of snow onto a pegasus who was just minding her own business.

The sun was just coming up when I got back to my dorm. Peggy was still sound asleep, so I very quietly put on my vest. I'd noticed that the clouds were low and sparse, and I thought I might try to see if I could wrangle one.

Once I had my clearance, I flew up to a likely candidate. Up close, clouds aren't as substantial as they appear on the ground, especially after they've been around for a bit. This one was a straggler from the storm, and it had spent most of its moisture in the storm. Probably once the sun got all the way up, it would be no more than a memory—but I could use it for a nobler purpose.

The first trick to wrangling a feral cloud is to isolate it. I flew around its boundaries, cutting it out like a sheepdog might. Once I had a feel for it, I began to work my way inward.

This was something we'd rarely practiced. Normally, cloud-wrangling is a team job; you have a couple on the downwind side holding it back, and one on the upwind side ushering it along, and maybe a quartet on the points to force it inwards. With just me, it was going to be a chore.

I'd love to say that I succeeded in the end, but I didn't. I couldn't feel it like I'd felt the snowclouds yesterday, and despite my best efforts, little tendrils of it kept getting loose.

I was over downtown when I finally gave up. I'd made some progress; it was thicker than it had been when I'd started. If I'd had all day to work with it, I would have been able to capture it, but it was all right that I hadn't. The exercise had been good for me, and I now better appreciated the limits of my cloud magic here on Earth.

I'd want to find a denser cloud, and cut off a small portion of an edge. That would be the solution. And not pick a bigger one than I could handle on my own, too.

Just the same, it pained me to go to weather class emptyhooved. And I kept thinking about how the cloud had gotten away because I hadn't been good enough to get it by myself, and I had to keep reminding myself to pay attention to the professor. There would be more clouds, and I was going to find one that I could catch.

Philosophy class wrapped up with Aristotle, and we had to take a test proving that we'd been paying attention to what the Greek philosophers had said. We weren't allowed to use our books, but we could use our notes if we wanted to, and some people were upset about that 'cause they hadn't taken very good notes, but I had so I thought I'd do very well on the test.

After classes, because it was Friday, a lot of students were playing outside, and I joined them. There was plenty of snow for everyone to play with, although we had to be careful to stay clear of people riding sleds down the hill. They couldn't steer very well, and if you got in their way you'd get knocked over.

At dinner, Sean told me that I was famous on YouTube. I didn't know what that was, so he showed me. He said that one of the sophomores had taken a video of me rolling around in the snow and uploaded it to the internet, which I guess not only computers have, but portable telephones as well.

It felt pretty good to be famous. Not that many ponies are famous enough to star in movies, and here I was on an internet television, having lots of fun in the snow. I watched through it a couple of times, and Sean asked if I wanted to comment on the video. I thought about it, but then I couldn't come up with anything that sounded good. And the movie kind of told the whole story, especially since it was called 'Pegasus playing in the snow.'

He told me that later he could come over to my room, or I could come to his, and he'd show me how to download the video so that I could show it to ponies back home if I wanted to. That was really kind, but I felt a bit guilty when I said yes, 'cause I still haven't come over and watched Star Trek like I said I would. And I wasn't that sure that downloading it would help, unless that put it on a filmstrip somehow.

So I told him that I would only let him help me with that after we'd watched a Star Trek movie, and he thought that was a great idea.

January 23 [Lousy Day]

January 23

Ugh. Today turned into a lousy day.

My morning trot was fun. There hadn't been a lot of people out exercising yesterday because of the snow, but they were back again this morning. Not all the sidewalks are clear, so the man I sometimes trot with was running on the road. I stayed on the sidewalk like I'm supposed to, but I flew over the places that were still snowy. He said that he wished he could fly. I told him that there were nice men like Mark who could help him get a pilot's license and then he could. He laughed and said that that wasn't what he meant.

When I got back to the dorm room, Peggy said that she had to go to Walgreens (which is not very far) because she was out of tampons. I didn't know what those were, so she explained it to me. It turns out humans go in and out of heat just like ponies, except that they do it all year long. (That's also why she smelled different yesterday, I bet.)

I couldn't really think of anything I needed from Walgreens, but I thought it would be interesting to go. I didn't have anything else I was planning to do, anyway, besides playing in the snow, and I could put that off. The snow would still be here when we got back.

Walgreen's is down the hill at the bottom of campus, and around the corner, and Peggy said she'd heard that it used to be a Burger King, which is a restaurant, but then they had made it into a store. Just like Meijer, there are big glass doors that know when you're coming and open up for you, and once you get inside there is shelf upon shelf of stuff. Humans like to have lots of choices of things to buy, and I still wasn't sure what kinds of things they needed and what they didn't.

Peggy knew where she was going, so I followed her. She went around to the back of the store and picked up a little blue box with a yellow end. I was kind of disappointed that this was all we'd come for, and asked if it was okay if I looked around the store a bit, 'cause I was interested in what other kinds of things were for sale here. There weren't so many people crowded in like there had been at Meijer, so I didn't feel as overwhelmed by it all.

She thought that was a good idea, and started taking me on a little tour of the store. There were boxes filled with pills for every imaginable purpose, and she said that in back, there were more pills that you had to use a prescription from a doctor to get.

There were shelves of beauty supplies and shampoos and soaps and clever elastic hair ties. Peggy snickered when she saw them, and said that on Earth when people tie their hair back it's called a pony tail. And I thought about buying some, even though it would be strange to have my mane tied back, and my tail hung just fine on its own.

Then we went and looked at the food, and Peggy decided that she needed to get some Doritos and Pop Tarts as well, and that she should have gotten a basket to carry things she wanted in.

Well, I knew right where those were; I'd seen them on the way in, so I said I'd get one. She asked if I was sure, and I nodded. They had little handles that you could carry in your mouth, just like a proper wicker basket.

It was a little tricky to pull one out of the pile; I had to stand on my hind hooves to get the handles but I managed. But when I moved back, I accidentally bumped into a man's legs.

He was wearing a nice suit, like Mister Salvatore was when I first met him, and I muttered an apology to him.

He spat at me! And then he said that when Trump was president he was gonna build a wall to keep us all out (how would that work?) and I dropped the basket and took a step back and bumped into the counter.

When he moved forward, I reared and spread out my wings, and that was enough to get him to back up, which gave me enough room to get free. I know I'm not supposed to fly inside, but he started yelling about goddamned ponies and bleeding liberals and his face was getting red, so I flew up to the counter and told him that I had every right to be here. Princess Celestia said so.

By then, one of the Walgreens workers had heard the commotion, and he came running up to see what was going on. The angry man said that he wasn't ever going to shop here again if they were letting livestock into their store.

Peggy came running up along with another store employee, and pretty soon she was yelling at the angry man while the two employees tried to calm things down.

He finally stormed out of the store, and I saw him get into his car and start it up—he'd left it right in front of the front doors. I went to pick up the basket, but Peggy shook her head and said that we were leaving.

She bought her tampons and then the two of us went out the front door. I saw the angry man's car was right next to the door—he hadn't left like he was supposed to have—and before either of us could react, he threw a cup of coffee at us and then raced off into the street.

Peggy shouted that he was a motherfucking cocksucking asshole and that if he had any balls at all he'd come back and fight like a real man, but he was too far away to hear her. Then she said that she was sorry for swearing in front of me, and that we were going to go back to campus.

Instead of going to our room, though, she went to Christine's room, because it was closer. On the way there, she asked me if I was okay, and if the man had hurt me at all. I said he hadn't; he'd just said lots of mean things.

Christine was surprised to see us, and surprised to see that Peggy was covered in coffee, so Peggy had to explain what had happened, and then said that she was going to take a shower and decide if she wanted to try and press charges.

She propped the bathroom door open and kept on talking while she was in the shower. I stretched out on the papasan and Christine sat with me while she talked back to Peggy. Since she was sitting with me, she ran her fingers through my mane and petted my coat. It was very nice of her, and helped calm me down.

Once Peggy was done in the shower, she had to borrow some of Christine's clothes, which didn't fit her very well. She's got bigger breasts and bigger hips than Christine, and she's a little shorter.

They decided that there wasn't any point in doing anything about it. They'd wind up spending most of Saturday talking to policemen, and probably nothing would come of it. I suggested that maybe I could tell Mister Salvatore and that he could get something done, and we all decided that was the best idea. He'd know what to do. He got me an ornithopter license; surely he could handle this.

Rather than go back to our room, Christine decided that we'd have fun in her room, so she got out some beer, and she and Peggy started to play a game on the television. It was called Mario Kart, and it was a racing game. They explained all the rules to me as they were playing, and Christine even decided that I could give it a try if I wanted to. I didn't have any luck with it; even with her holding the controller, there were too many buttons and I crashed a lot.

But it was fun watching them play it.

Throughout the day, some more people showed up, and pretty soon we had a game of euchre going, a couple of people playing Mario Kart, and a couple of other people just watching and talking. One of Christine's roommates, a girl named Cecilia who had frizzy hair that was a slightly oranger shade than Christine's, joined us, along with a pale girl with jet-black hair named Amanda. That was half of her roommates. Amanda said that I was really cute.

I was kinda able to forget about how the morning had been, ‘cause all of us were hanging out together and having fun, but then after dinner when we were back in our dorm room, I was in bed and it just kind of hit me again, how mean that man was for no reason! He didn't even know me.

Pretty soon I was crying, but trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t disturb Peggy—it wasn’t her fault she was dragged into it, and she had her clothes ruined by him—but she heard me anyway.

She got out of her bed and came over and got in with me and told me that it would be all right; Mister Salvatore (who I had sent a computer letter to) would take care of it, and that that guy was just an asshole. I told her how awful I felt, not only because of him, but because he’d ruined her clothes, and she said that was okay, at least nothing else had happened and then she hugged me until I was all cried out.

January 24 [Fallout]

January 24

When I first awoke in the morning, Peggy was still in bed with me. Instead of getting up, like I should have, I snuggled against her. Her breast made a nice soft pillow, and with my ear against her chest, I could hear her heartbeat. It was quick like a yearling’s, even though she was still asleep.

I had been worried 'cause we'd learned that humans didn't like too much close contact or mutual grooming and it was going to get awfully lonely to be a year without. Humans have a 'personal bubble' that you're not supposed to get inside without permission.

But here I was, inside that bubble. I guess when it counts, we're not so different after all.

When I woke up again, Peggy was also awake. She asked if I felt better, and I told her that I did.

She reached up and used her ~~claw~~ fingernail to scrape some of the crust of dried tears out of my coat, and I turned so that I could nuzzle her forehead.

Then we both went to the bathroom to pee. Peggy asked me if I had anything planned today, and I told her that I thought I would fly for a while, then take a shower and go to lunch, but if she wanted to do something together, that would be fun as well.

She told me that she could work on her math homework while I was flying, and then we could plan to do something after lunch.

So I called the airplane directors, and once I got my permission to fly, I made a low circle around the campus and then picked up some altitude.

None of the other tribes really understand the freedom of the sky. There were no roads I needed to follow, nor were there walls to keep me out. Even Trump couldn’t build one high enough. I could fly all the way to the horizon, and when I got there, I could fly even further. Unicorns liked to stay in their castles and earth ponies had their farms and houses, and we had the whole sky, so we were freer than they were.

But I wasn't going to go to the horizon today.

Off to the west, I could just see the great lake that was the source of the storm, and one day I’m going to fly all the way there. It's not all that far away.

I wasn't feeling like flying over Kalamazoo any more than I had to, so I flew north because that was the shortest distance to trees and open fields.

Once I got there, I started to do loops and dives to sweat out the last of my frustration at the angry man. When I'd worked up a bit of a lather, I just hovered and looked down at a fallow field, letting my mind become as pure and white as it was, then I rolled on my back and made a giant half-circle dive, pulling up just before I got to the ground.

I kept my forward speed as I came upon a woodlot, rolling to the side to avoid the peak of a pine tree, and then I went flat and down under the crown of a big oak. I think I shook some dead branches off it as I went by.

Then it was up and out, shooting up into the sky until I'd bled off all my momentum.

A couple of dozen climbs and dives later, I was satisfied. My wings ached and my barrel was soaked in lather. I'd worked a bit harder than I'd meant to, which I only realized on my way back to campus. I keep forgetting how much harder it is to fly on Earth, so I'll have to work to build up my endurance some.

When I'd finished my shower, I checked in on Peggy. She was still leaned over her homework, biting at her pencil and frowning.

I asked her if I was allowed to help, and she said that I could try. It didn't go very well at first; I didn't recognize all of the symbols they used for the math, but after she explained it to me and said that she was doing partial derivatives, then I understood.

So I helped her with the problems, and she got a funny look on her face and finally asked me why I knew calculus.

I told her that pegasuses had to use a lot of math to work with the weather—it isn't all instinct and practice—and since I didn't want to be a cloud-pusher all my life, I had to learn how to work the supply side of the system, which included calculating forecasts, and there was lots of math in that. That was why I was in college; you had to know this stuff or else you'd always be taking instructions from somepony else.

Then she said I was absolutely the most adorable thing ever and gave me a huge hug.

I went back to my bed and started brushing my mane, and Peggy asked if it would be okay if she did it. I told her that was all right, but only if she let me brush hers in return.

She thought that was really funny, but she finally agreed. I let her brush my mane first, and then I brushed hers. It was good bonding for both of us. Even animals know that and they're not so smart as ponies or people.

At lunch, everyone asked if we were okay, and I said I was fine, and Peggy said that she was as well. Then Peggy asked me if I'd heard anything from Mister Salvatore and I told her that I had forgotten to check but I would when I got back to the room.

Well, there was a computer letter from him, and he said that he was going to come by in the afternoon if that was okay with me, and he'd sent the letter late last night and I hadn't checked my computer mail like a good pony would.

I sent him a computer letter back, and he replied within five minutes and said that he would come around dinnertime and that we would go out to eat together and that I could have Peggy come along if she wanted to.

Well, I was glad that he wasn't mad at me, and I told Peggy that she was invited to come along, and so she said that she'd come with me.

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon writing letters—real paper letters, not computer letters. I wrote one to Miss Chestnut, since she’d been so helpful in getting me in this program, and one to my mother, and another one to my little sister. My sister really likes poetry, too, so I wrote down a couple of Emily Dickinson's poems, as well as Longfellow's poem about the blacksmith, 'cause she used to have sex with the farrier in Hatchaway Falls. She still isn't sure if I actually know about it, and it's fun to twist her tail. I never told her about the time I saw them behind the shop and she should have known if she wanted it to stay secret that she shouldn't do it outside, even if it was behind a fence.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn arrived around six, and we all went to Bilbo's again. He had both of us go through what had happened step-by-step while we were waiting for our pizza, and then he asked a few more questions while we were eating. He didn't seem all that upset by what had happened, just sad.

Peggy asked if they thought they'd find him, and Mister Salvatore said that they already had; the store had cameras that had looked at his car as well as cameras inside that saw the whole thing. Then she asked what they were going to do, and he said he didn't know yet, that it would depend on a lot of factors and the whole thing was really complicated. He told Peggy that she had the option to press charges if she wanted to, but that things might work out better for everyone if they just buried the incident and didn't get the courts involved at all.

She asked if they needed an answer from her now, and he said no, they didn't. Mister Salvatore told us to talk it over for the next few days, and let him know by Wednesday (hump day!) what we had decided.

When we got back to the dorm room, I was super-tired, both physically and emotionally, and went to bed a bit early. It was hot in the dorm room and my belly was full, so that had made me even sleepier.

Author's Note

Human resting heart rate: 60-100bpm
Equine resting heart rate: 38-40bpm

January 25 [Making More Friends]

January 25

The moon is almost full, and it was very pretty this morning.

It's strange to look at it, so similar to our own, but not the same. When I catch it out of the corner of my eye, it looks familiar, like an old friend, but then I look closer and it's smaller and the shadows are different.

It also doesn't keep a good schedule. It ought to come up right at sunset, and settle over the horizon at sunrise, but it doesn't do that. We learned that's because instead of having the sun and moon controlled by Princesses, on Earth it's a spinning system like a carousel, with the moon and the Earth held in place by gravity. It boggles my mind that the whole system doesn't just fly apart, sending the Earth and Moon flying off into the void, but as far as I know there aren't any human mages who are keeping the system together.

One of the strange things about Earth is the houses. They're a little bit bigger than pony homes, but that's not surprising; humans are almost twice as tall as a pony.

Most of them look more like bunkers, though, squatting down on the land they own. The humans seem to pride themselves on boring, regular lines on the outside of the house, and they paint them all dull pastel colors. If it hadn't been for the brightness of some of their cars, I would have thought that maybe they didn't have bright paints, but they did.

And many of the stores are brightly colored. McDonald's are a vibrant red and yellow, the giant store next to Bilbo's has a blue awning, and other stores and signs are bright colors as well. But not the houses.

Especially in the winter, it would brighten things up, and it would free them from the sense of sameness that their houses have. They even have to number all their homes so that mail can be delivered to the right place. I guess that sort of makes sense in a big city like Kalamazoo, but it's my understanding that the same thing applies in small towns.

And speaking of numbers, even their cities have numbers. Kalamazoo is 49006. Does that mean that there are at least that many different Kalamazoos? Why wouldn't they think of another name for the city, if they'd used Kalamazoo so often? I have to put 48823 on letters to Aquamarine.

There isn't any of this foolishness on Equestrian mail. A pony's name, a neighborhood name, a city name and that's it. Some of the smaller towns don't have neighborhood names, either. That's only for the bigger places, like Canterlot. And you can send mail to farms or sailors on boats . . . do boats have numbers, too, so that people can send mail to them?

I felt a bit nervous when I went into climate class this morning. Sort of skittish. I was kind of looking at the windows and thinking about how they might open . . . all because of the angry man.

It was kind of stupid, I know. Dumb Silver Glow. But while I'd made a lot of friends already, they weren't in the same classes as me, and if something were to happen, I could be all alone, and it would be safer if I had more friends.

Not that I was thinking of it that way when I went to class, of course. I only thought about it later, when I had time to reflect on my slight discomfort and my urge to get close to some more people.

So rather than sit in the front row, I moved back a bit, to a seat which I knew was usually vacant that was between Crystal Dawn and a boy named Luke (and if I don't look too closely, he kind of looks like Luke Skywalker, which makes his name easy to remember). The professor seemed a bit taken aback by this new seating arrangement, but didn't say anything. There weren't rules about where you had to sit but after the second day everybody had kept to the same seats.

They didn't give any outright signs of rejection, although I suppose I could have missed some. Human body language is a lot different than pony body language. If somepony moved in on me and I didn't want them there, I'd put my ears back and maybe stretch out my wings just a little bit. Usually that's enough. Humans couldn't really move their ears too much and they didn't have any wings to signal with.

Well, I didn't exactly make fast friends, but of course it takes a little bit. Humans are sometimes a lot frostier than ponies, and some of the nuances of their behavior still go over my head. Crystal Dawn is interesting; besides having a very pony-like name, when she talked I could see a gap between her molars and incisors. A lot of unicorn mares who have them have them filed off for vanity; I wondered if she had too, or if she'd just been born without them, like some ponies. My mom always said not having fangs was a sign of unicorn blood in the past, but I wasn't so sure that she was right about that, 'cause even the spa would take them down if you wanted.

Philosophy was a tougher cloud to break. Oddly, there wasn't anypony in the class who I felt any particular attraction towards, although there were a few who I was sure I would not particularly like.

It didn't help that the class quite honestly baffled me. We started in on Thomas Aquinas, who wrote several important treatises (which are like essays) on Aristotle. That was well enough; it makes sense that if you're trying to refine philosophy you'd want to illustrate the shortcomings of your predecessor’s work. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all built upon each other's work, after all.

But then I kind of got lost when he started talking about God's laws. I'm not sure who God is, or why the Greek philosophers didn't bring up what He thought in their discussions.

The best I could figure is that He was around for a while, which is probably why there's such a long gap between Aristotle and Aquinas. Then once He left, humans had to work out how to deal with things on their own.

I was kind of embarrassed to show my ignorance in class, so I didn't raise a hoof and ask for clarification. But I did think about what might happen to us if Princess Celestia were to somehow disappear—what would we do? How would we live without her guidance? Who would raise the sun?

I didn't have a good answer for any of those questions. I think it would be very bad for us, and we'd spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we should do in her absence, and that was probably how Thomas Aquinas felt.

When I got to Equestrian class, the teacher wanted us to sit in small groups and talk about our weekends. She suggested that I should pick a trio of people to talk to (there are only twelve people in the class, counting me), so I sat with Becky and Lisa and Meghan—who I pulled along after the ice storm—and that was a lot of fun. All three of the girls really liked me, and it turns out all three of them play bells with Aric as well. They like him, too.

We continued our conversation after class, and they invited me to come over and talk some more with them. They had a lot of questions about cloud cities, and I was just the pony to answer their questions, 'cause I knew about them.

Then I wrapped up the day playing Durak. Aric came by and gave me a ride again. I didn't lose any times, which was nice.

He offered me a ride back, but I thought I would rather walk with everyone else, and I think he was a little disappointed by that, but it gave me the chance to talk more with all of Keith's friends who are also now my friends.

January 27 [Resolution]

January 27

This morning when she was getting dressed, I asked Peggy if she knew who God was. She gave me a sort of funny look, and then asked why I wanted to know, so I told her how I was learning about Thomas Aquinas and what he'd said.

She said that some people believe that He created everything, and set down laws which mankind was to follow if they wanted to be rewarded in the afterlife. Then she said that some other people don't believe that He exists at all.

I asked her what she believed, and she said that she wasn't sure. It wasn't an easy question, she told me, and a lot of people wouldn't want to talk about it, and some people would want to talk about it too much.

That wasn't a very satisfactory answer, but it was pretty obvious that this was something that Peggy really didn't want to discuss with me, so I asked her who I might talk to if I wanted to learn more about God.

After a little bit of thought and some muttering to herself, she suggested that I could talk to one of the religion professors about it. She didn't know for sure where their offices were, but she knew that there were offices in the basement of Stetson Chapel (which is the building with the bell tower), and probably anyone in there would be able to tell me.

I thought about asking everyone else at breakfast, but then I decided that if Peggy didn't want to talk about it, maybe nobody would either.

I sat between Crystal Dawn and Luke again in climate class. One of the things the professor does is put the forecast for the next week up on the board, along with a pressure map. Despite the difference in symbols, it was about the same as the ones we used in Equestria, and it hadn't taken me too long to figure out how it worked. There'd probably be low, scattered cumulus clouds Friday morning, and I was going to get one and bring it in. It was either that or wait for fog, and Peggy told me fog didn't usually happen here until spring.

Since we'd moved beyond most of the basic basics, the professor started a lecture on how humans collected climate data. That was actually rather interesting.

It hadn't occurred to me how difficult it would be for them. They had people at remote outposts writing down messages about the weather, and then they'd get the report to the nearest telegraph station and send it off. They had special balloons which flew up and saw what was up there (those are called radiosondes or just weather balloons), they used radar waves which bounced off moisture in the atmosphere, and they had even flown kites to find out if clouds make electricity. There was still a lot that they didn't know.

At the same time, I got the impression that they knew some stuff that we didn't. Because they can't control the weather very much, they get as much data as they can so that they can make accurate predictions as to what will happen next. We usually have more basic information, and the local weather teams make adjustments as needed. Sometimes that doesn't work—rainclouds don't always work like they ought to. There was a really bad summer where most of the moisture calculations were off, and some places got nasty storms, while other places got rainclouds that didn't rain at all. It turned out a journeymare had mixed up a couple of columns in her report, and nopony caught the error until it was too late. There were a lot of unhappy ponies on the ground because of that mistake.

In philosophy, we learned that Thomas Aquinas had seen that a monarchy was the best form of government. That's what we have, and it works very well. Technically, it's a diarchy, but the principle is really the same. Both sisters take their turn being in charge—sometimes two heads are better than one. And then littler towns have their own leaders because it's okay for them to change without as big a plan as Princess Celestia and Princess Luna have for Equestria. They had to think about the whole nation and our mayor only had to think about our town, so she could focus on the little specifics which are too small for the Princesses to have to worry about, like whether we should add another dock to our harbor or just make do with the ones we have.

I talked with Lisa and Becky and Meghan some more in Equestrian class. The professor is still having us in groups, but she's having me just move between the four groups rather than stay in one place. That's better 'cause everybody can learn more that way.

Everyone started reading Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, and I came around and helped them with concepts that they don't understand. I thought that I'd be pretty bored, but it turns out that there was a lot they had trouble with.

It was kind of funny to watch a bunch of college students struggling with a novel. But I couldn't laugh at them, because nopony is laughing at me when I struggle with Aquinas or e e cummings or anything else that humans understand and I don't.

Meghan said that she was having some trouble, and wanted to know if I could come over to her dorm room and help her out. I said I couldn't tonight, but that I would tomorrow night. So she gave me her room number and telephone number as well.

At dinner, Peggy and I discussed what we were going to tell Mister Salvatore to do about the angry man. We maybe should have done it sooner, but I think it helped both of us to take a little time to think about it. Sometimes in the moment you want to just rush into something and you wind up doing something dumb but if you have time to think it's always better. We like to get a feel for feral storms before we go fight them, 'cause even if it gets a little bit further while you're thinking you do better against it if you know the best places to hit it.

I decided that I would abide by her choice. She's the one who had her clothes ruined, and she knows humans and the law better than I do. To my mind, there wasn't any point in pursuing it further. He was gone, and if I saw him again, I'd know to stay away from him. It wasn't much different than seeing a predator; you avoid it, stick a little closer to your friends, and then there is no problem.

Peggy grudgingly agreed. She said that there wasn't any point to making a federal case out of it. So when we got back to our room, I typed a computer letter to Mister Salvatore saying what we'd decided, and Peggy read over it as well, and then I sent it.

Either Mister Salvatore spends a lot of time at his computer, or else I just have very good timing, because he sent me a letter back right away and said that he would respect our decision and not pursue the matter any further unless it became necessary, and then he asked if there was anything else I needed.

Well, I thought it would be fun to meet up with Aquamarine some weekend soon, and wondered if he might be able to give me a ride, if she was interested in spending some time with me. He said that he would, so I also wrote a letter to her asking if I could come out and visit, or if she wanted to come here (because Peggy thought that would be really cool).

January 28 [Meghan, Lisa, and Becky]

January 28

I have decided that I like Tuesdays and Thursdays the best. Poetry class is really fun.

Last night I agonized over poetry—agonized over it. What poem spoke to me the most? I'd think I'd found just the right one, and then I'd read a little further ahead and come upon another that I really really liked.

I thought for sure my favorite would be Why did you go, and as I narrowed down my choices (I even read some to Peggy, who doesn't really like poetry all that much) I kept coming back to it. But I had the good sense to take the book with me this morning, tucking it neatly in my saddlebags.

I didn't read anything at breakfast, of course. It would be rude to be reading a book in front of my table-mates. But once breakfast was over, I sat on the front steps of the dining hall just for a bit and read a couple more poems.

Then I found the perfect poem, or maybe it would be better to say that it found me. A wind has blown the rain away. I might not have even thought of it, except that I was sitting on the front steps of the dining hall and looking at the snow-covered lawn and the bare trees stretching to the sky, waiting for spring to come.

I'm sure he was talking about fall rains, and nopony really appreciates them. No; that's not totally true, a lot of earth ponies actually like them because it is a time when they can cuddle together in their homes and drink hot chocolate and see if they are ready for the winter (but they won't tell you that they like them). Plus they are important to keep the ground moisture up in the forests so that we don't have forest fires. Lots of fallen leaves and dry brush can be a fire hazard.

Right at the beginning of class I read the poem, and Conrad smiled at me and said that he thought it was a lovely poem as well.

After lunch, I thought it would be fun to chase the wind for while. It was a little gusty, but not too much.

After I got permission, I went south. Not too far from the college was a big stadium with a horse-head on it. The university next to us is called Western Michigan, and their mascot is a bronco, while we have a hornet.

I'm really more partial to the bronco, I have to say.

I followed above the road until it got to a big highway, and then I turned around and headed back. That was enough exploration for one day—there was so much to see! So many buildings! Right now I was still trying to get a sense of the area, so I'd know where all the important places were. It was the best time for it, too; without all the leaves on the trees, you could really see a lot. Later, in the summer, much of it will be covered by the tree canopy.

Since I could see the bell tower from my altitude, I decided to take a different route back. I knew where the main road (which is actually called Main Street) went, and I was sure that the crossroad I was at would lead me to it, so I decided to find out. Sure enough, when I got close I recognized the Maple Hill Mall.

Unlike the cars below me, I wasn't constrained by roads, so I cut the corner in a broad arc, and then followed Main Street back towards the center of town. As I got close to Aric's house, I thought about flying down and saying hi, but I could see that Winston wasn't there. The other truck was, completely covered by snow.

I'd made a point of not working myself too hard on my flight. I didn't want to have to take another shower today. It's best to get in the hard exercise in the morning, anyway; it's a good way to wake up. A lot of the students rely on coffee or cans of what they call energy drinks.

I landed in front of the chapel and opened the front door. When I was inside, I thought maybe I'd been misled—there was a big meeting hall, with a railing and a podium, and behind that a gallery. But then I saw a little sign on the wall that said “Offices,” and pointed downstairs. So I went where the sign had told me.

Nobody was downstairs. All the rooms were closed and locked up. That was disappointing, but I had nopony to blame but myself. I could have gone over to the chapel right after lunch and found out about God, if I hadn't been flying instead.

I stopped back in our dorm room long enough to comb the tangles out of my mane and tail, then I went to dinner. It was another themed night; most of the food was what they called 'Italian,' and they had put red and white checkered tablecloths on the tables. They mostly had different kinds of pasta and sauces to put on the pasta. None of it looked all that appealing, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway, since you can't always judge things by their appearance.

Well, that experiment was a bust. Noodles are a menace. I kept getting little splotches of sauce around my muzzle, much to everyone else's amusement.

I did finish my plate, because it's not polite to take food you don't intend to eat, even if you don't like it all that much.

Once dinner was over, I made my way over to Meghan's room. She lives in a dorm called DeWaters, which is right next to mine. Like many of the buildings on campus, it's built on a hill, so the floor where you enter the building might not be the first floor (my dorm has entrances on the basement floor and the first floor).

I hadn't seen a room like hers before. She has a roommate like I do, but then there is a bathroom and another room on the other side of it, so there are four people who share a pair of rooms and a bathroom. The other three people were Lisa and Becky, who I already knew, and Amy who I hadn't met yet.

We were going to work in Meghan and Amy's room, but Amy was doing homework and so we decided to go to the other side. We went through their bathroom (which has a bathtub that I'm going to ask if I can use sometime) and to their room which was essentially a mirror-image of the first.

Since there weren't enough chairs, Meghan and Lisa sat with me on the bed, while Becky sat in one of the desk chairs. Instead of sitting in it the right way, though, she turned it around and leaned against the backrest. I didn't know you could use a chair like that.

They had a lot of questions about the book, and I tried to answer them as well as I could. It's funny how much you forget about a book when you haven't read it for a while. Then I had to explain a bunch of stuff to them, like that there aren't really living clouds (although sometimes with magic you can make it appear that there are).

It was fun to talk about it, and it brought back a lot of happy memories. I'd gotten the books for my birthday, and so many of my friends were jealous because they all had spring birthdays—like most ponies do—and so the books hadn't even been published yet. I've got a late birthday, because my Mom got lucky at a meteorological convention, and they always hold those in the summer and fall, 'cause the weather's easier then.

After we'd talked for a while, Meghan asked if she could touch my wings. That was kind of an odd thing to ask, and maybe a little forward, but I told her as long as she was gentle it was okay, and I stretched one out across her lap so that she could.

The feeling of her fingers on my wings was really weird, but not in a bad way. She was kind of hesitant at first, sort of poking at them, until she got up a bit of confidence, and then she lightly ran her fingers over them, feeling my feathers. To be fair, I stretched out my other wing, to give Lisa a chance to feel it, and of course then Becky wanted to touch them as well.

I was a little tense; I don't know them all that well, after all. But I felt in my heart that they were kind people, and after a little bit I relaxed. Maybe it was foolish, but it was nice to have two warm bodies against mine. I don't think humans touch each other enough, which might be why they're grumpy a lot.

Before I left, I asked them if I could come over sometime and use their bathtub, since I didn't have one. Meghan said that I could; that I should just call her when I wanted to use it.

All three of them were really nice, and if Amy lives with them then she must be as well. It was good to meet some new people. Meghan said I could come and watch them practice bells—I was curious about that, so I said I might. And she asked if I'd be willing come over more, and I said I would.

I hadn't realized how late it was until I was headed back to my dorm. Fortunately, it wasn't too far, and when I got there it hit me just how tired I was, so I just crawled into bed and wrapped the blankets around myself and fell right to sleep.

Author's Note

A wind has blown the rain away

Why did you go?

January 29 [The Cloud]

January 29

As soon as I got up, I looked out the window, and I could see small puffy white clouds through the branches of the trees, just like I thought I would.

I got dressed in my flight outfit really quick, and asked for permission to go flying. The person on the radio this morning was more chipper than the one I'd talked to before, and asked me if I was going up for dawn patrol, which is what they call an early-morning flight. I said I was, and she told me to be careful.

I zipped up to altitude, climbing in a nice diagonal path which put me right at the cloud I wanted. It was a smallish cumulus cloud, which meant I could easily fly around it and contain it. The winds at altitude were nearly nonexistent; that also made it easier. It’s hard to wrangle a cloud when it’s whisking across the sky, and then when you do get it it acts like a sail and you have to fight against the wind to get it back where you want.

I started by touching its edge. When you're up-close to a feral cloud, it's really hard to tell where the clear sky ends and the cloud begins; what looks like a sharp boundary from the ground really isn't.

That gave me a good feel for it. I got an idea of how much moisture was in it, and how it was going to react to me.

I circled around the whole thing, then started to push my way in. As it was, the cloud was too big and too unwieldy to pull down to ground. I needed to condense it, but I needed to do it carefully; if I pushed in too quick, I'd just cause all the moisture to fall out of the sky, and I'd be left with nothing.

It was a delicate operation, and I worked slowly and cautiously, squeezing and holding until I'd finally pushed it down to a manageable size. Basically, I was doing the reverse of what a weatherpony does—and this is why we usually just break up feral clouds. It's a lot of effort to corral them!

To check and make sure it was going to hold together, I flew to its top and very gingerly set myself down on it. Too much, and I'd upset the balance and make it drop all its moisture.

It held me just fine, so I lifted off and found a flat spot on its tail and began pushing.

The cloud really didn't want to cooperate, and it was quite a struggle to get it all the way to the ground. By the time I'd finally managed, there were a bunch of students standing on the quad and looking up at me and my cloud. I thought some of them were going to laugh as I struggled to get it around tree branches (any weatherpony who had that much trouble with a factory cloud would be the laughingstock of her team), but they didn't.

When I got my hooves back on the ground and turned off my blinking light, a bunch of them came up to me and asked what I was going to do with the cloud. I told them I’d brought it for class. Then they wanted to know if they could touch it, and I said that they could; that was the whole point of bringing it down in the first place. You had to be careful with clouds, though, 'cause a lot of times they had a charge from the atmosphere and they'd zap you, but this one was safe. I hadn't felt any sparks off my hooves when I'd landed.

So everybody did, and a bunch of them took pictures with their telephones, and I would have been late to class except that I heard the campus clock chiming.

Of course, there was no way that the cloud was going to fit into the classroom. I should have thought of that before I caught it. Luckily, Crystal Dawn was among the students who were playing with the cloud, and she said that she would go get the professor and make him come out here. I didn't want to interrupt the lesson, but I was sure he wouldn't mind delaying it a little bit so that he could see the cloud.

I stayed by the cloud—it was taking a lot of effort to keep it from falling apart in front of me, especially with all the students touching it—and kept an eye on the door.

When he came out, the look of shock on his face was unbelievable. He just stopped right there in the doorway and then he dropped the notebook he was holding. His face went really pale, and then he locked his eyes on me (I was still wearing my flight vest, so I wasn't very hard to see). For a second, I thought he was going to faint.

Luckily, he didn’t. Instead, he scrambled over to the cloud and reached out his hand and touched it.

Once he was done fondling the cloud, he turned to me and started asking me all sorts of questions, mostly about how I did it, and so I started explaining to him about how our inherent magic works, When I’d gotten done explaining that, he started asking some really specific questions.

So I told him how I could work around the fact that the cloud was now supersaturated, and of course much heavier than air, and I explained how it was a lot more difficult here on Earth because there wasn't any rising magical potential from grounded ponies, so I was actually putting a whole lot of effort into the cloud, more than I ever would have back in Equestria.

Then he had Crystal Dawn bring down the rest of the class (which wasn't many; most of them were already outside looking at the cloud) and he had me repeat what I'd said to the class before. Since there were so many of them, I flew up to the top of the cloud and sat there—it wasn't all that good a perch, since I was using a lot of energy to keep the cloud aloft, but at the same time it was a little easier to feel what the cloud was trying to do when I had my hooves on it, and I could keep it under control with just a little effort, rather than waiting until it started changing on me and using a lot of magic to push it back.

I was getting really tired, and so after I'd gotten done talking, I told him that I needed to get the cloud back up into the air so I could dissipate it. He wanted to know what would happen if I just let it go on the ground, and I told him that I was worried about the amount of water it would drop as it broke up.

He said to do it anyway, so I told everybody who didn't want to get wet to move back, and that I was going to very slowly let it free. And I warned everybody to not touch the cloud, because if they did, their hand would get covered in ice almost instantly.

Just as I'd expected, as soon as I started to let it free, the overabundance of water in the cloud started leaking out, quickly forming an icy spot on the snow.

Everybody watched the cloud dissipate in front of their eyes as the water fell out of it. Pretty soon there was nothing more than a cloud of vapor like an exhale on a cold day, and then that was gone too.

The whole project wound up taking up most of the class period, and I hadn't really meant it to. I probably should have tried with a smaller cloud, or maybe waited for some fog (I could have manipulated fog right on the ground where the other students could see what I was doing). The professor didn't seem upset by that, though; he really had a look of wonderment the whole time.

We all went up to class afterwards, and he said that there wasn't any point in rushing through the lecture he'd prepared, but instead that if I was willing, I could answer some more questions.

Well of course I was willing, so I sat in my spot between Crystal Dawn and Luke and told them about how our weather patrol teams worked until the very end of class, and I also told them why the things the professor was teaching were important, because if we didn't work with nature, we'd have to put a lot more effort into the weather because the whole system is so big and we're just a little part of it.

I was completely exhausted by the end of class, and my voice was a little hoarse from talking so much, especially right after all that exercise up in the sky and then not having breakfast at all. The rest of the day pretty much went by in a daze. But I managed to stay awake through all my classes, and I got to talk to Meghan and Lisa and Becky some more in Equestrian class.

I also took the time—even though I was pretty tired—to go over to Stetson Chapel and talk to a woman who knew about God. Her name is Liz, and she's very nice. She said that what I was asking would take a really long time to explain, unless I wanted the most simple version.

The simple version was appealing, but if they built a whole building just for God, He's probably really important. I thought about how my climate science professor hadn't really understood about how we managed the weather until he'd had time to talk with me about it for a while, and thought that it would be best if I got the full version.

So she said that she would love to take me out to lunch tomorrow and we could talk about it then, and she would even give me a Bible as well, which is God's biography.

January 30 [Lunch with Liz]

January 30

I woke up later than I'd planned to. All that effort with the cloud yesterday had really tired me out, but it had been worth it. I know it's not nice to gloat, but I had showed my climate science professor that I really could work with clouds.

I didn't miss a lot from my late morning, though. Peggy usually sleeps in on Saturday mornings, and she was asleep now, lying on her side with the covers pushed half-off her. Her shirt had wrinkled up a bit, too, so that her belly was showing. She looked like she might be cold, so when I got out of bed, I pulled her covers up over her.

The clouds from yesterday had thickened and formed into snowclouds, and there were gentle flakes of snow drifting down. It didn't feel like there would be enough to do more than dust the ground with a fresh coat of white, but that was okay. There was still plenty on the ground from the last snowstorm, and the fresh snow might make the hill a bit more appealing. Since that first day, there hadn't been very many people riding sleds down it, and I hadn't had another opportunity to borrow one.

There are a couple of people who are often out trotting in the morning—they call it jogging—but today I was late and missed my usual friends, which made me feel bad. But I met somebody new, a man named John.

He was surprised to see me. He was coming around the corner where Academy Street curves around Valley Street, and he just stopped in his tracks and stared at me, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. I also stopped, because he was someone new and unfamiliar, and maybe he'd want to be my friend, too.

Once he got over his surprise, he moved up closer to me, and we introduced ourselves. It turns out that he won't be a trotting buddy for very long; he lives out in the country and was only in town because he was visiting his mother, who lives nearby. That was kind of disappointing; he was a very nice man. Hopefully I'll see him again.

When I was back, I took a nice long shower and made sure I was presentable. Peggy has a mirror which hangs over her closet door, and I groomed myself in front of it. She still wasn't awake, so I kept very quiet.

I had a light breakfast, and then checked my mail. I didn't get any letters, which was disappointing. Maybe there would be some on Monday.

Peggy was finally up when I got back to the room, and she asked me what I was doing today, and I told her that I was going to lunch with Liz, who was going to tell me about God.

Well, then Peggy got kind of a funny look on her face, and said that I should be careful, and I asked what she meant, and she said that there were a lot of opinions about Him and maybe not so many facts. And then she asked if I was sure I wanted to do this.

I told her that I'd said that I would, and I was a mare of my word (even though I still haven't watched Star Trek with Sean but I was going to) and she nodded and hugged me tightly.

Well, I wasn't sure what to make of that. It was kind of an odd thing to say, and it got me a little bit worried. It's a small campus, and surely everyone knows everyone else, so maybe there was something about Liz that Peggy knew and I didn't. And maybe she was just too polite to say.

Or maybe she was jealous that I was doing this. But I think that Peggy is a good, trusted friend, and wouldn't tell me to be careful unless she was honestly concerned, although I couldn't think of a reason why she might be. But I thought I should stay at least a little bit on guard, just in case.

At half-to noon, I walked over to the chapel, which was where she was going to meet me. She was sitting in her office, typing on her computer when I walked in. As soon as she saw me, she stopped typing and gave me a warm smile and welcomed me in.

We walked together to her car, which is a boxy blue thing named Rav-4, which is a really dumb name. Maybe it meant something to her, or maybe she had had three others like it before she bought this one.

We weren't in it for all that long. She drove up to a small shopping center which isn't very far from campus at all. We could have walked.

One one side was a store called Tiffany's and a Papa Johns, which delivers pizza. In the back was a restaurant called Nina's, which is where we went.

The waitress was surprised to see me, but knew Liz—she called her 'Pastor Liz.' We picked a booth in the corner, and the waitress brought over a mug of coffee for Liz and two glasses of water, then asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I thought just the water was fine.

Then we looked at the menu and decided what to eat. That was a bit more difficult than being at the dining hall, where I can see what's offered, but luckily the menu had a little V for things that don't have meat in them.

There weren't a lot of choices, though, and Liz said that she was sorry and she should have thought of that, but I said it was okay; it was better to not have so many choices. I ordered a salad and a grilled cheese sandwich, while Liz chose an omelette and a bowl of fresh fruit.

While we were waiting for our meal, Liz asked me why I wanted to know about God, and I told her that Thomas Aquinas had mentioned him, and He seemed like He had been an important person.

Then she started asking me a whole bunch of questions about what we ponies thought about spirituality and how we believed that the world had been formed and what Princess Celestia's role was in our lives, and I thought that was kind of a dirty trick, since she wasn't telling me who God was, and by the time our food had arrived, I didn't know any more than I had before I came.

We ate in silence for a little bit, and I was just starting to wonder if this is what Peggy had meant to warn me about, then she put down her fork and leaned across the table.

She told me that some of the things that I had told her were faith, because we couldn't know them, and then she explained that many people—including herself—believed that back in the beginning God had created everything that there was, and that He was up in heaven. She said that humans who were good and who followed His laws would go to heaven to be with Him when they died, and those who were bad would not.

I asked her how it was that Thomas Aquinas knew of Him, but the Greek philosophers had not—if He had been around since the beginning of the world, wouldn't they know who He was as well, and Liz said it was very complicated how it all worked, and asked me just how much detail I wanted.

I said that I thought I could figure it out from His biography that she said she was going to give me, and she chuckled and said that with that kind of confidence, maybe I would.

She told me that the Bible was divided into two parts, the Old Testament and the New. She said that originally, God had made a covenant with the Israelites, and they had kept His laws. Then God sent Jesus to make a new covenant with the people, and that was the basis of Christianity.

That, she said, was what Thomas Aquinas had believed in. Then she reached across the table and put her hand on my hoof and told me that it was very important that I understand that while God is perfect, the men who wrote the Bible were not, and that they were not always wise either. She said that to this day people argue about what it all means, but she said that the one thing I should remember above all else was that Christians were supposed to love one another.

She said that some people had forgotten that, but that was the most important tenet of Christianity, and it was something I should remember. Then she drove me back to campus and parked along the street.

Then she reached in the back and brought a big black book with gold lettering on the cover. She told me that I could keep it, and she stuck a card inside which she said had her telephone number on it and I could call her anytime and it also had her computer mail address if I wanted to send her a computer letter instead of calling.

I thanked her for taking me to lunch and told her I would call her if I had any questions, and then I took the book in my mouth and went back to my dorm room. I had a lot to think about; some of what she'd said at lunch was still a bit confusing, but hopefully it would be a little more clear once I'd read a bit.

It was a really big book, and I wasn't going to get all the way through it anytime soon. The best way to approach it would be to read a chapter at a time. I didn't make it very far, though; just to the part where God made a perfect land for humans to live in, and then they messed up and He kicked them out.

I would have gotten further, but the telephone rang, and it was Mister Salvatore, and he wanted to check in and see how things were going with me and wondered if there was anything I needed, and we wound up talking for a little bit, up until it was time for dinner. I told Sean that I would watch Star Trek with him tomorrow after dinner, and he was really happy about that.

Then when I got back to the room, it was social time again. We sat around playing cards and drinking beer until it was pretty late, and I didn't have a chance to read any more.

January 31 [Star Trek]

January 31

Sundays are good days for flying. I went west again, this time following along the main road. I'd looked on the map for the Kal-Haven trail, and I'd found it. It started near the center of town, but I thought I'd pick it up a little bit further out, because that would give me a chance to fly and see more of the city.

It was easier to follow Main Street, so I went west past the Maple Hill Mall and across the 131st highway and then much to my surprise I saw another Meijer off in the distance, which isn't the one that Peggy and Christine and I went to. I can't imagine why there would be two of them in Kalamazoo; surely one has enough things for everyone. Plus you can get some of the same things at Walgreens (except when an angry man shouts at you).

The Meijer was a very good landmark, though, and I turned north along the 10th Street N and followed it until I came to a parking lot with a sign for the Kal-Haven Trail.

There were several cars in the parking lot, and some of them had racks on their roofs. I'd seen a few cars like that in the college parking lots too, and asked Peggy what they were for, and she said that people put bicycles and kayaks and other sporting equipment on them.

I followed the collection of feetprints to the trail. There was an informational sign planted right next to it which said what the rules were, and I dutifully read them like a good pony. One important rule was that horses weren't allowed on the trail, but I'm not a horse; I'm a pony. Horses don't go to college. So I could go on the trail.

The snow on the trail hadn't been cleared off at all, and most of the tracks on the trail were either long, mostly-parallel lines, or big wide tennis-racket shaped marks. Humans have skis and snowshoes that they put on their feet so that they can walk on the snow, and that's what kind of marks they leave.

I didn't have skis or snowshoes, and the snow was pretty deep along the trail; but that didn't matter, because I could fly.

It was a different kind of flight. I kept below the canopy of trees, following along the path of the trail. It was sort of like being in a tunnel, but not at all confining because the open branches of the trees let lots of light through and I could fly up and over if I had to.

As I got close to people, I would drop down and slow down and kind of gauge their reaction before I got too close. There was one woman who had two ~~colts~~ young sons who were all bundled up in snowclothes and on pony-sized skis, and they were very excited to see me, so I landed and let them pet me. That made them really happy and I didn't mind too much except that the smaller one was a little bit grabby and tugged on my mane some.

I followed the trail for two miles—roads outside of cities are a mile apart, so it's easy to keep track of how far you go. Then I turned around and flew back, taking it nice and easy. I came upon the woman and her sons again at the parking lot; she was helping them take their skis off. She said that they'd just talked about me ever since they saw me, so I let them pet me again, and everyone was happy.

I had a late lunch, and then went back to my room to relax. Peggy asked me if I had any plans for the evening, and I told her that I was going to watch Star Trek with Sean. I asked her if she wanted to come, but she said she was going to dinner with a friend.

I read a little bit more of Genesis, but it got really confusing. Either God was really mean, or people weren't very good at following His rules. I wasn't sure which, and I thought about calling Liz and asking, but what would she think of me if I couldn't figure it out for myself? I ought to at least give it a good attempt. I was not even one full chapter in, and a lot of times stuff that doesn't make sense at the beginning of a book makes a lot of sense when you get farther into it.

So since there was still some time before dinner, I read some more poetry, and that cheered me back up. Then Peggy got re-dressed (it must be inconvenient to wear clothes all the time but Adam and Eve were ashamed to be naked and I guess other people must be, too), and asked me if her new outfit looked too slutty. I wasn't a good judge of that, I don't think, because I didn't know much about human clothes still, so I said that it looked fine.

When she left, I went over to the dining hall, even though it was a bit earlier than I usually get there. I sat at my favorite table, and pretty soon Christine and Sean had joined me, and then Joe showed up as well, and before too long everybody was having nice conversations.

As we ate dessert, Sean began to give me background on Star Trek. He said that unlike the Star Wars movies, there were a whole bunch of different movies and television shows that were all based in the same universe, and that he was going to start by showing me a movie which everyone had liked, which was called Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. Then Christine told him that he was cheating if he showed the movies out of sequence, and he told her that she'd showed me Star Wars 4 first. She said that she'd showed them in the order that they were filmed so that wasn't cheating at all.

We went over to Sean's room to watch the movies. He had several little models hanging from the ceiling, and he told me that they were different spaceships from the show. They didn't look anything like the ones in Star Wars. I guess nobody has settled on one spaceship design.

The room was kind of crowded—it was even a little smaller than the room Peggy and I shared. It was also in the basement, which I didn't like all that much. He had a window, but it was half-covered with snow.

Since there weren't any couches or papasans, we all clustered together on his bed to watch the movie. Christine and Sean leaned back against the headboard, and I stretched out at their feet.

I liked the movie a lot. There wasn't as much fighting as there had been in Star Wars, and I thought that their plan to go back in time and save some whales was really clever. I know that a lot of time spells are banned in Equestria because of the unintended consequences of using them. Princess Twilight has used a few, but that's okay because she's a princess.

It was also neat because some of it was set on historical Earth, which is something that I still don’t know a lot about. A lot of it looked pretty much the same, except the cars were bigger and blockier, and there weren’t as many computers. There was one scene where Scotty tried to talk to his computer, and I didn’t understand why that was funny, but Sean said that back then you couldn’t talk to computers. I can talk to mine!

In the middle of the movie, I had to use the bathroom, and asked him where to go (I should have turned down that second beer). He said that there was a men's room right around the corner and I could use that if I wanted to—that there weren't any other men in this wing besides his roommate, who was gone for the weekend and wouldn't be back until early tomorrow morning.

I thought that was against the rules, but Christine also said it would be okay, and she would guard the door for me if I wanted her to. She said she had to pee, too, so it wasn't any bother, and so then Sean said that he would guard the door for both of us, and that way we could get back to our movie sooner.

It wasn't like the one in our dorm. Instead of a stall for the shower, there was a big shower room on one side, kinda like the shower rooms they had at the weather factory. So maybe boys like social bathing but not girls.

On the other side there were the usual stalls with the usual toilets, and there were also some different ones mounted against the wall which Christine said were urinals for boys.

I thought that they might be more convenient for me to use than the normal toilet, but I didn't want to break any more rules, so I just used a normal stall.

When the movie was over, Christine said that she was going to stay with Sean, so I went back to my dorm room by myself. Peggy wasn’t there, which probably means that her dinner went really well.

Road Trip!

February 1

Peggy still wasn't back when I woke up, so I was happy for her although it felt a little bit lonely in our room without her there.

I decided that since I'd gotten in a good flight last night, I was gonna trot around the neighborhood a little bit, and I'd get back in plenty of time for class, so I stretched out and then when I got outside I stretched again and then bounded through the snow towards the road instead of taking the sidewalk, 'cause it was more fun.

I went west along Academy Street, and then I remembered as I got to where it curved to the right that if I followed the curve around, the road took me to Grove Street, which had a big dip in it. So when I got to the top of the dip, instead of following the sidewalk, I flew straight across. I had to be a little bit careful, because the electricity wires dipped down to follow the road, and I didn't want to crash into them and get tangled up.

When I got to the other side, I decided to turn around and do it again, just for fun, but this time I glided down the hill and used my momentum to get most of the way back up. I could have flown the rest of the way to the top, but I landed instead and trotted up to the top and then I went back across Arlington street to Academy Street and then back to my dorm.

I hadn't exercised enough to get very lathered, so it didn't take me too long to shower, and then I went back to my room and after I'd dried off and groomed myself, I wrote a little bit in my journal before I went to breakfast.

Peggy wasn't at breakfast and I hoped that she hadn't had so much fun that she forgot about class.

The professor was kind of distracted in Climate Science class, 'cause he'd spent all weekend thinking about the cloud I'd brought down, and he tried to teach us the lesson he'd planned but everyone could tell that he was a little bit distracted and he kept looking at me, which was kinda embarrassing. And then at the end of class he finally decided to spend the last few minutes asking me some questions about clouds. They were really basic questions, but humans don't really know that stuff, like knowing that a lot of storm clouds have electricity in them from the sky, and if you touch them you can get zapped when you touch the ground again.

Peggy was at lunch, and she was in a really good mood. I got there a little bit early 'cause the climate science professor had forgotten to give us any homework, and it was really nice to just sit around together and not feel rushed at all over our meal. Sometimes I feel like if I'm taking too much time at lunch, I might miss my next class, or I'm wasting time when I should be doing homework.

In Equestrian class today, Meghan invited me on a road trip! That's something humans do: since they have cars, they drive them places to go see things.

She said that Lisa and Becky were going, and that they thought I'd like to go with them, too. It would give me a chance to see some of the country, and that it was for an important cultural event.

I thought she was kind of stringing me along, like you might wiggle a lure in front of a fish to make sure that it got the point, but truth be told, I was sold as soon as she invited me. I didn't really care where we were going, or what we were going to see. Besides learning, we were supposed to explore new things and I could explore a lot further in a car than I could on hoof or wing.

But of course there was a catch. We'd be leaving after dinner tonight, and I'd have to miss class tomorrow.

I'd have to skip class. Like a bad pony.

So I told her that I wasn't sure, and maybe it was something that could be postponed until the weekend, and she said no, it had to happen today. She told me that it was an important part of human weather forecasting: tomorrow was called Groundhog Day, and that the people of Pennsylvania (which is a state) relied on a groundhog to tell them when winter would end.

Well, that got my interest right back. Even the climate science professor had mentioned it in class. So I told her that I would have to call my poetry professor and make sure it was all right, and she said that she understood, and if I wanted to come, I had to be at their room by 7pm sharp, and to bring whatever I needed for a two-day trip.

I wrote a computer letter to Conrad Hillberry, and he said that it was okay if I missed class; he said that he was young once, too, and while he would miss my glowing presence in class, he knew that I would make the most of the experience. And then he asked if the mood struck, if I might write him a poem about it!

I hadn't expected him to be so supportive! So I told Peggy where I was going, and I packed what I thought I might need, which wasn't very much, and she suggested that I could take my portable telephone with me as well, and to make sure that I had some money too and be careful and to call her whenever I had time and have fun and then I nuzzled her goodbye and headed out of the dorm.

Then I turned back and got my poetry book, in case I had time to read it in the car. I didn't know how long the trip would take.

It didn't take us too long to make our way to Becky's car (neither Meghan nor Lisa have one). It's a bright red Focus, which she called a station wagon.

They asked me where I wanted to sit, and I said that the back was fine, so Meghan got in one side and I got in the other, and we set off down the road.

I'd never been driven around at night before, and that was kind of weird. All the businesses have big glowing signs so you can find them at night, and there are some lights above the road in towns to help you see, but once you get out on the highway, there mostly aren't any lights at all.

All cars have a pair of spotlights in the front so that you can see where you're going, and then they have smaller signal lights all around them, so that other drivers can see what you're planning to do. There were some big trucks which Meghan said were semi-trucks that had lots of lights, and they were very pretty to see. There were also police cars that had flashing red and blue lights. Those stayed at the side of the road behind other cars that had misbehaved.

Looking outside wasn't quite as exciting as I had imagined it might be, since it was dark, and after a while, the blackness outside of the window started to look mostly the same and even the big advertising signs got repetitive.

But that was offset with a lot of lively conversation inside the car. All three of the girls had all sorts of questions for me, and I had all sorts of questions for them, and so we just talked and talked.

When we were passing through a town called Dundee, Becky asked if any of us wanted to get something to eat. I wasn't really hungry; it doesn't take a lot of energy to just sit in a seat, but the other girls were, so we went to a Taco Bell! They have what is called a drive-through, so you don't even have to get out of your car to get your food (which was a bit of a disappointment; I wanted to see what the inside of a Taco Bell was like).

I got a bean and rice burrito. It was kind of difficult to eat in the car, but Meghan helped me with it. Becky ate while she was driving; her car had little recesses that the drink cups could fit in.

I was really excited when we got to Ohio. It was a new state, and at first it looked kind of the same, except that the roads had a lot more lights around them, and the pavement was much better. You also had to drive more slowly and maybe that's why the pavement was better.

Then we had to go through another drive-through and pay money to get on the Turnpike. Becky got a little slip of paper and tucked it above her visor, and we continued on our way.

Unlike in Michigan, there weren't all that many exits, and they were very far apart. I guess there aren't that many places to go in Ohio. But they did have oasises, which were really neat. We stopped at the first one, because everyone needed a bathroom break and a chance to stretch their legs, and the car needed to be fed more gas.

Gas is really stinky. I didn't like it, but it made the car go, so it was important to have.

I'd love to say that I stayed awake and alert for the whole trip, but I didn't. Not too long after we left the oasis, I started to doze off.

It wasn't just that it was past my bedtime, but the swishing noise of the wheels on the pavement and the air passing over the car, plus the slightly overheated inside all worked together to tire me out. Maybe if the windows had been down it would have been better for me (there is a little button on my door I can push to make the window go down but I can't make it go back up because I can't get my hoof under the button and Becky had to help after I accidentally pushed it). I could feel my head drooping and got that kind of funny loose feeling in my body when I'm on the edge of exhaustion. The sounds of their voices kind of rose and fell, and my eyelids were really heavy, and Meghan said it was okay if I wanted to nap, so I stretched out across the seat with my head in her lap and closed my eyes.

I never really fell fully asleep, but I drifted in and out as Becky kept on driving. Sometimes the car would make a sudden movement, and I'd wake up briefly. One time I did, Meghan was running her hand along my back, and that felt really good and I leaned into her stomach. Another time was when we stopped at another oasis, and the sudden rush of cold air into the car woke me. Becky said that we were in Pennsylvania now.

My eyes were used to the dark, and it looked a lot hillier than Ohio had been.

I looked up at the sky when we got out of the car, and my eyes were drawn to all the different stars. It wasn't anything like the Equestrian sky had been. Meghan pointed out a few constellations for me; there was the big dipper and the little dipper and that was all the ones she knew, and there was also the Milky Way, which was a whole wide band of stars. She said that that was our galaxy, and we were looking towards the center of it.

There were also moving blinking lights in the sky, and she said that those were airplanes. Like the car, they had lights on them so that they could be seen at night. I knew about those from getting my pilot's license.

I was invigorated for a little bit after stopping at the rest area—the cold air and the chance to be on my hooves for a bit woke me back up—but we weren't back in the car for all that long before I fell asleep in Meghan's lap again.

February 2 [Groundhog Day]

February 2

When I woke up again, we were there! Meghan woke me up by gently shaking me and for just a second, I couldn't think of where I was, but then the familiar scents of the girls and the car brought me back.

I stuck my head up and looked out the window. We were in a gas station parking lot—the gas station is called Sheetz, which I'd never heard of before, but that was because we were in a new place.

I stretched out as well as I could inside the car, and then Lisa got out and opened the door for me, and I set hoof in Punxsutawney, which is not pronounced how it's spelled.

I got a better stretch out on the ground, and we went inside for some gas station food and drinks. Becky said that they have good coffee, and their doughnuts were pretty good too, and it was just the kind of thing to have on a road trip.

I wasn't so sure, myself. I would have preferred something green that would give me energy throughout the day, rather than the oversugared doughnut and slightly overdone coffee (although they had little containers of french vanilla flavored cream which at least made the coffee more palatable) but it did wake me up.

On the other side of the road were railroad tracks and a river, and the river had a weird structure in it. I was curious what it was, and wanted to get a better look, but just then a long train hauling a string of dirty black cars loaded with coal slowly made its way along the tracks, blocking my view. I thought about flying over the train and getting a look, but the girls were getting back in the car and I didn't want to be left behind. I didn't think Peggy or my helpers would be too happy if I had to call them and tell them that I was lost in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania.

Becky drove us to Gobbler's Knob, which is where the prediction was to be made. There were lots of people there, and I also saw a couple of pegasuses off in the distance, hovering over the crowd. They were a little ways off and we couldn't really make our way through the crowd very easily, and it would have been rude of me to fly off to go greet them.

I could see why they were, too—standing on my hooves, I wouldn't see all that much. So I told Lisa that I was going to fly up a bit if they didn't mind, and they said it was okay.

We weren't there for too long before some men in long coats and top hats came onto the stage, and they made a few speeches, and then a man with glasses picked up this big fat groundhog and held him up so that everyone could see. Then he put him down on a little platform that looked like a tree stump, and the groundhog sort of sniffed around and then the man picked him back up again.

Then one man on stage picked up a sign that said 'No Shadow,' and other held up a sign that said 'Think Spring,' and that was pretty much all that there was to the ceremony—an announcement of what the sign had said by the official herald, all said in rhyme. It was very much like a part from a play, rather that what I'd consider an official announcement. (The rhyme said that the groundhog had a hoverboard, but Meghan later told me that wasn't true; there are no hoverboards.) Lots of people cheered for that, and then the ceremony broke up.

I asked Meghan how accurate the woodchuck's prediction was, and she said he was right about half the time.

Well, I'm no foal; with those terrible odds he might as well be guessing. But it was hard to imagine why so many people would come out to see a groundhog guess when spring might come. What do animals know about spring, anyway? We wake them from their winter hibernation and bring the birds back north. Why would they have to concern themselves with seasons?

I was about to ask her why we'd come, but then I saw how happy the three of them looked.

Then Lisa asked me what I'd thought of the event, and I told her it had been interesting. She asked if we did anything like that, and I said that we did not. I told her that we pegasuses had been tending to the weather since even before the tribes were united and Equestria was formed.

That kind of gave her pause, and she fell silent. I thought that maybe I'd insulted her somehow—maybe this ceremony was more important to her than I'd thought.

We walked back to the car in silence. Becky pushed the little button she has that wakes the car up, and the lights flashed and the door locks clicked. Lisa put her hand on my door to open it for me, and then dropped her hand and crouched down so that she was face-to-face with me.

She asked me what the weather was going to be today, which was an odd question.

I looked up at the clouds, and kind of felt the air on the ground, then I told her that I would have to fly up to altitude and see a pressure map, and I could tell her with a high degree of confidence. Ninety percent accuracy, for sure—better than that groundhog. And if human weather wasn't so feral and I knew the area well, I could be almost a hundred percent certain, even if I didn't know the weather schedule at all or if there were feral storms that came in.

And then she asked me about the rain and the snow, if I could predict that. I said that I could, as long as I had unfettered access to the sky and a few maps and a little bit to work it out on paper (I can get a good, quick back-of-hoof calculation in my head, but just one pegasus can't monitor a whole weather system). I told her that I'd taken advanced classes on feral weather, and been posted on the seaboard for two summers in a row in weather school and now I worked with feral weather all the time in Equestria. (Lisa didn't appreciate what an honor that was—only the best pegasuses work in coastal zones.)

Then she asked me what happened to us—how we'd lost our sense of wonder. And I asked her what she meant, and she said that the weatherman would make a prediction, and people would discuss it, whether it was going to come or not, and if it did if it would be like the weatherman said it would be.

I thought that sounded like poor management.

Lisa said that I couldn't imagine what it was like to hear the weather forecast on the radio and then go to bed hoping that school would be canceled the next day, or how it felt to look up at the sky hoping to get home before the rain started. She said that the weather forecast was more like a lottery and sometimes your lucky number came up and sometimes it didn't.

Well, I couldn't argue with that—that was all true. And it was important! How could farmers know what to plant if the weather wasn't right? How could they schedule markets and fairs and school plays if they didn't know what the weather was going to be? On the few occasions where there was an unplanned storm because somepony messed up, it was really inconvenient, and everypony had to work harder to deal with it.

But when I told her that she looked kind of sad. She opened the door for me and I hopped up in my seat.

We drove for a bit in silence, and I just thought about what Lisa had said. And then I told her that I thought it was pretty amazing that Becky had Focus, which had taken us this far with only a few stops for gas and none for water at all. And that they had these stores that were full of so many things, and the tall skyscratchers and big bridges and everything else that they had built, and we didn't have anything like it at all. I told her that we didn't even have Taco Bells, and she thought that was really funny.

Then Meghan said that one of the most important thing about visiting a foreign country was seeing what was odd to you that was an everyday thing to everyone who lived there all the time, and I said that she was right. Everyone had been amazed by the cloud I'd brought down, but if I'd done that back in Equestria nobody would have been all that interested. And I said that if Becky brought Focus to Equestria, there would be so many ponies crowded around it that it wouldn't be able to go anywhere.

Lisa said that maybe she was wrong, but she still thought it was kind of sad that ponies weren't surprised by the weather, and that we ponies didn't have to rely on the predictions of a woodchuck.

When we finally got back to campus, everyone including me was completely exhausted. I trudged back up the hill to our dorm room and collapsed into bed, even though it was hours before I normally went to sleep.

February 3 [Descartes]

February 3

It was nice to wake up in my own bed again. I was up a little bit earlier than usual, because of how early I'd gone to bed the night before.

I decided I'd start my day with a short flight, and then trot around the neighborhood. Maybe I'd see John again, or Jackie with her dog that likes me, or Ethan who sometimes trots along with me.

I'm starting to get a bit familiar with the people who control the sky. I don't know their names, because they're not supposed to say them on the radio (which is silly), but I know their voices. The deep-voiced man was talking on the radio this morning. He always sounds so calm and professional!

They give me a weather report each time I want to take to the sky, although of course I can see the weather with my own eyes. This morning was no different; he told me how high the clouds were and then gave me permission, and I took to the sky.

I flew right up to the base of the clouds, stopping when I was there to look around for airplanes, and to be sure I gave a good listen as well. Small airplanes buzz like bees, and bigger airplanes . . . well, I don't know what they sound like from outside, but inside they're noisy and shaky and the air smells funny. I haven't been close to a big airplane from outside, because it isn't safe.

I touched the base of the clouds, and tried not to think of what they promised, but I couldn't. It was too much a part of me, and it couldn't be ignored. Maybe Lisa was right; maybe I didn't have something that humans did. Maybe I couldn't appreciate the weather; maybe I was forever cursed to just see them as objects to be moved around in the sky to fill a quota.

Was that what we'd become? Did we pawn a part of ourselves when we first began moving clouds? Or had that always been in our nature?

It bothered me that I didn't know.

If I were allowed to fly through thick clouds, I would have flown to the top and sat there until the sun rose. Sitting on a cloud perch and watching the moonlight paint the cloudtops silver, and then watching as the sun begins to light them in reds and oranges, washing out the stars, until they're all a perfect white like a fresh new snowfall, that's something you can't see on the ground.

So what if I knew what the cloud under my belly was? When I stood on the cobbles and watched the Summer Sun Celebration, was it lessened by the fact that I knew what cobbles were and how they were made? Did their meaning change because I knew that they'd be there tomorrow and the tomorrow after that?

I didn't think so, but Lisa thought so, and I still wasn't entirely sure that she was wrong.

As I sat through climate science, I considered if even human-style weather teaching took the magic out of the weather. I don't think that Lisa knows any more than what she reads in the normal weather report—most people don't. The dining hall sometimes has a newspaper called USA Today which is kept above the garbage can and that anybody can read if they don't mind that it's all wrinkled and the pages are out of order. It has a picture of the whole America, and it shows what the high and low temperatures will be and if there will be any precipitation, and that's all. No pressure charts, no humidity charts, no winds—the airplane control tower gives more detailed reports than that!

Then Crystal Dawn asked if I could clarify what the professor had just said about valley exit jets, and I explained how diurnal mountain wind systems often coupled with the heavy cold air could cause them at low altitudes, and then I wondered if maybe I was taking some of the magic of the air away for her—but ponies and people with airplanes need to know about them! Foals can get caught in them unawares, just like rip tides.

In philosophy class, we continued with Rene Descartes. I'm still trying to wrap my head around his philosophy. Who wonders if they even exist? I know I exist. I can touch my hooves to my body, and I can hear and see and smell; is that not proof enough? Apparently, it wasn't for him.

I overheard one of the boys in class mutter that if God can lie, than Descartes' whole foundation collapses. He was the same boy who muttered under his breath about Aquinas, as well. If he's not going to learn from his elders, why is he in the class?

Some humans have an attitude about learning, I guess. There were some ponies in flight school who thought they knew everything and most of them got showed up by High Winds, who is a retired Wonderbolt (he didn't tell anypony that). I only knew because my Mom had a crush on him, and I didn't tell anypony because even though it's a little mean to watch somepony get blasted by a lightning cloud, it's also dumb to boast when you haven't got anything to back all that hot air up with.

Then in Equestrian class I nuzzled Meghan and Becky and Lisa before I remembered that humans don't greet each other that way even when they know each other pretty well. But it was okay because Becky ruffled my mane a little bit while I was doing it, and Meghan nuzzled me back. Then I told that class that that was how friends greeted each other in Equestria.

Ted, one of the other students, said that he preferred a handshake, but I told him that I didn't like those. It's dangerous to have your hoof grabbed! That's a weird custom, one that we were warned about.

I wonder if humans who are visiting Equestria are warned about nuzzles?

At dinner, Aric said that he had missed me at Durak, and I told him that I was sorry I hadn't come, but that I had gone to Pennsylvania instead. He said it was okay; there were things in life more important than a card game, but he'd missed me all the same, and since he looked really sincere, I invited him back to my dorm room to play a game of euchre, as long as he could find a partner. He said that sounded like fun, and that he'd probably bring Sean and Christine if I was okay with that. That was good, I thought, because if Peggy didn't want to play, Sean and Christine could be partners, and Aric and I could also be partners.

Well, it turned out that Peggy did want to play, so Christine sat out and watched us.

While we were playing, Aric told me that he was going to have a Super Bowl party at his house, and he invited both of us. I thought it sounded like fun, and Peggy did too.

It would have been nice to play a second round after the first, but my poetry book was sitting sadly neglected—I hadn't read any of it during the road trip—and so after the game was done, I started catching up on my homework.

February 4 [a poem]

February 4

How do ponies rhyme? How do poets? Do they sit at their desks all day long, picking one word and then another and another?

I didn't think writing a poem would be all that hard. I've read them, and had them read to me. I can write a couple of pages in my journal in maybe an hour or so—I don't really look at the clock when I'm doing it. I usually write a little bit right after I get up, and then fill in more later during my downtime in the day. That way, I don't forget stuff!

Since I couldn't figure out how to rhyme, I stopped trying. Emily Dickinson didn't rhyme, and neither did e e cummings, so it was okay if your poetry didn't.

Where do you go, cloud?
You drift across the sky,
Aimless.

Nobody directs you,
Nobody causes you to rain:
You're purposeless.

Those on the ground do not know you
They do not understand you
Like I do.

They marvel at your shadow,
They think of your shape,
They think you are a wooly sheep.

I know you.
I can touch you and feel you.
I can make you rain.

But I don't. I let you drift
Aimlessly
Bringing joy to those below.

It wasn't that great of a poem, and I was nervous to present it to the class. So many people in class were so smart, and I couldn't even write a proper poem. I bet any of them could have done it in a heartbeat.

I didn't have to, though. Conrad Hillberry smiled when he saw me, and then he said that we were going to read some Poe because this was the time of year when he felt the weight of years on his shoulders.

I was expecting something cheerful and lighthearted, so imagine my disappointment. Poe's poems are dark and gloomy. I think they are better November poems.

They were also captivating. I hadn't expected that. Poe had a way with words, and he used them to trip me up. It felt like there was almost a tempo, and then it was gone. Waves do that—they surge and recede. Maybe Poe liked the sea; maybe that's what inspired him.

After class, I presented my poem. I read it for Conrad (he said I can just call him by his first name), and then he had me read it for him again.

I had expected him to either tell me that it was terrible, or maybe tell me that I'd made a good effort, but instead, he leaned forward on his desk and folded his hands together. He said that it reminded him of a summer day when he was a young boy, and he was sitting with his high school sweetheart, and they were looking up at the clouds, watching them slowly sail across the sky like giant fluffy ships.

Then he asked me what the poem meant to me. I hadn't expected that! So I told him about what Lisa had said, and how it had made me feel.

He told me that he had been studying poetry for over fifty years. He had written a dissertation about e e cummings for his doctorate, and that he could tell me anything about the craft of poetry that I cared to ask. He said that even after all that time he had not lost his love of poetry, even though he knew it inside and out, and that there were two kinds of love and wonder. One was the ignorant kind, and that was the kind he had when he read the first poem which touched his heart. The other was the intimate kind, and that was the kind he had now. He thought that Lisa had the ignorant kind of feelings for the sky, while I had the intimate kind.

He said it might be no different than a child who had a crush on a classmate telling his parents that they didn't really understand love, since they'd been married for so long.

And then he told me that even with his vast knowledge of poetry, every now and then a student would surprise him and see something in a poem which he had never noticed before, and he said that I was one of those students.

So I thanked him, and I tore my poem out of my notebook and gave it to him and he thanked me for it.

February 5 [fun day]

February 5

We had a guest in climate science class today! She's named Cyndi, and is the meteorologist for WWMT, which is a local television station.

I don't think that the professor had told her that I would be in class. When I went in, she was standing beside his desk, talking over the lesson with him, and she looked up and saw me and then took a step back, and I was a bit surprised so I extended out my wings a little bit, then tucked them back in right away before I scared her off.

She kept kind of glancing in my direction as I took my seat. Crystal Dawn leaned over and told me that she thought I had a new fan, and Luke thought that was really funny, then he said I ought to have brought a cloud to class for her. If I'd known she was going to be there, I might have.

Crystal Dawn asked if pegasuses gave each other clouds for gifts, and I shook my head. A cloud wasn't much of a gift (unless it was a building cloud). It would be like an earth pony giving her stallion dirt.

Then we all quieted down when class started. Cyndi said that her father had been a meteorologist, and she was following along in his footsteps. Then she asked us if any of us had climatologists or meteorologists in our families, and I raised my hoof. I think weather work counts, and my mom is a weatherpony.

She asked if any of us were interested in becoming meteorologists, and one girl in the back of class raised her hand. Cyndi was kind of disappointed by that, but continued on. I would have raised my hoof, but I thought that working with clouds wasn't the same as meteorology.

She gave us a brief overview of how the television station presents the weather, and how much more complicated it is from what we see on the screen. She also explained that to become a proper Certified Broadcast Meteorologist, she had to have a college degree, a strong backing in math and science, pass a test, and take continuing education classes. She told us that a lot of weather reporters on television don't have those certifications and so they just read off what someone else had decided the weather was going to be. Which was how a lot of weatherponies worked, too; they just did what they were told. It was the supervisors who had to know lots of stuff.

She also told us what kind of equipment they had to monitor the weather, and how the technology had changed over the years. She said that the models were getting better every year, which made the forecasts more and more accurate.

Then she asked us if we had any questions, and Luke raised his hand and asked what her opinion of global warming was.

She rolled her eyes and sighed, and then she said that man-made global warming was a fact, backed up by mountains of scientific evidence. I thought it was a stupid question, too: the professor had covered that in the very beginning of class. Maybe Luke hadn't been paying attention.

Luke raised his hand again, and Cyndi gritted her teeth and called on him again. This time, he asked her what her professional response was when the television station aired a segment suggesting that global warming was false, or at least implied that it might not be true. That put the interest back in her, and she said that it was a difficult position to be in. She didn't have the authority to stop them from airing such segments, but that she would advise her fellow anchormen that the story was BS. She said that there had been a few segments she'd kept them from airing because they were fake science, but that there were other syndicated shows that she didn't have control over and that was kind of frustrating.

When she was done answering questions, she told us that we could be friends with her on Facebook, and a bunch of students took out their telephones, then she left and we finished up with a normal lesson.

I was happy that we were wrapping up Descartes in philosophy class. I couldn't make sense of him. Despite all the professor's explanations, I still didn't understand why he would start out his philosophy with the idea that he didn't exist. And it only got more confusing when Ted asked the professor if it would make a difference if we really all were brains in a vat, since we wouldn't be able to do anything to change that. Then he asked if, according to Descartes' philosophy, a self-aware artificial intelligence could be said to exist.

The professor said that Descartes was attempting to remove anything that could be doubted from his philosophy, and Ted countered that you can't have a first principle of nothing.

Then the professor sweetly suggested that that would be a great topic for the final exam, and there were a few groans in the class. It also shut Ted up.

Anyway, we're moving on to John Locke next, and that will be a pleasant change I'm sure.

Lunch today was mostly pizza, and leftovers from yesterday's dinner. Christine said that they weren't trying, but I thought it was pretty exciting, and judging by how many other people were eating slices of pizza, it was a treat for them, too.

They weren't as good as the one Peggy had ordered. Sean (who had nearly a whole pizza on his plate) said that it was better than dominos. I hadn't ever eaten a domino, so I just took his word for it.

I wanted to try lots of different toppings to see what my favorites were. I probably ate more than I should have—I felt really bloated after lunch, and I resolved to not eat anything besides a salad for dinner.

In Equestrian class, I asked Meghan if I could use her bathtub tonight. It would be a great way to relax after the week. She said it was okay with her, and the rest of the girls said it was okay with them, too.

So I went over after dinner and started drawing my bath. We talked a bit while the tub was filling, and I told them about the soaking tubs that every ground village has, and how popular they are with everypony. Meghan said that there was a place that had hot tubs in Kalamazoo, but she wasn't sure if they were sanitary, and she also wasn't sure that they'd let a pony in. And she said that her uncle also had a hot tub and maybe we could use that sometime.

Once it was full of nice hot water and lots of suds, I lowered myself in and stretched out, and just relaxed. At first, I was alone; the girls stayed behind when I went into the bathroom, but eventually Meghan stuck her head around the corner and asked if I minded if she came in, too.

I said that I didn't mind at all; she could even join me in the bath if she wanted to. It would have been crowded, but I think we could have managed to fit.

She said that she'd just sit and talk, which was almost as good. So she sat on the toilet seat, and then eventually Becky and Lisa pulled their chairs up to the door, but they were pretty hesitant. Becky stayed a bit off at an angle, and I really had to stretch out my head to see her. Until she eventually moved closer.

All three of them smiled when I sculpted the soap bubbles into little clouds and set them floating around the bathroom. I wasn't all that good at it; one of my weather teachers could make whole cloudscapes out of them, and she even used ink in the soap solution to represent different types of clouds. But she'd had a lot more practice, and she probably wasn't as good with real clouds.

It was really relaxing, and it was nice to chat while I was in the bath. Sometimes I try to have a conversation with the other girls in the bathroom when I'm in the shower, but most of the time they don't want to say much more than 'hi.'

When I was done, I was all fluffy from soaking and drying off with towels. Meghan said that I looked absolutely adorable, and asked if she could brush my mane and tail. I told her that she could, so I stretched out on her bed and let her groom me.

That was about the best Friday night ever, and it just got more better when I got back to our dorm room. Peggy and Christine and Sean were all there playing euchre (you can play it with three people, too, but it's not as fun as having a partner) and drinking beer. When they finished their game, we played a four-person game; not too long after we started Aric showed up as well; he said that he had just been passing by and seen our door was open.

He sat on my bed while we finished the game, and then Peggy thought it would be fun to watch a movie on her computer, so she turned it so we could all see. Aric and I shared my bed, while Christine and Sean sat on the floor.

There was a little debate while they decided what movie to watch, but they finally decided that How To Train Your Dragon would be fun, because I knew about dragons and because there were some good flying scenes in it.

I wound up snuggling against Aric when the movie got really intense, but he didn't mind.

It was kind of disappointing when he had to go—I think he didn't want to, either, but the party kind of broke up a little bit after the movie.

February 6 [LARP]

February 6

The best thing about Saturdays is that I can sleep in if I want to. I hadn't really planned to, but my bed was nice and warm, and the pillow smelled like Aric.

The downside was that I wound up not even going trotting at all this morning, 'cause I was being lazy.

Peggy and I did laundry, and then she said that she was going to go to Meijer because she was out of snack food and beer, and asked if I wanted to come along. Of course I said yes; I've gotten more used to big crowds of people, so it probably wouldn't be as intense as it was last time, and when I wasn't so nervous about sticking close to them I'd get a chance to see more of what people sold in stores.

We both went to lunch together, and Christine said that she'd come along, too, and asked me if I was still interested in LARPing—they were having a session tonight in the common room of Hoben Hall (which is the one where Sean lives).

Christine wanted to go right after lunch, but Peggy said that she didn't want to go to Meijer without a bra, so we'd have to wait a little bit. I didn't see what the big deal was; she'd been without all morning and it hadn't seemed to be a problem.

She said that there was a lot I had to learn about fashion, and I said I was perfectly happy being ignorant. Then she asked if it bothered me that people could see my junk. She had to explain what she meant; I thought the word only meant stuff that's broken. Then I told her that I thought that was a dumb thing to call it; my vagina worked perfectly well. Christine nearly choked on her drink when I said that.

Then Christine asked Sean if he'd ever looked at my butt, and he told her that he wasn't going to answer that question, so she punched him in the shoulder.

Maybe if ponies had eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge we'd be ashamed to be naked. But why would God want people to hide their bodies if He made them in His own image? Was He embarrassed about how He looked?

I thought the answer might be in the Bible, so I started reading Exodus while Peggy's laundry was finishing. It was about Moses, who was an important person that God spoke to from a burning bush.

It reminded me of the Crystal Ponies, how they had been oppressed by King Sombra and then trapped in a spell for a thousand years. They were a strange bunch; they sometimes put more faith in their Crystal Heart than Princess Celestia, although perhaps that was understandable, since it had been the Crystal Heart which saved them from Sombra in the end.

I was disappointed in how little progress I'd made. At the rate I was going, I wouldn't finish the Bible until the very end of the year, but it was difficult to read, and there were so many people to keep track of, and I didn't always know who was going to be important later on.

When Peggy's clothes were done, she got dressed and we got into Cobalt and stopped by Christine's dorm, then drove out to Meijer. While we were on on the way, I asked Peggy if the two different Meijers sold different things, but she said that they were basically the same. She said it was more convenient for people to not have to go so far to get to one, and that made sense.

Christine said that she thought that there were four in Kalamazoo: besides the one I'd been at and the one I'd seen on the other side of the 131 Highway, there was one further south in Portage and another one on Gull Road.

Since the girls wanted to get a few more things, and since I wanted to look around, we took our time. I didn't get to explore the whole store, though, because that would have taken forever. But I did get to look at the toys (there are Star Wars dolls, and I think I'll buy one for Christine because she's so nice) and lots of cute stuffed animals and toy cars and a whole row of building blocks called Legos.

Then we went to the stationary department, and I bought some new pens. Human pens took a bit of getting used to, but they write very well, you don't have to wait for the ink to dry, and a lot of them have a little clicker on the end that I can push with my tongue, but not too much because it annoys Peggy.

The notebooks are nice, too: the paper is very white, and has little blue lines to guide you. And there are many different colors for the cover, so that you can tell which one is which at a glance.

Then we went over to the personal hygiene department. I bought more shampoo and conditioner—the human stuff doesn't seem to last as long as pony shampoo—and since I was thinking about it, I asked Peggy where I could go to get my mane and tail trimmed. She shrugged and said that probably a normal salon could do it. Christine said that Action Shot had gone to a groomer, but that she also had had her coat trimmed.

Unicorns are really vain about that, and some earth ponies too. I don't mind being shaggy in the wintertime, because it helps keep me warm. I might have to have my hooves trimmed while I'm here, though. I'm walking on a lot of pavement, more than I usually would, and sometimes that makes them wear unevenly.

We got food next; mostly beer and snack food because the dining hall doesn't have either. Christine bought a whole bunch of boxes of Mac and Cheese and bags of Ramen noodles, and then we went into the canned food aisle so that she could get some tuna to put in her Mac and Cheese.

I considered getting some for myself, but then I found something even better: little flat cans of anchovies. That would make a much better snack than Doritos, I thought.

Peggy thought it was weird that I would eat fish, and I told her that I'd lived on the coast for years, and it was a part of our diet, especially in the winter when other forage was harder to come by. Plus fish are really energy-dense.

I paid for my purchases with a Visa card, which is like my student ID card, except it has an eagle on it. I had to stand up on my hind hooves to put it through the machine, and then use the plastic stick to sign for it. The cashier was very patient with me, which was nice.

We got back to campus in time for dinner, which wasn't anything too special. Then I did a little bit of homework, until it was time to meet with Christine so that we could LARP.

She'd put on different clothes—a tight-fitting chestpiece that she called a bodice, tall boots with buckles on them, and she'd braided her hair. She said that some of the people who played liked getting dressed up in costumes that fit their characters.

Then she explained the rules to me. It was a little complicated and confusing, and I couldn't do rock-paper-scissors with my hooves, so she thought about that for a little bit, and then suggested that I could hold out my wings for paper, stomp a hoof for rock, and bite for scissors. So we practiced that a little bit.

Christine told me that she'd stay close to me as I was getting used to it, and that everyone who played was friendly and would not be bothered if I had to ask questions. She said that Keith and Sean and Seth and Thomas all played frequently, and that they'd be there tonight, and any one of them would be happy to answer any questions I had.

Then she asked me who my character would be. I couldn't really think of anything creative, so I said Zapp (I had to explain who that was). She thought that was a pretty good choice, that it would probably be good as a starting point to play a character who I was familiar with, and then later on maybe I could make an original character.

So then we walked to Hoben and started playing. It was a bit confusing, especially since some of the people I knew were pretending to be different people, and even their actions were different. Christine 'killed' a couple of them.

There were some people in the group who did multiple roles; Christine told me later that they were NPCs, and the storyteller told them what to do, while other people like her and me were main characters, and we got to make our own choices. She said that everyone took turns at being a NPC.

I liked the idea of making my own choices, but I thought it might be easier to get into it if I played as a NPC for a while, until I got used to the game. She was kind of disappointed at first, but then decided that might actually be a good idea, so next time I play I won't be Zapp, but I'll be whoever the storyteller says I am.

It was pretty late when I got back to my dorm room, but Peggy was still up. She asked me if I'd had fun, and I said that I had and that I thought I was going to play next week as well. She said that maybe she'd come and watch.

Super Bowl Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday

This morning I made sure that I got up on time. Sleeping in is nice, but then I don't get as much done as I want to, plus I feel sort of sluggish all day.

It was another nice day—although a bit chilly. I took a brief trot around campus to limber up, and then went back to my dorm to get my flight vest.

While I was there, I decided that I'd try one of the cans of anchovies as a pre-flight snack. There was a little ring on the lid that I could pull with my teeth, which was really convenient. Peggy has a can opener, but it isn't very hoof-friendly.

They were just as tasty as I'd hoped they would be, even if they were only fillets. I swallowed them down whole and then used my radio to call the airplane directors and get flight clearance.

I zipped around in the sky for a while, not really doing anything other than stretching my wings. I would have flown for longer, but my light stopped blinking, and I'm not allowed to fly without it unless I stay close to the ground.

I wasn't really disappointed, though. I'd made a couple of nice laps of downtown Kalamazoo, and I kind of took the long way back, just made sure that I stayed low where airplanes weren't allowed to fly.

It's interesting how the perspective changes depending on your altitude. The main part of Kalamazoo is in sort of a depression, with hills around it, and when I'm down low, I can't see very much of it, just some of the tall buildings and smokestacks and of course the college bell tower.

There are other spindly towers that are cell towers and television towers, and I'm supposed to stay away from them because they can put off dangerous radiation. They have lights on them so that they're easy to see.

When I got back to the dorm I took off my flight gear and went to the shower. I didn't have to wait to use it, 'cause there wasn't anyone else awake. Even Peggy was still asleep, and so when I got done in the shower and went back to my room I groomed myself quietly 'cause I didn't want to wake her up.

I spent most of the morning studying—there was a climate science test coming up on Monday, and I was still having trouble remembering the human names for things. Then I helped Peggy a bit with her math. We went to dinner a bit early, so that we'd have time to get over to Aric's for the Super Bowl.

I was happy that she wanted to walk there, 'cause it gave us time to talk about the game. Peggy gave me a brief run-down of how the game is played, and who the two teams playing were. I asked if Kalamazoo had a football team, and she said that the city didn't, but Michigan had one called the Lions. She said that they were the worst team in the NFL.

She told me that the teams that were playing in the Super Bowl were the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos, which were not the same as the Western Michigan Broncos. She hoped that the Broncos would win, because they were her local team back in Colorado.

We were not the first guests to arrive: Keith was already there, along with Christine, Sean, and Donald (who plays Durach with us). I also met his roommate, David, who lives in the basement, and his other roommate Sara, who was really short. She was happy to meet me and petted my mane. He has a third roommate named Douglas, but he was out of town, Aric said.

There was a big television set up in the front room, and a couple of couches facing it. One of the couches was huge, and a hideous gold color; the other was smaller and more threadbare. There was also a chair which he called a Lazy Boy that had silvery patches all over it. Peggy said that was duct tape, and David said that you could fix anything with it. Since that wasn't enough room, there was also a rug and blankets on the floor.

In the next room back were stairs leading to the second floor, and there was also a big table set up with snack food and bubbly soft drinks. The center of the room had a silver barrel of beer sitting in a pool full of ice to keep it cold.

That was my first stop. Aric said it was Bell's Oberon, which I liked. And he had lots of red cups which were called Solo cups, and they were plastic so if you dropped them they wouldn't break.

A bunch more people showed up, and pretty soon there were several conversations going on all at once. It got a little confusing because there were also several men on the TV talking about what the game would be like, and how well the teams had done in the season. It reminded me of listening to the smalltalk in pubs back in Equestria—if mares weren't complaining about stallions, they were talking about sports.

Then it was time for the game to start, and everyone found a spot in the living room. Since there wasn't enough couch space to accommodate everyone, some people had to sit on the floor.

That felt like the most social spot to me, so I joined the group on the floor. It was kind of tricky to move around, since there were cups of beer and plates of snacks that had to be avoided, but we managed.

Aric gave up his seat on the couch to join us on the floor, which was really nice of him, and worked out to my benefit, too. (He'd said that I could sit next to him on the couch, but I didn't want to crowd Sara.)

Peggy sat down next to me, and said that she was going to make sure that there wasn't any hanky-panky, and Aric raised both of his hands up in the air and said that he wasn't doing anything.

By the end of the first quarter, things had kind of settled down. Peggy was happy because the Broncos were winning, and I was happy because I was snuggled between Aric and Peggy. I was resting my head on his leg, and he had his hand on my back.

Everyone got up and stretched out during halftime. Aric said it wasn't really worth watching, because the announcers would recap what we'd just seen, and then there was a concert that probably wouldn't be any good. Sara and Keith got in a good-natured debate on the merits of Beyonce's music, while pretty much everyone else took turns at the bathroom.

Aric's house has two; one upstairs and one downstairs. The downstairs one is right off the kitchen, and there is a frosted glass window in it to let light in. A couple of the girls went upstairs, while the rest of us just waited our turn for the downstairs bathroom.

We had more beer and more snacks during the concert, and just talked about stuff, then when it was time for the game to start again, everyone got back in their old places and watched the rest of the game.

Peggy had told me that usually, people get up during the commercials, but they're special in the Super Bowl and so we ought to watch them. There was one for Budweiser which had horses in it (it even said Not Ponies, as if people wouldn't know the difference). There was kind of a hush that fell over everyone; I think they were waiting to see how I'd react to it.

It was kind of weird, but I'd just seen them for a moment, and couldn't really make much judgment on them from that. And it wasn't like I didn't know that there were horses on Earth.

So I said that if they were smarter, they'd be in college drinking Oberon and watching the Super Bowl, and everyone had a good laugh.

By the third quarter, some people were leaving. Keith went home with Christine and Sean and Donald, and Sara went up to her room for the night, and everyone who was left (mostly the people who had come late that I didn't know very well) sort of re-arranged themselves.

The Broncos wound up winning, which made Peggy very happy.

Then the other people started leaving. We moved to the vacant gold couch, and Aric turned off the sound on the television. It was kind of funny watching the people on the screen doing stuff that we couldn't hear.

When Aric got up to use the bathroom again, Peggy said that it was probably time for us to go—it was late, and we both had classes tomorrow. I agreed . . . but I didn't want to. I was enjoying Aric's company too much.

She muttered something under her breath when I said that, and moved over so that she was sitting right next to me on the couch. She asked me if I was sure about what I was doing, and that it wasn't just the beer talking.

I said that I liked him; he was nice and funny and just fun to be with.

She sighed and said that if that was how I felt, that was how I felt. She told me to not do anything that I'd regret, and then told me that she was going to sleep on the couch just to make sure that I'd be all right.

When Aric came back in the room, Peggy looked him right in the eye and told him that if he did anything to hurt me, she was going to rip his dick off and beat him to death with it. Then she reached up under her shirt and pulled her bra out her sleeve, lay down on the smaller couch, and pulled a blanket up over herself.

So Aric and I took the bigger couch for ourselves. We could have gone to his bedroom, I suppose, but I didn't want to leave Peggy alone in the living room.

He stretched out along the couch, and I snuggled up against his chest, then he put his arm around me and we fell asleep like that.

February 8 [Girl Talk]

Feb 8

I woke up stretched out on Aric's chest. It wasn't as comfy as Peggy's had been, but that was okay. It was nice to be sleeping with someone.

He must have felt me moving around, because he cracked open his eyes and then reached up and brushed his hand through my mane, so I leaned down and nuzzled his cheek.

We snuggled for a little bit until I finally stretched out and pushed the covers back. I tried to keep my hooves quiet when I climbed to the floor; I didn't want to wake up Peggy too soon.

It would have been nice to go for a morning trot—Aric might even have wanted to join me—but I didn't want to leave Peggy alone. She'd been so nice to stay with me even if she didn't really want to and was maybe overly concerned about me and Aric, but that was something good friends did, and I loved her for it.

Aric said that he would give us a ride back to campus if we wanted, and he went out and started up Winston. He said that it took her a while to warm up in the morning, and I asked if he wanted me to wake Peggy up and he said that I didn't have to; if Peggy wasn't ready to go once Winston got warm, he'd just turn it off again and it would warm up quicker when she was ready to leave.

Peggy woke up about ten minutes later, and said good morning to both of us, then went off to the bathroom. Aric figured that once she came out, she'd want to go back to campus so that we wouldn't be late for class, and he was right. It was a little strange to be driven back when we’d walked over the night before. But it was quicker, which was nice, so I had time to take a good shower and groom before I went to breakfast.

I felt like I did okay on my test in climate science class. Not great, but I hoped the professor would be a bit lenient, since I understood the concepts but just not all the words used to describe them.

Then in philosophy, we started on John Locke, who already seems to be making more sense than Descartes did. Instead of beginning with nothing, he believed that there was a natural law which was above rulers or religion. I think that's a pretty obvious conclusion—we know that the griffons and the minotaurs and all the other species in Equestria all have come up with remarkably similar laws, even though they don't all have a lot else in common.

He also said that God's laws were only given to certain people, and that makes sense too. Since we ponies weren't kicked out of the garden of Eden, we feel no shame at being naked. I had suspected this was so, but it's nice to see that a smart philosopher saw that, too.

And he said that it was the duty of citizens to replace their government when it isn't serving them any more. We've done that—the Princesses replaced the unicorns when they were trying to extort other ponies, and of course we choose a new pegasus assembly whenever the old one can't do its job. Earth ponies have a similar system, where they vote for a mayor. Unicorns just believe in bloodlines, which is dumb. Just because your dam was a good leader doesn't mean you'll be.

When I was back in our room before dinner, Peggy got up from her desk and sat down on her bed, then told me to sit down next to her. She said it was time for a little girl talk.

She asked me what my intentions were with Aric, and I said that I wasn't really sure yet. I hadn't known him all that long, but so far I liked him and he liked me, so that was a good start.

She asked me if I was sure that I knew what I was getting into. I told her that I knew how it went with stallions, but that humans were different, although from what we'd learned the anatomy was similar. Peggy said that wasn't what she meant at all—she was sure it was possible for us to have sex, she just wasn't sure that I was ready for all the baggage that might come with it.

Then she said that on Earth because there weren't any other sapient species besides humans, it wasn't okay to have sex with anything besides other people. Some places it was illegal, and other places it was frowned upon.

Peggy said that she understood that I wasn't an animal, but that a lot of people would look at it that way, and it might make things difficult for me or Aric. She reminded me of the angry man at Walgreens, and said that there were people who would be just as angry if they found out that I was having sex with Aric, or maybe even angrier; she said it might be hard for me or for him to deal with.

I flattened my ears and told her it sounded like she didn't want me to have any fun, even though she was spending the night with a boy sometimes.

She said that wasn't what she meant, and she just really wasn't good at explaining how conflicted she felt about this.

I told her maybe she was putting the cart before the pony. I wasn't sure where this was going to end up going anyway; I think that Aric likes me but I'm not sure if he likes me that way. I thought that the best thing to do was just to let things take their course and not worry right now about might-bes.

She said she was worried about me getting hurt or getting my heart broken, but that as long as I knew what I wanted and what I was comfortable with, than it probably wasn't any of her business. Then she had me repeat her telephone number until she was sure that I had it memorized, and told me that if I needed her to give her a call no matter what time it was.

I asked her if she was really serious about beating Aric to death with his own dick, and she smiled and said she probably wouldn't, but that she would make him wish she had if he hurt me. Then she rubbed her hand through my mane and nuzzled my cheek.

Then we talked about past boyfriends and coltfriends, which turned into a kind of funny competition to see who had had the most interesting sexual experience. That turned into a draw; she'd never done it on a cloud, and I'd never tried it in the backseat of a car at the county fair. I told her I could probably bring down a cloud if she ever wanted to try it—it wouldn't be quite the same, though, and I wasn't sure if a cloud could actually support a human, either.

She hugged me and I gave her a little nuzzle on the cheek, and we went off to dinner together.

Later on, Aric came by to pick me up for Durak, and I snuggled up against him while we were driving to the coffee shop, but when we were inside I stayed a little bit away, just in case any of the mean people who would jump to conclusions were in there. He didn't press the issue; I think he was happy that I was there after I'd missed the last session. That actually made me a little sad.

Keith said that if I'd enjoyed the LARP—which I had—that I might be interested in the SCA. He said that it was kind of similar, and that there was a big event coming up and I could go if I wanted to. Then Aric chimed in and said that he was going to go as well. I didn't have any plans for the weekend, so I said I would, and asked if I could invite Peggy if she wanted to go. He said that would be fine.

We played a bit later than usual, because the last game lasted quite some time after the deck ran out. When it was finally over, Keith picked his cards back up, and Aric gave me a ride back to campus. We stayed in his truck and snuggled for a little bit, and then I thought it was probably time to go, and went up to my room.

February 9 [Second Thoughts]

February 9

I got off to a late start again. Not only was I up later than I ought to have been playing Durak, but I had to put new batteries in my flashing light so that I could go flying. The batteries are kind of like power crystals, but they look the same when they're charged or depleted, so you can't tell by looking how much power they have left. I could take a spare set in my flight vest, just in case.

But it was worth the wait. There was a low cloudbank over Kalamazoo, and I flew right up to the base of it and zipped around in the little tendrils of cloud that were dangling down from the main body. I even made a game out of seeing how close I could get to them without touching them, sort of like when Hiccup was flying on Toothless. Unlike the rocks in the movies, my passage broke up the clouds.

I thought about trying to make a one-mare cloud drill to see if I could suck some of it down in my wake, but besides the difficulty of doing it solo, I wasn't sure how the clouds would behave, and I'd probably get in trouble if I accidentally caused a tornado, even if it was very small and short-lived.

Regardless, I hadn't really stretched my wings in a couple of days, so it was really good exercise, and it was fun just to play in the sky, too.

On my way back to campus, I zipped over Aric's house, and just for fun, I left a trail of hoofprints on his porch roof. I know I'm not supposed to land on houses, but I was sure Aric wouldn't mind—he'd probably think it was funny. Hopefully Sara would see them out her window and tell him about them.

While I was flying back to campus, I thought that if I wanted to make sure he saw hoofprints, I ought to make them on the garage roof, too, so I went back and landed right on the peak and then made a bunch of hoofprints on the side of the roof that faced his house, and when I got to the bottom of the roof I glided off and then flew up and back to campus.

The problem with getting up late is if I'm too late, the shower is already taken by the late risers, and this time was no exception: I stuck my nose in the bathroom, and there was someone already in the shower.

So I went back to my room and took off my flight clothes, then went back to the bathroom, but it was still occupied, so I sat down on the little bench to wait my turn.

It felt like longer than it probably was before the shower turned off, and I waited what I thought was a decent interval, and still the girl inside didn't come out, so I knocked politely on the door. Sometimes girls like to groom themselves in the shower, especially if they don't think anybody's waiting for a turn.

And I was in luck! Brianna opened the shower door a crack and looked around before she looked down and saw me.

I told her I was sorry for bothering her but I had gotten a late start and needed to take a shower before class if she was done. She said that she still had to shave her legs, but she could stand off to the side and do that if I didn't mind. I said that was okay, it wouldn't bother me at all, so she put on her underwear and opened the door to let me in (I could have flown over, but that was rude).

I couldn't understand why it was fashionable for human girls to shave their legs, but then fashion has never been about practicality. Most gala dresses can't be flown in, and ponies that trim their winter coats have to wear something to keep warm.

Thanks to Brianna's kindness, I made it to poetry class in time and not smelling like sweat. Conrad doesn't tell us what poet we're going to be studying beforehoof, so I never know what to expect. I think he just decides on his way to class what he's in the mood for.

That's very wise of him. A few students grumble about it, but most of them like it, too.

He came into class with his usual warm, welcoming smile, and told us that we were going to read Robert Frost poems today.

We read a poem called The Road Not Taken, and Conrad asked the class what they thought. While a few students gave their thoughts, my mind was going in a different direction than them—taking a different road, maybe. I was thinking of what Peggy had said about me and Aric and how hard it might be . . . how hard it might go for him.

What if it wasn't a happy poem, like most of the class thought? Maybe the road not taken wasn't a pleasant road? Maybe that was why nobody took it.

Frost didn't say whether it was good or bad, just that it made all the difference.

I considered keeping quiet, but I couldn't, so I raised my hoof, and after he had called on other students, he called on me, and I told him what I thought.

Then another girl in class spoke up and said that what if we imagined this poem were written by a prisoner on the way to the gallows? (I didn't know what those were, so I had to look it up later.)

I still had that thought on my mind after class was over, and I was kinda moody at dinner. It wouldn't be nice of me to cause Aric suffering just because of who I was, and the kindest thing I could do would be to put some distance between us before things got tough. But I didn't want to—what did that make me?

Christine picked up on my mood right away, and she looked me right in the eye and asked 'why the long face?' Then Sean almost choked on his dinner, and Christine started laughing so hard she almost fell out of her chair. I just watched the two of them in total bewilderment: humans are really weird sometimes.

I couldn't tell them, because Peggy said I shouldn't, so I didn't really know what to do. I sort of suffered through dinner, trying to put on a brave face, but I wound up not really having much of an appetite at all and didn't finish my food, and then I felt guilty about that, especially when no one else wanted it and I had to send it back to the kitchen.

When I got back to our room, Peggy wasn't there, so I decided I was going to go flying again. Flying helps clear my head. I didn't feel like getting clearance, so I would just stay down low. I still took my blinking light, though, just to be safe.

I followed the railroad tracks away from the center of town.

I wasn't really thinking about where I might go, and before too long I wasn't really thinking at all, just flying. I let my bad thoughts drizzle away like rain out of a cloud, falling to the ground where they wouldn't bother me any more.

I really only came back to myself when I got to the 131 Highway. There was a big bridge that the tracks went under, and I couldn't decide whether I ought to fly over the bridge and the highway, or if I should fly under the bridge, so I hovered off to the side and considered it.

Tunnels can be dangerous—some ponies have tried to fly through them and gotten killed by trains. They look big, but they aren't much bigger than the train, and there isn't any room to fly around. This bridge looked plenty tall enough, but what if I was wrong? What if I'd only seen short trains before, and there were taller trains that needed all that height?

Well, it was a silly worry, really: trains aren't very sneaky, and the bridge wasn't that wide, plus of course it was open on both sides, so I could just fly to the side and there wouldn't be a problem. It wouldn't be crowded like a train tunnel.

The important thing was that it kind of knocked me out of my funk. I got to really considering what Peggy had said—that I didn't understand what problems Aric might face.

But he did! He wasn't me, and he wasn't ignorant when it came to Earth. So as long as I took it slow and easy and made sure to let him set the boundaries, there wouldn't be any issues.

That made me a lot happier, so I zipped back to campus. I had just picked up some altitude to fly over Hoben, when it occurred to me that maybe I could spend the night with Aric again, if he didn't mind (and I didn't think he would).

When I got there, though, Winston wasn't in the driveway. I sat on the roof for a little bit, but he didn't come back, so I finally flew back to my dorm.

Peggy wanted to know where I'd been, and she said that Christine had called her and said that I looked pretty down at dinner. I said that we'd read a sad poem in poetry class and it had affected me more than I thought it would. I don't think she believed me.

February 10 [Salon]

February 10

I didn't sleep very well—I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was being chased by angry men who wanted to hurt me because I liked Aric, and when I first woke, not only was I disoriented, but I was tangled up in my blanket and thought I was trapped, so I rolled over and that only made it worse, then I fell out of bed.

Once I got untangled, I didn't want to get right back in bed, because I knew I wouldn't be able to fall back asleep; I'd just be lying there hyper-alert. I needed to walk it off (back at home I might have flown it off) before I could curl up and relax again.

So I pushed open the door, quietly, so I wouldn't wake up Peggy. The hallway lights are always on, and I had to blink away the brightness until my eyes adjusted.

I just walked up and down the halls for a while. It was kind of eerie; my hoofsteps echoed up and down the silent hallway. Normally, there were all sorts of noises that kind of covered them up, but the dorm was silent: everyone was asleep. Everyone but me.

Instead of going all the way to the ground floor, I pushed open the door to the outside walkway between wings. For some reason, it's called Pebble Beach. It's got a stone covering, so that's where the 'pebble' part comes from, but it's not very beachy. There isn't any water near it.

I sat on the walkway for a bit, looking at the sleeping campus. It wasn't totally empty; there were a couple people walking in front of Hoben Hall, and I saw a car drive up Academy Street, but there wasn't anybody near me.

For maybe ten minutes, I surveyed the campus, and then I yawned and fluttered my wings. The last of the nightmare was gone, and it was time I got back to bed.

When I got up again, I went for my usual morning trot, followed by a quick flight just around campus, then I got ready for class and went to breakfast.

We got our tests back in climate science class, and I got a B. That annoyed me; I thought the professor was being unfair. Just because I can't remember Latin doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing! I thought about coming in on Friday with a super-condensed tuft of cloud, and dropping it in his coffee cup when he wasn't looking. It'd freeze solid.

That would be mean, though. Besides, Cloud Climber was always whacking our hooves when we got them wrong in weather class. She said we'd never get proper weather jobs if we called clouds things like 'white fluffies' and 'grey gloomies.'

So that wasn't a very good start to the day, but at least I had John Locke's wisdom to cheer me up. He was so smart! I'd been a little concerned with Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes, thinking that maybe they'd somehow gotten philosophy wrong—or worse, maybe we ponies were doing it wrong. But now I saw that they had just had wrong philosophy and John Locke was fixing it.

The teacher discussed his ideas about the separation of powers, which she said were an important concept to the founders of America. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true, because while we do have councils and assemblies and mayors and so forth, that's just so that Princess Celestia doesn't have to do so much work. If we had to wait for her say-so on everything we did, nothing would ever get done, and she probably wouldn't even have time to raise the sun. But the humans didn't have anyone like that, so I guess it made sense for them.

Before Equestrian class, I ran into Peggy, and remembered I was supposed to ask her if she wanted to go to the SCA event this weekend.

She said that she couldn't, because it was Valentine's Day, and she had plans.

I didn't know what that was, so she explained it to me, and it sounded a lot like Hearts and Hooves Day.

I asked her if her plans were with her boyfriend, and she nodded. He'd rented a hotel room with a hot tub and she had bought new underwear from Victoria's Secret that she probably wouldn't be wearing for very long. She wanted to know if we had similar customs.

So I told her about Hearts and Hooves Day, which is a little bit later in the year to encourage foals. I told her it would be about a moon and a half after Winter Wrap-Up. We compared calendars, and decided that Hearts and Hooves Day would fall at the beginning of May. She told me that I ought to celebrate it with Aric, and I thought that was a fine idea. Something to look forward to!

Then I had to rush off to Equestrian class.

We pretended that we were going around trying to buy things from pony shops. That took a while; people in class weren't used to haggling over prices. There are a few big markets where you don't, but mostly you do. There is a certain art to it, and it was very difficult to explain, so we did a lot of practicing. It was important to get it right, 'cause otherwise you might insult the salespony, and also pay too much for what you got.

That reminded me that I still hadn't gotten my mane and tail trimmed, so I asked Meghan and Lisa and Becky where to go to do it, and Meghan said that her salon had a stylist who would love to do a pony's hair and we'd go right after class and be back in time for dinner, and she'd take care of everything for me.

She didn't have a car, but she said she could get one with Uber. I thought that was a person, but it turned out it was a thing her phone did. She pushed the screen some, and then said that we could watch on her telephone where the car was, and see a picture of the driver.

So we did—we sat in the lounge at the front of the dorm, and pretty soon a bright red car pulled into the parking lot, and we got in.

The driver looked a bit surprised to see me, but he didn't say anything, just tapped his map a couple of times and then drove us to the salon.

Well, she was right. I caused quite a scene when I came in, and pretty soon there were several of the girls fawning over me. They helped me up into this amazing chair that could rise up from the floor and recline back, and they gave me a special blanket that would keep stray hairs out of my coat.

I had to wait for the stylist; she was finishing with another woman, so while I was waiting, one of the younger girls washed my mane.

They were a little less certain what to do with my tail; they had to re-arrange a few things so that they could wash it. As clever as it was, the chair wasn't designed with ponies in mind.

Then the stylist came over and trimmed up my mane and tail—she said that she had horses, so she knew exactly what to do.

When they were finishing up, Meghan ordered another Uber, and then we all sat and chatted for a bit. The woman who had horses said that she knew how to trim hooves, too, but she didn't do that at the spa. She gave me a little card with her name (Maura, which is a very pretty name) and told me to call her whenever I wanted to make an appointment.

The nice thing about going to a salon is I always feel like a princess after all the pampering, and it just feels different to have my mane trimmed, even though it's pretty much the same as when I went in, only shorter. And it was good to know that there was someone in town who could trim my hooves if that needed to be done.

I got to dinner a bit late, but not too late. Sean wanted to know if I was ever going to watch any more Star Trek movies with him, and I said that I would, but only if we could watch them in Christine's room because I liked sitting on her papasan, and he said that was fine and asked what I was doing tonight.

I knew what I wanted to be doing, so I told him that I wasn't sure, and he said that he would be at her room all night, and I could stop by as long as it was before ten, or give them a call.

He wasn't home again. Sara was, though, and she said that he was working—he worked late several nights a week. She didn't know when he'd be back, either; she said that sometimes he came back at midnight and other times not until later—she didn't know exactly when, because she was usually in bed by midnight.

I thought about asking if I could just sleep in his bed, but thought that might be a bit too forward, and I also wasn't sure what Sara thought about us being together, so I flew back to campus and watched a short Star Trek episode with Sean and Christine. She told him again that he was cheating, that he didn't want to show me Star Trek V because that would be a huge disappointment, and he said it was just too late in the evening to watch a whole movie.

I didn't mind—I was comfy in the papasan, and watching the episode was a nice distraction for all the other things that had been going through my head.

February 11 [Let what will be, be]

February 11

Today started out kind of gloomy. Midwinter gets like that sometimes. Maybe that's why people have Valentine's Day in February, so that they have something to look forward to.

I sat at my desk and just stared at my journal and clicked on the end of my pen while I was trying to write down yesterday's entry. I was still annoyed that Aric hadn't been home, and I kind of wished that I had stayed in his bed. That would have been a nice surprise for him.

I think.

Maybe he would have been mad, though.

I could sense that my head was starting to go around in circles again, so I decided to distract myself by doing something else—anything else.

Ruth's door was open, so I went down the hall to her room to visit with her for a bit. She was sitting on her bed, listening to a pair of headphones, but she put them down when she saw me and tapped on the mattress which is a human's way of saying 'come up.' It's kind of the opposite of scraping on the ground, and it had taken me a bit to get used to.

We talked about classes for a little bit—she's planning to get a degree in psychology—and then out of the blue she asked me if I ever wore pants, and I said that I really hadn't tried pants. I'd worn some flight suits before, for special duties, but those are whole-body suits. They're really hard to get into; it usually takes a couple helpers and some awkward rolling around on the ground to get everything in place. Plus they trap all the sweat in, and it's really easy to accidentally overheat in them.

She said that she thought I'd look great in pants like the ones she was wearing (they were lounge pants—lots of girls wear them around their rooms but don't wear them outside).

I said that it might be fun to give them a try—they did look comfortable, and whenever I'd brushed up against Peggy's leg or bumped her hip, they'd felt really nice. Almost downy.

The only problem was my tail, but Ruth said that wasn't a problem at all, because she had a pair of boy's lounge pants that she really liked, and they had a hole in the front, and if I wore them backwards, my tail could stick out that hole.

So then I agreed, and she got them out of her dresser and helped me get dressed. She wasn't a whole lot of help; by the time they were halfway up my legs she was giggling, and Ruth was pretty much in hysterics once we finally got my tail pulled through and had the waistband properly seated.

Then she had to roll up the cuffs so that the legs didn't drag on the ground and trip me up. I felt kind of silly, but her laughter had tapered off a bit and she said I was just the cutest thing she'd ever seen. She had me pose for her, then she scrunched up next to me and held her telephone out to take a selfie with me.

We were having a lot of fun, and it took my mind off other stuff. She asked me if I would go knock on Rebekka's door to see what she thought about my pants, and when she promised me that it wasn't mean, I agreed to do it.

Rebekka also thought that I was just adorable, and asked me to pose for a quick sketch. I was kind of in a hurry—it was getting uncomfortably close to poetry class—but nopony had ever wanted to make a drawing of me before, and I was flattered that she did.

She was a different person when she was making art. Most of the time when she walked around, her eyes were kind of unfocused, and she had the look of a newborn foal seeing the world for the first time. Plus, she normally wore loose, drape-y clothes that made her look smaller, somehow.

But when she sat on her little stool and started sketching, her movements were sure and certain, and her focus was completely on what she was doing. I'd seen that look on athletes before as well. It was a little trick of narrowing down everything else in the world, something that I didn't think I could do very well.

It didn't take her too long to finish and she thanked me and gave me a hug and then kissed me on the forehead, and I went back to Ruth's room to give her back her pants.

As I trotted to class, I thought that I ought to get to know her better. She was usually so quiet, though, it was sometimes hard to remember she was there.

The first poem we read was called Gathering Leaves, which reminded me of the Running of the Leaves. It's a bittersweet event; all the trees are magnificent yellows and reds and oranges when we start, and when we're done they're nothing but barren trunks and branches stretching up into the sky.

But it's important for the trees to be able to hibernate, and it's important to remember that winter is coming, even if you don't want it to.

Frost forgot to mention that autumn leaves don't taste good, either. They're dry and crunchy at first and after they've been on the ground for a little bit they're loamy and moldy and can make you sick if you eat them.

Then he read for us A Late Walk, which was another poem about autumn. It was kind of strange to be reading such poems in the midwinter, but it took me back. Not only to the walks and flights I'd taken, but to the time when I was getting ready for this trip, and didn't know what the future would hold. I was equal parts terrified and excited. I'd seen pictures and had lessons and thought I knew what I was getting into, but I hadn't really known much at all.

Even the most mundane things—like the aster flower in the poem—took on a new significance all of a sudden. I'd slowly gotten used to things over time, but now that I was thinking back on it, the little things like the bendy lamp on my desk or the excitement I'd had last weekend when I found canned anchovies stood out in a new light.

Then we finished the class with Acceptance, which I thought was a nice way to wrap things up. The last line is “let what will be, be.”

I thought I could do that.

So I wasn't too disappointed when I flew over to Aric's house and Sara said that he was at work again, and did I want to have her call him?

I was about to say yes, when I heard the announcer on the television say that they were going to return to the Democratic debate right after a brief commercial break, and I remembered that I had been meaning to watch it. Lots of people on campus were talking all the time about Democrats and Republicans and the Presidential election, and I hadn't even managed to see all the candidates yet.

Sara thought that was a great idea, so we sat down together and watched it through. It was a little more civil than the Republican debate had been; both candidates made somewhat clear pronouncements about what they were going to do in the future and what they had already done. Plus it wasn't as crowded, either.

Some of the stuff they said was worrisome, though. Just like the Republicans, they were certain that the government had broken, and that a new President was needed to make things right again.

Sara asked me what I thought, and I said that it had been eye-opening. I wasn't sure about all the issues that got brought up, so I didn't think I would be a good judge of who was the best. I told her that I thought that Hillary looked more confident, while Bernie waved around his arms a lot and tried to make himself look bigger.

But it's important to understand the issues. Sometimes former Wonderbolts get into assemblies, and they're usually terrible leaders. They don't know what ponies want, and just because they can boss around other Wonderbolts and fly really well doesn't mean that they're any good at taking care of political business.

I asked her who she was going to vote for, and she said that she was probably going to vote for Hillary, since she didn't think Bernie had a chance at winning, and she didn't want to throw away her vote. I told her that if everyone thought like that, it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and she laughed and said that maybe she'd reconsider.

While we were sitting on the couch talking, I heard a familiar rumbling sound, and then a pair of spotlights swept across the living room, and then I heard the truck door slam and he walked in the front door and just stopped when he saw me.

Then he kicked off his boots and sat down on the couch next to me and rubbed his hand through my mane.

He said that he was really tired—he'd been up until 4 am hanging lights, and had only gotten a couple of hours sleep before he'd had to go back to the theatre and finish up. They'd just gotten done with the first full run-through with light cues, and it had taken longer than anyone wanted.

I just put my head up to his shoulder and let him talk. I was perfectly happy to sit next to him on the couch while he complained about how his day had been. Sara excused herself and went up to her room.

Finally, he said that he was going to go to bed and I could join him if I wanted to. I told him that I had been hoping he would say that.

So we went up to his room and I got into bed while he took off all his clothes except his underwear (which covers a lot more than Peggy's does). He lay down on his back and I snuggled up against his side, and he fell asleep really quickly.

I had hoped for more, but I had resolved to let him lead, to let what will be, be.

February 12 [happy morning]

February 12

Mornings are always better when you wake up with a friend.

We had a bit more room than we'd had on the couch; his bed was even a little bit bigger than the ones that Peggy and I had in our dorm room. Not that we needed all that room—I had my head on his chest and my foreleg stretched across his belly.

Aric reached his arm up and ran it through my mane. His other arm was kind of trapped under my body. It can't have been that comfortable for him, so after he'd petted me for a bit, I shifted off to the side and let him get his arm back, even though I hated to give up my pillow.

He rolled over and put his hand on my back and traced down my spine. I angled my tail off to the side and arched my back, but he stopped when he touched my dock. He held his hand there for a moment like he wasn't sure where to go next, and then trailed it across my hip, before picking up his hand and starting again.

I shifted around and was about to climb on top of him when I remembered that I wanted to let him take things at his own pace, as frustrating as that was going to be. So I just relaxed and let him pet me.

If it had been a weekend, we might have had time to go farther (if he wanted to), but it was time that I got up for the day. Later, really. So I nuzzled his cheek and then kissed it and he got kind of surprised by that and then kissed me in the nose (which felt really weird, but not in a bad way).

I got out of bed first, and went and used his bathroom while he was putting on pants. Then I stood on my hind hooves and gave him a hug, and told him that I had to go to class. He was kind of sad that I had to go, and so was I.

Nevertheless, I was practically flying as I trotted through our neighborhood and back to campus.

I took a pretty direct route; I didn't want to be late to class.

I didn't really pay much attention in my morning classes: I was just thinking about Aric and imagining how things might go this weekend—it was Valentine's Day weekend, and from what Peggy had said, it was a time when humans (to use her words) hooked up. And hopefully that was what would happen with us.

When I got back to the dorm room from lunch, there was a new message on my telephone from Aric. I swished my tail excitedly while the telephone retrieved the message, then my ears drooped when I heard his voice saying that he was going to be at the theater really late so that he could finish up everything with the lights and have the whole weekend off.

It would have been nice to have spent another night with him, but I could wait. I was kinda in a bit of a funk, though. Luckily, Meghan and Lisa and Becky cheered me up in Equestrian class.

At dinner, Keith stopped by my table and asked if I wanted to stop over in his room tonight to get ready for tomorrow.

I wasn't sure how I needed to get ready, and he told me that people wore costumes to SCA events (they called it garb instead of costumes, though). Sort of like LARPing.

I said that I didn't really have anything to wear as a costume, and I doubted that they had anything fit for a pegasus. Keith said that was true, but Donald's sister Kathleen was visiting for the event, and she'd brought along her sewing supplies and could probably whip me up something appropriate to wear. He said that she'd said she didn't want to miss a chance to sew something for a pegasus.

That was the kind of offer I couldn't really refuse. It's mean to turn down an offer like that, and besides, I'd get a chance to maybe find out some more details about what this event was.

So I got directions to his room, and told him I'd be over a bit later. I still had to say goodbye to Peggy before she left for the weekend.

On the way out of the dining hall, I checked my mail, and there were two letters: one from Aquamarine, and one from my sister.

I put the letters on my desk to read later (I really should have read them right away), and then sat with Peggy on her bed until her telephone chirped and she looked down and said that her boyfriend was there.

I nuzzled her cheek and told her to have a good weekend, and she ran her hand through my mane and told me to have a good weekend as well, and to remember if I needed anything to call her, and she would come, no matter what.

Then she skipped out of the room with her duffel bag. I wasn't sure why she needed so much stuff for a weekend with her boyfriend.

When she was gone, I closed up our room and went over to Keith's. There was already a crowd in his room, and half of them were wearing costumes. Donald's sister Kathleen was in a commanding position in the center of the room, with a box of sewing supplies next to her. She was fixing the sleeve on Donald's shirt, but she stopped as soon as she saw me. She pressed the needle into his hand and told him that since he was studying to be a doctor, he ought to be able to finish mending the tear.

She was super-friendly. She wrapped me in a big hug, then introduced me to her husband, John Jacob. He was as friendly as she was, although he stopped short of a hug.

Kathleen said that what would look really awesome would be if I had a set of barding. I told her my cousin did because he's in the Guard, and she got a kind of wistful look in her eyes, but he's in Equestria and I'm here, so there wasn't much chance of getting it for tomorrow.

She said that I'd look great in a simple caparison, and that it wouldn't be that much trouble to make. A couple of years back, she'd made a coat of arms for all her friends—Keith showed me his, which was a little flag that hung from his belt—and she had some extras all sewn up.

It wasn't quite as simple as she made it sound; I was in the room for hours as she measured and cut and test-fit and then tried again. But it was worth it in the end. The main part was an off-white fabric that looked really nice against my coat, and she used leftover strips of that fabric to wrap my legs from the pastern to hock.

The herald—which is called a device—draped over my shoulders. It was a very stylized brown squirrel on its hind legs; in one paw it had a sword, and in the other a cookie.

Underneath that was the motto: Sanguis herbam alit. I asked her what it was, and she told me it was in Latin.

I knew that—everything important seems to be written in Latin. I don't think scientists want normal people to understand their stuff.

Unicorns do that too: they all use a different alphabet than the other tribes. That made them feel superior until ponies invented typewriters and telegraphs, and then they all had to learn to write like everypony else.

So I asked her what it said, and she said that the motto read 'Blood makes the grass grow,' and when she saw the look on my face, she laughed and said that it was a joke, that it was the motto of the heavy weapons fighters on campus.

So then she had to explain that. It turns out that a bunch of my friends role play with historical weapons, although they're modified so that they can't hurt each other. Sara uses a little sword called a foil (she's a little person), and Seth and Kennith and Keith and Aric fight with big weapons. She said that they would be at the event this weekend fighting a small battle.

I was a little concerned for their safety, but she assured me that it was all very safe.

She helped me out of my caparison—she hadn't had time to put on proper fasteners, so some of it was held together with safety pins—and I thought about going back to my room for the night, but then decided that I might as well stay with them. There were a lot of people in the room, and I knew I'd be lonely in my own room, so when I got tired I curled up on a pile of laundry that was in the corner and dozed off.

February 13 [Val Day]

February 13

When I woke up, I discovered that Kathleen was using me as a pillow. It was really cute. John-Jacob was snuggled against her; they'd covered themselves with one of the cloaks that they wore as part of their garb.

When I turned my head a little farther, I could see Donald by himself on the floor—he'd gotten a pillow from someone. I could see a pair of feet which I assumed were Keith's sticking out from under his covers, and looking the other way, I could see Malcolm's head. I didn't know when he'd come back; he hadn't been there when I fell asleep.

I stayed where I was for as long as I could; I didn't want to disturb anyone, especially not Kathleen. Humans mostly seem to be late risers; at least the students are. I guess not everyone is; when I go for my morning trots and flights, there are lots of cars on the road, and of course the people I see who are jogging.

By the time there was light in the room, people were getting up. Kathleen and John-Jacob woke up first, then they woke up Donald. We all took our turns at the bathroom, and then by the time we'd all finished, Keith was awake, too.

Pretty much everyone got dressed in the room, although Kathleen went into the bathroom to put on her bodice. She said that nobody wanted to see her boobs. John-Jacob said he wouldn't mind and reached out to grab one, so she smacked his hand.

I had to wait until she was dressed to have her dress me. If she'd had time to make mouth-friendly fasteners, I could have put on my caparison myself, but the safety pins were too finicky for me to use.

She ruffled my feathers a lot when she helped me get my wings through the slits in the fabric, and then she yelled at me when I started to preen them back into place—not a mean yell, just an impatient 'wait until I'm done getting this in place' sort of thing. I hadn't really meant to make it harder for her; it was just instinct to get my feathers back into order as quickly as possible in case I had to fly away.

When everyone was dressed, they asked me if I needed a ride to the event, and I said that I was going to go with Aric and that I probably ought to head over to his house soon. Keith volunteered to drive me there, to save some time. So everyone got together and decided what cars they were going to take. I went with Keith and Malcolm and Donald; we all crowded into his car which is called Montego. It was the most luxurious car I'd even been in, although I didn't really care for the smell of the seats.

He dropped me off in front of Aric's, and waited until I was let into the house by Sara.

She and I waited downstairs until Aric was ready, and then we all piled into Winston. The truck now had a cover on the back which Aric said was called a topper, and that he'd put it on because his armor and stuff was back there. It made the inside of the truck a lot darker; it blocked all the light coming through the big back window.

When we got there, I was kind of disappointed. The place was a boring-looking building not unlike the reception center had been. Aric said that it was the fairground and that I'd have to use my imagination some, but it was really more about the people than the location. He said that it was a shame that I hadn't come to Winter Revel in Ionia, because that was the best spot in Michigan for a SCA event—the building was absolutely perfect. Sara agreed with him.

So we went inside, and I was immediately struck by the change in atmosphere there. The building was still pretty mundane, but all the colorful costumes on the people made up for it.

Most of the outfits were really ornate and elegant. I'd gotten a bit of an expectation on what people might be wearing from what everyone had gotten dressed in this morning, but there were people wearing far fancier clothes. Women wore dresses that went all the way to the floor covered in needlepoint and lace, there was a man wearing a plaid skirt and out of the corner of my eye I caught a man wearing an all pink outfit that looked to be made entirely of satin or silk.

With all that, I almost instantly turned into the center of attention. Even before we got to the little registration desk, people were coming over wanting to talk to me and pet me. Well, the petting was mostly children. The adults were nice and respectful; the children thought I was the most adorable thing ever.

One girl with blonde hair and blue eyes almost the exact same shade as mine held out her hand and let me sniff it before she touched it lightly to my muzzle, and then she asked who I was. Aric had told me that everybody had their own persona (which is a fake personality, sort of like when LARPing), and that I ought to come up with something. Of course, I hadn't thought of anything so I just said I was Silver Glow (which was true!) and that I served in the second ile of Commander Hurricane's hipparchy (which wasn't true). Her eyes got really big, and she curtseyed to me.

I think I'll keep that as a persona. I actually felt a bit like a hero just saying it. Everypony knows that Commander Hurricane's hipparchy (along with the heavy lancers) crushed Princess Platinum’s coutilier and that was what made all the unicorns finally flee back to their castles.

We moved into the merchant hall next. Aric said that he always liked to look around and see what they had, and that the merchant hall wouldn't be there all day, anyway. They had to take down their stuff before the King and Queen held court.

This was a market like I was familiar with. There were lots of little stalls, and people at every one of them selling their wares. A lot of them—perhaps all of them—were the artisans themselves. I saw a jeweler making more beaded jewelry while she was talking to a potential customer, and a seamster stitching a pair of trousers.

There wasn't much that I needed, and most of the costume pieces wouldn't fit me anyway. But I found a gorgeous moonstone pendant on a silver chain that I just had to have, and the lady who'd made it agreed that it was just perfect for me.

Another man was selling swords and other weapons, and I considered buying one. I thought that would fit with my persona very nicely. He had a faussart—which he said was called a glaive—that I thought would be perfect. He thought it was funny that I would want a polearm, and asked how I would use it.

I told him that if he was willing to cut down the shaft a bit, I'd show him. So I pointed to how long it ought to be, and he cut it and then gave it to me.

I'll admit I'm not an expert with them; while we pegasuses all have some obligatory martial training, I'm no expert, and I'm sure my old instructor would have laughed me out of class for the demonstration I put on, but he was amazed—everyone who saw was—and then we got to talking tactics a little bit, and Aric weighed in, too.

I hadn't really considered how different human battle tactics would be: they only had to consider other soldiers on the ground, and made no consideration for spellcasters or fliers.

Well, the armorer was so impressed that he sold me the ~~faussart~~ glaive for half of what he'd originally been asking, and gave me his card and told me that he really wanted to spend some more time talking military tactics with me. He said that he lived in Battle Creek, which was not so far from Kalamazoo, and that perhaps we both had a lot we could learn from each other.

Aric said that he had to go and get ready for battle, and he leaned down so that I could nuzzle his cheek. I went around to a couple of the clothiers until I found one who had a bit of blue ribbon I could buy to put on my glaive, which made it into a proper weapon.

I met up with everyone else—they'd taken a corner in the main hall and were having a bit of a lunch snack—dark bread, several kinds of cheese, and a tube of meat the size of a donkey dick that Donald said was called a summer sausage. I wasn't too interested in that, but I had some bread and cheese. I wish I'd thought to bring some of my anchovies.

They also had several bottles of pop, which I also didn't want. I thought it would be nice to have had some beer; Kathleen said that this was a dry event, so beer wasn't allowed. I had to make due with water from the drinking fountain.

We were just finishing up when Aric came clanking back in, fully dressed in his armor and carrying his sword and shield. And it was nice, proper armor, all scuffed and dented, so you could tell that he'd been using it.

He had a quick snack and drank some pop and then he went off to join his team, and we all followed so that we could watch the fight.

In the hall behind the merchant's hall, they'd set up a small arena, which was fenced off with ropes. There was a small wooden structure that Aric said was meant to be a bridge—his shoulders dropped when he saw it.

There were a bunch of other people dressed in armor—I recognized Kennith and Seth and Keith; all the rest were strangers to me. Before too long, they formed into two groups. A herald announced that the objective of the battle was for one team to defend the bridge, and the other team was supposed to try and cross it.

I was curious to see some of the tactics put into action. Obviously, a pegasus brigade would never even bother trying to take a bridge—what's the point? Unless we had earth pony allies, it was smarter to break it so nopony else could use it. But I guess the humans would have to, if they couldn't go around it any other way.

The two sides came together enthusiastically, crashing their swords into each other. When someone 'died,' they'd walk out of the battle. If they were just injured, they weren't allowed to use that body part any more, so Seth fought the second half of the battle one-armed.

The advantage went to the bridge-keepers, which was Aric's team. They were able to form a tight group, and they fought together as a team very well. Kennith and Seth were particularly effective together; once Seth 'lost' his arm, Kennith covered that side of his body.

There was a lot of applause from the crowd, and a few disappointed sighs as well. But I thought it had gone very well.

By the time it was over, the merchants were gone from the main hall, and a pair of thrones had been set up in the center. We all stood around until the King and Queen came in, and then everyone bowed respectfully.

There were lots of awards given out—the herald announced each one, and then the person receiving the award would go forward and bow, and be presented with his honor. Aric and his team all went up together, to receive a commendation for winning the bridge battle: the King and Queen had been watching from the crowd, and thought that they had done very well.

After Court was over, everyone went to another hall for dancing. The first person I noticed was the man in pink—he was wearing a pink stuffed elephant over his crotch. Donald said that was called a codpiece, but normally it wasn't a stuffed elephant. I thought it was really funny.

The man in the plaid skirt was in charge of the dancing. Aric—who had changed out of his armor—said that he taught the dances at school on Wednesdays, and I said that I'd like to learn them.

One of the most fun ones to watch was called “Black Nag.” Aric danced with Sara, and during the hopping part (which I found out is called galumphing) he and John-Jacob would crash enthusiastically into each other. Nobody else did: Keith told me that was how Aric and John-Jacob liked to do that dance.

It was pretty late when we left. Aric said that rather than drive back to town, he'd gotten a hotel room, and that really raised my hopes—I knew what Peggy was doing in her hotel room. To my disappointment, we were sharing the room with pretty much everyone and I was pretty sure that humans liked to be private when they were having sex.

I got over my disappointment pretty quick, though. We hadn't been allowed to drink on site, but it was okay in the hotel room, and so we all had a few beers and then a friendly argument over who'd get beds and who would have to sleep on the floor. I didn't mind the floor so much, but lucked out and got to share a bed with Aric (who said that he deserved one, since he'd paid for the room) and Sara. I slept in the middle, which was the best spot.

And Kathleen and John-Jacob got the other bed, and everyone else huddled up on the floor.

Author's Note

I've take a few liberties here. Val Day is a real event; it really occurred on Feb 13, 2016. It is only a one-day event; in this story it's going to be two. I also didn't bother with having it accurately reflect the real schedule of events (heavy weapons fighting took place earlier in the day, for example).

The man in the pink Elizabethan costume with the elephant codpiece was a real attendee in 1996. Here we are 20 years later, and I still distinctly remember that outfit. If you want a good mental image of that outfit (and who doesn't!) picture THIS, but all in pink. And with an elephant codpiece.

February 15 [tomorrow]

February 15

Ugh. Mondays are the worst, especially after a long weekend of fun. I think I'm starting to change to the human schedule of staying up late and sleeping in.

Maybe that's why the one airplane director always sounds so grumpy. Maybe he doesn't like mornings.

I didn't have time for both a flight and a jog, and I figured that since I was walking around all weekend, it would be more appropriate to have a flight.

When I flew over the downtown, my focus was a little bit on the hotel and what Peggy had said about looking over the town, unseen by anyone. I could zip by the hotel and see if anybody else had that kind of thought in mind . . . but that would be impolite.

I did make a broad circle of it, but I didn't get close enough to be spying.

After my shower and breakfast, I dragged my tired tail into climate science class. Crystal pulled out her telephone and asked me if I knew I was trending on YouTube again. I didn't know what it meant to be trending—she said that meant that the movie of me was really popular.

I was curious what it had looked like to have the girl riding my back, so I asked her if she had the movie on her telephone and she nodded.

Luke wanted to see, too, so she leaned up against me and held the telephone out so that we could all see it together.

It was pretty funny. The girl had the most gleeful expression on her face, and Aric hadn't started filming until after I got over my initial confusion, so I didn't look completely bewildered by the situation. Determined, perhaps.

In philosophy class, we started on Kant. He said that God might not exist at all, since He couldn't be proven to exist. That was a strange departure from what Aquinas and Descartes had based their philosophy on, and I wondered why the change. The Greek philosophers hadn't known about Him, and then all of a sudden He was the foundation of philosophies and just as soon He was gone again, replaced with reason and deduction.

It was very confusing, and if things kept going on like this, I was going to get totally lost, so after class I asked my philosophy teacher if I could meet with her.

She said that she was free tomorrow (why is it always tomorrow?) so instead of having the whole afternoon free, I'll be meeting with her.

Still, it will be good to get some understanding of where these philosophers are coming from.

I thought about eating lunch in the dark room to spend some more time with everyone who had been at Val Day, but then I thought that Christine might miss me, so I sat down at my usual table and talked to her and Sean. I asked them what they'd done for Valentine's Day, and Sean's face got red. Christine muttered that they hadn't really done much of anything, that it had been pretty low-key.

For all the gossiping they do about other people's love-lives, humans don't seem to like to talk too much about their own. That's kind of strange. Most of the mares on my weather team would be more than happy to go into detail about what they'd done and with who. That was a good way to share ideas, and find out who was interested in what.

I wasn't feeling any more awake in Equestrian class. The teacher wanted to do a brief practice session with public transportation, and she showed the students a copy of an Equestrian train schedule. None of them had ever seen anything like it, which I couldn't understand. They had trains—how did they use them? Didn't they publish timetables so you'd know when your train was coming and when it was gonna get where it was going?

There were buses, too: I'd seen them throughout town. Buses ran on similar schedules to trains, didn't they? Did no one in class use a bus, either?

I asked Meghan, and she said that there wasn't any point with Uber. Instead of having to wait for a bus she could just push a button on her portable telephone and a car would come and get her.

So then I asked what about long distances, and she said that they could just use the internet to get an airplane or a train and that nobody actually used printed schedules any more.

That made a bit of sense to me. The internet is handy for lots of things, and maybe we should have learned more about it before we came to Earth, but there isn't an internet in Equestria and Miss Chestnut's explanations about it hadn't made a whole lot of sense to me back then.

I did eat dinner in the dark room. Once again, I got told that I was trending on YouTube, and a couple of people—Nancy and James—both told me that I was internet famous. That made me puff out my chest a bit, and I asked if anyone wanted my autograph, which made a lot of people laugh.

I started reading through Leviticus after dinner. There are a lot of rules to follow, and some of them were pretty confusing. Most of them involved either shunning or outright killing rulebreakers, and I didn't like that one bit, 'cause maybe you should try to see if they would stop breaking the rules first. Plus I remembered in Exodus that there had been ten commandments, and one of them had been 'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' so I wondered what had changed so quickly. I really needed to have another meeting with Pastor Liz. Maybe I could do that this weekend.

When I'd made it through Leviticus, I set the Bible aside and happened to look over at the two letters neatly tucked away on my desk that I still hadn't read. I'm such a bad pony!

Of course, just then my telephone rang and it was Aric and he was on his way to pick me up for Durak.

I went three games without losing, which made me really happy, and then he kept his promise and took me home with him afterwards.

I thought about what Peggy had said about us talking and figuring out what we wanted, and I probably should have right then and there, but we went right to bed and he was running his hands through my mane and it felt so nice that I didn't want to interrupt him. Then by the time he stopped fondling my mane and running his hands along my back (and I was nuzzling his chest and giving him little kisses) I was too sleepy to have a serious conversation. As I was drifting off, I thought to myself that maybe I'd do that tomorrow, and then I chuckled, since I'd been angry that my philosophy teacher wanted to put off that conversation until tomorrow and here I was doing the same thing.

February 16 [philosophy is like poetry]

February 16

I got woken up by a weird voice calling out 'Hey, listen!’ I jerked my head out of the pillow and got my legs under me, then almost fell over onto Aric. Beds aren't really made for standing on, and it wasn't helped by him rolling away from me. My wings weren't much use for balance, covered by the blankets as they were, and I began shaking the covers off my back even as I was still struggling to stay on my hooves. It was not a pleasant way to wake up, and it was all the more scary because I didn't know where the voice was coming from.

Aric rolled over and pawed at his bedside table until he found his telephone, and when he tapped the screen, the voice stopped. By that time, I'd managed to fully extricate myself from the covers, which had the side effect of removing them from Aric as well.

That in turn woke him all the way up, and just as I was settling back down, he picked up his telephone and looked at the screen.

'Hey, listen!' it shouted again, and he muttered something under his breath and then answered it.

He said something about a collect call, and then a moment later his face paled and he sat all the way upright in bed. His conversation was super-short, he only said one or two words at a time, things like 'how much?' and 'where?'

I wasn't sure what was going on. Peggy usually didn't speak in less than a full paragraph at a time when she was on the telephone, but a lot of stallions aren't as gossipy as mares, so maybe that was true here too.

When he was done with his odd conversation, he put the telephone down and reached beside the bed for his pants. Without turning around, he told me that he had to go, David (his roommate) had gotten arrested last night and he had to bail him out.

I wanted to know what he'd done to get arrested, and Aric said that he didn't know; David wouldn't say on the telephone, but that a week ago they'd—and then he stopped and told me that it wasn't important, the important thing was that he had to get David out of jail.

Then he pulled on his shirt and slipped his phone in his pocket and kissed me in the forehead and said that he was sorry.

Well, so was I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just flopped back into the bed and pulled the covers over myself and thought that maybe if I had Victoria's Secret underwear like Peggy I'd be more attractive.

Maybe I was cursed.

I shifted over to the left, to lie on his warm spot on the bed and bury my snout in the pillow which smelled like him. Then I scooped up the pillow I'd just vacated and clenched it to my chest and dozed back off for a little bit.

I woke back up as the first light of dawn was painting the room, and there was no Aric. I could have waited a bit later, but there was no reason to stick around.

After a brief stop in my dorm room, I spent my frustrations in the air. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day, one of those days where you can really see the clouds at different altitudes: a high deck of cirrus clouds, with a lower scattering of cumulus. It fit my mood well; gray clouds as far as the eye could see.

I finished my exercise by stripping off a bit of a wandering cumulus cloud and carrying it back down with me. This time I'd only taken a little piece, and I'd been able to concentrate it into a size not much larger than a pony.

I dragged it into the dorm with me and Peggy poked at it in wonder while I stripped out of my flight outfit.

She wanted to know what I was going to do with it, and I told her that I was going to use it to get an ice-cold shower. Well, she wanted to see that, so she joined me in the shower cubicle and I set it just above and then once I was sure she was clear, I bucked it to knock the rain loose.

Peggy held out her arm like she couldn't really believe what she was seeing, and promptly yanked it back out of the flow, but then she bravely stuck her arm back in. She wanted to know how I did it, so I explained to her how clouds work and how our inherent magic lets us manipulate them and stand on them. If I'd brought a bigger cloud, I could have stood on it, but then it probably wouldn't have fit through the door.

After the cloud had spit out the last of its rain and evaporated, there was a thin skim of ice on the shower room floor—nothing much, just a little glaze—and my wings were crackling with it. The joke would have been on me if the hot water hadn't been working, but it was, and it melted the ice admirably.

Some splashing was unavoidable, and Peggy got wet, which I hadn't intended, but she said that she didn't mind. I think she could tell that I hadn't had a good night, but she didn't say anything or ask any questions, and sometimes that's best.

Then when I was done she looked down at her shirt and said it looked like she'd been in a wet T-shirt contest and laughed. She said that she hoped that she didn't run into any of the boys in the hall between the bathroom and our dorm room, and I offered to get her dry clothes, but she said it was okay, if I could go around flashing everyone, so could she.

We didn't have any more time to talk than that; I got dried off and preened while she got a set of fresh clothes and went off to take a shower (after telling me that I'd gotten half of it done for her).

Her good humor made me in a better mood, and it only improved when I got to poetry class. Conrad could put a smile on anypony's face.

He began by reading us a poem called You Want To Grow Old Like The Carters. I didn't know who they were, but the poem made them sound like very good people. One of the students asked if Conrad was making a political statement, and his eyes twinkled (just like the Carters!) and he said that if serving the poor instead of playing golf was a political statement, then he guessed he was.

And then the student bristled and he was about to say something else—and I bristled, because I could feel a bit of tension in the room, and then Conrad looked right at me and asked me if I would be so kind as to read When You See Water to the class. So I did.

I knew about rivers, and I knew that rain and clouds and streams and rivers and snow and fog and oceans and springs are all the same thing, even though they look different and serve different purposes and I thought of the little cloud I'd taken this morning down from its place in the sky and I'd made it pour itself into the drain but then it would go back to a river or a stream and then to the sea and the sun would warm it or a pegasus would lift it and soon enough it would be a cloud again, repeating the cycle over and over again. Sometimes the water even gets captured in an engine but it doesn't stay there for too long before it's free again.

Then he had another student read Turning Madness Into Flowers, which was about how when people die they become oil. That seemed like an odd thing to become, although I knew that some plants could be squished to get oil out of them. Sometimes there are metaphors which I don't quite understand.

He left us with a final poem, called She, and it made me think of Peggy, even though it was written for Gloria Steinem. I thought I ought to read it for Peggy and see what she thought.

I didn't have a whole lot of free time in the afternoon, since I was meeting with my philosophy teacher. I read the letter from my sister, who was doing well and thought that I was very brave for visiting such a crazy place as America. She had a lot of questions for me, mostly about flying (since I'd told her all about how I had to take a test and wear special clothes), and of course she wanted to know if I had found a humanfriend yet and if so what was it like.

I told her about how organized the sky was here, but not in the way she'd expect, and told her about Aric and the nice weaponsmith I'd met and my new glaive and moonstone necklace and caparison, and I also included Acceptance because I thought it was a very good poem and maybe I needed to be reminded to let whatever will be, be.

When I met with my philosophy professor, she explained to me how humanity had always been coming up with ideas about if there was a God or maybe several gods, and that as far as she understood it, the two major questions were always where did we come from and where did we go after we died. She said that different cultures approached those questions in different ways.

I said that Liz had told me I ought to read the Bible and that would tell me who God was and the professor sighed and said that that might not have been the best approach. I wasn't sure why she would say that; I thought Liz had given me pretty good advice, even if I was having trouble understanding everything in the Bible but I hadn't made it very far yet.

So the professor told me that faith and science were two different things, and that sometimes philosophy tried to be science even if maybe it wasn't, while faith was faith, and didn't need science to prove it. She also told me that it was important to be aware that all the philosophers only understood what was known at the time they lived, and their philosophy reflected it.

She said that she understood I would have problems comprehending it fully; she didn't think I knew enough about human history to fully grasp the cultures that had produced the men who wrote the philosophy, and it was important to be aware that there wasn't necessarily a 'right' answer. Philosophy was about the understanding of ourselves and our societies.

That sort of cleared things up for me. Philosophy was sort of like poetry, in that it was supposed to make ourselves look at things in new ways that we hadn't considered before.

She said that she'd never heard anyone make that comparison before. So I felt pretty proud of myself for that.

After dinner, I did my homework and then checked my Facebook and found out that I had a whole bunch of messages and people who wanted to be new friends because they'd seen my YouTube video and it was kind of overwhelming. By the time I was done talking to all of them it was getting pretty late at night and I was about to turn off my computer and go to sleep when I got inspired and took out the card that the weaponsmith had given me and sure enough I found him on Facebook (my computer is so clever) and asked him to be my friend.

I was kind of nodding off at the computer, so before I got a reply from him I told it to sleep, and then I went to bed myself.

February 17 [Hot Tub]

February 17

I dunno why, but when I woke up I had the feeling that today was going to be a good day. I might have had a good dream (but if I did, I didn't remember what it was). Some days are days that just feel right, and today was one of those days.

I started with a quick trot around the neighborhood. I did stop by Aric's house and fly around in back and look through the window but he was asleep and he looked pretty cute when he was sleeping and I knocked lightly on the window but he didn't wake up 'cause he'd gotten up so early to get David out of jail then I trotted back towards campus.

I was already wearing my vest; I don't know why I hadn't thought of doing that sooner. It was a little uncomfortable to trot around with it on, but I figured I could get used to it. Humans wore clothes when they were exercising, so I ought to be able to as well.

Before I was even back to campus, I lifted off. I was just that enthusiastic to fly. It defeated the purpose of trotting, and I had to keep reminding myself to keep my hooves on the ground, so my trip back was really more of a set of long jumps.

Very long jumps.

I could have taken off from anywhere, I know. It just felt right leaving from the snowy quad. I asked the airplane controller for permission to fly, and he said I could. It was the deep-voiced man. I asked him if he wanted a weather report (sometimes I hear them ask the airplanes that are flying what the weather is doing in a particular place) and he said yes, so I told him that I would let him know once I got to altitude, and then I took off into the sky.

I love flying at dawn. I can see the world waking up under me, and it's so pretty. The buildings have yellow and orange and blue-white lights around them, and the cars make their own lights on the street. When I look above, I can see airplane lights all over the sky. Then the sun starts to come up and it lightens the sky and I can't see the airplanes anymore unless they're leaving contrails behind them. Soon enough all the pretty lights of the night are washed out and vanish. The cars appear, and the buildings do too.

When I crested in the sky, I made a big, lazy circle, feeling the air ruffling my feathers. I let myself become a plaything of the air currents, going where the sky wanted me to go. Soon enough I would have to return to the ground and sit through classes, but for now I was free.

Up in the sky there are no borders.

I let the solitude wash over me. I kept my eyes heavenward.

All good things must come to an end: a pony can't fly off in one direction forever. When I felt that I was completely relaxed and one with the sky, I angled up just a little bit, bleeding off my slight forward momentum, and flew in place. I now knew the sky and what it promised. I dutifully told the airplane controller what the weather was and what it would be, then I dropped down and did a big loop and a couple of wing rolls, picking up some speed as I went. I zoomed through the sky like a hawk, and just as quickly I reached an apex and glided out like an albatross, then I headed back to campus and classes.

My morning just flew by. Philosophy felt easier now that I knew that it wasn't a certain thing. I ought to have met with the professor sooner. I still didn't get the historical context: the classes we'd had back in Equestria had only covered the most basic stuff.

Lunch was pizza, and that was really nice. Christine still didn't like pizza days, but I thought that they were fine. I did have the good sense to pick more carefully this time and not overeat. A full belly is nice; a distended belly is uncomfortable.

In Equestrian class, we talked about Canterlot. The teacher named off lots of different monuments, and that was kind of funny because there were ones that I had never even heard of. I would have expected that I'd know more about Canterlot than anyone in class, but I was wrong. So it was a really fun class for me, as well.

After class was over, Meghan asked me if I was doing anything tonight, and I told her that I didn't have any plans. She kind of had a nervous look to her (if she'd had a tail, she'd have been flicking it) and she said that ever since I'd borrowed their bathtub she'd been thinking about how her aunt and uncle who lived in Kalamazoo had a hot tub and she wondered if I'd be interested in using it sometime like maybe tonight because they weren't home and she had a key.

That sounded like it would be a lot of fun, so of course I said yes.

I was going to ask her if I could invite anybody else to join us, but then I remembered that Aric had to work in the theatre tonight because the play was starting tomorrow night.

She was really happy about that, and said that I could come to her room after dinner and she'd get us an Uber-car.

So I kinda ate a light dinner. Christine looked at my plate and joked that I'd eaten too much pizza for lunch again, and I assured her that wasn't the case, and told her what I was doing this evening.

Joe and Sean both stopped eating and looked at me and then back at each other, which was kind of odd. Christine hit Sean in the stomach with her elbow, then she asked me how well I knew Meghan. I said that I knew her pretty well; we'd gone on a road trip together and that had been a lot of fun.

Christine told me to make sure I let Peggy know where I was going, and then turned to Sean and told him that he needed to get his mind out of the gutter which I don't know why she thought it would have been in there in the first place.

Then she put a pea on her spoon and flicked it at Joe and told him that the same thing applied to him as well.

I wonder if humans find us as strange as I find them sometimes.

When I was done eating, I stopped back by my dorm room but Peggy wasn't there, so I left a note on her desk telling her what I was going to do and then went over to Meghan's room.

Just like she said, she called for an Uber and pretty soon a sleek silver car called Elantra arrived. The driver was kind of taken aback by me, and for a moment I thought he might leave, but he opened up the car and let us in.

It was a ways to her aunt's house. I tried to follow along with where we were going, but there were so many streets it was hard to keep track of them all. We went south on Westnedge for a while and then turned left Romence Road, and then I got completely lost.

We wound up in a nice little neighborhood and the Uber pilot let us out in a driveway.

Meghan walked up to the house with me following. Rather than go into the house like I thought she would, she opened a gate beside the garage (that's where some people store their cars) and we went through the backyard. The snow was a bit trodden down, but not too much. This wasn't a route that people walked too often.

I followed her up a set of steps and to a small deck. There was a big wooden box which it turned out was the hot tub.

It was interesting being on the backside of the house. From the front, there were lots of other houses pretty close, but when I was here, between the fence and the trees, I couldn't see any of them. It looked out to a small woods, and in the fading light I could see a stream meandering through the trees.

Even before Meghan took the cover off, I could feel the heat. She asked if I minded if it was outside, and I said I didn't.

She opened the door on a wooden locker, which had a bunch of towels neatly stacked up, and then she took off her jacket and pushed it into a cubby. Then she looped up her hair in a loose bun.

I might not be an expert in human body language just yet, but I could tell that she was tensing a little bit as she reached up for a button on her blouse. She fumbled with it and told me to make myself comfortable in the hot tub, so I waded right in.

There was a little bench that ran around the perimeter, and then the center was deep. A human could have stood up in it without any problems, but I would have to crane my neck to keep my nostrils above water if my hooves were on the floor.

Meghan unbuttoned her blouse and took off her shoes and socks and then looked at me as if she were waiting for something, then stepped out of her pants and blouse and put them in the little wooden locker and stepped into the hot tub. She walked over the bench and stood in the deeper water and asked if it would be okay if she took off her bra.

I told her that it would be fine by me, so she reached behind her and unfastened it and pulled her arms out of the shoulder straps all while holding it to her chest. She sank a little deeper in the water, sitting on the bench, and almost got it wet before she pulled it off (still keeping one arm over her breasts) and put it on the edge of the tub.

Then she scooched just a little bit lower in the water and stretched out her arms on the edge of the tub and got a smile on her face.

I did, too: social bathing is always nice, and it was something that I didn't think humans would like at all. So I was happy that we were doing it, and I relaxed and let the water warm me up, despite the chilly air above the hot tub.

We stayed on opposite sides of the tub for a while, then Meghan suggested if we moved towards the center we'd be able to get a better view of the woods and stream. I thought she just wanted to sit closer to me, and she should have just said that.

It did make the opposite side of the tub look a bit lonely, and I said that maybe next time more people would want to come, but she said that it was more intimate with just two.

She took her arm off the rim of the tub and wrapped it around my shoulder, and I leaned up against her side and we just sat there together watching the silent forest. She told me that in the springtime, there were deer over there and bats and birds and there was a lot to see. I told her that it was just as interesting as it hibernated.

We stayed there I don't know how long. I was really relaxed and warm and happy, and she'd completely gotten over her earlier tenseness as well. Then it was finally time to get out and Meghan asked me if I'd need help drying off.

I told her that would be kind. I could shake a bunch of the water off me but it's always easier to get all the way dry with help.

So she let me get out of the tub first and I shook off as much water as I could, then she had me go to the wooden locker and get her a robe—there were several of them folded up with the towels.

When I had it, she climbed out of the tub. I gave her the robe and she wrapped it around herself and then she tied it around herself and reached underneath to get her wet underwear off.

Then Meghan started rubbing me down, until I was nice and dry. She was really good at it, and paid close attention to everything, having me lift my legs one at a time so she could get them, and toweling under my belly and carefully drying my tail as well. She squatted down to make sure she did a good job.

Once she was finished with me, she got dressed herself. She put on her pants under her robe, but had to take it off to get her bra and shirt on. She called an Uber before she put on her socks and shoes, and then she laughed and said that she hoped it wouldn't be too long before it got here.

While we were waiting, she asked me if I'd had a good time and I said that I had, and she asked me if it was something I wanted to do again, and I said that I would like to.

We snuggled up in the back of the Uber-car as it drove us back to campus. When we got back to the dorm, I gave her a nuzzle and she leaned down and pushed back my forelock and kissed me on the forehead, then we went back to our rooms. Peggy still wasn't back, so I took my note off her desk and was going to toss it into the recycling bin, but then I thought that if Meghan and I were going to do this again, I probably ought to keep the note. So I tucked it in the back of my notebook and went to bed.

February 18 [Letter from Aquamarine]

February 18

There was a light snow falling when I got up, so I went outside and let the snow fall on me for a bit before I started my trot around the neighborhood. More of it stuck to me before I warmed up enough for it to melt right off.

I can tell spring is coming because the days are getting longer. Sunrise is earlier each morning: on Earth this is because the whole planet tips on its axis, wobbling like an unstable top. It's a kind of ridiculous system; it would make so much more sense if the Earth were nice and stable like Equestria and the sun just changed its path through the sky. Maybe when God created the Earth and humans to put on it, He thought they wouldn't follow instructions and so He had to come up with a different way of making seasons work.

(At least He kept weather the same. I would have been so confused if it had been different.)

It was going to be light snowfall most of the day, I thought. I'd have a better idea if I was up in the sky, but from down on the ground, it felt like the clouds were going to stick around.

When I’d gotten around the neighborhood and back to campus, I got permission for a short flight and zipped into the sky to dance with the snowflakes. I couldn't get up too high, because the clouds were low, but I skirted their bottoms while keeping my ears alert for approaching airplanes.

I went a bit west, not quite all the way to the Maple Hill Mall before I turned back around and made a long descending approach to campus. Some pegasuses are really good at gliding and can go a really long ways. In fact, there are gliding competitions which I've watched before. The trick is to be as aerodynamic as possible and make the fewest possible course corrections, because turning robs you of airspeed.

I probably wouldn't have impressed anyone with my glide back to campus. A foal could have done it; between the hill and my starting altitude relative to the distance I had to go, I was gliding down at a thirty degree angle or so. Not very skillful.

I made one loop around the bell tower and landed, then headed to the shower to wash off the sweat and all the snow that had stuck to my wings.

Since I was done with my morning routine a bit earlier than usual, I read through Aquamarine's letter. She said that it was still confusing to be on such a big campus where most everybody didn't know everybody else and that her dorm was noisy all the time with radios playing and people up and talking and sometimes partying late into the night. She said that that sometimes made it hard to sleep, but that it was nice in the mornings because everybody was quiet.

She had gotten several potted plants and kept them on the windowsill and they were doing alright. She was working in the greenhouses a lot, which she said was fun, and that I wouldn't believe how big they were. She said her family farm back in Ponyville would have fit inside the greenhouses, along with their house and if the greenhouses were taller, the barn would have fit, too.

She said that south of campus there were research farms with research animals and she'd had to go there when one of her shoes had worked loose because there was a farrier there and she got to look at some big Earth horses up close, and it was true what we had been taught that they weren't all that smart. Not even as smart as Equestrian sheep.

That struck me as kind of sad. What if we had wound up that way? How did it feel to be a dumb animal anyway? I couldn't imagine what it must be like.

I started to write her back about how I had gone on a road trip to Pennsylvania and that almost everyone I'd met so far was nice and friendly. I told her about my friends and about Aric and then before I could finish the letter, it was time to go to class.

I sat in my favorite chair and waited for Conrad to arrive. He was in a playful mood today; he said 'expect nothing' as he walked through the door. He stood behind his desk and said 'live frugally,' and then he unbuttoned his coat and added 'on surprise,' as he pulled off his coat and revealed that underneath he was wearing a t-shirt that said Mötley Crüe on it. A bunch of the kids in class began laughing when they saw it. I wasn't sure what was funny.

Then he sat down in his chair and finished reading the poem, which was called Expect Nothing.

That was a good motto for life.

Next, he had a student read A Picture Story For The Curious. I tried to imagine how I might look meditating on a chair or against a wall. I've heard that when zebras meditate they stand upside down on one hoof and if they're really wise they do it while balancing on a stick.

There was also a brief stanza about growing a garden in a pot, and I thought about Aquamarine fretting over her plants on the windowsill of her dorm room—I bet they were thriving.

And there was a part in the poem about snuggling all morning with her lover, and I sighed at that.

We talked about the poem a little bit, about how it's a poem about growing up and growing old. Conrad chuckled and said that he didn't know how to speak German and probably never would, and he asked us what things some of our grandparents didn't know how to do.

The first student who raised her hand said that her grandmother didn't know how to use a smartphone, and there were a few chuckles, and Conrad asked her if she thought that her grandmother had thought of using a smartphone when she was young. He said that he ought to have been more clear; the poem was about a skill or a dream which had never been fulfilled.

I raised my hoof.

It took a little bit before he got around to me, and I told the class that my granddam had never learned how to read; she'd only taken one year of school before her mother pulled her out of class saying that the teacher was filling her head with stupid ideas that no pegasus would ever need to know.

There were a couple of chuckles in class, and then Trevor raised his hand and said that his grandfather also had been illiterate. From the way he tensed his shoulders, it was obvious to me that Trevor was just waiting for somebody to chuckle, but nobody did.

Conrad finished off the class by reading Knowing You Might Someday Come, and that also made me think of Aric. Maybe I ought to make a list of all the things I liked about him. He was a good snuggler, and he smelled delicious; those were important qualities. Alice Walker was a very wise woman to think of all these things.

I passed the afternoon finishing up my letter to Aquamarine. I wanted to know if she had plans for spring break—ours was coming up soon, but Kalamazoo College had a different type of schedule than Michigan State did.

She'd told me that Michigan State had a very good basketball team and that they were probably going to go on to the finals. Last year, she'd told me, they were in the Final Four, but got defeated by Duke.

I didn't know if we had a basketball team. I supposed that they probably did but I'd have to ask Peggy to know for sure.

I sealed up the letter and mailed it on my way to dinner.

Almost as soon as I sat down, Christine asked Sean if he would get her another glass of pop, even though hers was half full. She said that it tasted funny and she wanted something else, so he got up and went across the room to the pop machine. As soon as he was gone, Christine leaned across the table and asked me how last night had gone.

Christine said that she thought Meghan was furry, and I said I was pretty sure only in one spot and then Christine started laughing and said I was so adorably clueless sometimes. She said Meghan had made a pretty clear invitation for sex, at least from how I was describing it. Then Sean arrived with her drink and she changed the subject, but it left me with something to think about.

Tomorrow was the opening night of the play, and Aric had invited me to watch it from the light control booth. He said that then I could come over to his house after the play was over, and since it would be a Friday night, we could stay up late.

February 19 [play]

February 19

I had a lot on my mind this morning: both that I was going to spend the night with Aric and that if Christine was right, Meghan was interested in me as a partner. I was going to have to ask her about it after Equestrian class, but maybe alone just in case she was embarrassed by it.

My morning classes went by quickly, and I ate a light lunch so that I was early to Equestrian class in case Meghan came alone, but she didn't. She was with Lisa and Becky, and I wasn't sure how much she'd told them. I know that I would have told my marefriends but humans were different about stuff like that.

So I had to wait until after class, and then I asked if I could talk to her for a little bit. She told Lisa and Becky that she'd catch up to them, and then she crouched down in front of me.

Rather than flap around the sky, I just asked her directly if she was interested in having sex with me, if that was what Wednesday night had been about.

I told her that one of my friends had said that she was furry even though I'd only seen one furry patch when her robe came open while she was putting on her pants and she blushed and sort of slid down to her butt and looked up and down the hallway, and then motioned for me to sit next to her.

She said that my friend had probably meant a furry, and then explained to me what that meant. She said that a lot of people thought that was weird, but it didn't sound all that weird to me.

Meghan told me that she really liked my personality, and that I was cute, too. She said that she wanted to be my friend and she'd seen how much fun I was having in their bathtub and thought I'd enjoy the hot tub.

Well, I had enjoyed it, and I told her so. Then I stretched up and kissed her on the cheek and headed off to dinner and only then did it occur to me that I hadn't really gotten an answer.

I had a little bit of free time between dinner and when I was supposed to meet Aric at the theatre, so I played around in the snow on the quad. Christine and Sean and Peggy joined me and we had a short boys vs. girls snowball fight (Sean didn't think that was very fair).

I shook off the snow that was on me as I walked past the statue of the crabs fucking and followed the sidewalk through the parking lot until I came to the Balch Playhouse.

The door to the upstairs wasn't well-marked, but I found it and pretty soon I was in what Aric had called the lighting booth.

Just past the door was a huge bank of electric machines, humming and whirring away. Then past that room was another room with banks of controls; there was a man in a buttoned shirt sitting there with a set of headphones on. He scowled when he saw me, but I ignored him.

In the next room, Aric was sitting at a console that had a big computer screen and banks of sliders. The whole place looked like some futuristic spaceship, almost like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, especially with the big windows that looked over the house and stage below.

I nuzzled against his hip and he reached down and petted my mane and then pointed to a chair where I could sit and watch. I pulled it over so that I was a bit closer to him.

He was moving the sliders on the control board, and I could see lights going on and off. Each time he ran a set of lights, he'd make a mark on a legal pad, and I realized that he was running through a checklist. When he finally got done, he went over to a spotlight and turned that on, then he sat back in his chair.

He told me that he was still waiting for Lisa, the spotlight operator to show up. Just when he said that, I suddenly heard the crash of thunder, and only a moment later realized that it was a sound effect. The scowly man in the next room was testing his equipment.

It wasn't until all the theatre had fallen silent again that Lisa finally showed up. She was a really skinny girl with short dark hair. I'd seen her around a couple of times, but didn't really know her very well.

She and Aric chatted a bit about the show and I just stayed back out of the way. I could tell when somebody was getting their professional face on.

Then Lisa went over to her spotlight and they both put on their headsets. They had a little microphone on an adjustable boom, and Aric turned his up and out of the way.

He told me a little bit about the play that they were doing, which was called Bad Jews. I didn't really get it, but I figured once I saw the play it would all make sense.

Suddenly, mid-sentence, he spun on his chair back to the board and pulled his microphone down. He said 'Standing by' into it, and put his hands on the control board. I peered out the window and suddenly realized that the house was full of people: I'd been so busy concentrating on Aric, I hadn't even known they were there.

A few seconds later, he said 'house lights, going,' and began to pull some sliders down. When they reached the bottom, he said 'house lights, complete,' and then just waited.

I learned pretty quickly that that was how their radio commands worked. He would stand by, then be going, then be complete.

Lisa didn't have as much to do. She mostly sat in a chair watching out the window, but I could tell that she was familiar with the play. She stood up and walked over to her spotlight, and then a minute later, I heard her say 'follow spot, standing by.' Then when she was done with her duties, she sat down in her chair and leaned back.

Aric finally brought the house lights up for the intermission, and asked me what I thought of the play so far. I admitted that I hadn't really been watching it that much, but it was interesting to be in the control room. Lisa said sometimes it was boring, and I told her I didn't think I'd get bored. She said that she knew some of the lines better than the actors by now and thank God they weren't doing a musical. Then she and Aric looked at each other and both of them began quietly singing a song which it turns out was from the play Company that they'd put on last year. Aric said he'd probably be cursed to remember the song for the rest of his life.

The intermission lasted exactly fifteen minutes. I watched the clock, and Aric must have been as well. He was already back in place when he acknowledged that he was standing by for the house lights.

I was just fascinated watching them work. I didn't pay as much attention to the play as I ought to have, so I was still a bit lost about why the Jews were bad.

When the play was finally over, I had to wait until Aric wrapped up his job. He made a couple of notes on his yellow paper and then he left the control room with me following.

I cuddled up with him on the ride to his house and when we got there he went to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth and I thought that maybe I ought to get another toothbrush that I could leave at his house if I was going to be spending a lot of time here because my teeth would be fuzzy in the morning.

He got ready for bed while I was peeing, and when I came back he was already lying in bed with his eyes closed. I lay down next to him and curled up with my head on his chest.

Aric asked me what I'd thought about the play and I said that I hadn't really paid all that much attention because it was just fun to watch him.

He hugged me close and said that it was fun to have me up there with him, too, and it was good just to be with me. I told him that he could do so much more with me, and he tensed up and said that he wasn't ready for that yet.

I rolled away from him and he followed, turning on his side and putting his arm around me and said that he was sorry but he wasn't sure what my boundaries were and he hadn't wanted to push me to do something I didn't want to do.

I rested my hoof on his hand and told him that if it had been up to me, we would have been having sex on the couch after the Super Bowl although Peggy had kind of put a damper on that—and I told him that I was glad she had, because I hadn't been thinking about things from his point of view and how hard it must be for him to think about.

He said that he wasn't so worried about what other people thought but it was just hard to prepare himself mentally and he knew that sounded dumb. I told him it didn't sound dumb at all; I'd fantasized about having sex with a griffon for years but when I finally got the opportunity it was really weird and awkward and we sort of muddled through it and I don't think either of us were satisfied when it was over.

Of course I know a lot more now than I did back then. Hopefully that griffon does, too.

I asked him if he would be comfortable taking off his underwear at least. He said that people might get the wrong idea and I asked him who was going to come into his bedroom and see? So I kind of got the idea that he might be uncomfortable being naked with me.

I rested my head on his chest and told him that he didn't have to if he didn't want to and we snuggled for a little bit.

I was almost asleep when I felt him shift under me and reach his hand down and kind of wiggle around, and then he pulled his underwear from under the covers and asked me if that was better.

I said that I thought it was.

Author's Note

Bad Jews is actually the play which Kalamazoo College presented in the Winter Quarter, but I moved it up one week.

February 20 [ugh]

February 20

I woke up at the first light of dawn, even though it had been kind of a late night last night. I guess I'm still on a more Equestrian schedule. I can't decide if I like that, or if it would be better if my internal clock shifted a bit later.

Aric was pressed up against my back, curling against me for my body heat and maybe something else, since he was hard against my rump. I hoped he wouldn't try anything from this position; my tail would get in the way and could get sprained if we got too enthusiastic.

But then I realized he was still asleep, and I rolled onto my belly, carefully so not to disturb him too much. He grumbled a bit in his sleep but adapted to our new arrangement.

I stretched my wing out over his side, because he'd pushed the covers back some and I thought he might be cold, and I put my forehead against his to let our breaths intermingle. Then I dozed back off again.

When I woke for the second time, he was running his hand through my mane. It felt really nice, and I didn't open my eyes right away because I thought he might stop if he saw I was awake. But my tail probably gave me away: I couldn't help it. My body knows what it wants even if my mind tries to slow it down.

I tucked my head up under his chin and contented myself with letting him run his hand over me. He knew that I was awake, though, and pretty soon he stopped and said that we ought to get up before too long. I told him that I didn't think that there was any real hurry, especially since we weren't being interrupted by telephone calls.

He chuckled and said that I had a good point.

We snuggled for a little bit like that, then he said that his other arm was asleep and rolled onto his back and I put my head down on his chest and reached a hoof just a little bit under the covers and lifted up the blanket.

Aric pushed it back down and asked me what I was doing, and I told him that I wanted to see and I wouldn't touch unless he wanted me to. He said that I was being silly but after a little bit he finally took his hand off the blanket and told me that I could.

I flicked my tail eagerly, but I'd made a promise and I meant to keep it, so I just lifted the covers up high enough to get a good look. It wasn't quite the same as a stallion's, but it was pretty close. Certainly close enough to work.

When I was finally satisfied with my inspection, I let the covers drop back down and nestled up against his chest and let him run his hands over me for a while. He really liked playing with my wings and I let him, even though he was messing up my feathers a little bit.

Eventually we got up. I sat on the bed and preened my feathers while he took a shower and got dressed, and then we drove to a wooden restaurant called Cracker Barrel.

It was a bit crowded and confined, and I probably would have been uncomfortable if I wasn't with him. But the food was good, and we had a good breakfast talk. He was a little more relaxed than he'd been in the morning.

We had to kind of rush on the way back because there was a matinee performance of the play on Saturday before the night showing, and he said that he was running a bit later than he wanted to, especially since he had to fix one light that had stopped working during yesterday’s performance. So he drove to the theatre parking lot and we kissed and he went off to work in the theatre while I went back to my dorm room to get my vest so that I could fly around a bit and work off some of the tension in me.

I didn't land until it was nearly dinnertime. Peggy was in our room doing homework when I got back and she said that she'd missed me. Then she asked if I'd had a good night with Aric, and I said that it could have been better, but we'd had breakfast at Cracker Barrel and gotten a lot of stuff worked out and hopefully next time would be my night. I told her I was a bit frustrated by the slow progress, but she said that maybe that was for the best. It wasn't what I wanted to hear, but she was probably right.

Ugh, I hate it when things get complicated. I just want to have some fun with someone I like.

Peggy and I went to dinner together. It was Italian again, and this time I avoided the noodles and just stuck with salad.

After dinner, since I didn't have any other plans, I went back to Christine's dorm room with Sean, and watched some more Star Trek. There was one episode I thought was particularly cute that had little furry things called Tribbles, which reminded me a lot of parasprites. There had been an infestation of them in Fillydelphia when I was a foal, and there was a little while where we really had to stretch our food because of everything they'd eaten. So I saw right away that they were bad, but the crew of the Enterprise didn't realize it as quickly as they ought to have.

Then we started hearing sirens outside, more than was normal. I picked up on it first, and then Christine said something about it too, and checked her telephone to see if it knew what was going on.

While she was looking, Sean said that the police department also fights fires in Kalamazoo, and there was probably a big fire somewhere in town, and that's where they were all going. He said that if he wanted to rob a bank, he'd start a fire on the other side of town first.

Then Christine said that it wasn't a fire, that there had been someone who was driving around town shooting people and nobody knew who he was or where he was or why he was doing it but he’d just shot two people at a car dealership on Stadium Road, which ran right by campus.

That made me really nervous, but Christine said that it was probably safe here. It really put a damper on the mood, though, and none of us felt like watching any more Star Trek. I said that I ought to go back to my dorm room to make sure Peggy was okay and they thought that was a good idea and offered to walk with me.

I thought that might make it more dangerous for them, and said that I'd be fine because I could fly and they couldn't. So they walked down with me to the front door and we looked through the windows to make sure that there weren't any strange cars waiting nearby, and then they opened the door and I took off almost straight up to get some altitude.

I relaxed a little bit when I got back to Trowbridge. I could see Peggy through our window, so I dropped down and went through the front door and then galloped up to our dorm room.

She didn't have any idea what was going on, so I told her and she got really pale. She checked to make sure that our door was locked while I was sending a telephone telegram to Christine to tell her that I was alright, and I sent one to Aric too, even though I knew he probably wouldn't see it until after he was done with the play.

Peggy found a news video on her computer and we both sat together on her bed watching it and trying to get a sense of what was going on. It kept getting worse, and unlike a rampaging monster that's pretty easy to find and avoid, nobody knew who was doing it or why or where he might strike next.

Then we just huddled together in her bed, because there was nothing else we could do.

February 21 [aftermath]

February 21

I woke up in Peggy's bed, and I was really confused at first, then what had happened last night came crashing back at me all at once.

She hadn't even gotten under the covers—the last thing I remembered I had been asleep on her lap—and it looked like she'd just tumbled over when she fell asleep.

I lifted her head and put a pillow under it, then since I couldn't get her under the blankets, I just gave her mine. Then I took my journal and sat back down beside her so that I'd be there when she woke. I didn't think it would be right to leave her alone at all.

It was always weird to see that it was the same outside today as it had been yesterday. There's a sort of sense of relief, but it's kind of guilty relief.

I'd just finished up my journal entry when Peggy woke up. She had dark circles under her eyes and it didn't look like she'd slept much at all. She looked pretty miserable overall.

I leaned forward and nuzzled her cheek and she put her arms around me and hugged me and asked if I was all right, and I assured her that I was.

She said that it was a terrible thing that had happened and that there had been no reason for it, then she bowed her head into my mane and began crying until she couldn't cry any more.

We were still embracing when my telephone rang and I was going to ignore it, but she said that I ought to answer it. So I did, struggling with the little buttons, while she wiped away her tears.

It was Mister Salvatore, and he said that he was coming over so we could talk about what had happened last night. The way he said it, I didn't think that there was much room for protest, so I told Peggy and she said that she ought to make herself presentable and she was sorry that she was such a wreck. Then she told me not to leave her, and I said that I wouldn't, so we went to the bathroom together and I stood guard outside the shower, talking to her through the metal partition.

Rather than get dressed, she just put on a t-shirt and lounge pants and I sat on her bed with her until Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn came.

At first, she stood by the door, while Mister Salvatore sat in my desk chair and asked me if I was okay. I told him that I was fine; a little shaken up, but otherwise okay. Then he asked Peggy if she was all right, and she said that she was not all right because she was sick and tired of how this bullshit just kept on happening and nobody did anything about it. She stormed out of the room then, and Miss Cherilyn went out the door right after her.

It took me a moment to react, because Peggy had moved so quickly, but I jumped off the bed and was out the door as well before Mister Salvatore could stop me.

I saw Miss Cherilyn turn to go down the stairs and figured that was which way Peggy had gone, so I took to the air and leapfrogged over Miss Cherilyn. It was a tight squeeze between her head and the ceiling, but I made it. Then I just followed the stairs down until I was right next to Peggy.

I didn't say anything—I didn't think I needed to. Peggy had a look of determination on her face, and I was going to stay with her because I'd told her I would, and I thought she still needed me.

Peggy smiled at me and said that she was going to Christine's and she really didn't want to talk to either of them (I knew who she meant) right now while she was still raw but I could if I wanted.

I turned back and saw both of them following along, although they weren't rushing at all. Miss Cherilyn was talking urgently to Mister Salvatore. I could barely hear them, but she said something about Colorado and he hung his head and slowed down even more.

I knew it was rude and maybe unwise to leave them behind, but that's what I did. Peggy was more important to me.

I don't know what she would have done if someone hadn't opened the door, but Cecilia did and let us in and Peggy flopped down on the papasan and I sat next to her. Pretty soon Christine came out just wearing a long t-shirt and she gave Peggy a big hug. Sean came out of her room also only half-dressed, and then Amanda joined us in the lounge, too.

Nobody really said much of anything: there wasn't anything to say. I could feel how tense Peggy was; she kept clenching her fist on my back.

Amanda looked out the window and asked who the two people that looked like FBI that were standing outside were, and Peggy growled that they were with me, and then she softened and said that we probably ought to let them in before they froze to death.

Christine asked if we were in some kind of trouble, and Peggy said that we weren't, that they were just my minders but the last thing she wanted to do right now was talk to them.

Amanda went to let them into the building, and she was gone for some time. When she came back in, she hugged Peggy and told me that they were both sitting on the stairs by the front entrance. She said that they'd asked if we were okay, and she'd told them that we were.

I don't know how long we sat there. Christine went back to her room and got dressed, and Cecilia brought Peggy a cup of hot tea. Finally, once she was done with her tea, she relaxed a bit and ran her hand through my mane. She told me that I ought to go and talk with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and that she'd be fine by herself. I asked if she was sure, and she nodded. She said that she had to talk to the girls, but it was human stuff and there was no need to burden me with it.

I was a bit skeptical, but she was insistent, so I hugged her tightly and then went outside to talk to them. Before I left, Amanda said that there was a lounge in the basement and we might be more comfortable there.

So we went down the stairs and sat on the couches, and if they were mad at me running off like that, neither of them gave any sign of it. Mister Salvatore just looked sad, and the first thing he asked me was how Peggy was feeling.

I told him that she was taking it hard, and he said he wasn't surprised. He said that we'd probably have a lot to talk about in the coming days, and he couldn't really prepare me for what would come up.

Then I asked him why Peggy was so mad, and Miss Cherilyn said that this type of thing happens in America, and it's one of the downsides to it being a free society that doesn't have any meaningful restrictions on gun ownership. Mister Salvatore said that wasn't quite fair, and she said that maybe it wasn't but it was true and he knew it.

He told her that this wasn't the time or the place and the two of them glared at each other. I think they forgot for a moment that I was there.

Then Miss Cherilyn said that America was still a young society and had a lot of problems that nobody really was sure how to solve, and this thing that had happened was one of the consequences.

We spent the morning in the lounge discussing it, until they were both satisfied I understood the two-edged coin that freedom is. It was strange to see the two of them not in complete agreement—I think the murders must have really hit them, too.

I went back to Christine's room once they left. I was curious if anybody was going to go to lunch. Peggy said that she wasn't, because she was sure that there was only going to be one topic of conversation in the dining hall and she didn't want to deal with that. So we ordered pizzas instead and then started up a euchre tournament and spent the whole afternoon talking about anything but what had happened last night, and for dinner we ate the pizza that was left over from lunch.

It bugged me a little bit that I hadn't really gotten anything done all day, but sometimes there are things that are more important than schoolwork. Conrad had said so, and if it applied to the good fun stuff like a road trip to Punxsutawney, then it also applied to the bad sad stuff, too.

Peggy was smiling by the end of the day, which was good to see. She'd bounced back from her grumpy mood at least. She sat down on the bed and laughed and said that she knew it was the weekend when she didn't have to get undressed for bed.

I asked her if she wanted company tonight, and she told me that if I didn't mind, she'd probably sleep better. I thought I probably would, too.

February 22 [Nietzsche]

February 22

I kinda hated to get out of bed, but my wings were gonna get stiff from disuse if I kept on sleeping in, so I nuzzled Peggy and got out of bed real slowly so that I wouldn't disturb her and then put on my flight suit.

It was a crystal-clear morning, maybe just a little bit nippy. I could still see a few stars standing out sharply: the sun hadn't come 'round far enough to wash them out yet, although I knew by the time I got to altitude, they'd be gone.

I was already in the air before I asked for permission, but even as eager as I was I kept my height below the chapel bell tower until after the airplane controller said that it was safe to fly.

Rather than take a long climb off in any particular direction, I thought I ought to stay close to campus, so I started a narrow climbing spiral until I peaked, then I flipped a wing down and did a vertical wing-roll halfway back to the ground, pulled out of my dive, and let my momentum carry me back up.

When I was up to height again, I made a couple of broad circles, slowly picking up speed until I could feel the air begin to respond in a mini-cyclone, then I stopped flapping and let it swirl me around for a couple of revolutions. It petered off pretty fast; I could have gone tighter and made a faster one, but there was the risk of creating a dust devil or a tornado if I got carried away.

Although I'd planned to stay on-campus, I saw a hawk off in the distance and dove down to investigate. The ground was barely lit by the sun, and I wondered what she was doing up in the air so early.

When she saw me coming, she banked down and flew off, and I followed for a bit but not very long. I didn't want to disturb her too much. Singing birds and waterbirds usually like pegasi, but birds of prey generally don't. It takes a while to earn their trust.

That was one thing I was looking forward to in the spring: the birds coming back. They didn't all leave during the winter here, but most of the fun ones did.

One of the strangest things about early-morning flights is how the sun is up when I'm at altitude, but if I land really quick, it's still down and I can watch it rise again. So I did that, circling back to campus and around the bell tower, where I hovered until the sun came over the distant treetops, then I dropped down to about fifteen feet and zigzagged around all the trees in the quad as fast as I could.

A couple of people on the ground saw me and started pointing their telephones at me which I've figured out means that they're taking a movie which will soon trend on YouTube. I didn't mind, though; I decided to give them something really good and descended a bit more and flew right at them, pulling up when I got close.

It was easy to see who the aspiring filmmaker was: one of the students let his telephone down and dodged out of the way (even though I wasn't all that close); the other one followed me, leaning back and turning as I went overhead to keep me in the frame.

I looped up to the roof of Olds-Upton, then angled back down and landed in front of them. First I apologized to the boy who I'd scared, but he said it was alright; it had been really cool to watch. The other one agreed and put away his telephone down and stuck out his hand and shook my hoof. He said that he was named Gates and he wanted to make documentaries and he thought it would be really cool to have a pegasus-eye perspective of what I'd been doing.

I said that I didn't think I could use a camera with my hooves while I was flying, and he told me that there was a special type of movie camera called a GoPro, and he had one and if I was interested he'd loan it to me.

So we decided to do that on Wednesday morning and then maybe again in the afternoon. He said that he'd be getting a better camera than his telephone, and he shook my hoof again and thanked me.

In climate science class, we started talking about climate change, which is caused when the mixture of gasses in the atmosphere changes from one thing to another, which changes the global average temperatures. That was really interesting: Luke had brought it up before but I hadn't been entirely sure what it was.

He started off by explaining how not much more than a dozen thousand years ago all of Michigan had been covered by a thick sheet of ice that was miles thick, and it was the reason that we had the Great Lakes—they'd scooped out low spots and they retreated and melted and then the melting water from them had filled those low spots.

Then he told us that the glaciers had been so heavy that Michigan was still springing back up a little bit. That was hard for me to believe, but apparently there was all sorts of geological evidence and now humans even had satellites that could measure how much the land rose and fell.

I raised my hoof and asked him how the glaciers had formed and he said that it had just snowed a lot for a long, long time and that was basically what caused them.

That was a troubling thought, that things could get so far out of control that glaciers might form and cover everything up, but I guess the same thing might have happened to us if the three tribes hadn't learned to work together and defeat the windigos, so maybe I shouldn't be too critical of the humans' system.

Then in philosophy we started to talk about Nietzsche, and I wished that he'd been brought up sooner. He'd come up with the idea of perspectivism, which said that there were no objective facts or knowledge of a thing-in-itself. That was sort of a rejection of some of what Descartes had said, but I thought maybe it took too much of the opposite extreme. Wasn't it true that if I bucked up on a raincloud, I was going to get wet? Wasn't that a fact?

But I don't think he meant for his philosophy to apply to everything, just things that are less tangible than clouds.

At the same time it was kind of strange to have someone say that there weren't universal truths to discover after all, even if he thought that having a value was as much of a value as what the actual value was (which is confusing, but Nietzsche thought it made sense). ~~Was that a universal truth? Was he wrong about that?~~

Philosophy is making my head spin. Luckily when class was over I could put it to the back of my mind and concentrate on lunch. It was a fact that after I ate lunch I wasn't going to be hungry any more, at least not for a while.

I was really looking forward to Equestrian class because I hadn't seen Meghan all weekend, and she was a lot of fun to talk to and hang out with. She came as usual with Lisa and Becky, and all three of them greeted me when they saw me and we went in and sat down together.

It was always a little weird to be in class, because I shifted languages and it was actually beginning to feel foreign to talk in Equestrian. But as the class went on, it felt more and more normal, even though I kept getting mentally dragged back out by mispronounced words.

One of the students who'd been reading ahead—a boy named Craig—asked me if it was true that unicorns used their own alphabet and I said that it was. He wanted to know how that would work if he wanted to visit a unicorn city, and I told him that nothing important was written in Unicorn script. That was reserved for spellbooks and the genealogy books that so many unicorns obsessively kept.

He wanted to know if I could teach him Unicorn, and I shook my head: I could barely read it, let alone write in it.

I don't think he was happy with that answer, but I really couldn't help him with it.

After class got out I asked Meghan if maybe some night this week we could go sit in the hot tub again, and she told me that she didn't really have a way to get there unless Becky wanted to drive us, because she'd deleted the Uber on her phone. I asked her why—it had been so useful—and she asked if I'd heard about what had happened over the weekend.

I told her that I had, and then she said that the guy who'd done it had driven an Uber-car, and she just wasn't sure if it was safe to use. She said that until she was confident in what the company was doing to protect riders and drivers, she wasn't going to use it any more, even though it was a bit inconvenient to not have it.

That was a disappointment, but she said that I could come over and use their bathtub again if I wanted to. She also reminded me that Friday night there was going to be a handbell concert and I should come to it.

I said that I would, then we nuzzled and I went off to dinner.

It wasn't anything special tonight, and I wasn't really paying attention to the food anyways; rather, I was counting down the time until I was going to go over to Aric's to spend the night.

When I got back to our dorm room, before I could even get started on my homework Peggy asked me if I was doing anything this Saturday. I told her I hadn't planned anything and she said that we ought to get out of town and go to a ski resort before all the snow melted.

That sounded like a lot of fun, so I told her yes. Then I got as much homework done as I could until it was quarter to nine, and I told Peggy I was going to Aric's for the night. She told me to have fun, and I said I would.

I took my flight suit, so that I could get my morning exercise tomorrow (although I was secretly hoping that we'd stay so late in bed I wouldn't have time) and brushed my teeth and then I was off.

He didn't want to jump into bed right away, so we sat on the couch together and watched a cartoon called Animaniacs and drank some beer. Some of it was kind of silly, but there was also a part with a singing cat named Rita and that was really beautiful.

We finally went up to his room and I just jumped into bed and stretched out on my back. Peggy had told me that was a willing pose for humans . . . maybe having their bellies exposed is inviting. It wasn't that comfortable, and I felt foolish and vulnerable.

When Aric came in and saw me he snickered, which kind of ruined the effect. I rolled on my side, and then he said I'd actually been kind of cute when I was on my back, so I pushed off with a wing and got back into my sorta seductive pose.

Then he got most of the way undressed and slid under the covers. He wiggled around a bit and then pulled his underwear out from under the covers and tossed it at the wall without me even having to ask.

He leaned up on an elbow and looked at me, running his eyes down my body, then he reached out his hand and started tracing it along the ruff on my belly, right down to where my coat ended. I turned my head to kiss him on the lips and gave his hand a little encouraging push.

Afterwards, I snuggled up against him and stroked his chest with my wing as he drifted off to sleep.

February 23 [memories]

February 23

Tuesday morning started out a lot better than Monday had. We'd figured out how things ought to work last night and now that we had some experience it went much more smoothly, except when he kneeled on my tail by mistake, and when I bit his shoulder harder than I'd meant to.

I felt a lot more satisfied and relaxed than I had in a long time. I didn't even mind that Sara gave me a sort of hard look as I was coming back out of the bathroom. I just smiled at her and flicked her with my tail as I went by.

Aric didn't feel like getting up, so I hugged him and kissed him and then said that I was going off for a flight, and I'd see him Wednesday night if I didn't run into him on campus before then.

It was another good morning for flying. The grumpy airplane director was on the radio, but I didn't let him get me down.

I flew along due north for a while, until I was past all the houses and over open fields, then I looped to the east and flew that way for a while before turning back and flying a straight leg to the bell tower.

There's a pretty good-sized lawn in front of Trowbridge, and I landed there this time. I had to come in on a shallow angle, because there are a lot of trees, but that was alright.

When I got back from my shower, Peggy was awake, and she sat up in bed and asked me how it had been. I kind of put an innocent look on my face and asked her how what had been, and she just crossed her arms and said I wasn't fooling her at all.

So I sat down on my chair and started to groom myself for class and told her how it had been. I said we'd done it dolphin style which was weird and kind of scary at first. I said that he was a bit hesitant and I had to prompt him a lot, but he got the idea, and once we'd started he'd really gotten into it.

Peggy got up and held out the palm of her hand, and I asked her what that was for, and she told me about how high-fives work, so I smacked her palm lightly. It was a lot like a hoof-bump.

While I was combing my tail out (it had gotten pretty knotted), Peggy got dressed and we went to breakfast together. We talked a little bit more about boys and what they liked, and she gave me some ideas I could try next time.

Conrad introduced Shel Silverstein to us. There were a couple of kids in class that seemed really surprised by that; I turned an ear back and heard a guy grumbling that Silverstein wrote kid's poetry, and then Trevor said in a really low voice that he only thought it was kid's poetry because he wasn't smart enough to really understand it.

We started off with a really short poem called Anteater, just to get us in the mood, then he followed that with another short poem called God's Wheel, which was about God letting somebody else control the world for a while.

Moses hadn't wanted to, and I didn't think that I would either. There was an awful lot going on with it, and it was more than I'd be able to cope with. There had been days when just getting the right weather in one sector had been a major hassle.

Then he asked us how many of us had had a job where we were in charge of other people, or were planning on having one. A few people in the class raised their hands, including me. Once I got my degree, I'd start off as a squadron leader, which meant that I'd have to take responsibility for the clouds we had and make sure that they went where they were supposed to, and I'd also be in on the planning meetings. There was a lot of stuff that they could teach in school, but it wasn't the same as actually being there and doing it.

He asked me to read a poem called Rain, which I liked, even if it was silly. I imagined flying in the sky working on rainclouds while my head slowly filled with rain until I started sloshing.

It wasn't that hard to imagine. There'd been more than one day working feral weather on the coast where I'd dragged myself home half-drowned with equal parts rain and saltwater soaking me to the skin. I was surprised I hadn't been sloshing those days.

That was one thing that the earth ponies (and I guess the unicorns too) had that we didn't: fireplaces. There was a little tavern on the coast where all the sailors liked to go and we did too sometimes after breaking up a nasty nor’easter. They'd buy us all a round of drinks and a pot of soup and then clear out a bit and let us sit close to the fireplace to dry ourselves off.

I'd kind of gotten lost in old memories and jerked back to the present when I heard Conrad's voice again. He told Trevor to read Forgotten Language. Then when Trevor was done he told us all to close our eyes and said to think back to when we were children and remember something that we used to do that we didn’t do any more.

That was pretty easy for me. I hadn't been flying for all that long when I came across a field of dandelions which had gone to seed and I galloped through them, raising up a white cloud of dandelion fluff, which I flew around in and pretended that it was a snowstorm. Unlike snowflakes, though, the fluff didn't melt, and when I got home all covered in it, Mom was so mad, especially when my little sister started batting at my wings and making the fluff come off and get all over her too.

She dragged both of us out of the house and made us wash off in a stream and made me bathe my little sister because it was my fault that she'd gotten dandelion fluff in her coat, and I thought it was the most fun ever and so did my sister. Mom tried to stay grumpy but pretty soon she was splashing around in the stream with us.

The next time I'd done it, though, it hadn't been as much fun, because she just told me that I ought to know better and sent me to wash up by myself, and I'd never done it since.

He asked us if we all had it in our minds, and there was a rustle of movement in the class as people nodded their heads. Then he told us that our homework was to be a child again, and write a poem about it.

At first I was thinking about what a problem that was going to be. When I stepped out of the building, it was all snow, not a dandelion to be seen. I'd have to fly south for days to find them. But then I realized that he hadn't said that we had to do what we'd thought of, just that we had to be a child again, and I figured that I could do that.

February 24 [movie star]

February 24

I got up a little earlier than usual and went right to the closet and stood in front of the mirror and brushed out my mane and tail, even though I don't normally before flying. A mare ought to be allowed a little bit of vanity now and then.

I checked myself out to make sure that I looked good and then put on my flight clothes and walked over to Old Wells to meet Gates, hoping he was an early riser.

He was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and drinking a can of green Monster. That's an energy drink and it comes in different colors which all smell and taste equally bad.

He had a big bag which humans call a duffel bag (because it's made out of duffel fabric) and that had some camera bags in it and a helmet with a mount on the top.

The helmet was for me. If I had to wear much more equipment, I wasn't going to be able to fly at all! He helped me fit it on and it was really uncomfortable on my ears. It trapped them down and I told him I didn't think I'd be able to wear it while flying because I wouldn't be able to hear in it.

But he was ready for that, and took out a knife and carved some ear-holes in the helmet. He didn't do a very good job of it; the holes were really jagged and uneven and I think he wound up completely ruining it, but he said it was okay, it would be worth it for the video. Then he set it back on and it was a lot better. I didn't have full ear-range, but enough.

Then he strapped it around my chin and hooked the GoPro camera to the top of it. He had me stand in a neutral position while he adjusted the aim, and then said that it was good.

I reminded him that I had to get clearance before I was allowed to fly, and he said that was okay, it would give him time to set up his cameras.

I didn't think he'd be seeing too much; it was still pretty dark out.

Then I found out just how long it takes to set up a couple of cameras.

I was getting kind of bored by the end of it, and flicked my tail impatiently as he was setting up his tripod right where he wanted it and then focusing the camera on the open sky. And once that one was set, he brought out a shoulder-mounted camera and had to test that, too.

I should have waited to get my flight permission, and I hoped that there weren't any airplanes that were detouring around where I was supposed to be. I didn't see any: they almost never flew right over campus.

It was getting light on the ground when he finally said that he was ready, and I took to the air with a great sense of relief. It's stressful to have to wait when all I want to do is fly.

He'd instructed me to basically do the same thing I'd done before, so I did. I'd been concerned about how far his camera could see, but he said that the GoPro on my head would see everything that really mattered, and the other cameras were just to document what I was doing.

When I got up to altitude, I winged right over and dove down, then pulled back up and spiraled into the sky until I'd lost most of my momentum. Then I made a big circle, trying to keep my head as level as possible (he told me to avoid head movement as much as I could), and once I'd gotten all the way around, I dropped again, racing for the ground.

This time, I flared out my wings and braked as I dropped, keeping my speed down. Then when I got close to the ground, I pulled up and zoomed around the trees, darting as close to them as I could.

I finished off by going up a little bit and doing the same low buzzing flight I'd done before that got his attention the first time, rocketing up to the roof of Olds-Upton and then coming in for a landing at a more sedate speed.

When my hooves hit the snow, he kept following me with his camera until I got within a few meters of him, and then turned it off and set it down in its case, which was perched on top of a snowbank. He got the helmet off me, and the first thing I did was turn my head back and bite the end off a primary I'd broken when I got a bit too close to a tree.

Then he told me that my ear was bleeding, and as soon as he said that, I noticed it. If he'd kept his mouth shut, I probably wouldn't have.

He said that I ought to put a band-aid on it, but I was worried that I would be late to class, especially since I hadn't taken a shower yet, so I told him it was alright and did he want to meet me again for more movies in the afternoon?

He said that he would, and he promised to fix the helmet better and then shook my hoof.

Washing up opened the wound again and it burned like fury when I got shampoo in it, but there was nothing I could do but grit my teeth and carry on. Of course by the time I was done in the shower there just wasn't enough time for breakfast, so I ate my last can of anchovies and trotted off to class.

We moved from global cooling and ice ages to global warming and all the bad things that could cause. I wanted to know if more airplanes could make more contrails to help reflect the sunlight away, but the professor said that studies had been done and that contrails made it worse, because the heat still got in but then the clouds kept it from getting back out. He said that it was a good idea, though, and maybe to solve the problem we'd need to have out-of-the-box ideas like that (even if it wasn't actually a solution).

He said that the other danger with a warmer climate was that the storms would be bigger because there'd be more energy in the atmosphere, and I nodded when he said that. Besides keeping track of the water, we have to keep track of the potential energy, because that's what powers storms. Let too much of it build up, and things will go out of control no matter how good your weather team is. Plus once storms start to go rogue—or come in feral—it's difficult to control them. A small tornado can be broken up by a few pegasuses counter-flying, but if nopony notices and it gets big, it takes several flights to rob it of its momentum and break it up.

Humans hadn't been paying enough attention to their climate, though, and only started to notice when it started to change on them, and now they couldn't decide how to fix it, and some people weren't even sure it was a problem. I guess those were the global warming deniers that Luke had mentioned before.

(Which reminded me that I hadn't done anything beyond becoming friends with Cyndi on my Facebook. Maybe I could ask her to visit the television station.)

It was really frustrating to move from that to something that baffled me. If Nietzsche's values of values weren't confusing enough, we learned that he said that people had killed God by not believing in Him as a source of morals anymore but if that was true, why did Liz even bother to give me a Bible?

And then we discussed his ideas of nihilism and how Europeans were drifting along rudderless because they'd killed God, and overall he had a pretty bleak outlook on humans. I thought that was unfair; people mostly seemed friendly and happy and mostly the same as ponies, really.

Plus it was really confusing when he talked about happiness. He sounded like someone who's never really been happy trying to tell everyone else why they couldn't be happy, and nopony likes a downer like that. So I thought that maybe Nietzsche wasn't that smart after all, and maybe it would turn out like Descartes where he came up with a thing he thought worked but then someone else proved that he was wrong.

I don't understand why we have to learn about who's wrong. Even if philosophy doesn't have absolutes, surely some philosophers just aren't right. In my math class, we never spent any time discussing the dumb pony who wrote a proof that one equals zero using antiderivatives. Fundamental misunderstandings aren't the foundation of learning, except maybe as a cautionary tale.

Which I guess would be a good reason to learn about wrong philosophy.

After Equestrian class I asked Meghan if I could come over Thursday night to use their bathtub again, and she said that I could. Then I hurried off for some more filming with Gates, ate a late dinner, and worked on my poem for tomorrow until Aric drove over to pick me up.

He was a bit more relaxed than he'd been on Monday night. Instead of watching cartoons, we just talked on the couch and snuggled for a while. I told him about the poem I was writing, and he told me about the time he and David had explored the storm drains under Kalamazoo, and then I told him about how Gates had filmed me in the morning and then again in the afternoon.

We went and looked on his computer to see if it was on YouTube yet, but it wasn't. I did find a video of me playing in the snow, though, which I hadn't seen before. Aric said that he thought I looked really cute in the video. I told him I looked really cute all the time, and then kissed him on the lips before he could reply.

When it was finally time to go to bed, I helped Aric get out of his clothes. It was a lot more difficult than Peggy made it sound, but it was worth it.

February 25 [Spring Is Not A Day]

February 25

Spring is not a day

Spring is not when we wrap up winter
Not when we push away the snowclouds
Not when we bring the chirpy birds back.

Spring is not when the ice on the ponds is broken
Not when the new seeds are planted
Not when Mom thinks about having just one more foal

Spring is flowers
Bursting forth from the earth to sing to the sun
And to show off their blooms.

Spring is the smell of flowers
And fields dotted with dandelions
All gone to seed

Spring is galloping through the dandelions
And getting covered in downy fluff.
___________________________________________________________
It's hard to write poetry. It's like a painting and I don't know if anybody else will get it. I know what it means to me, but what does it mean to an audience? Did I choose the right words?

Poems seem so short and easy, and they're not.

I bet the other students struggle with it, too.

I asked Peggy what she thought, and she said that it was pretty. Then I asked her about what being a human child was like. She liked to play with her dolls and sometimes she'd steal her brother's GI Joes because not all her dolls had boyfriends and she thought some of them must be lonely.

I thought that was pretty funny, and kind of cute. She asked if we had pony dolls, and I told her that I had a stuffed albatross that my Mom said was very special because albatrosses can fly forever and not land. But that was all. My other toys were clouds and the open sky, and that's all a pegasus really needs.

I tried to sketch out a little poem about my albatross before class, but nothing really came to me that seemed worthy of a poem. I had called her 'Albie' and worn smooth spots in her plush from hugging her and one of her eyes had come off and nopony in our house knew how to sew it back on so I just put a little black dot of paint in place of the missing eye, and one time I threw her off a cloud to see if she could actually fly and then spent the rest of the day looking for her. But nobody would want to read a poem about that.

Conrad was still in a whimsical mood. First he asked for everyone to turn in their poems because he said it would be distracting if we were thinking about them all class long, and then he read us a poem called Jake Says. I'd never thought about orphans that way, but I guess they are blessed. My Mom wanted me, but some of my friends in school were kind of by mistake. Plus a lot of times you don't really know how a foal's going to turn out.

Then he had me read Falling Up, which really spoke to me. Except for the part about puking; I've never done that from flying, although I kinda came close when I was on the airplane.

He had Trevor read Hug of War which was a good poem for him to read. Trevor has a nice, deep voice. I think that was his way of reacting to what had happened last weekend. Sometimes—

Sometimes a pony or a person really only knows one way to cope with things that are terrible, and maybe for Conrad it's poems. When the weight of the world gets too heavy on my back I can fly because the higher I go the less there is below me. Some ponies make gardens; when Wysteria lost her mother she made the most beautiful flower garden I have ever seen. And there was a stallion on our team who shaped clouds and then set them free over the ocean.

He finished off the day with a poem he said that he had never taught before. He said that I had inspired him. It was called Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony. I was blushing before he was halfway through with the poem. I know why he wanted to teach it.

So when class was over I went up to his desk and gave him a big hug and thanked him for reading that poem for me. Conrad said it wasn't for me, it was for him. He told me that he used to think that Abigail was a silly little girl who was maybe just a little bit spoiled, but now that he knew me he couldn't imagine what it would be like to not have me in his class.

I was blushing again, and I really didn't know what to say, so I put my hooves up on his chair and kissed him on the cheek and then went out of the class before my fur burned off from embarrassment.

On the way out of the building, I saw Trevor with a group of his friends, and I kind of was a bit hesitant to approach them because they were all big and dark like Trevor, but his face lit up and he crouched down and introduced me to all of them. I said he'd done a beautiful reading of Hug of War, and then all four of his friends just looked at him and then at me and my ears and tail went down 'cause I thought I'd said something wrong. Trevor stepped back and moved his feet apart and I could see his shoulders tense just a little bit.

Then Cedric—who was the biggest one—asked what Hug of War was about, and before I could stop myself I said that it was about hugging not fighting. He asked Trevor if he thought that would work, and my traitor mouth said it would before Trevor could say anything in his defense.

Cedric looked down at me and said I ought to prove it to him. I was really nervous; he was so much bigger than me and when I got close enough for him to grab me there wouldn't be any escaping. But then he crouched down and that was a little better, so I moved in and got up on my hind hooves and bravely wrapped my forelegs around him as best as I could, then bowed my head submissively.

For the longest time, he didn't move at all. The whole hallway got completely quiet; I could barely hear anybody even breathing. Then I heard him mutter 'aw hell,' and he put his arms around me and hugged me back.

When we finally broke our embrace, he admitted that maybe Trevor was on to something after all, and Trevor held out his arms. Cedric gave him a flat look and told him not to push his luck, then punched him in the shoulder, but not too hard.

It was all very strange. I should have thought first before I stuck my muzzle in a band of bachelors; even among humans they have a totally different dynamic than a proper mixed herd or all mares and since I mostly knew girls on campus I wasn't familiar with it.

Just the same it had turned out all right in the end, and I wound up eating dinner with them, too. I hadn't planned to, but Cedric saw me when I was picking out food and asked if I'd join them and even offered to carry my tray for me.

All five of them were actually really nice, and I wished I'd gotten to know them sooner. Cedric said that in the fall, he was a defensive tackle on the football team (which is a good place for a big man; I knew that much about football at least) and Leon who was pretty skinny said he was a wide receiver.

We talked a bit about football, and then they wanted to know what sorts of games we played, so I told them about hoofball (which is kind of like football). Cedric looked at me very seriously and said that it was my sacred duty as an ambassador to introduce Quidditch to ponies.

I didn't know what that was, so he explained it to me, and Leon chimed in too, then Trevor showed me a video of a game on his telephone. Then they started talking about Hogwarts and wanted to know if pony universities had moving staircases and talking pictures and trolls in the basement, and I said that they probably had those at unicorn-only schools.

By the end of dinner, they had all decided that I ought to watch Harry Potter. I told them that I would try but there were so many other things going on that I wanted to do I didn't know when I would have time, and I was already not watching as much Star Trek as I ought to be and had also fallen behind in reading the Bible. I didn't want to make a promise I couldn't keep, but I said that I would watch at least one of them before Spring Break.

I was in a really cheery mood when I went over to DeWaters. Meghan asked how my day had been and I told her about all of Trevor's friends and how nice they'd turned out to be and Harry Potter, and it turned out that Lisa had all the movies.

I hadn't been planning to watch one so quickly, and Lisa said that she had to do homework anyway so tonight wasn't a good night for it. Becky came over and we chatted for a little bit while the tub was filling, and then I got in.

Now that I'd been in a real hot tub, the bathtub just wasn't as nice. Meghan wouldn't get in with me, even though I told her she could, because she said it would just be too crowded. She was probably right, but it made it kind of lonely, even with her right there sitting on the toilet and talking to me.

But after I got out, she wanted to groom me again, and that helped make up for the lack of bonding in the bathtub. It was so relaxing having her brush out my coat I wound up falling asleep on her bed.

Author's Note

Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony
(hat tip to Fishberry for putting it in the comments)

February 26 [bell choir]

February 26

I woke up in the middle of the night totally confused. Even before I opened my eyes I could smell that I wasn't in my room or Aric's room, and it took my tired brain a minute to figure out where I was. Then I saw the spill of blonde hair on the pillow and even without even being able to see her face, I knew it was Meghan.

She was sort of crowded into bed, since I'd fallen asleep almost in the middle of it, and she'd gotten under the covers without even waking me. I must have been tireder than I thought I was last night.

Maybe I should have gone back to my room, but instead I just got under the covers and closed my eyes again.

I woke back up at my usual time. Meghan was still rolled with her back to me, so I nuzzled her shoulder but she didn't wake up. I probably could have prodded her with my hoof, but that would have been mean.

I got out of bed and let myself out of her room as quietly as I could, then went back to my dorm room for my flight clothes. It was really a poor day for flying—there was heavy wet snow gusting around—but it was a worse day for trotting. Orange snow-trucks might spray me again if I was on the ground, but they couldn't get to me if I was in the air.

The airplane controller was reluctant to let me fly, because the visibility was so poor, but she finally relented when I promised to stay under a thousand feet, which isn't all that high at all. Airplanes can't fly that low over the city unless they have special permission, so I'd be safe from them if I stayed low.

Right away I noticed that the blinking light had a very odd effect on the snowflakes: it would look like they stopped whenever the light flashed, and then when it was off they were moving normally again. At first, I tried to tune it out, but the more I flew the more disorienting it became, and I finally had stop and take stock of my situation. I could turn it off, but I wasn't supposed to ever do that. The one time its batteries had worn out was something that I couldn't have anticipated, but pushing the button on its base would be a deliberate action that might make them take away my flight privileges if anybody saw, and I didn't want that to happen.

I tried closing my eyes whenever I thought it was about to blink, but that was nearly as confusing, and I finally had to land. I couldn't fly like this.

So I shut off the light and told the airplane director that I was back on the ground again and then I flew my normal trotting route without the light. Any airplanes that were flying that low were going to hit trees and all the wires that criss-crossed the street.

When I finally got done and landed, I felt fifty pounds heavier with all the snow caught in my coat and on my wings and in my mane and tail. I shook as much of it off as I could before I went into the dorm, but I was still melting by the time I got to the shower. The hot water fixed that right up, and it was really good at melting all the ice out of my vanes.

In climate science class we took a test, and at the end of it the professor told us that the good news was that this was the last test we'd have besides the final exam. There was some groaning at the words 'final exam;' I guess humans don't like them either.

It's funny how quickly time goes by. It was hard to believe that we were almost done with the class—only two more weeks. Already people were talking about Spring Break, and I was looking forward to it myself.

Nietzsche . . . my attention wavered in philosophy class. I felt really bad; I'd been dutifully taking notes like a good pony and the professor was talking about the Übermensch and how people should ignore those who wanted to get away from earth (which offended me just a bit) and I just got inspired and started writing a little poem about Nietzsche.

'I think therefore I am' says Descartes.
'You are not,' says Nietzsche.

'God gives us divine laws,' says Aquinas.
'God is dead,' says Nietzsche.

'This is an ideal chair,' says Plato.
'There are no ideals,' says Nietzsche.

'Everyone can agree on virtues and morals,' says Aristotle.
'Morality is the herd instinct in the individual,' says Nietzsche.

'That's not rain,' says Nietzsche.
I lean over the cloud. 'It isn't.'

Then I turned the page before anybody saw I wasn't paying attention and listened to the professor explain how the Nazis had misinterpreted Nietzsche's philosophy. All I could think was that I was really looking forward to moving on to Sartre.

Some Fridays in the dining hall they try to make something nice for dinner, and other Fridays they don't. I've discovered that you can guess which it's going to be by what's on the lunch menu. If it's the same thing that you already ate once for dinner, then they're planning something special. But if it's something new, they'll serve mostly the same thing for dinner. Today they had leftovers from yesterday's dinner, which was a bit of a letdown, but meant at least they would have something special tonight.

I apologized to Meghan for taking up so much of her bed but she said that it was okay. She asked me if I was coming to the handbell concert tonight, and I said that I was. Then we spent all of class working through two chapters of Daring Do and the Marked Thief of Marapore. I was going to say that they were reading the books out of order, but it really didn't matter. Anyway, I'd watched Star Wars out of order and was watching Star Trek out of order, so maybe humans didn't like things in order.

Dinner was maybe Mexican and maybe Tex-Mex and maybe Southwestern; everyone called it something different. But it was tacos that we could make ourselves, and choose what went into them or on them. There were two shapes of tortilla chips and taco shells and soft tortilla circles and then all sorts of different things that could be put in them or on them. Nobody at the table had the same idea; Sean had tacos full of meat and cheese while Joe made a plate of chips with all the ingredients on top of it and he called that a salad. Christine rolled up the tortillas into a round tube like a spring roll which she said was called a burrito, and Peggy just had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I just put a little bit of everything except the meat on my plate because hooves aren't very good at rolling up burritos, and the taco shells kept falling over when I tried to use them.

I liked it; it was like Taco Bell food, and that had been really good. There was a Taco Bell near the Maple Hill Mall and I was going to go there someday all on my own.

After dinner, I convinced Peggy to come to the bell concert with me, and we went over to the chapel ten minutes before it was going to start. Instead of the individual seats like the theatre has, they had long benches called 'pews,' which were a lot more friendly. We could sit right next to each other without there being a barrier in the way.

There were several long tables with brass bells on them all arranged from biggest to least, and there was nobody up there until it was time for the concert to start, then a short man with a goatee and glasses came out and announced the concert, and the bell-ringers came in.

I expected Aric to be down by the big bells, but he wasn't. He was near the small ones, and when he picked up four I understood why. His big, clever hands could hold more bells if they were small.

I told Peggy who most of the people were—I knew Aric of course, and Meghan and Becky and Lisa and Amy, and that right there was half of the choir.

They played a bunch of songs, and they switched positions now and then. There was one song where Aric was playing big bells, and another where Becky played six at once, which was amazing to see. Usually they swung the bells and dampened them on their shoulders or breasts (Aric and the other boy were at a disadvantage when it came to dampening the bells) but sometimes they hit them with mallets while they were on the table.

My favorite piece was In the Hall of the Mountain King—it just kept on getting faster and more frantic right up until the very end. Peggy liked Danse Macabre the most, which had the biggest variety of ways to play the bells.

(I've heard that there are even bigger bells in the tower but those had to be rung with a rope.)

Aric was sad that I wasn't going to spend the night with him, since I had to be up early to get to the skiing mountain with Peggy.

All of us hung out for a while at a little restaurant under the main dining hall called the Quad Stop. They offer free milkshakes for rejection letters, and there is a whole wall covered with them. It was kind of sad to see, but I guess everyone whose letter was up there had gotten a free milkshake.

Aric shared a bit of his Stewart's Ginger Beer with me, which really burned my throat and nose, and I sneezed right after I drank some. He thought that was hilarious, then he drank the rest of the bottle to show off.

It was a little late when we said our goodbyes and Peggy and I went back to our dorm room.

Before I went to bed, I copied my little poem about Nietzsche onto a new piece of paper. I thought maybe Conrad would like it.

February 28 [makerspace]

February 28

I was pretty sore when I woke up, from all the exercise I'd gotten yesterday. I was pretty sure I'd pulled a wing muscle: a couple of times I'd tried too hard to stay on the snowboard when I probably ought to have just let it go.

There were two schools of thought on how to deal with this: either work it out, or relax and let it heal up. So I stretched out my wings as best I could and picked up my flight vest and went up for a quick trip. Nothing intense—I wasn't that foalish—just an easy, lazy trip to work the muscles some.

When I landed, I took a trot around the block to limber up my legs as well. A lot of pegasuses don't really like being on the ground all that much and haven't got a lot of endurance when they're on their hooves. It's kind of a point of pride, but shortsighted. You have to exercise the whole body, not just your favorite parts.

(Speaking of exercising favorite parts, I was hoping Aric didn't have plans for after Durach.)

My wing was stiffening up when I got back to my dorm room. I stowed away my flight gear and headed into the shower just as Peggy was waking up.

Once my coat and hair was all rinsed out, I made the water as hot as I could, and held my sore wing under it to relax the muscle. It was almost as good as a hot tub; I was so relaxed I was almost falling asleep on my hooves when there was a polite knock on the stall door.

I opened it up and Peggy was on the other side, a towel draped over her shoulder and a basket full of shower stuff in her hand. She wanted to know if I was going to be in there all day. I told her I'd considered it, but she was welcome to have her turn.

She must have seen me wince as I folded in my wing, because she stepped into the shower and set her little basket down and asked if I was all right. So I told her about my sore muscle, and she squatted down and started to knead her hands into the muscle.

At first I tensed up and she stopped, but I told her to keep on going, and pretty soon I could feel some more tension leaving the muscle.

I sighed happily when she was done and nuzzled her side, then left the stall so she could take her shower. I didn't want to, but I knew she wouldn't want me to stay.

Once we were both fully groomed and dressed, we went to breakfast together. They had omelets again, and I got one made just the way I liked it.

When we were all sitting at the table and eating our breakfast, Christine suddenly pulled her arms into her short sleeves until just her hands were sticking out. She shouted 'T-Rex breakfast,' and slammed her face into her bowl, sending cereal everywhere.

I have the strangest friends.

We did laundry next. All the washing machines were already full of damp clothes, so Peggy took them out and set them on the table. I asked why she didn't just put them in the dryer, and she said it was because there were some things that couldn't be dried in a dryer, that was one reason; plus, if she put them in the dryer that would reward the lazy person who had abandoned their clothes.

Rather than go back upstairs, we just stayed in the laundry room and talked. Peggy sat on top of one of the washing machines, so I took the other.

She wanted to know if I wanted to go snowboarding again, maybe at a better place, and I said that I'd like that. I told her it would be better if the board would stay attached to my hooves like hers did, and she told me that there weren't any boots or bindings for ponies that she was aware of. Then her face lit up and she said that she bet someone could make them, and we needed to go up and see Rebekka, because Rebekka knew a bunch of makers.

Makers, it turns out, are craftspeople. She did know some and knew that they would be at their makerspace (which is where they work) on the weekend, so once our laundry was done and we'd had lunch, Peggy drove Rebekka and me over to a run-down looking brick building.

Inside, though, it was clean but cluttered. I'd visited earth pony workshops that were much the same, although the makers had more machines.

Projects were scattered all over worktables, and when we came in there was a cluster of people watching a pair of round machines with knives on one end and balloons on the other scuttle around the floor.

I didn't want to interrupt them, so we went over and watched as the two machines fumbled around and one of them finally popped the balloon on the other. There was a lot of cheering for the machine that had won, and then they noticed me and all of a sudden everyone wanted to meet me, which was intimidating, coming all at once, and then they all wanted to show me their projects, and everyone wanted to be first, so it was really confusing.

Finally, Rebekka calmed them down and Peggy explained why we'd come.

They got to talking among themselves; pretty soon they were taking notes and one of them got out a dressmaker's tape that was made of metal and rolled up into a little storage container all on its own, and he used that to measure my hooves and pasterns and fetlocks.

They put their heads down and one of them started sketching while two others unfolded their computers and started interneting. A brown-~~maned~~haired girl named Karen showed us around, while the boys kind of came and went as they were working. I didn't get most of their names; there were a lot of them.

Every now and then one of them would pipe up and ask me a question, like how much did I weigh and if I could produce downforce with my wings as well as lift. (Downforce was kind of counterintuitive, since it's the opposite of flying, but if you angle them just right you can do it. We learned how in flight training because griffons and rocs try to grab pegasuses alive and if you make yourself hard to carry, they'll drop you.)

After about an hour of work and a tour of the shop, they came up with a couple of ideas that they thought would work, and they said that they needed to do some more research and figure out how much it was going to cost. Peggy gave them her number and mine, and they said that they'd call tomorrow when they knew for sure.

I was surprised that it was dinnertime when we got back to campus. We'd spent a lot more time than I thought at the makerspace, although it was neat to see how humans built things. Even with all their machines like the threedee printer they had, there was still a traditional forge for metalwork, and lots of little hand-held tools.

I think an earth pony craftsmare would really have liked to spend time in their makerspace. There were lots of unfinished projects that could give her an idea how things went together.

After dinner was over, both Peggy and I had to put our shoulders into the traces; neither of us had done any of our homework yet. I got done with mine fairly quick—I didn't have a whole lot that I needed to do—and then I helped her out with her calculus.

She paid me back by helping to make my bed. The bottom sheet has an elastic band around it, which holds it in place nicely, but makes it really hard to stretch it over the bed. I'll get three corners fastened and then when I'm trying to pull the fourth into position, one of the others comes off. With her long arms to hold the head in place, though, I was able to get the foot tucked in nicely, and bounced up onto the bed happily before putting the top sheet and the blankets back on.

I read and wrote on Facebook for a little while before going to sleep. Aquamarine had figured out how to add photographs of her plants, as well as a few of her campus. It was weird; the parts that I'd seen when we dropped her off were very urban, but most of the outside pictures she had posted were of open fields, and there were lots from inside a greenhouse.

I didn't have all that many pictures of myself. Nothing that I could put on Facebook, and that kind of bothered me a little bit.

Author's Note

Roomba Deathbattle!

February 29 [Leap Day]

February 29

Today is a special day. Because the humans can't control their sun, a year takes a little bit more than an even number of days to happen, so they have to make up for it by adding an extra day every four years, or at least that's what Peggy told me.

They ought to have made it some kind of holiday. Something that only comes around once every four years is pretty special. Instead, it was just a normal Monday.

By the time I got done with my normal flight, most of the stiffness in my wing had worked out. I could still feel a bit of tightness in the muscle that even a hot shower didn't eliminate, but it wasn't too bad. More annoying than anything, especially since there was this one spot where my wing muscle sort of tugged as I extended it.

I tried nibbling at the skin a little bit but that didn't help.

I made myself a waffle for breakfast—their waffle-iron was working again—and poured a little bit of maple syrup on my plate just so I could try it. A lot of the food that they serve tastes off, and I didn't want to ruin my waffle by putting the syrup on it.

I'd made a wise choice. The syrup wasn't very good at all. It had a bit of maple taste to it, but it was too sugary. I went back and got some strawberry slices instead and that was much better.

Sean said that the maple syrup didn't taste very good because it was artificial, and I asked him if that meant it came from artificial trees. I knew that in the springtime ponies tapped little spouts in trees and put a bucket underneath, and then they did something else because the syrup in the buckets was watery and didn't taste like much.

Joe and Christine laughed, and Sean said that there weren't any trees—real or artificial—in making fake maple syrup. Just things that tasted vaguely like maple and lots of sugar.

Humans have lots of fake things. There are fake flowers in the dining hall, and there's a fake lobster that they sometimes put out when they have seafood. I wonder if the disgusting fish sandwich I had at the ski resort was made out of a fake fish?

We had another guest lecturer in climate science class. He was named Doctor Thomas Thompson, and he was in charge of the National Weather Service office in Grand Rapids. They watch the weather and make the predictions, and they give people warnings if bad weather is coming. They're not always right, either.

He told us about all the different types of data they got, and how their computer models worked, and then he said that he was about to ask if anyone had questions but there was something he had to get out of the way first.

Dr. Thompson took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it in the air, then caught it in the palm of his hand. He said that was how they made the forecasts—if it was heads, it would be warmer tomorrow; tails, and it would be colder.

That got a lot of chuckles from the class. The weather forecasters misjudge a lot; they haven't got enough observers in the sky to be completely accurate.

When class was over, he wanted to talk to me a little bit. He said that he'd heard from the professor that I'd brought down a cloud, and my ears fell and I admitted it was true. Crystal Dawn—who had been waiting around to ask him something—showed him a movie she'd taken with her telephone, and he was really interested in that. I thought he'd be mad that I'd taken one.

He gave me a card which had his name and telephone number and computer mail address on it, and said that if I was thinking of doing it again, to give him a call.

I was interested in what kinds of instruments the humans used to measure weather, and wanted to know if it would be possible to get a tour of the National Weather Service office. So we decided to do that in two weekends. He said that he'd come down and get me and we'd hope that the skies weren't clear.

The professor thought it would be fun to go, too, and he said that on Wednesday, he was going to announce it as an optional class field trip, which made me happy. Trips are always fun.

Sartre disagreed with some of Nietzsche's ideas, and he didn't like Descarte's idea of thinking as a way of proving that he existed.

Then there were two kinds of being. Being-in-itself, which was all the stuff that exists but can't think and be aware it exists. Things like rocks and trees and snow. Then there was being-for-itself which is conscious and knows it exists, like me. But he thought that being-in-itself made being-for-itself sick, and I didn't understand why that would be so. I can eat a waffle, which doesn't know it exists, and it doesn't make me sick. And I wasn't sure why he thought that the world outside the body is meaningless; if it was, why would we even want to do anything with it? Why would it have to be there?

A lot of the newer philosophers started by knocking down everything that came before them, though, so maybe after the next class it will make more sense. Perhaps he's coming in at a different angle.

I was starting to get the impression that the newest philosophers were more interested in everything that's bad, not everything that's good.

Maybe they were just so focused on the bad stuff that they didn't see the good stuff. Maybe some people were too. Maybe ponies were just happier than people.

I decided that I wasn't going to let him get me down, and I went outside and played in the snow for a while.

We didn't do anything too interesting in Equestrian class, just finished up the Daring Do book. Meghan and Lisa said that I could come over and watch a Harry Potter movie tonight if I wanted to, but I told her that tonight wouldn't be good; I was going to be over at Aric's house.

So we decided that I could watch the movie Tuesday night instead. There ought to be a class on human movies. There are so many of them that are important, and I don't have enough free time to see them all!

Then Meghan asked if I was going to see Zootopia. There had been a preview for it before the Star Wars movie that I saw in the movie theater, and it had looked like it might be interesting. I told her that I hadn't thought about it, and she said that I should see it.

When I got back to our dorm room, Peggy told me that the makers had called, and they said that they'd come up with two ideas. One was to put fasteners on hoof boots; the other was to put metal plates on the board and tie magnets to my hooves.

The magnets would be cheaper, but they weren't sure that they'd hold.

Peggy and I talked it over, and we finally decided to take both options. She could bring her tools along to change what was on the board, and I had enough money to afford it. So she called them back and told them to go ahead with both options so that we could try them out and see what worked the best.

I flew right over to Aric's house after dinner. I thought it would be nice to spend a little bit of time with him before we went to Durach, because I’d missed him all weekend.

Aric was really happy to see me, and he crouched down and hugged me right on the front porch and kissed my muzzle. He asked if we’d had fun and I said that we had and we were going to a better resort next weekend and hopefully I wouldn’t pull a wing muscle again.

He wanted to know where it was, and if I thought massaging it would help. I said it probably would, and so we went up to his room and he massaged my shoulder and then just kept on going and we both completely forgot about Durach.

March 1 [Springmonth]

March 1

Today is the first day of Springmonth, or what the humans call March. It was a good day to wake up cuddled by Aric, and I stayed in bed maybe a bit longer than I should have but he wanted some attention.

Then he helped me put on my flight vest and I took to the sky.

It was a kind of blustery day, not quite squalling but it really wanted to. There just wasn't enough moisture in the air.

Flying in gusty winds is always a challenge, because you have to be one step ahead of them, and you have to have a recovery plan in mind for when you aren't. That's what flunks a lot of pegasuses out of storm duty, especially on the coast. Clear days usually aren't so bad; even when it's nasty out you can see where you are. If you're in the clouds, though, it's pretty easy to get disoriented, and sometimes the base of the cloud deck is really low.

I couldn't fly in clouds, so at least I didn't have that to worry about.

If you're flying into the wind and it's clear, you can sometimes get clues about what's gonna happen by seeing how trees and grass responds. Or over water—you can see little wavelets form as the wind whips across them. When you're going downwind, though, you don't get that much warning, just a brief pressure on your tail, and that's all the warning you have. So altitude is important.

I think that's why airplanes always land into the wind, so they can see what's coming.

Back when I was a foal, I used to not care about it so much. We didn't fly on really gusty days, and our kindergarten training area was well-protected. But the next year when I flew more out in the open, I came in for a downwind landing and got caught by a gust just before my hooves touched down, and I went tail over muzzle and crashed in an undignified lump. After that, the reason for what my flight instructors said stuck with me, and I knew that they wouldn't tell us something unless it was important, even if it wasn't obvious why it was important right away.

So I dutifully flew a downwind leg around campus and then landed upwind, dropping a bit more quickly than I'd planned when I saw the tops of the trees by the chapel bend. It turned out I was under the gust (the hill covered me), but I hadn't been sure.

I took a quick trot just around campus—there is Academy Street on one side, and right on the other side is Lovell Street. That's a one-way street, which means that you can only go uphill on it, unless you're a pedestrian in which case you have to go against the direction of traffic so that cars can't sneak up on you.

I got showered and breakfasted in plenty of time for poetry and remembered to get my poem about Nietzsche for Conrad. I didn't want to give it to him at the beginning of class because maybe he'd want to read it right away and delay the class, and then people would be mad at me. So instead I kept it folded neatly in my notebook for later.

He was reciting a poem when he came into class. 'One by one lights of a skyscraper,' he began as he walked through the door.

I wonder what he would do if anybody started reciting the poem with him? I think he would like that. But nobody spoke; we were all listening to his wonderful baritone voice until he finished the poem about the skyscraper and its mistress the night.

The poet was Carl Sandburg, and many of his poems were very short. They were about buildings or places or a new car. Where some of the terms in the older poems had confused me because they were in English that isn't used any more, some of Sandburg's poems were equally confusing because they were about things I knew nothing about. But, Conrad was really good at explaining—and then the poems made sense.

There were two he read us about railroads. One was about a caboose, who follows along behind the train and makes sure that everything stays together and gets where it needs to. And the other was short, and was about the little towns that the train goes through and doesn't stop.

I've always wondered about those little towns. Ponies live there, and to them it's the most important place in the world, because it's their home. When you're on the train, though, it's a little cluster of houses that zips by outside the windows. Sometimes you don't see the sign, so you don't even know the name of the town. It could be anywhere.

Plus it feels weird to be an interruption in their life. Sometimes I see ponies waiting to cross the tracks, and they're probably mad that the train came while they were on their way to wherever it is they were going. But sometimes they wave: on my last train trip I happened to look out the window as we passed through a little town and there were three colts standing in a garden, and the littlest one was eagerly waving at each car that passed him by.

It wasn't just towns, either. There were so many houses I passed by when I was taking a long trot through the neighborhood, or that I flew over, and I didn't know who lived in any of them. I could have been flying over Conrad's house every day, for all I knew.

I would like to see his house. I imagine that he has shelf upon shelf of poetry books.

Class ended too soon, and I gave Conrad my little poem. He read through it and laughed, and then asked if he could read it aloud to the class. I told him that he could—I was flattered that he asked.

In the afternoon, I got a computer letter from Gates that said he was done with editing the video and I could watch it on the link he sent, and then there were a bunch of blue letters that didn't spell any word I knew.

I asked Peggy, and she said it was a hyperlink. It didn't look very hyper to me, it was just sitting there being blue. When she put the pointer on it and clicked, it opened up a new page on the computer that was the video.

We both watched it together, and Peggy jerked back a little bit when I flew up to Olds Upton. The GoPro made it look closer than it had been.

It was interesting to see how I looked when I was in the air. Gates' camera on the ground showed some of my acrobatics really well. I could see a couple of problems with my form, and the GoPro showed that I moved my head a lot when I was flying, even though I'd tried not to.

I thought that next time we should put the camera right on my brisket. There wouldn't be as much movement there, I didn't think.

Peggy used my computer to send a hyperlink to her telephone so that she could show the video at dinner, and when she showed it, everyone liked it. I was going to have to show it to Aric. He also put music behind it, which made it that much more awesome.

Then after dinner, I went over to Meghan's and watched Harry Potter. Lisa wasn't there, but Becky came over and all three of us sat on Meghan's bed.

There weren't really wizards and witches on Earth, Meghan explained. That was all make-believe—everything in the movie was. There weren't any flying broomsticks, and drinking the blood of a unicorn wouldn't really save a mortally wounded person.

I told them that earth pony blood would and they just stared at me in wonderment until I started laughing and ruined the joke.

I could see why Cedric had said I ought to watch the movie. Quidditch was something we could probably play--we’d have to come up with something different for the Golden Snitch, or get a unicorn to enchant something, but all the rest of it was totally do-able. Hoops could be made out of clouds, and of course we wouldn’t need brooms.

And the audience would not be allowed to shoot the players with spells.

After we got done discussing it, Becky went back to her room, and Meghan asked if she could braid my tail.

She took her time, making sure that it was perfect. Also I was pretty sure she was just looking for an excuse to play with it because spa ponies don't spend nearly as long as she did.

When she was done, I swished it a few times—it always feels heavier when it’s braided, even though I know it still weighs the exact same amount. Then because she’d been so nice to me, I asked her if she wanted me to sleep with her, and her face got all red and she didn’t answer so I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

So I went back to my dorm room. Peggy said that my tail looked really nice in a braid, and I told her how Meghan had done it after we watched Harry Potter, and we talked for a little bit, and then I went to bed.

Author's Note

Caboose Thoughts

March 2 [New Atlantis]

March 2

My tail confused me when I first woke up—it slapped against my leg like a length of rope, and I jerked awake right away and kicked off the covers, then felt like a complete foal. At least I didn't wake Peggy up.

Flying with it took a bit of getting used to as well. I could get better speed, but lost just a bit of maneuverability. A lot of serious fliers will trim their manes and tails for their kind of flight, and some even clip their wings just a touch.

That wasn't for me, though. I would put up with a slight loss of top speed in order to look good.

The sound of sirens which were pretty close by caught my ear, and I listened around until I knew which way they were coming from, and flew off in that direction. Pretty soon I heard another behind me, too—a different sound—and I looked back and saw a red fire engine coming down the street behind me.

It passed under, and I followed along behind it. I lost sight of it when it turned a corner, but I could still hear the siren echoing above the buildings, and I cut the corner to catch back up.

When I got to the next road which I think is called Ravine Street, the fire truck was just around the corner, attending to a smashed car; there was another one with its side doors all crushed in sitting just off the side of the road.

I stayed around and watched for a little bit. A big white van which is called an ambulance arrived, and a couple of people got out of it and checked on the drivers of the vehicles. The fire truck left, because there wasn't any fire for it to put out.

Right next to where the cars had crashed was a big fenced-in place called Weller's that had lots of damaged cars behind the fence, so either this was a very dangerous intersection, or it was a lucky coincidence that they had collided right here.

I would have liked to stay around for longer, but I had to go to class.

The climate science professor announced the upcoming field trip to Grand Rapids, and asked for a show of hands to see who wanted to go. I raised my hoof of course; Crystal Dawn and Luke did as well. I'd be with friends, which was nice.

All in all, eight people said that they wanted to go, which was about a third of the class.

At the end of class, he gave us a fun bit of homework: a map of a made-up continent called New Atlantis. It had major geographic figures marked, and he'd put all the important information about the different layers of air, directions of prevailing winds, and so on on it. There were ten places named, from the big city of Gotham to the little town of Smallville, and each of those had monthly average data for them. Our job was to figure out what the monthly averages would be for ten other places on the map, based on that information.

I couldn't wait to get started. I could already see that Goldopolis was in an unfortunate location; even without running the numbers, it was probably going to be pretty arid.

I was dreading Sartre, but he actually made sense this time around. He talked about how not only does man influence the universe, but the universe influences man.

Well, there was a lot of the Earth that I'd seen wasn't controlled at all. The planet zoomed around its Sun in an uneven number of days, and the moon made her rounds out of sequence with that. The weather was feral; all the humans could manage were a few puny contrails here and there, and sometimes seeding rainclouds to make them rain a little sooner than they would have done, and probably all that accomplished was leaving the people downwind short of their rain. So that was all the universe influencing them.

But I guess at the same time they were controlling it. They made fields and roads and sidewalks where they wanted—almost all the major roads in town ran in nice, straight lines—and they made Arcadia Creek run underground as it went through the city, because they didn't want to see it. They couldn't fly, so they made airplanes to do it for them. They made spaceships and satellites so that they could go far far above the Earth and look down at it. And I'd overheard Gertrud telling one of her friends that in Switzerland, they were finishing a tunnel that ran under an entire mountain range so that the trains wouldn't have to go over it. She said it was fifty-seven kilometers long.

When I saw Meghan, I thanked her again for braiding my tail—I'd been careful in the shower so I didn't have to take it out of its braid. Becky and Lisa thought it looked really good, too.

Lisa asked me what I'd thought of Harry Potter, and I said that I'd liked it. I said that I kind of felt like Harry did sometimes; there were so many things here that were strange and almost magical, even though I knew that humans didn't really have magic. Lisa said that our world seemed like that to them as well.

Our conversation got interrupted by class, but later on when everyone was doing group work and I went around to their table, Lisa asked me what the strangest human invention I'd learned about was.

I said it was a microwave.

She asked if I was sure, and I nodded. Then I told her about how most cooking is done on wood stoves although there are some unicorns who know warming spells.

Cloudhomes don't have access to either, so we're used to eating our food cold or raw, although it's always a nice treat to go out to a restaurant and get hot food (and it's really nice that the college has hot food for every meal). But the idea of a little box that you can put food in and a few minutes later it's hot even though the inside of the box isn't hot was just unbelievable, and kind of scary.

She told me that all the dorms had microwaves in the lounges, and I said that I knew that, but I was afraid to use it because I worried I might use it wrong and let the microwaves escape.

Meghan laughed and said next time I came over, we were going to make microwave popcorn together, and she'd make sure all the microwaves stayed in the box.

I told her it wouldn't be until after the weekend, because Peggy and I were going to a ski resort, and I had to go back to the makerspace tomorrow after class to make sure that everything for the snowboard had been built and worked.

When I got back to the dorm after dinner, I got out my New Atlantis map and started working on it. My computer is able to do math, but it was a lot faster and more familiar to use my weather wheel when running the calculations.

Peggy came in when I was finishing up estimating the weather for Pleasantville. She'd never seen a weather wheel before, so I showed her how it worked. She thought it was really cool, but didn't quite understand everything I was doing with it.

I got almost finished up with it—there were a couple of places where I was going to have to run some more numbers, but mostly it was pretty basic stuff. The water budget is one of the foundations of all weather work.

Then I got my flight gear together and flew off to Aric's house. I thought about taking the weather map, too, but I probably wouldn't have any time to work on it.

When I got there he was out in his driveway, working on Winston. It didn't look like he was having much fun.

But he let me help him, and I think it went faster with the two of us. I held his flashlight in my mouth and aimed it so he could see what he was doing. He was replacing a black thing on the back of the engine that he said was a distributor, because it distributed sparks to the spark plugs, and that was called the ignition, and it made the gas burn. It took him several tries to get it right—there were a bunch of marks that all had to line up in order for it to work like it was supposed to.

He finally got it right and then he had to put the wires back on, and then the air intake, but once all that was done, he could start the truck.

He had a little blinky light like my flight strobe, and he used that to line up a yellow stripe with a groove on a metal plate, which he said was called the timing.

When he was done and had put away his tools, I told him how I wasn't going to be able to come over Friday or this weekend because Peggy and I were going on a trip to a ski resort. He said that that sounded like a lot of fun, and maybe I ought to see if I could borrow the camera that Gates had. So I told him I would.

Author's Note

Weather wheel

March 3 [full day]

March 3

Today turned out to be a rather full day, and in a good way!

I got off to a bit of a late start, but finished my morning exercises in time to beat Brianna to the shower. I didn't take too long, because I knew she'd be there before too long—it's funny how I've gotten used to other people's morning routines like that.

Sure enough, I heard the bathroom door opening when I was just finishing up, and was out of the shower just in time for her to use it. She gave me a friendly smile as she went in. I really ought to go to her room and talk to her sometime; on Tuesdays and Thursdays we often enough meet up in the bathroom, but that's about all I ever wind up seeing of her.

She told me that it was World Wildlife Day, so after breakfast when I saw a fat squirrel running around, I told him, but he wasn't impressed. Then I gave him a piece of toast, and he ran off with it.

I was kinda nervous at the beginning of poetry class, 'cause I knew that Conrad was going to read my poem, and I wasn't sure what other people would think of it. Maybe they all liked Nietzsche, and would think that I was mean.

He kept me waiting. He started off with a poem called Cadenza, and I couldn't help but think of Princess Cadence, which I'm sure the poem wasn't meant to be about.

I hadn't really thought of it before, but I can't be thinking of the same things that my classmates do. The world that these poets have seen is different than the world I know. And it's funny, because the evidence of it is right in front of my muzzle every single day, but I guess I never really thought of it like that until just today.

We read a longer poem called North Atlantic next. There's something about an ocean that's just different and hard to explain to a pony who's never seen one. It's always mysterious and no matter how much you think you know it, it always surprises you. Even the sailorponies thought that, and they all had their superstitions for a safe voyage.

It takes a special kind of pony to sail a ship across the uncertain sea. Sometimes ships would come into port with damaged masts and hulls, and sometimes they'd never arrive, and nopony knew where they'd gone. Pegasus patrols could only go out so far, and it was rare that they'd ever find anything.

Every now and then on the beach, we'd spot boards that had come from a ship, and we'd always spend the rest of the day speculating what ship it had come from and if it had made it back to port, or if it had been lost. There was no way of knowing.

Conrad waited until the very end of class to read my poem, and there were a few snickers at the last line.

I decided to eat lunch with Trevor and his friends again. Cedric and Leon said that I needed a nickname, because everyone who's anyone has a nickname. I said that sometimes my friends just called me Silver, but Cedric said that wasn't good enough, and the two of them debated a little bit before settling on SG.

I told them that I'd watched the first Harry Potter movie, and that as long as we could come up with something for a Golden Snitch, pegasuses could play it. That made Cedric really happy, and he said that he was going to have to find something for me to autograph, so that when ESPN was showing coverage of Equestrian Quidditch games, he could point to it and say that he knew the original Quidditch pony.

I spent the early part of the afternoon finishing up on the New Atlantis map. I'd been right about Goldopolis; it was completely in the rain shadow of the mountains. Nopony sensible would build a town there, unless there were some natural resource that wasn't available anywhere else.

Places like that were special weather zones. It was a lot of work to drag the clouds over mountains, although there were some places where there were convenient lakes that could be used to get water up to a weather factory. It was kind of a joke in school that the real failures would be sent to an arid place, because there wasn't anything they could mess up, but the truth was that such areas were generally a destination for experienced pegasi, because every drop of water counted, and you didn't want some idiot to mess things up.

I'd just finished up when Peggy came back from class, and after she'd relaxed for a little bit and checked her computer mail, we went back to the makerspace to see what they'd come up with.

We tested their simple solution first. They had taken a set of hoof boots and modified them so that they had attachment points on the tread for snowboard brackets, or magnets. So we tried the magnets first, and that was really weird. When I set my hooves on the board, they stuck down, and it was really hard to angle them enough to get them to unattach, but I could kind of slide them, if somebody held the board.

I could fly and it would stay on. To test how magnet-y it was, Karen and a boy named Brandon wrapped their arms around my barrel, while another one called Kurt sat on the board. Karen and Brandon pulled on me until my hooves came free of the metal plates that were screwed to the snowboard.

It worked all right—Peggy said that it was important that I could break free if there was too much force, because otherwise I might break a leg.

Then Kurt showed me one of his projects while Karen and Brandon put the other fasteners on the hoof boots and snowboard. Those, they told me, would work just the same as they did with a human, but they weren't sure how strong my leg bones were, so it might not be as good a choice.

They didn't want to try and pry me off the board this time, but they did let me clip myself in and fly around the makerspace with the snowboard attached. It was weird; I couldn't use my legs like I normally would when I was flying, and I thought that might give me some problems, but I was sure by the end of the week I'd be used to it.

I paid them for all the stuff they'd bought, and they insisted that I had to report back on how well the equipment had worked.

When we were driving back, I told Peggy that the hoof boots were going to be inconvenient; they were designed for human horses who couldn't put on their own boots, so the fasteners on them were going to be difficult or impossible for me to use. She said that she didn't mind having to tie my boots for me.

After dinner, I sent a computer letter to Gates, to see if I could borrow his GoPro for the weekend. I thought that once I figured out how to properly use the snowboard, I could probably do some tricks on it that might look good on the camera. Then I collected everything I thought I might need for the weekend (which wasn’t much) and Peggy and I loaded it into the car. We’d be staying at a hotel for the weekend, so I needed to have my shower stuff with me.

Right before I went to bed, I got a reply back that I could; he'd meet me in the morning with it.

March 4 [up north]

March 4

I thought about skipping out on my morning exercise, but then I'd be all antsy through class and I'd probably wind up hurting myself when I went snowboarding because I hadn't exercised enough. So I trotted around the neighborhood to limber up and then repeated pretty much the same route in the air. Then before I took my shower, I met with Gates.

He gave me a small duffel bag full of equipment. There was his GoPro in there, still attached to the helmet (and now the ear-holes were bigger and they had a cloth tape around the edges to protect my ears) along with extra batteries, a battery charger, and a bunch of little postage-stamp sized memory cards. He explained how to use them all, and said that I'd probably need Peggy's help to change out the equipment, but that was okay.

He told me that if I wasn't sure of whether I ought to be recording something or not, to just record it. He'd go through the movies later and edit them. Gates said that there were enough batteries and memory cards there that I could record from the moment we left campus until the moment we got back and we wouldn't run out.

I thanked him and nuzzled his cheek, then hurried back to the dorm to set aside his gear and take a shower.

I had expected to just turn in our maps, but the professor wanted each of us to go over them and tell the class why we'd come up with the answers we had.

He'd ask specific questions about how we'd come up with our answers for a specific town on the map. When it got to me, he asked about Ilium—and I thought he might. I had a much lower snowfall total for Ilium than anybody else in the class.

The professor reminded me that Ilium was at the eastern end of a long freshwater lake, and I agreed that it was, and the fetch of the wind would be the entire lake, but when it made landfall, the snow wouldn't start coming down right away; it would be a bit inland before it really started snowing. Maybe the very eastern edge of Ilium would get the beginnings of the storm.

I admitted that the major variable would be when ice started forming on the lake. It would naturally want to pile up on the eastern shore, which would have the effect of moving 'land' lakeward, and would increase the amount of snowfall, but I'd estimated that the ice cover would have to be a few kilometers into the lake before that had a significant effect on the snowfall.

He nodded and said that I had made a very reasonable conclusion with the information he had provided.

When I sat back down and the professor's attention was on a different student, Crystal Dawn leaned over and whispered into my ear, asking me how I'd known that. I told her how important the water budget was, and how we worked with natural features rather than against them. I said that if she wanted, I could meet with her after class on Monday and show her how to calculate that if she wanted to.

The professor must have overheard us, because all of a sudden he called my name and then asked what we'd been talking about that was more important than the weather in Bayport, and so I told him what I'd told Crystal Dawn.

He got a thoughtful look on his face and then said that for an extra credit assignment, he was going to let anyone who wanted to come up with a plan for managing the weather in any one place on their map, and that I could help students and then grade the assignments.

I wasn't sure if he was praising me or punishing me, so I just said that I'd do it.

That was a lot of work I hadn't intended, and right before I was going to leave for the weekend, too. I had to make a lot of estimations—I figured that the easiest way to express it was how many millimeters of rain over how much of an area one pegasus could be expected to add or subtract. The numbers weren't exact, but they were close enough.

I didn't have time before philosophy to translate my scribbled notes into something readable, so I decided that I would write the professor a computer letter later, and he could just send copies to all the students.

Sartre said that humans had no purpose before they were born, and the teacher likened it to a paper cutter, which had no specific purpose. I didn't think that was a good example: a paper cutter is meant to cut paper. Maybe that's not what it gets used for; maybe the person who buys the paper cutter never cuts a single sheet of paper with it, but that doesn't change the purpose of the thing. A craftsperson would make a paper cutter for cutting paper, even if they haven't got control of how it gets used once they sell it.

But I did agree that we ponies weren't pre-destined to be anything; we had to go out and find our special talents before we got our cutie marks. If we'd been pre-destined to be what we were, we would have been born with cutie marks. That much was obvious to me.

Humans don't even have cutie marks, but some of them put on tattoos of things that are important to them.

I ate a quick lunch and stopped at the mail hut. I'd gotten another letter from Aquamarine, but I didn't have time to read it: I went back to my dorm room to send my notes to the climate science professor, then I went to Equestrian class.

I told Meghan and Lisa and Becky that I was going snowboarding at a resort for the weekend, which would be my second road trip and they said to have fun, and Meghan warned me to not hurt myself. I said that I would be careful, and I would tell Peggy to be careful, too.

When class was over, I hurried back to our dorm room. Peggy wanted to leave as soon as she got out of class, and I wasn't going to be the one to hold her up. Aside from the bag of cameras, everything was already packed in the car.

I checked real quick to see if I had any new computer messages, and I did; one was from my climate professor thanking me for the calculations, and then there was another message from him which he'd sent to everyone in the class which was just the numbers I'd told him. There was also an offer for discounted Viagra, but I didn't open that one because I didn't know who'd sent it and it was important not to open computer letters if you don't know where they came from.

When Peggy came in, I'd turned on my Facebook and updated my status to 'going snowboarding' and I couldn’t decide if I should add anything else to that.

We both used the bathroom which is important before you leave on a trip, and then got in Cobalt and left town.

After about an hour of driving, we got to a big city called Grand Rapids, and Peggy asked me where I wanted to eat for dinner. I said that I liked Taco Bell. She said that was okay, but if I started farting, I was going to be putting on my magnetic hoof boots and riding on the trunk the rest of the way to the resort.

I thought that was worth the risk, so we went in the little drive-through lane, and then got back on the road with our food. I hadn’t noticed when I was on the trip with Meghan and Lisa and Becky, but the little packages of sauce have inspirational messages on them.

There was a big curve on a bridge over a river, which Peggy said scared her every time she drove over it and there were a lot of accidents on it, and she said that she'd heard it used to be worse, but it had been fixed about fifteen years ago.

The farther north we got, the less and less there was around the road, but I didn't mind. I looked out the windows at the farms and woodlots that we passed. Pretty soon there was just forest on both sides of the road, interrupted by the occasional small town. Peggy pointed out a forest of pine trees that were all in straight rows. She said that people had planted these forests, but she wasn’t sure why, and there were a lot of them like that in the northern lower peninsula.

Not long after dark we stopped at a rest area, then we got back on the highway, which stopped being a highway once we got a little ways past Cadillac—which is both the name of a town and the name of a car.

We finally got to the ski resort. It was a bit of a problem to check into our room; the person at the counter had trouble figuring out how my card worked or something and then he wanted to see some other identification, so I had to show him first my student ID and then my passport but after that he was pretty efficient and gave us little cards for our room and even had a man help us bring all our luggage up.

Our room was about the same size as the dorm room, although it felt a bit smaller because the beds were bigger. There was a bathroom with a toilet and shower, and there was also a small hot tub that sat next to the bathroom but looked over the rest of the room. Then on one wall there was a small icebox and a microwave and a television, and there were a couple of chairs by a desk.

Peggy told me that I could have whichever bed I wanted, so I chose the one closest to the window. She went into the bathroom and came out in her lounging clothes, then she opened a plastic box she'd brought called a cooler and took a beer out for each of us, and we sat on my bed and drank beer and talked about what we were going to do tomorrow. There was a folder that listed all the fun things that we could do at the resort, which was a lot. There was an outdoor pool that sounded like it might be fun and they even had a spa.

Once we'd made our plans for tomorrow, we each had another beer to celebrate and then we both went to bed so that we could get up early and go snowboarding.

March 5 [Boyne Mountain]

March 5

I kind of didn't want to get up because the bed was so comfortable and big. It was like having a cloud all to myself. But I couldn't spend all day in bed, so I got up and pulled the window shades open.

The sky was just starting to get light, but all the downhill runs I could see were brightly lit so that you could use the hill at night and not crash into anybody or anything. It was probably light enough that they could have been turned off, although I'd noticed from my morning flights around Kalamazoo that it had to get pretty bright before they'd get turned off, and sometimes during the day if there was a storm they'd be turned on.

The bathroom was much nicer than any of the ones at college. There were fluffy white towels for us, and little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo and conditioner. It wasn't really enough for me, but it was a nice thought.

I wanted to stay quiet and not wake up Peggy too early—not before the sun rose, anyway—so I explored around the room and found that there was a Bible in the bedstand, so I started reading Numbers, since I hadn't been doing a very good job of reading it.

Everybody started getting ready for a trip to the promised land, which is probably where the Garden of Eden is. Moses took a census, which is where people are counted, and then they started talking about the rules for their trip and getting ready for it. When they finally got into the desert, God gave them manna to eat, but they got tired of eating it every day and wanted some meat. He was mad that He was doing everything for them, so he gave them so much meat that they got tired of it, and then He sent down a plague as well.

Before I could find out what happened after that, Peggy woke up. Her telephone can play her a song to wake up with. It starts off quiet and then gets a bit louder—my ears turned as soon as it started, and I was looking her way when she reached out and fumbled for her telephone, then knocked it off the table by mistake. I didn't mind so much; it was playing Renegades and I like that song.

She got all the way awake while she was finding it, and she sat up in bed and stretched out then grabbed some clean underwear out of her bag and went into the bathroom.

Peggy came out of the bathroom in just her clean underwear. Instead of the lacy bras she normally likes to wear, she had a big black one that squished down her boobs which she said was called a sports bra. It didn't look comfortable to me, but she said it was important to keep them under control while she was snowboarding.

She put on the rest of her clothes and then we went to get some breakfast. The restaurant at the resort was a lot nicer than the one at Bittersweet had been.

We'd decided to try the magnets first and see how they worked on actual snow. Peggy fastened my boots (which were labeled inside so that I'd know which one went on which hoof) then she put on her snowpants and jacket and got our snowboards and my helmet and then we headed to the slopes.

All the slopes had names, and the chairlifts did as well. Humans like to name everything. If we did that with clouds, we'd be so busy naming them none of them would ever make it into the sky.

Since we weren't sure how things were going to work out with my snowboard, we started off on something that was pretty easy, but kind of long. It was called Hilda's Hideaway, and it curved down the side of the hill so it was never too steep. Peggy said that there probably wouldn't be all that many people there yet, and she was right: the chairlift was virtually abandoned.

When we got to the top and got off the lift, it took me a little bit to set my hooves right. There were little alignment notches in the metal plates to make sure that I got in the right place on the board—and the makers had fiddled with the placement a bit before I was happy with their location. My hooves kept sticking in the wrong place, and it was tricky to pull them loose again. The magnet would hold on and then suddenly let go. It was like walking in thick muck.

But I got it figured out, and then we slowly started down the hill, with Peggy at my side. She let me set the course. I went pretty much straight down for this first attempt, just to make sure that everything stayed where it ought to.

It was easier for her to take off her snowboard and go over to the chairlift without it, but I had trouble getting mine off, and then it occurred to me that I could just fly with it on. It was really weird; I never thought about how much I move my legs when I'm flying, but I was really aware of it when the snowboard was attached, since it held my legs in a somewhat immobile position.

We made a dozen more trips down the hill before I had pretty good confidence in the snowboard. Peggy did a lot of work with her legs, which didn't work out as well for me—I used my wings to help navigate it. The big difference was that she was crosswise to the board, while I was facing along it.

I thought it was time for something a bit more challenging, and Peggy did too, so we took some of the side paths that went off the main course. Some of them were shortcuts along the inside of the arc, and others took us to a different trail. Peggy took the lead and I followed her, doing my best to mimic what she was doing with her board.

As the day went on, it started to get more and more crowded. Each time we got to the top of the hill, I could see that there were more cars in the parking lot, and there started to be lines for the chair lifts. I could have flown back up to the top of the hill on my own, but it wouldn't have been nice to leave Peggy behind like that.

My tummy was growling by the time we finally came in for lunch. The whole lodge was packed with strangers, so I stayed close to Peggy.

A lot of them—especially children—came over and wanted to talk to me, so it took a long time to get our lunch. While we were eating, we were mostly left alone, but there was one little boy in a blue snowsuit that was almost the same color as my coat came over and started petting me before his mother could grab him and pull him away.

Before we went back outside, Peggy put a new memory card and a new battery in the GoPro, and while she was doing that we looked over the trail map (which was probably more for my benefit than hers) and decided that we'd try Mister Moll, and when I was confident with that, we'd take the Black Diamond Rush cutoff.

There were also little areas called terrain parks where we could do tricks. I wanted to try them, but Peggy said that that would be for tomorrow; today it was more important to make sure I had all the basics down so I wouldn't get hurt. I knew she was right, but it's frustrating sometimes to want to do something and have to wait until you have more experience.

But she was looking out for me, and that was important.

We'd talk on the lift about techniques and she'd tell me about other places she'd snowboarded. It was kind of a weird conversation, because we'd have part of it then reach the top of the lift and focus on snowboarding down, and then pick up where we left off when we were in line for another ride to the top of the hill.

I learned that there were a lot of good places to snowboard near Colorado Springs, which is her home when she's not in college. She said that one of her favorites was Monarch Mountain, and the most fun trail on it was called Mirkwood Bowl, which started right at the continental divide and went down the mountain from there.

She said that was also where she'd broken her wrist in a nasty fall, and she'd had to sit out the rest of the season while it was healing, which had been really frustrating, and that was why she wore wrist-guards now.

We ate a kind of late dinner, and then after that, we went back to the trails until the hill closed for the night. I was really sore—but in a good way—and my coat and tail were loaded with snow. Some of my mane had escaped the same fate because of the GoPro helmet, but along my neck it was stiff with ice.

It was uncomfortable walking back to our room in my boots, but I didn't want to let Peggy take them off because that would be more stuff she had to carry.

As soon as we got into the room, I turned on the faucet to the mini-hot tub. I planned to soak in it until all my muscles relaxed.

She said that sounded like a good idea, so she helped me take my hoof boots and helmet off, and then she used the coffee maker to make hot water while I carried the gear over to the desk.

I wasn't sure what she wanted the hot water for; the tub had plenty of it coming out of the faucet, but she said that it wasn't a good idea to drink hot water right out of the faucet. She didn't know why, but her grandmother had told her that.

She had little envelopes full of powder that turned into hot chocolate, and she added a bunch of Kahlua to it, which she said made the hot chocolate better.

It certainly added a nice kick to it, which was good: most of the snow in my coat had melted while I was waiting for the tub to fill, and I was actually feeling a bit chilled, despite the heat in the room. The hot chocolate warmed me right up, and Peggy made us both a second glass.

I got in the tub first and asked her if she was going to get in as well. She said that she had to put on her swimsuit, and started digging through her bag.

I asked her why she needed it; she didn't wear it in the shower, and I didn't understand how this was different.

She stopped rummaging through her bag and finished her hot chocolate then poured herself another. I hadn't had much of my second one yet, because I didn't want to drop it in the tub by mistake and there wasn't a good place to set it.

When she'd finished, she said that I was probably right and it would save her from having to deal with a wet bathing suit.

She took off the rest of her clothes and came over to the hot tub, then turned a little knob that made jets of water start shooting out of the walls of the tub. I'd wondered what the little circles in the walls were for.

She got in across from me and stretched out with her arms on the side of the tub, her drink in one hand. When she saw that I didn't have mine, she got out of the tub and brought it over, setting it beside the tub where she could reach it for me.

We sat and talked and drank hot chocolate with Kahlua until we were both completely relaxed and the bottle was almost gone. I dried off clumsily; between the alcohol and exhaustion, I was staggering on my hooves, and I finally decided that it was too much bother to dry off all the way and crawled into bed still pretty wet. I knew I'd be paying for it in the morning; my coat was going to be all clumped up, but I was too tired to care.

Peggy must have felt the same way; she got into her bed without putting on her normal sleeping clothes.

March 6 [snow machine]

March 6

I woke up with a pounding head from too much spiked hot chocolate last night, my coat matted down, and my mane and tail nothing but tangles.

I was willing to bet that Peggy felt the same way—she'd had more to drink than I had—so I used the room telephone to order a breakfast delivered to us. It was more expensive than going down and getting it ourselves, but I hoped Peggy would be happy to not have to get up and go down to the restaurant and get it.

The only way I was going to get untangled was a shower and lots of conditioner. Luckily I'd brought my own, since their little bottles weren't going to go far enough.

Of course the food arrived while I was still in the shower. The waiter's eyes got real wide when I opened the door, looking like some weird soap-monster, but to his credit he didn't drop our breakfast. As soon as he was gone, I ducked back into the shower to finish up.

I was done and brushing out my tail when Peggy's telephone started singing. When she'd shut it off—not knocking it off the bedstand this time—she noticed the breakfast, and right after that she realized that she wasn't wearing any clothes and pulled up her blanket to cover herself.

I thought that was really funny, and kind of cute. She got out of bed wrapped up in her comforter, got her plate of food and set it on the bedstand, and worked one of her arms out of her blanket-robe in order to eat.

She thanked me for ordering the food, and then tossed the blanket over my head and went into the bathroom before I could get it off.

While she was taking her morning shower, I made a pot of coffee. I knew how those worked, because Aric has one at home and I saw him using it before. This one was easier than his, because the coffee was already measured out in a little bag, and all I had to do was put it in the top chamber, fill the tank with water, and then turn it on.

Peggy was a lot more chipper when she came out of the bathroom. She had one towel wrapped around her head, and another knotted around her body. She poured herself a cup of coffee, added a little bit of the Kahlua to it, and then sat on her bed and sipped at it.

We didn't actually get off to much of a later start than before. Peggy changed the batteries and memory card in the GoPro, and we both got dressed. We had to check out of our room, too, which meant that we had to pack everything up and take it back to Cobalt.

She wanted to start off with a few runs on an easy course to warm up, and then said if I felt like it, we could try a black diamond course (which is the hardest rating).

So we took a few runs down Mister Moll, and then went over to Idiot's Delight.

We'd run down it a couple of times, when I noticed a man working on a strange round tube mounted on a pedestal which looked somewhat like the theater spotlight. I asked Peggy what it was, and she said that it was a snow machine. They were all over the place, but I hadn't paid them any attention before.

That sounded interesting to me, so I snowboarded down next to him and then got off my board (which isn't easy) and flew over and asked him how it worked.

At first he was surprised to see me and I don't think he was used to people talking to him when he worked. He probably wasn't expecting me to have flown up next to him.

He started to explain how the snow machine worked. He said that there were rings on the front that let a mist of water through, and the machine blew it out into cold air, and then it turned into snow.

Of course I wanted to see it work, but he said that he wasn't allowed to turn it on when people were skiing, which was a huge disappointment. He told me that down at the lodge, they had one that they used for demonstrations, and if I went there at noon, there would be a lecture about it, which would include having the snow machine make snow. So I flew back to Peggy and told her about it, and she said that we could go watch that.

Idiot's Delight wasn't that much harder for me, but my wings gave me an unfair advantage. I could soar over the difficult patches. I tried not to, because it felt like I was cheating, but I couldn't help my instincts.

Peggy thought it was funny, and she said that after watching the snowmaking demonstration and lunch, we were going to try out a terrain park and get some good footage for Gates. As if what I'd gotten yesterday wasn't good enough for him.

I lost count of how many runs we made down the hill before Peggy said that it was almost noon, and we went over to the demonstration area.

It was mostly small children and their parents, which was nice—small children are easy for me to see over.

The machine was pretty easy to understand. There were two kinds of snow machines, the ones that ran on compressed air and the ones that just ran on fans. The fan ones were more efficient, we were told, and the resort was changing to using all the fan types. They had big reservoirs to keep the water in, and a pumphouse to get it through pipes and hoses to the snow machines.

In principle, it wasn't significantly different than how we made snow. Rather than blast it out on the ground like they did, we had it fall from clouds and form normally, but the essence of the process was the same: humidity and air temperature were the big factors.

Also, their machines made little round snowballs instead of flakes. They said that was better, because it sat on the slopes and didn't wear out or melt as quickly as flakes did, and I guess I could understand how that would be better for them, but little round snowballs would not be as satisfactory to me as proper snowflakes.

Just the same, I paid close attention. There might be somepony interested in this kind of machine, especially since it was nice and simple. It was really clever how there were multiple concentric rings which could be controlled independently, depending on what the conditions for making snow were.

Then they got to the part I'd been waiting for, which was turning it on. The presentor asked if there were any volunteers to start it, and of course I raised my hoof, and I got chosen! Although it wasn't actually all that exciting. I got to turn a water valve, and the child who had also been chosen got to turn an air valve, and then it came to life and started spraying snow up into the air.

I flew around front to get a feel for what it was doing—I'd already had the technical explanation, of course, but I also wanted to feel it for myself.

I guess I wasn't supposed to have done that, because the presenter yelled at me and turned off the snow until I flew out of the snow area and promised not to fly back in. Just the same, I'd managed to get a decent sense of it.

When we went to lunch, Peggy said that Gates probably wouldn't be expecting to have video footage shot down the barrel of a snowgun.

We ate a light lunch, and then headed to the terrain park. That was only supposed to be for experienced snowboarders. She said I was probably experienced enough, and if I got in trouble to just fly out of it.

I could do that.

I started off just watching what other people did. There were ramps made out of snow, and the idea was to jump off of them and maybe make a loop in the air—it was obvious some people were trying for distance, and others were doing tricks.

When I had a good idea of what to do, I made my attempt. The first time down, I didn't have the right angle on the bow of the board, and it dug in and got yanked off my hooves. I wasn't quick enough getting my wings out: it took me totally by surprise. So I wound up crashing headfirst into the ramp.

I shook my head and got my board back and tried again. This time I got the bow of the snowboard up and launched off the ramp, managing about half a loop. It was obvious I wasn't going to be able to finish it, so I flew out of it and landed.

It took a few tries before I could go all the way over, but once I got the hang of it, it was pretty easy and I didn't have to flap at all.

I still felt like I was cheating. Peggy didn't have any wings to help her, and she was getting a pretty good height on her snowboard.

She said that she wanted to film me one time trying for distance. She said that what I ought to do was come right at her with my wings tucked in, and once I was above her head, let them out and glide into a landing. So she got in position with her telephone and then told me to go.

I had to pull up on the board a little bit right before I went over her head—she hadn't judged her standing position all that well. And then I glided down faster than I could have, because if I kept my original course, I was going to run into the second floor of the lodge, and I didn't think that would look too good on the camera, so I glided down into the base area.

We played around for most of the afternoon, until it was starting to get dark, and then it was time to go back home.

Both of us were really tired when we got back to campus—it was nearly midnight when she parked Cobalt.

Sitting in the seat for hours hadn't done me any favors. I probably should have done some cool-down stretches afterward. I could tell that Peggy was sore, as well, and we didn't have a hot tub back in the dorm to relax in, although a hot shower would do the job almost as well.

I told her that she could take the first shower, since she'd done all the hard work driving us back, and then I thought about turning on my computer and seeing if I'd gotten any new mail, and I thought about reading Aquamarine's letter, but I wound up doing neither and falling asleep on top of my bed instead, and not waking up until Monday morning.

March 7 [weathermaking]

March 7

I woke up in the morning still on top of my bed and feeling like I'd been put in a barrel and rolled down a hill.

I dragged my tail out of bed and went to the bathroom and thought about whether or not a trot around the neighborhood would benefit me any, or if I would be better off just taking a long hot shower to loosen up my muscles.

Exercise won out, but I cut my routine really short, not even leaving the main part of campus. I didn't think I could manage anything more than that. And then I did take a long, hot shower, which almost relaxed me enough to fall asleep in there.

I probably should have arranged a time this morning to meet up with Gates, but I hadn't, and besides most of our stuff was still in the trunk of Cobalt. I guessed Peggy felt about the same as I did, so I wasn't going to wake her up for that. Gates could wait.

Of course, I wound up running into him on my way to breakfast. So then I had to apologize for leaving the gear where I couldn't get at it, but he said that was okay, and he asked how the helmet had worked. I bowed my head and showed him that there weren't any cuts on my ear this time.

I told him that I'd used up five batteries and memory cards. Since we weren't sure how long the camera would run, we'd changed them at mealtimes. And I told him about the video Peggy had taken with her telephone. I said I'd get it to him tomorrow morning for sure.

Everyone at breakfast wanted to know how my weekend had gone, so I told them all about it, and I thought that I ought to make sure to let the makers know how well the magnet bindings had worked: we hadn't had to try and switch to the other ones, and once I'd learned to fly over the grates that were there for people to scrape their boots off on, I hadn't had any trouble with them.

When I got to climate science class, it turned out that everyone had decided that they wanted to work on my project, and the professor cancelled his normal lesson to let me help instruct.

I guess I hadn't been as clear in my computer letter as I ought to have been. At first I thought people were just dumb when it came to stuff like this, but everyone had problems with the same things.

So I spent the class explaining weather targets and water budget and how teams were set up, and how to make calculations from there. It was actually a learning experience for me, too, since as far as I knew, nopony had ever had to set up a system from scratch like that. When a new area is settled, a couple of weather teams are assigned, and then they build from that—but it wasn't something that had been done in my lifetime. I only had the vaguest idea of how it worked, because there was a weather book at our station that gave the history of all the weather teams who had served in our zone and I read through it when I was off-duty.

A couple of towns I knew right away what they'd need (weather-wise, they'd been pretty similar to some towns in our district), and so all of us together worked out what kind of teams would need to put the weather in place.

One thing I hadn't thought to mention was the supporting pegasuses. Not everypony is in the sky; the weather factory needs to be staffed, and there's a lot of hoofwork into getting the supplies where they're needed. While it wasn't really something to consider for the assignment, I summarized how the cloudmaking and delivery process worked.

I was able to compare it a little bit with the snow machines that they had at the ski resort, which actually helped out. I'm glad I got a chance to see how one worked, even if they hadn't let me fly in the snow it was spitting out.

I also learned that it isn't as easy to write on a markerboard as I thought it would be. Teachers must practice that.

About half the students stayed after class, because they wanted clarifications. I think everybody would have if they hadn't had to go to other classes. It made me feel important—even the professor was taking notes as I answered questions.

When I finally had to go to get to philosophy, I was thinking that maybe I could set aside an afternoon to go more in-depth about how the Equestrian weather system worked. I certainly would have been able to do more calculations if I’d had my weather wheel in class, and I thought that maybe they'd be interested in how that worked, too.

We started on our final philosopher, who was named Karl Marx and who had a beard much like Walt Whitman's. I had been prepared to be disappointed in what he thought, so I was pleasantly surprised when it sounded like he actually had some really good ideas.

He started off by saying how man (and ponies!) are better than animals, because we produce beyond what we need for our immediate survival. That was unarguably true. And then he said that what also set us apart was that we imagined things beforehand, and then made it happen.

I couldn't argue with that: as recently as climate class, I'd been doing just that, imagining weather for a continent that the professor had made up. None of it was any more real than a printed map and figures on the markerboard, but it already sort of existed in my imagination. And if it had been real, the calculations I'd made would have been a good starting point for its weather.

He also had something in common with Sartre; he said that man shapes the world and the world shapes man, but he took it a step farther and said that as the world changes, man changes as well, constantly growing and changing to suit the changing world.

I hadn't really thought of it, but while we had a lot of traditions and did a lot of things the same way we always had, there was new stuff, too. When my granddam was a foal, there were no steam locomotives, so nopony knew how to drive them or build them or fix them when they broke. Now there were ponies who did.

And the human world must have been changing like that, too. Sean knew how to fix computers, and Aric knew how to fix Winston, but there must have been a time on Earth when there weren't computers or trucks, and then nobody would have been able to work with them.

I was glad that we were ending with a philosopher who was smart. Although I was a bit skittish after the others, and I wondered if maybe Marx would wind up saying dumb things too.

By the time Equestrian class came around, I was ready for a nap and not at my best. Luckily, it didn't take all that much effort on my part to fall back into speaking Equestrian. Meghan was curious how my weekend had gone, and so were Becky and Lisa, so I told them about it, too. Then they told me that tomorrow was Michigan's primary, and after they explained it to me, I said that I wanted to go.

Meghan reminded me that I couldn't vote (Becky couldn't either, because she didn't live in Michigan, and I guessed that Peggy probably couldn't either), but that was okay; I thought it would be interesting to see.

Meghan still didn't want to use an Uber-car, but the college was making vans available to get to the voting places, and we decided to meet up and go in one of them.

Even though I was pretty tired, I went to Durak and had a lot of fun. I didn't lose any times, and after it was over, Aric and I went to his house.

I was really tired, and it turned out he was too—he said that he'd spent the weekend helping David move a radio console from Kalamazoo to Paducah, and the weather had been really bad part of the way back, so we wound up just snuggling for a little while and then we both fell asleep.

March 8 [Michigan Primary]

March 8

I woke up on my regular schedule, which was nice. And I felt a lot better, too: I doubt it was just one night's sleep that had done it, but sleeping with a partner. I always get better sleep when there's someone with me.

I don't always get as much sleep, though.

Both of us were pretty well rested, so we had some fun before I left. It's weird; sex usually makes stallions and men (based on my trial size of one so far) want to fall asleep, but it energizes me. I've heard that some stallions won't do it before a race, 'cause they think it tires them out, but most of the mares I know are in favor.

It was overcast this morning; low leaden clouds that promised more snow. I flew up to their base and rolled on my back and skimmed my hooves through them, shaking loose a few nascent flakes which I followed down to Earth, watching as they formed into proper snowflakes, not the little snowballs that the snow machines at Boyne Mountain make. So what if these aren't as good for skiing and snowboarding on; they're prettier.

My leg joints were still achey from being magneted to the snowboard all weekend, but a lap of the neighborhood after I finished my flight mostly took care of that. All in all, at the end of my exercise I was pretty limbered up everywhere, and the hot shower was just a nice bonus.

Like I'd promised, I got the duffel bag with the GoPro and the memory cards and batteries to Gates on my way to breakfast. He said not to expect anything too quickly—there was a lot of footage for him to review and edit, and I told him that was okay.

He also told me that he'd tweaked the first video some and promised to send me a link to it. He was going to use it as an assignment for his film class, and that made me sorta puff up with pride, so I was even happier that he had more footage to work with. Nopony had ever wanted me to be in an important film before. I wasn't some showmare or starlet or famous athlete.

It was kind of bittersweet when I sat down in poetry class. I knew that we were about to start on the last poet of the quarter, and that would be that.

I'd kind of cheated and read a little bit of every poet in the books Conrad had recommended, trying to guess who he'd be choosing next; and as always, he surprised me with a poet named Langston Hughes.

He started out with a long poem called Freedom's Plow, and he had students in the class each read parts of it until we finally reached the end. But he did something a little different than what he had usually done; instead of handing out a pamphlet with the poems in them, he had only one copy, and we had to pass it from person to person as we read.

I liked that. It was more intimate, and we couldn't read ahead to know what was going to come next. Only our words, and then we passed it along.

We discussed that poem for half the class, and what it was about. Then he did something else new: he passed out a copy of the poem to everyone, and he had us read it again.

Then he took the poem back and put it on his desk and walked around front.

He reminded everyone in the class that today was the presidential primary in Michigan, and he said that he hoped that every one of us who could would vote. He was old, he told us, and it wasn't as much his America as it had once been. It was ours, or it soon would be, and we ought to determine its future.

Then he went back around his desk and pulled out a much-loved book. He turned it open and read us a poem called Harlem, and then told us to think about what he'd said and class was dismissed.

We all stayed in our seats until he actually walked out of the door, and even then it was a little bit before anybody else got up.

Back home, I had my favorite thinking spot. It wasn't much; just a jumble of rocks on a spit of land that jutted out into the ocean. One of them was big and flat, and I could sit on that and watch the waves roll in, or—if it was windy or really rainy—I could get a bit underneath and have some shelter from the weather, if I wanted it.

I didn't have that here, which was a shame. So I flew up to the roof of Dewing Hall instead: there's a big open area in the center which you can't see from the ground that has some machines and smokestacks and other stuff that humans put on roofs, but more importantly, it was completely invisible from the ground unless I walked to the very edge.

It wasn't the only building like that on campus—most of the class halls were similar—but Dewing was the highest except for the Dow Science building, and that one sometimes had funny smells coming out of its chimneys.

I landed up there and sat in the lee of a big metal machine and read through the poem several more times and then just sat there and thought about it, trying to wrap my head around it. It wasn't about a thing, like so many other poems we'd read had been. Or maybe it was, but it wasn't a thing that could be grasped or even seen.

I didn't have the words to describe how it made me feel, but it was both sad and hopeful at the same time, and I thought perhaps that was how it was meant to be.

I met up with Meghan and Lisa in Old Wells after lunch. I'd never been in it before; usually the doors were closed, because it was only used for special occasions, and I guess this was one of them. That was kind of a shame, the room was very beautiful, with an arched ceiling and a mural on the far wall, and big tall windows that let in lots of light, even on a cloudy kind of snowy day like today.

Everybody was gathered in little clusters, and every so often a student would come in and a dozen or so people would step out, and all the little clusters of people would rearrange, moving that much closer to the door.

Pretty soon it was our turn. All of us crowded into the van, and I had to stand in the little aisle because everybody else was taking a seat and the driver didn't want to leave one open for me because I couldn't vote. I didn't protest; it would be unfair of me to take someone else's space just because I was curious.

We drove through town until we came to a church, and the driver opened the doors and everyone got out and went inside, where there was another line.

Meghan told me as we were walking in that we weren't supposed to talk about candidates, and she also said that there would be sample ballots that I could look at and a poster on the wall that said what their rights and duties as voters were and she thought it would be educational for me to read them.

She also told me that it was rude to ask people who they had voted for; if they really wanted to say, they would. And she warned me that sometimes there were television crews and newspaper reporters at the exit who would ask who we had voted for.

Meghan got a little smile on her face and said that I should probably just tell them 'no comment,' but if I wanted to have some fun with them I ought to tell them that I had voted for Vermin Supreme because of his pony platform and then refuse to say anything else about it.

Then Lisa told her that if I did, it would probably backfire somehow. Meghan insisted that it would still be hilarious.

I read the posters and ballots like she had suggested, and then when they got to the registration desk I had to step aside because I wasn't allowed to go any further. But I watched as they got their ballot papers and took them into a little booth, then brought them back out and fed them into a machine.

It was very complicated: they had to go to one person and show their identification and a little card, then they had to give that card to another person who marked them off in a big book and gave them a ballot, then they filled out their ballot and before they could leave, they had to stop by another person.

Then we all had to wait outside until everyone was done, and then we rode in the van back to campus.

I ate dinner with them, because I hoped that Meghan and Lisa would explain more about it to me over food, and they did. They explained how different states had different rules, and in Michigan you could take whatever ballot you wanted, Democrat or Republican. She said that there were some people who voted for their favorite candidate, some people who voted for the one they felt was most likely to win, and others who voted against the one they liked the least.

After dinner was over, we went back to Old Wells, where they were showing results for the election on a big screen.

Even that was complicated: it took a while to get an official count, so the numbers were estimates at first, but their accuracy improved as the night went on, until the reporter decided that Trump and Sanders had won the race in Michigan.

There was both cheering and booing when that was announced. It was sort of like watching a hoofball match, both in how the audience reacted, and how the winners and losers of the primary both gave speeches.

People started leaving after that, some of them happy and some of them sad. I wanted to stay for longer, or maybe go and discuss it some more with Meghan and Lisa, but I knew that I would probably have a bunch of computer letters waiting from people in the climate science class who had more questions, and it turned out I wasn't wrong about that.

The only good news was that the professor had decided to move the due date back to Friday.

Author's Note

Freedom's Plow

Harlem

March 9 [politics is like sports]

March 9

All anyone could talk about at breakfast was the primary. People whose candidate had won were gloating, which wasn’t that surprising, and the others put the best face forward and said that their candidate had done better than expected, or they were building momentum for the next primary, or they were showing that they were still in the race, or the results didn’t matter anyway.

It was a lot like sports.

What did seem odd was that each state got a primary, but they didn't all happen at the same time. There would be another one next week, and another one the week after that, and so on. Each candidate won a number of votes, and then they carried them forward until they had a majority of votes, or I guess there was some other convention where they could be nominated if they didn't have a majority.

After that, the two winningest candidates would face off against each other and then there would be another election, and the winner of that would be the next president.

It sounded needlessly complicated, and I told people that. Our cities had the same mayor until we decided that she wasn't doing a good job any more, and then we replaced her.

Joe asked me if we were worried about tyrants or dynasties. I said it was more about how well she did and not so much who her mother was. That's why the unicorn system is dumb. Sure, they must get good leaders sometimes, but they also got stuck with Prince Blueblood.

Then when I got to climate class, I had to change my thinking from politics to the weather. The professor said that he was going to spend half the class reviewing for the final exam, and then we could spend the second half studying on our own or else working on the weather project I was going to grade.

Well, that meant that I wouldn't get to do any studying on my own, so I really had to pay attention in the first half.

I think if wasn't for all the terminology the humans used, I would have been more confident, but I was still having some trouble with how they described things. Especially when it was an incomplete description, because humans didn't always know how things actually interacted and divided stuff into separate categories when they ought not to have.

I didn't want to undo what he had explained when I was talking about how we did the weather, either, 'cause I knew people were going to ask for more details. Even though it wasn't really part of the extra credit assignment..

So I told them about how we get the water up to the weather factories, both capturing it when it's already in the sky and making up the difference with water tornadoes.

Of course everyone wanted to know if I could make a tornado, and I said that I probably could, but I was worried that if I did it would go out of control, and by the time it was even formed at all, I'd be so exhausted that I wouldn't be able to stop it.

If there was already one naturally formed, or about to, I could influence it with less work on my part, but it was still incredibly dangerous.

They were disappointed that I'd refused, and I thought about making a little bitty dust whirl, but I didn't tell them that I probably could if I tried and the conditions were just right. Maybe next time I was flying over a large open field I’d give it a try and see what happened.

I reminded them that they weren't supposed to try and calculate how many ponies it would take to turn Goldopolis into productive farmland. Even I didn't know that. Besides just the weather ponies, you'd have to have lots of earth ponies working the soil for a long time: just dumping lots of rain on arid land would only cause flash floods.

Then class was over, and I took a break and read Aquamarine's letter. She said that she was looking forward to Spring Break as well and that she'd be happy to see me and it would be nice to talk mare to mare, 'cause humans were really weird about a lot of stuff. She also said that her roommate had said it was okay if I stayed with them for a couple of days, which was really nice of her roommate. I'd get to spend some more time with her and catch up face-to-face.

I wrote a quick computer letter to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn telling them what Aquamarine had said, and added what my schedule for finals was going to be. I'd gotten so busy the second half of the quarter that I'd almost completely forgotten about them. Then I rushed off to philosophy.

We learned about labor and value, which was something that I was familiar with. Ponies produce things that other ponies need or want based upon their skills. Weather ponies make rain, and the rain grows crops, and the crops are turned into food for the weather ponies, and so the cycle goes.

I asked the professor if taking things away also counted as value, and she wasn't sure what I meant at first, then I told her how I'd been working breaking up storms, and that could be thought of as taking something away rather than producing something.

Then another student said that he thought that was a type of production. We produced a measure of safety, and he said it was like the fire department, who protects everyone by putting out fires before they can spread.

But a few students protested why Marx's philosophy wouldn't work, and the teacher said that we weren't going to be arguing the political side of his philosophy; that was a different class, and that got people back on course.

At the end of it, I was still pretty sure that Marx had come up with the best ideas, and maybe that was why we'd saved him for very last.

It was interesting how at lunch almost everyone had forgotten about the election last night; nobody was talking about it at all. Or maybe they'd said all that they wanted to say at breakfast.

After lunch, I wrote back to Aquamarine, and told her what my finals schedule was and said that I was still waiting to hear back from Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and that I was sorry for not having written back sooner but I'd been snowboarding all weekend. I hoped she understood; I was going to be so upset with myself if she was mad. Then I added in at the end about the weather assignment I was going to help grade and wanted to know if she was doing anything similar.

I hope she can read my mouthwriting: I wrote the letter in kind of a hurry.

I just barely made it to Equestrian class in time, but I got there. There wasn't any time to talk before the class started, but afterwards Meghan asked if I wanted to come over tomorrow night and watch the second Harry Potter movie with her.

Surely, it would have been wiser to spend the time studying, but I could spend all day Sunday doing it, and it would be fun to see more of Harry Potter and spend some more time with Meghan.

I went over to Aric's right after dinner, and I had my saddlebags on, 'cause I wanted to have him help me with my vocabulary.

He wanted to know what was in it for him (he said it jokingly), so I told him what was in it for him when we got done with studying and he said that sounded like a pretty good deal.

So he reached under my belly and unstrapped my saddlebags and I got out my notebook. He sat on the couch and I lay my head down on his lap and he read the definitions and I said the words, and then we switched around to where I was defining the words, and after a couple of hours I was consistently getting them all right even though he was distracting me because he only needed to hold the notebook with one hand. No matter how many times I swatted it away, it came back, and I really didn't mind all that much anyway.

March 10 [spring is soon]

March 10

Sara gave me a dirty look again this morning. Maybe she isn't a morning person, or maybe she doesn't like it when I use the bathroom before her. I liked her better when she smiled at me and petted my mane.

I just gave her a syrupy sweet smile and went back to Aric's room to get my gear.

Today was absolutely gorgeous, but a touch chilly. A very light sprinkling of snow had fallen overnight and it made everything glittery. I knew it was going to be gone soon; the weather was supposed to be kinda warm and with the sun out, a lot of the snow would melt.

I took a pretty broad flight over Kalamazoo, sort of a big triangle loop all the way up to the Maple Hill Mall and the 131 Highway, and then along Drake Road to Stadium, then followed that back towards campus.

I was pretty sweaty by the time I got back, and when I was in the shower I noticed that I was starting to shed my winter coat. It was time to make an appointment with Maura.

I had to use my hoof to scrape the matted hair out of the drain grate so I didn't flood the bathroom, and then I used my wings to direct the water from the showerhead to get as much of it off the floor as I could.

Then I had to apologize to Brianna for taking longer than normal in the shower. She wasn't mad, though.

Since I was in a good mood and had gotten lots of exercise this morning, I had an omelet and a waffle.

I checked my computer mail before I went to poetry and had gotten a message from Miss Cherilyn saying that they'd meet me to chat and take me (and Peggy if she wanted to go) to dinner after my last final, and then the next day they could get me a train ticket to Lansing, or they could give me a ride all the way there in their van.

Taking the train would be more practical, but I was a bit reluctant to ride it by myself. Plus I hadn't spent as much time talking with them as I ought to have, so I wrote back that I would appreciate a ride if it wasn't any trouble.

Conrad started with a simple short poem called Sailor. Humans don't get cutie marks, so sailors tattoo themselves. I think it's so that they remember who they are, because the ocean makes you forget.

I thought about the ships I'd seen come into port, and the sailorponies step off and stagger onto land like they can't remember what it feels like to have unmoving ground under their hooves. Their coats are full of dried salt, creaking and cracking when they move just like the ship creaks and cracks when it's rolling in the gentle wavelets in the harbor.

Some of the oldest mariners refuse to set their hooves on dry land. They don't trust ground.

Next we read The Negro Speaks of Rivers. I didn't know any of the rivers he mentioned, but he mentioned Abraham Lincoln, who must have been a very important person. I thought I could ask Trevor about him, or maybe Cedric. Cedric really likes me, and he tries not to show it. And Leon likes me too, but he also likes to make fun of Cedric for liking me. Also sometimes Leon likes to talk like he's really dumb, but he isn't.

He had Melissa, who is a really shy, pale girl, read Red Roses. It was a shame she hardly ever read aloud; her voice was beautiful, and fit the poem very well. She read it with a quiet intensity that raised the hair on my back.

Then Conrad had me read a poem called Dust Bowl, about the land being dry and dead and wanting me to come back. I was sad when I got to the end of it, because I knew it was the last poem I was going to read for his class.

He ended with Trevor reading God. Better to be human, the poem said, and I thought that was true. According to the Bible, God had created humans in His own image, and then they just kept messing up, not following His rules at all and He sat in Heaven watching them, perfect—and lonely.

I wonder if Princess Celestia is lonely? I heard that she meets everypony who goes on the exchange when they come back; maybe I ought to give her a big hug.

I met up with Trevor and his friends after class and we went to the dining hall together. Cedric made a big deal about carrying my food for me, and then we sat down and I asked them why Abraham Lincoln was so important that Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes had written about him in poems.

That turned into quite the lunchtime conversation, and filled my head with a lot of not very nice history.

Well, I couldn't change the past, but I could do something in the present, so I wrapped my hooves around Cedric and gave him a big hug—he was sitting right next to me—and then hugged everyone else at the table.

Leon got all embarrassed and said that I was hurting his street cred, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

I spent the afternoon reviewing my notes for philosophy class. Our final exam was to write an essay on a philosopher, and I was trying to think of who I ought to choose, and I had to refresh myself on a lot of what they'd said.

Only Meghan watched the movie with me. Lisa was in the library studying, and Becky said that she had to do homework, too.

It was okay, though, because I got to stretch out on Meghan's lap and she petted me for a little bit and then noticed that I was shedding, so she brought over a wastebasket and one of her brushes and ran it through my coat during the whole movie.

I'd thought I'd figured out that there was a cockatrice on the loose, but it turned out to be a basilisk at the end. I should have known because the people weren't actually turned to stone—but it did make me wonder if maybe it wouldn't be as bad to look at a cockatrice in a mirror.

I didn't think I'd be the one to try it, though. Not with a cockatrice and not with a basilisk either.

When I told Meghan that there were phoenixes in Equestria, she wanted to know if they could really rejuvenate by burning themselves to ash, and I told her that they could. I did my best to mimic their call (the movie got it wrong), and tried to describe how beautiful they are. They're also kinda mean and territorial except when they're migrating and wintering, so they're best appreciated from a distance.

We sat and talked after the movie was over—she used a remote to turn the television off so that she didn't have to disturb me. I told her I wanted to brush her hair, and at first she refused, but then she said that I could. I put my front legs on her shoulders for balance and the brush in my mouth. Meghan thought it was really weird that I could still talk even when I was holding onto the brush.

Meghan slid back on the bed and put her back to the wall after I’d finished brushing her, and I curled up with my head on her lap. I thanked her again for brushing my coat, and asked her if she needed to go to the salon anytime soon, because I had to make an appointment with Maura to groom out some of my winter coat before spring break.

She said maybe we could do it Monday afternoon, and she’d call in the morning and find out.

My head was getting heavy, so I told her it was probably time for me to go back to my dorm room, and then she sighed and said that it probably was, unless I wanted to spend the night in her room.

So she went to the bathroom and put her sleeping clothes on and brushed her teeth and then asked if I wanted the inside or outside side of the bed. I thought that the outside would be more practical, since I like to wake up early.

When we were both under the covers she wrapped her arm around me and kissed me on the ear and then tucked her head against mine.

Author's Note

Sailor

God

March 12 [National Weather Service]

March 12

I didn't want to be late, so I skipped my morning exercise (I'd be getting some in Grand Rapids if there were clouds in the sky), packed up my flight outfit, and trotted over to the dining hall. Unfortunately, it wasn't open yet, because humans usually sleep in on weekends, and it wasn't going to open until after we left.

I hoped the professor planned to stop somewhere for breakfast. I was going to be a grumpy pony if I didn't get anything to eat.

Before too long, other people from the class started trickling in. Most of them looked not all the way awake yet. I don't really understand how weekends are that much different than weekdays: everyone would have been eating breakfast or on their way to class by now if it had been a weekday.

Luke was the last to arrive, and then we all got in the van, which is called Express. I sat in the back next to Crystal Dawn. That wasn't a good place to be in order to see where we were going, but I'd rather be with two people I liked than all alone in the front seat.

Crystal Dawn fell asleep before we were even out of Kalamazoo. She'd rested her head on Luke's shoulder and closed her eyes as soon as the van started moving, and she was completely out when we turned north on the 131 Highway.

I thought it was kind of strange that I was already familiar with this highway; it was my third trip north on it. And I hadn't really gone much of anywhere else, yet. We passed by the road that went to Bittersweet, and then before we got to the big S-curve in Grand Rapids that Peggy didn't like, we went onto a different highway.

I was a little bit concerned; the highway number (6) was on a black sign with a white diamond, and I knew on the snowboard trails diamond courses were hard, so was this going to be a more challenging highway? But it turned out to be just the same as the 131 Highway.

We went east for a little bit and then got off the highway and onto a normal road. The professor stopped at a Burger King, which I didn't like all that much, even though Luke gave me a paper crown to wear.

The National Weather Service is right next to the airport, and that was going to be a problem if they expected me to get a cloud for them. It was a much bigger airport than Kalamazoo, and even as we were pulling into the parking lot, a big airplane roared overhead, shaking the ground as it went by.

When we went inside the building, we had to wait until Dr. Thomas Thompson came around to escort us—the woman at the desk wouldn't let us by before that. She was the guard to keep the station safe.

He was really happy to see all of us, and he shook everyone's hand and my hoof too, and then he led us past the front desk and into the back.

I noticed right away that there were computers everywhere. A lot of the desks had several on them, all of them showing different things.

He showed us the radar data first. The computer was able to remember past weather, and when he clicked a few buttons it brought up a picture of a big storm that he said had come through a few years back. He pointed to a storm cell that was in front of the others, which he said was called a supercell (we'd learned about those). It could be identified by the strong rotational current inside of it—the radar showed red blocks that were velocities away from it and green blocks that were velocities towards it, and so they knew what the air was doing inside that cloud. He said that that supercell had produced a tornado, but they'd been able to warn people that it was going to twenty-four minutes before it had.

Then he moved on and introduced us to a man named Ryan who was in charge of the amateur radio. Ryan's little office was full of boxes with buttons and dials, which were all parts of the radios—some of them were for getting messages and some of them were for sending messages, and some of them did both. He told us that people called Skywatchers would actually be out in the field with radios, and tell the weather service what they were observing on the ground. That was important, because the radar could only see what was happening in the sky, and not what conditions on the ground were.

We needed something like that. In well-controlled areas, it wasn't a problem, because you always had teams up in the clouds and really good control on what was happening, but on the coast where I worked, sometimes we misjudged the feral storms and didn't have enough ponies ready when they came in.

Inland, there were some weather stations that had a telegraph near them, and a fast flier could relay messages that way, but that didn't work over the ocean.

Sometimes when we thought it was going to be really wild, we'd station a couple of pegasuses out on the coastal islands, and they'd fly in ahead of the storm to let us know what was coming, but if it wasn't that bad when it made landfall and then got worse, we were caught out.

I wanted to know if I could become a Skywatcher while I was here, and Ryan said that he'd get the information together for me. Most of their Skywatchers had ham radio licenses, he said, but there might be a way to get around that; he was going to have to check. I told him that I sometimes told the airplane controllers what the weather was like in the sky.

Then we moved on to the aviation and marine forecasting. They looked farther away than the local weather forecasters, and had pictures that were taken by satellite of the United States and Canada. They had different satellites that saw different things: during the day, they had visual images that looked down and saw the clouds; at night they used infrared, which could see them even in the dark. That was really clever: night flying in storms is super dangerous, because you can't see what you're getting into.

There were other small boxes off to the side of the big cloud map that showed humidity data and temperature data, and the forecasters used both their experience and different computer models (I don't know how a model computer helped) to estimate what the forecast was.

We moved on to the man who was in charge of the weather radar. That was the big white sphere on a tower behind the building, and I'd been warned that they were very dangerous to fly close to. There was one computer that showed how the weather radar was working, and then another that showed a picture of what it saw. Then he told us about how we could see what they were seeing on the internet. There was a picture of the whole United States that was a mosaic of all the different sites, which was really neat, and there was also a place where we could look at the current weather satellite pictures that they were seeing.

I was really excited about that: I'd be able to see with my computer the same things they saw, and I could get a different understanding of how things worked.

We had a pizza lunch in their break room, and once we'd all gotten some, Dr. Thomas Thompson showed us a movie about radiosondes and how they were used to directly monitor data. He had an instrument package that he let us examine, and he explained that not all the stations used them, but that there were two in Michigan that did: KAPX in Gaylord and KDTX in Pontiac.

Then when the tour was over, he looked outside at the scattered clouds and wanted to know if I thought I could bring one down. I said that I probably could (I was looking forward to it, to be honest).

We were going to have to go outside of Grand Rapids to do it, because like I'd thought we were too close to the airport, and I'd mess up the schedule for all the airplanes if I was to fly around with a cloud. So we got back in the van and drove down to Moline, which was far enough south of Grand Rapids to be safe.

Luke had to use his telephone to find out what the frequency for Grand Rapids airport was, and I finally got permission from them to fly. They were a bit confused at first. The Kalamazoo airplane directors know who I am, but the Grand Rapids ones don't and I had to do a bit of explaining because they weren't clear on my type.

I kept a good lookout as I flew up for other airplanes, and watched my altimeter carefully. I also made sure to get a good look at the landmarks near where I'd taken off from, since I was in new territory and didn't know it very well. The last thing I wanted was to get distracted and lose my bearings, then I'd be up in the sky with a cloud and have no idea where to land with it, and then I'd have to fly all the way back to Kalamazoo on my own.

The clouds were a little higher and a little bigger than I'd thought from the ground. I wasn't going to be able to get a whole one; they were too big, so I'd have to tear off a chunk.

I scanned the sky for a good candidate, looking upwind. It was going to be a lot easier to have the wind help push me back when I had a cloudlet. I found a good candidate a couple of miles west of me, and headed off in that direction.

I flew around the cloud to get a good feel for it, and decided that the trailing end would be the easiest to get, since I'd be able to break it off and slow it down some, letting the main part of the cloud drift ahead.

Once I'd gotten a good feel all around on the cloud, I found a good fracture spot and worked it apart. That was a bit tricky, and I actually overdid it a little bit and made some rain come out when I accidentally oversaturated part of the mother cloud. It's a lot easier to just break clouds up, or put clouds in the sky.

I'd learned a lot from the first one I'd brought down, and it didn't take me as long to compact it down to a workable size.

Once I'd gotten it stable, I started pushing it down towards the ground. I had to drop altitude faster than I'd planned, because the wind had pushed me further than I'd anticipated. I ought to have picked a cloud that was further away!

When I got it to the ground, I made sure it was stable and would stay together before I let anybody touch it. Dr. Thomas Thompson went all around it with various little portable analyzing instruments, which was neat to see. He stuck a couple of probes inside it that fed data to his folding computer, and even tried to take a sample with a jar but wound up nearly freezing his hand instead.

Once he'd gotten all the data he wanted, I pushed the cloudlet up and over some trees (to help break up the rain that was going to come out of it) and bucked it apart, then flew back down to them.

Dr. Thomas Thompson had all sorts of questions for me about how I was able to manipulate it like that, and I answered them the best I could. Some of it I just didn't know; it was something that all pegasuses could do, and I didn't really know the makeup behind it. I told him it was just like walking—nopony had ever had to tell me how to do it, I just figured it out on my own when I was a foal.

He was disappointed that I couldn't give him an exact answer for every single one of his questions, but he admitted that he'd learned a lot from what I could tell him. Then he wanted to know if I could form a small cloud.

That was a bit more complicated, especially to do at near ground level, but I told him I could try. And I gave it my best effort, but there just wasn't enough humidity for it to work out right. I kinda got one started, but it wasn't really that much darker than the surrounding air. I think if I'd had a couple of partners, it could have been done.

He went all over that area with his instruments as well, and he assured me that even though I hadn't made an actual cloud, what I had managed was really interesting and scientifically important.

He told me that I would always be welcome at the office, and said that as the year went by to let him know if I was planning to do anything interesting with storms or fog or anything else. He said to call him any time and he'd come down to visit me.

He also wanted to know if I'd be willing to wear sampling instruments while I flew. He said that he could get me some radiosonde instrument packages which would work if I wore them, and he could even show me how to transfer the data from the instrument package to a computer.

That sounded like a big responsibility, but then I thought that if I did, I might be allowed to fly into clouds and in fog and other weather where I wasn't allowed to fly now, so I told him that if I could get that permission, then I would do it.

He said that he'd have to make some calls, but he could probably arrange for that. I hope he does: I might get to be an official Stormwatcher!

I had my turn to nap on the way back—between wrangling the feral cloud and trying to make a new one, I was completely exhausted. Luke and Crystal Dawn let me stretch out on their laps, which was really nice of them.

After dinner, my first priority was figuring out how to grade the climate science assignments. I still hadn’t thought of anything. It didn’t help that not everyone had picked the same place, and some were more of a challenge than others. It wouldn’t be fair to give someone worse marks just because they’d picked someplace hard.

Then I decided that I’d give everyone seventy five points for just doing it, and add ten points for everything that they got right, and take away five for everything they got wrong, but not go below the seventy five. After I’d decided that, it was pretty easy. My teachers weren’t as generous, but then nobody in this class had ever tried to calculate weather like this before.

I sent a computer letter to the professor telling him what grade everyone had gotten, then went over to Aric’s to study a little bit more and then relax.

Author's Note

Special thanks to reprovedhawk for sending me pictures of a NWS office!

March 13 [Daylight Saving Time]

March 13

Today was a special day, although I didn't know it when the day began.

When Aric and I finally got out of bed, he went around and started changing all the clocks in the house. I asked him why he was doing it, and he said that today was the first day of Daylight Saving Time, then explained to me how in the springtime, every clock was set forward an hour, and then in the fall they'd be set back.

I wanted to know why, and he said that he wasn't sure. He said that it was kind of stupid, since you had to get up an hour earlier, although in the fall it was nice because you got to sleep an hour later. He thought that it had been started during the war, and then they'd just kept on doing it, although there were some places in America that didn't, which made things even more confusing.

I couldn't see it being an idea ponies would go for, especially if the only benefit was that you got to get up an hour earlier, and I couldn't imagine why people did it. Everyone I knew liked to sleep late except when there was something really fun happening, like snowboarding at Boyne Mountain.

Aric said that sometimes tradition trumped practicality. When people have done something one way for a long time they don't like to change even if the new way is better. I guess that’s true; a lot of ponies are that way too.

We walked down the street for a late breakfast together at Nina's, and then went back to the house. He didn't want me to leave and I didn't want to either, but I had to study and work on my essay. So we came up with a compromise where he drove me back to campus and I got all my notes and then we took them back to his house.

He promised not to be too much of a distraction, and he said that he had assignments he had to work on, too, so he sat on his bed and did stuff on his laptop while I sat at his desk and started writing my essay for philosophy class.

I'd decided to write about Kant. He was kind of the dividing line between philosophers that I agreed with and ones I did not and maybe if I examined his work a little more deeply, I'd see why the newer philosophers had gone wrong.

It was nice to study together with Aric, and it was really fun to take the occasional study break. After the first, he just put his shirt back on so that he wouldn't be cold, and covered the lower half of his body with his blankets.

By dinnertime, I'd gotten most of the essay done, and Aric and I had gone over my climate science notes one more time. I was feeling pretty good about the upcoming exams.

He gave me a ride back to campus, and we carried my stuff back up to my room. Then he said that since he was here, he might as well go to dinner with me.

He had to move Winston—it wasn't allowed to be in the parking lot because he didn't have a proper parking permit for it. He said that only students who lived in the dorm could use the dorm parking lots, and that there was a lottery on those spaces because there weren't enough of them.

There was a spot open behind the dining hall where he could park, and we went in the back way.

We ate in the dark room with all his Durak friends. They were a bit surprised to see him, since he didn't eat at the dining hall all that often because it was kind of expensive if you didn't have a meal plan like everyone else there did.

Everyone chatted for a while after dinner was over, then people started trickling off to do more studying.

He thought it would be a good night to walk around town for a little bit, and I thought that would be interesting as well. I'd flown over it plenty of times, but I'd never walked through it.

I did cringe a little bit as we walked past Walgreens, but Aric was with me so I knew it would be okay.

Even though we could go whichever way we wanted to, he followed the traffic directions. We went to where the two one-way streets came together, and stopped at a little tiny coffee store called the Water Street Coffee Joint, which is where David’s girlfriend Angela works. She was there, and we chatted a little bit and Aric bought himself a coffee and asked me if I wanted one, but I thought if I had one it would keep me up all night.

When we walked back outside, he pointed down to a round metal lid and told me that he knew what was under that. He said that those were the storm drains, David had decided that they ought to explore them, so one night they'd gone in there. He told me that if I was interested, maybe we could do it later in the year, when the snow had melted—it was too dangerous to go there now, because we could be trapped underground.

I wasn't sure I'd want to go. The thought of being underground was kind of scary. But he insisted on at least taking me and showing me where the entrance was, so we walked a little bit further, past the big sign that welcomed people to Kalamazoo, and crossed the street by a gas station, then went through a dirt parking lot.

He used his telephone as a flashlight so we could get down a little embankment, and then pointed to a big concrete arch and said that was it. A small trickle of water was coming out of it and going into the river.

I didn't like it; it looked like the kind of place a monster might live. It also smelled stagnant, like a swamp or bog.

We'd just gotten back to the top of the embankment when a bell started clanging. A moment later, I heard a train horn that made me practically jump out of my coat, and a spotlight swept across us.

He put his hand on my back to reassure me, and we watched as a train rumbled across the bridge just north of us, crashing and banging as it went.

I hoped that all trains weren’t that loud. The one I’d followed in the air hadn’t been, but maybe I wasn’t close enough to hear it that well. Maybe it was that loud up close.

When we finally got back to campus, I walked with him to Winston and gave him a kiss, and then he drove off for his home. As much as I wanted to spend the night with him, I’d have to be up early for final exams . . . even earlier than I’d thought, because of Daylight Saving Time.

March 14 [Final Exams Begin]

March 14

I’d had to set an alarm to make sure I woke up on time. I had trouble getting to sleep because my body told me it wasn't bedtime yet, and then I kept waking up because I was nervous that I was going to miss my exam.

It was not a good start to the day.

I cut my flying short—I didn't trust myself to judge the sun's position—and stretched my shower long in the hopes that that would help shake the rest of the cobwebs in my brain loose. But it didn't help at all.

Whoever decided to schedule exams right after changing the time was cruel.

Breakfast was eaten more out of a sense of obligation than any actual desire . . . I knew that if I went into my exam hungry, I'd do badly. And I was afraid that I was going to forget everything that I'd studied by the time the exam started.

By the time class started I was a nervous wreck, and I wanted to just fly away and hide on a cloud. I was convinced that I'd fail. I could think of a hundred ways that I could screw it up. At least sleeping through class wasn't a possibility any more.

The professor welcomed us to the exam, and walked around passing out tests. I leaned down and wrote my name on mine, then paused to build up my courage.

It was completely unnerving as we started taking the test there was no noise except for the scratching of pens and pencils on paper, and the occasional screeching of a chair being moved or somebody coughing quietly.

But when I finally started to focus in on the exam, it wasn't actually all that hard. Going over the vocabulary again and again had made it stick in my memory—some words more than others. Noctilucent clouds now had a special association for me.

I finished well before the three hours we'd been allotted, read through all the questions and answers again to make sure I hadn't made any dumb mistakes, and then turned it in. We were free to go once we were done, so I quietly thanked the professor for his class, and then walked out of the classroom.

I took a brief victory flight over campus—not high enough that I needed my flight gear—and then landed right back where I'd began, flicking my tail occasionally as I looked at Mandelle Hall. Finally, I made my decision and went inside.

The registrar's office was one floor up, and I boldly went up to the counter. Once she finally saw me, a woman I didn't know came up and asked if she could help me, and I told her that I wanted to change what classes I was taking next semester if that wasn’t too much trouble.

It turned out it wasn't that difficult to do. But she said that I wouldn't officially be changed until Conrad agreed to take me in his class; he already had the maximum number of students. I thought he would—I hoped he would. Another poetry class would be more useful to me than computer science.

Lunch was pretty quiet. Some people were still recovering from their morning exam, and others had just gotten up for the day. Nobody wanted to say too much. Sean was looking over his notes, and Joe had a vaguely haunted look in his eyes. I guess his exam hadn't gone very well.

I stayed at the dining hall longer than I normally would have, because I didn't have to hurry to get to Equestrian class. The teacher had sent me a computer mail saying that she was going to do the written exam first and then the oral exam, so I didn't need to show up until three pm.

I'd run out of things to do by two: all my friends were gone from the dining hall, and while I probably could have eaten another piece of pie, I knew that I shouldn't. Even if I deserved it for winning my first final exam. So I sat out on the quad and made myself a little snow nest and then sat in it and relaxed a bit.

That was kind of a mistake; as much shaking as I did didn't dislodge all of the snow, and I still had some clinging to my ruff and melting on the floor when we started the oral exam.

I don't know how teachers get so good at not reacting when students get things wrong. I know there were a couple of times when somebody mispronounced a word so badly I pinned my ears back, and they saw it, too. Then they got flustered and had a hard time getting back on track.

It was really hard to be fair when my friends were taking their turns. Luckily for me, Meghan was really good; she'd obviously been practicing a lot. Becky was pretty good, too, and Lisa was the worst. But she was still better than a lot of students. I bet they would have all been better if they’d been practicing with me—I could have been speaking Equestrian when I was over at their room watching Harry Potter or just hanging out.

When the last person had finished, the professor and I discussed their results. I'd picked up on some stuff they'd gotten wrong that she hadn't noticed, and it turned out that she'd accidentally taught them the wrong past tense of gallop, and hadn't been as clear as she ought to have been on what was considered a formal name for a pony.

I understood that, though. Humans usually use their second names when they want to be formal and their first names when they want to be friendly, but for ponies it doesn't always work like that. There are a lot of regional influences, and you've got to pay attention to get it right.

So I was glad that we'd taken the time to talk it over, because some of the mistakes I'd caught weren't really the students' fault, and shouldn't be counted against them.

By the time I got back to my dorm room, I was completely worn out, so I stretched out on bed with the intention of taking a short nap. When I woke back up, though, I'd completely missed dinner.

Peggy helped me order a pizza, and she traded me some beer for a few slices, and we sat on my bed together and ate pizza and drank beer to unwind from the day. Tomorrow was going to be a better day, because I was going to finish my essay in the morning and then take the poetry test in the afternoon.

March 15 [poetry exam]

March 15

Today started out like a normal Tuesday. I slept a bit late, 'cause of the stupid Daylight Saving Time change, but not too late. Got a good flight in—enough to relax me and unstress me the rest of the way. Although the beer and pizza last night had really helped a lot, too.

I was thinking about Kant as I flew. Turning over his thoughts in my head.

I think the part I liked the most was his idea that if you couldn't prove that something existed, you ought to try and prove that it did not. If you could prove neither, then you had to decide whether it was in your best interest to believe in it or not.

There was just something poetic about that. Maybe that was why I liked it.

I couldn't prove that I liked it because it was poetic, and I couldn't prove that it wasn't poetic, so I guess that means that I had to decide for myself whether it was in my best interest to believe it was poetic or not.

But how he built upon that to understand how the mind made sense of the world around it, and that the world existed regardless and behaved the same regardless of if anypony was watching it or writing down observations about it, well, that was pretty obvious. This world had existed before I even knew about it, and unless all my professors and friends were lying, there were things like clouds and rain and snow before the first pegasus set hoof on Earth. And they behaved sorta the same here as they did in Equestria.

I landed on the field in front of Trowbridge, setting my hooves into the snow which was very much like Equestrian snow. Then I stuck my muzzle in it and blew a cloud of flakes away from me, watching as they danced in the little wind I'd just made.

When I got out of the shower, I sat down at my desk and went back to work on my essay. When I read over what I'd written, I had second thoughts. I wasn't sure I was completely clear on what a priori and a posteriori were, although I was pretty certain that they were before and after. Miss Chestnut ought to have told us that we'd need a Latin dictionary too, as much as the humans loved using Latin.

His ideas on morals were the most important, and that's what I was focusing on. I think that was something that some of the newer philosophers had forgotten. They were too busy trying to figure out if the world existed at all, or why it was such a horrible place for them, but Kant was more positive.

I finished writing what I thought his formulations meant and then just sat staring at the paper while I tried to figure out a way to wrap it all up.

That's the hardest part of writing stuff. I get these ideas in my head and then I write them down and read back and they sound dumb, or I get to a point where I can't figure out what to say next.

I finally came up with a kind of rambly conclusion that I could probably form into shape when I got a second look at it, and started the tedious process of writing the whole thing again for the computer. The professor said that she wasn't going to accept any handwritten essays, and she probably also meant mouthwritten, too. But once it was on the computer, I could show it to some students in the English Department who were helping people with essays. I had an appointment for tomorrow morning, which was cutting it really close but would hopefully keep me from making any really dumb English mistakes.

I had most of it done when it was lunchtime. I could finish that up after the poetry final exam, and then make some changes on the computer (which was a lot neater than crossing stuff out in my notebook) and have it ready before I went to bed.

When I sat down in Conrad's class, I wasn't sure what to expect. The final for climate science and philosophy were both pretty obvious; I didn't know what he was going to do.

He came into the room and opened his desk and placed two jars on the table, one of them containing yellow slips of paper and one of them with white. Then he took a stack of papers out of his desk and set them beside the jar.

He had each one of us take a piece of white paper out of the jar, which had a number on it. Mine was 19. Then when we all had our numbers and were back in our seats, he told us that he liked to do things a little bit differently than the other professors did. He reached into the jar with the yellow slips and pulled out the number five.

That was Melissa's number, and she went forward and he handed her a poem with the number five written on the back.

He had her read it aloud, and then asked her what she thought about it. He asked if she could guess who had written it, and a few other questions like that, and then he had her draw the next number.

It took a while for my number to come, and I listened intently to all the poems which we hadn't read in class and I tried to guess who'd written them. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong.

Then Trevor picked the number nineteen and I almost flew out of my seat and got my page.

I knew as soon as I saw it that it was e e cummings. Nobody else wrote poems like that.

It was called O Sweet Spontaneous, and I smiled when I got to the end—it was all I could do to keep from laughing. Conrad asked me what I thought about it, and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

I told him that the world was an amazing place, and no matter how many scientists tried to explain it or how many philosophers tried to understand it, it would keep on being what it was. I told him that even Earth ponies who know all about plants have a happy joyous song for when the first spring flower bloom, and we sometimes sit on our outposts and watch the clouds playing over the ocean.

Then I drew the number twelve out of the jar and Miro who I didn't know very well got his poem and began reading it.

I felt a lot better about everything after class, because I asked Conrad if I could keep the poem, and he said I could, and then he said that I would be welcome in his next poetry class.

When I got back to our dorm room, I hung the poem on the wall next to my computer. I thought about how much I’d been struggling sometimes in philosophy class and a little bit in climate science, and e e cummings had said in so few words what I should have known all along: that the world was gonna keep being the same no matter how many scientists poked and prodded at it trying to get its secrets out.

I ran into Meghan and her friends at dinner and decided to sit with them. Meghan asked if I was still going to be able to go to the salon tomorrow—there hadn't been any free blocks on Monday after all—and I said that I would. It was going to be refreshing after my exam was over. Then Thursday I was going to meet Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn for lunch and then we'd drive to Michigan State University where I could spend time with Aquamarine before we went on Spring Break. They were going to get a hotel room nearby, until it was time to go on our trip.

I wasn't sure of all the details; they were going to tell me on Thursday. But I was looking forward to it.

I finished up my essay, and Peggy was kind enough to help me edit some of it. She said that she wasn't all that good at editing, so I ought to still let the English student at it, but she still picked out some pretty obvious mistakes, and had me explain a couple of things better that she didn't really understand from reading my essay.

Author's Note

O Sweet Spontaneous

March 16 [Final Exams are Done]

March 16

I still wasn't used to the dumb Daylight Saving Time, so I slept in a touch later than I meant to. But at least I didn't have any Wednesday morning classes to go to.

I decided that today I'd just work my legs and let my wings rest, so I trotted around the neighborhood. There were a few robins who had already returned, and they were busy poking at the bare patches of ground, looking for food. Some of the smarter ones had set up their territory near houses with bird feeders. Probably when the alpha birds were gone, the other robins would fly over and get something to eat, too.

It was kind of sad seeing winter dribble away as meltwater, but it was time for it to go. Time for the flowers to poke their heads above the ground and farmers to plant their crops.

The English helpers were in a classroom, and all of them had folding computers that they could use. My computer doesn't fold, and I was told it would be very difficult for me to take it with me, because there were lots of cables that all needed to go in the right places or else it wouldn't work.

I found my helper—rather, he found me—and he got my essay out of the internet and onto his computer. Humans call where it's stored 'the cloud,' even though it isn't really a cloud but just a giant room full of really big computers. They have a room like that in Dewing Hall, and I got to look through the window at it but wasn't allowed inside.

It looked a lot like a library, but instead of shelves of books it was shelves of computers.

He went through and showed me how to correct a bunch of things that he found wrong with my language. He showed me how to make the margins all line up, which made it look a lot neater, and how to add page numbers to the bottom of the page.

He also wound up making most of the changes, because he said that it was painful to watch me type one letter at a time with a pencil held in my mouth. It's not my fault that his computer won't let me talk to it.

When all the corrections he'd suggested had been made, he sent it to a printer which was a whole lot bigger than the one Peggy had. It was faster, too. Hers slowly feeds the paper out as it prints; this one spit out entire complete pages one right after another.

I stapled it all together with a sense of satisfaction, then went down to the classroom to turn it in.

After that I was a free mare.

The feeling of all that free time stretching in front of me made me giddy. I wanted to go out and play in what was left of the snow, or fly around, but I didn't, because then I'd have to take another shower before going to the salon.

But I did have a piece of pie and a brownie for dessert.

I met up with Meghan after lunch. Instead of an Uber car, a beat-up yellow taxi came to get us. It looked newer and sleeker than Winston, but smelled bad inside and was really bouncy. Just the same, it got us to the salon.

When we went inside, Maura was waiting for me. She showed me to a private room. I wasn't sure why the salon had a private room, and Maura said it was for when they did Brazilian waxing. Meghan's face got kind of red when she said that, so I guess it was something private. Maybe I'd ask Peggy about it later.

Maura put a long shirt over her nice clothes and opened her bag, bringing out a shedding blade. She asked me if we used them, and I told her we did, so she started scraping it through my coat, getting out the loose underhair.

Maura took her time and did a really good job. She had to ask me for guidance around my wings; she said that wasn't something she had to worry about when she groomed her horses.

Meghan just looked at the growing piles of loose hair in amazement. It gets a lot fluffier when it comes out, though, so it looks like there's more than there is.

I laid on my back so that she could get my belly—which was something else that her horses wouldn't do for her, she said.

She went over my legs with a coarse curry comb, then used a finer curry comb to get my coat back in order. She had clippers, too, and asked if I wanted to thin out my coat any more than she already had, but I thought it was good the way it was. There was still a bit of winter coat that would be working its way out over the next couple of weeks, so I set up an appointment for after I got back from Spring Break. By then, I'd be ready to have the rest of my winter coat groomed out.

Then it was my turn to wait as Meghan had her hair trimmed. I probably could have had my mane and tail done, but I decided that I might as well wait until my next appointment. It wasn't going to grow enough to be an inconvenience before then.

I felt a lot lighter and sleeker when we stepped outside, although I was also a bit chiller. That was the drawback to taking shortcuts; rather than a gradual lightening of the coat as the weather warmed, it was sudden.

She had the taxi take us back to her dorm, and we went to her room. She wanted me to stay and watch another Harry Potter movie, but then we decided that there wasn't enough time before dinner, and after dinner I had to go say goodbye to Peggy for a week and a half, and then I was going to spend the night with Aric.

Meghan was disappointed in that, but then suggested that we could watch something short instead. She thought I might like Over the Hedge, but before we started to watch it she made good on her promise to teach me to microwave popcorn.

We went off to the little lounge together and she took the bag out of its outer wrap and showed me how to set it right-side-up on the glass dish. She said that the microwave had a button for popcorn and that was the smartest thing to use.

The buttons weren't very hoof friendly and it took me a couple of tries before I got it, and then the microwave started making an unpleasant hum and a light came on inside so I could watch the bag of popcorn turning around and around inside.

At first it didn't do anything, and then it made one pop, then another and another and pretty soon it was a continuous popping that was almost louder than the microwave hum.

The microwave made a beeping noise when it was done cooking, and then to spite it, a couple of more kernels popped.

I had to fumble around to get the release to work, and Meghan insisted that she ought to be the one to pick it up because there would be a lot of steam coming out of the vent in the bag.

She shook it up to get all the popcorn seasoning mixed around, and then we went back to her room and she dumped it out into a bowl so that we could share it.

I wasn't sure how I was going to eat it without sticking my whole muzzle in the bowl, until she offered to scoop some out and let me eat it out of her hand.

The movie was about a bunch of wild animals that all lived near a human settlement and tried to get food for the winter from the humans and in the end they all worked together to defeat the mean humans and bear and get all the food that they needed.

It was a really good movie, and not too long. After the popcorn was all gone, Meghan put the bowl away and I stretched out on my belly by her leg, and she petted my mane and back. She said that I felt a lot sleeker now that my winter coat had mostly been combed out.

I promised her that we'd go watch Zootopia together after Spring Break was over, and we walked to dinner together.

I probably should have eaten dinner with Christine and Sean and Joe, but I stayed with Meghan instead and the two of us ate together in the front room. I waved at Cedric, who was sitting across the room from me, and he gave me a friendly nod.

We said goodbye for the week on the sidewalk in front of DeWaters, and I stood up and hugged her, and she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and told me to be safe and have a good time.

There was a little party going on in my room when I got there: Ruth and Rebekka and Kat who is Rebekka's roommate were all there, playing a game of euchre and drinking to celebrate the end of the quarter. Peggy poured me a drink and I sat down and watched them play until Rebekka and Kat lost, then Rebekka said that she'd sit out the next game so I could play, and I got partnered up with Kat.

We played a couple of games and I had a few more drinks than I ought to have had, then I hugged everyone and told them that I was going to miss them over the next week, and went out into the streets to Aric's house.

I was a little bit unsteady on my hooves, which meant that I really shouldn't be flying, or at least not too high.

I came pretty close to clipping a lamppost, but avoided it at the last second, and made it the rest of the way without any trouble at all besides falling into one snowbank by mistake. Then when I got to Aric's I kept trying to pick up the key for the front door that he kept in a desk on the porch but I couldn't manage to get my lips around it, so I had to knock on the door until he opened it.

He wanted to know if I was drunk, and I nodded and told him that I was because Peggy had introduced me to White Russians and they were really good. Then he shook his head and let me in which was good because I really had to pee.

I really wasn’t in the mood to do anything other than cuddle (and that made me feel guilty and sad) but Aric said that was okay, and he said that we could watch a movie and snuggle on the couch like we had after watching the Super Bowl.

So that’s what we did. He played The Perfect Storm, and I brought down a blanket from his bedroom. I leaned up against him and he put his arm around my withers, and then when I got really sleepy I finally laid down on his lap and tried to stay awake for the movie but wound up falling asleep instead.

March 17 [St. Patrick's Day]

March 17 [St. Patrick's Day]

I woke up in the middle of the night still on the couch with Aric's arm around me and at first it was really disorienting. It took me a minute to remember how I'd wound up asleep there.

There really wasn't any way to get out of his arms and get to the bathroom without waking him up. I tried, but it didn't work. He opened his eyes and hugged me a bit tighter and kissed my head and started stroking my belly, and I felt bad that not only had I woken him up but now I had to push his arm off so I could go to the bathroom again because I'd had too much to drink with Peggy.

I thought he'd already be asleep when I got back but he wasn't and so I snuggled up against him and pretty soon we were doing more than just snuggling and he whispered in my ear that we should go up to his room because anybody could come downstairs and see us.

Sometimes it's fun to be bad, though, so we didn't stop.

When I woke back up in the actual morning, it still felt weird, because not only was I still on the couch with Aric, but it was Thursday and I didn't have to go to class. I didn't have to do anything if I didn't want to, not for a while at least. So we snuggled a bit more, and then we went up to his bedroom.

Peggy thought that a small drink helped her after a night of drinking too much, but I thought when I saw her after Spring Break was over I was going to tell her I knew a funner way of taking care of a hangover.

We sat in bed and talked for most of the morning. Neither of us really felt like actually putting effort into getting up and—for him—getting dressed. Although he did put on a pair of pants when he had to use the bathroom, but he took them off again when he came back to the room.

He said that he was going to go on a road trip with David and Angela. They didn't really have a destination in mind; he was just going to drive in one direction until they found something that looked interesting and then they'd turn that way, and when it got late they'd camp for the night. That sounded like a whole lot of fun to me, and I told him that I wanted to do that over summer break if we could.

I said that I was going to visit my friend Aquamarine, and then I was going on a sightseeing trip as well: we were going to take a train around the US, meeting up with a couple of other ponies on the way.

Aric drove me back to campus around lunchtime, and kissed me and told me to have fun and not do anything too crazy and said that he'd miss me while he was gone. I gave him the same advice, and we both agreed to take lots of pictures to share.

The dorm room felt emptier without Peggy. I'd been in it alone lots of times, but this was the first time since I'd met her that I knew she was gone and wouldn't be back for a week. Her computer was turned off and her half of the room was neat and tidy and already looked lonely.

I packed up what I thought I'd need for the trip. It wasn't much; my flight gear, the camera I had hardly used because I was too busy experiencing things to step back and take pictures of them (and I probably would forget to use it on the trip, as well), a notebook and some clicky pens so that I could write things down, my Bible because I ought to read it some more, and after a little bit of consideration, two books of poems.

I needed some more shampoo and conditioner, so hopefully we could get that on the way.

The dining hall was mostly deserted for lunch. I sat by myself at our table and ate lunch, constantly looking around to see if any of my friends were around, but I didn't find anybody.

Then I went back to my room and waited until Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn arrived.

We got in Sienna and I told them what I needed, so they drove me to Meijer first (I didn't want to go to Walgreens even though it was close). There were a lot of signs up about St. Patrick's Day, and I asked them about it. She said that it was a holiday for an Irish saint, and that a lot of people celebrated by drinking.

So I thought I ought to get something to celebrate the occasion, and bought a necklace with little plastic clovers and a bottle of Jameson's which Mister Salvatore disapproved of. I thought about telling him that I'd had a bunch of White Russians last night but then thought better of it.

We took a bunch of different Interstate highways until we finally got off on Trowbridge Road. It was really a strange coincidence that it would be named the same as the dorm where I was living. Miss Cherilyn said that a lot of roads were named for people, and maybe the road and the dorm were named for the same person. She said that a lot of rich people donated money and in exchange wanted things named after them, and maybe that was the case here.

We drove right by the train station, and they went into the parking lot to let me see what it was like so I wouldn't get confused with where I had to go tomorrow. There was a lot of construction going on; Mister Salvatore said that it used to be an Amshack but they were making it better.

When we got to Aquamarine's dorm, it took a few minutes to figure out where we needed to go and then we went into a little room called an elevator.

I reflexively popped my wings out when the floor came up under my hooves. I didn't like it, and I probably would have been banging on the door to get out if they hadn't been with me.

They weren't sure exactly where Aquamarine's room was but luckily there was a student who knew. As soon as he saw me, in fact, he pointed us in the right direction.

When Aquamarine answered, they said their goodbyes and Miss Cherilyn wrote down her portable telephone number and then they left.

Aquamarine and me nuzzled and she introduced me to her roommate named Jenny, who was studying to be a veterinarian.

She was really excited to meet me, and said that it was really cool to meet a pegasus and wanted to know if she could look at my wings, so I held them out and let her run her fingers over them so that she could feel the bone and muscle structure underneath the feathers.

The three of us talked for a little bit, and then it was time for dinner, which was not anything like how they did it at Kalamazoo College. They had dining halls and mini-restaurants, and Aquamarine asked me which one I wanted to go to. I thought Wendy's sounded fun, although it turned out that they mostly had hamburgers.

I probably could have had one, but I just ate a salad and some French Fries, and then we went back to her dorm room.

I knew we'd have to get up early, but it was kind of hard to think about when they kept the door open and lots of people were roaming up and down the hallways drunk out of their minds. I got out my bottle of Jameson's and we started passing it around between the three of us. I didn't have all that much, because it burned my throat and I also didn't want to overdrink like I had last night. Beer was a lot safer to have.

Aquamarine turned on her computer and started showing me pictures of the plants in the greenhouse she had class in, and she also had a picture of her nose-to-nose with an Earth horse, which she said had been on the front page of the newspaper. The horse was huge!

There was a pasture where they lived not too far from the dorm, and Jenny said that we ought to get Aquamarine’s assistants (who were going to give us a ride to the train station) to take us by there.

I showed her and Jenny the YouTube video that Gates had made of me flying around Kalamazoo College. I was hoping that when Spring Break was over he'd be done making one about my trip to Boyne Mountain.

The evening kind of blurred into a bunch of faces and pictures on the computer and occasional sips from the bottle of Jameson's, and it was finally time to go to bed, because the train came in the morning.

Jenny said that we looked like a couple of puppies the way we were snuggled up together in bed and I stuck my tongue out at her as my answer.

March 18 [the trip begins]

March 18

Aquamarine and I got up before the sun and took a nice relaxing shower together. It was really nice to bathe properly, and we made a good team 'cause I could fly up and adjust the showerhead so that it was in the best position for both of us.

There wasn't any awkward bending around to brush out my tail or getting myself confused while looking in a mirror and working on my mane; she did mine and I did hers and we both looked really good when we were done.

We talked about how much trouble we'd both had finding somebody to groom us—she'd gotten a bit luckier than I had, I think, because the campus had farriers and groomers, but then I liked the salon that Meghan had found, and I didn't think I'd be as comfortable in a barn as she was.

I let her take the lead for breakfast. I knew she'd know the best place to eat.

We had to ride the elevator (she didn't really like all the stairs), and I got over my discomfort by just flying above the floor and matching its speed down. Of course it had to confuse me by stopping midway so that a couple of people could get aboard, and when they were on, there wasn't really enough room for me to fly without being really rude, so I stood next to Aquamarine and just dealt with it.

They should have put windows in the elevator.

We went to a dining room that was a lot like the one at Kalamazoo College, and had pretty much the same things to eat.

She went to a table with a bunch of her friends, and introduced me to them. I did my best to keep track of who was who, and I think by the end of breakfast I had it all right. It was nice to put some faces and scents to names I'd only seen in her letters before.

We couldn't stick around for too long because we had to get to the train station, so we took our trays back to the washroom conveyer (which was also almost the same as it was at Kalamazoo College) and then headed back to her room.

If I knew my way around her dorm, I would have flown up the stairs rather than take another trip in the elevator. But I didn’t, and I didn’t want to get lost.

Her human helpers were already waiting outside her dorm room, and she introduced me to them. They were Mister Barrow and Miss Parker, and both of them were just as nice and friendly as Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.

They helped us with our luggage—although there really wasn't that much—and Aquamarine woke up Jenny long enough to say goodbye. I thought it was odd that they were still having classes while we weren't, but Mister Barrow said that Kalamazoo College was on a different schedule, which is why I'd gotten out early.

I guess that meant that Aquamarine was missing a day of classes. Hopefully they weren't anything important.

They drove us to the train station in a small van like Sienna. Most cars have their names on the backs, but this one had a rear door that opened up on its own and so I didn't get a chance to see its name.

We had to wait around so I got a chance to see a freight train pass really close by. There were round black cylinder cars that had bottoms so high off the ground that I could have walked right under them if the train had been stopped—that’s how big it was. I couldn't imagine how much stuff could fit on a train this size, or what it was needed for.

When our silver Amtrak-train finally showed up, Mister Barrow and Miss Parker helped get all our stuff aboard. They were going to travel with us for the whole trip, just in case we needed anything or if there was any trouble like an angry man. Plus they were going to be tour guides and answer any questions we had.

The train cars were a lot like the airplane was, with rows of identical seats all together, but it had much bigger windows. They didn't open, though.

Unlike the airplane, we could pick whatever seats we wanted. I wanted to sit on the right side, because I'd be able to point out some of the Kalamazoo College campus as we went past it.

It was fun going through town—we went past houses and streets and some big buildings and a few freight trains that were on different tracks, then through a wide place where several trains were stored (I think those are called yards) and then we were out in the country.

I don't know if I would have recognized Kalamazoo as we were approaching it, but the conductor announced each station before we got there so people could get ready. Mostly everyone on the train kept to themselves, but there were a few people that waved at us and several young children who wanted to pet us.

There really wasn't much of the campus that could be seen from the train car, but I pointed it out as we went by. Then we whizzed by Western Michigan University, and out of town.

The train really started to pick up speed once we were in the country. It rushed past fields and through tiny little towns that were gone almost as soon as they were noticed.

We stopped several times in Michigan, then crossed into Indiana. The roads in Ohio were better than the roads in Michigan; I'd noticed that when we went to Punxsutawney. The tracks in Indiana were worse than the tracks in Michigan. We never got up to speed after New Buffalo, and the train alternately sped up and slowed down.

I could see that there were more and more factories and houses and stores and roads so I thought that we were probably getting really close to Chicago. But an hour later we were still going, and it was still mostly built-up—I was beginning to wonder just how big Chicago was. I knew that humans had big cities, but this defied belief.

And all the cars! Sometimes we were next to a road—it looked like a highway, but the cars weren't moving very fast at all. How were there so many of them? They were all crowded together, lane after lane of them all together. I even saw a truck that looked kind of like Winston, and pointed it out to Aquamarine.

The tracks were also terrible. The car banged and lurched as it crossed over bad sections of rail. I guess everyone who was riding the train was used to it: Miss Parker had come back a couple of times to check on us, and when we were in Michigan she had just walked normally, but now she was bracing her hands on the seats as she walked.

We finally got to the train station, and while we didn't have to rush to get to our next train, we couldn't spend a whole lot of time dallying, either, so we went to a little cafeteria and had a late lunch and walked around a bit to stretch out and went out of the building long enough to look at some of the Chicago skyscratchers, and then we had to find our way to our next train. Miss Parker was sending telegrams on her telephone to try and locate a pony who was supposed to meet us here. I tried to guess who it might be (because it wouldn't be fun to just be told).

But I was wrong. We finally located her, and her human helpers. They weren't going with us, so they weren't supposed to be on the train, but they'd managed to convince the conductor to let them aboard anyway.

This train was taller than the last one—it had a second floor on top of the first. Us ponies all had a room in the bottom floor, and Mister Barrow and Miss Parker had a room on the top floor in the same car.

I didn't really pay all that much attention to what they were saying, because Aquamarine and I were getting acquainted with Cayenne, our new traveling companion. She was a unicorn from Canterlot, who was going to college at Northwestern. I remembered seeing her before we left Equestria.

She had the most luggage of all of us, two full trunks plus her saddlebags. Aquamarine had just packed one suitcase and her saddlebags, and I just had my saddlebags.

We spent the time before the train left arranging our room and exploring the train. There was a dining car more towards the front, and a car that had big curving windows.

All three of us sat in the seats and talked about college. Mine was the smallest and most like an Equestrian school, while Aquamarine was at the biggest school.

Cayenne liked the nightlife in Chicago; she said that there was always something going on and there were theatres and art galleries and museums and she never was lacking for something to do. She thought it was weird that Michigan State had fields and greenhouses and pastures and lots of open green space.

It took us all by surprise when the train finally lurched and left the station, headed north.

We stayed in the city for a long time before we were finally out into countryside, and it seemed like it wasn't that long before things started getting built-up again. I was starting to get bothered by the lack of scenery beyond buildings close to the tracks, but once we left Milwaukee we were back in the countryside.

The final member of our group got aboard in Madison. She was actually wearing clothes: a little skirt and a sweater. She introduced herself as Gusty, and had just barely settled into our room when the train left the station, and our trip to see America began.

March 18-19 [Empire Builder]

March 18-19

I discovered that what I'd thought was Madison was actually Columbus, and Madison was a bit further south. I'd thought the town looked a little small to have a university, but hadn't wanted to insult Gusty's choice of towns.

Aquamarine asked her about the clothes, and she said that she'd started to feel uncomfortable being naked when everyone else was wearing clothes, so she'd started wearing them occasionally, and now she was just kind of used to it. She thought it was important to respect local culture.

I didn't think I was being unrespectful by not wearing clothes. Humans in Equestria weren't expected to go around naked, but it really didn't seem like something to argue about. If Gusty liked wearing clothes, there was nothing wrong with that. Plus she had her coat trimmed really short, and I thought maybe she was cold.

We took turns talking about what we'd been studying. I was the only one who was done with my classes right now; the rest of them were all mid-course. That was one thing that still needed work, I guess; the class schedules between all the different universities didn't line up with ours.

I told them about poetry class and climate science, which I had to dumb down a bit. Some of the really technical stuff went over their heads.

Aquamarine was studying plants, mostly—I thought she would like to meet Brianna if there ever was a chance for that to happen. Most of her work was indoors right now because of the snow, but when spring came she'd be out in the fields. There was a lot of stuff she thought she could learn from human farmers and botanists, and there was stuff she could teach them, too. She was working on a plant-growing experiment with one of her professors (she kind of lost me in some of the details about how the experiment worked).

Cayenne was studying physics, which was a little different on Earth. She'd had a lot of trouble in the beginning because all the symbols were foreign, and the equations were set up differently. I felt her pain: I'd had the same problem helping Peggy with calculus.

There was a lot of measuring equipment that they had on Earth which had proved some of our conjectures, so that was interesting, but humans didn't account for thaumic force in anything, apparently. She thought it was because they couldn't really apply it, and had started her own little lecture group to explain it, which she said as many professors attended as students.

Gusty was studying theatre, and I was pretty proud that I knew a few things about it from Aric. She said that as far as anyone knew, she was going to be the first pony playing Puck in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and recited some of her lines for us.

We probably would have talked through dinner if Mister Barrow hadn't come down to get us.

The tables were only made for four humans at each, and since we didn't want to crowd too much, we sat across the aisle from Mister Barrow and Miss Parker. I kept getting distracted from my menu by the scenery rushing by outside: there was a river running alongside the tracks and the land had gotten a bit hillier in the distance. I knew that when you went west in America you came to the mountains, but I thought they were further away. I was certain that we were still in Wisconsin.

There weren't as many choices as I was used to for dinner, but I finally settled on their black bean vegetable enchiladas. Both the unicorns wanted the pasta (it was tempting, but I didn't want a sauce-covered muzzle), and Aquamarine chose the Pad Thai. Then we had to decide on what to drink, and Cayenne was a big help there. She spent a lot of time out and about when she wasn't in class and had tried a lot of different human drinks, so she knew what all the various kinds of wine were.

Our dinner came while we were stopped in a little town called Wisconsin Dells, and the waiter had just finished setting down our plates when the train pulled out of the station. It was a smoother start this time. Maybe the engineer was getting better.

It was funny that the thing that people most seemed in awe of was Gusty and Cayenne eating their meals with aura-held forks and knives. I guess unicorn magic is pretty neat to watch if you're not used to it.

We each had a piece of cheesecake for dessert, and then we went back to our room. There was a lot of scenery to see, and we figured out pretty quick the best way to sit on the chairs so that we could carry on a good conversation but keep an eye on what was passing outside.

I'd learned that most of the people in America lived on the coasts and southern borders, and a lot of the middle of the country was pretty empty, and it seemed like that when we were on the train. The towns that we passed through were smaller and smaller, and there was a lot of wilderness or big open fields. A lot of the fields were so big that we couldn't even see the houses and barns that must have been there, somewhere.

And the roads had changed a lot, too; many of them were simple dirt trails rather than paved roads with marking stripes.

Aquamarine had brought a deck of cards with her, and Cayenne had some beer, so we started playing euchre with one unicorn per team, since neither of them knew how to play it.

Aquamarine was really good. A lot of earth ponies are smart and cunning. She only got better as we had some drinks, or else I got worse. I do get impulsive sometimes, and that's not the best way to be in a card game, so me and Gusty wound up losing.

Cayenne had a folding computer with her and she set it up and used her field to tap the keys—she was really good at it. She said that she had to do a lot of computer work in her physics class, so she'd had to learn how.

She also had one of the flat telephones that humans like—it was called an iPhone and had a helper called Siri—and she showed us how there was a moving map that showed us where we were. That was really neat; I didn't have to try to read the signs on the towns that we passed by.

There were silver sheds along the track that also had signs with names on them, but they weren't always the same as the town name, or at least I didn't think they were. People had nicknames for things that didn't show up on maps, though, so maybe Yard Limit was what they called one town and it had a different name on her map.

I was yawning and ready for bed when we got to Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Even though the clock on Cayenne's iPhone said it was only ten, it felt later than that to me. Aquamarine felt the same way.

All four of us decided that we'd get out of the train and stretch our legs a little bit. It had to sit at the station for a while; Aquamarine thought that probably the locomotives had to be serviced since they'd been running for so long already. I think she was right; there was a lot of activity on the platform.

Since the station was covered, I thought it would be okay to fly and exercise my wings as well. No airplanes were going to be down here, after all. So I flew the length of the platform a couple of times, and then landed back with the rest of the group and we went back to our room.

The train had left the station and we'd just settled in—me looking out the window at all the city lights—when an attendant came in and offered to set up the beds for us, which was really nice of him.

There were two upper beds and two lower beds, arranged into an L-shape. We decided that we didn't really have much use for the top beds, so we told the attendant to keep them put away.

I was pretty yawny by the time he left, so I excused myself to the bathroom and then crawled into the bed that ran side-to-side.

Our unicorn companions stayed up, but they were kind enough to keep quiet and let us sleep.

March 19

It's strange to sleep on a train. When you wake up, you don't know where you are.

Aquamarine woke up just after me—I'd rolled onto my belly and lifted my head up so that I could see out the window, but there wasn't too much to see because it was still dark out. The lights of the train windows hardly lit up anything at all, and there were only distant pinpoints of light to see, or the occasional car or truck waiting at a railroad crossing.

I could see out the other window that we were next to a road, going a bit faster than the cars alongside. There weren't too many, though. It was still dark out, but it felt to me like it ought to be light already. I guess Daylight Saving Time had messed me up more than I thought.

The sun was just coming up as we passed by a train with orange locomotives waiting on a side track. Just past it, there was a collection of big silver cylinders that Aquamarine said was a grain elevator, which is where grain is sorted and kept until it is ready to be shipped off.

Aquamarine and I decided it was time to get out of bed and get ready for the morning. The train is very self-contained, with bathrooms and showers for the riders which were just down a short hallway from our room.

There weren't any windows in the shower room, which was a pity. It would have been nice to see outside, but I guess since humans are embarrassed when they don't have clothes on it made sense. Just the same, it felt kind of confining to me, but I could mostly ignore it. Aquamarine didn't look all that bothered by it.

We put our shower supplies back in the room and checked on the unicorns, but they were both still asleep, so we decided to get some exercise by walking up and down the length of the train.

The passages between cars are kind of scary, because the two cars are moving relative to each other, so if you're ground-bound you have to judge carefully. There are little doors with pressure plates that you have to push before you can cross into them, so you can't accidentally wander into a between-car passage.

All the way in the back, the door didn't open, but we could stand up on our hind hooves and watch the ground zip by behind us. It was kind of dizzying, seeing all the crossties blur away. But it was a really nice view, not limited to one side or the other like our room was.

It really would have been something to be sitting in the locomotive, but I didn't think we'd be allowed to do that.

We passed by a train on a side-track—it was going the same direction we were, but not as fast. I waved out my window when I saw the locomotive, and to my surprise the man inside waved back at me.

The two of us might have stayed there all day but Miss Parker finally found us, and invited us to breakfast, and we followed her forward to the dining car.

We'd finished our meal and gone back to Miss Parker and Mister Barrow's room when the train stopped for a while in Minot. That was another long stop, so we all got out and walked the platform until the conductor said it was time to get back on the train.

On both sides of the train was farmland. Gusty thought it was boring, but Aquamarine liked it because she likes farms, and I liked how big and open it was. I don't know what Cayenne thought of it; she was using her computer to look at Facebook.

We'd had a couple of hours to ourselves when Mister Barrow and Miss Parker came down and asked if they could sit with us for a little bit. Mister Barrow said that he was going to tell us a bit about the train, which would be interesting.

He told us that the train used to be run by the Great Northern Railroad but then the railroads had started to lose money on the passenger trains because people were taking trips by car or by airplane, and then all the passenger trains wound up being run by Amtrak, and it had been that way for over forty years.

I asked him if the Great Northern Railroad still had any trains, and he shook his head and said that they had become part of the Burlington Northern, which had then become part of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, or BNSF, and those were the trains we would see now.

He told us that tomorrow, we'd want to get up to the Viewliner car early so that we could get a good view as we went through the Cascades, which were a mountain range. During the summer, we would have gotten a really good look at Glacier National Park, but we'd be passing it at night—and we'd pass over the Rocky Mountains at night as well.

Gusty thought it was odd that more people didn't like trains. It was a lot roomier than an airplane, and a lot nicer inside, too. She'd noticed that people were really jammed into their seats, and some people even had to crouch to walk through the aisles in the airplane, but the train was taller. She said that she didn't like cars all that much, either.

Aquamarine didn't mind cars (and I didn't, either). I thought that they were comfy inside, and it was a fun way to get where you were going. I asked Gusty if she had ever been on a road trip, and she shook her head.

Cayenne said that in Chicago, there were lots of trains to take you where you wanted to go. It was called “Metra,” and she said that was how she'd gotten to the train station to get on the Empire Builder. She thought they were better, because in a taxi or Uber-car, you were limited in how many of your friends you could fit in, but there was no practical limit on the trains. Plus, she said that a lot of the train terminals had musicians performing.

The land outside the train had gotten hilly and there were a lot of small ponds and lakes scattered as far as the eye could see. They were all covered in ice, but you could tell that they were there, because there were flat spots in the rolling land.

In Williston, there was a steam locomotive and a caboose that both said Great Northern on them. I suppose they had been left over after the Great Northern became the Burlington Northern. But then Cayenne said that humans kept old machines in museums and sometimes if they were big outside where people could look at them and admire them.

Just before lunch, we passed into Montana. There weren't any signs announcing it, like there were on the highway, and we wouldn't have known if Mister Barrow hadn't said something about it. The land had gotten really hilly around us, and we'd go long stretches without seeing any human civilization besides roads, and then we'd come upon a little town, and then we were back in near-wilderness.

The train made another service stop in Havre, and we all got out. It was colder than it had been in Michigan, and even with her clothes, Gusty decided that she needed another layer and went back inside. I was a bit chilly, too, and kinda regretting that I'd had my coat groomed.

After a while, Montana started to look the same, and we spent a little less time looking out the windows and a little more time talking about our experiences on Earth. Cayenne told us about the museums she visited on the weekends and the different clubs she went to at night. Gusty had a bunch of funny stories to tell about theatre people, most of which were about things going wrong on stage and people forgetting their cues. Aquamarine told us about all the different fields and barns and stuff that Michigan State has, and also about the basketball games she'd been to, and I told them about flying around Kalamazoo.

After dinner—which was pretty much the same as it had been last night—we all sat around Cayenne's folding computer and we took turns showing pictures of friends that were on Facebook. I didn't think I'd find that many of me, but Cayenne told me that if the pictures were tagged with my name, the computer could find them, and sure enough it did. I kind of blushed when I found a video of me rolling around in the snow, but the video of me giving a ponyback ride at Val Day made up for it.

Then when Aquamarine was taking her turn, Cayenne found a picture of her at the horse stables standing next to an unsheathed stallion. Cayenne's jaw dropped at the size of him, and Gusty got really embarrassed and turned away.

It wasn't too long after that we started talking about our sex lives on campus, and we decided that we needed to have some drinks for that. Well, Gusty thought so, and I wasn't going to turn down the bottle of wine she offered, so we passed it around and talked about doing it with humans.

Cayenne had the most to tell; she'd been to lots of parties and had figured out how to get boys interested in her. Gusty had met a girl she really, really liked and she wouldn't say any more than that. I told them about Aric, and Aquamarine said that she'd managed to score with one boy after a party but that had been it, and it hadn't been all that satisfying because he was drunk and didn't last very long.

We played another round of euchre after that, and then everyone got ready for bed so that we could get to the Viewliner car early. When Gusty got undressed, I noticed that she was wearing underwear, too, and that struck me as really odd. I thought about saying something, but that wouldn't have been polite.

March 20 [Seattle]

March 20

I woke up after only a few hours of sleep to a bunch of unusual motion. I wasn't really sure what was going on, so I asked Cayenne (who was in bed but awake) and she said that they didn't know, either, but we'd stopped in a station and there was a lot of activity going on around the train.

I couldn't really see out the window what was happening, and it probably wasn't anything to worry about anyway, but I got out of bed and went out in the hallway and out the exit door.

They were taking some of the end cars off of our train and moving them on to another one. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I saw Mister Barrow on the platform watching the action, so I went over to him and asked.

He said that the train split in Spokane (which is where we were), and half of it went to Portland, while the rest went to Seattle.

I thought that was pretty clever; rather than have to wake everybody up in the middle of the night and have them change trains, they just moved the railcars to a different train.

So I went back inside and told Cayenne what they were doing. She said that sometimes the trains in Chicago did that, too, but usually not when there were people on them. She stuck her muzzle up to the window and jerked back as a porter carried a big yellow cart by our car, ‘cause it surprised her, and then she went back to looking out the window.

I had a better view out the window by their bed than my own, so I climbed in and watched the humans bustle around the platform, getting both trains ready to go. I could see Mister Barrow out there still, keeping an eye on their progress, and then I heard the faint call of the conductor, and he turned and went back to the train.

A minute or two later, our train pulled out of the station, and we were on our way again.

I didn't think I'd be able to get back to sleep right away, so I went upstairs and walked to the back of the train—which was a lot closer to our car than it had been—and looked out the rear window. I could see the lights of Spokane disappearing behind us, and then we were back in the wilderness again.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see all the stars spread above us and I just watched them for a little bit, then went back downstairs and nestled next to Aquamarine and fell back asleep.

The two of us were both up before the sun. Aquamarine said that was because the farther west we went, the later the sun rose and our bodies just hadn't gotten used to it yet.

I left a note for Cayenne and Gusty, and the two of us went right to the Viewliner car like Mister Barrow had said we should. There wasn't a whole lot to see at first because it was still dark, but when the sun started coming up it was spectacular. We were following a river along through the mountains (which are called the Cascades) and the snow-covered pine trees were right up next to the tracks. Aside from the electrical lines that ran alongside the tracks, there wasn't any other sign of human civilization.

All of a sudden we went into a tunnel, and I thought it would be short but it wasn't at all. I was starting to get a bit panicky and so Aquamarine leaned up against me and reminded me that the train wouldn't go anywhere that wasn't safe. I was still pretty happy when we got to the other end of it, though. I hoped we wouldn't go through any more long tunnels.

Mister Barrow joined us not long after the train got out of the tunnel. He said that Miss Parker was still in the shower but would be along before too long and asked us where the two unicorns were.

I said that they were still sleeping, because unicorns like to sleep in.

When they finally showed up, we made some room for them on our seat. There were more and more people coming into the lounge, and we didn't think it would be fair to take up more seats than we had to. After a little bit of arrangement, we wound up with Miss Parker and the two unicorns sharing a set of seats, and Mister Barrow and me and Aquamarine sharing the other. It was a little bit crowded, but not too much, and that left open a pair of seats for anyone else who wanted to watch out the windows.

The train made a big turn, and pretty soon we came along a river and started following it. I knew that train tracks sometimes liked to follow rivers because even in mountains the river itself was a fairly flat course because water found the easiest way to the ocean as it could.

We picked up a little bit of speed when the train got past the mountains and more into flatter land. Miss Parker went and got us some snacks—she said that we could have a proper breakfast in Seattle, and we could keep our seats this way.

The river stayed our companion all the way to Everett, then the train turned south, following along a big body of water. Gusty wanted to know if it was the Pacific Ocean, but Mister Barrow said it was called Puget Sound, and it connected to the Pacific Ocean.

As the train started to slow down and got into the heart of the city, we went back to our room to pack up all our stuff.

Once we were off the train, we took all our baggage to a little parking area where there was a white van waiting for us. Mister Barrow opened up the door where the gas goes and the keys for the van were in there.

We got all our stuff put inside, and he drove us first to a tall white tower called the Space Needle. I didn't like the elevator, and Gusty was a little nervous about how high it was, but it was totally worth it when we got our table. There were big windows that looked out over the side, and the whole dining room slowly turned so that we could see everything around us.

While we waited for our food, Mister Barrow pointed out the sights. There was a distant mountaintop called Mt. Rainier that was very famous, but it was too cloudy to see it. He said we would have been able to see it beyond the skyscratchers if the weather had been clear.

I liked it when the view came around to the harbor. There wasn't any snow or ice at all, and lots of big ships were tied up to docks, and smaller ones were moving around the bay. It reminded me of home, of looking down from clouds at the busy ports, even though the big ships didn't have as much character as the sailing ships back home. There were a few steamships that ran up and down the Equestrian coast, but they never got too far from land because if they carried enough fuel and water to make the trip, they'd hardly be able to carry any cargo.

After lunch we walked up one floor higher to the observation deck. I wanted to fly down, but there was a fence in the way that closed in the whole area so that I couldn't.

Gusty wouldn't even go to the edge; she said it was too high and that she didn't like it at all, so Miss Parker stayed with her inside the closed-in part while the rest of us took in the sights. They were the same as we'd seen from the restaurant, but felt closer to me with the fresh air.

When we were done sightseeing, we went to the Pacific Science Center, which was right next to the Space Needle. There were so many things to see there it was a bit overwhelming, and we started by having everypony pick one thing they wanted most to see.

Cayenne thought we could see more if we split into two groups, but Miss Parker wasn't having that. She said that we ought to stick together like a family.

So we started off visiting the Science Playground, which was a whole lot of fun. Then we went on to the Saltwater Tide pool (that was Aquamarine's idea, but I would have suggested it if she hadn't) where we got to look at little fish and even touch starfish and sea enemies and hermit crabs. A lot of the stuff was pretty familiar to me (although I'd never touched any of them before), but Aquamarine had never been to the ocean before and it was all completely new. She was even confused by how salty the water was.

Then we went to see the Science on a Sphere, and it blew my mind. There was a giant floating globe of the Earth and it had weather patterns and stuff on it, and after the presentation I talked to the attendant a little bit and would have liked to talk to him more, but it would have been rude to keep Gusty waiting from what she wanted to see, which was the butterfly house.

I've never been in a butterfly house before. I thought that it would probably be boring because it was too early in the year for butterflies, but it was a big greenhouse so the butterflies were active all year long. Just the scents alone made me forget it wasn't quite spring yet (although it would be really soon). Gusty danced around like a filly, trying to take it all in, and I thought she might pass out from happiness when a butterfly landed right on her muzzle and she went all cross-eyed looking at it.

If this is what human museums are like, I want to see more of them. Everything was amazing, and the workers were very helpful, and I was sorry that we had to leave.

We had a light meal at the Science Center, and then walked to the Chihuly Garden and Glass, which was just across the street. I wasn't sure what to expect at first: it looked like another big greenhouse, but it turned out to be a greenhouse for glass sculptures that just boggled the mind. Cayenne said that there was a stained-glass museum on Navy Pier in Chicago, but that it was nothing like this.

I can't even describe how alive everything felt. How amazing the colors were, and how they changed as the sun set. There were fake glass flowers dyed the most vivid reds and yellows, and even a stained-glass ceiling.

We had a room for the night at the Alexis Hotel, and our room looked over the bay, which I thought was really nice. I wanted the bed closest to the window, and neither Cayenne nor Gusty cared which they got.

Cayenne wanted to go out to a nightclub, which is a fancy pub. She said that that was one of the best ways to experience a city. Gusty thought that sounded like fun, too, but I didn't particularly want to. I was getting pretty tired because I'd been up all day.

She finally convinced me and Aquamarine, though. We had to wait a little bit for Gusty to change clothes, and I made Cayenne promise not to bring a boy back to the hotel unless she was planning on sharing. She laughed and said that she wouldn't.

Cayenne was the smart one when it came to getting around a big town. She could use her telephone to get an Uber-car, and she had it take us to the nightclub she'd chosen, which was called the White Horse Trading Company.

We went right in and we'd just sat down at a table when a man came out from the back and introduced himself as Joe and said that he was the owner and that there had never been an actual white horse in his pub before, and that our first drink was on him. Then he asked us if we minded posing for a selfie with him, and of course we didn't mind. Cayenne took one with her portable telephone, too, and then we asked him what he recommended.

So we all had a pint of Stingo, which was strong, dark, and very good. Cayenne said that she had been expecting someplace livelier, but when she suggested that maybe we ought to go to a different place, we all told her no. I liked it; it was quiet and there were books all around the walls. Gusty said that every inch of the place oozed character, and that it would be incredibly rude to just walk out after the man who owned the bar had introduced himself.

Well, Cayenne didn't quite agree, but after her third beer she sort of came around and started having fun.

We stayed there pretty late—it felt like the middle of the night to me—and then we took another Uber-car back to the hotel and crawled into bed. As I was drifting off to sleep, I remembered that today had been the first day of spring.

Author's Note

Space Needle Webcam.
(You can set the date and time)

March 21 [Coast Starlight]

March 21

I got up first and rather than get out of bed, I looked out the window at the harbor below. It was still dark out, but in the bay I could see the little lights that ships have on them, and I could also see airplanes flying over the harbor on their way to the airport which is just a little ways south of the hotel.

When Aquamarine got up, we took a shower together, and it was a lot nicer than the crowded shower on the train. We had room to stretch out and move around each other more easily.

I didn't know what we were going to do for breakfast, but when we were out of the shower I used the coffee machine to make a pot that Aquamarine and I shared. The smell of the coffee was enough to get Gusty to stick her head up in interest, so I made a second pot for her and Cayenne to share.

They didn't get up until the sky was getting light, though. By then Aquamarine and I were done grooming each other and I'd preened my feathers.

They had to hurry in the shower 'cause they'd taken so long getting up. Me and Aquamarine went down with Mister Barrow and had a quick hotel brunch, and Cayenne and Gusty didn't get anything because they were not morning ponies.

In the van, though, Miss Parker gave them each a granola bar and an apple so that they wouldn't be too hungry and grouchy.

The van got left in the parking lot, and Mister Barrow put the keys back where he'd found them, then we carried our luggage to the platform and waited for our train to arrive.

Our room was the same as it had been before, and they both had a room upstairs just like last time. Me and Aquamarine and Cayenne all went up to the Viewliner car as soon as we'd gotten our belongings packed away; Gusty wanted to change her clothes because she was wearing the same thing she'd worn yesterday. I hadn't been keeping close track, but I think she'd worn more different clothes so far this trip than I owned at all.

A conductor made the same announcements that the last one had, and then as we were pulling out of the station we passed by several wave-shaped trains called Sounder. Cayenne said that they looked like commuter trains, kind of like the Metra trains she rode on in Chicago.

We had to turn our heads to see Mount Rainier, but Mister Barrow pointed it out when we could finally see it. It was still a little gloomy and rainy, but even so the mountain looked very impressive.

Seattle stretched on for a while south, and then we got out into rural land again after we passed Olympia. It wasn't as spectacular as the mountains had been, and there were a lot more houses near the tracks. Even though we were following the coast, we were a ways inland and couldn't see the ocean at all.

He told us that sometimes when we crossed over Interstate 5, we might be able to see Mt. Saint Helens, which is a volcano that erupted thirty six years ago, so we kept a close look out. I saw some steam coming up and wondered if that was it and it was going to erupt again, but he said that wasn't it, that was some kind of industrial building.

The land had gotten flat and a a little bit boggy. It wasn't as pretty as the route through the mountains, but you could see a lot further.

In a town called Winlock, we passed by the world's largest egg. Aquamarine asked if it was a dinosaur egg, because she's learned that there used to be dinosaurs and that they were a lot like dragons. But it was fake—it had been made to celebrate the opening of the Pacific Coast Highway. That was kind of disappointing.

Mister Barrow said that if Aquamarine was interested in dinosaurs, there were a lot of dinosaur fossils at the Field Museum in Chicago, and that they could go there sometime. Cayenne thought that would be a nice opportunity to get together, and it sounded interesting to me, as well.

We ate lunch before we got to Oregon. The train had a parlor car which offered an exciting and unique alternative to the dining car (that's what the menu said). There were only two options for lunch, but on the plus side that made it a lot quicker to decide what we wanted to eat.

We had a long stop in Portland, and all got out to stretch our legs. Portland is the biggest city in all of Oregon, and I thought with a name like that it would be on the ocean or maybe a bay like Seattle, but it was just on two big rivers instead.

When we started up again, we went slowly over a very long bridge over one of them (the Willamette), and when the train went around a bend right after getting off the bridge, I could see the tail of the train and how the bridge had big towers and a little house on top of it. Mister Barrow said that was because it was a lift bridge that could be raised to let boats get by, and I didn't believe that could possibly be true because it was so big, but when we'd gone a little bit further, I got a look back at it and the bottom part was slowly rising.

The scenery all started to blur together and I was kinda getting tired because I'd stayed up too late last night, so I went to our room for a little nap. I was hoping that Aquamarine might want to join me, but she was still wide awake.

One nice thing about the train is that the side-to-side rocking motion is very soothing. I didn't want to bother the sleeping car attendant to get out the bed, so I just stretched out on the chairs and went to sleep that way.

When I got back up and went back to the Viewliner car, I didn't know what time it was. My sense of time was totally messed up by being so far west. So I asked Cayenne—she had her iPhone out and was looking on the map at where we were, which was just south of Albany near a little town called Tangent.

It was all flat farmland on both sides of the tracks, and we still couldn't see the Pacific Ocean. I wondered if it would be possible to see it from here if we were high enough, but when I looked at the map it looked like we were as far inland as Kalamazoo was from Lake Michigan.

Mister Barrow promised us that the train would run along the Pacific in California, though, and that was something to look forward to.

After we left Eugene, we turned more inland, towards the mountains. Pretty quickly we left the farmland behind and were right back in snowy forest. We ate our dinner in the parlor car with trees practically brushing against us as we went.

It was getting dark after we finished up dinner, but we still sat in the Viewliner car for a while. I think there would have been a really nice night view if they'd turned off all the lights in the car, but then I remembered how I'd had a good view out the back window of the train, so when it finally got dark enough that we couldn't really see anything outside anymore, all four of us make our way to the tail end and took turns standing on our hind hooves and looking out the little window.

I could see the moon glowing through the clouds, but I couldn't actually see it or any stars at all, which was kind of disappointing, but it did provide some light on the forest that was all around us.

We looked out the back window a little bit longer, but the sky didn't get any clearer (and from looking at the clouds before it got dark, I didn't think it would), so we went to our bedroom and had the attendant fold down the bottom beds for us so that we'd be ready when we were tired.

Cayenne got out another bottle—her supply seems to be neverending. I wished that I had brought more than that one bottle of Jameson's which was already half-gone when I got on the train.

Gusty wanted to know if we might be able to come to see her play. She said that there were weekend performances, and that she'd be really happy knowing that we were there.

Cayenne said right away that she would, and I thought I probably could, too. Maybe I could get Aric to drive me! He'd probably like that. And Aquamarine and Cayenne talked about meeting up at the Field Museum to look at the dinosaur bones.

When we were getting ready for bed, Gusty said that she wanted to stay up and see when we went into California. I thought that was kind of silly; it was dark outside and probably California would look just the same as Oregon. But it seemed pretty important to her, and then the way she started talking about how great California was, I started to get interested in it, too.

Well, we knew that we wouldn't be in California until after we stopped at Klamath Falls, so we made her promise to wake us up when we stopped there, and then we'd all stay awake so that we could celebrate getting to California.

We didn't know how long it would be after Klamath Falls, so we all kept our muzzles to the glass, although Cayenne kept looking at the map on her iPhone. As we went around a curve that took us away from the highway and then back again, Cayenne said that we were really close, and said that she'd let us know when we crossed into California.

I spotted a sign on the highway that said that we were entering California, and Gusty got a little glimpse of it, too, although probably not enough to read it.

Gusty got a huge smile on her face and hugged us all, and then we had to stay up a little bit longer so that we could have another drink to celebrate.

March 22 [California]

March 22

Gusty was awake before I was. She was looking longingly out the train window at the buildings passing by. I wasn't sure what made it so special; to me it looked kind of dry and barren and the buildings weren't that much different than they had been in Oregon.

Before I could wish her a good morning, she turned around and saw that I was up, and her face lit up in a broad grin.

She kept her voice low to respect our sleeping companions, and started to tell me all the stuff she'd seen already, and then motioned me over to the window beside her.

I flew in a short hop to avoid accidentally stepping on Aquamarine or Cayenne, and sat down next to her.

She told me that she'd been awake since Sacramento, which was the capital of California.

I thought that since she was up and I was up we ought to go to the Viewliner car and get a better view of California, and she agreed with me. I was a bit surprised that she hadn't just gone up on her own, but maybe she didn't want to be alone.

We were just to the stairs when she remembered that she was only wearing her sleeping robe and had to go back to the room and get dressed. It seemed silly to me, and such an inconvenience to want to wear clothes all the time. Peggy was always changing from one thing to the other, too.

It took her nearly forever to get dressed, 'cause she'd pick one thing and then decide that she wanted to wear something else instead, and she kept getting distracted when a building went by the window, but she finally had clothes she thought were suitable, and we went up into the Viewliner.

The two of us were the first ones there, so we had our pick of seats. Gusty wanted to sit on the right side, because she said that we'd be able to see the ocean. That was something I'd been looking forward to, as well, so I took her advice.

By the time we got to Martinez, Aquamarine and Cayenne and Miss Parker had joined us. Miss Parker said that Mister Barrow was back in his room making arrangements on the telephone but would be along, and if we wanted to get breakfast he wouldn’t mind.

So we ate our breakfast while the train was coming up on Oakland, and were just finishing when it slowed down for the station.

Alongside the tracks, there were big flags on poles, and the buildings were nicely painted. Gusty was just staring out the window, her spoonful of oatmeal hovering forgotten above her bowl. The conductor announced that the train would be stopping for ten minutes in Oakland, and Gusty dropped her spoon, said that she was done, and rushed down to the door.

Miss Parker shook her head and asked if one of us wanted to join her. I was done with my breakfast, so I said that I would, and hurried down to find her, just in case she tried something dumb like jumping off the train while it was still moving.

She waited, but she almost crowded the conductor out of his position. She had her hooves up on the door when I got down the stairs and the conductor sort of pushed her back, so she just went to the other side and stared through the window.

When he finally got the door open and the little stepstool down, she hopped right off it and started dancing around on the platform, which of course made a bunch of people stare at her, but it was obvious she didn't care.

She wrapped her hooves around me and kissed me on the cheek and said that being in California was the most wonderful thing ever, and her mood kind of rubbed off on me a bit, so pretty soon she was cantering up and down the platform while I flew overhead, keeping pace with her.

It was warmer than anywhere we'd been yet, and I could smell the salt air. Seagulls were perched on lightposts and the edges of roofs, and they'd fly off when I got close and then circle back in case I'd accidentally dropped some food. Seagulls are weird like that. The ones who live close to land get really fat and lazy.

The two of us had made quite a spectacle of ourselves by the time we got back aboard the train. I noticed that Cayenne was watching from inside the car, but she didn't dare show her face on the platform while we were fooling around like a couple of schoolfillies.

We'd both hoped that we'd be along the coast from now on—we were so close!—but the train went back inland instead, and we were treated to dirt-covered hills instead.

They were kind of pretty, but not in the same way that Washington and Oregon had been. It was the kind of stark beauty that was nice to look at but why would anyone want to live there?

As we got further south, it got greener and the hills got further back (and they got greener, too). Then it got kind of dry again, and we went up into hills. We'd taken up seats on both sides of the car, so that we could go back and forth and look at the scenery on either side. That had been Mister Barrow’s idea.

I was glad we did. We went up into the hills and the highway that ran alongside us didn't, and it almost felt like we were flying. Unlike in the Space Needle, Gusty stuck her muzzle right up to the window and took in the scenery. I guess it made a difference to her that the train was only two stories tall.

The train went around a really sharp curve which the conductor said was called Horseshoe Curve. Cayenne laughed at the name, and then we all looked out the window at the front of our train making the curve.

I could tell that they were using some kind of artificial irrigation on the fields around their buildings, because those were a nice vibrant green and everything else was desert-y. Aquamarine said that it was kind of a waste, since humans couldn't eat grass. They'd do better to use the water on useful crops, rather than something decorative.

When we got out of San Luis Obispo, Mister Barrow told us that we'd be able to see the Pacific soon but he'd been saying that for a while, and I think Gusty was starting to not believe him any more. But then I saw off in the distance how it looked like the land was falling away, and I wished that the train windows could be opened, 'cause I know I would have smelled it.

The Pacific is gorgeous, and it only got more beautiful the closer we got. All of us had abandoned our chairs and just had our noses up to the window. I was starting to think that maybe Gusty was right about California after all. It hadn't seemed all that special before, but now that I was seeing what it had to offer, I was really liking it. We went along coastal bluffs and the track curved along to stay close to the shore.

We had to wait for a while just after we left Santa Barbara. There was something wrong on the tracks up ahead was what the conductor said, but he didn’t say what it was. Sometimes cows and stuff will wander onto the tracks and then the train has to wait until they move, so it was probably something like that..

I didn't mind all that much. We took the opportunity to eat dinner by ourselves. Miss Parker and Mister Barrow stayed in the Viewliner so that nobody would take our seats, which was really nice of them.

The train started moving while we had dessert, and it was kind of slow at first, but then it picked up speed again. After we’d been going for a little while, we passed a different Amtrak train that was sitting on a side track; Mister Barrow said that was the Surfliner.

We had the best view ever for the sunset. The train was nearly on the beach, and all of us watched in awe as the sun touched the ocean and then sank below. Everybody in the car was completely silent until the sun was all the way gone.

Just after that, the train turned inland, and as it got dark we went through bigger and bigger cities. Gusty didn’t want to leave the Viewliner to pack up her stuff, so Cayenne said that she’d do it for her, and Gusty gave her a great big hug and then just went back to looking out the window in wide-eyed wonder at all the buildings and lights of California.

March 22-23 [Los Angeles]

March 22-23

When we finally arrived in Los Angeles, everyone was exhausted except Gusty, who was still staring out the window like a filly on Hearth's Warming. Cayenne offered to pack up her clothes, 'cause it was pretty obvious that we'd have to drag her out of her seat kicking and screaming. She just nodded, and that was that.

I wondered if she was going to run around on the platform like she had in Oakland. And I wondered if Mister Barrow and Miss Parker were any good at chasing down a unicorn. Maybe if they had a golden bridle with them.

Since I didn't really have anything to put away, I helped Cayenne pack up Gusty's stuff. Gusty hadn't been too careful with her clothes when she was unpacking her suitcase in the morning, so we had a bit of work to do, but we got it done before the train stopped, and Cayenne carried everypony's bags to the entryway, where the conductor helped us put everything on the platform. They were kind of in a hurry 'cause the train was running late.

Mister Barrow herded us all to the parking area where there was another white Econoline van waiting for us. This one had a driver already in it, so Mister Barrow didn't have to get the keys from behind the fuel door.

We were almost to the van when the front doors came open and a man and a woman got out. The woman hugged all of us, and the man did too, and then they introduced themselves as Maggie and Peter. They told us a little about themselves as they loaded the van; they were looking after Sunrise Song, who was studying at UCLA. I hoped that we'd get to meet her—I didn’t remember her from the train ride—but they said she was on a spring break trip just like we were.

They helped put all our stuff in the van, and then we climbed in. I was glad that the van was big; with the four of us and our four helpers and everyone's baggage it was pretty crowded.

I dozed on the way to the hotel, 'cause I wasn't as impressed with Los Angeles as Gusty was. There were a lot of people who were going to have to scrub muzzle-marks off windows by the time we were done with California, that was for sure.

Miss Parker shook me by the shoulder and I discovered that we were at our hotel. I hadn't thought that I'd fallen that far asleep, but I must have. I was the only one still in the van, and I yawned and went to get my saddlebags but they were gone, and she told me that the bellhop had taken them.

I followed her into the hotel and into the elevator and I was so tired that I just leaned up against her legs and let the elevator take me upstairs.

Everypony else had already settled in a bit. Well, Gusty wasn't settled; she was standing at the window and looking at a big white sign in the distance that said Hollywood. Cayenne was stretched out on the bed nearest the window, which left the other one for me and Aquamarine.

We were all going to do different things tomorrow, which would be strange. I wasn't sure that I wanted to be split up, but I really did want to go flying because I thought my wings might shrivel up and fall off if I didn't, and tomorrow was going to be my opportunity. And it wouldn't be fair for everyone else to have to come along with me. I'd been a little worried 'cause there were four of us and only two of Mister Barrow and Miss Parker, but Miss Parker was coming with me. Mister Barrow was going with Aquamarine, and I guessed that Peter and Maggie would be with Gusty and Cayenne.

Once I brushed my teeth, I went straight to bed and slept like a log.

March 23

When I woke up, Gusty was still standing at the window. She was wearing her sleeping clothes, so she must have spent at least some time in bed, unless she got dressed for sleeping and then forgot to actually sleep. I was actually starting to get a little bit worried about her; if she went too much longer without getting a proper night's sleep she was probably going to collapse on her hooves.

I still hadn't figured out what she found so exciting about California, and I was kind of afraid to ask her. One of my friends back in flight school had really, really wanted to be in the Wonderbolts and if you ever asked him about the Wonderbolts, he'd bend your ear back with stories about how great they were until you really regretted asking at all.

I waited until Aquamarine was awake, too, and then we got out of bed and took a shower together. When Cayenne woke up, the three of us managed to pry Gusty away from the window and shove her into the shower. I made coffee for her, so that it would be ready when she got out of the shower, and then after she had her coffee she started tearing through her bags until she found the perfect outfit for the day.

Even though I knew better than to ask what she was doing today, Aquamarine didn't, and she told us how she was going to see Hollywood and that she even was going to get a tour of a studio and she probably would have continued in that vein forever, but there was a knock at the door and when we opened it Maggie was standing there with a big smile on her face and she had a gray stallion beside her who seemed awfully familiar to me, but he was also wearing clothes so I couldn't see his cutie mark.

Then he introduced himself as South Pole, and that didn't really mean anything to me, but I shook his hoof politely anyway—we all did—and then Gusty gave him a great big hug and the three of them left.

When he was gone Cayenne said that he was an actor and she'd seen him in a movie but he hadn't been all that good. She told us that she'd heard that he'd come to Earth to try his luck here, and she said that her friends had taken her to see a movie he had been in but it wasn't all that good. She didn't think that the screenwriter had known what to do with him other than have him be a token unicorn character and that there had been some stuff that she thought was pretty offensive.

I was worried that she'd wind up giving a long rant against Hollywood, but she just sat in a chair and looked out the window and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Peter arrived and took her away, then a few minutes later Mister Barrow and Miss Parker came along to take us where we were going.

It was a little nerve-wracking to leave Aquamarine behind, especially since the city was so big I got disoriented really quickly. But I really liked our car: it was silver and the roof folded into the trunk and it had been so much fun to watch that I had her do it again before we got out of our parking space.

She drove me to a beach called Santa Monica Beach, and told me that I could fly to my heart's content as long as I kept it over the ocean and below five hundred feet. She pointed off to the south and said that there was a really big, important airport there and that the airplanes wouldn't know to watch out for a little pegasus.

That was okay by me; I didn't need a lecture, I needed to go flying. I could stay low and stay out of the way of big airplanes.

She got a portable icebox and a duffel bag out of the trunk and rolled them down to the beach, setting up a spot right next to a white tower that she said was a lifeguard stand. She said that she had food for us, showed me where the public bathrooms were, and said that I had to be back by four so that we would have time to eat dinner and then get on our train.

The beach was already filling up, even though it was pretty early. A couple of people came over and greeted me and I had a feeling that I was going to become a spectacle pretty quick but I knew that they couldn't follow me in the air, so I took off and flew maybe a decameter off the ground over the beach and then over the water and headed out to sea.

Once I'd gotten a little ways beyond the beach I picked up some altitude and looked around. To the south of us was a big pier with a giant ferris wheel on it, and of course Los Angeles was behind me. I could see big airplanes landing and taking off from the airport—it was a little too close for comfort, but I knew that airplanes had to go where they were assigned, and that close to the airport they wouldn't be allowed to sneak around low.

I made a bunch of broad circles over the water, maybe a mile in diameter, maybe a bit more. Down below me when I got close to the beach I saw some people on long waterboards who were riding breaking waves and that looked like it would be a lot of fun.

When I'd had my fill of flying for a bit, I went back to the beach and landed beside Miss Parker. She had taken off her clothes and was wearing swimming clothes called a bikini, which is almost like a bra and panties.

I sat down next to her and let the sun warm me up—it was a lot warmer here than it had been in Michigan or Seattle—and then played around in the surf.

I mostly dried off while I was eating lunch, and then I went back in the air again. Rather than make big loops, I flew parallel to the beach, going up and then diving down parallel to a wave. I tried to get as close to them as I could without getting wet, and I was mostly successful. Then I flew with the surfers for a while—they call themselves that because they ride the surf.

One of them said that I could use his board for a bit if I wanted to try it, and I discovered pretty quickly that riding on waves was different than riding on snow and fell off the board a lot. Still, it was a lot of fun, and I bet with practice I could get pretty good at it.

I rinsed off in the outdoor shower they had, to get all the salt out of my coat and feathers, and then walked back to the towel that Miss Parker was on and sat down beside her. I asked her if it was okay if I stretched out my wings to let them dry quicker and she said that she didn’t mind, so I laid one across her belly and let the other one drape in the sand.

I kinda dozed off, but it must not have been for too long because my wings were still damp when I woke back up. Miss Parker said that it was almost time to go, especially if we wanted to get something to eat on the way back.

So I took one final flight up and down the beach, and we walked back to the car. She opened the doors and folded the top down first so that all the hot air inside it would get out, then put the portable icebox and her duffel bag in the car, and we went to a restaurant called Sugarfish and I had sushi, which is raw fish. It was really tasty, and I got all the energy back I’d spent flying.

But it took longer than we’d hoped (I’m not sure why; how long does it take to prepare raw fish?) and we had to rush a bit on the way back because we didn’t want to be late and miss our train.

As much fun as I’d had, I was looking forward to seeing my travelling companions again and finding out what they’d done for the day, so I had pretty mixed feelings when we stopped in the parking lot at the train station.

March 23-24 [Southwest Chief]

March 23-24

Miss Parker stopped at a little stand at the front part of the train station because she said that she wanted to get some aspirin. She said that being out in the sun all day sometimes gave her headaches, and she didn't think that there was any in her bag and she didn't know if she could buy it on the train.

I guarded our luggage, what little there was. She had her duffel bag and that was all, and I had my saddlebags. I knew that she had more luggage than that, because she'd had her own bag yesterday when we went to the van. I suppose Mister Barrow was going to bring it for her.

There were all sorts of candies and magazines and newspapers arranged around the stand, I suppose to interest me in buying something I might not have thought of otherwise. I saw that they had USA Today which is the same newspaper that they have in the Kalamazoo College dining hall, and I thought that was pretty amazing.

It had a big headline that said 'Terrorist Attacks in Brussels Send Shock Waves Around World.' I didn't really know what to think about that, so when Miss Parker was done buying her aspirin I asked her what it meant.

She tensed up and picked up her duffel bag and my saddlebags and said that we couldn't dally because we might miss the train, and I was pretty sure that she was just going to pretend I didn't ask the question.

I thought about how Peggy had reacted to the man in Kalamazoo who was shooting strangers, and I was afraid that I'd said something I should have kept to myself.

Miss Parker asked me what I knew about religion, and I admitted that it wasn't much. I knew that the Bible said that God had created everything, and then He'd made humans in His own image and given them some rules to follow, and that they weren't very good at following His rules, but I hadn't gotten much farther in the Bible than that. I knew from what Liz had told me that those people were Jewish, and later on God had sent Jesus to make a new covenant and those people were called Christians, but I didn't know much more than that because I hadn't read all that far in the Bible yet.

She said that there were other religions as well, and sometimes people did terrible things because they thought that their religion was right and the others were wrong. She told me that a terrorist group called ISIL had done it.

I wanted to know why, and she said that I wasn't the only one who wanted to know. She said that the simple version was that they believed anybody who didn't think like them—which she said was basically anybody who wasn't a member of their group—was an infidel, or an unclean person and that in their eyes that justified anything that they did.

That really didn't seem like much of an answer to me, and Miss Parker said that it wasn't much of an answer and if I wanted to, I could talk with her and Mister Barrow more about it on the train, or with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn in Kalamazoo.

When we got into the lobby, everybody else was there: Aquamarine and Cayenne and Gusty, and Mister Barrow and Peter and Maggie.

Gusty opened up her saddlebags and proudly floated out a picture of a dark-haired man posing with her who she said was Tim Stern, a well-known actor who had been in a whole lot of movies. So I smiled and said how wonderful that was, and she asked if I'd had a fun day as well, and I told her that I'd gone to the beach and gone surfing.

Then it was time to get on our train, and we all hugged Peter and Maggie and then went to the platform and got aboard the train.

Our room was familiar; the names of the trains might all be different but the cars were all the same inside.

As soon as we were settled, Gusty wanted to go to the Viewliner car so that she wouldn't miss a bit of California, but I could tell that she also wanted to tell everypony about her day in Hollywood.

I didn't want to let her down, so we all went to the Viewliner together, and she'd just started telling us about her day when the train pulled out of the station and she immediately got distracted by all the buildings.

I think that Los Angeles is bigger than Chicago was. We spent the first hour on the train still in it, and even after the sun went down there was plenty to see with all the lights. But after San Bernardino, we suddenly went up into mountainous terrain, and then there weren't as many lights.

We stayed up in the Viewliner until the train left Barstow, and then Cayenne finally managed to convince her that she wouldn't see any more from there than she would in our room, and she reluctantly agreed.

Gusty stretched out on the bed where she could see out the window, and the three of us talked about our days, getting interrupted every now and then when Gusty saw something interesting.

I told them about my day at the beach, and Aquamarine said that she'd gone to the Los Angeles Botanic Gardens. Cayenne had spent the day at UCLA, visiting their physics lab. That didn't sound all that exciting to me; I'd thought that part of the point of being on vacation was doing things that were fun and not schoolwork. And of course Gusty had gone to Hollywood.

Even after we got in bed, we kept talking for a little bit until the motion of the train put us to sleep.

March 24

Waking up was weird—since we were going east now, the sunrise was earlier. It was already a little bit light when I woke up. Gusty was asleep on top of the covers, still in the clothes she'd worn the night before.

By the time we got out of the shower were were nearly to New Mexico. We gave Cayenne our blankets so that she could cover up Gusty, and then waited around in our room until Cayenne was done with her shower before going upstairs for breakfast. It was a little bit later start to the day than I'd have preferred, but it was good enough.

Outside, the land was pretty dry, and there were rocky flat-topped hills that are called mesas. There weren't a lot of houses or people out there.

We were following along with a highway, and sometimes we'd be close to it and other times farther away. A lot of times when we got close it meant a small town was nearby.

We'd just finished breakfast when the conductor announced that we were about to stop in a town called Gallup.

Cayenne got it in her head that it would be really funny to gallop in Gallup, so we went down to the lower level and asked the conductor how long the train would be stopping.

He said it was a short stop, and that we had to stay on the train. Then Cayenne just looked up at him and asked if he could keep the train there for a couple of minutes so that we could gallop and he chewed on his lower lip for a minute and then nodded. He crouched down and told us that we could go all the way up to the locomotive and then back to this car, and that was it, and we had to be quick about it.

We promised that we would, so when the train stopped he set out his stepstool and first Cayenne got out and Aquamarine followed her; I flew over the two of them and then we galloped down the platform all the way to the locomotive and turned around and galloped back and jumped up into the train and fell on the floor in a fit of laughter.

The conductor thought it was funny, too. He said that since the train was probably going to be late, it might as well be for a good reason.

I felt really bad that we might have made the train late, and Cayenne did too because she apologized to him, and he said that it was okay; we had a good engineer and we had over three hours to make up those few minutes, and he was sure that the engineer would.

He kept his word; we got into Albuquerque on time. It was the biggest city we'd seen all day, and we had a chance to stretch our legs again, because this time the train was supposed to stop for a while.

Right after we left, the train started going more northward, and I looked at the timetable to see where we were going next and realized that we were going to go to Colorado, which is where Peggy lives. So I asked Cayenne if she could see on her map if we were going to be close to Colorado Springs, because Peggy lived there.

It took her a few minutes to check her map: it was really tiny so that it would fit in her telephone, and she had to make it bigger but then she couldn't see much, so she had to make it smaller and move it and try again.

She finally figured out where Colorado Springs was and where the train was going and they weren't very close at all, which was a disappointment.

We met Mister Barrow and Miss Parker for lunch. Gusty was still sound asleep in the room, and we'd debated on whether or not to wake her up, but decided that it would be rude. Cayenne said that she didn't think Gusty had gotten much sleep in the last couple of days.

After the train left Lamy the next stop was Las Vegas, and Cayenne got really excited until Miss Parker said that it wasn't the Las Vegas she was thinking of.

We spent most of the day skirting around the tops of mountains. Gusty joined us just before we got to Las Vegas; she looked a bit tired still but a lot better than she had looked in a while. Mister Barrow told us that we were coming up on Raton Pass, and told us a bit of the history of it and my ears fell when he said there was a tunnel.

And just then we went into it, but it wasn't all that long. I still didn't like it at all. Being in the Viewliner was even worse, because I could see flashes of light off the walls all around us and I just closed my eyes and leaned my head against Aquamarine's neck and didn't open them again until we were out of it.

Mister Barrow thought that was funny, and then he told me that when I'd closed my eyes I'd been in New Mexico, and now I was in Colorado.

March 24 [Colorado]

March 24

Colorado looked a lot the same as New Mexico. There isn't really much difference when you cross state borders, or if there was I hadn't noticed it yet.

It kind of made me wonder how people had decided one place was one state and another place was another state. The bottom half of Michigan was obvious enough; it followed the base of the Great Lakes, and the rest of it was surrounded by it. And there were some river borders, too, which also seemed sensible, but other states had nice straight lines that had nothing to do with anything as far as I could tell.

We sat down for dinner just before the train got to Trinidad. I was getting a bit bored with the repetitiveness of the menu and thought about experimenting and trying the herb roasted chicken. Miss Parker really liked it; that’s what she’d had for dinner every time.

It probably wasn't a good idea, though. Long trips already mess up your sense of time and sometimes make you sick, and it's not smart to make a significant change to your diet, too.

Cayenne was also annoyed with the sameness of our meals; she ordered a Bacardi as an appetizer and another to go with her dinner and I was kind of surprised that she didn't want one for dessert, too. It probably didn’t pair well with a chocolate cream tart.

I think it was getting a bit stressful on all of us to spend all this time on trains. I think the humans had the best of intentions when they came up with this plan, but they didn't ask us what we wanted to do, and of course none of us were rude enough to refuse.

But maybe I was being unfair. I'd had a good time so far, and the scenery outside was gorgeous. Next time Peggy talked about Colorado, I'd know what it looked like.

And I'd been wrong about Colorado being all mountains. When the train had turned east, it had pretty quickly gotten out of the mountains and into snow-covered plains. A lot of it was fenced off and there were cattle grazing through the snow.

Mister Barrow said that there used to be lots of buffalo or bison that roamed the western states, and they were such a symbol of America that they used to be on the nickel, which is one of the silver coins.

Aquamarine asked where they were now, and he said that the early settlers had driven them off and raised cattle on the land instead.

She told him that wasn't very nice, and she was surprised that the buffalo hadn't fought back, and then she remembered that on Earth, buffalo weren't smart and probably didn’t understand what was happening to them.

He told her that if she wanted to see buffalo, there were national parks that let them roam around wherever they wanted to, and she thought that would be fun to see. But then she said it was kind of sad seeing how dumb animals on Earth were compared to the ones in Equestria.

She told us that whenever she was out by the horse pastures at Michigan State, she understood a lot of what the horses were doing and why, but that it was a little uncanny seeing something that was so much like us that hadn't managed to take the next step to intelligence.

What made it the most difficult, she said, was that some of them were smart enough to have figured out one simple thing—there was one horse that knew how to turn on the water faucet, and she saw him do it once, but then when the water came out he didn't know to push the bucket over so he could drink out of it, and instead lapped the water up off the ground. And he didn't turn the faucet off after, either, which made the woman in charge of the pasture mad.

Miss Parker told us that she had the same feeling when she saw great apes at the zoo. They hadn't quite made the cut, but it wasn't too hard to imagine that some day they would be smart, too. She said that chimpanzees had been taught sign language and could speak to people, and some of them had learned to live with people but it was hard to overcome their instincts; deep down they were still animals, even if they could use sign language.

Gusty wanted to know what sign language was—she said that there were lots of signs everywhere with special symbols, but that wasn’t what Miss Parker was talking about, and she explained how sign language was a way of talking to deaf people, and showed us how to sign 'I love you,' which she said was all she knew.

That wasn't really all that useful, since none of us had hands to imitate her with. Aquamarine said that there was ear-language, and showed Miss Parker how to say 'I love you' in ear-language.

It was kind of slow, though. She used her ears to spell out words one letter at a time, but she did it using telegraph code, so her left ear was shorts and her right ear was longs. I tried to imitate her, but it's a little hard to get your ears to do what you want them to when you're thinking about it. Gusty caught on right away. I guess because she's practicing to be an actress she'd have to know that stuff.

Cayenne said that unicorns usually used horn-pictures, and made a little illusion of a human and a pony hugging each other. Gusty tried to copy her but couldn't manage to do much more than make a couple of glowing lights.

Cayenne said that it took a bit of practice to get it right, that you really had to imagine the scene in your head and then focus the magic, and Gusty growled that she could imagine scenes just fine but she wasn't as good at spellwork as Cayenne was because there wasn't a lot of call for it on stage. A good actress, she said, could do a whole show without a single magic spell; what was important was body language.

They were about to start arguing, so I jumped in and said that one of the mares on my weather team had gotten yelled at for making a cloud-penis that rained from the end, but we'd all thought it was really creative, and she'd put a lot of effort into getting all the details right. I heard later that our supervisor thought it was really clever, too.

Cayenne started to tell us about how she'd watched a sex movie with one of her friends and then made horn-pictures based on the movie, and Mister Barrow interrupted us to say that maybe we should talk about that kind of stuff in private and maybe we should get off the train and run around on the platform in La Junta to cool down a bit and maybe ponies shouldn't have two drinks with dinner either.

That sounded like a good idea, so we all went down to the bottom floor of the car and waited for the train to stop.

Since we went there a little bit early, Cayenne had a bit of time to demonstrate her horn-pictures, and I don't know about the other girls, but I was thinking how much fun it would be if Aric was on the train with me.

Just as we were getting off the train I heard a shout and flew up to see who it was, and it was Peggy! She came running over, and I flew towards her and had my forelegs wrapped around her before I had even landed all the way. I almost knocked her over!

She said that when she'd heard from Miss Cherilyn that I was going to be on a train in Colorado, she knew that she just had to meet me at the station, even if it was only for a little bit, and she waved to a man and woman who were her mother and father.

We hardly had enough time for introductions, and I didn't get very much time with Peggy at all because the train wasn't stopping for all that long. Her father shook my hoof, and then her mother hugged me, and they asked me a whole bunch of questions about myself and said that Peggy had shown them some movies of me playing in the snow and even snowboarding—Gates had apparently finished it while he didn't have classes—and I found out that her mother was in the Air Force and her father designed web pages.

Meanwhile, Peggy had introduced herself to my three traveling companions, and was talking to them. I was glad that Gusty didn't have her saddlebags on, because if she had she probably would have taken out her picture of Tim Stern.

It was kind of sad that we didn't have more time together—it would have really been fun if she had wanted to ride the train back with us—but I would be seeing her again in a couple of days.

We had to cut our conversation short when the conductor called us back to the train, and I just had time to hug Peggy and tell her that I missed her and then when I turned around everyone else was on the train and so I flew back and zipped through the door without even using the little stepstool.

I didn’t go right back upstairs with the other girls, but stayed by the door so that I could wave to Peggy and her family as the train was leaving the station.

March 24-25 [Kansas to Chicago]

March 24

It would have been nice if the train had windows that could be opened. I could have leaned out of a window and waved at Peggy for longer.

The train ran alongside a highway for a while, then the highway turned off and we went by a big lake and crossed over an arm of it on a causeway, and it looked really pretty in the last light of the day.

Mister Barrow said that we were almost out of Colorado, then we'd be in Kansas and that we'd go through Kansas at night, because nobody wanted to see it. He said that its only feature was wheat, and in the first part of spring there wasn't even that to enjoy. Miss Parker said that was unfair, that Kansas had a lot going for it, and he asked if she could name one thing. She said that they made airplanes in Kansas and Amelia Earhart had come from Kansas, and that was two things.

I didn't know who Amelia Earhart was. Miss Parker told me that she was the first woman ever to get a pilot's license, and that she was also the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean, and she tried to fly all the way around the world but she disappeared and nobody knew where she went.

I thought that made Kansas pretty special, and I wanted to see an airplane being made.

Miss Parker said she thought that would be fun for me, and that over summer break, I could take the train to visit Peggy in Colorado and stop in Kansas and see the Cessna factory. She said that she'd tell Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and that they could arrange it.

So I hugged her, and then we went down to our room.

It was going to be our last night on the train together, which was kind of sad. So Cayenne got another bottle out of her trunk and we just sat on our beds and talked about how much fun we'd had and talked about what we might do over summer break. Cayenne said that she was probably going to go out to a research lab somewhere and do physics work. She said that there was a lot of research into horn magic, and so far the humans hadn't made a lot of progress, because they'd had to spend all sorts of time just figuring out how to measure it and then design experiments from that.

I said that they were novices at stuff like that; there was a lot they knew about weather but a lot they didn't, too, because we'd been working with it for thousands of years and they had hardly scratched the surface there.

But we both agreed that they had a lot of better measuring tools than ponies did.

Aquamarine was going to stay at Michigan State. A couple of her professors had already set up experiments with her, and the only way to make sure that things worked right was to spend an entire growing season working with those plants.

Gusty was going to try and get a part in a movie. She said that she didn't care if it was a bad part in a bad movie, it would still be better than nothing. Her human helpers were already working on arrangements for her. She was also going to take some time and visit New York City, because that's where all the important theatre happened.

Well, that made me feel like maybe I wasn't taking things too seriously, because I didn't have any great plans like that. I didn't really have any plans.

Gusty said that was okay; everypony knew that pegasuses just flew around and didn't take stuff too seriously and it was just in our nature. I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be an insult or if she was really bad at cheering ponies up.

And it is kinda true, I guess.

Aquamarine flattened her ears and said that just because pegasus ponies didn't keep a lot of stuff and were always moving to where the weather was needed didn't mean that we didn't take things seriously. She reminded them that if all of us built houses and none of us were migratory, then there wouldn't be enough ponies to bring winter or wrap it up.

Cayenne reminded her that unicorns could do it just fine in Canterlot, and Aquamarine said that was just one city, and didn't really count. Nopony grew any food in Canterlot besides some public flower gardens and a few kailyards and that was it.

Gusty said she hadn't meant it like that. She got up and sat between me and Cayenne and nuzzled me on the cheek and that kinda broke the tension between all of us.

I asked Gusty where she'd gotten all her clothes, and she said that one of her friends in theatre had introduced her to a friend that was a seamstress and clothing designer for the theatre, and who made costumes for a bunch of the theatre groups in Madison, like the Madison Shakespeare Company and the Madison Theatre Guild.

She said that we ought to try some of them on; they were really quite comfortable when we got used to them, and her seamstress would love to make more clothes for ponies, because she enjoyed the challenge.

They weren't really cut right for a pegasus, but I tried them on anyway.

I didn't really like the underwear; it made me too hot and the little loop for my tail felt just a bit too tight. I didn't think it was; it wasn't chafing or anything, but just knowing it was there was uncomfortable.

And of course her tops didn't have wing slits, so that made it overly confining. At least it was loose on me; I was skinnier than Gusty.

Just the same, it was pretty nice. The material felt good and hung well on me, unlike my flight vest that wasn't cut for a pony at all. It was something that I could wear to a gala and feel alright in, although I'd go without the underwear.

I think that underwear was better suited to unicorns anyway. Their auras made getting dressed and undressed a lot easier for them, and I told Gusty that. I said that I wouldn't want to have to wear something all the time that I couldn't put on and take off by myself. It's okay for special occasions, but not for everyday.

Gusty said that I ought to try being undressed by a lover and see what I thought about it then. And Cayenne added that you could do a lot of fun stuff through clothes, which made Gusty's face get really red.

Aquamarine and I helped each other get undressed again and then Gusty folded up all her clothes and put them back in her bag. She gave each of us a telephone number for her friend, and said that if we wanted any clothes made than she was the perfect person for the job.

When we finally went to bed for the night, it took me a little while to fall asleep. I was still thinking about what they'd said about me not having any summer plans, and I thought maybe I was being a bad pony for not doing something scholarly over the summer. But there was so much to do, how could I just settle on doing one thing all summer long? I might not have had any for sure plans like going to California and being in a movie or doing botany experiments, but I was going to be doing stuff with my friends.

I snuggled up to Aquamarine—she was already asleep—and decided that Gusty was probably right; it wasn't in our nature. And I guess I couldn't help who I was.

March 25

We were still in Kansas when I woke up, but we didn't stay there for too long.

Aquamarine and I had just gotten out of the shower when the train slowed down for Kansas City, which isn't actually in Kansas. The train was going to be there for almost twenty minutes, which gave us plenty of time to walk the platform before breakfast.

Cayenne brushed her mane into shape real quick and Gusty didn't want to go at all because she was still in her nightclothes, but we insisted that she should, so she put on underwear and then got off the train with the rest of us, and I could tell that she was a little bit uncomfortable being out without proper clothes on, which made me a little bit sad.

But she loosened up after we'd been out there for a few minutes. A family that was on the platform saw us and their kids came running over to see us and they were really excited to find out that we were going to be on the same train together until Chicago.

The little girl thought that Gusty's gauzy shift was a princess robe, and that made Gusty blush. It was really cute.

We got back on the train and after the unicorns took a shower and Gusty got dressed, went to breakfast. The family we'd met wasn't eating in the dining car; I guess maybe they had gotten food before they got on the train.

I was feeling pretty spoiled with breakfasts—I'd had an omelet every day on the train, just because I could. But there weren't really a lot of other options.

The terrain was mostly the same as it had been in Kansas, but we were out of Missouri a lot quicker. Then we went to Iowa, but just for a little bit, and then we crossed the Mississippi River, which is the second-longest river in America. We'd crossed it in Minnesota before, but it wasn't as big there. Mister Barrow told us we'd also crossed the Missouri River, which was the longest river. It ran through Kansas City, and it wasn't as wide as the Mississippi.

After we'd eaten lunch, instead of sitting in the lounge car we decided to walk up and down the train together. We found the family we'd met on the platform in one of the coach cars—those were the train cars that didn't have beds for people—and they were really happy to see us again.

The little girl that thought Gusty was a princess hugged her, and Gusty got kinda embarrassed again.

We talked for a little while; they were from Blue Island which was a town that was just south of Chicago. Cayenne said that it was part of the Chicago metropolitan area, and then explained that some big cities kept going into other cities, and they kind of counted as the same place for people who didn't actually live there. She said that Northwestern University wasn't in Chicago; it was in Evanston, although there was a branch of it that was actually in Chicago, but that wasn't where she attended class.

That was kind of confusing to me, but I guess that sometimes as cities grew they wound up running into other smaller towns that were close. Manehattan probably would if it kept getting bigger, and I suppose they'd keep calling it Manehattan.

We passed through a little town called Sandwich, and then we got to Aurora, and from that point on it became more and more city, until it was all city for the last part of our trip. We went past street after street of houses and buildings and it was just kind of overwhelming.

We excused ourselves when the train left Naperville, because we had to pack up our things. Well, I didn't really, but it wouldn't be nice to leave everypony else to do it while I stayed upstairs.

It was kind of a relief and kind of a disappointment to finally get off the train in Chicago.

We had a whole day to go sightseeing: Gusty's train would leave at two pm tomorrow, and Aquamarine and I were on a train that left at four. Gusty was kind of mad that we hadn't spent another day in California, but Mister Barrow told her that was because we couldn't rely on Amtrak to get us where we were supposed to be without any delays.

Since it was a nice day out, Cayenne said that our first stop ought to be the Willis Tower, which everyone called the Sears Tower. Gusty wanted to know if it was like the Space Needle, and Cayenne assured her that it was a nice big solid building.

When we got there, there was a really long line waiting to get to the skydeck, but Mister Barrow showed his wallet to a man who was keeping things orderly and pretty soon a blonde woman in a nice suit came down and shook his hand and leaned over and shook our hooves and then we got to go in front of the whole line and up into the tower.

On three sides, the city stretched out as far as the eye could see, and on the other side was the big blue expanse of Lake Michigan. I could faintly see the shore on the other side, which was Michigan. Chicago was a lot bigger than Seattle had been; it was amazing to think how many humans it must have taken to build it all, and how long they must have worked.

They had little glass boxes that hung off the side of the building; Gusty wouldn't even entertain the idea of going in them. She also didn't like getting too close to the windows, either, so she missed out on some of the view.

Cayenne sat down in the box and said that she hoped that there were people on the ground looking up at her. I stepped into the box next to her and told her that it was hard to tell because they were so far down, but there were probably some of them who were looking up through the glass floor.

When we'd had our fill of the view we went back down to the ground, and walked to Navy Pier. I saw that they had a sailing ship that you could ride on and begged and pleaded for a chance to sail on it, so we got tickets for that and while we waited for the sailing time had dinner and looked at some of the stained glass they had on display there. I thought the museum in Seattle had better pieces, but this was really pretty as well.

When it was time, we got on the sailing ship and headed out into the harbor. That was a lot of fun, although they weren't really using the sails properly. There wasn't enough wind for them, so they used a motor to propel the boat instead.

I flew up into the rigging and watched from the crow's nest, which was a great view but against the rules as I found out when I landed again. They made me promise not to fly up there a second time, and I said that I wouldn't.

Mister Barrow and Miss Parker called a taxi-van, which looked a lot like the van I'd ridden in in East Lansing, except that it was yellow. That took us to our hotel, where our luggage was already waiting for us in our room. I wasn't sure how they'd arranged that; they'd been with us all along.

Cayenne wanted to go out to a nightclub again, but we were all tired from the long train trip and there was a hot tub in our hotel room, so she ordered a couple of bottles of wine from the room service and we soaked in the tub and drank wine. It was the first time I'd seen Gusty without clothes—I was expecting her to have some sort of swimming clothes like all the people did.

When we were finally done, we had to telephone room service and get more towels, too. Even though humans are bigger than ponies, they don't need as many towels to dry off, I guess.

March 26 [back to Kalamazoo]

March 26

We met Mister Barrow and Miss Parker in the hotel restaurant and ate breakfast, and they said that there were all sorts of museums and shops and restaurants that we could go to. Well, Gusty's ears perked at the word 'shops,' and she said that she wanted to go shopping.

That wasn't my idea of a fun day, really, but then yesterday she'd gone up to the top of the Willis Tower and ridden on the sailing boat with all of us, and so it was only fair that we let her do something that she'd really like. At least, that's how I saw it, so I didn't object.

We packed up all our bags and the bellhop put them into the back of a silver van, but we were going to hoof it through town.

It was a bit chilly, especially because there was a wind. Mister Barrow told us that Chicago was called the Windy City because of that. And the place where we were going was called the magnificent mile because of all the stores.

We were in a part of Chicago called 'the loop,' which was the very heart of the town. To our east was all public parks and museums and galleries and such and then a little bit further in where we were were the shops that Gusty wanted to see so much.

She didn't really have a plan; she just went into any shop that caught her eye and we followed. We went into clothes stores and shoe stores (that only sold human shoes) and jewelry stores and little galleries and antique shops. She even pressed her nose against the glass of restaurants as we went by, perhaps hoping that she would find something besides food there.

And even though I didn't find shopping all that enjoyable, when I thought of it more as a series of art galleries, it was pretty nice. A lot of the people working in the stores were super-friendly, and would answer our questions about what we saw for sale.

Then we went into a little store that sold stuff from Equestria, and that was really weird. A lot of it was really junky stuff: you could tell it hadn't been made by a proper craftsmare, but was cobbled together by an apprentice who was just learning the trade. And then there was also a bunch of stuff which was supposedly antique but was really just worn-out.

Most of the stuff was human-made, though, and they called that 'Equestrian-themed.' One thing they had that I kind of liked was a little hoop that they called a 'dream catcher,' and it had several pegasus feathers hanging from it. Small ones that weren't big enough to be used for quills, and some that had been clipped short probably because the vane had been broken.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my feathers when I moulted. Back in Equestria, we kept them and turned them in where they were cleaned and sorted and then sold to quillmakers, but here on Earth I hadn't seen anybody using a quill. So I took a card from the counter that had the shop's telephone number; I could call them and ask.

Even though there wasn't anything in the shop that was really worth buying, all the people there were interested in us, and asked us questions about Equestria and things on the wall and it was kind of funny how wrong they were about some stuff.

We probably could have stayed there for the rest of the day answering questions, but we wanted to move on to different stores, so we left the store after about ten minutes and went on to the next shop.

We had a nice lunch at a little restaurant called Pastoral, and then we continued our shopping until it was time for Gusty to go to the train station.

Everybody hugged and said their goodbyes. Gusty promised that she'd come to Chicago some weekend to hang out with Cayenne, and she reminded us again that we all should come and see the play that she was in. Then there was a lot of hugging and nuzzling before she finally got into the taxi with Mister Barrow. He was going to stay at the train station, because he'd be meeting the rest of us there in a couple of hours.

Cayenne took us to the park, and we walked all the way down to the waterfront. She pointed out some of the sights to us, and a sculpture called Cloud Gate that she thought I'd like. It was a big bean-shaped mirror that reflected the sky and the buildings, which was really clever.

Then she said that we could take an L-train and see some more of the city quicker than we could walk, so we rode it for two laps—first looking out one side and then the other. Then we had to walk to the train station, because the L didn't go there (Cayenne said that we could, but we'd have to change trains a few times).

Mister Barrow was there and so were Cayenne's human helpers, who introduced themselves as Miss Blaise and Mister Garvin. For the first time on the trip, we were outnumbered by our human helpers, which was actually kind of nice because it meant that we didn't have to carry any of our bags.

Aquamarine and I both said that we'd keep in touch with Cayenne, and find a weekend to visit her, maybe when the weather got a bit warmer and there were flowers in all the flower gardens in the park.

Then we hugged and went down to the platform and got on our train. This time instead of sitting in our own seats, we found a set of four that had a table between them, kind of like a restaurant table, and we sat there, with me and Aquamarine on one side, and Mister Barrow and Miss Parker on the other.

Since we were reversing our route from before, I kind of knew what to expect from it. The huge expanse of city that just stretched on forever was still hard to wrap my head around, especially since it extended in three directions from the train station: we'd seen a lot of the south side of it when we came in on the train (and now we were seeing it again), and then we'd left on our trip to the north, and returned from the west. I think if they could have built the city out into the lake, they would have done that, too.

Like before, we went slowly when we were still in the city. There were a lot of tracks and a lot of other trains, and our engineer probably had to be careful not to run into any of them.

I hadn't thought about it before, but when we jolted over a crossover, the train hadn't stopped for anybody to set the switch. I asked Mister Barrow about it, and he said that the switches were controlled remotely, so that they just had to put the train's route into a computer and then it would set the course for the train. Then he started to explain how you could stack trains and Miss Parker punched his arm and told him that we really didn't need to know that.

But I did want to know: I'd seen trains that carried long boxes that stacked on top of each other, and if they could do that than maybe they could put trains on top of each other if they were both going to the same place.

Mister Barrow laughed and said that wasn't what he meant; he said that there were signal lights that said whether a train could go or not, and that stacking routes meant that the train dispatcher could set a route for one train, and then one for the next train, and the switches would stay set for the first train until it passed, then they would change for the second train.

When we were finally out of the city, the train sped up, and I knew that it wouldn't be that much longer before I was home again.

We watched the scenery out the windows and talked about how much fun we'd had on the trip. I wanted to know what other ponies had done for their vacations. Miss Parker said that most of them had gone on trips like we had. Some had gone by airplane instead of train, because there were a few ponies who wanted to go to very specific places.

I thought about how much Gusty had loved California and Los Angeles and wondered why she'd gone by train, but then I remembered how much she hated the Space Needle and Willis Tower, and thought that maybe she was afraid of being in an airplane, too.

When we were getting close to Kalamazoo, Aquamarine helped me strap on my saddlebags so that I'd be ready to get off the train, and then I hugged her and kissed her and said that we should hang out some weekend because Michigan State and Kalamazoo College weren't that far away by train. And I hugged Mister Barrow and Miss Parker, too, and then it was time to get off the train.

I waved at it until it was gone, and when I turned around to go inside the building Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were both there, and I hugged them too.

It was sad to leave the train station behind. I already missed being with other ponies, and thought that maybe it would have been better if we'd done things on our own or with just our usual human handlers, because then the trip wouldn't end with our little traveling band being torn apart.

But at the same time, it was nice to be going back to a familiar place. I missed all my friends and I even missed the familiarity of my dorm room, and even the bathroom.

They took me to Taco Bell for a late dinner, and I gave them a brief summary of my trip. I said that I wanted to go see an airplane factory, and that maybe I could do that if I went on the train out to see Peggy, and Mister Salvatore said that he could arrange for that. He told me that he could get me into a Boeing factory, too, which was where they made big airplanes like the one I'd flown on before.

Miss Cherilyn reminded him that there was a museum in Kalamazoo that had old airplanes, and I thought that would be a fun place to go on a weekend. Since it was inside, maybe it would be best to go soon before the weather was too nice outside to want to spend the day inside.

Then I told them how Gusty wanted us to come and see her play, and how Cayenne wanted us to come visit her in Chicago, and how Aquamarine and I wanted to spend some time together on a weekend, too, and Mister Salvatore said that that all sounded like a fine idea, and all we needed to do was decide when and how we were going to get there, and they could take care of the arrangements from that point on.

I kind of felt like royalty when he said that. But I wanted to figure out some stuff on my own, too: it was nice to have them there to help, but you can't learn to fly unless you actually go out and do it for yourself.

They dropped me off at the dorm, and I went upstairs to my room and unpacked my bags and just sat down on the bed and kind of reflected on the past week and then I read some of my Bible 'cause I was really really behind on doing that. I read through Deuteronomy, where God told Moses the rules the people were supposed to follow and then Moses told them. From what I'd read before, I didn't think that the people would be all that good at following the rules. Then Moses died in the end, and Joshua took his place.

The next book was about Joshua, who had taken the place of Moses. He was going to lead the people into Canaan, and first he told them what to do and told them to make sure that they followed the rules, and then he sent spies into Jericho and they stayed with a prostitute who promised to help them if they kept her family safe, and they said that they would.

I stopped reading there because I wasn't sure how I should feel about her. She recognized that God had promised the Isrealites the land, and they would have had it already if they weren't so bad at following rules, but at the same time she was lying and betraying her tribe, and they'd been there first.

I really needed to talk to Liz about what I'd read so far, and I would just have to admit that I hadn't read as much as I should have. She was really nice; she wouldn't be mad at me.

I was getting kind of lonely, since none of my friends were back from Spring Break yet. I flew out to Aric's house, but Winston wasn't in the driveway and the house was all dark, so he wasn't back from his trip yet. Then I flew back to campus and thought I'd check on my other friends.

I went to DeWaters first 'cause it was the closest, and Meghan was back but nobody else was yet. She was really happy to see me and invited me in, and we sat on her bed and talked about how our vacations had been.

We talked until it was kind of late, and I really didn't want to leave and go back to my lonely dorm room, but she said that I could spend the night with her if I wanted to. So she went into the bathroom to put on her night clothes and that reminded me of Gusty and how she didn't want to be without clothes.

I told Meghan about that after she got dressed, and she laughed and said that Gusty had gone native.

I asked her if it bothered her that I wasn't wearing clothes, and she said that she didn't mind because it was a pony thing, but sometimes it was a little weird.

I said that if it bothered her and she had an extra shirt I could put it on, and she laughed and said that a shirt wouldn't cover anything important. I said that it would cover my wings, and those were pretty important; they were about the most important part of me. I’d rather lose a leg or an eye than my wings.

Her face got red and she said that wasn't what she meant; my veejay would still be out where anybody could see it.

I told her if it really bothered her I could find something to wear. Aric had underwear called boxers that had a slit for his penis to go through and if I wore them backwards my tail could fit through there, and it wouldn't be all that uncomfortable, but Meghan said it was okay, she was just being silly.

She changed the subject and told me that tomorrow was Easter Sunday, and she wanted to know if I was going to go to church, since it was a special day. There were going to be services at Stetson Chapel, and Liz was going to be preaching.

I said I hadn't known, but I would like to go. I could learn more about God, and afterward I could have Liz answer some of my questions.

She told me a little bit about Easter, and it was sort of hard to follow, but I think I got the idea. Liz would surely talk about it more tomorrow. And she said that it was traditional for people to wear really nice clothes to church, but she supposed that it would be all right if I went naked, and I stuck my tongue out at her and told her I had a nice dress back in my dorm room and I'd wear it. I knew that there were formal occasions where clothes were required.

When we finally got in bed together, she was a little bit squirmy but eventually we got settled into a nice position where she was on her side holding me against her. We sat like that for a little bit and then sort out of nowhere she said that it was a little hot with the two of us together in bed like this and would I mind if she took off her shirt.

It was okay with me, although I thought it sort of strange that she'd made such a big deal about putting it on in the bathroom where I couldn't see if she was going to take it off again. And it didn't seem like it was all that much cooler after she took off her shirt, either.

March 27 [Easter]

March 27

Meghan had me cuddled up in her arms again, with my head tucked just under her chin. She was drooling into my mane just a little bit, too: I could feel a damp spot just by my right ear. I didn't mind all that much. It was nice just to be with her.

I just sort of dozed off until she woke up and reached across me to get to her telephone. She kind of reached over me and brushed her breasts across my head which felt really weird. Then she set her phone back down and rolled onto her back and said that she didn't want to get up.

Well, I didn't mind staying in bed for just a little bit longer, so I rolled over to where I could put a foreleg on her chest and rested my head on her arm, and she reached across with her other hand and started petting my mane.

She said that we ought to get up and get ready for church. She said that she had to take a shower and do her hair and I said that I should do the same.

Meghan told me that it would be most efficient if she took a shower first and then I took a shower, and she could help me dry off and with my mane and tail too. I'd planned to just go back to my dorm, but I didn't want to turn down the opportunity for her to brush me, so I said that was a good idea as long as she let me pee before she went into the bathroom.

When I was done, she was still in bed, and she'd pulled the covers up over herself. I sat down on the foot of the bed and told her that it was her turn, and she nodded then looked down at the covers and I thought she would wrap herself up in them like Peggy had, but she decided not to and pushed them down and got out of bed.

Since her bathroom was attached to her room, she didn't have to have a little basket full of shower supplies: she just went into the room and closed the door, and I set my head down on the bed to wait for her to be done.

I must have dozed off again, because the next thing I knew she was shaking me gently and telling me that it was my turn.

After I’d finished my shower, she had me stand on a towel on her bed and dried me off, then got up on the bed with me and had me stretch out to where she could brush my mane. I told her that she ought to get dressed first—she only had a robe on—but she said that this way if she wouldn't have to worry about getting hair on her Sunday clothes.

That was smart of her; I wound up leaving a lot of hair on her robe, which made me feel bad, but she said that it was okay, that was why she was wearing it.

When she was satisfied with how I looked, she got dressed in a black skirt and a white bra, then she went into the bathroom to do her makeup before she put her blouse on.

The two of us went to the dining hall for a quick breakfast, and then back to my dorm room so that I could get dressed. It was kind of funny how I had to tell her what to do, although I suppose if I'd had to help her dress she would have been doing the same.

We went into the chapel ten minutes before the service started. Meghan picked a seat that was near the center, and we both waved at people we knew as we went by. I was expecting it to only be students, but there were some older people that I didn't know here and there. They might have been professors, or they could have been people from the community.

There was a black-haired girl who I'd never seen before sitting on a bench in the back playing the organ, and the whole front of the church was filled with lilies, from one side to the other.

Meghan held out a program for me, and once I'd gotten comfortable in my seat I started to read through it. The back of the pew in front of us had little pocket-shelves on it that held a Bible and two red books Meghan said were called hymnals, which was where the words we'd be singing were.

I guess I was paying too much attention to the church without even noticing what was going on, because all of a sudden there was a pause before the organist started a new song, and as soon as she'd begun everybody was standing up.

That was a lot easier for them than it was for me. The pews weren't made with ponies in mind, and I had to kind of stretch forward and prop my hooves on the pew in front of me.

Meghan held the hymnal down so that I could see it, and pointed to a page that not only had words but also the music.

Even before I'd figured out where we were, a choir started singing behind us, and then everybody in the audience joined in with them.

The choir filed by us and went all the way up front, where there were pews for them to sit, and when the song was over, they all sat down, and we did too.

Meghan leaned over and said that if it was too difficult for me to stand up I could stay sitting, but I didn't want to be the only one sitting down.

Once it had quieted down a little bit, Liz came out from a door in back and stepped up to the podium. She had on a robe like the choir did, but it was white, and had a white scarf that had symbols all over it and draped across the front. She greeted everyone, and then started reading our first lesson from the Bible, which was from Acts, and I tried to follow along but hadn't even found the page yet before she was done.

Then she said a prayer and we sang another song. I was hoping that there wouldn't be a sacrifice; there had been a lot in the Bible so far about animal sacrifices and I could really do without seeing that. But nothing in the program said there was going to be.

Liz went back up to the podium and then read several verses from the end of Mark, and then went right into her sermon, about how Jesus had been crucified, died, and been buried, and then on the third day He had risen again but that we shouldn't be afraid like Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome had been afraid, that we should go out and spread the good word.

When she was done, she said that we would have communion to remind us of Jesus' sacrifice for us, and she explained the Last Supper to us, and there were words in the hymnal that we had to say at the right time, then we all went to the front where a woman from the choir tore off a small piece of bread for us and then Liz held a chalice full of wine which we dipped the bread into.

After everyone had had communion, we sang another song, and the choir walked down the aisle and out of the church, followed by Liz. She stopped in front of the doors and gave a benediction and then the organist started playing happy music.

She stayed by the door and shook everybody's hand or gave them a hug as they were leaving. I hugged her and she asked how my reading was going, and I said that I'd gotten to Joshua and promised that I would do better. I said that it was hard reading about how the people kept messing up and making God mad, and Liz told me that was human nature, and people were still like that.

I asked her why He couldn't have made people who would follow His rules, and she asked me if I'd rather be born a slave, or choose my path of my own free will.

She had a bunch of other stuff to do, so she couldn't meet with me today, but she said that maybe we could meet on Thursdays for coffee or tea, and I said that was a good idea, and promised her that I'd have finished Joshua by then.

Meghan helped me get out of my dress, and then I went back to her room and hung out with her until it was lunchtime, then we both went our separate ways after lunch.

I spent the afternoon with the door open, greeting neighbors as they came back. Ruth and Kat and Monica and Barbara and Rebekka and then after dinner Peggy finally returned and she just dropped her bag on the floor and wrapped her arms around me in a great big hug. I thanked her for taking the time to come out and see us on the train, and she said that her parents really liked me and that she thought my friends were pretty cool.

We probably could have stayed up all night talking, but tomorrow was the first day of new classes, and it would be good to be well-rested for that.

March 29 [poetry debate]

March 29

Tuesdays are nice because I don't have any classes before lunch. That gave me and Aric some more time to play in bed and then afterward I told him more about my trip and he told me more about his. He and David and Angela had gone up along the west coast of Michigan but instead of taking the highway they'd gone on all back roads just for the fun of it. He said that it took them three days just to get up to the Mackinac Bridge, and then they had gone over that and into the Upper Peninsula. He said that it had been a little bit colder there than it was here and they all had to huddle together in the bed of the truck to stay warm and one night it was just too cold and they wound up staying at a hotel instead but that's what adventuring was all about.

He didn't have any real breakfast food, only strange flat pastries called Pop Tarts that had a crust that was too dry and jelly that tasted sour and fake. I don't know why humans like to eat such bad food. Maybe they have different taste buds, and can't taste how bad it is.

I told him that I probably couldn't come over Wednesday night because I was planning to go on a spa date with Meghan and then watch Zootopia. I hadn't set it up for sure yet, and I told him I'd send him a telephone telegram when I knew for certain. He said that he'd miss me, and I told him I’d miss him, too. Then I told him that he could exercise with me, and he said that the only way he would go running around the neighborhood was if he was being chased by wolves.

Since I'd forgotten my flight gear, I just trotted around the neighborhood instead. My legs needed the exercise anyway; I hadn't gotten hardly any on the train and all my muscles felt stiff and my joints felt creaky. So I kind of worked up to speed until I reached a canter, which is the best pace for being on the ground. It's easy and smooth, and my hooves make a really nice beat on the pavement.

I cantered around the neighborhood and whenever I got to a street crossing I extended my wings and did a broad glide-jump across just for fun.

When I got back to my dorm, the showers were completely deserted, and while I was in there nobody else showed up at all. I kept expecting Brianna to come in before I was done but she didn't, so I spent a little bit of extra time in the hot water relaxing my muscles.

I also had plenty of time to do a good job of preening, and as I was tugging at a loose feather that was probably an early moult (I always had a couple of them right before my first estrus) I thought that maybe I should save some of them and make a dreamcatcher like the one I'd seen in the store in Chicago, or maybe a couple. I could give them to my friends, and if they were hoofmade and had my feathers on it it would be really personal.

At lunch, I decided to sit with Trevor and his friends. As soon as I'd set my tray down Cedric reached over and hugged me. Leon said that he'd spent all of his Spring Break at home in the hood, and Cedric punched him in the shoulder and said that his family lived in Bloomfield Hills which was hardly the hood.

Leon said that he could see Eight Mile from his house, and Cedric asked him if he was standing on the roof of his mansion and using binoculars, or if he just had the servants report back. It sounded kind of mean to me, but I think it was just the two of them making fun of each other.

I was curious what Eight Mile was, and Cedric told me that was the dividing road between the safe, well-off suburbs of Detroit and parts of Detroit proper. Detroit was largely a bad city that was trying to revive itself, and most of the suburbs around it were a lot nicer. Trevor said that wasn’t entirely true, and Cedric said he was making it a bit simpler for me.

Leon told me that all the proper brothers from Michigan either came from Detroit or Flint, and all the rest were just wannabes, so he had to pretend that he was from Detroit because otherwise Cedric wouldn't talk to him, and Cedric rolled his eyes. It was funny to listen to the two of them talk, even though I didn’t get half of what they were saying.

Trevor interrupted them to ask if I was in a poetry class this semester too, and I said that I was, right after lunch, and he made a fist and bumped my hoof with it. He said that we literate types ought to stick together because we were better than the other ghetto rats at the table. Cedric just crossed his arms and snorted, and Leon said that a wise man knows his place.

We walked together to class and picked seats that were right next to each other and waited for Conrad to arrive. Unlike my other classes, there were a lot of familiar faces in this one, including Melissa.

He walked into class and sat down and took attendance really quick—he already knew most of the people in the class. I guess even the ones who hadn't been in the last poetry class had had a class with him before, or else he was just really good at remembering names.

He said that we were going to start with something fun, and introduced us to the 'Bulletin Debate.' That was an Australian newspaper (Australia is a country on the other side of the world that is full of kangaroos and poisonous snakes) and two major poets had competed with poems in the newspaper.

I really liked that idea, and it was something that they ought to bring back. All I ever saw in USA Today was bad news on the front page and the bad news continued throughout the first section. The second section sometimes had some good news, and then there was a section about sports and another about business and pages of letters and numbers that were describing stocks, which is a thing that is bought and sold at stock markets. If they added a page with a poem, probably more people would want to read the newspaper and not leave it on top of the trash can.

Conrad had us read the first poem, which was called Up the Country, and was about Henry Lawson's trip. It reminded me of the desert scrubland we'd gone through on the train, although we hadn't seen any wallabies or dingos (or if we did, Mister Barrow didn't point them out), and I could kind of sympathize with his remarks. It was hard to imagine how people or ponies lived in places like that, or why they would want to. Land like that was fun to see on the train, and I would have enjoyed stopping for a day to fly around and play in the thermals, but I don't think it's a place I would want to live.

That didn't sit right with Banjo Paterson, who lived in the bush that Henry Lawson didn't like and he had a very different perspective on the whole thing. He said that city life was crowded and terrible and that out in the bush it was free. He said that it wasn't a barren desert at all but a vibrant grassland.

And he did a really good job of it, too. By the time the poem was over, I was re-thinking my earlier thoughts. Some of my cousins had jobs in cities like Baltimare and Manehattan and they talked about how wonderful the nightlife was and how they could choose different pubs to drink at as the mood suited them, and that sounded appealing, but was it as good as drinking a mug of mulled cider after your team had broken up a nor'easter? How did stepping out of a rooftop apartment and flying up to your sector compare to spending the night on a cloud outpost and watching the waves rolling underneath and crashing into the shore, and then spotting off in the distance a ship with tattered rigging that had just sailed through a storm?

I couldn't explain how I felt about living on the coast half as well as Mister Banjo explained living in the bush but I knew I would have to remember his words.

Neither of those two poems sat well with Edward George Dyson, so he wrote a poem too, and he talked about the rain and the heat and the dust and horses and sheep running off and having to stay up all night on watch, and he wasn't wrong either. I'd dragged my rump home after long days with so much salt-spray caked in my tail that it crunched when I walked, and there were days of being soaked in freezing rain or pea-soup fogs so thick that you couldn't see a hoof in front of your face, and days when the booming of the surf kept you up all night. And it was that kind of day that sometimes we'd talk about how much nicer it would be to live in a city where the weather was well-managed and every day was the same. But I think when you've done it for a while it gets in your blood and you can't leave. They say earth ponies are bonded to their land, and maybe sometimes pegasus ponies are too.

Conrad finished the class with Mister Lawson's The City Bushman where he sort of admitted that maybe life in the bush had been good once but now it was dried up and infested with sheep and not so good as it once was (sheep are dumb but look like little fluffy ground-clouds, so I kind of like them) and now things were better in the city and Mister Banjo should recognize that. He also said that drover's children could swear better than street urchins, and I thought that was true. I had never met a sailor who could say more than two sentences without swearing and some of it had rubbed off on me. The more they cursed their ship, the more they liked it. It was just how they were.

I guess the back-and-forth was kind of showing two people that were very different and couldn't quite agree on what was good and what was not. I thought about Gusty and how she liked wearing clothes and being in Los Angeles and didn't like being in high places, and I was the opposite of that, and I don't think either of us could convince the other that our way was better.

Conrad promised us that there were more poems in the debate—a good debate didn't end after only four poems, he said.

I would have liked to stay a little after his class, but I had to go help out the Equestrian professor and it would be rude to be late. There wasn't an actual language class scheduled in the spring (although there was a class called a seminar that met Wednesday afternoons that was more to keep everybody fresh on the language, 'cause if you don't keep practicing you forget what you know, and I was going to attend some of those classes to help but not the one tomorrow). She was teaching people about life in Equestria and she thought it would be interesting to have a couple of lessons from a pegasus' perspective, and she also wanted me to go over some of the material and see if there was anything that I thought ought to be added or changed.

I read through some of the material and had to ask her for some explanations, since she was using human references that I didn't understand, like where she said that pegasus cloud cities were similar to ancient Greek city-states. When she told me what those were I said that was sort of right and sort of not: the big cities like Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus were kind of like that, but that there were a lot of small cloud-villages that were near earth pony towns and were considered a cloud-based extension of the town down below by everypony, and in those places ponies usually followed the instructions of the earth-town mayor.

That took longer than I thought it would because government is complicated even when it's a sensible system where we just follow the instructions of the most capable pony in our village and if it comes to a point where she can't properly lead any more we find a different pony who can.

I sat with Meghan and Lisa and Becky for dinner, and Megan said that she would make us an appointment for tomorrow and get movie tickets and that we could take an Uber-car because she'd decided that they were okay because the company had taken steps to make sure that they were safe.

Then after dinner I did my homework for cultural anthropology, sent Aric a telephone telegram like I'd said I would, and went to bed early so that I would have time to fly and then take a proper shower, and figure out what everyone's morning schedule was.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Brumby Run for bringing The Bulletin Debate to my attention.

Up the Country
In Defense of the Bush
The Fact of the Matter
The City Bushman

March 30 [Zootopia]

March 30

I got done with my morning flight a bit early 'cause I'd started off earlier. Peggy was in the dorm room, getting dressed for class, and I asked her if there had been anybody waiting for the shower after her. She said that Kat was in there now, so I thought I'd better get into the bathroom and wait. I could put together at least three people in the morning order, anyway.

So I sat on the little bench and waited for Kat to finish, and when she came out of the shower she wasn't wearing her glasses and kind of squinted in my direction before she knew who I was, which I thought was kind of odd since I haven't seen any other people on campus who are blue or shaped like a pony.

Ruth was coming down the hall to the bathroom when I went back into our room, and nobody had knocked or was waiting outside, so now I knew the morning schedule for everyone. I think it would be better if there were two showers in the bathroom, or a group shower but I guess people wouldn't like that. But there's one by Sean's room that's like that, so maybe some people like group showers and some people don't.

I had a waffle with strawberries for breakfast because the waffle iron was fixed again. I also tried a small portion of hashed browns, which is a fancy name for shredded potatoes. I'd had them once before but they were really brown and crunchy and tasted burned; this time they were a lot whiter and I thought maybe they'd taste better.

They didn't, though. They were even blander than before. I know potatoes don't have a whole lot of flavor, but the kitchen staff had managed to cook all the flavor out of them. Sean said that he liked dumping the cheese sauce on them, but I didn't like it. Cheese was supposed to be in wheels and blocks; it wasn't supposed to be soup.

Sean and I walked together to Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Doctor Sir Banerjee was right at the door to greet us as we went into the classroom, and where he'd gotten off to a bit of a late start in his first class, he was ready to go at the very beginning of class time.

He spent most of the class giving us all a bit of a review on linear systems, since we'd be building off that. There were a couple of students who looked kind of bored by this review, but not me: even though I knew some of this stuff already, the human mathematical representations were all new to me, and while I'd picked up some of it helping Peggy with her calculus, I didn't know them all yet.

Sean asked me after class if I had a calculator, and I opened my saddlebag and showed him my weather wheel. He said that probably wasn't going to be good enough for class and that I ought to buy a graphing calculator, but I thought I'd try it my way and see. I didn't want to be all bogged down in symbols I didn't know trying to use a tool I'd never used before.

Amy discussed how one of the best ways to study cultural anthropology was with an open mind immersed in the culture that we're trying to study, and said that foreign exchange students were a good example. She asked me if I had learned anything from living among humans that I hadn't learned in a classroom before, and I said that there were all sorts of things, like how cars play music for you. Then she had everybody in class who'd studied abroad raise their hands (or hoof) and she went around asking each student to name one thing that they thought was strange about the place where they'd been. One of the men in class had spent time in Kenya and he said where he was the electricity wasn't very reliable and so people were used to doing things that required it when it was working, and getting along without it when it wasn't. Melissa said she was surprised to find out that that people could sunbathe naked in Eisbachwelle, which is in Germany. Steven said that in Russia, everybody drove like there weren't any traffic laws at all, and Chris told us that in Japan students had to clean the classrooms themselves because there weren't any janitors.

We'd read some of The Coming of Age in Samoa, and we discussed that until class was over: there was a lot of stuff that Margaret Mead had gotten wrong, Amy said, but that didn’t make the work any less important.

Not surprisingly, our homework was to read some more of the book.

As soon as class was over I went back to my dorm room and put away my saddlebag and told Peggy that I was going to the salon and a movie with Meghan. She told me to have fun and said that she was going to go over to her boyfriend's because he was back in town.

When I got to Meghan's room, she hugged me and then used her portable telephone to order an Uber-car.

She said that if it was all right with me we could go out to dinner before the movie, and I thought that sounded like it would be fun. She asked where I wanted to go, and I said that Taco Bell would be nice, and she frowned and said that Taco Bell wasn't that great a place to have dinner, and so I told her that she could choose because I didn't know all that many restaurants.

Maura was happy to see us, and she had me go into the back room first to get my coat clipped and brushed out, and Meghan sat there too and talked to me while Maura was working.

When I was on my back and she was working on my barrel and under my wings, she came up kind of close to the wing joint and pulled a feather loose and dropped her brush and just stepped back in shock and then started apologizing and I had to reassure her that I was starting to moult and it was normal for feathers to come out; it was just like my winter coat coming out.

After that, though, she was kinda cautious around my wings, and she didn't get quite all of the loose hair out from under the wing joints, and I had to ask her to go back and see if she could get a little bit closer. I felt bad having to ask, 'cause she was already doing me a big favor but she said that I didn't have to apologize, and to tell her if she was being too rough.

When she was done, there wasn't as much hair 'cause she'd gotten a lot of it out before and I'd shed some more on the trip out west. But I still felt a lot sleeker now, and I was happy that she used a curry brush when she was done to help spread the oils back over my coat.

I paid her and let her have the feather, too. I didn't really have any use for it, and it was too big to make a dreamcatcher—covert feathers would be better for that.

Meghan had another Uber-Car take us to Chipotle, which was like a fancy Taco Bell where you could have the cooks make whatever you wanted on your burrito. I liked it because the tortilla was stretchier than the ones at Taco Bell, and the whole burrito was bigger, too, which made it easier to hold. But it was still sort of messy; I got some rice stuck on my chin and Meghan reached across the table and wiped it off.

Once we were done eating we went up to the traffic light and walked across the street. There was a business with lots of doors called Firestone that had a truck like Winston in the parking lot, except it was on bigger tires and was a pretty blue color. Meghan said that Firestone was a place were cars were fixed when they were broken, and I said that I had helped to fix Winston. She laughed and said that I ought to try and get a job at Firestone.

After we got our tickets, Meghan asked if I wanted to get anything at the concession, and the popcorn did smell pretty appealing but we'd just eaten dinner, and I was full. So we only got the medium bucket.

There weren't all that many people in the theater, because it was a weeknight and the movie had been out for a while. Then finally the lights dimmed, but then there were a whole bunch of advertisements for other movies that we had to sit through before the main movie started.

Overall, I thought it was a really good movie. It was a lot happier than most of the other ones I'd seen so far, and I understood most of what was going on without having to ask questions, which was nice.

When it was over, Meghan asked if I wanted to go to Steak and Shake and get a milkshake—I've noticed a lot of times people like to have conversations over food. And while I could probably do without, since I'd had both a burrito and several handfuls of popcorn, I could tell she really wanted to, so we walked over there.

Meghan asked me what I'd thought about the movie, and how it compared to Equestria. I told her that there was a bunch of stuff in it that was really pretty similar. There were a couple of big towns where different species lived together, but usually in their own neighborhoods because nopony would want to live next to a dragon; no matter how well-behaved they are, they smell like sulfur all the time. Plus they like setting stuff on fire. I'd heard that a few years back there was a dragon setting stuff on fire in Fillydelphia and Princess Luna had to stop him. I think that's where it was, anyway.

And we've also got little friends to look after, like birds and butterflies and breezies. They're all our little cousins.

I told her that what was really scary about predators was when you were alone. If you were with friends they weren't usually that scary. Plus we all knew how to get out of a griffon's talons if we had to.

I didn't think the city would work like we saw it in the movie. Not in Equestria. Appleoosa had at best a vague truce with the buffalo, and they probably wouldn't have that if Sheriff Braeburn wasn't bound to the Buffalo chieftess.

She wanted to know if maybe I was being a bit discriminatory—she said that on Earth there were problems like that where people just made assumptions about other kinds of people, and I said that I wasn't sure if it was the same. We'd learned that people were all physically the same and only had a couple of different skin colors and no other real differences, whereas we had earth ponies and batponies and pegasuses and unicorns and crystal ponies and zebras and breezies who were sort of ponies and we weren't the same at all.

Maybe we didn't always get along with the unicorns, but when times got tough they were ponies first, and they'd stand up and fight with us, and we'd do the same for them. That was what made Equestria strong: we were all ponies first, from the solid strong dependable earth ponies to the impulsive flightly pegasus ponies and the slow and thoughtful unicorn ponies.

Meghan said that was a lot to think about. I told her that it went both ways; we'd learned some about humans but what we'd learned had only scratched the surface and the culture was a lot deeper and more varied than I'd thought it would be.

I said that the one thing I was curious about was the part where they had visited the nudists. Melissa had mentioned in class that people sunbathed nude in Germany, and I was curious if people did in America, too. Miss Parker and everyone else on the beach in Los Angeles had worn clothes, but the movie made me think that there were special places where people didn't.

Her face got kind of red and she said that she thought there were probably places like that, but she didn't think that there would be any in Michigan because it was too cold for that most of the time.

I thought it would be interesting to go to one. Maybe I could invite Gusty; that would be a surprise for her.

She sent for another Uber-car, and when we were riding back, she asked me who my favorite character in the movie was. I said that I liked Nick the most, because he tried to be tough and he really had a soft heart. Meghan said that she liked Judy more because Judy really wanted something and worked her tail off to get it, even though everyone thought she wouldn't.

When we got back to campus, it was pretty late, and I knew I ought to get to bed even though I didn't have any classes in the morning, but we were having fun talking about the other characters in the movie and I could probably afford to stay up late.

Meghan said that she was getting a bit chilly and that we could go into the lounge in DeWaters and talk there. I said it would be alright to talk in my room, too, since Peggy was gone. So we sat on my bed and talked for a while, then went to bed. Meghan set an alarm on her phone and then took off her pants and got into bed. She asked when Peggy was going to be back and I said that I didn’t know, but she was spending the night with her boyfriend, so she decided it would be okay to take off her shirt and bra, too, and then she snuggled up to me.

March 31 [Thursday]

March 31

The alarm on Meghan's telephone woke me up and it woke her up too. And if Peggy had been in the room, I bet it would have woken her up, as well.

I knew her telephone was still in her pants pocket, so I hopped out of bed and grabbed her pants so she wouldn’t have to crawl over me to get at it. I just handed them to her and she got her telephone out and pushed on the screen which made it stop, then she flopped back onto the pillow with her telephone still in her hand.

Since she wasn't showing any signs of wanting to get up right away, I got back in bed and put my head down on her chest. She reached out with the hand that wasn't holding the telephone and scratched behind my ear and I responded by nuzzling her breast, which made her giggle.

We lay like that until her alarm went off again and this time she said that she had probably ought to get going because she had to get ready for class. So I lifted up my head and before she could move I leaned down and kissed her on the lips, and she sort of stiffened in surprise but then kissed me back. Then I got out of bed so that she could get dressed and get to class on time.

Meghan sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled her pants on, got up and gathered the rest of her clothes. She sat on the bed to put on her socks and shoes, then pulled on her shirt and didn't bother wearing her bra.

I thanked her for taking me to see the movie, and she said it was a lot of fun, and when would I be coming over to watch the rest of the Harry Potter movies. I told her that I could come over tonight, if she didn't think that was watching too many movies all at once, and she said she didn't think it was.

I stood up on my hind legs and hugged her and then when she'd gone I got together my flight gear and zoomed around the sky for a while until my wings were sore, then I landed and trotted around the neighborhood until my legs were, too. It felt good to get that exercise in.

When I got back to the dorm, I pampered myself with a long shower again, then had a quick late breakfast and then I sat in my room and read Joshua until it was lunchtime. It said how the Gibeonites were afraid of the Isrealites (and for good reason) so they pretended that they lived far away and made a peace treaty, and when Joshua found out he was mad, but he kept his word and kept them safe.

Then they went to battle and defeated all the other towns and left none alive, because God told them to, and then they divided up the land among their clans. And in one battle God made the sun stand still so that they could see to keep fighting.

I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I guess all the other tribes shouldn't have lived in land that God had promised to the Isrealites, but I didn't understand why He couldn't have just asked them to move. Or maybe He had, and they hadn't listened, and that was their punishment.

I just ducked into the dining hall long enough to grab a quick salad, 'cause I'd eaten breakfast late. Hopefully Peggy would want to go to Meijer this weekend so that I could get some more snacks and beer and shampoo. She'd probably be home tonight, and I could ask her then.

I was really eager to hear the rest of the poems in the debate, and I wasn't disappointed. Conrad started us off with Clancy of the Overflow, which was about a man named Clancy who herded sheep and nobody knew where he was. It was sort of like the sailors that come in and out of our harbor: the harbormaster keeps their mail, and when they're in port she gives it to them, and when they're out at sea nopony really knows where they are.

Then we read Banjo, of the Overflow, which made fun of the first poem and again said how miserable it was in the bush. I guess people aren't smart enough to sit under pine trees or bring tents for when it rains, or they make camps in low spots. I never once heard a sailorpony complain about getting wet.

I guess to people who are always accustomed to being inside, it must be bothersome. I've even seen cityponies run from the rain, as if it's going to melt them.

Mister Banjo didn't like all of that, so he wrote back that people who have settled into city life have gone soft, and gotten too accustomed to having all their comforts, and not having to do any work more difficult than move papers around and that sort of gave me pause because maybe one day that would be me, in charge of a weather sector and spending more time doing paperwork than actually flying. Maybe I would wind up like the old drover he wrote about.

But that wasn't so; I was just getting ideas from what he'd written. Lots of weathermares who were in charge got plenty of flight time in, and I could, too. I just had to be an active team leader.

Mister Lawson thought so, too. He wrote a poem called The Poets of the Tomb, and I could kind of tell by the tone of the poem that Mister Banjo's prodding had gotten to him just a little bit. Conrad had started reading it to set the tone, and then he gave it to Trevor next, and I got to read the last stanza.

It was interesting that he wasn't really talking about the bush specifically, but instead talking about people as a whole. And when Mister Banjo replied, it was almost an apology for having such strong feelings.

I got the sense that he was regretful that he had wasted his youth and was now an old man out of place, but I thought he was being too hard on himself. And I kind of wondered if Conrad ever thought that way, 'cause he was really old. Were there things that he wished he'd done when he was younger that he never had?

I suppose everybody winds up having those regrets.

At the end of class, Conrad told us that we'd be moving to a different continent next week, but he wouldn't say who we were studying.

I had the afternoon free, until I had my meeting with Liz, so I went to my dorm room and got my copy of Coming of Age in Samoa and sat down on the bed and started to read it, then I thought about what Mister Lawson and Mister Banjo had said about settling in, so I took my book outside and sat on a thick tree branch and read it there. It was a little bit chilly, especially since I'd gotten trimmed, but not too uncomfortable. The sun kept me warm, and of course keeping my wings out just a little bit helped hold in a lot of body heat.

After dinner, I went to meet with Liz, and first she asked me if I had enjoyed the Easter service, and I told her that I had. And then I apologized for being so slow at reading the Bible but there was always so much going on that it was easy to forget, and she said that it was okay, most Christians hadn't read it either. But she said that most people in America were raised with at least a basic understanding of some of the stories, and I didn't have any of that, and that she thought that perhaps it would be better to have me take my time reading it from the beginning and coming to my own conclusions, rather than have somebody telling me what I ought to think.

So I told her what I thought about how people were really bad at following God's rules, and that He was mean to them because of that. And I said that I'd been thinking about it a bit and how she'd told me that it was better to make free choices, even if they were bad choices, than to be slaves.

I said that it bothered me how angry He got sometimes, and how He had flooded the whole world and told the Isrealites that they could have land that somebody else already had, and that they should kill everyone. Especially since He wasn't mad that the Gibeonites made a peace treaty, even though they'd lied in order to get it.

Liz told me that she could understand why that bothered me, and she said that it bothered a lot of people. She said that after the Old Testament, God had sent Jesus down to make a new covenant with the people, and that some of the laws of the Old Testament had been changed as a result, and that Christianity ought to be about love.

She also told me that different people had different beliefs in the Bible. Some people thought that some of it was symbolism, like the creation story or the great flood, and other people thought that there was one specific version of the Bible that was absolutely God's word and that everything the Bible said had happened was true.

She said that one part that was currently being argued about was gay marriage and gay rights. In the Old Testament, it very specifically said that was against the rules, but Jesus struck down many of the old rules with His new covenant, so some churches felt it was okay for gay people to marry and others didn't think it was.

I asked her what she thought about it, and she said, “For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope, and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.” Then she hugged me and I promised to read more of the Bible before next week.

I thought about that as I was walking over to DeWaters. I guess our history hasn’t always been pleasant, either, because we didn’t always have a wise pony like Princess Celestia to tell us what to do. And there was a lot of time before she came where it was pretty bad and all the tribes were constantly fighting with each other, and among ourselves, too. So I ought to keep an open mind, because I thought what Liz was saying was that God learned that people couldn’t follow hard rules.

Meghan and I made popcorn and watched the third Harry Potter movie together. It felt darker than the first two I’d seen, but I was glad that they figured out how to save Buckbeak, even if they had to time travel, which is very dangerous I’ve heard. Harry is kind of dumb sometimes, but I think that’s just because he’s a boy. He’s lucky that Hermione is smart enough to help him figure things out.

I told Meghan that I had to be up early for class, so I should go back to my room, but she said that she’d set her phone alarm and asked what time I wanted to get up. I said that I shouldn’t need it; I woke up pretty reliably at dawn without an alarm, but I didn’t want to disturb her when I got up and she said that I wouldn’t, so she went into the bathroom to get dressed which was kind of disappointing but I guess it’s not nice to be naked around your roommate.

I let Meghan take the wall-side of the bed so that I wouldn’t disturb her when I got up, and then I settled into bed and snuggled up against her.

Author's Note

Clancy of the Overflow

Banjo, of the Overflow

An Answer to Various Bards

The Poets of the Tomb

A Voice from the Town

April 1 [April Fool's Day]

April 1

It was nice to wake up next to Meghan again, even if I couldn't linger in bed with her. I didn't want to wake her up so I just eased my way out of her embrace and kissed her on the forehead and then let myself out of her room.

I had to be quiet going into our room, too, 'cause Peggy would be asleep. But I got in and out without waking her up at all, and once I was outside, I took to the air.

It was a bit cooler today and there was the smell of snow in the air, but that didn't seem right. Spring had been a couple of weeks ago, so maybe it was something else that was confusing me. There was a building in town that made the sky smell like mint, and another that made it smell spicy, so probably there were other buildings that made different smells in the sky and one of them was mixing me up.

I'd gotten a good bit of exercise yesterday, so I didn't feel like I needed quite as much today. Rather than speed around, I went up to the base of the clouds and boxed one around the sky for a little bit. I thought about bringing it down with me, but then decided it would be happier up in the sky, so I pushed it back with its friends and dove back down to the school.

Every day there were more birds on campus, and that made me happy. It wasn't the influx that Equestria had, since the birds had to decide when to come back all on their own, but I was kinda used to that because there were some seabirds that went on their own schedules without a pegasus to help them.

When I was at tree canopy level, I scouted out all the new birds and got chased by a cardinal who probably thought I was going to try and steal his territory. I taunted him for a little bit then flew off so he'd feel good about himself.

Since I had a short flight when I got back to our room Peggy wasn't there. I guessed that she was in the shower, so I went into the bathroom to see. Sure enough, she was in there, and Kat was waiting on the bench for her turn.

What would happen if everybody had classes first thing in the morning? That was something that the bathroom designers hadn't thought of.

After Peggy was done, Kat took her turn and was pretty quick, and I didn't spend too much time, either, so when I got back to our room Peggy was still there, getting dressed.

She told me that today was April Fool's Day, which is a day when people played funny tricks on each other, which I thought was an interesting human ritual. I asked her why today, and she said she didn't know, but she thought she'd heard once that the French started it.

Then when she was at her desk gathering stuff up for her class, she said that there was a cowlick in my tail and that she could get it for me, so I turned around to let her and felt a kind of tug at my tail and then she said that it was good now and she had to go to class but she'd see me later.

I heard a couple of people giggling as I walked across campus, but it wasn't until I sat down with my breakfast that I realized that Peggy had played a trick on me: she had used one of her hair-clips to put a sign on my tail that said 'pull me.'

Sean said that was really juvenile, but Christine thought it was kind of funny and cute, and over breakfast we talked about some of the other pranks that people played all the time like putting sugar in the salt shaker or the other way around, and Sean showed me how to tear off a piece of napkin and then fill the very topmost part of a salt shaker with pepper.

Christine asked what kind of pranks ponies played, and I said that hitting ponies with rainclouds or lightning was really funny, and she said that I shouldn't do anything with lightning because it could kill a person here on Earth.

She wanted to know if I was going to do anything to get back at Peggy, and I told her that I hadn't really thought of anything, but she said I had to, just because Peggy had started it.

I said that I could hide all her underwear, but Christine told me that was kind of mean, and she wouldn't find out until tomorrow anyway. I couldn't really think of anything else right away that would be funny and not mean, so I finished my breakfast and took my sign and put it in my bag so that I would keep her hair-clip safe.

Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee started off class by reminding us that we used linear models because they were easy, but complex systems were almost never actually linear, and he gave some examples of manufacturing and chemistry, where when you combine two elements what you get sometimes is nothing like what you started with.

The weather is like that. There were lots and lots of different things interacting together in the sky and on the ground to make it happen, and the supervisors had to have an understanding of how it all worked together in order to make the things you wanted happen. And sometimes despite your best plans it doesn't work out because there was something that you overlooked and then it usually turns into a lot more work from everypony. But a lot of the ponies on the ground didn't know that and just got mad when there wasn't the weather that was promised when it was promised.

Then he got into describing the equations, and I really had to pay attention because there was a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary like lambda and sinusoidal and Jacobian linearization. I was glad that I didn't have to dip my pen in an inkwell, 'cause it carried all its ink inside in a little tube.

It's always weird to learn new symbols to draw, too. Everyone else in the class could do it better than me, I bet. English and math weren't made with mouthwriting in mind, and for a minute I felt a bit jealous that Cayenne was probably learning the same symbols but could copy them a lot easier with horn-writing.

When class ended it was almost a surprise. We had a bit of homework for the weekend, but it looked like it would be pretty easy so long as I could remember all the symbols.

In the dining hall for lunch they had replaced the tags that went with all the food with silly tags, which I guess was their idea of a joke but it wasn't all that funny since anyone could see that the food wasn't actually what the tag said it was. The only one that made me laugh was the card by the bananas that called them 'yellow curved fruit.'

I still couldn't think of a joke to play on Peggy, but I kind of had that idea that I could do something with a cloud, maybe. I just wasn't sure what. I didn't want to bring one into the room, 'cause that would get everything wet and she wouldn't like that. I wouldn't like that.

If I'd known earlier, I could have brought a small cloud down and given her a sleetshower in the bathroom. That would have been funny.

We spent all class discussing how Margaret Mead had gotten things wrong in her book. At first I thought it was kind of silly that she would have us read a book that had a lot of mistakes in it, but it turned out that the truth was a lot more complicated than that.

After discussing that for much of the class, Amy said that it was important for us to remember when we read material that our biases might influence us in what we read, and that it was especially important if we were ever engaged in anthropological study that we be aware of our biases and how they might mislead us. Then she gave us a small pamphlet about an imaginary primitive village of humans and it had some drawings and descriptions of some of the people who lived in the village and what the land around it was like, and she told us that our assignment was to write an essay describing one thing we'd like to learn about these villagers, and how we would go about learning it, and what methods we might use to make sure that we weren't jumping to conclusions.

That sounded like it would be fun. My first thought was to see what they ate, 'cause there weren't any fields on the map, and I knew a little bit about farming and a little bit about foraging, so I had some ideas how I might figure out their diet.

So I worked on that a little bit before dinner and then I started reading Judges and I think that Liz was right when she said that the men who wrote the Bible weren't perfect. Even after all God had done for them, they kept breaking His rules and getting punished for it, and finally they would cry out for mercy and He would send someone to help them, but then when that person was gone they'd go back to their old ways, again and again. Probably if He hadn't promised that He wasn't going to drown them all in a flood anymore, He would have done that and started over.

Even so, it was really sad how they couldn't learn to live together and get along together. Nobody seemed to figure out that if they all kept fighting that none of them would ever prosper.

It was too much for me to think about, so I did equations until it was time for dinner. I had to look at my notes a lot, just to make sure I got all the symbols right. It would have been easiest to solve them using our symbols, but that would come back to bite me in the tail if I got in the habit of doing it that way.

I still hadn't thought of anything funny to do to Peggy, but when she got up to get dessert, I got an idea and I went and filled a glass mostly with grape juice and then put a little bit of Sprite in it for the bubbles, and I put that in the place of her drink. The cups were dirty and smudgy because of how many times they'd been washed, so it wasn't very obvious that it was kind of a purple color, and Peggy didn't notice at all when she sat down with a couple of cookies on a plate.

It worked just like I'd hoped; she didn't really pay any attention to the glass and picked it up to take a drink and then made a face and spit it right back into the cup.

I left right after dinner to go over to Aric's. He was down on the couch watching a movie and he said that it was almost over, so I sat down next to him and watched it with him. He said that I was kind of distracting, and I didn't really get what was going on since I hadn't seen most of it, so he stopped the movie and told me it was called The Merchant of Venice and it was an assignment for class so he had to watch it even if he really didn't like Shakespeare all that much.

Well, I thought he could watch it later, but he said that it was due back at midnight tonight, so he had to finish watching it now, and so I kind of sulked on the couch until it was over. I think I would have liked it if I'd seen the whole thing. The language had a nice flow to it, and the setting was really pretty, too. It was a city called Venice, and there were lots of canals instead of roads.

When we rode to the movie library so that he could return it, he apologized for being a little short with me, he'd planned to be done watching it before I came over but he'd spent more time than he'd planned working on his set design homework, and had had to run out to an art supply store and get more foam board for it. And I was happy because it was fun riding in the truck with him, even if it wasn't as nice as any of the other cars I'd been in.

He ran in really quick to return the movie and then we drove back to the house and I leaned up against his shoulder and just enjoyed being close to him and this time he didn't swat my hoof away because he could still drive when he was distracted.

Then when he shut off the truck in the driveway I just climbed up on his lap and it was a little bit difficult but a whole lot of fun.

April 2 [Lazy Saturday]

April 2

I was a little bit grumpy when I woke up 'cause I'd just started my first estrus, and that one was always the worst. It was easy to forget in the winter time how it felt having all the hormones competing in my body, and it always seemed like during the first heat they were hardest to ignore. After that I got used to the feelings, and it was a lot easier. Plus the spring moult followed right after the first estrus, and that wasn't something to look forward to, either. Already my wings felt itchy just thinking about it.

I wonder if it would be better if we cycled all year long like human women do. That way it would be a nice regular thing and we wouldn't have to get used to it and then spend six months not thinking about it.

Since I was right next to Aric, I just nestled my head into his chest and let his scent fill my nostrils, and that helped ease my tension a little bit. But I knew I was probably going to be a little bit touchy for the rest of the day, then I'd be okay.

It was kind of like pain—when you're used to it, it's easy to ignore, but when it first comes on it's all you can think about.

He reached around in his sleep and put his arm across my back so I nestled in just a little bit closer and closed my eyes and took long, deep breaths to relax, which worked pretty well.

When he finally woke up, he said that he couldn't believe that we'd had sex in Winston last night right in the driveway and he hoped that the neighbors hadn't been looking out their windows, or any of his housemates either. I didn't think that they would have seen much, because our breath made the windows foggy pretty quick.

Aric noticed that I was a little tense and asked me if I was mad that he'd had to finish his movie last night, so I told him that I was in estrus and he didn't know what that meant, and I had to explain it to him. He wanted to know if that meant that I was going to be a nympho for the next week. I didn't know what that was, so he had to tell me, and then I said that yes, that would be the case; I'd just let myself be mounted by any man I saw who was receptive to my advances, because being in heat made me only able to think of one thing, and he actually believed that, especially 'cause I slid up against him when I said it.

I didn't tell him I was making it up until after.

When I got up and looked outside there was snow falling. Snow! Spring had started almost two weeks ago, so there was no reason for it, and it just annoyed me that it was coming down. I had to fight the urge to fly up there and try to stop the clouds that were being bad. I'd actually pushed open his bedroom window and had my hooves on the sill before Aric asked me what I was doing, and that gave me a moment to think about how silly I was being.

He said that the weather in Michigan was like that, and he'd seen it snow into late April and as early as September which struck me as very disorderly, and it was really amazing that humans could plant enough crops to feed themselves if the weather was that undependable. A snowstorm two weeks after Winter Wrap-Up would wipe out a lot of the earth pony's hard work, and if it ever happened in Equestria, we'd all be out of a job or worse. Nopony would put up with that kind of performance.

We went to breakfast together at Nina's and I had an omelet, and while we were eating we talked about what we wanted to do for the day. I figured that I probably wasn't going to have too many whole days free for the rest of the year, so we'd ought to enjoy this one together, and he said that since I'd thought his road trip up north had sounded like so much fun maybe we could have a little short road trip together.

We drove out to South Haven, which is a town on the shore of Lake Michigan, and parked on the beach which didn't have anybody else there because of the weather. There was a long jetty with a big red lighthouse at the end of it, and a long bridge that led out to the lighthouse. Aric said that was so that back in the old days the lighthouse keepers could get out to it in bad weather, but now the walkway had been removed to keep people from walking up there and getting hurt. But the bottom part was okay to walk on, so we went out to the light dodging the occasional breaker that came over the edge. I could have flown up and avoided them all easily, but it was more fun to dance around on my hooves like he was doing.

He said that in the summer the beach would be full of people, and he also said that on clear nights you could see airplanes taking off and landing from the airport in Chicago. He wasn't sure how high off the ground they were when you could see them, but that some days there was a definite line of them.

I flew off the jetty and circled around the harbor entrance for a while, thinking back on how much different Los Angeles had been from South Haven. And I also wondered if it would be possible for me to fly across to Chicago: it would be quicker than taking the train, and I was pretty sure that if he could see airplanes from the beach it was within my range. I'd have to look at a map and figure it out.

I would have liked to fly around longer, but I could tell Aric was getting cold standing out on the jetty with no cover from the wind, and I was getting a bit chilly myself, so I landed and we walked back to shore together.

We ate lunch at a small restaurant near the river that ran through town, and there weren't too many people in there. A couple of men gave me and Aric hard looks, and I thought they were going to say something or maybe do something so I kept my ears on them until they got up and left.

By the time we were done eating the snow had stopped, but as we drove back to Kalamazoo we caught up with the tail end of the storm, and it was snowy all the way back. We had to slow down and go around a red truck with flashing yellow lights that was helping a car that had fallen into the ditch, and after that Aric drove a little bit slower. He said that weather like this was when the roads got really dangerous, because at first they were warm enough to melt the snow when it landed, but then they cooled down and it formed ice that was called black ice because it was invisible, and you wouldn't know that you were on it until it was too late.

When we went by Meijer I asked Aric if we could stop so that I could buy some supplies, and he said that we could.

Shopping with Aric was a lot different than shopping with Peggy. He was more impatient and hurried the cart along the aisle and I had to trot to keep up until he finally noticed that I was lagging behind him and slowed down his pace a little bit. Even so, I had the idea that he didn't really like to look around at all the things in the store and would rather be in and out as quickly as he could.

Then when we got to the checkout we had to sort everything in the cart into his things and my things, and put a little bar that was next to the conveyor belt between them so that the saleswoman would know what was his and what was mine.

It was lucky that the top was still on the truck, because it kept the back dry and out of the weather. He had to arrange everything carefully since there was so much open space it could slide around and then it might get damaged.

We stopped at his house first so that he could unload all his things and then we went to campus and he helped bring all the stuff I'd bought up to my room. Peggy was surprised to see us; she said that she thought maybe we'd eloped, 'cause I hadn't left her a note saying what I was doing, and I stuck my tongue out at her and told her that we'd gone on a little road trip together.

I thought that we would probably go back to his house, but he said that since we were here and it was almost dinnertime, we might as well go to Saga together (which is what some people call the dining hall) so we did, and we sat with Peggy and Christine and Sean and Joe.

Everybody except Joe wanted to play cards, so after dinner we went back to our room, and Aric moved his truck to where it could be parked overnight, then came back to the room with us.

There were five of us which was too many to play euchre so Christine sat out the first round. Since we had our door open and were being social, more people showed up, and pretty soon Ruth and Rebekka had joined in, and then there was enough for two games because you can play euchre with three, although it's more advanced. But when they were there with us there was a little more interest in socializing than actually playing the game and Peggy decided to give up her spot and let Christine take it, so then it was boys against girls.

After we finished the first game we played a second and it got pretty intense towards the end. Christine and I were on a losing streak: whatever card got turned up was about the worst possible trump suit for us, and the boys had eight points while we didn't have any. Christine said that we had to get serious because we did not want to get skunked, and then we wound up losing the next hand, too. Sean said that she shouldn't have turned down the bower on the first hand, and that's why she was losing, and she told him that if we lost this hand he was going to suffer the consequences with her but then the next deal came up in our favor, and we took one trick, then Christine laid down her hand to show that she had both bowers which meant that we won, so even though we ultimately lost the game we didn't wind up skunked.

I was curious what the penalty for being skunked was because nobody had ever told me, and Sean asked Christine if they should tell me, but before they decided Rebekka said that if you were skunked in euchre you had to streak the quad right then and there, which meant to run from the chapel to the road and back naked. Ruth said that since I normally streaked the quad every day, I'd have to do it wearing pants.

We played a couple more games before it got late, although none of them were as tense as that second game. After that everyone drifted off, and finally Aric said that he ought to be going, too because he doubted that Peggy would want him to spend the night, so I grabbed my flight gear and went with him. I thought we'd be going to Winston, but he said that since he'd had a couple of drinks he shouldn't, and we wound up walking all the way back to his house.

April 3 [homework day]

April 3

Sunday could have been a repeat of Saturday, except that I still had homework to do: I hadn't gotten it all done Friday. So when I got up I put on my flight clothes and called the airplane controller for clearance. I was still in the bedroom and Aric was leaning on an elbow listening to me, and he said that it was pretty strange to listen to me asking for permission to fly, especially since I hadn't yesterday.

I felt a little bad about that, but I'd stayed low over the water and kept an eye out for airplanes.

So I told him that I was being responsible like he was responsible last night in not driving Winston home, and he sighed and said that he'd forgotten that he'd left it on campus. I said that if I knew how to drive a truck I could bring it back to him, and he said that would be really funny to see but you needed a special license to operate a vehicle.

Humans don't let you do anything without a special permit. It's kind of dumb, but there are probably lots of rules that you need to know in order to drive.

Aric said that there were places with little cars called go-karts and that I could try driving one of those. He didn't think that any of those places were open yet because of the weather, but when they were it would be fun to go out to a track and race.

I thought so, too, and I decided that I would pay more attention to how to drive when I was riding in cars.

The sky was clear today, and almost all the snow from yesterday was melted already. I flew west out of town and across the 131 Highway until I got to the Kal-Haven trail, which went all the way to South Haven. I'd kind of made up my mind that one day I was going to fly all the way there and back, but that would be a full day trip, and I didn't have time for it today, so I only went a few roads down the trail and then back again.

The only people I saw on the trail were a pair of women who were jogging together, and I flew down and greeted them before flying on. I would have greeted them again on the way back, but they were nowhere to be seen, so they must have turned off on one of the roads that crossed the trail.

When I went into our room to put away my flight gear Peggy said that I smelled a little different than normal, and she wondered if I was wearing some kind of perfume or had changed to a different shampoo and I told her that I was in estrus because it was the spring even if the weather wasn't behaving.

She said that it was weird that it made me smell different, and I said that I thought it was weird that humans could smell it in ponies but that they couldn't smell sexual changes in each other. I asked if it bothered her and she said that it didn't, it was just different.

I took my shower and then the two of us went to breakfast together, and then it was time to get to work.

I started off on my essay for anthropology, thinking that whenever I got stuck I could take a break from it and do some math. I had decided that I would stick with what kind of food they ate, and where they found it and how they prepared it. Obviously, the easiest way to find out would be to just go into the village and start eating meals with them, but sometimes when you were a guest you ate different things than your hosts normally would. If I ate in a different place than everybody else, I could just smell around the other houses and see what kinds of food I smelled, and if it smelled the same as what I was eating, which would be a start.

I thought that once I'd established myself with them at least a little bit, they would return to their normal diet, especially if they were foraging. Usually that means that you can't keep a lot of extra food around because it doesn't always keep for long, so you eat things when they're available and then move on to the next food source.

If they didn't move their settlement around, that meant that there was ample food year-round for them, or they had some way of preserving it for the lean season. So that would be something good to know, too. According to the map with the pamphlet, their town was near a river, so maybe they fished. That was something I could look for, too: fishing tools.

I could verify what they ate by going out on foraging trips with them, to see what they picked and what they didn't. I thought that they might find me useful, since I could fly and maybe get to things that they couldn't, and I could also search a wider area.

However, if they weren't so willing to show me where they gathered food—because maybe they were afraid that if I knew, I might steal it from them—I could also watch from a cloud perch and see where they went when they thought I wasn’t around. But that was kind of risky, because if they saw me then they probably would be suspicious of me from then on.

I thought overall it was a pretty good plan, and so I sort of got all my thoughts in order and started writing it.

By the time I was done, my voice was tired—it was a lot of work talking to my computer—and so I turned off the microphone and was about to start on my math homework when Peggy said that it sounded like it was a good time for a break, so I helped her put all her laundry in the washing machine and we sat in the laundry room and talked while we were waiting for it to be done so that it could go in the dryer.

Overall, that took about two thirds of an hour, and once it was safely in the dryer she set an alarm on her telephone and we went back to our room to do more work.

I'd gotten done with my math and was checking over my answers when her alarm went off, and once everything was put away in her room I asked Peggy if she would read over my essay because she was better at English than I was, and she said only if I would check over her math homework, which was a fair exchange.

Since we couldn't do both at the same time—neither of us would learn if we simply corrected each other's mistakes without discussing why it was wrong—she threw a coin up in the air which is how humans often decide things. She won, so I started pushing my chair over to her desk, then she said that was a silly way to do it, and she told me to sit on my bed, and she'd sit next to me.

I didn't think she could write like that, because paper is not very stiff, but she was smart enough to bring her math textbook so that she could make a little lap desk out of it.

She did pretty well; only a couple of mistakes and they were sort of dumb mistakes: once I pointed them out she saw what she'd done wrong and fixed it. And it was a good for me, too, because it was more practice on how humans write math.

Then she took her turn reading over my paper and she had some stuff to correct, but not a whole lot, and she said that she thought all the writing I was doing in my journal was probably really helping me with English. I said that I had bought a new notebook at Meijer because I'd almost filled the one I had and she didn't believe me, so I showed her that there were hardly any pages left in it.

After dinner was over, I caught up on my computer mail. Gusty had sent me a letter formally inviting me to her play, and because human computers couldn't write Equestrian she had written it out in horn-writing and then taken a picture of it and included that, which was something I hadn't thought of doing.

I showed Peggy, who couldn't read it at all, and then told her what it was about, and she said that sounded interesting. Then I sent a computer letter to Mister Salvatore telling him about it because it would probably be easier for him to arrange for trains than it would be for me.

When that was done, I asked Peggy how to put a proper letter into my computer as a picture, and she showed me how to do it with her printer which could also take pictures of papers and make more of them or put them in computers. That was really clever of it.

I read about what my friends were doing on Facebook for a little while, and then I thought it was time to go to bed so that I'd be well-rested for the morning. Peggy turned off the lights in the room, except for the little one on her desk, and when I got into bed I thought how strange it felt to be alone. I’d gotten spoiled over the last week, spending most nights sleeping with Aric or Meghan, and I thought that I could go over to Meghan’s and ask to stay but then I decided I probably shouldn’t come over unannounced this late at night.

April 4 [buffalo wing soup]

April 4

Some Mondays I wake up ready to go and other Mondays I wake up wishing it wasn't Monday. This was the second kind of Monday.

Lying in bed and thinking about how miserable a morning is doesn't make things better, though. So I got up a bit reluctantly and put on my vest and the thought that I was about to fly cheered me up even though I had to put new batteries in my blinking light and it was the last ones I had. I should have thought of that yesterday at Meijer.

The grumpy man was on the radio again and he was even grumpier than normal and I thought that maybe I could offer to fly to the airport and give him a hug, but having to re-order the airplanes around me would probably be more of a hassle for him. When I was on the beach in Los Angeles, the airplanes were landing and taking off one right after another. Kalamazoo wasn't so busy; when I flew in that direction I usually didn't see a whole lot of airplanes over there, but it would still probably be a hassle for him.

But I kept in my mind that I ought to ask Mister Salvatore if I could go to the airport and meet the airplane directors. Maybe on a day when the grumpy man wasn't working.

I followed the train tracks west for a while, then turned around and went back to campus, taking a shortcut across Western Michigan University. There were some students on the streets already, and a few of them pointed up at me. If there hadn't been so many, I would have flown down a bit closer, but I told myself I didn't have time anyway.

Breakfast wasn't anything special, just cereal and toast with jam. Christine said that she liked it when I ate toast because watching me lick the stray jam off my muzzle brightened up her day.

That brought a smile to my face, 'cause it's always good to make someone else happy.

After we turned in our math homework, we started learning about synergies. That was pretty easy to understand; that was like how the tribes worked together. We brought the rain and the earth ponies grew the crops and we both benefited from it. They couldn't grow as many crops without us, and we didn't have as good food without them, so with us working together there was enough extra food to feed all three tribes. He also talked about interference, which is pretty much the opposite thing, and is also called asynchronous, which means not in synchrony.

Then he built on that with feedback loops and non-equilibrium. I knew what both of those were, too, because both were really important in the weather.

Class felt like it got over really quick, because it was the perfect mix of things I already knew, and new vocabulary like asynchronous which I hadn't known in English but now I did. It's strange how many ways there are to make words opposites. It would be simpler if it was linear and not linear, synchronous and not synchronous and so on. I had to cross off some of my notes and put the right word in.

I had toast with jam for lunch, too. Being in heat sometimes messes up my appetite and I don't find anything all that appealing. Not that lunch today had much going for it. I guess the kitchen staff had decided they felt lazy today, too, because there were hamburgers, sandwiches, mashed potatoes, some limp, overcooked beans, and what they called buffalo wings, but I didn't think that they actually came from buffalo, 'cause I'd never seen one with wings, and human animals were a lot more plain than Equestrian animals. Whatever they were, they smelled disgusting.

Sean told me that the buffalo wings were probably chicken wings that didn't get eaten last night, coated in sauce and offered to us again. He said that whenever people didn't eat something, they'd either add sauce to it and try again, or else make soup out of it.

We turned in our essays in anthropology and then Professor Amy started off the class by telling us that she was looking forward to reading our assignments, and a boy in back said that she was going to be disappointed, and everyone got a good laugh out of that.

Then she started us off by explaining what we needed to know to be good cultural anthropologists. She explained cultural relativism, and said that it was important for us to be both a participant and an observer, and that we had to be able to speak the language and learn the customs. Then she said that it was important not to be ethnocentric, which meant putting your tribe in the center.

We had to keep open minds; nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. A bunch of people raised their hands all at once when she said that, and rather than call on anybody, she repeated that nothing can be judged wrong just because it's different. She pointed to the boy in the back of class who had said that she would be disappointed in our essays and said that we couldn't say he was wrong just because he was wearing a hat and nobody else in class was. She said that we couldn't even say he was wrong for supporting the Chicago Bears. What we could do, and should do, is ask him why he wore the hat and why the Bears rather than some other team.

Then she handed out notecards and told us all to write our names on them and then think of one question that we really wanted to ask the person next to us about their culture or their clothes or something else, but to keep it clean. She gave us a few minutes to think of something we wanted to ask, which was good because it was actually kind of hard to come up with a good question to ask that wasn't too personal. I barely knew the girl sitting next to me. Her name was Rachel and she had dark hair and wore dark clothes all the time and first I was going to ask about that, but then I remembered that she had a small tattoo the back of her left hand and I was kind of curious about that, so I wanted to know what it meant.

I didn't get my answer, though. Professor Amy took all our cards and mixed them up and said that she was going to go around the classroom in order and she would ask each person a question on the card and we had to answer even if the question didn't make sense: we had to pretend that it applied to us.

There were some chuckles at some of the answers, but everyone gave pretty good answers.

Then she said that we should think about our answers—we'd all come up with a way to answer the question that had been posed, and even though the question might not have made any sense to us, we could justify it somehow. She said that other cultures have their way of justifying the things that they do, and that we needed to understand what their reason was before we rushed to judge them. And she'd really been paying attention to who had answered what, because she used some of us as examples, like how I'd said that I wore boots because I spent so much time in the sky that my hooves were soft.

She told us that our next class was going to be a bit easier, because we were going to talk about sports. Then she said that before we did, we had an assignment, which was to find one thing that somebody who was a member of a different group than us did, and then find out why they did it. She said that since she was feeling nice, it wouldn't be due until Friday. And she said that she didn't want a personal question, but a group question. She said that since she was thinking of sports, it would be okay to ask a Packers fan why they wore cheese hats, but it wouldn't be okay to ask why one particular person liked the Packers. She told us that if we were unsure about our question to send her a computer letter or stop by her office and she would decide if it was a suitable question.

Sean had been right in his prediction: they had buffalo wing soup which nobody seemed interested in. He said that he thought the dining hall was in collusion with the Quad Stop, and when sales there were slow they came up with two meals of bad leftovers in a row to get us to eat down there. I said that he wasn't being creative enough, and that I'd found plenty to eat and it wasn't their fault he didn't like salads.

He said that they needed another pizza day, and I thought that would be nice, too. Maybe we'd have one tomorrow.

I sent Aric a telephone telegram saying that it was a nice night out and I wanted to fly to Durak, but then afterward I'd ride home with him, and he said that was okay. So when it was seven, I put on my flight gear and flew out there. I had to be careful because there were so many wires that crossed the streets and I knew where it was safe to fly around campus but it was a little bit more difficult in downtown—I stayed well above the treetops because wires didn't go that high, but when I came in to land there were a lot of them to dodge. I was glad that I hadn't tried it after dark.

Playing Durak was always fun, no matter what happens. Everyone there talks and laughs a lot, and some people always have interesting stuff to say. And there are a couple of people who have bad strategies, like Mandy who comes sometimes and just grabs a card as quickly as it goes on the table so that she won’t get all that many, or Aric who likes to beat the first thing he’s given, even if he wastes some good trumps that way, and Keith who sometimes fishes for good cards by trying to beat a low card with a really high one in the hopes he’ll get more of them for later.

When the game was over, I got in Winston and watched him closely as he drove back to his house. Then we took our turns in the bathroom, and when I got in his room he had gotten undressed already but he was sitting at his computer and I thought about climbing up in his lap but then he wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing, so I started teasing him with my wingtip instead, and it didn’t take very long before he stopped using the computer.

April 5 [New Journal]

April 5

I woke up at my usual time, but Aric wasn't awake yet. He wasn't much of a morning person at all. It was a little bit annoying because I didn't want to leave him without saying goodbye, but I didn't want to wake him up, either. So I snuggled up against his side and ran my hoof over his chest.

He finally opened his eyes and looked over at me and I kissed him on the tip of his nose and then on the lips, then I set my head down on his chest and let him pet my mane for a little while, then he ran his hand down my back and across my rump and then we celebrated the new day together.

Aric helped me put on my flight vest and gave me some extra batteries he had in case my light stopped working again, and we went out on the porch together and he hugged me and waved as I took off for my morning flight.

Sometimes I wish that Kalamazoo was a smaller town. It takes a while to fly outside of the city part of it, and while it's interesting to be flying over buildings and houses, I also like flying through the countryside. Although I shouldn't complain; it doesn't take that long to get outside of the city, depending on which way I go. If I lived in Chicago, I'd be flying all day to get out in the country, unless I just went over the lake.

I went north, because that's the shortest way out of town, and I made a big sweep around, about a mile in diameter, swooping up and down to exercise and relax my wing muscles. About half the land I flew over was forested, and I thought about how pretty it would look once the trees got leaves on them. In Equestria, they would have already, but trees here were slower to react to spring, maybe because sometimes it snowed when it shouldn't have.

On my way back, I flew a little more northward and passed over a couple of big dirt places with bright yellow machines scattered around them, and trucks with open-topped trailers that I'd seen on my way out and wanted to investigate. They hadn't really stood out when they were covered with snow, but now they were big scars on the landscape. From what I could see, they were dirt mines, and I couldn't figure out how dirt would be worth mining since it was everywhere, but maybe Aquamarine would know.

When I arrived back at my dorm room, I thought it was a little too late for breakfast, so I just had a can of anchovies and sat down on my bed with a towel under my barrel and my Bible in front of me. I planned to finish Judges before I went to lunch.

It got stranger as it went on. There were talking fig trees and olive trees and a man called Abimelek who had his own servant kill him so that nobody could say a woman had done it, and there was a man named Samson who was tricked by Delilah into revealing the source of his strength but he got back at the Philistines by knocking down their temple with them in it.

And throughout all of it, the Israelites kept forgetting what God had told them, even after He had saved them, and went off to do bad things until He felt sorry for them and saved them again. You would think that they would have figured it out by now, that if they followed His rules then He would make sure that they prospered, but if they broke them, He would let them suffer for a while until they learned their lesson.

I thought that they behaved like a bunch of foals who have only just learned how to fly and think that they're a lot better at it than they really are, and they all brag among themselves about how they're going to fly over to a distant cloud even when they’ve been told they shouldn’t, and then halfway there they get tired and have to be rescued.

I didn't get all the way to the end, either. I had just gotten to Micah who came after Sampson when it was time to go to lunch, and then poetry.

Conrad sometimes liked starting the day with a bit of poetry, even as he walked through the door, and today was one of those days. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” he began, then sat down at his desk. We had to wait for a little bit until he continued, and read us the rest of the poem, which was called If, and it was by Rudyard Kipling.

He told us about Kipling's life, and he sounded like Daring Do, if Daring Do wrote poetry. He traveled all over the world and then wrote poems and stories about them, and he even won a Nobel Prize for his writing, which I think is the most important prize you can get.

His poems covered a really broad range because of his experience. We read a couple more of them in class, and I liked every one, but my favorite was The Coastwise Lights because it immediately put my mind back to home, and I could tell that Kipling knew the ocean. I thought about the small lighthouse in the village below that cast its light out into the night when maybe nopony was there to see it, and I wondered at its mindless, purposeless turning, but then a ship with tattered sails would be seen in a sweep of the light and everypony thought that maybe they had imagined it, but then the light would strike it again and it was a herring drifter, lost and trying to return home, and then everypony grabbed lanterns and dove off their clouds to escort it safely back to port, and those were the nights when you knew why the lighthouse keepers worked tirelessly to keep the flame up and the beacon turning no matter what.

And in the fog there was the mournful bellow of the horn, and it was sometimes answered back by the ringing of a ship's bell off in the distance, and then you could see it slowly emerge from the fog like a wraith. Or the stormy nights when the rain lashed against the coast despite all our efforts, turning the waves into froth and there was one stormy night when the Athelstane Dawn came in on the head of a nor'easter, running before the wind with her sails reefed but still blazing into port, her bow bursting through the crest of every wave. She began dropping sail as she rounded the point, skirting the rocks, and then they were in beam seas and the crew had to hold on for dear life as waves washed across the main deck and we thought for sure she'd capsize, but then she got in the lee of the point and straightened right back up, and she had enough way on that she coasted all the way to her pier, and would have gone beyond if the crew hadn't dragged the anchors.

We didn't have much time to celebrate, though, because it was all teams in the sky fighting the storm.

When I got my mind back to the present, I discovered that I was the only student left in class. I'd completely gotten lost in memories. I went up to Conrad to apologize, and he said that there was nothing to apologize for, because that was what a good poem ought to do. He told me that his dream in life was one day to find a poem so profound that everybody in class just sat there stunned when he was finished reading it.

Then he told me that I was lucky because in many ways Equestria was very similar to the world Kipling had known, and I probably understood poems like that better than anybody else in the class.

I said that I didn't think that was true because there were a lot of words in the poem I didn't know, words like skerry, ness, and voe, and he said that I might not know them in my head, but I knew them in my memories and that was good enough. That was more than most other students could say.

The rest of the day I had a bit of a spring in my step. After dinner, I started writing in my new journal and it was kind of sad but happy at the same time, and Peggy said that we ought to celebrate the occasion so we both sat on my bed and had a couple of beers together which was really nice. Sometimes I think I don't spend as much bonding time with Peggy as I ought to. But maybe it's better when it's in short intense bursts and unexpected.

Author's Note

If--

The Coastwise Light

Special thanks to MrZJunior for suggesting Kipling.

April 6 [limit cycles and football]

April 6

Dreams are funny. I dreamed that I was flying across the ocean and it was a beautiful blue-green below me and then after a while I realized that there wasn't any end to it and there weren't any clouds to perch on either, but there was an albatross flying next to me and he said that he would show me the way to safety, and then I looked back down and instead of the ocean it was a grassland, and I landed and rolled in the grass, then I saw a giant serpent slithering towards me and I was all tangled up in grass stalks and couldn't get away.

When I woke up I was tangled in my covers, almost falling out of bed, and I was still a bit disoriented from my dream, so it took me a minute for everything to seem normal. It was comforting to see Peggy sleeping in her bed, lit up by the weird orangish light that humans like to use. It might have been easier for them to see in that light: I know some birds can see stuff that I can't. I've been told that there are little lines on flowers that are invisible to ponies which birds and butterflies and maybe even breezies can see.

I didn't really want to get out of bed because it was still the middle of the night, so I wriggled around on my bed (quietly so I wouldn't wake up Peggy) until I'd gotten myself free and then fluffed my pillow back into shape and kicked the covers back into position and then hooked my pillow between my forelegs and kind of hugged it while I lay my head on it. I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to get back to sleep right away, but I did.

The next time I woke up it was morning, and I headed out for a quick trot. I thought I'd go a different way than usual, so I went down past the Dow Science building and flew across the street because there were a lot of cars so it was safer to go over, then found myself flying over the iron fence surrounding the Mountain Home Cemetery, which is where dead people are buried. There are stones which say who is under them, and most important people have bigger ones. Some of them even had obelisks or statues, and they were probably very important.

It also has several roads that go around it, and those were fine roads for trotting on. It didn't seem like the kind of place that saw many cars driving around it, because it wasn't even wide enough for two cars to pass each other and there weren't any guide stripes on it and the curves were very sharp. But there was one car and it was at the other end driving around slowly so I thought that I would follow it.

It didn't take me too long to catch up to it, and when I got close I had to decide how I was going to get by it. I could have stayed behind, I suppose, but I wouldn't have gotten much exercise that way. I didn't want to be too close in front of it, though, in case it started to go faster and chased me. So I thought I might go back the way I'd came.

I had made much of another circuit of the cemetery when I heard a car behind me getting closer, so I politely got off the road and into the grass to give it room to get by, keeping one ear back on it so I knew where it was. As it got closer, I moved a little more to the side so that it wouldn't feel crowded or try to crowd me, and then it was right next to me and a man shouted out at me.

Well I jumped right up in the air because I didn't expect that, and pretty soon he was asking me what I was doing in here and why had I climbed the fence and was I up to no good. I said that I was getting exercise and I didn't know that the roads were special and you weren't supposed to be on them. Then he told me to get out of the cemetery because I was a nuisance and I wondered who he thought I was bothering besides himself, but I took off and flew straight back across Main Street and then I thought he might be following me, so I made a big turn over Grand Avenue and then flew towards the center of Kalamazoo, 'cause I could lose him there if he was after me.

I landed on top of a stack of parking lots next to the hotel and told myself I was being silly, he wasn't chasing me, and I should not have flown over the fence and should have read the signs that I had seen before near where the little cemetery road went onto Main Street.

Then I wondered if I wasn't supposed to have landed on the top parking lot, because I wasn't supposed to land on buildings unless I had permission first. So I left before anyone could see me and went back to campus, staying low because I didn't have my vest or my radio or my blinky light.

I went back around the south way, and up the slope by DeWaters, then crossed over the parking lot and neatly landed by the back door of Trowbridge, then made my way up the maze of steps to our dorm room.

In math, Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee talked about limit cycles and eigenvectors, stable and unstable manifolds, and different kinds of connections. He also said that sometimes they called the lines between the stable and unstable sections the separatrix, which I thought was a very nice name, but then he said that he preferred not to use the term, and he showed us an example of how as you changed mu, the system was an incoming spiral, or a circle, or an outgoing spiral. At first that was a bit confusing, then he put it all together and said how there was a stable oscillation between the incoming and outgoing spirals which was the limit cycle. Then he said that you could perturb it (which means poke it) and it would go to a different stable orbit.

That was the kind of thing I understood, because working weather was like that: we would perturb the system that was there until we got it to a different system, if we could. And he also explained how even our hearts worked like that, and other body functions as well, which was kind of neat. I'd never thought about that.

Professor Amy started off her class by showing us a disturbing movie about Balinese cockfighting, and then she explained what it represented: the cock was a symbol of manhood, and it was a way of relieving tension and aggression, and that it gave men a chance to strut around. I wanted to know why they didn't just hit each other with their dicks instead, because then there wouldn't be poor roosters having to fight so that their owner could feel proud of himself. A few girls laughed at that question, but I was being serious.

After that was over, she told us that she was going to show us a film of another sport that was very masculine, and that the men wore special uniforms that highlighted their masculine traits like broad shoulders. She said that the uniforms were supposed to be for protection, but that they were used as weapons, and then when she played the film it was a football game like the Super Bowl. So I was glad I was taking good notes, because Cedric and Leon both played football, and it was good to have a better understanding of the game.

There were some protests about how that wasn't the same thing, and then Rachel raised her hand and asked why the two quarterbacks didn't get on the field and hit each other with their dicks, and it was a few minutes before Professor Amy could bring the class back to order and I was sorry that I had opened my mouth because as an anthropologist we're supposed to observe and not judge.

Then she explained specialized jobs, and said that in a lot of cultures, the men wanted the more important jobs, while the women would take the boring jobs because they needed to be done, and I thought to myself that Equestria wasn't like that. Besides the Royal Guard, I couldn't think of any things that a mare couldn't or wouldn't do.

On my way to dinner I stopped by the mail hut and got my mail. There was a nice letter from Aquamarine, and since I had been bad about reading them right away, I sat down in one of the chairs in the main lounge and opened the letter and read it right there. Dinner could wait a few minutes.

She said that there was a draft horse show at the Pavilion this weekend and wondered if I might want to come see it, and she said that she was sorry she hadn't sent me a letter about it sooner and that it was okay if I sent her a computer letter back because it would probably take too long for the mail to arrive with my reply. And she said that Jenny said that I could stay with her if I wanted to.

I was just finishing reading when I noticed Christine and Sean sitting down across from me, and they were curious about the letter so I showed it to them. Of course they couldn't read it at all. Sean was really curious about the writing, so I explained to him how Equestrian worked, and he studied the letter and then had me read it out loud to both of them. I thought that was kind of weird, since they couldn't understand it at all, but they both were fascinated. Maybe I ought to talk in Equestrian more often.

Then at dinner, our conversation turned to different languages, and I found out that everyone at the table could speak at least a little bit of a foreign language. Peggy knew some German, Christine knew how to say a couple things in Creole, Joe was fluent in Japanese, and Sean could speak Klingon. That was kind of neat to hear all the different languages. Joe had a pen, so we wrote some stuff on napkins, too, and while the German and Creole used the same letters as English, the Japanese and Klingon had their own letters.

That inspired me for a topic for my Anthropology paper, ‘cause I hadn’t thought of anything else yet: I would ask Gusty why unicorns liked to use a different alphabet because maybe there was a better reason than they just didn’t want non-unicorns to be able to read what they write.

After dinner I wrote a letter back to Aquamarine and then had Peggy help me put it in the computer. I'd asked her if she wanted to come with me but she said that she already had plans for the weekend. Then she showed me how to buy train tickets on the computer. Figuring out the timetable was a bit difficult, but we found a train that left Friday night which would give me all day Saturday with Aquamarine. The only train we could find left early Sunday morning, so Peggy suggested the bus, which left in the evening. And it went the same place as the train, which was really convenient.

It would have been smarter to have figured out when I could go to Lansing first, to make sure that Aquamarine would be there to meet me, so I wrote her another quick letter with my schedule and Peggy put that in the computer too and sent it to her.

And I wrote a letter to Gusty, too, saying that I was looking forward to seeing her in the play and that I was still waiting for word back from Mister Salvatore when we would be arriving, and then at the very end I told her about my Anthropology assignment and then since I’d seen Peggy do it a couple of times, I put the letter in the computer all by myself.

Then I thanked her for all her help and nuzzled her on the cheek and said that I was going to Aric's and that I would be back in the morning.

April 7 [a history of war]

April 7

I spent a little longer in bed with Aric this morning because I knew he'd miss me when I was gone for the weekend. Besides, I was in a frisky mood anyway.

It was misty—not quite foggy and not quite rainy, but a sort of halfway point between the two. Good enough visibility, though, but you had to always be careful in weather like this because you could fly into thicker stuff without noticing, and then you could get disoriented. It was smart to always keep an eye on the ground.

Airplanes had all sorts of gauges in them to tell the pilots where they were going. The book I'd had to read before getting my license had mentioned them. They could tell you if you were right side up or upside down, what direction you were flying, and how high you were. Plus there were other special instruments, too, that mattered if you had an engine on your airplane, since it was important to know what it was doing. Cars had gauges like that, too.

I had my altimeter, but I didn't need to look at it all that much any more. I'd gotten enough practice flying on Earth that I could tell just by looking about how high I was.

Rather than fly around too far, I just got up to where there were some wispy clouds—which were totally invisible from the ground—and played with them for a while. I squished them into more concentrated bunches and then carried them up a little higher where the air was more to their liking.

A lot of ponies on the ground don't know that the sky isn't identical all over. It's like the ocean, with all sorts of complicated currents and temperature and humidity changes, and that's what makes the weather work. If it all somehow got to being the same, no matter how many pegasuses we had, we probably wouldn't be able to do anything with it.

As I was bunching up my last cloud of the day, I thought that maybe I ought to ask Gates if I could borrow his GoPro for cloud work. I bet that would be a fun thing for people to watch. Probably my weather professor and Dr. Thomas Thompson would like to see it, too.

After I'd dried off from my shower, I thought I'd check my computer mail and see if Gusty had written back. I didn't expect her to have, since it was late when I sent the letter, but she had.

My mailbox tells me what time computer letters arrived, and Gusty had written back only a few hours ago, which meant she must have been up most of the night. I hoped that it hadn't taken her that long to write a reply, because then I'd feel bad.

When I opened the letter, though, it wasn't all that long. She said that unicorns had kept their script because ours was too ambiguous. She didn't know a whole lot about how earth pony writing had evolved, but we only used a few more than a dozen different letters for writing, which she said meant that we had to guess a lot of words from their context.

Well, I knew that, and I knew that a lot of times ponies would add vowel points or other clues if there was the possibility of confusion; every foal knew that.

But then she said when it came to spellbooks, that wasn't good enough. Since Old Unicorn already had ample symbols to cover all the different sounds, they just started writing Equestrian words using the same letters they already had, all forty-four of them.

She had also included a picture of a page of words that were easily confused with each other, and written one side in simple Equestrian and then the words in Unicorn script, and on the Unicorn side of the page they were all longer, and none of them looked alike.

Well, I guess that all made sense. We used a lot of pictures in the weather offices to help cut down on confusion, and because there were still a bunch of mares who couldn't read. It wasn't all that helpful out in the sky, anyway, ‘cause it was more hooves-on up there.

Since I could read, I spent the rest of the morning with Judges, and finished it. The end wasn't much different than the beginning had been. One of the women was a concubine which is kind of like a prostitute and since women seemed to be more clever than the men (especially the prostitutes), I thought that she was going to do something clever, but instead she got raped and then cut up into pieces and sent to the twelve tribes, and suddenly I was wishing that I hadn’t decided to read the Bible before lunch.

Then in revenge Judah led the Israelites to fight the Benjamites, who had done it.

I didn't know all that much about war, because I'd only ever learned the basics of how to use my glaive and how to follow the instructions of my leader, but if I went to battle one day and we lost twenty-two thousand ponies, I wouldn't do the same thing the next day. But they did, and on the third day they had the smarter idea to draw the Benjamites out and then ambush them, and then they defeated them.

The next book was called Ruth and I thought that was really funny because I knew a Ruth that lived down the hall and maybe she was named after this Ruth. So I opened our door and looked down the hall and hers was open, too, so I took my Bible in my mouth and read Ruth while sitting on her bed. She didn't mind; she was doing stuff on her computer and moved her chair so that she could pet me, which made us both happy.

I liked Ruth a lot better, because even though it started out sad, in a famine, it got better because she found a man who loved her and then they got married and had a son together.

I asked Ruth if she had ever laid down at a boy's feet or harvested barley, and she said that she hadn't done either of those things. Then she got curious about the Book of Ruth, and looked for it on her computer, and pretty soon a whole page of information came up, with pictures even. So she started reading that and then laughed and I wanted to know what was so funny, so she pointed to where it said that 'feet' was a euphemism for 'genitals.' I can guess what woke Boaz up.

It was about lunchtime, so I put my Bible back in my room and got my saddlebags and went to lunch, where I sat with Trevor and Cedric and Leon. I said what I'd learned about football in anthropology class, and Cedric said that it was all true. He said that was why girls didn't play the sport.

Then Trevor asked if it was true what I'd asked in class, 'cause he'd heard it from someone else, and I admitted to what I'd said. Cedric said that was how they used to play it, but when they let black men on the teams it wasn't fair any more; all the white boys didn't stand a chance, and he held up his finger and thumb a couple of inches apart.

Leon started laughing so hard that he put his head down, and I stood up with my forehooves on the table and told Cedric that Aric was bigger than that and it got real quiet.

Just then I remembered what Peggy had said about how people might feel and that I ought not to tell anyone and I'd gone and opened my stupid mouth without thinking, and it hit me again just how big Cedric was. If he grabbed me, it was over.

I snapped my wings out real quick and pinned my ears and was about to launch myself off the table and get away before things got bad, but then I saw Cedric jerk back at my sudden movement; between his push and me on the table it tipped and sent everything sliding my way. I heard Leon say 'oh, shit,' and his hand flew out so fast and he grabbed at my cup before it went off the table, but he wasn't quick enough to get my plate and it shattered all over the floor, and every head in the room turned to look at us.

Well, all of a sudden I felt really foolish. They were my friends and they weren't going to do anything to me and I'd gone and broken a plate and wasted all my lunch, too, and now everybody would think that I was an idiot, and I was about to apologize for causing a scene, when Leon said really loud that his salad had had mache in it instead of arugula, and that didn't make any sense to me, but people started to turn back to their conversations.

I helped clean up the mess on the floor and apologized to Trevor for whacking him with my wing. Cedric said that I was scary, and coming from him that was really funny. Then he said that he thought I was going to come across the table and bite him, 'cause I guess I'd bared my teeth at him and hadn't even realized.

I said I was sorry about that, too, and he chuckled and said that if I ever played football all I would have to do was make that face and I could get right through anybody's defensive line. I stuck my tongue out at him.

Leon wanted to know why I had canine teeth. He said that every horse he'd ever seen had a big empty gap there, but when I'd clenched my jaw they looked a lot like fangs and all that he could think was how happy he was that my eyes were locked on Cedric and not him.

So I told him that the dandelions in Equestria were very tough, and everyone had a good laugh at that.

It was appropriate, I guess, that with my reading about war and almost having a scuffle in the dining room that we wound up reading some of Kipling's poems about war in class. I'd liked the ones about sailing and the ocean much better.

He finished with a poem called The American Rebellion, which was kind of sad. 'The snow lies thick on Valley Forge, the ice on the Delaware, but the poor dead soldiers of King George they neither know nor care.'

I guess it was kind of appropriate for the day, though. The mist still hadn't really cleared, and with the snow all gone, everything just looked stark and dead.

Liz and I talked about Judges and Ruth. There was some stuff that I'd missed completely, mostly about lineage because I guess the Israelites really cared about that, too, even though it seemed kind of silly to me. I didn't know all the rules in Equestria, 'cause most pegasuses didn't own any land, but I knew that farms were passed down from mother to daughter, and I was pretty sure that the unicorns did the same thing with their land and silly titles, but they really cared about who everypony's sire was and kept big books to keep track of it all.

So it turned out that she asked me more questions about Equestria than I asked her about the Bible, but I didn't mind. We had a nice conversation and she even had tea which was better than the tea they offered in the dining hall.

I met up with Meghan at dinner, and asked if I could come over after I finished writing my report for anthropology class, and she said that we could watch another Harry Potter movie.

By the time I'd finished, though, it was too late to watch the movie. It hadn't seemed like it was going to be all that much to write when I'd started, but it wound up taking a lot longer than I'd expected, and I was almost done when my telephone chirped at me like it does when I get a telegram.

It was Meghan and she wanted to know if I was still planning to come over, and I said that I was, but it was probably too late for the movie. I said that my essay had taken longer to write than I thought it would because the computer kept getting words wrong and Peggy had to help me put the picture from my computer mail into my essay. And I said that I was sorry it had taken me so long, and she said that was okay, and she would be waiting for me.

When I got there, Meghan was sitting in her desk chair looking at things on the computer, and Amy wasn't around. Meghan said that Amy was going to be gone all night, so it wouldn't be a problem if we were a bit noisy or stayed up a little late.

Since I had class in the morning, I didn't want to stay up too late and lose my opportunity for morning exercise and breakfast, and I could tell she was a bit disappointed, so I let her groom me, which was the perfect end for the day.

When she was done, I was almost asleep on her lap, and I hated to move at all, but of course she couldn't sleep with me lying on her like that, so I got up and let her go to the bathroom to put on her sleeping clothes, and while she was doing that I slid under the covers.

She crawled in beside me and took off her shirt and put it on the floor, then she lay on her side and let me snuggle up against her and it wasn't very long at all before I was sound asleep.

April 8 [shower]

April 8

I stayed in bed a little bit later than I meant to: Meghan has curtains over her windows that block out more of the light, so I didn't realize what time it was until her telephone started sounding its alarm. I cocked my ear over and her shirt was flashing, then I realized that the telephone was under it.

She shifted around behind me, waking up, then reached over and picked up the phone and turned it off. Then I asked her what time it was and when she told me I hung my head. Not only was I not going to have any time to fly, but I was going to miss my morning shower or breakfast, and I had to choose which one.

I told Meghan that I had to go because it was late and I had to get in line for the shower before it was too late, and she just pointed her finger towards the open door of their bathroom. Well then I felt dumb.

I asked her if she wanted to go first, and she said we could share so that way we'd both have time for a shower and breakfast. That perked my ears right back up, and I said that was a really good idea.

She got the water started and I hopped right in but she hesitated outside the shower curtain and I'd already gotten my head and back and tail wet and she still was just standing there, then she finally took her panties off and got in the shower with me.

At first she was a little bit quiet and shy, and she twitched when I picked up the shower-cloth and started rubbing soap on her back, but pretty soon she started to relax and enjoy it.

Working out a good method was kind of complicated. The bathtub was narrow with high sides, so I had to only lift one wing at a time for her to clean them, and she used too much soap so it took a while to get all the lather out of my feathers. And I couldn't get much higher than the curve of her back without standing on my hind hooves which meant that she had to stay pretty still and when I got around to her front she had a hard time not moving as I was washing her, especially when I got to her breasts.

She had to sit down so that I could shampoo her hair, and the whole shower took longer than it would have if we'd both been working efficiently, but I didn't mind. (Most ponies would stand nose-to-tail and take turns washing one half of each other at the same time, then the other, and that was pretty quick.)

Meghan groomed me and I brushed her hair, then she got dressed while I was preening my wings. Then since we were already together, we sat at the same table for breakfast, too.

Sometimes it was hard to decide who to eat with, so I usually went with the same pattern every day. I hadn't shared a table with Meghan in a while, and I hadn't eaten a meal in the dark room in a while either. I suppose I could come up with some kind of a schedule so that I could spend time with all of my friends, but eating together was the kind of thing that depended on mood, I thought.

When we were done and it was time to go to class, I stood up on my hind legs and kissed her and I could feel how much that was making her blush, which was really cute.

I was kind of distracted sitting through math, both 'cause I was still thinking about Meghan, and 'cause I was also thinking about going to Michigan State University tonight. Plus what Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee was talking about was pretty simple stuff—exponential growth and power laws—so all I really had to be alert to was the terms and symbols used to describe it.

Some of the students had trouble understanding it (and it's not completely obvious), so he said that if you had a test tube with one bacteria in it, and then after one minute you had two, and then after the next minute you had four, and so on; when it was half full how long would it take before it was all the way full, and a couple of students started to try and figure it out on paper but Keith raised his hand right away and then I realized that it would only be a minute even though at first thought it felt like it would be longer. And he also talked about Metcalfe's Law which is also called the Network Effect, and it’s an important thing for computers.

When I left class to go to lunch, it was snowing again. Not much, just little flakes drifting down, but why was it still snowing in April?

Professor Amy had us all give a summary of our reports, and then she asked each student to name one possible flaw in our method. For mine, I said that I had only asked one pony and she could have been lying to me (I didn't think she was, though). Then she asked us to think of how we might verify the information we had been given, but that wasn’t a question that had to be answered in class.

Well, mine was pretty easy because I could find out what all the different Unicorn letters were and then try and write Equestrian words in them and then look them up in a Unicorn dictionary or even ask another unicorn to read them, and if Gusty was telling the truth, than those words would be real words; if she was lying, they wouldn't be.

She concluded class by telling us to read the chapter in our books about beauty in the Kayan culture.

I probably should have read that right away, but Peggy was back and after I packed my saddlebags for the weekend and made sure that I had tickets (it was really convenient that Peggy's printer could make them, so I didn't have to go to the train station) we spent the rest of the afternoon talking.

She offered to drive me to the train station, which was really nice of her, but I decided to just fly instead. It wasn't very far, and it would make up for the exercise I hadn't gotten in the morning.

It was both scary and exciting to be on the train all by myself. I had been a little bit worried about how crowded it might be, but there weren't a lot of people on the train and so I could sit wherever I wanted to, and I could even put my saddlebags on the seat next to me. I didn't like wearing them when I was sitting because that wasn't very comfortable.

After we left Galesburg, we slowed down and then stopped in the middle of nowhere for a while, and I thought maybe the locomotive had broken, but then I saw a freight train go by right next to us, and then we started moving again.

Right while we were stopping for the East Lansing station, I saw another train that was pointed right at us, and I could see from its lights that the track it was on crossed over ours. I couldn't make out much else of it, because it was dark, but when I got off my train I could hear its engines working, and there were enough lights that I could see it crossing over our track. I probably could have kept watching it, but Jenny and Aquamarine had come out on the platform and we hugged and then walked together back to their dorm room and settled in for the night.

April 9 [Draft Horse Show, morning]

April 9

Both Aquamarine and I woke up nice and early. It was a pleasant change to be sleeping with somepony who kept sensible hours. So she got her shower stuff and we went off to the bathroom and she said that we could take as long as we wanted 'cause it was a Saturday morning and nopony would be up this early.

I think I would have found it a little creepy if I'd been here by myself. For all the people who must live in this building and all the students who were up partying last night (which had made it a bit difficult to get a good sleep), right now the hallways were completely deserted, and so was the bathroom. Plus it didn't have a window like the one in Trowbridge did, so it was kind of confining.

We took our time—I was still pretty clean; Meghan had done a very good job, and I hadn't exercised yesterday much at all. I had to spend some extra time on Aquamarine, 'cause she hadn't had anyone to help her and plus she was still in estrus. She said that it was just ending for her, and I said that mine had been over yesterday, and any time now I'd start to have a bit of a mood swing and my feathers would start falling out. Already there were a bunch that were getting itchy.

The show didn't start until ten, which gave us several hours to eat breakfast and amuse ourselves. Aquamarine had a schedule back in her room, and she said that we could look over that and see if there was anything that we particularly wanted to watch. She also wanted to show me to some of the greenhouses where she worked, and maybe introduce me to her professor if he was around. Plants didn't require the same level of care as animals, so he didn't always come in on weekends, she told me.

Once we were all dried off, we went back to her room, where Jenny was just starting to show signs of life. Aquamarine got the schedule and set it on her chair so that we could both read it. I was interested in seeing some of the team events, because I'd always wondered how so many ponies could be hitched to one thing and not trip over all the harness stuff. Just watching a single pony pulling a plow or a cart was strange. I'd lost a bet and tried it once and it didn't work out for me at all. The harness kept sliding around on me and the wagon would surge forward and then tug back. I didn't understand how earth ponies managed.

Aquamarine wanted to see the heavy horse pull, which was the very last event scheduled for Saturday. Then on Sunday there was a plowing competition, which she really wanted to see, and there was also an event called a 'unicorn hitch,' and neither of us knew what that was, so we'd have to watch that. Maybe there were teams of unicorns competing, but neither of us thought unicorns would like pulling carts all that much.

In between times, we could wander around the campus and see other things, or just gossip.

Jenny had gotten out of bed and gone to the bathroom by the time we were done figuring out our weekend schedule. We waited for her to get back and when she did she changed into her day clothes and brushed her hair and said that she was ready to go to breakfast.

We went to the same dining hall that we'd gone to before (at least it looked the same) and it wasn't very crowded at all. There were some students with folding computers and coffee cups, and one cluster of men all wearing shirts with math letters on them that looked very hung over, and that was about it.

There wasn't a very good selection of food, but that was because it was early. The dining hall at Kalamazoo College was like that, too. If you went right after they opened, they didn't always have hot food out yet.

And their waffle maker was broken.

They had tubes of cereal like we did, but instead of the little Shredded Wheats that I liked they had giant ones instead, so I got one and some fruit and that was my breakfast. Aquamarine had cereal that had flakes and sliced nuts and shriveled strawberries, and she gave me one of the strawberries and when I put it on my tongue at first it was dry like cardboard but then my spit softened it up and it turned into a normal strawberry slice, which was really amazing. Jenny had bacon and eggs and a slice of toast with orange jam on it.

We went right from the dining hall to outside. It was chilly and snowing and I was glad I'd thought to bring my hat and scarf. I shouldn't have gotten my coat thinned so soon, I guess. It wasn't bad moving in it, but I was worried that we'd be spending a lot of time standing in it.

The three of us followed along a sidewalk for a while, and then it ended and we had to walk in the grass along the side of the road. You could see a sort of path where feet had worn the grass away, so I guess a lot of people took this route. It was a big road, so it ought to have had a sidewalk next to it. Most of the roads near my college did.

Jenny pointed to a big white building that she said was called the Pavilion, even though it looked nothing like a pavilion to me. And she said that right behind it was the observatory, which is a special building with a slot in the roof that telescopes stick through so that they can look at stars and planets.

There was a train track that ran at an angle and crossed the road, and we looked both ways to make sure that there weren't any trains coming, and saw one off in the distance. Rather than try and scramble up the gravel embankment, we walked back to the side of the road because it was flatter and easier there, and then checked again to make sure it was still far enough away. Right after we crossed the track, the bell began chiming and the lights started flashing. Jenny was giggling like a schoolgirl as she dashed down away from the road and into the grass.

A couple of cars didn't obey the lights and went right under the fences that were coming down, and one of them that was a latecomer swerved out of its lane and around the end of the fence, and the locomotive honked angrily at it, and then it was booming across the road and I just watched as it kept on going by.

When we got to the front of the Pavilion, there was a big silver trailer outside that Jenny said was to put horses in when you wanted to take them somewhere, and it had a ramp so that we could go inside and look at it, and both of us did. Jenny said that she wanted us to stick our heads out the door so she could take a picture.

I had to remind myself that on Earth horses weren't smart like ponies. The inside of the trailer was okay, I guess, but there were walls to keep the horses apart from each other, and there weren't any seats to sit in or really that much of anything. I wouldn't have liked to ride in it.

The man at the ticket window was a bit confused when he saw us, and he said that the contestant entrance was at the back, and we said that we were just watching. We got weekend tickets so that we could come and go, and then went inside.

The smell hit me as soon as the front doors opened, and I could see that Aquamarine had caught it, too. Outside, it wasn't so obvious, but in here you couldn't miss it, and both of us stuck our muzzles up and tried to sort it all out. I think if there had been anypony I knew in there, I would have been able to pick her out, but I couldn't be sure, and that bothered me deep down.

Right up by the entrance there were some people selling food, shirts, and then a little bit down these angled hallways there were a couple of places set up selling horse things. One booth right at the top had giant horseshoes hanging from it, and I thought maybe later I’d buy one of them.

Jenny said that if we went down by the merchants, that's where all the horses were, or we could go into the main arena and see if they were competing. Aquamarine told me that maybe it would be best to go into the main arena first because that way it wouldn't be so much of a shock to me, but it wasn't time for any of the events to start yet and I stupidly said that I wanted to go back to where they were.

~~I could~~

~~When we~~

I had seen the picture of the horse with Aquamarine and the beer commercial with horses and there had even been some we'd seen from the train windows and of course pictures in our textbooks so that ought to have prepared me but it was one thing to see a picture and a very different thing to be there and they were kind of the same like us but not really and right then it hit me like a buck to the chest and I stepped back and clamped my tail and I just couldn't deal with all the thoughts going through my head all at once because any one of them could have been me, just standing there in a stall dumbly like a cow or something and I'd known, but I didn't know until right then, and I couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for them.

Then Aquamarine had her head down on my back and Jenny was in front of me, blocking my view, but she couldn't do anything about the scents or the nickers and whinnys and snorts and grunts that sounded almost like a nursery but it wasn't. These horses had grown up but they were never going to read a poem or solve a calculus problem or ride on a train or do any of the other things that I thought about or took for granted.

It felt like such a waste.

They sort of pushed me off out of the crowd of people and got me turned around and then sat me down next to the wall and Jenny took off her coat and draped it across my back and crouched down between me and the horses, while Aquamarine offered me her back and I put my head down against her mane and let her scent block out all the others.

I don't know how long we were sitting like that. Jenny was running her fingers through my mane, and she had her telephone out and was typing on it with her thumbs and that just sort of really got my attention—I'd never really focused on how efficiently people can use their telephones.

We finally moved away and back to an area that was a little less crowded and not so near the horses and that gave me a chance to relax. It had been a big shock all at once and I hadn't been ready for it at all, and I ought to have listened to what Aquamarine had said.

Jenny asked me if I wanted to leave, and I shook my head. I'd come all the way here, and I did want to see, I just hadn't been ready to see. So the three of us went to the arena and got seats that were in the middle and partway up, and the two of them sat on either side of me.

It was a little bit easier to see them from a distance, and before the teams came out, Aquamarine told me that she had first seen the herds that Michigan State kept from a distance and one day she'd been really curious and had gone over to the fence to look at them more closely, and that had been better but it had still been weird and taken her a lot of getting used to. And Jenny said that she'd come back crying the first time and then after they'd talked it all out Aquamarine had drank a whole bottle of whiskey and said that she was going to break them out and teach them to be proper ponies and then she passed out on the floor.

I asked Aquamarine if that was true, and she said that she didn't remember, but that it had been a bit hard.

Then it was time for the competition to start, and the first team came into the ring. The judges had them do all sorts of different things, and pretty soon I started to get into it. I was rooting for the team with the big green carriage because I could tell that they were proud, and pretty soon Aquamarine and I were talking about the horses and pointing out things like how the wheel team on the red wagon didn't want to be there, or that the mare on the swing team pulling the blue wagon totally had the hots for the horse behind her, and he wasn't interested in her at all.

Of course, Jenny was totally lost and so we both explained to her how we knew, like how she was holding her tail up and I bet she was winking at him, too, and you could tell by his body that he wasn't interested at all, 'cause he wasn't leaning forward to get a sniff or nipping at her hocks or anything like that.

I was disappointed when the team with the green wagon came in second. I wasn't really sure how they were being judged, and I told Aquamarine that we ought to go down there and tell the judges that they'd made a wrong choice. Jenny thought that was pretty funny, and said that maybe I ought to talk to the judges because that would be hilarious. She said that it was good to see that my mood was getting better, too.

I sort of had second thoughts on my way to the judges' stand, but I said I was going to do it, so I had to follow through. I just had to remember to be respectful and polite and not yell at them for what they didn't see because there's still some stuff I can't read very well in humans so probably they aren't as good as understanding horses as a pony.

Well, they were happy to see us there, and each of the judges shook our hooves and Jenny just kind of stood there a little awkward, and Aquamarine and I made our case for why the green wagon team was the best, and then they explained what it was they were looking for, and how they scored the competition, and they admitted it had been very close. They said that they couldn't change the ranking, but that they appreciated our input.

That was kind of a brush-off, and we both knew it. I said that I wanted to congratulate them anyway because in my mind they'd won the competition and never mind how high they lifted their hooves or whatever else it was that the judges were looking at. So they gave me the name of the owners and one of the judges called back to the manager of the stable area and found out where the horses were being kept and told us how to get there. And the one lady who seemed the nicest told me that she thought it would mean a lot to them if we were to congratulate them, and she whispered in my ear that she was certain that next year they would be the champion team.

I still hesitated a bit before going back there, but I was at least a little bit prepared, and I tried to keep my focus on finding them.

Their wagon was unhitched and loose, and all the horses were in the aisle, having their harnesses stripped off by a team of humans.

I'd meant to ask who their driver was (it was so hard to wrap my head around the idea that he might be their owner) but once I got close I just had to get to know them, and it took a little while to get through because we all had to greet each other, and that was a little nerve-wracking because they were so big. They could have crushed me with one stomp, or bucked me clear out of the stables if they'd wanted to, but all six of them were calm and gentle.

Of course their driver came out as soon as he saw what was going on, but he had the good sense not to get in the middle of things, and I could see by the way he behaved that he knew a thing or two about equines. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and he was big but gentle, just like his horses.

He waited until we were all done and then invited us into his stall, which was the same as the ones the horses had except that there wasn't sawdust on the floor and he had a couple of chairs.

I got straight to the point and told him what I'd thought and he smiled and said that he couldn't have asked for a better endorsement. We talked for a little bit about how he trained them, and you could tell that he had a mind that was always working because he paid close attention to everything we said and everything we'd noticed. Then he introduced us to all his horses again, one at a time, and he said what he had named them, and he gave us all a card and told us that he would love to have us visit his farm and if we had any suggestions for how to improve it he would love to hear them.

After we'd left, Jenny said that she thought he was a really nice man, and we started arguing about which horse was the best, and pretty soon that turned into how their names didn't really suit them. But I guess since the horses probably didn't understand their names it was okay.

The only thing that bothered me about his team was that none of his stallions had balls, and looking around it wasn't only his team. They were all missing, and I mentioned that and said that maybe earth horses had really small ones or else they were tucked away or something like that and Jenny's hands tensed and then Aquamarine explained how people took them away from the stallions so that they would be more compliant.

That explained why that one horse hadn't had any interest in the mare.

And then I was shivering again, because that was a hard blow. He had seemed so nice and understanding, but he must have been a part of the gelding; he'd said that he'd raised every one of his horses from a foal and it was hard for me to understand how somebody could be so kind and compassionate and yet do that to a stallion so that he would be easier to work with.

Did they think that stallions would just go out of control and mount any mare who showed the slightest interest in their advances? How could people take something away like that?

After that I had a closer look at all the stallions and sure enough. . . .

I was still fuming at the thought when I suddenly saw Miss Parker. She came over and crouched down and greeted us and said that she and Mister Barrow had just happened to be here and wasn't that an amazing coincidence, and I might not be all that good at reading people, but I could tell it wasn't an amazing coincidence at all. I probably ought to have been mad but I was just so happy to see another familiar face.

So when Mister Barrow showed up and we got to talking a little bit the truth came out and probably they hadn't meant for it to, but Jenny had sent them a message because Aquamarine had told her to, and they'd come right over and had been looking for us.

Once I told them that I'd figured it out, Miss Parker laughed and said that I was too clever for my own good, and Mister Barrow said it was funny how hard it was to find two ponies at a horse show.

We got in their van and went to Menna's for lunch, because Aquamarine insisted that I wouldn't get the complete experience of East Lansing unless I did, and Jenny said that it only really counted if I was drunk and it was two AM and I accidentally ordered one with beef and ate the whole thing and spent a couple of hours the next day sitting on the toilet and loudly saying that I wished I was dead, and Aquamarine said that had only happened once and it could have happened to anypony.

So we got a booth in the back and I read the menu carefully because I had no desire to be sitting on the toilet for a couple of hours and wishing I was dead, even if that was part of the East Lansing experience. There were a couple of people sitting in the booth next to us, but they got up and left not long after we sat down.

We talked about horses and their relationship with humans, and Mister Barrow said that it was a really complicated thing especially now that ponies were here. He reminded me that the most important thing to keep in mind was that they weren't smart like we were, and Miss Parker set down her wrap and told him to shut his mouth because he couldn't explain anything without falling back on his training.

Then she leaned across the table and said that I ought to imagine that our positions were reversed, and that we had humans in Equestria who were full grown, but no smarter than an infant, and so we trained them to do things to help us out because they had clever hands and were tall enough to reach things that we couldn't. And then imagine that suddenly smart humans showed up and how would we deal with that. Mister Barrow just shook his head, but I got it.

She said that we didn't really know how lucky we were, because our civilization had so many different intelligent species, while theirs only had humans and maybe (depending on who you asked) dolphins and some primates. She said that while Princess Celestia had extended her hoof in welcome, and President Obama had done the same, everyone else had been running around like the barn was on fire.

Jenny put her head down in her hand and shook her head when Miss Parker said that.

I kind of got the idea, though. And I thought back to what Professor Amy had said about judging other cultures, and that didn't make everything all right, but it made it better.

And I thought how maybe if we could tell one person who really cared about his horses that there was a better way, he'd change, and if he did, maybe someone else would, too, and that was progress.

I knew then that I would have to go visit him, and I was already composing a letter to Miss Cherilyn in my mind.

April 9 [evening]

April 9

Miss Parker offered to take us back to the horse show or wherever we wanted to go in their van, but I thought that being outside might clear my head, and Aquamarine thought so, too, so we thanked her for her offer and then went outside on hoof (or feet for Jenny). Since we had lots of time, we first went to the greenhouses.

That was a big change from being outside. They were hot and humid inside, and she explained how there were certain greenhouses she wasn't allowed in because earth pony magic had had some unintended effects, like healing plants which were part of a study on sick plants. She said that professors got mad when their studies were skewed.

Then she opened a little door and showed us her experiment, which was a bunch of ordinary-looking ferns. She was to care for them like she would care for a plant back in Equestria, and meanwhile there was another group of ferns that she wasn't allowed anywhere near, and I guess the purpose of the test was to see how much bigger and better her ferns were compared to the normal ones.

It wasn't a proper experiment, she said, because there was only her and her professor involved, but it was going to give them an idea how much of an effect earth pony magic had on plants. They had done the same thing with every other earth pony who had been at the university, and they said that in time it would provide a useful baseline for other experiments.

Aquamarine told us about some of the short term experiments that had been done, and while she was talking she was also caring for her plants, and when she got done showing them off, she wrote in a little journal when she'd come and what she'd done. She also had to report if she had seen any parasites on her plants or any other signs of damage.

Then we went into another room, which was where there was another experiment she was working on. In this one, each of the plants was in a little box all to itself—it was a clear box so that the plant got all the sunlight it could want. She called it the plant hospital, because those were small plants that were sick or injured. She gave them all a quick look and they all looked ok. She said that she had come in one time and the cucumber vine had had all its leaves torn off by something, and that was too much damage for her to fix, but she tried.

While we were on our way out, we ran into her professor who was named Doctor Krelborn. Aquamarine introduced us, and he was happy to see me and when he stuck out his hand to shake my hoof, I noticed that there was a lot of dirt on it which I suppose was the mark of a good plant professor.

He asked if I had any kind of plant magic, and I told him that I didn't, so he said that I ought to see one of his projects that Aquamarine wasn't allowed anywhere near, and so he took me into a little room and showed me a tiny tree in a pot. He said it was called a Bonsai tree, and explained how the art of the Bonsai was to make it small and visually pleasing, and he couldn't show it to Aquamarine because if he did pretty soon it would be ten meters tall and that wasn't what he wanted.

I thought it was kind of silly to spend a lot of time making sure a tree didn't grow up, but I didn't tell him that. And I thought maybe he ought to ask the tree what it wanted.

It was a bit of a shock leaving the greenhouses and going back outside. Especially because it was snowing again. If earth had weatherponies, they would have all been fired by now.

We walked south of the Pavilion, and came around to some big fields surrounded by fences. Aquamarine said that this was where the free horses were kept. She said that she had spent some time with them and that was why she was more used to seeing them than I had been.

Of course it was a big field and we weren't supposed to go over the fence, so we walked around towards the car entrance until we got close to the herd, who was grazing a little way back from the fence. She tilted her head back and whinnied, and I saw a couple of heads perk up and pretty soon some of the horses were trotting towards the fence to greet us.

I put my hooves up on the fence and that was when I discovered that one of the fence-wires had electricity in it. I hadn't been expecting that. I guess that was a way to keep the horses from trying to knock over the fence and go free, but I thought it was kind of mean, too. They wouldn't know until they'd gotten zapped in the muzzle a few times.

Even with that, it was still nice to see them, and it did help me feel a little bit more comfortable around horses.

We stayed there until all of them who wanted to come over and meet us had, and then we went along the fence line and across the driveway where there were some more horses kept in individual pastures. There was one stallion right near the gate and as soon as we got close he tilted his head up and pulled his nose back and I looked over at Aquamarine and she blushed and said that her heat wasn't quite over yet.

Jenny said that he was dropping, and I couldn't help but look at him. I told Jenny that he wasn't just dropping, he was getting erect and he was huge, and then we decided that we probably ought to get out of there before he figured out that if he really wanted to get some, the fence wasn't going to stop him. Even if it was mean to tease a stallion and leave him hanging like that.

We went back the way we'd come, and the horses came back over to the fence and sniffed at us again and I could tell that they were all friends with Aquamarine and they liked me, too. They weren't as interested in Jenny, but one of the mares stuck her nose over the fence and let Jenny pet her, then she mouthed Jenny's coat a little bit and covered one shoulder with drool. I put my head down and ate some of the grass and thought about how I might feel if I were one of them, but I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not be fully aware. Since it was off-season, the grass didn’t taste very good, and my nose and mouth got cold ‘cause of the little bit of snow that was sticking to it.

When we were a little ways off and they had gone back to grazing, I just stopped along the fence and put my hooves up and watched them for a while. They were happy . . . or at least they were content. But they didn't know any better, and that still made me a bit sad.

Once we were back at the Pavilion, we had a snack—the only two things that weren't some kind of meat were popcorn and French Fries, and neither of them made for a good meal. Aquamarine said that we could probably get some oats or alfalfa cubes in back, then Jenny said that we could order Jimmy Johns which had subs so fast we'd freak. She had their whole menu memorized and said that she could recite it off for us, and Aquamarine told her that we would have two number thirteens and a pickle.

It wasn't super-fast, but it was only about ten minutes before a man showed up and gave us our food, and we went back into the grandstands to watch the pull.

They had to pull a whole truck, which had weights on it which they'd lift while they were pulling. The truck had to go twenty-seven and a half feet (which was a very specific number) and they could make three attempts. There was a time limit, as well.

It was really interesting to watch. The doubletree was hooked over the back of the truck and there were a couple of people that helped hook it, and as soon as the horses felt it drop they started pulling. That went pretty well until the fourth team came up, and the helpers missed the hook and the horses took off anyway, with their leader holding the reins and scrambling to keep up.

They weren't very good at backing up, and they kept their hooves high in strange, prancing steps. You could tell that they were all eager to pull the weight and show how strong they were, and even from where we were you could hear the leader calling out encouragement to them.

As the weights got heavier, teams started to be disqualified, because they couldn't pull the truck far enough. Once they were over four thousand pounds, it started to go quicker because almost everypony had been disqualified. They finally got to 4,600 pounds of weight and that was what it took to crown the champions who were called Mike and Roger. The announcer said that they were the current world record holders, so me and Aquamarine decided that we had to meet them.

Around the arena there was a tall wooden fence that people could see over but ponies couldn't. We gathered by the gate with everyone else and when they came out there were lots of people congratulating them on the win (well, they were congratulating the driver, but he hadn't done any more work than hold the reins), and the crowd helped us get to the front to let the horses greet us, and that was actually a lot of fun. I'd never met the world champions at anything, and they were really calm and leaned down to sniff at us and I stood still as Mike got my scent and lifted his head and took a little step back to think about it, then leaned down again and brushed his nose against mine.

After they were led off into the stable area, we went back to the dorm, because it was late and there would be more to see tomorrow.

I was glad that Aquamarine was with me, 'cause I was still stressed out some with all we'd seen and all I'd been thinking about and I couldn't fully escape it even here because the scents clung to us, so I could still smell Mike and Roger and all the other horses we'd met on her and on me, and I still hadn't quite figured out what to make of it all.

April 10 [Unicorn Hitch]

April 10

I didn't sleep well, even though I was with Aquamarine. I kept on having nightmares that I was ground-bound forever in a pasture and I was the only smart pony in the herd, and all the rest of them ignored me. I couldn't go away, because I knew I wouldn't make it far on my own before some predator or a horny stallion got me.

I kept on waking up and I'd just snuggle into Aquamarine and watch her sleep for a little bit until my eyes got heavy again and I fell back asleep to another nightmare.

I don't think that Princess Luna's reach is quite this far.

When I finally woke up for the day, I didn't feel like I'd slept at all. Aquamarine wasn't in bed; she was on the floor stretching out and her getting up must have been what woke me. Jenny was stirring in bed, too. So we wound up all getting out of bed at about the same time.

One thing that was nice about the dorm was that there was more than one shower in the bathroom, which let us talk to Jenny even though she wanted to be in her own shower stall and not share with us. I said that I knew how to shower with humans but that didn't impress her.

When we'd gotten groomed and Jenny had gotten dressed, we went back to the Pavilion and got there in plenty of time to see the plowing competition. It was across the road from the main hall, and there was a long marked-out area in the dirt.

Pretty soon the horses came out and got hooked up to the plows—Aquamarine said that was one nice thing about human helpers; it was hard to put on your own harness and hook up to the plow. Most of the time a sister would help but every now and then you had to do it by yourself. Then the drivers took the reins and when they were told to, the horses started pulling and the men followed along, steering the plow.

Jenny was curious about how we steered our plows, so Aquamarine started describing how a pony plow worked, and how you set it to bite into the ground like you wanted to and how to make it go where you wanted, and it sounded really complicated. It wasn't something I'd ever thought about much: I just saw the earth ponies below me turning their fields.

I suppose they thought the same thing looking up at us moving around clouds, not really having any understanding of all the technical details.

Aquamarine had a good eye for it; she picked the winner before he was even announced. I couldn't see any real difference between the attempts. Some were squigglier than the others, but plants didn't care if they grew in neat rows or not, as far as I knew. Nothing I'd ever seen that had grown on its own had been in a row.

Aquamarine said that I didn't know the first thing about farming.

We went back inside and walked around for a bit, looking at all the different things that they had for sale, and Aquamarine got a flier for a camp that taught you how to drive horses and said that she thought that might be fun to do. Just the very idea bothered me . . . sure, pony coaches often had a driver, just because she had a higher vantage point and could see what was coming up before the team did, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

When we’d seen just about everything, I said I wanted to go see the horses again, so we went back into the stable area and started off at the perimeter.

All the stalls were the same, and they had tall fences around them so that the horses had to stay on their own, but some of the draft horses were so big that their heads went right over the barriers and they could greet the horse on the other side of them.

Different horses were handling their confinement in different ways. There were some who were asleep on their hooves, resting up for whatever was next, and others were looking around at the people milling about. There was an ex-stallion who kept grabbing a bucket in his teeth and banging it against the wall, and a pair of mares in side-by-side stalls who were both leaning up against the bars so that they would be as close to each other as they could get.

Around the back, there was a set of pens that had mules, who were a lot smaller than the horses but still huge. And right next to that was a washing room, but instead of shower heads it just had hoses and I bet none of them were hot water.

We'd seen in the center some people getting their horses ready, and then there was a stream of horses coming in from the arena, which meant it was almost time for the next competition to start, which was the unicorn hitch. So we headed back out of the stables and into the main area.

When they came in they were in a wedge formation. Aquamarine said that earth ponies called that the triangle, then Jenny asked her what they called four, and she said it was the square.

So I guessed that six were the rectangle, and she nodded. Then we took turns at guessing what eight would be called, which turned out to be the double square.

I wanted to know how far it would go, so I kept prompting her with more and more, and it wasn't until she said that a team of eighteen was called the greater long double squarangle that I realized she was making it up. (In my defense, the names of ship sails are like that.)

Overall, the competition was much the same as the six-horse formation we'd seen last night. They went around the arena and had to step in a certain way and go around orange cones and back up at the very end of it.

After that was finished, we got up and went to a store called Pizza House for lunch, which was also in the same nearby mall as Jimmy Johns and Menna's. They had a pizza which was called a Chicago deep dish that was made like a pie and it was really good. It filled me right up, even though I only had one slice and shared a second with Aquamarine. The whole pizza was more than the three of us could eat together, so we took what was left over with us.

As we were walking across the parking lot, we decided that we didn't want to go back to the show. I was tired and thought I could use a nap (and eating a filling meal when you're tired only makes it worse), and so we went back to their dorm room and I dozed off for a bit.

When I woke up, we ate a snack of leftover pizza and then started walking across campus in the direction of the train station, taking our time. We went to the Abrams Planetarium, which had displays about what the telescope at the observatory had seen, and there was a little section that talked about space exploration and all the special vehicles humans had made to explore it. There was also a picture of a space suit, which looked like a diving suit, and it was what human astronauts wore.

Right next to that was a door that was blocked, and there was a sign that said in big letters 'Coming soon: Ponies,' and there was a piece of paper next to it that said in smaller print how our two worlds had found each other, and it was a shame that it wasn't open yet.

Jenny had us pose by the sign and took our picture.

There were a lot of other rooms we didn't get to see because we'd come late and they were closing, but the security policeman said that the gift shop was open for a little while after the exhibits closed so we went there.

Their gift shop had astronaut ice cream, and Jenny said that we had to try it, so we bought it and tore it open and it was kind of disappointing that it was just a striped block that didn't look like ice cream at all. But she showed us how you broke off chunks and put them into your mouth and they turned into ice cream, and even though I thought she was pulling my tail I tried a piece and just like the strawberry in Aquamarine’s cereal at first it was super dry and didn't taste like anything and then all of a sudden it was like ice cream.

I wanted to know how it was made, and Jenny said it was called dehydration, which was where they sucked all the water out of something and I knew how that worked with sun-dried fruit but I didn't know that you could do it with ice cream. What stopped it from melting before it was all dehydrated? Jenny didn't know, but she asked her telephone and it told her.

I bet that would be popular with sailors. There's a lot of stuff you can't keep fresh on a ship, even with a crew of earth ponies.

We finally got to the bus station and Aquamarine and Jenny waited with me until the bus arrived. It was bigger and nicer-looking than the white buses that went around Kalamazoo, and there were little compartments underneath for luggage.

I sat right in the very front, where I could see out the big front windows. That was something you couldn't do on a train, which I thought made the bus a better way to travel. Plus it was cheaper than the train.

After a little bit of driving, though, I decided that the train was better. It was mostly smoother, and it was a bit roomier, and it smelled a little nicer, too, plus the bus took a stupid route. It went to Grand Rapids first, then Kalamazoo.

When it started to get dark out, there wasn't much more to see, so I took out my anthropology book and read my homework and I tried to take some notes but the bus was so unpredictably bouncy I thought I might wind up swallowing my pen by mistake, so I just read a little bit ahead in the book.

I couldn't have been happier when the bus finally stopped in Kalamazoo. I put on my flight gear right there in the parking lot and called the airplane directors. There was a man I'd never talked to before on the radio, and he didn't understand at first where I was departing from, but he finally figured it out, I think. I kept alert for other airplanes and helicopters too in case he hadn't gotten it right.

There was something comforting about being back at my own dorm room. I hung my saddlebags over the back of my chair and scratched at my coat where they'd been strapped down and then hugged Peggy. I would have liked to tell her about my weekend but she was deep in her math homework and I could see by the way she was gnawing on her pen that she was having some difficulty with it and I shouldn’t distract her.

After a little bit, I thought about doing something to get her attention like banging a bucket on the wall, but I didn't have a bucket, so I checked my computer mail instead, and then when there wasn't anything interesting there, I decided that I could write a letter to my sister about horses, but I wasn't really sure how to begin. Then I thought that maybe it would be better to write a poem because Conrad said I was pretty good at poems (even if I can't rhyme) so I worked on that for a bit and then helped Peggy check her homework, and then it was time for bed if I wanted to get up and fly in the morning.

April 12 [Rabindranath Tagore]

April 12

Since I didn't have my flight clothes, after sex and snuggles I had to trot for my morning exercise. That was okay; it's good to exercise everything. But I've decided I don't like the sidewalks so much; it feels like my hooves are wearing down too much. The cement that makes up the sidewalks is very rough which is probably good for human traction but not as good for hooves.

I waved to a blue-haired woman who was getting her newspaper, and she waved back at me. I hadn't seen her ever before, but she obviously had lived there for a while. As I continued past, I thought about how strange it is when you really think about meeting people or ponies in passing. Like my classmates, they had lives of their own before they’d met me, but now I was a part of their lives and they were a part of mine.

The blue-haired woman has probably heard me clopping by her house before, and maybe even seen me out her windows, and until just today I had no idea that she even existed. And there could be some day in the future when I'm back in Equestria that she misses the sound of my hooves trotting by her house.

That was kind of a strange thought to have in the morning, but sometimes when I was out trotting my mind went off odd places.

After my shower and breakfast, I sat down at my desk and stared at my paper again. There was a poem that wanted to be let out, but it was stuck in my head. There were a whole bunch of ideas that had half-occurred to me while I was trotting down Academy Street or rinsing the soap out of my wings, but they'd all gone and hid.

Clicking on my pen with my tongue didn't make them come back, and neither did going from the desk to the bed, so after too long spent in frustration, I finally gave up. The words would come when they wanted to, but I couldn't force them.

I set my paper back down and looked out the window for a little while. There were skeleton-trees outside, and when they decided that it was spring they'd get leafy, but they were waiting for the right time, and maybe I was, too. Maybe this was my mind's way of telling me I wasn't ready yet.

Once when I was a filly I was looking over the edge of a cloud (I wasn't ready to fly yet) and down below I saw a ship that was making circles outside the harbor, and I didn't know why they wouldn't just go in. Only later did my Mom tell me that they had to wait for the tide to be right because otherwise they'd scrape open the bottom of their ship and it would sink. How must those sailors have felt to be so close to their port and yet they couldn't go there?

I looked out at the tree again. It was waiting. The ship had been waiting. I was waiting.

Sometimes that was all you could do.

I ate lunch with Cedric and Leon and Trevor. I was a bit hesitant 'cause of how the last time had gone, and I might not have if Leon hadn't come up next to me in the line and asked if he could carry my tray.

I couldn't say no, so I let him and then followed him over to his table. He set it down and made a big show of making sure that it would stay on the table and my ears drooped and I said that I was really sorry for overreacting. He said that we were cool, but when I went around to nuzzle him he held his hand out and pushed me back a little and said that we weren't that cool. Then he saw the look on my face and kind of glanced around the room to make sure nobody was looking and ran his hand through my mane and told me that by the end of the semester he'd be the laughingstock of the football team.

Just then Cedric set down his tray and told him that he was already the laughingstock of the football team. He said that the only reason anybody watched the games at all was to see his sack.

I said that I'd like to see it, too, and both of them looked at each other and just started laughing. I knew that I'd missed something, but that happened a lot when the two of them were together. They both had a strange sort of relationship, and I couldn't quite figure it out, no matter how hard I tried.

When Trevor sat down, they calmed down a little bit, but both of them were still snickering a little.

Conrad surprised us by not being in class when we started. There was an empty glass vase on his desk, and a small folded card leaned up against it that just said 'in memory.'

We kind of looked around at each other trying to figure out what the reason was, and finally five minutes after class had started a girl named Erica went up to the desk and opened the card and started to read.

It was a poem inside, about how the flowers the poet had described a hundred years ago were dead and gone but there were new flowers now. After she read the poem she untied the card from the vase and passed it around and pretty soon we were talking about the poem and what it meant.

We almost didn't notice when he came into class, because everyone was focused on the poem. But he spoke, reciting another poem:

I asked of Destiny, “Tell me who with relentless hand pushes me on?”
Destiny told me to look behind.
I turned and saw my own self behind pushing forward the self in front.

He told us that the man who had written those poems was called Rabindranath Tagore and he had been a poet from India. He told us about his travels and how he also had been awarded a Nobel Prize.

He said that we could have a whole class on just Rabindranath Tagore and that we could have a whole second class comparing Tagore to Kipling, but that life was too short and then he read us another poem from The Gardener, which was the 38th.

Then class was over, and I went right to the library before anybody else thought of it and asked one of the librarians to help me find that book. I was sure that they would have it; the library has three floors which must mean that they have a copy of nearly every book that there is.

He showed me how to use the computer that knew where the books were, and then gave me directions to find it.

It was on a top shelf, so I had to fly up to get it. The library had little stepstools on wheels, but it wasn't tall enough for me to reach the book. I felt a little bit guilty when I got it because a lot of places it isn't polite to fly inside without having permission first, but nobody yelled at me.

The same card that lets me into the dining hall and the dorms lets me borrow library books, but instead of swiping it through a reader, there is a wand that reads the stripes on the book and the stripes on my card, and then the computer that knows where all the books are knows that Silver Glow has The Gardener.

Before dinner, I got done with my homework for tomorrow’s classes even though I wanted to read the poetry book right away, and then it was time for dinner.

When I got back to my dorm room, I sat right down on my bed and read through the whole thing. The book was very interesting; it had English on one side and on the other it had the original language which looked very beautiful, even though I couldn't read it at all.

And I really liked the poems, too. I hoped that I hadn't spoiled class for myself on Thursday by reading these. It felt a little bit like I was cheating by reading ahead, which was funny because I didn't feel that way in any of my other classes. But then I just pictured myself confessing and Conrad would just smile and ask me which was my favorite poem and why.

Author's Note

The Gardener 85

The Gardener 38

All of The Gardener

April 13 [Fermented Cabbage]

April 13

It was actually feeling properly spring-like outside, finally. I know Michigan is in the north, which is probably why spring is delayed, but they ought to have their first day of spring scheduled better to account for that.

I flew northwest, past the dirt mines and into the farmland. There were little wispy cumulus clouds way up high, higher than a pegasus could fly even if she had permission, and a bunch of long narrow airplane clouds. As I watched, I could see another one making a trail: the airplane itself nothing more than a glint in the sunlight.

I wound up going a bit further than I had intended to and found a long strip of land that had big metal towers carrying wires off into the distance. That was how electricity got from one city to another.

Humans had a lot of different ways of making it. There were factories that turned fuel into electricity, and there were also glass panels that made sunlight into electricity and big windmills that did it, too. I knew about them because all of them were on the list of places I wasn't supposed to go, especially the places that used nuclear fuel to make electricity. There was one of those called Palisades not all that far from Kalamazoo, and I wondered if that was where the wires came from.

I flew along above them for a little while, until I got to a big cement lot where there was an electricity switching yard that had all kinds of wires coming and going. Humans build a lot of really big things and it must be hard to keep track of it all.

One of the sets of wires curved around and went back south to Kalamazoo, so I followed it just because I was curious. They were a better path to follow than railroad tracks, because the tops of the towers were above the trees, and they had a much wider path where everything had been trimmed down.

I took a little detour when I got to a runway, and I checked all around to make sure that there weren't any airplanes nearby. I didn't see any, but I called the airplane directors to make sure. I knew what it was called, because the roof of the building said Walker on it.

When I was taking my shower, I got to thinking how much better it had been to take a shower with Meghan, and I decided I should ask her if I could come over on Thursday night and watch another Harry Potter movie and then maybe share the shower in the morning.

We got to do group work in math, which was really fun. There were a couple of students who grumbled about it, but I always thought that you learned better when you did something together. So Keith and Sean and me all formed into a little group and Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee gave us our math problem and we set to work figuring it out. I got out my weather wheel and both Keith and Sean got out their graphing calculators, and then we discussed what kind of equation we would need to solve each point, and then took turns calculating the answer.

They were really impressed with my weather wheel, because they'd never seen anything like it used before. But it wasn't all that complicated when you knew how, and it certainly wasn't as smart as their calculators, which could even draw graphs and stuff on the screen. I guess sometimes people (and ponies) are amazed by something that they've never seen before, no matter how complicated the inner workings are.

Plus their calculators were more precise than my weather wheel, which I thought might be an important factor later. So I guess I ought to get one and figure out how to use it. It would be really humiliating to fail math class because my calculations weren't precise enough.

We had a really boring lunch meal, which probably meant something special for dinner. Christine said that she thought they were going to do another ethnic meal, and I said that it wasn't fair that they didn't do any pony ethnic meals. Sean said that was because humans couldn't eat hay, and Christine punched him in the shoulder.

When we were done eating, I went over to Meghan's table and asked her if I could come over tomorrow night and watch Harry Potter and she said that would be nice.

Professor Amy had us watch a documentary film about snake-handling, which was where people who were Christians would play with poison snakes because they believed that if they were faithful enough, God would keep them safe from snakebites. So far in the Bible, there hadn't been anything about handling snakes. I supposed if God told them to then they ought to, but when we were discussing the film after it was over, nobody in class thought that the Bible said anything about it.

I reminded myself that I wasn't supposed to judge, just observe, so I kept my hoof down even though I had a lot of questions. And I didn't have enough knowledge to participate in the discussion of what a normal Christian service looked like, because I'd only ever been to the Easter service, and I didn't know how normal that was. But I paid attention, and the class together decided that drinking poison was not part of a normal church service, nor was healing.

Then she said that culture gives meaning to what we do; that nothing by itself has meaning except what the culture teaches us. She said that as we grow up, we have to decide whether to follow along with what we learned as children, or taking our own paths. And she said that she didn't want to speak for anyone in the class, but she was sure that some people in the classroom were having their childhood experiences validated, while others of us were making our own path.

That gave me something to think about after class. Nothing in my foalhood had prepared me for being an exchange student on Earth, 'cause we didn't even know it was there then. So I guess I was making my own path.

And that kind of bothered me a little bit, because it felt like I was showing that what I'd learned as a filly was wrong, and I didn't think that was so. Then I thought about it a bit more and decided that sometimes there's stuff that comes up that you couldn't anticipate or plan for before, and that didn't mean you were rejecting your culture. You were just adapting to the new situation.

When my Mom went to the weather conference, she wasn't expecting to come back pregnant with me. And when I decided that I wanted to go to college to be a weather supervisor, I didn't expect that I'd get the chance to go to Earth, but both of those things happened.

Dinner was German, and I was thankful that even when they had special meals they kept some of the basics the same, including the salad table. The main hot food line had various different kind of sausage and fermented cabbage, which didn't smell appealing at all. Everyone else at the table liked it, though.

They did have German-themed dessert, though, and that was a nice change from the usual cookies and pies.

After dinner, I read through some of Samuel. I learned how Samuel was favored in God's sight, and Eli's sons had been bad, so God punished them. And the Ark was captured, but it brought a curse wherever it was, so they sent it back with a peace offering. Then the Philistines attacked but the Israelites had learned their lesson and did what God had told them to and won the battle.

Then Samuel got old and decided to crown Saul (who was looking for donkeys) as the new king. And he fought in wars for all the time he was king, so Samuel decided to make David king instead.

I probably should have finished it, but Peggy came home and we talked for a little bit and she told me that she was going to be gone tomorrow night and Friday and all of the weekend because she was going on a little trip with her boyfriend. I asked if she was worried about missing her Friday classes, and she said that she wasn't; she could make it up later.

That didn't seem right to me, but then I'd skipped one of Conrad's classes to go on a road trip, so I couldn't really say anything about that.

So I packed up my flight gear and went off to Aric's house, even though it was a bit early. He was watching a movie with David and Angela, and it was a really weird movie that had bees in it. David said it was called Wax and I had no idea what was going on at all. After it was over and we were in the bedroom together, I asked Aric what it had been about, and he didn't know either. He said that David had really weird taste in movies.

Then he told me that he was going to be gone for the weekend, because David had sold a radio console on E bay, and when they'd tried to ship it they had discovered that it was too big to be mailed, so they were going to drive it down there in Winston.

That was disappointing; now I didn't know what I was going to do for the weekend, but surely something would come up.

I didn't let it get me down, though. I'd been the one to desert him last weekend, so I couldn't be upset that he’d made plans without me. I told him I'd miss him and to be careful and then I climbed on top of him and pretty soon we weren't thinking about anything beyond the moment.

April 14 [রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর]

April 14

I took another morning flight 'cause I had all my gear with me, but it wasn't as far as yesterday's. I stayed over town, going west to the Maple Hill Mall. On a whim, I flew down to the Taco Bell, and it was open. I thought about going in and having breakfast there, but then decided that it would be more fun if I was with my friends. So I flew off and back to campus.

It's kind of weird not having anything to do in the morning. I guess a lot of students sleep in; that's what Peggy likes to do when she can.

Since I had all sorts of free time until lunch, I got my sheets off my bed and took them down to the laundry room and put them in the washing machine, and then while they were being cleaned I decided that I would go to the bookstore and see if they had any good calculators.

They did; and I got a nice one like Keith had. There was a pretty girl working at the counter named Angel who I had seen around campus occasionally and she had curly blonde hair that I just wanted to push and see if it was as springy as it looked.

When I got back to my room, I tried to open my calculator but it was in a pegasus-proof package and I had to go to Rebekka's room and have her cut it open for me.

I not only got a calculator, but I got a whole book of instructions, and I spent the rest of the morning sitting out on the quad (it was too nice a day to be inside) reading through the instruction booklet and working the calculator on the sample equations. There were a lot of them where I didn't even know what I was calculating, because the symbols were totally different than ours. When they came up in class, though, I'd know.

Before lunch, I took my sheets out of the dryer and made my bed again, then wanted to get right in it because fresh-washed sheets are the most wonderful feeling in the world. It wasn't until I started going to university that I even had sheets at all. Having them made me feel like a princess when I got in bed.

I probably should have sat with Trevor and Cedric and Leon, but I hadn't sat at Meghan's table in a while, and so I sat there and four of us decided that we'd try to talk to each other only in Equestrian. Amy was kind of left out, though, 'cause she couldn't speak it.

And when we named foods, that was kind of fun. There was stuff that we didn't have, so there wasn't a proper word for, and I had to think on my hooves to come up with something. I had to ask them what the meat was and what it came from, 'cause I didn't know. Sometimes they didn’t know either and had to guess.

That was kind of interesting, because of course there was a lot of stuff that there was an English word for but not an Equestrian word, and it went the other way, too. I'm not all that smart with languages, but I bet that if hot dogs become popular in Equestria, that's what they'll be called, rather than 'cooked carrion tubes,' which is what I called them.

Conrad started out by reading us selections of really short poems from a book called Stray Birds. Erica said that they sounded like proverbs, which is a name for a small bit of wisdom. (There is also a book in the Bible called Proverbs and I am looking forward to reading it.) Sometimes we called them old mare's tales, 'cause they were the kind of thing your granddam might say to you.

It's a different kind of thought to appreciate them. They don't really describe a moment or a feeling like the poems I like best, but they make you think in a different way.

He read one that said the sky's language was eternal silence, and before I could think about it I raised my hoof and said that was not so, the sky was always talking, and it was just that humans were often deaf to it. Then I thought that Conrad might be mad at me for disagreeing, but he wasn't. He just smiled and said that perhaps I ought to think of a way to describe the language of the sky so that humans could understand it.

Conrad finished off class by reading one of his favorite poems called Sonar Tori, or The Golden Boat. It was about a man who loaded all his treasure on a boat and then it was full and the boat sailed off without him, leaving him alone on the shore.

When he was finished with the poem he told us that we were free to go and just stayed sitting at his desk as the class left, and it wasn't until I was in the hallway that I realized that I was one of Conrad's golden boats, so I turned around and went back into the class and hugged him.

I sat in a tree branch and listened to the voice of the sky. Tagore said that trees put roots into the ground and roots into the sky, and I think he is right about that. That's why earth ponies and pegasus ponies were meant to be together: we're the two halves of the tree.

I wrote my observations down in my class notebook and decided that I needed to learn more English words for the sky because I had written down a lot of Equestrian words since I didn't know how to say it in English.

Also it is hard to balance a notebook on a tree branch and write in it.

After dinner, I went over to see Liz, and we talked about all the fighting the Isrealites were doing some more. She explained some history of the region and how all the different tribes were constantly fighting, and said how archaeologists had found the Moabite Stone, which gave the Moabite perspective on some of the stuff in the Bible. So I was really curious about that and she found it on her computer and we compared what they had written to what the Bible had said.

Then I went over to Meghan's to watch Harry Potter. Amy was studying and she said that she could put headphones on and try to ignore us, but I thought that would be kind of rude. So Meghan said that we could go to the lounge because her folding computer could show the movie, too. Then I said that we could watch it in my room because Peggy wasn't there, so we wouldn't distract anybody, and Meghan thought that was a good idea, so she got her computer and the movie and a bag of popcorn and back in Trowbridge we made the popcorn and set the computer on my desk and watched it from my bed.

When it was over, Meghan asked if she could stay and I told her she could so she brushed a few stray pieces of popcorn off the bed and then I could see that she was thinking about what she was going to wear to bed because her sleeping clothes that she normally wore were back in her room.

But I guess she was getting more comfortable without them, because she pretty quickly took off everything but her panties and then joined me in bed. I curled up with my head on her chest and she put her arm around me and we fell asleep together.

Author's Note

Stray Birds

The Golden Boat (Sonar Tori)

April 15 [linguistic relativity]

April 15

Since my window didn't have curtains, I woke up at my normal time and then I had to make a decision. I could stay in bed and snuggle with Meghan until she woke up, but if I did I wouldn't get any morning exercise.

I could wake her up, and then tell her that if she wanted to stay around that we could take a shower together when I got back from flying. But it was kind of mean to wake someone up and then not be ready to do stuff with them.

Or I could leave her a note and hope that she read it, and then she could make her own decision when she woke up. That was probably the best—well, the best would have been if we'd talked about it last night but it was too late for that now. So I wrote a little note and left it on top of her folding computer and then went off to go flying.

When I got back, she was gone. She'd left a note for me on my desk apologizing for leaving, but that she didn't know when I was going to be back and she didn't want to be late for her classes. That was disappointing, but I understood. So I took a shower by myself.

Christine is a lot of fun at the breakfast table and she saw that I was looking a little bit down so she got a bowl of sugar cereal that she likes and she picked all the marshmallow shapes out of it and offered it to me, saying that it was unlucky charms and that it was just the thing for a pegasus who looked glum.

Even without them it was super-sugary but it was also rude to refuse food so I ate about half the bowl before I felt oversugared. I guess that's one way to wake up in the morning, but the energy just doesn't stay with you.

I brought my new calculator to Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee's class, but I didn't have to get it out. He spent the whole class talking about the Lorenz equations and drawing matrixes and equations on the markerboard, and I had to really pay attention on my notes.

During lunch I sat next to Sean and he showed me how to do a bunch of things on my calculator that the instructions hadn't said. Christine said that we were being a bunch of geeks, so Sean typed the number 58008 into my calculator and turned it upside down and showed it to Christine and she rolled her eyes and said that we weren't in middle school any more.

Joe said that since we were college students we ought to have a serious scholarly discussion over lunch, but everyone else said that was too much effort, and Sean said he'd rather steer the conversation back towards boobs. Christine said that was unfair because she had the only pair and then Joe said that he'd never thought about it before but where and then he just shut up and his face got really red.

So I wasn't sure what to make of that, and Sean went to say something and then just clamped his mouth right back shut when Christine gave him a death stare. Then she said that since he wanted to talk about boobs she knew someone who didn’t use letters for cup size but measured them in Hermans, which was a measure of handfuls. I asked if the different shapes had names, too, and she nodded and started to list them off and describe them, like bell-shaped and round and asymetrical. I said mine were probably closest to athletic and not even a full Herman, but that they would get a bit bigger if I was about to foal, and that was when Joe's face got so red I thought he might catch on fire. All the while, Christine had such an innocent smile on her face, and she turned to Sean and asked him if he would like to know more.

He shook his head and suggested that we talk about anything else, so Christine said since we were on the subject anyway, she'd tell me about Mardi Gras in New Orleans and that was sort of related to boobs, since there were places where you could get necklaces for showing them off. But that wasn't the main point of it.

She explained how it was a religious festival, the carnival season starts on January 6, which is called Twelfth Night, and that Mardi Gras is the very end of it. There were groups called Krewes which organized the parades, and they started parading the week before Mardi Gras, beginning with the Druids and the Mystic Krewe of Nyx. Then on Mardi Gras there are the biggest parades and people wear elaborate costumes and masks, and they toss out all sorts of trinkets from floats. It’s the last day of celebration before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent, and that’s when some Christians fast or give up something else for the forty days leading up to Easter.

Christine wasn’t sure about all the religious parts of the festival, because she said she wasn’t a good Catholic girl. But she said it was a lot of fun and it was a shame that I probably wouldn’t get to see it. She said that I could watch videos of it on YouTube, but that wasn’t the same as being there.

As I was going to anthropology, I thought about Joe saying that we ought to have a serious discussion, and I thought that we had, even if they hadn't wanted to hear all of it. I now knew how women measured the size and shape of their boobs, and I knew about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and I hadn't known anything about either before lunch.

Professor Amy talked about linguistic relativity, which was the idea that the language reflected the culture and the worldview. She said that the two most important thinkers who had developed this philosophy were Sapir and Whorf, and right away I thought she was on to something. I kept running into places where we didn’t have words or where humans didn’t, and I’d even learned once that all the words for sky and sky-things in Equestrian came from Pegaios (which was the proper name for our old language, but a lot of ponies just called it Pegos).

But then she talked about it more and it wasn’t just the words the language had or didn’t, but the very fundamentals of how their language was arranged. Concepts that meant something to one group of people might not be important enough to another to mention. She explained how some cultures had different words for water if it was in a jug than if it was in a lake, or how people sorted the most basic things, like kinds of animals. She asked a couple of people in class who weren’t native Americans if they could think of examples from their own culture, and I raised my hoof and said that we had three different classifications for birds, but as far as I knew on Earth there was only one.

Well, that raised a bit of debate in class until I explained that we had different names for the different types of birds, but that ‘bird’ had three separate forms, and that wasn’t even counting hybrids that they didn’t have on earth.

When I was eating dinner it suddenly occurred to me that I would have all weekend without any of my closest friends around. In one way that was an opportunity, but in another it was a kind of terrifying feeling. So I asked at dinner what people were doing and Christine said that they were LARPing again and everyone wanted to know when I was going to come back because they all missed me.

So I put on the caparison that Kathleen had made for me, and my necklace and my glaive, too, and went to Hoben and met up with everybody. They said that I wasn’t supposed to use my real name, but they liked how I said that I was in the second ile of Commander Hurricane's hipparchy, because that sounded really official. Since I wasn’t very good at coming up with a fake name I had to ask for help and everyone tossed out different names until someone suggested Sapphire Frost and I thought that was a very good name, so that’s what I called myself all night long.

We played until it was really late, and I had a lot of fun, but by the end I was nodding my head with sleepiness. The chairs in the lounge were really tempting, and it was all I could do to not just lie in one of them and fall asleep right there, but I managed to make my way back to my room and get undressed before crawling up into bed.

April 16 [South Haven]

April 16

Since I'd stayed up late LARPing, I slept late, too.

I felt a strange sort of anticipation for the weekend: maybe I was alone 'cause Peggy and Aric were gone, and maybe I didn't have any plans, but that just meant that I'd have to come up with something to do on my own, and I was sure I could think of something.

When I looked outside, it looked all bright and sunny, and I opened the window to check and it was already warm and properly spring outside, at long last. I'd been worried that the last nice day had just been a fluke, but now I was sure spring was here for real. Any time now the trees would make leaves and the seasons would go on like they ought to.

I was already planning to go on a good long flight today, and was getting in my flight gear when my portable telephone chirped at me. I was so not used to it making noises that I looked around the room before I figured out where the noise was coming from, and then I remembered that my telephone made that noise when I had a telegram.

It was from Meghan, and she said that since it was a nice day the girls were going to go to the beach at South Haven. That sounded like a lot of fun to me—the beach in Los Angeles had been nice—and I could do something else I'd wanted to do as well. So I sent her a short telegram back saying that I was coming over to their room and we could talk about it because I knew that we could make arrangements over the telephone but that wasn't as easy as a face-to-face meeting.

So once I was over at their room I said that I wanted to fly to South Haven, along the route of the trail (that was easier, because I could follow it and there weren't any cars on it) and I could meet them on the beach and play all day and then they could give me a ride back if I was too tired to fly. I still didn't know for sure what my flight limits were on Earth.

Meghan was a little bit worried about me, but I assured her that I could fly a lot further than that back in Equestria, and it would probably be similar on Earth. She said to make sure I took my portable telephone and to call them or send a telegram if I needed help and they would come and rescue me. But I didn't expect to.

They wanted to go before breakfast to get the full day, but I hated flying on a completely empty stomach, so I said that I was going to eat first and then I'd be along.

We arranged a place to meet, and then Meghan hugged me and said that she was looking forward to seeing me on the beach and I went to get my meal while they were finishing packing up.

I didn't want to eat too much, just enough for energy that would stick with me, so I had oatmeal and a small portion of scrambled eggs. Then I got ready and called the airplane directors and once I had permission I took off and headed towards the trailhead.

The beginning was familiar, and then before too long I was in uncharted territory, for me. There were signs at every intersection so that I would know where the trail was (but it wasn't too hard to follow, since it wasn't a road), and it went northwest for a bit and then curved southwest at a place called Alamo.

I passed by a farm which had a big pipe on wheels, and then after that there was one that had lots of irrigation ditches and I went right through the middle of that one. And there were lots of little lakes and a couple of big ones on either side of the trail. Some places I could see how it was navigating the high ground, and other places I wasn't sure why it went where it did.

Right after that was a town called Gobles, and then after I was by there I was out in farmland again pretty quickly. Most of the fields were fallow, but there were some pastures that had cows or sheep in them, and some smaller ones with horses.

I considered flying down and saying 'hi' to the horses, but I was probably better off leaving them alone. I did give a friendly whinny down to a couple of pastures as I passed over, though. And it was good to know that they were there, because there were water troughs in all the pastures, and if a horse could drink from them, so could I if I got thirsty.

I did have a couple of water bottles with me in case I needed to drink and couldn't find any other source of water. And a can of anchovies in case I needed some more energy. But I'd have to land to eat or drink, and I wanted to not land unless I had to.

Not too long after leaving Bloomingdale I went over a pretty big forest that had a few houses in it. And it stayed forested until I got to Grand Junction. I knew that the Kal-Haven trail used to be a railroad, and I could see that it had once connected to another in Grand Junction. Some of the trackbed was still there, and the other railroad was still in place, and even had a train on it when I flew over.

When I got to Lacota my wings were starting to get a bit sore. This was the longest stretch of flying I'd done since I had been on Earth, and I was wondering if I was at the halfway point yet. I thought I was, but I also thought that if I had been thinking of turning back, now it was too late. I wouldn't make it back to Kalamazoo without some rest.

I still couldn't help but make a slight detour because south of town was a squiggly road with a grandstand along a straight stretch, and I wasn't sure what it was for. It didn't go anywhere; cars on it could only go around and around and what was the point of that? Unless humans had sports like barrel racing but with cars.

After that, I could start to see features on the lakeshore, and I knew I was getting pretty close. I’d been seeing the lake for a while, but it was kind of hard to judge just how far it was, ‘cause it went along the whole horizon.

Pretty soon the farmland gave way to more and more buildings which was South Haven, and the trail ended by a bend in the river. I kept close track of where that was so I could go back along the trail if I wanted, and then followed the river along until it went out into the lake, 'cause that's where the beaches were, on either side.

I had a little bit of trouble finding my friends, but not too much. They were all near where they said they'd be, sunning on the beach, and I managed to sneak in without any of them seeing me until I'd almost landed, then Amy pointed in my direction.

They weren't the only ones who noticed me, of course, and there were a bunch of people pointing and gawking when I came down and landed.

I said that I was going to go in the water to cool off, and Meghan helped me get my saddlebags and flight vest off, and then I galloped down the beach not caring who saw and when my hooves hit the firmer wet sand at the edge I took off and glided out a few ponylengths before splashing down in the lake.

It was bitterly cold but it felt really nice after all the exercise I'd just done. Unlike in California, there weren't lots of swimmers in the water. Probably they waited until it had warmed up some before going in.

When I'd cooled back off, I shook myself off on shore and then went back and everyone shuffled around to give me a spot to stretch out. Since I was wet, nobody wanted to touch me, but the sun was out and I'd dry off before too long.

They'd brought a big icebox full of food and we shared it among ourselves for lunch. I offered my anchovies, but nobody wanted them, so I put them back in my saddlebags to have for later.

I went into the water one more time, and I managed to convince Meghan and Lisa to join me. Both Amy and Becky said that we were stupid, and we agreed that was probably so, but what was the fun of coming to the beach if you didn't go in the water, even if it was cold?

They didn't stay too long, though, and I played around by myself a little bit but it wasn't that much fun to be alone so I left the water and went back with them.

We spent the afternoon sort of dozing off and on and looking out at other people on the beach and the boats that were coming out of the river every now and then. For a while Becky used my back as a pillow and I didn't mind because I had my head resting on Meghan's lap and she was petting my mane and I had no desire to move.

Once it was finally time to leave, everyone helped carry things including me (I had beach towels draped over my back). I didn't really want to leave, but I knew it was time and I didn't think I would be up to flying back to Kalamazoo on my own. So we all crowded into the Focus, me in the back between Meghan and Amy.

Although we were back in Kalamazoo in time for dinner if we hurried, nobody wanted to go to the dining hall so we ordered pizza and while they were waiting for it to arrive everyone took turns getting dressed in their lounging clothes but of course I didn't have to.

I wouldn’t have minded watching another Harry Potter movie, but they wanted something more lighthearted than that and there was a little debate before we finally settled on Over the Hedge, which I thought was really funny. Squirrels are really like that and they're always chattery and angry when you're in their tree.

The movie was almost over when Amy got a telephone call and said that it was Russ and he was going to pick her up in a few minutes, so she got some new clothes and went to the bathroom to get ready for him and pretty soon she got another call and left. I didn't think she'd be coming back for the night, because I knew why girls went to boys' houses.

We sat around talking for a while longer, until Lisa and Becky finally decided that it was time to go to bed. When I looked towards Meghan's bed she just nodded and I pushed the covers back and hopped up on the bed. Then she took her shirt off and threw it at my head. Before I could get myself free from it she was in bed and pulling the covers up, but only partway so that I could curl up on her bare chest like I liked to.

If she'd meant to throw the shirt at me to hide the fact that she wasn't wearing any clothes she ought to have pulled the covers up higher, because I could see and I was about to say something but then I thought maybe she'd be embarrassed.

I reached down with my hoof and hooked on the covers and pulled them up a little bit higher and she sort of tensed and then relaxed. Then she leaned down and kissed the top of my head and put her arm around my back and pulled me close to her.

When I was snuggled up against her to her satisfaction she traced her hand along my spine all the way to my dock a couple of times, then she leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head, and so I tilted my head back and nuzzled her on the bottom of her chin then closed my eyes and fell asleep on her chest.

April 17 [Dreamcatcher]

April 17

Meghan must have pushed me off her chest when she slept, and I must have rolled over too and then gotten trapped between her and the wall 'cause I was on my back and her arm was draped across my belly which wasn't the way I normally slept at all, even when I was with somepony else.

Not that I minded too much. I knew that it was probably time to get up and exercise, even though her curtains were still trying to trick me into thinking it was earlier than it was. But I'd exercised plenty yesterday and I was warm and didn't feel like moving at all. I shifted around so that I was a little bit closer to her and our heads were touching and rested my hoof on her hand and closed my eyes and sort of dozed off but not really.

When she first started stirring, she pulled her hand out from under mine and wrapped it around my hoof and squeezed it which woke me up all the way because even though I knew that humans were being friendly when they did that my instincts were to try and get away.

I guess I must have jerked away from her a little bit, because she let go of my hoof and dropped her hand back on my belly and I told her it was okay so she started petting me right along my ruff until she found my belly button and then she felt around that with her finger and then announced that I had a belly button as if she had just discovered fire.

I reminded her that she had one, too, and stuck my wing against her in more or less the right area—as close as I could get with her that near to me.

Meghan pushed the covers back so that she could see me better, and just looked down at my stomach, kind of pulling the hair aside until she could see it. Once she was happy with her inspection she moved her hand along my side and asked if she could feel under my wing which was also kind of a weird thing to ask but I let her run her fingers through the downy feathers right near my wing joints. She said I was fluffy and warm and I told her that mother pegasuses keep their foals warm under their wings, and then I wiggled out from under her hand and rolled over and stretched my wing across her. I couldn't cover very much of her 'cause she was bigger than me, but I did the best I could.

She traced her fingers along my wing for a little while and then said that we probably ought to get up so I folded my wing back against my side and waited for her to roll on her back because I knew she'd have to go that way to get out of bed. As soon as she had, I stretched my wing out against her belly to stop her then scooted over until I could rest my head on her breast and I told her that I wasn't ready to get up yet.

She tried to reach down to pull the covers back up over herself, so I stretched a wing across her stomach and said that I would keep her warm and she gave up on her efforts to escape bed and concentrated on petting my mane and scratching behind my ear and I was about the most contented pony ever.

We couldn't stay in bed forever, so I eventually let her go, and she went in the bathroom to start the shower. On my way in I opened the curtains to let some sunlight in the room, and when I got there she was already in: she was a lot quicker at getting in the shower when she wasn't wearing clothes.

Because we'd practiced before the shower went a lot better this time, and I decided that I kind of liked the crowding because it kept us close.

When we were done she wrapped a towel around herself and then started helping me dry off. She asked if I ever got out of a shower on really dry days and became fluffy all over, and I said that hadn't happened yet.

Meghan was a little mad that I had opened the curtains because she said now anybody could see into the room and I reminded her that the ground was several floors below so that the only student who could see in was me, and I was already here looking at her. She looked down at me and then said she would give me something to see and took hold of her towel and pulled it open and then wrapped herself back up again and told me that exhibitionism had never been her thing and didn't it feel a little weird that everyone on campus had probably seen my junk by now?

I said it was something I never thought of at all; it was no different than any other part of my body, and I didn't understand why it should be different. She said that it must be nice, and then said that she was going to try it, so she put her towel on the bed and lay down on her back and said it felt really weird so I got up next to her and covered her with my wing.

It would have been nice to spend the whole day with her, but she said that she had a group meeting after lunch and she was getting hungry since she'd skipped breakfast and I was, too, but I'd been too polite to say anything. So she finally got up and got dressed and then we went to lunch together and sat in a booth all the way in the back corner which wasn't where she normally sat.

When she had to leave to go to her group meeting I nuzzled her on the cheek and then she turned her head and kissed me right on the nose and then on the mouth and then waved at me as she walked off, and I wanted to just leave my tray where it was and follow her but I wasn't invited to her group meeting.

When I'd finished my dessert I took my tray back and flew across the quad back to my dorm room. It was a beautiful day outside and I was planning to go up to my room and get a book and sit in a tree and read it but when I folded my wings in I felt a loose feather catch and when I pulled it out I remembered that I had been thinking of making dreamcatchers and maybe today was the perfect opportunity. So instead of going back to my room right away I knocked on Rebekka's door and when she answered I asked if she could help me.

She'd never made one before, but she said that she would love to help, so we went to the Fine Arts building to get supplies. Rebekka agreed that it was too nice a day to be inside, so once she'd filled her bag we went back to the lawn and sat on the hill where the sun could shine right on us.

Rebekka made the first one while I watched in order to get an idea how to do it. For someone who had never made one before, she was really good at it and I could see why she was an artist. I'd sometimes seen ponies make landscape paintings along the seashore and I could never figure out how they could take something that they saw and then mix up some paint and put it on a canvas so easily when I couldn't even draw a good stickpony.

She had to go back and redo some of her work because it was her first one but by the time she was done it looked almost as good as the ones in the shop, and I liked it better because I'd seen it being made. So then I set to doing it myself, and it wasn't easy. I think if I had been making them for anything other than as a gift, I would have given up because it was so hard, and she had to help with the little knots that made it all stay together.

When it was time to put the feathers on I stretched out a piece of string and she reached in with the scissors to cut it then said that she thought it might be a bit more personal if I tied them on with a strand of hair from my tail and I thought that was a really good idea, so she reached through my tail until she found one that was just right and snipped it off and we cut it into three pieces and tied one feather to each.

I was pretty satisfied with how it had turned out. It wasn't as neat as the ones I'd seen, but it was a lot more personal, and I knew just where the first one ought to go.

She packed up the supplies and took them back to my room so that I could make more in my free time and I gave her a feather that wasn't the right size for a dreamcatcher, and she tied it into her hair and then invited me to dinner with her and Kat and Ruth.

After dinner there was still enough light for me to sit on a tree branch and finish Samuel—although it turned out there was another Samuel after the first one—and then I went back to my room and wrote a letter to my sister, started on another dreamcatcher, and then went to bed.

April 18 [Lorenz Equations]

April 18

I'd opened the window last night because it was so nice out and I was glad I had. Over the winter the dorm got kind of stale, but now there was a nice fresh breeze coming through and the first thing I did was stick my muzzle up to the window and got a good sniff of the air outside. Then I got dressed in my flight gear and took off.

I wasn't all that far above the trees before I did my first loop. Then I flew over the neighborhood to Aric's house but his truck wasn't there and that worried me a little bit. I tried to put it aside; I knew machines broke sometimes and maybe Winston had but he was clever and probably could have fixed it.

I shouldn't have looked, because that bothered me on my whole morning flight and on my way back I flew over his house again and it still wasn't there.

Peggy still wasn't back, either. She probably would have had her boyfriend take her right to class, unless she had a duffel bag like the one that she took to the resort, then she would want to leave that in our room. Or maybe it was still in the trunk of her car.

It was no good getting worked up so I tried to push them to the back of my mind and worry about the now. At breakfast, I wasn’t being very social until Christine started stealing little bits of everybody's food to build a little display on her tray. She had a wall made out of shredded wheat and a house of toast and a path made out of bacon where the sausage link worms could travel. Then she brought down her fork and stabbed one and ate it and said that she now understood what it was to be a god.

Christine is a very strange person.

She cheered me up enough that I forgot all about Peggy and Aric for most of breakfast and didn't start thinking about them again until math class. And then I had to push it aside again because we were still talking about Lorenz Equations and how important they were. Instead of using the markerboard, he lowered a movie screen and showed us pictures of the equations being drawn out, and that really helped to explain how it worked and how the spirals formed on their own eigenplanes, because you could actually watch the lines being drawn and see how they were behaving.

Where it really helped was when he started changing the values, which changed the spirals. At some point he said that if they went out they would intersect and he showed us a picture of them which looked like two interconnected loops. But what was really neat was how when he showed us a movie of the lines being made and they made their own spirals for a while and then suddenly started looping around the central point on the other side.

When he explained how that system worked in water, my ears suddenly perked up. He said that if you imagined a big sphere of water with a heater on the bottom and a cooler on the top, and just then it clicked for me why the spirals would do this, because air was the same way and the hot air wanted to go up and the cold air wanted to go down but it got complicated because one blocked the other, so one went one way and the other went the other way and there were all sorts of eddy currents and stuff where the two interacted and that was what the equation was about.

Then he took his neat little graph-maker and showed us how the most minor difference would make different results—but they were predictably different. The two lines started off the same and then they got different after a little while, but no matter what they always wound up together on the two eigenplanes. That, he told us, was called sensitive dependence on initial condition, and he said in our next class he was going to explain to us how we couldn't measure the initial condition.

Peggy was back for lunch and I wanted to ask her if she'd seen the dreamcatcher I made for her but I didn't because maybe she didn't like it and was too nice to say anything so I thought I'd wait until she said something about it, but she didn't. I couldn't tell if that meant she didn't like it or if that meant that she hadn't seen it yet.

She told Christine that her boyfriend had taken her to the Great Wolf Lodge, which has an indoor waterpark. From her description, it sounded like it would be a very fun place to go. It was way up near the top of Michigan at a place called Traverse City and I knew that there was a big bridge near there called the Mackinac Bridge and I asked her if she had seen it and she told me it was too far away for her to see from Traverse City.

Professor Amy talked more about language relativism, explaining how color was named in different languages, and said that there were people who had entire careers just thinking about that. She gave us all a list of colors in English and said that the simple thought would be that they translated directly but that wasn't the case at all. Some languages considered blue and green two different colors, and some thought that they were the same, and the English word for the combined color (because English makes them different colors) was grue. So there were languages like Vietnamese where you had leaf grue and ocean grue. Then she said that there were other splits, like in Russian where light blue and dark blue were two completely different words, but in English they weren't.

I left class confused. Colors were colors; how could there not be the right words to name them? Who was in charge of coming up with a language that didn't know the difference between colors? I guess that Professor Amy's explanations made sense, but it still seemed like an oversight to me. You'd think that even if they hadn't noticed what they'd left out at first somebody else would have added it in later.

I spent dinner pondering that, and I finally came to the conclusion that people would only name colors if they mattered to them, just like other stuff. Earth ponies had a lot of words for plants and soil that we never used, and unicorns had their words for spells, and of course we had our words for clouds and sky and I guess to an earth pony they don't need to know exactly what kind of cloud it is and I don't need to know what kind of dirt it is and neither of us need to know about spells. So maybe for some people it wasn't as important to be specific about colors.

When I got back to my room I saw that Aric had sent me a telegram; he'd said that he was too tired to go to Durach but that I could come over after it was done and to just let myself in because he would be in bed. So I wound up excusing myself early because I really couldn't concentrate on the game, and I flew over to Aric's house and let myself in with his hidden key and then went up to his room.

He was fast asleep, so I climbed into bed next to him as quietly as possible so that I wouldn't wake him up and then I snuggled up against his side. I was a little mad that he had gotten back so late and hadn’t called me and was asleep instead of playing with me, and I was tempted to lift up the covers and see if I could wake him up the fun way, but I didn’t. I just closed my eyes and let the familiar scents of him and his room fill my senses until I was asleep.

April 19 [The Ballad of Reading Gaol]

April 19

When I woke up Aric wasn't quite awake yet so I went under the covers and by the time I was done he was awake.

While he was getting his energy back, I asked him about his trip and he said that it had taken longer than he'd planned because on the way down David gave him bad directions around Columbus and then he had gotten stuck in road construction near Charleston and then on the way back they had gotten off to a late start and then the radiator had started leaking and he'd limped it along until they got to Lima because there was a store there that had a new radiator but it was too late at night for the store to be open so they had to spend the night at the hotel and get it in the morning and then fix it before they could go back on the road again.

He said that it was all his fault; he knew that the radiator was not in very good shape but he hadn't anticipated that it was going to fail or else he would have fixed it before they left.

It sounded like the kind of adventure that is fun to talk about after it happened, but not so fun when it's happening. Lots of sailorponies told stories like that and sometimes it was hard to know what parts were true and what they were making up.

I kissed him and told him how glad I was that he was back, and then I teased him with my tail a little bit until I let him pin me on my back and get on top.

When we were done I got in my flight gear while he got dressed and he said that since it was a nice day wouldn't it be funny if I took off from his room and I thought that would be pretty funny, and it was something I'd wanted to do from our dorm room but there was a screen and I wasn't supposed to anyway.

He held the window open for me and then helped boost me up on the windowsill which I think was an excuse to get his hand under my tail one more time before I left, and then I pitched out and opened my wings really fast.

It turns out that flying out of a window isn't as easy as I thought it would be. If the window had been wider and taller it would have been a lot easier.

There were some low fluffy clouds and I circled several before finding just the perfect cloud to play with. I went around the edges of it and knocked some of the weird bits off and then set to work shaping it into a cloud-pony. It took a special kind of skill to get clouds just right and I hadn't ever been all that good at it, but by the time I was done it was a passable pony, and it would probably keep its shape for a little bit. At the rate it was drifting, I thought it would still be recognizable until it was out of Kalamazoo, and there was something satisfying about the thought of hundreds of people looking up and seeing my hoofwork.

At lunch, I sat with Trevor and Cedric and Leon and told them about the cloud I'd shaped and Trevor asked if we did that in Equestria and I told him that we did sometimes. Leon said that that was messed up, that clouds were supposed to be fluffy things that floated through the air and people guessed what they looked like. Cedric said that he was jealous that he'd never had a cloud shaped after him and I said that I wasn't much of an artist but I could try.

Leon shook his head and said that clouds weren't black enough; that that was just another example of the man putting them down. Cedric said that Leon didn't know anything about being put down by the man, unless he meant the time that he got kicked out of Rugby Grille in Birmingham for not wearing a suit.

I wasn't sure who the man was. Cedric said that it was anyone who exercised authority over you that you didn't like, and I asked him if that meant that the FAA was the man because they made me ask for permission to fly and there were places I couldn't go even if I wanted to. Leon said that I was being put down by the man. He said that we both knew the struggle, and he put out his fist so that I could bump it with my hoof.

Cedric just shook his head and said that we were both idiots, and Leon said that that might be so, but he'd rather be handsome than smart. I said I was pretty and smart and Cedric nearly choked on his drink.

Conrad told us that we were going to go back to England with our next poet and that we were going to spend the whole day on a long poem. It was called The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and it was about the time that Oscar Wilde spent in prison for loving another man.

I didn't like it.

The very thought of being imprisoned frightened me and it sounded like a terrible terrible place and yet the words were so compelling that I couldn't help but listen. And when it got around to my turn to read my voice wasn't much more than a whisper because I could see the terrible place in my mind.

We discussed the poem after but there wasn't anything that I thought I needed to say; the poem had said it all. Even the classroom walls felt confining and for the first time ever I was happy when the class ended and I could go.

I didn't want to wait to go back to my room and get my radio or my jacket or my blinking light; I needed to be free so as soon as I set hoof on the sidewalk outside the building I took off and let the sky embrace me and I flew until was high enough that I couldn't see the people on the ground any more and then I found a little cloud and I sat on top of it and tried to think of nothing but the spread of land below me and the unreachable top of the sky above me.

Peggy had told me that some people might not like it if they knew I was having sex with Aric, but the thought that they might not like it so much that they would put me in a jail had never occurred to me because that just wasn't right. Nobody could be that cruel, could they? But Conrad had said that it had happened and he wouldn't be making that up.

Suddenly I felt very alone.

In the sky I was free, but none of my friends were there—none of them could go there. So I abandoned my cloud-perch and glided back down to the ground and I went back to my room and Peggy was sitting at her desk listening to music on her headphones and even though it was kind of rude of me I just stood up and hugged her.

She took off her headphones and set them on her desk and asked if she needed to rip anyone's dick off. I said it was probably too late for that—Oscar Wilde had written the poem over a hundred years ago—but she had gotten me to smile, and I told her about the poem and how much it bothered me.

Peggy hugged me and said that things were different now than they had been back then. She said that there was still a long ways to go, though, but in America at least what happened to Oscar Wilde couldn't happen any more.

That sounded to me like she was holding back so I asked her if there were still gallows and if people were still hanged and she said that she didn't think that hanging was done any more, which was reassuring.

But I got the sense that she was still not saying everything and I was about to ask her what she wasn't telling me when she reached out and ran her finger over the dreamcatcher I had made and said that she really liked it. So I told her how I'd gotten the idea from a store in Chicago and Rebekka had helped me make it and I was going to make them for all my friends with the feathers I was shedding.

She thought that was a very good idea and so after dinner when she was done with her math homework and I had checked it over for mistakes she helped me finish my second dreamcatcher, and I'd meant for it to be for Aric but when it was all done I knew in my heart that it ought to go to Meghan.

April 20 [420]

April 20

When I got back from my morning flight, Peggy told me today was a special day: it was four-twenty.

I didn't know what that was, so she explained how some people smoked pot—which is what they call marijuana—and today celebrated that.

I had seen people smoking cigarettes but pot wasn't the same because you weren't supposed to unless you were doing it to treat a disease, although she said it was legal in Colorado and some other places. I thought it might be interesting to try but Peggy said she wasn't sure if that was a good idea. She wanted to know if I ever had smoked pot before or knew any ponies who had, and I said that I didn't.

So she said that I probably ought not try it at all, just to be safe. She said that I might hear some people talking about how great it was but it really wasn't anything special and that if I wanted to get high I should use my wings instead.

I told her that I already had and she laughed and then leaned down and ran her hand through my sweaty mane and told me to hurry up and get into the shower or else I'd miss my turn.

That was something for me to think about when I was showering. I liked drinking socially sometimes but that was about it. I knew that there were some ponies who drank too much: some of the sailor ponies especially when they were on shore drank themselves senseless, and I'd heard of ponies eating thorn-apple because it made them hallucinate, but I'd never tried that. I didn't think it was very smart.

So I thought that even if I could try pot I shouldn't.

Nobody at breakfast felt like making a big deal out of the day, either. They'd had more fun for April Fool's Day. Our conversation was as normal as any breakfast where Christine wasn't eating her breakfast like a Tyrannosaurus Rex or making a breakfast village and destroying it.

I asked Sean what he thought we were going to learn in class and he said that he wasn't sure. He told me about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which was where you couldn't measure both the position and speed of a particle at the same time, but he didn't think that was what he was going to cover. Chaos theory was broader than that, he said, and he thought the professor was thinking of a broader principle.

I'd noticed that lots of formulas and principles and equations had names, and I asked him if that was because a person named Heisenberg or Lorenz or whoever had discovered them, and he said that was the case. He wanted to know if we did that, and I said that there were Wonderbolts stunts that were named for the pegasus who had invented them, and there were also unicorn spells that had been named after the first unicorn to cast them. (Well, I figured that was why, anyway.)

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started out by drawing a point and then asked us if that was supposed to be a point in the motion of a pendulum could we really actually measure it? And then he explained how in astronomy they had the same problem; you knew that a planet was about there, but you couldn't know exactly where it was.

The inaccuracy was what he called 'error bounds,' and that was how far off you expected your observation to potentially be. I knew about those in the form of significant digits: when we calculated in cloud class, it wasn't acceptable to get a result which was more precise than the numbers we had started with, because we couldn't get information we'd never had as a result of the calculation.

Then he drew a little circle around his point and said it was called the 'error ball,' which several students in the class thought was a very funny name. Over time, the error ball became smaller and more elliptical because of the eigenvalues, and that was what all stable systems would do.

Unstable systems were different; they could actually get bigger as time went on. And if there were complex equations inside, any given point in the ball could rotate, and the ball could get bigger or smaller. And in the chaotic systems they were stretched and folded over each other again and again. That kind of reminded me of metalworking which I knew a little bit about because of my sister.

He said that the shape it made could be described by Smale Horseshoe Mapping and everyone in the class looked at me and I just held up an unshoed hoof and said that I didn't know anything about them and even Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee laughed at that.

Professor Amy talked about the differences in marriage and kinship in different cultures. She said that there was actual biological kinship and that there was also fictive kinship, which was things like relatives by marriage. Then she said that there was the family of origin, which was the family you were born into, and the family of procreation, which was the family your offspring belonged to.

She also talked about a thing called exogamy which meant that you had to marry outside a certain group, and one example she gave was that you usually couldn't marry a blood sibling. And then there was also endogamy which meant a group which you had to marry inside of.

She explained how the rules of a society could even say where you went to live when you got married, and there were even fancy terms for that like neolocal and unilocal and matrilocal and patrilocal and it was all very confusing. No wonder unicorns are always keeping track of their ancestors if they have to follow all those rules. I was glad that we didn't do anything like that.

I guess we have some rules, but they're not written down; everypony knows them. Like how when a stallion's an adult he goes off to somewhere else.

It was strange how a class that had seemed pretty boring to me was so interesting to everyone else, though. Lots of people were talking on their way out of class about what Professor Amy had said and how they had never thought about the rules for marriage.

I read through some of the second book of Samuel before dinner, which started off with David becoming king of Israel. But like everyone before him, no matter how much he tried to be good he broke God's rules when he saw a woman in her bath and lusted for her. When he got her pregnant he decided that he would have to kill her husband, and that made God angry and to punish David, God made his son get sick and die.

I couldn't read any more beyond that point. I was already a bit distracted because I could feel that the weather was changing and I told myself before dinner I was going to look at the NOAA page and see if I was right that storms were coming.

It bothered me that David who was supposed to be so great and in such favor with God would do such a thing, and that brought me back to the idea that marriage was stupid. Obviously Bathsheba was interested in him or else she would have just told him no, but David was afraid of what her husband might do even though it had been as much his wife's doing. Unless I wasn't understanding and David had raped her.

I might not have been right about how marriage was supposed to work, either, and I thought I should ask about that because maybe I was jumping to conclusions when I shouldn’t be. It didn't feel like a good dinnertime topic, people liked to laugh and relax and sometimes complain about classes at dinner.

I could wait a day to know, I decided. Liz made marriages so surely she knew about them, and I could just ask her.

When I looked on the computer at the weather it said that there were going to be thunderstorms tomorrow, and I was looking forward to that, but it would be weird to be watching them and not doing anything with them. That would be a strange change for me.

I went over to Aric's a little bit earlier than I'd planned, and he was out in the driveway again working on Winston. He showed me what the radiator was that had leaked and said that he had jury-rigged a repair because he didn't have all the right tools but he was fixing it correctly now.

That was fun to watch and he even let me help hold things in place for him while he worked. Just like on a ship, every little piece had its own special name.

Under the truck was a flat pail full of sweet-smelling liquid that he called coolant and my nose kept being drawn to that because unlike nearly everything else on the truck it smelled really tasty and I wondered if it was okay to drink. I was going to ask him, but he was kinda busy trying to line up bolts then he asked me if I could help him hold the fan shroud in place. He said that it didn't fit quite right because it had gotten broken before and he hadn't bought a replacement for it yet.

I had to lie under the truck on my back to hold it in place, and that wasn't very comfortable because his driveway was made up of sharp pebbles.

Some of the coolant was still dripping off the bottom of the truck, too, and I got some on my muzzle and without even thinking I licked it off and it was really sweet but a moment later it left a horrible bitter taste in my mouth and Aric just laughed and said I was a real mechanic now.

When it was all put back together he poured the pail out into the radiator and then added some more until it was full and said that I'd been really helpful. I thought he was just being nice; I'd only held a couple of things when he told me to.

To celebrate we drove Winston to the beer store (which wasn't far at all) and he said that I could get whatever I wanted, so I picked a bottle of Dark Horse ale which he thought was really funny and so did the clerk at the counter.

We sat on the couch together and cuddled for a while and then went up to Aric's room and got undressed for bed but neither of us really felt like having sex, so we just snuggled up together and talked quietly for a little longer.

April 21 [Stormy Weather]

April 21

I woke up a couple of times in the night and checked out the window at the weather. Aric slept through it—I suppose most people would because they're not attuned to it like a pegasus. One time I saw distant flashes of lightning; I don't know what time it was because all Aric's clock does is flash and I asked him about that once but he said since he uses his portable telephone for an alarm, there's no point in setting it. Which makes me wonder why he even has it.

It was raining outside when it was morning and since I woke up first I pulled Aric's window down so that rain wouldn't come inside. He probably ought to have closed it before the rain started.

When I got back into bed he was already waking up, and the first thing he did too was look at the window to see what the weather was. He told me that they were predicting thunderstorms and I said that I knew that.

He said that he liked the rain and I told him that I did too, and then he said that he had a really fun idea so he got dressed and we got into Winston and drove out of town until we were on a dirt road and then he turned off the road and drove through the grass until we got to a little clearing and he turned Winston around and then got out and opened up the tailgate and we went back there and had sex with the rain rattling on the roof and sometimes splashing onto us and thunder rumbling around us and it was almost like being up in the clouds. The only downside was that the back of the truck was metal and it was all greasy and dirty and he said that if he had planned better he would have brought some bedding for the back of the truck because that would have made it a lot nicer.

I told him it was okay. I'd gotten a bit scratched up and there was some dirt ground into my coat but that would wash out.

We sat there in the back of Winston watching the rain come down for a while until he started to shiver from the cold and put his clothes back on. Then when there was a little bit of a break we ran around to the front of the truck and got in the cab and he drove me back to his house.

I wish that I had thought to bring my flight gear in the truck because then I could have taken off from the small clearing where we'd parked, and that would have been an interesting flight. But when I put my things on at his house I was glad I hadn't because the batteries in my light were depleted again and I had to get some new ones from Aric.

I flew around in the rain and went up to the bottoms of the clouds. It had lightened up a lot which was good for me because I wasn't supposed to fly when visibility was bad because airplanes couldn't see me and I couldn't see them. It's funny: a lot of pegasuses don't like getting rained on even if they work the weather, but I didn't mind it at all. To me, coming back home soaked to the skin was a badge of honor, proof that you'd done a good day's work.

And it also make the morning shower feel that much nicer. I probably could have not taken one at all because the rain had washed me off really well, but it didn't feel right to go to class dirty, so I washed off and didn't bother drying myself because it was still raining.

Different people had different ideas about the rain. I saw a bunch of people scurrying around under umbrellas trying to keep from getting wet and some people had hoodies and there were a few people with yellow rainjackets and others just wore their ordinary jackets.

The whole dining hall smelled different because of all the wet things in it which wasn't really a bothersome smell but it was just kind of there. I think it would have been fresher if the windows had been opened, but I guess they didn't want the floors to get wet. They always put up little yellow signs to tell you if it was.

I sat with Cedric and Leon and Trevor and they were as much fun as always. Cedric said that he liked the rain because it made the city smell nicer and cleaner after it rained. He said that a lot of the gangs didn't like being out in the rain, so it was more peaceful, too. Then he told Leon to open the window that was by their table to let some air in.

It was just a bit gusty outside and every now and then a little bit of rain would splash on our table, but it was hardly any and nobody minded it much. Well, I didn't and if Leon did he didn't say anything.

We got to talking about storms and I found out that sometimes in storms the electricity stops working because the wires break which was something I'd never had to worry about before. Leon said that they'd had a storm come through when he was in high school and they'd lost their power for two days and it was really hard to cope and he couldn't understand how people had lived before they had electricity.

I said that it was easy; we just didn't have anything that used it. Besides, how would you get electricity to a cloud? You can't keep lightning in a bottle and let it out when you need it, I don't think. Unless that's how batteries work . . . maybe they have a tiny little lightning bolt that got put inside them and when it wears out the battery doesn't work any more. I wonder if I can take one apart to see what's inside?

I was a little bit nervous on my way to class because I was afraid that Conrad might have us read other poems like the last one but he didn't. He said that he had a good rainy-day poem for us and started reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I couldn't help but wonder if he had done that for me.

It wasn't a happy poem, but then the sea isn't always a happy place. I felt like I was back home as soon as he started reading it and then I thought of the tales that the sailorponies had told of their ships and the ocean and of the strange things they had seen when out at sea like salamander-fire on the upper works or giant rogue waves or strange patches of dead calm in the middle of the ocean. And I could hear their voices as the Ancient Mariner spoke again through the mouths of our class.

I knew that he shouldn't have killed the albatross. They're good-luck birds, everypony knows that.

When we were discussing the poem I told the class about some of the old ship captains I'd known, the ponies whose coats had been bleached by the sun and the salt, and who still had a bit of a sway to their walk because they weren't used to solid ground underhoof. And some of them went out every single day on their little fishing boats and every now and then they didn't come back and we'd put on extra patrols in the hopes of spotting a raft or wreckage or anything, but we usually didn't.

It would be the talk of town for a couple of days after that, and it always nagged at some ponies' minds that nopony would ever know what had happened.

After class was over I sat on the porch in front of Hicks and watched the rain and thought about home. I missed the ocean.

I must have been really gathering clouds, 'cause I didn't even notice when Meghan sat down next to me and put her hand on my back and asked me what I was looking at. I told her that I was thinking of my old village and she said that she'd like to visit it sometime and then she asked if I was going to come in for dinner.

I hadn't realized that it was dinnertime. Of course, when she said something my stomach grumbled at me.

After dinner I told her I would come over later because I had something for her. And then I went off to meet with Liz.

We talked about Saul and David for a bit, and then I asked her about marriage and how I thought that if it wound up with people killing other people it wasn't a very good idea. She said that the general idea of modern marriage was that two people were making a promise to each other to stay together and to stay faithful. Then I said that David had had many wives, the Bible said so, and she said that was true, and if I didn't mind she would give a brief history of marriage and marriage equality and a history lesson all in one, and then we could go back and pick it apart.

Well, it seemed like there were all sorts of rules and exceptions and ideas had changed over time and until recently a marriage was supposed to be between only one man and one woman but then the Supreme Court had decided that same-sex marriage was okay too but a lot of people were really mad about that and some of them had resorted to dirty tricks to prevent marriages.

I said that I thought it was better to not have marriage and she said that it had been important to track bloodlines. I told her that I knew who my mother was and my granddam, too, and what more did I need to know? Plus there was my sister and I had aunts too and a bunch of cousins and an uncle who was down south somewhere.

She wanted to know how we raised our foals with only one parent who was working, and I said that older sisters would look out for younger sisters and there were aunts and cousins and friends and everypony just looked out for everyone's foals and she said that there was a saying on Earth that it takes a village to raise a child and that we were putting that into practice. So I guess Earth people knew that, too.

I asked if you had to get married on Earth, and she said that you didn't. A lot of people did because of their beliefs but not everyone did. And she said these days a lot of people were waiting until they were older and had established their careers before they got married.

So I was glad that we'd had our conversation and went back to my room and asked Peggy if she was thinking about marrying her boyfriend once she had established her career and she laughed and said probably not; she didn't think he was good husband material but he was fun for now. She said she was still young and didn't want to think about getting tied down yet and I said that was the right attitude and I held out my hoof and she bumped it with her hand.

I went over to Meghan's room and gave her the dreamcatcher I'd made and she thought it was really pretty and Amy did too, and they had to call over Lisa and Becky who really liked it, too. Meghan wanted to know if we had them in Equestria, and I said that we didn't, but that I had seen one in a store in Chicago and that was where I had gotten the idea to make one.

We sat and talked for a little bit; we had to be quiet because Amy was still doing homework although she probably couldn't hear us because she was listening to music. And then I asked if I could stay and Meghan asked if we could go to my room instead or was Peggy there?

I said that she was, and Meghan got all thoughtful and said that maybe it would be best if we didn't tonight and my ears fell and she looked over at Amy and chewed on her lip and said that she'd changed her mind I could stay but she was going to have to wear her sleeping clothes.

So she went into the bathroom to get dressed and I got up in bed and when she came out she got in bed and we snuggled up together with me next to the wall.

April 22 [Girl Talk again]

April 22

I woke up late again because Meghan or Amy had closed the curtains in the room and it was dark inside. I don't like that because it confuses me about what time it is and then when I find out it's later than I thought my whole morning routine is off.

I snuggled up to Meghan and nuzzled her cheek and she opened her eyes and reached her hand out towards my head so I bowed my head against her chest in the hopes that she would scritch behind my ears and she did. Then her alarm went off and she had to turn it off before it woke up Amy.

I asked her what time it was and of course it was too late to go flying. We still had time for a shower but Meghan was a bit reluctant at first and I don't know why. I thought the last couple of times had gone well and had been good bonding and I thought that I had done something wrong but she said that it wasn't my fault. So she decided that she would but reminded me that we had to be quiet because Amy was still asleep and maybe Becky and Lisa were too.

She got out her new clothes and took them in the bathroom with her and then turned in the water and started undressing and I got in and said that I should bring over some of my own shampoo because it wasn't fair to be using hers and she said that she didn't mind when I did.

Right before we were done there was a knock on the door and Meghan said she was almost finished and then muttered under her breath that that was the bad thing about sharing a bathroom.

I let her get out of the tub first and then shook myself off as well as I could and then sat down on the bathmat and started drying myself off and it was kind of crowded because she was standing on the bathmat too while she dried herself. Then she got dressed and unlocked the doors and when we were leaving Becky went in from her side and sort of blinked when she saw the two of us then shook her head and shooed us out and closed the door.

Amy was still asleep so Meghan finished getting dressed very quietly and then she got her books and we went to breakfast together. While we were waiting in line for food she overheard someone say that Prince had died, and she didn’t believe it but she used her telephone to look at a page called Wikipedia and it said so, too. I didn’t know who he was, so Meghan played some of his music on her telephone and said that she had always liked his music.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee surprised us with a test on what we'd learned so far in class, and there was a lot of grumbling about that. When I started reading the questions, though, some of them were pretty funny, like where we had to choose what we should call him, and the last question which said that we should calculate when the next quiz would be, given an margin of error of one class day, and he had labeled his axises for date and time and place and it was pretty obvious to me that the correct answer would be the only answer which put us in this place at this time in the future, and that wasn't too hard to figure out.

Then he started introducing us to the Rossler Equation, which had both its x and y axises linear, and only z wasn’t linear, so if you said that z was zero, you could study it in two dimensions because it almost sat on one plane. He said that type of equation was especially useful in chemistry.

When I got to lunch Peggy said that she'd been a little worried when I didn't come back from Meghan's and I told her that I had stayed the night. Sean set his fork down and asked if that meant that I had slept with Meghan and I said yes, and Christine said that if he said another word he was going to have to sleep with Miss Michigan for the rest of the quarter.

I asked who that was because it wasn't anyone I knew and Sean held up his hand which didn't really answer my question, then both Christine and Peggy started telling me other things it meant like how he would have to go solo or yank his own crank or skin his own flute and finally Peggy said what they meant was he would have to masturbate, which I don't know why she couldn't have said that the first time.

Then Peggy said that we were going to have a little girl talk after dinner and Christine said that she hated to ask but since the topic was already sort of out there how did stallions masturbate anyway? Well, I wasn't a stallion so I couldn't say for sure, but I had some pretty good guesses and so I used my drinking glass to demonstrate how you could hook something with your hoof.

And I told her that some stallions were big enough and flexible enough that they could use their mouths and Sean said that he'd heard that there were some men who could do that too. Joe said that was all sorts of too much information and he wasn't hungry anymore and asked if anyone wanted his second hot dog, but nobody was interested in it.

Professor Amy said that since we’d talked about marriage in the last class now it was time to talk about babies. Rachel raised her hand and said that she had skipped a step, and there were a few laughs and the professor said that we would be talking about that later.

There were all sorts of rules about who could be with the mother and where she had to give birth and then after she had different societies had rules about what you could do with the baby—who was allowed to see it and who was allowed to touch it and things like that.

Some cultures wanted to name the baby right away, and others waited for a while. She didn’t tell us about any cultures where children got new names when they became adults, but that’s what some ponies do, and I heard from a sailor once that zebras consult a shaman who does a ritual and then tells them what to call their foal.

My favorite was the Balinese belief that a newborn’s feet can’t touch the ground for two hundred ten days because they are believed to be divine beings before then. A lot of foals spend at least that long in the clouds before their first trip to the ground. I bet I did, ‘cause I was born late in the year. My mom would have still been nursing me through the winter and I probably didn’t touch the ground until after Winter Wrap-Up.

At dinner Peggy said that there was an Earth Day run tomorrow and wanted to know if I had heard about it and if I was planning on doing it. She said she would run with me if I did.

I said that I didn't know that she liked running, and she said that she didn't, but she thought I'd enjoy it, because it was on trails in a nature area. So I said that I would—it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. I haven’t really gotten to participate in many sports since I got to Earth.

And everyone else had plans for the weekend as well: Sean and Christine were planting trees in a park, and Joe was going to help in the Bat Cave, which was underneath Dewaters and didn't have any bats, but had stuff that could be recycled or reused. I was the only one who didn't have plans because nobody had told me that this weekend was special.

I didn't think that Aric would mind me running in the morning; maybe he'd even want to join me and Peggy.

After we were done eating, Peggy and I went back to the dorm room and Christine came too like she'd said she would and everyone sat down on my bed and Peggy asked if I'd broken up with Aric because she's just assumed that when I was gone on weeknights that's where I was and I asked her if it was okay to say because she'd told me I wasn't supposed to tell anyone and she said yes, it was okay no matter what I said they weren't going to be mad at me.

So she said that if I was dating Aric that I shouldn't be sleeping with Meghan because people are supposed to be only in one relationship at a time, and I asked her what that meant because I was only having sex with Aric and not anyone else and Peggy said that she had misunderstood then because I guess when people said 'sleeping together' they meant sex. I said that we hadn't done that yet; just showered together, and Christine said that was practically the same thing, and I said no it wasn't or else sitting in the hot tub with Peggy would also be the same.

Christine said it didn't count because Peggy was wearing a swimsuit, and Peggy's face got red and she said that she wasn't but that wasn't the point.

So then Christine and Peggy got to arguing about what was appropriate and what wasn't and even they couldn't agree with each other, so they finally said that was the problem with relationships a lot of times that both people weren't always open about what they wanted and expected in the beginning and then they wound up in situations like these and it didn't help that I had a different viewpoint than Aric or Meghan probably did. But they both agreed that I shouldn't be going behind anybody's back.

Peggy said maybe it would be okay if Aric said it was—she said that some guys didn't mind if their girlfriends were casual lesbians because they hoped that maybe they'd get a threesome out of it. Christine said she shouldn’t have told me that, and Peggy said that it was the truth. And then she made me promise that I would ask first before I did anything else with Meghan.

So we all hugged and Peggy said that since we'd just had a girl talk we should go to the Quad Stop and have ice cream together. They make really good milkshakes and when we sat down and started drinking them Christine said that my milkshake brought all the boys to the yard and Peggy just started laughing but I didn't know why mine was special.

Christine went back to Hoben to visit Sean, and Peggy and I walked back to our dorm room. I said that I was going over to Aric's but I would see her in the morning for the run and asked if there was anything I needed to bring. She didn't think that there was.

Rather than fly to Aric’s house, I walked so that I could get my thoughts in order. Peggy should have told me earlier, rather than bring it up now. And I thought that maybe he would be mad so I went to the beer store and bought some beer so that we could share and talk about it over drinks.

He was a little bit upset that I was planning on jogging with Peggy in the morning just because I think he wanted to have a nice lazy day with me and I didn’t want to maybe make him madder but I had made a promise to Peggy . . . I had promised her I would tell Aric before I did anything else with Meghan. Since I wasn’t planning to do anything else with her, I told Aric that I would come over tomorrow and spend the evening with him and stay late on Sunday too and he said that sounded good.

Then his mood got a little better and he said it was going to be fun to see me running with all the people and I asked him if he wanted to run, too. He said that he only liked running when he was being chased by wolves and I asked him how often that had happened and he said it hadn’t yet but I could be sure that when it did he’d take a sudden interest in the sport.

April 23 [Nature]

April 23

I woke up right away because I was already eager to go trotting with a bunch of people in the run. I poked Aric with my hoof to wake him up and then I remembered I was supposed to tell him about Meghan and my ears dropped 'cause I really didn't want to. He might be mad and then I would spend all day being grouchy because he'd yelled at me or told me I couldn't come over any more and I decided it would take too long anyway and I didn't have a whole lot of time this morning before I had to get to the nature center to race.

Plus he had woken up and had one hand on my rump and that was pretty distracting.

I let him have his fun for a little bit and then when he started to roll towards me, I pushed his shoulder back down with my hoof and straddled his chest and teased him with my tail then stretched out on his chest and let him put his arms around my back.

He usually didn't last as long when I took charge but that was okay. I tried to stretch it out as long as I could, both for him and for me.

Aric knew right where the nature center was so he took me there after we had breakfast. He'd bought some oats because I liked them and he also had some cans of anchovies for me. I liked those even more since Aric made funny faces when I ate them.

It didn't take us too long to find Peggy, and she had already entered me in the race and had a number I was supposed to wear. She had fastened hers to her shirt right over her stomach but it wasn't so easy to figure out where to put it on me.

Aric said I ought to wear it on my tail, and that turned out to be the best idea we could come up with. Peggy went to her car and got a couple of hair ties and looped one around my tail just below my dock and pinned the number to that. It felt weird, but it would work.

Then we went up to the starting area and there were lots of people waiting around for the race to start. Peggy said that they were staggering the starting times so that not everyone would go at once because otherwise it would be too crowded.

There were three groups that went before us, and then it was our turn.

The whole race was a lot of fun. We went from the main building where the exhibits were right out into the wood and ran along there for a little while before we came out on the top of a ridge which the trail followed.

I definitely could have done better on my own, even without flying. But it would have been rude to leave Peggy behind, so I kept her pace. It was still a bit frustrating seeing people who I knew I could outrun passing us by.

She ran a little faster after we passed the last kilometer marker. I think it was her competitive spirit kicking in, encouraged by the fact that some people who hadn't paced themselves that well were tiring out. Then we got to pass some of the people who had passed by us earlier.

Still, we didn't win—not by a long shot. Right at the end we were passed by a man who had started in the group after us, and I really didn't need to look at times to know that we hadn't done all that well.

There was a table at the end of the race which had bottles of water for the runners and Peggy took one and splashed it on her face and head and then drank the rest. She told me that she used to like running more but then she got boobs and it wasn't as fun after that.

When the last runner had finished they presented awards and then had a free picnic but we had to listen to a speech from a woman who told us about what the nature center was about and how we could become members. I didn't mind; it was a nice cool-down from the race.

After we'd eaten, Aric and Peggy and I decided that since we were here we might as well walk some more of the trails. So we started out on one that looped to the north and went through the woods for a while and then turned and went right next to the railroad tracks.

When we got back to the lodge Aric looked at the trail map to see which one we could go to next and I said that I had to go to the bathroom and Peggy said she was going to come with me.

As soon as the bathroom door had swung shut behind us Peggy asked how Aric had felt and I said that I hadn't told him yet. Peggy swatted my head and told me that I was a bad pony that I had promised I would tell him and I said that I was going to and she made me swear that I would tonight before we went to bed.

I asked her if she was mad at me and she said that she wasn't mad, but she didn't think that I knew how much of a big deal this kind of thing could be for people and the longer I dragged it on the worse it could get when it all came out—and she said that it would, sooner or later.

Well that made me kind of mad because she had been the one who had told me I was supposed to keep it secret and maybe I would have told Aric about Meghan or Meghan about Aric but I wasn't supposed to tell anyone and Peggy said that that wasn't meant to be permission to sleep with whoever I wanted to.

And then I felt kind of dumb because I probably should have asked what human relationships were like sooner and it wasn't Peggy's fault and I said that I was afraid I was going to screw up and lose all my friends and she said that my real friends would stay with me and gave me a tight hug and I cried into her shoulder a little bit.

The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon at the nature center looking at the exhibits and walking around another trail and then Peggy said that she was going to get back to campus because she had some important work to do and that she'd be at her desk all night long and all day tomorrow too, and then she headed off to Cobalt.

Aric said that she'd been in a kind of weird mood all afternoon and wondered if I'd noticed as well. I said that I wanted to walk on the hawk trail so we went out that way and when we got to the top there was a little deck where you could see around the whole valley.

I told him that I needed to tell him something, and he sat down and I hopped onto the bench next to him and there really wasn't a good way to start so I told him everything and said that I hadn't meant to hurt him but that I didn't know that it was wrong to do that and then I started crying again because he hadn't said anything yet and I thought for sure he was going to tell me that he never wanted to see me again but he leaned over and hugged me and said that it was okay and he wasn't mad.

Then he asked if it was the Meghan from bell choir and I told him it was and he thought that was really funny and asked if there were any other girls in bell choir that I was sleeping with and I slapped him with my wing. But it did lighten the mood a little bit.

He said that he wasn't going to be the one to tell me that my friendship with Meghan was wrong, and he wasn't going to try and force humanity's morals on me.

Then he leaned over and kissed me and told me that he was hungry and we ought to get something to eat.

We went to Jimmy John's and got some subs and we stopped at the beer store and got some beer and he asked me how I felt about spending the night out in the woods and looking up at the stars and I thought that was a great idea even though it might be a bit chilly. So we stopped at his house long enough for him to load blankets and a mattress which he called a thermorest into the back of Winston and then drove out the same way we had before and turned into the little clearing.

We sat on the tailboard and drank beer and talked and looked up at the moon and stars and he pointed out the constellations he knew and after we'd run out of beer we curled up together under the blankets.

April 25 [Thunderstorm]

April 25

When I woke up I felt a little too hot even though I'd shook off all my blankets as I slept, which I figured was because I'd spent the night before outside and then was back inside, plus I'd taken a shower late and I thought that would mess me up, too.

I felt a little stiff, as well, but shrugged that off as well. I'd had a lot of fun over the weekend and I was paying for it now, that was all. So I got on my flight gear and called the airplane directors and it was the nice lady and she told me to be careful out there because storms were coming and you couldn't always rely on the weatherman to tell you when they'd arrive, and I said that if I was on the job they would be right where they belonged just when they were supposed to be.

There were scattered clouds and some of them were low enough for me to play with, so I bumped them around in the sky for a little bit, pushing a few of them together into a bigger cloud. Not so big that it would start to rain, though; I didn't want to make anyone mad by sending off a rogue raincloud.

Then I beat down a flat spot on the top and it would have been fun to play queen of the cloud but there weren't any other pegasuses to play it with.

From my perch on top of the cloud I could see the nature center and if I'd had more time I would have flown over there and sat back on the bench on the hawk trail, but then I'd have to skip my shower or breakfast or both.

I'd been drifting southish with the wind, so I had a bit of ground to make back up, and I decided that I was going to do it fast. So I pretended that I was racing even though I didn't have anypony to race against, and dug into the cloud like we did back at flight school to get a good launch, and then I was off the edge and falling but I had my wings out quick: if you dropped too far you got some speed, but you wasted most of it getting back up to altitude.

Well there wasn't an official timekeeper at the end, but I thought I'd done pretty well when I landed back in front of Trowbridge. I'd considered the sidewalk that runs through the middle of it to be the finish line, so I kept up my speed until I crossed that and then dumped as much speed as I could for my landing.

I was completely soaked in sweat and I swear that I kept on getting hotter while I waited for my turn. It probably didn't help that all the steam from the shower was filling the bathroom.

Well I felt a lot better and ready to face the day when I went to breakfast, although it turned out when I sat down and started to eat that I wasn't as hungry as I'd thought I was, so I more picked at my breakfast rather than eat it properly.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee introduced us to discrete time dynamical systems, which is where you sort of imagine a graph of points that are actual observations that are as in-detail as you want them to be and then model them over time. He gave us a couple of simple examples, like population growth in a country. He said that censuses could be an example of the data points, and then you could kind of figure out trends from that.

Of course the models could get pretty complicated because there were lots of factors that went into population growth, and things like food shortages or war or monster attacks (which he forgot to mention) could all change it.

He said that an interesting study done on wild populations of animals was the wolf packs and moose population on Belle Isle, which is way up north in Michigan, in the middle of Lake Superior. He said that some years the wolves did well and some years the mooses did and that currently the wolf population was very low and people were debating if new wolves should be brought to the island or if the study should continue until there were no more wolves on the island and then after that they would make a decision.

I should have read more of Samuel before lunch but I didn't feel like it. The pressure had dropped while I was in class and I was feeling antsy: there was another storm coming. I went back to my dorm room and looked on the computer and was calculating on my weather wheel when Peggy came in and asked me what I was doing.

She said that it was silly for me to calculate the weather when someone else had already done it, and I said that it was silly for her to snowboard when there were probably other people who were better than she was and that kind of changed her attitude and she sat down and I showed her how to do the calculations.

It was kind of like when she taught me how to snowboard, I think. I could tell that there were some things that she didn't understand, but she sort of got it, and then said that she wanted to try a test and asked me to calculate out the weather for Colorado Springs, so I turned the page on the computer to Colorado Springs and did some back-of-hoof calculations and said that the temperature was going to stay pretty flat for the rest of the day, it would be cloudy, and that there was a slight chance of rain but it probably wouldn't.

I told her it would be easier if I'd spent time there because there were a lot of variables and I just didn't know them all that well because I didn't know the area. She just turned her portable telephone towards me and she'd gotten the weather forecast and I stuck out my tongue because that was all I needed to say.

After lunch was over I went to Anthropology. Professor Amy split us up into groups and gave each group a story about a tribe that we had been observing, and we were supposed to figure out some stuff about their marriage and birth rituals, and that before any of us quick readers figured out that there was missing information, we were supposed to figure out what else we needed to know to draw proper conclusions and then write a short essay about what we'd discovered and what we hadn't and how we'd go about finding out what we wanted to know. She said that it was due in at the beginning of our Wednesday class—which was the next one. Then she said that Friday we'd be having our mid-term test because she felt it was her duty to make us suffer a little bit before we talked about where babies came from in different cultures.

So we spent most of the class talking about that and while I didn't really think that religion could be as important as they did, since all three of them were sure it was a factor, I sided with them. But they liked my idea that what Professor Amy called food insecurity was a reason for the large festival before the marriage, because I thought it was a way to prove that the man could be a good provider to a family.

When class was over we all agreed to meet tomorrow after dinner at the library to finish up the assignment and Rachel said that she would type up what we'd come up with so far and so she got our computer mail addresses and said that she would send us a computer letter that said where the essay was and we could put in comments as we thought of them.

I tried to read more of the Bible after class but I just wasn't in the mood because the pressure was still falling and so I sat in a tree instead and let the wind blow on me.

It hadn't come by the time dinner was over, or by the time I was ready for bed, either, but I could feel it. I'd been out on the quad and flying low passes over campus—low enough that I didn't have to call the airplane directors—and it felt more and more like another big storm with each passing hour. The wind was shifting and picking up speed, and I could smell the rain and when I finally went in for the night I'd started to see some distant flashes of lightning that were far enough off I'd never have seen them during the day.

I was in bed but not asleep when it came in. The thunder and lightning had been getting more and more frequent and pretty soon it was on us. I got out of bed and went to the window and Peggy sat up in her bed and I told her that I wanted to play outside and she said that I was stupid and I would get hit by lightning but she also was putting on her pants when she said that.

So we went downstairs and she held the door open for me and I ran outside and started galloping around in the rain and pretty soon she joined me and it didn't take too long before both of us were soaked to the skin but we didn't care. It was fun to be out in; it was fun to see the lightning flashing around us, and it was fun to get wet.

When it had tapered off a little we went back inside and Peggy crossed her arms over her breasts because her wet t-shirt wasn't hiding anything, and when we were back in our room she started taking off her wet clothes and said that she had the advantage because she could towel off and put on dry clothes and she'd be warm right away and I was going to have to suffer with wet fur.

(I thought about shaking myself off to prove her wrong, but that would have been a mean thing to do in our dorm room.)

When I'd dried off as well as I could I noticed that the light was blinking on my portable telephone and I saw that I had gotten a telephone telegram which was from Aric and he said that I hadn't been at Durach and to send him one back if I was planning on coming over to his house.

I'd been distracted by the weather and completely forgotten about it.

So I sent him a telegram back saying that I was sorry and I had been distracted by the thunderstorm but I could still come over and he sent one back and said that he wasn't mad at me because when I hadn't been there he had decided after Durach to drive Winston in the storm because they were so much fun. And he said if I wanted to come over I could let myself in but if I didn't want to walk or fly in the storm that was okay too.

Well, I did want to go over but I was pretty exhausted so I promised that I would come over Wednesday night.

April 26 [Sick]

April 26

I woke up in the middle of the night with a stuffy head and a runny nose and decided that I was sick, and then my nose started twitching and before I could even get my hoof up I sneezed and I thought it would be loud enough to wake up Peggy but it wasn’t.

And that was pretty much it for my night. I was either too hot or too cold, and no matter how I lay in bed I couldn't get comfortable for too long.

I kept trying to sleep, but it just wasn't working at all. I probably dozed off and on but it wasn't restful at all and I finally got up at well before sunrise and went out and walked around the quad for a bit and then went back to my room and turned on my computer and sent a computer letter to Miss Cherilyn because I was supposed to do that if I was sick or hurt. Then I went and took a hot shower because I knew that it would make me feel a little bit better.

Of course such relief is short-lived, unless I wanted to stay in there all day.

I think it would have been better to have been in the showers in Hoben, because there was a whole shower room and I could have filled it all with steam, but that shower room wasn't for girls unless I had permission and I didn't want to wake up Sean to ask him.

When I got back to our room, I checked my computer mail and I had a letter from Miss Cherilyn and she said that they would be over soon.

I couldn't decide if I should wake up Peggy to warn her because she probably wouldn't want to see them when she was in her sleeping clothes, or if I should let her sleep and maybe they would be gone before she woke up.

And I wound up not making my decision before there was a quiet knock at the door and I stood on my hind hooves and looked through the spy-hole and it was Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore so I let her in but said that he had to wait outside because Peggy was asleep and not wearing pants. So he handed her a bag and said that he would be in the hall and she came in and sat down on my bed and asked if I minded if she did some tests.

I said it was okay, so she took out a flat tablet that was like a pocket telephone only bigger and she set it up on my desk where it was facing us and she touched some buttons on the screen and pretty soon a picture came up of a unicorn.

He said that he was going to ask me how I felt while Miss Cherilyn got ready and I didn't know what that meant until I saw her getting a thermometer out of the bag and putting on blue gloves. Humans like to wear those to keep their hands safe.

When I got done saying when I'd started to feel sick and what my symptoms were she stuck the thermometer in me and then held her hands up against my neck to feel for my pulse, and after she was done making sure that my heart was still working she used a stethoscope to listen to my heart and my lungs, which was about when Peggy woke up.

Peggy didn't pay any attention to Miss Cherilyn, who was talking to the doctor on the big pocket telephone, but she went right over to me and petted my head and asked what was going on and I told her I was feeling sick and assured her it wasn't because we'd run around in the thunderstorm last night.

Then she had to move so that Miss Cherilyn could look at the thermometer and take it back out and Peggy asked why I didn't just put it in my mouth and I said that I really would rather not.

The doctor said that I either had a cold or an upper respiratory tract infection, and he wanted some more tests to be sure which it was.

I wasn't expecting to go right away, but Miss Cherilyn said that they were ready to take me and she asked Peggy if she wanted to come along, too.

She did, so Miss Cherilyn gave her ten minutes to get ready and told me that I should take anything that I thought I might need for a van ride and the doctor's office. Then when Peggy had put on a robe and gone to the bathroom she went outside to talk to Mister Salvatore for a minute.

When we were ready—which only took about ten minutes—we all got into Sienna and Mister Salvatore went out to the 94 Interstate and headed east. I thought we might be going to East Lansing, but we passed by the 69 Interstate and kept going straight.

We followed a blue car almost all the way there. It got in front of us right after we passed the 69 Interstate and then Mister Salvatore followed it. I guess it was showing him where to go.

They eventually stopped in front of a low brick building and the blue car left, 'cause it's job was done.

We all got out of the van and went inside and I got to go to a little room where a couple of nice nurses took blood samples and used a stick with cotton on the end of it to wipe some of the snot out of my nostrils and then they used a bright little light to look into my nose and eyes and mouth and pretty much everywhere.

Peggy stayed in the room with me and so did Miss Cherilyn. Mister Salvatore spent his time out in the hallway on his portable telephone and every now and then I would see him pacing up and down.

I was upset that I was missing class. I could have gone and then seen the doctor afterward. I almost regretted calling them. But it was important to be healthy, and Miss Chestnut had told us several times that it was possible that we might get some kind of sickness that nopony had ever had before because we were in a whole new world, so it was important to tell our assistants whenever we felt sick.

And I was starting to get worried because it felt like I had been there forever already and I hadn't heard any results so I was thinking that maybe what they found was a new thing that nopony had ever been sick with before and to distract myself I got out a poetry book and started reading it.

I'd read a half-dozen poems before I thought that maybe Peggy and Miss Cherilyn were also getting bored with waiting so I read the next one out loud and then we took turns reading poems.

We got interrupted when a nurse came in with lunch for all of us. I wasn't all that hungry, so I hadn't been thinking about it, but Peggy had missed breakfast, and I thought that Miss Cherilyn had, too. So I poked at my food and had half a sandwich that I didn't really want but they also had given me a big glass of thick milk which the nurse who brought the food said was an instant breakfast.

When we were done a doctor came in and she said that I just had a cold and a mild fever and as long as I got lots of rest and drank plenty of water I'd be fine in a few days. I asked her if it would be okay if I went to Madison this weekend to see Gusty's play and she said that it would be as long as I wasn't showing any more symptoms.

Then she said that they were going to set up a schedule to do blood tests just to make sure that everything was okay but that could be done in my dorm room and they would just send someone over. And then we were free to go.

Of course by the time we got back in Sienna I knew that we wouldn't be getting back to Kalamazoo until it was late.

We had to go out a different way than we'd come in because there was a big white bus that said CDC on it parked near the entrance. I didn't know what that was so I asked Miss Cherilyn and she said that it was sort of a portable hospital.

It was dinnertime when we got back to Kalamazoo and I still wasn't very hungry even though they said that we could go to Taco Bell. I was tired and felt pretty miserable so Mister Salvatore stopped by his office and brought out a big bag of stuff which he said would help make me feel better, including little candies called antihistamines which tasted minty and made the mucus go away.

Even more exciting was that there was a bag of tea from Equestria and even though I wasn't that particular to tea the smell of it just relaxed me.

When we were back in our dorm I made a cup of tea and drank it and I felt a lot better after that, but I was pretty tired so even though it was still light out I got into bed and I thought that I ought to send a computer letter to Conrad so that he would know why I had missed class, but then it felt like that was too much effort so I just closed my eyes instead.

April 27 [Still Sick]

April 27

I felt a little better when I woke up on Wednesday morning, but I still had a fever and a really runny nose. I sucked an antihistamine candy and went to the microwave in the little lounge to make hot water for tea. I couldn't remember exactly how long Peggy cooked water for, so I thought I should do it for five minutes and then see how hot it was.

Five minutes was too long, and I was lucky that I just brushed the mug because if I had grabbed it I would have burned myself.

I didn't have a good way to get the cup out of the microwave so I just left it there while I went to the bathroom and when I came back it was cool enough to touch at least.

I sat at my desk and sipped my tea and that helped unstuff my nose but I still didn't feel all that good. Peggy got up and told me that I was going to stay in the room and get better and asked if there was anything that she could get for me. I couldn't think of anything, so she said that she would come back between classes and if I needed anything I could call her, or I could call Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, and they would come right over.

She said that I should probably stay in our room as much as possible and rest so that I would get better quickly, especially since I was going to Madison this weekend. Then she wrote down on a piece of paper how to use Netflix. Her Netflix name (which was like my airplane call-sign) was Snowboarding_Chick and her password was Sa1omon (she said the underline was because it was the number one not the letter l which looked the same).

Then she had to go and take her shower so she would be ready for class.

I was thinking that I should go to breakfast—it's not good to stop eating just because you feel sick; that can make it worse—and I finished my tea and was brushing my mane in front of the mirror when Peggy came back from her shower and she said that she would bring me breakfast before she went to class.

I'd gotten back in bed before she came back and I was reading poetry when she came back. There was a lot in the new book that I hadn't gotten to yet, and I felt really bad for missing Conrad's class yesterday.

She set the tray on my desk and said that I should eat whatever I thought I could and that she would get me more orange juice, then there was a knock at the door and it was Miss Cherilyn.

She had a plastic shopping bag from Walgreens, and she put it on my desk. She told me that she had brought more antihistamine candies and a bottle of Vernors because that would make me feel better. And Peggy left, 'cause she could see I was being taken care of.

It's so nice how helpful and friendly some people are. She reminded me that there would be a nurse coming to draw my blood and that the nurse could get my vitals or she could do it if I didn't mind, and I told her that I didn't mind, so she put on her little gloves again, and when she was finished she sent a computer mail to the pony doctor who had been on the big pocket telephone.

I spent most of the morning either reading poetry or dozing. It felt kind of rude to not talk to Miss Cherilyn, but when I talked too much my throat got scratchy and then started coughing. I tried a glass of the Vernors and it was bubbly and tingly and made me sneeze but it did make my throat feel better and sometimes medicine isn't supposed to taste good.

I think humans must get sick a lot because I see people drinking Vernors out of little bottles all the time.

I was in bed when the nurse came in but I wasn't asleep so I got up to greet her and she asked me how I was feeling and did the same things that Miss Cherilyn had already done and then did the things that doctors do like listening to my chest and looking in me with the little light and then she took a cotton-stick and got some snot and then stuck me with a needle and got some blood and she said that if I had to pee she wouldn't mind having a sample of that, too. I didn't have to, so she said when she came back it would be really nice if she could get a urine sample, so I told her I would remember.

Then she told me that I shouldn't go to class today and they were going to run some more tests on my blood and my snot and that she would be back in the afternoon and she petted me on the head and said that I had been good and reached into her pocket and pulled out a bone-shaped cookie and then slid it back in and shook my hoof instead.

I ate the rest of breakfast for lunch, and Miss Cherilyn made me another cup of tea and Peggy brought me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that was wrapped up in a napkin and brushed my mane. Then she went out in the hall and talked with Miss Cherilyn for a little bit, and then she had to go to class again.

I was feeling a little better in the afternoon and I used my computer and Peggy's Netflix to watch a movie. She thought I might like The Little Mermaid, which I did. But I didn't think that Ariel was too smart to give up her fish-tail for a boy; I wouldn't give up my wings for a stallion no matter what. I would never be happy without them, and I don't see how she could be happy out of the sea forever.

I told Miss Cherilyn about the merponies and seaponies and how shy they were, but I'd seen a pod of merponies sunning on a rock once when I was way away from land near some shoals. A lot of the sailors saw them more often and they were always a good sign because wherever they were, there weren't any sea monsters.

She asked if I had ever been to a merpony town and if it was like in the movie, and I said I hadn't because I couldn’t breathe underwater but I had heard of ponies making diving bells and special suits and sometimes visiting them. I told her that the sailors often gave them gifts, and sometimes the merponies helped sailors who were lost at sea.

Peggy came back while we were talking about how annoying seaponies could be. She asked how I was feeling and I said I was better and that I could probably go to class tomorrow and Miss Cherilyn said that I ought to wait for the results from my tests. And just when I was starting to think about dinner the nice nurse showed up again and went through the whole routine again and I even got a cup of my pee for her.

I spent the rest of the evening with Peggy, reading my Bible while she did homework, and then helping her with her math. Peggy told me she had sent a telephone telegram to Aric telling him that I was sick and I thanked her for doing that. She didn't have to.

She said that she had talked to Meghan at dinner and told her, too.

I was kind of surprised that none of them had come over but maybe that wasn't a thing that most humans did. Some predator species like griffons would just abandon a friend who got sick because they were afraid that they might get sick, too. And sometimes that was for the best; when a pegasus got feather flu she had to be isolated until she was better, or else everyone would get it.

I had to get a bunch of shots before I came here; I wonder if Peggy had to get some, too. Maybe that was why she wasn't worried about staying with me but everyone else was.

It was too much to think about, so I just got in bed and lay on my back and stretched out my wings and let my belly cool off until my back was all sweaty, then I rolled over and lay on my stomach and had one more antihistamine mint then I fell asleep.

April 28 [Edna St. Vincent Millay]

April 28

I felt a lot better when I woke up Thursday morning. I was still stuffy but not as feverish.

I wanted to get up and go flying but Peggy said that I should wait until the nurse saw me, and even though I didn't want to wait she was probably right. It's important when you've been sick or injured to wait until you're better before you go out and do stuff that might make you worse.

It was frustrating to have to wait, though. I took a shower because my coat and mane were still all matted from being sweaty, and that helped a lot. It was like I was rinsing off the last remainders of the sickness.

Miss Cherilyn stopped by first just to see how I was and she had brought breakfast which was from McDonald's and it was called a Big Breakfast. It had some scrambled eggs and pancakes and a biscuit and a terrible fried potato patty which she said was a hash brown. And she also had some coffee too and I would have asked her for some but then I remembered I still had some tea left and I was sure that Mister Salvatore had gone to a lot of trouble to get it so I should drink that instead. I let Miss Cherilyn make the tea, though. She was better at using the microwave than I was. The buttons were too small and I kept pushing the wrong ones by mistake, and the handle of the cup got really hot and if I wasn't careful, I'd burn myself when I held it.

I had just finished eating when the nurse came back and went through her whole examination again. She said that everything looked good and I asked her if that meant I could go back to class again and she said I would have to wait for the results of the blood test but if it came back okay than I could. I wanted to know how long that would take and she said it wouldn't be until afternoon, and that made my ears fall because that meant I would probably miss poetry class.

She said that it took time to do the tests right and they wanted to make sure that everything was okay, and I told her that I understood but why couldn't they do them faster? Poetry was important!

The nurse petted me on the head and said that she knew it was frustrating and that I was looking a lot healthier and all my vital signs had been good and the best thing for me to do would be rest up until they got the all-clear, then she packed up her bag and went.

Well, I didn't rest up. I paced the room like a caged animal and I tried to write a letter to my parents but I kept getting distracted by the birds flying around outside or the occasional bits of conversation from people coming in and out of the dorm and I knew that I was mostly better but the nurse hadn't been convinced.

Peggy came back and she saw how restless I was and so she tried to distract me with funny videos on the internet mostly about people falling down when they were snowboarding and she happened to find one that we hadn't seen before of me snowboarding and doing the jump where I kept on flying and that was pretty funny to see.

That distraction worked pretty well, too, because the thing that broke our concentration on the YouTube was my telephone ringing and it was Miss Cherilyn and she said that she had just gotten the all-clear from the doctor.

She said that it was provisional and I would still have to have daily samples taken until all the virus was gone but that didn't matter to me at all. I would put up with being poked every day if that was what it took to go back to class and go to Madison to see Gusty in her play.

I told Peggy the good news and then I galloped out of the room and had to kind of sheepishly walk back and get my saddlebag for class because I could still eat lunch and go to poetry.

I sat down with Cedric and Leon and Trevor and Trevor asked where I'd been on Tuesday and I told him that I was sick. Leon asked if it was rabies, and Cedric punched him in the shoulder. Then he asked what I'd had and I said it was just a cold and a little bit of a fever.

Leon asked if ponies puked rainbows, and I said that only unicorns did. Then I sneezed and Cedric said that it sounded like I was allergic to bullshit, and I told him if that was true then I'd be sneezing a lot more often around the two of them. Leon and Cedric just looked at each other and Trevor was laughing so hard he almost fell out of his chair. He pointed to the two of them and said that they had just been owned by a little pony.

It was a little odd for him to talk so much at lunch: usually he just sat there and ate his food and occasionally laughed or talked when he was addressed, but otherwise he was pretty quiet, so I asked him why, and he said it was because it was more fun to listen to Cedric and Leon argue about who had the most street cred and he didn't want to get involved in that because he was an English Major.

Cedric said that being an English Major was a white man's gig, and so I asked him what he was majoring in and he said biology. And Leon said that he was going to go to law school once he graduated and made me promise that I would never tell anyone else that because he said if word got out nobody would respect him any more.

Cedric told him that it was too late; nobody respected him now.

I said that I respected him and he gave me a big smile and Cedric said that nobody could argue with the SG.

On the way to class, I thought about asking Trevor who we were studying in poetry but then I thought it was better to be surprised.

Humans have mostly reserved emotions. If I'd been sick in Equestria then everypony would have wanted to hug and nuzzle me when I came back but here nobody moved out of their seats to greet me, which was kind of sad.

Conrad came in and sat down at his desk and looked over the class and gave me a little smile so I knew that he had missed me. He started off with a lovely little poem: “Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!” Then he said that was by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and he told us a little about her, and then he said that I could read the first poem of the day, which was called Afternoon on a Hill.

It made me long for springtime which surely would be along soon. The grass was green and there were fresh shoots poking through the ground that wanted to be flowers and the birds were back but the trees still weren't leafy even though it was a month after springtime.

And we read through a bunch more of her poems and some of them were happy and some were sad and some were whimsical and I thought that maybe if she were a pony she would have been a pegasus pony because she reminded me a little bit of myself.

When class got over I went right up into the sky and I wish I had brought my flight equipment with me because I didn't want to spend another minute grounded if I could help it. So I kept low and over campus where it was safe for me to fly without having permission and sort of hopped from building to building and then tree to tree across the quad.

Then when I'd gotten that out of my system I went back to my room and traded my saddlebags for my vest and had a proper flight.

I was still not all the way back to health, so I didn't push myself too hard. Just a nice easy flight in the wide open sky.

I came back down in time for dinner and I had to decide if I should eat with my friends or try and talk to Meghan over dinner and I was kind of afraid to talk to Meghan because what if she was mad and decided she didn't want to spend time with me any more.

But I had to; Peggy said so.

I probably spent a little more time than usual putting away my flight gear and I thought about taking a shower before going to dinner but I didn't because I wasn't very sweaty and I did send a telegram to Liz telling her that I had been sick and I was going to have to miss our weekly meeting this week and then it was time to go to dinner.

Well she was happy to see me and asked how I was feeling and if I was better and I said that I was and then I said that I needed to talk to her after dinner because I didn't think that she would want to talk about it with her friends there so we finished up our meal and then the two of us walked outside and there were a couple of benches next to Stetson chapel so we sat there and I told her about Aric and I could see that that made her unhappy and then I told her how it was for me, and that I hadn't known that it was wrong to be sleeping with her and showering with her at the same time as I was having sex with Aric.

She said a lot of stuff and I could tell some of it wasn't for me but was her being mad at herself and then she started crying and I put my head against her chest and said that I wanted to continue hanging out with her because she was a lot of fun and a really nice person and I just hadn't understood what rules humans had.

Meghan wiped off her eyes on her sleeve and said that they hadn't even said in any of the Equestrian classes anything about what kind of relationships we had and I said that nobody had told us about how it worked for humans either and we both agreed that that was something that they ought to have told us about.

Then she told me it would take some getting used to and she asked if I was bi, and I didn't know what that meant so she said it was where I liked boys and girls the same. Well, I didn't think I was because boys and girls were different so how could you like them the same?

She said that it must be nice to have such a simple worldview.

We kind of both got quiet for a while and just sat on the bench together looking down at people walking across the quad. I was sitting so that I was up against her side and she had her hands together in her lap and she finally put her arm around my back and hugged me to her and said that since we were being honest with each other it was going to be hard for her and maybe she would have been better off not knowing and that I'd put a whole lot on her all at once and she wasn't sure where we should go from here.

Then she ran her hand through my mane and said that she had to go do homework now but she was glad that I was feeling better and got up and walked towards her dorm and I just sat there on the bench and thought for a while.

Author's Note

Afternoon on a Hill

April 29 [Leaving for Madison]

April 29

When I woke up the first thing that came to mind was Meghan walking back to her dorm and I was still thinking that I should have followed her and not sat on the bench like a useless lump. And I didn't take the same joy in flying that I usually would have, because she was still on my mind and I was kind of mad at Peggy and Christine for making me tell her because I thought that she was happier not knowing.

But then I thought that it was probably best to have told her because if she was upset now she would have been really mad if she had found out from someone else.

I was just taking off my flight gear when Peggy came in and I told her while she was getting dressed about how our conversation had gone and she told me that I was better off having told her and then she said that if Meghan really liked me she would forgive me but maybe it would take her a little bit of time and I hoped that was true. Even if we couldn't sleep together or take showers together anymore I still liked her.

Then when I was in the shower I decided that either this would destroy our relationship or else it would grow back stronger than it had been before, and I really hoped it would be stronger.

The nurse was waiting outside our room when I got out of the shower and I'd kind of forgotten that she was coming over to examine me again. I told her that I felt pretty good today; I was still a bit stuffy but not too much and I didn't have a fever any more. I was sort of grooming myself while she talked and I tugged out a couple more loose feathers and she wanted to look at one so I gave her the biggest one. She was a little worried that maybe I was losing them because I was sick, so I told her that I was just moulting and that had started right about the same time as I hit my first estrus and it would be over by the time the next one was done although there would probably be a few stragglers that came out late just to prove me wrong.

I went to breakfast after she was done and I was a bit later than usual and maybe a bit grumpy because of how things had gone last night but everyone was so happy and cheerful that helped to make me in a good mood at least until breakfast was over.

Then I got sort of gloomy again in math class and didn't pay as much attention as I ought to have and when class was over and I realized that I didn't have any idea what we'd learned I felt really bad.

So I told myself that I needed to focus in Anthropology and I sort of did, but it didn't help that she was talking about sex which made me think about Aric especially since I was back in estrus and I hadn't gotten any since Sunday. And this weekend I wasn't gonna, either, since we were supposed to leave for Madison tonight, after Aquamarine got here.

Well I was going to be restless and antsy the whole time I was there I was sure so when class was over I stuck my notebook in my saddlebags and went right over to Aric's house in the hopes that he was there and he was out in the driveway working on Winston. He had the hood open but he was on his back on the floor in front of the seat and so I flew in and sat on the seat and asked him what he was doing and he said that he was putting in a new CB radio which was like my airplane radio but talked to trucks instead.

I asked if I could help and he said that he didn't think hooves would be very good at wiring, and I said he was probably right. Then he wanted to know why I had come over so early and I told him that I was going to Madison after dinner tonight to see a play and I missed him because I hadn't seen him since Sunday and he said that he missed me too and reached up and ran his hand along my hind leg and asked what time it was and I said that I didn't know exactly but I knew what time I had left class, and he said that maybe he would wait to finish the wiring until later because the radio wasn't going to go anywhere.

So he slid out from under the dashboard and closed the door and the hood and we went up to his bedroom and spent more time than I had planned to, so I didn't get to eat dinner at all but that was all right. Probably if I asked nicely I could get Mister Salvatore to stop at Taco Bell.

I got back to my dorm room before Aquamarine arrived, but not by too much. I had just finished packing my saddlebags—which I should have done sooner—when she and Mister Barrow and Miss Parker all arrived together and Peggy was really excited to meet Aquamarine.

We all went down to the lounge to wait for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, 'cause it was pretty crowded with all of us together in the room.

Aquamarine was really happy to see Peggy again and they both got to talking right away. And Miss Parker said that she'd heard that I'd been sick and I told her I was better now; the nurse had said so.

It wasn't too long after that that Mister Barrow's pocket telephone rang and he looked at it and said that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were ready for us, and we all walked down to the back parking lot where their van was right by the door and got inside and Miss Parker told us to have a good trip and to say hi to Gusty and Cayenne and we promised we would, and then she closed the sliding door and we started off on our trip.

It had been a lot nicer to go by train because it was roomier and we could walk around but Sienna was nice enough.

We stopped at every rest area so that we could stretch our legs, and I also got them to drive through a Taco Bell so I could have dinner. And when we were in Michigan it was nice and scenic along the highway but once we got to Indiana it started to get more built-up, and even though we weren't taking the same path as the train had I was pretty sure that I would see mostly the same things, and I was right.

Off in the distance we could see the Chicago skyscratchers and they were all lighted up for the night and very pretty. But I didn't like the road so much; we had to keep on stopping to give money to the road guards so that we could keep on traveling and there were so many cars that it was dizzying trying to keep track of them all. I don't know how Mister Salvatore could do it; he even was able to talk to us while maneuvering among them all.

It took a couple of hours until we were all the way out of it and back into the countryside, which was now very dark and pretty soon it was hard to stay awake so I stretched out on the seat and fell asleep until I felt Sienna's motion start to change, and I saw we were in a city again and it was Madison.

We were going to have to stay in a hotel because Gusty's dorm room wasn't big enough for all of us, and Mister Salvatore got two rooms—one for us ponies and one for him and Miss Cherilyn and I said that it would be cheaper if we shared; we were only going to use one bed and they could have the other.

Miss Cherilyn said that there were rules about fraternization and I didn't know what that was but guessed it was another dumb human rule about sleeping with people.

Our two rooms were right next to each other and there was even a door between them that we could use if we wanted to and Mister Salvatore told us if we needed anything to just knock on that door or call their room but right now he was tired from all the driving and wanted to go to sleep, and me and Aquamarine were pretty tired, too, so we snuggled up together in bed.

April 30 [A Midsummer Night's Dream]

April 30

Me and Aquamarine were up with the sun and I got coffee going then we took a shower and groomed each other then drank our coffee and talked.

Neither of us wanted to wake up Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn, 'cause they'd been up really late driving us while we were sleeping so it was only fair that they got to sleep in. But I hoped it wouldn't be too long.

Once we were done catching up, we found glossy magazines which said what the hotel had to offer and what the town did. I found where we were on a map, which was between two lakes, and Aquamarine said that the hotel had a restaurant on the roof. I thought that would be a fun place to eat and we both agreed that Gusty probably wouldn't like it.

I wasn't sure if we'd have a lot of time to hang out with her before her play, because I knew how much time Aric put into his theatre work and I figured that all he was doing was making the lights work and it had to be a lot harder to act. I didn't say it to Aquamarine, but I figured that Puck was probably a pretty small role, but she'd still be spending a lot of time making sure that her character was just right.

I didn't know when Cayenne was going to show up, either.

We finally heard a knock at the door between our rooms and I opened the door and it was Miss Cherilyn and she asked if we were ready for breakfast. We both nodded and she said that we would get something to eat and then go to campus to meet with Gusty. I asked if we could eat at the roof restaurant but she said it wasn't open yet but promised that we would eat there before we left Madison. So we ate at the Portage Pi instead. Aquamarine ordered oatmeal and I ordered granola and we shared with each other.

After breakfast we took a leisurely walk around Madison towards the campus. Mister Salvatore was talking on the telephone behind us, trying to get in touch with Gusty but apparently she wasn't answering. I didn't mind so much; Miss Cherilyn led us by a brick building that looked like a castle and down to the lakefront. There were steps leading into the water, plus little buoys that looked like they marked off a swimming area. We both galloped off the steps and jumped into the water and splashed around a little bit. There were a few people walking around that noticed us and one guy who was wearing shorts took off his shoes and waded in with us, but not deep enough that he would get his shorts wet.

Then it was time for us to go see Gusty, so we let Mister Salvatore take the lead because he seemed to know where he was going. I followed along in the air just to stretch out my wings a little bit but not too high because I didn't have any of my flight gear and didn't know how high I was allowed to fly in Madison.

She lived in the Ogg Residence Hall, and when we finally found her room it almost had a lake view, if there hadn't been any other buildings in the way. She hugged us both and then Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn for good measure and said that she was really happy that we came and she introduced us to her roommate who was a girl named Jamie. Aquamarine asked her if that was the girl who made all her clothes, and she said it wasn't, but we'd meet her later.

Then she picked up a newspaper that was on her desk and proudly showed us a picture of herself in costume, which was right atop a review of the play. She said that they had done really well in the first show and now that people knew she was in it she was sure the house would be sold out for the rest of the run.

And then she noticed that Cayenne wasn't with us and asked if she was coming, too, and Mister Salvatore said that she was; the last he'd heard she'd be arriving just in time for lunch.

She said that we just had to meet Nicky, who was her friend who made all her clothes and who had convinced her to audition for Puck instead of one of the faeries and so we said goodbye to Jamie and Gusty practically skipped out of the room with us following along.

We went back out into the street and walked into a neighborhood that was a lot like Aric's and we came to a big old house that had several different front doors and she went to the middle one and rang the bell.

I heard footsteps coming down stairs, and then the door opened and there was a girl with short brown hair and dolphin earrings and when she saw Gusty she leaned down and kissed her on the nose and then sort of realized that the rest of us were all standing on the porch, too.

So we all introduced ourselves and she led us up to her apartment which was kind of cluttered and had lots of playbills on the wall and there was a very fancy looking sewing machine and some humankins and lots of fabric and also a funny looking helmet. I asked Nicky what that was and Gusty said that not only did she make clothes but she could also weld sculptures and Nicky blushed when she said that but admitted it was true and said that she had a whole welding setup in her garage.

She brought us all bottles of Leinenkugel's and we sat in the living room and drank our beer and chatted. Gusty had to answer a telephone call and when she was done she said it was Cayenne and she was on her way over and she was so happy she was practically glowing.

I thought we'd go out for lunch at some point, but after Cayenne arrived, Nicky brought us snacks and we just sat around talking until it was time for Gusty to go to the theatre and get ready.

That probably would have been our chance to get dinner, but none of us felt like it because we were having so much fun talking and Nicky had lots of snacks including hummus which was really tasty.

All six of us walked to the theatre together, and Nicky pointed out some of the landmarks around campus for us. She had to stop at a friend's house and pick up a huge bouquet of flowers—she said it was for Gusty and she'd had to hide them there so Gusty wouldn't sniff them out.

When we went to the theatre we went into a special line that was named Will-Call, and we got our tickets and then the ushers led us down to our seats which were right in front. Nicky didn't have as good of seats as we did and I felt bad about that, then Cayenne noticed that the barriers between the seats folded up and she thought that if we all crowded together we could make enough room for her, so she went to get Nicky, and she was so happy that she was almost crying.

We read through the program and Cayenne pointed to Gusty's biography and it was weird to see it in print like that.

It sort of took us all unawares when the house lights dimmed halfway and the crowd fell silent. I looked behind me and I could see a row of windows and I knew that was the light booth and the sound booth and I could imagine that there were people up there who were now completely focused on the instructions that came through their headsets and then the lights went all the way out and the play began.

I know all of us were on the edges of our seats waiting for Gusty to appear, and the whole first act passed and there was no sign of her, but then in the second act she came right out on stage and I could see right away how at home she was there. She had a crisp, formal accent, and her voice carried over the theatre, and whenever she was on stage she stole the scene.

We couldn't talk about anything else during intermission, and I wanted it to end as fast as possible so that we could see her again. There was almost a sigh of relief when the lights went down again and then she came back on and I just watched mesmerized right up until she spoke her final monologue and then the stage lights went dark and suddenly there was so much applause it was like thunder and everyone was on their feet and Miss Cherilyn was wiping tears from her eyes and when everyone came out for curtain call it got so loud I thought that the whole theatre might collapse around us.

After everyone had bowed they all went up through the house and stood by the doors to greet everyone and there was a long line of people by Gusty but when she saw us she waved us forward and I felt like I was sort of a celebrity too. Nicky gave her the flowers and Gusty hugged her and kissed her and there was a bunch of applause at that, too. Then she hugged and nuzzled the rest of us and I would have liked to talk to her right then but there were so many people in line who also wanted to so we moved down the line and greeted everyone else who had been in the play (except for Nicky, who stayed right beside Gusty).

We talked for a little bit once the crowd had finally left, and she said that she was going to a cast party and we could come if we wanted to and we all knew by the way she said it that we'd be imposing and she was just saying that to be polite, so we hugged her and told her again how well she'd done and she said that she would like to see us again before we went back. She looked over to Miss Cherilyn who was standing the closest and then turned back to us and said in Equestrian that she would be spending the night with Nicky (which I don't think was a surprise to any of us) and so we said that we would come see her in the morning.

I thought it would be nice to see the play again; there was a matinee performance, but she said that it was sold out, and there was a rumor that they were going to extend the show for a second weekend so that everyone who wanted to could see it.

When we got back to the hotel we went up to the roof-restaurant and sat outside where we could look over Madison. It wasn’t so high up as the Space Needle or the Willis Tower had been, but there was still a pretty good view. It was really too late for dinner, so we had some snacks and a few drinks and then it was time for bed.

Neither Aquamarine nor I thought it would be right to have Cayenne take the other bed and be all by herself, so we said that she could sleep with us. Aquamarine wound up in the middle, and I was on the window-side of the bed.

May 1 [The First of May]

May 1

The problem with sharing a bed with a unicorn is that they don't like to get up early, so once me and Aquamarine were both awake we abandoned Cayenne and I made another pot of coffee, since the smell might wake her up.

She was stirring in bed but wasn't up after Aquamarine and I had both had a third of the little pot, so we went off to the shower without her and we were pretty much finished when she finally stumbled into the bathroom and slid open the curtain far enough to climb in.

There ought to be some sort of stepstool or stile into the bathtub. I never really had much trouble with them 'cause I could fly over, but Aquamarine had struggled with it, and Cayenne wound up doing a sort of sliding belly-flop into the bathtub. Then she muttered something about not being all the way awake yet and stuck her head right under the water.

I've always thought that cold water works better to wake up quick.

But it worked okay for her because she pulled her head back out and shook some of the water out of her mane and said that outdoor fucking started today. I told her that I’d already started and I didn’t know that we weren’t supposed to start before the first of May and she just stuck her tongue out at me, levitated a loofah and started to scrub herself.

When me and Aquamarine had finished up our shower and dried each other off we went into the main room to finish grooming, while Cayenne was still in the shower washing her mane.

I guess that either Cayenne had made us sleep in a little or else Miss Cherilyn was up early 'cause I was still brushing Aquamarine's tail when we heard her knocking on the door and Cayenne just looked over and opened it then turned back to getting her bangs just right. I suppose there are some advantages to rooming with a unicorn.

Miss Cherilyn was a little bit surprised that there wasn't anypony near the door but she told us that if we were almost ready they were too and we could go get breakfast.

With the three of us all together we did even better for breakfast; not only did we have granola and oatmeal, but also a fruit salad. Mister Salvatore said that we could order more than one thing if we wanted to so we got a second fruit salad to share.

Cayenne told us in Equestrian that it was still pretty early so we ought to stretch out breakfast. She said that theatre parties usually ran really late; she had been to one in Chicago and she said that she hadn't gone to sleep until four am. Then she grinned and said that she had been in bed by two and that it had been a great party.

Miss Cherilyn asked what she was talking about, and she waved a hoof and said 'unicorn stuff,' then before Miss Cherilyn could ask anything else she floated up a cube of melon and ate it with a satisfied grin on her face.

We finally finished drinking our coffees and then went back to the room to pack our things. Neither Aquamarine nor I had all that much—it had only been a weekend trip, after all—and even Cayenne had made do with only one bag besides her saddlebags. And we had to put it all in Sienna 'cause otherwise we would have had to carry it with us.

So we went towards Nicky's house 'cause that's where Gusty was, and Cayenne managed to find another way to delay us at a store that sold greeting cards, scented candles called Yankee, and other small gifts that looked to me like the kind of thing you give someone when you don't know what they actually like.

There were lots of different subjects for the cards and Cayenne found one that she liked. It was pink, and on the front it said 'All her life she imagined being this impressive, amazing woman, and one day she woke up and realized she was.' It would have been better if is said 'pony' instead of 'woman,' but I didn't think we'd find a card that said that.

Then we all signed it and put it in the little envelope and we were about to leave when Cayenne said that she ought to get a candle too, and she found one called Midsummer Night, which was just perfect. Miss Cherilyn had gotten into the spirit and found a nice bag that we could put it in, and then she said maybe we should get something for Nicky too but none of us could think of anything that she might like.

When we finally got to her house and rang the doorbell, Gusty came down and opened the door just a little bit and said she wasn't dressed yet and would we mind waiting out on the porch for a few minutes, and Mister Salvatore looked down at the three of us who weren't wearing anything and raised his eyebrow but didn't say a word.

And it didn't take her too long before she opened the door and let us in and happily trotted up the steps with us following. We all congratulated her again on how well she'd done and everyone got hugs and nuzzles and then we gave her our gift and she was so happy with the card and with the candle. She told us some funny stories about rehearsals and said that she got to help one of the Mechanicals put on his stage makeup because he couldn't do it himself and he didn't trust any of the girls to do it for him.

She told us that she'd heard last night that they were going to get to do a special performance in Stratford, and that was where all the famous Shakespearean actors performed, and she was really looking forward to that.

We talked up until it was time for her to go to the theatre to get ready for the matinee performance, then we hugged her and wished her good luck except for Cayenne who told her to break a leg and I thought that was mean to say.

Cayenne rode with us in Sienna all the way to Glencoe, where she got out so that she could ride a Metra train, and we went back through Chicago which was even busier and more crowded than it had been before. When we stopped for the hundredth time at a guard station Mister Salvatore said that next time he was going to fill out the paperwork for an Easy Pass and Miss Cherilyn said that she had told him he ought to.

I wanted to stop for dinner at a Taco Bell, but I got outvoted and we stopped instead at Denny's and this time nobody was mad at me for being a pony. Aquamarine had never eaten at a Denny’s before and she said it was kind of shoddy. Mister Salvatore said maybe so but it was a lot nicer at four am when you were on the road and the only thing better was Waffle House but there weren’t any of those nearby.

Miss Cherilyn changed the subject and said that Nicky and Gusty were so cute together and so I guess she hadn’t been fooled at all. We all agreed that they were.

Then we went along a different highway for a little bit and stopped at a beachfront dunes park where you could see Chicago off in the distance over the lake and that was really neat. The skyscratchers were like distant mountains, and I was glad he'd thought to stop there for us.

It was kind of odd to think that somewhere off in that distant city that I could barely see was Cayenne, and it had only been a few hours since she was in the van with us. Human travel is so fast.

Once we’d left the dune park, it didn’t feel like all that long before we were back in Kalamazoo, and we agreed that we'd had a great weekend and we still needed to get together in Chicago and see the museums. And once we'd said our goodbyes I went back to my dorm room and started catching up on my homework 'cause I'd missed a lot when I was sick and then even more 'cause I hadn't been able to pay attention on Friday. So it was nearly midnight when I went to bed: even Peggy was undressed and in bed before I finally closed my Anthropology book.

May 2 [a normal Monday]

May 2

I got up at my usual time and got right into my flight gear. The nice lady on the radio said that she'd missed me and I told her I'd been sick but I was better now, and I got permission to fly. I reminded myself that I was going to see if I could come and visit her someday. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to ask Mister Salvatore to arrange it; she was always talking to other airplanes and that was a lot of responsibility that I shouldn't interrupt.

It was kind of chilly and overcast outside, and it smelled like it had rained not that long ago. Looking up at the clouds I figured that it would rain some more during the day, but probably not too much.

That was the kind of rain most ponies liked the least, and we'd learned in weather management classes how to avoid it. It was basically when you had just a little too much moisture to stay up, but not enough to sustain a good rain. Or sometimes you had different temperatures in the sky and the rain would fall but not make it all the way to the ground. Humans called that virga, and because they had uncontrolled weather with some really really high clouds it was a lot more common on Earth. We didn't really have a name for it, because it was usually a screw-up.

I wasn't going to let it dampen my spirits, though. I darted around right at the base of the cloud and listened for airplanes. I didn't know how thick the clouds were so I didn't want to try and fly through them.

I landed a bit later than I had intended to and I certainly didn't have time to send a computer letter to Mister Salvatore, so I just wrote a note to myself and put it on my desk so that I would see it and remember later. Then I got in the shower and it was kind of lonely, but it made me smile when I remembered how both Aquamarine and Cayenne had struggled getting over the edge of the bathtub while I could fly right over. And maybe in a couple of hours when Cayenne got up she would be soaping herself in the shower with her loofah and thinking how nice it was that she could just move it wherever she wanted with her telekinesis rather than have to struggle to get everything.

While I was preening, I plucked out some more stray feathers and put them on my desk so that they'd dry off before I went and added them to my collection. I'd lost a couple of primaries, which were big enough I could make a wall-sized dreamcatcher if I wanted to.

Everyone was happy to see me back at breakfast and in a good mood. I told them all about my weekend and how great Gusty had been in the play and that they were going to go an extra week because it was so good and then they were going to perform in Stratford and Joe asked me which one and I didn't know that there was more than one.

He said that there was one in Ontario that was pretty close and probably the one she was thinking of, or there was the original Stratford in England, and I said I would ask her next time I wrote her.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee reminded us about Poincaré sections, and explained how that simplified orbits by reducing one dimension and I'm glad that he reminded us because I hadn't been paying good enough attention on Friday when he first went over it. And he reminded us that we could only count piercings from one direction in that plane; the other ones didn't count.

He explained autonomous systems and non-autonomous systems, and explained how the state space of a non-autonomous system was on a cylinder, and rolled up the paper to show us how time zero and time 2π were the same thing, and it would repeat like that.

Then he gave another example of an electrical circuit, and I got completely lost because everyone in class understands exactly how electricity works, except for me. I don't understand how you can make little copper paths for it to follow without it jumping to other places, but that's how it works on Earth.

At lunch I decided that maybe I could educate myself some on electricity because Sean must know all about it because he knows about computers and everything inside works on electricity. But it turned out that as smart as he was he didn't know all that much about what kept the electricity on the right path; he just knew what it did when it got where it was going. Still, that was useful because he explained how logic gates worked and then used his pocket telephone to show me how a computer made out of dominos (not the pizza) could add numbers together.

Professor Amy taught us about social stratification. She said that privilege doesn't just mean that which is obvious, but all the unspoken rules which are what the social stratification causes.

She said that in egalitarian societies, everyone is born with an equal chance, and that most hunting and gather societies are like that. That was what pegasus societies are like; everypony is equal and it's what you accomplish that matters, not who your mother is.

In rank societies, there is a difference in prestige, which was based on how close you were to an important person. It occurred to me that was what unicorns like to do: they based their social status on how close they were to an important unicorn, which is why it was so important to them to keep track of all their ancestors, and that was a silly system because it could change arbitrarily. If Gusty wound up becoming an important actress, than all of a sudden her sisters would have more rank than they had had before, even though they hadn't done anything.

Imagine if we had such a silly system: my sister would suddenly be more important because I was the only pegasus with a pilot's license.

And there were a whole lot of other types of social standing, and they could vary from one place to another. One of the dumbest that humans liked to use was color, which was silly because they were all different colors and not even as colorful as ponies, and I couldn't see how it could make any difference at all what color they were.

Even the unicorns had more sense than that.

We had Italian food for dinner again but this time they had two different trays of ravioli, which is a little pasta sandwich. One had meat in it and one which didn't, which is the one I picked. And they also had all sorts of sauce and I tried some of the ravioli without it but it was too dry so I got some and decided I'd just be careful to keep it out of my muzzle.

Of course it was one thing to think that and another to actually do it but at least I entertained Christine, who would helpfully point out spots and then laugh when I licked them off.

Then Sean said he was kind of jealous of my tongue, and Christine went and got a cherry and plucked the stem off of it and worked it around in her mouth for a moment and stuck it back out and it had a knot in it. So I got a cherry and tried it for myself but I couldn't do it and she said it wasn't just how long your tongue was but how well you used it and both Peggy and I agreed with her.

I spent some of the evening reading the rest of Samuel, then I went over to Aric's early but he wasn't there, and I couldn't send a telegram to him because I had left my telephone back at my dorm room. So I let myself in with the key because I knew he wouldn't mind and I went up to his bedroom and found a book on his bookshelf which was called Letters from the Earth which made me think that Mister Twain didn't have a lot of use for God's rules.

I wonder if God got mad at him because of it?

I read until my eyelids got heavy and Aric still wasn't there so I stretched out on his bed and closed my eyes and hoped that he would be there in the morning.

Author's Note

In lieu of a blog post:

And I picked the Twain book by going over to my bookshelf, closing my eyes, and grabbing a random book.

May 3 [Yeats]

May 3

I must have been tireder than I thought because I didn't really wake up when Aric came home. When I woke up in the morning he was next to me and I had a vague memory of him asking me if I could move over a little bit but I thought I'd dreamed it. And maybe I had; but he was there.

He had his back to me and I nuzzled along his spine then when he didn't respond I hooked a hoof over his shoulder and kind of gave him a little tug and he finally snorted in his sleep and rolled onto his back, and I put my head on his chest.

I probably could have stayed like that for hours but he started to wake up and I felt a little bit guilty—I should have let him continue to sleep. And he didn't open his eyes but he lifted his hand and rested it on top of my forehoof, then he gave a little squeeze and felt around until his hand was on my cheek.

I asked him what time he had gotten home and at first he didn't answer and I thought maybe he was still asleep but then he said three am and I asked him why and he said that he was putting up lights for the Frelon Dance Company, and had he forgotten to tell me that there was a show coming up this weekend?

That sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember if he'd told me a specific date for it before. So I asked and he said it was Friday night, and then afterwards I'd get indoctrinated into one of the great campus traditions if I wanted to but when I asked what that was he wouldn’t tell me.

He said that he would be home late every night this week because of the amount of work which went into the show. And then he finally opened his eyes and sort of pushed me off him so that he could properly gesture. Humans love making hand gestures to illustrate things.

There were lights that had to be run on stage, he told me, and more lights in the background and by the time they were done they would be using every circuit in the theatre except for six of them that nobody could find.

Then he told me how there wasn't any map of where all the circuits were and only the ones in the catwalk were labeled, so it was guesswork to find the rest. He had found a couple in the basement, under the moving stage elevator, and there were more hidden in the back balcony, but he said that there were still six that couldn't be accounted for.

I told him I could come over and help him look and he laughed and said that I didn't have to; they'd designed the show without using them and everybody thought that they probably had been covered over in one of the renovations of the theatre, like when they'd built a new stage floor maybe.

And he asked me how my weekend had been and I told him all about seeing Gusty and how well she had done. He said that he wasn't really that much of a fan of Shakespeare but he would have liked to see that show.

Even though he was still pretty tired—I could see bags under his eyes—he said that it wouldn't be a proper morning if we didn't have sex and I couldn't agree more. I told him that he owed me for not being home last night and he was going to have to do all the work, then I rolled onto my back.

He ran his finger down my ruff and said that he would be home late every night this week, and that if I didn't want to come over I didn't have to but I told him I wanted to even if he wasn't home when I went to bed it was better waking up with him than alone, and he said that I was an eternal optimist.

I flew out his window and he waved goodbye and when I looked back he was still standing at the window, so I guess he didn't mind if the neighbors on the other side saw his penis.

I felt a lot more complete this morning and the trees were starting to bud finally. It was chilly again, but this time it was clear and so I could get up to altitude and look over the whole world and that was a fun feeling because it was like I owned it. I was queen of the cloudpile.

Then I heard a distant noise and finally located an airplane far above me (they're really hard to see when they don't leave clouds behind them) and I guess it was actually queen of the cloudpile because I knew from up there you could see even further.

It didn't get me down, though, 'cause it went across the sky and then vanished and I was still here.

I took a long leisurely shower and I could have stayed in there until lunch except finally Brianna knocked at the door and said that she thought my singing was lovely and she hated to cut me short but she wanted to take a shower too, then I felt guilty because maybe she had been waiting for a while and hadn't wanted to interrupt so I stopped the water and shook myself off and let her have a turn.

Trevor and I went to poetry together after lunch and we both sort of wondered out loud what we'd be learning. He told me that the thing he liked the most about Conrad was how spontaneous he was; how he'd just pick a poet which he thought fit the mood and I said that was what poetry ought to be like. Classes like math, you had to learn one thing before you could move on to the next. But you could approach poetry in any order you wanted to and it wouldn't make a difference.

And so it was. He introduced us to William Butler Yeats, who was Irish. And he started us off with a short poem called A Drinking Song, and one of the girls in the class said that was stereotyping and Conrad just laughed and said that he hadn't been the one to write the poem.

Then he followed that with An Irish Airman foresees his Death. He had Trevor read it and it sounded both sad and noble at the same time. And I hoped that when I met my fate it was also somewhere in the clouds above.

Conrad got a little twinkle in his eye and said that I could read the next poem which was called The Fascination of What's Difficult, and I had a really hard time reading through it without laughing because it was about the theatre and Mister Yeats was using a colt as a metaphor and before I could think I said that maybe I ought to take Mister Yeats's advice and lock my colt in the stable before he spends any more time in the theatre.

Melissa raised her hand and said that she knew this was not about Yeats but had any of us heard of the pony Puck in Madison and I said that that was my friend Gusty and I had seen it last weekend and it was really good.

We had a little bit of a talk about Shakespeare and Conrad said that maybe we'd talk about him more later but he hated to step on the theatre department's toes like that. Then he asked if anybody wanted to read Adeh Tells of a Valley full of Lovers, which sounded like a place Cayenne would like very much.

I was going to read more of my Bible tonight because I was way far behind and would never finish up by the end of this school year but at dinner Sean and Christine invited me over to her suite to watch another Star Trek movie because Sean said that I needed to catch up on the lore if I planned to see the new one that was going to be in theaters and so I said I would, and they said that they wouldn't be starting the movie until nine.

So I did get to read a little bit of the Bible, and I got a computer letter from Doctor Thomas Thompson asking if I was still interested in being a storm watcher and I thought that would be a big honor so I sent him a letter back saying that I was interested. There had only been one storm so far but surely there would be more.

Before I knew it it was almost nine and so I went down to Christine's room and I sat on the papasan and we watched the movie. It confused me a bit because it took place before any of the other ones I'd seen, even though it was newer, and Sean explained that that was called a reboot, which was where the filmmakers made a movie about what happened before other movies, or when they changed around a franchise a little bit.

I thought it was pretty good and Sean said that he thought that most of the new actors played the parts really well. And it reminded me that I ought to see if I could find a place to go skydiving because that was something I could do with my friends.

As I was flying across the quad and back to my dorm I got to thinking that there were a lot of things that I wanted to do and the school year was coming to an end really quick so maybe I ought to be smart and write down a list and then check things off as I'd done them. Big things that might take a weekend and little things that could be done in an afternoon.

Author's Note

A Drinking Song

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

The Fascination of What's Difficult

Aedh Tells of a Valley full of Lovers

May 4 [Force Day]

May 4

Not too long after I took to the sky, it started raining, and not a drizzle, but a good genuine soaking rain that farmponies love. I loved it, too; it's a lot of fun to fly in the rain although you have to be careful because it muffles sounds and smells and of course you lose vision, too. And I could stay out in it longer because it washed off all the sweat and so I didn't have to take a shower at all when I was done with my flight, which was a real time-saver. My mane and tail were wet and droopy but even if I'd taken a shower and combed them out they would have looked the same again by the time I got to class, so why bother?

The talk at the breakfast table today was that Ted Cruz had dropped out of the presidential race, leaving only John Kasich who didn't have very many votes and wasn't too popular with anyone. Meanwhile both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were still competing, and there was some debate at the table which one would win.

I thought it would make sense if all of them competed together; what was the point of having one set of elections to pick two semi-finalists and then another to pick the winner? It would be a lot easier if people could just choose from all the candidates. But I guess that's not the way it works; there are only two parties and when there is a third people get confused.

Before anyone could talk too much about politics, Christine held up her hand and said that what was more important was that today was Force Day, named in honor of Star Wars. Then she reached out and touched everyone's forehead and said 'may the force be with you' when she did.

I didn't feel any different after but that was okay; it was still nice of her.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee told us about the phase portrait which is the picture of the orbit in general on the plane. And he said that no matter what, it would make a particular shape, which was a definite structure. Then he explained the bifurcation diagram, which was where you started to plot specific points on the plane to see what that did to system behavior. And after he explained all of it, he brought up a map which showed us easily how the system behaved with a period one orbit for a while, then it had two, then four, then eight, then it got pretty chaotic after that.

This was important because it easily showed us the points where things started to get unstable, and he explained that most likely if we could figure out why it went from one to two, it would be the same reason it went from two to four, and so on. Then he wrote a fourth-order equation on the markerboard and told us to solve it.

That was difficult but a lot of fun. We'd already solved two equations for the period one orbit, and after he hinted that they were roots of the period two equation, it wasn't that hard to solve. Since Sean was struggling, I helped him out in exchange for him writing down all the symbols which I wasn't very good at.

Once we'd all had a chance to figure that out, he showed us several of the different graphs layered on top of each other, and then what we'd been calculating all made sense. We could see how the period kept doubling over time, and when he made the layered graphs again we could see how the original points were still on the line, along with more new ones.

I think that one of the most interesting things about the math class was how many ways there were to explain things that were really too complicated to easily understand, and then put them all together for a pretty good approximation of what was happening.

They had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and Christine said that they would be really nice if they'd made them right but they were too soggy and greasy. Sean dipped his in tomato soup and said that if you ate it that way it was really good.

She said if it was meant to be eaten that way than they would have grilled cheese soup, and he held his hand over her mouth and told her not to say that where they could hear. Then he said if there was grilled cheese soup on the menu for dinner he was going to make her drink a whole bowl of it.

Christine told him that they wouldn't think of that, and he just crossed his arms and glared at her.

Professor Amy told us about personality development. She started off by saying that there were some genetic aspects to it; that people could be born with traits that didn't fit well in their current social setting. That was a lot of words to say that pegasuses weren't happy when they had a groundpony foal. I suppose the same was true with unicorns having anything but another unicorn. I'd heard the earth pony parents didn't mind having unicorn or pegasus foals, though, because they could also be useful on a farm or on a ship.

There was a pegasus who lived in town who did all the thatching work and lived in a ground-house and she liked it. She didn't like flying much higher than roofs, which was weird. I think she just wasn't used to it. But she was really strong from lifting bundles of thatches and sometimes her helper when they had a big job like the roof of the pub.

Professor Amy said that what mattered the most after that was how the child was raised; what the social expectations of the parents and community were, and how the child learned what to adopt. Then she said besides the potential problems with genetic traits, there was a theory that there were three different types of personality: tradition-oriented, inner-directed, and outer-directed. But when she described each different type I thought that each one could apply to me, and when she was done a whole bunch of hands went up and before anyone could speak she said that there were problems with this theory and would anybody who felt that they had more than one of those traits put their hands back down.

Well that was pretty much everyone and she went on to explain that most people exhibited all those traits in their day-to-day life but that it was still useful to know because often in societies there was one type of personality which was the most dominant but that people were a lot more complicated than just sets of labels.

The clock said it was almost time for us to go and I thought it was strange that she hadn't given us anything more than a broad overview because she often told us specific things. Then she said that our assignment was to determine which personality trait was most common in our hometown and why.

I spent the rest of the afternoon outside playing in the rain and splashing around in puddles and I even nibbled at some of the grass that was under the deeper puddles because it tasted the best then, and it was easy to pull it loose and get some of the roots, too. Not too much, though, because it was rude to leave bare patches.

Then I had to take a shower because I'd gotten my legs all muddy.

There wasn't any grilled cheese sandwich soup for dinner; instead it was their normal stuff. I had all warm food because I'd already eaten my greens outside and it was nice to have warm food on a rainy day.

I spent most of the evening working on my homework. I started with Anthropology, where I decided that the pegasuses in my town had mostly inner-directed personalities because we all knew what was right and what was wrong, but second to that was definitely tradition-oriented and I almost made that first. What changed my mind was thinking about how we were a little too practical to stick to tradition when something newer and better came along. A lot of the older ponies were skeptical of it, and maybe that was good; there wasn't any sense in galloping along towards every new idea there was. But if it worked better than the old way then they'd pick up on it, like with reading. Some of the older mares on the weather team complained that in their day they didn't need to know how to read to do their jobs, but nopony griped that all the younger mares knew how and there was one mare on the afternoon shift who had been taught how by her daughters and she was really proud of it and now she liked to read everything she could get her hooves on.

When that was done I decided to see if I could solve the eighth-order equation that would come next, which was really tricky because first I had to figure out how to write it. But since he had given us the others and I'd written them down, I got what looked right to me, and just to verify I used the points we'd already calculated and they worked out so I thought it was probably correct.

Peggy looked over my shoulder and asked if I was learning Greek, and I explained that I was solving the equation for fun and she said that between reading the Bible and solving long math equations I had a really odd idea of fun sometimes.

I was pretty proud of what I'd come up with, even if it did fill a couple pages of my notebook. And I kept on working on it while Peggy was doing her math, but I finished before her. I hoped I had done it right: I was going to have to get to class before everyone else and show Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee.

While I waited for Peggy to finish, I went back to listing off things that I wanted to do, and I was so engrossed that I didn't notice when Peggy came across the room and asked me what I was doing. So I told her, and she laughed and said that I had now acclimatized to Earth so much I was writing a bucket list.

I didn't know what that was, and she told me that was the name for things I wanted to do before I kicked the bucket, which was a human way of saying dying. I said that the list would be a lot longer if I included everything I wanted to do in my life.

She said I was going to be a busy pony and said I didn't mind, and she said that she was free Saturday afternoon if I wanted to go Go-Kart racing and get that off my list.

I told her I was going to see if Aric wanted to go, and she said that the more of us who came the more fun it would be, and then she petted my mane.

After I got done helping her with her math, I flew off to Aric's house, shook myself dry on his porch, and then went upstairs to his bedroom. I probably could have read more of Mark Twain—the book was still where I'd left it—but I was kind of tired, and I thought that maybe if I went to bed a bit earlier I'd wake up when he came home.

May 5 [Cinco de Mayo]

May 5

I did wake up when Aric got home. He smelled like rain overtop of the strange hot dusty smell that the theatre had, and when he came into his room I pretended to be asleep but I opened one eye just a little bit and watched him get undressed and then I reached out and brushed up against him with my wing which he wasn't expecting at all.

I must have helped him relax from his long day because afterwards he fell back asleep before me, and I just listened to him sleep for a little while.

When I woke up again in the morning I got out of bed quietly and opened the window 'cause it was kind of stuffy in his room. It was overcast, but the rain had stopped, and all the grass outside the window was glittering in the early light.

He caught me by surprise when he got up and came to the window beside me—I had been watching the birds hop around on the lawn. There were a couple of robins who had found something to eat in the grass, but I couldn't see what. Probably worms, 'cause worms like to come out of the ground when it rains. I think their burrows fill with water and they have to.

I could just see a little bit of the driveway and there were a couple of smaller birds which I think were chickadees that were splashing around in a puddle.

Aric asked me what I was looking at and so I pointed out all the birds and he watched them too and said maybe he should get a birdfeeder, but if he did, I had to promise not to eat the seeds out of it. I said it would depend on what kind of seeds he put in it.

Then I told him that me and Peggy were going to drive go-karts on Saturday afternoon and I wanted to know if he would come, too. I told him that she had said that the more people who were there the more fun it would be.

Well, he agreed with that, and he said he would.

We stood by the window a little bit longer, and he ran his hands through my mane and rubbed my ears and then ran his hands down to the sensitive spot on my back that he'd been so proud to have discovered and we went back to bed for a little bit.

Once we'd gotten up for the second time, Aric said that on Saturday just to make sure that we didn't start go-kart racing until noon, because he wouldn't be up before then and I said that I'd tell Peggy. Then he kissed me on my nose and I went out the window again because it was fun and I wasn't supposed to do it from my dorm room.

I thought I'd fly a different way than I usually did, so I went across the big road by campus and then followed a curvy road called Oakland for a while. It came to a big open pasture right before it got to the 94 Highway, and I landed there and trotted around for a bit. It was a strange place; there were short grassy trails and little holes marked with flags and I couldn't figure out why, unless they were afraid that people would trip on the holes. But then when I got more towards the front a man driving a white car yelled at me for being on the golf course, and so I guess that's what it was and I wasn't supposed to be there.

I don't think he expected me to fly away when he yelled. I thought about circling back around and landing on the roof of his white car but there wasn't any point in making him mad, so I just made a big circle away and back towards campus.

At lunch I mentioned how I had been shouted at and Leon said that the white man doesn't like coloreds on his golf course unless they're caddies and that was just another way that The Man kept us down. I wasn't sure if he was joking or not, until Cedric asked Leon what his handicap was and Leon said it was eight and he sounded proud of that.

Cedric said that the last time he'd played golf he'd scored a perfect three hundred, and I thought that was pretty good, until Trevor started laughing and told him that he was mixing up his sports again. Then Cedric said that bowling was a better sport anyway because the black ball got to knock down the white pins.

Trevor said that the last time he'd bowled he'd gotten a blue ball and what did that mean, and Leon put his hand on his shoulder and said that it meant he didn't have game, and all three of them started laughing.

Lunch was really lousy, which I hoped meant that they had something special planned for dinner. Even the lettuce didn't look all that good; it was kind of wilted and sad.

Conrad began by reading a poem called The Fisherman, and it reminded me of home. Even the name of his clothes sounded like the name of my village, and so I couldn’t help but perk up a bit in my seat and listen to every word. There was a pair of old stallions just like that, and one of them was gray and the other a dingy brown. Their coats were forever stained with sea-salt and each morning they would go down to the beach and wade out in the surf with nets behind to fish—they were too old to work on a fishing boat anymore; everypony knew it—and they would bring back their meager catch and sell it in the market. They were both quiet and respectful and every now and then my mother would trade them some fresh grass that she'd found for a small fish or two. And when I was little I didn't understand why that made them so happy, but now I did and so whenever I was at market I'd buy a fish from them, too, even though I could have gone out and caught my own easily enough. And sometimes I'd give them pasture grass and sometimes I'd give them a bunch of wildflowers in exchange, and sometimes when there weren't either I'd give them a bit coin but that felt cheaper.

We read another sailing poem next, called Sailing to Byzantium, which started out by saying that it was no country for old men, which I thought was an interesting change from the last poem. Mister Yeats thought that Byzantium was a really nice place but I'd never heard of it.

Conrad finished out the lesson with a poem called Easter 1916 and I thought back to the Easter service I had attended with Meghan, but this was much sadder and maybe not literally about Easter at all.

But then a lot of poems weren't really about what it seemed like they were about, and a lot of the students said that they thought it was about World War One, so I thought about asking Conrad about that, then decided that there were so many books in the library surely there were some about World War One and I could find out about it there and not have to bother him at all.

Before I could do that, though, I went back to my room and read more of the Bible. King David constantly fought battles and got dethroned for a while but then took his throne back and then he got so old that his friends found a woman who would sleep with him to keep him warm. And then he made Solomon the next King.

Of course not everyone was happy with that, and there was still some fighting and people getting killed because they had been loyal to the wrong person in the past or because King Solomon just didn't like them. But then King Solomon did something that was smarter than anyone else had and he asked God for wisdom, and so he was so wise that people came from all over the world to hear him talk.

Then he went and got all the good workers and built a house for God called a temple and after that was done he built a palace for himself, too.

But when he got older his wisdom must have run out because he married hundreds of women and then he started building temples to their gods, too, and that made God angry at him. And so God decided that He was going to split up the tribes of Israel like He had said He would if Solomon was bad, but He let Solomon remain king until he died, because He had made a promise.

I should have known that was going to happen. Nobody had had the good sense to follow God's instructions and I thought that Solomon would be better because he was so wise, but he messed up, too.

I stopped by the library and one of the student helpers found me a book on World War One, and I took it back to my room before going to dinner.

We did have a special meal; it was tacos and burritos and other food like Taco Bell has and Christine said that was because it was Cinco de Mayo, which is a special day in Mexico. I asked her why it was special and she didn't know. Joe said that it was because the Titanic was carrying a cargo of mayonnaise, and then it sank, and Sean told him that was the stupidest theory he'd ever heard because the Titanic sank in April, not May.

Christine said that John Kasich had given up and so now Trump was the Republican nominee. Joe said that he was glad he was moving to Japan after he graduated because that was a pretty safe distance to watch from. I was worried that if he got elected he might build a wall like the angry man had said, and Peggy said that so far the only wall he’d proposed was the one between the US and Mexico and besides no matter who got elected they wouldn’t actually get to be president until January, and I’d be back in Equestria then.

Liz met with me outside since it was a nice day now: the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared and it had warmed up. And that was probably for the best because I'd eaten more tacos than I should have.

We talked about how the kings of Israel still weren't very good at following rules, and she said that was just human nature. And then she said that she'd heard I had been sick and I told her that I was better now and that I was going to go watch a Frelon dance tomorrow and then participate in a campus tradition that Aric wouldn't say what it was, and on Saturday race go-karts.

She laughed at that and said that the campus had a lot of traditions and she had been a student when they first started having their after-Frelon tradition and she'd think about participating for old-time's sake. But she wouldn't tell me what it was, either.

I thought after that that I'd better see Meghan 'cause I hadn't talked to her for a week, so I went over to her room and knocked and she was surprised to see me and I said that I knew it was short notice but maybe we could watch another Harry Potter movie together and start over again and she considered that for a minute and I thought that she was going to close the door in my face but she wound up inviting me in.

She put the movie on but we didn't get very far before neither of us were watching it any more. I farted really loudly during a quiet scene right at the beginning and she looked over at me and I said that was the tacos talking and she laughed and then we started talking and didn't pay any attention to the movie at all.

We both agreed that we had made bad assumptions going in and that perhaps if we had known more we would not have made those mistakes but she said that nobody had brought them up in any of her classes and I said that no one had told me either until it was too late.

And then we both decided that the best thing to do was start over, sadder and wiser than we had been before. Then we talked about what we were going to do for summer break which was coming up really soon, and I told her that I didn’t have any firm long-term plans yet but I was going to go go-kart racing on Saturday with Aric and Peggy and maybe some other people and she could come if she wanted to. She said that sounded like fun and she cheered up a little bit and it made me happy too because when all my friends were doing different things it was hard to choose what I wanted to do.

I snuggled up on her lap and she pet me for a while and then braided my mane and neither of us really had noticed that the movie was over until she had to get up to pee. When she came back out of the bathroom she said it was pretty late and that I could stay if I wanted to.

I told her that I would like that very much and waited until she had gotten undressed and then got in bed beside her and fell asleep with my head on her chest.

Author's Note

The Fisherman

Sailing to Byzantium

Easter 1916

May 6 [Frelon]

May 6

There was a big difference between waking up with Aric and waking up with Meghan. I wouldn't say one was better than the other, but it was different.

I snuggled up with my head on her breast until her telephone sounded its alarm and woke her up, and she reached out and made it stop for a little while so we could snuggle until it really was time to get up if we didn't want to be late for our classes.

I didn't want to push my luck by asking if we could shower together, and I guess maybe she wasn't in the mood 'cause she didn't offer so when she finally got out of bed I went back to Trowbridge and waited my turn for the shower there. I probably would have had enough time for at least a good trot around campus, 'cause Peggy hadn't even started hers yet, but I didn't feel like it.

While I waited I checked my computer mail and Doctor Thomas Thompson wanted to set up a meeting with me and so I sent him one back saying that I could do it on Sunday if that would work for him. And I said that maybe he could bring some of his instruments with him too and if the weather was right I could bring down another cloud for him to study, because I thought he would like that.

I had just finished up when Peggy got done and so I told her that Aric had said that he didn't want to go Go-Karting before noon and that Meghan wanted to come, too. Then I went into the bathroom and waited for my turn in the shower.

I got to math class early and showed Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee the calculations I'd done. He was surprised and said that he hadn't asked us to do that and I told him that I knew; I had just done it for fun. So he looked it over and said that I had gotten it right which made me really proud.

Then we started talking about bifurcations and topological equivalence. He told us that sometimes it was also called flip bifurcation and we might find it that way in some math books that we studied on our free time and a lot of people laughed when he said that but he was looking right at me when he did, and I just smiled.

We went back to the graphs we'd seen before and explained how the time between the bifurcation points could be expressed as a ratio and then he told us that result was a number which had been discovered by Michael Feigenbaum, and if we were interested we could look up the proof for that but it was beyond the scope of this class to do more than a brief overview.

I was interested in that, so I wrote myself a little note to look it up later. I think I could probably find it on the Google, or else at the library.

Then before we left he told us about an experiment a student named Donye Farmer did on a leaky faucet that determined the behavior of its dripping, which changed depending on how much the faucet was opened. I thought maybe next time I heard a drippy faucet I'd try and see if I could figure out the pattern.

They had leftover tacos at lunch and I wanted to have some but then thought better of it. My insides still weren't all the way settled after last night's dinner, so I just had a nice leafy salad instead.

We turned in our reports in Anthropology and then Amy asked us to think of coming-of-age rituals that were performed in our societies. Well, I knew about cutie marks and there was always a big party after a pony got one 'cause that meant she was mature (although I knew a few fillies that really weren't) and understood her place in the world. And some ponies took on new names then, like I had.

Professor Amy told us about all the different types of rituals that humans had, from circumcisions to Bar Mitzvahs to ordeals and just about everything in between. What they all had in common was that there was some way to mark the person as an adult; a way of saying that they had learned enough to be grown-up. Plus it also marked the social group that they were in.

I thought it was funny that for the boys most of the rituals took place at a particular age, while for the girls it didn't happen until they were sexually mature. To me that made more sense; if you were gonna have a foal you ought to be grown up first and know your place but I guess it was okay if boys didn't. Probably 'cause once they'd gotten you pregnant you didn't have to stick around with them if you didn't want to.

After dinner I thought about whether I should wear a fancy dress to Frelon or not: I'd never been to a dance before and I didn't know how formal it was going to be. But I decided not to because if it was okay to watch Shakespeare without, then it would be all right to watch a dance like that, too. At the same time, it was just gathering dust in my dresser and I ought to find something to wear it for.

Peggy and I left together and we met up with Sean and Christine and got there a bit early so that we could get good seats. I turned around and waved up to the light booth 'cause I knew Aric would be there with his little headset on waiting for his cue to go. And pretty soon the whole house was full and people were talking and then the house lights went down and the spotlight turned on, and a pretty woman came out and announced the show for us.

Then the lights went back out and the curtain opened and I saw six dancers standing in position and music started and then the lights came up and pretty soon I was totally lost in the show.

They did all sorts of different dances, from fast pieces to very slow ones, and sometimes they wore costumes and sometimes they didn't. I was just amazed by how much the human body could do. There was one dance where the men were lifting the women over their heads and then sliding them under their legs and they made it look so effortless. And there were some funny songs like It's Raining Men and then one that felt really sad to me called Saint Teresa.

I tried to pay attention to the lights, too, because I knew how much effort Aric had put into them. There were light-trees on the stage and more lights in the balconies and even more overhead and I wondered how he could keep track of them all, especially during some of the fast changes.

There was an intermission which gave everyone a chance to get up and stretch out and probably gave the poor dancers a chance to sit down and relax for a little bit, then they were back on stage and the second half was just as varied as the first had been.

At the very end there was a big finale and then everyone came out and bowed and my ears were ringing from the loud music and just like in Madison the auditorium thundered with applause.

When some of the noise died down I heard Peggy and Christine talking about if they were going to go to the Quad after and I asked if that was where the tradition that Aric had told me about happened and Peggy nodded and so I told her that I was going even if none of them did. Sean said that he wasn't sure and Christine told him to grow a pair.

I wanted to wait for Aric and Peggy said that was okay; it wouldn't start for a little bit, so we went upstairs to where the light booth doors were and waited. He finally came out and he was talking to Lisa who had been working the spotlight at the last show, too. Aric hugged me and Lisa did too, then Chad came out of the room and he just glared at me and went down the stairs. I didn’t think I liked Chad very much.

There were already a bunch of people clustered up by the chapel when we got there, and I could see still more trickling over, including some of the dancers. They formed their own group kind of in the center and people moved back to make room for them. From where we were I didn't think anybody who was with me could see them; I had to fly up a bit. But there were two arcs of people with the dancers in the middle.

And then on some signal people all started taking off their clothes and just leaving them on the ground and I landed in total confusion as I saw that Aric and Peggy were getting undressed, too. Then there was a shout from somewhere in the center of the group and that got carried on to everyone until a loud cheer went up and everyone ran down the hill. When they got to the sidewalk some people turned around and started going back, but most people including us went all the way down to the road between the quad and Hoben before turning around.

When we got back to the top of the hill people were getting dressed again and Aric asked me how it felt to have streaked the quad and Peggy said that I did it every day, so I stuck my tongue out at her.

After Aric had put his pants back on he leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and said that he had to go back to the theatre and button everything up because tomorrow night they were going to have to pull all the lights out of Dalton and move them to Balch for the mainstage show which was next weekend.

I asked him if that meant he would be home late every night next week, too, and he said he hoped not because once things were set up there was a different light board operator for that show so he wouldn't have to do that, just fix things that were broken and rig all the lights.

So we met up with Peggy and Sean and Christine and went back to our room and drank beer and played euchre until it was pretty late. Sean had had too much to drink and was almost asleep where he was sitting—which was why he'd done so badly in the last game—and so I offered my bed to them if Peggy didn't mind me sleeping with her, and she said she didn't. Then she said that they weren't allowed to have sex in my bed, and Christine said that she was no fun.

May 7 [go-kart]

May 7

I woke up a little later than I normally would have and my head was pounding a bit because maybe I'd had one or two more beers than I should have but that was okay, I was super-excited that I would get to drive today. Even if it wasn't a real car it would be fun.

Peggy and Christine and Sean were still asleep so I was quiet when I got out of bed and got my flight gear. It was another really nice day out, and I was going to get in a good flight to make up for my laziness yesterday.

I called the airplane director when I was outside and it was the nice lady and I said that I should come out and visit her and she laughed, and then I got to thinking that I should, so I told myself right after I was done flying I would send a letter to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and we could arrange something because I knew I wasn't supposed to have long personal conversations on the airplane radio.

I decided I'd fly into town and follow the river for a bit. The trees had finally decided that winter was over, so they were mostly leafy now, and I even saw some that had started to blossom on my flight.

When I got to the river, I flew down low right above the surface and under bridges that crossed it. I saw a few fish darting around here and there but I didn't try to catch any, even though I probably could have. They were pretty small anyways.

I went along the river until I saw a big dam and then I thought that was a good place to turn around, and just to be safe I stayed downstream from the rapids at the bottom of the dam because those were dangerous and could suck you under.

I knew that I was pretty close to the railroad tracks and I could have followed them back into town but I went along the river again instead. Most places there were buildings on both sides but I flew past a couple of areas where it was all trees. One of them had a single building that was on a little island that a small channel of the river flowed around and it said that it had topless girls and karaoke music. I hadn't noticed it on my way out because the bend in the river had kind of hidden it from me.

When I got back to the railroad bridge over the river, I flew up and then followed the tracks back to campus. Then I took my shower and by the time I was done and back in my room Sean and Christine were already gone, and Peggy was in her lounging clothes looking at her computer.

I started mine and wrote a computer letter to Mister Salvatore and then I left it on and wrote a letter to Gusty, too, asking her how the play had been so far and asked her if she was going to the Stratford in Ontario or the one in England, and then I told her about Frelon and thought about adding in how everyone ran down the hill naked after it was over but then decided that might bother her.

Peggy put it in the computer for me and I sent it off.

I wrote a letter to my Mom but I didn't wrap it up in an envelope just yet because I wanted to send her a dreamcatcher too but that meant I had to make her one, so I spent the rest of the morning doing that and Peggy helped with the little knots that I couldn't tie.

Then when that was done it wouldn't fit inside an envelope so Peggy said that I would have to get a bigger one at the post office, and since we still had some time before go-karting we drove to a real Post Office where they had an assortment of different-sized envelopes and some boxes and tubes and then went back to campus to pick up Christine and Sean.

We drove to the Airway Fun Center, which was right across the street from the airport, and I waved at the tower but I doubt the nice airplane director saw me. There was a strange set of towers that looked kind of like a brightly-painted scaffolding which Peggy said was a ropes course, and in front of that was something called a mini-golf course.

We all waited in the lobby until Aric showed up in Winston and he had Angela and David with him, and then not too long after Meghan and Becky and Lisa arrived, too.

So we all went to get the go-karts, and the man at the counter had to talk to his manager and his manager asked if I had a driver's license and I told him I had a pilot's license and showed it to him and he said that he supposed if I could fly an airplane I could drive a go-kart, and he wasn’t trying to be mean but it was just that I was a pony.

Then we had to sign a piece of paper saying that if we got hurt it wasn't their fault, and they gave us a little presentation on how to drive the cars and what the instructions meant and then we all got in one and they started a race.

I didn't do very well in the first race. The pedals were hard to reach and the go-kart didn't behave at all like I thought it would so I didn't go very fast while I was figuring it out. Plus the belt on my chest was really uncomfortable and the helmet that they gave me pinned down my ears and mostly deafened me but that was for the best because the cars were even louder than Winston.

It was a lot of fun, though, and by the time I'd finished the first race I sort of had an idea what I was doing, so I did better in the second race, and we wound up spending most of the afternoon racing. Then we split up into two groups of five and played a game of mini-golf which I was not good at at all. The golf-stick was awkward to use and swinging it like a glaive didn't work as well as I'd hoped it would. Hitting the ball wasn’t very hard but making it go where I wanted it to was.

When we got done we broke up our group even more. Aric and David and Angela wanted to race go-karts again, and Meghan, Lisa, and Becky wanted to try the ropes course and they talked Peggy into doing it, too. Then Sean and Christine said that they would most like to drive the go-karts, too, and so I did that a couple more times. I don't think I would have particularly enjoyed the ropes course, since to do it like you were supposed to I would have had to balance on my hind hooves and what was the point since I could just fly to anywhere on it.

I got good enough by the time we left to have come in fourth place once.

We finished off our day at the Fun Center by driving the bumper cars, which were inside, and unlike the go-karts, you were supposed to run into each other. They were a little harder to steer, because they could turn so much more quickly than the go-karts, and they even went backwards if you turned them too far.

Then we decided that since we were all together we ought to have dinner together so we went to a restaurant called Applebee's and got a big table and all ate together.

After dinner I rode back with Aric and David and Angela. It was pretty crowded with all four of us in the front, and I offered to get in the back and Aric thought that would be kind of funny because he said a lot of guys drove around with dogs in the back of their trucks and it would freak people out if they saw me back there. But then Angela said it was fine for me to be in the front and it was probably safer anyway.

When we got back home Aric said that we ought to watch a movie and that David wasn't allowed to make suggestions, so the four of us sat together on the couch and we watched a strange and funny movie called The Fifth Element which Aric said was a classic.

After the movie was over and we were about to go to bed I remembered that I was going to meet with Doctor Thomas Thompson tomorrow and maybe bring him a cloud and I thought that might be the kind of thing Gates would want to get a movie of, so I asked Aric if I could use his computer to send a letter and he said that I could.

I wouldn't have thought of it, but my ears still hurt from where they'd been folded under the go-kart helmet.

May 8 [Skywatcher]

May 8

I got off to a pretty lazy start this morning, sleeping in until almost eight. Then I just couldn't stay in bed any longer and Aric was a little bit grumpy about getting up, but he did. He should have had plenty of sleep last night, if he was really sleeping until almost noon like he said he would be.

We had breakfast at Nina's, then I convinced him to go shopping with me, 'cause I needed to get some stuff for the rest of the school year like more batteries for my blinking light and more cans of anchovies and more shampoo and I also thought while I was there I should get some laundry soap because I'd been borrowing Peggy's and I ought to pay her back. We also found a nice birdfeeder that looked kind of like a house and he said he'd hang it up in the backyard and by the next time I slept over the birds would probably be used to it.

He said that since we were out anyway he was going to stop by a parts store and pick up a set of brake pads for Winston because the ones that were on it were nearly worn out and he didn't have any more spares. I thought that would be interesting for me because I'd learn more about what made a car work, and there were so many different parts, rows upon rows of them. If I hadn't been meeting Doctor Thomas Thompson, I could have spent all day there with him as he told me what Frams were or why there needed to be so many different kinds of windshield squeegee.

The brake pads came in a little box, and when we were in Winston he opened it up and showed them to me and then held them in his hand and demonstrated how they squeezed on the brake rotor to stop Winston. Then on the way back he told me how the brake pedal pushed on a piston which put pressure in pipes and that pushed on more pistons at each wheel. It seemed pretty complicated; if wagons had brakes there was just a lever that pulled on a rod that applied the shoes.

He dropped me off at the dorm and helped carry my things up to my room (even though I could have carried them myself because the bags have little loops in them for hands or mouths) and then we kissed and he left and told me to have fun today.

I checked my computer mailbox and I had gotten a letter back from both Mister Salvatore who said that I could go visit the airplane director and take a tour of the control tower on Tuesday and from Gates who did want to get a movie of me catching a cloud.

So I didn't have a lot of time left, but I met up with him at his dorm and he gave me the duffel bag full of equipment and asked if he could come along to film from the ground and I thought that would probably be okay but we'd have to ask Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn for sure.

Well, they didn't mind. They were already there when I got back and they were a little annoyed that I hadn't been there when they’d arrived, but they softened when I told them about the great movies that Gates had already made and so he got into the van, too, and we went off to meet with Doctor Thomas Thompson.

We went to a place called Yankee Springs, which was north of Kalamazoo and had a big lake that I could fly over. The place where we met was a pavilion on the end of a peninsula, and Doctor Thomas Thompson was already there along with Ryan the weather watcher leader who I had met at the NOAA weather station and another man who introduced himself as Mel, and he was a ham radio operator.

To be a proper weather watcher, I needed to be able to use a different radio than my airplane radio, and I had to have a special license for that, which meant that I had to take a test like I'd had to for my pilot's license. Mel explained that there were several different levels of license, and that the one I'd want would be a technician's license, and that he could tell me about that. Or I could relay messages using a different type of radio called a CB radio which didn't have any special requirements but did have a much more limited range.

I asked if I could start with the CB while I was studying to be a proper radio technician and he said of course I could. It meant when I was storm watching I would have to stay in range of what Mel called a ground station, who would receive my messages and pass them on. He said that depending on the weather conditions and terrain that might be as few as a couple of miles, which was why it was better that I got a technician's license.

He gave me books to study and Mister Salvatore said that there was a lot of electrical theory in there that I probably didn't need to know but he wasn't sure that he could get it taken off the test just for me and I said that was okay; I'd make sure to study it all. And then Mel told me that there was an internet page that had practice tests and I ought to take them several times until I was confident that I knew what I needed to know.

So then Mel gave me a radio that I could use for the time being and showed me how to use it. It was a lot like the airplane radio, so I was at least a little familiar with the controls. Then he said that he was going to go to his truck which was parked right next to the pavilion and I could fly out over the lake and practice using the radio some. They had rigged up a little strap just like with my airplane radio so I could wear it on a leg.

Gates said that I might as well wear the GoPro helmet while I did and so I put that on and then flew out over the lake and pretty soon I heard Mel talking on my radio. He told me for now to just listen and gave me directions on how he wanted me to fly. Then he said that I could take turns talking to him and he asked me to describe what I was seeing, just for practice. Then he changed frequencies a few times and I followed along with him, then he let me request a change that he had to follow with.

I asked him why and he said because the CB was line-of-sight, it was possible that I might have traffic on my band that I could hear but that he couldn't from where he was, or I might be getting interference that he wasn't. He said that would be less of a problem when I had a ham radio license.

After that short trial run I called the airplane directors and got permission to fly up higher, so I did that and we kept on talking. He asked me to report on what I was seeing, and so I took a good look around at the sky and the clouds and the ground and then they had me land again.

We had a bit of a snack that Miss Cherilyn had thought to pack and she offered me a bottle of yellow drink called Gatorade.

I still wanted to catch a cloud for Doctor Thomas Thompson but there were hardly any so Miss Cherilyn said that she would watch for clouds that came close while the rest of us talked about other duties as a weather watcher and that way we could kill two birds with one stone.

I didn't want to kill any birds, and she laughed and said that was just an expression that meant get two things done at once.

Ryan who had mostly just been watching us got out his folding computer and sat down next to me and started to explain to me the basics of being a good skywatcher. It actually went pretty quick because mostly what I needed to know the most was the different human terms for weather and we'd covered some of them in climate science class. He said for now I'd be paired up with Mel so if anything needed clarification, Mel would be able to do it.

And then Miss Cherilyn pointed out a cloud which she thought might be close enough so I went away from the computer and looked up in the sky and it was kind of hard to judge with it just being there all on its own but there was nothing to lose by trying.

It was going to be a little bit awkward with another radio hooked to me, but I'd just have to take that into account. I probably could have left the CB behind but I knew that I should get used to having it.

When I finally got close to the cloud, my ears fell. It was pretty thin and it was going to take a lot of work to get it to even hold together at all. Even the wind off my wings might break it up if I wasn't careful.

If I could have gone up higher, there were some airplane clouds that looked a lot thicker and would have been easier to grab. But I wasn't allowed to, so I would just have to work with this one.

It took me a lot longer than I would have liked to compact it down into a smaller, denser cloud, and when I did it started sinking but that was okay because me and the cloud were going down anyway.

I stayed on top and rode it down, sort of helping it, 'cause that also let me feel if it wanted to just rain out all its moisture—I'd be really embarrassed if I got it most of the way down and then it just broke up under my hooves.

There hadn't been a whole lot of wind so I didn't have to make up much distance over the ground. I took it over a grassy strip near the pavilion and once I was in the lee of the trees it got pretty easy to control.

Well, I'd attracted a bit of an audience by then; I guess everyone who was out on a boat had seen me and a lot of them had come to shore and there was a lot of talk among them. Plus a few people who had been in the park had seen, too, and they were all coming over, too.

I did my best to ignore them while Doctor Thomas Thompson and Ryan looked over the cloud and Gates moved around taking a movie of it. Mister Salvatore had gone to talk to a man in a brown uniform that said DNR on the shoulder, and Miss Cherilyn was just watching over the crowd.

Eventually some of the people who had been watching came closer and looked at the cloud but I made sure that none of them got close enough to touch it.

Then since I didn't want to get the pavilion wet I pushed the cloud into the parking lot and Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore had to help keep people back. They kind of formed a ring and I set the cloud near the center and hopped up on it a couple of times and it dissolved into rain pretty quick.

I got a little bit of applause for that, but I could also hear a couple of people grumbling too.

Mister Salvatore decided that it was a good time to leave, and he said that it was almost dinnertime anyway so we might as well go to a restaurant, so we went to a place called the Sandhill Cafe. I thought it ought to be called the Sandhole Cafe, because there was a big hole next to it that looked like a small dirt mine.

There was a bit of a wait until we could get a table big enough for all of us and we probably wouldn't have except Mister Salvatore showed his wallet to a waitress and pretty soon a man in a suit came out and found us some space.

Ryan finished explaining things to me during dinner, and then he said that I was officially a Skywatcher now and shook my hoof and we all celebrated by having a nice dessert.

We got back to Kalamazoo kind of late, but everyone was happy with how the day went. I took my new books and new radio up to my room and started studying right away. I was determined to get my new license as soon as I could.

May 9 [Math Test]

May 9

Of course, today would have lots of clouds to choose from. There hadn't been very many when I got up but by the time I was done with my morning flight, they'd rolled in and it was pretty obvious by noon they'd be covering the sky completely.

I got in the shower earlier than I'd planned 'cause when Peggy got out she said that Kat wasn't waiting for a turn. I hoped she wasn't sick—maybe she'd gone away for the weekend or something. But that was nice because it gave me a little more time before breakfast and I didn't feel as rushed as I sometimes did.

It was the seventh week now and people were starting to talk about their plans for the summer in more specifics. I didn't have any plans yet, just my bucket list. I guess I should have planned further ahead like all my friends had but that sort of wasn't a thing that pegasuses liked to do if we could help it. It was a lot better to just take things as they came.

Hearing Joe talk about how he was going to move to Japan really got me thinking about it. If there weren't any classes in the summer, did that mean that I was going to have to move to a different place during the summer? And where would that be? Would I have a roommate?

Peggy was going back to Colorado, I knew that. Aric had a house, so I could live with him. Or maybe Meghan. I would have to ask Mister Salvatore, he was smart about things like that. I didn't know how to get a house. In Equestria, I would have just had my friends help me build one.

We had the last test before the final exam in math class, and that took the whole class period. It was a pretty complicated test and it was a bit stressful to know that I couldn't ask any of my friends to help explain things if I needed it. I didn't, it turned out, but that thought kept on nagging at me, that there would be some symbol that I had completely forgotten and then I wouldn't be able to answer the question.

Then when I was done nobody else was and I thought that either I was a lot smarter than anyone else in the class, which I doubted, or else I had flown to conclusions I should not have, so I went back through and double-checked all my work and I'm glad I did because there was one question where I had made a really stupid mistake.

I still had some time after I turned in my test but there was no more class so I went back to my dorm room and read through more of the ham radio book. Mister Salvatore was right; there was a lot in there that I didn't really need to know. I wasn't building my own radio or antenna. But he said that they would be on the test so I had to understand them. And while it didn't give me exact details on how electricity worked, it did show how complicated it was to make sure that it went where you wanted it to.

I thought I'd change things up a bit and sit with Meghan and Lisa and Becky for lunch. They told me that they'd all had a fun time racing go-karts, and on the ropes course as well. And the three of them seemed pretty cheery and I asked them how their Equestrian class was going and they said that it wasn't the same without me.

So I suggested that maybe it would be fun to talk in Equestrian for the rest of lunch, and they all thought so too. It was kind of hard to switch back from English and I felt like I'd forgotten how to say a bunch of stuff, which was really weird.

I said that things were getting kind of busy for me because the end of the year was coming up but I should go visit their class again.

Then Meghan invited me to come over Tuesday night and see another Harry Potter movie, and I said couldn't watch a movie on Tuesday because I had an exam on Thursday but I would come over anyway. Lisa asked us which one we were on, and I said that we had watched The Order of Phoenix but that Meghan and I had wound up talking through most of it so I didn't remember what had happened and we decided that we ought to watch that one again.

When we were taking our trays away, Meghan asked me if I was free Saturday night because we could use the hot tub again if I was, and I told her that I would. Then I asked her what she was doing over the summer and she said that she had a short-term lease on an apartment in Kalamazoo, so she'd be around, which made me happy. I had been thinking how lonely it was going to get in a couple of weeks and at least there'd be one familiar person around.

Professor Amy reminded us that we'd be having a test on Wednesday (I think all the professors were trying to get in one more test before finals) and then she said that today we were going to talk about exchange.

She said that was one of the fundamental things that separated us from wild animals: in the wild, the only exchanges were typically between mother and child, or a pair of potential sexual partners. However in human society (and in pony society, too) exchanges went beyond that.

At first I thought she was only going to talk about buying things at market but it turned out to be more complicated than that. She explained how the idea of sharing probably started with hunting, because one person couldn't eat all the meat before it went bad and so he would share it with his friends and presumably when they'd caught something and he hadn't, they'd share it with him, and that was sort of the foundation of all society.

And as she went on I could see how we had also developed a similar system. From the very beginning when pegasus bands had begun to ally with earth pony tribes, exchanging weather for better food than we could forage, and as the two tribes grew closer exchanging protection, too. And then as time went by and cities grew ponies got more and more specialized so that now instead of one farmer trying to grow everything, she might only plant peaches and would supply all the peaches to her town and maybe the ones around, too, and when peaches weren't growing she would use the money that she had gotten to buy other food.

We would explore for new land and work with the earth ponies to make it fertile, and we'd also give them extra feathers to make into quills so that they could write and keep track of it all, and pretty soon everypony could do what they were best at and not have to do things that they weren't good at.

I suppose the unicorns were doing the same kinds of thing; they can't have all been raising the sun.

Dinner had fish which would have been good except that most of it had a bread coating like the bad fish sandwich I had had at the ski resort, and I didn't trust it. Usually when they had something that was fried that meant that it was bad and they were trying to cover up how bad it was.

But there were also salmon patties that looked like they might be okay and also some thin fillets of cod so I tried those.

Sean was surprised to see them on my plate and told me that they were meat and I said that they were fish, anybody could see that. Maybe that wasn't fair; the salmon patty could have been anything but it smelled like fish. They tasted all right, too. A little bit dry, but not too bad.

Peggy told him that he was lucky that he hadn't smelled any of my cans of anchovies and I said those were good for energy in the morning. Sean said that he had never heard of anybody actually eating anchovies before and Christine told him that there were anchovies in properly made Caesar salads, and surely he'd had one of those before.

He told her that he didn't believe in salads, unless it was a taco salad. She said that didn't count, and he insisted that it had lettuce therefore it was a salad.

I wanted to do more studying for my ham radio license after class, but I thought that I'd better review my Anthropology notes instead, because of the upcoming test. And then when I was done it was time to go to durach, and I walked there with everyone and rode back with Aric. I asked him if I could drive because I'd done so well with the go-kart and bumper car and he told me I couldn't but maybe one night soon we could find a big, empty parking lot and I could try there.

May 10 [Airplane Director]

May 10

I got up while Aric was still sleeping and went out to the window and looked for the birdfeeder. He'd hung it on a little beam from the garage and there were a bunch of birds all clustered around it. You could easily see who the boss birds were 'cause when they flew over all the other birds went away and waited their turn.

Then a squirrel hopped down from a tree and ran along the roof until he got to the beam and the cardinal who was at the birdfeeder chirped at him but didn't deter him and he sort of slid down the string the birdfeeder was hanging from and held on with his hind paws while he ate his fill of seed.

The little birds didn't mind; they flew in and started pecking at all the stuff he was dropping from the feeder.

I guess I was paying too much attention to the birdfeeder because Aric poked me under the tail and made me jump, and he said that he couldn't help himself because it was right there, and I stuck my tongue out at him and turned my rump away from the bed.

He got out with the sheet wrapped around himself 'cause he said that he didn't want me to get any ideas, and then he looked out the window and saw the squirrel and said that he hadn't been expecting them to figure it out so quick and now he was going to have to come up with another way to hang the birdfeeder to discourage them.

I wasn't sure why you'd want to; squirrels go around and plant trees so they're pretty important to have. And it was pretty funny to watch him when he was done eating and had to turn around to go back up the string, because he missed and then fell down and went running across the yard and up the garage. Aric leaned more towards the window to see where he was going and I had my chance for revenge.

Pretty soon it just turned into us groping at each other and sort of trying to block but not really and then I managed to push him back into the bed and got up on top of him before he could get away from me and I teased him just a little before I claimed my victory.

We sat in bed for a little while after and I told him that I was going to be getting my ham radio license soon, once I'd wrapped my head around the parts on electricity. I told him that Ryan had already made me a stormwatcher and now I just had to wait for the first storm.

Aric said it probably wouldn't be long and he was surprised by how few there had been yet this year. He said the weather was cooler than normal and that was probably why. But he told me that there had already been tornadoes down south, and while we weren't in a prime tornado location here there had been one in the eighties that had torn through downtown Kalamazoo.

I flew out the window and then stopped by the birdfeeder and it had sunflower seeds in it, so I shook it a little to let some of them out and ate them then flew off before Aric could yell at me for doing it. Sunflower seeds are really tasty.

North of town, there were some tractors that were already out plowing their fields. I circled one field a couple of times just because I wanted to watch. I'd wondered how humans could take care of such big fields, but their tractors and plows were huge and it didn't take a genius to figure out that their cultivators and harvesters would be, too. Humans really liked making things just as big as they could. It must have been a source of pride for them to have such huge machines.

I spent more time than I'd meant to on my morning flight, 'cause after I'd watched the farmer I flew up to the base of the cloud deck and poked around there for a little bit, playing with the bits of clouds that were hanging down. So I had to wait for Brianna before I could take my shower, but I didn't mind. We talked about plants some and I promised that I'd introduce her to Aquamarine next time she was in town.

I got to lunch a little bit late but nobody minded. Cedric and Leon were busy arguing among themselves like they always did, and Trevor was just quietly eating his lunch.

I told them that I had gone golfing but that I wasn't very good at it and Leon asked me what course and so I said it was the one in front of the Airway Fun Center and he laughed and said that he had played there before too and gotten a thirty-three. I said my score was about a hundred points higher and he said that I was probably the worst golfer ever.

That was what everyone else had said, too.

I told him that golfing wasn't much of a pony sport anyways and he said that actually now that he was thinking about it how did I even golf. Well there weren't any golf-sticks in the cafeteria so I couldn't show him, but I did get out from my seat and stood on my hind hooves and showed him the motion I'd used which I said was really more of a glaive move.

Trevor looked up and asked if that meant I could use a glaive, and both Cedric and Leon looked at each other and Cedric asked what a glaive was, and so we explained and Cedric nodded and said that he knew I was a badass. Leon said that if you fuck with the pony, she'll cut you, and then just started laughing.

Conrad said that since everybody had tests this week, he was going to let us enjoy an easy day today and read some of Edward Lear’s poems, which were mostly short and simple. A lot of them were in a form that was called a Limerick, and those were strange because it was almost like they were a joke. Even the longer poems were funny, although I didn’t understand why people were snickering so much about the Owl praising his beautiful Pussy.

Also Edward Lear didn’t seem to like bees very much.

Right after poetry class was over I went back to my room and dropped off my books and then went out to the parking lot where Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were waiting for me.

We went right to the airport and Mister Salvatore had to show his wallet again at the gate. He has a special identification like my student identification, and it lets him get into places that other people can't go.

We parked in a special small lot that was different from where all the other cars had to park, and by the time we had gotten out of the car two men in blue clothes which were like police officer uniforms came over to meet us. They shook hands with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and then with me.

The back of the airport wasn't very nice. It was like the center we'd first arrived at, all cold brick and hard tile and bad lighting. There were some posters up on the wall but instead of pictures of happy people in nice places like the ones I'd seen at the airplane stations where I got on and off, these were all words and looked very stern and official. I stopped to read one and it was rules about being paid and right at the top it said that this poster was required by law.

We went up a flight of stairs and they led us into a room which they called a lounge. It also looked kind of run-down, but there were posters on the wall of airplanes and a big corkboard that had things pinned to it along with a couch and a television and a little kitchen.

And there was a woman sitting in one of the chairs drinking coffee out of a paper cup and when she saw me she got right up and came over and hugged me and she said her name was Dori which was short for Dorinda.

We talked for a little bit and then she led me up to the tower. She said that there was an elevator but I said I'd rather walk if she didn't mind.

We couldn't interrupt the people at work, but there were some extra computers and so she showed me how they could see where all the different airplanes were, and explained how there was a ground controller who I had never spoken to that kept track of where the airplanes were on the ground and then another one who was the arrival and departure controller and that was who I usually talked to. That was an older man with a big bald spot and I asked her kind of quietly if he was the grumpy man and she laughed and said he was and if I stayed around long enough I could meet him when he went on break.

Then she told me to wait where I was and she went over to her desk and picked up a little strip of paper and brought it to me and it had my callsign on it and then a bunch of little letters and she explained it was a flight strip and that all the airplanes got one and that was how they kept track of them all, and this was the one from my morning flight. She said I could keep it because they made a new one each time I flew.

There was a UPS airplane leaving soon, she told me, and so I watched as the ground controller gave it instructions and had it wait until a small airplane had landed before it could go on the runway and leave, and we listened until the grumpy man had given control over to the regional controller that handled flights which were outside of Kalamazoo's airspace.

It looked like a whole lot of work to keep track of all those things, and she said that the ground controller not only had to give permission to airplanes but to vehicles that needed to cross runways and taxiways as well. And she showed me the special telephone that they used in emergencies—it was called the crash phone, and it talked to the airport fire department.

She was explaining how they made sure that airplanes wouldn't bump into each other when they all flew at different altitudes and different speeds when I saw a man go stand behind the grumpy man and look down at his screen and all the little blocks that contained the flight strips and I asked what he was doing and she said he was getting the picture of all the traffic so that he would be ready to take over and after a few minutes a medium-sized airplane that had a blue tail landed and once it was clear of the runway he took off his headset and the other man took over.

He was a little surprised to see me, but he agreed to meet me in the lounge. So we went down there and he came in after a little bit and said that it was nice to put a face to a voice on the radio and I asked him why he sounded grumpy all the time. He ran his fingers through his hair and said it was 'cause whenever I went flying it was a pain in the butt to clear my airspace and I hadn't realized it was so much work so I told him that I was sorry and was there anything I could do that would make it easier?

He told me that if I stayed below a thousand feet whenever I was over Kalamazoo it would be a lot easier because airplanes weren't supposed to fly that low except in special circumstances, like the medical helicopters, and he said that as long as I went west it became a lot easier as long as I stayed outside of the normal descent routes into the airport. So I promised that I would do that and then he shook my hoof and I wanted to hug him but I didn't think he wanted a hug.

After that I did give Dori a hug and she said that she would like to visit the Air Zoo with me sometime and I said that sounded like fun but I wasn't sure if I would have time until after classes were over and she said that was okay.

I was pretty hungry by the time we left the airplane station, so we stopped at Jimmy John's and got sandwiches and then they took me back to my dorm so I could study some more.

I could have gone over to Meghan's after I finished studying for Anthropology, but then I decided that I should read some more of my radio book so I could get my license. And then I thought I had it all figured out so I took a test on my computer and didn't do very well; I only got half the questions right so I made a note of what I'd gotten wrong so I could study it more.

By the time I finally went over to Meghan's I was pretty tired. It had been a long day, but a fun day, and it was really nice to end it by snuggling up with her in bed even if she was wearing her sleeping clothes because Amy was there.

Author's Note

The Owl and the Pussycat

May 11 [Anthropology Test]

May 11

When I woke up I nuzzled Meghan until she woke up too and then I kissed her on the forehead and said that I was going to go flying 'cause I was nervous about the test coming up and she hugged me and wished me good luck, and then I quietly let myself out because Amy was still asleep.

I kept the grumpy man's words in mind when I asked for my flight clearance, and I stayed low over Kalamazoo until I was west of town, across the 131 Highway. Then I got permission to fly higher and did some peaks and troughs until I was a little bit tired, so I hovered at my last peak, told the airplane directors that I was going to go down again, and then did a big dive and pulled out into a glide and made it most of the way back to campus hardly flapping my wings at all.

Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee introduced us to fractals, and he started off by explaining how all the geometric shapes we studied were the idealized shapes, and that reminded me of Plato and his forms.

He explained how functions for curved lines were idealized lines, and if you looked really closely at the line it was actually straight there, and I raised my hoof and said that ancient pegasi had considered a circle to be a polygon with a hundred forty-four sides and that was how they approximated the circumference and volume of it, and he said that humans had done something similar before they’d discovered pi.

A man named Benoit Mandelbrot had discovered the fractal nature of things when he discussed measuring the coastline of England, which is an island, and his discovery was that the shorter a measuring stick you used, the longer the perimeter got, because you were measuring smaller and smaller variations. Islands and coastlines are very bumpy and irregular. I don’t know why he wanted to measure it, because it’s how big it is, but humans like making measurements of things, so I guess that was important to him. And so it turned out that the coastline of England is infinitely long, if you use a small enough measuring stick, yet it encloses a finite area.

By the extension of this principle, you could imagine drawing a big, ideal rectangle around England, and of course you would know the area of that rectangle, But then inside that would be England with its infinite coastline, and you would therefore have an infinite line contained inside a non-infinite space.

I kinda ate a light lunch, because I was worried about my anthropology test. It was funny; Peggy worried about math tests but they were less stressful to me because the rules of math were really straightforward and there was a right answer and a wrong answer and that was that. But in classes like Anthropology there wasn't a clear right or wrong, and so you sort of had to guess at what was the best answer.

I suppose poetry is like that, too, but Conrad seems more interested in what the poem says to us rather than what the poet meant to say.

Like she'd done with some of her other assignments, the test was about a made-up tribe of people, and we had to use the observations that she had given us and come to conclusions from that. And some of the stuff was really hard to figure out, because she hadn't given us any definite answers. I guess that's what it would be like in real life: if you were just watching you might not know for sure.

I was pretty frazzled by the end of class. I'd had to read over the information she'd given us several times to sort of tease out the information I wanted, and I wasn't sure by the end of it that I was right. But I thought she'd be happier with an honest attempt, so when I wasn't certain about something, I'd decided that I would offer other observations which might help to get at the root of the matter, because that seemed like something that she would be in favor of.

I talked to Rachel a little bit after class was over. She'd found the test really difficult, too, and she said that when she'd gone into Anthropology she'd thought it would be an easy class but that it had turned out not to be at all. So I asked her what she meant by that and she said that in order to graduate students had to take certain classes which were outside of their majors and minors and a lot of people picked classes which they thought would be easy if it was a subject that they weren't that interested in.

Well, my first reaction was that that was silly; what was the point in being required to take a class that you weren't interested in? But then I got to thinking about it more and I wondered if maybe that wasn't smart after all because it would make people learn something that they might not have wanted to but which might be useful just the same. I know when I was a filly I didn't want to go to school at all because I could have been pushing clouds instead of going to class, but now that I was older and wiser, I knew that the mares that hadn't couldn't get beyond local supervisor because no matter how much they might know about the local weather from hooves-on work, they didn't understand the big picture.

And sometimes you didn't know the big picture right away, and you just had to trust that the ponies in charge were wiser than you. I hadn't known how difficult me flying made it for the airplane directors—I hadn't seen what they saw; I hadn't known that I didn't show up on their screens like all the other airplanes so they had to guess where I was and to be safe they had to make sure to keep airplanes away from where I might be, and some of them were cheerful about it and some of them were resentful for the extra work that I made.

But now that I knew better, I could make sure to make it easier for them.

So maybe there was stuff that would matter later but didn't matter now. Maybe Rachel would go on to look at life with slightly new eyes because she understood better how not everybody was the same. Different cultures and different tribes had different ways of looking at the world, and maybe it wasn't always the best way but it was the way that they knew and so we had to understand that before we could decide if they were right or wrong.

I was thinking about that a little bit as I studied more of my radio book. It was hard getting through some of it because it kept nagging at the back of my mind that I didn't need to know it, but then I thought that maybe somehow it might later on, so I studied and took the practice test and took notes and studied some more and took it again and I wasn't satisfied until I took it three times in a row and got a perfect score each time. And it wasn't because I remembered what the answers were, either; the computer kept changing the questions.

It felt like I had made some important discovery so I was in a pretty good mood when I went to dinner, and on my way out I stopped by the mail hut and got my mail. There was a letter from Gusty—I'd thought that she would have sent one back on the computer, but she hadn't. So back at my room I opened it and the first thing I saw was a newspaper clipping and it was a review of their play, and it had a very nice picture of her.

In the letter she said that the second weekend had gone very well and they had been sold out every show thanks to the review in the Chicago Tribune. And she thanked me for coming to see it and also said that they were going to be going to Stratford Ontario, not England but maybe if they did really well in Ontario they could go to England.

She said that the only downside had been that on Sunday after she had gone to check her computer mail she had gotten all kinds of invitations from other theatres and that she had been planning to go to California but now she wasn't so sure if that was the right choice.

So I showed the letter to Peggy and the newspaper clipping, too, and then I wrote her a letter back saying that I was proud of her and that she shouldn't make a decision right away but look into her heart and see what felt right to her.

Then I started my computer and sent a letter on it to Mister Salvatore to tell him that I was ready to take the radio test and then I made a couple of more dreamcatchers and read some more of the Bible and I probably should have started reading the book about World War One as well but I was starting to get sleepy, so I flew off to Aric's house instead with one of my new dreamcatchers for him.

May 12 [first stormwatch]

May 12

When I got out of bed in the morning I looked at the birdfeeder again (which was now hung between two ropes) and kept my rump away from the bed, because Aric had already spent enough time under my tail.

Aric leaned up on his elbow and asked me if I was thinking of flying down there and taking some more of the seeds and I told him that maybe I was because he had deliberately tempted me by putting sunflower seeds in there and he said the birds loved them and I said so do ponies.

He thought that was really funny, and I asked him if he'd ever tried sunflower seeds before and he thought that was even funnier.

When he was done laughing he told me that you could buy bags of just sunflower seeds and you could get them with the shell on or off, whichever you preferred. So then I felt a little bit silly about taking them out of the birdfeeder.

I asked him if he'd put up the ropes to keep the squirrel out, and he said that he had, and I told him that it wasn't working. Squirrels are really clever.

He got up and stood beside me and watched the squirrel eating out of the birdfeeder and then he picked up a shoe and opened the window and threw the shoe at the squirrel which made it run off but it came back pretty quickly. Then he told me to go talk to the squirrel and tell it to leave and I said that I couldn't talk to them, I just knew what they were like.

I suppose I could have maybe tried to find a hawk and get it to follow me until it saw the squirrel but that would have been a lot of effort and probably wouldn't have worked anyway, unless I convinced the hawk to live on Aric's roof. And if I did, none of the other birds would want to use the feeder, so that really wasn't a good solution at all.

I said that he ought to just let the squirrels have what they want, or else put up a separate feeder for them so they leave the ones for the birds alone, and he said that he didn't really want to encourage them but unless he could find some way to hang the birdfeeder that they couldn't get at it he wasn't going to have much of a choice.

I just flew over Kalamazoo but I kept low, below the tops of the tall buildings, so that the airplane directors didn't have to worry about me. Dori was on the radio and she was as cheerful as always.

When I was back at my room, I checked my computer mailbox and I had gotten a letter from Mister Salvatore saying that I could take the test on Friday if I wanted to schedule it and that was going to be tight because there was a play but if I went right after Anthropology class, I could make it work. So I let him know and then I went to breakfast.

I spent the morning working on a couple more dreamcatchers and reading more of the Bible, and then at lunch both Cedric and Leon were doing last-minute studying for their class so they weren’t in the mood for any conversation, which was too bad.

But then right at the end of dinner Cedric leaned over and hugged me. He said it was for luck, and then I asked Leon if he wanted a hug for luck, too, and he pretended like he didn’t but he really did.

When I went outside after lunch I could feel the weather changing—there was a heavy, pregnant feel to the air, so I excused myself for a moment and flew up until I could see over all the trees and I could just make out some building clouds off in the distance, so I was a bit antsy when I went into class.

Conrad asked if anyone in the class still had exams coming up, and only two people raised their hands, so he said that he was going to introduce us to a slightly newer poet called Cate Marvin. He started off by reading us a poem called Landscape Without You, which I sort of didn’t understand because a lot of it was about new things that I haven’t grown up with like shingle roofs instead of thatch or shake. I guess they wear out and leak and have to be fixed, just like the seams on a ship. There was a protected sandy inlet not too far from town and sometimes sailors would run their boats aground at high tide and then rig ropes to pull it over on one side or the other as the tide went out and then they’d scrape barnacles off and fix the seams, and when the tide came back in, re-float their boat.

He had us read Flowers, Always next, which was about Miss Marvin looking for an Always and not finding one, and then she was sad because she understood that there never was an Always. I don’t think she should be sad, though—I think it’s better that there isn’t an Always. I think it’s better that it’s always a Sometimes.

Then he finished by having us read Dead Girl Gang Bang and that was not a very cheerful way to end the class.

Outside it was raining but not too much, and the wind was gusting worse than it had been, and kind of gusting and shifting around uncertainly and the sunlight was a little bit muted, so I knew that there would be more of a storm coming in pretty soon.

When I got back to my dorm room my telephone was blinking and there was a message from Mel saying that storms were predicted to come in and did I want to go out and observe them then there was another more recent message saying that they'd revised the forecast and that they might be here as soon as four or maybe sooner.

That didn't leave me with a lot of time to meet up with him, so I grabbed all my equipment really quickly and made sure to take my telephone too. I wouldn't be able to get out there in time by wing, so I begged Peggy to take me and she said that she hated driving in bad weather but she would just for me and I hugged her and then we hurried out to Cobalt.

I tried giving her directions but I wasn't very good at it and she finally took my telephone away from me when we were sitting at a light and tapped at the screen a little bit and pretty soon a woman's voice from my telephone was telling her where to go.

She got onto the 94 Highway and took it west until the Mattewan exit and neither of us saw him at first so we were going to go to a gas station and then we saw his truck in a parking lot right next to the highway. It was parked across several spaces so that the nose was pointed southwest which is where the storm was coming from.

Peggy had to help me put on my flight gear because it was really difficult inside Cobalt and then I got out and knocked on Mel's window and he rolled it down and gave me the latest update. The cab of his truck had a bunch of different radios inside and also a folding computer which was showing radar pictures.

He asked me if I wanted to go up and get a feel for the clouds and maybe see if I had a better view of any trouble spots and I told him that I would love to, so I radioed for clearance and got it after a minute or so, then I flew up and called to him on the CB radio to make sure that we had good contact with each other, then got more altitude until I was kind of in the thick of it.

This was what I was made for; this was what I loved. The wind was gusting around and rain was spitting down on me and off in the distance the clouds looked nasty and that was just the kind of thing that our weather team lived for. If the other mares had been with me, we would have flown out there and knocked down the storm, but they weren't. It was just me and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I kept a running report of what I saw until the storm cells passed us by, and then the sky got a little bit lighter and the wind dropped down and the rain lightened and I could see and feel that the worst of it had passed us by but just to be sure I got permission to fly up higher and went right up into the clouds just a little bit then came back down.

There had been so much energy in the sky that my hooves sparked right before I landed and I got another little shock when I touched the door on Mel's truck but after that it was gone. He said I'd done a real good job and that made me proud. Maybe here on Earth I can't fight the storms like I could in Equestria but at least I can let people know that they're coming.

When I got back in Cobalt all soaking wet, Peggy hugged me and said that it had been a little scary on the ground to see the trees whipping back and forth and that for a while when it was really intense she had lost sight of me and she had been so relieved when the rain lightened up and she saw my blinking light again.

Then when we were driving back she asked me if that kind of thing was really what I did in Equestria, and I said that I got closer and my team helped to break up the storms and sometimes we also patrolled for ships in weather like that or worse and she just shook her head and concentrated on the road.

Of course I'd missed dinner, and so had Peggy, so I treated her to a meal at Steak 'n Shake and I told her I was sorry that I had gotten Cobalt's seat all wet. She said that was okay, she never rode on that side anyways.

I was still pretty damp when I went over to Meghan's, so she put a towel down on the bed for me and I told her all about my day and then she got curious about how it had been back in Equestria, so I started telling her about some of the storms I'd seen.

Pretty soon Lisa came over and she asked if we'd started the movie yet and Meghan said that I was talking about weather work and it was really interesting, so Lisa wound up sitting on the bed with me and I just naturally switched to Equestrian because it was a lot easier to describe that way. And it didn't take too long before they were talking in Equestrian, too.

I guess we were kind of louder than we should have been, because a little bit after that Becky came over and she said that she thought we were going to watch a movie, but I was in the middle of a story and at least wanted to finish that first, and then it wound up that I spent all evening talking about my weather team and life on the ocean and I don't think any of us were sorry that we didn't see the movie.

It was pretty late when Lisa and Becky finally went back to their room, and Meghan locked the door between their rooms and then got undressed except for her panties and then she got in bed with me. I snuggled up with my head on her breast and she petted my mane and then rested her hand on my shoulder and drifted off to sleep.

Author's Note

Landscape Without You

Flowers, Always

Dead Girl Gang Bang

May 13 [Friday the 13th]

May 13

I got right up with the sun again, ‘cause today was going to be a pretty busy day. I nuzzled Meghan until she woke up, too, and then we took a shower together which was nice. My wings were a little bit sore from flying in the weather and she gave me a pretty good back massage.

We ate breakfast together and then I went to Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee’s class, where he started the class by giving back our tests (I got a 93% which is pretty good) and then continued to teach us about fractals.

He told us about the Julia Set, the Fatou Set, and the Mandlebrot Set, which are the most famous kind of fractals, and showed us pictures of how they looked. They were really elegant—I’d never thought of math being pretty before, but it was. And then he showed us the equations and how little changes would alter the characteristics of the set, and class just flew by. Then he told us that Google had programs that would draw sets for us if we put in the equations, and I thought that would be a fun thing to play with when I didn’t have anything else to do.

At lunch, Peggy started telling everyone about how I’d been skywatching, and so pretty soon I had to tell them all about it. Humans don’t get to work with clouds but they do a lot of stuff which is pretty amazing, but I guess that it’s so common for them that they don’t even think about it.

Christine mentioned that today was Friday the Thirteenth, which was considered an unlucky day. But I thought that it had been a pretty good day so far, and I told her that I was going to make it a lucky day ‘cause I was going to take my radio test in the afternoon and then I would be able to carry a better radio and even stormwatch on my own sometimes.

Professor Amy congratulated us on doing well on our tests but I hadn’t done as well as I had on the math test. I wasn’t surprised, but I was a little disappointed in myself. I’d studied so hard, so maybe there was just something about me; maybe I wasn’t all that smart about anthropology.

But she didn’t seem disappointed when she gave mine back.

We spent most of the class talking about what we were going to do for our final exams. Instead of taking them in class, we were to write a research paper, and she gave us a whole list of topics that we could choose from. Some of it was stuff that we hadn’t even covered in class yet, and when Rachel asked about that she said we would have to go to the library and get some books, and everyone in the class groaned at that.

She told us that we could also pick a different topic if we wanted to; the list was just a suggestion. But if we did, we would have to tell her what our topic was on Monday, and give her a little bit of an outline of what we intended to do with the paper, and that sounded like a lot more work than just picking something off the list.

I thought it would be smart to go to the library and see what I could find first, rather than choose a topic and later on find out that I couldn’t make any sense of it, which meant I was going to be spending a lot of time in the library over the weekend.

As soon as class was finished I rushed out of the building and flew over to the parking lot behind my dorm. I came over the top of Trowbridge ‘cause it was faster, and saw Sienna sitting there, waiting by the door, so I landed right in front and I don’t think that Mister Salvatore was expecting that.

Miss Cherilyn opened the door for me and then we drove off along Westnedge like we were going to Meijer, and then we went a little bit further until we were right by the 94 Highway. There was a road that took us to a fancy brick and glass building which had a twin building right next to it and he said that that was their temporary office and where I would be taking the test.

There was a room called a conference room and it had a long table with a lot of chairs, more than we needed. Mel was there, and he shook my hoof when I came in and wished me luck, then Mister Salvatore gave me the test.

It didn’t take all that long, except for the questions about electricity. I was glad I’d taken all the practice tests and known that I needed to study for it more, otherwise I think I would have been lost. Even with the practice, I was still kind of uncertain, so I made sure I read the questions carefully and then double-checked my answers when I was done.

He went away to grade it, and Miss Cherilyn and Mel and I just chatted for a little bit until he came back and told me that I had passed the test. I asked him if I’d gotten all the questions right, and he shook his head, but he said it didn’t matter: I’d done well enough. Then he brought out a box that had a new radio in it, and it looked a lot like the other one, but it worked on different frequencies.

Mel congratulated me and I would have liked to stay around and talk some more but it was getting late and I knew that I had to go see the play, so we left and stopped at Taco Bell for dinner and then they dropped me off back at my dorm. I galloped upstairs so I could give the CB radio back, ‘cause I had the new one now.

Peggy was in the room, so when I got back, I told her the good news and I also sent a quick computer letter to Doctor Thomas Thompson telling him and I would have sent one to Ryan, too, but I couldn’t remember his computer-mail address.

I probably could have just met Aric at the theatre, but I flew over to his house instead so that we could ride to the theatre together.

He said that we could sit up in the light booth if we wanted to, or else we could take normal seats. I thought it would be a lot more fun to be up in the light booth, because I liked watching how serious everyone was, so we went up there and when we passed the little room with Chad he glared at me and I stuck my tongue out at him.

There were a couple of hard blue chairs and we sat on them kind of out of the way, and watched the show. A red-haired girl named Beth was using the light board, and Lisa was handling the spotlight again.

The play was called The Learned Ladies, and it was about Henriette who wants to marry Clitandre, but her mother wants her to marry a poet named Trissotin. And they spent the whole play trying to find a way that Henriette could marry the one she loves and not the poet (who wasn’t a very good poet anyway), and finally in the end they trick Trissotin into admitting that he only wanted to marry Henriette for the family’s money.

After it was over we got in Winston and as Aric was driving home I asked him if I could drive. He said that he had been thinking about that and it would be complicated for me because the truck was a stick shift, which meant that there were more pedals to push and a lever that had to be moved into the right place.

But when he turned onto his street, he went right past the house and then went west all the way out to the Maple Hill Mall, and we drove around to the back of it and he said how would I like to steer while he used the pedals and the shifter.

That was a pretty good start, so I sat on his lap and it was a little bit awkward for him to get his hands where he needed to and me to grip on the steering wheel, and he liked it a little too much when I was shifting my rump around on his lap to get into a good position.

When we were all settled he reminded me to start off by only making small corrections on the steering wheel because the truck didn’t drive like a go-kart. And then we went across the parking lot, back and forth, until I finally got the hang of steering and pretty soon I could go around the light poles and put it between the white lines that mark parking spots.

I asked him if that meant I could do the pedals, too, and he said not this time but maybe next time, and so I got back in my seat and he drove us back home, and then he stopped in a little parking lot at the end of his street and said I could steer the rest of the way home. I didn’t bump into anything.

Just before I fell asleep, I thought back to how Christine had said that Friday the Thirteenth was supposed to be an unlucky day, and I thought maybe I should tell her it had been a really good day. Maybe it's only unlucky for humans.

May 14 [Saturday]

May 14

I hadn't noticed it when I came up to the room last night, but my dreamcatcher was hanging above the other window in his room—he has the one that goes to the backyard and then he has another that looks at his neighbor's house and the curtains are always closed on that one. I asked him if he liked it, and he said that it was working and had caught him a dream.

I asked him what it was like, and he said it had blue eyes and a white tail and furry ears that felt like velvet. And he said that she was cute and funny and I bumped him with my hoof 'cause he was embarrassing me. Then I kissed him and told him how sweet he was.

That's when he told me that he'd made something special for me, and he said to look out the window. There was a little sign hanging next to the bird feeder that had a shadow-pegasus with a red circle and slash across it, and he said that meant no pegasuses in the birdfeeder.

I told him that he couldn't stop me; I knew he was tired after sex and he demanded that I prove it. So I did. And then I went and ate some more of his sunflower seeds. Not too many, just enough to prove that the sign wouldn't stop me.

He was standing at the window looking at me so I held a couple in my lips and flew back up to the window and spit them out in his hand and said that they'd give him strength. He said that there was an ancient Greek metaphor about gifts and horses' mouths, so he would have to refuse them.

I said he was being silly and pushed my way back into the room, then I told him that if he ate the sunflower seeds it might give him enough energy to have sex again and he said that was worth trying, so he cracked them open and ate the seeds (I like the shells, too) and then we got back in bed.

The grumpy man was directing airplanes today, so I told him I was going to keep low and to the west over Kalamazoo, and he said that was okay and to be careful because it was overcast and raining off and on. I promised I would be and flew off, waving to Aric one last time as I went over the trees around his backyard.

I went all the way down to the building where I'd taken the radio test, and Sienna was sitting in the parking lot up against the building. I wondered if that meant that they were there, or if they had their own cars and just drove Sienna when I was going for a ride.

That was a good place to turn around and head back to school, I thought, so I did. And then I took a shower and went to breakfast. Peggy hadn't been in the room and she wasn't at breakfast either, so she must have been spending the weekend with her boyfriend.

Christine asked me if I'd been in the rainstorm last night and I said I hadn't. It had only been raining a little bit when I went to sleep.

She said that it got a whole lot heavier after that and she was curious if a heavy rain would wake me up.

I said it usually did, but that human buildings messed with the sound and if the windows were closed I couldn't always smell it, either. Plus I'd been distracted. But it was a bit worrisome, just the same. What if I got back to Equestria and I'd lost my instincts for the weather? I didn't think I was, but how would I know? There weren't any other pegasuses here to compare with.

I spent all morning in the library, looking through the list and trying to come up with an idea. The problem was that I'd see one thing and think that it might be a good topic, then I'd go down to the computer that said where all the books were and have a library page look up what I needed, and then I'd take them to a little study desk and skim through them to see if anything caught my interest and then I'd wind up more confused. So when it was time for lunch I hadn't found a single thing, and I'd filled half a cart with books to be re-shelved because the library page got mad when I put them back myself.

So I went to lunch with no topic chosen, and I must have been more stressed about it than I thought because Christine asked if all I was having for lunch was a small salad.

I told her, and she asked to see the list of topics because she bet she could find one that I'd like. I wasn't so sure, but I had nothing to lose, so I gave it to her and she read over it and asked me how I'd feel doing a paper on marriage.

I said that I didn't know anything about that; I didn't know of any ponies in our village who were married. Then she said I'd be the perfect neutral observer, because to me I was walking in to a subject that I had no biases on.

Well that actually seemed like a pretty good idea, and I guess I'd just been too blind to see. So I thanked her and went right back over to the library to get some more books. The library page wasn't too happy to see me but I promised this would be the very last time that I would be in today, and I intended to keep that promise.

Since I didn't know what I'd need for sure I checked out as many books as would fit in my saddlebags and then stumbled back to my dorm room with them. They made a nice pile on my desk, right alongside the World War One book I hadn't read yet and the Bible that I hadn't finished reading.

And that was when I realized that I'd forgotten to meet with Liz on Thursday. So instead of starting to read right away, I went over to her office but she wasn't there, so I went back to my room and wrote her an apology on the computer. And I promised myself that I'd remember to go to the service tomorrow to apologize in person, because a letter's nice, but it's not the same as a muzzle-to-muzzle apology.

I completely lost myself in the first book, which was about the history of weddings. Then I heard a knock on my door and I just called out that it was open, and Meghan came in and asked me what I was reading, so I told her it was a book about weddings.

She said that she didn't think things were that serious, and at first I didn't understand what she was saying, then I realized that she thought I was thinking of marrying Aric, and I told her that this was just research for my final Anthropology essay.

Meghan was kind enough to wait until I finished the chapter I was reading, and then we went to the dining hall together. She said that Amy was going to be gone all weekend, and I laughed and said that I thought Peggy would be, too, although she hadn't said anything to me about it.

When we were done, she called for an Uber-Car (she'd decided that they were okay again) and we walked over to Hoben to wait for it, since there wasn't a road in front of Hicks, and the back smelled a little like garbage all the time.

This car was a yellow Scion and it was kind of boxy and felt a little cheap inside, but it was still nicer than Winston or the yellow Taxi-car that we'd taken to the spa once.

Besides, just like the airplane, this wasn't about the trip, it was about the destination. So I leaned up against Meghan and she brushed her hand through my mane.

When we got there she got out and I followed her around the back. It was kind of muddy 'cause of the rain so I flew—she'd be taking off her shoes, but I wouldn’t have a good way to get the mud off my fetlocks and hooves unless I rinsed them in the stream.

She was less hesitant this time; once the cover was off the spa, she just started getting undressed and set her clothes into the little cubicle. I would have already hopped in, but it wouldn't have been polite, so I waited until she got into the water and then I joined her. She reached back and turned on the water jets and then I sat right next to her.

It felt strange to be up to my shoulders in hot water and then have a gentle drizzle coming down on my head, and she said that if it got worse maybe we'd have to go inside, so I said that I hoped it wouldn't.

For a little while, neither of us talked, and I think that's one of the signs of a good friendship—you can just be with each other, and that's all you need.

Then it did start raining more and Meghan looked up at the sky (although it was too dark to realy see much) and said maybe we should get out of the tub, and I told her that I thought it would pass pretty quickly, which was really more of a guess than anything, but it did, and so we giggled about the rain and we talked about college and then after a while she said that it was actually pretty relaxing to just sit in the hot tub with me.

And when the spray jets stopped, it was quiet but for the rain splashing on leaves and we both just listened to the music of nature until it was time to get out of the tub.

I went first so that I could shake myself off and then she got out and dried herself off and got dressed, but she left her panties and bra off because she said that she was feeling rebellious.

We waited under the overhang for the roof until an Uber-Car arrived to pick us up—it wasn't much shelter, but it was better than none. When the car finally came, we'd both gotten wet enough again that we probably could have not bothered to dry ourselves off.

Even with the heater in the car on, Meghan was a little shivery when we got back to campus, so she went back to her room and dried herself off and put on a robe and then sat down on the bed and wrapped a blanket around herself.

I said that I could curl up on her lap if that would help—I would have done it right away but my coat was still damp and she had just put on fresh clothes. She didn't mind at all; so I got up and stretched out on her lap and she moved her robe away so it wouldn't get wet.

She asked if I wanted to see the Harry Potter movie now, but I told her that I didn't really feel like it. I was too relaxed already.

May 15 [Study Buddies]

May 15

I was all comfy and snuggled on Meghan's breast when I remembered that I had to go to church today so that I could apologize to Liz. So that meant that I would have to get up earlier than I'd planned.

Meghan was a little bit grumpy about that, so I told her that after I flew I would come back and we could take a shower together and then I'd brush her hair, and that cheered her up. She said that she was going to catch up on her sleep a little bit and to knock on the door when I was done flying.

I went back to my room and put on all my flight gear. I thought about leaving the second radio behind, but it was probably better that I had it in case I saw a distant storm or something while I was up in the sky. I didn't think I would, but you never know.

Dori was directing airplanes, and she gave me permission to fly over the west side of Kalamazoo: she said she would clear out a wedge of airspace for me between Stadium and Main. She didn't have to, but it sounded like she wanted to, so I took advantage of that and flew almost straight up from the quad, gaining altitude in a big spiral. Then I zipped off over Western Michigan University, and all the way up to the 131 Highway, where the big bridge over the railroad tracks is.

I circled around up there for a little bit, practicing some swoops, and then back down. There was a funny little neighborhood that was sort of shaped like a comma, and another clear spot next to it that was the same shape where maybe they were going to build more houses. It was interesting how some roads were straight and others had curves in them—I could see how some had been built to go around obstacles, but others were just curved for the sake of it, I guess.

It would have been nice to get in a little more flight time, but it would be really rude of me to break my promise to Meghan or be late to church, so I made a long descent back home, focusing on the bell tower.

One disadvantage of the trees getting leafy is that it's a little bit harder to pick landing spots from a distance. But the parking lot behind Trowbridge is tree-free, and it's easy to spot when I get closer. Since I was going to DeWaters anyway, I wanted to land there.

I saw that Meghan's light was still out as I skimmed across the parking lot, and I thought about going to my room and taking off my equipment first, but it was just as easy to do it in her room and get it later, so I went up and knocked quietly on the door.

It took her a minute to answer, and when she did she sort of stood behind the door as she opened it, then pushed it shut as soon as I was in the room, fast enough that I actually got a bit of my tail caught in it, so she had to open it a little bit again.

She'd just gotten out of bed and hadn't bothered to put on clothes at all, which explained why she had hidden herself behind the door. I told her I wouldn't have minded waiting another minute or two outside while she got dressed, but she insisted that there wasn't any point to it if we were going to get into the shower right away.

Plus, she thought it was really funny that I was wearing more than she was.

She helped me unstrap my equipment and get undressed, then started the shower. I needed more scrubbing than she was used to, 'cause of all the sweat and lather from flying, and I told her I was sorry that I was all sweaty but she said it was okay; she didn't mind.

After we were done, she helped dry me off and then brushed my mane and tail, and I returned the favor, brushing out her hair.

She got dressed and I didn't, then we went off to breakfast together, and after that we went to the service.

It wasn't as fancy as the Easter Service had been; there wasn't any communion and there weren't as many songs. Pastor Liz gave a sermon about not giving in to fear and hate, especially when it was hard, and then at the very end she walked down the aisle and gave everyone a blessing, then stood at the door to hug and shake hands.

When it was my turn I told her how sorry I was that I had missed our talk, and she told me that it was okay, we would just have to have a better talk next week to make up for it. And then she leaned down and we hugged and I knew that she had forgiven me.

She and Meghan hugged, too, and then we walked back to Meghan's dorm. She asked me what I was going to do today, and I said that I had to research my Anthropology essay and that I should read the Bible too, and my book on World War I. She said she had a lot of homework, too, and she said that we could be study buddies.

That sounded like it would be nice, so we went to her room and I got my flight gear and she got her books and then we went back to my room since it was a little bit bigger than hers.

At first, I sat at my desk and she sat on my bed, but after a while I decided it would be nicer to stretch out next to her. It took a bit of creative repositioning to make it work, but we finally settled into spots where we could both be comfortable and productive and also be close. She held her book in one hand and had her notebook on her knee, so she could rest her writing hand on my back when she wasn't using it to take notes.

After reading through the first book, I thought that maybe the best thing to focus on would be the actual wedding ceremony itself. That was a ritual, and I thought the case could be made that it was partially a coming-of-age ritual, since people had to be a certain age to marry.

Meghan grumbled good-naturedly when I got up, but when I turned around with the next book in my mouth she said that she had to get a picture of how cute I was, so she took out her pocket telephone and took a picture and then she asked if I minded if she put it on her Facebook.

I said I didn't mind, and scooted up next to her while she was doing that and started reading the next book. Like the first one, there were only a couple of chapters that I was really interested in, which was good. I would have been overwhelmed if I had to read through every page of the books for my essay.

It was getting pretty close to dinnertime when I finished with the second book. That had a lot of really good information on the origins of traditions, like how the wedding party wore similar clothes to the bride and groom in order to confuse evil spirits, and how bread was put in the communal drinking goblet, which is why they called lifting the glass a toast.

Meghan folded the corner of the page in her book to mark her place, and then the two of us went off to dinner together. I was a little bit hungry because we'd forgotten to eat lunch (I'd thought about suggesting it when it was lunch time, but we were both pretty comfy in bed and I didn't want to get up and I didn't think she did, either).

We sat with Becky and Lisa and pretty soon the four of us were all talking in Equestrian. Lisa complained about how cold it was, especially this late in May, and I said that if Earth had proper weather pegasuses it wouldn't be. Then we kind of got on the subject of climate change and she asked how I would fix it if I were in charge.

That was a really complicated subject, and I had to admit that I didn't have an answer. I dealt with local weather, and while I had an understanding of the bigger picture, it was hugely complicated. I thought that the easiest way would be for people to just stop doing the things that were causing it, and that would be an important first step. Then I thought that probably earth ponies could help, too, by planting more trees.

She said that there were a lot things it would be hard to give up, and I said that was probably true. There were some things that I knew I was going to miss already, like being able to have a hot meal whenever I wanted it.

And then Lisa got a kind of strange look on her face and said that here she was worried about not having her portable telephone and she took hot meals completely for granted. And I guess she was really thinking about that, because she didn't say a whole lot for the rest of dinner.

After dinner, Meghan went back to her room and I went to mine, and it was kind of lonely, so I got my Bible and went outside and sat in a tree and finished the first book of Kings.

It was pretty depressing. They had one bad king after another, and they were always fighting. I guess they never thought about how stupid that was, about how much better off they'd be if they stopped their fighting and did what God told them to do, especially after some of the prophets had warned them what God would do if they were bad, and then He did because they didn't listen to his prophets.

I guess it was a long time ago, though, and we ponies didn't used to be any better.

Peggy was back in our room, so I hugged her and told her I missed her and she asked where I'd been, and I told her I'd been sitting in a tree reading the Bible, which she thought was really funny.

And then she asked about the wedding books, too, and so I told her about my essay and she said that it sounded like an interesting topic.

I said that math was more fun, and she laughed and said that I was welcome to help her with hers, so I reviewed her answers and she'd done pretty well—there were only a couple of problems that needed to be corrected, and she found one on her own while we were reviewing.

Then I showed her the fractals that we'd learned about and how pretty they were, and she said that she wasn't sure that she'd ever be that smart in math, and I told her that she just needed to practice more. It wasn't all that complicated.

We talked a little bit longer, and then I got together my flight gear and went over to Aric's house. He wasn't home yet—I knew he would probably be at the theatre putting away all the lights and that maybe there would be a party after that, but I knew when he eventually got home he would be happy to find me in his bed, so I curled up on a pillow and went to sleep.

May 16 [The Space where Fractals Live]

May 16

Aric was a whole collage of scents when he got into bed. I woke up when the door opened and I don't think he even noticed I was in bed right away, 'cause he was struggling to get out of his pants without falling over. And then when he got in bed he smelled like hot theatre dust and sweat and beer and smoke so I guess they had had an after party.

He wrapped his arms around me and muttered something that didn't make any sense at all, something about his new orange hat, and then he put his head on the pillow and fell asleep.

He was still pretty out of it in the morning. When he woke up, the first thing he did was put on his wrinkled pants and made a beeline for the bathroom, and when he staggered back into the room he had to put his hand on the doorframe to steady himself.

I asked him how much he'd had to drink last night, and he said too much. He told me he didn't even remember getting home, and said his head was throbbing. Which I guess I could understand: he didn't look too good.

Aric stepped out of his pants and climbed back into bed and so I nuzzled his chest and told him that I hoped he'd feel better when he'd had a chance to sleep it off, and he said that he hoped so, too. He said that he'd see me at Durach, and the way he felt he'd probably be sleeping until then. So I opened the window and flew out, then landed on the roof to get my flight clearance.

I said I was going to keep low today, and I did. I followed Main Street east, through town, and then instead of continuing to go East, I went along a northerly route, through the part of Kalamazoo called Parchment because they used to make paper there.

When I came back, I went up Academy Street, and noticed that Winston was still sitting in the theatre parking lot. So at least Aric had had enough sense not to drive it home with him last night.

Peggy noticed that I was in a sort of grumpy mood, and so I told her that Aric had gotten home last night really drunk, and she said that was because boys were dumb. That didn't really cheer me up all that much, but then again he'd hopefully be well-rested tonight, so that was something to look forward to.

I was hoping that we would get to do more work with fractals today—and we did—but it wasn’t drawing them. Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said that we were going to learn about the space where fractals live, and I sort of had an image in my mind of a wonderful magical place, but that wasn’t what he meant.

He spent the whole class talking about measuring things, and some of the stuff seemed kind of basic at first, like how a line between points x and y should be the same distance whether it’s measured forward and backwards, which seemed pretty obvious.

I trusted that was going somewhere with that, though, and he was, because pretty soon we were talking about Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry and the Hausdorff metric and he would ask us how far apart a pair of fractals were, and then when we came up with an answer, we’d go through the definitions of a proper xy line and make sure that it filled the criteria.

Plus the mathematical symbols he used to draw out the definition of a line were really neat. It seems kind of silly to write, but when you’re talking about complex things, it’s very important that everyone has the same definition, otherwise it would be like if we were trying to set out clouds but everypony was working from a different gridmap.

I had a feeling we were going to get into some really good stuff on Wednesday, and I was looking forward to it.

Between class and lunch, I stopped back at my dorm room to take some notes on the wedding books. I should have done it last night, but I was so comfy on the bed with Meghan and it's really hard to write on a bed. I was worried that somebody else might want to borrow the book and it wouldn't be fair if I still had it.

I didn't have enough time to take notes from both, but I finished using one book and returned it, which only made me a little bit late to lunch.

Sean and Christine were having a good-natured argument about Star Trek and Star Wars, and I sort of tuned them out. Joe was reading a book in Japanese called a Manga, and he showed me some pages of it. I couldn't read it, of course, but I liked the art.

Peggy said that maybe I ought to watch one of Miyazaki's movies, and Joe set his book down and had a look on his face like he'd just been struck by lightning and then both of them said together Castle in the Sky.

So we decided that we'd watch that tomorrow night in Christine's room (which meant that I could sit in the papasan).

Professor Amy started off the day by asking us what our essay was going to be about, and when it got around to me, I told her about my topic. Luckily, nobody else had picked it first, or else I might have had to come up with something else.

Then when we were done she said that we were going to talk about race, and she started out by telling us that it is scientifically impossible to describe race. She went on to explain how there are a large mixture of characteristics, and that the significance of traits is cultural, not biological. There were some protests to that, and she reminded the class again that this was an anthropology class, not a biology class. But it didn't matter; the discussion got pretty heated for a little bit.

By the end of class, it felt like her lecture had been completely lost in the argument, and I kind of felt bad about that. Plus the whole thing had confused me: nobody in class could seem to agree on anything. I guess humans aren't split up in obvious tribes like ponies are, so I guess it was really hard for them to tell. All I knew was that I hadn't seen anybody yet who belonged to an obviously different tribe or race.

I asked Professor Amy about that after class, and she said it was really, really complicated, and then she explained how people had once organized different types of people into different classifications based on their skin color and certain features, and that there had even been a theory which was now discredited that all the different races had evolved independently from each other. She said that we now knew that wasn't the case; all of humanity had had common ancestors, but either way that wasn't the point of the class.

Then she said that the reason she had made the blanket statement at the beginning of the class was because all humans had common DNA, and they could all breed with each other, and as they did traits would get mixed, or, over time they would change in order to adapt to new living conditions. She told me if I wanted specifics on that, I'd have to ask a genetics professor, because that wasn't her field of study and she didn't want to give me wrong information.

And she also said that sometimes in different fields, different things matter. And what the students needed to understand was that if you took a human baby from any culture and put it in a new one, there was nothing to prevent it from growing up the same as any other adult in that culture. It would learn the language and customs of that culture, and that was the point. Humans weren't pre-programed to be one thing or another; it was all learned behavior.

Well, I guess that was true of ponies, too. But there were still some other important differences. I could see how an earth pony being raised in a unicorn house might act like a unicorn, but I didn't think it would be able to use spells. And probably a unicorn wouldn't be as good at farming as an earth pony.

Some groundponies had mixed families, and some pegasuses, too. I don't think I would like being in a mixed family; I think when I was young, I would have been upset to find out my parents and siblings could do something I'd never be able to.

I thought about that some at dinner, and I looked around at my dining companions and tried to decide if they might be different races. I didn't think that they were, even though I could pick out lots of differences between them.

I spent the early evening taking notes from the second wedding book, and then a third, and I returned both of them on my way to Fourth Coast. I noticed that Winston was gone, so Aric must have recovered enough to drive it home.

Sure enough, when I got there, Winston was in the parking lot, and Aric was sitting upstairs along with Lisa and his house-mates David and Angela. He said that he'd dragged them out of the basement.

There were enough of us to play, so we played a round while we waited for everyone else to show up, and they trickled in just as we were finishing.

It was a lot harder to play with only five people, and I wound up losing, but it didn't really matter because we had fun. And then we went back to the big group, and I didn't lose any more.

When we rode back, it was really crowded in the cab of Aric's truck. Angela sat on David's lap, and Lisa and I squeezed together in the middle. He left her at her dorm, which meant that everyone had to get out and rearrange, then he went home and parked and we all got out and went in through the side door. David and Angela went downstairs to the basement, and Aric and I went upstairs to his room.

Since he'd slept all day, he really wasn't very tired at all, and he wound up wearing me out. Then he was sort of tossing and turning like he couldn't fall asleep so I finally suggested that he'd be less fidgety if he read a book. So he got up and picked a book called Bloodhound off his shelf and propped himself up on a pillow and started reading, while I curled up with my head on his chest and fell asleep.

May 17 [T. S. Eliot]

May 17

He must have fallen asleep while he was reading, because the book was on the bed next to him and the light was still on. Or else he hadn't wanted to wake me up, which was really sweet of him.

The blankets were pushed down, so I stretched out my wing to keep him warm, and rubbed against his cheek then dozed for a little bit until he finally woke up. Then I rolled all the way on top of him and kissed him on the nose.

We ate breakfast at Nina's—I'm beginning to wonder if he knows how to cook. He has a stove, but nobody ever seems to use it. So I asked him, and he said that he knew how to cook but that there wasn't any food in the refrigerator, but if I didn't like Nina's we could go somewhere else next time, or he could get some food and we could make breakfast in the kitchen.

I thought that would be fun, so he promised we'd do that on Thursday. Although I had to admit I'd kind of miss Nina's, too; the waitress is really nice.

We went back to his house after breakfast and I told him that I was going to go for a trot around the neighborhood, and said he could come along if he wanted to, but he didn't.

I'd gotten about a block from his house, when it occurred to me that I could trot around at the nature center and that would be really nice. So even though I didn't have my flight clothes, I took off, keeping below the trees, and flew over there. The ridge trail was easy to spot, so I landed on it and then trotted off to the east.

That was really nice—a lot nicer than the roads. The dirt was a lot softer on my hooves, and I didn't have to watch out for cars, which sometimes go without seeing people or ponies on the sidewalks. And there were a lot more animals I saw, too: there was a small herd of deer grazing, and when I got close I saw their heads come up and they were sniffing at the air trying to figure out what I was.

I didn't want to bother them, but I guess it didn't matter what I wanted, because even though I slowed down, when I got too close they all ran off, their white tails flicking in the air.

Since they were galloping, I thought I might as well, too, so I raced down the trail all the way until it went into the woods and joined up with the other trails, then did the loop a second time, cantering along the ridge, and galloping along the base. That pretty much tired me out, so when I was back around to the place where I'd landed, I took off again and flew low back to campus.

It took a while to get all the lather off my coat, and by the time I was done with my shower, I was hungry again. Luckily, it was close enough to lunch time.

I got there before any of my friends, so I took my tray and set it down on the table where Leon and Cedric and Trevor liked to sit.

I had my back to the door and they must have seen me before they got their food, because I didn't wind up making a mess. Cedric came up behind me and poked me in the back—he can move really quietly for as big as he is—and I popped out my wings reflexively and twisted up and around out of my chair.

Leon was laughing his head off and Cedric said that the SG was sack-proof. Then he told me he was sorry for surprising me like that and I crossed my forelegs and glared at him and wouldn't accept his apology until he gave me a hug.

After that they went and got their food and I just sat there feeling kind of embarrassed by my reaction—but they'd surprised me. I should have heard them coming. I was paying too much attention to my salad, even though it wasn't going to go anywhere.

He said that he was sorry again when he sat down, and he set a familiar-looking vase of flowers on the table. I asked him if he had gotten that off the dessert table, and he said so what if he had. It was the thought that counted.

And they did look pretty in the center of the table. Even if they were fake.

Trevor told him that he was never going to win over a girl with fake flowers and that he ought to learn poetry, and Leon said he didn't know any poetry but he did know some limericks. Trevor said that counted as poetry, and we'd just read limericks in class last week. So Leon started saying that there was once a man from Nantucket, and Cedric held his hand over his mouth and said that he could not finish that limerick. He said it wasn't for pony ears.

I said that I didn't mind, but Cedric said that he minded and that was what mattered. It was kind of an odd thing for him to say.

So I said that maybe I'd ask Conrad, because he was really smart and knew all the poems, and Trevor just started laughing and said that he would probably recite it in class if someone asked.

Cedric said that from what he'd heard, Conrad was about a hundred years old, and Trevor said he couldn't be more than seventy, and had more wit than both of them put together.

Leon claimed that Cedric dragged down the average, and then by way of apology he took a flower out of the vase and handed it to Cedric.

Then after lunch was over, Cedric got up first and when he was walking out of the dining hall Leon whispered the rest of the limerick in my ear and I told him that I'd dated a stallion who could do that.

He just shook his head and said that blue girls were crazy and walked off to catch up to Cedric.

Conrad introduced us to T. S. Eliot today. He said that he was legally obligated to do so, because Mister Eliot had been such an important poet. Then he said that he’d start out with a poem about naming cats. He told us that T. S. Eliot knew a thing or two about cats; he’d even written a book which was sort of the basis for the Broadway Play Cats. That sorta made my ears perk up, ‘cause it was the kind of thing Gusty would like to know about.

It was kind of funny how after the poem was done, the class focused more on names than the actual poem. Most people have three or more names, which felt like a lot. Ponies usually only have two, or sometimes three. I guess maybe a unicorn’s House sometimes counts as a name, too.

Some people in class knew the meaning of their name, and others of them didn’t. Trevor said that he was named after his father, and he didn’t know what it meant. I said that I suppose when my Mom named me that was my everyday name, but then when I got my cutie mark, I also took a new name. And then everyone wanted to know what it was, and I said Moonglow, ‘cause I was born at night.

He had us read a poem about a Hippopotamus next, which was kind of weird. When we were first reading through it, I could tell it was making fun of the church, but I wasn’t sure how. And the class couldn’t reach an agreement, either. That’s one thing I really like about poems, how the author can paint a word-picture and then everyone else sees what they want in it.

We finished with a really short poem called Morning at the Window, which made me think of the noises of the campus in the morning. It started off pretty quiet but then you’d start to hear cars driving down the street and people coming in and out of the dorm. And some of the students who had spent time in big human cities thought it was still pretty accurate.

After we left class, I asked Trevor if he thought that Cedric might like the poem, and he thought he would, so I said maybe I’d read it at lunch next Thursday.

I had time before dinner to start organizing my notes for my essay, and then just a little bit of time left to start reading 2 Kings. I thought at first that Elisha was going to be a good man, but then he had bears maul boys who made fun of him for being bald, so I wasn’t sure any more.

I hadn't really noticed that lunch was leftovers, but it had been, and they had a nice dinner for us. It was French, Peggy said.

There was an egg pie called a quiche that was very good. They had two kinds, one that was vegetarian and one that had bacon in it. I took the vegetarian one but tried a small bite of Peggy's that had bacon and that was good, too. And I also had some fancy sliced potatoes that were pretty good, and all the rest of the special food was meat and long loaves of bread called baguettes. We took a whole one for the table and broke it apart and shared it, and that was nice.

I did a little bit of homework after dinner and then Peggy and I went down to Christine's room to watch the movie, and Peggy sat with me on the papasan.

I really liked the movie. The style was simple compared to all the other movies I'd seen, but it was beautiful. A lot of it really felt like Equestria, or maybe Equestria as it would be in a few years. And right at the end, I started to cry when Sheeta told Muska that the throne room was a tomb for them and I thought how brave she and Pazu were to stand up to him, and I thought that they'd died when they spoke the spell of destruction and the city began to collapse. But in the end it was okay; the tree saved them, and the simulacrum kept tending to the garden.

And maybe I was crying a little bit too because I couldn't spend as much time in the sky as I was used to, and I couldn't take my friends up there with me. They couldn't see what I saw, just drifting around on a cloud.

Still, I suppose it's better to have friends down on the ground than to be all alone up in the sky.

Author's Note

The Naming of Cats

The Hippopotamus

Morning at the Window

May 18 [Day of Gracious Living]

May 18

I woke up in the morning to the chapel bells ringing out a tune. I think I was awake before the first bell had even finished.

I'd never heard them ringing on any day except Sunday and Tuesdays when they practiced, and certainly not this early in the morning, and the first thought that came to mind was Poe's iron bells, so I had my muzzle to the window right away to see what was going on.

My first thought was fire. I didn't smell it, but I could have been upwind of it. My first duty whenever a fire was spotted was to tell everypony about it, but I didn't have to do that because the bells were already ringing, so my next duty was to get clouds to help put it out. I glanced up at the sky and from what little I could see through the window, there weren't any, which was bad.

All the commotion woke up Peggy, but she didn't seem too panicked by the bells and that calmed me down a bit—she'd know what to do.

I asked her why they were ringing and what I needed to do, and she told me they were ringing because today was the Day of Gracious Living, which meant that all classes were canceled. She sat up in bed and explained how the tradition had begun in 1974, and it had continued since then. She said that nobody knew what day it was going to be, except that it was always in May.

I told her that it would be a good day to catch up on reading the Bible and getting started on my essay for Anthropology, but she said that I wasn't allowed to do that. The rule was that on the Day of Gracious Living, it was mandatory to abstain from schoolwork.

Then she told me that a lot of people went to the beach at South Haven, and that was what we were going to do today. She said we'd eat breakfast, and then we'd put Sean and Joe and Christine in the car, and we'd go and sit on the beach and that was that.

I probably could have argued with her, but my heart wasn't in it. I wouldn't mind a day at the beach with friends.

Peggy took a quick shower and I didn't bother, since I hadn't done any exercise at all. Then we ate breakfast together and Peggy told everyone else at the table that we were going to the beach and there were no excuses. She said that they had twenty minutes after breakfast to get ready and then she was going to drag them out of their rooms, and I think she would have.

It was kind of funny that the dining hall was more crowded today than it normally was, and everyone was in a cheerful mood. I could see some people had come to breakfast without getting dressed; there were a few people in sleeping clothes and one girl that was even wearing fuzzy teddy-bear slippers.

Peggy made good on her promise, packing up a small bag which she called a day bag. The only thing I really needed to take was a towel, and I didn't need a bag for that; I could just drape it over my back.

We were in Cobalt in eighteen minutes, and she got Sean and Joe first, then picked up Christine. I had to sit in the back, because the car wasn't really designed to have three adults in the back seat but I could fit in ways that humans didn't. Joe sat in the front, and I sat in the middle of the back. I thought Christine and Sean would want to sit next to each other, but they both said it was okay.

We made it to the beach by ten, and the parking lot was already half full. It was a nice, calm day and totally cloudless.

Peggy picked out a spot and we set up our towels. The girls got undressed—they were both wearing swimsuits under their clothes, then Peggy got out a bottle of suntan lotion and she and Christine put it on each other.

I asked if it was okay if I flew out over the water for a bit and they said that was fine. So I trotted down the beach and then when I hit the firmer, wet sand at the shore, I took flight, flying straight out until I reached the end of the jetty. There were a lot of people on it, and a bunch of them pointed to me and waved. One man who was fishing beckoned me over and asked me if I could see where the fish were, and I said I could. So I picked up a little bit more height so I could see through the water better, and I found a school of them, and I pointed down, and he picked up his gear and moved to a new place on the jetty.

There was also a seagull that didn't like me very much. I guess I got too close to what he thought was his, and he came after me, squawking his displeasure, so I spun around and flew at him until he backed off. But I knew that wasn't the end of it; he'd probably try and come at me again if I got too close.

I went around to the other side of the harbor entrance, past the red lighthouse, and there was another beach there but it wasn't as popular. Still, I saw Leon and Cedric and Trevor there (Cedric was really hard to miss). I landed to say 'hi,' and Leon made me swear to tell no one I'd seen them because hood rats didn't go to the beach, and so I asked why they were there, then, and he said he needed to work on his tan.

So I promised I wouldn't tell anyone that they were there, and told them if they changed their minds about not being there, we were over on the other beach.

When I landed, Christine was lying on her stomach with the back of her swimming bra untied, and Peggy was right next to her but on her back. Sean was reading something on his pocket telephone, and Joe was sketching the lighthouse in his notebook.

They'd left my towel between them, so I landed right on it and stretched out and dozed in the sun for a bit.

I woke up when I felt Peggy moving around next to me, and when I stuck my head up she was re-tying Christine's swimming bra. I asked her why it had been untied, and Christine said it was to avoid tan lines.

Then I said that she was still going to have them on her breasts and she told me that couldn't be helped unless she took it off, so I asked her why she didn't.

She told me it was illegal for her to do that, and I said it didn't seem fair that the boys could not wear tops but that she had to.

Sean said that I probably knew how sharks were drawn to blood in the water, and I said that I did. He said that when women go topless, it's the same effect on men, that they cease to be rational.

Christine told him that he'd ceased to be rational as soon as he'd opened his mouth, and he responded by grabbing at her breast. She swatted his hand away, and Peggy rolled her eyes. Joe pretended to ignore us.

In the afternoon, some students set up a volleyball net and people took turns playing games. Peggy and I played a couple of times. She was pretty good at it, and I wasn't at all. I had better control if I hit the ball with my head, but after a while that started to hurt. But it was still lots of fun.

After we were done playing I went down to the waterfront and started to dig at the wet sand, and Peggy asked me what I was doing, and I said that there were sand crabs that liked to hide in sand and they were a good snack, but I wasn't finding any of them, and she told me that she didn't think that there were any of those in Michigan.

I dug at the sand a little bit more, but I think she was right. I hadn't found any at all, and usually they were so plentiful that it didn't take more than one or two hoof-scuffs before you had one.

When we were walking back to our blankets, she said it was always a little bit weird to see me eating meat, and even weirder to think of me trying to catch it.

We hung out for a little while longer, then everyone got back in Cobalt and we went looking for a place to have dinner. We finally settled on the Big Boy, since it was a decent restaurant, and not too far out of the way. There were a lot more choices in Kalamazoo, but nobody wanted to wait that long for food.

Sean was complaining about how his back and shoulders had gotten sunburned. Christine reminded him that was because he had been too stubborn to put on any suntan lotion. Peggy had some bright red marks on her arms, too, but that was from playing volleyball, not from a sunburn.

They had a pretty good salad bar, which all of us girls got, while the boys wanted to get hamburgers. Then for dessert I ordered a vanilla milkshake and shared it with Peggy.

I hadn’t noticed on the way to South Haven, but there was a big orange car parked along the side of the road on top of a hill, and there was a sign next to it that said Gene the Pumpkin Man. Peggy promised that we would go out there next fall.

She dropped everyone off at their dorms, and then we went back to ours. Peggy put on her lounging clothes and I went outside to brush the rest of the sand out of my coat, then decided that I would go to Aric’s a little bit early.

I flew over to Aric’s house and he was in the driveway with his feet sticking out from underneath the not-Winston truck. I stuck my head underneath and he didn’t notice me right away; he was holding a light in his mouth and had both hands up on top of something and a pile of tools on top of his chest.

He reached down and dropped the tool he was holding on his chest and felt around until he felt a different one and it disappeared up where his hands were. And then he happened to look and notice me.

He was putting in a starter--it was one of the things that the not-Winston truck needed--and said that he was almost done; once he got the two big bolts in he could leave it like that and finish up in the morning.

I told him that I didn’t mind how long it took him, but I guess he didn’t want to make me wait, because before too long he started pushing tools out from under the truck and then he came out, too. I leaned down and kissed him before he could stand up.

He had to take a shower and get all the grease off his hands before we could do anything else, so he went off and did that while I sat in the backyard watching the birds. One of them landed on my back while he was waiting his turn.

Aric opened his bedroom window when he was done in the shower, and the squeak of wood on wood scared the birds away and got my attention. When he’d turned away (and since the birds were gone for now) I shook some more sunflower seeds out of the birdfeeder then flew into his bedroom and took his towel off.

May 19 [Home-cooked Breakfast]

May 19

When we were done in bed, Aric got dressed and went downstairs to make breakfast like he'd promised. He said he was going to make scrambled eggs and pancakes and hash browns.

I asked if he minded if I watched, and he said that he didn't mind at all.

The first thing he did was to make coffee, though. He has a pot called Mister Coffee and it makes the coffee for you, so he filled it with ground coffee seeds and started it. I think if I'd still been upstairs, the smell would have been enough to bring me down.

For some reason, he kept the eggs and butter and cheese in the refrigerator. I'd noticed that at the grocery store, too, but I hadn't asked why, so I asked Aric, and he said that they would go bad otherwise. They must be different on Earth, then, because in Equestria they'll keep for weeks out in the open.

His stove made little snapping noises when he turned the knobs, and then it started burning all on its own. He got out pans for everything and let them start warming up and melting the butter while he was making the pancake batter.

Humans have really clever pancake batter. It was in a yellow jug and he just added some water and shook it up a lot and all of a sudden it was batter.

It didn't take too long before all the food was cooking, and I heard some footsteps on the stairs. Pretty soon David opened the door to the kitchen and I think he was surprised to see me there.

I was surprised to see him, too. Even though I knew he lived downstairs, I didn't know that the stairs went up into the kitchen. Plus, he wasn't wearing a shirt and I saw he had earrings in his nipples and belly button which I had never seen before.

He mumbled a greeting and went to the bathroom. Aric said that he was glad he'd bought enough breakfast for everyone, and just then remembered that the pancakes needed to be turned.

When David was on his way back downstairs, Aric asked him if he wanted breakfast, and he said he did, and that probably Angela would, too.

She came upstairs right after he left, and she was wearing a white shirt and a pair of sleeping shorts that had fire trucks on them. When Aric saw them, he asked if they were David's, or if she had her own pair, and she said that they were his fire truck boxers, but she was only wearing them because he was wearing her underwear. Aric said that he didn't need to know that, and she shrugged and then asked him if he wanted any help cooking.

I could tell that she thought he wasn't doing it right, but she kept her mouth shut and cooked the pancakes while he stirred the eggs and made sure that the hash browns weren't burning again, and then they filled up plates when they were done, and David set out places with plates and silverware that were exactly like the ones that the college dining hall had. The coffee cups all said Denny's on them.

People like advertising stuff on their clothes and on their cars and on their coffee cups, too, I guess.

It was kind of crowded at the table, and Angela had to sit on David's lap because there weren't enough chairs for everyone. But we had a nice breakfast even if the hash browns were a little bit burned and a couple of pancakes weren't all the way cooked through. I bet if Aric practiced a little bit he could be a really good cook.

When breakfast was over, Angela said that she and David would clean up the kitchen, and Aric and I went out to the front porch, where I got dressed and then got permission to fly.

It was a beautiful day for it: the sky was perfectly clear, so you could see everything. I was glad it was Dori giving directions, 'cause I wanted to be as high as I could just so I could look around and see the world. And it was worth it, even though there was a bit of nagging guilt at the thought of airplanes getting re-directed because of me. I couldn't quite see Lake Michigan—I thought maybe I was, but the haze at the horizon could have been fooling me. It always looks a bit ocean-y right where the horizon is, unless there are mountains.

I flew around for a while, not really exercising but just having fun, until it was time to go back.

I didn't notice until I had landed but my blinking light had stopped working while I was flying, so when I was getting undressed, I changed the batteries before I forgot. Then I went to the shower and cleaned myself off before I went to lunch.

I was just on the way out when Brianna came in. I hadn't talked to her in a while, and I thought about how I had said that I was going to try and invite Aquamarine for a weekend, and then I'd forgotten to do it. I'd have to do it soon, there wasn't much more time left before the end of the year.

I did remember to bring the poem to read. When I sat down I told Leon that he looked more tan, even though he really looked the same as he had yesterday and the day before that. But it's always nice to compliment a person.

Cedric thought that was pretty funny, and then I asked if they minded if I read a poem, and they both said that I could.

Of course when I was done they were both laughing and joking about it. Cedric said that the part about the housemaids ought to be familiar to Leon, and he swore that none of their maids were despondent but that the butler had a rather hangdog look to him. And then Cedric admitted that it did kind of remind him of waking up in the city, that it never really went to sleep but it sort of napped at night and in the afternoon on hot days. He said that it had been hard to get used to how quiet the college was, and I thought that was funny because it was a lot louder than I was used to.

Conrad began by reading us a poem called Rhapsody on a Windy Night, and I thought about what Cedric had said about the city never sleeping. I had seen it half-awake in the morning, the sidewalks empty and the traffic lights signaling cars that aren't there. But I had never seen it at night, and I thought that maybe I should.

I liked poems about the sky and the sea and the forest and open plains, but why shouldn't the cities have poems of their own? I could almost imagine myself walking through the downtown of Kalamazoo at night, with nothing but the light of the moon and the streetlights to guide my hooves.

We followed that by a poem called Gerontion, which was kind of sad. It was about an old man who had never done anything that he thought was useful, and I could kind of think of how a ~~pony~~ person might think that, 'cause I think that they like to remember their heroes.

But maybe that's not right. Apple Bread never did anything heroic, except every morning he was at his bakery from sunup 'till sundown, and the village just wasn't the same without him.

He finished with Portrait of a Lady, which felt like kind of the opposite view to me. Like it was about him being young and her being older and wiser.

I think that there are two worlds, the one of the old and the one of the young. To the old it's changing and decaying from what they knew, but to the young it's new and full of promise. And I guess it's the same world no matter what, so perhaps the thing is to always see it as if you're young, and look for the wonders of it.

At the very end of class, he said that if we wanted to, we should read The Waste Land, and Morgan asked him if there was extra credit and he got that little smile I liked and said the satisfaction of having read it was extra credit enough.

I was still thinking about the poems at dinner, and so I didn't really pay all that much attention to what everyone was saying. Nobody really noticed; they were talking around me, and that was okay. Just before I got up to get dessert, Peggy rubbed my mane and by that I knew that she'd noticed.

I wonder if she misses me? I haven't slept in our room in a while.

Liz and I talked about bad kings and flawed prophets. She reminded me that the Bible was written by one tribe of people, and that I should keep in mind that who was a bad king to the Israelites might have been a very good king to the Philistines or the Babylonians or any of the other tribes who lived there that the Israelites were fighting with, which was something I hadn't thought of.

So I told her about what I'd thought about Eliot's poems, and how it was a matter of perspective, and she said that she thought I was getting wiser.

I asked her if she was going to stay at college for the summer, and she said that she lived in Kalamazoo, and we could meet at her house and continue our discussions if I was in town. It didn't have to be Thursdays, either; she could meet whenever we wanted.

And then I asked her about the bears, and she said that it was a difficult passage. She said that the youths were challenging Elisha's right to speak for God, and God's authority as well, and so right there in front of everybody as proof, God made the bears maul the youths.

I wasn't too happy with that explanation, but I guess at least He didn't flood the world again or destroy the whole city. And she reminded me that the people of Bethel were supposed to be following God's word, and they weren't.

When I got back to my room, I wrote a letter to Aquamarine inviting her to come to Kalamazoo the weekend after next if she could, and then I made another dreamcatcher, while I was thinking about if I should go to Meghan's room or spend the night with Peggy instead.

I finally asked her if she minded if I invited Meghan over to spend the night, which would kill two birds with one stone, and Peggy said that she didn't mind so long as we didn't have sex. So I sent a telephone telegram to Meghan, and she came over while I was finishing up helping Peggy with her math.

The three of us chatted for a little bit—it was kind of tense at first, but we all had a couple of bottles of beer which maybe wasn't so wise, but it really lightened the mood. And it was kind of late when we went to bed, but I felt like I was going to sleep really well, and I was right.

Author's Note

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Gerontion

Portrait of a Lady

Big thanks to Cynewulf for suggesting these poems :pinkiehappy:

May 20 [Kalamazoo Sleeps]

May 20

I didn't get out of bed until Peggy's telephone alarm went off. I should have, but I was nice and cozy and Meghan had wrapped her arm around me, and I told myself that I didn't want to move and risk waking her up.

But if I didn't get up, I wasn't going to get to go flying, and I did consider just skipping it today.

When Peggy had gone off to the shower, I wiggled out from under Meghan's arm, and that didn't wake her up, so I nosed her shirt up a little bit and kissed her on the tummy, and that did wake her up. She pushed me back and sort of scooted away so that she could sit up.

I told her that I was going flying but I would be back pretty quick so I didn't miss my shower time.

She said that she'd left all her shower stuff in her room, and I said she could use mine, but she said that she'd rather go back to her room where it was more private.

So I said that I would go there when I was done, and that made her happy. She leaned down and kissed my nose, and then I tilted my head back just a little so we could have a proper kiss. Then she helped me get dressed and put on her own pants while I was getting permission to fly.

It was another nice clear day out, but this time I stayed low because the grumpy man was on the radio again.

As I was taking off, I thought about the radar picture he was seeing. I couldn't see any airplanes, but the big ones were really hard to see if they didn't make clouds.

I flew around below the tops of the tall buildings in town, where airplanes weren't allowed. I circled around a couple of them, kind of playing a flag race in the air, then I chased a couple of cars down the street for fun, before I turned around and went back to campus.

I stopped off in my room first to leave my flight gear behind, then told Peggy I was going to take a shower with Meghan, and happily went down the hallway, down a flight of stairs, and then out to the roof boardwalk. It was a perfect place to fly to DeWaters from, and I don't know why I'd never thought of it before.

She opened the door when I knocked, and said that we had to wait because Becky was in there.

It wasn't too long before she was done, and Meghan went in and turned on the shower and started getting undressed while I got in and rinsed off the lather. Then we brushed each other and went to breakfast together.

I told her how Aric had cooked yesterday, and Angela had helped. She wanted to know if I was going to live with him for the summer, and I said that I didn't know—I hadn't asked him if I could. I really needed to think about it, but I didn't want the school year to end, and I guess in my mind maybe I thought that if I didn't make plans, it wouldn't. That was stupid, of course; school would be out when it was supposed to whether I had a place to stay or not.

She said that maybe I could stay with her if it was okay with her roommates—she didn't have a really big place, but I was small and didn't have very much stuff.

I kissed her again as we left the dining hall, and she went off to her class and I went to mine.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started teaching us a new way to find fractals, and he started out by giving us a different equation and showing how it would work on squares, because they were simple. And he explained how it would have to be contractive, or shrinking down.

He wrote out a couple of proofs, which I really like seeing. Proofs demonstrate that something that you think is true is true all the time. Plus, it's fun to see if I can figure out what the conclusion is before he gets there. I think if he just wrote it all out, it might be boring, but he always keeps pausing partway through and asks the class what we think is going to happen to one of the variables as he goes on.

Once we had finished the proofs, he showed us pictures of iterated triangles, and then he showed us how to completely map out a table of the values. Then he showed us for the rest of class how to make things with them, like squares that turned into a triangular shape, and he showed us how to do it for a fern, and he said that over the weekend we could practice and see how to write out other fractal shapes.

At the very end of class, he told us about a book called Fractals Everywhere, in case we wanted to learn more about the proofs. I made a note to get that after I returned the World War One book.

I went to the mail hut after class (which I should have done before but I was having too much fun with Meghan to think of it). There were a bunch of letters there, one from my sister and one from Aquamarine and one from Comcast and one from Discover.

I sat down to read them all. I read Aquamarine's first, 'cause I was surprised that she'd sent it so quick after getting mine (I was surprised she'd even gotten mine). But it turned out she'd sent it a couple of days ago, and they had just passed each other.

She said that she was done with school already, which I hadn't expected. I had two full weeks and then finals before I was done. And she said that she had a nice apartment with Jenny—it belonged to a bunch of students who were going to be away for the summer and they were subleasing it. She said they were called The Hamptons, and they weren't too far from where she had lived before. It was above a bunch of stores, which reminded her of Ponyville, and that they had a balcony and the railroad tracks were right by her room, too.

That sounded pretty nice. I wish our room had a balcony, then I could fly right off of that and not have to go down the stairs and outside before I could take off.

My sister wrote that it was kind of boring without me, and that a lot of the mares on my team really missed me. She said that my little cousin was asking her if I had seen any of the big metal sky-ships, and if I had could I send a photograph of me next to one?

She said it had been a good year so far; she'd flown south with a bunch of the girls at the beginning of spring and helped to wrap up winter all up the coast, ending in Baltimare, where a group of northern pegasuses took over. She said that they all talked funny.

And she told me that the Crimson Bounder had been lost in a storm. They'd lost their masts and their lookout Helia had flown to the nearest pegasus patrol and they were able to rescue everypony before the ship sank. Some of the crewponies were hoping to sign on to the next merchant ship that made port, while the captain and her mate had gone to Baltimare to get another ship built.

Both Discover and Comcast asked me to buy things that I didn't want. They had little envelopes inside that were called sassies that you could send back without a stamp, which I kept so I could send them a letter saying that I didn't want their credit card or cable.

At lunch, Joe amused us by only talking Japanese, which he said was for practice. Sean started talking back to him in Klingon, and pretty soon the two of them were laughing because neither of them understood what the other one was saying. We ignored them.

Professor Amy picked up where she had left off in her lecture, almost as if we hadn't had a day off earlier in the week. I guess everyone had said what they wanted to say, because this time she got right through it pretty easily. I sort of knew what she was going to say, since I'd stayed after on Monday and asked, but it was nice to have her go over it again.

Then she said that we were going to have a test, and she said that she wanted us to be honest; they were all true/false questions, and we were going to grade our own tests so nobody else could see them or what we'd written. And as proof of that, she put a wastebasket with a special cover on the desk.

She showed us two dozen pictures and had us answer if they were a particular thing or not. Then she told us all the answers, and said that we were to remember our score and then fold our papers and one at a time put them in the wastebasket, which ate them.

Then she asked if anybody had gotten a perfect score, and nobody raised their hands.

Professor Amy said that was proof of what she had been saying. And a couple of people complained that she had given hard examples, and she said that she'd make it easier, then, and she asked each one of them to guess her ethnicity, and neither of them were right. Then she asked if anyone else wanted to make a guess, but no one figured it out. So she said she was a Bosniak, and nobody in class knew what that was, either, and she got a sort of sad smile on her face and suggested that we Google it.

I was going to start reading my World War One book after I finished writing letters, but Christine and Sean and Ruth and Rebekkah all came over and were playing cards and it would have been rude to just ignore them, so I joined in, and pretty soon we were making enough commotion that Kat came down, too, and we had a three-way game going with me and Sean and Christine, and a four-way game with the rest of the girls.

We switched around, making the two winners of the four-way and the winner of the three-way play a three-way, and kept on rotating like that until we'd played a bunch of hands and had a few drinks each, and it wasn't until almost eleven that everyone finally drifted off.

I flew over to Aric's house, and when he was getting undressed for bed I mentioned the poem about the city at night, and he put his pants back on and said that it was time I experienced it, then. It was a perfect night, and the moon was full.

So the two of us walked through the neighborhood and by the college and then through downtown. There was a different feel to it; there weren't so many cars and most of the stores were dark but there were lights on in apartments above them.

We went all the way to the railroad viaduct, and he said sometimes when it rained, it flooded and cars got stuck underneath. Then we went up and over, and I said that I thought it was dangerous because a train could come, and he said that was what made it fun.

I thought that was pretty bold for someone who couldn't fly away.

We went back along the other side of the main street, then up to the top of the parking lots next to the hotel, where we could see all of Kalamazoo stretched out around us. I had to stand up on the wall, 'cause it was too tall to see over.

He told me to just listen, and I did. At first I didn't really hear anything, but then I started to notice that even here in the middle of town there were bugs chirping, and every now and then I heard a car's radio pass by, or people down on the street below talking as they went past—some of them were really drunk, too. Lights in the hotel went on and off, and I heard a car below us start up and then it sort of faded out as it descended through the levels.

I don't know how long we were up there, but I was yawning a lot on the way back to his house, and it was really tempting to just turn away when we went by Trowbridge, but I still wanted to spend the night with him.

By the time we got back to his house, I was swaying on my hooves, and I was in bed as soon as he had opened the bedroom door. I remember putting my head on his chest when he got in bed and thanking him for walking with me, then I fell asleep.

May 21 [Air Zoo]

May 21

At least I had an excuse for being lazy this morning, cause I was up late last night. Plus, Aric was probably sad that I'd fallen right asleep. So I snuggled up against his chest until he woke up, and then I teased him with my wing a little bit more than I should have. After he recovered we tried again.

He didn't have any eggs left, but he still had another bottle of pancake batter and more hash browns. Plus there was oatmeal in the cupboard, and that made for a pretty good breakfast.

While we were eating, he asked me what my plans for the day were, and I said that I was going to go on a nice long flight to start the day, then I had to start on my essay. Plus I still had to write letters back to my sister and Comcast and Discover.

He said that he didn't have anything he had to do, but he'd be smart to start work on his theatre final.

Then I asked him what he was going to do for the summer.

He said that he'd been meaning to tell me; he had gotten a grant to work over the summer at a theater in Lafayette. Then he said that if he'd known I was going to be here that he wouldn't have, but he got the offer last November and he really shouldn't back down now.

I got a little mad that he hadn't told me sooner, especially if he'd known since November, then he got defensive and said that I hadn't bothered to tell him what I was doing for the summer, either, so the lack of communication went both ways.

He was right, of course. But I wasn't thinking straight—I was afraid of spending the whole summer without most of my friends. So I told him that was just 'cause I didn't know, but if I had known I would have told him right away.

Aric went around the table and put his hand on my shoulder and told me that it was okay; Lafayette wasn't all that far and maybe he could come up on weekends or something. But it was a theatre internship, and they were kind of hard to get, and it was close by.

I told him that I was sorry for yelling at him and that it was just unexpected, but after that I didn't want to leave at all, 'cause I knew it wouldn't be too long before he was gone.

So we changed our plans—instead of studying like we ought to, we'd go to the Air Zoo and look at the airplanes there, and he could take a picture of me standing next to one so that I could send it to my sister. And then he said we'd go out into the woods for a late picnic lunch, and just spend all day relaxing.

I said that I ought to fly out to the picnic spot and at least get some exercise today, so that's what we decided to do.

When we got in Winston, I thought about using my airplane radio to talk to Dori and see if she wanted to meet us at the Air Zoo, but I'm not supposed to use my radio for stuff like that, so I didn't.

The Air Zoo is right next to the airport, and there are a couple of airplanes sitting outside. I posed for a picture next to the white one, because it looked faster. Aric told me that it was a passenger jet, while the other one was a fighter jet, but I still thought it looked like the fastest one.

The woman selling tickets was really surprised to see me, and she came around from the desk and used her telephone to take a selfie with me, and then said that I could get in free because I was basically an aircraft. But she still made Aric pay for a ticket.

It was pretty overwhelming in there; the whole place was stuffed full of airplanes and helicopters, and each one had a little display telling us all about it. Plus some of the people who were touring the museum also knew about some of the airplanes that were in there, too, and they were happy to tell us about them, too.

We wound up spending most of the day there, and he took my picture in front of a couple of different airplanes: the Grumman G-73 Mallard, which I liked because it was an airplane that could land on water, and the Douglas C-47 because it was big, and the Lockheed SR-71 which was the fastest airplane in the whole world. Aric said that it could fly faster than the sun, which meant that they could take off at sunset and fly west, and they'd see the sun rise the wrong way and then set behind them.

And we talked to an older man named Tony whose father had flown the Waco CG-4 in the second World War. That was a special airplane, too, because it was a glider, so it had to be towed like a barge behind another airplane, and when they got near their landing site they had to release the tow-rope and there weren't any second chances. You were gonna land, and you'd better hope that if it wasn't on the runway, it was somewhere soft.

He said that in Burma, the gliders brought in equipment and the C-47s brought in men, and it was done before the Japanese even knew that the Americans were there. Then he asked if he could see me fly before we left.

We weren't ready to leave yet, so he gave Aric his telephone number, and we both went our separate ways, and looked at more of the displays. There was a little section about female pilots and astronauts, and there were biographies of the most famous ones, like Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride who was the first American woman in space.

There was also a little flight simulator that Aric insisted that I try. When we got there, though, I didn't like it right away because it closed all around you like a clam, and I thought it would be scary inside. Anyway, you had to be four feet tall to use it, and I wasn't.

He said if I stood on my hind hooves I probably was.

I stuck my tongue out at him and told him if he wanted to try the box, he could, so he got inside and the lid closed on him and the whole thing sort of shook around for a little bit and then he got out and said that it was a lot of fun.

We spent a little bit of time in the museum store. There were some postcards that I bought, and a book about female pilots which looked interesting. And we also bought a bag of astronaut ice cream. Aric wanted to know how I knew about it, so I told him about how we'd had it at the museum in Seattle.

It probably wasn't the best thing to eat on an empty stomach, but we did anyway. Then Aric called Tony and said that we were getting ready to leave, and we waited around the entrance for him to show up.

I probably wasn't supposed to fly this close to the airport, but I knew that if I stayed below the light poles in the parking lot it would be okay, so I flew a couple laps around the parking lot and then glided around the final time. I don't think his father would have been impressed; if it wasn't for the hot air coming up off the parking lot, I wouldn't have made it at all. But he was impressed, and said that I was the most wonderful thing he'd seen all day.

I was pretty hungry when we left, so we stopped at Taco Bell for a snack, and then Aric said that if I still wanted to have a picnic, we could. I wanted to, so he said that if I wanted to get my flying in, too, we could meet in the little clearing where we'd been in the rain. He showed it to me on the map, in case I didn't remember how to get there, and reminded me that with all the tree cover it would be hard to see.

I told him that if he put a big P for pegasus on Winston it would be a lot easier to find.

He said that I could call him on his pocket telephone if I got lost, and I could just land at any crossroads and read the sign and he'd know where I was. Then he helped me into my flight gear and we kissed and then I got permission to fly, and I took off.

It really wasn't that hard to find. The roads were pretty regular, and so even when they were covered by trees, it was pretty obvious where they were. I hadn't seen it marked on the map, but the clearing was really close to the field with all the irrigation ditches that I'd seen on the Kal Haven trail.

I didn't find the right clearing right away, though. There were a couple of them, and I passed two that didn't have Winston before I found the third. And it made me laugh; Aric had painted a bit white P in the back of Winston, and it was still wet, which I found out when I landed on it.

He was still in the truck, so I tapped at the back window and he slid it open and I kissed him, then touched a bit of wet paint to his forehead.

Aric had the tailgate lowered, and we sat there and ate sandwiches and each drank a beer and then just sat together and talked until it started to get dark, then we decided to do a little bit of driving.

That little bit turned into a lot. I lost track of where we were before too long, because he was taking all back roads, and some of them were pretty twisty. Most of the time I couldn't see the moon because it was behind trees, but I managed to get myself somewhat re-oriented when he went by the railroad tracks, because I'd been there before.

We followed them all the way to Battle Creek, and then he drove down a road that overlooked the airport, and it was really pretty with all the lights marking the runways and taxiways. The different colors tell the pilots where they need to go and where they shouldn't go.

While we were sitting there, he pointed off in the distance and I saw a set of airplane spotlights, and pretty soon it came over us and landed.

On our way back home, we had to wait for a train that was going towards Kalamazoo, and once it had gone all the way by, Aric sped up until he was even with the locomotives, and then kept pace with it all the way back to Kalamazoo. We fell behind a couple of times, when we had to go through towns where we had to slow down and it didn't, and he had to get ahead so he could cross the tracks in Galesburg. We cut it pretty close; the warning lights started flashing right as we bounced across the rails.

When we got to Comstock, we had to give up the chase, because there was another crossing coming up but the road had a slow speed limit, and Aric said he didn't feel like getting a speeding ticket by running through town at sixty. I didn't mind; it had been fun and it was okay that it was over now.

He brought me back to his house and we sat on the couch and watched the end of a movie called The City of Lost Children with David and Angela. It was in French, but there were English words on the bottom so that we would know what the people were saying.

It was very strange. The town was a nightmare of a seaside town, and I was really confused about what was going on. He said it would make a lot more sense if I saw it from the very beginning, and I thought he was probably right.

Still, there was some stuff that was pretty familiar, like the big wooden wharfs and the diving suit that 'the Original' wore.

We had a couple of beers and just snuggled on the couch (that's what David and Angela were doing, too), and when it was over Aric told them how much fun we'd had at the Air Zoo, and showed them the pictures he'd taken of me.

Then we went upstairs and went to bed. It was a nice night outside, so Aric opened both of his windows and we had a little bit of a breeze.

May 22 [Homework Day]

May 22

I woke up in a kinda bittersweet mood, 'cause it was sad that Aric would be leaving soon, but we'd had a lot of fun yesterday. I knew in my heart that this was probably our last full weekend together, since finals were coming up in a few weeks and then he'd have to pack his stuff and go to Indiana.

I decided that I wouldn't go flying. My body would miss the exercise, but my heart would be happy. So I just stayed next to him and dozed off and on until he woke up.

Sometimes we can't get what we want, though, because when he left to use the toilet I was thinking about the classwork that was piling up and the books I wasn't reading, and I knew that he had things he was supposed to do, as well, like his theatre project.

But we didn't have to do them right away, so I lured him back into bed (it wasn't difficult).

He was out of food, so after he'd gotten dressed we went to Nina's and ate breakfast, then at the end of it we both agreed that we should do homework even though it wasn't fun.

Aric went to the theatre building where they have special drawing tables, and after he'd gotten himself set up, I kissed him and then went back to my room and started working on the essay for Anthropology.

The topic had seemed like such a good idea when Christine first helped me think of it, but it was hard to organize my notes. I tore all the pages out of my notebook and arranged them on the floor, moving them this way and that to try and see what order felt best. That was a trick I'd learned in Equestria; sometimes it made more sense in one order rather than another.

Peggy came back from lunch and asked me what I was doing, so I told her how I was trying to organize my essay and she laughed and said I had a strange way of doing it. But then she said that everyone has strange ways of doing homework and that she liked to write her English term papers in her lounging clothes.

I said math was easier naked, but that wasn't working for my report so maybe I should go and see if Ruth would let me borrow her lounging pants. I bet she would.

Peggy didn't think that wearing pajamas would help, even though she said it would be adorable. She told me I ought to go wherever I do my best thinking.

Well, I was sure that I did my best thinking when I was in the sky, but it was really hard to fly and write, and there weren't any clouds to perch on, so that wasn't an option. But I had to do something; I was just flying in circles and getting nowhere.

It always seems easier to write stuff than it actually is.

So I decided that as long as my mind was flying in circles, my body might as well be, so I put on my flight gear and headed outside.

At first all I could think of was how I was wasting time when I should be at my desk, but then those thoughts sort of faded and then for a while I just sort of looked down at the city below me, and the distant horizon in front of me.

I'd flown over a golf course—the same one that I got chased off of before—and I flew around watching the players hit the balls, and then it occurred to me that I could just list stuff off in order, and maybe at the end of it wrap it up in some sort of a neat conclusion.

That meant that the first thing I ought to do is pick what traditions were the most interesting and I could do that by rearranging my notes one more time.

It would probably be kind of rough at first, but I could work on that. I still had a couple of weeks.

When I got back to the dorm I didn't want to forget what I'd thought of, so I started sorting through my notes again. I liked the gift-giving traditions; that was important. And I wanted to do a little bit more research on the clothes people wore, because I'd learned that that was a combination of a personal choice and a traditional choice.

The wedding party was pretty important, too, so I made sure to move those notes up to the top. One of the books said that the groomsmen traditionally used swords to protect the bride and groom.

I thought that was a good starting point. So I wrote numbers on my papers so that I could keep them in order and then sat at my desk and started to write.

Peggy came back with a basket full of clean laundry while I was working on the middle section. She noticed that I was still wearing my flight vest, because I'd gotten distracted and forgotten to take it off, which she thought was really funny. She said I was making sure that no one ran into me while I was working at my desk.

I'd kind of forgotten I was wearing it, so I got undressed and then sat back down and worked until it was almost time to go to dinner, then I took a quick shower. There wasn't any competition for the shower at five in the evening.

After dinner I looked over what I'd gotten done and decided that I ought to finish writing the section on the bridal party. Then when that was done, I wrote short letters to Comcast and Discover and put them in the envelopes, and started one to my sister. I wanted to include some of the pictures that Aric had took, but they were still in his pocket telephone and I hadn't thought to ask him to get them out. I'd ask him after Durach.

When I'd finished the letter to my sister, I started reading the Bible, and then I thought that maybe I could read it over at Meghan's. When I knocked on her door, though, she wasn't there, so I went back downstairs and sat in the lounge to wait for her.

Elisha had started doing mostly good things and what God told him to, and I hoped he'd be smart enough to keep following God's rules. But it was kind of frustrating that just like in the last book, verses about a particular king's reign would be summed up by saying it was in another book. I guess the Bible was already thick enough that they didn't want to include that stuff.

I was just starting to read how God told Jehu to be king when Meghan came in. Well, I didn't see her but she noticed me and sat down next to me and petted my back then ran her fingers through my mane and asked me how my weekend had been.

I told her about the Air Zoo and driving around at night, and she told me about her weekend. She had just gotten back from a study group, and she said that she was going up her room for the night and wanted to know if I'd come along. I said I would.

She still had a little more homework to do, so I sat on the bed and read a little bit more but once I read how the eunuchs had tossed Jezebel out a window and her blood had splattered on the horses I decided I didn't want to read anymore 'cause I might have nightmares. So I closed up the book and just relaxed, watching Meghan do her homework.

She had a habit of brushing her hair back over her ear, even though it would fall forward again while she was working, and then she wouldn't notice it for a while, but whenever she leaned back she'd push it back out of the way. That was really cute.

And she liked clicking her pen like I did.

I don't know how long it was before she finished, but she finally did, and she closed up her book and came over to the bed and petted me a little and said she was sorry she was boring. I said that she wasn't boring, but right then I yawned, which made her laugh.

Since Amy wasn't back yet, Meghan changed into her sleeping clothes in the bedroom and then got into bed and we snuggled up for the night. I stretched out my hoof on her chest and she took it in her hand and held it gently and I knew I wasn't going to have any nightmares tonight.

May 23 [Week Nine Begins]

May 23

Meghan was still holding my hoof when I woke up after a nightmareless night. I couldn't move around too much because of it, and I knew that nuzzling her armpit tickled her, so I just wiggled as close as I could and stretched my wing over her belly.

The moment lasted until her telephone alarm sounded, then she had to let go so she could roll over and turn it off. But right after she had, she turned back on her side and brushed my mane back and then kissed me.

She said that she'd dreamed that we were both in Equestria together, and I said that I hoped one day that would happen. I knew that I couldn't show her my home, but there was a lot of stuff in the village I think she would like. And it's only a couple days' train ride from Canterlot, which isn't all that far, especially since our trains go slower.

She got out of bed and stretched, and I followed, fluffing out my wings and reverse-arching my back. Then I told her I was going to go flying, and she said she wished she could go with me.

I told her that someday soon I was going to go skydiving and it would be fun if she came along. Her face got kinda pale, and when she said it sounded like fun, I don't think she was telling the truth.

We kissed goodbye and I took my Bible back to my room then got dressed for flight.

It was another perfect day outside, and I wanted to fly all the way up, but the grumpy man was on the radio again, and I didn't want to spoil his day by making him work too hard, so I kept low.

I flew all the way out across the 131 highway and landed to get a drink of water at the Kal-Haven trail. Then right when I took off, I made a new friend: a little blackbird with yellow and red stripes on his wings landed on my back and rode on me all the way to Drake Road, then he flew off. I tried to tell him that if he wanted to go towards downtown Kalamazoo, I'd take him the rest of the way, but he just chirped politely and headed north.

Ruth had gotten up a bit early, and I was a bit late, so I missed out on my normal shower slot. So I didn't get to go to breakfast at all, but I did have a can of anchovies and also ate two of Peggy's granola bars, then left a little note on her desk telling her that I'd get her new ones. I knew she wouldn't mind; she had already said that I could have some of her snack food if I wanted, but it was still polite to tell her I had.

I was still damp when I sat down in math, but at least I wasn't late. When Sean sat down next to me he asked me why I'd missed breakfast, and I told him. He said that sometimes when they were in a hurry he and Christine took a shower together and I said that none of the girls in my dorm had been interested, but if he wanted me to join them I wouldn't mind. The showers next to his room were really big, not a little stall like we had in our dorm.

His face got red and he said that he didn't mean it as an invitation, so I told him that he shouldn't have offered.

I bet he would be mad if I just showed up one morning.

And I bet Christine would think it was hilarious.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee taught us fractal algorithms. He started with deterministic algorithms and then taught us random iteration algorithms, where the probabilities of points became important. Next he told us about the inverse problem, which was how to generate the equation from a fractal. He had to start by showing us the collage theorem, and since he had been explaining as he went I figured out how it worked before he got to the very end.

That was really neat, because you could even do things with it like make a circle that turned into a four-part square. And then he spent the rest of class showing us how to reduce complicated fractals to only twenty-eight numbers.

They had pizza for lunch, which was really nice. I broadened my horizons by trying a slice of pepperoni (I didn't want to take a whole slice because it looked really oily and I knew I wouldn't eat it all, but Peggy peeled a piece off hers and let me try it) and ate two pieces of my own: one had mushrooms and bell peppers; the other had olives and onions and broccoli. Broccoli isn't as good as a lot of flowers, and they hadn't done it any favors by overcooking it.

I told Christine that Sean had invited me to shower with them, just to see what she would say. She raised an eyebrow and looked at Sean, who was shaking his head 'no.' Then she looked right back at me and said tomorrow at seven in Hoben, right by Sean's room.

I told her that I had other plans for Tuesday morning, otherwise I would. And then I thought that since his showers were big enough, wouldn't it be fun to have a shower party? But I didn't think that anyone would be interested in that, so I kept my mouth shut.

Joe said that group bathing was traditional in Japan, although the bath houses had a wall between the men's side and the women's side. He said that they were originally built because people didn't have water in their houses, but now they stayed popular because it was important for socialization.

I'm glad that some people on Earth are still sensible about that stuff.

I brought my partially-finished essay to Anthropology class. I wanted to make sure that I did well on it, so it was best that Professor Amy get a look at it right away before I got too far along. Or else I might waste a bunch of time writing something that wasn't any good at all.

She talked about different classes in society, and how sometimes one class could do things that another couldn't, or wouldn't. She said that different cultures had different ways of approaching it, and then she said that in some societies immigrants did the menial jobs and sometimes that was a good deal for them and that started a bunch of debate.

I think maybe she got bored with how many students weren't paying attention and so decided to say things that would get their attention.

So we mostly spent class debating whether it was right to pay migrant workers less than proper citizens, and if offshore manufacturing was fair, and a bunch of other things I really didn't know anything about, but it was good to listen to.

It's strange how students expect to be able to take up a different viewpoint than the teacher. I'd noticed in Conrad's class that people had different ideas about what a poem meant, and he didn't say whether anyone was right or wrong, but that was a poem. Something that spoke to the heart. This was supposed to be about fact, so wasn't there one fact that everyone agreed on?

Math is so much simpler.

Professor Amy said that my essay needed a lot of work. She said that I should focus more on the cultural significance of the traditions, rather than the historical context. She said while the historical context was important, it was more relevant why people were doing it the way they did it now, rather than how the tradition had originated. That was disappointing, but it was good to know that now instead of finding out when I got a bad grade. So I told her I'd fix it and asked if she minded if I kept on showing it to her.

She said that nobody ever visited on her office hours that wasn't an anthropology major, and that I was welcome anytime.

When I opened the door to our room, I saw Peggy was sitting at her desk wearing her little ear-speakers and I could see she was using her calculator, so I knew that she was doing her math, but what was really weird was that I could see her shoulders were bare and then I remembered that I had told her that math was easier naked and I wondered if she was actually trying it that way.

Since she hadn't noticed me, I pulled the door back shut quietly and went to Ruth's room and knocked on the door and when she answered I asked to borrow her lounging pants. She got a big smile on her face and pulled her drawer open and even helped me put them on and rolled up the cuffs so that I wouldn't trip on them.

I told her that I'd give them back after dinner, even though she said I could keep them for as long as I wanted. Then I went back to the room and got into my chair and had started setting out my homework before Peggy noticed that I was there.

She wasn't naked, but she was just wearing her bra and panties. And she saw that I was wearing lounging pants, and we both started giggling about how we were trying something new in the hopes that it would make our work easier.

I worked on my essay until dinnertime: I was going to have to check out those books again, and maybe some more, because I hadn't taken good enough notes. But now I knew what I didn't know, and that was important.

And I didn't feel any smarter wearing lounging pants, and Peggy said that all she'd learned from doing math mostly naked was that it's chilly sitting around in underwear. So I guess our experiment was a failure.

She got dressed and I got undressed and then we went to dinner together. They had pizza again. Christine said that she thought it was probably because they'd run short on money and couldn't afford to cook real food. Sean said that he didn't care, this was infinitely better than their buffalo wing soup and she agreed that was a good point.

One thing that they never seemed to run out of was salads, and I liked that. They weren't creative and didn't involve much preparation beyond cutting up the vegetables, but there were lots of choices and nothing ever seemed to be out of season. I thought that if my tablemates liked salads better, they'd find that they were never lacking a good meal.

I checked out the books I'd had before at the library. Their computer was smart enough to remember what I'd had, although I didn't know that until after I'd read off the book titles from my bibliography for the library page.

I spent the rest of the evening working on my essay, until it was time to go to Durach. Aric came by to pick me up, and we wound up getting there first. He bought a bunch of chocolate-covered espresso seeds and offered me one. After I ate it, he offered me another, but I said if I did I wouldn't be able to sleep all night.

He said that being a theatre major had spoiled him, and ate a handful. Then when people started showing up, he poured them out on the table and everyone grabbed for them until they were all gone.

The one I ate must have helped me out, because I did really well at every game. I even went out of cards first once.

May 24 [Ezra Pound]

May 24

I really liked Aric's new birdfeeder—it was always nice to look at the birds in the morning, and Aric didn't mind having my butt in his face. I tickled him with my tail just to make sure he got the message, and pretty soon I felt his fingers on my rump.

He got up and watched the birds with me for a little bit before we got back into bed, and he let me push him down and be on top.

We could have gone to breakfast at Nina's again, but he still had some rolled oats left and that's a good enough breakfast for me. People like to make them mushy by putting them in hot water, but I think that they're fine raw.

When I was ready to fly, he stuck a bag of sunflower seeds in my flight vest pocket. He said it was so I wouldn't have to raid the birdfeeder anymore.

I told him that he couldn't bribe me to stay away from it, and went out the side door and into the yard with him chasing after me. Every time he'd try and grab me, I'd just fly high enough that he couldn't quite reach, and he finally gave up and shook out a bunch of seeds and offered them to me. So of course I had to fly down to try and take them, and then he grabbed my hoof and 'caught' me, and we tussled on the grass a little bit before I pinned him down and sat on his chest, then I ate them out of his hand and kissed him before taking off.

I decided to change around my morning routine a little bit, and followed the Kalamazoo River north and west for a little bit, a few roads past the nature center. I could see a town off in the distance, but I didn't think I'd have enough time to fly there and back again, so I turned around and headed back to campus.

I was getting low on shampoo again, so I hoped that Peggy would be up for a shopping trip to Meijer soon. I probably could go by myself, but they were really big and there were a whole lot of people I didn't know in them.

I wish the college store had Mane and Tail shampoo. That would have been really convenient.

I worked on my essay a little bit, then went to lunch early. I'd gotten to a good point to stop, and didn't think that I'd have enough time to get through the next section before lunch. So I went to stop at the mail hut, and then I remembered that I hadn't asked Aric for the pictures on his telephone.

There wasn't much point in turning back to send him a computer letter now, but I reminded myself to do it right after poetry class.

When I checked my mailbox, I saw that I had gotten another letter from Aquamarine, so I sat down in the lounge and read it.

She said that she could come visit this weekend. It was a holiday, and her botany professor had said that it wouldn't hurt the experiment if she took a few days off.

I took a page out of my notebook and wrote her a quick letter back saying that she was welcome to come, and she could share my room. I didn't think Peggy would mind, and I guess if she didn't want two ponies in the room I could sleep with Aric or Meghan. Then I had to beg the girl at the counter for a stamp and an envelope, because I didn't have any with me.

She took my student badge and wrote down my number which I thought was kind of silly. I'm not sure why people can't remember me without my little card.

But the letter got mailed, and that was what was important.

I was really excited that she was coming, and the first people I saw to tell were Cedric and Leon and Trevor.

Cedric asked if she was as chill as me, and I said I thought so. And Leon wanted to know what she looked like, so I described her for him and he said she sounded like a real girly pony. I wasn't sure what he meant by that—she was a mare—but sometimes humans seem to have trouble with that.

I said that he'd probably like her, and I bet that she could beat him in hoof-wrestling, 'cause she's an earth pony so she's pretty strong.

Leon said that he wouldn't challenge a girl to a test of strength, and Cedric said that was because he was afraid that he would lose. So then Leon spent the rest of lunch pretending that everything was too heavy for him to lift.

I think they'd like her, but I'm not sure she'd like them. They are kind of weird. But I promised we'd have lunch together anyway.

Conrad had rearranged our desks into two circles and put his desk in the middle and it was very confusing. I didn't know where I was supposed to sit, so I finally wound up picking the seat that was nearest to where I'd sat before.

The desk wasn't the same, though. There had been a little carving in mine: it had said morior invictus. This one didn't say anything on it.

Once we'd all found a seat, Conrad said that he'd gotten bored with the old arrangement, and that this new one was much better. And then he said that before anyone in the back got the idea that they were out of his sight, his chair had a swivel, and he demonstrated by backing it away from his desk and spinning around in it.

He told us that we were going to read some of Ezra Pound's poetry this week, because you couldn't talk about Eliot without Pound. Then he started out by having Melissa read Shop Girl, and then he followed right after that with The Spring.

It was kind of late in the year to be talking about the spring.

I'd never really thought about it, but it was kind of strange to organize the poems by poet, rather than to organize them by what they're about. We could have read a bunch of spring poems right at the beginning of spring, and read rainy-day poems when it was raining, and so on. I think if I were teaching the class that's how I'd do it.

But maybe that would be confusing for people, because we'd be going from one poet to the next all the time. I think it would make more sense, though.

He had me read a really short poem called The New Cake of Soap. I didn't know what a Chesterton was, but I thought it was really funny to write a poem about soap. Soap is something that you don't really think about, and how clever Mister Pound was to see it and write a poem about it.

What kind of poem would I write about my shampoo?

Or what other things might I write about?

We read two more poems before the end of class: Simulacra and The Tea Shop. The last one was about a woman who had been beautiful but had grown old, and it was kind of sad. It would have been a good fall poem. I guess it was a reminder that our class was almost over—the year was almost over. And that meant that some of the people in the class would graduate and I'd never see them again.

After class, it was still nagging at my mind that he was sorting the poems by their author, so I asked him about it after class, and he got a little smile on his face and said that I was a believer in 'it is the tale, not he who tells it.'

I said that I thought that was a good way of putting it.

He said that I was wise beyond my years, then he told me that the old model was to sort poems by their author but that maybe the internet would change that, and that he would not object to poetry books being sorted by poems about the rain or poems about the sea or poems about the spring or any other classification and he said that if we ponies arranged our poems that way than we were smarter than humans.

I told him that humans were plenty smart, too, because I didn't think that anypony had ever written a poem about a cake of soap, and he said that I ought to be the first.

I was really flattered that he thought that much of me, so I hugged him and then left before he could embarrass me any more.

While I was working on my essay, though, I was also thinking about what he said, and at the same time I was clicking on my pen because I was trying to think of what to say next and then I thought maybe I could write a poem about my pen.

When I got back to our room, I asked Peggy if she would mind if Aquamarine stayed over, and she said that she didn't mind at all, which was a relief. And then I said that she was coming this weekend. Peggy wanted to know if either of the unicorns was coming, and I said that they weren't as far as I knew. Hopefully we'd be getting together in Chicago soon . . . but if school was over for Aquamarine, maybe it was over for Gusty, too, and she was in California now.

I should probably check my Facebook more often. I felt bad that I didn't know.

I went over to Meghan's right after I'd worked on another section of my essay, 'cause I was eager to tell her, too. I was sure she'd be happy to meet Aquamarine, too, and so I ought to tell her before she made plans for the weekend. I thought maybe if I was lucky, she'd be willing to take both of us to her uncle and aunt's hot tub.

She wasn't in her room, though. Amy thought that maybe she was at the library, and said that I could check there or call her, but I didn't want to do that. If she was busy, it would be rude to interrupt her.

So I sat in the lounge instead and read through the rest of 2 Kings and started on 1 Chronicles before Meghan came back. She was sort of trudging when she came into the dorm, but she brightened right up when she saw me.

We went up to her room together and I told her about how Aquamarine was coming and asked her if we could maybe go to the hot tub. She said that she'd have to find out but she was pretty sure that it would be okay.

She said that she had some more homework, and I told her I didn't mind waiting while she finished it. I wasn't going to finish the Bible anytime soon. So she kind of thought about that, and finally got up in bed with me and stretched out and she read her book and I read more of 1 Chronicles, until she'd finished her homework.

Meghan went into the bathroom and got ready for bed while I was finishing up the chapter I was on, and by the time she was done, so was I, so we snuggled together under the covers.

Author's Note

Shop Girl

The Spring

The New Cake of Soap

Simulacra

The Tea Shop

May 25 [Agriculture]

May 25

For once Meghan woke before me. I opened my eyes and she wasn't in bed, then I heard the toilet flush and the sink running, and she came back out of the bathroom and climbed back in bed with me.

Meghan put her arm around my barrel and gently pulled me against her, which I didn't mind at all, and ran her hand along my belly and kissed my ear and then I felt her kind of go limp and I was pretty sure she was asleep again.

I put my hoof over her hand and dozed back off until her telephone alarm woke both of use up, and she had to let go of me so that she could turn it off.

When she rolled back my way, I turned towards her and tucked my head under her chin and let her pet my back until the alarm went off a second time, then we both got up.

I'd gotten a nice flight in yesterday, so instead of flying again, I trotted around for a little bit. There was a nice little triangle of grass where Academy Street curved and it smelled really nice this morning, so I went and rolled around it for a little bit, which it turned out was kind of a mistake because someone must have cut the grass not that long ago. But I shook most of it out of my coat and went on (and I did smell pretty nice).

I got back to the dorm on time this morning, and when Peggy came in from the shower I told her that I needed more shampoo. She started to say Walgreen's would have some, but then said that we could go to Meijer tonight after dinner and get some.

I wound up using the last of it by the time I was done with my shower, so I tossed the empty bottle in the little blue bin on my way out of the room.

That reminded me that I needed another trip to the spa. My mane and tail could use a trim, so I would have to ask Meghan about getting an appointment.

I really needed to get my hooves filed, too. The cement sidewalks hadn't been kind to them, and I'd started to feel a little pain in my left hind pastern when I was trotting. I don't know why, but that hoof always seemed to grow a bit uneven. Plus my hoof walls were really chipped and cracked.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said he was going to tell us how to compress fractals, which I thought was going to be squishing them down like I did with clouds, but it wasn't. Well, it sort of was, because we were finding how to get to the attractor, which could be thought of as the nucleus of a cloud.

He showed us how to figure it out on a piece of coral, where we'd find the points that mapped to other points, and once you had the three of them it was pretty easy, because it just left you with six equations to solve.

Then he explained the compression more, and said how since all the parts were the same you only needed a few numbers to describe it, which was what he'd been saying in the last class, too, but it was worth repeating.

It was kind of funny to watch some people finally understand. And I didn't see how it was such a hard concept—hadn't all the poems in my poetry class been written with only twenty-six letters, because that's what the human alphabet has.

So on my way to lunch, I flew over to an oak tree and looked at its leaves and how they came out of the branch and thought about how you might write that as a fractal equation. And it would be repeated leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and pretty soon you'd have a whole tree, but the math-tree wouldn't have a squirrel in it that was angry at me for being too near his nest.

I stuck my tongue out at him and then flew off to the dining hall.

I told everyone at lunch about Aquamarine coming to visit. Peggy already knew, of course, but nobody else did.

Sean said that he didn't think the campus was big enough for two ponies, and Christine punched him in the shoulder and said that she wouldn't mind if a whole herd of ponies showed up on campus. Then Joe said that he welcomed his new pony overlords, which was a very strange thing to say.

Then they all wanted to know what we were planning to do for the weekend, and I said that I wanted for Aquamarine to meet Brianna but otherwise I didn't have any plans. I thought she'd like playing euchre with us, too.

So then everyone had suggestions, like to go to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum downtown or the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and Sean thought go-karts would be fun again, and also 'cause it was a holiday on Monday there would be a parade and that was something we should see.

I didn't mind suggestions, although I thought that maybe Aquamarine might be overwhelmed by it all. I kind of had gotten the sense that she wasn't fitting in as well as I was, 'cause as far as I knew she was only really friends with Jenny . . . but maybe I was wrong; maybe she just wasn't one for putting a lot of stuff in writing. Some ponies were like that. And she'd enjoyed the stuff we did on spring break.

I wonder if maybe it's harder to make friends when there are more people on campus?

Professor Amy said that today was our last regular class—that we'd spend three days next week in groups. That part made me kind of nervous, 'cause I hadn't been a good pony in the last group, since I'd been sick, and after the first day I'd only been able to participate on the computer, which wasn't the same as actually being there.

She said that we'd be in the same groups as before unless anyone thought that they couldn't work with the people they had earlier, and I was worried someone in my group was going to raise their hand and say that they didn't want to be in my group, but nobody did.

We talked about agriculture and specialization. That seemed kind of out of order after all the other stuff we'd talked about, but I trusted that Professor Amy knew what she was doing.

She explained the beginnings of agriculture, which was really interesting. I suppose earth ponies figured it out the same way, while we pegasuses were just flying around eating whatever we could find. And she explained how different cultures came up with different strategies, like how the Incas planted their crops at different levels since they lived in the mountains. Then she said that agriculture starts to bring about a gender gap, and that most societies chose males to be their warriors because males were more expendable. That was pretty logical; once a stallion gets you pregnant you don't need him anymore, and it was good that people had thought of that, too.

The drawback to moving to an agricultural society was that it also began to cause a wealth disparity, because there's only so much land, and you either have it or you don't. And that was also why people started to defend their land and make countries and stuff. If you were grazing and gathering, you'd go where the food was, but if you were growing it, the food was where you were, and you'd want to keep anybody else from stealing it.

Then she ended by saying that one of the drawbacks to modern agriculture was that there was a greater possibility of famine, because people were tied to the land, and if the crop didn't do well for whatever reason, than everybody might go hungry, and there was a greater risk of disease because there wasn't as much genetic diversity in seeds. She told us that the Irish Potato Famine had been caused by their staple crop becoming sick, and as a result a lot of people had starved, and those who could had moved away.

I was glad that people had managed to figure out how to avoid that problem. There had never been a lack of food at the dining hall, and the stores were stuffed full of food. No doubt going hungry was a distant memory to humans.

I met Peggy when she came back from her class, and we got in Cobalt and went to Meijer. We didn't have a whole lot of time, plus I still didn't feel all that comfortable in the store since there were so many people, but I did go through their fresh food area and admired all the different fruits and vegetables that they had sitting out. Then we got some beer and snack food for when Aquamarine was over, then went to the shampoo aisle and I got two bottles of Mane and Tail shampoo. I also saw some really cute butterfly hair clips and decided to get them, too. They were silver and had little jewels that Peggy said were fake, but they were still pretty.

We got back home in plenty of time for dinner, and I even had time to send Aric a telephone telegram asking for the pictures so that I could put them in a letter for my sister.

It was tacos again, and this time I'd learned my lesson about eating too many so even though I wanted to have a third, I didn't.

I took a little break from my essay and finished reading 1 Chronicles instead. Next, I'd start reading the World War 1 book, and find out what that was all about. The man at the Air Zoo had said that his father flew in the Second World War, so I guess it was a war that humans kept repeating for some reason, which meant it was worth learning about. I probably should have asked him about it, but I was enjoying listening to him repeat his father's stories, and he was having fun telling them.

I tried calculating out the equation for an oak leaf, and I thought I got pretty close. Then I tried to use the computer program that Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee had showed us, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work right and Peggy wasn’t much help. She said that she didn't even know what half the words on the page were.

Sean did, though. I called him and he came over with Christine, and while she and Peggy were talking, Sean showed me where to put my numbers, and pretty soon the program was drawing mutant oak leaves. But after working on my calculations for a bit I got one which sort of looked like a leaf. It was a lot harder than I'd thought it would be, and it wound up with extra little leaves in the center that didn't belong but if I recalculated probabilities I was pretty confident I could get rid of them.

Of course, I kind of forgot about going over to Aric's until it was pretty late. Christine said that she had the perfect excuse for me, so Sean sent the picture to Peggy's printer and made it make a copy, then told me to write the equation on the paper and he would be so impressed by the math he'd understand how I'd been distracted. She said that she'd played Dungeons and Dragons with him and he was bad at addition, so he probably wouldn't understand this at all.

That seemed kind of mean to me, but I did like she said, and he didn't even understand the first equation. But he didn't think I was being mean by showing him that; he thought it was pretty funny how smart I was and I told him that pegasuses invented calculus, and then the unicorns stole it from us. Well, they did improve it a little bit, too.

Aric wanted to know what we needed all that math for and I said it was really complicated to calculate weather requirements and the more efficiently you could do it, the fewer pegasuses you'd need on a team, or the more territory each one could cover. And if you were setting up counterstorms, it was important to not use too much or too little.

I could see that he wasn't really paying attention anymore, so I leaned over and unbuttoned his pants and that got his attention back.

He said that he had something to give me, and went out to Winston and brought a folder of me standing next to the airplanes, as well as one he'd taken when I was flying in the parking lot. I could see by my wing position it was when I was gliding, and he'd taken it when I was nearly overhead, so you could just see the sky above me.

I didn't want to put them in my flight vest right away, because they might get wrinkled when I put it on, so I set the envelope on his desk and put my radio on top of it so I'd be sure to have it in the morning. Then I finished unfastening Aric's pants and he wiggled his hips until they fell down, and he stepped out of them and said that if I could get his underwear off, too, I'd win a prize.

May 26 [and the days are not full enough]

May 26

I woke up not too long after going to sleep to the sound of thunder and rain, and I got out of bed as quietly as I could and stood at the window just watching it. My radio was over on the desk and I wondered if it would need a storm-spotter and if I should call and see.

Either I disturbed his sleep or the storm did, because Aric woke up and put his hand on my back. Then he got out of bed and sat down beside me on the carpet, and we both watched the lightning flash through the sky, until the worst parts of it had passed.

Then he said that we could move the bed closer to the window, as long as I didn't mind maybe getting a little wet, and since I didn't, he shoved the bed over until the head of it was right under the window.

I wish he'd thought of that sooner. I stretched out on my belly and dozed back off, but whenever it intensified, I'd pull my head back up and look out at it and sniff at the air and I could do that without disturbing him, which I knew because he had started snoring.

When it was actually morning, the sky was still overcast, but the storm was gone, and with my head right by the window I could feel the pressure, and I knew it wouldn't be coming back. The birds knew it, too; they were out at the feeder eating their breakfast, and I watched them until I felt Aric's hand running down my back and around my dock.

Once we'd gotten out of bed I told Aric about Aquamarine visiting for the weekend, and said that I probably couldn't spend the night, 'cause she was staying in my dorm room and it would be really rude to leave her behind. She was coming Saturday morning at about ten thirty, and leaving Tuesday morning just before nine.

Well, he was a little disappointed in that, but said that it would be fun to see her, and I wasn't trying to keep her away from him, was I?

I said I wasn't; and maybe we could pick her up from the train station and do some stuff Saturday morning together. We didn't have any definite plans yet but everyone had made a lot of suggestions.

Aric asked if she liked cars, and I said I didn't know. He said if she did, there was a car museum called the Gilmore that was really neat, and that was an option.

I kissed him goodbye and remembered to take the pictures off the desk. Aric helped me stick them in my pocket, and I kissed him again for good measure, then went out the front door this time, 'cause I didn't want to risk them falling out while I was flying, so I was going to hoof it back to campus with all my flight gear on.

It wasn't the most comfortable walk. The radios slid down my legs when I was walking, and I had to stop a couple of times and adjust them back up. But that was better than damaging the pictures.

I couldn't decide which one to send, so I sent all but one of them—I kept the one where I was next to the white fast-looking airplane out front. Then I had to write on the back of each one what kind of airplane it was and what it was used for and why it was special, and by the time I was done and had sealed up the envelope, it was too late to go flying very far, so I just did a couple of low fast laps over the college and part of downtown to stretch out my wings, then took a quick shower. Then I went down the hall to tell Brianna that Aquamarine was coming and asked her when she was free to make sure that I made time for them to talk.

I ate lunch with Trevor and Leon and Cedric, and they were all talking about what they were going to do over the summer. Both Trevor and Leon had summer internships, while Cedric was going to spend most of his summer building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He said that he was going to work in Tennessee because he had some family there, and it would be nice to see them, too.

Leon said that Cedric didn't know a damn thing about building houses, and he said that he knew the roof went on top, and other than that, he'd just do what they told him to.

I didn't know anything much about building houses, although I'd helped the thatcher carry bundles of reeds a couple of times when I was younger. It wasn't a lot of fun, but it helped build wing strength.

But I told Cedric that I'd helped put a roof on a house once, and Leon started laughing and said that the thought of ponies on ladders was really weird. Trevor reminded them that I could fly, and the two of them looked at each other and started asking me all sorts of questions about what kind of jobs pegasuses did besides weather and clouds, and so I told him about how ships had a pegasus or two as a lookout and messenger and whatever else might be needed, and how there were a lot of jobs where being a pegasus was a real asset. Like they had a lot of tall buildings in Manehattan and most of the windows got washed by pegasuses.

So then they were wondering if every job on Earth that required a ladder would be a job in Equestria requiring a pegasus, and I said that there weren't enough of us to do all those jobs. Plus Earth ponies built clever devices to help them go where they couldn't otherwise. And both of them got a little pale when I described how a bosun's chair was used—because a lot of the smaller fishing boats didn't have any pegasuses on their crew.

Conrad started by reading us a poem called Coitus, and that got a few laughs out of the class. Jason, who usually sits in the back but was across from me with our new seating arrangement, asked if Georgia O'Keefe was familiar with Pound's poems.

So he had Jason read Women Before a Shop, and people were snickering when they made the connection between the two poems.

We read a couple more short poems, then one about a river in a country called China. Conrad told us that Pound had had it translated from ancient Chinese, and he had made a mistake because he didn't know the language, and it was actually two different poems.

Then we discussed the problems with translating poems, and whether it was better to retain the spirit of the original, or the exact text.

I thought it was better to keep the spirit, rather than the original language. A few people in class had read translated poems and then read them in their original language and said that there was a big difference between the two.

Conrad told us not to bother bringing any books next week, because we were going to be traveling off the beaten path. He said that summer was upon us and it was time that we spread our wings and fly, and he looked right at me as he said it, so I fluffed them out a little bit and pretty soon everyone in the class was laughing.

Then he said that we would finish class by reading his favorite poem by Pound, and he asked who would do him the honor, and I wanted it to be me, but he gave it to Trevor instead, and I thought that was a smart choice, 'cause he had a better voice than anyone else in the class.

I don't know what impulse struck me, but after everyone else had left, I told him about Aquamarine's visit and asked him if he wanted to meet her. He said that he would be honored, and then wrote his telephone number and address on a sheet of paper for me.

It was too nice a day to be inside, so I claimed one of the little benches at the front of Stetson Chapel and sat down there and finished writing my essay for anthropology so that I could show it to Professor Amy tomorrow.

I took it back to my room and read it to my computer, making a few corrections on the way. Sometimes something sounds smart when you write it down but then it sounds dumb when you say it out loud.

It took me until dinner, and it still wasn't all the way done. But I didn't want to miss my friends, so I went to the dining hall anyway and listened to Christine and Joe debate whether Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton would win the primary. Finally, when it got kind of heated, the rest of us moved to a different table where we could have a somewhat peaceful conversation. It was close enough so that we could still overhear them if we wanted to, but far enough away that we could also carry on a conversation.

Finally Sean said that their argument had gone on long enough, and he went over to the bread table where they had long loafs of bread, and he got one and broke it in half and gave one half to Christine and the other to Joe and he told them to settle their argument like reasonable adults, so they hit each other with the bread until it had all broken up, then we moved back to that table and had a nice quiet dessert together.

I started reading the book on World War 1 before I went to see Liz. The beginning was really complicated, with lots of different kingdoms all making alliances with each other, all in the hopes of preventing a war, but then the book said that assassins killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but at first nobody cared. And then some Croats and Bosniaks (which is what Professor Amy is) killed some Serbs, and after that Austria-Hungary sent a list of ten demands that they knew wouldn't be obeyed in order to provoke a war.

That made me think of how the Israelites were really bad at following God's rules and His Ten Commandments, but that wasn't the same, I didn't think. He hadn't made the rules difficult to follow; most people just didn't.

And that was what Liz and I talked about. There were more kings and most of them didn't do what God had told them to, and so the tribes of Israel kept fighting and God didn't help them very much because their kings wouldn't follow His rules.

I told her it was weird to come across a long list of ancestors, and she told me that it was important to a lot of people to know, to be able to trace their lineage as far back as they could. And she told me that in America, people had often written the names of their sons and daughters in the family Bible, along with records of baptisms and confirmations and so on.

I read a little bit more about World War 1 after our meeting, and it started to get confusing. I was glad that there were maps, because I'd never heard of some of the countries involved. Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary and then Germany. Germany declared war back, and demanded that France stay neutral, but then decided to go to war with it anyway. And then once they'd started, some of them didn't know who they were supposed to fight, or where, except that Austria-Hungary was planning to quickly defeat Serbia, but seeing how much more of the book there was, I didn't think that their plan had worked.

Since I'd been up in the middle of the night watching the thunderstorm, I was kind of tired, so I went over to Meghan's room. She said we'd have it to ourselves for the weekend, because Amy was already away with her boyfriend. And then she asked if I wanted to watch the Harry Potter movie that we hadn't really watched before, but I was too tired for that. So we sat in bed together and talked for a little while. Meghan said that tomorrow she would make a salon appointment for us, and she also told me that we would be able to go to the hot tub either Saturday or Sunday night. I thought Tuesday would be the best day for the salon because I didn't have very many classes.

When I'd started to get really yawny, she petted my head and said that she was sorry for talking my ear off, and I reached up a hoof to make sure that they were still there because I was too tired to realize that was just another human expression.

She got undressed and got into bed next to me and I put my head on her breast and fell asleep while she was stroking my mane.

Author's Note

Coitus

Women Before a Shop

The River Song

May 28 [Aquamarine Arrives]

May 28

When I woke up, I watched the birds at the feeder and the squirrel who had figured out how to get past the obstacles Aric had put on the ropes.

He woke up not too long after the squirrel had finished his breakfast and gone back home, at which point the birds returned.

I wonder if it bothers them to have to wait for their meal?

Aric said I was getting distracted, but I thought it was nice to be able to look out the window, and it wasn't like I wasn't paying him any attention. Except when the cardinal and blue jay got in a fight; that was a bit distracting. And he was the one who had asked what all the angry chirping was, so it wasn't my fault I stopped long enough to look out the window and see.

There was still only oatmeal and Pop Tarts in the kitchen for breakfast, so I had a bowl of oats and Aric had one and a half Pop Tarts—he shared part of one with me because he thought I might like it. He said it was ice cream sundae flavor, and it was. It was kind of like astronaut ice cream in a way—it had nearly the right flavor, but not the right texture at all.

We both rode in Winston down to the train station. I wouldn't have minded walking, but Aric said what if she had a lot of stuff with her? I doubted she would, and he told me that girls pack way too much stuff for trips.

I said that maybe human women and unicorns do, but pegasuses and earth ponies are different and we pack light.

We got there but the train was delayed. There was a McDonald's right next to the train station, and Aric went there to get a cup of coffee and he offered to get me one, too, but I didn't really feel the need for one.

When he came back, the train still hadn't arrived. He had the coffee and a cinnamon roll which he shared with me. It was really sugary and wound up getting glaze all over my muzzle (and he pretended not to look while I was licking it off myself, but I saw him watching).

We had to wait nearly an hour for the train to finally arrive. I'd gone out to the platform and flown up a couple of times to see if I could spot it, but with all the trees leafed out, even from the air I couldn't see that much of the tracks.

He was getting a little bit impatient, too, 'cause he still needed to finish his theatre assignment that he hadn't finished last weekend. And I felt bad that I was keeping him from that but he said it wasn't that big a deal, but I thought it really was.

I told him that he could go home and do his work, but he crossed his arms and said that he'd promised to give her a ride, and he would. And then we didn't have to argue any more, 'cause both of us heard the train off in the distance, and pretty soon it was at the station.

They must have been trying to make up for some of the time they'd lost, because it didn't stop for more than a minute. And I think that everyone who was waiting to get on and off kinda knew the routine. The doors were opened before it came to a stop, and the conductor set down his little step and got off, and he helped a few people and Aquamarine off, then he was herding people onto the train, and he grabbed his little stool and waved at the front of the train and then they were moving again. It can't have even been a minute.

Aquamarine and I nuzzled and then hugged each other and then I introduced her to Aric. I didn't have to tell her anything else, 'cause she sniffed it out right away. Aric was surprised to know it, though, and maybe a little embarrassed, too.

I saw her ears drop when she got a look at Winston, but she got up inside anyway. I told her that I'd helped put a radiator in and I'd also driven it before, and that got her attention. Aric said that was true, and maybe we could do go-karts together.

We sort of had a little bit of catch-up on the drive back to campus. Plus she told me that Michigan State had some pretty beat-up trucks, too, for out in the fields. She said that there was an old green Dodge they had that only started when you swore at it, and even the professors did. She'd heard that they could get a new truck if they wanted, but everyone liked having the old truck to yell at, so maybe that was another weird human thing.

Aquamarine admired the campus all the way to the dorm. She said it was a lot prettier and a lot less crowded than hers, and she was surprised that on the way to Trowbridge she saw almost all of it.

Aric dropped us off behind Trowbridge and I kissed him goodbye and he said that he'd let me know later tonight when he expected to be free, and then he drove off.

Peggy was happy to see Aquamarine again, and we talked until it was lunchtime, which really wasn't all that long. If we'd had more time, I would have taken her down to Brianna's room, but they couldn't have had much of a conversation before lunch.

Everyone at the table besides Peggy was surprised by how bulky Aquamarine was. I don't know why; there had been an earth pony here before.

Joe said it was just because they were seeing the two of us together, which made it more apparent how she was bigger than I was, but it wasn't obvious when there had been only one pony. So we had to explain how the three tribes were different, and the earth ponies were the biggest and strongest of the three tribes.

Well after they'd gotten to know her a little bit, everyone wanted to know what we were going to do, since I'd never really decided on a specific plan. So the same ideas as before got offered up again, and by the end of lunch we'd decided that this afternoon would be a good time for her and Brianna to bond, and then after dinner we'd have a party in my room.

I think Aquamarine might have been happy without the party in my room, but I had too many friends who all wanted to spend time with her.

So after lunch we went to Brianna's room and knocked on the door and she let us in and I sat on the bed while the two of them talked about plants and botany and I don't know what else because I didn't understand one word in three. But they were both having a really good time and it wasn't too long before they decided that a dorm room was a really bad place to talk about plants (even though Brianna had a bunch of them on her windowsill).

So we went in Brianna's car which was called Avalon and drove to the nature center and started walking around the trails and studying the native plants. Aquamarine demonstrated what earth ponies could do on a couple of plants, making them grow a little bit. She said that she could make them grow even taller but it wasn't good for them to do all that growing at once, and she explained how if she were pushing a crop, she'd do it in small bits over weeks, rather than all at once.

I guess in a lot of ways, earth ponies have magic that's a lot like unicorns, but it takes longer to manifest, unless they're clumsy. It's usually pretty subtle.

They also found a sick tree, and Aquamarine laid her hooves on it and worked some of the sickness out.

She said that if she had a special talent relating to trees, she could have cured it right then, but she didn't.

It was funny to think how that last time I'd been here, I'd been galloping around the paths, and now we were stopping every decameter to look at an interesting plant.

We stayed until it was dinner time, and then we stayed even later. I was getting a little bit bored, to be honest, but I had wanted the two of them to get together and talk about plants, and they were doing that, and it would have been rude of me to complain. So I tried to figure out what they found interesting, and I mostly didn't manage, but I did find an interesting yellow flower that Brianna said was called a prairie coreopsi and they were kind of uncommon in Michigan.

On our way back, we stopped at a Taco Bell for food, and then we all went to my room to hang out. Everyone from our table was there, plus Ruth and Kat. Peggy had gotten a lot of beer for us to all share, so we gathered on the floor and played some euchre with me and Aquamarine on a team. They played it at Michigan State, too, and she was pretty good—good enough that we beat Sean and Christine twice in a row.

By the end of the evening, I was pretty drunk. Peggy had started making White Russians and I knew what they did to me but I had three of them anyway. Aquamarine drank more than I did, but she's got a higher tolerance.

I fell asleep on the floor, and only got woken up after everyone had left. I stumbled into the bathroom and thought about brushing my teeth but decided that was too much effort, and went back to my room and got in bed with Aquamarine and promptly fell back asleep.

May 29 [Sunday Morning: Kalamazoo Valley Museum]

May 29

I woke up with a pounding head, full bladder, and Aquamarine’s head on my back. And when I managed to get my eyes all the way open, I realized that we were both down at the wrong end of the bed and there was a pair of feet over on the other side of her. I didn’t know who they belonged to and I had too much else on my mind to worry about it.

I tried rolling and twisting to get Aquamarine off me, but that didn’t work—I wound up getting more tangled in the bedding. Fortunately, she woke up and got out of my way.

We got out of bed without stepping on feet or disturbing the mystery sleeper—which was Brianna—and I got my shower things and also raided Peggy’s drawer for a couple of aspirin. I thought she’d understand; besides, it was her fault that my head hurt anyway. She knew I had a weakness for White Russians.

It wasn’t fair how much better Aquamarine looked than me. I knew she’d had at least as much to drink, maybe more, but she was still fresh as a daisy. Which was a good thing; I might need her to hold me up in the shower.

I set the shower basket down on the little bench and took the first toilet stall and at least I felt a little better after I’d peed.

Being in the shower helped, too. I don’t think that rain (or showers) can really rinse out being drunk, but there were some ponies who swore by it. Either by upbucking a raincloud, or using the earth pony method of dunking your head in a barrel, it was supposed to shock you into soberness.

It helped a little bit, I guess. I let the water beat on me for a bit, then moved aside so that Aquamarine could have a turn in it, and after a couple of cycles I felt at least mostly awake, so then we washed each other and since there weren’t any girls waiting for their turn, we really took our time.

We shook off inside the shower, and then went back to the dorm room to finish drying off.

Not much had changed while we were gone. Brianna was still sleeping in my bed, Sean and Christine were in a lump on the floor, and Peggy was all alone in her bed. Both of our desks were littered with empty bottles. Even the vodka bottle was empty.

Once we’d gotten groomed, I asked Aquamarine how she felt about a nice walk around the neighborhood. A trot would have been nice, but we’d just got out of the shower, and I didn’t want to take another one. Earth soap takes too many oils out of the skin and coat if you’re not careful with it, and that can cause problems.

She thought it would be a good way to finish waking up, so I left a note for Peggy under the vodka bottle saying where we were going.

We talked while we walked, which was nice, although a little strange. I was used to mostly having my own thoughts while I was exercising in the morning.

I think that’s why we went further than I usually do. After we went by Aric’s house—which I pointed out to her (and Winston wasn’t in the driveway, so Aric must have spent all night at the theatre working)—we kept on going west on Main Street a few blocks, which I’d flown over and driven before, but never walked. That gave it a new perspective, and we both admired the odd mud-brick style house on the south side of the road.

She told me about her apartment and how much nicer it was than the dorm room, but it was kind of quiet compared to what she was used to, except when trains went by. Then it was pretty loud.

And she said that her professor had told her several times that he was getting really good data from her experiment. He wouldn’t tell her if it was a success or not because he claimed that would bias it, but she was fairly sure it was. He’d had her help him with a paper on an earlier, shorter version of the experiment she’d done, and by every measurement her plants had been bigger and stronger and healthier than his.

I told her a little bit about what I’d done with the weather, although there hadn’t been much, but she was proud that I’d become an official Skywatcher and said that she didn’t think that anypony else had done that yet. I didn’t think so, either.

When we got back to campus, we went right to the dining hall. She couldn’t use her student card, and had to use a money card (hers said MSUFCU on it and mine just said VISA, but otherwise they were the same). We took turns at the waffle-maker, which was still working, and got a big plate of fruit to share. She got some coffee and I got orange juice and we sat at my usual table and continued our conversation from the morning.

We were almost finished up when Peggy and Christine and Sean showed up. All of them looked a little worn-out from the night: Sean only had dry toast on his plate, and he just sort of picked at it. Christine had her Lucky Charms cereal, and Peggy had a few strips of bacon and some eggs because she said a greasy breakfast was the best way to recover from a night of drinking.

Aquamarine asked what we were going to do today, and Sean suggested going back to bed and waiting to die, so Christine threw a marshmallow star at him and it stuck on his forehead and he just left it there and pushed his toast aside and then put his head down on the table.

None of them looked like they wanted to do anything too active today, so I thought that go-karts was probably out, but there were a couple of museums that sounded interesting. I thought of other places I’d seen on my flights around town, and then I asked Peggy what karaoke was, ‘cause I’d seen it on a sign.

She told me it was singing, which sounded like it might be fun. I said that there was a little place on an island called Moonraker that had karaoke and Sean looked up and said that was a titty bar.

I didn’t know what that was, so Christine told me, and I thought that would be interesting, then Peggy said that she wasn’t going to be the one to drive a pair of ponies to a topless bar. So maybe I’d have to ask Aric later.

The Kalamazoo Valley Museum got the final vote, so after everyone was done eating and getting dressed, we met up in the Trowbridge parking lot, and all got into Cobalt. It was a little crowded in back, since there wasn’t enough room for both Aquamarine and I to lie down and still comfortably leave room for a third, but we got around that by having Christine sit in the front and move the seat all the way forward, which left a nice spot on the floor I could curl up in, sort of. It wasn’t very comfortable, but we weren’t in the car for too long.

We went to the mummy display first, because that was as good a thing to see as any. There were lots of little signs around explaining how the mummy had come all the way from Egypt to Kalamazoo, and how they had figured out how long ago she had died, and that was really interesting stuff. They had used machines to look inside the wrappings and see what was there, and they’d found out a lot about her from that, like that she’d had arthritis and bad teeth, and they’d even made a bust of what she’d probably looked like thousands of years ago.

After Christine read that she wanted to know why Aquamarine didn’t have canine teeth like I did, and so we explained how not all earth ponies have them and almost no unicorns do, but most pegasuses do.

Then we went on to an exhibit called Seasons of Southwest Michigan. That was really neat, because unlike the mummy, everything there could be touched. There was a big tube of lightning that would jump at your hoof or hand when you put it on the tube—it didn’t hurt, but it made you a bit warm—and there was also a bigger tube that had a little tornado inside. I galloped around it really quick in the opposite direction that it was rotating, and managed to slow it down a little bit. I think I would have done better if I could fly and if there wasn’t a tube keeping it contained.

They also had a sand-table where you could use a fan to make little sand dunes and then collapse them, and another that represented earthquakes. Christine made a little sand-tower and then the earthquake knocked it down.

Next we went to an exhibit called Science in Motion which Sean said was for kids, but that didn’t stop him from playing with everything he could get his hands on. Me and Aquamarine had the most fun with a device called a generator that you could power yourself, and once we’d figured out how to work it with hooves we had our own little competition which she won easily.

They also had a really neat section on the human body, and we both learned a lot from that. A lot of what went on inside humans was the same as ponies, but not all of it, so it was kind of fun to compare and contrast. Humans don’t have a cecum at all.

There was a machine that could measure your heart rate, too, and that was fun to play with. Sean had the highest and Aquamarine had the lowest.

We would have stayed longer, but the museum closed before we could see everything. I thought it would be fun to come back later, though.

May 29 [Sunday Evening]

May 29

When we got back to campus, it was dinnertime. Both of us were pretty hungry, 'cause we hadn't had anything for lunch, so we all went to the dining hall together, but when we got there I remembered that I'd promised to introduce Aquamarine to Leon and Trevor and Cedric, so after we got our food we went over to their table.

It was a bit more crowded with an extra pony there, but not too much. I'd told her that Leon had said he wanted to hoof-wrestle, so when she sat down she put her right foreleg on the table and he looked at it and asked if she was serious, then Cedric said if the pony wanted to wrestle he'd better do it. But there was too much food on the table and it would have gone everywhere, so they didn't, although I could see that the two of them were kind of sizing each other up.

Then they started talking to her, asking her all sorts of questions about what she did and whether we'd known each other before, and told her a little about themselves, which wasn't new to me. She was pretty impressed that they were both on the football team, and disappointed that none of them knew anything about botany.

After that, we pretty much fell into our normal dinnertime conversation, which I don't think she was prepared for. Both Cedric and Leon bragged about themselves and put each other down, and Trevor didn't say too much to either of them, but he did talk with me a little bit about poetry.

When she was eating her dinner roll, Cedric noticed that she had shoes, and all of a sudden that became a topic of great interest to them. Both Cedric and Leon convinced her to put her foreleg on the table so that they could get a closer look, and they leaned down to examine it.

Leon was the first to notice that her shoes were nailed on, and he told her that was pretty hardcore. She'd kind of figured them out by then, so she shrugged and said it wasn't a big deal; it hardly hurt at all. And then they wanted to know everything about being shod, so she told them how when it was time the farrier cut the old nails out, then used files to level her hooves, a knife to trim her frog, and then hammered the new shoe on. And Cedric kind of paled and ran his finger across the little stubs of nail that were in her hoof wall, then he just sat back in his seat and shook his head.

Once everyone was done with dinner, Aquamarine asked Leon if he still wanted to hoof-wrestle, and he had trouble deciding if he wanted to or not, until Cedric told him that he couldn't wimp out.

Cedric decided to take charge, and took everyone's trays to the vacant table next to us. Then, when it was all clear, we all moved far enough away to give them room, and she put her hooves on the table. There was a little discussion about whether to go by pony rules or human rules, and they finally decided that pony rules was fairest. Plus I think that Leon wanted an excuse in case he lost.

And he did. I could have told him that earth ponies were stronger than they looked, but they wouldn't have believed me. Leon was straining for about ten seconds before she beat him, and he tipped an imaginary hat.

Cedric decided he ought to have a try, too, so he and Leon changed places. It was more of a contest this time, 'cause Cedric probably weighed twice as much as Leon, but Aquamarine won again. Cedric took her hoof in his hand and lifted it up and kissed it then got a really funny look on his face, and Leon just shook his head.

Then Trevor said he was curious about the little bare white patches around her barrel, and she said that was from wearing a harness—she'd worn one that wasn't sized right one year, and it had wound up pulling out some of her coat and damaging it to where it wouldn't grow back. So that sparked a whole new round of conversation where Leon said that the man was putting her down, and then he had to explain who the man was.

She told him that most farmponies she knew had strap-scars, and Cedric just shook his head sadly and said she was too pretty for that, which was kind of an odd thing to say. I could see by the way she turned her ears that she didn't know what to make of that, either, and luckily Leon managed to say something stupid before things got really weird.

Cedric took away all the trays that he'd moved to the other table, and when he was doing that, Leon leaned over and dared Aquamarine to hug him when he came back. I told her that he was a good hugger, so she said that she would.

He came back with a whole pie and he set it in the middle of the table and said that it was there if we wanted any dessert, so we each had a piece (he had two) and then Aquamarine went around the table and wrapped her hooves around him and he sort of sat for a moment, then he dropped his fork and twisted until he could get his arms around her and lowered his head until his chin was resting on her mane and whispered something in her ear. Then she leaned in and nuzzled his chest and that was really cute. Leon just watched with his mouth hanging open and I stuck my tongue out at him.

When Aquamarine sat back down on my side, Trevor said that neither of them were going to have any street cred after this weekend, and Cedric said that he didn't care.

Leon cleared the empty pie-tray and our plates off the table and took them to the return window, then we all got up and said our goodbyes. Aquamarine hugged everyone—Leon said he didn't need a hug but I knew he did, so we both hugged him—and then we went back to my dorm room while they went back to theirs.

I checked my telephone, and saw that Aric had sent me a telegram saying that he was still busy with his work, but that he would meet us tomorrow morning to go to the parade.

We went over to Meghan's room, and I asked her if tonight was a good night to go visit the hot tub, and she said it was. So she called for an Uber-car, and while we were waiting for it to arrive, Lisa and Becky came over and we talked for a little bit.

This driver took a slightly different route, but we got there just the same, and after he dropped us off out front, we went around to the backyard.

Aquamarine didn't go right for the hot tub; she wanted to look at all the plants around the yard, so we followed her and Meghan tried to answer what kind some of the plants were but she wasn't really sure, and so she promised she'd find out from her aunt and then tell me so I could include it in a letter. And that left both of us with dirty hooves, so Meghan had us rinse them off before we got into the tub.

Instead of getting undressed right away, Meghan sat down on one of the benches and we talked for a little bit—I think she needed to get more comfortable with Aquamarine. So we just sat there and talked for a little bit, and finally Meghan asked if we were ready to go in, and we both nodded. She was still kind of slow, and I thought about trying to help but I didn't think she'd like that. So I told Aquamarine that she could get in the tub now, 'cause that would take some of the pressure off Meghan, and that was what she'd wanted, I guess; she got the rest of the way undressed while Aquamarine was climbing into the tub and then she went in herself, and I got in last.

Meghan wanted to know more about life in Equestria, so Aquamarine told her about Ponyville, and what it was like living there and growing up on a farm. I don't know when it happened, but we just sort of naturally slipped into speaking Equestrian, and for a while I forgot where I was—there were just the three of us in the hot tub, looking at the stream and woods behind the house, and we really could have been almost anywhere.

It was a beautiful night out. The moon was half-full, and you could see some of the brighter stars. They're really washed-out most places on Earth, 'cause of all the lights, and I think that's too bad. The night sky's really pretty. Aric said that if you go far enough north in Michigan, you can see a zillion stars.

It must have been nearly midnight when we got out of the hot tub and dried ourselves off. Meghan got a little bit mad when Aquamarine shook herself off without thinking, but only 'cause she'd dried off her stomach and then had to do it again.

The night was kind of chilly, especially after having been in hot water for so long, so we got back on the bench and snuggled together until another Uber-car came to take us back to campus.

Aquamarine dozed off on the way back, and Meghan had to shake her awake when we got back to campus. I asked her if we could spend the night with her, and she said that would be okay, so we went to her room together and she got back undressed. This time she wasn't as reluctant to take off her clothes, but maybe that was in part because Aquamarine had climbed up on her bed and fallen back asleep.

Meghan and I helped push Aquamarine to the side, then I said that she could have the middle if she wanted it, so she got in and scooted right next to Aquamarine and I got in on the other side of her and curled up against her chest.

May 30 [Memorial Day]

May 30

When Aquamarine got out of bed to go to the bathroom, that's what woke me up. Since she was on the very inside, she had to either go over or around, and even though she went around she moved the mattress a lot.

Meghan didn't wake up, though, although she shifted around in her sleep and flopped over on her back, which took up most of the room that Aquamarine had had. So when she was done in the bathroom, I took a turn and let her have my spot.

That meant when I was finished, I had to work my way in along the wall, but I didn't mind. It was a little tricky to get in without waking Meghan all the way up, but I did, claiming her breast as my pillow.

Both of us snoozed until Meghan woke up. I felt her moving around under me, and when I opened my eyes I was looking right at Aquamarine who had also figured out how nice a pillow Meghan could be.

So we didn't get up right away, because Meghan was so happy to have us cuddled up against her that she took turns scratching our ears and petting our manes.

It was really crowded in the shower with the three of us, and we sort of had to change around our routine a little bit, but Meghan didn't mind. She washed herself while me and Aquamarine washed each other, and once we were all clean she brushed out our manes and tails. Then I showed Aquamarine how to brush Meghan, which was basically the same as a pony except that she had to sit on the floor so we could reach.

We went to breakfast together and didn't have waffles because the waffle-maker had gotten broken again, but there was plenty of other food.

Since it was a really nice day again, Aquamarine wanted to walk to the parade, and I kind of did too but Aric was going to give us a ride, and I hadn't seen him all weekend. When I said that, though, Meghan said that she would send him a message of where to meet us, and she said that she didn't think he would mind if we met him there.

I thought she was probably right, so she took out her telephone and sent him a telegram, then we went down the hill and into town.

There were already all sorts of people lining up, but we were early enough that we got a pretty good spot, just past the hotel. Meghan told both of us what Memorial Day was about, and she said that we would be seeing veterans of various wars marching in the parade.

Parades weren't really a pegasus thing—although we occasionally had fly-bys—but Aquamarine was familiar with them. She said that they had parades for the Summer Wrap-Up festival and for the Summer Harvest and Autumn Harvest festivals as well.

We'd been there for maybe twenty minutes when Aric came walking up, followed by David and Angela. When he got close I got up on my hind hooves and kissed him, even though I probably shouldn't have with all the people around.

After that, it was a little awkward standing around while we waited for the parade to start. I think it would have been better if I had just been with Aric, and Aquamarine with Meghan, but it would have been rude to just leave Aquamarine.

I think Angela kind of figured out what was going on, because she pulled David between Aric and Meghan and kind of moved me and Aquamarine around to be in front of them. It probably wasn't the best arrangement, but it worked. Aric started talking to David, and Angela talked to Meghan, while Aquamarine and I talked to each other.

We heard the parade before we saw it. Off in the distance, I began to hear a band playing, and then I leaned my head out in the street and saw a pair of people carrying a sign come around a corner, and behind them were a group of people carrying flags, and then behind that was a band, and I couldn't see any further.

There were a lot of people leaning forward to see as the parade got close, but once it got by us, we just watched as everybody went past, and it was quite a sight to see.

After the first marching band passed, there was a big group of soldiers, all of them young. They were followed by a big red car that didn't have a roof, and there were two pretty girls in sparkly dresses sitting on the back, waving to the crowd.

Then there were a couple of floats, each one pulled by a shiny pickup truck. One of them had a bunch of kids throwing candy into the crowd.

Those were followed by a group of men wearing plaid skirts and playing a set of pipes that had a haunting banshee wail, and the veterans were behind them. Some of them were as young as the men in the very front had been, but others were much older. Their uniforms were more of a hodge-podge; the younger ones were wearing outfits like the men in the front, while others were wearing neat suits with ribbons on their breasts. And right behind them was a bright green semi-truck towing a flat trailer that had seats on it, and even older men sat on that, waving to the crowd.

They were followed by a bunch of children and teenagers wearing tan and khaki outfits, who had a sign that said Troop 292.

Men with funny hats in tiny little cars followed behind them, zipping all around the road. I thought one of those cars would be fun to have.

Another marching band came behind the cars, then more floats. There were a pair of wagons pulled by horses; one of them said 4-H, and the other one said FFA. Both Aquamarine and I whinnied a greeting to the horses, and they whinnied back.

At the very end of the floats were a whole line of firetrucks and ambulances, and their sirens were loud enough that both of us ponies pinned our ears back. And when the last one had passed, the parade was over, and people all around us started to walk away.

We went with Aric back to campus. Meghan came with us, and when we got to Winston we had to decide how we were all going to fit in, and we finally decided that the best way was for three of us to ride in the back and three in the front. So me and Aquamarine and Meghan would up being the ones in the back, which was a lot of fun. I could put my forelegs up on the railing and pretend that I was riding on a float.

When we got back to campus, we had to decide what our plans for the rest of the day were. I still wanted to see Conrad, which we could do after lunch. Plus Aquamarine wanted to talk to Brianna some more, so we planned to do that after meeting with Conrad, then we'd eat dinner on campus and later meet Aric at Durak.

He said that since he was here, he might as well eat lunch with us, and he moved Winston into a parking spot and invited David and Angela to join us.

We ate in the dark room, because Aric knew everyone who sat at that table a lot better (and it gave me a chance to introduce Aquamarine to a bunch of my Durak friends).

Lunch went long, because everyone wanted to talk to Aquamarine, and we were having so much fun that we probably could have stayed through until dinner.

The three of us went together back to the parking lot and he offered to give us a ride to Conrad's house, but it wasn't very far and me and Aquamarine both wanted to walk. But we followed him over to Winston anyway, so I could give him a goodbye kiss.

When he got to the truck, he picked a little white slip of paper off the windshield and said that Lynette was really on the ball today, then he crumpled it up and tossed it into the back of the truck. Then he leaned over so I could kiss him goodbye and we both waved as he drove out of the parking lot.

Conrad lived a couple of blocks away, and while we walked over there I told Aquamarine about him, and about poetry class. She sounded pretty interested, and so I recited a couple of short poems that we had learned, and I promised I could read her more when we got back to the dorm room if she wanted. I would have liked to memorize all the ones I liked, but that was a lot of poems and I wasn't too good at memorizing poems.

I wonder how Gusty had managed to memorize all her lines?

It didn't take too long before we got to his little white house with a white fence around it and a garage that was right up against the road. Aquamarine got distracted by his plants—there were grassy-looking bushes right up by the road, and flowers lining the brick walk up to his front door.

I pushed the bell and pretty soon he answered the door and welcomed us both inside. He shook hooves with me and Aquamarine and then led us into his library which had more books than I'd ever seen in any one place besides the college library. It was hard to believe one person could own so many books.

He left us in there while he went to fetch his wife. I liked her the moment I saw her; she was a full head shorter than him, but had the same lively look in her eyes. When he introduced us, Jean said how much Conrad had talked about me, which made me blush. Then she went away for a minute, only to come back in with a silver tray with tea and cookies on it.

There were enough chairs for all of us, although Conrad had to pull the one away from his desk.

He read her a couple of his favorite poems by e e cummings, and then he also read a poem called St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils, which was by William Carlos Williams who we had not talked about in class. It was a kind of silly poem, but I liked it, and so did Aquamarine.

Then he said that he had a very special poem to read for her, and he took a sheet of notebook paper off his desk and read her my poem about the cloud, and he told her that I had written it.

Aquamarine didn't have any poetry that she'd written, but she knew some: she said that last year, a pegasus named Gypsum Prose had visited Ponyville, and she'd read some of her poems. One of them was called The Cutie.

She recited it first in Equestrian, 'cause that was the way she knew it, and then we translated it for him:

I wonder, I think, I try, I do!
A flash of inspiration, revelation.
A new path before me opens
A new future now unfolds
As if in a burst of light.
It now shows for all to see
That special thing that makes me... ME!

He wanted to know what it was about, so we explained to him about cutie marks and how we got them when we found something unique about ourselves that sets us apart from other ponies. And Jean thought it was a little strange that they'd just appear, but we both said that was what had happened to each of us, and that was what happened to everypony.

She said that there was one more poem she could remember perfectly, and that was called Writing:

A scratch in silence
A dance of pen on page
Thought given form, sometimes crudely.
Dream transcribed, a wish expressed
Story saved for generations
Poetry given life
Art Transcribed in medium
Alas, all for nothing if not shared
Or ignorance doth reign.

Conrad asked her why that poem had stuck with her, and she said it was because that winter she had tried her hoof at writing some poems, but she hadn't been very good at it. She said that she would get a little ways into it and just get stuck. He said that she ought not get discouraged, and just try again. Then he told her how Emily Dickinson had only published a few of her poems while she was alive, but after she had died, her sister had discovered all her unpublished poems and all of them were very good. He said that sometimes writers are afraid to publish because they don't see their own worth, but if they touch a life then they have done a good thing.

Then he asked if he could read a couple more poems for us.

She nodded, and so he first read her The Golden Boat, and then he said he had a very special poem that he couldn't read for the class. It was called The Sea, and he had written it himself.

When it was time for us to go, I hugged Conrad and his wife, and Aquamarine did, too.

Back on campus, Aquamarine wanted to go visit Brianna again, and we found her in her dorm room, doing her homework. However, she was happy to see both of us, and pretty soon we were out on campus, walking around and looking at all the plants. I was sure Brianna had seen them all before, but that didn't dampen her enthusiasm any. She took us around to all her favorite plants on campus, most of which had been planted intentionally. We ended our tour by fighting our way down the slope next to DeWaters, where she pointed out a scraggly marijuana plant that she figured some student had planted as a joke.

Aquamarine said that it didn't look very healthy, and Brianna told her that she was pretty sure that they needed more sun than it was getting down here. So Aquamarine wanted to dig it up and transplant it where it would do better, but Brianna said that was a bad idea, because they were illegal plants. Then Aquamarine asked if it was dangerous, and Brianna told her it wasn't; it was just illegal because the people who made laws were really stupid sometimes.

I could see that she was skeptical about it, but she agreed to leave it alone.

They had pizzas for dinner, and with the two of us together, we got to pick more slices than I would have alone, because humans don't like sharing their food.

Brianna ate at our table so she could talk to Aquamarine more, and when dinner was over, they exchanged addresses and promised to write each other, than Brianna gave Aquamarine a big hug and made her promise to send updates on her experiments.

We had a little time before Durak, so I said that there was one more thing I wanted to show her, and took her over to the big parking lot tower next to the hotel, and we went all the way up to the top and looked over the edge at the city around us. I said that it was the best view you could get without being able to fly or being in one of the skyscratchers that were around it. I hadn't really thought about it before, but I wondered if it was possible to get up to the top of one of them? The Willis Tower in Chicago had a floor where you could look out the windows, so maybe one of these would as well.

Of course, I didn't really need that, since I could fly high enough to see whatever I wanted. But it might be nice for next time Aquamarine visited.

We still got to the coffee shop early. The man at the counter who's called a barista recognized me of course, and I introduced Aquamarine to him and told her that the mint mocha with whipped cream was the best thing on the menu, so she ordered that, too, and we took it upstairs and the two of us pushed the tables together so that there would be enough room when everyone arrived.

Aric got there next, and pretty soon the rest of the group showed up, and we had to explain the rules to Aquamarine. I sat right next to her and looked at her cards and helped her out in the first game, which Keith said was cheating, but I didn't think so.

Then as the game played out, a third ace of spades showed up, and then everyone accused Keith of cheating—even though he hadn't gotten any of them—and he said that he didn't know what had gone wrong, and after the game was over everyone helped sort the two decks, but that was the only extra card that we found.

In the second game, Aquamarine had gotten a pretty good sense of how it worked, so I let her play on her own. She was a little more cautious than I was, but still good enough not to lose any times, although it was pretty close in the last game—she was the second-to-last to go out of cards, and she got lucky because she was able to dump two useless fives when Keith played a five of trump, and she went out of cards just before he did.

Everyone agreed that that had been a bad loss for Malcolm, because he only had trump cards left in his hand, but everyone else had had fewer cards left, and if he hadn't played cards that we could follow up on, he would have won. But he admitted he'd thought that all the fives were gone, and if he had known that there were still two of them in play, he wouldn't have played his hand out that way.

I would have liked to spend the night with Aric, but Aquamarine had to be on the train pretty early tomorrow morning, and it would be rude to make her sleep on the couch, or leave her alone in my dorm room just because I wanted some sex. So I had him drop us off at Trowbridge and he said that he could come tomorrow morning and take her to the train station, which I thought was really nice of him. And it kind of hurt to kiss him goodbye.

We curled up in my bed together and Peggy looked up from the book she was reading and said that we were the most adorable thing ever.

Author's Note

St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils

The Golden Boat (in case you missed it the first time around)

The Sea

Gypsum 'Gypsy' Prose is an OC of Poet Knight, and both of the poems were written by Poet Knight, and are used with his blessing.

May 31 [Final Week]

May 31

We got up at first light and both went to the shower. I was planning on flying this morning, so I just helped Aquamarine shower and mostly avoided the soap.

We dried off in my room, keeping quiet so that we wouldn't wake up Peggy. And when we were done, I gave Aquamarine the dreamcatcher that I had made for her, and she packed it in her saddlebag where it would be safe. She said that there was a spot just above the headboard of her bed where it would go nicely, and she wondered if maybe it would help Luna come into her dreams.

I said that I didn't know; I hadn't made one for myself and so far I hadn't had Luna come into any of mine. We were so very far away from Equestria, though; maybe she couldn't come this far.

I wonder if any humans in Equestria have Luna visiting their dreams?

On the way to breakfast, she asked me what I was doing for the summer, and I had to admit that I didn't know. I didn't even know where I was going to live, although I could probably bring down a couple of clouds over campus and sleep on them if I had to.

She laughed and said that I was a typical pegasus, which kind of hurt because I knew it was true. Gusty and Cayenne and Aquamarine all had plans, and here I was two weeks away from the end of the school year and not knowing what I'd do next.

But I guess the other side of that coin is that other ponies often get upset when things don't go the way they'd planned, and we don't worry too much about it. Something will always come along; something always does—the sky's a big place.

We were so early to breakfast that we had to wait for a little bit until they opened the dining hall, and when we got in there they hadn't put out all the food yet. The serving trays sat in hot water, which kept the food nice and warm, and where there was normally the different kinds of breakfast meat there was just an open trough of steamy water.

I wouldn't have minded a few eggs for breakfast, so once we'd gotten fruits and vegetables and grains, I went back by the hot food buffet and now there was some food there. A sleepy-looking boy was putting in trays one at a time, wearing big mittens to protect him from the heat, so we waited until he'd set out the scrambled eggs and I got some for my plate.

When I turned around, I practically ran right into Cedric. I probably would have, except that he had just picked Aquamarine's tray off her back and was moving away so that Leon could reach in and get mine. Since I knew that none of my other friends were likely to be at breakfast this early, it was an easy choice to follow them back to the table and sit with them.

Both of them looked pretty awake, compared to some of my other friends. Leon said that they exercised in the morning so that they'd stay in shape, and then Cedric said that Leon ought to work more of his body than just his mouth 'cause he got beat by a girl in arm wrestling.

Aquamarine told him that he'd lost too, and Cedric shook his head and said that he hadn't lost anything. Then he stopped eating and asked Aquamarine what she was doing for the summer, and she told him about her biology experiment, and how she was staying near MSU all summer and (even though we hadn't talked about it) she would probably come to Kalamazoo a couple of times to visit me, and I'd probably go to Lansing, too. And there was also Gusty's play in Stratford; neither of us knew exactly when that was going to be, but we both knew that we were going to go.

He asked what play, and so we told him about how she was Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and she was really a great actress. Leon said that he didn't know anything about plays, and Cedric told him that he knew all about playing a role, he just didn't do it well enough that people would buy tickets to see it. Then I said I'd buy a ticket to watch Leon, and both of them thought that was hilarious.

Then Cedric asked if we'd be eating lunch with him as well, and I told him that Aquamarine was going to go back to Lansing on a train today.

Leon opened his mouth to say something, and Cedric just looked at him and I think if he were a pegasus he could have made it sleet from a clear sky with that look. Then he reached into Leon's pocket and took out a pen and wrote his computer mail address and his telephone number on a napkin and slid it across the table to her.

She borrowed the pen to write on her own napkin, and gave it back to Cedric, who stuck both the napkin and pen in his pocket. Then after that we were quiet for a little bit, before Leon started bragging again, and Cedric started making fun of him, and it was weird but I really liked that about them. That was their way of posturing, and no matter what they said, they didn't really mean anything by it.

She hugged both of them before we left, and I did too just for good measure.

We waited in my dorm room until I got a telephone telegram from Aric saying that he was in the parking lot. I helped her put on her saddlebags and also grabbed my flight gear and we rode together to the train station.

This time there wasn't much of a wait. Aric said it was sort of a miracle, because the train arrived right on time, and I nuzzled her goodbye, and we stayed on the platform and waved when the train left, even though I wasn't sure if she could see us, since the windows on the train don't open.

When we were back in Winston, Aric asked me what I was doing today, and I told him that I really needed to stretch out my wings, 'cause I'd hardly flown at all, but that wasn't the only thing that needed exercise and he said that he'd had the same problem all weekend, so we went back to his house and he started getting undressed before he was even in his room.

We'd spent so much time apart that he decided to drive me out to the Nature Center, 'cause he said that even though he couldn't fly with me, he could go out into the grasslands area and watch me. Well, it wasn't as much flying room as I would have liked to have, but at the same time it was nice that he was there on the ground watching me, so I did a bunch of acrobatics to get back in practice, and between every pass, I saw him down on the ground looking up at me.

I was in the air longer than I'd meant to be, and so we stopped for lunch at Jimmy John's, and I ate my lunch in Winston, which was an interesting experience. I think he had a harder time of it, though; he had to try and choose gears with a sub in his hand.

He dropped me off at Trowbridge and I licked a bit of avocado sauce off his lips then kissed him and asked if he minded me leaving early tomorrow if I spent the night. He said that was a sacrifice he was willing to make, then he leaned over and nibbled on my ear a little bit just to be silly and so I hit him with my wing.

I was pretty rushed in the shower, and I didn't really manage to get all the way dry or brush my mane as well as I'd have liked, but I couldn't be late to Conrad's class. (He probably wouldn't have minded, but I still couldn't be late).

The desks were still arranged in a circle, so I took the seat I'd chosen before and I'd barely settled my rump on the hard plastic before Conrad came in and told us that everyone would expect him to do Ginsberg next but since there were only two classes left we were going to do something else instead, and he asked us who in class had heard of W. S. Merwin.

Nobody raised their hand, and he said that it was his duty to fix that, and he said that we were going to get up and go outside.

He had us all gather around a tree, where we were in the shade, and he read us a poem called Witness, and I thought it was a shame that Aquamarine wasn't here to hear it, because she still knew the forgotten language of the trees.

He asked us who wanted to read the next poem, and a bunch of hands went up, and my hoof too. He picked Melissa first, and had her read a beautiful poem called Native Trees.

I never really think too much about how old trees are, but I bet that the ones on campus are older than any of us, and they'll probably be there long after we're gone. I wonder what earth ponies think about that? Sometimes it's hard to get a sense of the scale of history when what I do is gone the next day and nothing more than a memory.

After we'd talked about what that poem meant, Conrad chose Trevor to read the next poem, which was called After the Alphabets and was also about language that people can't speak, but insects know. Then he had me read one called Sunset After Rain, and I knew how that looked and felt, how sometimes we'd work our way so far out over the ocean that the land was hazy and off in the distance and there were never more stars than on those nights.

Conrad finished up class by reading us A Last Look, then he said that we were free to go and on Thursday we should plan to meet up under the same tree. Someone asked what we would do if it was raining, and he said that we would read poetry in the rain.

On my way back to my dorm, I stopped by a little flower garden—I knew what all the flowers were called, thanks to Brianna and Aquamarine—and sniffed at the blooms, then watched a yellow-winged butterfly flit around and settle on a bloom, and it was strange to think that such a little insect could know what it meant to go to sleep a caterpillar and wake a butterfly.

I had to return my World War 1 book because it was due, and I felt really bad that I hadn't made any progress in it at all, but the librarian said I could renew it and keep it for longer if I wanted.

I said that I shouldn't; someone else might come along and want to read it, and she said that the computer told her that I was the first person to check it out in ten years, so she didn't think that anyone would really be needing it. So I had her renew it for me, which meant that I could keep it until the very last day of finals, then I had to give it back, but she told me that the library stayed open all summer, and besides the lounge area on the main floor that was near the magazines, there were cubicles upstairs where I could read to my heart's content, all summer long.

Well, I wanted to finish the book before then if I could, because I thought it would be more comfortable to read it on my bed rather than in a cubicle. But it was a big book and I had gotten behind over the weekend, so I might have to finish it at the library.

I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing my Anthropology essay so that I could show it to Professor Amy tomorrow and make sure that there weren't any more major changes I needed to make. Then I ate dinner with Peggy and Christine and Sean and Joe, and when it was over I went to Aric's house.

He wasn't home, so I let myself in and went up to his room. I found a book on his shelf called Trickster's Choice, and I really must have gotten into it, because I was just learning how Nawat the crow could turn himself human when Aric surprised me by running his hand over my rump and I probably would have bucked at him if I hadn't been sitting on my belly—as it was, I jumped up off the bed and spun around and he backed up and crashed into his bookshelf and knocked one of his plastic block buildings off, and then we were both apologizing to each other.

Aric said that he was sorry for not being home but he'd had to put the finishing touches on his theatre project and that had taken longer than he'd planned because he had messed up his light plot and had to re-draw it. I said that I hadn't minded; I really liked the book he had.

He said that there was a second, too, and that I could borrow it for the summer if I wanted to, which was really nice of him. Then he got undressed and got in bed with me, but since it was really early we didn't have sex or try to go to sleep. I read more of the book, and he read a different book that he had on the shelf, and it was really nice to just spend some time with him where we weren't doing anything.

I finally closed up the book when the words had started to get blurry, and rested my head on Aric's chest. He kept on reading until he'd finished the chapter he was on, and as much as I wanted to tease him while he was reading, I didn't—but once he'd closed the book and set it aside, I slid my wing down his chest and he ran his hand over my rump, and when I climbed up on him I thought about how maybe the tree endures, but maybe it was better to live for moments.

Author's Note

Witness (second poem on the page)

Native Trees

After the Alphabets and A Last Look

Sunset After Rain

A big thanks to Cynewulf for suggesting these poems!

June 2 [Apartment Hunting]

June 2

While we were cuddling in bed, I told Aric that he needed more seeds for the feeder, 'cause they were running out and soon the birds would be hungry.

He said that if I wasn't raiding it every time I came over, there'd be more for the birds, and I told him that I wasn't because the 'no pegasus' sign kept me away from it.

And then I told him that I would make sure to fill it whenever I had a chance when he was away, because I didn't want the birds to forget it was here. So he said that there was some seed in the garage and he could get enough to last through the summer, but if he did, the mice or squirrels would find it and eat it all.

I told him that maybe if he put it in the truck he was leaving behind they wouldn't be able to get to it, 'cause it was like a big metal box and he laughed and said that even if there weren't rust holes big enough to throw a cat through, the mice would get in somehow.

He promised that we'd fill it up before I left, then he put on pants and we went downstairs and had breakfast in the kitchen. It was only oats—he still hadn't put more food in his icebox—but I was about to have a sunflower seed snack.

Aric went out to the backyard bare footed, and opened the garage door to get at the seeds. I hadn't ever seen the inside of it or any garage for that matter. It was dark and smelled like car. There was a dusty blue car that was all smashed in the front and I asked him why he had it, and he said that he needed the engine for his other truck. He said he'd gotten it at auction for a hundred dollars, and he was pretty sure that the engine worked, because how else would it have gotten damaged.

I said a truck might have hit it, and he said that wasn't possible; there wasn't any explosion damage. Then he grabbed the bag of seeds out and asked if I wanted to put the seeds in the feeder for practice.

Well, he could have easily—it was low enough that he could reach it with his hands—but said I would and I took the bag and flew up to it. He opened the top and I poured in the seeds, only spilling a little bit on the ground (and the squirrels would eat those, if birds didn't find them first), then instead of giving the bag back, I flew up to the garage roof and stuck my muzzle in the bag and ate a bunch of sunflower seeds before flying it back down and giving it to him.

He told me again that I could just buy them, but where was the fun in that?

We went back into the house and I told him that I would be going out in the afternoon to look at apartments with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn. He said that if he'd known that I was going to be looking for a place, he could have sublet his room to me.

I would have liked that; it would have been nice to be in a familiar place, but at the same time the house wouldn't be the same without him in it. It would be like the palace without Princess Celestia.

Since I was thinking about the summer, I asked him if we could go on a road trip up north this summer, like he'd done with David and Angela, and he got all enthusiastic and said that we could—he had a week off before he had to start in Lafayette, and he'd had some plans about what he was going to do but he could cancel them.

I asked if he was sure, and he said that he was. It wasn't anything important that he was doing, and he'd rather spend the time with me.

So he got out a map and pointed to all the places where he'd gone, and he started pointing to things that he thought I'd like to see. There was a lot; Michigan is a very big state.

Since he had the map out, I wanted him to show me where Lafayette was. It wasn't on the same map; it was in Indiana, kind of towards the middle west of the state. I asked how far it was, and he said he didn't know but it was about a three-and-a-half hour drive, which meant it was about an hour further away than Chicago.

We decided that we'd leave right after graduation—which was the twelfth—and just take our time driving around and seeing whatever we wanted to. So that gave me something to look forward to right at the start of the summer.

I kissed him goodbye and took off to get my morning flight in. It was clear and cloud-free today, so there would be nothing to bring back to school, even if Sean had managed to find a rope.

I just did a bunch of exercises at low altitude: the grumpy man was directing airplanes today. But I got a good workout, 'cause instead of riding thermals, I did everything by wingwork and was pretty lathered up by the time I got back to my dorm.

After a quick shower, I went to lunch, and for once Leon and Cedric weren't bragging about themselves. Both of them were quieter than usual, and when I asked why Cedric admitted that he was a little worried about the exams coming up next week. He had one first thing Monday morning, which he said was the worst possible time, even though I thought that it would be better to get it over more quickly.

Leon said that I didn't understand college; it was a place where you could put stuff off until the very last minute and then cram like crazy.

Then Trevor said that real life was like that, too. And I kind of agreed. There were slow days, and there were days when everything seemed to rush at you, and the best you could do was deal with it as it came. And sometimes on really nice days we slacked off and went to the beach instead of patrolling like we were supposed to. The weather coordinator didn't mind, as long as we were all ready to work if we were needed.

Leon said he had this vision of a big cluster of colorful ponies standing in a cloud-office gossiping by the watercooler, and I said sometimes it was kind of like that, and I'd once overheard a couple of tourists who were in the tavern saying that the weather team just lazed around, but they hadn't been there when everypony was fighting off a gale for two days and we'd drop down to the tavern every now and then for long enough to melt the ice off our wings and drink a bowl of hot soup to warm up our insides and then we'd be back in the air again.

Cedric said that he'd played football in the snow before but he'd never considered what it would be like to fly in it.

Conrad had us meet outside again, and said that we were going to end the year by reading poems which he didn't think fit in any other lesson plan. The first one was from a man named Kit Smart (which everyone thought was a great name), and it was called For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry. Everyone had something to say about it, whether they liked cats or not, but we all agreed that the poem described them very well.

My favorite line was that cats are a mixture of gravity and waggery, because they are. And after I said that, Trevor leaned over and said that I was, too, and so I licked my pastern and rubbed it across my cheek and then looked at him innocently and said that I didn't know what he was talking about.

He had us read one next that was called When the Economy Was Booming by Mindy Nettifee, and that was a bit confusing for me because I didn't know what some of the things in it were, like Radiohead and Santa Anna dogs, but I think I still got the idea of the poem. And it made Melissa blush, probably 'cause some of it was about masturbating and a lot of people don't like talking about that at all.

Then he said that before he finished the class, we were all going to sit and write a poem for ourselves, and that it could be whatever we wanted, and we wouldn't have to turn it in or read it out loud or show it to anybody unless we wanted to. It would be ours for as long as we needed to keep it.

I have flown over the ocean
I have seen ships from distant lands

I have visited a world
not my own

I am a traveler, forever bound
to the sky, cursed
(some say)
to wander forever

Never putting down roots

I am one with the wind,
Drifting along like dandelion fluff

Here I am, belly on the grass
And the shadow of an elder tree on my back

Tomorrow I will carry my song
Elsewhere.

To distant shores
To distant ears

As people finished writing, they put their pencils and pens down and just sat quietly until finally Conrad said that some of us would be graduating soon, and all of us would be leaving for the summer, and he was sure that every one of us would make our mark on the world in our own way. Then he read a poem called The Man in the Glass.

I think that poem resonated with everyone in class, because when he finished nobody spoke. I think everyone was thinking about it and things that they had done that they wished they hadn't—I know I was. But I think that in the end a lot of those things had been because I didn't know any better, and there was a difference between doing something out of ignorance and doing it out of greed. And I think that if you don't love yourself, all the wealth in the world is nothing at all.

I blinked my eyes and noticed that Conrad was gone, but the class stayed there for a little while, talking about poems, and a couple of us shared what we'd written and then we kind of drifted apart—some people had to get to another class, and others wanted to go back to their rooms to study, and I had to go look at apartments.

I'd been a little worried that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn would be mad that I was late, but they weren't. He said that if they were any old people, the landlords would probably leave us hanging like they had when he was in college, but his shiny government badge opened a lot of doors.

We spent the whole afternoon looking at different rooms. Some of them were pretty close to campus, and others were further away, and some of them were in houses and others were in special buildings called apartment houses that was a big house for apartments that were in turn houses for people.

The one I liked the most was a yellowish house on Grove Street, which was very near Aric's house. It was kind of old and the paint was peeling a little bit but I liked it because it had a balcony and the windows looked out at mature trees and it wasn't so big that I'd feel lost inside of it. Plus it had a bathtub which some of the apartments didn't, and it felt kind of cozy.

When I told them that that was my favorite, Miss Cherilyn frowned and said that I had a very different view than she did, and if it were up to her that would be the very last choice because it was old and not very nice. She asked if I'd noticed that one of the windowpanes was broken, and I said that I didn't mind; there was nothing wrong with having some fresh air.

We went to dinner together at Bilbo's Pizza, and we talked about it more but my heart was set on the apartment on Grove Street. Some of the others were nicer and newer and I guess there were things like laundry rooms and exercise rooms in the bigger apartment houses, but I didn't need either. And I liked being close to campus and to Aric's house (even if he wasn't going to be there), so she finally said that it was my choice, and Mister Salvatore took out his telephone and when he was done talking he said that the apartment was mine, and that next week they would come to help me move out of my dorm room and over there.

Then we talked about some of the big trips for the summer—like going to Stratford to see Gusty, and maybe visiting Cayenne some time, and I still wanted to go to see an airplane factory, and also visit Peggy over the summer. We didn't set dates for any of it yet, but I was happy that they were figuring it out.

We talked longer than I'd meant to, and I was surprised by how late it was when we finally got back to campus. They let me out in the parking lot, and reminded me to tell them what time I needed to move, then they waved goodbye and drove away.

I went right over to Meghan's room, and told her about my new apartment and how nice it was, and she was happy because it wasn't all that far from hers—she was living in the neighborhood by the cemetery—and she told me that I had to have a housewarming party because that was tradition.

She had to go into the bathroom to change into sleeping clothes, 'cause Amy was home, and when she was done we got in bed and snuggled up together.

Author's Note

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry

When the Economy was Booming

The Man in the Glass

For I Will Consider My Cat, Jeoffry was suggested by Cynewulf.

The Man in the Glass was also a suggestion, but I can't remember who made it.

June 3 [Final Day of Classes]

June 3

Today was the last day of classes until the fall. I woke up feeling kind of edgy and unfocused, sort of adrift. It's the same kind of feeling I had sometimes when there was a big feral storm coming but we didn't know exactly when, so we'd push a bunch of clouds out and there'd be a pegasus or two on each one, and at least one of the weathermares getting telegrams and reporting cloud-to-cloud on the storm's progress.

The weird thing with feral storms was sometimes they died on their own, or veered away, so sometimes when we were put on alert, it was for nothing. Even though we knew that everypony would rather have no weather than a giant feral storm, it felt like a let-down when we sat on our clouds all day for nothing.

I wondered if the human weather people ever felt like that? Did they sometimes see storms on their radars that just faded away before they got to them?

I snuggled up against Meghan and closed my eyes, because I trusted her alarm to wake me up in time for class.

I didn't really fall back to sleep, but I was almost asleep enough that when her alarm went off I noticed that I had drooled on her shirt. I didn't think she'd be mad, 'cause she'd drooled on my foreleg.

She turned it off for a little bit and sat on her back so that I could rest on her chest. She had to move her telephone from one hand to the other so that she could rub along my back, and she scratched between my withers, which felt really good.

We got up after the second time the alarm went off, and I kissed her goodbye and then went outside so that I could go flying.

I knew that even though I'd been thinking about storms, there weren't going to be any today. The sky was clear, but more importantly, it felt like the sky was stable. Admittedly, just because it was where I was standing didn't mean that there wasn't a big storm coming, but I'd been here long enough to get a feel for the weather, and I was sure that there wouldn't be anything.

Dori wished me a good morning, and I told her that it was a CAVU morning, which is what the airplane pilots call it when they can see all the way to the horizon.

I was still kind of aimless while I flew. I didn't do any exercises; I just kind of wandered around the sky in my clear area until I decided it was time to go back to campus, and I waited in our room until it was my turn in the shower.

When I got breakfast, I took more than I wanted to eat on my plate by mistake, and I tried to give the extra away, but nobody wanted it, so I had to send it back into the kitchen. I hoped that whoever was taking the plates on the other end wanted my food because it would be a shame to waste it.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said that on our last day together he was going to teach us about the Lyapunov Exponent. Before, we'd learned that the other ways had showed us how the points were distributed, but this was going to tell us how far it would diverge from its initial condition. And then he drew us a couple of lines and wrote out the equation for it.

What was really clever about it was that obviously two lines from the starting point couldn't diverge forever, so it took the average of a bunch of iterates, which meant that there was a lot of calculating involved and I liked that. I don't know why some of the other students grumbled when he started talking about repeatedly derivations. I guess they didn't like math as much, but I thought that each new equation he taught us was like a new toy to play with and see what it could do.

So even though I was sad when class was over, I knew so much more about math than I had before, and I bet there weren't a lot of other ponies who knew stuff like this. Probably not even very many unicorns (although Cayenne might).

I stayed until everyone else had left, and then I thanked him for his class and for teaching us so many things that I hadn't imagined ever before. And he told me that it had been a pleasure to teach me, and he hoped that I would find a use for nondynamical systems and fractals back in Equestria.

I was sure I would; some of the equations we'd learned might be useful for weather planning, especially if and when we had to start managing weather in a new district.

At lunch, everyone seemed just a bit out of it. I guess that my friends weren't any more prepared for the summer than I was. Only Joe acted normal (which for him is usually not paying too much attention to the rest of us). When Christine asked him why he was so chill, he said that he had two easy finals in classes he liked, and his third final was in Chemistry, and he'd figured out from what his class score was that he could not get his final grade up, and he would only fail the class if he got a two percent on the test, and there were fifty questions that were multiple choice.

He said that meant if he only got one question right, he'd pass the test, and since that was the case he was going to hedge his bets and choose 'b' every time. He hadn't decided yet if he should even open his test booklet, or just fill out the bubble-sheet and be done.

I told him that he should try to do better, and he agreed that he should, but then said that he didn't want to, which I thought was a really strange attitude.

On another hoof, there was more than one way to win Durak, so maybe his plan wasn't as dumb as it sounded to me. But even if it worked, what did he learn by it?

Professor Amy had us get back in our little groups, and she gave us more papers, which were based off the notes which we had taken in the last class. What I thought was really fun about it was that there was one page that we got and it looked like all the other ones, but it said 'Biased Result' in big red letters across it.

So we talked about that one first, and decided that we had managed to set up our observations in a way that we had gotten an unreliable result, but our method had shown us that it was unreliable.

That made us look over the rest of our work with a really sharp focus, because all of us were convinced that we had probably been in a fog on some other stuff, too, but how would we know what it was?

Everyone discussed that, and we decided that there were a couple of observations we'd made where there might have been bias, or where we hadn't thought them through enough, and that some of our conclusions might not be valid. So when we wrote up our final notes, we made sure to say what we weren't certain about, and then Rachel suggested that we ought to be sure to include how we'd seen what we'd seen, so that any future person who was reading our notes would understand why we thought what we did, in case we were wrong.

I didn't really think about that until after class, but when I was flying up the quad to my dorm room, I realized that before I'd come to Earth, I would have assumed that whatever conclusions I came to based upon what I saw with my own eyes were the right ones; now I found myself sometimes thinking that I needed to know more before I could decide one way or the other.

I took my Bible and sat in a tree to read it, but I didn't even make it through one chapter. I kept getting distracted and losing my place as I saw people walking across the quad and while I could have flown off to a quieter tree, it wouldn't have changed things much. I'd had my last class until the fall, and I'd turned in my essay at the very end of class. I had two final exams next week, and I thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea to go back through all my notes for math and make sure that I hadn't forgotten anything important, but that could wait until later. For now, I was a free mare.

So since I wasn’t going to get anything useful done, I went back to my dorm and then went to Ruth's room because her door was open, and she dressed me up in a shirt and lounging pants like she was wearing and then took a selfie with me and put it on her Facebook, and then we sat on her bed together and talked until it was dinnertime, and I took the clothes back off, which kind of disappointed her.

I asked if she was going to change (Peggy didn't like wearing her lounging clothes outside of the dorm), but she said that she was going to go to dinner in her lounging clothes because it was the last day of class.

The bad meals over the last few days had probably been so that they could save up enough bits for their big dinner: they had four special sections this time, one with American food, one with Chinese, one with Mexican, and one with Italian, and it was almost too much to choose from. So I wound up with a spring roll and fortune cookie, a little pasta with white sauce, and a taco, and if I'd thought I could eat more I would have taken a piece of pizza, too.

All of my tablemates had also mixed up their dinners, and so had everyone else I saw.

Christine said that they were doing this to make us not remember all the bad dinners we'd had, the ones with the beef patties floating in pools of oil, or the tater tots that were raw inside, and Sean said that was probably true, but he didn't care because right now he had the most American meal ever, which was a beef patty with cheese and bacon between two slices of pizza.

Christine said that she didn't know why she was dating him, and he said it was because she had bad taste in everything, which was why she liked Star Wars, and I thought she was going to punch him but she didn't.

Instead, she finished her food and got up and came back with a long loaf of bread and she said that George Lucas was her god, and when Sean looked over at her, she said that there can be only one and smashed him in the head with the bread. And when he started to object, she jabbed him with the broken loaf and said that she was settling the argument like a mature adult.

So he got up and came back with a chocolate cream pie, and he stood right across her at the table and held it up in his hand and said that there was only one proper way to end an argument over dinner, and she dropped her bread and pushed her chair back so fast I thought she was going to fall over, then he just set it in the center of the table and began lifting wedges out and putting them on our plates.

I only ate half of mine, 'cause I was full, and unlike my leftover breakfast when I offered it to Sean he ate it.

Everyone except Joe went to our room after dinner, and we played euchre and talked for a couple of hours, along with Ruth and Kat. Peggy made White Russians, and this time I was smart and only had two of them.

It was almost midnight by the time that Sean and Christine left. I had one more drink—only a small one—and then I flew off to Aric's house and got a little lost because I decided to fly by my apartment on the way and land on the balcony and look inside and then I thought I'd take a shortcut but flew in the wrong direction. Luckily I knew my way around the neighborhood pretty well and figured out that I'd gone the wrong way after only a block.

I didn't want to disturb anyone, so I fumbled with the key for a little bit before deciding that it would be easier to go through his window. It was half-open, and he had put a screen at the bottom to keep bugs out, but that was easy to push aside, and then I got the window a little bit further open but not quite enough and I got stuck on the sill and he had to rescue me. Which he had a hard time with, mostly because he kept laughing, and when he finally got a good grip on my pasterns, he said that maybe he ought to call the paramedics and have them meet me with a gurney.

I stuck my tongue out at him and once he'd helped me inside I said that if he'd left his window wider open that I could have flown right in and not had a problem.

He said that the screen wasn't bigger, so he couldn't unless he wanted moths and stuff to get it, and I said that I didn't mind moths. They were the butterflies of the night.

He wanted to finish up what he was doing on his computer, so I stretched out on the bed and had almost fallen asleep when he got in bed, even though it wasn't all that long. He kissed me and asked if I'd been drinking and I nodded. And he asked if I was really tired, and I said I wasn't that tired.

June 4 [Taco Bell and Finals Party]

June 4

When we finally got out of bed, Aric asked me what my plans for the day were, and I told him that I was going to go flying and then review my notes from math class so that I would be ready for the final on Monday (I was pretty sure that I knew it all, but it was still wise to review it) and that there was going to be a party in Christine's room tonight.

I also told him about my new apartment, and said that I wanted to have a housewarming party there but the more I thought about it, by the time I moved in almost all of my friends would be gone.

He said that if I needed help moving, he had a truck.

We had breakfast at Nina's and talked for a little bit, and I decided that we could leave on the trip after Peggy went back to Colorado. I felt bad that I hadn't spent as much time with her as I should have, so I didn't want to be the one to leave first and leave her all alone in the dorm room. Especially if she needed some help with math before her final.

The two of us took a little detour back to his house, so that he could see my new apartment. I didn't have a key yet so we couldn't go inside, and since it was on the second floor, he couldn't look through the windows. That was too bad: I thought about lifting him up to the balcony so that he could see—I know I'm not supposed to fly carrying people but I don't think it counts if I only fly up one story.

He said that wasn't a good idea and he reminded me how much trouble I'd had flying in his window, which I said was only because he hadn't opened it far enough and there was nothing above the balcony, so it would be no problem to put him on it. But he wasn't convinced, so we walked back to his house, and I got dressed in my flight gear and flew out his window, and this time I didn't steal any sunflower seeds, 'cause I was full and also because there were a bunch of birds on the feeder and I didn't want to bother them.

I could tell that there was rain coming: the pressure was dropping and the wind speed was picking up, and off to the west I could see distant clouds.

I flew west, all the way over the 131 Highway and then to the Kal-Haven trail. Then I told Dori where I was and that I was going to go down low, so that if there were any airplanes waiting they could fly in my area.

There were a lot of cars in the parking lot, probably 'cause it was a nice day, although I didn't see anyone there. Now that the trees had leafed out, you couldn't really see much of the trail from the air, although it was still obvious where it went because there was a long line of trees that cut through farms.

I followed it all the way to Kendall, then I did a few victory loops in the air—not so high that I would get in the way of an airplane—and turned around to go back.

The wind was starting to pick up, which made my flight even easier, since it was on my tail, so even though I was more tired than I had been when I started, I made better speed.

I thought about flying higher over town, but decided not to bother Dori again. So I kept sort of low, and followed along the road, and in front of a bank I saw a sign that said it was twelve-thirty, which meant by the time I got back to campus and took a shower, I would have missed lunch.

(Banks have lots of different names, but you can always tell that they're banks because they have signs that tell you the time and temperature.)

So I decided to get lunch at Taco Bell. As I was landing in their parking lot, I felt a little nervous because I'd never gone in one by myself, but I'd had their food before so I knew what I liked.

The doors opened towards me, and they were heavy glass, and try as I might I just couldn't find a way to grab onto their handles and get them open. But then a mother and her children came out and the taller girl pushed open the door for me and when I came in the younger one wrapped her arms around my neck in a hug even though I was all sweaty and I was too surprised to do anything. And the taller girl let the door close and started petting my mane, and then their mother yelled at them and I said that I didn't mind because they were kind of cute, but I think she was mad that I was all sweaty and her kids had gotten a bunch on themselves.

And then after she got her kids away from me she started trying to shoo me out the door, and I told her that I was going inside because I wanted a burrito and she started to talk more loudly and more slowly and put her hands on her hips.

Then the taller girl said that she was scaring me and ran over to hug me again and her mother grabbed her by the collar and her other daughter by the wrist and pulled them out the other door and trotted across the parking lot so fast that a car had to swerve to avoid them.

So then I got a little bit more nervous about getting food, because maybe I wasn't supposed to be inside, and I couldn't open the door anyway so I ought to leave but then I decided that I wasn't going to leave without a burrito, so I managed to hook a hoof on the door handle and tug it open far enough that I could get my head between the door and frame, and I pushed it open that way.

I had to stand on my hind hooves to order and the man at the counter just stared at me like he couldn't hear and then he called for a manager to come to the front, and while I was waiting I was thinking about how much more efficient it was to order Taco Bell food from inside a car.

When the manager finally came to the front, he asked the man at the counter what the problem was, and he just pointed in my direction and then the manager asked what I'd done, and he said that I was trying to order a burrito, and the manager asked if that was it, and he nodded and then said that I was a pony.

Then the manager rolled his eyes and looked at me and asked what I wanted and so I told him a burrito and he put that in the computer and then asked if I wanted it for here or to go. I didn't really want to eat inside alone, so I said that I'd have it to go, and when I paid he gave me a slip of paper that said my order number was 238, and told me that I could wait at the other end of the counter until it was ready. So I went down there and waited and all the while the man at the counter just kept staring at me. It was kind of uncomfortable.

The woman who brought it up front was a lot nicer, though. She had a big smile on her face and set it on the counter and asked what my name was and I told her and she said that her name was Lakisha which was a very pretty name. Then she asked if I wanted any sauce or napkins, and I did, so she put a couple of little packets of mild sauce and some napkins in the bag for me and asked if she could take my picture, too.

I told her that she could, so she took out her telephone and took my picture, and then told me to have a blessed day, and I said I would, and took my bag in my mouth and pushed my way back out then took off again.

I'd meant to wait to eat it until after I took a shower, but I'd had the smell of it in my nose the whole way back and so when I got up to my room I tore open one of the sauce packets and unrolled the burrito enough to squirt it inside so it wouldn't be as messy, and then ate it. It had gotten a little bit cold on the flight home, but was still very good.

After I'd taken a shower, I got out my math notebook and sat on my bed and started reviewing. Peggy had come back and had the same idea; she was sitting on her bed with her own notebook.

We spent the whole afternoon in the room together, getting ready for our final exams. When the rain came, I got up and looked out the window at it for a bit, and I also turned on my radio just in case I had to go watch for storms, but it only was a gentle rain.

It had tapered off by the time we went to dinner, but had started up again when Peggy and I went back to the dorm.

We studied some more until she said it was time to go to Christine's for the party, and I sent a telephone telegram to Aric to tell him that the party was starting and then he asked me what room it was in and I had to ask Peggy, 'cause I'd never paid attention to the number on their door.

It took him a little while to answer back, and I was thinking that he somehow hadn't gotten the message, but he finally said that he was on the way, so Peggy and I left and when we were on our way I heard a familiar noise and turned around and Winston was on the street right behind us. So even though it wasn't far at all, I convinced Peggy to get in the back of the truck with me and ride down to her room that way and she said that she was glad she'd decided to wear jeans because she didn't think she could climb over the tailgate in a miniskirt without flashing everyone.

He found an open space near Christine's dorm, and parked there and we got out of the back and went to her room together. He had two big boxes of beer and all the ingredients for White Russians.

There were a whole bunch of people already there—her roommates, who I sort of knew, along with Sean and Joe and Keith and Malcolm.

It didn't take too long before some people were playing games on the television and Amanda and Malcolm were sitting on the couch right next to each other talking and I got to sit in the papasan with Aric for a while and with Peggy for a while and then Cecilia fell asleep in it because she'd had too much to drink. And it was a funny kind of party, because it was partially everyone celebrating that they'd finished a year (even though they really hadn't until they were done with finals) and kind of saying their goodbyes, too, because most of them were going to leave the same day that they were done with their finals.

Some other people came by and visited for a little bit because the door was open, and someone—I don't know who—ordered Papa John's pizza. Keith asked me if I wanted to play Mario Kart with him and I said that I wasn't very good at it because the control buttons weren't made for hooves, but he said that I'd have fun anyway. And Aric watched me crash a lot and said this was why ponies shouldn't drive, and I reminded him that he'd let me drive Winston before and when Peggy glared at him he told her that he'd only let me steer, and he'd been in control of the pedals.

It was well after midnight when we left, and the three of us—me and Peggy and Aric—walked back up to my dorm room, 'cause Aric was too drunk to drive. Aric started singing a nonsense song called Bad Romance and Peggy joined him, and I did for the chorus, too, because I knew the words for that. And then when we got near the dorm I decided to fly up and sit on a tree branch where I could sleep until Aric finally convinced me to come down and go the rest of the way back to the dorm, even though that seemed like a lot of effort.

Both Peggy and I went to the bathroom as soon as we were back in the dorm, and then she said that I should drink some water so that I wouldn't have as much of a hangover in the morning, which seemed like kind of dumb advice to me since I thought it would just make me have to get up and pee more, but she insisted that it was the right thing to do, so I drank some water out of the sink, and then when I got back to the room, Aric was lying on top of all the blankets with his shirt off but his boots still on and he was already snoring so rather than try to move him, I just cuddled up next to him.

June 5 [Studying Sunday]

June 5

I woke up a few times in the middle of the night to pee, 'cause of all the water that Peggy made me drink, and the first time I had to hold my wings out since I couldn't find my balance and the second time Aric woke up too and he followed me into the girl's bathroom but I guess it was okay because there wasn't anyone else in there, and when we got back to my room he took off his shoes and pants and got under the covers.

When I finally woke up in the morning, though, I felt pretty good except that I had to pee again, so maybe Peggy had been right that drinking a lot of water helped to wash out the alcohol.

Aric was awake when I got back to bed, and he had dragged his pants off the floor and put them over head which had spilled all the coins from his pockets all over the bed.

I got back in bed with him and he put his hand on my rump and when I asked him if he was awake he said yes but he wished that he wasn’t and then he said that he had to piss like a racehorse but he was afraid that his head would fall off if he got up. I helped him out by taking the covers off him and he finally slid until he was sitting up in the bed with his feet on the floor and his hands holding his head up. Then when he stood he took a step backwards and I thought he might fall over, but he made his way out the door and when he came back I had to open it for him because he didn't have a key.

He wanted to know if I had any aspirin, and I said that Peggy had some but he didn't want to go looking through her things without her permission. I said that I could and she wouldn’t be mad, but he just fell on the pillow and closed his eyes and said that he would be fine after he had a little more sleep.

After a little while I got bored with being in bed, so I got up and got one of my poetry books and started re-reading e e cummings.

When Peggy woke up she asked how I was feeling, and I said pretty good, then I asked her if she could get out some aspirin for Aric and she nodded and got a bottle out of her desk and shook three out and set them on the edge of my desk, then she said that she was going to take a shower because she felt pretty grungy after the party last night. And she asked if I would wait to go to breakfast after she was done.

That sounded good to me, so I kept on reading until she got back. She'd put on her underwear and a t-shirt underneath her robe, 'cause Aric was in our room,and then she looked through her clothes until she found a pair of pants she liked and some socks. She said that she didn't really want to do laundry today and I asked her why not.

She told me it was an American tradition to try to be wearing your last set of clean clothes when you went home for vacations so that your Mom could wash them for you.

I thought that was a silly tradition, and said that it would be fun to do laundry today once Aric got out of my bed. Surely he wouldn't sleep all day.

So we went to breakfast together, and Christine made fun of Sean for being hung over again and he said that he was fine and then laid down on the floor under the table and told her that he was just going to take a little nap.

He didn't actually fall asleep, though. He shifted around a little bit trying to find a comfortable spot, then he started to complain about the feet of the table pushing into his back, then he got quiet for a little while.

We talked about finals: Christine said it was bad luck that my math final was first thing Monday morning—Sean had been complaining about it to her—and I said that I didn't mind at all. Then I leaned under the table and asked him if he wanted to review today. I was pretty sure that I knew it all, but sometimes you'd find things you weren’t perfectly clear about when you discussed them with someone else.

He said that sounded like a good idea, and we could do it in my room after lunch unless he was dead by then. Then he rolled on his side and held onto Christine's leg and kissed her just above her socks.

It wasn't going to to be that long until 'after lunch' anyway, since we'd gone to breakfast late.

Christine poked Sean a few times with her shoe. She said she was just making sure he was still alive, and then said that he ought to eat something since he was here, so she reached down with a piece of toast for him, and after he'd eaten it she reached down with a second but she wouldn't let him have that one until he got off the floor and sat in his seat.

When we got back to our room, Aric was still asleep in my bed, but the aspirin were gone so I guess he'd woken up enough to take them.

I nuzzled his cheek while Peggy was gathering together her laundry, then I helped her carry it downstairs. I guess I'd have to wait to wash my bedding, 'cause he was on it and it would be mean to kick him off.

Once she'd put her clothes in the washing machine, Peggy sat on top of it and so I got on top of the dryer and we talked for a little while, then Brianna came down to get her clothes out of the dryer, and the three of us talked about our plans for the summer. I said that I wanted to have a housewarming party and I thought I ought to have it pretty soon, 'cause everybody would be gone and so we decided that Tuesday night was best because most finals would be over, but there would still be a lot of people.

When Peggy's clothes were in the dryer, she asked me how I felt about having a pizza with a snack, and we could share it with Aric if he was still in the room. I thought that was a good idea, so she asked if I wanted Domino's or Papa John's, and I'd liked the pizza we had last night so we got Papa John's.

We each had a slice of it before her clothes were done, then set it on top of the dryer while she folded up her clothes and put them in the basket with her blankets on top. Since she had to carry her laundry back to her room, I took the pizza, flying behind Peggy with it in my forehooves. I was glad that we hadn't opened the little bowl of butter, or else it probably would have spilled all over everything.

She made her bed and put away her clothes and then decided to change into her lounging clothes for the rest of the afternoon since they were clean anyway, and then I poked at Aric with my hoof until he finally got up.

Peggy had told me on the way up the stairs that I shouldn't let him have any pizza until he'd carried my bedding downstairs and put it in the washing machine, so I didn't. Then when he'd left the room with my sheets, she laughed and said that she didn't think I actually would.

I said that since she'd bought the pizza, it was only fair she decided who got to eat it.

He had a couple of slices when he came back to the room and then he said that he had to go home and practice for his acting final because he was supposed to give a monologue and he couldn't remember all of it.

He said it was called Cowboy Salvation, and Peggy crossed her arms and said was it because he liked riding horses, and then I said that I thought it would be fun to ride a horse, and then both of them started laughing.

Aric asked if I was going to come over tonight, and I said that I shouldn't because of my math test in the morning, and he nodded and said that he'd miss me. Then I told him that I was going to have a housewarming party on Tuesday. I said that he could come and so could everyone who lived in the house with him, even Sara (although I don't think she would, because I don't think she likes me any more).

He said that Sara had moved out, and I asked him why. He said that she was kind of religious, and that there were things going on that she disagreed with. Which he said was kind of funny, because a lot of the stuff that he and David had done which she knew all about hadn't bothered her at all, but all of a sudden me being a pony was a big problem.

Well, I felt bad about that, even though I couldn't help being a pony, and he said it was okay, he didn't want to live in a house with a close-minded person anyway, and he said that he'd come and I stood up on my hind legs and kissed him and Peggy pretended to ignore us.

Sean came over not too long after and Peggy loaned us her comforter because my sheets were still in the washing machine and the mattress was plastic and not at all nice to sit on when it didn't have a cover. And the two of us spent all afternoon going over his notes and my notes until we both knew nondynamical systems backwards and forwards and could recite all the theorems and equations we'd learned in the class, and we only took breaks when I had to get my laundry.

He thought it was pretty funny that I wanted to make sure I knew how to spell Lyapunov correctly (it was a very strange name) but I said it might be on the test, and he told me that he would give me five dollars if that was on the test—he said that the exponent might be, but the actual name wouldn't matter, and I said that if it was important enough to have a name, the name might matter and accepted the bet.

We went to dinner together, and Sean and I kept on quizzing each other on math. And I also made sure to tell Christine and Joe about my party, too, 'cause I hoped that they would come to it. Plus when I was taking my tray back to the kitchen, I stopped in the dark room and told all my Durak-friends, too. Keith and Malcolm both said that they would be there.

I decided after dinner that I was going to go flying: I hadn't done it all day, and I knew it would relax me. So I put on all my gear and eventually got permission from the airplane directors—they had trouble figuring it out, 'cause I so rarely go flying in the evening.

So it wouldn't be too difficult for them, I went in my normal wedge, and this time I followed the railroad tracks all the way out, dropping down to fly under the big bridge on the 131 Highway (it was fun to fly under) and then picking it up on the other side.

I flew around on that side of Kalamazoo, not going anywhere in particular. When I got to the end of my assigned airspace, I called the airplane directors back and they still seemed a bit confused, but I knew that if I flew low it was okay, so I told them that I was going under five hundred feet, and zipped down so that I would be out of the way of airplanes.

I got a bit lost on my way back, and I wasn't high enough to easily pick out landmarks, but I knew that the 94 highway ran south of everything and if I found it, I could find everything else, so I went south until I saw it, then flew parallel to it until I came to the 131 highway, and followed that north until I came to Stadium Drive, and then I knew where I was.

Rather than take a direct line, I decided to keep to the road, and I'm glad I did. I had just flown over Drake road when I started to smell baked goods, and went down even lower to investigate and saw a plain-looking building called Sweetwater's Donut Mill, and I was a little bit hungry plus I thought that since Peggy had bought pizza I could do something nice for her, so I landed and went inside, even though I was a bit worried people might yell at me, but it smelled so good I thought it was worth the risk.

Nobody yelled, and the woman at the counter was really nice and let me take my time deciding what to get, and I left with a bag full of cinnamon rolls which were the size of the plates at the dining hall.

I gave one to Peggy when I got back, and ate my own, too, and then I took the last one with me to Meghan's, and she was really happy to get it, too. She said that Sweetwater's donuts were the best studying food, and offered to share it with me but I told her that I'd already had one.

I sat on her bed until she'd finished it and her studying, then after she'd gone to the bathroom and changed into her sleeping clothes, curled up with her in bed.

June 6 [Math Final]

June 6

I slept like a foal, and when I woke up I was ready for the new day. I probably could have stayed in bed until Meghan's alarm went off, but I wanted to get a little bit of exercise in because that helped wake me up, so I kissed her on the cheek then got out of bed and pulled the covers back up over her so that she wouldn't be cold.

Before I left, I stuck my muzzle against the window to see what the weather was like and it was perfectly clear—as far as I could see, anyway—and I thought about opening the curtains, but I didn't.

I had to go back to my room to get my flight gear, and then I went out to Pebble Beach and got my flight clearance and even though I wasn't supposed to, I said that I had a final exam today and the grumpy man told me good luck!

I always worry that I'll be late to important stuff like tests, so I stayed close by and just flew in a big ellipse around to the far edge of Western's campus then back again. It was a short enough flight that I didn't get very sweaty, but I still took a shower because I didn't want to change my morning routine.

Then when I went to breakfast I was too early and had to wait in the lounge until the dining hall opened, and I was the first one in there.

It was a good thing, too. Like the last time I was early, they hadn't put out all the food yet, but the waffle-maker was there and so I made a waffle and also had some fruit and then I also took one strip of bacon because protein was good for sustained energy and they didn't have any fish.

I didn't know who would be at our table, and when I got there there wasn't anybody, so after I had finished my waffle I looked in the dark room and none of my friends were there, and no one was in any of the other rooms, either, so I went back to my usual table and ate my bacon and then when I was eating my fruit Sean sat down. I asked him if Christine was coming, and he shook his head and said that she'd sent him a telephone telegram last night saying that she was going to be up all night cramming for her afternoon final.

He said that he was ready for the math test, and so was I. I finished my fruit and took my tray back, and then sat there until he was done eating. I'd noticed Keith and a few other people from our class had come into the dining hall for breakfast, too; Keith looked really tired and his tray only had two cups on it.

I guess he had been up all night, too.

We went to class together, and waited patiently until Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee came in and he waited a few minutes after class had officially started before he closed the door and then passed out our tests.

There weren't that many questions, and as I went through the test I saw that most of them were what we'd learned in the last three weeks of class. That was good; I really liked fractals, and having a test on them was a lot of fun.

Then I got to a question that asked which was a real exponent and there were choices like Leprechaun and Lenovitch and the correct answer was of course the Lyapunov exponent and I set down my pencil and looked over at Sean and when he looked at me I stuck my tongue out at him then went back to taking the test.

He must not have been as far along, because I was on the last page when I heard him say 'goddam it' under his breath which I figured meant that he had gotten to that question, and I would have looked up and stuck my tongue out at him again but I was busy writing out an equation and I really had to focus on those because even though I'd gotten a lot better at drawing math letters, it was still difficult to get them right.

Just like last time, I finished first and had lots of time to carefully go back through my test and make sure that there weren't any mistakes. Then I took it up front and set it on Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee's desk and quietly thanked him for the class and he said that it had been a pleasure having me.

I had the whole rest of the day free, which was kind of weird. I didn't know what I was going to do to fill the time, but I thought that it would be nice to wait for Sean, so I flew up to the nearest tree and landed on one of the low branches and stretched out there and watched for him to come out.

I was kinda having second thoughts when he hadn't showed up for a while—maybe he was going to go out the front doors, 'cause that was closer to Christine's dorm—but he finally came out. So I flew down and asked him how he'd done and he said that he was sure he'd passed, but there were a few questions he'd had trouble with, and I said that maybe we should have studied together a bit more, but he'd said that he knew everything when we'd finished up on Sunday.

He told me that when he takes tests, he forgets about stuff he knows, because of the stress. And then he reached into his back pocket and took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to me and said that he never would have guessed that would actually be on the test.

Sean said that he didn't have any plans for the rest of the morning, either, but he had another test in the afternoon in his computer science class which was going to be really easy for him. And he said that Christine would have her test in history which is what she had been studying for all night long.

Since there wasn't anything else to do, he said that if I wanted to, I could watch an episode of Star Trek in his room before lunch, so I followed him back to his room and watched Captain Picard fight with an alien called Q, and when it was over he told me to keep his room safe while he went to the bathroom.

I thought about the time that me and Christine had used it even though we weren't supposed to, and I thought about the big open shower they had in there and so when he got back I asked him if the shower was so big because this was the dorm for people who liked taking group showers, and he said that it was just like that because it was old and hadn't been remodeled and he was really happy that there weren't many people who wanted to use it.

Then I said that it would be fun to take a group shower, and he shook his head and said that there was no way that was going to happen, which was kind of disappointing.

But the joke was on him, because when he brought it up at lunch, Christine said that it would be a great way to unwind after a day of finals, and she eventually managed to convince him and Peggy and Joe by telling them that everyone would wear underwear or bathing suits or whatever they were comfortable in and it would kind of be like the beach. I don't think she would have thought it was a good idea except that Sean thought it was a bad idea.

I had to leave lunch a little early, 'cause Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn needed to take me out shopping for things for my new apartment, because it didn't have anything in it. Well, they thought that the most important thing was a bed, so we looked around at a lot of different choices, and I finally decided to get a futon, which was a really clever thing that could be both a couch and a bed. I also got a papasan chair just like the one in Christine's room, and also a desk for my computer and a chair that I could sit in and then there were a lot more things that Miss Cherilyn said I ought to have like curtains but I couldn't think of a use for them and Mister Salvatore said that he liked my minimalist style.

There was a really pretty painting of a tree that changed from having leaves to being bare depending on how you looked at it and I thought that was nice, so we got that, too.

Then since we were out anyways I got some groceries plus food for the party, which was mostly beer and lots of flavors of potato chips, plus a couple of big platters of vegetables.

Everything fit in the back of Sienna, and we took it over to my new apartment and they carried it upstairs and put it together and I could see that Miss Cherilyn wasn't too happy about it, but she didn't say anything.

There was a room in the very back that was supposed to be the bedroom, she told me, but I didn't like that it only had one window, so had them put the futon in the other big room, and the papasan, too, and I had him hang the tree-picture between two windows and I thought it looked pretty good.

Then she said that I needed a shower curtain, which we hadn't got, and I remembered that I would like a bookshelf, too, so we got back in Sienna and made another trip and then finally everything was set up.

They dropped me off back on campus, and gave me the key to my apartment and Miss Cherilyn reminded me to lock the door always, and then they also gave me a copy of the rules to read, which I thought I'd do tomorrow after my poetry class and before the party.

Everyone was a lot more relaxed at dinner—like I'd thought, having a final early meant that you didn't have to worry about it any more once it was over—and even though Christine complained that they didn't have anything too good for dinner, everyone was in a pretty good mood. Joe said that he was only one final away from freedom, and he said he was going to spend the rest of the week resting on his laurels before graduation. Then Peggy asked him if he'd gotten all his lecture credits, and he nodded. He said that there were some seniors who had been forced to attend every play and concert and lecture that was offered for the last quarter because they hadn't, and I remembered that Aric had been laughing about them because he automatically got them for every play he worked on.

I guess I was lucky that I didn't have to worry about them, since I was a visitor. I wonder if the student who's exchanging with me gets a break because she's in Equestria?

One thing that they did have for dinner that made everyone happy was ice cream for dessert. There was a machine that made fake ice-cream in a weird star-shape, which I'd tried once and didn't like, but they had big tubs of real ice-cream instead and lots of different toppings, and so we all had some for dessert.

Before we split up, Christine reminded us to meet in an hour at Sean's for the group shower, and he put his hand over his face like I'd seen Captain Picard do, and Christine punched him.

So Peggy and I went back to our room and we both turned on our computers and checked our Facebooks and computer letters and I had gotten one from Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee saying that I had gotten a 98% on the test and my total grade was 97%, and so I told Peggy and she thought that was really good, and reminded me not to brag about it because maybe Sean hadn't done as well. Then she got a little smile and said it was okay if he bragged first.

She put on her swimsuit and then her clothes back on top of it and then changed her mind and put on a sports bra instead and a pair of panties that wasn't as lacy as the ones she liked to wear. I asked if she was going to wear all that in the shower and she said it depended on what everyone else did. Then she reminded me to take a towel, too, and I told her that I'd never forget my towel and tossed it across my back.

When we got to Sean's room, we had to wait for Joe to arrive, and when he got there were were talking and finally Christine said that we ought to talk in the shower, which I agreed with, and even Joe said that it would be a good learning experience since they did this kind of thing in Japan although the public baths were separated by gender. Christine told him to imagine that she had a dick, and he said that didn't help.

Sean said that we ought to make a sign so nobody was surprised, and he drew one that said 'orgy in progress.' Christine told him that was all wrong, and added the word 'platonic' to the top and said it was good and then herded him out the door and we all followed.

He went in the bathroom first to make sure that no one was in there, and when he was sure it was empty he told the rest of us to come in. Christine put the sign on the door, and Sean started turning on the showers, trying not to get his pants or shirt wet. He said that the steam would help hide his shame.

Pretty soon everyone was getting undressed. They had to take turns on the bench to get their shoes off—humans have trouble taking them off if they're standing—and then once that was done, people moved aside to let the next person sit on the bench.

Christine had already taken off her shirt and bra before she sat down, and by then Joe and I were in the shower. He was wearing a swimsuit-like pair of shorts he called boxer briefs and of course I wasn't wearing anything.

At first, Joe completely avoided looking at Christine until she said that if she didn't want anyone looking at her boobs she would have left her bra on, and then when his face got really red (and he still wouldn't look at her) she told Sean that if he'd lose his underwear she'd lose hers, too.

Sean said that he didn't want to be the first one to get naked, and she said that he'd been beat by a pony, which I didn't think was fair but I kept my mouth shut, 'cause I didn't want to start an argument, and I thought that maybe people weren't having fun, which was too bad, 'cause I'd thought it was a good idea, but it had wound up with the boys at one shower and the girls at another and me kind of in the middle.

Then Christine said that she'd had more fun at a funeral, and she told Sean it wasn't like he had anything to hide anyway and went over and took his underwear off for him and before he could protest she looked him right in the eye and said that the Death Star had a better fire-suppression system than the Starship Enterprise, and he said that wasn't true at all and then they were arguing about it until I think he forgot he was naked.

She took off her panties when she was arguing, and I don't think he noticed. She slid them over her hips and then stepped over them when she was poking her finger into his chest to make a point.

Once Sean and Christine had finished their argument, everyone clustered together around one shower, and it was a lot more fun then. Peggy finally decided to take her sports bra off, throwing it on the bench, and then Joe had two girls that he wouldn't look at—I sort of felt bad for him.

We were probably in there for an hour or more. One guy came in and he looked over at all of us then shook his head and went right back out, but otherwise we weren't bothered even though we were breaking the rules. Peggy said that there were rules that mattered and rules that didn't and this was one of the ones that didn't.

Eventually, we decided that we'd had enough fun and turned off the showers and dried off. Neither Christine or Sean put their underwear back on, since it wasn't too far to his room, and Peggy decided that she could go without her bra back to our room.

On the way back, she said that it was weird of her to think that that kind of thing was normal for me, and then she said that she wondered if Joe would get used to social bathing when he was in Japan. I said I didn't know; it was the kind of thing I'd never thought about until I was on Earth, and it was still kind of weird to me how people wanted to hide certain parts of their bodies from everyone.

And I said it was also still a bit weird that men had nipples.

When we were back in our room, she changed into her lounging clothes and asked if I was going to be staying for the night, and I told her that I was going to go to Aric's house and spend the night with him.

She told me that there was a sex position called 'cowboy-style' and said I should try that because maybe it would help him with his monologue, and I thought that was a fun idea.

I gathered all my flight gear and hugged her before I left, then I flew over to Aric's house.

I went through his window—this time I made sure to not get stuck—and sat on the bed while he did his monologue twice, then when he got undressed and in bed I got on top of him and it was really weird but we both liked it.

June 7 [Housewarming Party]

June 7

I had all morning off, 'cause my poetry exam wasn't until after lunch. So I stayed snuggled up with Aric, just watching the birds out the window and listening to him sleep.

I'd gotten focused on the birds when he finally did wake up—I felt the bed shifting and turned an ear back to him, then I felt his hand on my side, brushing up alongside my wings and then sorta along my flank and then down my leg all the way to my hoof, and I swished my tail at him and then leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

He twisted to the side and looked out the window with me for a little bit, then started running his fingers down my back and over my dock and I responded by tickling him with my wing.

Before we got out of bed, I asked him to tell me his monologue again, and he did, and it sounded pretty good to me.

He had bought some breakfast food again because he said that since it was the last week of class it was worth eating well. He didn't make pancakes this time but he did have waffles that cooked in the toaster, and he made scrambled eggs too with a little bit of cheese in them.

All of the noise of us being in the kitchen must have woken up David and Angela, because they both came upstairs when he was putting the food on the table, and while he hadn't made enough to share, there was still food left so Angela went to the stove and cooked more eggs and David put more waffles in the toaster.

It turned out everyone had afternoon finals, and David said that we ought to have a toast, so he made some coffee for everyone from a jar of strange coffee powder and it tasted pretty bad (I wasn't the only one to think that) but we drank it anyway.

We went back up to Aric's room afterwards and I got dressed and kissed him goodbye and went out the window.

I went north, past the dirt mines, and over to farmland. Human tractors can plant their crops much more closely together than we do, so a lot of the fields weren't neat rows, but almost solid plant cover, and that was kind of strange to see.

I found another golf course, and this time I knew to avoid it so that nobody would yell at me. And then I kept flying straight even though the road turned until I came to the river, and I followed that back which was a lot of fun because I could fly right above the water and below the trees and there weren't many places I could fly that low.

Plus it made the trip back a little longer, since the river twisted around, and if I'd flown higher I probably would have taken shortcuts where it bent around a point.

I surprised a couple of men who were in a little silver boat fishing—they were both looking upriver and I just zoomed right by them and I heard one of them say something behind me but I didn't look back at them, I just kept on going.

When I got to the railroad bridge over the river, I flew up until I was safely above the tracks and the wires, and followed the rails all the way back to the base of campus, then turned toward my dorm and flew over the quad and landed on Pebble Beach and then went inside.

After last night, it felt pretty lonely in the shower, and I kind of considered going over to DeWaters to see if Meghan had taken her shower yet but she was probably either at a final or preparing for one, so I just washed myself and then went back to my room to groom.

Peggy came back in when I was preening, and I looked up long enough to greet her and then went back to work. She said that she'd just finished her math final and it was awful but she was sure she'd passed it. Then she got out a bottle of Oberon and asked if I wanted one.

I said I had my poetry final after lunch so I shouldn't, and she said that she'd heard that most poets were drunk all the time so maybe it would make more sense if I was, too. But I thought that was a bad idea—now wasn't the best time to try a new thing. And she said that she wasn't being serious, either; she agreed that it was better to be sober when taking tests but she was done with them for the day.

I read a little bit of Tagore to get in the mood for poetry class, and then we went to lunch together but I said that I wanted so sit with Leon and Cedric and Trevor, because I always did before poetry.

So we talked about finals and neither Leon or Cedric was in as much of a joking mood as they normally were—Leon kept looking at a book while he was eating, and Cedric was a little more quiet when he didn't have Leon to hassle.

He asked Trevor what we did for poetry finals—did we have to remember the names of poets or finish lines of poetry, and Trevor said that we each had to compose a couplet in full iambic pentameter on a subject which Conrad would tell us when we'd started. Then he said that as an example, if we were talking about love he might say 'I thank you for this profit, and from hence I'll love no friend, since love breeds such offense.'

Cedric just stared at him and Leon put down his book and asked how the hell had he just come up with that. And then I started to get worried, 'cause I wasn't prepared for that at all and I said that we hadn't had to do that for the last test, and had I missed something?

Then he started laughing and said he'd been lying; he'd played Othello in high school and that was something Iago had said to him and for some reason it had always stuck in his mind.

Leon said that he'd heard about Othello before and that was the play that had the greedy Jewish banker and Trevor said that he was thinking about a different play but at least he had gotten the playwright right.

Before we left for class, I told everyone about the housewarming party at my house, and they said that they'd come.

I would have liked being outside again, but we were in the classroom instead, and it was arranged back the way it usually had been, and there was a bowl on his desk with little slips of paper.

Once we all were in our seats, he said that most of us knew what was coming next, and he opened up his bag and took out a bunch of poems and then he had everyone count off and once we all knew our number he picked the first from the bowl and it was me.

So I went up front and got my poem and read over it once just to make sure that I knew all the words, then read it aloud for the whole class. It was called Trees by Joyce Kilmer, and it was kind of short but very nice, and I said that it made me think of afternoon naps on tree branches and listening to the birds calling out from the trees and then in the wintertime seeing the squirrel nests high up in the branches. And I told him that trees didn't get to choose where they lived but they made the best of it, from the twisted little trees that lived on the coast where the wind was always pushing at them, to the ones that grew on islands in rivers and got flooded every spring, and the big shade trees like the ones that were on the quad.

Then he asked me what my favorite kind of tree was, and I said that it depended on the season, because in the summertime it was nice to have shade, but in the winter if it was really windy you could get in a stand of pine trees and be warm and dry.

I was glad that I'd gotten to go first, because that meant I could really listen and enjoy all the other poems that people read, and they were all poems that were new to me and by poets we hadn't talked about in class.

When we'd finished, I went up to his desk and hugged him and said that I would miss his class, and he said that he was honored that I had been in it.

I didn't really think about it until I was back out on the quad, but that was it. My last class until summer vacation was over.

So I flew up and sat in a tree and watched people walking on the quad until it was time for dinner.

We probably would have spent a long time at the dinner table since pretty soon we were all going to go our separate ways, but everyone was coming to my party so even though I'd said it wasn't starting until eight, we all left dinner together and walked over to my apartment.

Both Peggy and Christine thought it looked pretty plain, but I said that once I put my posters up it'd look really nice and Peggy said that I only had two posters, which was true, but that was enough.

Sean put his telephone on the desk and had it play some music, and we went to the kitchen and got beer out of the electric icebox and talked until people started to show up—Aric came first, and I gave him a little tour (although with the doors all open inside, you could see all three other rooms from the living room) and then Meghan and Becky and Lisa came and after a while Cedric and Leon and Trevor did and pretty soon the whole place was full of people talking, and Keith had brought his Durak cards so a bunch of us played a round and then Cedric and Leon decided to join in even though they'd never played before, and I gave up my space because it wasn't fair to ignore my guests who weren't playing.

A couple of people brought their own food and beer, and pretty soon the kitchen counters were completely covered with more than I could eat in a week, but I'd underestimated how much people could eat and by the time everyone had left except Aric, the food was almost gone.

I said that we could go to his house, 'cause I didn't have any blankets or pillows or anything and then he said that he'd thought of that and went downstairs and when he came back he had all his blankets and pillows and he put them on the futon.

I didn't sleep all that well, 'cause it was a new place and so I kept waking up when I heard a loud car go by or strange creaking and popping noises coming from the house, and sometimes I didn't know why I'd woken up at all, but with Aric next to me I felt safe all night long.

Author's Note

Trees

June 8 [Goodbyes]

June 8

It was weird waking up in my own apartment. I guess I still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of it being mine yet. It was different than the dorm, ‘cause that was a part of the school and I hadn’t gotten to choose but here I did get to pick.

I wondered if humans normally had that kind of enthusiasm when they moved into their homes? Had Aric felt like that when he got his house? Or was it different for them? I’d never had any special attachment to temporary cloud-shelters that we sometimes built when we were out on patrols for a couple of days; maybe because there are so many apartments available humans don’t really think too much of them.

I thought that Meghan seemed pretty happy about the one she had, which I hadn’t seen yet. Maybe today after we got done at the salon we could go look at it. She said that my apartment was homey, and I hoped hers was, too.

It was too much to stay in bed, so I got out of bed and put the covers back over Aric to keep him warm, then I went into the kitchen and used the faucet to fill a cup with water—that was really convenient—and then I went around the apartment, looking out all the windows and sniffing the air to see what kind of smells were around. There was only one window that looked west which was in the kitchen, and that was kind of strange: there was another house like this one right across the driveway. It was maybe five meters away, and it might be nice to chat with the neighbors without going outside.

In the back the windows looked over a gravel parking lot that had some grass growing at the edges. There were three cars back there along with Winston and all of them looked pretty worn out. One was a squashed-down van (that style is called a station wagon), and the other two were both sleeker looking cars like Cobalt.

To the east was an open lawn that was a lot greener and more inviting. There was a brightly-colored building in the backyard that was for kids to play on, and around the edges there were little flower beds. And in the front were the big windows that faced south and let lots of light in, but it wasn’t too bright because the tree shaded it. I could imagine that in the wintertime when all the leaves were gone it would be nice and bright inside, and it always felt warmer when it was bright.

I went out on the balcony and thought about how nice it would be to put a bird feeder on the tree, up nice and high where I could look right at the birds and I bet that they would perch on the balcony railing, too, while they were waiting their turn.

I pushed the papasan chair over to the big window that looked out on the balcony and sat in it until I heard Aric waking up, then I got back in bed with him and he put his arm over my back and his head against my neck and fell asleep again for a little bit.

He was a little too tall for the futon, and I felt bad that I hadn’t gotten a bigger one but it had looked plenty large enough when I saw it. When he rolled on his back and stretched out, his head was right up against one railing, and his feet were sticking under the other.

Even so, it was plenty big enough.

There were a lot of vegetables left over from last night—nobody had seemed too interested in eating them—so that was what I had, and Aric ate potato chips, which I thought were too oily and too salty for breakfast. But he’d had a few drinks last night so maybe that would help. I’d only had a couple of beers, because I kept moving around talking to all my friends and while it was pretty convenient for people to hold beer bottles in their hands while they were talking, it wasn’t so convenient for me.

I told him that I was going to have a morning flight, and then I was going to help Peggy pack up her stuff, and after that I had an appointment at the salon. I said that since it was our last day together I wanted to stay with Peggy and he said that was okay.

I had to go back to my dorm room to get my flight gear, ‘cause I’d left it all there, but I flew out of the balcony door anyway and just kept low. There was an electricity wire that ran right along the driveway next to the tree, and it would be easy to run into it by mistake. People would be so much better off it they put them under the ground or something where they weren’t in my way. But the birds liked sitting on them and sometimes squirrels would run on them too, so I suppose they also did some good.

Peggy was still in bed when I went in the room, but she got up while I was getting dressed and hugged me and asked if I was ready to pack things up. I said that I wasn’t but at least when the summer was over we’d be back together for another quarter.

She said that she had mixed feelings about leaving, too, and told me to have a safe flight. I nuzzled her cheek and told her that I would, and then I went back out to Pebble Beach and found out that most of the area where I liked to fly was blocked off to me for a bit, because there was an air ambulance flying there.

South was available, though, so I went off that way, flying diagonally across the houses and streets until I got to Westnedge, and then I followed that south all the way to the 94 Highway, and I made a little loop around the office where Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn worked and I thought about landing and going in to surprise them but then I thought that maybe they would think that something was wrong if I showed up uninvited, so I made a big curve back north, and then flew in a straight line back to campus.

When I got back to the dorm I took my shower and then Peggy and I sat down on her bed and she had a beer and offered me one. I didn't want to take it because I thought I might spill it on her sheets—which were pretty clean—and she said it didn't matter if I did but we ought to have a toast to a good year together.

Then we just sat there, drinking in silence, and I think we were both considering how empty the room was going to look once we both packed up our things.

Lunch was kinda sad, too. Christine was leaving right after, because she had a friend who was giving her a ride to the airport so that she could fly back to New Orleans, and Sean was leaving later tonight, too. And I could see that the dining hall wasn't as full as it normally was for lunch, so a lot of people must have already left.

But it was also happy because Sean and Christine had gotten me a housewarming gift which she said they would have given to me last night but they hadn't planned on going right over. And then she picked up a bag that had been by her feet and inside was a waffle-maker. So I hugged both of them and kissed Christine on the cheek and Sean, too.

Me and Peggy spent most of the afternoon packing our things. I didn't have too much to pack, although I had more than when I'd arrived. It wasn't all going to fit in my saddlebags, 'cause I had books from class and poetry books and my calculator which I had hardly used for class, and of course my computer too.

By the time I was supposed to leave to go to the spa with Meghan, almost everything in the room had been put in boxes and bags. Peggy was pretty creative at packing all her stuff away, and it helped that she didn't have any textbooks anymore, because she'd sold them back to the bookstore. I was going to keep mine.

She still had a little more than she could fit into her suitcases, so she gave me a box of things for me to use if I wanted, like her unused shampoo and soap because she said that Cobalt was going to be pretty full and there wasn't much point in taking extra bottles back home with her.

I was glad that Aric was going to come over tomorrow and help me move, because it would be a lot quicker than me carrying a few things at a time.

I nuzzled Peggy and told her I'd be back, then went over to DeWaters to meet Meghan. She was coming down the stairs when I came in, and she said that she'd thought that I'd forgotten, and so I told her that I'd just been busy packing.

We got in the Uber-car and rode it to the spa. I told Meghan that I was going to spend the night with Peggy 'cause it was her last night and she seemed kind of disappointed so I said that we could spend the night together tomorrow in my new apartment if she didn't mind sleeping on a futon and she said that she didn't mind, and she got a little cheerier after that.

Maura gave me a good looking-over and brushed out my coat really well, and also trimmed my mane and tail while Meghan was getting her hair cut. And she'd also thought to have one of her friends come over who was a farrier, which she didn't have to do: I would have been happy to go to her friend's house.

Her friend was named Stefan and he smelled distractingly of horses, and I think he really liked Maura because I could see he'd tried to groom himself but he didn't seem to be all that good at it. And I saw the woman who was cutting Meghan's hair frown a little bit when he came in, but she didn't say anything.

Still, he was fascinated by me, and I could tell he didn't really know what to say because I think he spent a lot of his time working with the poor dumb Earth horses and maybe didn't feel all that comfortable being around one who could talk back, and so he couldn't decide how to treat me.

Once Meghan was done with her hair, we went into the back room and he had a big bag full of tools and most of them were the same as what I was used to. It took a bit of trial-and-error to find a good working position for both of us and he finally wound up sitting on the floor so that he could put my leg over his.

That wasn't the way I'd ever done it, but it was the way he was used to working.

He was happy that I kept the bottom of my hooves pretty clean; he said that he had to pick big clumps of shit out of normal hooves, then his face got red and he picked up his hoof knife and scraped a little bit around my frog (it's hard to get all the dirt out of there) and when he was satisfied he asked Meghan if I spent a lot of time on hard surfaces, and I said that I did a lot of walking on concrete and he kind of jumped because I think he forgot I could answer him.

But after that it went pretty well. He filed my hooves a little bit and made sure that they were even and trimmed my frog just a little—he wasn't sure how much he could do it without causing problems, and I wasn't sure either. It wasn't something I normally had to think about, 'cause the spa in town did it.

And I'd never gone this long without having my hooves filed, but the roads and sidewalks were really keeping them worn down.

He also filed down some of the chips so that there wouldn't be a sharp edge that might catch on something, and when he was done I stood up and walked around the room a little bit and it felt weird because he'd chosen a little bit of a different angle than I was used to, and it made my joints and muscles feel a bit weird, but it wasn’t anything unusual. In a couple days I'd be used to it.

I thanked him for helping, and he smiled and said it was his pleasure and he hadn't thought that he'd ever get to do hoof-work on an Equestrian pony.

Meghan and I had another Uber-Car take us back to Comensoli's, which is a little Italian restaurant on an island of land where all the roads and the railroad tracks come together. We both had Tortellini which are little round pastas with cheese inside, and sauce on top. Then when we were done with dinner Meghan took me to her apartment, which wasn't very far at all. It was a big house with a big porch and a lot of different doors in the front, and then when we got inside there were a couple more doors, and then a staircase that led to her room, which she said was a studio.

It was a lot like mine, but it was smaller and only had a kitchen and a bathroom and a main room. And one side didn't have any windows at all, which she said was because that was someone else's studio apartment.

I liked mine a little bit better because it had more windows and a balcony, but hers was pretty nice, too.

We walked back to campus together, and I went to her room for a little while to say goodbye to Lisa and Becky and I would have said goodbye to Amy, too, but she was already gone, and Meghan's room looked kind of empty with half the things missing and one of the beds without bedding.

I agreed to come and get her tomorrow and we'd go over to my apartment together and then I kissed her and went back to my room that wasn't going to be mine after lunch. We had our door open and Ruth and Rebekka came by and said their goodbyes, and Peggy made everyone White Russians and then a second for me because she said we might as well kill the bottle. Then we got in bed and it was really sad to think that this was going to be our last night together for a long time.

Even when the lights were out, we kept on talking about the things we'd done together and how much fun the year had been, and Peggy made me promise to come see her in Colorado and she said we'd go all sorts of fun places together, and I said that I would.

June 9 [Peggy Goes Home]

June 9

I woke up at my usual time but didn't get right out of bed to go flying, because I wanted to stay with Peggy until it was time for her to leave. So I sat at my desk and wrote in my journal some—it's almost time for a new notebook—and then thought about how it hadn't really been all that hard to put everything that we had in a few little boxes and bags and in a couple of days if anyone came into the room they would never know who had been here, and that was a kind of strange thing to think.

I guess I hadn't known who was in this room before us. Maybe it was someone who was still at college or maybe it was someone who had graduated and didn't need the room anymore.

Seems like almost everyone sleeps in really late when they don't have to go to classes, but Peggy's alarm started beeping and she didn't get up right away—she reached out from under the covers and turned it off—but the second time it started she pushed back the covers and sat up and then got out of her bed and the first thing she did was take off all the bedding and fold it up and then she stuffed it in a sack. She said that would motivate her not to get back in bed, because it was a long drive and she wanted to get to Omaha before it was too late, which was going to be where she spent the night. Colorado was too far away to get there in only one day.

She took a quick shower and got dressed in the clothes she'd set out last night, and then she put her lounging clothes in her backpack, along with her soap and shampoo. She left the towel hanging on the end of her bed so it could dry off some before she left, and then we went to breakfast together.

A lot of people must have left yesterday, because the dining hall was nearly empty. The selection of food was smaller, too; there wasn't anyone making omelets, and half the spots in the hot food counter were empty.

They still had all the different cereals, and I thought about having some of the Lucky Charms that Christine liked so much, but I stuck with my normal breakfast instead, and it seemed like it was too soon that we were done eating, and we couldn't put it off any longer, so we took our dishes back and went back to our room and she got her bags and draped the towel over my back and we went to Cobalt and she put the last of her things in the car and hung the towel over the shotgun seat and then we hugged each other and she got in Cobalt and drove off and when it turned around the corner and disappeared I felt so alone and going back to the room made it worse, because there was nothing there but my things all packed up except for the bedding.

How long would it be before our scents were gone, and the room was nothing more than just empty lifeless brick and tile?

I closed the window and bundled up my bedding and put it away and then I sent a telephone telegram to Aric to tell him that I was ready for him to move me.

It didn't take him too long to arrive, and he carried everything down and put it in Winston, then he waited until I had signed out and the room had been looked at to make sure that we hadn't broken it, and I gave my key to the RA and when she closed the door that was it.

I gave him the key to my apartment and said that I was going to walk over there to give me some time to think, and he nodded and said that he'd carry my stuff up and then we could figure out where to put it. And he leaned over and kissed me before he got in Winston, and he disappeared around the corner like Peggy had done, too.

I could have flown faster, but walking along the streets gave me time to think and wipe away a few tears as I thought about my friends who were now scattering like the leaves in an autumn wind.

By the time I got to my apartment, Aric had unloaded everything from Winston, and we spent all morning and some of the afternoon figuring out where it looked best. He set up my computer, although it couldn't do much because the cable that carried the internet wasn't connected; a workman was supposed to come out and turn the valve on but he wasn't going to come until tomorrow, and I would be gone then—Mister Salvatore was going to meet him and make sure that everything worked like it was supposed to.

We put all my books on the bookshelf, my poetry books and my math book and my climate science book and my philosophy books and my Bible and it was nice to see them all arranged in a little library instead of being stacked on my desk and dresser. And we hung up my posters, too, and put the waffle-maker in the kitchen and also cleaned up what was left of the food from the party. Aric thought it was strange that I put all the potato chips in one bag but that was a lot better than having half a dozen different mostly-empty bags.

He said that he would take me to get some food if I wanted, or we could eat here and get something sent over or just snack on what there was. Well, I didn't want there to be too much food in the apartment 'cause we were leaving on our trip tomorrow afternoon, but there wasn't enough to make a proper meal. But Aric said he didn't mind, and he'd just snack on some mystery potato chips while I had the rest of the vegetables.

If you eat breakfast late, it's called 'brunch,' but Aric said that neither 'lunner' or 'lupper' were real words.

After he was done eating he kissed me and told me to have fun with Meghan and said that if he wasn’t up yet when I got to his house tomorrow to just come up to his room and wake him up and then we'd get ready to go on our trip up north. He said he was going to spend the rest of the afternoon packing and putting the top back on Winston and I asked if he wanted any help. He said that it was generous of me to offer but he could do it by himself and I should go off and have fun.

So I put on my flight gear first and flew around the downtown for a little while, just to stretch out my wings. I didn't very often get to fly though town in the afternoon, and it was a lot different than during the day. All the stores were open, which meant that there were a lot more people on the streets, and some of them pointed up at me when I went overhead.

I hadn't visited very many stores in Kalamazoo so maybe this summer Meghan and I could go around to them and see what they had.

When I went back to campus I landed on Pebble Beach out of habit, and it wasn't until I'd opened the door into the dorm that I remembered I didn't live there anymore. So I flew down to the front door of DeWaters and let myself in and went up to Meghan's room.

It was pretty empty; Amy was gone along with all her things, and Meghan had obviously been packing and I decided that it just felt too lonely so after she'd finished filling a box, she agreed to go back to my apartment with me. I think she felt the same way.

She said that she was going to use a van called a U-Haul to move, and I'd seen a lot of them around town. They had murals on the side with the names of places, kind of like how ships usually had the name of their home port.

When we got to my apartment, Meghan noticed that I was swaying a little bit when I walked and I said it was 'cause the filing was still fresh and my legs still hadn't gotten quite used to it. Sometimes back in Equestria it might take a week or more, 'cause I didn't spend as much time on the ground, and 'cause not much had any kind of paving since it was easier on everypony's hooves for it to be grass.

I took off my flight gear and asked Meghan if she wanted to take a shower with me and she did, but she said that she didn't have a towel with her, so we decided that we could share mine. She said if she didn't get her hair wet it would be enough, and I didn't mind being a little damp until the water all evaporated.

She had to show me how to work the water—the shower in Trowbridge just has a little knob that you turn to make the water as hot as you want, but this one had three knobs. One of them was for hot and one was for cold and the middle one let you choose whether you wanted the water to come out of the showerhead or the faucet, and none of them were that easy to work with my hooves, but I knew I'd get better with practice.

It took a little while for the water to get warm, and then she wanted to close the door but I liked the natural light that came in from the windows but she said that the windows didn't have curtains on them.

She decided that it was okay if the door was half-open, because lots of light could still get in but it blocked the view from one of the windows, and then she got undressed and joined me in the shower.

By the time we were finishing up, the hot water had mostly run out and she had to turn the cold water all the way off just so what was left was warm enough. That was a bit of a disappointment; everywhere else I'd taken showers had as much hot water as I could want. Even her aunt and uncle's hot tub stayed warm, despite being outside all year long.

That just meant that we had to shower faster, though, so next time we could get in a little bit sooner and not debate the door and then we'd have plenty of time.

She dried off in the bathroom and put her shirt and panties and pants back on before she would open the door and go back into the living room, 'cause she was afraid that someone might see her through the window even though we were on the second floor and there weren't any other pegasuses in Kalamazoo.

She hung the towel on a rod over one of the windows, and said that was a good place for it to dry, even though it blocked some of the light. And then she walked around the apartment looking out the windows like I had and decided to close the kitchen door, too, because she didn't like the window that faced the next-door house.

She did like the view out the big front windows, though, and how the tree filled all of them. She said it was kind of like being in a treehouse, and turned the futon a little bit for the best view. I sat with my head on her lap and she brushed my mane and we just watched the tree and both laughed as a squirrel ran up my balcony railing and jumped into the tree.

There were some beers left over from the party so we shared them and when it was getting dark outside we turned on the lights and talked for a little while longer until it was all the way night. I folded down the futon and she helped me put my blankets on it, and she said it was funny that I only had one pillow so I told her that when she was staying with me she could be my pillow, and she said what if she wanted to use me as a pillow.

I didn't think I would be as soft of a pillow, but she took off her pants and we tried it anyway but after a little while it was obvious that it wasn't all that comfortable for either of us—it kind of hurt my wing to have her lying on it, and she said that the angle of her neck wasn't very comfortable, so we switched around to the arrangement that I thought worked best.

June 10 [Leave for up North]

June 10

Meghan must have rolled over sometime in the night, leaving me completely pillow-less. When I woke up I was on my side with my back towards her, and she had one arm on my gaskin and the other was under me.

She woke up as soon as I started moving around and ran her hand up to my stifle and then started petting me on the barrel, going against my coat but it was nice, so I didn't mind. I tilted my head back into her chest and she put her chin down on my forelock.

I let her pet me for a little bit then I pushed against her to get her to roll on her back and turned around so that I could put my head on her chest and when I did she reached up and ran her fingers through my mane.

When we were done snuggling and cuddling in bed I had to admit that I didn't have any food for breakfast except for the mixed chips and I think there was still one beer in the electric icebox unless I lost count last night. She said that was okay, we could eat later. She told me that the dining hall at college was still open, because the seniors were supposed to stay through until graduation, but she thought it would be sad and lonely to be virtually all alone there, and I agreed.

She went over to the papasan and sat down in that and looked out the front windows and I jumped up in her lap. She said if she had a brush, she'd brush out my mane, and so I got up and went to the bathroom and brought mine back (it was nice to be able to leave my grooming supplies in the bathroom and not have to carry them back and forth all the time) and gave it to her.

She made a big show of wiping it off on her shirt but I don't think she really minded. Then she brushed out my mane while I sat on her lap and she said she could do my tail, too, but there wasn't any way that we could do it comfortably on the papasan chair, so she sat on the floor and I stood in front of her and let her brush it.

While she was working, she asked a lot of questions about where we were going, and I had to admit that I didn't know. Aric and I had looked at a lot of places on the map, and some of them that I'd pointed to he knew what was there but there were a lot of other places that he'd never been to and some of them he thought would be good places to stop.

I made her keep sitting on the floor so that I could brush her hair, too, because I don't think it would have worked for us to get back in the papasan chair.

After that she got the rest of the way dressed and we decided that we'd walk to Nina's for breakfast because it would be good to have a full belly for the drive. I got an omelet and she had scrambled eggs and toast, then we walked back to campus together and she told me to call her when I was back in town and we'd do something fun together. And she said that she was going to bring over some fabric for curtains, too.

We kissed goodbye and I flew back to my apartment, just long enough to get my flight gear and my grooming supplies, then I went over to Aric's house.

His house was somewhat packed up, too. There was some stuff missing from downstairs, and when I went in his bedroom about half his things were missing and there was a collection of boxes on the floor.

He was asleep in bed, and I woke him up by yanking the blanket off him and then stretching out on his chest. Then I told him that it was time to get up because I was ready for the road trip and he said I was too enthusiastic for this early in the morning. I told him that it was nearly eleven, and he blinked and looked at his telephone and said that it was a good thing he'd packed everything last night.

I asked if there was anything I could do to help, and he said that he was ready to go, all he had to do was get dressed and I swear he took forever on purpose. So I said that I was going to fill up the birdfeeder so they wouldn't go hungry while he was gone and he told me not to steal any sunflower seeds this time.

I said that he couldn't stop me if he was naked, and flew out the window and down to the garage. Cause I knew he'd be watching, I took the bag right outside and flew it up to the feeder and dumped it in without taking any of the sunflower seeds from it, then I closed the lid and put the bag back in the garage where it went.

Then when I came back out, I shook a bunch of the seeds into the tray and ate the sunflower seeds before going back up to his room. I told him I wanted to make sure it was working properly.

He said that in all of his life, he'd never thought he'd have a girlfriend who ate out of birdfeeders, and he'd dated a rennie before.

I didn't know what that was, and he said that it was someone who worked at Renaissance festivals, which was sort of like the SCA event but bigger and with a whole lot more people.

So I asked if there were any of them in Michigan, and he said there was a big one in a town called Holly and I said that I wanted to go to it.

He told me he'd be back before it was over and it would be a lot of fun to go together.

Then he put on his shirt and patted his pockets to make sure he had his things and he said that he was ready to go.

He started Winston and said that the most fun thing about road trips was the trip itself, so he was going to make it his mission to avoid major highways wherever possible, and we'd just go wherever we felt like for the next week.

Once we were across the 131 Highway, he turned off on 9th Street and drove all the way to H Ave. and then went out that way, over the part where it turned to dirt and where we'd spent the night in the clearing in Winston. He had to zig-zag as roads ended as we went on—one thing about the back roads, he told me, was that they didn't always go all that far before they stopped, but that was what made it fun.

It was weird when we crossed into another county, all the roads had numbers, and as we kept working our way north they counted down, until we were on 4th Ave, then we went up 46th Street and wound up on 102nd Ave. He said it was because we'd crossed into another county and they had a different way of numbering.

I thought that would be kind of confusing, but I guess it made sense to humans.

It was kind of like riding on the train because there was hardly any other traffic, and we passed through farmland and woods and over rivers and by ponds.

I asked him if he knew where he was, and he said that he had no idea, but he knew that if he kept driving generally west eventually he'd reach Lake Michigan, and after that as long as we kept the lake to our left, we'd be going north.

That sounded like good enough directions to me.

We eventually did get to the lake after crossing the 196 Highway, and turned onto a road called Lakeshore Drive, which I thought was a good name for it. We were kind of back a ways, so we couldn't see it very much, but sometimes there were openings and there it was.

We ran out of road in Saugatuck, and had to backtrack to find a bridge that went across. Aric looked at his map and said that this was the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, and I thought that was kind of neat—we'd been driving for a couple of hours already, and now we were at the place where the river ended.

I was curious where its source was, and Aric said that he didn't know but he thought it must be this side of Jackson, because he said that the Grand River started in Jackson and we hadn't crossed that yet.

We had to do another detour around a big lake called Lake Macatawa, which was in Holland. He said it was named after a Holland in Europe, and that there was a genuine Dutch windmill there, and I wanted to go see it, so he checked the map and drove to Windmill Island, which is where it was.

We had to park and then go across a little suspension bridge to get to the island, and when we got inside everything looked pretty familiar but it was bigger than what I was used to. Aric started trying to explain what things were, but he was just guessing, and I had to explain it to him. He might be smart about machines but he didn't know anything about windmills.

He wanted to know how I knew so much, and I said that windmills were an important part of the Equestrian economy because that's how grain was turned into flour and practically every village had one or more and when I was a filly our teacher took us to visit one and the miller showed us around.

When we were done there, we had to go through downtown Holland before we could get back on the coastal road.

We stopped at a little park for dinner, and it gave me a chance to fly over the lake some and stretch my wings out.

He drove us a little bit further, all the way up to Muskegon, and then we went to a big park there that let you spend the night. There were people that had white wheeled houses which were called Arveys and also some people had tents and all we had was Winston, but that was all right. That just meant that we didn't have anything to set up.

He said it was the beginning of the busy season, and after the Fourth of July it would be pretty packed but there were still a lot of kids in school so there weren't that many families out yet.

He parked Winston so that the tailgate faced the water, and we walked around the park and down towards the water and he sat on the beach while I played in the water and made friends with a couple of kids who were building little towers out of sand that kept collapsing when the water hit them.

When it started to get dark, I went back and sat next to him, and we watched the sun set over the lake, and when it had gone below the horizon a few people on the beach started clapping. Aric said that was silly, but I thought it was nice. Maybe the sun does set every day whether you watch it or not, but there's nothing wrong with appreciating it.

Back at our campsite, we sat on the tailgate for a while and then I got inside and Aric closed it and climbed over, then pulled the big glass back window shut. There were sliding windows on the side and in the front that let a nice breeze in, and we snuggled up inside a pile of blankets he'd brought.

June 11 [Muskegon to Platte River]

June 11

Aric woke up at the same time that I did. He said that he didn't sleep as well in the back of Winston as he did at home. It certainly wasn't as comfy as a normal bed; even with the blankets and stuff he'd put down it was still pretty hard.

We didn't have sex, 'cause he said that there were too many people around and some of them might get mad, but he promised me when we got further north that wouldn't be a problem. Right now we were too close to all the tourists.

It was funny to watch him get dressed, 'cause he couldn't stand up, so he had to pull on his underwear and pants while he was sitting down, and he could put on his shoes but not tie them. I was glad I didn't have to worry about that.

He had to get out first and open the tailgate for me, and then we went to the little bathroom building that they had, and he asked if I wanted to get on the road right away, or play on the beach a little bit.

I said that since we were up, we might as well start driving, unless he wanted to have breakfast first. He said that we could get it on the road, so we got in the cab and he started up Winston, and we stopped at a Tim Horton's and got breakfast and coffee and then stopped at a gas station so that Winston could have gas, and then we went back on the Lakeshore Drive, which was now called Scenic Drive.

We had to go around a lake and there was a short section of road that was almost on the beach. Aric said that when we got to the Upper Peninsula, there was a lot of road like that, and I told him that the train in California had been right along the beach, too. It looked like when it was stormy, waves could come right up over the road, and there was a lot of sand that was covering the sides of the road.

The road turned a little bit after that and we had to go through Whitehall and Montague before we could get back to the lake. There were a lot of lakes and channels and harbors and there weren't a lot of bridges across them until you got inland. I didn't mind, though; it was fun to look at the harbors and all the boats in them. There were lots of sailboats, although most of them only had one mast, and other boats that didn't have masts at all. Aric said that the bigger ones had an engine like Winston, and the smaller ones had an engine that hung off the back called an outboard motor. I'd seen those kinds of boats when I was in South Haven, and some of them were pretty noisy. I think I would rather be on a sailboat.

We had to backtrack a couple of times, 'cause the roads Aric found that went to the water didn't intersect with any roads that went north, and the one that he did find ended. It had little houses on either side that he said were cottages, and he said that people went to them for vacations, but usually didn't live there all year long.

We stopped at another park called Silver Lake, and that one had a big sand dune that was covered in all sorts of cars and trucks that were racing up to the top of the sand dune. They all had big flags on them so that they could be seen, and I said that he ought to get a flag and we could go drive on the dune, too, but Aric said that Winston wasn't built for that kind of thing. He said that it took special tires and four-wheel-drive and besides you had to have a bunch of permits.

It was a lot of fun to watch, though. There were open cars that were called dune buggies, and there were also cars that were just a frame of pipes which he said were called sand rails.

I flew around a little bit, but I stayed a little bit away because sometimes they were going so fast that they jumped when they got to the top of a dune, and it looked like if they went much faster they could fly for a while, and I didn't want to get hit by a flying car.

When I'd landed, though, Aric said he didn't think that could happen. He said that cars couldn't fly that far, but I thought it was still better to be cautious about it.

It took a while before we found a road that went along the lakeshore again. He thought that probably all the sand dunes was why there weren't any—he said that this part of the state was mostly sand dunes on the west side, and he said that somewhere up here there was a big artificial lake that was a pumped-storage facility, which was where extra electricity was used to pump water into a lake and then when there wasn't enough electricity, it was drained out which turned turbines that made electricity.

He told me that that had been built because it took a really long time to turn Pallisades Nuclear Power Plant on and off, but he thought that the same idea could be used for wind turbines, which were windmills that made electricity. He said that he thought that Michigan could get a lot of money that way, but he said that the current governor wasn't interested in clean energy or clean water.

When we got to Ludington, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant he'd heard about called PM Steamers. He said it was named that because the Pere Marquette Railroad used to own a fleet of ships that took trains across Lake Michigan all the way to Wisconsin, but they didn't do that any more. He said that there was one of them still in Elberta, and we could see it when we got there. And he said that there was still one in Ludington that took cars across Lake Michigan, and I thought that would be really fun to ride on. He said that he'd never done it, but maybe we could on the trip back.

The restaurant had lots of pictures of the ships and trains, and I would have liked to get a closer look at some of them but it would have been rude to fly over people's tables as they were eating, so I had to look at a distance.

I didn't like our waitress; she had kind of a scowl and took her time giving us food. When we were done eating, Aric said that he was tempted not to tip her, but if he did she'd probably still have bad feelings, so he left her a ten dollar bill under his glass, which was half as much as the dinner had cost.

We had to zigzag a lot after we left Ludington, and he wound up on a couple more roads that just ended near the lake without connecting to anything. He said that they needed better signs, 'cause he went past a lot that said 'No Outlet' and 'Dead End,' but they didn't all say that. And he found one road that was dirt and had an open gate at the end and we started going down that and after a while where there weren't any houses or signs or anything else he said that he thought it might be a fire trail, and he couldn't decide if he should keep on going or back out, until we got to a hill that he didn't think Winston could get up without getting stuck, then he did have to back all the way to the road, because there wasn't any room to turn around.

After we got through Manistee, he found Lakeshore Road again, and we kept following that up the coast, and then it went back inland to get around another harbor and he found M-22, which he said was also a very scenic route, and he said that we'd follow that for a while.

It was nearly dinnertime when we got to Frankfort and Elberta, which Aric said was near the park where we were going to camp tonight. He went around the harbor but couldn't find the ship, which he said was really odd because he remembered that it had been there. I said maybe they were using it again, and he said that was unlikely. It was more likely that it had sunk, but he said that he didn't think the harbor was deep enough for it to have disappeared all the way.

He stopped in a parking lot and said that maybe it was somewhere close and he just didn't remember exactly where it was, but after he checked his pocket telephone a bit he found out that it was in Manistee now, which meant that we'd passed it without seeing it.

We found a restaurant that was called L'Chayiam, and Aric said that name sounded really familiar to him but he couldn't remember why. They had lots of different sandwiches, and an open kitchen where you could see them making the bagels, which was really neat. I was a little wary, because I'd tried bagels before but they weren't very good, but Aric told me that there was a big difference between these and the ones that the dining hall had, and he was right.

Plus the people there were all nice. An older couple came over and introduced themselves and were really curious about me because they said that they'd seen pictures before but never seen an actual pony, and they wound up sitting with us, and we talked through dinner, and then they insisted on paying for it, too, which was really nice of them.

When we were done eating, we drove out to the beach and walked all the way out to the lighthouse at the end of the jetty, and I flew over the harbor a little, but not too far, since I wasn't wearing any of my flight gear.

I managed to attract a bit of an audience of people who were already on the jetty, and so I did a couple of wing-rolls and a loop just for fun, then got a bit of altitude and swooped down along next to the jetty, just above the water, before going up and over and back the other way, and I heard a couple of people clapping for me when I landed.

On our way back, we passed a few kids who wanted to pet me, and one little boy who asked if I knew Iron Man, 'cause I flew like him, and I said that I didn't, and so the boy told me how awesome Iron Man was. He said that his friend Billy from school said that Wolverine was better but Wolverine couldn't fly so obviously Iron Man was better.

We drove to the Platte River campground, and there were a bunch of Arveys parked in some of the loops, but Aric found one where there were hardly any people, and he said it was because these spots didn't have any electricity. So he backed into one that didn't have any neighbors on either side, and then he gathered together a bunch of wood for a campfire, and set it up but he said it wasn't time to start it yet, because we ought to go down to the beach and watch the sunset.

We had to walk along the beach for a while, because we were in a bay and the shore was looking north, but I didn't mind. It felt good to stretch my legs after being in Winston most of the day.

The sunset was just as beautiful as it had been last night, and when it was over we kissed and then made our way back to the campsite. It was pretty dark when we got back, and Aric started the fire and then got out some beer and we sat next to each other watching the flames and drinking beer.

He said that tomorrow night, we'd be far enough north that instead of having a fire, we'd go and look at all the stars. I could tell even through the gaps in the trees that there were a lot more of them than I could see in Kalamazoo, and I would have flown up to get a better look but it was nice sitting by the fire with his arm around me.

We shared memories of being in the wilderness at night while the fire burned down and when it eventually started to really die out, Aric poured a bunch of water on it to make sure it was really out and then he used a small folding shovel to stir around the ashes.

Aric used a lantern to pick up the empty beer bottles and put them on the picnic table so that we wouldn't accidentally step on one in the night and break it, then we got in the back of Winston and I said that we didn't have any nosy neighbors tonight and he said that was true, and took off his clothes.

June 12 [Platte River to Leelanau Peninsula]

June 12

We got off to a late start, 'cause it was foggy outside. I had to wake Aric up so that I could get out and pee, and it was just barely light out and the fog was so thick I couldn't see the other end of our campsite.

He said he had to pee, too, and he put on his pants even though it was so foggy that nobody could have seen him if he hadn't, but he didn't put on shoes so he had to sit on the tailgate and brush the dirt off his feet when he got back to Winston.

Fog always feels weird, 'cause it's being in a cloud when your hooves are on the ground, and there hadn't been many fogs since I'd been on Earth, so I'd kind of lost familiarity with them. Since it was here, though, it was good practice to move it around, so I trotted around our campsite and managed to break off a big chunk of it and sort of compact it down into a little angry cloud that promptly rained out on the ground until it turned back into a little fogcloud.

Aric thought that was really amazing, but I hadn't accomplished anything: the rest of the fog just came back in, and in five minutes you couldn't even tell what I'd cleared. But he wanted me to do it again, so I did, and then he went over and poked at my little cloud and said that it was a lot colder and wetter than he'd expected it to be. And when he took his hand away, he was surprised at how wet it was, and wiped it off on his pants.

I told him that the ones up high were even colder, then I let my second cloud go and it rained out another wet spot on the ground and went back to being fog.

We got back up inside Winston, and he took off his pants and we both watched out the back, and we took our time with me on top for a while and then he was and he said that he'd never noticed before how he could tell by my ears whether I was paying attention to him or not, and he tried to balance himself on one hand and turn my ears back to him when I heard something crunching through the trees.

Then both of us stopped because there was a fat raccoon that came out of the fog and he sniffed around and got up on the picnic table and started to smell the beer bottles but he knocked them over and noise scared him enough that he bolted off into the fog even before Aric started laughing at him.

Even after we were done, we stayed curled up under the blankets until the fog started to thin a little bit, then Aric started a fire again and said that today we'd be eating camp food for breakfast, so while he was getting that ready, I sat at the picnic table and wrote in my journal which he said was really funny.

He had little packets of oatmeal, which had maple syrup and brown sugar in it and it was really good, and once I'd licked my cup clean (and he'd wiped some stray oatmeal off my muzzle) he refilled my cup with coffee crystals. It still tasted kind of bitter, but somehow it tasted better than it had at his house.

He said that everything tastes better when you're camping.

We sat around until the fire died down, and I played a little bit more with the thinning fog, then he put out the fire and I packed up the beer bottles and we got in Winston and went back on the road.

We didn't go too far to our first stop, which was the next park. It was called Sleeping Bear Dunes, and it was a really big sand dune. There was an observation balcony at the top, where we could look over the lake, and he said that when he was in Boy Scouts, they had gone there and all the younger kids had run down the dune to the water without realizing that it was easy to go down but not so easy to get back up. He had stayed at the top with the rest of the leaders, like a smart person.

I wanted to go down, and I didn't have to worry about how hard it was to trot in loose sand, so I glided off the balcony and all the way down to the bottom, then circled out over the lake to lose some of my momentum, and also to look around in the water. It was pretty clear and I could see some big fish swimming around but there weren't any people fishing who might want to know.

I dipped my hooves in the lake, and then made a couple of climbing circles until I was as high as the balcony, and took a good look around the lake. It was just like the ocean—even from my height, I couldn't see anything but water off in the distance (it was still kind of hazy, though, so maybe I could have seen the other side if it was clear).

There were more people crowding on the balcony, so when I was nearly back, Aric left his spot and started walking along the path and I landed next to him and nuzzled his hip.

We tried to keep along the lake as we kept going northeast, but it was pretty challenging, 'cause there were still a lot of roads that didn't go through, so Aric had to backtrack a couple of times, but that was all right. Some of the roads just had a barrier right at the very end to keep you from driving into the lake, and we'd stop there and get out and walk down the beach and look at the water. He said that he hoped we'd see a ship (and I did, too) but there didn't seem to be any. He said it was because ships stayed further out here.

Back in the old days, though, he said that the Great Lakes were very dangerous for ships, because they would stay close to shore so they could navigate, and if a storm came, their only hope for safety was to make a port—he said that they couldn't outrun a storm like they could at sea, because the land was too close, and he told me that the Great Lakes were littered with shipwrecks, and there was a shipwreck museum we could go to.

We stopped for lunch in Leland at a restaurant called The Village Cheese Shanty, because he said with a name like that it would be a crime not to stop there. They had really good sandwiches and he also bought some cheese to take with us. He said that once we got further north we'd have to have our own food with us, and that before we crossed the bridge he was going to fill the cooler he had in the back.

Once we were done eating, we walked around the harbor and looked at the boats there. There weren't that many because the harbor was pretty small and the river through town had a dam in it, so boats couldn't go very far upstream.

Aric also stopped to put more fuel in Winston, because he said that there wasn't going to be anyplace to stop as far as he could remember, and we also got some more beer so that we'd have it for tonight. Then we drove up the peninsula until M-22 ended and we had to get on another road called M-201 which he said went all the way to the tip of the Leelanau peninsula.

It was kind of weird driving along the road because there wasn't any traffic going the other way. Aric said that was because we were still early in the vacation season, and that meant that there probably wasn't going to be anybody at the park.

But he said it still felt kind of weird.

We got to the park and he drove around until he found a good campsite that was near the beach. Compared to the last two, it was pretty deserted—there were a couple of Arveys parked near the entrance but that was all.

Right down by the beach, there was a sign that pointed towards some islands out in the lake, and we could actually see one of them off in the distance. Aric said it was Beaver Island, and that the others were too low to see. He was pretty sure that there was a lighthouse on South Fox Island, and he said that maybe if we came here after dark, we'd be able to see its light.

Since we had some time before dark, I asked if he minded if I went flying, and he said he didn't mind at all, so we walked back to Winston and I put on my flight gear while he used his telephone to find out what I needed to set the radio to in order to talk to the nearby airport.

It took them a little while to give me clearance to fly, because they couldn't figure out what airport I was departing from and they had a very hard time understanding that I wasn't leaving from an airport at all but from the state park, and then a different person asked me what kind of aircraft I was and I said that I was an ornithopter and he asked if that was a kind of drone.

I finally had to tell them what my flight rules were before they decided that it was okay, and I was getting pretty frustrated by the time I was done, but it was important to make sure that everyone knew what kind of airspace I needed to be safe.

I went a little bit north over the lake, and it didn't take me too long before I was high enough to see the other islands that couldn't be seen from the ground. If I'd been by myself, I think it would have been fun to fly to them, but it would be rude to Aric to leave him behind for hours.

We were at the very end of a long peninsula that made a big bay, which was partially split in two by another short, thin peninsula. There were lots of boats in it, most of them down towards the bottom of the bay.

There were also some boats out in the lake, but not as many. I could see a really big boat off in the distance that must have been one of the ships that Aric was hoping we'd see. From where it was, though, I didn't think he'd be able to see it from the land, and it didn't look like it was going to get close enough unless it turned and went into the bay.

I also saw an orange and white helicopter off in the distance, and as I flew around it started to get closer, which made me a bit nervous. It seemed to be heading in my direction, and I didn't want to be too close to it, so once it was a couple of miles away, I dived down towards the water to get out of its way. It shouldn't have been there, unless the airplane directors misunderstood where I was flying, or I hadn't understood their directions.

I'd gotten my wings pretty well-stretched anyway, so I flew low over the water until I was back at the lighthouse, and then landed on the grass next to it and walked back to our camp. On the way back, I called the airplane directors and told them that I had landed and I thought about saying something about the helicopter but I didn't.

I could still hear it out there, though, flying around.

When I got back to the campsite, we had dinner, which was some of the cheese he'd bought from the Village Cheese Shanty and crackers that were called Triscuits. He also had a bag of sunflower seeds that he said he'd bought just for me.

We went down to the beach right by our campsite after we were done eating, and he had to pick his path pretty carefully because the ground was wet. I just happily splashed through the water, but I had to be really careful ‘cause of all the loose rocks that could make me slip and hurt a leg.

At the very edge of the water there were a lot of flat rocks that were all piled on top of each other, and Aric told me that the wave action stacked the rocks, and I thought that was really neat . . . until he started laughing and I realized that he was lying. But I did wonder why someone would have done that, and he said that he didn’t know.

We were on the wrong side of the peninsula to see the sunset, which was too bad.

Before it was all the way dark, we made our way back to more solid ground. I flew, while he took a careful route again, and then we sat on a bench that overlooked the water and watched the stars start to appear overhead, first one or two and then hundreds and then thousands and thousands of them, dotting the whole sky and it was the most I’d seen since I left Equestria.

June 13 [Leelanau Peninsula to Wilderness State Park]

June 13

It was chilly and overcast when I woke up, and I could feel the oncoming rain in the air. Aric was cuddled against me, and since he was naked and coatless he was probably pretty cold, so I stretched my wing out over him to help keep him warm.

One thing that Winston wasn't very good at was keeping the wind at bay, and even though there wasn't all that much, I could feel little gusts blowing through the edges of the tailgate and the rusty holes in the sides.

He shifted around in his sleep and tucked his head into my neck and I kissed him on the forehead and closed my eyes again and slept a bit longer, until I felt him shift around and try to pull me tighter against him, which didn't really work with my wing stretched out. And I woke him up when I tucked it back in, even though I didn't mean to.

It was a little bit strange to try and stay all the way under the covers, and he kept having to pull them up when I got too enthusiastic, but we made it work and afterwards he said it was good practice for when we were further up north, where it would be even colder even though it was almost summer.

He said that humans had had to adapt to cold climates and could have sex while mostly dressed. He said that was how humans has survived the last ice age.

I told him that I thought it made more sense to have a nice coat all the time, and get furrier in the winter to keep off the cold.

Aric got dressed while still under the covers and then opened the tailgate to let us out, then after he'd watered a tree he started to build a fire so that we could have breakfast, which was the same oatmeal and coffee as yesterday.

After he was satisfied that the fire was out, we got in the cab and continued our trip, which started with some backtracking, since we were as far north as we could get on this peninsula. Once we got to Northport, though, he took a different route that followed along the shore of the bay.

We drove through Traverse City, which he said was an important city up north, and was famous for its cherries. It was the biggest city we'd gone through since Holland, and it was kind of weird to be in that much traffic all of a sudden when there had been barely any before.

He stopped at the bottom of the bay, and we got out of Winston and he took me to a little park that had a miniature train that we could ride on. The man selling the tickets for it seemed confused that I wanted to ride on the train, too, but Aric convinced him that it was okay, and we got seats right in the front.

It was really fun to ride, and it smelled a lot nicer than the big trains that I'd been on, plus it had a proper steam whistle instead of an annoying horn. When I closed my eyes, it was just like riding a train back home, and I was glad that he'd thought to stop so that we could ride on it.

The train just went in a big loop, so when the trip was over, we were back where we'd started, so we walked back to Winston and continued on our journey.

Once we'd gone around the base of the bay and back up the other side, I saw a skyscratcher in the distance and asked Aric what it was. He said that it was the Turtle Creek Casino, which was a place where you could play card games and win or lose money.

I asked if we could go there, and he sighed and then said that if I just took my money and threw it on a fire it would at least keep me warm, but then he turned around in a parking lot and made me promise no matter what to not spend more than twenty dollars.

The inside was full of bright light and noises and it was kind of overwhelming, and I didn't know how any of the games worked. I had traded some money for plastic tokens that were used in the casino, and Aric said that the best way to spend it all was to try each game once and then move on.

So first I tried blackjack, and I lost, and then I tried craps and I lost that too, and then I tried a slot machine and it took my token and didn't give me anything. I went to another table and played a game of Texas hold-em, and I had to bet so many times that I was down to only one token.

He said that I should keep that as a souvenir, but I thought I might as well lose it on another game, so I went over to a roulette table, and Aric started to explain the rules to me, but before he could they called for bets, and I put the token down on my birthday.

The man spun the wheel and the little ball landed on my number and I got a big pile of tokens and I asked Aric what I should do now, and he told me to never play roulette again.

The man who spun the wheel was kind of sad to see me leave (Aric said that they were hoping I'd bet again and lose all the money I'd just won), and we went and changed all my tokens back into money except for the one I'd bet on the table because I thought he was right about keeping it. Maybe I could have a hole drilled in it and keep it as a necklace.

When we were out in the parking lot, Aric told me about the odds on the wheel, and how bad a single number bet was, and it made a lot of sense, even though he was wrong about the odds of winning—they were worse than he thought. But I didn't care; I'd come out of the casino with more money than I went in with, and from what he said that was a rarity.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Torch Lake Cafe, and I had a cheese quesadilla and sweet potato wedges. Aric had a BLT, which is bacon lettuce and tomato, and he let me have a bite of his sandwich.

A little further north, he turned off into another park which was called Fisherman's Island State Park, and drove all the way to the very end of the road there and then parked Winston and we went for a walk on the beach.

There was a little piece of land he said was called Fisherman's Island, and depending on what the water level was, it was either an island or not.

The water was deep enough that it was an island, but only barely. He took off his shoes and rolled up the bottom of his pants, while I just splashed through the shallows, and we crossed onto the island. There was a lot of land back home that was underwater or not depending on the tides, but he said that on the Great Lakes there wasn't enough tide to make a difference, it was a matter of rainfall and summer temperatures and ice cover in the wintertime, and he told me that the lake levels were up because a couple winters back there had been almost complete ice coverage which made the water not evaporate.

I told him I was familiar with climate science.

Even if I hadn't been, it was obvious that this land had been above water recently, because there were bushes growing out of the shallow water, and they didn't look like they were too happy about being submerged. I suppose Aquamarine would have known better.

When we were at the very end of the island, Aric asked if I wanted to be bad, and I asked him what he meant, and he said that he'd always wanted to have sex outside in broad daylight somewhere and this was the perfect place to do it because there probably wasn't anybody else for miles around. Then he laughed when I looked up right after he said that, and said I must be the only pegasus in a hundred miles or more—he didn't think that Michigan was a destination for most ponies, and he was probably right, although I thought that they didn't know what they were missing.

We went back into the bushes a little bit and found a nice clear spot and even though it was his idea he was a bit reluctant to take off all his clothes, until I told him that if he really wanted to do it he had to do it all the way.

Afterwards, we lay on our backs and looked up at the clouds for a while and said what they looked like, and I bet him that he wouldn't stay naked until we'd gotten back to the mainland.

He did, but he cheated and led me around the other side of the island, and he had me fly ahead and make sure that there wasn't anyone on the beach.

I suppose that still counted, though.

I don't think he'd planned to spend so much time at Fisherman's Island. It was nearly dinnertime when we got back to Winston, and we didn't come across anyplace to eat until we got to Charlevoix. We stopped at Subway for food, which was like Jimmy John's, but not as good.

He told me when we were back in the truck that he'd planned to stay at Wilderness State Park for the night, but now he wasn't sure that we'd make it there unless we skipped the Tunnel of Trees and there was no sense in going up north without visiting that.

I said that I was sorry I'd wanted to stop at the casino, and he told me that I shouldn't be sorry; he'd never seen anyone win at roulette on a single-number bet or walk out with more than they went in with and that was totally worth it. He told me as long as I didn't go into another, I would have beat the system, and that was something to be proud of.

We did make it to the tunnel of trees while it was still light out, and I could see why it had been named that. The road went through trees that completely overhung it sometimes, and other times it was open and you could see Lake Michigan off to the left, and once the sun started to get low and paint the sky in reds and oranges it was even more beautiful and I could see why it was a place that we just had to visit.

He stopped at the very south end of Wilderness State Park so that we could watch the sunset, and then when we got back in Winston he apologized for having to use his telephone map to find the campground, but said that it was late and he didn't want to spend half the night blundering around in the dark. And even though I'd thought we were pretty close, since we'd already crossed into the park, it was quite a while before we got to the campground.

Like the Leelanau State Park, it was practically deserted, and we had our pick of spots. He found one that was pretty close to the lake, close enough that I could hear the waves crashing on the beach, and once Winston was settled for the night we went down to the water and he pointed out all the different lights in the lake. One of them was a freighter, and as we watched it slowly plodded its way east. There were also some red lights that he said were navigation buoys, and off in the distance a long string of light which he said were the Mackinac Bridge which we'd be driving over tomorrow.

June 14 [Wilderness State Park to Carp River]

June 14

It was warmer and not as windy when I woke up, and a little bit stuffy because Aric had closed the windows so we wouldn't be as cold, so I pushed the back window open and stuck my head out to get some fresh air.

He'd parked with the back of Winston facing the water, and I just watched it until I felt his hand brushing at my tail, then when he didn't get my attention that way he sat up and scooted to the back next to me and looked out at the lake, too.

Aric pointed across the lake at the Upper Peninsula, and he said that it got a lot closer where the bridge was. And he said once he got dressed we could go down to the beach and we'd be able to see the Mackinac Bridge off in the distance, although some of it was going to be blocked by land.

He didn't have to tell me what he wanted to do before he got dressed, so I tugged the back window back down.

When he'd put on his clothes, we walked down the beach so that I could see the bridge. It was kind of hard to tell how big it was for sure, 'cause I didn't know how far away from it we were, but I thought we must have been at least a half-dozen miles away, and it was big. He said we'd be driving over it later, which I was looking forward to.

Aric said that if I flew up, I could get a better view of it, since I'd be able to see over the headland, and he promised while I was doing that he'd start a fire and make breakfast.

It was too bad that I couldn't share the view with Aric. On one side, the land came together and the bridge stretched between the narrowest point, and on the other the lake kept widening, to where the Upper Peninsula disappeared in the haze. I could also see off to the west a lighthouse that was built right in the lake, and it was hard to imagine how someone could live there and tend to the light.

When I landed, we had oatmeal and coffee for breakfast again, and when we were done he put out the fire and we got in Winston and drove towards Mackinaw City, which Aric said was the northernmost town in the Lower Peninsula.

There was a famous island called Mackinac Island that was out in the strait, and he told me how the island didn't allow any cars so there were lots of horses, then he said that we could go there today, although we might have to skip some stuff later if we did.

I thought about it—it sounded like a fun place—but it also kind of seemed like Equestria and I thought that maybe it wasn't smart on a vacation to go to a place like home.

On another hoof, even if the buildings were the same and the wagons were the same, I knew from the horse show that how people worked with them was different than what I was used to, so there might still be things to learn.

I must have been completely lost in thought, 'cause when I was still thinking, Aric poked my shoulder and when I looked over at him, he told me I'd zoned out there for a minute.

I told him that I couldn't decide what I wanted to do, and he said that we'd get groceries and if the total was an even number we'd go to Mackinac Island, and if not, we wouldn't on this trip and do it as a weekend trip later instead. He said if we went straight there from Kalamazoo, we could leave on a Friday, spend all Saturday and some of Sunday on the island, and then get back home.

It was kind of funny that we could easily see the Mackinac Bridge from the park, but then it wasn't until we were almost in town that we saw it again over an open field, and it was even bigger than I'd thought.

He said just wait until we got on it.

We went to a grocery store, and got beer and stuff to make sandwiches and then because I insisted a lot of vegetables too, and he also got some graham crackers and marshmallows and chocolate bars and I found they had some anchovies so we got those too, and he also bought a big bag of ice. Then he put all the stuff that was supposed to be kept cold and the ice in a beat-up green icebox he had which he hadn't used yet, and the rest of the things went into a plastic container that he said would at least slow down any animals who wanted to steal our food.

It wound up being an odd number of money, and he said that the gods had spoken and we were going to the UP today. Then he said before we left we had to go to the waterfront and find a fudge shop because you couldn't visit Mackinaw City and not buy fudge.

They made it right where you could watch, pouring it out on a big table and using a long scraper to level it, and it all smelled really good. There were lots of different kinds, and so we got one block of maple and one of chocolate with walnuts, and the girl at the counter put them in a little white box for us.

We had to get on the 75 Highway to use the bridge. It wasn't very fast because right after we got onto it we had to stop at a booth and pay to use the bridge. Aric said sometimes in tourist season it took a long time to get on the bridge, and sometimes they had to close it to traffic because it was too windy.

The road went up and up and then we passed a big concrete bunker and the cables started rising up, and I just kept looking around, trying to see everything. I noticed that the center lane of the bridge was grating like the drawbridges we'd gone over and asked Aric if this one opened, too (I didn't see how it could, it was so big). He said it was so the wind wouldn't blow it over.

I thought he was joking about that, but he told me that there had been a similar bridge in Washington that had blown apart in strong winds, and so the designers of the Mackinac Bridge had wanted to make sure that that couldn't happen to this one.

We passed under the first tower, which was itself as tall as a skyscratcher and I bet there was an amazing view from the top. Even where I was, I could see the lakes widening out on both sides of the bridge, Lake Michigan on the left and Lake Huron on the right.

He pointed out Mackinac Island and another, bigger island that he said was Bois Blanc, which he had sailed to once. There was one between them, but he didn't know what it was called.

I was kind of sad once we crossed under the second tower. I wish we could have stopped, but he said that people weren't allowed to stop on the bridge unless it was an emergency, which was a shame. People always seem to be in a rush to get where they're going and they don't take the time to stop and look around them. Probably everyone else on the road was just hurrying along to get where they were going and weren't thinking about the scenery at all.

There was a long jetty on the north side of the bridge which we had to drive across before we were finally in the Upper Peninsula.

Aric said that he was going to break his rule about driving on the highway for a little bit, because he thought the best place to get lunch would be Sault Ste. Marie, and then after that we'd take back roads.

We got there a little quicker than he'd expected, and it wasn't lunchtime yet, so he parked Winston and we got out and went to a little museum about the Soo Locks, which was where ships from Lake Superior went through to Lake Huron.

The museum had displays explaining how the locks had been built and then enlarged as ships got bigger, and there were lots of historical pictures of people working on them. They also had a really big topographical map of Michigan and the lake bottoms, which showed just how deep some of the lakes were.

They also had little cards that gave facts about the locks, and Aric called my attention to one that said that a ship called the Perry G. Walker had once crashed through the locks.

He told me that outside there were observation platforms, and there was a schedule of when they'd be passing through, and there was one coming soon.

So we went out and had lunch, and then we came back and went into the observation balcony to see the locks work. It was coming up from the east, which Aric said meant that it was coming from Lake Huron and was an upbound ship. Right in the front it had a big white bowhouse on it with the name Michipicoten spelled out all the way across the front, and when it started to get close, it began blowing its horn, signaling to anyone else on the water I suppose.

It was kind of hard to get a good sense of just how big it was until it got close, and then I started to think that it wouldn't fit in the lock at all, but I suppose that the sailors all know how big their ship is and where it will fit.

It took a while to get it into the right position, but once it was settled in the doors closed and at first there didn't seem to be much going on, and then all of a sudden it began to rise, and it didn't take that long at all before it was towering over the lock, and the west gates opened, the crew brought their ropes back in, and the ship got underway again.

Aric said that we'd been lucky to see a ship in the locks like that—he said that the last time he had been in Sault Ste Marie had been about the only day that no ships were transiting—and then he said that maybe we'd get lucky again and see something in the Saint Mary's River, which was where they went between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.

So we got back in Winston, and he drove out of town along back roads, keeping the river to our left most of the way. We got lucky; when we weren't too far out of town, he pointed out a freighter in the distance, and when we got to a long narrow passage just before we got to Munuscong he stopped and we got out and waited for it to arrive.

This one was even bigger, and Aric told me to watch the water carefully as it got close, so I did. The water suddenly started to just go away, and he said it was because of the size of the ship. I asked him where it went, and he said he didn't know, but that was what happened when big ships came by and that it would come back when the ship left.

The ship was an kind of ugly brick color, with a grey diagonal stripe on the front. There was a crewman standing on the railing in the front, keeping watch, and I waved at him as the ship went by.

On the stern, there were big open squares, and Aric said that they were for a type of unloader, and that the Roger Blough was the only ship he knew of on the Great Lakes that was like that.

I was busy watching it as it passed, so I didn't see when the water came back, but when I looked in the channel again after it was gone, the water was back to the same level it had been before.

After we caught back up to the Roger Blough, we didn't see any more big ships, but there were a lot of little boats out on the water, darting around. Aric pointed to one that was a big small boat with lots of fishing poles sticking up on it, and he said that was probably a charter boat. He explained how there were lots of boats where people could pay money and be taken out to where the fish were, and then they could catch them themselves. He said that it was more profitable than the ship captains fishing for themselves, because they got paid whether or not anything got caught.

We turned back west in De Tour, which was at the very end of the Upper Peninsula. Then we followed the coastline all the way back to the 75 Highway, and then followed a parallel road to a campground called Carp River.

Aric said that he'd planned on getting all the way to the Hiawatha National Forest, but it was getting kind of late and so we'd stop here for the night.

We had sandwiches for dinner and I had some vegetables and I made him eat some, too, then he gathered some wood and made a fire and we sat around it drinking beer and telling stories until it was late and it was only after he'd put out the fire that he remembered he was going to make s'mores.

June 15 [Carp River to Pictured Rocks]

June 15

It was cold and windy again, although the trees were doing a pretty good job of keeping most of the wind up and away, but I could see them swaying around and hear them creaking.

Aric must have woken up in the night because he'd put clothes back on, and even so he was kind of burrowed under the covers.

If I was a unicorn, I could have started a fire so that he'd have something to warm up to, but the best I could do was stack the wood, and he'd be able to do that better than me anyway. So I pulled the covers all the way up instead and snuggled against him.

He put his arm around me and pulled me in a little bit. If it was this chilly and windy in June, they must have been freezing in the back of Winston on Spring Break. No wonder he'd said that he had to snuggle with Angela and David.

When he came out from under the covers, he peered out the window at the overcast sky and said that it was perfect Upper Peninsula weather. Then he kissed me and said that he was going to get a fire started and make breakfast for us, and he opened the tailgate and got out of Winston.

I helped him by getting the breakfast supplies and the metal grate that he had that went over the fire, then he had me watch the fire while he went off to pee but maybe he didn't trust me with fire, because he didn't go any further than the edge of our campsite.

I reminded him not to face upwind, or he'd be sorry.

We had oatmeal and coffee again. Aric said that was the only easy thing to cook for breakfast, and it didn't make any dishes. I didn't mind; it was nice to have a routine to start the day.

He said we were going to go north today, and we were going to stop somewhere very special for lunch, but first we would see Tahquamenon Falls.

Aric started Winston before he put out the fire, because he wanted to give it time to warm up a little bit. And then he used the rest of our water to put out the fire, but was smart enough to stop by the water faucet and refill the jug on our way out of the park.

We went north through lots of woods, and there were little side-trails that weren't big enough for a car that had yellow diamond signs with a picture of a person on a wedge-shaped thing. Aric said that was a snowmobile, and in the wintertime there was so much snow that it was the only way to travel.

There weren't a lot of other cars at all. Every now and then we'd pass one going the other direction, and there were occasionally houses and stores but for the most part it was just forest.

He said that was the great thing about the UP, that it was mostly scenery.

We kept going north until we got to a town with the strange name of Dollar Settlement, and then he turned west. Once we were out of town, we could see Lake Superior on the right side of Winston, and I kept a watch at it while we were going through the trees.

He stopped at a parking lot which overlooked the lake and I asked if I could fly down to it, and he said that I could. He told me we were in national park land, and that as far as he knew it was all open to the public, especially if I didn't touch the ground.

I said that I wouldn't, and I got up on the stone fence and jumped off, letting the wind give me a bit of lift before I flew down just above the treetops. It was a little ways down to the lake, and the wind was really gusting, and kept catching me off-guard. I'd gotten out of practice being on Earth and not up in the sky all the time, so it was a kind of wobbly flight down to the water.

I kept my tail to the wind, because the gusts kept flinging sand in my face, and stood on the shore and looked at the angry grey water roaring in. We might have been at home in stormclouds, but the sea was a different matter, and even on a ship the size of the Roger Blough, I wasn't sure that I'd feel safe.

I thought that since I was down here already I ought to get my hooves wet, although it didn't work out quite like I'd planned and I wound up getting most of me wet when a breaker caught me and almost knocked me off my legs. I think if I'd had my radio, I would have lost it right then.

I got out of the way by the time the next one came in, and shook myself off on the beach, then took flight again and nearly did a tumble when another gust lifted my right wing. But once I had a little bit of speed it was alright, and I actually used the wind to gain altitude, which made the flight back up the bluff really easy.

Aric was standing at the edge with his pocket telephone, taking a movie, and when I landed he put it down and asked me why I was all wet.

I thought he was being silly, but then I realized when I looked back down that you couldn't see the little beach I'd found from here, and so I told him that I'd been hit by a wave.

When we got back in Winston, he said that the bay we were looking at was called Whitefish Bay, and it was where the Edmund Fitzgerald was trying to get but she never made it.

The road eventually went inland, and then it ended and he went north for a while, until we crossed a river and came to a park called Tahquamenon Falls.

Aric told me that he'd never approached them from this end before, but he was sure that there would be signs that told us where they were. Then he asked if I'd noticed the color of the river as we went over, and I hadn't because I'd been able to see Lake Superior out the right side and I'd been looking at that.

He told me that it was tea-colored because of all the tannin that was in it, which came from all the trees. I wanted to know if it tasted like tea, and he said that he didn't think it would, but he'd never tried to drink the water from it.

It took a long time to get to the park, and Aric had to look at a map to figure out how to get there. The road which he'd thought would lead all the way to the park didn't, and we had to go a ways around. He felt kind of bad about that, but I didn't mind.

It had started to rain a little bit when we finally got to the parking lot, and he said that he hoped it wouldn't get much heavier. I opened my door and flew up a little bit so that I could get a decent look at the clouds to the west and then told him that it didn't look like it was going to for a while. It was the best I could do without flying up high enough to get a good feel for the sky, and I knew that just because I'd gotten fairly familiar with Kalamazoo weather, up here it might be totally different.

Aric decided it was worth taking the risk, so we went along a path through the woods and I could hear the roar of the waterfall long before I first saw it.

The river was down in a valley below us, and there was an observation area where we could look upriver at the falls. What was really weird about them was that they weren't a consistent brown color all the way across, but kind of streaky, so some places the water was almost a pure white and other places it was dark brown. Aric didn't know why that was, either, but he guessed that maybe the depth of the water where it went over the edge made a difference, or else it wasn't evenly mixed.

I wanted to know if I could fly over them, too, and Aric crouched down so that he could look me in the eye and said that if I did I would have to be careful, because the river current would be very strong and there would be a lot of undertow at the base of the falls.

I said I'd make sure to be safe, then I kissed him for good luck and went off the edge.

It was a little trickier flying out to the falls, because there were a lot of trees in the way, and since the land was falling away from me, I was going up through the canopy. But trees aren't solid, so as long as you take your time and pick a good path, you can get through.

I made a beeline for the falls when I was clear, because I thought that Aric probably had lost sight of me and was worrying. And I did consider toying with him and seeing how close I could get, but it would be really mean to make him worry like that, so I kept a good distance away from them, crossing over the lower part of the river first, and then circling away from the falls and up so that I could go over the top of them.

I saw another observation platform on the topside, and rather than try and pick my way back through the trees, I landed there because it was pretty open to the river, and hoofed it back towards the observation point where he'd been, and I guess he must have seen me land, 'cause he'd headed in my direction.

After we'd left the park, we drove through the woods some more until we came to a town called Paradise, and we stopped at a little restaurant and Aric didn't even look at his menu, he just ordered a cheeseburger.

All I got was french fries and salad, and I was happy with that but Aric insisted that I have the tiniest little bite of his burger because he said it was important, but he wouldn't tell me why. So I did, and it was kind of oily and greasy and salty and I don't think I want to try it again.

It had started to rain a little bit more heavily and we rushed out to Winston and drove up to the Whitefish Point Shipwreck Museum and Lighthouse.

The whole thing had once been a lighthouse and lifesaving station, and you could go into all the different buildings. The lighthouse itself was furnished like it would have been back when it was built, and almost everything looked like the stuff I'd seen in earth pony houses, except it was a little bit bigger.

There was another building that was a boathouse, and it had a lifesaving boat inside of it, and displays on the wall that explained how when the station was built the men would walk the beach looking for ships that were aground. Each station would send men out, and they'd meet on the beach and change tokens to prove that they'd patrolled, and if they found a ship in distress they'd go back to the station and launch their boat and row out to help.

Inside the shipwreck building, there were models and pictures of some of the ships that had been lost near Whitefish Point, and it also had big glass lenses from lighthouses. They were called Fresnel lenses, and Aric explained how they worked: they were like a regular curved lens, but they'd been pushed down in rings, which made them a lot thinner and lighter. He said that you couldn't focus a lens like that as well as other designs, but that it didn't really matter for a lighthouse, because the idea was to shine the beam as far as you could.

And he said that even so, they were so heavy that sometimes they were floated on a pool of mercury so that they could spin.

He knew about some of the shipwrecks, and he pointed me to the model and pictures of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which had been the last major shipwreck on the Great Lakes. He said that she sank without a trace and that none of the crew had survived and nobody knew what had happened. There were a lot of theories, but that divers hadn't found any conclusive evidence for any of the theories on the wreck.

I was curious how big it had been, if it was the same size as the other freighters we'd seen, and he said that it was bigger and newer than the Michipicoten but smaller than the Roger Blough.

It was hard to imagine how a ship that big could just vanish. And he said that the lifeboats survived, sort of, but everyone thought that they'd never been launched, but torn free as the ship sank.

Then we went down to the beach, and the wind had come up even more and the rain was blowing diagonally, and I thought about how in weather worse than this, men had rushed down to the water with a rowboat in order to try and save the crew of a ship that had run aground. At least we could fly above it.

Aric said that he'd originally planned to go back south and along the Lake Michigan shoreline, but that it would probably be overcast and rainy down there, and he didn't think we'd make it before sunset anyway, so maybe the best idea was to stay along the Lake Superior shore and go around the north side of the state. And he said that he'd always wanted to go to Copper Harbor, so this was a good excuse to do it.

I said whatever he thought was best, and he nodded and said that we were going to Pictured Rocks. Maybe tomorrow if it wasn't stormy we'd get to look at them, and if it was, than we'd admire what we could in the rain and move on.

So we drove along the north side of Whitefish Point, and then along twisting roads through the woods that seemed to go on forever. Some of the roads were paved and some of them weren't, and Aric went kind of slow because he said that there might be deer or bears that would jump out of the woods at us.

We stopped along the side of the road for a break and to have sandwiches for dinner, and Aric proved how smart he was because there was a sliding window in the back of Winston that opened up into the bed and he could turn around and reach through and get into the cooler without ever getting out of the cab, and also without getting rained on.

It was a little awkward to eat inside the truck, because there wasn't anyplace good to set my sandwich down, and so Aric held it for me between bites.

We didn't get to the campground until it was well after dark, and since it was still raining he only got out of Winston long enough to get a tag for the campsite and rather than put it on the pole like he was supposed to, he stuck it up on the dashboard. He said that there were hardly any other campers anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

I was really sleepy—I'd been drifting off for the last hour, because of the heat in the truck and the darkness outside, so I was really happy when Aric turned off Winston, 'cause that meant it was time for bed.

He looked at the back window and asked if I thought I'd fit through. I wasn't sure if I could—it was kind of small, and it would be really hard to not crash land in the back of the truck (plus I didn't want to get stuck in another window while Aric was watching). He went through it, and opened up the glass and the tailgate and told me that when there was a break in the rain to run for it, 'cause he said he didn't want to snuggle up to a wet pony.

I told him I was going to jump in a puddle, just 'cause he'd said that.

But I didn't. The rain didn't let up and I started to get bored, so I got out and ran around, and didn't get too wet. And once I was in the back, the fresh, cool air woke me back up, and I pushed Aric down and started kissing him and we both got so distracted that we forgot to close the tailgate or back window even though every now and then a gust of wind would spray some rainmist on us.

June 16 [Pictured Rocks to Fort Wilkins]

June 16

It was chilly again this morning. I guess the summer comes later in the Upper Peninsula.

It was hard to know how far we'd travelled. It hadn't looked all that far on the map, but sometimes maps deceive you, and I thought maybe we were really far north.

When Aric woke up, I asked him if it was polar bears I was supposed to have been looking for last night, and he asked why I would think there would be polar bears here. So then I found out that there were ninety divisions between the middle of the Earth and the top of it, and we were no further north that the 42nd or 43rd (Aric wasn't sure). He said on the way back to Kalamazoo, we'd pass the 45th Parallel, which was the halfway point between the north pole and the equator.

Aric and I gathered up some wood and built a fire, which turned out to be a real challenge, 'cause all the wood was wet and there was water in the fire pit even. After a few unsuccessful tries, he said that he knew an old Boy Scout trick that worked every time and went into the cab of Winston. I saw him tilt the seat forward and he rummaged around back there for a little bit before he pulled out a red stick that was about a foot long.

There was a spike on the bottom of it so that he could stick it in the ground, and then he cleared out all the kindling from the center of the woodpile (most of it was damp, too, which was part of the problem), and then took a plastic top off the red stick and struck the two together like a giant match, and it flared into a painfully bright red flame.

He gently set it under the woodpile and threw the kindling back on it and said that was how you started a fire in the rain.

At first, it just smouldered, but then it finally started burning nicely, and pretty soon the wood was hissing and steaming and popping, and we had a fire.

Neither of us was too motivated to hurry up and get back in Winston, so we went and gathered up a nice pile of firewood and set it around the fire, then he put the kettle on and boiled water for our breakfast.

We took our time eating, and we both had a few cups of coffee and watched the fire and watched the dull grey clouds roll overhead. I thought that the storm was breaking; it felt like maybe there might be a little bit of rain off and on in the morning, and then the clouds would break up and taper off.

He said that if this was like every time he went camping, the weather would get worse. Then he said on the bright side, we were at Mosquito Beach, but it was obviously too rainy for them.

Once we were done with breakfast, Aric raked out the fire and then soaked it with water, which was kind of sad 'cause of all the work he'd done to make it in the first place, but we both knew how dangerous it was to leave a fire unattended.

On our way out of the camping ground, he pointed to a brick building that said it was a showerhouse, and we both kind of looked at each other and he lifted his arm up and sniffed under it and asked how I felt about a hot shower before we got back on the road.

I felt like that would be a good idea; the best I'd gotten on the trip so far was getting rained on and getting washed by a wave. So he stopped the truck right by the showerhouse—he said that technically he wasn't supposed to park there but there weren't any other cars so it wouldn't matter—and I asked if we could shower together. He said that was against the rules, too, but if there were any park rangers, they'd be too busy writing a parking ticket for Winston to even check the showers, so why not.

He told me that it would be safest to use the boys' side. I didn't see how it would make a difference, but he said it did. Then he checked to make sure that no one was inside, and I followed him in.

It wasn’t as nice as the ones at the college or even the one at my apartment, but when the hot water finally came out of the showerhead it was plenty nice enough.

Aric wasn't too good at washing me, but he tried his best. He was really nervous about my wings, too, and I had to kind of lead him through it, and I don't think he ever really got comfortable with it. I could feel some spots that he hadn't gotten very well, and I probably could have asked him to get them again, but it felt like the wrong thing to say.

And then when I was clean, I tried to take the washcloth so I could wash him and he got really confused at first, and then he said that I didn't have to, but I wanted to, so he finally let me have it, and crouched down so that I could wash his back and I must have done a good job 'cause he let me do his stomach, too. Then he said that was good, he was sure that the soap running down his body had washed everything else, and I told him that since he was in the shower he ought to get washed properly.

Then after I'd gotten done cleaning the rest of him, I asked if he wanted to have some fun in the shower, and I didn't have to persuade him at all.

We backtracked out of the park, and went to where there was a scenic overlook (people seem to like places where they can park their cars and get out and walk a short distance to see things) and even thought it was overcast and Lake Superior was still grey it had a rugged beauty to it that kind of made me homesick.

He stood at the edge with me, just looking out over the water, and when I asked what he was thinking, he said that he was imagining how it must have been to be on a ship out there in a bad storm and to know that even if you made it to land here, you wouldn't be safe.

Even in the dull light, I could see the muted colors of the rocks, and I could imagine how they might look when the sun was shining and the lake was calm. There were some headlands that jutted out in the water, and they were undercut at their bases because of all the waves washing into them. I pointed it out to Aric and he said that the seas take everything, eventually.

We got back in Winston and drove along the coastline, through a town called Munising, and then we went a little bit further before he turned into another park so that we could have lunch.

He brought the whole cooler, and we made sandwiches and ate underneath a building without walls that Aric said was called a pavilion, and he said that there were smaller, round versions called Gazebos.

He offered me a beer, and had one himself, which he said was to settle the dust, and once we'd put away our lunch supplies, we walked through the park and to the bay.

There was a sign that said ships used to stop here and melt their cargoes of raw ore into pig iron, which was then taken to steel mills further down in the lakes. The whole place was gone—it had burned down when some coke (which was a special kind of firewood for the furnaces) had started a fire—but there were bits of sandstone bricks all around.

Aric picked one up and showed me how one side of it had turned into glass from the heat of the ovens, and it was the most amazing rock I'd ever seen. One side of it was a dark glass, and then there was a whitish line through it, and the other side was sandstone.

He explained how a lot of times, people would build things like this as cheaply as possible, so they probably quarried the local stone because it was easy, and when their furnaces melted from the heat, they just built new ones.

Then he took off his shoes and rolled up his pants and waded out into the water, and I followed him, and he rummaged around on the bottom until he came up with a rust-colored rock that he said was some kind of ore-bearing rock, and it had surely been dropped a hundred years ago or maybe even more, but this was what they'd been carrying on the ships that they'd melted into pig iron.

He carried it back to Winston and on our way back, he picked up one of the glass and sandstone bricks, too, and said that he was going to keep them as souvenirs.

I took a look back before we left and could almost see what it might have looked like back then—with sailing ships in the harbor and little houses scattered around a ways away from the furnaces. It would have looked a lot like Chonamare, maybe.

And maybe in a hundred years, Chonamare would look like this, with nothing left but some stones.

We stopped in Marquette, and along the docks, and Aric showed me where the ore ships used to load. It was a gigantic concrete structure with chutes for the ore to run down, and he said it was too big to be knocked down, so that they had just left it when they didn't need it any more, and took out the bridge that led up to it.

He told me how whole trains of ore could be unloaded into a ship at a time, and how the mines could keep producing ore even when the ships weren't running, so that they would have giant piles of ore waiting to be loaded, and once the ice was off the lake the ships would start coming.

He thought that in particularly bad years, some of the furnaces down the lake ran out of raw materials, and he thought that they'd probably have to be shut down if that happened.

I wanted to know why they didn't use it any more, and he said it was because the mines near here had played out, so they had to go somewhere else, like Minnesota. But there were still mines in the UP; he said that there was one not that far away, and it had orange lakes that you could see from space.

I said that I wanted to see that, and he said that I would probably regret it, but I might as well. So we went back towards the middle for a little while until we got to a town called Negaunee and he told me that I could fly up and look at it.

The airplane directors up here weren't as confused as the other ones had been, because they gave me permission pretty quickly, and so I flew off and it was kind of like the dirt mines in Kalamazoo but a thousand times bigger. And I could see off in the distance the orange lakes that Aric had mentioned, and he hadn't told me that I shouldn't get close to them, but I didn't need him to have told me. They looked evil, and I didn't want to get any closer than I already was.

I guess that it was important to get the iron ore out of the ground so that they could make things out of it, but it was very ugly to see. And when I'd landed and told Aric that, he said that there was a human saying that you didn't want to see how sausages were made.

I thought it was wisest to not ask him how sausages were made.

We stayed away from the lake for a while, until we got to a little town called L'Anse, which was right on the water, and then we followed the shoreline for a while until we cut back inland by a river, and then we came to water on our other side which was also Lake Superior, which meant that we were probably getting close to the end of the peninsula.

It was further than I thought it would be. Aric stopped at a park that was just before Copper Harbor, and said that this was about as far north as the UP went, except for Isle Royal which was way, way out in the lake.

The skies had cleared, like I thought they would, and the water was the most beautiful blue stretching all the way to the horizon, and the angry waves from yesterday had subsided into calm swells.

We walked along a shoreline path, all the way to the very end of the point, and I flew across the narrow stretch of water to an island on the other side. The water was too deep for Aric to wade, so he stayed where he was.

The other side of the loop looked over the bay and Copper Harbor, and that was what we took back.

When we got back in Winston, Aric said that we were almost to the campsite, and we drove through Copper Harbor and went to a place called Fort Wilkins.

It was getting too late to explore the park, so we picked a good spot and started a fire and had sandwiches and vegetables and beer. When it was almost dark, Aric got out some metal sticks that he said were old coat hangers and he showed me how to make s'mores, and then he showed me how to peel the burned crust off my marshmallow after I got it too close to the fire.

He warned me not to wave them around when they were on fire, because they could fly off the rod and they would stick to you. I asked if he'd learned that in the Boy Scouts, too, and he said that it was actually church camp.

I burned my tongue when I got greedy and tried to eat one without letting it cool down at all, and after that I was more careful.

Once we'd had our fill of s'mores, he let the fire burn down and pretty soon there was nothing but the sound of the woods and the singing of frogs and bugs, and the whole big sky full of stars, and we both lay on our backs on the picnic table and looked up.

There weren't too many airplanes flying by, which was something I was used to seeing. And then Aric pointed to a star that was moving, and he said that was a satellite, and we watched it until it went out of view.

He said that sometimes in Michigan you could see the northern lights, and it would be a very special treat if we did, but they were kind of rare. We did see a meteor, though, streaking through the darkness, and I thought that was pretty special, too.

We were both pretty tired when we got into Winston, so we just curled up together and fell right asleep.

June 18 [Back Home]

June 18

I'd forgotten until I woke up that Wisconsin is in a different timezone than Michigan, which didn't make a whole lot of sense, 'cause we'd gone back east on our way south. And it didn't feel like the sunrise was that different than it had been before, either, but when Aric looked at his pocket telephone he muttered something about it not even being seven yet and then ran his hand through my mane and fell back asleep.

We weren't going to make it to the boat if we kept delaying, but there wasn't anything I could do to help, so I let him sleep a little bit longer and then started pushing him with a hoof until he woke up. Then when that didn't work—he was awake, but pretended not to be—I started tickling him with a wing and reminded him that we couldn't miss the boat.

He finally put on his clothes and got out of Winston, and then after a stop at the bathroom, we got in the front and drove out of the park.

He used his pocket telephone for directions, which was the first time he'd done that all trip, because it was the first time that we were going somewhere really specific. And it told him that it was less than an hour, and then I felt bad for having been so insistent at waking him up, especially since he'd been up late driving when I was sleeping.

I thought about offering to drive, but I don't think he would have let me anyway.

He said that the road we were on, the 10 Highway, was special because it was one of the only US routes that had a ferry as part of it. He said that he was pretty sure there was another one, but he didn't know where it was. And he said that there had been others, but most of them now had bridges instead of boats and theoretically they could build a bridge or a tunnel to get across Lake Michigan but it would be too expensive.

He also said that he had read a story once about a tunnel being dug from Benton Harbor to Chicago, but that he didn't think anybody had ever seriously considered it.

It didn't even take us an hour until we were in Manitowac, and then we drove around looking for a restaurant. He didn't want to eat at a fast food restaurant and was sure that there would be family restaurants in town, but they were harder to find 'cause they didn't have big signs, and he said that his GPS was biased against them.

He found one called Shooter Malone's, which he said looked like a bar but if it was a bar why was it open so early? And then he said that maybe it hadn't closed yet, or else in Wisconsin they got to drinking really early in the morning, and decided that it was worth trying out.

He was even more surprised when he looked at the menu that they had breakfast food, and decided that since we were here we might as well eat here, so we picked a booth by a window and we both had omelets and pancakes.

The waiter was really interested in talking to me, and I think that if he hadn't had other tables to wait on he would have spent the whole meal with us. And then when he brought us the bill he said that he had comped the coffee, which meant that we didn't have to pay for it. So Aric left him a really big tip, and as we were leaving I gave him a hug, which he wasn't expecting.

It was kind of nice to have had something other than oatmeal for breakfast, but at the same time it felt kind of weird to change what had been a routine. I'd gotten so used to helping Aric get firewood and then making a fire and boiling water and then having breakfast by the fire and this was just another reminder that our trip was almost over, and then he'd be gone to Lafayette.

We were about to cross the river so we could get to where the ferry would be, when Aric saw a sign for the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, and we went there, since we still had a few hours before the ferry would arrive.

They had a room where we could play with little boats and send them through little Soo Locks, which was a lot of fun, and they also had a bunch of wooden fish carvings which were so detailed it looked like they were real. And there was another room which showed the history of boats in Wisconsin and on the Great Lakes, all the way from canoes that the Indians had made out of bark and up to the modern freighters.

Aric laughed when he saw that there was a display of the Edmund Fitzgerald—he said that he supposed it was a requirement for any museum on the Great Lakes, and I thought it was interesting because even though it said the same stuff as the museum at Whitefish Point, there was another little model of it and more pictures of the wreck on the bottom of the lake.

There was an actual steam engine from a ship called the Chief Wawatam, and we could make it operate but all it did was turn. And then there was also a display about a submarine, which was a ship that could go under the water. It said that it had been built in Manitowoc, along with over two dozen more submarines, and Aric said that he hadn't known that any subs had been built in the Great Lakes but it made sense. He said he thought they were all built in Groton, then he told me how during World War Two, lots of factories had to make things for the war effort and it made sense that there were shipyards on the Great Lakes that could build boats.

Then he said it was kind of funny to imagine submarines in the Great Lakes.

They had another room inside that talked about another submarine called the Cobia, which was tied up outside and we could go on a tour of it.

I thought that would be fun, and so did he, so we first looked at the displays and learned a bit about it, then we went on board.

I'd been on a couple of ships before, and this was a lot bigger than any pony ship, so I thought it would be spacious inside.

I was wrong.

Every little bit of it was crammed full of pipes and wires and machines and I guess it must be really complicated to make a ship that can go under the water and not sink, but I wasn't sure why they hadn't made it bigger.

There were doors between the rooms and they had a big lip at the bottom that you had to step over, and almost everyone had to duck to get under the top, too, and those were there so if the ship got damaged and started to leak it wouldn't sink.

The rooms for the crew were tiny, and their bathroom and shower was smaller than the shower stall in the bathroom in my dorm. People had to press up against the wall so that they could pass each other, and it was hard to think who would willingly go to sea in this. Five minutes after we went in, I wanted nothing more than to get back out, and I think if I hadn't been there with Aric—who was really interested in it—I would have just left and gone back to where I could see and feel the sky.

I wasn't the only one who felt that way, either: most of the other people on the tour said how small it was and how they couldn't imagine being in it for weeks or months at a time.

I was really happy when we got back out and I said that if the car ferry was that cramped, I'd find some other way to get home. Aric promised me it wouldn't be, and he said that we could go up on the decks and be out in the open on the ferry.

And then he pointed to a sign that said there was an overnight program where you could pay to sleep on the submarine, and asked if that sounded like fun. I shook my head and said that the time we'd spent on the submarine already was more than enough for me.

On the way out of the museum, we stopped in the store and he bought a book about the Carl D. Bradley shipwreck as told by one of the survivors, and said that he thought it would be really interesting to read. And he promised me that when he was done reading it he'd loan it to me. I was really curious about it, because that had been one of the ships that there was a display about, and it was sailing on its last trip of the season before wintering right here in Manitowoc.

I thought that maybe it would be bad luck to have a book about a shipwreck when we were on a ship, and he said that maybe it was tempting fate, but he was willing to risk it. It was a beautiful day and the lake was calm, and he said that the Badger had been sailing across Lake Michigan for fifty years or more.

While we were on our way to the ship, he pointed to a big black pile which he said was probably coal for the Badger, because that was what it used for fuel. He said that there were similar coal-piles outside power plants, and he didn't see anything else around that it could have been for. When I asked him why it was so big, he said that it wouldn't surprise him if they ordered it by the shipload, and then just piled it up there for the whole season. He said it wouldn't go bad being outside, and it was probably a lot cheaper when you ordered it in ten thousand tons at a time.

It hadn't arrived yet, so we just parked and waited. Aric fell asleep, but I kept a watch out on the lake, and pretty soon I saw it off in the distance.

It took a while for it to get to shore—I'd made the assumption that it was a lot smaller than it really was, even though I should have known better, 'cause of how big the other lake freighters had been. Aric was awake by the time it came into port, and we had to wait while all the cars and trucks that were on it drove off, which didn't take all that long, and then it was our turn to go on.

The deck where we parked was a lot taller than it needed to be, and Aric said that was because it used to carry trains. I liked it, because it didn't feel nearly as crowded as the submarine, even though there were lots of cars parked on it.

We got out and went to the upper decks, and walked around looking at what scenery we could see while it was in port. The submarine was right across the river, and it was funny how big it had looked when I first set eyes on it, but it was tiny compared to the Badger.

We hadn't even finished our exploration when the ship got under way, and we both went to the stern and looked at Wisconsin fading in the distance, until we couldn't see it any more. Then we went up front to the bow, and we couldn't see Michigan, either.

Then Aric started to get a little bit uneasy, and he said that he had never been out of sight of land on the Great Lakes. I thought about how I didn't like closed spaces where I wasn't near the open sky, and maybe he didn't like big open spaces which were away from land which I guess made sense, so I suggested that we could go inside and he could not look out the windows until we could see Michigan.

He did look out the windows, though, but he said that he felt more comfortable being inside. And they had a bar, so he bought a beer and said that I could go outside if I wanted.

Well, I did want to, but I didn't want to leave him alone, and besides there would be time once we saw land again, so I stayed with him and helped him drink his beer. And then he said that he wanted to order another one, but maybe that wasn't so smart since he still had to drive home.

I kept going outside to check and see if there was land in sight, and eventually I saw it for sure, so I went back inside and got him and we stood towards the bow and watched as Michigan got closer and closer.

The ship had to go farther inland to dock, between a pair of long jetties. Aric said that maybe because the weather almost always went from the west to the east, they had to do more to protect the harbor on the east side of the lake.

And when we got into the harbor, he pointed to another ship that was just like the Badger, and he said that was the Spartan, which was out of service but kept for spare parts. And I asked him if that was what the other truck in his driveway was for, and he said that he did plan to get it running again one of these days but admitted that it was useful for spares, as well.

We stayed up top while they tied up, then went back down to Winston, and drove out of the back of the ship.

This time he didn't take back roads, and we got back to Kalamazoo before nightfall, which was kind of a shame. I wouldn't have minded getting back later.

He said that we could stay at my apartment for the night, but he would have to get up right away in the morning so that he could load up his things and get down to Lafayette because he had to be there by Monday morning, and there would be a little bit of setting up his new apartment and it was a seven hour drive to get there.

So we ordered pizza and ate it while snuggled up on my futon, and then he folded it down into a bed and I helped him get undressed and pretty soon we were competing for who was going to be on top and I won.

June 19 [Sad Sunday]

June 19

Neither of us wanted to get out of bed, 'cause we both knew that when we did, Aric would have to leave, and we both wanted to make this morning last as long as we could, but it couldn't last forever and I cried a little bit and he did too and then finally sat up and leaned right back down and kissed and wiped my cheeks and told me to be safe and stay in touch and he would come visit me and I should visit him, too, and then we kissed one more time and he went out the front door and I went to the back window in time to see him get in Winston and then I made it to the balcony in time to wave as he drove down the street and then he turned the corner and I wanted to fly after him.

I sat on the papasan for a while and watched a confused black butterfly bump its nose against the window and I watched the leaves of the tree swaying in the wind, and I thought about our trip and how fresh it still was in my mind. I could almost smell the dirt and the smoke from the campfire and the mapley oatmeal and the bad coffee that tasted so good first thing in the morning.

There were some pegasuses who never had a home, but they drifted around the skies over Equestria and I think I know why.

But it was also nice to be home, to be back where things were familiar, and even though it hurt that Aric was gone and so were most of my friends, there were still some left, and I'd make some new ones soon, too. Like the person who lived downstairs, or the people who lived in the house across the driveway, and the ones who lived across the lawn . . . I didn't even know my neighbors yet, and soon it would be time to meet them.

Not yet, though.

I was waiting in case Aric needed me. Maybe to help him load something in Winston or even help fix her or maybe he would stop by on his way out of town to hug and kiss me one more time and what would he think if I wasn't here?

I kind of knew deep down that he wouldn't, though. But I waited just in case.

I sort of thought that I should probably have something to eat, but there wasn't any food in the house and even though he'd said that I could have the leftover food from the trip, he would probably want that, so I hadn't taken any.

I flopped back down on the papasan chair and waited, and I dozed off, and when I woke up again I went out on the balcony and stood on my hind legs with my forelegs on the railing and I could just reach some leaves on the tree and they weren't all that good, but they were better than nothing.

I paced around the living room a little bit and fluffed my wings out and then I thought that I needed to fly, so I put on my gear and got permission and Dori was happy to hear me again and if it hadn't been against the rules I would have told her all about my trip but all I said was that I had gone up north for a week with Aric.

I usually didn't take my portable telephone, but I did this time just in case he called.

I flew over his house on the way out of town, and Winston was still in the driveway but he'd taken the top off and put it on his other truck (which was where he kept it when he wasn't using it on Winston) and the back was mostly full with boxes and his bed and his dresser.

I didn't see him, though, but I waved anyway just in case he could see me and then I started to gain altitude, and I sort of lost myself in the sky for a while, and when I started to really notice things on the ground again, I was over the dirt mines, so I looped around and went back towards downtown, turned around the hotel, and flew straight for the Stetson bell tower.

Normally, there were people all over campus and cars parked everywhere, even where they shouldn’t be, but the parking lots were almost completely empty and there were lots of spaces open along the street, too.

When I went back by Aric's house, Winston was gone.

I sorta moped around the apartment for a bit, then I tried to read some poetry but I found that I couldn't focus on it, and I looked at my Bible but I knew that I wasn't in the mood for that, either, so I stretched out on the futon and took a nap. The pillow still smelled like Aric, and that was comforting.

Waking up was really weird. I'd been dreaming that I was on vacation and I was supposed to take a train and I couldn't be late and then I fell down and broke a bone in my fetlock but I didn't feel it at first, and it was only after someone told me that it looked broken that I couldn't support my weight on it any more.

So I went along on three hooves, until the train that was supposed to take me finally arrived and then I thought that I should get money for the trip, and when I was about to do that, I woke up and the light in the apartment was really confusing and it took me a minute to remember where I was and that it was the middle of the afternoon and not night.

I went outside and flew off the balcony and over Aric's house again but he was still gone and he would be gone for weeks and months and I kind of made a lazy orbit while I thought about what I could do next. I could go to Nina's and get some dinner, but it wouldn't be the same without him, or I could order a pizza but then I'd be eating it all alone and it felt like it was too much effort to get food at all, so I circled back home and went back inside and looked through my books until I found one of Walt Whitman's poems that had a really nice picture of grass on the cover and I started to read it.

Then I thought that Aric might be arriving in Lafayette any time, so I turned on my computer (while I was gone, the internet valves had been set, so I could go to Facebook and anywhere else I wanted to) and checked to see if he'd sent me a message or put up anything new, and there was a picture taken through the windshield of stopped traffic and underneath he said that he was near Waterford and stuck in construction.

That was a few hours old, but from all the cars I could see he would probably be there for a while. So I went back to the papasan and read some poems but they didn't really stick, and then I checked the Facebook again but there was no new news, and finally it was starting to get too dark to read, so I checked one more time and there was nothing new, so I went out to the balcony and let the breeze ruffle my coat and hair, and I flexed both of my forehooves just to make sure that my pastern bones were all okay.

It was pretty quiet, which I liked. The house mostly blocked the sound of traffic on Main Street, and there was hardly any on Grove Street. I could hear some radios and televisions, and the humming of window boxes that were called air conditioners, and some animals too.

It felt like the right amount of noise. Not so much that it was distracting or overwhelming, and not quiet enough that it was lonely.

I stayed out there until it was dark and I could see a few stars through the canopy of the tree in my front yard, then I went inside and closed the balcony door and checked Facebook one more time but there wasn't anything, and then I got on the futon and pulled the blanket up and sniffed at the fading scent on the pillow.

June 20 [Meijer Monday]

June 20

I woke up nice and early and felt pretty energetic. The first thing on my mind was to fly, so after I used the bathroom stretched out and put on my flight gear and I went in the kitchen to get a glass of water, and that's when I remembered that there wasn't any food in there.

The only thing in the electric icebox was a half-empty beer that smelled off, so I poured it out and set the bottle with the rest by the sink. Every other Wednesday, a truck would come by and pick up all the things that could be recycled and reused, or I could take the bottles back myself and get ten cents each for them.

I thought it would be easier to just give them to the truck.

So I figured that I could fly and shop. Meijer is open all the time. Many human stores are like that, because humans are usually so busy that they can't go to the market during the day.

That was nice, though, because I would never have to worry about what time was the right time to go to the store—I could go whenever I wanted to, and they had so much food there that I thought they'd probably never run out of it.

It was a little weird to put my saddlebags over my flight vest, and I had to really tug on the girth strap to make sure it was tight, then I had to pull some wrinkles out of the vest so it wouldn't chafe my skin, but I finally got it settled like I wanted it to be, and got permission to fly.

The weather was perfect, and the skies were clear, and even though I was a little bit out of practice at flying 'cause I hadn't hardly done any over the last couple of weeks, I made really good time to Meijer.

I hadn't ever been to this one, so when I landed I discovered that the doors were closed and I had to go in a different entrance, but that turned out to be more convenient since the other entrance was right by the food.

Carts were pretty inconvenient. I could push them on my hind hooves, but after I'd gone a few aisles my hips were starting to hurt a little bit from the position, and I was thinking that maybe I would have been smarter to get a basket.

There weren't too many people in the store, but there were lots of boxes out everywhere, and a weird wet swishing sound that turned out to be some kind of big blue machine called Tennant that had spinny brushes on the front. There were two of them, and each one had an operator, and right behind that a third man carrying a mop was picking up the water that the Tennants missed.

It kind of reminded me of the orange snowplow trucks, 'cause they usually seemed to work in pairs, too, with one in front and another one following behind.

Lots of people were opening the boxes and putting things on shelves, and they were really helpful. At the end of each aisle, they had a sign that said what was there, but they only had room to list three things and there were lots more than three things down each aisle.

Just the same, I found anchovies and oatmeal and even sunflower seeds and then in the front was the fresh fruit and vegetable stands which looked a lot like the markets I was used to except that there weren't any farmers by their stands to tell me about their produce.

I also found out when I got to the checkout counter that I was supposed to have put the fruit and vegetables into a bag and write a number on it which said what it was.

They also had a separate set of aisles that had flowers in little bouquets or even dirt-filled pots, but most of them didn't look very good. Still, I got some chrysanthemums to snack on; I thought they'd be good for dinner, even if there was a lot of stem and not so much flower and they were kind of pricey.

I could have gotten more, but my saddlebags weren't all that big, so I could only take what would fit into them. And I wound up loading them badly, and was off-balance for the whole flight back, and I mentally kicked myself for not thinking that the cans of anchovies were kind of heavy, but I was worried that they'd crush my fresh vegetables and flowers. And it wasn't all that long a flight anyway.

When I got home I put my food away and then took off my saddlebags and flight gear and was about to take a shower when I thought how much nicer it would be to take a bath and really relax, but that didn't work out because the valve that closed the bathtub drain didn't work at all no matter how much I jiggled it, so I had to settle for a shower after all.

Making the stove work was a real challenge. There were knobs at the back that controlled the burners and I turned one of them on and it started making a hissing noise and pretty soon it smelled like farts in the kitchen but that was all. Then I remembered how on Aric's stove you had to turn it a certain way to make the flame, so I tried that and found the place where it made the clicking noise and pretty soon it went up with a whoosh and so did a lot of fur on my fetlock, 'cause I was reaching over the flame.

Well, I thought that was just about the dumbest arrangement ever, and I guess I should have seen it coming. I put my foreleg under cold water until it went numb, then filled the kettle and put it on the stove and while I waited for it to boil, I unrolled some toilet paper and wrapped it around my leg and wished that I'd had something a little bit stronger. It started to dissolve as soon as I touched it with my lips.

I didn't worry about it too much, though, and when the water boiled I turned off the stove before I took the kettle off, 'cause at least that kept the flames away from me, and I made a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and sat out on the balcony to eat it.

I hadn't gotten any of the coffee crystals, so I rinsed out my bowl with some of the hot water from the kettle and put it next to the sink to dry, and then I took my Bible and went back out to the balcony. I'd decided that I was going to make some good progress through it and then I would go to the library and start reading about World War I.

First, they said how the King David was doing good things—even if it was fighting the other tribes, because I guess that was what all the kings did. The Bible even said that spring was the season when kings went out to fight. But then David counted his soldiers and that was a bad thing, so God got mad and punished the Israelites with a plague, and then King David felt bad and God felt bad, so King David said that he should be the one to be punished, not his men, and God told him to build an altar, so he did, and then God had His angel stop the plague and David decided to build a house for God.

And since King David had been fighting, he had his son, Solomon build the house instead, and gave him gold and silver and so much copper that it couldn't even be counted, and told everyone to help build the house for the Lord, and Solomon did and when King David got old, he made Solomon the new king of Israel.

Then there were chapters and chapters about what the different tribes all did, and I guess even without cutie marks, humans had some kind of destiny based on their tribe, and they even had a tribe who became the musicians, and I think that was important. A town without songs isn't much of a town at all. The fisherponies had their songs and the sailors had songs and even the thatcher sometimes sang when she worked, and she said that her mother had taught her a song for reeds when she was a filly.

It wasn't until I got to the part about Jehoshaphat that I realized these were the same kings that I'd already read about before, but the story was a little bit different and had some other details that hadn't been mentioned before, and they also left out some stuff that they'd said in the earlier book. I probably should have noticed that sooner, but it had been a really long time since I'd read the Bible. So it was good to read it again. And it hadn't said before that God got so mad at Jehoshaphat for making friends with Ahaziah that He wrecked Jehoshaphat's whole fleet of trading ships.

I wondered if maybe God sometimes got mad at the lake freighters, and that was why so many of them sank. But Pastor Liz had told me that God didn't act like that any more. So then I got to thinking about it more, and maybe the storms just happened. Even with weatherponies, we couldn't stop them all, and we couldn't do anything about the ones far out to sea. It would be something to ask Liz about next time I saw her.

Almost as if the wind was listening to my thoughts, it picked up and flipped a couple pages in the Bible. It would have been a fine day for sailing: the sky was clear and the winds were brisk.

I had just gotten to the part where Jehoram's bowls fell out and nobody cared because nobody liked him, when I saw Sienna turn into the driveway, so I went back inside and pretty soon Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn came up and asked me how my vacation had been and how I was liking my apartment and before I could tell them much about it, Miss Cherilyn saw my toilet-paper bandage and asked me if I'd gotten hurt on the trip.

So I told her how dumb my stove was and Mister Salvatore went in and looked at it then he took a little notebook out of his pocket and wrote something down on it and Miss Cherilyn said that maybe I should get an electric kettle 'cause than I wouldn't have to use the stove to boil water and it might be safer for me.

Well, I didn't want them to go to all that trouble, and I'd already gone shopping once today and didn't feel like going again, but she made me promise not to use the stove and said they'd get me one and see what they could do about getting me a different stove that wasn't a danger to me, and she also wanted to get a look at my leg, and she used her pocket telephone to take pictures of it which I thought was really silly. And she said that I ought to see a doctor just in case, and maybe I could get something that would make it hurt less. She said that there was stuff for humans but didn't know what I should use.

I didn't know either, 'cause I was normally smart enough not to stick my hoof in fire.

They reminded me that they were there for anything I needed, any time of the day, and then Mister Salvatore went outside muttering something about stoves and Miss Cherilyn said that they'd been a little bit worried sometimes when I was on my trip 'cause I'd gone so far away that they didn't know where I was all the time and maybe next time I wanted to go off somewhere remote I could do them the favor of telling them where just in case.

Then when I folded my ears down she said she wasn't mad and I could go wherever I wanted to, but just in case it would be nice to know where I was.

Mister Salvatore came back with a small pouch that had a red cross on it and he got out some gauze cloth and put it on my leg and then said that I might as well keep the whole kit, then he changed his mind and took all the little packets of pills out of it and said he was going to have to check which ones were okay for me.

We had a little snack of fresh vegetables and I offered them some flowers too but they didn't want any so I ate those. And I promised that I'd make a list of things that I needed for my apartment as I thought of them and I said that I was going to get a bird feeder next time I went to Meijer with someone who had a car. Miss Cherilyn offered to go today, but I still didn't want to go a second time.

I hugged them again when they left, and then I turned on my computer and saw that Aric had put up some pictures of his new apartment, and also some of his new friends that he was living with. There was a blonde man named Richard and a bald man named Chris and a blonde girl named Autumn and a brunette named Felicity. Two of them, Richard and Felicity, worked at the same theatre, and the other two didn't.

Autumn sounded kind of like a pony name. I didn't know that humans ever got named for seasons.

Facebook has its own instant telegram system, and there was a green dot by his name, so we had a little chat about how his drive had been (he got there a lot later than he'd planned to) and how his new room was and I told him about Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn coming over and how I'd burned myself on the stove, and he reminded me that if I needed to, I could also ask Angela to help me cook, because she was still at the house. And it was nice to talk to him on the computer but I would have liked it better if he had still been here.

He had to go to a meeting, and when he was done I had some dinner and then decided that I ought to visit Meghan, so I flew over to her house and I couldn't remember which door was hers, so I flew around the back and knocked on her windowframe and when she opened her curtains she was really surprised to see me and she opened her window and told me to come around to the porch.

So I did, and she opened up the door and I made myself remember which one it was, and then we went up to her apartment.

I told her about my vacation and how I'd burned my leg, and she told me about her job, and then she put on her lounging clothes and we sat on the bed and watched Harry Potter together. I felt bad for Harry and his friends, because Mrs. Umbridge was really mean and stupid and petty.

And it had a really sad ending, too. Meghan said it was her favorite book, though, because it had two of her most favorite scenes, both when Fred and George do their final prank (that was in the movie but Meghan said it was better in the book) and also the scene when Dumbledore got arrested and told Mrs. Umbridge that she thought he was going to surrender peacefully when he really had no intention of that.

She went to the bathroom and then I had a turn, and when I came back to her room she'd taken off her lounging clothes and when I opened the door she held her hands to cover herself then when she saw it was just me she laughed and said that I'd been gone for too long.

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I didn't ask, and she folded back the covers on her bed and got in and laid on her back so that I could get comfortable. She picked up my burned leg and kissed the bandage and said that maybe that would help me feel better, then she kissed my forehead and put her hand over my back and I draped my wing over her stomach and we fell asleep like that.

June 21 [Caleb, Lindy, Trinity, and Jeff]

June 21

When I woke up, I nuzzled Meghan's chest and I hadn't meant to wake her up but I did, and I felt kind of bad for that.

But I guess she'd been about to get up anyway, 'cause her telephone alarm went off while she was petting my mane and she swore at her telephone then made the alarm stop and scratched me behind my ear.

She liked to actually get up the second time that her alarm sounded, so I knew that we had a few minutes to cuddle, and I thought that I'd be generous so I rolled off her and onto my side, since she liked holding me like that. I thought maybe she'd fall back asleep, but she didn't; she kept petting my ruff of fur and then poked me in the belly button and started snickering.

I couldn't really get back at her unless I smacked her with a wing, which would be really mean.

Even though I was expecting it, it still caught me kind of by surprise when the alarm went off again and Meghan had to kind of roll away to turn it off.

She let me have a turn in the bathroom first, then said that she was going to take her shower and asked if I wanted to join, but I was gonna go flying and get all sweaty, so it probably wasn't the best time to do it.

I said if she wanted company, though, I could watch, and she said that just sounded wrong. And she said that she couldn't really wait until I was done flying, 'cause she had to go to work, so we both agreed that we'd figure out some kind of arrangement, and then we kissed goodbye and I went out the door and took one more look to make sure that I knew which one it was.

If I'd been smarter, I would have worn my flight gear over to her house, but I hadn't, so my first stop was back at my apartment. I landed on the balcony and went inside to get my gear, then got permission from the grumpy man to stay low until I was over the 131 Highway, then I could fly as high as I wanted to as long as I stayed between the 43 Highway and the Kal-Haven Trail.

I said that I would do that, and took off.

I hadn't flown along the 43 Highway any further than Meijer, so I did that, picking up altitude when I was allowed to, and when I'd made a few circles off the weak thermal over the Meijer roof, I looked along the road and decided that I'd pick a good endpoint for my flight now.

There were mostly trees, which reminded me of being up north (and also reminded me about getting lost in the pine forest), but up ahead I could see a big clearing that was a golf course, and beyond that a bunch of small lakes that seemed like a good place to turn around.

Most of the lakes were on the wrong side of the highway, which was too bad because when I got close I could see fish swimming around in them and I thought it might be a good place to get a snack. Then I dove down because as long as I was below a few hundred feet I could fly outside of clearance, and I saw a sign that said it was a fish hatchery, which meant I probably wasn't supposed to eat fish from there.

I went out over the other lake, and saw some in there, too, and there were also some men in a little fishing boat, and I flew down to them and told them where the fish were and then circled over the fish until they came over to where I was.

Their stern-motor scared the fish off a little bit, but lots of fish are pretty dumb, and it wasn't too long after the men stopped their motor that the fish came back.

So I felt pretty good about helping them, and then I thought that rather than turn right around, I could fly north for a bit until I came to the Kal-Haven Trail, so I went over the woods and then I discovered that I was at the dirt road with the clearing where Aric and I had spent the night a couple of times.

I went there and landed and walked around in the tall grass for a bit, nibbling on some stems that had gone to seed, then I took off again and followed that road all the way back to town, dropping low as I went over the 131 Highway like I was supposed to.

I went by the three dirt mines, and then followed Douglas back to campus and it was only when I was passing over the cemetery that I remembered I didn't live on campus anymore, so I turned to go back to my apartment.

When I got inside, there was a shiny silver kettle on my desk, along with a note that explained how it worked. It was pretty simple—I put its tail into the electrical socket and then there was a button I could push to make it go on or off.

I took it to the kitchen and set it up on the counter, and decided that I would try it out tomorrow.

I took off my flight gear and hung it up and had a can of anchovies then took a quick shower. Meghan's tub had had a mat in it that made it not slippery, and this one didn't and it was kind of treacherous underhoof, so when I was done and had dried off I made a note on my list of things that I needed. I thought that it would be best to wait a week or so before getting them, because that way I wouldn't have to make a lot of trips to the store.

It was probably time to start thinking about what I wanted to do for the summer.

I'd gotten some mail, so I guess the mailperson knows that I moved—most of my mail had a yellow sticker on it with my new address and a note to inform the sender where I was living now. There wasn't anything from my friends, though, just some offers for more plastic money and television and a very brightly-colored piece of paper that said I might have already won a new Dodge Charger, which was a car. That one didn't have a Sassy, so I couldn't write back saying that they should give it to someone else.

I wrote letters to Aquamarine and Gusty and Cayenne, telling them about my trip and wishing that I'd had some pictures that I could include, and then I also made sure at the very bottom to tell them my new address so that they would know where to send a return letter.

Then I put them in envelopes and found out that I was out of stamps, and I didn't know where to get more of them, since the Mail Hut was probably closed until classes started again.

I got some vegetables for lunch out of the icebox, keeping an eye on the stove in case it tried to burn me again. I don't think it can unless I turn it on, though, and I had no plans of doing that again. I didn't know how to cook anything anyway.

I took my bowl of food out onto the balcony and ate under the tree, and when I was done I just sat on the boards and thought about what I could do. Probably it would be good to spend some time with Doctor Thomas Thompson, although I'd need a way to get to Grand Rapids, and a place to stay.

I still had my bucket list, and I ought to do something on that every weekend at least. And I should start as soon as possible, so that I didn't wind up not doing something because I ran out of weekends. It seemed like a long time now, but I'd noticed during the school year that weeks had a way of flying by.

When I washed and put away my lunch bowl, I remembered what Aric had said about Angela helping me cook, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to ask her that favor just yet, but that did make me remember that I ought to be sure the bird feeder at Aric's house was full of seed. Maybe he'd forgotten when he left.

So I flew over there, and it was half-empty, so I got out the bag of seeds and filled it right up to the top, then shook out some sunflower seeds to make sure it was still working like it was supposed to.

Just as I was turning away, a bold bluejay flew by and scolded me and I stuck my tongue out at him, but he probably didn't see, 'cause he was smart enough to not stick around since I was so much bigger than him.

I perched on the roof of the house for a bit, and when the bluejay came back and started eating I thought about flying down and scaring him off, but I didn't. And when he was full, some little birds came from a nearby tree and lined up on the feeder, happily pecking at the seeds.

I flew back diagonally to my apartment, and when I landed I heard noise in the backyard next door, and saw three children playing a game with bright plastic water-squirters, and so I flew down to introduce myself to them. The oldest one was a boy called Caleb, and he had two sisters who were named Lindy and Trinity.

Well, they were all happy to see me, especially Trinity, who thought I was adorable. Caleb said that my wings were pretty cool, and he was jealous that I let Trinity pet me first. Although he pretended not to be.

A man who said he was their father came out, and he kind of gave me a hard look, like he wasn't sure what I was, so I told him that I lived next door in the upstairs apartment, and pretty soon he got friendlier, I think because his kids were so happy. His name is Jeff.

They wanted to play with me, and Trinity got me a water-squirter and it wasn't something that I could really use at all but that didn't matter, because they had a lot of fun chasing me around anyway and it didn't bother me.

So we spent most of the afternoon playing and it made me feel like a foal again. And Jeff said that on Fridays he liked to have a cookout and invited the neighbors over and I'd be welcome to come, which I thought was really nice of him.

I brought my papasan chair outside and read the rest of Chronicles, which was mostly about bad kings who rejected God and suffered because of it, and good kings who did what He had told them, but even the good kings screwed up sometimes and made God mad. And they even lost His book of rules, but then they found it again and for a while they were good, but then they stopped following His rules again and finally Zedekiah made God so angry that He let the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and the temple, too.

When I had finished I went back inside and put the Bible back on my bookshelf and pushed the papasan chair back inside too, then went for an evening flight just over my neighborhood. Not so high that I had to tell the airplane directors.

Then I got out my journal and went back to my bucket list and decided that I would call the man who had sold me my glaive and see if he wanted to meet me to spar, because that would be fun to do. And I had to kind of rummage around through my stuff because I couldn't remember where I'd put it, but I finally found it tucked into the book of dances that I'd also gotten (and I think that was from something else, because it had a different date and said Terpsichore at the Tower on the front).

He didn't answer and so I left a message, and then I got to thinking that he was from Battle Creek he'd said and all of a sudden I wasn't sure if Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn would want to drive me there, so I thought that when he called back I could see if he would come out here.

Then I thought that there was probably somewhere closer that Aric and his friends had practiced. So I turned on my computer and used Facebook to send Aric a telegram.

I hadn't heard from either of them by the time I was ready for bed. I'd decided that I would plan to spend some of this week meeting more people, and then pretty soon after that I would be able to come up with a good plan for the summer.

When it was just me, it was as easy to leave the futon folded like a couch, because there was plenty of room for me on half of it. And I'd picked a good spot for it, 'cause the breeze through the windows blew right across me, which was really nice. It was almost like sleeping outside.

June 22 [Thunderstorm Patrol]

June 22

As soon as I woke up, I could feel a change in the air from yesterday, like there was a storm coming. So I turned on my computer and went to the NOAA page and saw that they were predicted, so I started to look at the different maps to figure out where the fronts were. I probably should have been doing that all along, 'cause it took me a minute to remember what all the symbols meant.

It didn't look like anything was going to come in until the afternoon or later, but I wanted to stay alert just in case things started to change once the sun warmed stuff up.

I opened a new page so that I could check my Facebook, and I had gotten a message back from Aric at three am—he said that they had practiced at the Western Michigan Rec Center but it closed in the summer so when the weather was nice they practiced at the Lovell Street Park, which was right by campus, near the railroad tracks. And he had also given me the telephone number for a girl named Karla, who I didn't know at all, but he said that she was the one who was in charge of the heavy fighters in Kalamazoo. And he said that I might have seen her at Val Day, but I couldn't picture her from his description. Lots of girls there had had their hair braided and were wearing bodices.

So I sent him a thank-you reply and told him about my new friends next door, and went and put on the electric kettle so that I could have oatmeal for breakfast.

Then I checked my telephone and I had a message from the weaponsmith,whose name was Stellan. He said that he would be happy to meet me. I didn't know when the practices were, because Aric hadn't told me, so I talked to Karla first and found out that they met on Thursday nights at seven, and would be at the Lovell Street Park, so then I talked to Stellan and he said that he would be there and maybe we could spar. He promised to bring a padded glaive for me.

My water was well-boiled by the time I set my telephone back down, and so I made a bowl of oatmeal and then went out for a morning trot. I wanted to see if Pastor Liz was at Stetson chapel, because I wanted to talk to her again, and maybe the Mail Hut was open—it wouldn't hurt to check.

I got lucky twice—Pastor Liz was in her office, and she was really happy to see me. She said that she thought maybe I'd given up on my goal, and I told her that I hadn't, but a lot had happened over the last couple of weeks and I just hadn't had time and I felt really bad, and she said it was okay. And then even though I hadn't planned it, we talked for a little bit about the kings of Israel, and she told me again that they were flawed but all humans were, and while some of them hadn't ever tried to do the right thing, others of them did.

And I asked her if she thought that God made storms at sea to punish sailors who had been bad, and she said that she didn't think so. She thought that the weather occurred by itself, and that God had chosen to let that happen, but if He wanted to, He could bring a storm or He could equally calm the seas, and she reminded me how Moses had parted the Red Sea so he could escape Egypt.

I would have stayed a little bit longer, but she got a telephone call and once she picked it up she said that it was about Orlando and she would be busy for a while, but she set the telephone down long enough to hug me and tell me that she would have a proper meeting with me at the usual time tomorrow.

I went across the quad to the Mail Hut, and there was someone in there and he sold me some stamps and if I had been smart I would have brought the letters with me and I could have mailed them, but I hadn't.

On my way back home, I flew up by my old window in Trowbridge and looked in and the room was empty and that was kind of sad.

I went the rest of the way back home on hoof, only flying again to get up to my balcony so I could get in. And I took my letters and put stamps on them and then took them down to the mailbox—there was a little flag that you could set so that the mailperson would know you had something to send—then went back inside and sat at the computer and looked at the weather again.

It was still a ways away, and the sky was clear. I know humans aren't all that good at weather, so maybe they were wrong, but it still felt like it was going to storm. I didn't think my senses were fooling me.

The neighbors weren't outside, so I wrote in my journal and then added 'new journal' to my list of things to buy, because I was running out of pages. Pretty soon I would have to write on the edges of the paper, 'cause that was all that was left. And I snacked on some vegetables and even went down to my backyard but there wasn't anything good there, then I flew up high enough to be over the trees and as far as I could see the sky was clear.

My gut was telling me it wasn't going to stay that way, though, and the NOAA page didn't think so either, and I thought that we probably weren't both wrong, so I laid out all my flight gear and then dozed on the papasan for a while.

It was dinnertime when I got up again, and I went outside and looked and the sky was completely overcast and the wind had picked up a little bit and I could smell the rain on it, so I ate a can of anchovies and got dressed and made sure that my radios were tightly strapped to my forelegs, then I got out my pocket telephone and called Mel.

He said that he was finishing his own dinner, and he'd just looked at the weather maps and thought there was still a little while left before things got bad. And he said that when he was done with dinner he would come pick me up, unless I wanted to fly out to the same overpass where we'd met before.

I told him that I wanted to save my energy, and gave him my address, then I sat down on the papasan and waited.

It was maybe about an hour and then I saw his truck turn into the driveway, so I hurried up and put on all my flight gear and then flew down to meet him, which it turned out was in the stairway outside my front door 'cause he'd gone up there, not expecting me to fly down.

He showed me on his pocket telephone what the weather looked like and I said that I had been looking at the NOAA weather and it was starting to build along the coast and he thought so too.

I told him about my trip while we drove out to the overpass, and he interrupted me once to point out a fire truck that was sitting at an intersection. He said that they were staging for the weather, too.

We were almost to the overpass when one of the radios on his dashboard made a horrible noise and as soon as it had stopped he turned up the volume and a strange-sounding woman announced that there was a severe thunderstorm watch. Mel smiled and said that we were just on time.

He parked the truck in the same place he had before, and before we got out of the cab he talked on the radio to some of his friends who were in the west, and I could hear occasional pops in the signal that were caused by lightning.

I got permission to fly as long as I stayed below the cloud deck which was kind of annoying. I think Dori would have let me fly into the clouds. How was I supposed to get a good feel for the storm if I couldn't?

On the other hoof, maybe there were airplanes in the clouds. They had all sorts of fancy IFR equipment that let them know where they were even when they were in the clouds, and I knew that they wouldn't be able to see me until it was too late.

I showed Mel how to do a hoof-bump for luck, then I took off. Once I was a few thousand feet from the truck, he flashed his lights and we did a radio check, then I circled up until I was right at the base of the clouds.

I really would be more useful to them if I could fly higher, 'cause I could look over the tops and see the big anvils of thunderclouds, but I guess I should be happy with what I'm allowed to do.

At first, there wasn't anything to report. It started to rain, and I could see the cars below on the highway were turning their headlights on. Then I started to see distant flashes of lightning, way too far away to hear the thunder at all.

I broke the rules a little bit and went up and grabbed out some cloudstuff and brought it down a couple of hundred feet so that I could have a little perch. It reminded me of the lines we sometimes set up in front of an approaching storm, although there weren't any other pegasuses with me.

Mel kept calling me and reporting what he saw on the map, and I told him what it was like up where I was and what I could see. I didn't get to relax too much on my cloud, 'cause the wind kept pushing it east, and so every time I started to drift too far away, I'd go fly it back west and let the process repeat. But I did get to relax some, and I thought that was what was going to matter later, 'cause it kept looking worse and worse off to the west.

Pretty soon I could hear the thunder and count off the distance, and the wind started to gust and then it was close enough that I could sometimes hear the lightning sizzle in the air, and then it was right upon us and my cloud disintegrated under me, adding just a little more rain to the downpour.

I did my best to stay where I could see a good distance, but it wasn't always possible. From where I was, the rain whited everything out, and the bottoms of clouds scudded below me, and whenever I got a break I looked down and figured out my ground position so that I could stay as close to Mel as possible. And I kept giving him updates, letting him know what the clouds were doing and what I was feeling in them.

I could feel the wind direction shift as the clouds moved over me, and I got hit by a really nasty downdraft once and lost probably a thousand feet of altitude or more before I got out of it. And my wings were getting sore by the time it finally lightened up, and it was pretty dark so I glided back down and shook myself off by his truck and then got into the cab.

I had to have had a cloud's worth of water on me still, 'cause as soon as I sat inside the windows fogged halfway up, and he pushed some buttons on his dashboard and after a minute or two it cleared off the fog and we could see again.

He showed me the weather radar pictures, and it looked like there was another storm cell coming after this one, which meant I'd be going back up, so I told him that I was going to take a nap until it got close, and he said he'd wake me up when it was near.

I'd snoozed long enough to get kind of dopey and have my wings stiffen up some, and then he shook me awake and I got back outside. It was after dark, which made the distant lightning that much more visible, and I called the airplane directors again and said I was going back up.

Mel and I did another radio check, just to be safe, and then I was circling back up in the sky, making my best estimates for how far away it was. And then it was right on top of me, and there were times when it was so intense that the only thing I could see besides the lightning was my own flashing light reflecting off the clouds and rain.

It kept up like that for another couple of hours, and I didn't really have any time to land until I was sure that the main part of the storm had moved past us. I was exhausted—it was long past my bedtime, and since there was only one of me, all I could do was ride it out. When I finally landed, I didn't even have enough energy left to shake myself off, and I just flopped on the seat and took one more look at the weather radar with him.

We both agreed that there was nothing more coming tonight, so he turned around and drove to the fuel station and got us both cups of hot coffee and it probably wasn't the best thing to be drinking but it perked me up and warmed me a little bit, and I sat up in my seat and watched out the windshield as he drove slowly back into town, dodging around some tree limbs that were in the road.

He pointed to a blue and white truck that had yellow flashing lights and a long crane with a man on it. It was right next to a telephone pole that had a big grey cylinder on it, and the man was poking above it with a long stick. Mel said that he was probably resetting circuit breakers, because sometimes they went out in storms. He said that must have been an important one, too, if there was already a truck by it.

We saw some other signs of the storm in town as well. At the intersection of Main Street and Drake, the traffic lights weren't working, and there was a policeman standing in the center, directing traffic. And a little bit further down the road we had to wait as a fire truck went by, racing to the center of Kalamazoo.

He had to stop right after he turned down Clarendon Street, because there was a big tree that had fallen across the road and there were wires under it that were hissing and popping and he turned on his bright headlights and then used his telephone to call for a police car to protect the road, and wouldn't move until it had arrived. I probably could have gotten out and flown home from there, but I didn't really want to, even though we were so close. 'Cause while we waited we talked about storms, and he said that he had first become really interested when a tornado had gone through Kalamazoo and until then he hadn't really ever thought about the weather or how important it was to have people on the ground reporting what was happening.

And he said that he kept thinking that one day technology might replace humans but it hadn't yet.

We finally left when a police car parked across the road with its lights flashing to warn people, and he let me out in front of my apartment and stayed there until I'd flown up to the balcony.

There was some water on the floor that had come in through the windows but not too much, and I didn't realize until I went to turn on the light in the bathroom that there was no electricity any more. I should have expected that; I bet the wire that the tree had knocked down had my electricity in it. But I was too tired and too wet to care, so I took off my radios and my vest and did a quick preening of my wings to get them at least mostly in order, and then lay down on top of the towels and fell asleep, knowing that I was going to be sore in the morning.

June 23 [Fighting Practice]

June 23

I woke up late, and my wing muscles were stiff and cramped and my feathers were also all out of place, 'cause I guess I hadn't done a very good job of preening them at all.

I would have gotten laughed at for them being in such a sorry state back in Equestria. Luckily, nobody was here to make fun of me. Although I wouldn't have minded another pegasus. Sometimes after really bad storms, when we'd drag ourselves home, some of the weather apprentices would help preen our wings while we were napping.

I slid off the futon and plodded into the bathroom and climbed over the edge of the bathtub and that was when I remembered that all the water fell through the drain and I couldn't stop it, so my plans of taking a hot bath were already foiled.

That was too bad, because that would have been the best thing to relax my muscles, so I started to think of what I could block the drain with. I knew if I got a pretty good seal around it, the water would stay in the bathtub like it ought to, so it was just a matter of finding the right thing. A lot of bathtubs in Equestria had rubber plugs, but I didn't have one of those, and even if I had, it wouldn't have fit, because there was a grate that arched up.

It was full of little holes to let the water out, and maybe you were supposed to put something in all of them. If that was so, it was dumb.

There wasn't anything in the bathroom that would work, and I thought about what else I had in the apartment but the best I could come up with was a washcloth. I didn't think it would stop the water from going out, but it might slow it down some.

Then I got the bright idea to use some of a plastic bag, because I had a couple that my groceries had come in. So I got out of the tub and put the washcloth in the plastic bag, thinking that the bag would seal against the drain and the washcloth would help it.

My idea worked well enough, I had to hold it in place with my hoof until the water came up to my fetlocks, but after that it stayed in place as long as I didn't move around too much. And so I stretched out in the soothing hot water, wishing that the tub was wider so that I could stretch out my wings, but even with them mostly folded the hot water really helped relax my muscles.

I stayed in there until the water started getting cold, then I pulled my makeshift drain-cover off and let the water drain out and went out onto my balcony and stretched out my wings and shook off, then started preening myself right.

By the time I was done, I felt a lot better. I still had a lot of stiffness in my wing muscles, and I thought I'd do a little short flight to work it out, but I wanted to get something to eat first.

I had to get waffle batter—that got added to my list, along with a proper bathtub plug—and I was going to have oatmeal, but my kettle didn't work. At first I thought it was broken somehow, but then I remembered that the electricity was probably still gone. Opening the electric icebox proved it was; the helpful little light inside of it didn't come on, and it wasn't all that cold inside, either.

So I ate the rest of my carrots and then I flew off the balcony and did a treetop patrol of the neighborhood—high enough that I was above all the wires, but low enough that I didn't have to ask anyone for permission to fly, and that I could easily land if one of my wings cramped up.

I did know how to glide down from any altitude with a hurt wing, but it was a lot less pleasant to have to fight a muscle cramp all the way down from cloud-level.

I saw that the tree had been cut up to clear the road, and the wires that it knocked down had been put back up on their poles, but I guess that alone hadn't made the electricity work again.

When I'd landed back at my apartment, I stretched my wings again and then was going to check my Facebook but my computer didn't work either without electricity. Humans have a lot of really neat stuff, but I guess one strong storm can make it all worthless.

I cleared off my desk and made another dreamcatcher for my next-door neighbors; I thought that they might like to hang it in their bedroom and hopefully it would bring good dreams to all three of them. I put three different feathers on it, the smallest for Trinity and the biggest for Caleb and I was pretty happy with it when it was done. I'd give it to them if I saw them playing outside today, or tomorrow when Jeff was having a party in his backyard.

When I checked my mail, I found that I had a letter from Peggy. She said that she was having fun back home in Colorado and that the first thing she'd done once she had gotten back home was go on a short vacation with her parents and she sent me a picture of her standing at the very top of a mountain, which she said was called Pikes Peak. It was really beautiful, and it was right up with the clouds. I hadn't seen any views like that when I was on the train, and I knew that when I went to visit her, we'd have to go there.

And she asked me how my trip had been, too. So I wrote her a letter back telling her all about it, even the part where I got lost in the forest, and I also told her about the storm last night. I wished that I'd had some pictures to send to her, but I didn't, so hopefully my words were good enough.

Then I folded it and put it outside for my mailperson and then read a couple of Kipling poems. One of them was about a storm at sea and it made me think of the lashing I'd gotten last night and of the breakers rolling on Lake Superior, or the storms back home and how harsh the sea can be when it's angry. And there was another one about how hillmen like their hills and not the sea, and I knew some ponies who wouldn't set hoof on a boat because they didn't like the movement, even if the harbor was completely calm.

There was a third poem that followed those and looked really interesting called The Undertaker's Horse, but I had to go to meet with Liz, and then right after that I was going to go to practice-fight, so I had some more vegetables for dinner and then I took my glaive and flew off to Kalamazoo College.

Liz and I talked about the kings some more, and she was able to use her computer to show me a chart of when each man was king, and that helped me a lot. I wish I had known about it sooner, and she said that she had found it last night after talking to me because she remembered that was kind of confusing.

And she told me a little bit more about the history of the area, and I told her how before unification, all the different pony tribes had fought with each other and then when things started getting bad the pegasuses and earth ponies made a pact and that had worked out pretty well because together we were stronger than the unicorns and pretty soon we had pushed them back far enough that the earth ponies could start to grow enough food for both our tribes, but then after a while the land went bad and even they couldn't fix it and then winter came and it didn't leave, no matter how hard the pegasuses tried to drive it back, and then things just got worse because everyone was fighting for what little food there was.

Liz said that she imagined that the tribes in the Middle East fought for the same reasons.

Then she said that after the end of Chronicles, I might like Ezra, because it was mostly about rebuilding and finding your way back. And she tapped her fingers on the desk and looked over at my glaive and I asked her what she was thinking about, and she sighed.

She said that since I hadn't asked she had been thinking of not telling me but that wouldn't be right, because I was an adult and so she asked me if I had heard about Orlando. I told her that all I knew about it was that it was a city in a state called Florida and it had a kingdom for an imaginary mouse. And then she told me how a self-proclaimed ISIS terrorist had decided to go into a gay nightclub and kill and wound over a hundred people.

Liz told me that every religion had extremists, and they tended to take a very narrow part of their scriptures and make them the most important thing, and then they would lash out at the people who they thought were their enemies. And she told me that the most dangerous people were the ones who were preaching a gospel of fear and hate, because they would goad some of their listeners into violence on their behalf. And she told me that even some people who called themselves Christians did that—she said that if I listened to the news that I might hear people claiming that Islam was a religion of hate, but as often as not those who said it were haters themselves.

Well, that was a lot to think about, and I thanked her for meeting with me and we agreed to meet again next week at the same time, and then I took my glaive and went down the hill.

There were a lot of people at the bottom of the hill, and I wound up not remembering too many names, 'cause I was still kind of tired from last night. Karla was there; she was kind of short and bulky and had a thick braid all the way down her back. She came right up when I landed and introduced herself and then told me that I couldn't use my glaive because they had padded weapons, and I said that I had known that already.

It was kind of fun to watch people putting on their armor—it was the first time I'd seen people help each other dress, but I guess they had to because even for them there were a lot of fasteners that were hard to get to, and it just looked like it was easier with help (although there were some people who dressed themselves).

And Stellan came, too, and like he'd said he would, he had a padded glaive for me to use.

I wound up really interrupting their practice, because everyone wanted to watch me, and I felt kind of embarrassed at first. Stellan and Karla both wanted me to show my moves kind of slow, and so I slowed them down as much as I could so that they could see what I was doing, but that also meant that I fumbled it a lot. I'd never thought about how hard it was for my instructors to do the moves slowly so that we could learn them.

But that was good for me, 'cause I was really out of practice, and when I was done there were a couple of things—mostly diving moves—that both Stellan and Karla thought were too dangerous to try in practice, but they said that everything else was okay.

And then because she thought it was only fair, she sparred with Stellan. She had a quarterstaff, which is basically a stick of wood, and he was using a sword which he could hold with one or both hands.

Both of them called out what they were doing at first, but then they kind of got into it and forgot and sped up a little bit and it was a little hard to follow, but I got the idea.

Then Stellan said that he would practice with me, and since I didn't have any armor, he said that we would move very slowly.

We probably spent an hour figuring out each other's fighting style, and then we sped it up a little bit. Karla said that Stellan would only defend himself and not attack, while I was free to try and hit him. I thought that was a little unfair, but he said it was okay, and then he said I could move at normal speed, and I wasn't allowed to hit his helmet.

It turned out that a lot of the moves I knew were pretty ineffective against him. We hadn't really gotten much teaching on how to fight someone who just stood there, and the best tactic I knew was ambush from a cloud, and that wouldn't work when I couldn't do a diving attack or bring down a cloud.

But I still got some pretty good hits in and I even managed to knock his legs out from under him once.

After that, he did a few attacks on me, and he moved really slow on purpose, so I was able to defend almost all of them. Even so, he did manage to get me in the withers once, and even though his sword was padded, it hurt.

Stellan and Karla ended the night by fighting one more round against each other and this time they went at their normal pace and I could barely follow along. She could use both the head and the butt of her quarterstaff to hit him, and block in the middle, too, and she wound up winning after she managed to knock the sword out of his hand.

It was starting to get dark, so they picked up all their gear and took off their armor and I flew home and put my glaive away and I could see by the little blinky lights on my internet box that the electricity was back on and I thought about turning on my computer and visiting Facebook for a little bit but I was really tired, so I just went to bed instead.

June 24 [Shopping and Party]

June 24

Today, I woke up at my usual time, still a bit stiff and sore from flying in the storm, and on top of that I had some fresh new bruises from Stellan's sword.

I turned on my computer and plugged in my pocket telephone and my radios—I should have done that last night—and then I went into the kitchen and made a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.

It looked nice outside, and I was looking forward to my morning flight. I was gonna have to stay low again, 'cause my radio was really low on power. So I decided to go over to the nature center and fly around there, plus I could trot around some, too.

I didn't take my vest or blinking light, 'cause I wouldn't get as lathered if I didn't wear my vest, and without my vest I didn't have anywhere to attach my light. I guess I could have clipped it to my tail.

It was a nice, easy flight over. I passed a couple of people on bicycles, and they had bright vests like mine, and they stayed on the road as I curved into the park and made a big turn to get to the clearing.

I did a couple of quick laps by wing, and then I landed on the high spot and looked around. There was a little patch of grass that looked tasty, and I thought that if it was okay for deer to eat it, it would be okay for me to as well. I knew I wasn't supposed to walk off the path—Peggy had told me that—so I flew over to the grass and landed just long enough to get a mouthful and then took off again. It was nice and juicy because of all the rain we'd had last night, and so I went down and had another mouthful before going back to the path for a good trot.

I went three laps on hoof, then two more on wing, and one last one on hoof to cool down, and then I decided that I might as well fly over the railroad tracks and splash in the river to really cool down, so I did that and then shook myself off on the riverbank and then took off for home.

Right as I got above the trees I saw a shape off in the distance, and at first I didn't know what it was, but when I got a little bit closer I saw that it was a hot air balloon. I didn't know humans had those at all; I would have thought that with their airplanes and their apparent general desire to get places as quick as they could, that they wouldn't use hot air balloons at all. Obviously, I was wrong, and I flew off in its direction to get a closer look.

And then I had a kind of dilemma, 'cause as I got closer it was obviously above a thousand feet, and since I didn't have my radios with me, I couldn't call for permission to fly up to it, and even though it looked safe and we used to fly up to balloons all the time in Equestria, I didn't want to get in trouble, so I just circled below it, looking up and studying it. And I could see a couple of people inside who were looking down and probably studying me, too.

I probably could have followed it until it landed, but I had better things to do with my time. Still, it was nice to know that humans had them, because it would be a lot of fun to have some of my friends in a balloon and me flying along next to them.

Since I'd been following the drifting balloon, I'd gotten a little off-course, so I turned around to fly home, and on the way I also flew over to Aric's house, and waved at Angela who was sunning herself in the backyard. If she'd waved back, I would have landed, but I think she was asleep, and if she was it wouldn't be nice to wake her up.

I landed on my balcony and checked my Facebook. Aric had sent me a message saying what play they were doing next (I had never heard of it) and he said that people in Lafayette had heard about Gusty's performance and that he'd been basking in some of the reflected glory 'cause he knew me and I knew her.

I told him about the storm and how the electricity had been broken and that was why I hadn't been able to talk to him yesterday. And I told him about my neighbors that I had met, too.

He probably wouldn't get the message until it was late, 'cause of his theatre work.

When I turned on my portable telephone, I had a message from Miss Cherilyn, and she wanted to know if I needed to do any shopping, and I thought that would be a good idea. I'd used all the gauze in the first-aid kit, and there were a lot of other things I needed that I hadn't thought of when I first moved in.

It was so much easier to live in a college dorm. Almost everything you really need is given to you.

So I sent her a telephone telegram back saying that I would like to go shopping and that I needed to be back in time for dinner with Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity. And it wasn't very long before she said that they were on their way over.

I ate a quick lunch while I was waiting, and then used Facebook to send a message to Meghan and see if she wanted to come over tonight. I thought maybe she would like meeting my neighbors, too, since they were so nice.

Mister Salvatore was a little grumpy, and when we got out of Sienna Miss Cheirlyn said it was because he had been worried while I was stormwatching and then he hadn't heard anything from me so I told her that all my electricity had gone.

She said that hers at home had too and it had been really inconvenient and I guess I hadn't thought of how it might be for a person, but it hadn't really bothered me any.

Then I asked why they hadn't told me about Orlando when they came and visited after my trip, and Miss Cherilyn said that she'd wanted to but Mister Salvatore had said that I didn't need to know that.

I said that I didn't want to know that, but it had happened and I should know it because pretending it didn't happen was insulting. I understand that there are things that you might want to keep from a filly or a colt but even if you want to sometimes you have to tell them that their mom isn't going to come home ever because her ship sank in a storm and we tried our best but it wasn't good enough.

And then Miss Cherilyn turned to Mister Salvatore and whispered to him and I probably wasn't supposed to hear but I did and she said that she'd told him so. And he got even grumpier.

He said that if she wanted to tell me, that was fine, and he was going to go look at power tools and fishing supplies and then see if somebody had accidentally put Playboy magazine with all the other magazines and when we were done making house to come and find him.

When he was out of earshot, I said that I thought maybe he needed a nap.

Well, me and Miss Cherilyn talked while we were getting the things on my list, and she told me more about how there were radical groups that used religion as an excuse to do terrible things, and how difficult it was to balance the freedoms of our country with the security requirementes to keep everyone safe, and then somehow the conversation got turned towards ponies a little bit and she said that when they had first started to come over, their handlers had been with them all the time; there had been three teams for each pony, and there was always one team within view and a second on nearby backup.

But now they gave us a lot more freedom than they had before, and in a way I kind of had the most of all, because I could fly off wherever I wanted and they wouldn't be able to follow me at all. She said that it was good that I had that freedom, but it came with responsibility, and Mister Salvatore wasn't totally sure that I understood about that.

He said that the different teams talked to each other all the time and that one of the ponies in their district had been a real handful and I wanted to know who it was but she wouldn't tell me. I bet it was Cayenne, though.

So I promised that I would try and be a better pony and let them know what I was doing just so they wouldn't have to worry, and they could tell me things.

And then I moved the conversation back to Orlando, and asked if she knew why, and she said that some people hate people who are different than them, and that includes sexual orientation, so maybe that was one reason. And she told me, like Liz had, that some people had a very narrow view of their religious texts and used that to justify hatred, and often times they were goaded on by someone else.

She said that there were people who hated ponies, and some of them had set up computer pages where they could talk about how much they hated ponies, and I asked if the angry man was one of those. She said he wasn't, yet, but she kind of thought he might be. And she told me that they kept a good watch on people they thought were likely to commit violence, but they couldn't always be sure, and so my best option if I found myself in a bad situation was to get away as fast as I could, and if I couldn't to fight my way out. And she said that Mister Salvatore would probably be happier if I never went anywhere alone, and even happier if I had him with me everywhere I went.

I thought that was a little bit extreme.

Then I asked if it was bad to be homosexual, 'cause Gusty was having sex with Nicky and maybe that was why she had tried to keep it a secret on the train.

Miss Cherilyn said that it was legal; whether or not it was moral was up to an individual to decide. She said that some religions prohibited it and others didn't.

Well, when we were all done with shopping, I said I'd trot ahead and find Mister Salvatore, and she told me not to fly in the store, so I kept my hooves on the ground and went looking. It was a like a really big game of hide-and-seek, 'cause there was so much stuff and so many people.

I didn't know where everything was, so I kind of wandered through the store, and I found myself in an aisle with pillows and blankets and other bedding, and I got to thinking how even though it hadn't been on my list it might be nice to have an extra pillow for when Meghan came over so that I would have one to sleep on when I wasn't sleeping on her breasts and I poked at a couple of them with my hoof to see how soft they were, and when I found the one I liked I went and grabbed it with my mouth and just then someone whistled at me and said that he liked my pussy and at first I didn't understand what he was saying, but he kept on talking about what he wanted to do to me even though I wasn't interested in him at all and I clamped my tail down and tried to ignore him but he kept following after me.

The floors in Meijer aren't made for galloping, so I didn't try, but I did pick up my pace to a slow trot and he kept even with me (I was kind of glad he was talking, 'cause I could keep an ear on him and know where he was), and I went past aisle after aisle and I couldn't decide if I should try and lure him out of the store so that I could fly away or go towards other people who might discourage him but then I went around a corner and saw Mister Salvatore and I knew he'd keep me safe so I went straight to him.

At first he had a smile when he saw me coming and then he saw the man behind me and his face got hard and he started going in our direction and the man was so busy concentrating on me that he didn't notice when Mister Salvatore leaned down and said something into his coat, and he didn't notice how he moved his legs as he stepped away from the shelf, and then I was behind Mister Salvatore.

Mister Salvatore asked if there was a problem, and the man who had been following me said that it wasn't any of his business, we were just having a little talk, and Mister Salvatore said that the conversation was over and he had best be getting on his way, and the man said that nobody was going to tell him what to do and tried to push by Mister Salvatore, and a moment later he was on the floor with a knee in his back and Mister Salvatore said that was the wrong answer. And he reached back for his belt and pulled out a pair of silver bracelets that had a chain between them and he put them around the man's wrists and then pulled him back up off the floor, and then he showed him his wallet and the man got kind of pale.

Then Mister Salvatore reached into the foul man's back pocket and took out his wallet and opened it and when he saw his ID, he wrote down everything on it and then he gave it back to the man and said that he was in a bad mood and he didn't really feel like getting in a worse mood by writing up an arrest report and that everyone would be happier if the foul man just left and did his shopping elsewhere and Mister Salvatore said he would be very happy if he never met the foul man again and then he asked if he was being perfectly clear.

The foul man said that he was, and so Mister Salvatore got a key and unfastened the bracelets and told the man to get lost.

He was in a more cheerful mood after that, and we went and picked up my pillow and Miss Cherilyn said I could get a different one instead but I thought I'd kind of earned this one, so she put it in the cart and we went up to the cashier and then out to Sienna with my new things.

I kept on thinking about him while we were driving back, though, and I wondered if maybe Gusty had met a person like him and she'd decided to just wear clothes to help herself fit in. But it was hard to see how that would help; she was still a pony under those clothes.

When we got home, though, I could kind of put it out of my mind as Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore helped me put away my things, and he reminded me to keep my front door locked all the time and then when they were ready to leave he told me that I could call him any time I needed to, even if it was the middle of the night.

Then I hugged both of them and I said that they'd given me a lot to think about, and once they'd gone I set the dreamcatcher out and sat on the balcony until I saw Meghan walking over, and I had to open the door for her 'cause she couldn't just go up on the balcony with me.

Well it was nice to have her with me, and Jeff didn't mind. He introduced me to some of the other people who lived in the neighborhood, and when the kids came out I gave them the dreamcatcher and we played for a little bit but we couldn't use the water-squirters because we might accidentally spray one of the other guests who didn't want to be wet. And Trinity begged me to give her a ride, so I did, but I remembered to tell her not to squeeze my barrel too hard.

Jeff had some tables and chairs where people could sit, and we also could eat standing up. Most of what he cooked was meat, but there were also some vegetables, and they were really good—he'd made ears of corn and green peppers and asparagus and there was a sugary drink called punch that was for the kids and people who didn't bring their own beer.

We stayed over there until it was getting dark, and when I wasn't playing with the kids people were asking me about what I was going to college for and how I liked Kalamazoo and could I really move clouds and could I do magic and if I'd ever met any of the Princesses and some of them used their portable telephones to show me pictures of their stuff, because some humans think that having things is a symbol of their worth.

Before we left, I nuzzled both of the girls (Caleb didn't want a nuzzle) and thanked Jeff for inviting me and I thought that next time I would bring enough beer for me and to share, because that was the friendly thing to do.

I flew up to the balcony so I could open the door and let Meghan in, and she went and put up some curtains just like she'd said she was going to but I insisted that she leave the front windows open and she decided that was okay. But all the windows looking towards Jeff's house and the one in the kitchen were covered, and she closed the door to the bedroom, too.

Between the party and her being over, I'd almost forgotten about the foul man at Meijer, and what little thought I gave to him was pretty quickly gone when I rested my head on my pillow (that still smelled a little bit like Aric) and Meghan put her arm around my barrel and kissed me on the forelock.

June 25 [Kalamazoo Valley River Trail]

June 25

When I woke up, Meghan still had me cuddled against her chest, and even though I wanted to lie on her I waited until she woke up and I was about to roll over and push her on her back but then she started gently scratching my belly and that felt really good.

I stretched out and then she kind of shifted around so that she could reach more and I rolled on my back, so that I could get a complete belly rub, and she eventually wound up sitting up and I put my head on her lap and she leaned down and kissed me then used both hands along my belly and under my wings. And it was kind of funny to watch her sort of wave away the few downy feathers that escaped as she was under my wings.

Part of me wanted to stay in bed with her all day.

We didn't, though.

She asked what I was going to do today and I said that I didn't have any plans yet. I told her about the hot air balloon I'd seen yesterday and asked if she knew where to go to get to ride in one of them. She didn't know, but she said that she could probably find out.

It was a nice day, and she said that it would be fun to walk around town, and I thought so too.

She said that she wanted to take a shower and I said that I would, too, because if I was going to be with her all day I wouldn't be flying much, and I was also kind of selfishly hoping that when we were done she'd want to brush me and braid my tail.

Then I remembered that I had just gotten a plug for the bathtub and asked her if she wanted to take a bath together instead, 'cause it would be kind of like the hot tub only a little bit more crowded.

She thought that would be fun, so I fetched the new plug and she started filling the bathtub and put in some shampoo so it would make bubbles and when it was about half-full the two of us got in and it was really crowded and it took us some figuring out how to make it work.

We wound up face-to-face, with my back up against the faucet and the water from it splashing on me before it found the bathtub, and she had put her knees up first but that was kind of unfriendly so she moved until her feet were on either side of me.

Once the tub was full, she had to reach behind to me to turn the water off, 'cause I couldn't get it, and then we had to be kind of careful about how much we moved or else we'd splash all over the floor and it turned out to not be really practical for actually washing either, but it was nice and relaxing and I played with the soap bubbles and made some of them drift away in little clouds, and then she took a big handful of bubbles and set them on my head and said that now I had a hat. It was really weird hearing them pop right next to my ear like that.

When Meghan said that the water was getting a little bit cold, I didn't want to get out of the tub yet so I climbed on her and rested my head between her breasts and even though my back started to get cold pretty quickly it was nice and warm between us, plus it let her reach and pet my mane easily.

Then she had the smart idea to drain out the water and take a shower to get clean because she said that she couldn't wash her hair in the bathtub anyway. So I kicked at the drain until it came out and the water started to gurgle out but I didn't move until she sort of pushed me off.

We both had to be careful getting up, and I retreated to the front of the shower so that she could reach over me and turn it on and it took a little bit but then it heated up again and we could rinse off the soap what was still left from the bath bubbles and then do a proper washing job on each other.

After we had finished and mostly dried off, we sat on the futon and she brushed my hair and then braided my tail and then I brushed her hair and by then both of us were pretty hungry so we went into the kitchen and I said that I wanted to make waffles so she took my box of waffle batter and asked if I had a mixing bowl, which I didn't. And it turned out I didn't have any eggs, either. I thought that the box was all I needed, so I was pretty disappointed in myself for not knowing that I needed other things to make waffles.

She said that we could get eggs, if I had my heart set on waffles, or we could go to a restaurant, or we could just eat what I had and I liked that last idea the best so she made oatmeal instead and said that she had never made breakfast naked before but it was kind of liberating.

I only had the one bowl, so we had to share, and when we were done eating she asked if I knew how to cook at all, and I shook my head. I said that cloudhouses didn't have stoves, so everything I'd ever eaten before that had been cooked had been cooked by someone else.

Then she asked if I wanted to learn, 'cause she could teach me, and that was really nice of her so I said that I would.

She washed the bowl and put it in the drying rack and then sat down on the futon while I went and unpacked the birdfeeder I'd bought from Meijer which was just like the one Aric had, and I went outside and hooked it on the tree just a little bit above the balcony and put some food in it for the birds and then I invited her to come over to the papasan to watch.

Meghan said it was too close to the window and people might see her but then I guess she got lonely and wrapped the blanket around herself and did come to the papasan and I got out to give her room and then hopped back up and sat on her lap and the two of us watched until the first bird discovered the feeder and started to happily chirp and pretty soon a couple more birds flew over, too.

While she was watching the birds, I pushed the blanket open a little bit so that I could rest my head on her chest and she didn't object.

By the time we finally got out of the chair and she got dressed, the sun was overhead and I felt a little bit like I'd wasted the whole morning, but that thought didn't really bother me at all.

We had a snack before we left, and we went to her apartment first so that she could get her backpack and she put in some granola bars and bottles of water in case we got hungry or thirsty while we were exploring, and then we set out for the river trail.

It started off right next to the railroad bridge across the river, and went both north and south. We went south first, and that was nice; the trail went through a park and was right alongside the river. She said that it was kind of funny to have a nature trail that had a railroad yard on the other side of the river, but I guess the railroad yard had to be somewhere, and maybe the train drivers liked seeing the river, too.

That leg of the trail didn't go too far; it looped around and then went back the way we'd come, so we crossed over to the north leg and there weren't any railroad yards on this side. We had to cross over the river twice, and also over the railroad tracks a couple of times, too. And we went all the way until we got to F Avenue and it sort of had become part of the road there and wasn’t as nice, so we both agreed to turn around and go back.

We each had a couple of granola bars and some water on our walk, and since neither of us wanted to go back too quickly, she found on her pocket telephone that there was a park called Markin Glen that was right next to us, and all we had to do was cross off the path onto Pitcher Street and then we'd be on their trails.

The new trail went past a set of metal houses that Meghan said was a mobile home park, and then to the lake at Markin Glen. And that looked like a fun park, 'cause there was a beach for sunning and swimming, and it even had an island with a bridge to it, so we could both go over to the island.

When we got back to Kalamazoo, Meghan said that if we wanted to cook we'd have to go to her apartment since I didn't have any food or cooking utensils, or she said that we could stop at a restaurant downtown and just have dinner there.

I liked the idea of stopping at a restaurant, and I said that I would pay for our meals, so we went to a place called Olde Peninsula which had beer that they made themselves and that you could buy in a big jug called a growler. I had a salad named Zorba that was really good, and Meghan had a hamburger, and we each had a beer. I had the stout because I liked dark beer the best, and she had a cream ale which was a lot lighter but also very tasty. And then I got a growler of Midnight Stout to take home with us to share.

On her way back to my apartment, she said that we could stop at Walgreen's and get some eggs and a pan and a mixing bowl and a spatula and tomorrow morning we could have scrambled eggs and waffles and I kind of didn't want to go in there, which was silly. The angry man wouldn't be there any more.

Meghan didn't notice that I'd stopped to think, and she was across the parking lot and going through the doors and I didn't want to be out here all alone, either, so I galloped to the doors and when I got inside it took me a second to find her, but then I did and I stuck close to her a she picked out all the dishes I'd need to make waffles and got some eggs and cheese.

I wish I'd brought my saddlebags, 'cause it all would have fit in them. But I didn't have them, and when we were back out of the store and walking up Academy Street, I insisted on carrying one of the bags.

By human standards there wasn't a whole lot to do in my apartment, 'cause I didn't have a television or any movies, but Meghan didn't mind. We sat in the papasan for a little bit and drank beer and watched the birds until it got dark—the ones who had found it in the morning had told their bird-friends, so it was pretty busy. And of course there was a squirrel who wanted to get his share of seeds, too, and it was fun to watch him hanging by one hind paw as he stretched down to get at the seeds.

Meghan said I should chase him off, but I didn't mind him. There was enough food to share.

When it was almost all the way dark and the birds and squirrel had gone back to their nests for the night, Meghan made the bed and got undressed and lay down on her back so that I could curl up with my head on her breast and she put her arm around me and said that we'd had a great Saturday and I thought so, too. And tomorrow morning we'd have waffles!

June 26 [Goodwill]

June 26

I accidentally woke up Meghan when I tried to use the corner of the blanket to wipe a little bit of drool off her breast. She hit me in the chin with her hand and then we both said that we were sorry at the same time and then we started laughing and then she took the blanket out of my mouth and wiped it off herself. Then she said that horse drool wasn't very romantic and I told her that she'd drooled in my mane last night, and then we both started to giggle again.

It's hard to go back to sleep when you're giggly. And for the rest of the time we were in bed, we'd sort of calm down a little bit and then start again.

I had a little bit of a hangover from the beer last night, and she said that she did too, and I said that waffles would be the perfect thing to eat for breakfast. She told me that I had an unhealthy obsession with waffles, but then she came into the kitchen and showed me how to make the batter.

At first, she tried to crouch down so that I could see what she was doing, but that looked kind of awkward for her so I flew up and sat on the counter next to the sink, and she let me help even. She measured out the water by guessing 'cause I still didn't have a measuring cup, then put an egg in and the batter and said that it had to be stirred with the spoon, so I did that while she held the bowl. And we got some little bits of batter on us and she started giggling again when I licked it off.

Once all the lumps were gone, which she had to help with, she plugged the wafflemaker into the wall and we waited until it got hot and then I knew what to do after that.

She said that since I was in charge of the waffles, she was going to make scrambled eggs, and she put a pan on the stove and I warned her that it would try and burn her, but she was tall enough that her arm could easily reach across the top and not be in any danger from the flames, and I was kind of jealous of that.

It looked like scrambled eggs were pretty easy to make; she just cracked some eggs open in the pan and then moved them around with a spatula, and she put some chedder cheese chunks in it, too.

When it was done she piled them all on a plate which kind of crowded out the waffles and she laughed and said that I was the only apartment-dweller she knew of that only had one of each utensil and I guess I should have thought to get more but I hadn't seen the reason to have more than one plate or bowl or cup.

Meghan told me that there was a store called Goodwill that sold used plates and bowls and cups and silverware and that it was very cheap and maybe we should go there. I thought that was a good idea, and would be something that we could do today after breakfast and maybe a shower.

I kinda wanted to fly today, too, but I'd feel bad leaving Meghan behind.

We ate breakfast together in the papasan and watched as the birds ate their breakfast (and the squirrel, too). There wasn't a really good way to sit so that we could both use the plate so we took turns, and she tried to balance the plate on my head and feed me, too, but that didn't work out as well as she'd wanted it to 'cause the waffle fell off and landed on her lap and she almost got me in the eye with the fork when I leaned down to get the waffle back.

Once we were done eating, I said that I really wanted to fly today 'cause the weather was pretty nice and I hadn't flown hardly at all yesterday, and Meghan said that was okay, as long as I wasn't planning to stay away all day. I wasn't, and I said that when I got back we could take a shower together and then go to the Goodwill store to get plates.

So I put on my flight gear and she helped me strap on my radio and altimeter and then I went out to the balcony and got permission to fly and took off.

I stayed low at first, 'cause I wanted to check on Aric's bird feeder and make sure that it was still full, so I just flew along the street and then when I got to his house I flew up the driveway and over not-Winston and there were enough seeds in it to last for a couple more days, so I went up into the sky.

It had been clear, but now there were clouds coming in and I could feel a little breeze and the temperature dropping some so I thought it would probably rain but it didn't look like it was going to be all that much.

I didn't really have any place in mind to fly to, so I made a lazy loop of the triangle, all the way up to the 131 Highway and then across to Stadium Drive and back home again. I did a few dive exercises and then just for fun some wing rolls and I was a little bit sloppy at them. It's weird how something that I used to do all the time without thinking now was a little bit of effort, 'cause I wasn't spending nearly as much time in the air as I would back in Equestria.

When I landed on my balcony and looked inside I saw that Meghan was sitting on the papasan reading one of my poetry books, and she'd put her shirt on, but when she got up out of the chair I saw that was all.

We didn't try to start with a bath today; just took a shower and she made me rinse off first 'cause of all the lather on my coat. I'd kind of pushed myself a little bit on the last part of my flight but not as much as I could have.

She thought it was funny that I tilted my head back and drank some of the shower-water, which I guess was something that she never did.

Once we were done drying off and she was dressed, she said that she wanted to go to her apartment and change into clean clothes 'cause she hadn't planned to spend the whole weekend with me and her clothes were getting kind of grungy. I didn't say anything, but I was thinking that if people didn't wear clothes so much maybe they wouldn't have to worry about keeping them clean. I had to wash my flight vest every now and then 'cause I got it all sweaty when I was flying, and also my bedding, but otherwise when I was dirty I could just take a shower and be ready to go out again.

So we walked over to her apartment and went upstairs and she got undressed and then redressed and then called for an Uber-car.

Goodwill was near the Maple Hill Mall and if I had realized that I could have stopped there on my flight, but I hadn't known. Still, it was more fun to shop with both of us, and after we'd found some plates and bowls and cups and silverware and put them in the cart, she looked around the clothes for a while and picked out a nice-looking sweater for the fall, and also a pretty white blouse that she said was made by Tommy Hilfiger and was normally pretty expensive.

They also had some furniture and radios and TVs and books (none of them were poetry) and pretty much everything that you'd need to furnish a house, and I also added a painting of the ocean with a ship on it that I liked.

Then she also found some towels and said it wouldn't hurt for me to have some more, and I thought she was right, because with both of us showering my towels were pretty wet by the time we'd dried off. And she found a happy yellow duck that she said was for the bath, and something I needed, especially since it was only a quarter.

So when we left we had two big bags of stuff, and I guess there weren't any Uber-cars that were close, so we had to wait around outside and there was a little island of grass with a small tree on it where we sat until the Uber-car came and picked us up.

Meghan wasn't too happy with the all-vegetable lunch (although now I had plates for both of us), which made me feel kind of bad, although she said that at least I wasn't only eating hay because humans couldn't digest it. I suppose that's why with all the vegetables that Meijer has they don't sell any pasture grasses.

Well, she got curious after lunch and it turned out that I could order small amounts of hay on the computer which was pretty exciting. I hadn't had any alfalfa in months, and even though she wasn't convinced that it was all that good, I decided I was going to order some. There were still some dandelions in the backyard and making an alfalfa and dandelion sandwich would be a pretty good lunch.

We decided to go downtown and visit some stores until it was dinnertime, which was a lot of fun. Humans have so many things that they sell, and it was a great way to spend the afternoon looking at all of it. There were things that were not much different than what a craftspony might make, and then there were things she had to explain to me like a little squishy tube that was supposed to protect your wrists while you were using a keyboard.

There was even a place called Climb Kalamazoo that had a wall you could pay to climb. I would have just flown to the top but humans had to use the little grips and there were different colors depending on how difficult you wanted your climb to be.

Probably we could have gone to a restaurant for dinner, but Meghan was kind of determined to teach me more about cooking so we went back to her apartment when the stores had started to close and she made a lasagna which is layers of really wide noodles with stuff like cheese and spinach and alfredo sauce between them and I wasn't a whole lot of help but she let me pour the jar of alfredo sauce over the noodles and gave me all the spinach stems to snack on, too.

Her stove had electric fire, which meant that there weren't any actual flames coming out, just coils of metal that glowed.

It took a while to cook, and while we were waiting we sat in her bedroom and snuggled and she un-braided my tail and brushed it out smooth again.

My stomach was growling at me after she took the lasagna out of the oven but she said we had to wait for it to cool down before we could eat it so while we waited she helped me use her computer to order a box of alfalfa that would be shipped to my apartment. And she said it might be cheaper to get it by the bale but she wasn't sure where, so she looked around and said that maybe we could find a horse stable that had it.

So that made me think about how I wanted to ride a horse and she did some more looking (which she called Googling) and found a riding stable called Lou-Don which wasn't that far away and said that we could make an appointment for next weekend, which I thought was a great idea.

While we were eating, she said that it was probably going to freak them out, and I kind of thought it might, too, but I felt like it was something that I needed to do to really understand how humans got along with horses, especially because a lot of children like Trinity or the girl at Val Day had really wanted to ride on me which didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

There was more lasagna than we could eat, so when we'd both had our share Meghan put what was left in little boxes and put them in her electric icebox and said that would be her lunch for the rest of the week.

After I begged, she let me clean the dishes, which turned out to be not much fun 'cause there was a lot of stuff stuck to the lasagna tray, and it didn't really want to come off. My electric kettle didn't need much cleaning since there was only water in it, and when I was done eating vegetables I only really needed to rinse out the bowl but her meal had left lots of dirty dishes that were hard to clean.

Then we went back to her room and watched the sixth Harry Potter movie and by the very end I was crying 'cause I'd really liked Dumbledore. Meghan hugged me and turned off the TV, and laid down on her bed and I curled up against her and she ran her hand through my mane and promised me that it would turn out okay in the end, and she said it was too bad that it was so late that we couldn’t watch the last two movies but I trusted her that it would all be okay in the end.

Author's Note

Tomorrow's chapter will be late, and then I ought to be back on my regular schedule. I spent all weekend at the family pan-birthday celebration, and (this is true) among other gifts got a bird feeder.

If it winds up attracting pegasi, I will be sure to let y'all know.

June 27 [North of Plainwell]

June 27

I woke up a little bit before Meghan's alarm but not too much. I'd just woken up enough to snuggle against her and close my eyes again when her alarm started sounding and I had to move to let her roll over and turn it off.

She mumbled that she didn't want to go to work and held her portable telephone against her chest, where she could turn it off the next time that her alarm sounded.

I wouldn't have minded if she didn't; we could have found something to do together, I'm sure. She got up the second time her alarm sounded, though, and I got up with her and offered to brush her hair when she got out of the shower.

So she went off to the bathroom and I stayed in her bedroom and after a little bit I was wishing that I had thought to pee before she went in the shower and I probably could have gone in but I thought she might mind so I just waited until she had gotten out of the bathroom.

Then she asked what we did if we were working a storm or something and had to pee and I said that as long as we weren't over a town we just did.

Then I brushed her hair for her and when I was done she went to her closet and showed me some clothes and asked me what I thought she should wear today and I'm kinda not a real good judge of that but I thought the colors of the white blouse and light blue dress looked really nice together and she said that they were pretty new.

We ate breakfast together—she had little shredded wheat cubes but hers had frosting on one side and it made them really sweet—then when she was done we talked a little bit until her friend who had a car came by to take her to work.

I went back to my apartment and got my flight gear, and when I asked for permission, Dori said that I could fly north 'cause it was clear out there, so I went along Douglas Street and past the dirt mines and the park with the island where we'd gone on Saturday and all the way over Plainwell and then because it was a really nice day out, I went even further north until I was at an even smaller town which I found on the map later and it was called Martin.

Off to the west, just across the 131 Highway, there was a long paved strip with taxiways around it that I thought was an airport but when I flew over that way to investigate I saw that instead of having a tower and airplane hangars it had benches on either side and I didn't think that landing and taking off was a spectator sport so I went down until I could see the sign and it said it was the US 131 Motorsports Park.

I wasn't sure what that meant. I flew around it and there wasn't anyone there and I couldn't figure out what it was for, although the nice dark strip of road made a pretty good thermal that I rode partway back up to my flight altitude.

I'd flown a bit further than I meant to, and when I turned around and saw how far away Kalamazoo had gotten, I decided not to do any tricks but just use thermals and gliding. I wished I'd thought to put a can of anchovies in my vest pocket; they'd have been a good snack.

I could have followed the 131 Highway back, but it wasn't as direct as Douglas Street, so I angled across it and went back the same way I'd come, only changing my path once the top of the Stetson Bell Tower was visible, and I angled just a little bit west of it so that I'd arrive more or less right over my apartment.

The only drawback to the tree in front of my apartment was that I had to go below its crown and then back up to the balcony, but it did give me a chance to check my mailbox which I hadn't done on Saturday or Sunday because I'd been with Meghan, and I had a couple of new letters. One of them was from Aquamarine and I wanted to open it right away, but I didn't want to drip sweat on it, so I took off my flight gear and ate a can of anchovies and took a shower and then I opened her letter.

She said that Jenny had told her about a special festival in Bay City which had lots of what humans called tall ships, because of their masts, and there was even going to be a Viking ship there and the way she described it it sounded like it would be a lot of fun, and she said that if I could go I was welcome to come along.

Well, I thought it would be a lot of fun. Those sounded a lot like the kind of ships I was used to, but they were probably bigger 'cause they were for humans. Maybe even as big as the ships that Aric and I had seen on our trip.

She also was kind of jealous of my trip with Aric, and said that she hadn't seen as much of Earth as she'd hoped to yet, and her professor had tried to get her to go with him on a trip to Costa Rica, which is a country between North America and South America, but that her assistants had said that she couldn't go because there were potential problems with vaccines.

I hoped that wouldn't be an issue before we went to see Gusty in Stratford.

So I wrote her a letter back saying that I would love to come to see the tall ships, and I asked if I could bring a friend, too, if Meghan didn't have plans for the weekend.

I was kind of sad that I hadn't gotten a letter back from anypony else yet but maybe since they were further away it would take longer for a letter to arrive.

I must have missed my mail delivery, 'cause when I went down to put the letter to Aquamarine in the mailbox there was a postcard in there that told me how Comcast had a special deal on premium TV channels but I didn't even have a television to watch premium channels on.

Their postcard didn't have a mailing address but it did have a telephone number and so I called them to tell them that I didn't have a TV and the man who I talked to was very confused by that, then he wanted to know why I had called if I didn't, and I said it was so that he wouldn't have to send me any more postcards. Then he just hung up without thanking me and I was going to call back but I think he would have hung up on me again.

I went out on my balcony and started to read Ezra. At first, the birds got scared off but then the bold ones started to come back, and they'd stay as long as I didn't move too much or turn a page. It was nice to listen to them eating and chirping happily while I was reading.

Pastor Liz was right; I liked the first part where the Israelites came back and got to rebuild their temple and altar because God told the Persian king to have them return to their homes. But then their enemies got a new Persian king to make them stop, and they had to until there was another Persian king who saw that the first one had said that they could and so he let them keep working until they had finished it and celebrated Passover there.

That was the problem with changing kings so often, I thought. Princess Celestia would never tell somepony to build something and then change her mind and tell them to stop and then change her mind again and tell them to start again.

This had all happened a long time ago, though, and so maybe now it was better and people didn't do that any more. Maybe they kept better track of the things that they were doing so if they had a new king they could keep on working on their important projects. Otherwise it seems like a lot of people would be putting a lot of effort into things only to find a few years later that the new king wanted to do something else.

Then partway through it changed so that it was the words of Ezra himself saying how he came back to Jerusalem. He had to send messengers to find Levites, because he had forgotten to bring them with him, and then after he'd found some and got back to Jerusalem, he found out that the people there before him had married the wrong people which was against God's rules, and he was so ashamed he couldn't even look at God when he told Him.

And it was kind of strange how they all agreed that they'd been bad but they didn't do anything about it right away because it was raining, but eventually they sent away their wives and children so that God wouldn't be mad at them.

It didn't say where they had gone, and the next book which was called Nehemiah didn't, either. At least not in the first chapter and I thought about reading all of it but my stomach was getting a bit growly and so I decided I would have dinner first and then maybe read Nehemiah.

Of course, as soon as I looked at the food I had I started to have a craving for the alfalfa I didn't have, but that would make it taste that much better when it finally arrived.

So I filled my bowl with vegetables and had that for dinner, and I also had some unflavored oats out of a cardboard can and when I was done I turned on my computer to see if Aric had sent me any computer letters or Facebook telegrams over the weekend.

He had sent a pretty long computer letter about how his internship had started late so he was already behind. He told me that the first play that they were putting on was only in a month and it was called Fiddler on the Roof and it was for children, and he was in charge of the lights and so he'd had to spend the whole week learning what the theatre had for lighting instruments and what their control board could do and I thought about how even at Kalamazoo College, the two theatres I'd been in had completely different controls and catwalks and stages and I guess you would have to do different things for different shapes of theatre.

He'd never really gone into that much detail about how he decided what lights needed to go where, but it was probably kind of like clouds, in that what worked in one place might not work in another and you had to know before you wasted a lot of effort putting the wrong clouds somewhere.

I don't know why it came to mind, but after I'd written him a letter back saying what I'd been doing I remembered how the weather lady had invited me to come to the television studio and I never had, and so I thought I should send her a computer letter to let her know that I was still interested and to apologize for not having done it sooner, and I had to dig through my notebooks until I found her computer mail address.

Then I turned off the computer and went back outside and I thought about how nice it would be to sleep outside on the balcony so I got my pillow off the futon and put it out on the balcony, and it was pretty nice although the wood floor was kind of uncomfortable, and I kept on waking up so I finally went back inside and curled up in the papasan chair and fell asleep there.

June 28 [Alfalfa]

June 28

I woke up early, 'cause there were a couple of birds fighting outside the window—two cardinals were swooping at each other and finally one of them flew off and the winner landed on the birdfeeder and ate his fill before he left, and he was pretty quickly replaced by a bunch of little chirpy birds.

It was overcast and smelled like it might rain, so after I'd gotten on my flight gear I went up and gave the grumpy airplane director a weather report, which cheered him up a little bit.

I was at the top of my altitude and that wasn't enough to get at the bottoms of the clouds; in fact, they still looked almost as far away, and was pretty sure that it wouldn't be raining from them, but they might be coming in ahead of a front. Or else they were all clouds that airplanes had made, but those clouds usually didn't cover all that much of the sky. I think if the weather was just right they might spread out, though, but I hadn't seen it happen over Kalamazoo yet.

While I was flying around I remembered that I'd forgotten to invite Meghan to come to the tall ships festival with me, so when I got done and landed I sent her a telephone telegram right away, even before getting into the shower.

I wish that the shower was wide enough to really stretch out my wings. I turned sideways and that helped, but then I either had my muzzle against the wall or the shower curtain and that made it feel more confined. Plus it was against my instincts to have the water coming at me sideways.

I woke up my computer and Aric hadn't written me back but the weather lady had and she said that she would still like to show me around and she thought that everyone in the studio would like to meet me, and she asked if Thursday was okay. I wrote her back to tell her that it was, and then I went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Today felt like a good day to make waffles, so I got out the bowl and it was kind of hard to break the egg into it and I had to fish out half of the shell 'cause I dropped that in by mistake. And I couldn't remember how much water Meghan had put in, either, so I kind of guessed at that and then kept adding more (because it would be really hard to get extra water out) until it was all mixed up like she'd showed me.

I made two waffles for me and then put the rest of the batter in the icebox because I thought that if the egg had to be kept cold while it was still in its shell it would probably have to be kept cold after it was out of it, too. A lot of food goes bad if it isn't kept properly.

When I was done eating, I saw that Meghan had replied, and she said that she wished she could come but she had a conference in Indianapolis that weekend and so she couldn't.

Well, that was disappointing, 'cause it would have been fun to have her there. I guess even though I had all summer free to do whatever I wanted to not all my friends did.

I needed to get a train ticket, and this time I was determined to do it myself without Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn's help, so I flew down to the train station and went to the ticket window and bought myself a Friday morning ticket to East Lansing and a Monday morning ticket back home. It would have been nice if there were trains more often, but it would be fun to just visit Aquamarine and Jenny at their apartment which I hadn't seen.

She hadn't seen mine, either. I think she'd like it, although maybe she wouldn't like how the backyard was mostly gravel.

I thought that maybe I'd like for the futon to be a little bit closer to the balcony, so I pushed it across the room until I was satisfied with where it sat—I could lie on it and look out the window, and I made sure to leave enough space that the back could fold down. But that made it kind of crowded with the papasan right near it, and I couldn't think of a good place to put it, so I tucked it right in the corner and maybe I'd think of something better later.

Then I sat down at my desk and got out my new notebook for my journal 'cause I'd completely filled the old one. And I was writing down what I'd done with my day when my doorbell rang and since it was quicker I went out the balcony and around rather than open the door and go down the stairs.

There was a grey-haired woman in a brown suit and she was holding a brown box and even before I got all the way to her I could smell the alfalfa and I remembered that I hadn't eaten lunch yet.

Well, she was surprised to see me come up the sidewalk and I had to tell her my name and put my mark on her little hand-computer before she would let me have my package, then she held it out for me and it was too big to carry in my mouth so I picked it up sideways with my forelegs and flew from my downstairs door up to the balcony.

They'd put too much tape on it—I guess they didn't want any alfalfa to fall out—and I had to really work at it to get it open, and then when I got inside the box it was all wrapped in plastic anyway. So I got that open and had to remind myself not to just gorge on it, but to eat like a proper pony, so I took the bag (which was a lot easier to carry) into the kitchen and put it on the counter and then scooped some out and put it on a plate and carried it back out to the balcony and ate it there.

It was a little bit dry, but still very good. I was going to have to order some more; maybe a box a week. And I think I could have it sent to college, too; the mail hut kept boxes that wouldn't fit into the pigeonholes and gave you a slip of paper to let you know that you had a package. It would be a nice treat to have. Plus not only did it taste good, but it made the apartment smell good, too.

If I was an earth pony, I'd plant some alfalfa and clover in the backyard. I wonder if Aquamarine has a little yard where she can plant things?

I went out and refilled my bird feeder, then I flew over to Aric's house to check on his, and it was low, too, so I filled it and then I flew over to Tiffany's to get some beer that I could share with Meghan tonight if she wanted me to come over,

The handles on the beer carriers aren't really made for ponies, and I should have worn my saddlebags. Next time I would—I got it home safely, but one bottle was jammed against my throat the whole way home and that didn't feel very good.

When I got back home I noticed that my telephone was blinking at me, and I remembered how I was supposed to have it with me but it was so easy to forget plus I didn't really have anywhere to carry it.

It was from Meghan and she said that she was home and if I wanted to I could come over for dinner and she'd show me how to make rice.

I was smart, and I put on my saddlebags and filled one side with all my flight gear and the other side with the beer and also my pocket telephone and I thought about bringing some alfalfa but I was pretty sure that she wouldn't eat it if I did, and it would be rude to be eating my own food instead of hers.

Since I remembered which door was hers, I waited on the porch and rang the doorbell.

When we were up in her room, we both had one beer and then we went into the kitchen and she showed me how to cook rice which was pretty easy—you put the right amount in a pan and added some water and then let it cook on low heat for a long time. She said that there was even a thing called a rice cooker that cooked rice for you, and that if I really liked rice it would be a good thing to have because it was cheap but since I didn't have one she was showing me how to do it on the stove.

Rice by itself was kind of boring, and she thought so, too, so she got out two other pans and the bigger pan was for vegetables and the little one was for some strips of meat for her rice.

She made a spot on the counter where I could stand and let me help cut up the vegetables but I wasn’t very good at it. It was hard to see what I was doing with a knife in my mouth, so I cut them into big pieces and she then cut them into smaller pieces and that worked out pretty well.

And when it was cooking, she let me stir it and I felt kind of dumb for not thinking about standing on the counter in my kitchen. It was slippery but I wasn't going to be galloping on it, and if I just flew up and stood there I would be fine.

I could maybe even light the stove without burning myself that way.

We had to wait a little bit for the rice to be done, 'cause it took longer to cook than anything else. Then she said that she was going shopping with her friend on Wednesday after work and if I came over Thursday night she'd show me how to make cookies.

After the dishes were done we went to her room and she changed into her lounging clothes and we sat in her bed and watched the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and things just kept getting worse and worse for Harry and I was pretty sure that Voldemort was going to win after all, especially when right at the very end he stole Dumbledore's wand.

I wanted to watch the last one too, but Meghan said that it was late and she had to get up for work tomorrow and that was true and I guess it would be pretty selfish of me to keep her up late, and she promised me that things would turn out all right in the end.

June 29 [Amtraks are Fast]

June 29

I must have been tireder than I thought, 'cause I didn't wake up until Meghan's alarm went off and it kind of scared me and I managed to roll over to get up but I was too close to the edge of the bed and flopped onto the floor instead and then while I was shaking my head to clear it she leaned over the edge and asked if I was all right.

I said that I thought I was and stood up and flexed out my wings to make sure they were okay and I'd probably have a bruise or two and a sore knee but nothing serious.

I thought that since I was already out of bed she would get right up but she didn't; her head disappeared back over the edge of the bed and then I heard the mattress shift and when I stuck my head up over the edge she was on her back with her arms crossed over her chest and her telephone under them.

Well, if she wasn't going to get up yet I wasn't either so I hopped back in bed and since she'd blocked my favorite resting spot, I put my head down on her belly instead which wasn't quite as comfortable.

She reached down and petted my head and then scratched my ears and then her telephone alarm went off again and she made it quiet again and said that she was feeling rebellious today, and went back to scratching my ears.

On the third time, though, she said she had to get up and I got up first and went to the bathroom while she was putting on her robe, and when I was done she was outside so I let her in and went back to her room to wait, and sat on the bed and flexed my leg, and my knee made a funny little pop noise and then it felt a little bit better.

I heard the shower turn off and so I got her brush off the dresser and when she came into the bedroom I was holding it in my mouth which she thought was really funny. And she sat down on the bed so that I could brush her and then she put on some lacy red underwear and when I asked her why 'cause I'd never seen her wear it before, she said it was because she was feeling rebellious and when she had it on she made a little pose like a dancer.

It was kind of a shame that she hid it under pretty boring clothes.

We both had more shredded wheat for breakfast and she hadn't even finished when I heard crunching gravel from a car and Meghan looked at her pocket telephone and realized that she was late, so she told me to finish up and make sure that the door was locked when I left, and she kissed me on the nose and I would have kissed her back but I still had a mouthful of shredded wheat.

So after I finished my breakfast I put hers in her icebox so that the milk wouldn't go bad, and washed my bowl and then I went downstairs and out and I locked the door like she'd told me.

While I was still on the porch making sure that it was locked, I saw a flap open in the bottom of the door on the neighbor's house and a cat came out and that was pretty clever. If she had something like that next to her window I could go in and out without having to use the front door.

It would have to be pretty big, though, and I knew from Aric's window that it was easier to get out than in.

While I was flying back to my apartment, I tried to decide what I wanted to do today and I thought it would be nice to fly to South Haven and sit on the beach, but I wasn't sure I'd have the energy to make it back at the end of the day. I remembered the last time I was pretty tired when I arrived there.

It was a good day for a long flight, but maybe not that far unless Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn wanted to come out to South Haven and give me a ride back home at the end of the day and I wasn't sure that they'd want to.

So I thought I'd go a different direction instead. I'd followed the railroad tracks east and north but I'd never followed them west and so I thought that would be fun.

This time I thought to put some food in my vest in case I got hungry and then I called the airplane directors and got clearance to fly, but Dori asked if I could stay low until I got past the 131 Highway and I promised I would. She also advised me that there was balloon traffic near Texas Corners and to watch out for it.

I went across Western Michigan's campus, and then turned southwest when I was above the tracks and followed them along at about a hundred feet high.

I dove down under the 131 Highway bridge just 'cause that was fun (and I looked both ways to make sure that there wasn't a train coming when I did that), then started to climb up.

Since I was interested in what was on the ground, I only flew up to two thousand feet, which was above all but the tallest antenna-towers.

Pretty soon I was out of the city and over fields but there were also little neighborhoods here and there with curving roads to the houses, and also another trailer park that was bigger than the one by the park with the island.

I saw the balloon that Dori had told me about, too, and it was a long ways off. Far enough away that I didn't need to worry about crossing paths with it.

The tracks crossed under the 94 Highway near where we'd gone to watch for storms, and then they continued on their way southwest. I had just passed by a field of baseball diamonds (which are called that even though they are shaped like quarter-circles) and a grass airport which was called Kerby Field when I saw the headlights of an Amtrak off in the distance and so I dove down to get a closer look at it but I really misjudged its speed and before I could lose more than five hundred feet it zoomed by under me.

I circled around and watched it until it disappeared, and then turned around again so I was going the right way. I could see another town in front of me and I wanted to go there before I turned around.

I wound up going all the way past it and then I found a nice open field with three rows of trees where I could land and have a snack without bothering any farmer's crops.

There was a little bit of unfarmed ground alongside the trees and they also made for good shade. I sat under a tree that was at the very end of the row and admired how tall the corn was—no matter how much I stretched I couldn't see over it with my hooves on the ground. It was really close together, too—I was used to rows where a pony could walk through them and look at her crop, but here I don't think there was any way a human could pass without knocking over the stalks.

I opened up my can of anchovies and ate it and then relaxed for a little bit, then I put the empty can back in my vest and flew off again.

I'd just gotten back to the 94 Highway when I saw another train coming out of Kalamazoo and since I knew how fast they went I dove down and landed on the grassy embankment right next to the bridge so I could watch it go by up close, just 'cause I'd never seen anything that big move that fast.

And up close it was even faster than I thought it would be. I felt a strange impulse to move towards it as it got closer and then before I could even blink it zipped by me in a long silver flash and was gone. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. When I'd been on it, I hadn't know it was going that fast. I guess it was different when you were inside of it and couldn't feel the wind blowing in your face.

No wonder the windows don't open.

I was so distracted by it that I almost ran into the electrical wires when I took off again. I knew they were there, too—I'd gone around them when I landed—but I'd forgotten by the time I took off again and I had looked back at the highway because I heard a rumbly truck and then when I turned around I was almost on top of them and I kind of did a mid-air tumble to avoid them and then made a kind of weird loop to avoid them and the trees and the highway and the train tracks.

I probably couldn't have picked a worse spot to land and look at the train.

I paid close attention to where I was going until I was sure I was high enough to not run into any more wires, then I went higher just to be sure, and then glided for a bit while I refocused on flying and not running into things that I shouldn't.

Then I took a good look at the sky because it would be just my luck that there would be a balloon or a blimp or an airplane sneaking up on me, but luckily the sky was free of other obstructions. And there still weren't any clouds, either.

The rest of the trip back to my apartment was familiar and uneventful. This time I went above the 131 Highway bridge over the tracks, since I now knew just how fast the trains went. I'd thought that I had a good enough line of sight for them to not catch me by surprise but now I knew that I was wrong.

When I got back the first thing I did was go into the kitchen and drink some water—humans are always carrying around little plastic bottles of water and they were smarter than I was. I'd thought of food but not anything to drink, and if I was going to go on longer flights I'd want to have water.

Then I had my lunch and finished my meal with another plate of alfalfa.

It was a good afternoon for reading, so I went out on the balcony and read through all of Nehemiah, which was mostly about him going to Jerusalem and finding out that the walls had fallen down and getting people to rebuild the walls and the gates. All of the gates had names, and for some reason one of them was named the Dung Gate. I'm surprised that they didn't come up with a better name for it.

Since I didn't have anything else planned for the afternoon, I pushed the papasan chair next to the window and preened my wings then dozed off for a little bit. I woke up at bird-dinnertime and watched them eat. There was a fledgling robin who looked like he hadn't been flying all that long and he was pretty unsure of himself as he swooped at the feeder then got scared off by the birds that were already there even though he was bigger than them.

As long as I watched he didn't get anything to eat, 'cause he just wasn't bold enough. Then I saw him fly out of the tree and down to the ground, so maybe he was going to pick up the seeds that had fallen onto the lawn.

I had a salad for dinner and decided that since I'd been lazy all afternoon I didn't really deserve any alfalfa.

Then after I'd washed my bowl I remembered that I hadn't checked my mail so I did but the mailbox was empty, which was disappointing.

I flew up but didn't see anybody in the next-door backyard, and then I went around to my downstairs neighbor's front door and knocked so that I could introduce myself 'cause I hadn't done that yet but nobody answered, and so I went back to my apartment and got out my climate science book and skimmed through it just to make sure that I hadn't forgotten any of the important words because I'd gotten back in the habit of thinking of weather in Equestrian and I didn't want to sound dumb when I met with the weather lady tomorrow.

Luckily, I did remember almost all of them. Studying them with Aric had really been helpful although it also made me miss having sex with him.

When I was done with the book I paced around the apartment for a bit and then decided to go on an evening flight before I went to bed, so put my vest and blinking light and went around the neighborhood just a little way above the trees, and it was really pretty to see all the lights below me.

I found out that it's a lot harder to find my apartment from the air after dark. All the landmarks I was used to seeing to line up on it were hidden in the dark, so instead of a direct flight I went to Main Street, found Berkley and then followed that back in.

I had just laid down on the futon when I heard a car drive into the backyard and then I heard a door downstairs open and a woman and a man were talking and giggling and I thought about getting out of bed and going down and introducing myself but before I could make up my mind they got quiet and I thought that maybe they had gone to bed and if they had they probably didn't want to be bothered.

June 30 [WWMT]

June 30

I only took a short little flight around the neighborhood today 'cause I was going to go see Cyndi at WWMT and I didn't know how long it would take me to get there, and I didn't want to be late.

Then I took a shower and made extra-sure that my mane and tail were brushed really well and had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and then I checked the mirror one more time to be sure that there wasn't any oatmeal stuck in my muzzle.

The directions I had were for roads, and I figured that if I flew I would get lost, but I could fly faster than I could trot, so I compromised and flew just above the sidewalks.

That meant that I had to cross at intersections and obey traffic signs 'cause if I didn't a car might squish me. It must be frustrating to be a groundpony and have to wait for stuff all the time. Plus I also found out that sometimes when cars were turning right they wouldn't look to see if there was a pony off to that side trying to get across the road and a couple of them had started their turn before they saw me and one even honked and it probably shouldn't have done that because I bucked it in the nose. I didn't mean to, but it surprised me.

It was just west of Westnedge, behind a restaurant called The Korea House. And when I got there I had to look around until I found the front door, and there was a man in black pants and a white shirt with a badge who wouldn't let me by until I told him who I was, and then he saw that my name was on his list but he still wouldn't let me by 'cause he said that they were on the air right now and I would have to wait.

I didn't think he meant in the air, or else I would have told him I could fly up to meet them.

He directed me to some seats which were arranged like a couch but had arm rests between them so I couldn't stretch out. And there was a table with magazines about golfing, and also a little tree in a pot. It looked like a bonsai tree that had grown up.

The man went back to his business and it wasn't until a red light that said 'On Air' turned off that he picked up a telephone and made a quick call, and pretty soon Cyndi came out to greet me.

No sooner had I hugged her, but two more people came out, and introduced themselves as Kirk Mason and Alex Jokich. Alex said that Cyndi had been talking about me and so she wanted to meet me, too.

The three of them gave me a real quick tour of the TV station and their studio where they did the news. Kirk asked if I thought it looked bigger on the TV and I said that I had never seen it on the TV and Alex started laughing. She said that I was the first visitor who had never seen their show.

Kirk used his pocket telephone to show a video of him reporting on a bicycle crash that happened recently (although this was the first time I heard about it) and I looked at his telephone and then back at the studio and said I thought it looked bigger in reality than it did on his pocket telephone.

Then he and Alex both had to run off to get ready for their next news broadcast, and Cyndi took me to her office, which was just a little set of rectangular walls that didn't even go all the way up, so when she stood up everyone else could see her. She said it was called a cubicle, and I thought it was a nice idea because you'd never be lonely with all those other people around you all the time. When I flew up to see over a bunch of people were looking in our direction.

She showed me her computer and her weather radio which were a lot like the ones that the NOAA office had, and she said it was pretty much the same thing except that they had more stuff. And so we talked for a little bit about predicting the weather—which still felt a little bit backwards to me—and then she took me to her studio which was even smaller than the one Kirk and Alex had. One side of it was a big green screen and she said that she had to watch a small TV which showed her what she was pointing to on the screen.

I didn't understand, so she had one of the television crew start the equipment so that I could watch, and it was like magic—she was in front of a blank screen, but when I looked at the small TV there was a picture behind her.

She let me try it, and so I went in front of the screen and the man with the camera had to aim it down to even see me, and then I saw myself in the television screen with a map behind me but when I turned around it was just a green wall.

Cyndi told me to point to Grand Rapids and I went and poked at the wall where I thought it was, but I was wrong and had to move my hoof four times before I got it right.

She said that it took a lot of practice to point to things that weren't there, and a lot of people didn't appreciate that. Then she asked if I could do a special weather broadcast for her on the Fourth of July, which was coming up really soon.

I asked if it would be just me, or if she was going to help, and she said that she would be there, too. She said it wasn't a for-sure thing; she'd have to get permission first. And then she asked if I had ever been on television before and I said that I hadn't but I had been on YouTube lots of times and she said she'd seen some of those videos.

Then she told me that if I was going to be on TV I couldn't swear, because that was against the rules, and I also had to keep my head towards the camera. She said that they couldn't show my backside and I asked her why not, and she told me that it was also against television rules to show genitals.

I guess YouTube doesn't have rules like that.

So she let me practice a little bit more and then we went back to her cube-office and spent some time looking at the weather map and arguing good-naturedly about what the weather was going to do tomorrow or even later today. We both agreed that it was going to rain tomorrow, probably early in the morning, and then she said it would be mostly clear until Monday and I wasn't so sure about that.

Then Cyndi told me the worst part of her job was telling people that the weather was going to be bad for a holiday weekend because everyone always expected it to be nice but weather didn't work like that. And I said that if there were teams of weather pegasuses it could. We kept the skies clear on big market days and made sure that all the farmers got the rain that they needed. And we mostly stopped the storms that came in from the ocean and maybe one day we'd have enough weatherponies that we could.

She went with me back to the main room and on the way said that she would email me if she got approval to use me in a short segment and she said that I might want to think about a bio, because probably Alex would introduce me.

I told her that I would and then we hugged. She asked me how I was going to get back home and I said I would fly, and she wanted to see that so she went out to the parking lot and I took off and circled the building once and waved at her then flew back towards my apartment.

I wonder if Gusty has ever been on TV? I bet she has.

Once I got home I didn't have a whole lot to do so I ate lunch and then went out to the balcony with my Bible and read about Esther. She had been an orphan but when Queen Vashti didn't come to dinner with the King, he replaced her with Esther. A bad man who hated Esther's uncle planned to not only kill him, but all the Israelites, and I thought that the King was going to go along, especially since Esther was afraid to speak in front of him, but at the end she did and when the King found out what Haman's plan was, he had Haman hanged on the gallows he's built for Esther's uncle Mordecai.

I flew over to Aric's house to check on the bird feeder. David was out in the backyard, fixing a black grill like the one Jeff cooked on, and Angela was sunning herself again. David wasn't wearing his shirt—judging from the black smudges on his chest and arms from the grill, he had taken it off so it wouldn't get dirty. Angela was wearing a swimsuit with the bra untied like Christine did.

I filled the feeder and tested it and David asked if I wanted to have some burgers for dinner. He said that they were vegetarian, so I said I would, and so he told Angela that he was almost done and it was time to start gathering things for dinner, so she held her bra up against her and went inside and when she came back out with food she was wearing a shirt that said Einstürzende Neubauten on it and had funny little stick-man that had a simple eye as a head.

David said that was his shirt.

She said he was wearing her panties again, and he looked down and pulled his pants away from himself and said that he wasn't, so she reached down and unbuttoned them and pulled down the zipper and said that he was.

I thought that while they were cooking and looking at each other's underwear I would go get some beer to share, even though it would be helpful to learn to cook on a grill. So I went to Tiffany's and got six Oberons because everyone likes them and flew them back and it turned out that I didn't miss much because unlike Jeff's grill, this one had to have a fire in it and then it had to turn into coals before the food could be cooked.

I had two vegetable burgers and Angela had two and David had an actual meat burger and he also had a little tub of potato salad and he said that he was getting ready for cooking out the Fourth of July. He said that his mother and her wife were going to visit along with a bunch of other friends that they had, and I was welcome to show up and bring my friends.

So I told him that I would unless Meghan had something else planned, and then thanked him for cooking me dinner and then flew off to campus.

I think that Liz was happy that I didn't have my glaive with me this time. We talked about how bad things always seemed to happen to the Israelites and I said that I thought a lot of the reason was because they weren't always following God's rules like He had told them to. And then she told me some of the historical context of the chapters I'd been reading, and she said that there was even a movie called One Night with the King that was about Esther, and I might enjoy it.

And then she asked me how my summer was going and I told her it was fun so far but it was strange to not have a regimented schedule like I'd had in class, and I said that sometimes it was lonely in my apartment.

She invited me to church and said I'd be welcome, and then we hugged, and then I went back home long enough to pack up my flight gear and then flew over to Meghan's apartment.

We started off by making cookies, which was a lot like the waffles but the dough was thicker and more sugary and then she put it on flat tins and when she was done there was some batter left over and she said that eating it raw was one of the best things about making cookies.

I thought that we could watch the last Harry Potter movie while they cooked, but she said that they wouldn't be in the oven for that long, so instead we did the dishes which wasn't as much fun as watching a movie.

And while we were, I told her about how I got to visit the TV station and was maybe going to get a chance to do a weather report for them, and I also told her about David and Angela's party, and she said that she would like to go to that but reminded me that we were also going to go horseback riding.

Then the cookies were done and it was frustrating how good they smelled but we couldn't eat them yet because they had to cool on the rack first.

That was why I never flew above the bakery.

When they were cool enough she got a plate of cookies and a glass of milk and we went to her room to watch the last movie.

I spent most of the movie in Meghan's lap and I think I would have stopped watching if she hadn't told me that it turned out okay in the end, because it seemed like things kept getting worse and worse and I was pretty sure that Voldemort had actually won until Harry Potter came back to life.

Once it was over, we ate the rest of the cookies and Meghan brushed a few stray crumbs off her bed and put the dishes away and then she got undressed and got into bed.

I snuggled up with my head on her breast and she put her arm around my back and petted my wing and she fell asleep pretty quickly but I was still kind of stressed out about the movie so it took me a while longer and I think if I had been by myself I would have had trouble sleeping but since I was with her I felt safe.

July 1 [Casual Friday]

July 1

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a downpour and I had to go see it so I carefully climbed out of bed and put my muzzle against the window. And then I wanted to smell it, too, so I pushed the window up just a little bit and then pushed up against the screen and sniffed the air.

Behind me, I heard Meghan ask what I was doing, and I told her that I was watching the rain and so she got out of bed and moved her desk chair over by the window and sat down in it and I got up on her lap and we watched it come down.

I thought about going outside and playing in the rain, and I thought about turning on my radio and seeing if Mel or any of the other stormwatchers were talking and then I thought that it was the middle of the night and she had to get up for work in the morning so I got back off her lap and she closed the window and we went back to bed.

I dreamed about Harry Potter, which I guess shouldn't have surprised me. My dreams have humans in them and human things, and I wonder if that's happening to all of us. And if that's happening to the people who are in Equestria. Are they dreaming of ponies?

In my dream, I was Ginny Weasley's patronus, and she and the other good wizards were all fighting the death eaters and I was really scared but they were so hopeful when they saw me that I went towards her and then there was a big battle around me and then at the end of it I heard a mournful song and then when I woke up it kept on and I realized that it was a bird calling outside.

It was just barely light, but I was still a little scared from my dream so I huddled against Meghan and put my wing over her stomach and she twitched a little bit in her sleep 'cause I guess I tickled her.

Her just sleeping peacefully calmed me and even though I didn't go back to sleep, I felt the stress draining away from me.

I hadn't known before that her telephone lit up before the alarm went off, because it wasn't something I was normally looking at, but a flash of light from it got my attention and I'd just looked over that way when it went off and she moved under me and reached out to turn it off and then she set it on the pillow next to her and used her hand to rest on top of my outstretched wing and I leaned up and gave her a good morning kiss.

I felt her hand tighten on my wing and then she kissed me back and thanked God that it was Friday and there was a three-day weekend ahead.

Then she asked if Jeff was having a barbeque again tonight or if he was putting it off until the Fourth of July, and I said that I didn't know but I thought that he probably would and we ought to go.

Since we'd been talking, it wasn't so annoying when her telephone alarm went off again and I got off her and then she slid out of bed and I went to the bathroom and then let her have her turn for the toilet and shower.

I had enough time to go to the kitchen and get out the shredded wheat and set out the bowls before I heard the shower turn off and so I hurried back to her bedroom and was waiting with the brush when she came back in her bathrobe.

She wore jeans and a Kalamazoo College t-shirt because she said it was casual Friday which meant that she didn't have to wear clothes that were as nice.

I said that every day on cloud patrol was casual Friday.

When she went downstairs she was happy to see that I had already set out breakfast for us and while we were eating she asked what time she should come over and I said that she could come over right after work because I'd either be at my apartment or next door playing with the kids.

She helped me into my flight gear and I had her put my saddlebags on loose because I was going to take them off and drop them on my balcony as I went by.

We were both out on the front porch when the car arrived to take her to work, and as soon as she was in it, I took off and cut diagonally from her house to my apartment, dropped off my saddlebags, and then went South.

I kept low over town; I knew that I was flying near the airport's landing area and didn't want to make extra work for the airplane directors. But I was high enough that there weren't too many obstacles in my path, either.

The route was very familiar, and I swooped around my helpers' office, then over the 94 Highway and back down the other side and pretty soon I was in new territory for me.

I'd angled my course just a little bit to be over Westnedge Road, and all of a sudden it stopped, and that must have been the very southern border of Protage, because after that there were trees and two big lakes and one of the lakes had a parking lot right next to it which I'd learned meant that was probably public.

I flew over that and a little bit further until I came to a long row of circular fields, then thought that was a good place to turn around.

I knew that the 131 Highway was off to my right, and that I could probably fly high once I was on the other side of it, so I flew west until I found it and I was lucky that it was right next to a town so that I could tell the airplane directors where I was. I still had to fly around a little bit until I found the name of the town, though.

I got permission to follow the 131 Highway back to Kalamazoo, so I did, keeping to the west of it. It curved around a bit and there was a road that went straight that was next to it, but I was having fun so I just followed the curves all the way back to the railroad overpass and then I turned and dropped down so that I would be out of the way.

I was pretty hungry and thirsty when I got back to my apartment, and so I had a drink of water and some alfalfa and then I took a nice shower and when I had gotten done and my nose was full of the clean smells I went back into my living room and that's when I noticed that my flight jacket really needed to be washed and I suppose my bedding would need to be soon as well, but I didn't know where to do that. When I'd toured the apartment, I hadn't been shown a laundry room. So I would have to ask Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.

I was going to need to go shopping soon, too. Maybe we could do that over the weekend, if stores were open. Since it was a holiday, they might not be.

So I checked the electric icebox and cupboards to make sure I had enough food just in case they weren't, and I did.

I had to go out on the balcony to add more seeds to the birdfeeder, and when I did I heard Trinity and Lindy and Caleb playing out in the backyard so I flew down to join them.

They'd put little metal hoops in the ground and were playing a game called croquet, and there was an older woman with them who Lindy said was their grandmother. She was certainly not expecting to see me, and she was a little wary at first but then Caleb reminded her that Jeff had mentioned me coming to his last barbeque.

Well, I could tell that she still didn't quite trust me, but she let me stay after Lindy and Trinity begged and Caleb said that I was cool, and I watched them play their game. I'd had trouble with golf and these sticks looked even more awkward to use, so I didn't join in, but it was still fun to watch.

When the game was over, their grandmother said that it was time to put the things away so that they could get ready for dinner, and I asked if they were having a neighborhood barbeque again and she said that they weren't and I said that was too bad because the last one had been a lot of fun and all the other neighbors I'd met had been nice and I think she took that the wrong way because she frowned and went back inside the house.

I guess some people are just grumpy for no good reason.

I went and checked my mail, and I'd gotten a postcard offering Jet's Pizza, which was the home of the turbo crust. I hadn't had one of their pizzas yet and I thought that I might want to, and the postcard had their telephone number.

I was a little bit worried about Gusty and Cayenne. Had my letters gotten lost? Or maybe they were just too busy to write back to me. I suppose both of them had lots of stuff to do now; Cayenne had her physics work and Aric was really busy with his play so maybe Gusty was busy with hers, too.

Before I could worry any more, I heard my doorbell and so I went down the stairs to let Meghan in. She had a bag with clothes in it so that she wouldn't have to wear the same thing all weekend, which she set by the futon.

I told her that Jeff wasn't having a barbeque tonight after all and so I didn't know what to do with the evening, and she said we could stay at home and watch a movie or two on Netflix and that sounded kind of lazy to me but I didn't have any better ideas.

We decided that we'd have pizza for dinner instead, and that we'd also have beer so the first thing that we did was go back outside and walk to Tiffany's and got some Bell's Kalamazoo Stout and then went back to the apartment and she showed me how to order a pizza online and then we sat down and shared a beer before the pizza arrived.

Then she showed me Netflix, which is a page on the computer that lets you watch movies if you have a password. I didn't, but she did, and so we pushed the futon around and she turned my computer screen and then she said that she ought to go to the bathroom before we got comfortable. Then she started to sort through movies and there were a lot of them. I asked her how many movies there were and she said that she didn't know but it had to be tens of thousands.

I wanted to know how you could choose what to see, and she said that you searched the same way you could on Google, and showed me how it worked, and so we picked random subjects to type in and it would come up with movies that were about that. And then I suggested Equestria, and she found one that she said she'd watched as a girl and hadn't seen since and that sounded like it would be fun to see, so she chose it and pretty soon it started playing, and she said she was really interested to see what I thought about it.

Well, I thought that the man who was talking hadn't spent too much time there because there was a lot of stuff that he got wrong, and she noticed that, too, because there were a couple of times when she started laughing at what the man said. But he got some stuff right, too, and sometimes I just kind of stopped paying attention to what he was saying just to watch the movie. He'd been places that I'd never visited and some places that I didn't even know existed. And we both got excited and pointed to the screen when he was talking about Ponyville and Aquamarine was in the background with a bunch of other foals. I wonder if she knows she's in a movie?

Gusty would be so jealous if she found out.

When the movie was over she asked if I wanted to see another movie and I said that I did and so she picked a movie called Flushed Away and then sat back on the futon and climbed in her lap and I noticed that she wasn’t wearing her bra and she said that was because she decided to make her Friday even more casual.

I thought that was a really good movie even if there weren’t really rat-cities in the sewers. Meghan said that New York City had alligators in the sewers, though.

She closed Netflix and shut down my computer when the movie was done, and then checked to make sure that all the curtains were closed before she got undressed and I folded the futon down into a bed.

Once we were settled, Meghan asked if I was looking forward to riding a horse and I said that it was going to be really weird but it felt like something I needed to do. And she said that there were things in life that were like that and sometimes it was hard to chase your dreams, and I said that I thought I'd done pretty well so far.

July 2 [Horseback Riding]

July 2

I was pretty eager to get up and go, but Meghan wasn't. I didn't mind sleeping in a little bit late, 'cause it was nice to snuggle up to her, but eventually I thought it was time that we should get up and I had to pee anyway so I got out from under her arms and went to the bathroom and she still hadn't gotten up when I got back although her eyes were open.

She wanted me to come back to bed and I reminded her that we were going to go ride horses today and she said that we could still do that but five more minutes in bed wouldn't hurt especially since there was no point in taking a shower before we went.

Well, that was a good point, so I got back in bed with her but I didn't get under the covers and she held my hoof and kissed my nose and said that I was really cute when I'd just woke up.

That was nice of her to say, especially since I could see some of my mane was all tangled from sleep. I shook my head in the hopes of getting it more in order, and it stuck on my cheek so after she laughed at me she pushed it back with her hand.

Then she sat up and gave me a proper kiss and went off to the bathroom herself.

I got out my brush and was running it through my tail when she came out of the bathroom and took it from me and started to give me a proper brushing. Then she asked how I'd want my tail for riding horses and I hadn't really thought about it.

She asked me to stretch out on the futon and she could get on my back and show me how humans rode horses. I told her that I knew, because a girl at the Val Day had ridden me, and so had Trinity.

She said that they were kids, though, so maybe they weren't doing it right, and also I probably hadn't looked to see exactly what they were doing, which was a good point.

So I did and turned my head so I could see how it was done and she told me to keep my wings in and then got in bed next to me, sort of crawling on her knees, and she put her hand on my back to steady herself and then swung a leg over my back and sat down.

Then she kind of wiggled her butt on my back a little and tightened her legs against my side and said that that was how it was done. She said that if I was a riding horse, I'd also have reins that she would put in her hands, and a saddle horn that she could hold on to.

It was going to be kind of weird to balance like that and my hind legs didn't bend like a human's, so I wasn't sure that I could sit on a horse the same way.

She said that we might as well experiment, so she got off my back and lay down on her stomach on the futon and said that the first thing to do would be see if I thought I could balance myself well on her back.

I took my time placing my forehooves 'cause I didn't want to hurt her, and I asked before I put weight on them, but she kept assuring me that it was okay, and so I sort of stepped across her back until I was straddling her with my hind legs which felt really weird, and then I sat back and pushed myself up with my forehooves.

It didn't feel very natural at all, but I thought it would work all right. I said that it was kind of uncomfortable to have my hind legs spread like that, but I was pretty sure that it would work. So she asked how stable I felt, and I wiggled around a little bit and said it felt pretty good.

And she asked if my tail was going to be in the way, and it kind of was, but it was no worse than sitting in a chair. So I thought it would work out.

She wanted to try it kneeling, too, to take all the weight off my legs, because she said that might feel completely different to me. And so I got off her back and then we both got off the futon so that she could put the blanket on the floor to protect her knees. Then she told me to get back on the futon and she'd kneel right next to it and I could climb directly on her back like that.

It hurt my hips a little bit more when I didn't have my hind legs supporting any weight at all. It wasn't really a bad pain, more of a stretching in a way I wasn't used to. And there was a little bit more pressure on my dock than I would have liked, but it wasn't all that bad.

It turned out that the hardest part was getting back off of her. I couldn’t figure out how to do that without risking scratching her back with my hooves and I couldn't really pull either of my hind legs up to the point where I could use them. She had to crouch down, which looked really awkward for her.

So that was a problem we hadn't anticipated, and I was glad that we'd tried this.

We discussed it a little bit, and then I tried just sitting on her back like I would in a chair, and that worked out pretty well, but Meghan said I might have trouble balancing because of how much a horse's back moved as it walked. And I hadn't really thought about that, so she had me walk around the apartment and told me to pay attention to what my back was doing.

That was kind of weird. It was one of those things that I never really thought about, but she was right.

She said that we could try both methods with her crawling on all fours, and I said that she didn't have to because if something went wrong on the real horse, I'd just fly off. But she wanted to, so she put on her pants so that her knees wouldn't get scraped up on the floor and then had me get up on her back again, and we went around the apartment once with me sitting pony-style and once with me straddling her, and she was right that the second way was more stable, but it was a little less comfortable.

She told me that the only problem she saw was that horses were wider and taller.

Then we went to have breakfast and I wanted to make waffles since I still had some batter left but Meghan said it might have gone bad even though it was in the icebox, so we dumped it out in the sink and she mixed a new batch of batter with my last egg and said that the smart thing to do was to use all the batter at once and keep the extra waffles in the icebox.

So we cooked all the batter (the last little bit only made a half-waffle) and when we were done eating she put away the extras and told me that if I had saran wrap they'd stay fresher longer. She said that was the clingy kind of plastic that she'd put over her cookies. I didn't have any of it, though, so I went into the living room and wrote it down on my little shopping list.

Maybe I could go shopping with Meghan during the weekend.

She made an appointment for an Uber-car to pick us up, then she got dressed and we went outside to the balcony to watch for the Uber-car.

The man driving the car thought it was hilarious that we wanted to go to the riding stables, and he kept looking back in his mirror and snickering all the way there.

When we got out of the car, the smells of the stables hit me and I'd thought I was ready for it but I wasn't and I took a side-step and ran right into Meghan's legs and she put her hand down on my withers and that gave me a minute to collect myself.

I should have spent more time around Earth horses before we did this. Over the months since I'd been to the draft horse show, the memories had kind of dulled and faded and it took me a little while before I could bring myself to go forward.

Well, by the time I'd gotten my thoughts back under control, a lady had come out to greet us and so had a thin-nosed dog who sniffed at me then got behind me and barked and then went off in the direction of the barn before turning around and coming back.

I was kind of paying attention to the dog, and so I didn't really notice that we were slowly moving towards the barn until it suddenly got dark and I saw that we'd gone inside and the dog sat down and gave me a satisfied look.

I heard a horse nicker at me so I nickered back and then a head came over the wall next to me and I felt hot breath on my back and so I turned and blew into her nostrils and she pulled her head back then put it back down and sniffed at me and I sniffed at her and then we were friends.

The woman—who said her name was Deanne—asked me if I was sure about this. I guess while I'd been paying attention to the mare, she and Meghan had been talking.

I said that I wanted to and she asked if I'd even ridden a horse before and I admitted that I hadn't but I'd ridden Meghan this morning for practice.

Then she narrowed her eyes and asked if this was some kind of sick fetish because if it was we had better leave right now.

It took a little while to clear up that misunderstanding but finally Deanne agreed to let us try and I gave her my plastic money and so she went with us and helped saddle up the mare I'd met before who was named Hoshi, which she said meant star, and she said that she'd gotten that name because of the white blaze on her forehead.

Meghan got to ride a mare named Peaches, and Deanne rode her own horse who was named Henry. It was a lot of work for her, because she had to saddle Henry and Hoshi and also make sure that Meghan saddled Peaches the right way.

Then when I got on Hoshi she had to shorten the stirrups, which are little foot-cups. I couldn't use them, but if she left them dangling they'd be in the way, she said.

I kind of looped the reins loosely around my forehooves and then Deanne used her telephone to take a picture of me, and then we went out into the training pasture.

Hoshi seemed to know what to do, which was good because I don't think I was controlling her at all. I didn't want to pull on the reins and hurt her, so I let her do what she wanted, which it turned out was walking along the fence for a while and then leaning down to eat when she found a patch of grass she liked.

Deanne said that she was trained to get moving when people pushed their heels against her barrel but my legs didn't reach far enough down to do that, so we got in a line and when Peaches started walking at Meghan's directions, Hoshi followed her, and then Henry brought up the rear.

We spent an hour in the training pasture and Henry kept sticking his nose at me and sniffing and Deanne kept having to pull him back. And I couldn't really control Hoshi at all; she'd sort of respond to me tugging at her reins but she wouldn't go anywhere unless she had Peaches to follow.

It wasn't a total failure, though—the practice with Meghan had worked out pretty well so I didn't fall off.

We went on a little trail ride anyway, and the horses knew what to do, which was a relief. I could tell that this was a familiar thing for the horses, because they went along the path without much prompting, and Hoshi obediently followed Peaches for the most part, although there were a couple times when she stopped by a bush or tree that she liked and had some leaves and one time I ate a mouthful, too, just so see if they were as good as Hoshi seemed to think.

It was pretty good—it was sweet and sappy, and so I took a good look at its leaves and sniffed it so that I'd know to look for it in the future. I would have had another mouthful, but Hoshi had moved on a little bit and I couldn't reach any more.

When we were done with the ride we had to unsaddle the horses and rinse them off and Deanne did most of the work again and then she gave carrots to all the horses and because I asked nicely she gave me one, too.

I was pretty sore from riding and I saw that Meghan was walking a little bit funny, too.

While we were talking and waiting for the Uber-car to come and get us, we stayed inside the barn because the dog kept pestering me whenever I went outside but he didn't mind when I was in the barn. And Deanne said that they gave riding lessons and that if we worked at it perhaps I could get at least somewhat decent on a horse.

We had the Uber-car stop at Jimmy John's on the way home and we got sandwiches for a late lunch, and ate them out on the balcony, then went back inside and soaked in a hot bath for while which helped to relax my sore muscles. Then when the water had gotten cold and all the bubbles were gone, she drained the tub and we took a shower to wash off, then relaxed in the papasan and Meghan groomed me.

While she did, we talked about how the day had been and how weird it had been for me to ride Hoshi and she asked if I was going to want to do that again.

I said that I wasn't sure yet. I hadn't decided how I felt about it. Part of me thought that it felt like slavery, like we were taking advantage of them because they didn't know any better, but they seemed well-cared-for, and they were big enough that if they'd wanted to put up a fight I don't think any of us could have stopped them.

Then we sat and watched the birds for a while until we were both hungry again, and we decided to go back to Olde Peninsula because both their food and beer were good. Meghan got dressed in new clothes that didn't smell like horse sweat, and she reminded me to take my growler so we'd have beer to take home with us.

I got the smoked salmon poutine and she had a fajita thai roll-up and then we decided that since it was a holiday we were going to have dessert, too, so she ordered a peanut butter pie and I got a bread pudding and we shared them and they were both really good, too.

I was glad that we had to walk home, because we'd both eaten a little more than we should have.

It was dark by the time we got back home but we didn't go to bed right away. She sat in the papasan and I got up on her lap and we shared the growler between us and before it was even half-gone I fell asleep in her lap.

I don't remember falling asleep, but she woke me up when she had to get up and use the bathroom and she was kind of staggery and the growler was completely empty. She said she was sorry for drinking the rest but I didn't mind. And she was sort of swaying on her feet and so I let her put her hand on my back for balance and led her to the bathroom and waited outside so that she could use me to help walk back.

She made it to the futon without my help and also without her pants, then she fell onto it and I had to push her over a little bit so that there was room for me, too, and I couldn't get at the covers at all because she was on top of them.

I thought she might be cold without any covers, so I got one of the towels that wasn't too wet out of the bathroom and covered her legs with it then curled up next to her and fell back asleep.

July 3 [TV Interview]

July 3

Meghan must have been really tired, 'cause when I woke up she was still flat on her stomach, sound asleep. The towel had come off during the night, so I pulled it back up (she was still on top of all the blankets) and then I got up and went to my desk and wrote my bio for WWMT which I should have done already, and then I wrote in my journal.

Sometimes it was hard to keep up with it. I had a lot of long, busy days, and it was hard to make time, but it was important.

I heard her roll over in bed, and dropped the pen out of my mouth and turned to see her reaching for covers, but she'd kind of pushed the towel away from her and trapped it under her legs.

I don't think that she was really all the way awake yet, and so I got back in bed with her and covered her with my wing. Even with me nestled up right against her, my coverts only reached down to her knees, but I guess that was enough, because she stopped moving around and then I heard her start to softly snore again.

She probably snoozed for another third of an hour, then she woke up and brushed her hand over my wing and kind of pushed it off to the side, and I obliged her by pulling it in and out of the way.

She was still a bit stumbly as she went to the bathroom but she made it without my help. Then she went into the kitchen and drank two glasses of water and came out and asked me if I had any aspirin.

I did, so I got some out of my desk drawer and she took it into the kitchen and had a third glass of water and some aspirins and then sat down on the futon and said that she was going back to sleep. Then she rolled up in the covers like a little burrito. I kissed her on the forehead and she ran her hand through my forelock and said that she was sorry she was being a bad friend but she'd had too much to drink last night.

I said it was okay, and once she was asleep I went over to my desk and turned on my computer and copied the bio I'd written into a computer letter and then sent it to Cyndi.

Then I left my computer on in case they wanted to send a reply, and went out the balcony door to get my mail. I knew that it didn't get delivered on Sundays, but maybe there had been some that came yesterday while we were riding horses.

I was glad I did, 'cause I got a letter from Gusty, and as soon as I got back up to my apartment and checked on Meghan (she was fast asleep) I opened it.

She said that because of how well she'd done in A Midsummer Night's Dream, an agent that South Pole knew had negotiated to get her a recurring role on four episodes of Orange is the New Black, where she was playing an new inmate who was being held before transfer back to Equestria. She said that they hadn't really given her too much background at first, because they wanted to see how she'd do, but after her first scene they'd really liked her, and so in her second appearance she had a monologue about how she was a wanted fugitive in Equestria who had stolen another pony's identity and made her way to America on forged papers but then had gotten caught. She said it was kind of a silly premise, because the filmmakers really didn't understand that much about ponies, and I laughed when she said that there was a flashback scene of her inking her hoof and stamping it on a piece of paper because that was one thing that humans used to keep track of who was who.

And she said that if she'd really been in prison, she could have just used magic to escape, since the director didn't have her wearing a suppressor on her horn, and there weren't any magical barriers at all. She'd mentioned that, but the director said that the audience wouldn't know the difference anyway.

She said it was really different than theatre. She had to be up early so that they could put on makeup because they didn't trust her to dress herself, and then they'd shoot one little bit of a scene again and again until they were satisfied with it and then they'd move on to another one. And a lot of it was out of order, which made it kind of confusing to know how it fit in, and there was a lot of time when she had to just sit and wait.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic, and she said it was hard to imagine how it turned into an actual episode, but she'd seen rough cuts of the first episode she'd been in and it all made sense when it was together.

Gusty said that the episodes were filmed in New York and one weekend some of the girls had taken her to New York City and they'd seen a play on Broadway called Les Miserables.

When she wasn't filming, she said that she used Skype to talk to Nicky, who was in England, and she also talked to her agent about getting another film role after this one was over. She knew that she wasn't going to be able to get a main role in any major production, because she just didn't have time for it, but she hoped that she could still get a secondary role.

Then she reminded me that she'd be in Stratford the second week of August for their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that they had a whole week there of rehearsals before the actual show on the weekend and she'd be really happy if I could come.

At the very end she said that she'd put some pictures of her with some of the stars on Flickr, which is a computer photo album, and she included instructions for how I could look at them.

Each one of the pictures had the names of the people written in it, although I didn't know who any of them were. But they looked like they were happy and so did Gusty. Some of them were posed but there was also a really nice candid picture of her looking up at a small cloth ball that she was floating over her head while a woman named Ruby Rose watched. I could see cameras and stuff in the background, so that must have been on the set.

Meghan got up while I was looking at the pictures and came over to see what I was doing, so I told her all about what Gusty had said, and then went through the pictures again.

Then I checked my computer mail and I'd gotten a letter from Cyndi who wanted to know if I could come in in the afternoon to do a brief interview that they could put on their Facebook page. She said it would be really short, and it would be with her and Alex. She said that around three would be good, and I thought that the way she worded it made it not sound like they were flexible on the time.

So I said I would.

Meghan and I ate the leftover waffles, and then we took a shower together and when that was over she dried me and fussed over my coat and hair because she said that I needed to look my best to be on television.

She wanted to come with me and I guess we could have taken an Uber-Car but the TV station wasn't that far away and it was a nice day to be out.

So we had a little snack before leaving. I had some more alfalfa and Meghan tried a piece, too, and said it wasn't bad. And she filled a bottle she had with water in case we wanted some then she checked herself in the mirror before we left.

I let her lock the front door—I didn't like using human keys at all—and then I told her she might as well keep the key because I had a spare and I didn't think I'd need it anyway. My balcony door didn't have a lock, because nobody could get up there except me.

She knew about cars not paying attention when they turn, and always looked to make sure that there weren't any coming even when the walking man said we could go. I was surprised that people that careless were allowed to drive, but Meghan said that once you got your license it was really hard to lose it.

I led her until we were on Westnedge, and then after that we walked side-by-side. There weren't too many people out walking: I'd noticed that people liked to run in the morning and after three in the afternoon but the rest of the time there weren't too many people on the sidewalk except downtown.

It took us about an hour to get there and as soon as we'd signed in Meghan ran off to the bathroom, saying she wanted to make sure she was presentable. I just sat down in the chairs and waited.

We didn't have to wait too long. Cyndi came out and shook my hoof and Meghan introduced herself and then we all went back and went to the studio. Meghan had to stand in the back, behind the cameras, and promise not to make noise.

An assistant put a microphone on me, which gave him all sorts of trouble. Cyndi's was clipped to the neck of her shirt, but my coat was too short for it to stay and so he finally got a little piece of gaffer's tape and stuck it to me with that, then he strung the wire around my back and clipped the little box to my tail.

Then when I was ready, I sat in a chair and they had to make a couple of adjustments until they thought I was sitting at the right height, and then when everything was set, Cyndi sat down. She said that they'd decided to do two interviews; she'd ask me weather questions and then Alex would ask me general questions. And she said it was best to give short answers when I could because they'd want to chop it up some for editing.

So we had a little practice, and she asked me about what we did on weather patrols, and so I explained how we sometimes broke up storms and sometimes brought rain, and we also patrolled the sea near the coast for ships that were in trouble.

Then she asked me some questions about stormwatching, and asked me how it was different to be in the air in the heart of a storm as opposed to being on the ground feeling its effects.

Every now and then we'd have to stop because the cameraman had to do something, and once I answered a question too long and she had me go back and try again. And my microphone fell off and had to be taped back on, because I was sweating under the hot studio lights. I couldn't imagine how it must feel while wearing all those clothes.

When she was done, Alex came in and shook my hoof and mostly had me expand on what I'd said in my bio. She also wanted to know what I thought about Kalamazoo and I said it was the biggest place I'd ever lived and there was so much to do that I couldn't possibly get it in in one year. She asked what some of my goals were, and I told her that I wanted to fly to Chicago and that I wanted to go to a nudist resort and she had me do that question again without mentioning the nudist resort because she said that wasn't the kind of thing that their viewers really wanted to know.

And then she asked me how it felt to be a YouTube celebrity, and I said that I didn't know that I was. So she told me that the video that Gates had made of me flying had gotten millions of views which was hard to believe.

Then she asked me a couple of questions about how hard it had been adjusting to life in America, and I said that everyone at college had really been helpful, and it was the little things that took the most getting used to, like how a lot of the door handles were really hard to use with hooves and that there were coins and paper money and plastic money and that was all a lot to keep track of.

When she was done, they turned off the bright lights and she shook my hoof again and said that there would be a teaser on the evening news and that they'd air my weather interview in the morning before I did the weather and then they'd put on the one she'd done.

And she said that I should be at the station at 5 am in order to get ready.

I heard Meghan groan at that.

Then we got shooed out because they had to get ready for their evening news show. But Cyndi waved at me again on my way out.

It was a little easier walking back, 'cause it was more downhill. It also felt really good to get back outside, because the studio had been uncomfortably hot, which was maybe why Gusty said that they did the filming in little bits and then had breaks.

I asked Meghan how she thought I'd done, 'cause she'd probably seen other TV interviews, and she said that I'd done a really good job. And she thought it had been funny how the tape had come unstuck from me and made my microphone fall onto the desk.

We were both hungry for dinner by the time we got back to downtown, so we stopped at a little cafe called Bagel Beanery which was right next to Fourth Coast, but we couldn't stay too long because they were closing. I thought it was really early for them to close, but I guess on Sundays some places don't stay open very late.

So we took our sandwiches away in a little bag—we could have stayed, but Meghan said that they'd be happier if they could close up the store on time—and then walked a couple of blocks until she saw a small park with some hanging straps she called swings. They reminded me of the bos'n chairs some ships had.

They weren't very comfortable for me, but I didn't mind sitting on the ground.

When we were done eating we took our time going back to my apartment. She said that she'd like to go with me to the TV station in the morning, and I reminded her that meant that we had to leave at four in the morning, and she said that she would do it.

Then I said that meant we'd have to get up at three, and she said that was okay. And I kind of didn't think she'd really want to, but she was determined to do it, and she said that she'd gotten plenty of sleep this morning so that it wouldn't be any trouble at all.

So when we got back to my apartment, we sat on the papasan for a little while and watched the birds and then she reminded me that if we were going to get up that early we ought to go to bed now.

It was really strange getting ready for bed when it was so light out still, and I asked her one more time if she really meant to get up that early because she didn't have to, and if I went by myself I could leave a little bit later because it was faster to fly there, and I could just have a little nap now on the papasan and then get a half-night's sleep later and I'd be fine.

Meghan insisted that she wanted to, though. So she got undressed and got in bed and I curled up next to her.

It's really hard to force yourself to go to sleep, even when you know that you're going to need it. Neither of us was all that tired—Meghan had just gotten up less than a dozen hours ago—so we shifted around a lot trying to find a comfortable position.

It didn't help that there was a lot of noise outside. I could hear Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity playing next door, and the birds were still pretty active, and then around dusk we started to hear people sending off fireworks to celebrate.

Meghan muttered something about assholes who didn't have to get up at three, and put her head under her pillow to muffle the sound.

I thought that was a good idea, so I put my pillow over my head and tried to ignore the louder bangs that got through it and thought that I probably wouldn't get back to sleep.

July 4 [Independence Day]

July 4

Getting up at three am wasn't any fun at all. I'd gotten used to Meghan's alarm going off at its normal time in the morning, but I wasn't prepared for it and I jerked up in bed, smacked Meghan with a wing, and was backing out of bed when I realized what the noise was.

Meghan picked up her pocket telephone and glared at it and I thought that she was going to throw it across the room and we both sort of shared a look like the sensible thing to do would be to just turn it off and go back to bed and wake up at a sane hour of the day.

And she could have done that and I wouldn't have even been mad. I'd promised that I was going to do the weather report, but she was probably just going to have to sit off in the background, being quiet.

I really did want her to come, though.

She groaned and rubbed her hand over her stomach, where I'd smacked her, and then pushed the covers the rest of the way off and sat up in the bed. I got back in and nuzzled her side and she reached down and scratched between my shoulders and then said that maybe a shower would help wake us up.

I thought coffee would, too, so when she went in the bathroom to start the shower I filled the electric kettle and got it going. I had a jar of coffee crystals I'd bought for early mornings.

She'd already gotten in the shower, so I hopped in the back and waited for my turn to stick my head under the hot spray.

We took turns washing each other and then she got out first and went on the other side of the shower curtain so I could shake myself off some, and when I hopped out she had a towel waiting for me.

It was a bit chilly in the apartment and there wasn't any sun to warm us up. But that helped us wake up—it's hard to sleep when you're chilly. She got dressed quicker than she usually did after a shower, putting on her bra and shirt before I even combed her hair. And then she got the rest of the way dressed while I went and made coffee for us.

Meghan blew on the cup to cool it down a little bit then took a sip and made a face. I tried some of mine and it was pretty bitter, but it certainly opened my eyes, so I guess it worked.

We used the rest of the hot water to make two bowls of the mapely oatmeal that I like, and then we were ready to go.

The town was very different this early in the morning. When we got to Stadium Drive, there weren't any cars on it in either direction, and Meghan said that was kind of creepy. And most of the buildings were closed and dark, although there was a gas station that was open.

As we were walking along Westnedge, every couple of minutes a car or two would pass us. One was a police car with lights on top and it slowed down as it went by, then sped off up the hill. And I saw a red wrecker with a smashed-up car behind it.

Meghan checked her telephone when we got close and said that we were a little bit early, so she crouched down and combed my mane again with her fingers, and I pushed her bangs back over her ear with my nose. Then we went inside.

I knew that bakers got up early to start baking bread, and I guess newspeople did, too, because while the town outside seemed nearly deserted, once Cyndi escorted us back through the door it was bustling with activity. Meghan leaned down and said that people had no right to be that chipper this early in the morning.

They rushed me off to get ready, and Meghan followed along. We went right to Cyndi's little studio, and a man stuck a microphone on me again and then had me check to make sure it was working right. And he reminded me to be careful sitting down because the pack was on my tail like it had been last time.

They had to use a few more strips of tape this time, 'cause I was going to have to fly up a little bit to point to things on the greenscreen, and they also wanted to make sure it didn't come off. So he put a couple more pieces on my back, 'cause it was easiest to run the wire along my spine rather than under my belly.

After I was ready, Cyndi and I read through the weather report a couple times, just to make sure that I knew what was in it, and then we had a little practice with the screen. Then when it was almost time to start, they told Meghan that she couldn't be in the studio while they were filming, because of the incident in Virginia last year, but there was a separate little room where she could watch what was happening.

They started turning the floodlights on, and people came in and put the cameras in position. I noticed that each one of them had a little rubber duck on the end, which were all different colors, and Cyndi told me that was how they knew which camera was which. They had labels on the other end, but the ducks were easier for everyone to see.

Alex and Kirk came in and took their seats at their desk and shuffled through some papers, and Alex looked over at me and waved, and then we had to be quiet because it was time to start.

It was really strange to watch, because while Alex and Kirk were the only ones talking, all the actual action was taking place on the floor, where no one but us could see it. Besides the people with the cameras, there was a woman on the floor who watched everything intently and occasionally made hand-motions towards the cameramen.

TV had commercial breaks, and so when it was time they turned off the light that said 'On Air' and everyone relaxed a little bit. My ears perked up after the second when Alex said that they were going to do a very special Fourth of July weather report next, and then she kind of stayed in position with a friendly smile on her face until the 'On Air' light went out and I knew it was about time.

And then Cyndi told me to look towards the camera—she said to never turn away from it even if it wasn't on—and I heard someone say 'thirty seconds,' and then before I knew it Cyndi was introducing me, and then the camera that was looking at her turned and looked at me and I waved.

I was glad we'd practiced, because otherwise I would have just been standing there like a scared foal. But it was still fresh in my mind where I was supposed to point and what I was supposed to say, so I did.

And then before I knew it it was over. The lights went off and Cyndi said I'd done a great job and gave me a hug, and then the man who'd put my microphone on took it back off and asked me if I wanted to stay for the rest and I kind of did but I thought Meghan was getting lonely, so I had him lead me to the room where she was.

She hugged me when I came in and said that I'd done a great job and that I should ask if I could have a copy of their broadcast, or at least the parts about me. And she wanted to know if I'd been nervous and I said a little bit but once it was my turn I didn't have time to be nervous, I just did what we'd practiced.

It was strange going back outside because now it was light and there were lots of cars on the road, and it looked like the city was alive again.

I wish that they'd had a cot or a couch for us to sleep on, because now that I was done the anticipation had worn off and I was starting to feel pretty tired, and neither of us was really looking forward to walking back to my apartment.

We stopped at the Bagel Beanery again and had breakfast sandwiches which were like normal bagel sandwiches except that they also had egg on them. And if we'd wanted to stay up, we would have had coffee but both of us were in the mood for a morning nap.

We'd still have to go and get some beer before David and Angela's party, but that could wait until after we'd had some sleep.

I waited until Meghan was in bed, and she asked if I was waiting just so I could sleep on her, and I admitted that I was. She laughed and got in bed and I curled up with my head on her breast and my wing over her stomach and she put her hand on my withers and asked if I needed an alarm set.

I said I'd rather wake up without it and she agreed that would be best.

She must've woke up before me, 'cause I woke up to her petting my wing and back and so I turned my head and kissed her to show her that I was awake. And she asked if I minded her petting my wings and I said as long as she was gentle.

After a little while she asked me about preening, and so I moved off to the side a little bit and pulled my wing up so I could get to it and after I showed her how I let her try.

It was a little hard for her at first, and her fingers felt a lot different than when I did it with my mouth and teeth and she left a few feathers kind of ruffled, but she really wanted to learn so whenever she made a mistake I told her and she gently fixed it.

Then she wanted to do my other wing, so I turned around and put my head on her hip and stretched it out for her. That wasn't as comfortable as having my head on her breast; I should have just gone across her.

But her hands were already in my feathers, so I stayed where I was until she was done. Then I got out of bed and fluffed out my wings and straightened a couple feathers that she'd missed, and did a little hop-flight around the living room while Meghan watched. I landed back on the bed and kissed her on the forehead and said that she'd done a really good job especially for it being her first time.

She got dressed and then we went to Tiffany's and bought five carriers of beer so that we'd have plenty to share with everyone and Meghan said that she could have made something and if we hadn't slept so late she would have. My ears kinda fell when she said that, but she said it was okay, she didn't think he'd be mad.

It was pretty close to get to the house, so we just went directly over there. David had put a tablecloth across the hood of not-Winston and Meghan set the beer there first before she saw a blue icebox which had enough room for about half of the beer.

There were probably about a dozen people in the backyard—David was at the grill and Angela was helping him, and I saw an older woman who looked kind of like him that was probably his mother. And there was one more person who I recognized from college, but didn't really know and the rest were strangers.

Angela lead us around and introduced us to everyone. David's mother was named Mary and her wife was Susan and said that they had both seen me on the weather report this morning. And the man from college I sort of recognized was Jay. There was another man named Lanny, and David's friend from high school named Matt.

Angela's friends were Allison who had very bright red hair, Miriam, a tall awkward guy named Zach, and a couple called Daniel and Amanda. Everyone was really friendly and they were all a bit curious about me 'cause none of them had ever seen a pony up close before. So at first I was kind of the object of everyone's interest, but after a little bit the novelty wore off and people started talking about other things, and that was a lot more fun for me.

I ate more than I should have and so did Meghan but she said that was some of the fun of a party. And I thought about showing her around the house a little bit, since it was open, but I wound up not until she asked where the bathroom was, and so I led her in the side door and showed her the bathroom off the kitchen and she said that she had never seen a house that had a bathroom door with a window in it.

I took a little bit of time to refill the bird feeder, even though I knew that there wouldn't be any birds around while there were so many people in the backyard. Aric's bag of seeds was almost empty, so I thought that I ought to get a new one for him, too, when I went shopping next.

After David was done grilling, he set up a little ring in the backyard and people took turns throwing giant darts at it. The rule was that you had to be twenty feet away but I got accused of cheating when I went twenty feet straight up and dropped them down like that.

The darts got put away when it got dark and he went into the garage and brought out a couple of big boxes of fireworks and cleared a spot on the lawn and then started to set them off.

I'd seen fireworks before but not that often and they were always a treat to watch. There were little rockets with stick-tails that got put into beer bottles and made whistling noises as they shot up into the air and exploded, and there were some that made even bigger patterns. He had sparklers which you could hold but I stayed away from them because I didn't want to have any more burns anytime soon, and strings of little firecrackers he called daisy-chains that all went off one after the other.

When everything else was gone he pulled out a really big tube and set it on the ground and told everyone that if the cops came to play innocent. And he lit it and it shot up into the air and at first nothing happened, then it exploded into dozens of bright starbursts really high in the air. And then a second rocket went up, and a third, and all told six of them went up like that, exploding and sprinkling down on us.

The party started breaking up after that, and we left while about half the guests were still there. I said my goodbyes to everyone and thanked David and Angela for inviting us, then we walked back home to the accompaniment of other people all around the neighborhood shooting off their own fireworks. There were so many, I didn't think there was much chance that the cops would have noticed the one that David launched at the end.

We stopped at my apartment long enough for Meghan to pick up her bag of clothes, then went to her apartment since she had to get up early in the morning. And when we were snuggled up in bed right before she went to sleep she said that she thought this had been one of the best Independence Days she'd ever had.

July 5 [Battle Creek]

July 5

Meghan got up after the second time her alarm went off like always, and then I set out breakfast and helped groom her for work and this time she finished her breakfast before the car came to take her away.

We waited on her porch—there was a hanging couch but it wasn't hers so we couldn't sit on it—and she said that we should have a spa day again soon, and maybe in the evening we could use her hot tub. I thought Thursday might be a good day for that, until I remembered that there was a chance of thunderstorms. So we decided to be safe and do at least the hot tub part tomorrow, and we'd just have to see when we could get time at the salon.

I reminded her that I was leaving on Friday to go to Lansing, and wouldn't be back until Monday evening. And she said that was when she had her conference so that was part of the reason why she wanted to go to the salon before that.

She rubbed my head when the car came to get her, and I nuzzled her hip and then when she was gone I flew back to my apartment and put on my flight gear.

While I'd had a nice lazy weekend with Meghan, now it was time to work my wings and then in the afternoon I was going to go shopping with Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn again.

I had an urge to fly east, so I took off and went low over town, until I was across the Kalamazoo River, and then I started following the railroad tracks until I got to Comstock. I thought that was far enough away from the airport that I could easily get clearance, and I did. Dori said that she'd missed me over the weekend, and I asked if she'd seen me on TV and she said that she had. She told me that CNN had picked up on it, which I guess was a good thing although I wasn't entirely sure what CNN was. And then I told her that my intention was to fly to past Augusta and she reminded me that I might fly into Battle Creek's airport zone, and gave me the frequency for their tower. She told me I ought to contact them no later than Augusta, and once I was past Galesburg to monitor their frequency.

Well, that was something I hadn't done before, but I guess I should have.

I picked up altitude and followed the railroad tracks, since they were a straighter guide than the river. And I was all the way at my ceiling by the time I got to Galesburg, so I flew in a big circle and changed my radio to their frequency and just to be safe I advised them of my intentions.

They said that the sky was clear and to monitor the general aviation frequency until I got to Augusta so I changed my radio again and waited for a break in traffic and then announced my position and my heading to anyone who was listening, and when I got to the right point in my circle, I kept going along the tracks.

I had to circle again while I was changing my radio, then when I got it they gave me clearance to proceed along the tracks and to maintain an altitude of ten thousand feet. So I did, and pretty soon I saw the airport off to my right and it was pretty exciting to be that close to it. I saw a funny stumpy-looking airplane that had dull olive paint zoom under me and land and I hadn't thought before that how the airplane directors might have aircraft go under me. So after that I paid a lot more attention to my altimeter.

I went a little ways further and then I got permission to turn around and I saw another one of the stumpy airplanes go down for a landing but instead of stopping on the runway he flew along it and then went back up in the air like I'd done to get my flight license.

I thought that they were really busy at the airport, so I didn't ask for permission to descend until I was near Augusta again, and then they told me that I could but to switch back to the general frequency once I got under five thousand feet.

So I did a nice, slow gliding descent, with a big loop at five thousand feet. Nobody objected to me going down more, so I continued losing altitude and finally landed at a parking lot near a bend in the river.

I went down the little ramp to the water and the water smelled okay so had a good drink, then I waded in a little bit further to cool myself down some, but kept my wings up and dry.

Then I walked around the parking lot a bit before taking off again. I went in a mostly-west direction until I was over the railroad tracks again, and then I followed them.

I was almost back to Kalamazoo when I saw a train coming my way, and it passed under me in a bright silver flash and then I turned and watched it until it disappeared around the corner in Galesburg. That was the train I took to see Aquamarine, and now I'd covered a portion of its route. For some reason that made me feel really satisfied with myself. It was almost like I knew the train's secrets.

I took another break near the karaoke bar that no one wanted to take me to. It was closed; it didn't open until the afternoon, but I peeked through the glass doors. Then I flew the rest of the way home, keeping low enough that airplanes went over me and I could land whenever I wanted to.

The shower felt really nice on my wings—a few days of hardly flying really made me ache the next time I put in a long flight—and when I was done I dried myself off and relaxed in the papasan for a little bit, then I ate a light lunch and waited for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn to arrive.

I probably ought to have read another chapter of the Bible, but I thought I'd do that tomorrow—I'd have a shorter flight, and then do it in the morning, where I'd have time to get all the way through another chapter uninterrupted.

They'd both seen me on TV, and when I asked what CNN was, Miss Cherilyn told me it was a cable news channel that did national news, instead of a local channel like WWMT. She said that she thought I'd make a great weatherpony, and she asked Mister Salvatore what he thought and he said that a piece like that might bring the nuts out of the woodwork and I wasn't sure what he meant by that.

Then we got to talking about flying, and I said that I thought I ought to get some bottles of water like people always had 'cause I got thirsty and Mister Salvatore said that I should get a camelback.

Meijer didn't have them. We looked at the sporting supplies—which Mister Salvatore said was his favorite section of the store—and there weren't any. There was lots of other stuff, though, like golf balls and tents and shoes with caulks and fishing gear.

I told him that I didn't need any of that to fish; I just watched from above and dove down when I saw one that looked good swimming too close to the surface and he said that I probably ought to have a fishing license then. So we went to the counter and I got one (all I had to do was give them my plastic money-card and fill out a form) and he gave me a pamphlet that said what kind of fish I could and couldn't catch.

Then he said it was probably silly, but he really didn't want to have to explain me to the DNR. And he asked if I hunted for anything besides fish because I guess you needed a special kind of license for that, too, and I said that I didn't.

He said that there hadn't been nearly as many headaches when Action Shot had been here but he was smiling when he said it.

We got more food for my apartment and also a mat for the bathtub so my hooves wouldn't slip as much. It had suckers on the bottom like an octopus that would hold it in place. And Miss Cherilyn said that since I bought so many vegetables maybe I would enjoy shopping at the farmer's market and when she told me that the people who grew the food also sold it, I agreed that was where I wanted to go. So she told me she'd get directions to it.

After we'd gotten everything we went back to my apartment and put it all away, then got back in the van and went to a store called Dick's and they had a camelback and it didn't fit all that well but then Miss Cherilyn got the idea to cross the straps and that made it much better. It would fit under my flight vest and would let me carry lots of water.

When we were driving back home, I told them how I was going to Bay City to see the ships next weekend and said that I already had bought train tickets for myself. And then I said that I still wanted to fly to Chicago and Mister Salvatore said that he needed to know ahead of time because Chicago had a very big, very important airport. And he wanted to know how far I could fly without landing and I said that I wasn't sure. It was different on Earth, 'cause I couldn't go up and rest on clouds, and it was a little harder to fly so he got kind of thoughtful for a bit and said that if I was going to do it, he'd want to charter a boat to follow me along and that way if I had to land I could land on the boat.

Well, I thought it would hurt my pride to have to land on a boat, but I guess I could understand why he was worried. A lot of parents didn't like their foals flying out over the ocean; even my mom had told me not to when I was little. I'd thought that was unfair because she did all the time, but she said that there were lots of ponies who flew too far and got lost and then drowned when they couldn't find land and couldn't find any clouds.

And I guess she had a good point. We never patrolled out very far without being in a group. We weren't always close, but we were close enough that we could keep an eye on each other.

So I said that I thought having a boat was a good idea, and I promised that I wouldn't do it until we'd scheduled a good time for it and then he said that he thought maybe it would be easier to go from Chicago to South Haven, because the wind usually blew from the west, and so that would help me.

He was probably right, but it felt like it would be more satisfying to go to Chicago, rather than the other way around.

We went to Bilbo's for dinner. I wouldn't have minded just going home and having something light, but he really wanted to eat there and I did like their pizza and beer.

I told them over dinner how Gusty had gotten a role on Orange is the New Black, and reminded them that she was going to come back to put on her play in Stratford and he said that it was something he was really looking forward to because getting us into Canada was a real treat.

Our waiter had seen me on TV as well, and he asked really nicely if he could take a selfie with me and so I did. I asked Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn if they wanted to be in the picture, too, but they didn't.

We really took our time at dinner, but it was nice. I didn't spend as much time with them as I ought to have, I guess sometimes because they felt like surrogate parents and I was of the age where all my instincts said I should be flying away from home.

And we decided on when we were going to go on a trip out west. Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore were going to come with me, and I said that they didn't have to but Mister Salvatore said that it was a great way to get a vacation without actually taking any vacation time and he was pretty sure that was why Mister Barrow and Miss Parker had been so quick to volunteer for our last train trip.

Right now it seemed like it was so far off, but I had a feeling that it was going to sneak up on me and all of a sudden we'd be getting on the train. I was going to have a busy August, that was for sure.

When I got back to my apartment, I saw that I had a telephone message (Mister Salvatore wagged his finger at me when he saw that I'd left my telephone at home but where was I supposed to put it if I brought it with me?) and it was Meghan saying that she had gotten an appointment for Thursday after work.

Miss Cherilyn liked watching the birds and Mister Salvatore looked around my apartment again and asked if I wanted to get a different stove because he could lean on the landlord and make it happen. And he asked if there was anything else I needed and I said that I'd like it if the shower was wider because it was crowded when Meghan and I were in there together and he frowned and Miss Cherilyn said that was a pretty major change and she didn't think that they could make that happen. I said I'd thought the same thing because the bathtub was pretty built-in and if it got much wider it would run into the toilet.

And then I remembered that I needed to do laundry, so we gathered together all my dirty stuff and it was kind of annoying that I had to use my plastic money to get paper money and then turn that into coins before I could use the washing machine and dryer and when I was done I was left with a lot of coins and no good place to put them, because I hadn't thought to bring my bit-purse. So I tucked them in with my sheets to they wouldn't fall out, and put them away when I got home.

It was kind of late when I got back, but I wasn't all that tired. So I put on my clean flight vest and my blinking light (we'd bought enough batteries for it to last the rest of the summer) and then took off for a low flight around the neighborhood.

It was kind of neat, because occasionally I'd see people launching fireworks off in the distance. Not too many; they'd probably used most of them up on the Fourth, but I guess some people had them left.

I went all the way over downtown, circled around the hotel, and then followed Main Street back to my apartment.

The futon felt kind of lonely without Meghan, and I wound up tucking one pillow between my forelegs before I could fall asleep.

Author's Note

Technical correction: several chapter back, I confused Augusta and Vicksburg. There is a Vicksburg near Kalamazoo, but it's to the southeast, and not between Galesburg and Battle Creek.

July 6 [Downstairs Neighbor]

July 6

When I got ready to go flying the first thing I did was fill my new camelback with water. It was kind of hard to use, and I spilled a lot of water out of it that should have gone in it, but I got it figured out.

Then I had to struggle into the straps—they had to be all the way loose so I could get my forelegs through, then I had to pull them tight. They had a clever kind of plastic tab so that once they were tight they didn't loosen until you pulled them at an angle, which was a lot nicer than the arrangement on the buckle of my saddlebags.

The vest went over that and I felt kind of hunchbacked when it was on. It was weird seeing it stick that far up out of the corner of my eye. And I guess that must be how it got its name, ‘cause it did kind of look like a camel’s hump.

I put on my light and radio, but I left my altimeter behind. I was planning to do a low flight out to the nature park and then alternate groundwork with bits of flying, just to keep my wings limber without putting too much stress on them from the long flight yesterday.

One thing I'd found was fun to do was to jump-gilde off the balcony and pick up some airspeed as I went under my tree. I had to be careful, though, 'cause it was hard to see if there were any cars coming. Luckily, not too many of them went down my road that didn't live on it.

I waved as I flew over a pair of children riding their bicycles across Westnedge Ave., but they didn't see me, and then I cut a little bit diagonally so that I could land in the open field at the nature center which was by the railroad tracks.

There's a big pasture full of tasty-smelling pasture grasses but I'd already been told I wasn't allowed to eat it so it was kind of unfair that there was a small herd of deer right in the middle of it. But I guess if it was their food, it wouldn't be nice of me to take it. They didn't have anyone to take them to Meijer.

I dropped down and skimmed along the trail, going in and out of treeshadow. Then I flared out my wings and made a trotting landing, and just kept up the pace with my hooves on the ground.

I did a lap and a half, and when I crested the ridge I broke into a gallop on the downside and when I was about halfway down I snapped out my wings and with a couple of strong beats the ground was falling away from me.

While I circled, I reached up with a hoof and put the straw from the camelback in my mouth and had a drink, and I decided that this was one of the best things humans had invented. I could work myself a little bit harder and not have to worry about getting too thirsty.

Overall, I did about ten laps on the ground and another five in the air, and I felt like I'd worked just about every muscle on my body. So I did a victorious wing-roll, yawped (but not too loud 'cause the deer were still there) and flew back home.

The clouds that were forming overhead promised some rain, but I didn't think that there would be too much of it. Cyndi had predicted less than an inch, and now that the weather was actually coming here, I thought that was optimistic—there wouldn’t even be a half inch.

I stopped at my apartment long enough to get the birdseed I'd bought from Meijer for Aric's feeder. I hadn't taken it over there yesterday even though I probably should have. But it had been late.

The stupid bag was really heavy when it was full, and it was super awkward to fly with it clenched in my forehooves, and by the time I was halfway there I started to worry that I might drop it.

I made it there with it and I landed on the roof of the garage and tore the corner off so that I could dump it in the bird feeder and then I remembered that there were still some seeds in the garage and I ought to have used those first but it was too late now.

I left it up there while I opened the top of the feeder, and then I flew back, carefully grabbed it and spilled a bunch of seeds on the roof anyway, but then I had better luck at the feeder and hardly spilled any in the grass.

I put the bag in the garage, next to the one that was mostly empty, and went back outside to make sure that the birdfeeder was still working like it was supposed to. And it was; I got a mouthful of sunflower seeds out of it.

Angela was in the kitchen so I waved at her and she opened the window and thanked me for filling the feeder. And she said that I looked really sweaty, and I said it was 'cause I'd been trotting and flying all morning. Then I waved goodbye and went back to my apartment for a shower.

The new shower mat was really nice. My hooves weren't so cloppy on the bathtub floor, and it also kept me from skidding at all.

I shook off and then went out in the living room and looked out the windows. I wasn't going to be drying off outside, 'cause it was raining now.

I put a towel down on the futon and set another alongside it and got my Bible and stretched out, put the second towel over my back, and started reading Job.

Well, I didn't like it too much. In a strange way, it kind of reminded me of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Right at the beginning all kind of bad things happened to Job, and then his friends weren't much comfort to him, either. They said that the only reason bad things were happening to him was because he'd sinned but he said that he hadn't. Then he asked where wisdom could be found, and decided that God had hidden it from them.

Then Job said all the good things he'd done and demanded that God talk to him, and I kind of thought that was a bad idea. I was pretty sure that all the Israelites knew what had happened to other proud people who questioned God.

And then when God came in a whirlwind, I thought he was just going to strike down Job. But He didn't. He asked Job where he was when the world was created and who made all the wild beasts and who could tame the Leviathan, and it sounded a little braggy, even if it was true. When He was done, he had Job's friends make sacrifices, and then he restored to Job everything that he had taken away twofold.

So I kinda wasn't sure what to think of it. If Job was so good all along, why did so many bad things happen to him? Did God not care? Or was He too busy with other stuff and didn't have time for Job until Job came to confront Him?

I thought I'd have to ask Pastor Liz about that on Thursday.

Then I remembered that I was planning to go to the salon with Meghan on Thursday, so I sent a telephone telegram to Pastor Liz asking if we could meet sooner.

I ate lunch and then sat in the papasan and watched the birds for a little bit. The rain had stopped and so they were back, making up for lost time.

Then my telephone rang and when I answered, it was Meghan and she said that she was really, really sorry but she had to bail on me tonight because her idiot of a boss had scheduled a mandatory dinner meeting and was confused why no one was happy because they’d be eating dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings and the company would pay for it.

So I told her I understood—I’d had to change plans real fast in Equestria a couple of times when there was a ship in trouble or a storm that went out of control—and at least we still had the salon appointment tomorrow. Then, since I suddenly didn’t have any evening plans, I got the Bible back out and looked at the next book. Maybe it’d be happier.

Well, it was called Psalms and they were like little poems. The first ones were about seeking salvation in the Lord, and some of them said that they were supposed to have stringed instruments, so I thought that maybe once upon a time people sang or chanted them and that would be interesting to hear. There were hymns that we'd sung in church, and maybe some of them were in the Psalms.

I read through the first twenty, and then I put my Bible away for the day. I'd heard a car come in and then the downstairs door open and so I thought it was time that I introduced myself to my downstairs neighbor.

So I flew out the balcony and around and knocked on her door and I heard the clicking of her shoes and then she muttered something but didn't open the door.

I knocked again and I heard her mutter something and then she yanked the door open and looked around over my head and then took a step forward and almost tripped over me.

She looked up and down the driveway and then I said hello and she shrieked and pinned my ears back. Then she covered her mouth and crouched down and held out her hand and so I stuck out my hoof and told her I was Silver Glow and I was the pony who lived upstairs.

She was really pretty—she had dark creamy skin and long dark hair that was held back with a headband. She said that her name was Quinn, which was short for something so ethnic I'd never be able to wrap my tongue around it, and she said she'd kind of wondered who was living upstairs because it sounded like there was a herd of donkeys at all hours of the day and night.

I told her that I'd just gotten a mat for the bathtub so I wouldn't slip and it would make my hooves quieter and she said that was considerate of me.

Then she said that she hadn't thought that anyone would rent the apartment after the old tenant had left suddenly and I asked why, and she shrugged and said he'd gotten arrested back in March and that was all she knew.

I could kind of tell by her look that she knew more than that, but I didn't ask for any more details.

She said that she'd like to talk for longer, but she was between jobs right now and she wanted to take a shower and put her heels up for a little bit before she had to go back out. So I shook her hand again and went back around to my balcony and thought about what I could do for the rest of the evening.

I wanted to know where the farmer's market was, even though I didn't need any food yet. So I filled up my camelback again and put it back on, and then I got my saddlebags too because sometimes at the end of the day farmers sell leftover stuff really cheap so that they don't have to take it home with them again.

Which meant I had to take my camelback off again, because I couldn't put the saddlebags on top of it.

The farmer’s market wasn't that hard to find. It was southeast of the downtown, and right next to a park that had a big outdoor swimming pool. I was right; it was too late to get any food although there were a few people still there, putting the last things into their trucks and vans. So I didn't land, but I circled around it and then I flew back home.

I had a late supper and then I decided that I ought to write a letter back to Gusty, congratulating her on her role and maybe bragging a little bit that I was on TV too. And I wanted to reassure her that I was coming to see her in Stratford. And I told her about riding horses and I asked if she'd seen any and how close she'd gotten to them.

Then right at the end I thought about asking her about Cayenne and I kind of thought about that for a while. It was kind of rude to end a letter asking about somepony else, and if she wasn't sending letters to Gusty, either, maybe it would be unfriendly to remind her. But on another hoof, maybe she was busy and just didn't have time. So I kinda compromised by not asking specifically about Cayenne but instead saying that this coming weekend me and Aquamarine were going to Bay City to see sailing ships.

When I'd finished up the letter I opened my balcony door and let the gentle wind blow in and it also brought a wayward sparrow who hopped in through the door and then he looked around at where he was and I guess he knew that he wasn't supposed to be inside, 'cause he flew up to go back out but he wasn’t all that smart and bumped into the window a few times before he finally found the door.

He'd left me a little present on the floor, too, so I had to get out of the papasan and clean it up before it dried.

After the birds had mostly flown off for the evening, I closed the door and turned on my computer and wrote a computer letter to Aric. I could see that he hadn't said anything on Facebook for over a week, which probably meant he was really busy with theatre stuff. But maybe he'd get a chance to read my letter when he wasn't, even if it took a couple of days.

I had a lot to tell him about. I thought he'd like to hear about me riding a horse, and I also told him about being an assistant weatherperson, and I also told him when I was going to be gone so that he'd know. And I told him that I'd gone to a barbeque with David and Angela, and that Meghan was teaching me to cook, and I told him that I'd gotten a camelback which was really nice to have and that I missed him and hopefully we'd see each other again before too long.

Then after I turned off my computer I got in my futon without folding it down and lay down with my back against it and my forelegs around a pillow and thought that I ought to have Meghan sleep over after I do laundry.

July 7 [Gull Lake]

July 7

I woke up in the middle of the night 'cause I heard someone open my door and then something thumped on the floor so I turned around to see what it was and promptly bumped my nose on the back of the futon.

So that gave me a moment to think, and I tried to decide if it was smarter to stick my head up over the futon and see what was happening, stay where I was and hope that nobody noticed I was there, or just charge in without thinking.

Well, I thought the first option was the best 'cause then I'd know if I should charge in or fly away. So I popped my head up real quick and saw that it was only Meghan, bent over to take her shoes off. She was facing away, so she didn't see me at all.

She was wearing the nice blouse we'd found at Goodwill and a grey-looking skirt (it was hard to be sure of the color 'cause it was dark) and her hair was up in a bun.

Meghan didn't notice I was looking until she'd unbuttoned her blouse most of the way and she let go for a minute to wave at me.

I couldn't help her undress, but I could help with the futon, so I got out and folded it down so that we'd both have room and she folded up her clothes and put them on my desk then got in bed with me.

She smelled kind of spicy, and it was most intense on her fingers. At first I couldn't figure out where I'd smelled that before, then I remembered the Buffalo Wings and then the Buffalo Wing Soup that they'd served us. And she'd said that she was going to a restaurant called Buffalo Wild Wings.

Meghan took the little band out of her hair and shook it down, then lay down next to me. She said that she hoped I didn't mind getting up a little early 'cause she'd have to go to her house to get dressed tomorrow 'cause she didn't have any clean clothes with her.

I asked her how her meeting was and she said it had been stupid and a complete waste of time and the only thing that made it marginally worthwhile was the free food, but she'd rather have been sitting in the hot tub with me instead. So I said that maybe it wouldn't rain tonight and we could do it after the spa.

Then I kissed her 'cause she still looked kind of stressed, and rolled on my side so she could snuggle me.

In the morning, her alarm went off too early and when she sat up she said she was glad she'd only had two beers, otherwise she'd really be hating today. Then she got up and started putting on her clothes from last night and when she was dressed she kissed me and said that she'd see me later tonight.

I was really glad that I'd given her a key.

I ate a light breakfast of vegetables, filled up my camelback and then put it on and my flight vest over it. Then I put a can of anchovies in my vest pocket and strapped on my radio and my altimeter so that I could get a couple of hours of flying in.

I thought I'd try something a little bit different today, and I went northeast after I got out of town. There was a main road that went off that way after getting across the river, and I thought I might follow it. I'd seen a big lake off in the distance when I was flying to Battle Creek, and I thought that this road might go there.

On my way out of town I passed by another Meijer. I thought about going inside just to visit, but then I would have had to drop back down and call the airplane directors to cancel the clearance they'd just given me and it seemed like a lot of work for everyone, so I just kept going.

Beyond Meijer, it started to turn into farmland along the road. There were a bunch of circle-fields and one that looked like it had been smooshed, and then after that most of the fields were rectangles. Humans really seemed to like making things into rectangles and squares—most of the roads were on a grid, and the few that ran diagonally or curved looked kind of out of place.

The road ran into a town called Richland and then must have turned into another road, but I didn't bother going low enough to read road signs. I could see the lake ahead of me, and the town and the single diagonal road that led back to Kalamazoo were more than enough to navigate by.

All around the lake were little houses right up on the shore, and most of them had docks with boats tied up to them.

I thought I'd do a lap of the lake before I started back, so I went into a bit of a dive when I started crossing over the water, and I wasn't much higher than a thousand feet when I got close to the other side.

That dive had given me lots of forward speed, and I bled some of it off in a turn, but I was still going pretty fast as I started along the east shore. Unfortunately, that speed doesn't last forever, but I still made it a third of the way up the lake before I had to start flapping again.

I followed the shoreline around and over the top. There was a little lake off to the northwest, kinda like a little hat for the big lake.

I was most of the way down the west side when I saw some fish flashing in the sunlight and I circled over them, trying to guess how deep they were and if it was worth trying to catch them. I couldn't see the bottom, and I knew that a lot of fish are smart enough to dive when they see a shadow coming overhead, so I didn't think I'd get any of them. Which was too bad, 'cause now that I had a fishing license, it was kind of a shame to not use it.

On the south end, there was a peninsula and right off the end of that was a small island which also had lots of houses on it with their docks pointing off into the water.

There were a few boats out in the middle of the lake and I didn't bother them, but then I saw one coming out from behind the peninsula so I flew down alongside it just for fun. One of the women in the back pointed at me and pretty soon everyone was looking at me so I waved and then made a sharp turn east to continue my circuit of the lake.

I heard the sound of the boat's motor change, and when I looked back, I saw that it had turned to follow me. If I'd been stuck on the ground it might have made me nervous to have it chasing me, but I knew that it couldn't fly, so I just minded my own business. Probably they were curious and just wanted to look at me.

Maybe they were making a movie of me and were going to put it on YouTube.

When I got back to the house that I'd marked on my flight in, I turned to cross over the lake and started to climb, as well. When I looked down, the boat was still there, keeping pace just a little bit behind me, so I flicked my tail at it.

It followed me all the way across the lake, but then it couldn't go any further and I could. I was high enough up that I could easily see Richland and the diagonal road, so I took a bit of a shortcut, flying a shallower diagonal alongside it until the road and I met up near Meijer.

I used my radio to tell the grumpy man that I was descending underneath his airspace and would not be back up in it, and he thanked me for that.

I did a steep dive at first and when I was down to two thousand feet I changed my angle to still be descending but not as fast. I could have made it all the way to the river if I didn't have to worry about airplanes, and had gone for the longest distance. But that was okay; I made it almost halfway.

One of the interesting things about Kalamazoo—and maybe this is true of all big human towns—is that all the roads sort of wind up meeting nearly in the middle of town, which means that there were a lot of landmarks I was pretty familiar with by now. Even the railroad tracks met up at the same place, just past where they'd put the train station.

I was really ready for a shower by the time I landed on my balcony. I hadn't eaten my anchovies after all, but my camelback was completely empty.

After a shower and lunch, I read a couple more Psalms and then I went to see Pastor Liz.

Liz said that Job was more like a play than an actual telling of events. She said that most people read it as trying to answer why bad things happened to good people, but that wasn't really what it was about at all. It was more about God's sovereignty, his power over things. And so at the end, we see that not only does God have all these other things that He has to care about, but He also cared enough about Job to come down and talk to him.

And when she said it that way it kind of made more sense to me. It was kind of like blaming Princess Celestia when things went wrong, when really she had a lot more to worry about than a leaking boat or a bad year for a farmer's rye crop. So I told Liz what I was thinking and she frowned and said that it wasn't quite the same unless Princess Celestia had created the world.

Well, I didn't think she had. She hadn't been around before Harmony, as far as I knew. But I guess I wasn't sure about that. I'd never heard anyone saying that she'd made the world, but I'd never heard anyone saying that she hadn't, either.

So then Liz said that the other moral to the chapter was that Job's friends had been bad because they hadn't trusted him and they'd kept trying to find out what he'd done to make God angry when he really hadn't done anything at all and that was why God had punished them at the end, and when I thought about it that made sense. I thought that maybe they could have questioned him once, and when he assured them that he hadn't done anything bad, than they should have stopped asking and helped him more, and Liz thought that was true, too.

Maybe if they had, all four of them could have had an audience with God instead of just Job, and maybe all of them would have been rewarded.

Liz thought that was true, and she said later on I was going to read about three friends who stuck together even when the king wanted to destroy them, and because they stuck together and kept their faith they were saved.

And then I told her that I had started Psalms, but I'd only gotten to the twenty-second so far, and I was really liking them.

She said that the Book of Psalms was a collection of hymns for praise or salvation and that I'd probably noticed the little notes at the top. I nodded, and then wanted to know if there was music for them.

Liz said that although it might be hard to believe, there was. Some of the ancient manuscripts from thousands of years ago still had the marks to show how they were supposed to be sung, but nobody was quite sure how to read them anymore, although there were people trying to figure it out.

Then she told me that there were YouTube videos of them being sung in ancient Hebrew and while it probably wasn't how they'd originally been sung they were very nice, and so she found one and played it for me, and it was really beautiful.

When we were done with our meeting, we hugged and then I went over to Meghan's. I had to wait outside for her 'cause I didn't have keys to her apartment, and although she'd thought my idea of a pegasus door was a good one, she said that the landlord wouldn't let her cut holes in the wall.

Once she was home and we were up in her apartment, she called for an Uber-car and then got changed into more comfortable clothes. We had a quick little snack and then the car took us to the salon.

Maura was really happy to see me again, and it was really nice to be at the salon 'cause everyone there was gossipy and once they were done talking about me being a TV weatherpony, they all started talking about people they knew who had been on TV or who knew someone who knew someone who had been on TV and so I told them about Gusty too and a couple of the girls watched the show and started talking about it and I got kinda confused because sometimes I couldn't tell if what they were saying had actually happened or if it was just in the TV show.

Maura also wanted to look at my hooves and my coat since I was there, and of course she spotted the burned spot on my foreleg right away. Enough of my coat had come back that it didn't look bare anymore, but it wasn't as long and thick as everything else. She wanted to know what had happened, so I told her about my stove, and she poked and prodded at it a bit before deciding that it seemed to be healing well.

Well, I thought it was too or else I would have seen a nurse.

She said that my hooves looked pretty good to her eye and asked if I was having any trouble with them at all, and I said that I wasn't. I'd been more careful about walking on sidewalks and roads and it was helping. I think the vacation with Aric had helped a lot, because I'd hardly walked on any pavement at all.

I paid for both of us—it was only fair; she'd paid before—and when we were about to leave Maura warned us to be careful because there was a severe thunderstorm watch; she'd just gotten a notification on her pocket telephone.

That meant I had to go on duty.

So I thanked her and Meghan had the Uber-Car take us back to my apartment and I called Mel on the radio and he said he'd come and get me, then I started putting on my gear. I made sure to fill up my camelback and Meghan helped me put it on and then my vest and my radios and my blinking light (we put new batteries in it to make sure it'd stay bright).

She told me that she'd be at my apartment when I got home and I told her that she didn't have to, 'cause I might be out late depending on the weather, but she insisted. And then she hugged me and told me to be safe, and I promised that I would.

It didn't take Mel that long to arrive, and I kissed Meghan on the lips then flew out my balcony door and down to Mel's truck, and as we pulled away I waved one more time at Meghan.

He drove out to our usual spot, and once he'd parked I flew up and did a quick circuit just to see what things looked like. There were big storms building off to the west, and it was mostly cloudy where we were—I found a hole that was big enough to go through and not have to worry about airplanes sneaking up on me—and then I remembered that I ought to tell the airplane directors where I was and what I was doing. Little airplanes couldn't fly in storms, but big airplanes still did.

Well, I made a couple of patrols and landed between them. Once when I was in the air, Mel went to the gas station and got me a Subway sandwich 'cause I hadn't had a proper dinner.

Nothing much happened before sunset. I spotted one storm off in the distance and kept an eye on it, but it went well south of us. And another one passed over but it was just rumbly and not producing anything yet, and it didn't feel like it would until it was a ways past Kalamazoo.

On his radar, stuff kept popping up and then going away again. The clouds were sort of unsure, but they could go either way and that's why I was up there. All the NOAA weatherpeople saw was blobs of color; they didn't get their hooves into the storm like I was.

I took a short nap on his seat between false alarms, until he shook me awake and said that I'd better get back up there because there was another cell coming.

It looked just like all the others had on the screen, but as soon as I looked through the windshield I could tell by all the lighting in it that this one was going to bring the rain, and when I opened the door I could feel it, so I went east and up, and I was maybe two thousand feet off the ground when the first downdraft sent me tumbling and once I got upright again it started to pour, and I had to shout into the radio to tell Mel what I was seeing.

Unlike the last storm, it was just this one big cell it turned out, but that one fought me with everything it had, from contrary winds to squalls of rain and even some hail mixed in. Whenever I got a little break, I yelled into the radio but I don't know if he heard me at all because I never heard him call back.

You could have wrung me out when I finally landed after it passed. I was as soggy as if I'd just fallen in the ocean and I was really glad for the warm cab of his truck when I climbed up inside. He angled the little vents in the dashboard so that three of them were pointing at me. When the next blob came on screen, I really didn't want to go back up but it was my duty, so I opened the door of the truck and took off again, expecting the worst.

Luckily, this one didn't have much fight to it, which was good 'casue I was worn out. Once I was sure that it wasn't going to get any worse before it passed Kalamazoo, I called Mel and he said that I might as well come down because there wasn't anything else on the radar that looked nasty.

I napped on the seat a little until he said that it was clearing up and we'd ought to get back home.

I hardly had the energy to fly back up to my balcony, and I was really glad to be home when I stepped inside.

Meghan was asleep in the papasan—I thought that maybe she'd been watching out the window for me which was really sweet. She hadn't gotten all the way undressed 'cause she was near the window and she'd probably intended to take the rest of her clothes off before getting into the futon with me.

But I thought it would be a shame to wake her up, so I slid under the cover she had on her lap and curled up on her legs and she didn't wake up and I think I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the papasan.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Cynewulf for helping analyze Job

July 8 [Lansing and Bay City]

July 8

I felt like I'd been put in a barrel and rolled down a hill. Waking up wasn't fun at all, and getting out of the papasan wasn't fun either.

Meghan looked like she was a little stiff, too; when she got up she flexed her shoulders and then twisted around her back a couple of times, while I was stretching out my wings. And then we both looked at each other and shared a laugh.

My coat was all matted down from sleeping on it and my feathers were kind of a mess, too. There hadn't been enough room in the cab of Mel's truck to preen them right.

We decided that since I had to go to the train station and Meghan's house was halfway there anyways we'd use her shower, and after she put her pants on, she helped pack my saddlebags with stuff I might want for the weekend, which wasn't really all that much. Mostly my flight clothes and my camelback (which could be folded up pretty small when it was empty) and radios and some cans of anchovies just in case. And she also put her bra in my saddlebags 'cause she said there wasn't any point in putting it back on just to take it off again once she got home.

So we walked over to her apartment and that helped work out some of the stiffness in my legs and belly, although my wing muscles were still pretty achey.

It was strange how I'd only had my bathmat for a couple of days but I already missed it when my hooves were slipping on her shower floor.

The shower worked really well to relax my muscles the rest of the way, and Meghan straightened out my feathers some while we were in the shower still, and then after we'd finished and I'd brushed her hair she had me sit down on the bed next to her and worked on my wings, and we both kind of lost track of time until she heard her doorbell ring and then looked at her telephone and realized that her ride to work had arrived.

Since she still wasn’t wearing any clothes, she had me go down and explain that she was running a little bit late. And I had just started to go back to the house when she came rushing past me, carrying her purse in one hand and a silver package of Pop Tarts in the other.

Meghan told me to have fun in Bay City, and said that she wished she could be there, too, and reminded me to make sure the door was locked when I left, and then she got in the car and it hurried out of her driveway.

Since I had a few hours before the train arrived, I went back upstairs and finished preening my wings, and then I left a note for Meghan saying that I was sorry I'd made her late and then I had a bowl of Shredded Wheat (I didn't think she'd mind) and got my saddlebags and made sure that the apartment was locked.

Even though it was early, I went down to the train station and waited around and then I went to McDonalds which was right next door and got a cup of coffee to help wake me up and then I waited some more.

I knew that the train would arrive just before eleven, but I had a while before that happened. So I people-watched a bit and I wished I had a book of poetry or my Bible to read, and I listened to the airplane radio for a little bit and it was nice to hear Dori's voice on the radio even if I wasn't flying myself.

The lobby filled up with some people and then the westbound train arrived and most of them got on it and then it left.

That meant that my train was getting close. I could picture it in my mind, rushing past the fields near Lawton and the grass airport outside Mattawan and underneath the 94 Highway and then under the 131 Highway and alongside Stadium Drive and Western Michigan and Kalamazoo College and then it would be at the train station. But picturing it in my mind didn't make it arrive any faster, and I went outside and flew up a little bit but with the curves in the tracks I couldn't see all that far.

I stayed out on the platform and kept an ear cocked in that direction, and after a little while I heard the distant wail of a train horn, and then it was hardly any time at all before I heard the bells at the crossing start to ring, and then the train screeched into the station and as soon as the conductor put down his little yellow step, I flew aboard and found a seat next to the window.

The first part of the trip was pretty familiar territory. We crossed over the river and then through the railroad yard and then went through Comstock and Galesburg and made a turn before Augusta and all the while I was picturing where we were from where I'd flown. But my flights hadn't gone beyond Battle Creek yet, so once we got into the city there it was much less familiar.

Dozens of little towns passed by after we left Battle Creek, and lots and lots of fields. It still amazed me how many fields there were. I'd never seen so many one right after the other.

The train slowed down as it got to Lansing, and we went alongside a river for a little bit then past lots of houses and a strange park, and then it slowed down for the East Lansing station. It was kind of strange that each time I rode the train I saw different things, 'cause I knew more about Earth.

Aquamarine and Jenny were waiting on the platform for me, and as soon as I'd gotten off the train Aquamarine came up and nuzzled me and then when we broke apart she asked me how I was doing and what I'd thought about the storms that came through last night.

Well, I told her about them on the way to Jenny's car (which was called Malibu) and she said that she was glad that she could keep her hooves on the ground inside a good, strong building, rather than be up in the air like I was. But I thought I'd rather be up there where I could see it and feel it, instead of not being sure what it was going to do next.

Jenny said that we might as well go right to Bay City, unless there was something I really wanted to do in Lansing. She said that the ships would start arriving tonight, and that she already had a hotel room for tonight and tomorrow that was near the festival.

I couldn't think of anything I really wanted to do in Lansing, so she drove through town until she got to the 127 Highway and followed it to the 69 Highway.

We talked some, but mostly Aquamarine and I watched out the windows. Towns were marked with green signs and blue signs said what there was in that town. Those were things I hadn't known when I'd first gotten to Earth. And there were orange signs to warn where people were working on the road.

I felt like I'd learned a lot from taking trips in cars.

When we got to a city called Flint, we went to the 75 Highway, and that took us north. When we came upon a really big bridge, Jenny said that we were getting close—the bridge was called the Zilwaukee Bridge, and it went over the Saginaw river. She said it was really tall because ships had to fit under it, and I thought about how big the ones I'd seen on my trip up north were.

I wanted to know why they hadn't just put in a drawbridge instead, and Jenny said she didn't know but she thought that they couldn't put drawbridges on highways, because cars didn't expect to have to stop.

I wished that they hadn't put up concrete barriers on either side of the road, because we were high enough that we could have seen a lot on either side of us. Jenny said that they were there to keep cars from falling off the edge, which made sense, but they could have been long tubes like on the Mackinac Bridge. Those let you see out to the side.

It wasn't too long after that we left the highway and went into town. Jenny had a little moving map on her dashboard that told her where to go, and it led her right to a big park along the river. Men in bright vests like mine had little wands and waved them at her to give her directions, and they led her right to a spot where she could put her car.

We left my saddlebags in the car, and went to a booth where we paid to get in. The woman there was giving out bands that went around people's' wrists, and me and Aquamarine gave her some trouble as she tried to figure out where to put our bands. Finally she decided that they'd go around a foreleg well enough, and so we got banded and then went in.

There were a bunch of little shops that had food set up in a row, and Jenny said that when we wanted fair food we'd have to stop there. And she warned us that fair food was deep-fried and overpriced. And as we walked to the front she pointed out a stage and a beer tent and also little light blue boxes that she said were portable toilets.

Along the riverfront was where the ships would be, although there were only a couple and one of them was on the other side of the river. I'd kind of had an idea how much bigger they'd be from the ships I'd seen before and while they weren't anywhere close to that size, they were still a lot larger than any pony ship had ever been.

We went over to it and the crew was happy to show us around, plus they were really excited to see a pair of ponies who were interested in their ship. It was called the Denis Sullivan, and they said that it was the flagship of Wisconsin.

Jenny had never been on a ship like it before, so she was really excited, and Aquamarine hadn't either, although she was kinda familiar with some parts of it, 'cause she said that she'd read a few novels about ships back in Equestria.

Most of it looked pretty familiar to me, but I realized as we got led belowdecks that I didn't know the human names for all of the parts. So I paid real close attention, and repeated the names to myself so that I'd remember them.

She had three masts, which were a foremast, a mainmast, and a mizzenmast, and she had a deeper than normal hull because she wasn't an exact copy of historical ships, and we were told that there was more headroom belowdecks because of it. And she also had a diesel motor which the old schooners hadn't had.

I asked if I could fly up and take a closer look at the masts and rigging, and our guide had to ask her boss, but I finally got permission and so I flew off the deck and took a look around the topsides of the ship.

There were ropes everywhere, holding the masts up or holding the booms and sails in place, and it was kind of a nightmare to navigate, although I knew a few pegasuses who could do it in their sleep. Most of the ocean-going ships had one or two pegasuses on their crew for lookouts and minor weather control and emergency repairs. But it was hard to imagine what it would be like to be flying around the spiderweb of ropes with the ship pitching and rolling in a storm, trying to fix a sail that had gone wrong.

From where I was, I could see another set of sails downriver, so when I was done having a look around, I flew down and told everyone what I'd seen.

We went all the way to the poop deck which was the best place to watch from aside from being up a mast or flying, and pretty soon the drawbridge over the river went up and then we could see her clearly. She was slightly smaller and only had two masts, and I didn't really notice until she got close, but they were really raked back.

That was the Pride of Baltimore II, and she took her place across the river from us.

We spent the rest of the evening watching the ships come in, until both sides of the harbor were lines with sailing ships and I all of a sudden felt really homesick. Even though they were bigger than any of the ships I'd ever seen in Equestria, watching them come up the river and cast their lines ashore was just like being home again, and it didn't take much for my mind to see ponies loading and unloading cargo, or for the memory of the smell of sea air to come back to me.

Jenny was right about the food booths, but we had a snack at them anyways. And we both insisted on visiting the beer tent, and we got beers called Landshark which were pretty good.

When it started to get dark, we got back in her car and drove to a hotel called Euclid, which was like a long house instead of having lots of floors for rooms like the other hotels I'd stayed in.

We let her choose which bed she wanted, and then Aquamarine and I took the other one. I was still a bit tired from last night, so I sort of dozed against Aquamarine's side while she and Jenny talked, then finally Aquamarine shook me awake enough to lie down under the covers with her.

July 9 [Tall Ships]

July 9

I woke up first, 'cause I'd been napping before bed yesterday. And Aquamarine woke up right after me, before I'd even finished stretching.

She covered a yawn with her hoof and then the two of us got out of bed as quietly as we could, so that we didn't wake up Jenny. Then after we'd used the bathroom we both decided we wanted some exercise. If I'd been by myself, I would have just flown, but that would be rude to Aquamarine.

So we decided to trot around the neighborhood. Aquamarine started writing a note for Jenny so if she woke up and saw that we were gone, she wouldn't be worried. And I went to get my camelback out of my saddlebags in case either of us wanted water, and that's when I saw that I still had Meghan's bra in them.

She has a lot of bras, so she hopefully wouldn't miss this one for the weekend.

I showed Aquamarine how the camelback worked, and it was nice 'cause it had little pockets in it, too, and that was a really easy way to carry our things.

When she saw how it fit on my back she wanted one, too.

Outside, there weren't any sidewalks on our side of the road but there was a dirt path that ran alongside the road. Neither of us was really sure which way was the best way to go, so I flew up and looked around to see if I could spot anything interesting nearby.

I saw that our motel had a pool and I saw that the street we were on was all shops in both directions, and there was a Taco Bell to the north of us. And there was a big open field that looked like a pasture almost right behind the motel which we could get to if we went up the driveway by an Arby's.

So we walked that way and then we went into the big grass pasture. There was an apartment house to the south of it, and Aquamarine said that she thought whoever owned the apartment house had bought all this land so that they could build more when all the apartments they had got full.

It was plenty big enough to trot around in and we raced each other across it a couple of times. Not too seriously; she would have won if we did. And when we got thirsty, we shared the water out of my camelback.

We exercised until the sun was above the trees ('cause Aquamarine said that was when Jenny usually woke up on the weekends) and then she said that we ought to head back to the motel.

I thought it would be nice to get breakfast for her before we went back, so we went to McDonald's together and got two breakfast platters and a cup of coffee for Jenny, too. The girl at the counter thought it was odd that Aquamarine wanted the coffee cup in a bag, but how else was she going to carry it?

Since Aquamarine couldn't fly, we had to go all the way to the end of the block where we were allowed to cross the road and then back to the motel. And then Aquamarine set down the coffee and got the little plastic key out of my camelback and let us in.

Jenny got out of bed when we came in—she said that she'd been up already and then seen our note so she decided to lay back down until we returned. And she was really happy that we'd brought her breakfast, and we gave her the meat patty that was in ours and her coffee as well.

There were only two chairs, so Aquamarine and I shared one and Jenny sat in the other. When we were done with breakfast she said that we could have the first shower and I tried to convince her to join us but she didn't want to. She said that she was going to sit in the chair and finish her coffee.

When all of us were showered, brushed, and in her case dressed, I refilled my camelback and she put some bottles of water in her pants—she had really clever pants she called cargo pants that had extra pockets on the legs. Then we all got in her car and drove back to see the ships.

We started on the far side of the river, 'cause there were ships over there, too.

You were allowed to go on any of them, and since it was early there weren't very long lines, although Jenny said that there would be later in the day.

We decided to go on the Galeón Andalucía first. It was what was called a galleon, and it was something that the Spanish had made for sailing across the ocean to discover new lands and set up trade routes, and it was the only one that still sailed although Jenny said it was a replica. She said that she didn't think that any of the ships that would be here were original.

It wasn't the most graceful of the ships there, but it looked really sturdy, and I could see why they had designed them like they had. It looked like it was really seaworthy and could carry a good cargo for long distances.

We went aboard with a small group of people and the man who showed us around was curious about me and Aquamarine, so we told him that we were students at Michigan colleges. He had an accent which Jenny said was Spanish.

The ship had six decks and we got to tour them all. I saw some people had to duck going through doorways, and I heard a woman say how crowded it was but it didn't feel that way to me.

Someone asked if this was the kind of ship which had discovered America, and our guide said that those were smaller, and called a caravel. Those had different types of sails, which let them go closer to the wind.

When we were done with our tour, a couple of the crew asked if me and Aquamarine would pose for pictures with them, and we said that we would, so we got led up to the bow and Jenny became the photographer for everyone. She had her own camera, and everyone else gave her their cameras and pocket telephones and we posed for a dozen pictures or so before everyone was happy.

The next ship we visited was called the Draken Harald Hårfagre, and it was long and low and only had one sail. While we waited in line, Jenny told us that Vikings had lived in the north and sailed all over the northern Atlantic Ocean, setting up colonies in places like Greenland and Iceland and even America. She said that they had actually discovered it long before Columbus, and they'd even had a colony there but the native Americans had fought them and kicked them out.

Then she had to explain how America had been there all along but the Europeans hadn't known about it, even though the Vikings had and they came from Europe, too, so it was all kind of confusing.

This ship’s mast was right in the center, and it had a shallow draft so it could make beach landings. It also had twenty-five sets of oars so that it could be rowed when there wasn't any wind to push it along.

When we got aboard, the guide told us how it had been built using Scandinavian boatbuilding traditions—which he said had been passed down from the Vikings—as well as some historical details that had been discovered on ancient shipwrecks. And he said that after they had built it, they had had to spend some time practicing sailing it, because nobody knew any more how a ship like it was supposed to be sailed.

He also said that the Vikings may have navigated using a crystal called a 'sun stone,' which he said polarized the light so that it could be used even when it was cloudy. He told us that since they sailed in northern latitudes in the summer, they probably didn't use stars for navigation, since the days would be long and the nights short. And he also said that the ships often had crows aboard, and if they got lost they would let the crows go, because the crows would instinctively head for land.

I liked how open it was, but Aquamarine said if she had to be on it for a long time she wasn't sure she'd like the open decks as much, especially if it was raining. Which I suppose was a good point. But the low sides and open deck made it useful for all kinds of different work; and the high bows and stern looked like they'd make it really seaworthy, and the long narrow design meant it could go through water really efficiently.

The crew wanted to pose with us, as well, and Jenny got to be the photographer again.

The last ship we visited on this side of the river was the Pride of Baltimore II, and before we even got on board, the guide explained the raked masts, 'cause he said that was what everyone wanted to know about. He said that the way they were designed made the rigging lighter, and that the Baltimore Clippers were built light, because they were meant to carry light cargo very fast. He said that the design also made it easier to cut the sails, but in gentle winds they had a tendency to fall inboard and jibe, which was when the boom snapped across from one side to the other.

Sailors don't usually like jibing their boats, because it puts a lot of stress on the rigging, and if they're not careful, they can capsize. It's faster than tacking, though.

When we were done with our tour and pictures with the crew, we got in Jenny’s car and went across the river to the park. I wouldn’t have minded walking, but she didn’t want to leave her car on the other side of the drawbridge, just in case the bridge stopped working and stranded us.

After we got our fetlock-bands, we went to the food stalls. There was a little booth that sold elephant ears, which was a kind of sugared bread and not actually elephant ears, and we had those and Jenny had a coney dog (which was a meat-tube that wasn't from a dog) and then we also had nachos with a spicy yellow cheese sauce (which wasn't actually cheese). And then we went by a tent that was selling kettle corn, and so she bought a big bag of that, too, and we shared it between us.

Then we sat down for a while and watched a play on the stage we'd seen last night. It was called King Gorbeduck, and for actors they had people from the audience join, and I got to be a Princess in it. It was kind of stressful because there were two men called Thing 1 and Thing 2 who told me what to do, but they kept changing their instructions after people did what they said. The audience thought it was really funny, though.

We went to the Niagara next. While we were waiting to go on board, the guide told us that it had originally been built for the War of 1812 and had been Commodore Perry's relief flagship, then after the war it had been sunk so that it would be preserved. Everyone thought that was really odd, but the guide swore that it was true, and that most of the fleet had been purposely sunk. Then in the 1930s they had started to restore it again but ran out of money and didn't finish until 1963, and then in 1988 they rebuilt it again.

So I guess that made this the oldest ship, even if you didn't count the almost hundred years it had been underwater, and that made it original unlike what Jenny had said.

And there was a story in its launching, too: the guide told us that Presque Isle was protected by a sandbar which meant the British ships couldn't get in, but the Niagara couldn't get out, either. So they took out the guns and ballast, and dragged it onto the sandbar, then they brought two other barges called 'camels' next to it, sunk them, tied them to the Niagara, then pumped the water out so that they would lift it up and over the sandbar, and then they put the guns and ballast back on it.

Nobody believed that, either, and he told people to look it up on Wikipedia. So a bunch of people got out their portable telephones and did, and I heard a couple of people mutter 'no shit.'

This ship had some of the rooms with historical fixtures inside, so that we could see how sailors would have lived back then, and they also had replica cannons on board and also some real ones that they could fire off. We could buy tickets to ride on the ship out into the bay, and our guide promised us that if we did, they'd fire the cannons.

That sounded like it would be fun, so once we were done with our tour, we bought tickets and the woman who was selling them decided that she would be nice and let me and Aquamarine have children's tickets (which were cheaper) 'cause we were smaller than humans.

When we were out of her earshot, Jenny said that wasn't fair 'cause Aquamarine weighed more than she did.

The last ship that we looked at was the Mist of Avalon, which had started out as a fishing ship, and it hadn't had sails back then. When its fishing days had ended, it was left abandoned in a harbor, and a man bought it, restored it, and then added the sails.

I liked that one the best because it was a real working ship. Aside from the Niagara, all of the other boats had been built to replicate something that wasn't used any more, but the Mist of Avalon had been built from the beginning to make its living on the sea, and had taken its crew out and back again for decades.

And I could see the strength in its lines even though it had been completely converted, and I could almost still smell the fish that its holds had once been full of. If we hadn't already gotten tickets to ride the Niagara, I would have wanted to go sailing on it.

There were more ships to see, but Jenny said that we could do that tomorrow; she wanted to look around at what all the other people had for sale at the market, and maybe go eat a proper dinner before we went out on the Niagara.

We started right by the water, where the people who had done King Gorbeduck had a booth showing weapons, and that was neat to see. There were long tables with different kinds of swords and old-fashioned guns and pieces of human armor. I was disappointed that they didn't have any glaives, because I knew from Stellan that humans had used glaives before they invented guns.

Jenny really liked seeing all the weapons, and she said that she was practicing to become a blacksmith although right now she didn't know how to make anything.

Aquamarine and I really liked all the little stands that they had around the park, because most people in them had made what they were selling, and that was something that all the other human stores I'd been in so far lacked. There was a lot of stuff at Meijer, but the people working there didn't know anything about what was on the shelves except where to find it.

We met a photographer who took pictures of lighthouses and a painter that made paintings of ships that were very beautiful, and we also met a wood-carver that made signs and a man who was selling books about ships. He hadn't written any of them, but he'd read them all and when I told him about where I lived, he said that he thought I'd really like a book called The Finest Hours, which was about the Coast Guard rescuing sailors from sinking ships. So I bought that.

Then we walked to Eucidi's Pizza, which was right on the main street and had a place outside where you could sit and eat. Most restaurants I'd been to hadn't had that.

We got a pizza to share, and it turned out to be so big that we had some left over when we were done.

Since we still had our fetlock-bands, we got back into the park just by showing them, and got on board the Niagara for our trip. They used their motor until they were out of the river, and then the crew put up the sails and once we were clear of all the river traffic they warned us to cover our ears and they fired the guns like they'd promised.

Even with my ears covered, I could feel the blast of pressure in my chest, and I had to shake my head to clear it before I got my balance back.

They let us try and work the lines, pairing us with experienced crew members who told us what to do, and it was a lot of work. I was too light for it, and when the wind shifted I got dragged off my hooves. I wasn't the only one, at least; when the crew got the sails set right again, there was plenty of laughing at our expense.

The crew praised Aquamarine, though. Even though she'd never been to sea on a sailing ship before, she knew how to hold the lines and not skid and tumble across the deck.

We had to move out of the way once it was time to turn around, because the captain had to tack, and they didn't want anybody getting in they way of the crew. So we all clustered around and watched as the helmsman brought the head of the ship into the wind and the sails went slack, and he used its momentum to continue the turn until they started to pick up the wind again, and the booms shifted the other way as the sails filled.

They fired off the guns one more time as we got into the mouth of the river, and we were lucky that the winds were with us because they were able to keep the sailing until we got near the drawbridge.

And even after that, they kept them up, but I could tell that they weren't doing any work; the crew had let them luff, and were just leaving them up for show.

We stayed a little bit longer after we got off the ship, but the park had mostly closed down except for the beer tent. Jenny didn't want anything to drink again, but Aquamarine and I each had a dark beer called Guinness, and all of us sang along with a couple of sea shanties.

I was glad we stayed, because I overheard someone talking about pancakes with pirates in the morning, and that sounded like it would be fun, since they were only play-pirates. And Jenny thought so, too, and said that we'd get up a little bit earlier tomorrow.

We were all kind of tired from the day when we finally got back to the hotel, and even though Aquamarine thought it might be fun to go swimming in the pool, nobody really had the energy to do it, so we relaxed and talked for a little bit, then we went to bed.

July 10 [More Tall Ships]

July 10

We both got up before Jenny and we were going to run out and play in the grass again but then Aquamarine said that we ought to try the swimming pool. She thought that we might as well use it, since we were here, and so we went between the buildings and up to the gate around the pool. There was a big white board that had lots of rules. It did say no horseplay, and neither of us was really sure what that meant but we didn’t think that it applied to us.

The water smelled funny, because humans like putting things in the water to help keep it clean. It wasn't harmful as long as you didn't drink a lot of the water.

The pool had a shallow end and a deep end, and a little barrier of buoys tied together with a rope to separate the two halves, and there were chairs where people could sit and sun themselves when they weren't in the water, although with the way the buildings were around the pool you wouldn't get a whole lot of sun-time.

I jumped off the edge and did a duck-landing, and Aquamarine just sort of flopped into the water, and we both figured out at about the same time that the shallow end wasn't really shallow enough for our legs to comfortably touch the ground.

That was okay, though.

She was a better swimmer than I was. There were some pegasuses that were good with swimming with their wings but I wasn't one of them. And at first, 'cause I hadn't been swimming in so long, I held out my wings to keep me level, which was just like having a sea-anchor on each side of me.

When I remembered to keep them tucked in, I did a lot better.

Once she'd gotten to the far end of the pool, she taunted me by saying that she thought I'd grown up on the ocean, and when I got to the edge I reminded her that it was above the ocean, not in it. I'd never claimed to be a seapony.

She let go of the side and dove to the bottom of the pool then popped up in the center, her mane completely over her eyes. So I guess she'd forgotten how to come up without blinding yourself.

Aquamarine stuck her head back under and shook her head to get her mane clear then came back up above the water with a challenge in her eyes, so I let go of the side of the pool and dove down, too. Underwater, my wings were a real asset, 'cause I could move a lot of water with them. I just had to be careful to not get carried away, 'cause that's a good way to get wing-strain.

She went down, too, and we did a little dance underwater, circling like dolphins, and then we came back up for air.

Pretty soon we were having all sorts of fun. I could tow her underwater pretty quick if she bit my tail, and in the shallow end I could stand on her back and she could flip me all the way out of the water, and once we got our timing figured out, I could do just a single flap as I came up, then tip nose-over-tail as I went over the buoys and use that turning momentum to carry through in a dive and come up back in the shallow end, next to her.

So that was a lot of fun and pretty good exercise for the morning. We finally got out of the pool when her vision started to get a little blurry from the chemical they put in the water, and I saw that they were a bit bloodshot. So she looked at my eyes and they were fine, 'cause the water couldn't get through my third eyelid.

We didn't have towels with us, so we both shook off on the deck around the pool before going back to our room. Jenny was in the shower so we had to wait for her to finish, and since we didn't want to get our bed wet we just stood and dripped on the carpet.

Both of us were getting a bit chilly, 'cause the room had an air cooling machine that blew air in and the buttons were small and flush.

I'd opened my bags to try and find something to poke them with when Jenny came out of the shower and looked at the two of us—I'd found my pen for my journal at the bottom of my bag—and wanted to know why we were both soaking wet and why there was a bra with all of my flight gear.

So I told her how Meghan had put it in my bag so that I could carry it home for her and then I'd forgotten I had it, and Jenny rolled her eyes and said that cleared it up and then she said it looked like Meghan had bigger boobs than she did.

It was nice in the bathroom; all the steam from Jenny's shower was still hanging around, and we didn't have to wait for the water to warm up at all.

Aquamarine wanted to know more about Meghan, so I told her how we were sleeping and showering together and how she was learning to preen my wings and she was teaching me how to cook and how much I liked spending time with her. And I told her about our adventures together, both being on television and how I'd gone horseback riding.

She said that was something she wanted to try, too, so I told her how Meghan had practiced with me before we did and said that I thought that had been a really smart thing to do but I still hadn't been very good at riding a horse because I couldn't get it to go where I wanted it to.

Aquamarine said that she'd been going by the pastures on her way back from the greenhouses and one time she'd even gotten up her courage and when nobody was looking she'd jumped the fence and spent an hour in the pasture with them and she'd gotten in a bit of a dominance fight with one of the mares but the rest of them hadn't been any problem.

We got dried off and when we got back out in the main room Jenny was dressed in her cargo pants again and she was nice and filled up my camelback for me while Aquamarine and I were brushing each other's manes.

Once we were ready, we packed up all our things and put them in the car then checked out of the motel. Jenny drove us to the park and we had to get new fetlock-bands then we went over to the big tent where they were having the pancakes with pirates.

That was a lot of fun because the pirates were really silly. Right after we sat down, one of them took a pancake on the tip of his sword and everyone chased him around the tent until they finally caught him before he could eat it, and another one of them kept trying to put pepper down the barrel of his gun because he said he thought it was gunpowder.

There was a blonde girl who folded up a newspaper-hat for the pancake thief, and she stole his hat and put the newspaper-hat on him instead, and he kept wearing it even though it was too big for him.

Jenny said that she thought the breakfast was meant for children, but I was having fun and so was Aquamarine, and besides there were plenty of seats for everyone.

Before we left they told us that we should watch their morning play which was called Down and Out on the Barbary Coast, and we said that we would. The pepper-pirate said that he was in it.

We were just getting down towards the river when we heard a loud honking, then the bell for the drawbridge started to ring. Since all the ships were already at their docks, we weren't sure what was coming but as it opened I saw a big black lake freighter slowly coming upriver.

Everyone stood and watched as it went by, and it was a good reminder that as big as these ships were, the newer ships were so much larger. It was called Buffalo and it was from Wilmington, Delaware.

You could feel the ground moving a little bit from the pulsing of its engine. And there was a crewman up in the bow, watching where the head of the ship went, or maybe just looking down on the tall ships as he went by.

We lost sight of it when the next drawbridge upriver closed, and I wondered where it was going. Jenny said it was probably going to Saginaw, and she didn't think that it could go any further up the river than that.

We visited a couple of smaller ships first, which were called the Appledore IV and Appledore V, which both were from Bay City. And right in front of them was another small ship named the When and If, and the woman at the dock told us that it had been built for General George Patton, who had wanted to sail it around the world after World War Two was over. But she said that he never had; he'd died in Europe before he could return home.

Jenny looked at the swords again until the play was about to start, then we sat and watched the play, which was pretty funny. In the end all of them fought with swords until both of the older pirates were defeated, and the younger pirates ran off with their treasure to get married.

We had a snack for lunch at the booths, and got more elephant ears and kettle popcorn and then we took one last look around before crossing over the river to see the last few ships that we hadn't seen yesterday.

Both of them were from Canada; one was called the Playfair and the other was the Pathfinder, and we took a tour of each one of them and then we decided that it was time to go back to Lansing.

On our way out of town, Jenny wanted to stop and take a picture of the city hall, which wasn't very far from where she'd parked. It was a big, grey, stone building with a red roof that looked kinda like a castle, with a clock tower on one end.

We took a different route out of town, crossing over a pair of bridges that joined on an island, and that took us back to the 75 Highway, and from there we reversed our course back home.

We stopped for dinner in a town called Durand, and she found a restaurant called Nick's Hometown Grill, which was really near the railroad tracks and right as we were getting our food, we heard a train horn and Aquamarine and Jenny looked at each other and laughed and said it was just like being back in their apartment.

It was maybe another half hour after we left Durand that we finally got back to East Lansing, and Jenny parked her car in long car-pavilion which she said was called a carport and had been included with their lease. And the bottom floor was all little stores; there was a restaurant and a coffee store and something called Spartan Net which I thought might be a fishing store but Aquamarine said it was for computers instead.

Their room was on the corner, and it had a balcony which looked over a triangle-field between the road and the railroad tracks, and you could also see through the trees a bunch more fields across the tracks and Aquamarine said that those all belonged to Michigan State, and they experimented with crops in them.

The inside was really nice and new, and a lot nicer than my apartment. Everything in the kitchen was sleek and shiny chrome, and they even had a microwave oven. Along the windows, there were tables with lots of plants in them which were all Aquamarine's. She showed me one baby tree that she'd found in a drainage ditch without any leaves and wrapped in an old plastic bag and so she'd dug it up and brought it home to nurse it back to health and then she was going to plant it near the railroad tracks once it got a little bit healthier.

We spent the rest of the evening sitting in the living room and talking. Jenny showed us some pictures on the computer of her working at a blacksmith's forge, which was really neat, and she showed us a twisted knife she'd made for practice. She said it wasn't very good at all and would probably serve better as a tent-peg than a knife, but she was still proud of it because it was the first thing she'd made all by herself.

Aquamarine looked at her Facebook, and Cedric had sent her a picture of him working on a house. He said a friend had taken it, and you could tell it was kind of candid; he was walking away from a big flat truck that was just out of focus, and had a stack of mill-wood on his shoulder.

I asked Aquamarine if she'd written him any letters, and she kinda turned her head away and Jenny leaned over and whispered that they talked on the telephone a couple of hours each week.

And then she had some pictures of her biology experiment, which just looked to me like a shelf of potted plants. But she said that her professor was getting really good data from them.

Aquamarine and Jenny had two different bedrooms and I thought that was kind of odd. She said that Jenny liked it that way, but it did feel kind of lonely sometimes. She'd put her bed up against the wall between the two bedrooms, and she said that helped.

She wanted to know if I ever felt lonely in my apartment, and I told her that I did sometimes but I had lots of birds outside that kept me company, and Angela and David were only a short flight away, plus Meghan came over or I went to her apartment.

My ears perked up as I heard a train, and I went to the window to watch it go by. Aquamarine said that the day after they'd moved in, someone had ignored the lights and gates and tried to get around the train and their car had been completely smashed by it, and the train had sat across the road for three hours until it could go again.

I could still see some ruts at the edge of the triangle-field, and she said that was where it had gotten pushed by the train. She said that the guy in it had survived but that the fire department had to cut the car apart to get him out of it.

She used her computer for a little bit, and I wrote in my journal until it was time for bed, and then the two of us snuggled up together.

July 12 [Farmer's Market]

July 12

It was nice to be able to snuggle a little bit in the morning, especially since we'd been up late last night. She'd set her alarm ten minutes later than usual, and turned it off and held her pocket telephone in her hand like she usually does in the morning so she'd be ready for the next time it sounded.

I claimed my spot on her breast and she used her other hand to pet my mane and scratch my ears and when her alarm went off a second time I poked her telephone with my nose and made it stop and she thought that was really funny and rewarded me with more ear-scratches.

We got up the third time it went off, and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. I still had some oatmeal left, so I made that for us, and she sat in the papasan to eat it so that she could watch the birds. I kind of wanted to sit on her lap, but I thought I might wind up with oatmeal in my mane by mistake, so I pushed my computer chair over next to her and sat on that.

When she was putting her clothes on I was going to give her back her other bra, but she said she really didn't want to carry it back to her apartment because people might get the wrong idea, so I should just keep it and next time she'd come over without one.

Once she'd gotten dressed, she helped me put on my flight gear, too, then we went back to her apartment.

When she'd gotten her ride to work, I called the airplane directors and told them I was going to go west, and the grumpy man said that I could but to keep my altitude below a thousand feet until I had crossed the 131 Highway. I said that I would, and I told him I could give him a weather report when I was out.

I waited until I was a little bit past Meijer to begin climbing. And I announced myself on the small airplane channel, too, like I was supposed to. Nobody objected and nobody insulted me, so I climbed up and kept going west.

Down below was a big pasture that looked like it had been recently mowed, and all the grass had been put into windrows. There was a green tractor pulling a big boxy trailer along the windrow and so I circled slowly around to see what it was going to do. Well, all the hay was disappearing inside it and then all of a sudden the tractor stopped and the back half of its trailer tipped up, then a big round bale of hay rolled out the back. The tractor moved forward, the trailer closed up, and then it went back on its way, picking up windrows.

I'd seen those haybales before but I'd never seen what made them.

I looked around to make sure that I remembered the field—most farmers would leave a row or two of crop for pegasuses after they'd harvested, and I hoped that humans did that too. There was still a lot of field for it to cover, but I could fly out this way tomorrow and maybe I'd get lucky.

I went all the way out to a little cluster of buildings around an intersection that had a blinking light. I could have gone a bit further to Glendale, but I still wanted to go shopping at the farmer's market today, and I was also a little bit worried about how it was starting to cloud up around me. It was the kind of weather that liked to make rain and thunderstorms.

So I made a big turn and headed back to Kalamazoo, starting a slow descent once I was over the fish-ponds. I checked my altimeter and I was under a thousand feet when I passed over Meijer, which was where I was supposed to be.

I made a last-minute decision to stop at Taco Bell for lunch, 'cause I didn't want to go to the farmer's market all hungry, or else I might buy a lot more food than I could eat.

It's tricky to land in parking lots because even though there are arrows that tell cars which way to go, they don't always obey them, and sometimes they cut across parking spaces and I don't think they're supposed to do that. I even saw one cross a grass island once, so they're not always safe from cars.

But cars aren't supposed to go on sidewalks, so I curved over the parking lot to avoid wires, and then landed on the sidewalk and went up to the door.

There were a bunch of people waiting in line and when I came in a couple of them looked at me and then tried to pretend not to look at me, even though they still were. I ignored them because I was looking at the menu and thinking what I wanted to eat.

The person who took my order (I think it was a girl but I wasn't completely sure) at least wasn't confused by my order, so I got a couple of bean burritos and also a small bowl of cheesy potatoes that turned out to have the same yellow cheese gravy that the nachos at the Tall Ships Festival had had. And it came with a strange little spoon with spikes to eat it with.

I didn't feel like carrying my meal home, so I went outside to the little round tables that no one was using and ate there. And I saw a couple of seagulls up on lightposts watching me, 'cause I bet they were hoping that they'd get a free meal.

Well, I didn't really like the potatoes all that much, so I pushed them across the table and one of the seagulls flew down and landed on the next table over and examined the food, then he hopped off the table and strutted around on the concrete. When he was sure I wasn't going to catch him, he flew up and snatched a potato cube out of the bowl and flew off with it.

That was enough of an invitation for the other seagulls, and all of them took turns darting down and snatching at my potatoes until there weren't any left.

I put the bowl with the wrappers in the bag and put that in the trash can and then took off and the dumb seagulls started to follow me, and they stayed behind me all the way home. When I landed on the balcony, they circled around and once I went inside, one of them also landed on the balcony and peeked in my apartment. I guess they thought maybe I'd give them some more food.

I really didn't have anything to give them, unless I wanted to offer a can of anchovies, so I ignored him and took off my flight gear: I needed a shower before I went to the market.

When I got back out, the seagull wasn't on my balcony any more, so I guess he'd finally figured out that he wasn't going to get any more food from me.

I went without my flight vest, and then I had to decide if I wanted to go without the camelback, too. I probably wouldn't need the water. But it did have pockets, and I'd need to take money so that I could buy things, and I'd have to put that somewhere.

So I filled it up, strapped on my saddlebags, and then stepped into my camelback and pulled its straps tight, took a sip of water to make sure it was working like it should, and then went out to go to the market.

It was a lot busier today. The little triangular lot where I'd landed before had some cars in it, so I made sure that none of them were trying to move before I touched down, and then I went to the pavilions where people had set up.

Just like I'd hoped, the people who were selling the food were the ones who made it, and they also had honey and bread and bars of soap and one woman was selling flowers, too.

Everybody was happy to talk to me about their produce and how they'd grown it and why it was better than what I could get anywhere else, and it was just like being in an Equestrian market. One of the women even had a picture at her booth of a watermelon she'd grown that was so big it won a prize, and the woman who sold the honey knew what kinds of flowers her bees were making honey out of—she said she had several fields of clover just for them.

By the time I got to the last stand, my saddlebags were jammed full of food and I had a bundle of daylilies tucked into a strap on my camelback. They smelled fresher and they were cheaper than the flowers I'd bought at Meijer.

I was really happy with the market. It had cost a little bit more than Meijers, but it was really convenient and the food smelled a little bit fresher, and it was really nice to talk to all the people. I'd promised them I'd be back next week, and I gave one woman my address because she said that she could sell me whole bales of hay for less than what it cost to get them on the computer.

When I was back at my apartment I put away all my new food, and I couldn't help but have a daylily before I put the rest of them in the sink—I hadn't thought to get a vase to keep them fresh in. The sink had two sides, so one of them could serve as a really big vase.

I sat on the papasan and spent the rest of the afternoon reading more Psalms. By dinnertime, I was pretty sure a storm was coming, and so were my bird-friends. A bunch of the little chirpy-birds flew in together and all ate quickly then flew off again, probably back to somewhere safe for them.

Plus it was gettting gusty outside.

So I looked on my computer and it was predicting evening thunderstorms, too.

This time at least I had enough warning to get ready. I called Mel and he said that he was looking at the weather, too, and he'd be around to pick me up in twenty minutes or so.

I got dressed and then had some fresh bread with blackberry jam and a couple of carrots and a beet (the lady at the farmer's market sold them with the leaves still on, 'cause she knew that the leaves tasted really good) and another daylily for dessert, and I was just finishing it up when I saw Mel pull up outside my apartment.

I went out the balcony and got in, and he started driving off to our favorite stormwatching spot.

There was a woman talking on the radio in his truck and right after I got in, I heard her say that the police were still investigating the shooting in Saint Joe, and I asked Mel what that was. He said that yesterday a man had somehow gotten a gun in the courthouse and killed a couple of people. He told me that the police were assuring people it wasn't a terrorist attack and they didn't think it was related to Dallas.

I didn't know what Dallas was and I was kind of afraid to ask. I thought I'd ask Miss Cherilyn later, if she didn't bring it up first. The way he said it, it sounded like it was recent.

Mel parked his truck and turned on his blinking lights and I got out and flew a little ways away so that we could test our radios, and then when we were both satisfied that they were working, I called the airplane directors and told them that I was about to go up stormwatching.

They gave me permission to fly, so I started circling up, using the thermals off the parking lots to help me, right until I was up at the base of the clouds, then I looked around to see what was coming.

There was a whole big line of thunderclouds stretched out in front of me, and they were moving pretty fast. I could see that down on the ground there wasn't much wind at all—the flag over the gas station was almost completely limp—and even where I was, there wasn't a whole lot, but I knew that was going to change real soon.

It took another quarter of an hour for the storm to reach me, and this time I was ready for it. I'd been flying lazy loops and when I felt the wind start to pick up I put my nose into it and got up some speed right as the storm front hit.

At first, it wasn't all that bad. There was some lightning and rain but it wasn't all that serious, and then it was like the clouds just exploded around me, and there was lightning everywhere and the rain was coming down like a waterfall.

I gave Mel a quick update when it died down a little, and then it got really intense again and I could tell that this cloud was intent on dumping out all of its water as fast as it could.

Luckily the intense part of it didn't last all that long, and then I could see the ground again (and I could see that I'd drifted about a kilometer with the storm).

I told Mel I was okay and flew back to my original position.

The thunderstorm lasted for about an hour, and clear skies trailed behind it. So I told him that there weren't any more storms coming, and I circled back down and I had a couple of big sparks off my tail when I landed—I should have kept my tail up 'cause it doesn't feel as sharp when it comes off my hooves.

He had the heater in the truck at its highest setting and three of the vents aimed at my seat, along with a towel for me, which was really nice. His window was open, 'cause it was actually pretty nice out, and I think he'd have been too hot if it had been rolled up.

When I'd gotten settled, he pointed to the rainbows the storm had left behind. They weren't as bright as the ones we had in Equestria, but they were a lot bigger. And when I squinted I thought I could see another one above it that the colors were backwards on and so I pointed it out to him and he said that it was a second rainbow and that they were kind of rare.

Once I'd relaxed a bit and gotten sort of dry, he drove me back home and on the way he said he'd been thinking of tornadoes and that there hadn't been any yet, but if there were did I think I was safe up in the air or not. I said that I'd flown around waterspouts before and as long as you didn't get too close to the funnel it was safe, and you had to be careful because sometimes they moved really quick.

So he said that there was always a chance that there would be tornadoes, although so far the weather hadn't been right for them, and he said that if he got a warning while I was up in the air he'd try to radio me, and if I didn't acknowledge him he'd start flashing the headlights on his truck. And he showed me how I could just click my transmit button, and we set up a signal like that in case I couldn't talk, or if it was so busy up in the sky that he didn't understand me when I did.

He also said that there were sirens on the ground that would go off if a tornado was near, and he said I'd know when I heard them because they were loud enough to wake the dead.

Mel let me out in front of my apartment, and I flew back up, scaring off some of the birds who had come back out now that the storm was over and I folded down the futon and stretched out on it to preen my wings, 'cause this time I wasn't going to go to sleep with un-preened wings. And when I had that done I had a little snack, and I thought about maybe looking at my Facebook or reading some more Psalms, but then I decided that I'd rather just go to sleep.

July 13 [Alligators]

July 13

It was a really nice morning, and I felt pretty good when I woke up. I was a little bit sore from the storm yesterday but not too much. And I felt a lot better having gone to bed properly preened, ‘cause my feathers hardly needed any straightening this morning.

Outside, the first of the early birds were at my bird feeder and there was also a fat squirrel on the balcony picking up what they’d dropped. I thought about joining them for some sunflower seeds but that would just scare them all off.

I decided that I wanted to fly southeast today, ‘cause I hadn’t done that yet. There wasn’t a good way to avoid the airport, so I’d have to make a jog. I probably could have gotten permission to fly over the airport, but I didn’t want to make trouble for the airplane directors.

I was getting pretty good at filling up my camelback and putting it on and it only took me a couple of minutes. I had some daylilies for a breakfast snack and also the last package of mapley oatmeal and then I called the airplane directors on the radio and told them where I was going.

Dori was directing airplanes, and she told me to keep low over the city, because they had some runway traffic and so I promised her that I would.

When I was over the city, I saw a big airplane passing overhead and I thought that must be the traffic that Dori was talking about. It was a brown airplane like I’d seen at the airport before. I’d learned that they carried packages, and then they put them in big brown delivery trucks, and that was how I’d gotten my alfalfa. It probably wasn’t important enough to fly on an airplane, though.

I went all the way out to the lake with the dam, which is called Morrow Lake, and then I turned southeast just like I had planned.

The land below me was a patchwork of fields and some woodlots. Some of them had square edges, which I guess means that somebody cut the trees down right to the edge of his property but his neighbor didn’t.

After I’d flown for a ways, I saw a little town ahead of me, and dropped down a little bit to give it a look. There wasn’t much to it; just a few streets, railroad tracks running diagonally through, and then more fields.

I angled a little bit more east, and flew on over more fields. There was a really odd narrow one between trees, and I also saw one that looked stripey—there must have been two different kinds of crops planted—and I went over a grass lot with lots of loopy dirt tracks in it.

There was a town up ahead a few miles away and I thought I might as well go there before turning around. So I crossed over a winding stream, and right as I got to the outskirts of town I saw a place that had stands like at the Tall Ships Festival and lots of little square pools, so I flew down to take a closer look.

I had to rub my eyes and circle around because it didn’t make sense the first time, but I wasn’t imagining things. The pools were full of alligators.

Well, I knew some ponies made pets out of pretty dumb things, but who would want alligators? I guess that I didn’t know much about them besides that they lived in swamps and floated around pretending to be logs and if you weren’t paying enough attention, they’d grab your legs and roll you under the water to drown you and then they’d eat you.

Well, I guess there was no figuring out what people did.

I made a big loop around the town, which was called Athens, and then started flying back towards Morrow Lake. I could see Battle Creek off the the distance to my right, too.

By the time I got near the lake, I was kinda tired. I think I'd gone further than I'd meant to, 'cause of the jog in my route. Still, it was good practice. If I was gonna fly over Lake Michigan, I had to be in shape!

I called Dori and told her I was about to turn, and they told me to begin a descent to a thousand feet or below, so I asked how soon I had to be low, and she said by the time I got to Sprinkle Road would be good.

I was hoping I could stretch my glide out further, but I guess not.

The railroad tracks were the easiest thing to follow, plus it was just a little bit shorter—the road curved around a bit—and so I checked my altitude when I crossed over Sprinkle Road, and I was at about a thousand two hundred and that probably wasn't too far off my assigned altitude, so instead of dropping down right away, I just made my glide a bit steeper and by the time I was over the railroad yard I was at nine hundred feet.

I followed the railroad all the way to the base of campus and then dropped down the rest of the way over my neighborhood.

I took off my flight gear and ate a couple of carrots then went right into the shower. I got in when it was still cold and I was hot enough that there was a little bit of steam coming up off my back.

I'd completely emptied my camelback on my flight, so I tilted my head back and drank some of the shower-water, but not too much at once 'cause it would give me cramps. It was hard to overdo it when it was coming out of the showerhead.

When I was done, I turned on my computer and found out that I could take the train to Lafayette, but I'd have to go to Chicago first. That was okay; I knew what the Chicago station was like and could find my way around it easily enough, and I might have a little bit of time to look around in Chicago, too.

So I bought my tickets and then I sent a computer letter to Aric telling him that I was going to come see his play and visit Lafayette.

I ate some more lunch, and then read through more of Psalms. There were so many of them! I stopped when I got to a hundred, and turned ahead to see how many more there were because I wanted to be done with them before I met with Liz tomorrow. I had fifty more, which I could read if I didn't go on a long flight.

I put away my Bible and sat on the papasan to watch the birds but it turned into a little nap, and when I woke up it was cloudy and raining just a little bit, so I got out my radio and called Mel to see if he was going to drive out and watch.

He said he was already out there and it didn't look like it was going to be much so he hadn't called me.

Well, I was a bit relieved by that but then I got to thinking that maybe he was wrong. The weather I'd observed hadn't always been what he'd seen.

I couldn't really skip out on my duty like that.

So I filled my camelback and put on my vest and radios and flew out and up and I could see distant lightning to the west, and I wondered if he saw it down on the ground, too.

It didn't feel like it was going to be much of a storm, but they'd caught me by surprise before.

I knew that I wouldn't make it out to our normal spotting place, especially if the weather got real bad, so instead I went along Main Street and when I was across the 131 Highway and could fly higher, I got permission from the airplane directions and got right up to the base of the clouds.

It had rained all the way out, a nice, gentle rain. Those were the kind that everypony liked, 'cause the crops got watered and the ponds got filled and nothing got damaged.

I called Mel and told him where I was and he told me to stay safe.

I kept my eye on one thundercloud, 'cause it was pretty active and I saw it from a long ways off. Most of its lightning stayed up and inside, but I saw a couple of bolts hit trees and towers off in the distance, and I kept a good watch after each one to make sure that it hadn't started a fire.

Once it was gone, things stayed calm for about an hour, and I just circled and observed. Then another bank of thunderclouds rolled through, and they had a little more rain in them than the first ones did. I saw a tree get hit about a mile from me, and about half of it fell over in a field. But it didn't catch fire, so it was okay. The farmer would be mad about having to move it, but that was all.

After that went by I could see it was clearing off to the west, so I told Mel I was flying back home and he said he was about to do the same except he was going to have to drive. And so I got to chase the thunderstorm into Kalamazoo and that was kind of neat because it picked up a little bit of intensity when it got over town, and I saw lightning hit the hotel and a couple of the tall towers that are further off to the east.

This time I was smarter and when I got close to my apartment, I brushed my forehooves against the metal top of a street light to get the charge back off me. I was still mad that I'd made a filly mistake and gotten zapped hard in my tail yesterday.

Well, I didn't think that I was all that tired but when I was done preening my head was nodding, and since I was already on the futon, it wasn't any real effort to let it nod just a little bit further. It was kinda unfair, since I'd had an afternoon nap, but I guess my body wanted a bit more rest.

July 14 [Bad Buffet]

July 14

I woke up suddenly, 'cause I was dreaming that alligators with wings were flying around and trying to eat me but I was a better flier than them, so I was getting away and then there was an alligator in an airplane and I couldn't outfly it.

I hate waking up from nightmares, but at least it was the morning and not the middle of the night.

I had a quick breakfast and then I put on my flight gear and flew to Meijer, so that I could get more oatmeal and waffle mix and eggs and anchovies. And when I was there I bought some cheese, too, because I thought maybe I could make scrambled eggs with cheese. They didn't look like they'd be too hard to cook. Meijer had cheese that was already shredded, which was very convenient.

Nobody followed me around or anything, and there was a really nice boy who was shopping with his mother who came up and petted my nose. When she saw she said she was sorry, but I didn't mind.

I was heading out when I thought I ought to get some beer, too, so I got a box of Oberon bottles and then I also saw some Landshark which I had liked, so I put that in the cart, too.

The man at the cash register wanted to see my identification, and he got really confused when he saw what it said my birthday was. So I had to explain that we counted our years differently than humans and he finally asked someone who was wearing a grey vest, even though I insisted that I bought beer all the time.

I finally was allowed to buy it, though, and they put the stuff in bags and put them back in my cart and it was only when I got outside and wanted to put things in my saddlebags that I realized I'd bought too much.

The box of Oberon and the carrier of Landshark wouldn't fit at all, and I finally had to take them out of their packages and stuff the bottles in individually and I wound up having to carry a couple in my camelback, too, which was a bit worrisome 'cause I couldn't close the zipper all the way, so I'd have to be really careful on my flight back home.

Meijer has wastebaskets on lightposts, which is nice of them, although they weren't made with a pony in mind. It was a bit of a trick to get my empty boxes in them.

It occurred to me that if I had one fewer beer, I could close the zipper on my camelback and not have to worry about accidentally dropping it, so I slid one of them back out, closed the zipper, and drank it, then I put the bottle in the wastebasket too.

That probably wasn't the best way to start my day. I felt a little bit fuzzy as I flew back over town, and then when I landed I had to pee and there was no way I was going to be able to use my toilet with saddlebags and a camelback full of beer.

Aric had said it was okay to use a tree, so instead of going up to my balcony, I landed in the backyard and used the tree there, then flew around to my apartment.

Once I'd gotten everything put away, I flew over to Aric's house to check on his birdfeeder. There was hardly anything left in it at all, so I used up the last of the old bag and then put some from the new bag in, too.

I went back to my apartment and started reading more Psalms. I had just started the 136th when my portable telephone rang, and when I answered it it was Mister Salvatore and he said that he and Miss Cherilyn were coming over if that was convenient because he wanted to talk about the incident with the airplane.

So I said that they were welcome to come over, and went back to reading Psalms.

I'd only made it a few more when I heard my doorbell and I thought it must be them, so I went downstairs and opened the door and it wasn't them; it was a woman in a brown UPS suit and she had two boxes for me. I took her little pen and wrote on her hand-computer, then she asked for my last name. Humans have first names and middle names and last names, and their last names are their family names, so I told her that mine was Silver, 'cause I figured that was what she was asking for.

And I guess it was, 'cause she pushed a couple of buttons on her hand computer and then the pasture grass was mine.

I took it upstairs and opened both of the boxes and then decided I'd have a little snack to celebrate and tried a mouthful of the timothy.

That turned into a couple of mouthfuls because it was so good. I wonder how they keep it so fresh? Maybe it had come on the airplane I saw yesterday.

I'd just put the boxes in the kitchen when my doorbell rang again and this time it was Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.

She sat on the futon, and there was enough room for both of them but he just stayed standing.

He started off by saying that we both were wrong to be jerks on the radio, and I knew that I was, but you can't take back something that you said. And then he said that technically the other pilot had not violated any rules, unless he'd gone below a thousand feet, and he asked me if he had. I said I didn't know for sure, but I knew he hadn't come all that close.

So he said that this ought to be a learning experience for everyone involved. He told me that the airplane directors in Kalamazoo had maybe been giving me a false sense of security, and normally in uncontrolled airspace, the rule was 'see and avoid.' He said that I couldn't lay claim to a section of the sky; calling on the radio just advised other airplanes that I was there, but it didn't give me free rein.

He told me he'd had a lot of long conversations with the FAA, and I got a little nervous because they'd been pretty hesitant to give me a license to fly at all and I was afraid that they had changed their mind.

I guess he could tell what I was thinking, 'cause he told me that they weren't going to take my license away. He promised me that they weren't going to do that, but he said from now on instead of telling people that I was an ornithopter, I was supposed to say that I was an Equestrian pegasus. And he reminded me again that even if I had asked for airspace, that didn't mean it was exclusively mine. He said that even when I was under a thousand feet, where airplanes weren't supposed to be, I should still pay attention.

I told him that I understood, and I said that I always kept looking and listening for airplanes.

Miss Cherilyn asked if I wanted to go out to lunch, and I said that I would, so we went down and got in Sienna and she asked how I felt about Chinese. I said that I was willing to try it, and I knew what it was because there had been a couple of Chinese food days at college.

While Mister Salvatore was driving I asked Miss Cherilyn about Dallas and I saw Mister Salvatore's hands tighten on the steering wheel.

She got out of her seat and came back to sit beside me and said that it was really complicated. Then she explained how the short version was that there had been a social movement called Black Lives Matter which peacefully protesting police officers who killed black people when they probably shouldn't have and one man had become so angry that they had decided to shoot police officers. She said that there had been a man in Dallas who had done that recently and she said it was important to know that his actions had not been part of the protest, which had been peaceful, and she said it was also important to know that the police officers had acted to protect the protestors.

So I asked her if she was saying that the Black Lives Matter people had been protesting the police, and she said that was true. And then I was curious about why the police would have protected them and she said it was because it was their job.

Miss Cherilyn told me that one of the problems with the news reporters was that most of them liked simple stories and the reality was a lot more complicated, so they ignored some of it. Which I guess made sense.

She said that it was very easy for them to say one thing was good and one thing was bad but in reality it wasn't that simple at all. And she said that the reality was that there were bad police officers who did bad things but there were also good police officers who did good things. And she said that there were bad people who deserved what they got and there were other people who didn't, and it wasn't as simple as being something which could be determined by seeing what color they were or what religion they had or where they had come from.

I would have liked to talk about that a little bit more, but we got to the restaurant and Mister Salvatore looked kind of grumpy and I thought maybe it was because I was asking the wrong things.

The restaurant was like the college cafeteria; they had lots of trays of food and you could choose what you liked. So I got some spring rolls and fried mushrooms and fried rice and a crab roll and they were all pretty tasty and when I had finished what was on my plate I was allowed to have a second so I got another crab roll and two more spring rolls, and when I'd eaten that I was completely full.

Mister Salvatore really liked General Tso's Chicken, 'cause he had two plates of it.

We got fortune cookies at the end and my fortune said that I was very lucky and I read it out loud and added 'in bed' at the end and Miss Cherilyn nearly choked on her drink.

As good as the Chinese food had tasted, it didn't make my tummy too happy, and Mister Salvatore had to roll the windows down on the way back. I told him that I was sorry, and Miss Cherilyn said that the important lesson for today was to not take ponies to Chinese restaurants.

I told her that Taco Bell made me fart, too, and he said he was going to put that in the file because it was useful information.

When they dropped me off at my apartment, Mister Salvatore reminded me to stay alert in the air and not be a jerk on the radio even if the other guy deserved it, and Miss Cherilyn hugged me and reminded me to call or send a computer letter if I needed anything and said that I had done the right thing to tell them about the man in the airplane.

Mister Salvatore said that they were still working on rules for pegasuses flying and that I was an important part of the process.

And I hugged him, too, before he left, 'cause he still looked grumpy and maybe a hug would cheer him up a little bit.

I spent too much of the afternoon in the bathroom and decided that I ought not eat at Chinese buffets ever again, just to be safe.

I also finished the rest of the Psalms.

I was feeling a little bit better by the time I went to meet with Liz. And we talked about the Psalms and how some of them were happy and some of them were sad and some of them were hopeful and she said that they were a good view into the humanity of the authors who had written them.

She also said that it was funny that I had my glaive again, and I told her that I was hoping that the fighters would be practicing again, although I hadn't thought to send a message to find out for sure.

She said that she didn't have anything else to do, and thought it might be fun to watch me, so we walked together down to the little park. I did some exercises with my glaive, and then Stellan arrived so I traded it for a padded weapon and we play-fought for a little bit and he thought he was getting pretty good at stopping my swooping attacks.

So I told him that I'd show him how they were supposed to be done but he'd have to be careful and only do what I told him to do, and he promised he would.

I went up and got a little bit of a cloud and I brought it back down and then I set it far enough above him that he couldn't get it and I told him not to touch it, and then I told him to get ready and face the cloud. So he did and I couldn't really make a proper attack because there was only the one little cloud, but I still managed to catch him unaware, by keeping the cloud between us and flying through it.

I pushed the cloud-piece over the creek before I broke it up, 'cause I didn't want to get the ground all muddy, and I told him that a proper pegasus ile came through the clouds like that.

We practiced until it was nearly dark, and I got to partner with a few different people. It was kind of awkward, 'cause most of them didn't like being aggressive and hitting me until I'd hit them a few times. I guess people didn't expect that ponies knew how to fight when we had to.

Liz watched the whole time and Karla asked her if she wanted to join, but she said that she didn't.

When we were done, they put their armor and weapons in their cars and drove off, and I went over to Meghan's apartment. I should have brought her bra with me, but I'd forgotten about it.

She said that she'd get it tomorrow when she came over after work.

So we snuggled up in bed together and before we went to sleep I asked her if she wanted to ride in a hot air balloon and she said that would be fun, so I told her that tomorrow during the day I’d buy tickets for us.

July 15 [Teapot Dome]

July 15

I woke up before Meghan's alarm, and the sad bird was calling outside again. I would have liked to go to the window to see if I could see it, but she had her arms wrapped around me and I didn't think I could get out without waking her up.

When her alarm finally went off, she shifted around and then let go of me and rolled over so that she could reach it, and once she had her portable telephone in her hand I put my head on her breast and she reached down and scratched my ears and said that she was glad it was Friday.

We got up after her alarm went off again, and when she got in the shower I went downstairs to put out breakfast and then went back upstairs to help her get ready.

If I knew more about clothes I could have set some out for her, too.

When she came out of the shower she sat on the bed and I brushed her hair, then she got up and found clothes for work. And once she'd gotten dressed we went downstairs and had cereal together. I asked her if she knew what kind of bird the sad bird was and she said that it was a Mourning Dove. She said that they were kind of ugly, and looked a lot like pigeons.

We stood out on the porch and enjoyed the morning sun until her friend arrived, and she pet me on the head before she left.

I hadn't brought my flight gear with me this time, 'cause that would have been a lot to carry to fighting practice, so I picked up my glaive and flew back home with just that. I stayed plenty low so that I wouldn't be in anybody's way.

I put my glaive away and filled up my camelback and put on my flight vest. I'd forgotten to ask Mister Salvatore to get another one for Aquamarine but I knew how to find Dick's, so I decided I'd get her one on the way back and then I could find a post office so that I could mail it to her.

I decided I'd kind of take a triangle route, and so I called the airplane directors and told them where I was going, and I got permission.

So I cut across Western Michigan's campus and then followed Stadium Drive southwest. It was all pretty familiar—I passed by the place where Mel and I did our stormwatching, then I kept going until I came to a town called Paw Paw.

The 94 highway was pretty close and I could have turned around there and followed it back, but I thought I might as well get a little bit more flying in, so I kept on going, until I finally got to a place called Teapot Dome.

A lot of the fields around here had bushes of some sort—I didn't recognize them from the air—and what looked like grapes on trellises.

I made a big circle and looked around for airplanes and then called the airplane directors and told them that I was going to follow the 94 Highway back to Kalamazoo then land at Dick's. So they told me that would be okay, and so I straightened out my circle and flew back towards the 94 Highway.

Some of the signs along the side of the highway said how far away exits were, and so I figured out pretty quickly that I had to fly about twenty miles to get to Dick's.

I would also go right by Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn's office, so I thought maybe I'd go down a little bit lower when I got close and wave to them.

It was kind of fun to see the cars on one side coming towards me and on the other side appearing in front of me, almost like magic. I tried to imagine all the places that those people were going.

I could have taken a shortcut—the 94 Highway turned a couple of times and I could have cut across the inside of the turns—but that wasn't as much fun as flying along and pretending that the highway extended all the way up into the air.

When I'd passed our stormwatching spot and got to the railroad tracks, I looked both ways but didn't see any trains.

Once I'd gotten nearly to Kalamazoo, I found a strange curved road that went off into the woods from a building, and it had one big loop and one little loop and I couldn't make any sense of it. And a little further up on the same side of the highway, there was a long narrow parking lot and I didn't know what that was, either. There weren't any cars parked there, and it didn't look as big or nice as the rest areas I'd seen.

Once I crossed over Oakland Avenue, I started gliding down. I could see the Westnedge exit ahead, and the office building where Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn worked, so I waved as I went by, then I angled off to the south. I could see the big building where Dick's was, and so there wasn't any sense in following the road anymore.

I landed on a big curvy island, and then went inside the store. I knew right what I was looking for, so I went over to their camelbacks and picked out one that was just like the one I had and then took it up to the counter.

The man who was there remembered me from last time and he asked if something had gone wrong with mine because there was a warranty, and I told him that it worked fine and was under my vest right now, but one of my friends had seen it and had wanted one, too. And he asked if my friend was another pegasus like me and I told him that she was an earth pony.

He put it in a bag for me and I was about to tell him that I didn't need it when I thought about how useful it would be. The loops on the end were nearly big enough for a forehoof to fit through, and so I used my teeth to pull it on and then it was nice and secure. It would make landing a bit tricky, but as long as I kept my leg up (and it would be hard to forget) it would work.

So once I was back outside I told the airplane directors I was going back home and I was going to stay under a thousand feet and after they gave me permission, I took off from the parking lot.

The bag wasn't too heavy but it was really awkward and I think I should have found a different way to carry Aquamarine's camelback. I probably looked really silly flying it over Kalamazoo.

When I got back to my apartment, I had to pry the plastic bag off my hoof. And then it felt really weird to not have any weight hanging off my hoof.

I ate lunch, and took a shower, then I called a place which had hot air balloon trips. The man who answered said that they had an opening for tomorrow, because someone had canceled. He said that the forecast wasn't great, and there would probably be clouds but he wasn't expecting for there to be any rain and I could take that if I wanted, otherwise he didn't have anything for a couple of weeks.

Well, I thought that I'd take a chance, so I said that I would like two tickets for the balloon. And he told me where we would meet, and said that we would ride out in a van to our launching site, which they would determine depending on how the winds looked.

Then I checked my mail but I didn't have anything interesting. I'd gotten a couple of letters offering me a different money-card, but there was nothing wrong with the one I had so I wrote back that I wasn't interested, and put those in the mailbox to be sent out.

I wish I could have done that with the camelback for Aquamarine, too, 'cause that would have been really convenient. But Meghan and I could go to a post office tomorrow and mail it from there.

I was going to read some poetry and I'd even got out a Walt Whitman book and carried it over to the papasan when I looked outside and saw Caleb and Lindy and Trinity all looking at their portable telephones so I went out to the balcony and asked them if they were looking for Pokemons again and Trinity said that they were. So I flew down and asked if I could walk with them and they said that would be nice.

Caleb had figured out that each of them could try and catch the same Pokemon and that they didn't have to take turns trying to catch it, and Lindy said he felt really dumb for that. He told her that he'd thought it was only logical that each Pokemon could only be caught once, 'cause that was how it worked with real animals.

So we walked around the neighborhood for a couple of hours and even went all the way down to Stadium Drive and in the creek there they found a Magikarp and all three of them caught it, then we went back up along the back side of Western Michigan University, and near the campus police station they found a Jigglypuff, which Lindy didn't get, but both Caleb and Trinity did.

They also found another Pidgey in the park that hadn't been there when we went by the first time and Trinity said that I could try and catch it if I wanted to. Well, I didn't think I would be very good at using their portable telephones; it looked kinda complicated when they tried to catch one. But I said that we could catch it together if she wanted to get on my back.

So she did and she told me where to go to get close to the Pokemon and even held her portable telephone in front of me so that I could see it, and then when we were in the right spot she caught it and said that we'd done it.

I let her keep riding on my back, 'cause it felt kind of natural and she wasn't squeezing too hard. Lindy had taken a picture with her telephone and showed it to us and said she was going to tweet it, whatever that was.

Caleb said it was close to dinner time for them, so we went back to their house, me with Trinity on my back, and I could smell that Jeff was cooking things in the backyard. He was having a barbeque again and he said that I was welcome to join them.

I knew that Meghan would be coming over soon, so I said that I needed to meet her and that if she wanted to we'd come back, but she might have had plans for dinner already. So he said that he hoped we would but he'd understand if we didn't.

It was about a third of an hour and I heard her let herself in downstairs.

We hugged when she got upstairs and she set her bag down and then saw that her bra was hanging over the back of my computer chair (I'd thought if I put it there I wouldn't forget it).

I told her that we could have food with Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity and some of the neighbors if we wanted to, and I told her that I had gotten tickets tomorrow night for a balloon ride. She said that she'd brought some food for dinner 'cause she'd thought it would be fun to cook together but she could put it in the electric icebox and we could have it for lunch tomorrow instead. And then she said she had to put on a bra before she went over to the neighbors and I didn't see why if she'd walked over here without it.

Once she was ready, we took a bunch of the beers with us to share, and added them to the icebox that Jeff had, and stayed over next door until it was almost dark, talking and drinking and playing with the kids some.

Meghan was a little bit giggly from the beer and I'd had one more than I should have, too.

We thanked Jeff for inviting us and he thanked us for bringing beer and also thanked me for walking with his kids while they played their game. Then I flew up to the balcony while Meghan went around, and I'd already folded down the futon by the time she got out of the bathroom.

Just when I'd gotten comfortable she remembered that if she didn't want a hangover she ought to drink some more water, so she got up and got a glass of water and by the time she got back into bed I was half-asleep so I just snuggled against her side and when she saw that I wasn't trying to sleep on her, she rolled on her side and started scratching my back until I fell asleep.

July 16 [Hot Air Balloon Ride]

July 16

When I woke up, Meghan was still on her side with her arm over my back, so I leaned over and gave her a gentle nudge with my head to see if she would roll over and she did. So I put my head on her breast and stretched my wing out over her stomach.

She was kinda awake, and after a couple of minutes she reached up and scratched behind my ear. I started rubbing her belly with my wing and that made her giggle.

Then she reached under me and started to tickle my belly and I flicked my tail at her but she didn't stop, so I started to tickle her with my wing and that turned into a close-range pillow fight.

Pretty soon both of us had staked out one end of the futon and she had taken the blankets to make a little fort for herself while I had a pillow in my mouth in case she got too close but I lost the fight 'cause she could reach farther than I could.

I jumped anyway and I got her once then she dropped her pillow and trapped me in the blankets and tickled my belly and there wasn't anything I could do. She asked if I surrendered and I said that I did, so she let me out.

Since I had fresh waffle-mix, Meghan made waffles and I made scrambled eggs (she mixed them up in the bowl for me, 'cause it's really hard to crack the shells and not get them in the bowl). She said that we ought to have a cooking show together.

I asked her if she knew how to put videos on YouTube, 'cause maybe I could get a camera like the one that Gates had loaned me before and then we could.

Meghan said she wasn't being serious, but I thought it might be a nice idea. Other ponies who didn't know how to cook could watch it, maybe.

When we were done eating, we washed the dishes and put them to dry, then Meghan asked what I wanted to do for the morning.

Well, I really didn't have any good ideas. It was kind of an overcast day, but it would still be nice to walk around, and she said that we could go on the river trail again if we wanted to. Or we could go downtown and do some shopping, or we could get an Uber-car and go to a mall.

I thought going to the mall would be fun, but maybe not today. The river trail sounded nice, even though we'd been there before. So Meghan said that there was another trail near her uncle's house which ran along Portage Creek, and we could go there instead. She said it was really nice, but it was a ways away.

Since it was in the daytime, she said that there was a bus that went close, and we could take that if we wanted. So she got dressed and I filled up my camelback and she put some snacks in its pockets, and we walked to the bus stop.

This bus wasn't as nice as the other one I'd ridden. It was lower, and the aisle was wider, but the seats weren't as comfy and it was a little smellier. But that was okay; we wouldn't be on it for all that long.

We got off at Meijer, and we had to walk back north to Kilgore Road to get to the park. Meghan said that there was a bus, but she didn't think it ran on the weekends.

We crossed over a set of railroad tracks and then when we got to the parking lot, we turned onto the trail. A lot of people must have been enjoying it, 'cause the parking lot was full of cars.

The trail went through the woods, and it was pretty nice. There was wide pavement to walk on and it had marks on it like on a real road so that the bicycles would know where to go. Meghan told me to be alert for them and not step in front of them, 'cause the bikes sort of had the right of way. Then she said she wasn't sure if that was totally true, but they acted like they did.

The creek was between us and the tracks when we started and the trail followed the river but the tracks didn't—they went in a straight line and crossed over it on little bridges whenever the river bent, so for a while it was on the other side of the tracks from us.

The trail crossed over a bridge and then went under a bridge for the 94 Highway, and then we went away from the railroad so that we could follow the river. There was a big field off to our right that Meghan said used to grow celery, and she said that the whole area used to be known for its celery and Kalamazoo used to be nicknamed Celery City.

She said that Kalamazoo was kind of strange because some cities had lots of suburbs around them but in Kalamazoo a lot of places you'd just cross a road and then be in farmland. I'd noticed that, too, but I thought that was normal. What I'd seen of Lansing was kind of like that as well. Michigan State just ended in fields and pastures, mostly.

The trail kept zig-zagging to stay on firm ground—a lot of the lowlands by the creek were pretty swampy. Then we came out of the trees and there was a people-bridge over the road.

We went through a parking lot and Meghan pointed to the buildings that were to the west of us—she said that they were historical, and one of them was a grain elevator and another one was an old school. She said that you could rent them and one of her cousins had been married there.

The trail went back along the tracks again (I guess people like building trails next to railroad tracks). We had to get out of the way of people on bikes a couple of times. Meghan said that there were two different kinds of bikers, the ones who were really serious about it and the ones who were just having fun, and she said that they were easy to tell apart. She said that the serious ones had lightweight bikes and would be wearing skintight clothes, and the people who were having fun had heavier bikes and wore normal clothes.

We also stopped to make friends with a big shaggy dog and the humans who were leading him along. He gave me a big friendly lick on the nose and I nuzzled his head and Meghan thought that was hilarious.

There wasn't a people-bridge to cross Romence Road, so we had to wait for traffic to go by before we could cross. I could see a big building to the west of us through the trees, and Meghan said that was called Sam's Club and it sold lots of things cheaply but you had to have a membership to shop there. Then she laughed and said that you could go in and buy alcohol without a membership, because that was state law.

When we got a little bit further she pointed off to the east and said that's where her uncle's house was and so I flew up and I could see the hot tub behind it and I said since we were here why not use it?

She got a sort of funny look on her face and then got out her portable telephone and made a call and when she hung up she said that they weren't home so why not?

We had to go a bit more down the trail until it crossed over the river, and then we went off the trail and through the woods and we finally got to the backyard. She rinsed my legs off with a hose, 'cause I'd picked up a bunch of mud, and then I got in the tub while she got mostly undressed and then she joined me.

She didn't take her panties off until she was in the water, even though she usually took them off before. Then she set them on the edge of the hot tub.

Meghan was kind of tense at first, but after a little while she relaxed and said that she hoped nobody else was going to come wandering out of the woods like we had.

We spent about an hour in the tub, and then she said that we probably ought to start heading back so that we had time to eat before we went on the balloon ride, and before her uncle and aunt got home. So she got out and hid up against the fence until she was dressed again, and then we went back through the woods and followed the edge of the stream until we found the trail again, and then we sat beside the trail and had a little snack before we went back.

Once we got to Meijer, we had to wait for the bus to come, and then we rode it all the way back to the train station.

Instead of going back to my apartment, we went to hers since it was closer, and she made sandwiches for our late lunch. She had lots of good vegetables, too, but there were some I wasn't allowed to eat 'cause she said she was saving them for a stir-fry. That was too bad, 'cause she had lots of different colors of pepper.

I told her that she ought to try a sandwich with timothy on it, or maybe daisies, and she said she wasn't sure about the timothy but she was willing to try daisies if I made them. Then she told me that when I bought flowers I had to be careful to find out if they'd done anything to them to preserve them or make their color better, because humans didn't eat flowers so a lot of times flowers had stuff on them that wasn't healthy.

She said that the ones at the farmer's market were probably okay, though.

Then I remembered that she'd brought food to my apartment that we were supposed to have had for dinner last night and then lunch today and I reminded her and she said that we'd have it for lunch tomorrow, so we'd ought to plan on that when we came up with our plans for the day. So I said that I would remember.

When we were done eating, we cleaned up and she decided that she'd get her digital camera and take that with her for our balloon ride, and then we walked back to my apartment. One of the ways we could go took us right along the wall beside the cemetery, and I mentioned how I'd gotten chased by a car there once, and she thought that was pretty funny. Then she told me how some people are jerks and do bad things to grave markers like knock them over or paint things on them, and that was why there was a car that went around.

I thought that was pretty disrespectful and she agreed that it was, but said that some people were like that.

We had some time before we had to leave to get our balloon ride, so we sat in the papasan and watched the birds, then Meghan said that she was kind of nervous because she's never been in a balloon before, and I told her that I hadn't either but I'd seen them flying around and they looked nice and big and stable.

Then she said that she was kind of afraid of heights, too, which turned out to be mostly afraid of falling. Well, I knew about that—Gusty had been afraid when she was in tall buildings, too—and so I promised her that no matter what, I promised that I could keep her from falling.

She said that was nice of me to say, but what could I do? And I told her that if she fell, I'd catch her and glide her down to the ground. Well, she didn't seem convinced, so I said that we ought to go out to the balcony, and I'd hold on to her and she could jump off and I'd show her.

Meghan looked me right in the eye and asked if I was sure, and I was . . . mostly. I'd never tried carrying anything as heavy as she was, but I was fairly sure I could. I wouldn't be doing any flying, but I could glide down gently.

I said if I didn't think I could, I wouldn't have suggested jumping off the balcony, and she said that was good enough for her and we didn't have to try it.

Then I talked about how things looked from the sky, and how different it was to see it from up above instead of down below, and how you could see stuff in lakes and rivers that you'd never see from the ground. It was kind of weird for me to talk about, though, 'cause I wasn't used to thinking from such a limited, ground-bound perspective. Although I'd started to see some stuff that way since coming to Earth, since I didn't get to fly as much as I was used to.

So she was actually pretty excited when the Uber-car arrived to take us to the hot air balloon.

When we got there, we checked in and I gave him my plastic-money to pay for the trip, and he went over some rules. He said he was Captain Green and he said that we had to listen to him and do what he told us when we were flying. And I asked if I could fly out of the balloon and he said that he'd make his final decision when we were at the balloon and he could get a better judge of things. He said that flying out of the balloon wasn't a problem; he'd taken skydivers up before, but he was less sure about getting back in the balloon without damaging anything, including myself.

We also had to sign a paper saying that we knew that ballooning could be dangerous, and that we accepted the risks, and Meghan got a little nervous and he said that he wouldn't be flying it if he wasn't confident, and I reminded her that I could catch her, so then she signed the paper.

Then he told us that we had to drive out to the launch field: since the balloon got blown along by the wind, he couldn't take off from the same place every time. And he said that we'd probably go over the north side of Kalamazoo, but he couldn't guarantee it because of the winds, and he wanted to stay out of the airport's control zone because they got mad when balloons came through.

I told him that if he brought an extra rope, I could probably tow the balloon along.

He said that he hoped it wouldn't come to that.

So we got into an old van called Voyager, and took it out to the launch field which was northwest of town 'cause of the wind direction. When we got there, there were a couple more people who had come in another van and they had already gotten out the balloon and set it out and were filling it with hot air. It was mostly stretched out on the ground still, and when Meghan saw it she reached out and squeezed my foreleg and told me it looked really insubstantial.

We stayed in Voyager until it was mostly full and the envelope was off the ground, and then he brought us over and explained the things which we needed to know, which was mostly follow his instructions and don't touch anything.

When the basket started to want to lift, he had us get into it and then he took over the burners. He liked short bursts of flame, which he said gave him more control.

I tested out the space between the ropes that held the basket, and said that I could get in and out of them without breaking anything, and said I could demonstrate, so he paused on the burners long enough for me to try. With it on the ground, it was actually harder for me to take off, 'cause I couldn't jump and pick up airspeed that way, and the basket wasn't big enough for a good stationary liftoff.

Landing was pretty easy, though. I just had to come in slow and be careful of the ropes. The space was bigger than Aric's bedroom window, though.

So he said that I could fly if I wanted to but that he'd still rather have me stay in the basket.

I thought that Meghan would probably want the support, so I decided I'd stay inside.

We gained altitude pretty quickly at first, which he said was important to make sure that we got above trees and power lines. Then the wind started to grab us and we began moving towards Kalamazoo as we climbed.

Meghan kept to the front of the basket at first, watching what was in front of us and I think she was kind of in his way, so I told her that she could see from all around and besides we were already too high to run into anything.

That wasn't true; I'd seen antennas that were a lot taller but we weren't near any of them.

So she came over to the side and I started pointing out stuff I'd seen from the air. We were a little bit northwest of where I'd flown, but I could see some things off in the distance that I knew, and as we got closer and closer to Kalamazoo, there was a lot more that looked familiar.

We did pass north of town, but it was close enough that she could see the Stetson bell tower rising up above the trees and how it was a good landmark, and I also pointed to the dirt mines, which were pretty visible, and then we decided that the lake with an island that we saw near the Kalamazoo River was the park we'd been to when we were on the river trail. And I showed her where the nature center was, too, and she thought it was pretty amazing to see Kalamazoo like I did whenever I flew.

Well, by then she was pretty comfortable in the balloon, and Captain Green had been curious about seeing me fly, so we all decided that I'd fly the last little bit on my own. He pointed to a field just past Morrow Lake where he intended to land, and then admitted it wasn't his favorite landing spot 'cause there were power lines right next to the lake, but he'd done this a bunch of times and he wasn't too worried. And then he pointed to a coil of rope right by his feet and said that he'd call me if he needed a tow.

So I put my hooves up on the edge of the basket and then boosted myself off, and I heard him dumping a little bit of air to make up for losing my weight, and once I got air under my wings I circled the balloon and then came back up and flew alongside and Meghan took a picture of me, and I flew next to the balloon until it landed in an open pasture safe and sound, just like he'd promised.

And then while his crew was helping to put away the balloon, Meghan said how much fun the flight had been and I thanked him for being such a good pilot and he said how neat it had been to see me fly, and we talked for a little bit about flying and feeling the air and knowing what it was going to do.

Once his crew had started packing the balloon away, we got back in Voyager, and he said that since he was taking us back through town he might as well drop us off at my apartment and save on taxi fare, which was really nice of him. And he also said that if we wanted to go flying with him again he'd give us ten percent off.

When we were back in my apartment, Meghan admitted that the flight had been kind of stressful but she was glad that I'd been there with her for most of it, and she got a beer and sat in the papasan and so I got one too and sat on her lap.

We watched the last of the late birds get their food and she said it was weird how different it looked from the air, and that the city looked a little bit smaller when you were looking at it from above. When we'd driven the Go-Karts, it had felt like it was a really long ways out to the airport, and yet even though we'd been north of town, she'd been able to see the airport off in the distance and it didn't look too far.

And she said it was also strange to see how many trees there were, even in places that she thought were pretty urban.

Plus, she'd seen for herself how water towers stuck up over everything else and were a really easy way to navigate from one spot to another.

When her first beer was empty I went to the electric icebox and got us two more and when I came back I saw that she'd taken off her shirt and bra 'cause she said it was kind of hot with me sitting on her lap.

It was dark out by the time we'd finished those beers and we moved to the futon and she turned on the kitchen light so we'd be able to see each other. And I sat down next to her and then after one more beer I was stretched out on my belly and she was preening my wing for me.

When she finished with that wing, I got up and got us a couple more beers to end the night (any more than that and I thought that both of us wouldn't want to get up in the morning) and she did my other wing, and I was feeling super-relaxed.

She had to get up to use the bathroom and when she came back she'd taken off the rest of her clothes, which meant she was probably ready for bed, so I folded down the futon and she helped to make it and then she went and had a glass of water and laid down in bed.

I thanked her for preening my wings and asked if there was anything I could do for her. She said not unless I knew how to give a back massage.

Well, I'd never done that before but that was no reason not to try. I'd gotten a couple when my back was really sore from flights, so I knew what it ought to feel like. So I had her lie down on her stomach and began to gently knead her back with my hooves and at first she kind of tensed up but then it started working and she started to relax.

She had a lot of tenseness in her shoulders, and then when I got down her back I figured from all the walking we'd done today her rump was probably a little bit sore, too, and she twitched a little bit when I first put my hooves on it but then she let me work the tension out.

When I was done she rolled over and said that she'd never expected that hooves on flesh could feel so good, so I was pretty proud of myself. And then I turned around and went all the way to the foot of the futon to get the covers, 'cause she'd kicked them down so that I could massage her and she said that she liked looking at my butt.

I told her she was being silly, and tugged the covers up and then curled up on her chest and she put her arms around me and said that wasn't silly at all, I had a nice butt.

I hit her with my tail, but I was really kind of flattered that she'd said so. And I thought about turning back around so she could look at it some more, but I'd just gotten comfortable and that seemed like it too much effort.

July 17 [New Explorations]

July 17

Meghan woke me up when she got up to pee, and she went to the kitchen and got another glass of water, too.

It was a little early, and I guess she didn't want to get up for the day, 'cause she got back in bed and put her head back down on the pillow and I asked if she felt okay. She said she had a little bit of a headache but it wasn't much.

I told her I still had some more aspirins, and she said she'd be fine with a little bit more sleep and maybe a shower right after she woke up.

I nuzzled her cheek and she turned her head so I could kiss her, then she rolled away from me to get the light out of her eyes, and I tried to reach my hooves around her so that I could snuggle up to her back but that didn't work all that well.

So I put my hooves on her side and pulled myself over, which ended in my falling face-first into the futon and she snickered at me, so I hit her with my tail and then burrowed my way between her arms until my head was just under her chin.

Meghan started petting my belly and my flank until she fell asleep again, and then I kinda drifted back off to sleep, too.

When I woke back up, I heard a couple of birds arguing at the feeder, and I stuck my head up as far as I could to see who it was. It sounded like a couple of cardinals, but I couldn't see them, and I didn't really feel like getting up to help them deal with their territorial issues.

Me moving around had woken Meghan back up again, and she wiped a bit of drool off my mane and then kissed my ear, and I asked her if she felt better now.

She said she did but she still didn't want to get out of bed because she'd rather snuggle with me. So I kissed her and she put her head on my shoulder and started tracing my cutie mark with her finger and said it was weird that it didn't feel any different than any other part of my coat.

I told her that after I'd gotten it, for a few months it kept surprising me when I looked back and it was there—that every time I'd preened my wings, it had been strange to see—but after a while I'd gotten used to it and now it was hard to imagine what it had been like when my flank was blank.

She said that she thought that cutie marks were an erogenous zone, and I asked her why she thought that. I'd never heard of it. And she told me that some of the early things that people had learned about ponies wasn't true at all, because they'd also thought that cutie marks were brands.

I told her that we'd first learned that humans were related to minotaurs and it was only later on that we learned that they were actually related to monkeys. And the first ponies had thought that humans were practically deaf with their fixed ears.

That was something that when I thought back on it was a really dumb thing to have believed. Owls have fixed ears, too, and they've got better hearing than ponies do.

She said that it must feel weird to have a tail, too. I guess it wasn't something that I really thought about all that much, 'cause I'd always had one and I said that I thought fingers were kind of odd, too. They looked so small and fragile, and it was hard to imagine how they could do all the things that they did.

She ran her finger along the crest of my rump and my dock, and I swished my tail just a bit, brushing it against her leg, and she put her hand around my dock and then ran it down the length of my tail, and I let her play with it until she decided to let it go. Then she rolled off me and slid over a little bit until she could take one of my hooves in her hand, and she felt around the bottom of my hoof, touching me lightly on the frog.

Meghan seemed a little disappointed when I told her that my frogs weren't ticklish, 'cause the bottoms of human feet were. I told her I thought that was because humans wore shoes all the time and if they always went around barefooted the bottoms of their feet wouldn't be so sensitive. Then I told her that my frogs had been a little bit less calloused before I got to Earth, 'cause I didn't spend as much time on the ground back in Equestria.

Then she traced up my leg to my belly and ran her finger along my ruff, down to my belly button and back up again, kinda going against the grain of my coat, so I reached out with my wing and brushed it down the center of her belly.

She reached over and pulled me against her and kissed me and then I felt her tongue pushing at my lips and things kind of progressed from there.

I'd never had sex with another mare but I knew what made me feel good, and I figured it would make her feel good, too.

We snuggled up in bed for a while afterwards even though I felt like I was ready to fly around the world, and then we decided that we'd ought to take a shower to get cleaned up. And I took advantage of my height in the shower, and it was a good thing that I had the mat down, otherwise Meghan probably would have fallen down.

When we were drying off she told me that I had the most amazing tongue and I said that I thought she really liked my butt. She said that she could like two things, so I wiggled my butt at her then stuck out my tongue.

Breakfast was just leftover waffles from yesterday which got warmed up in the oven. And I had some daylilies and Meghan had one too and said that it was kind of perfumy, and she only ate a little bit of the stem 'cause she said that was pretty bitter.

We ate the waffles on the papasan and when I dribbled a bit of syrup on her leg I just licked it off, and when we were done instead of taking the plate back to the kitchen, she set it on the floor next to the chair and petted me for a little bit, while we decided what we wanted to do for the afternoon.

She said that she really didn't want to get dressed at all, but that meant we'd have to stay in my apartment, and I kinda wanted to go out and get some exercise, ‘cause it was a really nice day. So we decided to walk around the neighborhood and I told her that maybe we'd run into Caleb and Lindy and Trinity while we were out, if they were hunting Pokemons again.

So she got dressed and we walked around for a couple of hours. We stopped by Aric's house so that I could make sure his birdfeeder was full, and then we went back to Kalamazoo College and she said it was odd to see it with no one there, and I thought so, too. I wonder if the dorms felt lonely and purposeless with nobody in them?

Meghan's portable telephone didn't show her where the Pokemons were—she said it was an app that you had to download and she wasn't too interested in it. And we didn't see my neighbors, either. There were a few other people who were out and about, though: an older woman who was walking her dog, and there was one man who was jogging that I'd seen before but I didn't know his name. When he went by, I asked Meghan if he was a serious jogger, 'cause he had on tight pants and no shirt and she said that he was.

Meghan decided that we'd go over to Tiffany's before we went to the apartment and she said that we ought to buy wine instead of beer, 'cause that would go better with our dinner. There were just as many wine choices as there were beer choices, and Meghan had to use her portable telephone to help her pick, but she finally decided on two bottles from St. Julien's winery—one of them was cherry, and the other one was called Founder's Red.

She said that the winery wasn't that far away and maybe one weekend we could go there and drink wine. Apparently human winemakers also let you sample their wine so you can decide what you like the best.

She told me that they grew a lot of grapes near Kalamazoo, and I said I'd seen fields of grapevines near Paw Paw, plus some bushes that were maybe blueberry bushes (I wouldn't have thought of that but they also had a blueberry wine).

Then we went to the kitchen and Meghan started getting out the things for dinner. She'd brought some of her own dishes, since I didn't have too many, and then she put a saucepan on the stove and measured out milk and water in it, and I just stayed back and out of her way.

Pretty soon she had a couple of pans on the stove and the oven heating up and I'd had to retreat to the corner of the counter to give her room to work. I got to help chopping up the chard, but I wasn't too good at it.

She kept going back and forth between the pans, adding polenta to one of them and mushrooms to the other and I don't know how she kept track of all of it. She had to keep looking at her portable telephone, too, 'cause that's where the instructions were.

It all smelled really good, and by the time she'd finally put all the ingredients into a baking dish, I was getting pretty hungry.

Meghan told me that while we waited for it to cook, we could have a little bit of wine and relax. And she said that once it was cooked it had to cool before we could eat it, and she was going to make a cake while we waited.

So she opened the red wine and we sat on the papasan and sipped it out of the bottle until her telephone beeped, and she went back in the kitchen and got out the casserole and set it the counter to cool, and then she got out a plastic tub that had cake powder in it. She told me she'd mixed it all up before and made her own cake mix which was going to be lots better than what came in boxes at the store.

Once she'd stirred it up a little bit, she let me finish mixing it while she checked on the casserole, and then she sprayed butter on the cake pan and put it in the oven. She said that it would probably be done by the time we'd finished dinner, and then we'd have to wait for it to cool before we could put frosting on it.

Well, my tummy was pretty growly from smelling all the food for so long and I was ready to dive into my plate as soon as she put a big slice of casserole on it.

She pushed my computer screen out of the way so that we could sit at my desk and eat, even though it wasn't really the best place for it. I said that maybe I could get a table and a couple of chairs and put them in the room that I wasn't using, and she thought that was a good idea. She said that I might as well get something cheap, 'cause I wouldn’t be needing it once I went back to the dorms.

Her casserole was really good and there was some left over for meals later. She told me that I could keep her casserole pan until it was empty, and reminded me that I needed to keep it in the electric icebox so that it wouldn't go bad.

When we got the cake out of the oven, she put the lid on the casserole pan and put it away for me. Then she set out the cake on a little cooling rack and I wanted to put the frosting on right away but she said it had to cool down first or else the frosting would melt, and besides it was important to let our dinner settle a little bit before we ate cake.

That had never been a problem at the dining hall.

She said that we might as well wash the dishes while we were waiting for the cake, so we went back to the kitchen and got everything cleaned up, and when we were done she felt the cake and decided that it was cool enough to put the frosting on.

The frosting was in a little jar and she said that she'd bought it because she hadn't felt like making her own. And she let me spread it on the cake and when I was done I got to lick the knife and then she said that she got to lick the extra frosting off my muzzle, which I thought was fair.

She opened up the other bottle of wine so that we could have it with dessert, and then she cut the cake into eighths and rather than take it out of the kitchen, we ate it right there with me sitting on the counter and her standing next to it.

When we were done eating, she washed the dessert dishes and took the bottle of dessert wine to the futon and then turned my computer screen so we could both see it and we started to watch a movie called Kung Fu Panda. We hadn't gotten very far into the movie or the wine bottle before we started kissing, and then after that we stopped paying any attention to the movie at all.

July 18 [Mid-night Storm]

July 18

I got woken up in the middle of the night by the crash of thunder and I jerked up on the futon just in time to see the whole inside of the apartment light up with a big lightning flash and I jumped out of bed and went to grab my vest.

I had it on and was strapping on my radios and wishing that I was smart enough to keep my camelback filled in case this exact thing happened when Meghan got up and went to the window and told me it was looking pretty bad out there.

Well, I'd thought so, too, which was why I had to go up. It was already too late to ride with Mel—he'd probably tried to call me, and I hadn't answered.

I unlatched the balcony door and a gust of wind blew it all the way open and I heard Meghan say that I was crazy, and maybe I was. But I had a duty, and I wasn't doing it. So I kissed her and told her that I'd be back and that I wasn't going to go too far, but I had to see what was coming, in case people needed to be warned.

I got Mel on the radio and it was really hard to hear him with all the static from the lightning, and he said it was looking pretty wild to the west. I let him know that I was going up in the air and I'd be headed out to the 131 Highway but I didn't think I'd make it much further than that, and he told me to be careful and said that they didn't give out medals for stupidity.

As soon as I got above the trees, the wind really hit me, and I lost some ground as I got altitude. Every time there was a big gust, I got pushed back some, but I mostly made forward progress, although not too quickly. And it was hard to judge where I was, 'cause sometimes the rain was so intense I could barely see the ground below me, and I just had to trust that what I could see on my altimeter when lightning flashed was right, 'cause otherwise I might wind up crashing into a tree or something.

I had just passed over what I think was Howard Street when a nasty gust hit me and forced me down, and I know that I'm not supposed to land on roofs but I didn't really have a choice. It was big and flat and loomed up out of the darkness and I hit kind of hard.

There must have been a couple of inches of standing water on the roof, and even over the pounding of the rain I could hear it gushing out the scuppers.

I didn't stay there too long, just long enough for the wind to die down, and for me to radio an update to Mel, then I took to the air again. The wind had died down some and the rain had slackened, too, and I was able to get up to a thousand feet and call for clearance to go higher.

Well, they said that there wasn't anything else up in the air so I could fly all the way to the cloud bottoms. That was good; I wouldn't have gotten forced down before if I could have had more altitude.

Once the rain slackened some, I could see out a mile or so, and I could see the lightning further than that but it was really hard to judge just how far away it was. It was all around, though, even behind me as far as I could see.

I kept up my patrol until a second heavy thunderstorm came through, which fortunately was somewhat less intense than the first. And I left my station a bit early—Mel called me and told me that it was clearing off in the distance so I might as well go back to bed. And he warned me to be extra careful around trees, because sometimes they got tangled up in power lines. He said if I wanted, I could land in the Meijer parking lot and he'd come and pick me up, which was really nice, but I said now that the rain was letting up I could probably fly home just as quick as he could come and pick me up, 'cause he was ten miles away or so.

Of course, keeping pace with the last thundercloud on my way back home wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done, but I was tired and wanted to get back to bed, and I couldn't really get any wetter.

I took Mel's warning to heart, and I did a circle around my apartment to make sure that there weren't any wires stuck in my tree before I dove under it, and I shook myself off on the balcony as well as I could. And then I almost forgot and landed normally, but at the last moment I remembered and lifted my tail up, and I was glad I had, 'cause I got a pretty big spark off my hind hoof.

Meghan was sound asleep in the papasan chair with the blanket over her. I didn't want to wake her up before I was ready to get in bed so I went to the bathroom and got some towels and wrapped one around my mane and set another on the futon and even though I was really tired I preened my wings, 'cause I knew I'd regret it in the morning. Then I draped the second towel over my back and got up on her lap and that woke her up a little bit. She put her arm on my back and then fell asleep again.

I probably wouldn't have woken up for her alarm, except that she had to get up to get her portable telephone when the alarm went off, 'cause she'd left it in her pants which had just gotten tossed on the floor last night.

Since she was already up, she didn't sit back down in the papasan. She stretched out and asked me how long I was out and I told her maybe a couple of hours—I wasn't exactly sure. And she said that the weather had been really bad for a bit and she hadn't meant to fall asleep, and I said it was okay.

Then she pet my mane and rubbed my ears and said that the whole weekend had been great and she was really tempted to call in sick today.

I didn't think it was nice to be lying about that, though. So I said that she ought to get showered and ready for work and I'd make breakfast while she was in the shower, and then we'd walk to her apartment together and wait for her ride.

I went in first so that I could pee and then I turned on the water to let it start to warm up, and when I came out she crouched down and kissed me.

Well, it didn't take too long to put water in the electric kettle and start heating it, so once I'd done that I went back and pushed the bathroom door open and sat on the toilet seat and when she came out of the shower I kissed her in the tummy and gave her a towel. Then I hopped off the toilet and went to the kitchen to put the oatmeal in bowls.

She came in with the towel wrapped around her head and took her bowl to the papasan and I followed her out but sat on the floor to eat mine, 'cause I didn't want to drop oatmeal on her by mistake after she'd taken a shower.

When we were done with breakfast, I helped her brush her hair and then while she was getting dressed I packed all her cooking dishes into her bag, and she told me that I didn't have to come to her house with her. But I'd said I would, and I wanted to, so I did.

There were some small branches down on the sidewalk and a lot of leaves, too, which really showed how strong the storm had been. And we had to take a little detour around a big tree branch that had fallen in her neighborhood. It was mostly across a lawn, but the very end of it was over the sidewalk, and it was a good thing that the wires were on the other side of the street or it would have gotten them.

Meghan told me that I could use her room for a nap if I wanted, and I thought that was really nice of her to offer, so I said that I would, so she carried her bag upstairs and then left the door propped open. Before she left for work, she reminded me to lock up on my way out.

Her bed was wider and plusher than mine and I could almost get lost in it.

Since it was already getting kind of warm, I didn't get under the covers; I just streteched out on top of them and pretty soon I dozed off.

I slept for a couple of hours, and when I woke back up I stretched out and went outside, locking up behind me like I was supposed to.

I had a lot to think about on my way back home. I was gonna have to tell Aric that me and Meghan had had sex and I didn't think he'd be mad about it but I couldn't be sure. So I'd send him a computer letter today, 'cause I had to tell him that I was coming to see his play, too.

And I hadn't told Meghan that I was going to Lafayette next weekend. I should have, but it had slipped my mind. I'd call her, though, or maybe stop by tonight. I thought she'd said that it was tonight that she made dinner for her housemates, and I didn't want to interrupt that.

I went by Aric's house to make sure that it was all okay after the storm and I saw that the birdfeeder had fallen down. Luckily, it hadn't broken, but the rope that had held it up had.

So I was trying to figure out what I could use to tie it back up when Angela came out. She said that she'd seen me out the kitchen window and she would have come out sooner but she had to put on pants.

Well, I said that it wouldn't have bothered me if she hadn't worn pants, and she said that it didn't really bother her either but the neighbors might complain.

So we looked around the garage and we found some more rope and then David came out and he wanted to help, too, and between the three of us we managed to get the birdfeeder back up where it belonged.

Most of the seeds had fallen out when it landed, so I refilled it, and then I flew off and sort of roamed aimlessly around town until I started to feel hungry for lunch.

Taco Bell was kind of tempting, but there was lots of food at my apartment, so I went back there and had a piece of leftover casserole and a slice of cake and that was probably a little too rich for lunch.

After I'd cleaned up, I wrote the computer letter to Aric and that took a while 'cause I kept on being unhappy with what I wrote, and had to change it. But I was finally satisfied and so I sent it to him.

I was going to sit on the balcony and read Proverbs but then I thought that the backyard at Aric's house was nicer than mine—it was sunnier and grassier—and I didn't think they'd mind, so I picked up a towel and my Bible and flew over there.

Angela was outside on a blanket, right close to the wall of the garage, so I guess she'd had the same idea. She was lying on her stomach and had her swimming-bra untied and I landed next to her and asked if she minded if I read in the sun for a little while. She said she didn't mind at all.

So I started to read Proverbs, and it began by saying how important wisdom was and how it would teach wisdom. And it said that if you had wisdom you wouldn't do wrong things or be with the wrong people.

Then there were a couple of chapters where it said how bad and dangerous it was to sleep with another man's wife, and after that it got to the wisdom of Solomon, and each bit of wisdom was only two lines long so that it was easy to remember.

Then there were thirty sayings of the wise, and then there were more sayings of the wise and more wisdoms of Solomon and it was a whole lot to remember, but I did know that usually if you thought something was unwise, it probably was, and if you thought that maybe something was bad, than it probably was. I think that Proverbs was maybe supposed to be taught to children when they were young and hopefully by the time that they were adults they would have learned it.

Although I knew some ponies who might have benefited from reading Proverbs.

When I finished it, I thought that maybe I did feel a little bit wiser.

So I closed the Bible and thought that there would be some wisdom in just sitting and looking around and letting my mind wander.

Angela had decided to lie on her back and she hadn't bothered to put her swimming bra on, but she had it next to her in case anybody came by I guess. And there were a couple of bold birds that were hopping on the roof and looking at the feeder even though we were there—I think they were trying to decide if either of us wanted to eat them.

Further down towards the ground, there was a row of weeds along the fence that were flowering, and I saw a couple of bees darting from blossom to blossom, and some other bugs flying around, too. A lot of insects like to hide in the hottest parts of the day.

I just sat and watched the wildlife for a bit, while Angela slept. There was a squirrel who really wanted to get at the birdseed, too, but he wasn't brave enough. He'd go partway across the lawn and kind of take a few steps forward, towards us, and then he'd change his mind and run back to a tree and watch from the trunk for a little bit and then try again.

He wasn't ever going to get fat like the squirrels at Kalamazoo College.

Angela sat up and put her swimming bra back on when she heard tires crunching in the driveway—it was one of their new housemates, an older man named Mick, she said. She said that he was consulting on a pipeline project and so he only needed a place to stay for a couple of months, and then he would move on to the next one.

She said that he was pretty quiet, and sometimes was gone for days at a time but he'd paid all his rent upfront in cash which was nice. He'd been gone all weekend, she told me, and he would probably take a shower and spend a little time on his computer then most likely he'd be gone by 5 am tomorrow. She said that was why I hadn't seen him yet.

I hugged her goodbye and then took off, and rather than fly over the house I flew over the driveway. Mick’s truck was really nice and had lots of chrome and big wheels and looked like it had been really expensive.

I ate leftover casserole for dinner and a bowl of timothy and the rest of the daylilies, and then I checked my computer and Aric hadn't sent me a letter back (probably because he was really busy with their final rehearsals) and then I decided I'd take an evening flight around Kalamazoo and then go to bed early.

My vest was still a little damp from last night—I hadn't hung it up like I should have—and my airplane radio didn't work at all, 'cause the batteries had worn out. The display came on dimly, but that was all. So I put its cord in and just went over town, keeping low enough that I didn't have to worry about any airplanes bumping into me.

It was a really nice evening, and off in the distance I could see a hot air balloon and I wondered if it was Captain Green's balloon. If it hadn't been so far away, I would have flown over to find out.

When I got back home, I took a shower and then I sat on the papasan and read Walt Whitman until I got sleepy, and then I put the book away and lay down on my futon.

July 19 [Haybales]

July 19

Right after I got up I went outside 'cause it was already a pretty day, and it was good to get fresh air first thing in the morning. I love my balcony so much; it's almost like living in the clouds.

I had oatmeal for breakfast and then I decided I'd have a morning flight, and in the afternoon I could go to the farmer's market and get some more fruits and vegetables and maybe the woman who said she was going to bring me a bale of hay would have it.

I hope she wasn't thinking of one of the big, round bales. That would last the summer, but I don't know how I'd get it up to my apartment.

I thought I'd try something a little bit different today, so I took a low flight through town, following the city roads all the way out to the 94 Highway, then I went east. That was a wedge of territory I hadn't really explored yet, 'cause of the airport, and it looked like I'd be far enough south of the Battle Creek airport to be out of their way.

The 94 Highway ran along the south side of Morrow Lake—we'd flown over it right before we landed in the balloon—and it was mostly big square fields. I saw a field of pasture grass that had been harvested into big round bales like the ones I'd seen being made and there wasn't any leftovers on it. I guess humans didn't do that, which was a pity.

Then there was a big patch of woods, and after that I saw a couple of big dirt mines. One of them even had a lake in it, which was a really pretty blue and looked kinda inviting, so I thought that maybe on the way back I'd go down and rinse off in it just a little bit.

Once I got past the forest, I flew over fields for a couple more miles, and then I started to see more and more city-houses, and then a big cluster of stores right by the exit off the highway. There were lots of big signs saying what kind of stores they had. I didn't know what most of them were, but I did see a Tim Horton's and that reminded me of going snowboarding with Peggy.

I flew out past where another highway called 194 crossed. That was kind of a dumb name; it was a lot like 94 and I think it would have been smarter to use a number that was more obviously different.

I took a big loop around to the south, crossing over the lake that was ahead of me, 'cause the 94 Highway had angled northeast, and that would cut a little bit off my return trip, plus I'd get a little bit different view of things.

I met up with the highway again right after I passed over the shopping malls. There was only a gentle breeze, so it wasn't any more effort to fly back than it had been to fly out. Someponies liked to fly downwind first and they were sorry when they went to fly back.

It was kind of weird how the main part of the city was all north of the 94 Highway, and Kalamazoo was mostly like that, too. It seemed that it would be more efficient to put the highway right through the middle, like they had with the railroad tracks.

I set my eyes on the dirt mine with the lake, and started sort of gliding down towards it. I had to remember my radios; they could get a little wet from rain and stuff but I didn't think they were supposed to be dunked underwater. I was pretty sweaty, and kind of looking forward to getting in the water.

When I got right down to it, though, it didn't smell quite right. I couldn't quite figure out why, 'cause it looked inviting enough. So I landed on the shore and stuck my nose right down to the water and sniffed at it, and there wasn't really any smell that was a danger-smell, but it didn't smell like proper lake-water, either.

I was disappointed by that, 'cause it really did look nice, like the water in postcards from tropical islands, but I thought it would be smarter to not try and swim in it, so I took a couple of sips from my camelback and then took off again.

I flew past a big store for big trucks—there was a parking lot full of them and there were more of them backed up to the door, and most of them said Target on the side which was a type of store. I'd seen a people-Target at the Maple Hill Mall.

Once I got by Morrow Lake, I left the 94 Highway behind and flew along it, then past the dam and I followed the railroad tracks back into Kalamazoo. I went over a slow-moving train that was making the turn north by the train-and-bus station, and flew over Meghan's house just 'cause I could, then went back over to my side of Main Street and landed on my balcony, scattering a few birds who probably thought I was coming to chase them away from the feeder.

That was the one drawback to having it so close to the balcony.

Well, I remembered just when I was taking off my camelback that I'd bought the one for Aquamarine and I'd never remembered to mail it. I was glad that she wasn't expecting it, but I still felt bad.

So after I had lunch and a shower, I thought I might as well turn on my computer because I could find where the post office was on it.

I was in luck; there was one right downtown that wasn't too far from the farmer's market.

I put her camelback in my saddlebags and then I flew out to the post office. It took me a few minutes to find, 'cause a lot of the buildings downtown look kinda the same from the air.

The woman at the counter was really friendly, and she weighed my package to find out how heavy it was and then told me all the different ways I could have it delivered and there were a lot of different options, so she said that basically the difference was how fast I wanted it delivered, and she said that to East Lansing even at the normal rate it wouldn't take more than a couple of days. So I got that, but I was kind of thinking that I could carry it to East Lansing in a couple of days myself and there were lots of things that were faster than me, like cars and trains and airplanes, and they could probably get it to her this afternoon.

I had to type in my secret number to pay, which meant that I had to hold the plastic pen in my mouth and I didn't like doing that because it made some people angry. But she kept her smile, which was good.

Next time I went to the farmer's market, I was going to get there early. A lot of the food was already gone, and some of what was left wasn't the best. I should have expected that, I guess. There were ponies in Chonamare that would wait right by the docks when the fishing boats came in so that they could get the freshest fish. Some of the fisherponies didn't like them—there was one who came down from Manehattan with a special enchanted wagon and always wore a suit—and they'd always sell him the fish they'd caught on the way out, and he was too dumb to know the difference.

But I did get some carrots and some celery, too, since Meghan had said that Kalamazoo used to be known for its celery. And the woman who had said she would sell me a whole bale of hay was there and she said she'd brought me some samples to try. She said that her husband grew hay and she had her little garden and she'd never thought she'd run into a pony at the farmer's market who was interested. She had some timothy and alfalfa, which were both good, and she also had some clover hay which I just loved and I said that was what I wanted, and I asked her how big they were and she pointed to the bales of straw that were around a booth and said that they were that size. (I don't know why the woman at that booth had straw bales; they were old and moldy and nopony would ever want to eat them.)

So I asked her how much, and she said that she'd have to charge me a little bit extra since she was going to deliver it to my house, and she told me that she'd have to charge twenty dollars a bale.

Well, that was four times as much as I was getting over the internet, and less than half the cost. So I told her that I wanted one clover and one alfalfa, and she said that she would deliver it tomorrow and just like that I had another use for my extra room. 'Cause those haybales weren't going to fit in the kitchen anywhere.

I did a little bit more shopping and got two boxes of raspberries, one black and one red. And I went over and got a loaf of sourdough bread, 'cause that sounded interesting, and when I was leaving her booth I ran into a kind of crazy woman named Suzi.

She made sure to tell me her name was spelled with an i.

Suzi was nice, just a little bit intense. She said that she was in charge of the market, and she thought it was really excellent that I was shopping at it, and asked me how I liked it and how it compared to markets back home.

Well, I didn't want to be mean, but I didn't want to lie, either, so I told her that it was nice but the markets at home had a little bit more variety than this one. Besides the fishmongers, there were also ponies who sold beer and wine that they'd made, and even the miller came to market once a week with flour, and then along the edges sometimes you'd have enterprising foals that wanted to sell something and set up a little stand on an old crate.

She said it was hard to get permission to sell alcohol or meat without having special licenses, which was why they didn't. She said that there were fishmarkets around but I'd have to go closer to the coast to find them.

I told her that I was happy that I was able to buy hay here, though. Even with all the things that Meijer had, there wasn't any hay anywhere in the store. And I said that I did like talking with the people who grew the food, and she said that was the best part of the market.

Then she said that she hoped I'd keep coming to the market and she crouched down and petted my mane and told me to have a blessed afternoon and I said that I would try.

I flew back to my house and unpacked my saddlebags, and put everything in the electric icebox to keep it fresh, then I sat down in my papasan and started reading Ecclesiastes.

It was very strange, especially coming right after a whole book about wisdom. I couldn't help but think of Nietzsche when I read it, because the author—who said he was the wisest man—thought that everything was meaningless, and that it was better to be stillborn than to live, and that all the pleasures and labor of life meant nothing.

I didn't think that was right, though. But it did kind of make me think, and I think he was wrong. I think that there is pleasure and satisfaction in doing your duty even if later on ponies won't remember you because you didn't do the kind of great things that troubadours sing ballads about. Commander Hurricane might be remembered but where would he have been without all the soldiers in his army, and all the other ponies who grew the food that his army ate, or made spears, or tended to the wounded so that they could fight again?

He was smart about some things—having wealth wouldn't make you happy. Everywhere I've been on Earth people have so many things, things that we have never had, but they don't seem to be happier than ponies are. Happiness was having good friends and a warm dinner on a stormy night.

I couldn't figure out why he had written a book in the Bible. He kind of said that everything you do is meaningless and God doesn't care.

Well, I thought I was going to enjoy myself even if he thought it was meaningless, so I flew outside and sat up in the tree, far enough away from the birdfeeder that I didn't bother the birds, and I listened to the soft wind rustling the leaves and the birds chirping at each other and I bet they didn't think their lives were meaningless.

I stayed there until my ribs got a little bit sore, then waited a little bit longer until there weren't any birds at the feeder, and dropped off my branch and flew back to my balcony and went inside to see if Aric had written me a computer letter back.

He had, and he said that he was looking forward to seeing me and he wouldn't be able to pick me up from the train station, 'cause he would be in the light booth (I should have thought of that). So he gave me directions to his house, and said that I could probably get a taxi or fly and he said that he would leave a key for me under his front mat in case nobody was home, and he wouldn't be mad if I was asleep by the time he got back, 'cause he probably wouldn't be back until midnight.

And he asked how the birdfeeder was and if I'd been keeping it filled, and whether or not I'd been taking cooking lessons from Angela, and then at the end he said that he missed me and was really looking forward to seeing me.

He didn't say anything about me and Meghan, and I wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

I had a couple of carrots as a snack—I figured that Meghan was probably going to come over later, and maybe she'd want to cook something—and then I carefully took all the rest of the casserole out of her baking dish and put it on a plate, and then I put the dish into the sink and filled it with hot, soapy water to soften some of the crust on it so that she could take it back today if she wanted to, and I also put the cake pieces on another plate so I could clean the cake dish.

She got to my apartment later than I'd expected, and she said that she was sorry but she'd had a meeting after work and hadn't gotten home until just now.

She was happy with having leftovers for dinner; she said that we ought to eat them before they went bad anyway. And so she warmed up the whole plate in the oven, 'cause I didn't have a microwave, and we'd just started eating when I heard a rumbly truck pull up into the driveway.

I looked down out the kitchen window and it was one I hadn't ever seen before, but I knew who it was 'cause I saw two bales of hay in the back, so I set down my plate and opened up the front door, and Meghan helped carry the bales upstairs and set them in my extra room.

When the lady had left, Meghan said that she bet the landlord wasn't expecting for his new tenant to use the bedroom as a hayloft.

I said I was thinking about sleeping on the haybales tonight 'cause they smelled so nice, and Meghan just started laughing.

She was still snickering when I pushed the bales into a line, and I was wishing I'd gotten four, 'cause then they would have made a big enough bed for both of us, at least until I started eating them.

Meghan said that we might as well try it at least, but she wanted to put the sheet over them so that she didn't get chaff all over her.

And so we made the haybales into a temporary bed, and she moved the curtains from the kitchen to the bedroom—they had a little springy rod that held them up, which was really clever—and then she got undressed and lay down on the hay and said that this was the weirdest thing she'd ever done.

Well, it worked okay for sex but it wasn't so good for both of us sleeping, 'cause the bales just weren't wide enough. At first I tried lying down between her legs but she couldn't pull up the blanket without me being too hot and stuffy, and then I lay on her stomach for a little while but she said that wasn't comfortable, either.

I moved up to the top and she put her head on my back and that felt pretty good for a while, but I never really fell asleep 'cause she was kind of pressing on my wing and my forelegs kept slipping off the bale, and she said that my shoulder was kind of bony, so we eventually had to pick up the sheet and she shook off all the loose chaff and then put it back on the futon and that was a lot more comfortable for both of us.

July 20 [Training Field]

July 20

Both of us were kind of tired since we hadn't slept well at first last night, so I only woke up a little bit before her alarm went off and instead of getting out of bed after the second time, she waited until the third . I didn't mind, 'cause I had my head on her breast and she was running her fingers through my mane.

I made her oatmeal while she was in the shower, and I left it on the counter for her and brushed her hair after she was done eating.

Then she put on her clothes, and we walked together to her house to wait for her friend to take her to work. I told her that she ought to tell her friend to come over to my apartment—it wasn't all that much farther, after all—but Meghan said that it was a lot easier to just get picked up at her apartment every morning, 'cause that way she didn't have to try and remember to tell her friend where she was going to be. Which made a lot of sense. Plus sometimes having the same morning routine sets your mood for the day.

I had to go back home to pick up my flight gear, 'cause I hadn't put it on before walking to Meghan's.

I tore the corner off the clover bale and ate that, and I thought about having some bread, too, but that would have been a little bit much before going flying.

While I was filling up my camelback I thought about where I wanted to go, and decided I'd fly east again today. Not as far as I had yesterday—it was best to kind of alternate between long flights and short flights.

I headed out along the railroad tracks, and when I was getting close to Morrow Lake I turned more to the northeast and then I called the airplane directors and asked for permission to fly higher. Dori said that I couldn't right now because there was a student pilot practicing IFR at 3000 feet, and she thought it would be wise to give him a little bit of extra room.

She told me that I could go southeast if I wanted to, but I'd been that way yesterday and so I said I'd keep flying the way I was but stay low.

I started following along the trail of electrical towers that came from the dam. They stuck up pretty high, which would have made them really easy to follow anyway, but they also didn't have any trees under them. Then they branched off, and one branch went east while the other went north and I thought I'd follow the smaller branch for a while and see where it went.

It went over a big dirt track and then I saw the horse stables where me and Meghan had gone riding off to my left and in the practice field there was someone riding a horse and jumping it over barriers so I flew down to get a closer look at what was going on.

Well, it was Deanne on the horse and even before I could tell that it was her she waved at me. I'm probably the only pegasus she knows.

I couldn't decide if I should land or not, but finally my curiosity got the better of me and I did land in the big dirt parking lot next to the practice field.

She kept up her routine while I watched, occasionally pushing at the dog with a hind hoof 'cause he kept sort of edging up on me. Then when she got done with all her jumps, she came over to the fence and I stood up on my hind hooves so that me and Henry could sniff each other.

He wrinkled his nose back after he smelled me and I blushed, then he leaned down for another sniff and pawed at the ground and Deanne had to kind of rein him in, and she slapped him on the side of the neck and told him to stop misbehaving.

He snorted, and she tugged at the reins a little bit to back him up, then she got off her saddle and said that I might as well walk with her while she cooled down Henry.

So we went all the way around the stables and then she led him over to a concrete pad with a coiled-up hose hanging on the wall next to it and a long rail, which she tied Henry to.

She took off his saddle and put it on the rail, then she took off his blanket and put it there, too. Then Deanne filled a bucket with water and started rinsing the sweat off his back, and I was paying too much attention to her and not enough to him, 'cause he leaned down and nibbled at my neck, and I told him that I wasn't interested but he didn't really understand, and he reached down a little bit further to try and nip at my fetlock and I just backed away from him until he turned his attention back to Deanne.

Deanne went into the barn and brought out a halter, and put one loop around his neck then switched the rope to that so she could take off his bridle. She said that usually she didn't have to do it this way but Henry seemed to be a little frisky, so she wanted to be safe.

It was weird to see that big piece of metal come out of his mouth. I thought that there must be a better way to let the horse know where it was supposed to go than that—it looked like it was really uncomfortable, and I think Henry thought so too, 'cause he stuck his tongue out once it was gone and then took a drink from the rinse bucket.

When she'd hung up his bridle, she put the halter on over his nose, and got a hoof knife out of her pocket and started to clean out his hooves, and when she was finally satisfied that he was done, she took him around the barn again to the pasture out back and he trotted out to the middle of the field and then started rolling around on his back.

I was kind of tempted to go out there and join him.

I decided that I would like to ride today, and maybe learn something so that next time Meghan and I came out here I'd be better at it.

I took off all my gear in the tack room—Deanne said it would be safe in there. Then I went to Hoshi and we blew in each other's nostrils and then Deanne got her saddled up for me and led her out to the training pasture and told me that we'd just be riding around the edge, and that she'd give me instructions. She said Hoshi wasn't trained to jump so she wouldn't try, and she said once I had mastered the reins I could try navigating around the jumps, 'cause it made a good obstacle course, but until then I'd be sticking to the edge.

After a little while, I figured out that having the reins looped around my forehooves worked the best, and I started to get better at steering Hoshi. Or else she'd figured out the course, and didn't need me to tell her what to do at all.

Deanne must have thought I had the idea, and she had me navigate through the center and around some of the jumps. Hoshi was kind of wary of them, so I guess she hadn't seen what they were for. And there were a few times when she went the wrong way but overall, we did pretty well.

We worked together for about an hour, and by the end of it I was getting pretty good. Well, decent. And then it was time to lead Hoshi back and get her undressed, and I rinsed her down after Deanne took off the saddle.

I don't know what I was thinking, but after we'd put Hoshi in her stall and gone back outside, I said that I thought it would be fun to gallop around and do the jumps like Deanne had been doing when I arrived, and she said if I wanted to, I could, and she'd walk me through the pattern.

It was kind of complicated, and she led me around it twice so I'd know the route, which folded back on itself a couple of times. Then I trotted it once, going around the jumps rather than over.

She said I'd got it right, so I set myself up at the starting line and went right to a canter.

The bars that I was supposed to jump over were pretty high, since Henry had such long legs, but that was okay because I had wings.

I did pretty well the first time around but I knew I could do it a bit faster now that I knew what to expect. I'd lost some time by being on the wrong hoof before a jump, and I lost some speed from flying up late. So I took a drink of water and went around a second time, and I was only off-hoof once, and I thought I did pretty well.

Deanne wanted to know if we had competitions like that in Equestria. I said that was more an earth pony thing; we usually set up clouds and stuff to race around.

Then she offered to pick my hooves if I wanted to let her and I thought that would be nice, especially since there'd been a lot of horseapples on the ground and I hadn't avoided them all.

She picked out my hooves and then used the hose to rinse off my hooves, and said that I'd been the easiest equine to teach the course to.

When I'd gotten back in my flight gear, I called the airplane directors and told them that I was taking off again, and then I nuzzled Deanne and took off for home.

I hadn't planned on being out for so long, so I was pretty hungry by the time I got back home. I had some of the sourdough bread with jam and I think that the bread would have been better by itself. And I thought about taking a shower, but decided that I'd take a bath later, since I hadn't gotten all that sweaty today and anyways I was home alone and nobody would complain about the dried sweat on my coat. But that did remind me that I needed to do laundry.

I took my flight vest and sheets and pillowcase to the laundromat to wash them, and it took some effort to stuff them all into my saddlebags. I had to settle for having some of the sheets draping out the edge like I was carrying some kind of a banner, but they weren't going to fall out 'cause they were pushed in so tight. And I wish that the little machine that let you buy boxes of soap had holes in it so you could sniff the soap before you bought it, 'cause how else would you know if you liked the scent? I thought 'spring fresh' was the best choice, since it had a picture of grass and blue sky on it, so that's what I got.

I would have brought a poetry book along, but there hadn't been room. They had some on the shelves, though, and they also had a newspaper on top of the trash can, so I thought I'd read that.

I probably should have chosen something else. There was a story in it about how mosquitoes in Florida had tested positive for Zika, which the newspaper said was a disease that was very bad for pregnant women, and there was also an article about a man in France who had run over a crowd of people with his truck, and Donald Trump had been voted as the Republican nominee and then gotten in trouble because his wife had given a plagiarized speech, it said. And then they said that Princess Twilight had given a similar speech, too, so it didn't count as stealing.

I didn't know Princess Twilight all that well but I didn't think she'd steal a speech, so I thought that maybe the newspaper was lying.

I put the newspaper back on top of the wastebasket and decided I'd rather just watch my laundry go around and around in the soapsuds.

I liked the washing machines at the laundromat better than the ones in our dorm, because these had front doors and it was a lot easier to put the laundry in and take it back out again.

It was fluffier and kind of spring-like and also very warm when it came out of the drier, and I leaned my cheek against my fresh sheets for a minute before I put them back in my saddlebags.

I had mixed hay and carrots for dinner—I made a salad out of some of the old hay I had and a little bit of the new, and I ate it in the papasan and then I went and filled the bathtub up and soaked in it until the water got cold.

After I'd dried off, I decided I'd read some of the Song of Songs before bed.

That was a lot nicer than Ecclesiastes. It didn't really have much to do with God, but was more about how handsome Solomon was and how pretty his wife was, and how much he liked her breasts and her garden that had things growing in it I'd never heard of.

I think that the people who put things in the Bible were maybe smarter than I'd thought yesterday. Because I could kind of see how Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs all tied together—the first taught you wisdom and then the middle book said that maybe nothing was worth anything, and then the last book was about love.

I think that was a good lesson overall.

My haybales were missing some of their corners but were still plenty big enough for me, and even though I knew I'd have some chaff in my coat in the morning, I just stretched out on top of them without even a blanket under me, and fell asleep with the pleasant scent of clover in my nose, which was much better than the spring-fresh laundry soap.

July 21 [Afternoon Thunderstorm]

July 21

When I woke up, I had chaff stuck to me everywhere, and my neck was a bit stiff, too. A good stretch worked eased up my neck, but the chaff was more of a problem to get rid of.

A shower wouldn't help; that would just make it wet and it would stick even more in my coat. That was a lesson I'd learned as a filly. A good, strong breeze would blow it right off, and since there wasn't much wind, the only solution was to make my own.

So I went out the balcony and flew up to about a thousand feet, then dove back down to just above the treetops, and did that a couple more times and I was mostly chaff-free.

I made an oatmeal breakfast and thought about what I wanted to do today.

It was a nice day for a long flight, I decided, and today I'd go west. That would make the airplane directors happy, and I'd get some good exercise. I could fly most of the way out to Lake Michigan, maybe even all the way.

I'd already measured on a map a couple of times to make sure, and it was about eighty miles from South Haven to Chicago, so if I was gonna fly that I would have to make sure I had enough endurance to stay in the air that far, and I wasn't quite there yet.

I was getting closer and closer to it, though.

My birdfeeder was a bit low, so once the morning crowd of birds had left to do their bird-things, I filled it back up then I flew over to Aric's house to make sure that his was full, as well.

When I got in the garage, I saw that someone else had discovered the birdseed—there was a small hole gnawed through the bottom of the bag and mouse poop and little bits of shells scattered around. Of course, I didn't notice any of that when I picked up the bag, and I left a little trail of seeds out the door and in the grass under the bird feeder.

Earth ponies put some of their food in metal boxes to discourage mice, and of course in the clouds we never had to worry about them. I wasn't sure if Aric had a metal box for his birdseed, and I didn't think that the mouse would eat that much, and the bag was getting pretty empty, so I decided that I'd worry about it later.

I was satisfied with my morning work, so I flew back home and got into my flight gear. My vest was especially nice, 'cause it was all clean and fluffy.

Once I was ready to fly, I called up the airplane directors and told them where I was going to go. The grumpy man was directing, and so I promised that I would stay below a thousand feet until I got past the 131 Highway and he said that sounded good. And then he told me to be safe, and keep an eye out for thunderstorms because the forecast was calling for them.

I said that I would, and before I flew off my balcony, I went back inside and strapped on my other radio, just in case I needed it. I was probably being overly cautious: right now it didn't look like storms at all, and the skies were clear as far as I could see.

I'd gotten over the 131 Highway and started climbing, and I was starting to see more and more clouds off in the distance. At first I thought that they were forming up over the edge of the lake and moving inland, but by the time I'd gotten to M40, I could see that they were popping up well inland, too, and it was starting to get thicker and greyer near the lake.

I decided I'd continue on and see what the weather did. And I also decided that maybe I'd cut my flight a little bit short if it started to look more stormy, since I'd have to be up in it and I wouldn't be very useful if I was tired from flying all morning.

By the time I got over Bangor, I'd decided that the clouds meant business. The main part of the stormfront was a little bit further over the lake than I'd thought, but it was really building, and I'd flown up to a couple of the scattered clouds and gotten a feel for them, and they were promising rain to come, too. They kept building on themselves as they picked up more and more water out of the air.

So the only sensible thing to do was cut my trip short, and head back. At least this storm had the courtesy to happen during the day, so I wouldn't be flying around half-blind, trying to figure out how big it was and how bad it was.

I angled south of Main Street and started heading towards the 94 Highway. My plan was to spot it somewhere before Mattewan, and follow it to our stormwatching spot.

By the time I got there, I was feeling a bit hungry, so I told any airplanes who were listening that I was going down and I flew low over town to see what restaurants they had.

I didn't find a Taco Bell, but I found a Pizza Hut, and since I hadn't had any pizza in a while, so I thought that would be a good lunch.

They didn't let you get individual slices of pizza, but they did have a small one that they called a personal pizza, and the woman who showed me where to sit and gave me the menu said that if I had any leftover, they'd put it in a box for me, so I got a Veggie Lover's and while I waited for it to be cooked for me, I tried to call Mel on the radio, but he didn't answer, so then I called him on my telephone and asked him what he thought was coming.

He said that it looked like we were going to have some thunderstorms, which might last all afternoon, and he was going to finish lunch and then come out and he could pick me up if I needed a ride.

I told him that I was already here, and about to eat pizza, and that I would go out to our spot when I was done eating.

Then I sent a telephone telegram to Pastor Liz, telling her that I wouldn't be able to make our meeting because there was a storm coming and I was going to be up watching it, and she sent me a telegram back telling me to be safe and I said that I would.

My pizza was cut into four slices, and I ate two of them right away and then tried to decide if I should eat the rest or take them with me. It seemed kind of silly to carry them with me, but I wasn't going to want to fly if I ate too much pizza for lunch.

So I decided I'd have one more, and then I'd save the last one in case there was some downtime in the storm and I got hungry.

My waitress put it in a little box for me, and I had to take off my vest in order to get it in the pocket on my camelback, and then when she brought me back a receipt for my dinner she also brought a little candy called a Starlight.

It was hard to get out of its wrapper—I had to pinch it in my teeth and work it out with my tongue to get it free. But it was worth the trouble, it was very minty.

Rather than fly, I crossed the street and followed the sidewalk until it ended, then I walked through a parking lot and since there wasn't any more sidewalk after that, I took off, being careful of the electrical wires that went right overhead.

I didn't get too high, 'cause I didn't want to burn a lot of energy on such a short flight, but even above the trees it was pretty obvious that a storm was coming. The clouds were getting thicker and the wind had picked up a little bit, and I could smell the rain that it was going to bring.

Mel's truck wasn't in the parking lot yet, so I landed and sat under a pair of trees and waited for him to arrive.

He hadn't come before I started to hear thunder in the distance, so I called him on the radio and he said he was about fifteen minutes away, and he was delayed because there was an accident at West Main and Drake that had half the road blocked. I told him that I was going to be up in the air when he got here, 'cause I could already hear the thunder, and I'd give him my next report from the sky.

I circled my way up, and took a good look at the storm front. I thought it would be to me in a half hour or maybe less, and from below it I couldn't see the tail end of it because of the rain.

That was one thing that was nice about being above the clouds; you could see where they started and stopped no matter what they were doing.

I saw Mel when he arrived, and I waved at him and I guess he didn't see me, 'cause he called on the radio and said he was here.

My half-hour estimation was pretty close.

At first, it was infrequent lightning, and then it started to pick up in intensity. The rain did, too. It started off pretty gentle, and then it got a little bit heavier, but it really wasn't too bad. I didn't expect that to last, though, 'cause it kept looking darker and darker.

I was glad that I could still see the ground through it, 'cause that meant that the gusts at the front of the storm didn't catch me by surprise. I could see trees bending, and right behind that sheets of rain, and I opened out of my circle and went straight into it, and even so I lost some ground when it hit me.

I heard Mel on the radio—I guess he'd just gotten hit by it, too—but I didn't have time to answer him, 'cause I was too busy trying to stay in the air. That was another thing that was annoying about having to fly under the clouds instead of over; the winds at the front got me every time.

When I'd straightened back out and the wind had dropped down a little bit I called back and told him that I was fine.

Even in the storm there were some pretty powerful gusts of wind. I did an unintentional wing-roll when I was banking into a turn and the wind flipped me, and when it had finally moved on after about an hour, I was soaked all the way through.

Since there wasn't anything coming behind it, I glided back down to the parking lot and stopped just short of a light pole. When I reached out with a forehoof, I got a nice big spark and the light flickered for a moment, which made me think maybe I should find something else to touch before I land. I guess their lamps don't like extra electricity.

I shook off in the parking lot before getting into Mel's truck, and he was nice enough to give me a ride back to my apartment.

Following a storm was kind of strange, because the sky was really dark, but on the ground everything that was on the ground in front of us seemed unnaturally bright, especially if it was white. When we got into town, the light poles in the Maple Hill Mall parking lot almost looked like they were glowing, 'cause they were so bright compared to the sky.

When I got undressed, I remembered my last piece of pizza, and I was going to put it in the electric icebox so that it wouldn't spoil, but the electric icebox couldn't save it. I'd gotten so soaked that it was hard to tell what was cardboard and what was pizza, and I finally decided that I'd toss it in the front yard and maybe some scavenger would benefit from it.

I took a long, leisurely shower, then I dried off and preened my wings. Even though I'd done dives and flown to Bangor and back to Mattewan and then flown in a storm, there was still a little bit of chaff that was stuck in my feathers.

I packed my saddlebags with everything I wanted to take to Lafayette, then I walked over to Meghan's apartment.

She had dinner almost made, which was kind of a disappointment—I'd wanted to help. But I don't think she would have wanted my help if I'd arrived a soggy mess.

Meghan told me that I was very brave to fly in the storm, and she said that when the wind gusts and heavy rain had started she'd been thinking of me and she asked if we had to fly in storms like that back in Equestria, or if we didn't have them because we made the weather.

I said that we didn't have enough weatherponies to work over the ocean, so we had to go up and deal with them when they came inland, and I was pretty used to it. I said that the most important thing to know was when to fight and when to let the storm carry you and here on Earth I wasn't always getting it right, since the weather was different than what I was used to, but I knew that I'd get it figured out sooner or later.

And I said that this time I'd only gotten flipped in one gust, and hadn't been driven out of the sky at all, so I thought that was pretty good.

When we were eating the grainloaf she'd made us, I told her about how I'd gone to the riding stables yesterday and gotten better at riding Hoshi and then I'd also gotten to do the obstacle course. And I thought that we ought to go horseback riding again sometime soon, and she said that she'd like that.

I helped her with the dishes, and then we watched Kung Fu Panda again, only this time we paid more attention to it. I thought it was a pretty good movie, and she said that there were two more that we could watch another time.

When we went to her bedroom, I thought it would be fun to help her get undressed, and I did pretty well except for her bra. I knew that it was supposed to hook together in the back but I couldn’t figure out how to get the hooks detached, and she finally did it for me and told me that I shouldn’t feel bad, because bras couldn’t be unfastened by men either.

July 22 [Train to Lafayette]

July 22

I was kinda eager to leave, so I woke up a little early and by the time Meghan's alarm went off I was ready to get out of bed, and I would have except she started rubbing my belly and then moved her hand towards my tail and then I decided it would be okay to stay in bed a little while longer.

Since I wasn't going to have time to do it later, I joined her in the shower, and we had to hurry a little bit 'cause we'd spent more time than we should have in bed, but it was worth it.

We took turns brushing each other, then went downstairs for a quick breakfast, and she'd just finished the dishes when I heard her friend pull into the driveway.

Meghan kissed me and told me to have a good trip and said to call her when I got back, and I said that I would, then we kissed again and had to hurry out of the house so her friend didn't get mad.

The westbound Amtrak left earlier than the eastbound did, but I still had a little bit of time before the train arrived, so I didn't hurry right over to the train station. I had a nice, leisurely flight around downtown Kalamazoo instead, and then I went and played in a big park that was near the train station for a little bit. There was a pond that the creek went into, and then it disappeared underground at the other end, and there was a big grate to keep people out.

The ducks that were on the pond fit right through the grating, though, and they'd swim in and out of it, so I guess it didn't bother them any.

There was also a store called the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, and if it had been open I would have bought some beer for Aric, but there wouldn't be enough time before my train arrived.

I was close enough to the station that I probably could have waited until I heard the train before I went back, but I risked missing it and there wasn't another train until tomorrow, so I went and got a cup of coffee from McDonald's and then sat outside on the benches and waited for it to arrive.

About ten minutes before it was supposed to arrive, a few other passengers started walking outside and sitting on the the benches or standing along the tracks to look for it, but I kept sitting until I heard it off in the distance, then I went up and stood by the yellow line, too.

There weren't a whole lot of people on the train, and so I could pick whatever seat I wanted. I'd always liked to pick the side that was next to Kalamazoo College, so I thought I'd do something different and pick the opposite side, which would give me a view that was mostly south.

I could keep good track of where we were until we got outside of Kalamazoo, and then it got a little bit trickier. The train went so quick, I was still puzzling over landmarks that were familiar enough from the air, and then they were gone. I think if I'd been able to look out the front of the train, it would have been easier, but I could only see things as they blurred past.

I was pretty sure that I saw the spot where the train went under the 94 Highway—the spot where I'd been watching it and nearly run into wires—'cause I couldn't remember any other places where there were two bridges side-by-side like that.

We raced through the countryside, and even though I'd been this way before on the train it looked a little bit different being on the other side.

I would have liked for the whole trip to be this fast, but the train got into a busy area and had to slow down, and just like on my last trip, there were lots of tracks on both sides with all sorts of trains on them. It was still hard to figure out what so many trains could be carrying.

After that it was nothing but houses and buildings and roads with occasional trees, and we mostly plodded along. Most of the time the cars on the highway that were right next to the tracks were faster than us, but then I saw a bunch of them slowing down and stopping, and then we went past a toll gate and got ahead again.

When the train finally stopped in the station it was nice to know that the first half of my journey was over. It had been nicer to be here with Aquamarine and Miss Parker and Mister Barrow, and I remembered how I'd been anticipating the rest of the trip and meeting up with Aquamarine and Gusty.

There wasn't anypony to meet up with this time, though. And I had five hours of free time before the next train arrived.

Well, I thought that the first thing I ought to do was have lunch, and then I thought I'd go out to the waterfront and walk around, and maybe visit a museum. So I ate at one of the snack kiosks which was called Au Bon Pain and had a hot vegetarian wrap, and then I went outside and the Willis Tower was right there and I thought about flying up to the top, just for fun. I wasn't sure that I was allowed to, although I thought that if I stayed close to it, I wouldn't have to worry about airplanes, and surely they weren't allowed to fly lower than the skyscratchers, anyway, or else they might bump into one.

If I'd been smarter, I would have done that before I had lunch, and maybe while not wearing my saddlebags, but I did it anyway, climbing up around the building in a tight helix. There were lots of offices inside, and there must have been people who noticed me, but I didn't stick in any one place long enough to be sure.

The air currents around the building were kind of tricky, especially as I got higher. There were lots of eddies and cross-currents, and I had to pay attention to avoid crashing into it by mistake.

I got up to the observation floor, which had the little glass boxes that stuck out, and I looped around that twice just so that everyone who didn't notice me on the first lap got a second chance, and then I headed down for the shore.

Cayenne had said that it was all pretty in the summer, and she was right. There was a big stretch of park with little walking paths and fountains and flowers, and I walked around it, thinking how strange it was that on one side there was a really big city, with tall skyscratchers and stretching so far that it took the train almost two hours to get from one end of it to the other, and on the other there was a big, open lake, and here in the middle was a nice park for everyone to enjoy.

I bet it was really pretty to sit in the park and watch the sun rise over the lake.

When I started getting hungry for dinner, I knew it was time to go back to the train station, and this time I didn't fly too high. The Willis Tower was a really good landmark, so I flew right to it and then the train station.

Their clock said that it was still an hour before my train left, so I went back to Au Bon Pain and had another vegetarian wrap, 'cause the first one had been so good.

When I went back down to the train shed, there wasn't an Amtrak waiting on my platform, but instead a brown and orange train called Iowa Pacific, and I asked the conductor if this was the train I was supposed to be on or if there was an Amtrak coming after he left.

He said that this was my train, and that I could get aboard if I wanted.

The inside was nicer than the Amtrak, and it had a car with a big glass dome, like the trains we'd taken out west, and I wanted to sit there but that was the dining car and I wasn't allowed to.

I wish I'd known that it had a dining car, 'cause I wouldn't have had dinner at the train station if I'd known.

I picked a seat on the lake side of the train in the hopes of getting a better view than just a highway.

Well, it wasn't really any better until we left Chicago, then it turned into fields and trees. This train didn't run as fast as the Amtrak did in Michigan.

I discovered that some of Indiana is very, very flat, which I guess makes it perfect for big fields, and there were a lot of them. The corn was high enough that sometimes all I could see out the window was cornstalks.

We passed by a big collection of silver silos—I'd seen some like them on farms before, but never a big collection all in one place like this. I figured it must be a place where the crop is stored before putting it onto a train.

Towards dusk, it started to get hillier, and I saw out the windows on the other side that there was a road that ran next to the track, and that was kind of neat because while the tracks went straight and level, the road went up and down, so sometimes the cars were a little above us and sometimes they were parallel and sometimes we were looking down on them.

The train started slowing down as we crossed a river, and pretty soon we arrived at the train station, which was in a river valley.

I looked at the directions that Aric had given me and they were pretty easy to follow. Right outside was Main Street, and I was supposed to follow that until I got to Kossuth Street, which was right after a zoo and baseball field.

I wasn't sure what a zoo would look like—I suppose it would have lots of different animals in it—but I knew what baseball fields looked like, so I flew up until I was clear of all the wires than ran overhead and started following Main Street away from the river.

The baseball field was really easy to spot, and he'd said that there were a couple of streets that didn't quite line up in an intersection and that the next one after that was Kossuth Street, and I'd turn east there, and then it was right on the corner of 28th Street.

It didn't take me very long to find. It was on a pretty big lot, with a square garage in the back and a big porch in front. I rang the doorbell, but all the lights were off so I didn't think anybody would answer, and no one did.

Just like he'd promised, the key was under the doormat, and I put it back after I let myself in.

My first stop after dropping my saddlebags was the bathroom, which took me a minute to find, and I might not have if the door hadn't been open.

I didn't want to go poking around, 'cause I knew that there were other people living there, too, but I couldn’t help but sniff around a little bit and try and get a sense of his house-mates. I thought about the picture he’d sent me and tried to guess who was who.

It didn't look like there were enough rooms upstairs for everyone who was living in the house, but then David and Angela lived in the basement at Aric's, so there were probably basement rooms in this house, too.

I sat at his desk long enough to write in my journal, and I kind of wanted to stay up until he got home, but I was pretty tired. So I got in his bed and it smelled just like him, and I curled up on the pillow and closed my eyes and even though the house was in a place where I'd never been before, my nose told me that it was familiar, and it didn't take too long to fall asleep.

July 23 [Lafayette Civic Theatre]

July 23

Aric woke me up when he came in, and I thought I'd pretend to still be asleep just for the fun of it.

He sat down on the bed (and that would have woken me up if I hadn't heard him open the bedroom door) and whispered that he knew I was awake 'cause my ears had given me away.

I told him that my ears moved when I slept, too.

(I was pretty sure that they did. How would I hear stuff if they didn't?)

He told me that I was a silly pony and kissed me and said how much he'd missed me, and how happy he was that I was here, and I nuzzled his cheek and then put my head on his chest and fell back asleep.

In the morning, I woke up before him and I couldn't decide if I should get out of bed or just stay cuddled up with him. I didn't know what time he got home last night, and I didn't want to be rude and interrupt his sleep, even though he probably wouldn't be mad if I woke him up.

But I finally decided to let him sleep in at least some, and a little bit of extra time in bed wouldn't hurt me any. Tomorrow I wouldn't be getting home until late, anyway, so it might be nice to have had some extra sleep.

I still wound up waking him up, 'cause I got kind of antsy after a while. I wanted to be flying around or having sex or doing something, and I was getting a little bit hungry, too.

He was still kind of sleepy, so I got on top of him.

Well, that woke him all the way up, and after we were done he put his pants on and went to the bathroom, and when he got back he got dressed the rest of the way and asked if I wanted to eat breakfast at home or go to a restaurant. He said that he was thinking either Denny's or the IHOP, which was the International House of Pancakes.

I thought that IHOP sounded the best, 'cause I hadn't had pancakes in a while. So we got in Winston and drove out to the restaurant.

On our way out there, we passed a big building that had lots of tall pipes on the roof and it said Caterpillar on the front and I wanted to know what it was for—I thought maybe it was a butterfly hatchery, although I couldn't imagine what the pipes were for unless that was how the butterflies got out. He laughed and said that they made engines for big things like trains and ships.

The IHOP was in the middle of a parking lot and surrounded by hotels, and it was obvious to me that whoever had designed this area had only thought of cars and not about how ugly it all was. Even the grass around some of the parking lots didn't look too healthy. I guess a lot of human shopping areas are like that. Even the Farmer's Market is on concrete, not a proper grassy square.

Maybe cars don't like grass very much.

When I looked at the menu, I was kind of tempted by their waffles, but then I decided that I'd come for pancakes, so that was what I'd have. And they had a lot of different kinds. I didn't know what a Rooty-Tooty was, so I finally chose the harvest grain and nut pancakes, and Aric ordered the bacon temptation omelet.

While we waited for our food, I asked him how he liked Lafayette, and he said that he'd made a new friend who had a special kind of truck that climbed on rocks, and that there was a big park near Attica for that, called The Badlands.

Then he told me that he wished I'd been there to help him put in the clutch, and I said that I wished I had too, because it sounded like it was fun, and he said it wasn't as fun as I thought.

I wanted to know if he'd gone to The Badlands, and he said that he had and it had been fun but really stupid because Winston wasn't meant to go off-road like that and that was why he'd had to put a new clutch in it. And he said that in retrospect, he was lucky that was the only thing that he'd broken, but he'd had to be winched out of a mudhole before he got too far in, and that was also what had broken the clutch.

He said that he liked Kalamazoo better than Lafayette and couldn't wait to get back in the fall. But he told me that the theatre was pretty nice and that they had some newer equipment than Kalamazoo College did, and so it was good practice for him to work there, and it also was still close to Michigan and not a really big city, 'cause he didn't like really big cities.

I told him about my train ride here and how I'd flown around the Willis Tower, and then our breakfast came and I shared a pancake with him and he let me have a little piece of his omelet.

While we ate, I told him about my neighbors, Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity, and how we'd been hunting for Pokemons around the neighborhood. And I told him about all the storms I'd been in, and he said that he wished that I had a video of that. So then I thought that maybe I could get a camera like the one Gates had, and wear that. I'm sure that Mister Salvatore would know where to get one, and I could figure out some way to attach it to me. I suppose I could use a helmet, but I didn't really like wearing them. Maybe I could wear it on a yoke or something like that.

We went back to his house after breakfast so that I could meet all of his new housemates. He said that by now they ought to be awake, although he couldn't promise it for sure.

Luckily, everyone was awake when we got back, and he introduced me to Felicity and Richard and Chris and Autumn and we spent more of the afternoon than I had thought we would just sitting around and talking about stuff. So I guess that I wasn't going to get to tour Lafayette after all.

But that was okay. All of his housemates were really interested into talking to me, and they had all sorts of questions about Equestria, and Richard said that he'd seen a unicorn in Orange is the New Black, and I said that I knew her and we were friends and I'd been on a train trip with her to Washington and California and Colorado and everywhere in between, and Richard said that I should have gotten her autograph.

Everyone just sort of had snack food for dinner, and when it got close to time to go to the theatre, Aric went and changed into his blacks, which was just all black clothes. Theatre people wear them so they can't be seen.

We got in Winston and drove to the theatre, which was right near the train station. The road had a section of tracks running down the center, and I asked why they were there, and Aric told me that he'd wondered the same thing and it was because back in the olden days, it had been a big deal to cities to have the railroad go to them, and that there were small towns which had failed because the train went somewhere else. Lafayette had wanted to be important, so the mayor had said that the railroad could put the tracks wherever they wanted, and the railroad had decided right down the middle of the street was a good place for them.

He said that they'd been in use until the nineties, when they'd moved the tracks to the river.

We went in the back, and it took a little while to get up to the light booth, 'cause everyone we saw wanted to meet me and he said that we were lucky that most of the actors and actresses were already in the dressing rooms getting ready for the show, because otherwise I would have been mobbed with kids.

Aric got me a chair so that I could sit and have a good view of the show, and he said that the sound in the theatre wasn't all that good, so I might have a hard time hearing some of the dialogue from where I was. He said that he'd been told that it was better before they remodeled the light booth and put in glass windows, and that they hadn't thought to make the windows so that they could open.

Then he said that he had to get ready, and he kissed me and then sat down in his chair and put on a headset and announced that he was going to run a light test.

Pretty soon, he was turning on and off all the different lights, and midway through he stopped and wrote something down and I knew that there had been a problem. Sure enough, when he'd finished he got out of his chair and went over to a long blue cabinet and turned a switch on and off, then went back to the light board and tried again.

He said that one of the Fresnels was out and he was going to go fix it if he could and said I might as well come along, but I had to promise not to fall off the catwalks, and I said that I wouldn't.

Their light shop was through a door and behind the light booth, and he opened up a gray cabinet and got out a little box that had a new bulb in it, and then he climbed up a ladder and opened a hatch in the roof. I flew up after him, and he helped pull me through, 'cause the opening wasn't wide enough for my wingspan.

I was glad that I was shorter and had four legs, 'cause Aric had to crouch to get past beams and pipes, but I could mostly just step under them.

When we got out to the light that was bad, Aric unplugged it from its socket, and then reached down and pulled a metal frame off the front that had a colored gel in it. He said that might fall out when he opened the front, and he didn't want to have to go down and get it back.

Then he lifted a latch, and the lens of the Fresnel swung open and he had to lie down on his belly and reach around to get the light bulb out. He set that out of the way and then put the new one in—it had a little plastic cover because you weren't supposed to touch the glass with your hands—and then plugged it back in and it came on.

He said that he'd left the circuit live, so that he'd know if it was fixed before he got back to the light booth.

Then he closed the lens and put the gel back in, and we went back to the light booth.

We had a while to wait before the show started: he tested the spotlight, and then told the stage manager that he was done with the light check.

I kinda thought that maybe we should talk about our relationship, but I didn't want to distract him from his job so I decided that I'd wait until later. And I could see that he was sort of tense, too, and maybe for the same reason or maybe he was just a little nervous about getting everything right.

He said that he should have brought playing cards or something, and I told him that I missed Durak and that was one thing that I was looking forward to doing again when school started again.

We had to be quiet when the auditorium opened and people started to come in, and I could see him beginning to focus on the show. He went back to his light board and checked his notebook one more time, and he told me that he couldn't believe that the spotlight operator was so late but he could run it if he had to.

It was maybe ten minutes before the show was supposed to start when his spotlight operator, who was named James, finally arrived, and apologized for being late, and Aric said that it was okay, at least he was here now. And then he introduced me and said that I was a friend from back in college.

James said that guests weren't supposed to be up in the light booth, and Aric said that it was okay in my case because I was into theatre and I even knew the unicorn who was on Orange is the New Black, and then James asked me if that was true. Well, it was at least half-true (and I didn't want to get in trouble), so I nodded and I said that I was going to see her in Stratford soon, 'cause she was also Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

After that he smiled and said that it was good to meet me and he hoped that I enjoyed the show, then he put on his headset and the two of them got ready.

Aric had been right; it was hard to hear much of the dialogue especially since some of the kids were kind of quiet, but when they sang, it came through the glass pretty clearly. And I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but it was kind of a story about traditions and the Tevye wanting to marry his daughter to someone that she didn't actually want to marry, because she loved someone else. And Tevye finally says it's okay, and she marries the man she loves.

I snuck a look at Aric every now and then, because it was interesting to see how serious he was when he was working the controls. I could tell that he'd practiced it a lot, because he was always looking intently at the stage and sometimes I'd see him move his hands towards the controls even before he radioed to the stage manager that he was standing by, which meant that he knew where his light cues were supposed to be even before he was told.

James was the same way—he sat on a stool when he wasn't needed, and Aric only had to tell him once that there was a cue coming, and even then I think that James was about to get up and back to position.

When the show was over, we had to wait until everyone was out of the auditorium before he could turn off the light board and leave. He said that was the other bad thing about the way it was set up. He said that some theatres had the house lights controlled on stage, so that the stage manager could turn them on and off, but that here he had to stay and do it all himself.

So I could see why he'd come home late last night.

He said that if we wanted to, we could go to the Lafayette Brewing Company and hang out, 'cause after the show that was where the actors and techies went to hang out. Then he said that it wouldn't be as crowded as he'd heard it usually was, since all the actors had been kids, and they weren't allowed at the bar.

So we went and we each had a couple of beers and talked with the other theatre people. He introduced me to the stage manager, who was called Sheila, and I didn't tell her that I'd watched the show from the light booth. I didn't see James there—Sheila said he had been but he'd left a little while ago. And Felicity was there, too, and she came over and sat with us and shared a couple of her fried pickles with me.

I kinda wanted dinner, but they were closing soon and wouldn't make any for us. Aric said it was because Indiana had dumb laws about alcohol, and that we could stop somewhere else for a snack.

I didn't want anything too fancy, and I said that we might as well just get something at home, and he said we could do that, too.

Back at his house, he had some Triscuits, and I had a couple of them and some carrots, and we each had one more beer and then we went to bed. When he got undressed he said that he was sorry that he hadn't been as much fun in the morning, but he'd make it up to me now, and he did.

July 24 [Lafayette]

July 24

I slept in later than usual, 'cause Aric had kept me up so late last night, but I still woke up before him.

I had to wait to use the bathroom until Autumn was done taking a shower, and then I went back to his bed and rested my head on his chest until he woke up.

Well, he was feeling pretty frisky, and I let him play with me a little bit before I pushed his hand away and said that I wanted to make sure that he understood that me and Meghan had had sex a couple of times already.

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair and said that he couldn't be mad because he'd already said that I could and that part of him had hoped that I wouldn't, that I would just sit up in Kalamazoo eagerly waiting for him to come back which was incredibly selfish of him. He said that it wasn't like either of us could have expected this to be a forever thing, because at the end of the year I was going to go back to Equestria anyways, and even if we got visas and visited, it wouldn't be for all that long.

That was kind of sad to think about, but it was true.

Aric said that it was a little bit difficult to get past his human expectations, but at the same time he could only imagine how much culture shock I had every single day I was on Earth, and that he'd be the worst boyfriend ever if he added to it, and he said that he thought that the most important thing was that I had come to see him, which meant that I still liked him, and I said that that was true.

So he told me that we ought to make the most of our time together, and if when he got back to Kalamazoo I came to his house some nights and I went to Meghan's some other nights that he understood because he wanted me to be happy most of all.

I thought that was really sweet of him, so I kissed him and then I got on top of him and kissed my way down his chest, and he said that I didn't have to, but I wanted to.

We couldn't laze around all morning, 'cause it was Sunday and that meant a matinee performance.

We took a shower together, and then we had cereal for breakfast. The only cereal he had was Frosted Flakes, which were way too sugary for breakfast food, so I had some more carrots instead.

He said that after the play he was going to have to strike some equipment, although he didn't have to take all the lights down like he had had to do at college, and he said that if I wanted, I could fly around a bit and just come back to the house when I got tired. That way I'd get my exercise in.

That sounded like a good idea, and it would give me a chance to explore. He said that there was an airport near town, so I would have to be careful if I was flying.

We had to get out a map to find it; it was southwest of the theatre, so I thought as long as I kept low and on this side of the river, I'd be okay, but I still would want to tell the local airplane directors, 'cause of how close it was.

Since it was Sunday, everyone was pretty relaxed and after we'd finished breakfast we went into the living room and watched Richard and Chris and Autumn play a game on TV called Mario Party where their characters would compete with each other. It looked kind of like fun, and they said that they could start over if I wanted to play, but I didn't want to be a bother. I did play a couple of rounds as Chris, and I wasn't very good at it, so after that I just watched them out of the corner of my eye.

Felicity was in a big cushy chair reading a book, and me and Aric sat on the couch until it was time to go to the theatre.

This time, there wasn't anything broken when he did his test, so we just sat and chatted until James showed up (on time), and I watched the play a second time through and I still didn't completely understand everything that happened, but I did like the songs.

Plays ought to all have songs.

Once it was done, I kissed Aric and headed back out of the theatre. We'd left all my flight gear in Winston, so I got it out and put it on and then called the airplane directors and told them that I wanted to fly over the city, and it took a little while before they let me, and I had to stay under a thousand feet.

I thought I'd stay a little lower, just to be safe, and I hadn't gotten very high before I could see the airport and it was even closer than it had looked on the map.

The city was very strange. Besides the Caterpillar building, I saw another couple of really big buildings called Alro and Wabash Trailer, and they looked kind of like factories, but they were on the same street as lots of stores, so I wasn't completely sure about that. Then when I went further out of town, I saw a big parking lot next to a railroad yard that was completely full of trailers, although I couldn't see a purpose for them all being there. And I went a little bit further down the railroad tracks, and there was a huge building that was surrounded by the biggest parking lots I'd ever seen, and they were filled with cars, most of which were identical except for their color. One side of the parking lot had railroad tracks in it and big silver-roofed railroad cars and there were ramp into the railroad cars, and as I watched, I saw a couple of cars be driven into the railroad cars.

So maybe this was like a ferry terminal, like the one for the Badger, but instead of a boat, the cars went by train.

After that, it was just farmland all around, so I flew back to the 65 Highway and followed that north through town, and off to my side I spotted another runway but I don't think that anybody was using it for airplanes any more, since there were trailers parked on it.

When I got back to Aric's house, he was there and he asked how my flight had been, and when I told him what I'd seen, he said that the really big factory built Subarus, which were a kind of car.

Autumn said that she'd like to see me fly, and then Chris said he thought it would be interesting, too, so we decided that we'd go out somewhere far away from the airport where I could really show off, so we drove a little bit south of town with me and Aric in the front of Winston and everyone else in the back.

He stopped at an intersection that had nothing around it but fields, and I called the airplane directors and told them that I was taking off again, and that I was at E 600 S and S 450 E, which was what the road signs said the roads were called, and I got permission to fly up and around.

Well, I started off with a good routine, keeping kind of low so that they could see me better, and I did some loops and wing-rolls and a dive over the cornfield, which I hadn't been doing much of lately since I'd been working on endurance. Some ponies think that we're just playing when we do aerobatics, and we are, but it's also good 'cause you get experience in recovering from upsets while you're in a storm, which happens a lot.

There were some scattered clouds around, and they were almost close enough to get. I probably shouldn't have, but I looked all the way around and made sure that there weren't any airplanes anywhere near where I was, and then I flew up a few thousand feet higher so that I could catch one.

I was definitely out of practice at it, and the cloud put up a good fight, but I finally got it to cooperate. Of course, the wind had blown us a ways away from where I'd lifted off, and I hadn't gotten as good a look at the ground as I should have. At least I could see Lafayette off in the distance, so that helped orient me, but I was still kinda guessing until I got low enough that I could see Winston on the side of the road.

I brought the cloud all the way down with me and landed on a big lawn with it, and I told them that they could look at it but not to touch it, and Chris said it almost looked like it would fit into the back of Winston.

I told Chris that even if it did fit, I'd have to be back there to keep it together and nobody else could be and what would be the point of taking it home anyway? Sooner or later it would just break up unless I kept giving it attention.

Well, while we were talking about the cloud and looking at it, an Indiana State Police car came up and a man got out of the car and came over and asked just what in the Sam Hill was going on here, so I told him that I'd caught a cloud and brought it down so my friends could see it and that I was going to let it go when they were done looking at it.

He said that he didn't think it was right to take clouds out of the sky, and I told him that it was just an ordinary altocumulus cloud and there were lots more of them up there, and he could look at it if he wanted to.

He said that he'd rather I put it back and that we got on our way, so I went and pushed it back up in the sky. The policeman was making me kind of nervous—when I looked down, he was still there, with his lights still flashing—so I didn't take it all the way back up, but let it go at a few thousand feet up, even though I knew it wouldn't last too long at that height. The air was too dry, and it would all evaporate.

Then I dove back down and we all got back in Winston and drove back to Lafayette, and he followed us for a little while and then when we got to Sagamore Parkway, we turned north and he went south.

When we got home, everyone was hungry for dinner, and so people started making meals for themselves. I guess each person had their own food and nobody really shared, which was kind of a pity: it felt like if they'd all worked together they could have had a better meal than everyone working separately. But I didn't say anything, 'cause I guess that was the way that humans liked to eat in their own homes.

Chris didn’t eat, because he had to leave to go to work—he worked delivering sandwiches for Jimmy John’s, and he said that he thought that they ought to hire a pegasus to do it, ‘cause I wouldn’t have to obey traffic lights and Aric said that a pegasus delivering Jimmy John’s was a great idea.

When we were done with dinner, we drove to a park called Murdock park and walked on the trail through the woods. It wasn't much of a trail, since the park was so small, but it was still nice, and if you ignored all the city-noises, when you were in it it was almost like being up north again.

Then we drove down to the river, and he parked by the train station and we got out and walked to a people-bridge across the railroad tracks and that was neat because you could watch trains go by below you.

He said that I could make a bet on which way the first train would come from, and I asked him what I'd win, and he said that he hadn't thought that far ahead yet. So I looked down the tracks and I couldn't see all that far down them because they curved to follow the river, and I got up on my hind hooves and that didn't help me see any farther, so I was looking up at the structure of the bridge, and Aric reached down and told me that flying up to look was cheating.

And then he said that we could get ice cream across the river, and if I won the bet he'd buy it for me but if I lost I would have to buy it for him.

I told him that I'd left my money back at his apartment, and then I heard a train horn and I cocked my ear and it was coming from the south. I didn't think that he'd heard it; it was pretty faint. So I said that I'd pay him back when we got home if I lost, and I was betting that the next train would come from the south.

The train had gotten a bit closer when Aric finally heard it, but he couldn't tell which direction it was coming from until it was pretty close, and I could faintly hear its engines when it wasn't blowing its horn. And we watched as it came around the bend in the track—it had bright yellow locomotives with gray roofs and a big American flag on the side.

It roared under us in a blast of heat and stinky exhaust, then car after car of stacked boxes went by. I'd seen those before—they were called containers, and they could also be carried on truck trailers and on boats—but I hadn't known that the bottom of the railcar was mostly open until one passed that was empty. I was curious about why some of the cars were empty, and Aric said that he didn't know. He thought it was odd, too, and the only thing he could think was that the train had stopped somewhere and some of the boxes had been unloaded.

After we'd bought our ice cream, I admitted that I'd cheated, and heard the train before I called the direction, and he said that he wasn't mad at me; he'd been planning to buy ice cream anyway.

We watched on the bridge as a train went by the other way, and that one had empty coal cars. Aric said it was probably going to Wyoming to get more coal.

We went to bed early, 'cause my train left in the morning at 7:30. I told Aric that he didn't have to worry about breakfast; I'd get it on the train. And I said that if he didn't want to, he didn't have to take me to the station, either, but he did want to.

I'd said my goodbyes to everyone already, since I knew we were leaving really early.

I helped him get undressed, and we took our time in bed, both trying to make it last as long as we could, and then he curled up with his arms around me and said that he was really happy I'd come, and when things had settled down at the theatre a little bit he'd make time to come back to Kalamazoo at least once before the summer was over.

July 25 [Train Rides]

July 25

I woke up in the middle of the night to thunderstorms and I got up and went outside to the porch and looked at the sky and the rain coming down and I tried to decide if I ought to put on my weather gear and go up there. I didn't know any stormwatchers in Lafayette, so I wasn't sure who I should call, and they looked like they were pretty light anyways.

But when I went back to the bedroom, I felt like I was avoiding my duty by not being flying, and I didn't fall asleep again until the storm had passed.

It was still kinda dark out when we got up and we didn't really have too much time to play in bed. He got dressed while I re-packed my saddlebags and he used the microwave to make us each a cup of coffee to help wake up.

When we got to the train station, he said he'd wait with me until I got on my train, and then he was going back home to get some more sleep. So we sat outside on one of the benches and he kind of dozed off—I guess the coffee didn't do the job—until a passing freight train with more boxes woke him up.

He was kind of jealous when my train arrived. He said that the locomotive was kind of ugly, and it looked like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a freight locomotive or a passenger locomotive and had tried being both, but he liked the rest of it, and he said that he hadn't known that Amtrak wasn't operating out of Lafayette.

We kissed on the platform and then I got on the train and went upstairs to the dome so that I could have breakfast. I waved at him from up there as we left the station, and it was a little while before the waiter came but I didn't mind at all—the longer my breakfast took, the longer I could sit at the table.

I ordered a breakfast burrito and we were all the way in Monon before I'd finished it. Even though I'd had a bunch of meals on trains before, it was still strange to start eating in one city and not be finished until I was in another city.

I probably could have spent a little bit longer finishing my coffee, but it would have been rude to be keeping someone else from my table, so I got up and went downstairs to the seat in my car and watched the fields go by.

When the train started getting into Chicago, I was disappointed, because the view wasn't as good anymore. We crossed lots of roads and when I'd look at the cars waiting to go by, I wondered where they were going and what they thought of the train and whether or not any of them noticed me. I think it would be really easy to get lost in a big city like Chicago, 'cause so much of it that I passed by looked alike.

We finally dipped down into the trainshed, and the conductor thanked everyone as they got off the train and he helped people with their suitcases, too. He didn't get to help me, 'cause my saddlebags were securely strapped on.

I had six hours before the Amtrak train would take me back to Kalamazoo, so I left the station and flew back to the parks and started walking around until I saw a big building that was called the Shedd Aquarium.

That sounded like it would be a fun place to visit, so I went inside and paid the woman at the kiosk and she gave me a little brochure which said where all the exhibits were.

Well, the first place I went to was an exhibit about fish that lived in the Great Lakes, and that was really interesting. Most of the fish were pretty dull colors, but some of them were really pretty just the same. They had lots of tanks against the wall, a couple of smaller ones that you could go all the way around, and a big open tank in the center like the one in Seattle where you could pet sea-life. This one had barriers around the edge, so we probably weren't supposed to pet the fish.

Then I went to see a northern exhibit and that had penguins which are black-and-white birds that can't fly. They'd waddle around on land and then flop into the water and swim around for a little bit then climb back out and waddle around some more. They looked like they were kind of dumb, but it was fun to watch them. And they were pretty good swimmers—a lot better than me.

I was kind of running late on time, so I thought I could only see one more exhibit before I had to leave. Since I wanted to get the most in, I visited something called Waters of the World, which had fish from all over. I liked those—there were a lot of really bright ones that lived in corals or in the Amazon River, and there were some really weird ones, too. They had seahorses, and octopuses, and they also had a fish called Granddad, who was the oldest fish in any aquarium. They had gotten him in 1933, and had had him ever since.

He was kind of ugly.

I went by a really big tank on the way out, which had lots of fish and even sharks swimming around in it. One of the sharks liked to swim really close to the glass, and I saw a couple of people jump back as he came by, 'cause maybe they thought he was going to get them.

I wished I could have stayed longer, but I couldn't miss my train, so I flew back to the station and stopped at Au Bon Pain and got another vegetarian wrap, then I went down to the trainshed and waited for my train.

It backed in, and I went to get on but the conductor said that I had to wait because it wasn't ready yet. So I waited while a bunch of people with yellow carts got aboard it, and after a while they left and the conductor told me that they had been cleaning it and now it was ready and I could get onboard if I wanted to.

I picked a seat on the left side of the train, 'cause that side had the best overall view. Then I dozed off a little bit, until the train started to move.

We bumped and banged through all the tracks in the station and crept along the tracks, past all the sidings full of railcars. I looked out at them as we went by and wondered if maybe the train that I'd seen going north last night was here—there were lots of the railroad cars with the container-boxes on them, but they all looked kinda the same.

I couldn't imagine how humans managed to sort them all out. The railcars had numbers on them, and a lot of the boxes did, too, so I guess they must have just walked around until they found the one they wanted. If they'd been smart, they could have put numbers on the top and then somebody could just sit in a watch-tower and find them that way.

When we finally got through all the outskirts of Chicago, the train started to pick up speed. I think the engine driver was impatient, 'cause it actually pushed me back in my seat a little bit when he started to accelerate. And before too long, we were flying through the countryside.

Before, the cars I'd seen on the highway were going faster than us, but now we just rushed right past them.

I didn't know that we were in Kalamazoo until the train started slowing down by Western Michigan's campus, and then we went by Kalamazoo College and curved into downtown.

I waited my turn before I got off the train, and then took off from the train station to go to Meghan's apartment.

She was really happy to see me back, and she asked me how my weekend had been, so I told her all about it, and I was yawning before I was done, ‘cause I hadn’t slept very much last night. So Meghan insisted that I ought to lie down and get some sleep, and I kinda didn’t want to go to bed before she was ready, but I was almost asleep on her lap.

Meghan said that she wouldn’t be up much later, but she had some things that she had to finish before she could go to bed—she had some laundry downstairs I think she said—and so I got in bed and I told myself I was only going to doze, but I fell all the way asleep and I woke up a little bit when she got in bed and put her arm around me, and then I fell back asleep again.

July 27 [Makers]

July 27

I was a little bit stiff when I woke up and so when I got out of bed I did some stretches to help loosen up my muscles. I should have gone outside; the floor in my apartment is wood and it's kind of slippery underhoof sometimes. Not as bad as the bathtub was before I got the mat, but it's easier to do deep stretches when you can really dig your hooves into something. I learned that from an earth pony.

It was a nice day outside, and I thought that I'd start with a short flight to warm up my wings, then do some trotting, and fly back home for lunch. Then I thought I'd go and see the makers and find out if they could come up with some kind of harness for my GoPro.

While I ate breakfast, I considered whether I wanted to wear my camera or not. It was going to be an easy flight, so even if it slipped off I could catch it, and even if I had to land to adjust it that wasn't a big deal.

So I put on my camelback and my vest and then I sat on my rump and pulled the camera-holder over my head. It was kind of stretchy, so it gripped pretty well.

If I was going to turn the camera on, I would have to take it back off, 'cause I couldn't use my hooves on the buttons.

Since it was just for practice right now, I left it off. Nobody would want to watch a movie of me flying to the nature center anyways.

I flew low, so that I didn't have to bother the airplane directors, and went straight to their pasture and dropped in at the far end, away from the deer. Deer didn't like new things, and ran off into the woods whenever something scared them.

My GoPro had stayed on all the way over here, so now it was time to see what it would do when I was trotting.

I did an easy lap to warm up—I hadn't been doing as much legwork as I ought to have, mostly because I didn't like cantering and galloping on sidewalks. With how close the nature center was, though, that really wasn't a good excuse.

I picked up speed a little bit on the second lap, and when I was on the straight leg that went to the high point, I went to a full-out gallop.

That turned out to be a little much for the GoPro, and I felt it begin to slide up my head, until the strap got caught on my ears, which was really annoying, and I had to stop and pull it back down. Which told me all I needed to know about the head-mount: it was okay for gentle use, but in a storm, it would be gone by the time the first big wind gust hit, and I'd never find it again.

So I didn't go any faster than a canter after that, and my GoPro stayed on my head where it belonged.

When I started to get tired, I made one last trot around the path, and on the uphill side I changed into a canter even though my legs were starting to get tired, just so when I reached the peak I could let my wings take over.

It wasn't quite as fun as doing it at a full gallop, but it was close.

I kept up my speed as I climbed above the trees, and then I peaked out at about two hundred feet and dropped my nose down to keep my speed up, and then just for the fun of it I went to the first road as fast as I could, until I angled across Westnedge. Douglas Avenue swings by really close to it for some reason.

I followed Douglas Avenue until it angled east, and I went west to get back to my apartment.

I decided that I'd pamper myself with a bath, and started filling up the bathtub before I took off my equipment. It felt weird to take off the GoPro harness; the way it had been squeezing down on my head made it feel like my head got bigger when I took it off, and it kind of tangled up my mane some.

It felt really good to lie in the bathtub, even though I couldn't stretch out my wings over the water unless I turned sideways and scrunched myself up against the edge.

The bath would have been nicer with some bath salts, too. I wonder if humans have those? I'd have to ask Meghan.

When I felt fully relaxed, I got out and drained the bathtub and shook myself off and went into the bedroom to have lunch.

As I was eating, I looked at the bag of birdseed that was supposed to go to Aric's. I'd had trouble with the last one, and I didn't want to risk dropping it on somebody below me on my way over to his house, which meant that the sensible thing to do would be carry it on my back.

There was a way that earth ponies lifted heavy things up onto their backs, and I kinda knew what it was because I'd seen them do it plenty of times, but it wasn't anything that I'd ever tried, and even when I got partway under it, I had trouble lifting my head up to slide it down.

I'd never thought that earth ponies had strong necks, too.

I could use my wings to shift it a little bit side-to-side, and that got it centered, and that was about when I started to think how I was going to get down the stairs and open the door at the bottom. Flying off the balcony wasn't an option; with it crosswise on my back, I couldn't really use my wings.

Then I got the bright idea to slide it further back to clear them, and I could sort of bend my legs and hop it back which worked pretty well once I got the hang of it. I'm sure Aquamarine would have been laughing if she'd seen me.

That idea didn't even make it over the balcony railing. As soon as I started to lift off, the weight back there pushed my rump down, and I just managed to level out before it slid all the way off. But I wasn't going to lift off, not with it unsecure.

So I had no choice but to resort to walking down the stairs with it pressing against my neck, and then when I opened the door hop it back until it was centered on my back.

After that, it didn't give me any more trouble. Every now and then it wanted to shift, but I could use my wings to get it back.

When I was finally in his backyard, I dropped it off my back (gently, so the bag wouldn't break) and opened the garage door, then I gripped it in my forelegs and flew it in and set it on the bench. Then I thought about the mouse—or mice—and how it would be better off in a metal container where they couldn't get to it.

There were some metal boxes with tools in them, and I suppose I could have filled them with seed, but I would have had to empty out the bag into them, and it would be really inconvenient when I needed to fill the bird feeder again. I could have put them in the cab of not-Winston, but I didn't feel like taking it back out of the garage.

Then I saw his icebox, tucked away in a corner, and it was big enough. So I got it down and opened the lid and jammed the birdseed bag into it, and when the lid was closed again I was satisfied that would stop the mouse.

I flew back home and got my GoPro, then flew over to the building where the makers worked. It took a little bit of searching to find it, because I couldn't quite remember how Peggy had gotten there, and a lot of buildings look kinda the same from the air.

I found it eventually, though, and landed outside. There were a bunch of cars parked around it, so I went inside.

Karen was there, and a couple of boys that I remembered from before but I didn't remember their names at all, which made me feel kinda bad.

Well, they were happy to see me and it turned out that they made the rope for tying up a cloud. I'd kind of forgotten about that, and of course they wanted me to try right away, but I didn't have my flight gear (I'd stayed low so I didn't need it) and there weren't any clouds in the sky anyway.

When I told them that I wanted a harness so that I could fasten my GoPro well enough to use it in a thunderstorm, they got really enthusiastic, and Karen went into a little side room and brought out a harness like the one I'd tried on at Best Buy. I told her how it wouldn't work, and she said that she'd make it work, and all we had to do was figure out how to adapt it to me.

So I stood there while she fitted it on me and took measurements with her tape—one of the boys who was called Conner wrote down all her measurements—and then she got some pins and bunched up the harness and it was a little bit better but still didn't fit right. She and Conner debated about that a little bit, and then they sketched out something that they thought might fit better.

Karen went back into the side room and brought out a roll of narrow cloth, like what the bottom part of my camelback straps were made of, and started building a harness around me, and then I thought to tell her that I would be wearing a camelback when I wore the GoPro.

So that made things different, because they had to account for those straps, too, but then she thought that it might make it easier, because they could put buckles on my camelback straps and then all it would need was a loop around my back.

I didn't have my camelback, but they had a backpack that was kind of similar, so I put that on and she made some more measurements and once she had something she thought would work, she had me move my head around to see how I got in and out, and before too long she said that she knew what to make.

She told me to come back Friday afternoon, and we'd do a final fitting, and hopefully there would be some clouds then so that I could use my rope.

I flew back home, and out of the corner of my eye I was starting to see clouds off to the west, and if I'd had my flight gear, I would have turned around and gone back so that I could wrangle a cloud.

Before I ate dinner, I checked the weather on the computer. I'd been thinking of flying south all the way to the 80 and 90 Highway; that was about 37 miles each way, which was just a little bit longer than my flight to Grand Rapids had been. The forecast said that there was about a 50% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow, though, and I didn't want to tire myself out with a long flight if I was needed for weather patrol, so I thought that maybe it would be smart to check the weather again in the morning and then decide what I wanted to do.

After I'd eaten, I sat down on my papasan and read more of Isaiah. He said that once God got done being mad at the Israelites, he was going to be mad at the Assyrians, and then He was going to strike down Babylon and the Philistines and Moab and then Damascus and Cush . . . it sounded like He was mad at everyone for not following his rules. Isaiah even said that God was going to devastate the Earth, even though He'd promised not to do that anymore after the flood. That was kind of worrying, because He'd even made a rainbow to remind Noah and Noah's children of His promise.

I thought that maybe as long as He kept sending rainbows, that meant that it wasn't time for Him to lay waste to the Earth yet. That was something that I could ask Liz about. She would know.

When I read a little bit further, Isaiah also said that God was going to do good things for the Israelites who followed His rules, so maybe things weren't as bad as I thought that they were going to be. And I had to remember that what the Bible said was a long time ago, so maybe all the things that Isaiah had said had already happened and I was just reading about it afterwards.

And I did know from reading that sometimes even a wise, faithful man didn't know everything that God did.

It would have been so much simpler if God had written the Bible Himself.

I should have finished Isaiah, but I felt like taking an evening flight around the neighborhood. So I put on my flight gear and took off, making a big oval that went over Western Michigan's campus and downtown.

I was yawning by the time that I got back to my apartment, so as soon as I got out of my flight gear, I lay down on the futon and fell asleep.

July 28 [Barley Soup]

July 28

The first thing I did after I got out of bed was turn on my computer so that I could check the weather report. It said that storms were coming in in the afternoon, and they sounded like they were pretty certain about that. So I thought that I'd probably postpone a long flight, in case I was needed.

So the next question was where to go instead.

I decided that I would fly along Main Street to the M-40 intersection, which is really easy to see because there is a flashing light to direct traffic there. It would be a little bit over twenty miles, I could stop at Meijer on my way back and get more cans of anchovies, and then I'd have plenty of energy left for the afternoon, if I needed it.

Plus, that would give me time to finish Isaiah before I met with Pastor Liz, as long as the storms held off anyway.

I filled up my camelback and got my flight clothes on and then I debated whether I should add my saddlebags overtop, in case I bought more than would fit in the camelback's pockets. I still had a little bit of beer left from last time and the bags of birdseed were new, and I couldn't think of anything else I needed.

Then I remembered I was getting overeager to fly, and hadn't even eaten breakfast yet.

It was too much bother to take all my gear back off, so I snacked on some of the hay and then called the airplane directors. Dori told me to keep low until I crossed the 131 Highway, and told me to have a good flight, and I thanked her and then took off.

I flew over Main Street until it went over the 131 Highway, and then I announced where I was on my radio and said that I was climbing to 5000 feet. Another pilot thanked me and said that he was at eight thousand southeast of Gobles and headed for the Kalamazoo airport. So that was someone to watch out for, and I decided I'd fly a little below 5000 feet, to be extra safe. But not too much, 'cause someone else could be planning to fly under me, like the stumpy airplanes in Battle Creek.

Out to the west, it was clear, but I could feel that the air was restless and changing, and so there probably was going to be a storm later on.

I'd just gone past the fish ponds, when I saw a few big birds circling off in the distance, and I knew that they must be buzzards, 'cause they looked kind of hawkish, but hawks didn't fly in groups. They were dropping down, which meant that they'd seen something.

Buzzards are important, but I don't like them all that much. They're big and ugly and they smell bad, and they're mean, too.

Just the same, I thought that I'd better see what they'd found.

I had to lose some altitude, so I said that I was descending and looked around to make sure that there weren't any airplanes around, and then I went down to a thousand feet. Buzzards have really good eyesight—better than a pony's.

They were all clustered around something kinda big, which was a little ways off the side of the road. I was close enough that I could smell it, but all I smelled was decay, and that didn't help.

I circled once and decided that it probably had been a deer. It was about the right size, and what I could see of it was the right color. I'd seen them by the side of the road before—Aric said that they were dumb and ran into the road in front of cars and I felt bad about that but there really wasn't anything I could do to change it. He said that the road commission usually came along and took them away and I didn't know what happened to them after that.

It was another reminder that humans had different feelings about animals than ponies did.

There was nothing I could do, so after checking for airplanes and telling any pilots who were listening what I was doing, I flew back up to five thousand feet and kept heading west.

Just past M-40, there was a big greenhouse but instead of being full of flowers it was full of cars. I dipped down a little bit to get a better look at it, just because it was so odd, and then I turned around and flew back east.

I was glad that I was listening to my radio, because I heard someone say that he was taking off from Newman's Airport. I didn't know where that was, but he sounded kinda close on the radio, so I kept alert and a couple of miles ahead of me I suddenly saw an airplane pop up from the trees, right alongside the road. He was going across my path, and well below me, but climbing pretty fast. So I kept a good eye on him, just to make sure that he didn't come in my direction.

He kept going north, though.

When I got closer, I saw the runway. It was a little ways back from the road and I don't think I would have noticed it if I hadn't been looking for it.

I landed at Meijer and went inside to get anchovies. The store was always pretty busy, and every time I came in I thought about just flying over all the displays to get where I wanted to go, but it's really rude and also against the rules.

They have a kind of machine that you can use instead of a cashier, and I had fewer than twelve cans of anchovies, so I was allowed to use it, but it seemed kind of complicated to me, so I just waited in line until it was my turn.

I didn't want to bother Dori, so I stayed low all the way back to my apartment, then got out of my gear and took a shower.

It was a little bit early for lunch, so I sat on my papasan and finished up Isaiah. After it got done saying all that God was going to do, it told how the King of Assyria had tried to attack Jerusalem, and God had struck down all his soldiers, because He had promised to protect Jerusalem.

Then He said how he was going to bring down Babylon and restore everything that had been ruined, and that Cyrus was going to help Him.

I remembered Cyrus being mentioned in another book I'd read recently. I think it was Ezra, and they said lots of good things about him.

So that made me think that maybe some of the chapters in the Bible weren't in order, or else they told the same story in a couple of different ways.

I took a break and ate lunch while I thought about it. I knew that the Hearth's Warming Pageant wasn't quite the same as what I learned when I got old enough to train for fighting, and then by then I was wise enough to know that there were some things that adults knew that foals didn't need to know or weren't ready to understand yet. So maybe the Bible was written like that—maybe sometimes something was written one way so that one group of people could understand it, and then another way so that wiser people could understand.

It was yet another question I had for Liz.

Isaiah ended with God saying all the good things He was going to do to the good, faithful people, and the bad things He was going to do to those who hadn't followed His rules. I was really curious if it had all happened already—surely it must have, because there was a lot more of the Bible I hadn't read yet.

It was getting cloudy outside, so I flew up and got a feel for the sky. Rain was coming for sure, and it felt like there would be a thunderstorm, but it was probably still a ways out.

I went to the National Weather Service and studied their maps for a little bit. I thought I'd have time to meet with Liz—which was especially important since I'd had to skip last week—as long as Mel would give me a ride out to our stormwatching spot. But I'd want to make sure that I had all my gear with me when I went to see her.

I sent Mel a telephone telegram and said that he should stop by Stetson Chapel and pick me up there if he went out before six.

I gathered everything up and put it in my saddlebags, then I relaxed on the papasan and watched the birds. They knew rain was coming; they were coming a bit earlier than usual, and they were less chatty.

Some of the weathermares got like that, too. Especially if it was a bad storm coming. I'd noticed that it was mostly the older mares; the ones who were my age liked to talk and do stuff until it was time to go out.

I decided that I'd leave a little bit early, so I put on my saddlebags and since I didn't want to disturb the birds, I went out the downstairs door instead of my balcony door.

Liz was happy to see me, and she was really proud that I'd gotten all the way through Isaiah already. I told her that some of the books had been pretty easy to read, like Song of Songs, and others like Ecclesiastes had been a bit harder to understand, and that I was a bit confused about the timeline of things.

She said that was a lot to break down, so she started by saying that humans now knew that the book of Isaiah was written by several authors over a period of centuries, which was part of the reason I was having trouble figuring it out. And she said that I had been right; that there were parts of it that were also talked about in other parts of the Bible, and that the conquering of Jerusalem and restoration had already happened historically.

Then she said that the Book of Isaiah also prophesied the arrival of Christ, and that didn't happen until long after it had been written.

So that settled some of my confusion, and we started to talk about Proverbs, since it made the most sense to talk about the books in the order I'd read them, even if that wasn't always the order that things had happened. And there wasn't a whole lot to talk about there, because we both agreed that it was good to be wise, and most of what Proverbs said made good sense.

Liz had suggested that I think of Ecclesiastes as a man asking questions on the journey of his life, and only reaching his wisdom towards the end. She said that rather than be absolute statements, he was deliberately asking provoking questions to make the reader think more deeply about things, because sometimes the simplest and easiest answer wasn't the right one.

That seemed to me like an odd way of doing things, but maybe that was how humans thought. My philosophy class had talked about a lot of philosophers who had contradicted other philosophers, and sometimes it seemed like the newer one was smarter and sometimes I don't think that they were as wise at all, and I told Liz that.

She laughed and said that the pursuit of truth is a lifelong journey and the only thing that can be known for certain is that a different person ends the journey than the one who begun it.

We'd just started to talk about Song of Songs when my telephone chirped at me and when I dug it out of my saddlebags, I saw it was Mel, and he said that he was on Academy Street.

I told Liz that I had to go and watch the weather, and she reminded me that I could call her anytime if I was having trouble figuring something out, and then gave me a hug.

It was already raining a little bit, and I could hear distant thunder. Mel said that on the map, it didn't look like anything bad was going to come for a little while. I wanted to be ready, though, so I got into my flight gear in his front seat, which wasn't easy at all. I left the camelback off, since I hadn't thought to fill it before I went to see Liz, and of course I didn't put my saddlebags back on.

He parked at our spot, and I got out of the truck and flew up and we checked our radios, and then I climbed up until I was at the base of the clouds.

There was thunder and lightning above me, mostly going through the clouds. And the rain was pretty light for half an hour or so, and then it picked up a little bit, and the clouds got more thundery.

I stayed up for a couple of hours, and it never got really intense. The rain didn't get too heavy, and the winds weren't bad, either, and once I'd seen that it was clearing in the west, I flew back down and sparked off on a tree, since streetlights didn't like it, then I shook myself off before getting into Mel's truck.

He told me that storms were forecast for tomorrow, too, in the morning, and I said that I'd be ready.

I had him drive me all the way to Meghan's apartment, and she came down pretty quickly when I rang the doorbell.

I gave an appreciative sniff at the door, and she said that what I was smelling was her homemade barley soup that was the perfect thing for a rainy day. She said that she thought I'd be out in the weather and might want something to warm me up so she'd left the pot simmering on the stove.

Well, I was starving, 'cause I hadn't eaten since lunch. I should have known better.

She helped me take off my flight gear and then I went right to the table and sat down, and she brought me a bowl of soup and then went to get a towel to drape over me, 'cause I was still pretty damp.

It had a kind of tangy kick to it which she said was Worcestershire Sauce, and said that she hoped that I didn't mind it, and I said that I liked it.

I had to force myself to take my time eating, 'cause I knew that I'd be sorry if I bolted my food. And when I'd finished my bowl she asked if I wanted another, and I did, but not right away.

So she left the pot on the stove and she dried me off and brushed my mane and tail out, and then I had the second bowl of soup.

I wanted to help her with dishes, but she told me that I deserved to relax, and that when she got done she'd preen my wings for me.

So I stretched out on the bed and relaxed until she came into the bedroom and she sat down on the bed and I held a wing up so she could scoot up against me and I could lay it out over her lap.

I leaned my head up against her side while she worked, and I was already pretty sleepy by the time she'd finished one wing: she was warm against me and my tummy was full of warm soup.

We switched sides so that she could do my other wing, and then I helped her get undressed. I tickled her butt with my wings and she said that I'd better not mess up my feathers after she'd just preened them.

I rolled over on my back and told her that I'd keep my wings in, and I mostly did.

July 29 [Cloud-Rope]

July 29

Me and Meghan had kind of a rushed morning, 'cause as soon as I woke up I could feel the incoming storm in the air. I got out of bed and checked my portable telephone, and I hadn't gotten a call from Mel yet, so they weren't right on top of us, but I knew that they were going to be.

Meghan got out of bed right after I did—I guess she doesn't like sleeping past her alarm as much when I'm not in bed with her—and she looked at her telephone and then showed me a picture of Michigan with stormclouds off to the west, but they were still a ways out so we had some time at least.

She looked at it again while I was brushing her hair after her shower, and said it was getting closer and just then my portable telephone chirped at me, and it was Mel, who said that he would be at my apartment to pick me up in fifteen minutes.

So I had to send him a message back that I wasn't at my apartment but I was at Meghan's, which was where he'd taken me last night.

Well, we had enough time to eat breakfast, and then I heard Mel's truck come into her driveway, and I kissed her and said that I'd see her tonight.

The thunderclouds were still a little ways off in the distance when we got to our spot, and I had plenty of time to fly up and test the radio.

The first couple that came through weren't anything too dangerous, and I'd been up in the air for almost an hour before things started to get interesting. We'd passed the time by me trying to teach him the names of clouds in Equestrian, and even though it was hard to get the pronunciation right over the radio, I think we both learned some stuff from it. I know it helped me remember what humans called certain cloud formations.

The next storm front led with a heavy downpour, but it tapered off right as it passed, into a moderate rain, and it kept up like that—mostly moderate but occasionally heavy—for the next hour. The lightning rate stayed about the same through most of it. I couldn't tell for sure when it was really heavy, because it was hard to hear and hard to see, so I had to assume that it was keeping to the pattern.

It tapered off to almost nothing and I had a little break before the next set of clouds came over, and I'd had my eye on them because even with the limited vision I had below the cloud deck, this was darker and there was a lot more rain coming out of it.

It was a lot nicer to be watching storms during the day, because I didn't get caught out by sudden gusts or downpours. So I was ready for it when it hit, and for a couple of minutes it was really intense, then it tapered back off to a moderate rainfall.

When it had finally tapered off and I couldn't see any more stormclouds off to the west, I curved around and landed, and when I got in Mel's truck I was surprised to see that it was almost noon. Time flies by really quick when you're doing something.

He dropped me off at my apartment, and I hung up my vest so that it could dry off a little and then took a nice shower and had lunch, then sat out on the balcony so I could preen my wings. The clouds had broken up a little so that there was some sun, although it wasn't enough to get me all the way dry.

After relaxing in the papasan for a little bit, I put all my flight gear back on and put my GoPro on my head so that I would have it with me, and then I took off again, this time heading to the maker's building.

There were more cars in the parking lot than there had been last time, which made me think that they were all busy with something.

When I got inside, there was a group of them clustered around a computer, and I could see that they were either watching a movie or playing a game. I was kind of curious what they were doing, but then Karen called me over and said that she wanted me to try my harness on.

She said that it was kind of like a breastcollar harness, but the normal human style wouldn't work on me because I had to be able to put it on and take it off by myself. So what she'd done that I thought was really clever was make it so that it attached to my camelback straps, and then there was another cross-strap which was held in place by a long velcro strip that kept it all stable and in place.

I could pull the strip tight with my teeth, and then hold it in place with a hoof and it would stick, just like those little burr-balls that stick in your coat. And even if it came unfastened in flight, I wouldn't lose the GoPro, it would just move around more than it should.

Well, they wanted me to test it out, and they also wanted me to test the rope, too, since there were some scattered clouds that were following after the storm.

So I asked the airplane directors for permission, since I was going to have to fly up pretty high to get it. It was the grumpy man, and I had to explain to him twice that I was going to go up and try and get a cloud and then tie it to a tree.

Finally, he said that it was okay, but I needed to keep listening to my radio and be sure not to drift closer to them, which I said I wouldn't—the wind was going the other way anyhow. So I looped the rope around me and then Karen said that I ought to have my GoPro on, because that way we could look at the movie it made and if my harness needed to be adjusted, she could do that.

She attached it to my breastcollar, and I flew up and looked around for a suitable cloud that was drifting away from the airport.

I found one that looked about the right size, and flew up to it and circled it to get a good sense of it, and then I started working the edges in and compacting it down some.

It took me a little while to get it shaped up, especially since I had to keep moving it back against the wind, so I didn't drift off too far. And then came the next tricky part, which was tying a loop in the rope while I was in the air.

I'd learned a fair bit of ropework from sailorponies, and while I'd never be as good at it as they were, I finally got it tied and then I draped the rope over the cloud so that it was about centered, and let the free ends of the rope hang.

I hadn't wanted to tie the knot while I was on the ground, because I knew I'd have to drape the rope and then bring the ends together. In hindsight, though, I could have.

I was glad that I'd gotten lots of rope, because the cloud had a pretty respectable girth.

I took the free end and flew over to the loop-knot, then slipped it through and pulled it tight. And just like that, I had a cloud on a rope.

The other thing I hadn't thought about that I probably should have was how I was going to tow the cloud. I could hold the rope in my teeth and pull the cloud backwards like that, but it wasn’t that easy to fly backwards.

There was a really clever knot that sailorponies used when they were tying up their ships: it was a couple of loops of rope and if you made it right, you could toss it over the end of a piling, and it would pull itself tight and not let go, and I could have done that around a hoof. I didn't, because I knew if a sudden wind came up, the cloud had a lot of sail area, and I'd be going wherever it went, whether I wanted to or not.

So what I did instead was to tie a slip-knot around my hind hoof, and I left the free end of the rope long enough that I could untie it by just pulling with my mouth if I had to.

That made for a really weird flight back, 'cause I had the cloud tugging against one hind leg, and it put me really off-balance, and my tail kept hitting the rope, too.

I don't really think about my tail all that much when I'm flying, but now I couldn't help but think of it every time it hit the rope.

I needed to be careful coming into the parking lot, because the cloud was hard to control, and I knew that if it touched any of the electrical wires around that would be bad, and then I also had to warn everyone not to touch the cloud or the rope.

There was a dead tree next to the parking lot that looked pretty sturdy, so I flew over to it and wrapped the rope around a branch, then unhooked it from my leg and wrapped it more securely around the branch, so it wouldn't go anywhere, and flew up to my cloud and landed on top.

I knocked out a little hollow on the top of the cloud and lay down in that, and that was nice. If I put my head down right on the cloudstuff, the little ridge blocked my view of the ground and I could imagine that I was floating freely in the sky.

The rope felt kind of funny against my belly—it was almost like sitting on a cold piece of metal, but my body heat didn't warm it up at all; it stayed cold. I hadn't noticed that when it was tied to my leg, but then that had been such a strange position to be in that I probably wouldn't have noticed.

It would have been nice to spend the rest of the afternoon up there, but I knew that the people on the ground were probably still watching, and Karen was waiting to find out if my GoPro mount worked, so I got up off my cloud and landed.

Well, they had a lot of questions about the cloud and how it worked and how I could bring it down like that and I couldn't answer all their questions as well as they wanted me to, but there was some stuff that I just know but can't explain. It would be like me asking how to walk on two legs—someone could tell me the principle of it, but I wouldn't know how to do it from that.

They also wanted to know how long the cloud would stay up there and I said that I didn't know and we'd go inside and see how the GoPro worked and then when we came back out we'd find out if the cloud was still there.

So Karen put a cable in my GoPro and got the video on her folding computer, and we all watched it, and she thought it looked pretty good. It wasn't quite a pegasus-eye view, but it was close.

The part where I shaped the cloud didn't come out well at all, 'cause mostly all you could see was the cloud. But everyone was satisfied with the mount, and I said that it hadn't been in the way at all, and then Karen had me take it off and put it back on again, just to show that I could, and we were all satisfied with how it worked.

When we went out into the parking lot, the cloud was still there but it was looking kind of raggedy. I got up on it, and I could feel that it had lost a lot of its moisture while I was inside, 'cause I hadn't been around to keep it under control. It sort of firmed up again under me, but it wasn't the cloud it had been anymore.

So I thought that it would work okay if I was lying on the cloud, but it wasn't going to keep a cloud tethered outside my room for any length of time unless I was holding on to the end of the rope.

I hadn't really thought of a good way to get the cloud back off the rope, either, so I wound up just going up there and breaking it up, which turned into a mini-rainstorm in the parking lot before it was gone. Then I just untied the rope from the tree and picked it up off the ground.

Well, before I left, Conner suggested one more improvement, and that was instead of my loop-knot that I'd made, he tied on a clip called a carabiner which was a clever little aluminum clip that easily snapped over the rope and came off pretty easily, too. There was a spring on it so that it wanted to go closed, and then a separate little security sleeve to make sure that it wouldn't open when you didn't want it to.

I was really happy with what they'd made for me, and I thought that their price was very good. They said that if I thought I needed anything adjusted, to just come back and they'd fix it, and then they helped coil up my rope and put it on my back. That was another thing that the carabiner turned out to be useful for—it clipped onto the strap of my camelback, and held the rope in place.

Meghan was already at my apartment when I got home, and after I got out of my flight gear we went over next door to have barbeque with Jeff. We brought the rest of the beers I had left to share with everyone, and Meghan had brought six of her own also.

When I was telling Meghan about my rope, a couple of neighbors overheard us and after the second time I'd told the same story I was thinking about bringing down another cloud to hang over the party, but with all the wires around I thought maybe it would be too dangerous. What I needed to do was practice over a lake until I got a really good feeling for how the cloud was going to behave, before I tried it somewhere as confined as Jeff's backyard.

I also got to race across the backyard a couple of times carrying Trinity, which was lots of fun for both of us.

Both Meghan and I were a bit tired out by the time we finally left Jeff's barbeque, but not quite tired enough to go to bed, so we sat on the futon and talked and snuggled a little bit—I rested my head on Meghan's lap, and she pet my mane and scratched my back. I burrowed my head under her shirt and kissed her stomach and pressed my head up against her chest and then I got kind of tangled up under her shirt and she thought that was really funny.

We didn't fold down the futon until after, and that was only because we both had to use the bathroom before we fell asleep.

July 30 [Lost in a Storm]

July 30

I woke up to my portable telephone ringing, and it took me a minute to know what it was. I guess Meghan was confused by it, too, because she also woke up and was trying to turn off the alarm on her portable telephone.

By the time I got out of bed to answer it it had stopped, but it remembers who called and shows you.

Meghan was sitting up in the futon and she looked a little bit grouchy, and I turned my ears and heard a familiar engine outside, and I saw that it was Mel who had called. It took me longer than it should have to figure out what was going on, and then I opened the balcony door and could feel the way the wind was moving and faintly hear thunder off in the distance.

Meghan must have figured it out, too, because she had made her telephone show a picture of the clouds and the whole west side of Michigan was covered in yellow and red splotches.

Just then my portable telephone rang again and it was Mel and I told him that I'd be down pretty quick and started scrambling to get my flight gear together.

Meghan wanted to come, too, so both of us were scrambling to get ready. I got her clothes together for her while she was in the bathroom and then when she was getting dressed I filled my camelback and decided that I could put on the rest of my flight gear while we were on the way. It would be even more crowded in the truck with Meghan there, but she could help me get dressed.

Mel shook her hand and introduced himself when she got in the truck, and we didn't have a lot more time than that because the storm was coming.

Meghan said that quarter to six on a Saturday morning was far too early to be up, and I kinda agreed but what could we do? Back in Equestria, the weather team worked in shifts, but here I was the only weather-watching pegasus, so I had to go out when the storms came, no matter how inconvenient it might be.

It was really weird to have Meghan dressing me while I sat on her lap. Fortunately, she knew how everything went on except for my GoPro, and once I explained it to her, she didn't have any trouble attaching it where it belonged. She said that she'd turn the camera on when we got out there, because she could do it for me.

The two radios in Mel's truck were pretty active with updates from other watchers and warnings from the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids. There was a severe thunderstorm warning, a flood warning, and a tornado watch, as well as a small craft advisory for Lake Michigan.

On our way out, he stopped at Tim Horton's long enough to get coffee for all of us, because he said that we both looked like we needed it.

When we got to our watching spot, the gusty wind that I'd felt earlier had dropped off, but off in the distance I could see constant lightning in the clouds.

We sat in the cab and drank our coffee, then I called the airplane directors and told them that I was going up, and Dori gave me one-time permission to go through the clouds and see what they looked like from on top. She said that I couldn't stay there; I'd have to go back down under them, but I could take a look and report back.

So I flew up and once I was about a thousand feet up, I checked my radio with Mel and waved to him and Meghan (I'm not sure that they could see anything besides my blinking light), and then started climbing to the clouds.

For once, I didn't have to watch my altimeter, and I didn't have to stop when I hit the bottom of the clouds. I pushed right through and kept going, my light giving strange flashes up in the cloud.

When you're in a cloud, it's just like being in fog. Sounds get strange and distant, and smells are overwhelmed by the clouds itself, and it's pretty easy to get disoriented. My blinking light was not helping with that, either, because all it did was light up the cloudstuff around me. If there were any airplanes in this cloud, we'd never see each other before we collided.

This cloud was going to grow into a thundercloud once it got a little bit more energy, but it wasn't quite there yet. Back in Equestria, we'd have been working on clouds like this to get them to drop what they had before they could pile up into a big stormcloud, but with just me here that wasn't going to happen.

As I got close to the top of it, it started to get lighter, and pretty soon I broke through. I didn't have a proper perspective, since I hadn't been allowed to fly above clouds on Earth, so I couldn't say for sure how far away the front was, but it was a towering pile of anvil-shaped cumulus clouds, flashing with lightning all the way up to their tops.

I told Mel what I was seeing, and then I told Dori on the airplane radio as well, and before I went back down I stood on a little hill of cloud and looked around me, since I probably wasn't going to get the opportunity to be on top of a solid cloud deck very often.

Off to the east, I could see some rainclouds that had already passed by, and there were other big towers of cumulus all around me, so it looked like as far as I could see everyone was going to be getting storms.

There were also some airplanes far above me, adding their own clouds to the mix. I could see an arc where one of them had turned to avoid the top of a stormcloud.

When I'd gotten a good look, I punched my way back into the cloud and made my best guess for how far I'd drifted when I was above the clouds. Since I couldn't see anything on the ground through the clouds, I had no way of knowing where I was, and I couldn't even tell how strong the winds were up here.

That was one of the most dangerous things about flying through the clouds over the ocean. You could land on top of a big mass like this and then when you went back under them discover that you were over the ocean with no land in sight, and no sun or stars to guide you back. With experience you learned to judge the drift, but I had virtually none here on Earth. The only thing that I did have in my favor was that I hadn't been up all that long and there was a lot of land to the east of me, so no matter where I was, there was going to be someplace to land.

Well, it took me a minute to orient myself once I was back under the clouds. There was a big patch of forest under me, and I could see the lights of Kalamazoo off in the distance. It took me a minute but then I found the railroad tracks and the 94 Highway, and from there I could see where they crossed, and from there find our storm-watching spot.

I called Mel and told him where I was, and started to fly back towards them. The wind had started to pick up, and then the rain started coming down, and it just got heavier and heavier, and I wound up going off-course because I couldn't see them at all. When the rain dropped in intensity, I could see the headlights of the cars on the 94 Highway, and I kept heading in that direction until I was over it, and flew back in that direction, then off to the west some more so that I'd be able to give some advance warning on the intensity of the storm.

There was lightning and thunder all around me, and sometimes the rain was coming down so fast that I couldn't even see the ground at all. Keeping a roughly stationary observation point turned out to be completely impossible, so I kept flying back towards our spot whenever I could see it, but as the storm went on I wound up drifting far enough off course that I couldn't find it any more, so I just kept flying generally into the wind.
Even when there was a break in the rain, it didn't help, because I couldn't see enough of the ground to orient myself. Kalamazoo was out of sight through the rain, and I'd lost the 94 Highway, and I couldn't see the 131 Highway yet, and there was nothing on the ground below me that was distinct enough to be sure where I was.

At least the radio still worked, so I could talk to Mel and let him know what the weather was doing. I asked him if he could see me—maybe my blinking light would be visible through the rain—but he said that he couldn't.

I didn't know how long I'd been up before the rain finally lightened up enough for me to find the 94 Highway again, which was behind me. So either the winds had shifted and I hadn't known, or else I'd overcompensated flying into them. And I still didn't know which side of our stormwatching spot I'd wound up on, because nothing around me looked that familiar.

I guessed that I'd probably overflown to the west, because I thought that I'd probably have been able to seen Kalamazoo if I'd drifted to the east, but I couldn't decide if I should dive down until I was low enough to read the signs on the road, or just trust my instincts. I didn't want to lose my altitude, but I'd lose a lot of energy if I flew the wrong way.

It was starting to clear up, and I knew that I'd recognize Kalamazoo from a couple of miles out, so it wouldn’t be that much of a waste of effort, I hoped. So I called Mel and told him that I was over the 94 Highway and I thought that I was southwest of him but I wasn't sure. He asked if there were any good landmarks, because he could look on a map and find them, and I said that I was over trees and swampland, and I could see some fields off in the distance and that there were a couple of lakes behind me and he said that he didn't think that was enough to go on.

So I told him that I'd fly east along the 94 Highway and hopefully I'd find him again, and if I saw Kalamazoo ahead of me, I'd turn around and come back.

I'd guessed right, because after I'd flown for a little while, still not seeing enough of the ground through all the rain to be sure of my position, he called me and said that both he and Meghan could see my blinking light.

Before too long, I could see the bridge over the highway, and I felt a sense of relief.

And then the heavy rain came again. I felt the cold wind suddenly hit me from behind, and turned back into it as sheets of rain washed over me. I lost all sight of the ground again, except for occasional flickers of lights on the ground below me, and once again I was completely caught up in the storm.

This time it didn't last all that long, and when it cleared up a bit I could still see the 94 Highway, and I lost it again.

The storm continued until noon, and sometimes it was really heavy and other times there was enough visibility for me to see the ground and keep my position. The gas station has a really tall sign with a white S on it, and that was a good landmark.

When he finally called me down, I was completely exhausted. My wings were sore, I was starving, and I was completely soaked. Meghan helped me out of my flight gear and dried me off some, then we got in the truck and Mel stopped at the gas station and bought me a doughnut called a Krispy Kreme and also another cup of coffee.

It wasn't the best food for an empty stomach, but it perked me up some, and on our way home, Meghan used her pocket telephone to order us a pizza for lunch.

It was ready when Mel got to Papa John's, and I wanted to start eating it right then, because it smelled so good.

Mel let us off at my apartment, and we sat on the futon and had pizza and then Meghan asked if I wanted to take a shower.

I said that I wasn't sure if I did because I'd had enough of water for one day, and now that my belly was full and I was mostly dry, all I wanted to do was sleep, and she was yawning, too, so we got back in the futon and curled up together.

I didn't want to lie on her 'cause my coat was still pretty damp, and I didn't want to get her shirt wet. She said it was okay, and that she'd been really scared when she lost sight of me up in the storm, especially when she'd heard me telling Mel that I didn't know where I was.

I'd been a little worried, too. I'd thought that I might have to land and then have Mel come and pick me up, and I thought that would be really inconvenient for him.

She said that he wouldn't have minded, and she said that they'd been talking and he'd suggested that I could get a wristwatch that showed where I was, and that maybe I should have one.

I'd have to ask Mister Salvatore about that.

We napped for a couple of hours, and when we woke up, after I'd stretched out Meghan insisted on preening my wings, which really needed it. I shouldn't have gone to sleep without doing it, and if I'd been by myself, I wouldn't have. I guess it was kind of selfish thinking of me, but I'd sort of thought that she'd want to after our nap. So she sat up and had me turn around and put my wing on her lap, and then she started straightening out my feathers, and I just nickered contentedly while she worked, and nuzzled her hip and side when she worked really unpleasant tangles out.

When she was finished, we ate the rest of the pizza for dinner, and then we tried to decide what we wanted to do for the evening. It was still gray and overcast outside, although it had stopped raining hours ago. She said that she didn't really feel like getting dressed again, and we decided that after this morning I deserved to relax at home.

So she moved the papasan so that we could both sit in it and watch a movie, and we watched one more Kung Fu Panda movie, then after it was over she got up and said that she wished that we had a bottle of wine.

Well, I told her that I’d go and get one, and she decided that she wanted to come along, too, so she put on her pants and shirt but not her underwear because she said she wanted to be naughty.

I think that the clerk at the counter noticed, ‘cause he kept looking at her boobs while pretending not to.

When we got back she opened the bottle and took a drink, and then gave me the bottle so she could get undressed again. And we sat back on the papasan and watched a third Kung Fu Panda movie and shared the wine, and by the time the movie was over we’d drunk half the bottle.

We stayed in the papasan kissing and touching and nuzzling for a while, and I wanted to get up and get into the futon, because it wasn’t fair that I was having all the fun and couldn’t easily return the favor. And she leaned down and kissed me and ran her other hand through my mane until I collapsed on her chest.

When I finally got up, she got out of the chair and turned off my computer and put away the wine bottle—we agreed that we’d finish it up tomorrow—and I think she was kind of taunting me by taking her time going over to the futon, so I nosed her in the butt to motivate her.

She sat down on the futon and said that she hoped that there wasn’t another storm tomorrow morning, and I agreed. Then I got to thinking and even though I’d been trying to motivate her to lie down, I thought maybe in case there was, I ought to make sure that the camelback was filled and all my flight gear was laid out, so there’d be less scrambling in the morning if there was a storm.

So I did that, and she checked her portable telephone and said that there wasn’t a storm forecast for tomorrow, which was kinda a relief. And then she said that tomorrow we ought to see what kind of movie I got on the GoPro, so we agreed that we’d do that, and then we finally both got in bed and I teased her a little bit and kept my rump away from her at first.

July 31 [Another Lazy Sunday]

July 31

It was nice to not be woken up by a storm or a portable telephone ringing or anything else unexpected. Meghan had her arm around me in a hug, and I guess she was already awake, 'cause when she felt me moving around she squeezed me a little bit then kissed my ear.

Since we didn't have to get up at all, I rolled off to the side so that I was facing her, and then nuzzled her chest and started kissing her, and pretty soon we'd gotten completely tangled up in the sheets and in each other.

For breakfast, Meghan and I made waffles, and there wasn't anything else in the icebox to have with them. I guess I ought to do more shopping. I offered her some hay if she was still hungry, and she did nibble on a stalk of clover.

After eating breakfast, we took a shower together and she said when she was shampooing my tail that it looked like it was getting long again and I had some split ends, and I said that I'd noticed that, too, and it was time for another spa trip.

She said that she'd make an appointment tomorrow—she could find a time this week that she could go after work. And then she asked if I had any plans for today.

I didn't have anything in mind. I still wanted to fly south to the 80 90 Highway but I could do that tomorrow. Meghan wouldn't be happy if I abandoned her to go flying, especially after yesterday morning. Anyway, my wings were still a bit sore from yesterday.

So we decided that we'd go to the trail that ran behind her uncle's house again. I liked it better than the river trail.

I wanted to help Meghan get dressed, so after we'd dried off I stuck my nose in her bag and got out a pair of underwear for her and she started giggling at me as soon as I popped my head back up. And I wound up being a failure at it; the only thing I managed to do right was put her t-shirt on. She hugged me and said it was okay because human clothes weren't really designed for ponies to use anyway.

I bet Gusty could have done it.

My camelback was already full, so I put that on and Meghan said that we should get some snacks on the way to the bus station, and I thought so, too. So we walked down towards the bus station and since I was with her I decided that we should go to Walgreen's since it was right close by and had a lot of food.

I still kind of hesitated when we went in the doors, and she could tell I was a little bit tense but she didn't say anything and just put her hand on my head and I kind of pressed up against her leg, and we got some granola bars and a bag of dried fruit to snack on and then we paid for it and I relaxed when we were back out in the parking lot.

We had to wait at the train station for a few minutes for the correct bus to arrive, and when it did we got seats near the front, because I liked looking out the front windows better than the side windows. I wish that you could do that in trains. The dome car on the train from Lafayette had a view over the top of the train and out the front, although I hadn't been able to sit right by it because there had been people there already.

We got out of the bus at Meijer and walked to the start of the trail, and once we were in the woods, Meghan told me that when she was a little girl she imagined that the trail was through a big forest rather than just through the city. She said she'd make up stories about the creatures that she thought might live in the forest, or imagine where the trail might lead.

She pointed out a little side-trail that went through the woods towards the creek and she said that when she was young she thought that maybe it went to a fairy glen but adults would never let her go down there because they said she was supposed to stay on the trail and not go wandering off in the woods. When she was older, she finally had one time, and discovered that it just led to a little clearing full of empty beer bottles and used condoms which was kind of sad.

But she said even though it hadn't turned out to be a fairy glen, she still kept imagining that somewhere and somehow the mythical creatures from history were actually real and she felt vindicated when she first saw an actual unicorn on the television.

And she told me that it was kind of strange to have at least part of her imagination come to life, because here she was now on the same path and she was with an actual pegasus.

She said that she hoped she'd get to go to Equestria, and she'd gone to Kalamazoo College because they had a good Equestrian program, and she hoped that with the small size of the student body, she would have a chance to study in Equestria, but so far that hadn't worked out. There was a pretty competitive lottery, and it was as much luck as anything, she told me.

I nuzzled her and told her I hoped that she could come someday. I said that I'd gotten pretty lucky just because I was a pegasus.

She asked me if I was going to try and visit with one of the tornado teams when I was out west.

I'd heard a few things about them, but I didn't know all that much. Before I'd left, there was talk among the weatherponies that this year they were going to try and see if a team of weathermares could do anything with tornadoes, but there had been a lot of discussion about whether or not it would be allowed.

Meghan said that she had heard that the team had finally been given approval, and they'd partnered up with a human team of experienced stormchasers.

I thought that would be fun to do if I could; maybe on the way back from Colorado we could stop for a while and I could visit with them. I might even be allowed to help out, although I didn't think that Mister Salvatore would like that too much.

We sat just off the trail on a bench for a while and each had a granola bar and some dried fruit. It was nice, although it was pretty close to the 94 Highway so there was a lot of noise from traffic.

I told her about how it hadn't been as much of a surprise for us when Princess Twilight announced that we'd found Earth, since there had been other portals that had gone other places. But then the more I learned about Earth the more amazing it sounded and I thought it would be fun to visit, and I was glad that I had.

She asked me how long I'd been working the weather, and I said that ever since I'd gotten my cutie mark, I'd been on a weather team. The year before that, I'd gotten to help out with Winter Wrap-Up, mostly pushing clouds while an older pegasus told me what to do and I said how funny it was looking back at it how bad I was—how bad all of us fillies were. Clouds would get away from us and drift off and then we'd have to chase them down.

I'd really liked it, though, and my mom had seen that I was a pretty quick learner, so she helped me train and when I was old enough, I joined the team.

So from then on, I worked on a cloud team after school, and it wasn't too long before they saw how good I was with feral clouds, so I got switched to a storm team, which was a lot more work but also a lot more fun. And I liked that sometimes I got excused from classes, because they needed everypony who knew how to help break up a storm.

I'd been kind of surprised when I got elected team leader, because everypony on my team had more experience than I did. And I felt kind of like I was a fraud, so I started reading every book about weather that I could get my hooves on and managed to teach myself some things that nopony else knew.

Meghan said it was really weird to think that we were both at the same level of college and yet I had so much more world experience than she did. And I said I didn't think that was true, we just had different kinds of experience.

We kept up our conversation as we went the rest of the way down the path, and I don't know when but at some point we switched to speaking in Equestrian and that was kind of strange, because there were a few times where we were isolated enough on the path that I could have been back in Equestria, and she could have been another pony.

It wasn't until we'd gotten back to my apartment that the clouds started to break up.

Since I didn't have all that much food left, and not a whole lot that Meghan would like, I said that I'd buy her lunch at Nina's and she said only on the condition that I come over to her apartment tonight so that we could cook dinner together, because she kinda felt like a bad friend for not teaching me more about cooking like she'd said she was going to.

I said that I would, and I said that we'd have to remember to take the wine bottle with us.

Neither of us had too much at Nina's, because we'd had a late breakfast and now we were having a late lunch, and we didn't want to spoil our appetite for dinner. They had a Choritto Wrap that was very good, and it was enough for both of us to share.

On our way back, I wanted to stop by Aric's house and make sure that the birdfeeder had survived yesterday's rainstorm—I should have done that yesterday. Well, it was still hanging but it was pretty low, so I went into the garage and got the bag of seeds out of the icebox and filled it back up, and then we went back to my apartment.

Meghan put more seeds in my birdfeeder, and then we sat down in front of my computer and she put the movie from the GoPro on the computer so that we could watch it.

I really liked the first part—it was kind of boring when I went through the cloud, 'cause all you could see was the blinking light reflecting on the cloud, but the view from above was really good. I pointed to the different kinds of clouds on the screen and told her what they were and what they meant.

After that, though, it got kind of boring, because all you could see most of the time was little bits of me (whenever I talked in the radio, my foreleg blocked half the view) and rain and greyness and lightning flashes all around.

And I blushed when the picture all of a sudden went sideways—I'd got caught in a bit of a downdraft and rolled.

Well, we didn't watch it all the way through because it was really long, and neither of us wanted to spend all afternoon sitting in front of the computer screen when there were other, better things that we could be doing.

She thought it was pretty amazing, though, and wanted to know if it was the worst storm I'd ever been in and I said that it wasn't. I said that the storm a couple of weekends ago had had bad enough downdrafts that I got forced down on a roof, and I'd also been in ones where the winds were so strong that we couldn't do anything to stop it. That one had been scary, 'cause we lost a mare who'd been on the edge of our formation, and once the storm had passed and we could fly again we'd looked everywhere for her but couldn't find her.

It was a day later that she finally came back—she'd been blown inland and the storm had been so bad that she hadn't dared land because she couldn't see how far she was above the ground, so she'd ridden it out, flying crosswise to the front until she'd finally gotten through the worst of it.

When she landed she didn't know where she was, and she spent the whole day huddled under a cluster of pine trees, and it wasn’t until the storm had finally passed that she'd been able to fly up and find her way back to our village.

So Meghan asked if I minded her uploading the movie on her YouTube channel or if I'd rather make my own, and I said that since I wasn't going to be here all that much longer, it would kind of be wasteful to have my own channel.

It took a while for it to all get on the internet, so we cuddled on the papasan and watched the birds until it was done. Then she packed up her bag and I couldn't decide if I should take my flight gear, in case there was a storm, or leave it behind. Meghan said that the weather forecast was for no storms and a nice day tomorrow, and I hoped that was true.

Once we got back to Meghan's apartment, she started getting dinner ready, with me on the counter helping and watching and learning. She said that she was going to make spaghetti, which was a kind of pasta, and I didn't really like that too much because the sauce got all over my coat but I didn't want to refuse either.

But it turned out that she was going to make a pasta casserole, and she said why she'd thought of it was because maybe it would be possible to substitute hay for the pasta.

I tried my best to remember everything that she did, but I knew that I wasn't going to. She told me, though, after she put the spaghetti and sauce and cheese and vegetables in the baking pan that it didn't matter all that much exactly how it was made.

The thing that I don't like about cooking is that when something's in the oven it starts to smell really good long before it's actually ready to eat, and if you're hungry it's hard to wait for it. And then when it comes out of the oven it has to cool for a little bit before you can actually eat it.

Maybe that's a good thing, though. We had time to do all the dishes while it was baking, and we also had a little bit of wine, and then she made a tossed salad, and we ate that while we were waiting for the casserole to cool.

So the dinner wound up being really yummy and worth the wait, and like she'd promised the casserole kept the sauce from getting all over me. It was a lot like a lasagna, except that the noodles were smaller.

She put away all the extra food in her electric icebox, and then we had some more wine and she made brownies and put them in the oven and said that we could have them later, as a before-bed snack.

Then she taught me how to play a human game called Battleship, where you had to guess where your opponents ships were. I lost the first game, because I didn't have a good strategy, but I was figuring it out by studying the board and the size of the ships and by the second game I had a pretty good idea of the strategy, and how to hide my ships more effectively.

It was a good math exercise. And it reminded me that maybe I should spend some time with my math textbook to make sure that I hadn't forgotten anything.

After I won the second game, she wanted to play best out of three, and so we had our brownies and shared the wine bottle back and forth (it was cute how she'd cover her eyes as she pushed the bottle towards me so that I could see she wasn't trying to cheat by seeing where my ships were).

She beat me, but only by one turn. She showed me her board and I could see that my next move would have found her minesweeper.

She put the game away and then we snuggled on the couch until the wine was all gone, and then we went into her bedroom and I might not have been much good at putting her clothes on but I knew how to take them off which was more fun anyway.

August 2 [Croquet]

August 2

I was a little stiff and sore when I woke up, so I stretched out while I was still on the futon, and then hopped off the bed and decided to take a little morning flight around the neighborhood to work my muscles some.

So I went out the balcony, scattering a couple of the early-morning birds, and flew up until I was just over the treetops.

When you're a ways up, all the trees kind of look like they're the same height, but when you're right at the tops of most of them, there's always one or two that are poking their crowns above all the rest. There were a couple of proud oaks a few blocks from my apartment that stood above all the others.

I just made a quick loop, and then landed on Grand Avenue and trotted back to my apartment, to give my legs a bit of exercise too.

Since we'd used all the waffle mix, I had hay for breakfast and then I started to plan out my day. I hadn't seen any clouds in the sky and it felt like there wasn't going to be any rain at all, so I probably didn't have to worry about that. I knew that some places had a rainy season which sometimes was called monsoon season and I had been worried that maybe Kalamazoo did, too.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to go and trot around at the Nature Center some, and I had to get more food, and I should also call Mister Salvatore and see if he knew of some kind of little map I could carry. My telephone had one, but it wasn't very hoof-friendly, and I think if I tried to use it while I was flying, I'd just drop it.

So I called him, and told him that I thought I was almost ready to fly to Chicago, and that I'd also been thinking that it would be useful to have some kind of portable map like my pocket telephone had, but one that would be useful while I was flying, and he said that he'd see what he could find. And he said that he didn't think I should try to fly to Chicago before I went to Canada, and I told him that I'd been thinking the same thing. Gusty would be upset if I got lost at sea right before her play.

He said that he could probably get a boat for the week after, and that would give him enough time to negotiate with the airplane directors at O'Hare, which is the big airport in Chicago.

He asked how my GoPro was working, and I said that Meghan had put a video on her YouTube channel of me flying in a storm, and it was kind of long to watch.

Mister Salvatore promised that he would see what kind of navigation aid he could get for me. He said that he might try a couple and I could see which one I liked the best, which I thought was a good idea.

I told him that I was going to go shopping today and he asked if I wanted a ride, but I wasn't planning to get anything that I couldn't fit in my saddlebags.

It was still a little bit early to go to the farmer's market—they didn't open first thing in the morning because they needed time to come in from their farms.

So I thought I'd go to Meijer first, and then I would have time to empty out my saddlebags and get to the farmer's market before lunch.

I didn't feel like putting on all my flight gear today, so I just wore my saddlebags and kept low over the street, which was safe because airplanes weren't allowed to fly that low.

I'd gotten so used to wearing all my flight gear that it felt strange to fly without it. My forelegs felt lighter, and my barrel and back seemed to be cooler than normal, even though it was a hot day. And I didn't have the fabric of the vest brushing against my wing roots, either.

When I got to Meijer, I landed on one of the car-free islands in the parking lot, and then got a cart out of their little cart paddock and pushed it inside. That's one thing that I don't like about shopping by myself, because the carts are really awkward to push. I guess they don't get many ponies shopping here.

As tempting as all their produce was, I skipped over it and went straight to the aisle with the waffle mix. There were lots of other mixes, too, and so I also got a box of Bisquick that could make pancakes, because pancakes were good. I had to get a can of spray-butter so that they wouldn't stick to the pan, and some other stuff like baking powder that the box said that I needed.

It didn't tell me what kind of milk I wanted, and there were lots of different kinds to choose from. Some of it was only 2 percent milk, and then there was half and half, and there was also almond milk and soy milk, and I didn't know that you could milk an almond or a soybean. I would have to ask Aquamarine about that.

They did have whole milk, and I thought that would be the best, so I added it to my cart and then went to find the sugar.

There were also lots of choices for sugar. I could get confectioners or brown or cane or beet or artificial and I didn't know what was best for pancakes. How could there be so many kinds of sugar?

Since pancakes were brown, I thought that brown sugar was the best choice. But then I saw a small package of maple sugar, and it was also brown and when I sniffed the package it smelled nice and mapley, so I changed my mind and got that instead.

I also got some Oberon and thought about buying a bottle of wine to share with Meghan but it was more fun to shop for it together, because we could decide what we wanted right before we drank it. And there were hundreds of different kinds, which was really overwhelming.

This time I'd been smart enough to not buy so much that it wouldn't fit in my saddlebags, and the woman who tallied up my groceries was even nice enough to put the groceries in my saddlebags for me. She didn't balance them very well, though, so I was a little bit lopsided flying back.

I got to the farmer's market not too long after they'd opened, which meant that I had my pick of the freshest and biggest fruits and vegetables, and I would have bought more except that I knew I was going to be gone for the whole weekend, and I didn't want any of it to go bad before I got back.

So for lunch I had a fresh cucumber and some carrots which still had the greens on them, unlike the ones that Meijer sells, and some green beans and a turnip.

I did still want to get some more exercise, so I flew out to the Nature Center and did a few laps of their pasture course. It wasn't as fun as it usually was in the morning, because there were more people there that I had to watch out for, and the deer weren't anywhere to be seen. They like to hide in the woods during the day, and only come out in the mornings and evenings to feed.

Instead of flying back the normal way when I was done, I flew across the railroad tracks and along the river, just above the water except when I had to fly up to get over an abandoned railroad bridge.

They'd taken the tracks off it, but there were still long rusty streaks on the wood crossties from where the rails had been.

There was a big factory with stinky ponds that smelled like sulfur and shit, and that smell stuck with me for a little bit. When I'd first seen it I thought that maybe the ponds had fish in them, and maybe they did but I wasn't interested in getting a closer look at it.

When I got to the active train-bridge, I turned to follow the tracks most of the way home, up until they crossed over Main Street, then I went that way, curving off at the cemetery to my apartment.

I took a shower, and then I got my Bible and sat down in my papasan chair and I'd just opened it to Jeremiah when I heard a knock at my door, so I went down to see who it was.

It was Lindy and Trinity and they asked if I wanted to come out and play because Caleb was away at a camp and they kind of didn't miss him because he was a boy and boys were dumb but it wasn't as fun playing with only two people.

So I said said that I would, and Trinity was really happy and hugged me and they played croquet first, and let me hit the ball with my hoof instead of the hammer. I still wasn't very good at it, but I didn't mind. Having fun with friends is more important than winning a game of croquet.

I also gave Trinity a ride around the backyard, and then when Jeff came home the four of us walked around the neighborhood looking for Pokemons. He wasn't hunting any of them, but he said that he needed the exercise.

They found a Tanglea, which looked like a ball of worms wearing a pair of shoes and I didn't see what the appeal in it was but Lindy said that it was rare and that Caleb would be mad that they'd found it and he hadn't.

While the girls were trying to catch it, Jeff said that he could see some of the birds around my bird feeder, and that he liked watching them in the morning when he drank his coffee. He said that the girls did, too, and he asked if I'd considered getting a suet block and maybe attracting woodpeckers.

Well, I hadn't thought of that, but it sounded like it might be something fun to set up. I thought that I could put it by the living room window, and hang it off the side of the house. There was a gutter that ran around the edge, and I could hang it off that, which would give Jeff a good view of it.

There weren't any other interesting Pokemons in the neighborhood, but they did find a couple more of them that they'd already caught. It seemed kind of silly to catch the same ones that they already had, but it gave them experience, Trinity said, and experience was important.

I guess I caught the same kinds of clouds a lot.

There was a mare on my team who was really good with cumulus clouds but she couldn't do anything with stratus. They'd get away from her every time.

We went back home so that they could have dinner, and I made myself a nice dinner, and then I sat down on my papasan chair and did start reading Jeremiah, until the light started to fade.

It was kind of like Isaiah, with God saying how Israel had been bad and He was going to punish them because of it, and he was going to come after them with horses that were faster than eagles, because they weren't following His rules.

He told Jeremiah that if he could find one good person, than He would spare the city, but if he didn't, God was going to make all the Israelites live in a foreign land to punish them. But He also promised that He was going to restore things once they had learned their lesson.

Some people didn't like what Jeremiah had to say, and so they wanted to kill him. But God found out, and told Jeremiah not to worry because He was going to take care of them.

God said that He was going to restore his people afterwards, though, and He was going to give them back what He had taken away.

I put the Bible away and took a dusk flight around my neighborhood, and then across Main Street and over that neighborhood, too. There was a woodlot over there, and also a strange little cluster of houses on a looping road, that all faced one that was in the center. It was odd that I'd never noticed that before, but I usually didn't fly that way.

It was dark enough that bats were beginning to fly around when I landed back on my balcony, and I yawned and stretched out my legs then went inside and got a blanket and just curled up on the papasan and fell asleep there.

August 3 [West Michigan Loop]

August 3

My back was kinda kinked from sleeping in the papasan, but that didn't spoil my mood at all. I was gonna fly another long flight, and then I'd be ready to go to Chicago.

And the weather was perfect for it. It was nice and clear outside, and I turned on my computer and looked and there was no chance of rain today.

I'd already figured out where I wanted to go on the map. First, I'd thought about going to Holland, 'cause it was about fifty miles each way and I thought that would avoid all the airports, but there was one on the south side of town, and I didn't want to have to wait around getting approval to fly into their airspace.

But there were some roads that looked like they'd be pretty easy to follow, and when I measured them out on the map with a piece of string, I could get my hundred miles. A little bit of the route was going to be unfamiliar, but I'd be making my final turn and coming back from South Haven, and I knew where that was and what it looked like.

So I made oatmeal for breakfast and I made it extra mushy because one thing I'd learned from my last long flight was that I was going to run out of water before I was done flying.

I also had a can of anchovies to give me more energy, and I changed the batteries in my flashing light just to be sure that it wouldn't quit before I was done flying. Then I put on my flight gear, except for my weather radio, because I wouldn't need that.

The grumpy man was directing airplanes, and he probably would have let me fly higher above Kalamazoo if I'd asked nicely, but I didn't want to bother him and make extra work for him, so I told him that I wouldn't go higher than a thousand feet before I got to the other side of the 131 Highway and he said that would be okay.

I jumped off my balcony and then climbed up over the wires and trees and started heading west.

I cheated a little bit on my altitude, 'cause I'd been making a nice, slow climb all the way out to the 131 Highway, and when I got over Drake Road I was already at nearly a thousand feet, and I didn't want to break my rhythm, so I just kept climbing after making sure that there weren't any airplanes around, and I was at about a thousand one hundred feet when I crossed the 131 Highway.

Now that I knew that there was a grass airport off to the south of Main Street, I paid special attention for airplanes coming that way, especially since it was such a nice day for flying. I did see one airplane on the ground near the runway, but it had a cover over its windshield, so it wasn't going to be flying anytime soon.

When I got to the M40 road, which was where there was a greenhouse full of cars, I turned north and followed that. I knew that it went through Gobles, and I knew what that looked like because the Kal-Haven trail also went through Gobles, but after that I was going to be in completely new territory for me until I got back to South Haven.

I spotted the Kal-Haven trail when I was a bit south of Gobles, because it looked just the same as train routes. It went where it wanted to go, even if that was cutting through the middle of someone's fields.

There was also another grass airport off to the west. That one was even easier to see, because the wires that ran by it had big red balls on them that I could see really easily. The people I'd seen fishing in South Haven had red and white buoys on their fishing line that bobbed when a fish took the bait, and at first I thought maybe they were for something like that, but then I realized that they were so the airplanes could see the wires and not run into them.

On the north side of Gobles, there was kind of a cluster of lakes I was flying towards. I think that it was a little lower and swampier out here.

The road curved off to the east, and I followed it, past a big open lot that had a squiggly dirt trail in it, and more lakes. If I hadn't been carrying my camelback, I would have been really happy seeing all these lakes.

There were a lot of fields out here that didn't have regular sides at all, and sometimes it was pretty obvious why—I didn't know a lot about farming, but I did know that you couldn't plow a swamp, so you avoided it—but other times the woods were left in a jagged edge along a field for no reason I could determine.

Farmers were smart, though, so they must have had a reason.

I found the Kalamazoo River again in Allegan, which was where I had to change roads. I'd intended to fly all the way to the intersection, but now that I was getting closer to town, I wasn't sure that I would be able to tell where the M89 road ran through town, and I could clearly see it.

I'd cut maybe a mile off my trip if I flew over to it now, and if I got lost looking for it, I might add a mile. I decided that was worth the risk, because even if I followed the wrong road through town, I could go to the right one when I was outside of town.

I did lose it in town, and so I flew all the way to the river and over a big dirt oval on a spit of land that was around a bend in the river, and then turned and caught up to the road after it had crossed over the river. I could see that the river kind of broadened out into a lake and at the very end of it I saw what I thought was probably a dam.

The next turn was a bit tricky because there weren't any good landmarks, and I wished that I'd had a map of some sort with me. I knew that I had to turn due west, but I wasn't entirely sure which road to follow, and I wound up going too far north, because the road I was flying over stopped when the ground got swampy.

But I could see the one that I did want, just south of me, so I angled along until I got over it.

I could see Lake Michigan ahead of me pretty clearly now, and I guessed that I was a little more than ten miles from it, so navigation would be pretty easy from here on. Even if I lost the road I was supposed to be following, all I had to do was fly to the lake.

The last town I went over before I got there was called Fennville, and it was a strange town. There were lots of houses that just went along the main road with nothing behind them, and little neighborhoods that stretched off north and south a ways out of town. And they also had a collection of square ponds with fountains that I thought could be fishponds, but I was too high to see if there were any fish in them.

I crossed over the 196 Highway, and then right beyond that was the lakeshore. That brought back fond memories of driving along it with Aric on our road trip, and now I had a completely different view of it.

Lots of little boats were out, most of them pretty close to the shore but I could see some further out in the lake, too. I didn't see any big freighters, and I thought that they would probably be out in the deeper part of the lake, away from all the little boats. It had been really nice to see them going by so close when I was with Aric and when I was at the Tall Ships Festival, but those passages were really too small for them. I knew that the bigger ships at home had to be really careful when they were going into harbor, and they couldn't have very many sails set or move very fast, and I think that if they didn't have to come into port to unload their cargo and to get new supplies, they would rather stay out at sea where they had room to maneuver.

I liked having the whole sky to play around in, rather than having to stay low and watch out for trees and tall antennas and wires.

I flew a ways out over the water and followed the coastline south, and once I could see what I thought was probably South Haven, I angled out even more over the water.

Besides the boats, there were lots of seagulls flying underneath me, and every now and then I saw a shadow in the water that could have been a really big fish, although it was probably just my imagination.

I don't think that there are any really big fish in the Great Lakes. There aren't any whales or dolphins or sharks at all. Which is too bad. It's really fun to see a pod of dolphins playing in the waves.

I also kept looking over towards the other side of the lake, hoping that maybe I could see the tops of the buildings in Chicago, but they were just too far away to see, even though it was still really clear.

When I finally got to South Haven, I turned inland once I got over the harbor, and then flew southeast over the city until I found the M43 road. There's another road that goes almost due east, and it has a big, easy-to-find intersection with the 196 Highway, but that's not the right road. I probably could have followed it back and found Kalamazoo once I got far enough inland, but that wasn't the plan.

It was pretty easy to spot from the air, as long as I didn't look for it in town, 'cause it ran diagonally away and all the other roads were pretty straight.

A electrical wire path ran alongside it for a while, and I finally noticed that they really stood out because they would make really sharp turns, almost at random. If I knew where all of them were, I bet it would be possible to follow the big wires from place to place.

By the time I got to Bangor, I was starting to feel a bit of flight fatigue, and I had to keep reminding myself to pay attention to the things around me and not just focus on the road, so I started to play little games with myself to keep myself sharp. Following cars with my eyes wasn't as easy, because the road wasn't as wide or straight, so I would lose them in the trees, plus a lot of them would stop at houses or turn down other roads, which they mostly couldn't do when they were on the highway.

And there weren't any railroad tracks, either, so I couldn't watch a train or even watch for a train.

So I tried to spot the furthest away field that I could tell what direction the rows went in, and that helped me keep my head and eyes moving, which meant I was more alert.

I was really happy when I crossed over the M40 road, because that meant I was getting pretty close to town. Close enough that it was time to start thinking about descending, and this time instead of trying for a smooth descent, I did a more stairstep descent, where I'd glide for a little while, then flap my wings, then glide, and so on. Which put me a bit too high as I was getting close to Meijer, so I just glided until I was across the 131 Highway, and by then I was under nine hundred feet.

Just like last time, when I got inside, I took off all my flight gear and went right into the shower. I really needed to figure out a way to carry some extra water with me when I flew over Lake Michigan, because that would make the trip a lot more pleasant.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, though, because it would probably be cooler over the lake.

When I'd rinsed off all the lather and cooled down some, I went to the kitchen without drying off and had a light lunch, then I went back into the shower to wash properly.

I preened out my feathers and brushed my mane and tail and then I went outside to go to Meghan's so I could meet her for our salon appointment. I really didn't feel like flying all the way there, so I just flew across Main Street and landed on the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Tree.

I'd been inside and they hadn't had any trees at all.

On my way there, I did make a couple of short glides, just to work my flight muscles a little bit so that they wouldn't cramp up.

Meghan had to get changed once she got home and I should have gone upstairs to help her, but I'd found a nice sunbeam on her porch and I was enjoying it too much to move, and she promised she'd be right back down anyway.

She sat on the porch with me while we waited for an Uber-Car to pick us up, and asked me what I'd been doing, so I told her about my flight and she said that I really deserved to be pampered after flying all day like that.

Maura was really happy to see us both, and Meghan and I got to sit next to each other while we got groomed, and even though I'd already washed my mane and tail, they did for me again.

She looked at my hooves, too, even though she didn't know how to trim them. She said that they were looking pretty good, and I said that was because I'd been doing more flying and less walking on cement. I said that I still thought I'd want them filed the next time we came to the spa, just to make sure that they were in good shape.

My tummy was pretty growly by the time we were done in the salon, because I hadn't eaten much for lunch, and Meghan heard and said that instead of making a nice dinner that would take a while we ought to just have the rest of the leftover casserole and brownies and a bottle of wine that she'd bought for us yesterday and I thought that sounded like a really good plan.

It had tasted better the first time, but it was still really good, and the wine she'd picked was perfect. Maybe a little too good, because I had more than I should have, especially after a whole day out flying. It didn't really make me feel drunk, just really, really sleepy.

And then Meghan said that she thought what I really needed to relax was a good massage, and I thought so too so we went up to her bedroom and I lay down on her bed and she started to massage my wings and barrel and I think if it was possible to melt with pleasure I would have. I couldn't even move when she'd finished and I told her when she got undressed that she was just going to have to roll me out of her way and she said that I might get cold not being under the covers and I said that I would worry about that if it happened.

So she got a new sheet out of her dresser and lay down on top of the blanket next to me and put the sheet over both of us and I stretched a wing out over her belly and told her that it was all her fault for relaxing me too much,then tucked my head down against her side and closed my eyes.

August 4 [Thursday]

August 4

I woke Meghan up in the middle of the night when I got up to pee, even though I tried to be quiet and sneaky. At first I couldn't remember why we were on top of the covers instead of under them.

When I got back to the bedroom, she'd put away the extra sheet and was under the covers, and I got in next to her and curled up against her, and she started petting my back and side and then she reached her hand further down and I lifted my tail out of the way for her and pretty soon we were fighting for who got to be on top and it was really hard to put up much of a fight when she was under my tail.

So in the morning she wound up not wanting to get out of bed until after her alarm had gone off four times, and by then she was too late to have breakfast at all and really had to rush her shower, too. I went through her dresser and picked out clothes for her and set them out on the bed for her, and then brushed her hair for her and she was just buttoning up her blouse when the doorbell rang.

Meghan kissed me and told me that I knew the drill and then ran off downstairs so that her friend wouldn't be mad at how late she was, and I waved from upstairs but I don't know if she saw me.

I thought it would be rude to eat her food while she wasn't even here, so I just picked up her dirty clothes and put them in the basket, and then I went and flew back to my house and thought about what I wanted to do today.

I wasn't sure that tomorrow I would have any time to fly at all, so I wanted to get a decent-length flight in. I also needed to make sure that Aric's birdfeeder was full, so I went to do that first.

So I flew over to Aric's house and went into the garage and got the seeds out of the icebox and then since I felt kind of bad for taking all the mouse's food I put a little pile on the workbench for him before filling the bird feeder.

Angela was in the kitchen, and after I took the bag back to the garage I waved to her and then flew off for home.

I still didn't know which way I wanted to go when I put on my flight gear, but since I hadn't flown east in a little while I thought I'd go that way.

So I went along the railroad tracks through town and towards Galesburg and then I decided that I wanted to visit the horses again. I think when I get back from Stratford me and Meghan should go riding them again before I go out west.

I remembered that the big electrical wires went more or less right out there, and that was easier to follow than roads, 'cause I could easily see where they went, and it was right by a crossing of two electricity routes.

So when I got the the big towers that ran from the dam, I followed them north and around, and then went to the branch that crossed under them, 'cause that was the one I wanted to follow.

It didn't take me all that long to get there, and I circled around to see who was there. The barriers weren't set up, and I didn't see anyone outside, so I landed just outside the barn and went in.

There was one horse who I didn't know tied out in the aisle and a teenage girl working in his stall, shoveling everything out into a big rolling cart. Her back was to me, so she didn't see me at all.

Right after I went into the barn, Hoshi whinnied at me and I whinnied back, and then I went over to her stall and she leaned down and we sniffed each other and rubbed noses to say hello, and she sniffed at my flight vest 'cause I'd put a couple of carrots in there in case I got hungry, so I gave her one of them.

I went down to the tack room in case Deanne was there, but she wasn't. So I went and asked the girl who was cleaning out a stall, and she was really surprised to see me and then she said that Deanne wasn't here yet but she would be soon to teach a riding lesson.

So I went back outside and waited by the training field for Deanne and the dog came over and kept moving in on me and I kept side-stepping down the fenceline until I ran out of fence and he was still not happy, so I just flew up and sat on a tree branch, and he didn't like that too much, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. He kept circling around the tree and staring up at me and he looked really confused.

I saw her come in—she had a little squarish red truck that I'd seen around before, and she parked it near the fence and when she got out I flew down to greet her.

She said that she had a lesson this morning but I could stay and watch if I wanted to, so I said that I would.

Before too long a man in a nice-looking car came by and he let a girl get out, who I guess was the student. She looked like she was a little bit younger than Trinity, and I was wondering how she'd manage to get up on a horse.

She came over to meet me, and I didn't want to take up too much of her time but I introduced myself and she said that her name was Hannah, and that she was just learning to ride properly and that she went to school in Kalamazoo and what was Equestria like and did I know how to ride a horse.

Well, I said that Equestria was very nice and I liked it but I also liked Earth, and I said that I did know how to ride a horse but I wasn't very good at it at all, and she said that Miss Deanne was a very good teacher.

I stayed out of the way while she saddled up her horse, and tried to stay out of the dog's way, but he kept nosing at me now that I was back on the ground. I thought about going back up to the tree, because it would give me a better view of the training field anyway, but I didn't.

Hannah came back out riding Peaches, and Deanne walked alongside.

I didn't learn much that was useful to me watching Hannah being taught, because she was learning about something called posting, which was where she stood up on the stirrups when Peaches was trotting. I could see why that was a good skill to have, because it looked like it was pretty bouncy on Peaches' back, and that was something I'd noticed when I was trying to ride.

Once her lesson was over, and she'd unsaddled and washed down Peaches, Deanne asked if I wanted to go on a little trail ride and I said I didn't think that I wanted to today, although I did want to next week sometime.

She was curious why I'd come out here then and I said that I wasn't sure but that it had seemed like a good idea. I think I was starting to understand why Aquamarine had been spending time with the horses out at Michigan State because even though they were big and dumb in a way being around them was a lot like being home. Maybe even more so for Aquamarine, since she was grounded anyways, while to me birds were almost as close of kin.

So I felt kind of stupid for having come out, and I felt like I was kind of wasting her time, and I was thinking that maybe I should leave, but then she said that since she was here she was going to take Henry out for a ride and even if I didn't want to ride I could come along with her and so I said that I would.

She promised not to leave me behind, but I could tell by her little smile that she was going to try and outrun me.

Deanne got Henry dressed and he sniffed at me when I was close and then mostly ignored me.

She got up in the saddle and rode out into the back, and I followed behind, and for a while we just walked along and then she picked up the pace a little bit and Henry was in a really slow trot while I was trotting as fast as I could to keep up, and I was thinking of switching to a canter. If I had legs as long as he did, I could fly right on the ground.

Deanne looked back to see if I was still following, and then she asked me how fast I could gallop and I said that I didn't know, but by my best guess maybe fifteen or twenty miles per hour for a short distance.

We came around a curve in the path to a long, straight section, and even before she pushed her heels into Henry, I knew what she was going to do, and I broke right into a gallop, closing on him for a moment as he picked up speed and then he left me in a cloud of dust.

She looked back once to see where I was, and as soon as she turned forwards again I took flight, and the race was on.

Henry was fast, but I was faster. She wasn't even halfway down the straight stretch when I passed her and I didn't slow down at all until I got to the end of the straight part.

Well, she said that I had lied about how fast I could go and I said that I hadn't; she'd asked how fast I could gallop, and then I said that she'd lied about not leaving me behind and she said that obviously she hadn't because I got to the end of the trail before she did.

We kept together after that, and when she was halfway she went off the trail into a patch of nice grass and let Henry have a snack and it smelled so good that I had some, too.

Once we got back to the barn she took off Henry's tack, and let me wash him down, and then she rinsed me down, and I got dressed again and thanked her for letting me go out on the trail with her.

I was thinking about Henry as I flew back home. He seemed really happy and content and I don't know why that bothered me.

My thoughts were interrupted by my portable telephone ringing, and I ignored it 'cause I knew that if I went to answer I'd wind up just dropping it, but I did find a good spot to land at the edge of a golf course. I stayed by the very edge, in a little cluster of trees, so that nobody would be mad at me, and I got out my telephone and saw that it was Mister Salvatore who had called and he said that he had done some research on what might work for me and if I wanted to go shopping today we could look at our options.

So I said that I would come and look, and I could meet him at his office in an hour or so, and he said that he would be there.

I called the airplane directors and gave them my new course, which was going to take me pretty close to the airport if I wanted to fly straight. Dori said it was okay as long as I stayed under a thousand feet and that when I got close to the airport it might be safer if I went below five hundred to make sure that I didn't get hit by any wake turbulence.

I told her that I would, and all the way over I kept looking down at my altimeter to make sure that I was low enough, especially since for a little bit I was right in line with the end of the runway.

I could see their tower, and I wonder if they could see me?

No airplanes took off or landed over me, which was probably for the best. I wasn't sure how bad wake turbulence might be, and at only five hundred feet above the ground I probably didn't want to find out. I'd lost more altitude than than in bad downdrafts before.

When I got to their building, I had to wait downstairs until Mister Salvatore came and got me, and then he took me upstairs and we looked at pictures of different kinds of things that I could wear. There was a watch that was nice and compact that gave altitude and also bearings to the nearest airport, or I could put waypoints in it—it was designed for airplanes, he said.

And there was also a yellow GPS that was like the ones that some cars had but this one was simpler and didn't make you go on roads and that was pretty neat, too. It had a case that strapped around an arm, and it would work on a leg, as well.

Then he showed me what was called a smartwatch that talked to my portable telephone, but I didn't like that as much because it didn't have any buttons, just a screen that you touched and that wasn't very convenient for me. At least I could talk to my telephone and make it work, but he didn't think that I could do that with the watch.

I couldn't decide if I liked the watch or the GPS better, and he said that if I wasn't sure, I ought to get both and try each out and decide which one was best to use.

Well, I thought that was a bit much to be carrying around with me—pretty soon my forelegs were going to be nothing but human devices strapped from hoof to elbow, and I was going to have to tie a weight to my tail to balance myself back out.

Mister Salvatore told me that I could try one at a time and that it could take the place of my altimeter, and I guess that would work.

He said that he was going to have to order them, but it wouldn't take all that long to get and that I'd probably have them after we got back from Stratford.

So I thanked him for finding them, and then on my way out we went by their office so I could say hello to Miss Cherilyn. She was on the telephone, so we didn't have any time to talk.

I stopped at a Taco Bell on my way home and bought lunch, and I flew home to eat it. When I took them out of the bag, the food fit nicely in my vest pockets.

I just relaxed for most of the afternoon. I should have finished Jeremiah, but I wasn't really in a mood for it, 'cause I was starting to get eager for my trip tomorrow.

So when I met with Liz, I had to admit that I hadn't made as much progress as I'd meant to since I was training up for flying across Lake Michigan to Chicago, and going on a trip tomorrow, and I felt like I'd let her down a little bit.

She wasn't upset, though, and she said that maybe we could talk about other stuff instead, like what I'd done today, so I told her about going out to visit the horses and about flying earlier in the week, and we just chatted for a while and had tea which was really nice.

I nuzzled her when we were done talking, and then I went back home and packed up my saddlebags, because we were going to leave pretty early tomorrow, and then I went to bed early.

August 5 [Driving to Canada]

August 5

I got up a little bit early, and made myself a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast because that was a good way to start the day. And then I sat out on the balcony and let it cool a little bit and by the time I started eating, the bold birds were back at the birdfeeder, having their breakfast.

When I'd finished, I went back inside—which made the birds fly away again—and washed my bowl and then checked over my saddlebags to make sure that I'd packed everything that I would want to have with me. I decided to also take my Bible because I was way behind and maybe I would have a chance to read some more. I probably wouldn't; it's rude to read when you're with your friends unless they have something to read, too. But I'd be sorry if I had idle time and no Bible.

I didn't have to wait too long before Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn came to get me, and since I was watching out the front windows, I knew that they were here before they even had a chance to knock on my door. I grabbed my saddlebags in my mouth and flew off the balcony and around to the side, and Miss Cherilyn was just walking up to my door while Mister Salvatore was turning Sienna around.

Before we left, they wanted to make sure that I had my identification cards, and Mister Salvatore made me go through my saddlebags and show him. He said that I couldn't get into Canada without them and he wanted to make sure that we didn't get turned back at the bridge for a dumb reason.

He put on sunglasses and Miss Cherilyn asked if I wanted to sit in the front seat but I didn't mind it in the back.

When we were driving, I told them about the time I'd flown over the 94 Highway to Battle Creek and all the things I'd seen from the air. You could see some of them from the ground, too, like the big Target for semi-trucks, but a lot of things were blocked by trees. I know that we went past the dirt mine that had the bad-smelling pretty lake, but I didn't see it.

Mister Salvatore wanted to stop at Firekeepers, which he said was a casino, and Miss Cherilyn said that he couldn't with me in the van, and so I said that I wanted to go, too. She told him that he was corrupting me, but I don't see why going to a casino is corrupting. And we didn't stop anyways because if we did we'd be late to pick up Aquamarine.

Just after Battle Creek, we went around a looping ramp and got on the 69 Highway, and we followed that northeast towards Lansing. There was a town called Anger which we passed and I didn't think I'd want to go there.

We got off the highway on a road called Lansing Road, and Miss Cherilyn asked Mister Salvatore what he was doing, and he told her that it was a shortcut. She said that she didn't trust his shortcuts and if was really that great why wasn't anybody else doing it, and he said it was because they were all sheep blindly following their GPS when anybody who could read a map would see this was half the distance.

I don't know if it was any shorter, but we got on the 96 Highway and took that to the 127 Highway and then took Trowbridge Road and drove past the train station and then followed a road called Mt. Hope to get to Aquamarine's apartment.

Miss Cherilyn went in to get her, and a few minutes later, Miss Cherilyn came back with Aquamarine, and she hopped into the back of the van with me and we nuzzled each other and said how much we were looking forward to Stratford.

Well, we couldn't go until Aquamarine showed Mister Salvatore that she had her identification cards, too, and when she did, he drove us back to the 127 Highway and instead of going back south to the 96 Highway, we went north and turned back on the 69 Highway.

Both of us knew the first part of the trip—that was how we'd gotten to the Tall Ships Festival—so we talked 'cause there wasn't anything new for us to see until we didn't go on the 75 Highway.

Right after the exit we didn't take, the road got really bad, and we went past neighborhoods of run-down houses and dead trees and I asked where we were. Miss Cherilyn said that this was Flint, and it had once been known for making Buick cars, but now it was notorious for having poison water.

Well, that didn't sound like anyplace I wanted to visit.

After we left Flint, it turned into farmland on both sides of the highway, and it stayed that way until we got to Port Huron. We joined up with the 94 Highway, and then there were a bunch of signs warning us that the next exit was the last exit before Canada and then more warnings that traffic was going to stop.

And it did; there was a long line of cars and trucks waiting to go through the little booths that were set up across the highway. They were like the tollbooths, but slower, and there wasn't an EZ-Pass lane.

A man in the booth asked a couple of questions and then Mister Salvatore paid the toll and we went on the bridge.

When we were on the other side, there was another set of booths that was wider, and the line was longer, and we had to go into a special lane and park near a building called Canadian Border Services Agency.

Before we got out, Mister Salvatore gave me and Aquamarine a clip-on earring with a number on it and he said that we had to wear them until we got back in the van.

All of us had to get out of Sienna and go inside, and then we met with three men in blue uniforms and for a little bit me and Aquamarine didn't have anything much to do, because Mister Salvatore was showing them a bunch of papers.

Then I got called and I had to show one of the men my identification card, and he said that he had to ask me some questions. So he started out by asking if Silver Glow was really my name and what my hometown in Equestria was and where I was going to school, then he asked me how long I would be staying in Canada, why I was visiting, and if I had been to Texas or New Mexico in the last three weeks.

So I answered all his questions and then he asked me if I'd been around any other horses in the last six months, and he didn't seem too happy that I had been out at a horse farm yesterday. So he started asking me if any of the horses there were sick and I said that I didn't think so. And he looked at my earring and then made a note on a piece of paper.

I guess he was happy with my answers, because he let me go back with everyone else, and then he called Aquamarine in, and she was gone for about five minutes before she came back out, too.

They welcomed us to Canada and let us go back outside and get in Sienna and when we were moving again Miss Cherilyn took back our earrings and I asked why we'd had to wear them.

Mister Salvatore said that one of the requirements for a horse to go to Canada was that it had to have an identifying number on an ear-tag, mane-tag, or neck-tag, and he thought it was a stupid requirement for us but since it was the law, he had no choice.

And then Miss Cherilyn said that they would have let us in without them, and Mister Salvatore grinned and said that he'd wanted to make sure that we were in full compliance, and besides, had she noticed how embarrassed the one border guard looked each time she saw us sitting there with numbers in our ears.

We got off the highway—which was now called the 402 Highway—so that we could have lunch. We drove to a Tim Horton's, because Mister Salvatore said that their food was better in Canada. It was right across the street from a big park called the Hiawatha Horse Park, and he asked if when we were done eating we wanted to go over to the park, and we both did.

He wasn't expecting us to say yes, I guess.

Well, it was more parking lot and less park, so it wasn't very pretty at all. He said it was for horse racing, and Aquamarine wanted to know if we could run around the track, and he said maybe we'd do that on the way back but he had a rule to never be deported from a country within one hour of entering it.

He did have us stand by the sign at the front and had Miss Cherilyn take a picture of us and him, then we got back on the 402 Highway.

Ontario was pretty flat, and the highway went much straighter than any of the highways that I'd flown along in Michigan. But we kept our eyes outside the van just to see what we could, because we were in a new country now and that was pretty exciting.

Off in the distance to the south I could see some big white windmills, and Miss Cherilyn said that the south part of Ontario was covered with them. She said that in America, most people were against free electricity, but in Canada they were more practical and made lots of it and then sold it to America.

When we got to the 81 road, we went north and then turned off it and went along the 19 road. There weren't very many towns at all—it was mostly fields and trees. It was like being on the train, almost. When we got close to a town, there would be a few big advertisement signs, and then we'd go through a little town and then we'd be back in fields.

After passing by a town called St. Marys, we went by a big reservoir, and then pretty soon we were back to farmland again.

We finally got to Stratford, and Mister Salvatore drove us to the hotel, which was called the Bruce. He got the cards for their room and for our room, and he gave us our cards (we also had an extra one for Cayenne when she arrived) and he said that Gusty was already here and so we put our things in our room and then went to see her.

Gusty was really happy to see us, and we all hugged and nuzzled and she said that she was really excited for the show and she'd been going over her lines to make sure that she got them all right and Nicky was coming to watch the play, too but she wouldn't be here until tomorrow morning.

So we said that we could stay in her room tonight if she wanted us to, so she wouldn't be lonely, and she smiled and hugged us again and said that that meant a lot to her.

We talked up until it was dinnertime and then Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn found us and took us to the restaurant which they said was the very best in all of Stratford.

He was telling the truth about the meal—it was really good. All three of us studied the menu and decided to get the farm salad and the summer squash composition, and we also got a grilled romanesco cauliflower and I got an ivory salmon, and we shared everything between us except for the salmon because neither Aquamarine nor Gusty wanted to try it.

And then they had a good dessert menu, too, and my eye was drawn right to the sunset on 21, because it had cloudberries in it, which are really yummy. So we got that and also a cheese plate and we shared that, too. Aquamarine was kinda surprised that Gusty had suggested the cheese plate, 'cause she said that most unicorns don't like cheese.

We all needed to stretch our legs after that meal, so we went outside and walked down to the park where the festival was. Gusty said that was where they were going to perform in the morning and she was really excited about it. And she said that a couple of her friends from Orange is the New Black were also coming to see the play, which was really exciting, and she hoped that we'd all get a chance to meet tomorrow.

We were on our way back to the hotel when Mister Salvatore got a call, and it was Miss Parker, saying that they were almost in town and she was sorry that they were late but Cayenne's flight had gotten delayed.

All of us waited for them in the lobby, and when they came in everyone was so happy to see everyone else and we were all hugging and nuzzling and shaking hands and hooves and pretty soon someone in the lobby started clapping.

Well, Gusty got kind of embarrassed that we were causing a scene in the lobby, so the four of us went up to her room and we all laid down on the bed and Cayenne opened one of her suitcases and got out her folding computer and a big bottle of Jacapple, which was a spiced apple whiskey, and we sipped that and took turns showing pictures of ourselves and friends on her computer. I guess I was the only one who didn't use Facebook much, but I told her about the movie of me flying in a storm that Meghan had put on her YouTube and we watched some of that. Gusty wanted to know how I flew in a storm like that at all, and I said that it wasn't even the worst one I'd been in but I hadn't had my GoPro in the storm where I got forced down on a roof.

I think that Cayenne could have stayed up all night, but the rest of us were tired so Gusty put on her nightclothes and then the three of us snuggled up in one bed and told Cayenne not to be too loud and not to invite any boys over, and she said she wouldn't.

August 7 [Sterling Silver and Viola]

August 7

Cayenne was in bed with us when we woke up, laying on top of our comforter with the one from the other bed across her back. She smelled like sex and whiskey, so I guess she must have had a good night.

We got out of bed and opened the door, and there was another basket of coffee and muffins for us, which was really nice. Me and Aquamarine shared a cup of coffee, and we left the other one for Cayenne, 'cause I thought she'd probably need it.

The two of us were almost done with our shower when she staggered into the bathroom, the coffee cup floating just in front of her, and she walked right into the shower and stuck her head under the spray, then pulled back out long enough to finish her coffee and float the cup over to the sink.

I asked if she wanted us to help her, but she said that she'd be okay by herself, so we got out and started drying off. Aquamarine asked her how her night had gone, and she said that she found a party and a couple of people there remembered that there had been a unicorn in one of the plays, and she swore that she didn't pretend to be Gusty, but they might have thought so because they were pretty drunk. Also she flashed them on the way in and that could have influenced them a little bit.

I guess I was glad that Cayenne had had a good night, but I thought that while it might be fun to have lots of sex, it was better to do it with someone that you were friends with.

We wanted to meet Sterling Silver and Viola for breakfast, so when I was preening my wings Aquamarine called them, and she asked if we wanted to meet at their hotel in half an hour. They had a buffet breakfast which she said was really nice, and they were at the Best Western which wasn't very far from our hotel, so we said that we would and then I poked my head back in the bathroom and told Cayenne to hurry up so we could get breakfast.

She groaned and turned off the shower then shook herself off, and went to the mirror to comb her mane.

Well, we left a little bit later than I wanted to, so when we got there, both Stirling Silver and Viola were sitting at a table with coffee cups in front of them.

We all nuzzled (Sterling Silver was a little uncomfortable with that) and Cayenne got more coffee, then we talked for a little bit before we started breakfast.

They wanted to know more about what we were studying in school and what we were doing for the summer, and we learned that he was the owner of Silver Barrel in Manehattan, which I'd never heard of but Cayenne had. He said that his company put advertisements in newspapers in Baltimare, Canterlot, and Manehattan. Cayenne asked him if he was getting any ideas from visiting Earth, 'cause there were advertisements everywhere, and Viola said that they were on vacation and he wasn't thinking about work, but he nodded at Cayenne.

When he'd finished his coffee, we all got up and went to the breakfast buffet, which was a lot like the one that they had at the dining hall, but the food trays were a lot fancier and had shiny silver tops over them to keep the food warm.

Cayenne helped everypony get their food, and we were kind of quiet while we were eating. It wasn't as good as the food at The Bruce, but it was more familiar to me.

The scrambled eggs were a little bit runnier than I liked, but otherwise it was very good, and just like in college if we wanted more we could go and get it. Plus it was nice that we got to smell the food and look at it before deciding what we wanted to eat.

Aquamarine and Sterling Silver both went back for some more food, while the rest of us were happy with what we'd picked the first time around. I was a little disappointed in their apples; the one I'd taken was big and shiny red, but it was pretty mealy when I bit into it and I almost didn't want to finish it.

Viola wanted to know about the humans who were with us, and so we told her that they were our helpers and that they took us places and mine had helped me to get my pilot's license and radio license, and Aquamarine said that they'd also gone on the train trip with us and drove us around and then Cayenne said that they got her out of jail once and of course everypony wanted to hear that story.

She said that she'd gone to a rally with a friend of hers, and she'd thought it was some kind of race but it was really a bunch of people shouting about Donald Trump, and then things kind of broke out into a big scuffle and someone had put her in the back of a police car and then taken her down to a police station and that had been kind of fun because nobody there had any idea what to do with her, and they'd taken hoofprints and then had her sit in a chair with metal hobbles around her forehooves until her helpers came to get her.

So that led to them asking what we knew about the election, because ponies in Manehattan were talking about it and nopony really understood it. So I told them how I'd gotten to go to the primary election with a bunch of students from college and even though I didn't get to vote I got to kind of watch how it was done and they even had a sample ballot that everyone could look at.

Aquamarine had also gone with Jenny, but Cayenne said that she hadn't, because her helpers had told her that she ought to stay away from politics.

Then we started talking about trains and how much nicer human trains were. They were bigger and not as smoky and went a lot faster. They were both unsure whether to believe that we'd taken a train that was two stories tall, but we said it was true. And even the train I'd taken from Chicago to Lafayette had an upstairs dining room.

It would have been nice to spend the whole day together, but they were going to see a morning play, and we were going to see Gusty again, but we promised that when we were back in Equestria we'd get together sometime for a meal in Manehattan.

The three of us walked back to our hotel to meet our helpers, and then we went to the theatre. We had different seats this time, a little bit higher up and further back, and on the other side, and it was strange how when we watched it the second time it looked really different just because were were watching from the other side.

It was kind of sad when the play ended, because I knew that they wouldn't ever do it again and I wondered what Gusty thought about that.

We could have probably rushed and gotten to her sooner this time but we all agreed that it was better to wait, because she had so many well-wishers who wanted to hug her or shake her hoof.

I told Aquamarine that it was kind of unfair that none of the tech people were in line, and so we looked around and tried to find them but I think they were probably still upstairs in their little booth.

They don't get enough credit for a performance.

We didn't have a private lunch today; instead, once the crowd had finally left, Gusty and all the other actors went off to their own party, and we went back to the hotel and had lunch there. They had a nice zucchini soup, and also spelt, which was something I'd never heard of but it's a kind of wheat.

Then in the afternoon we went to the Avon theatre and watched a play called Shakespeare In Love, which I didn't like as much as I'd liked H. M. S. Pinafore. But it was still pretty good, even though Miss Cherilyn said it was all made up and that Shakespeare hadn't really been in love with any of his actresses as far as anyone knew and besides back then men played woman's roles.

So that was kind of like how in the Hearth's Warming Pageant a mare usually played Commander Hurricane.

We had dinner at The Bruce again, and it was just as good as the first time. I'd hoped that Gusty would join us, but I guess she was still out with her theatre friends, which I could understand. Ships crews tended to stick together in the tavern, and so did us weatherponies, 'cause we were always a bit more comfortable with who we knew. And I thought that in some ways finishing a play was a lot like finally landing after a big nor'easter, 'cause you kind of had to talk it through and remember it, and if you weren't up flying it or out on a boat in it you didn't really understand it. And I think that's okay.

Miss Parker said that we could probably get tickets to another play tonight if we wanted to, but me and Aquamarine both wanted a chance to get outside and stretch our legs, and I think that Mister Salvatore was happy that he didn't have to go to another play as well. So we split up again, and we walked around the parks for a little bit. It was kind of strange to be in another new country and yet so many things were just the same as in Michigan. We'd seen a lot more variety of plants and terrain when we went out west on the train, but what I'd seen of Canada was a lot like Michigan. I guess that since they were closer to each other than Michigan was to California, that made sense.

I really wished that I could fly around some, and I did a little bit, but I didn't want to fly off and leave Aquamarine alone, and I also wasn't sure that I was allowed to fly up high in Canada, so I stayed close to the ground.

We stayed out until it was dark, and then we went back to the hotel. It would have been nice to soak in the bathtub again, but it was kind of late, so instead we just sat on the bed and talked for a little while, and we both agreed that we'd try to convince Mister Salvatore to take us somewhere tomorrow. We didn't know where—we couldn't think of anything special that we wanted to do—but we thought that since we were in Canada we ought to do something special on the way back.

When we were finally ready for bed, we left one side of the bed folded back for Cayenne when she came back.

August 8 [Back to Michigan]

August 8

Cayenne woke me up when she came back to the room. I heard her close the door, and I opened my eye to see who it was.

She had her horn lit just a little so that she could see where she was going, and she went into the bathroom so I put my head back down and closed my eyes but I hadn't fallen back asleep when she climbed up in bed with us and pulled the covers over herself.

I stretched out my wing to cover her and she slid in a little bit closer and nuzzled my cheek, then dropped her head to the pillow right next to mine.

When I woke up again in the morning, she was still there, tucked up against me and I actually felt kinda sad for her.

We stayed in bed until she woke up, and then she got our coffee basket and brought it inside. There was a little latch on the door that we could use to make it not close all the way in case Gusty came by to visit, so we used that and then got in the shower together.

She hadn't shown up by the time we were done showering and grooming, so I went down the hall to her room and knocked politely on the door. I knew she was up because her coffee basket was gone.

After a few minutes, Nicky poked her head out the door and I asked if they wanted to come to breakfast with us, and she said that would be nice, but that they weren't ready yet. I told her to just come by our room, and gave her the number in case Gusty had forgot.

Cayenne had a late afternoon flight out of Detroit, and she said that Mister Barrow had told her that they wanted to leave around one just in case there were delays at the border. And we could leave whenever we wanted to, since we were riding in Sienna all the way back.

I wasn't actually sure how Gusty had gotten here.

So we hung out in our room until Nicky and Gusty came by, and then we went to breakfast together. I found out that Gusty had come on a bus with all the other actors and that had been nice because it was big enough that they could lie down and nap if they wanted to and they also could practice their lines in little groups, plus she said that it had been important for them to all bond again before the play.

Me and Aquamarine and Cayenne got a big order to share—we got an omelet and steel-cut oats and also French toast and then split it all up except for the omelet that Cayenne didn't want, so we gave her all the potatoes that came with it instead.

And Gusty and Nicky shared their breakfast, too, which was really cute.

So we were talking about what we wanted to see, and Gusty said that we ought to visit the Shakespearean Gardens, which weren't too far. I didn't know what that was, and she said that they had plants that were in Shakespeare's plays, and that she had gone there on Friday with all the other actors and it had really helped get the scene in their minds. She said that the flowers on stage had been false flowers, but that she could still smell the Cupid's flower that they had in the garden.

We got directions from her—it wasn't too far away at all—and I was kind of hoping that Gusty would want to come with us but she wanted to stay with Nicky, so when we were done eating we all hugged and nuzzled each other and wished each other safe trips home, and then we went out of the hotel and to the garden.

It was strange going through town because it had been so crowded with theatre-goers all weekend long, but lots of them were leaving or had already left, so there weren't all that many people out on the sidewalks.

We were almost on the same street at the gardens, so it was really easy to find. And it was just like Gusty had said it was. The park along the lakeshore in Chicago had been bigger but this one was really nice because it had the kinds of plants that Shakespeare knew and there were little signs that told you what it was called and what play it was in.

The Cupid's flower—which the sign said was also called Cupid's dart—was a really pretty lavender with strange-looking petals that had a sawtooth end, and it didn't look much like the flower that she'd had in the play.

When we'd looked at all the flowers and smelled them all we all sat together on a bench that overlooked the river and closed our eyes and let the smells of the garden mix together in our noses and that was really nice, and I could almost imagine that if I opened my eyes I might see the fairies running around in the garden.

There was a path back that mostly followed the bank of the river, so we took that until we got to the Festival Theatre, which was sort of right behind our hotel.

We had to go across another park, and there were a couple of men in red coats and tan hats riding on horses, so we went over to greet them. I'd seen men dressed like that a couple of times over the weekend, but always from a ways away. They were easy to see, 'cause being on a horse like that put them above the crowd.

They said that they were from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and they were really friendly. One of them was blonde and his horse was interested in us, which kind of scared Cayenne. When he leaned down to sniff her she backed away, which wasn't very friendly. Both me and Aquamarine made friends with him, and we finally coaxed Cayenne to come closer so she could be friends too.

As we were walking back to the hotel, I asked Cayenne why she'd moved away, 'cause even though they were big they mostly acted like foals. She said in Chicago, the police sometimes ride horses so that they can bully their way through crowds and she'd seen a policeman on a horse pushing people back at the rally where she'd gotten arrested.

We both helped Cayenne pack her bags back up. She said that she wasn't supposed to take the liquor across the border, and it was a shame to pour it out, so we each had one drink and then she set it on the desk. She said that maybe one of the hotel maids would like to have it.

Our helpers were waiting for us in the lounge, and so we took our bags out to the vans, and then we went inside for lunch.

It was sad to split up after we'd finished eating—if it hadn't been for Cayenne needing to get back to Detroit for her flight, I think we would have made dessert last a little longer. Maybe not too much longer, 'cause the ice cream would have melted.

So we nuzzled her goodbye and hugged her helpers and then she got in their van and we got in Sienna, and me and Aquamarine still hadn't thought of anyplace that we wanted to visit while we were in Canada.

I asked if there were any casinos in Canada, and Mister Salvatore said that there were but we weren't going to stop at one because he had done nothing to deserve having to fill out that much paperwork. Miss Cherilyn said that was what he got for trying to corrupt me.

Then Aquamarine saw a sign for the Stones n Bones museum and it had a picture of a big skeleton that looked like it might be a dragon and we said that that sounded like a fun place to visit. And Miss Cherilyn thought so, too.

Well, it was kind of disappointing that it wasn't an actual dragon skeleton. Instead it was a dinosaur, which was kind of like a dragon but it couldn't fly and it couldn't breathe fire. But they used to live on Earth and then somehow after they'd died their bones had turned to stone, and then someone had dug them up and figured out how they all went together and reassembled them into a skeleton.

There were drawings of what the dinosaurs might have looked like when they were alive, which was pretty neat to see. And they had some other kinds of fossils, too, of other kinds of smaller dinosaurs and mammals and even some fossil plants, which Aquamarine was really interested in. They even had a small collection of fossil dinosaur eggs.

Another room had butterflies on the wall and they were pretty but it was sad that they were all dead. Butterflies were a lot prettier when they were flying around.

When we'd had a look at all the displays, we went to the gift shop and Aquamarine bought a book about ancient plants, and Mister Salvatore found a package of astronaut ice cream and bought that. He was really excited about it because he thought that they didn't make it any more, and he said that we should try some and I told him that we'd both had it before in Lansing.

So after that we got back in Sienna and he gave us our earrings and told us that we shouldn't mention having visited the horse racing track unless they specifically asked about it. He said that if they asked if we'd seen any horses in Canada, to say no.

But I said that wasn't true because we'd seen the mounties and they'd been on horses and he let out a long sigh and said that he was glad that he'd gotten ice cream and while he was waiting at the customs house he was going to see if he could use his badge to get a cup of coffee.

It turned out to be quicker than on the way over, though. We still had to take turns answering questions, but not very many. And I did get asked if I had any alcohol or drugs or firearms in my saddlebags. I also wasn't supposed to have any fresh fruit, which I didn't.

Mister Salvatore had gotten his cup of coffee—when I came back out he was sitting on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs with it in his hand and he said that if I wanted he could get me a cup, too, but I said that I didn't need it.

So once Aquamarine had had her turn to answer questions, we all got back in Sienna and drove back home.

She asked Mister Salvatore if he could take her to the greenhouse instead of her apartment, because she wanted to check her plants, and he didn't know where it was but she gave him directions on how to get there and Miss Cherilyn offered to wait and give her a ride back home.

Aquamarine thanked her but said that she would probably be at the greenhouse for a while and could get a ride from Jenny if she wanted it, so we nuzzled and then I got back in the van and we went back to the highway.

Mister Salvatore offered to buy me dinner on the way home and I was getting kinda hungry, so I said that we could stop somewhere if he wanted to. So we stopped in Charlotte and had dinner at Pizza Hut, then we went the rest of the way to Kalamazoo.

I was kind of sad that the trip was over, but I was glad that I was back home and the first thing I did was put on my flight gear and took a nice flight around town until it was getting dark, and then I got undressed and flew over to Meghan's.

She was really happy to see me and gave me a big hug and then when we were inside crouched down and kissed me, and we went upstairs and snuggled on her bed and I told her all about the trip and everything we'd seen. She was kind of jealous that I'd met a couple of the actresses from Orange is the New Black.

I didn't get to tell her everything that we'd done today, 'cause we'd started kissing and pretty soon most of her clothes were in a pile on the floor and I was on top of her. We didn't wind up having sex, 'cause she'd just come off estrus, but I didn't mind. Just being curled up with my head on her breast and her hand on my back made me happy.

August 9 [New Flight Gear]

August 9

Meghan ignored her first alarm, and after she'd turned it off I asked her why she even set it if she was never going to get up when it went off. Why not set it ten minutes later and get up then?

She said that it was because she wanted that ten minutes to be awake and snuggling with me, and then she kissed my forehead.

I kissed her back and then put my wing across her belly and gave her a little wing-hug and we snuggled together until her alarm went off again.

When she was in the shower I went downstairs and got breakfast ready, then I went back upstairs and picked out clothes for her. She liked what I picked and said I was getting good at choosing her clothes.

I said I still thought it was more sensible to not wear clothes.

After we'd eaten we washed the dishes together and then went out on the porch to wait for her friend. It was a beautiful day out, and I was really looking forward to flying.

Once her friend had arrived, I nuzzled her hip to say goodbye and then took off for home.

I had to fill the birdfeeder, and after I'd done mine I went over to Aric's and filled his up, too. There were just some empty shells on the workbench, so I guess mister mouse had found them. I swept those off with my wingtip and then left him some more.

I thought I'd do medium-length flights today, and relax in between. That way I wouldn't wind up tiring myself out.

Going west first would be easiest, so I filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear and then called Dori and told her that I was planning to fly over Stadium Drive and then along the 94 Highway until I got past Three Rivers, and then turn around and come back.

She told me to have a safe flight and keep under a thousand until I crossed the 131 Highway. I liked it better when I was allowed to climb up early, but I said that was okay, and I dropped off my balcony and under the tree and wires, then up into the sky.

It was a beautiful day for flying—even before I got much above the trees, I could see how blue and open the sky was and it was days like this that I felt like I could fly forever.

I'd made it all the way to where Stadium Drive crosses the 131 Highway and I was just starting to climb when I heard my pocket telephone ringing in my saddlebags.

If I'd been higher, I would have ignored it, but I'd decided to keep even lower over the city, and was only a few hundred feet up, so I wasn't going to lose much by landing to see who had called. So I circled back, and landed in the grass by Costco and got my pocket telephone out.

It was Mister Salvatore and he said that had gotten my navigation watch and portable GPS, and that he could bring them to me or I could come to his office and get them.

Well, I was eager to see what he had gotten, so I called him back and said that I would meet him at his office in about a sixth of an hour, and then I used my airplane radio to call Dori back and tell her that I was going to have to stop my morning flight, and she was a little bit worried so I told her that it wasn't anything bad but I had to pick up some new flight gear that had just come in for me.

When you want directions on the ground, you want to ask an earth pony 'cause they always seem to know where the roads go and what's the best way even if it's not obvious. But in the air you can't beat a pegasus who knows her territory. So I turned around on the lawn until I was pointed almost right at Mister Salvatore's office and I took off, making a little detour around a light post that was inconveniently in my way, and kept my eyes fixed on the sky until I was high enough up that I could see all the way over to where I knew his office was to see how well I'd done at guessing the bearing.

I was pretty close. Humans measure the compass in 360 degrees, and I was only off by one or two from my first, on-the-ground guess.

It was only a trio of miles, so I didn't get very high. There wasn't any point; I would waste just as much effort getting up out of ground turbulence as I would flying through it.

Even though I hadn't planned it, I liked the course I took, 'cause it was mostly over lots of neighborhoods with trees, a park, and by the golf course where I'd gotten yelled at. I thought about making a little low arc over it just to annoy them, but there was already a hawk circling there who might have had the same idea.

I came down around the front of their building, which faces the 94 Highway. I made a big circle to lose altitude and I came a bit closer to the highway than I'd meant to and got a bit of an unplanned sideways boost from the wind blowing off a big truck.

Miss Cherilyn was waiting in the lobby for me and she said that Mister Salvatore was upstairs, playing with the new toys.

She took me up to their office and sure enough, Mister Salvatore had a watch in his hands and he was looking at a big sheet of paper with little tiny writing on it and then pushing buttons on the watch. And he also had another little flat thing that was kind of like my portable telephone.

Well, I thought that Mister Salvatore wasn't just playing but that he had figured out how they worked, 'cause once he looked up and saw me he had me sit down in a chair next to him and he showed me how to use them.

He said that he had also gotten an extended wristband for the watch so that it would fit around my leg, and we tried that first 'cause it was made for pilots. It could tell you your altitude, and you could put in an airport code and it would tell you what direction it was. He showed me with Kalamazoo's airport, and showed how when he turned around it changed what the bearing was. And there were buttons on the side that you could push to show where the airport or waypoint you wanted to visit were, or another button that would show you how to get to the nearest airport, which would be useful if I got lost.

It didn't say how fast I was going, though, and it also didn't have a very good map. It showed a couple of little points but that was all.

Still, it was not as bulky as the altimeter I had on, and it hardly weighed anything.

Mister Salvatore explained how for all the functions to work properly it had to talk to my portable telephone, and he said that we could learn how to use that together, but that it didn't need to talk to my telephone to show my bearing or altitude.

And then we tried out the GPS. It didn't show airports, but it had a good ground map and it also could show altitude, and since it had a bigger picture, it could show more things.

He said that I ought to try both of them out and see which I liked best, so he put the watch on one foreleg, right where I usually wore my altimeter, and the other one on my other leg, where my weather radio usually goes.

I said that I was planning a couple of medium flights for today to get ready for tomorrow. And then I nuzzled him and Miss Cherilyn, too.

I got permission to fly again; staying low was even more important now than it had been before, because I was closer to the airport. So I took off and followed the 94 Highway, about six hundred feet up.

The bigger display on the watch was nice, and since it was lighted it would be easier to see at night.

I had to be careful not to get distracted with my new navigation equipment, because even though it knew where I was, it didn't know who else might be in the air around me.

Well, I couldn't say for sure that it was enough to keep me from being lost—I think the only way to test that would be to get lost and then see if the GPS could find me—but I did find that the watch was very good at knowing where the Kalamazoo airport was, and when I was in Three Rivers and picked the nearest airport it gave me a bearing to the grass runway that was near Mattawan. At least that looked like where it was suggesting.

I kind of wanted to have both with me but I thought for a flight to Chicago, the little watch was going to be more useful 'cause it was so small and light. But I think for storms the GPS might work better.

I circled around with my hoof held out in front of me and watched the bearing numbers change, then I went back along the highway and then home.

Since I was going to go out flying again, I didn't want to eat too big a lunch, so I ate some hay and took a short nap in the papasan, then had a little bit more hay, and read the manual for the watch. It was really long and complicated, because the watch was so smart. It even said that it could keep track of how far I swam, which was a feature I hoped I wasn't going to need.

I experimented with it, to make sure that I could make it do what I wanted it to. It knew if I was flying by how fast I climbed, but I had to change its setting because I didn't think that I could ever manage to climb five hundred fifty feet per minute, unless I dove first to get some speed, or found a really good updraft in a thunderstorm.

Even though I hadn't figured out all the functions, I did want to get flying again before it was too late, so I refilled my camelback, and got dressed in my flight gear again.

This time I went northwest—I thought I'd fly to Allegan and then turn around there. So I told my watch to find the Allegan airport, and then I asked the airplane directors if I could fly to Allegan and they said that I could.

Rather than follow a road directly, I trusted my watch to point me the right way, and tried to pay as little attention to the ground as I could. It wasn't a great test, because it was really hard to avoid the instinct of looking down and finding the landmarks on the ground, especially since I had to always look around me to make sure that there weren't any other airplanes around.

And when I got close, there were other airplanes around. The watch told me when I was ten miles from the airport so I called out my position on my radio and another airplane warned me that there were skydivers in the area.

They were pretty easy to find, when I thought to look down, because their parachutes were big and bright. But I'd thought they'd be higher up, and it turned out it was really hard to spot a falling person in the air. I probably wouldn't have seen any of them if I hadn't heard their airplane and focused in on where the sound was. I guess that they fall down from a high altitude and open their parachutes at a low altitude.

I didn't want to get too close to them, so I circled the opposite way that it was flying, and I told them where I was going so that they would know.

Even from a safe distance, it was neat to see their parachutes balloon open and watch them drift down.

I watched until I didn't see any more parachutes, and the airplane that the people had been jumping out of went back to the airport. Then I turned around and went back towards Kalamazoo.

I followed my watch for a little while, and then I could see Kalamazoo, so I went the rest of the way visually, 'cause I knew that I'd be doing the same tomorrow—I'd set the watch to point me to Chicago, and at some point over the lake, I'd see it, and then I'd be able to fly visually towards the skyscratchers.

Once I got close to Kalamazoo, I started a long descent, making a little bit of a course correction when I found the Kalamazoo College bell tower, and then I skimmed over the tops of the trees in my neighborhood before dropping under the canopy at my backyard. I cut it a little bit too close and got some leaves for my trouble, but at least it was only with my hooves and not my face. Trees looked kind of soft when you were above them but they really weren't.

I cooled down in the shower, even though it was pretty late to be taking a shower, and then I sat on my bed and read the rest of the instructions for the watch, to make sure that I understood everything that it could do, and then when I'd figured it all out I preened my wings.

Before I went to bed, I made sure to put it in its little cradle, so that it would be ready for the morning, and I also put new batteries in my blinking light.

I had a hard time getting to sleep 'cause I was really looking forward to flying tomorrow, and after I'd laid in bed for a while I got back up and went to the kitchen and set out a couple of cans of anchovies for tomorrow and I don't know why that made me feel less restless, but it did, and when I got back in bed I fell asleep pretty quickly.

August 10 [Flight to Chicago]

August 10

I woke up earlier than usual, 'cause I was so eager for my trip. And it was already looking like another beautiful day today, even though the sun wasn't very far up yet.

The first thing I did was stretch out and then I flew out my balcony and took a quick trot around the block, flexing my wings a little bit, and then I did a couple of jog-hops, and when I got back around to my apartment I flew up to my balcony and apologized to the birds for scaring them off while they were eating breakfast.

My own breakfast was oatmeal and a little bit of hay, and then I checked over all my flight gear and put it all in a neat pile on the bed so I wouldn't forget anything and I stuffed my saddlebags full of hay—I'd have Mister Salvatore take them with him; I didn't want to wear them when I was flying. And I sat down next to my gear and started preening my wings even though I'd done it last night. A couple of feathers had gotten ruffled while I slept.

I put my portable telephone in my vest pocket along with the two tins of anchovies, and then I stuffed the other pocket full of the moistest hay from the middle of the bale. That kind of made a mess in the bedroom but I could clean it up later.

Then I took my portable telephone back out 'cause I thought that maybe I ought to call Meghan but I didn't want her to worry but she'd probably worry anyway so I did call her and she sounded worried and I promised her that I would call her when I got to Chicago and that Mister Salvatore had a boat and I had a new watch that would tell me where to go.

I sat in the papasan and watched the birds for a while and then I went and checked through all my flight gear again to make sure that I had everything and cursed myself for being silly because I'd already made a couple of flights that long before, so of course I wouldn't forget anything.

Well, I'd only checked through my flight gear two more times before Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn arrived, and they helped me carry everything down to Sienna, and I checked through it one more time to be sure that I had everything before we left.

I'd planned to relax in the back seat, but I just couldn't because I was too eager to fly.

When we got to South Haven, we went to the docks and Mister Salvatore got his boat. Mister Salvatore thought it was really nice and Miss Cherilyn said it was pretty small. There were little vertical pipes all over it which were used for fishing, but they wouldn't be doing any of that today.

The captain of the boat was named Captain Buroughs, and he was really interested in me, and he said that this was the strangest charter he'd ever had.

We put all my gear on the boat—the plan was that I would fly off of it after he got into the main channel—and then we all lined up for a picture.

Mister Salvatore and I put the directions in to my watch. He'd decided that I should land on Northerly Island, because he said it would give him immense satisfaction to stick it to Mayor Daley, and there was a nice little beach there where I could cool off and a marina behind it so that the boat could get fuel.

And he gave me another little bit of equipment which was called an EPRB, and he said it stood for emergency pegasus rescue beacon. That could go on a hind leg, 'cause I probably wouldn't need it, but if I did he showed me how to make it send a signal. He said that it could also be set to trigger automatically if I landed in the water, but I would want to make sure that it was turned off before I went swimming on the other side.

So I put on all my gear and Captain Buroughs had Mister Salvatore help him untie the boat from the dock and I was already dancing on my hooves by the time that we were moving into the main channel.

I told myself that I wasn't going to take off until we got along the jetty, and it was really hard to wait. Mister Salvatore was standing in the front, helping to look for other boats or obstacles in the water, and Miss Cherilyn was sitting in the back, watching the land go by, so I stood next to her until I could see the jetty and lighthouse ahead.

I went up to the bow and Captain Buroughs slowed the boat down so that it wouldn't overrun me.

I took one last look at all my gear and when I was sure that I had everything, I called the airplane directors in South Haven and told them that I was taking off from the mouth of the Black River on a course for Chicago, and they gave me permission right away.

Just as a wave pushed the bow of the boat up, I took off and started climbing. Not too fast; I didn't want to overexert myself early and not make it all the way because of that.

There were a lot of small boats out in the lake already, and for a while I could use them to easily judge my height, but as we got further out into the lake there weren't so many any more, and without knowing how far away they were it wasn't as easy to know how high I was.

As the shore got further and further away, it was really reassuring to see the boat, although it looked really tiny out there all alone.

I kept land in sight for longer than I'd expected, because I was flying at an angle to the southwest and that was kind of the way that Michigan's shore went, too. So even after the sun had passed overhead, I could still make out the shore of Michigan behind me, but eventually I got far enough away that it was gone completely, and there was nothing but Lake Michigan as far as I could see in every direction, and one little boat that was following me.

I'd kind of known that this would be the most boring part of the trip—I was glad that I'd ridden on the ferry with Aric, 'cause I think I wouldn't have been prepared for it otherwise. There was nothing to see, and only my little watch telling me which way to go.

After a while I started to lose track of time and it felt like I'd been flying forever and would keep flying forever because there was nothing but water and sky. And the sunlight reflecting off the waves was starting to hurt my eyes a little bit, and it didn't help that I was straining them in the hopes of seeing Chicago in front of me, but there was nothing.

It started to get a little bit cloudy, and that was nice because I could cool down a little bit when I was in cloud-shadow, and it also cut down on some of the reflections off the lake, but it meant I couldn't see as far, I didn't think.

I'd been flying for over five hours when I finally saw Chicago clearly enough that I knew it wasn't a mirage. I'd thought I'd seen something that way before, but I hadn't been sure. But this was it: it was kind of hazy because of the distance, but the two white antennas on the top of the Sears Tower were unmistakable. And I was right on course; it was right in front of my muzzle, so I reached my foreleg up and gave my pilot's watch a little kiss for being so smart at knowing where I was supposed to go.

As I got closer, I started to see boats out on the lake, and small flocks of seagulls flying over the lake looking for a meal. And I could see the island that I was aiming for, too: it was long and rectangular, with a little notch that was the beach and a round building on the north end.

I had to remind myself not to rush—it was still a long ways off.

I wondered how much they could see from the boat. Surely the skyscratchers would be visible to them; they stuck up so far over the lake that if I could see them so could they.

When I was about fifteen miles away, I called the Chicago airplane directors and told them where I was and where I was going and at first they told me I couldn't land at Meigs Field because there wasn't an airport there anymore and then another airplane director said that I could and told me to fly straight in and he asked what my bearing was to him and how far I was.

I wouldn't have known that before, but since O'Hare was the nearest airport, I could just push a button on my watch and it told me, so I told him and he thanked me and told me to call them if my flight conditions changed. I liked him better than the first one because he sounded nicer on the radio.

By now, I was pretty exhausted. My camelback was empty, and my tummy was growling—I'd managed to eat most of the hay that was in my vest pocket, but I'd dropped a little of it down to the lake by mistake.

The final stretch was as much willpower as anything. I started getting into a bit of a headwind, which wouldn't have been anything normally, but I was to the point where I was trying to stretch my glide as much as I could, and I guess it probably made all the sailboats happy but it wasn't what I wanted, and I started to wonder if I'd ever make it or if the wind would pick up even more and keep me out to sea. Maybe it would blow me all the way back to Michigan, and then I'd have to start all over again.

But when I was finally close enough to see people on the ground I knew that I was going to make it. And some of them were pointing out over the water at me.

I knew that boats weren't allowed to go boating where people were swimming, so as tempting as it was to land on the beach, I went just a little bit further past the end of the main beach towards a second, smaller beach. There were a bunch of people out there flying kites and enjoying the wind, too.

I'd misjudged and dropped too much altitude and I had to climb up a little bit once I got to the edge of the island or else I would have crashlanded on the beach, so I stuck my nose up and then dropped to the grass.

I turned around and there was the boat, and it got as close to the shore as it could and Miss Cherilyn jumped out and waded up the beach to greet me, and she helped me take off my flight gear so that I could go wade out in the water and cool down some. And she brought a bottle of water with her, too.

I can't think of any other time in my life that wading out into water has felt so good. I went in until the water just touched my ruff, then I laid down, stretching my wings out over the surface and letting the little wavelets move them up and down for me.

Captain Buroughs took the boat around to the other side of the island where the marina was and Miss Cherilyn asked me how my flight had been and I said it had been long and I was exhausted but it had been worth it. And then I told her that she might have to drag me back to shore.

I finally got out of the water and shook myself off when Captain Buroughs came across the island, because he said that he had to take the boat back to South Haven, so he couldn't stay the night, but he said that he wanted to say goodbye before he left, and he gave his portable telephone to Mister Salvatore so that we could have a picture of me in Chicago with him. Then he shook my hoof and said that next time I wanted to fly across the lake to call him.

I sat on the grass and let the sun dry me off and talked to a bunch of the kite-fliers and swimmers who had come over because they were curious. All of them were pretty amazed that I'd flown all the way across the lake and a woman in a bikini asked me why I'd flown across the lake and I said because I wanted to.

Even though I was exhausted I was really happy that I'd done it.

I also called Meghan and told her that I had made it safely and I said that I wished that she was here to preen my wings for me.

Once I was mostly dry, I got up and Miss Cherilyn wiped some grass off my belly, then Mister Salvatore called for a car to come and pick us up, and before too long a big Suburban pulled into the parking lot, and we all got in. I sat in the back next to Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore sat in the front.

We went to the Hilton Hotel, which was where we were going to spend the night. They had a restaurant called Kitty O'Shea's and we ate dinner there. I had the lake trout—and Mister Salvatore said that the boat had had a fish-radar and that next time we did this trip he'd want me to circle around for a little while while he did some fishing. I stuck my tongue out at him.

They also had a beer sampler called Flight to Ireland that sounded pretty good, and he said that I could only get it if I shared because he didn't want to have to deal with a drunk pegasus flying all over Chicago and I promised that I wouldn't do any flying at all because I was too tired to fly.

After we were done eating we went up to our room, which was kind of like a suite except that there was only one bedroom but it did have a lounge, and a nice view over Lake Michigan. Mister Salvatore said that he could sleep on the couch but I said that I wouldn't mind it, 'cause it would be like my futon.

I took a nice long shower 'cause my muscles were starting to cramp up a little bit, and then I took a pile of their fluffy white towels out to the lounge and made myself a little nest on the couch where I could sit and watch the lights of the city.

August 11 [Pony Car]

August 11

I was a little bit confused when I woke up 'cause when I opened my eyes I was in the sky, and I thought that maybe I was somehow back in Equestria but then I realized that I was looking out a window, and I watched the sun rise over the lake from my towel-nest.

When Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had gotten showered and dressed we went downstairs to the 720 South Bar and Grill and got breakfast. They had a breakfast pizza but I didn't think I'd want to start my day with a pizza. And I was going to get an omelet but then I saw that they had a Nutella waffle, and I asked Miss Cherilyn what a Nutella was because I didn't know. She said it was a chocolatey hazelnut butter that was really good and so I thought I'd try that.

It was really really good and when I'd finished it and licked all the Nutella off my lips I really wanted another one but that would have been greedy. I asked her if you could buy it in at Meijer and she said that you could. And then I asked if we could stop at Meijer on the way home.

She said that we could, and Mister Salvatore asked if he got a say in it, and she told him that he didn't. Then he asked if she was going to eat the rest of her bacon and she said he could have it if he agreed to take us to Meijer. And he said it was pretty low to try and bribe him with bacon, but he took it anyway.

We had to go up to our room to get our things, and then we went all the way downstairs to the underground parking lot, where Mister Salvatore said that there was a car waiting for us. He had the keys in his pocket and he asked Miss Cherilyn to guess what we'd gotten to drive back.

She said that knowing him he'd probably tried to justify a Corvette, and he was about to explain how I was going to ride on her lap all the way back.

He said that he wished he'd thought of that, but he'd gotten something more practical and pushed the button on the keys, and a white car honked and flashed its lights at us.

She shook her head, but Mister Salvatore said that a Mustang was the most logical choice—I was a pony and it was a pony car, and since I liked open skies, he'd gotten one where the roof folded down.

So we put all our luggage in the trunk and he folded down the canvas roof, and it had a kind of neat rumbly exhaust that sounded almost like it was growling happily.

When we got out on the road, she asked how he'd managed to get it out of Chicago's motor pool for the trip back to Michigan and he said that he'd volunteered to spend rush week with Cayenne, helping out. I didn't know what rush week was, but Miss Cherilyn whistled and said that they owed him the convertible for a week at least for that.

He said he was keeping it until we went on our trip out west, 'cause instead of taking Amtrak to Chicago, we were going to take the Mustang.

It wasn't that much fun to be topless in Chicago, 'cause all the traffic made it smelly and hot, but when we finally got off of the Skyway it sped up a little bit, and then it was a lot of fun. I could hold out my wings a little bit and let the wind push them up and down depending on how much angle I had, and I was pretty sure that if I stuck them all the way out I could fly out of the car without a single flap, but I wasn't dumb enough to try it.

We stayed on the 94 Highway until we got to the 196 Highway and Miss Cherilyn asked Mister Salvatore where he was going, and he reminded her that Sienna was still in South Haven.

She glared at him and said that he was probably expecting us to ride home in Sienna and stop at Meijer in Sienna and meanwhile he'd be living out his adolescent fantasies in a Mustang convertible.

He said that it was the most logical choice.

But when we got to South Haven and got to Sienna, Miss Cherilyn asked which car I wanted to ride in, and even though I liked Sienna, I also liked having the wind in my mane and open sky, so I said that I liked it better, even though it made me feel a little disloyal.

She smiled and told Mister Salvatore to have fun shopping, and that she'd meet him back at the office, and then she roared out of the parking lot.

I hoped he wasn't mad at me. At least we were close enough to Kalamazoo that I could fly back home if he left me, too.

Well, he wasn't mad at all. He said that she'd gotten him good but he didn't care because he still had a convertible. And then he asked if I wanted to take the scenic route to Meijer and I said that I wouldn't mind.

So instead of taking the M43 road, we went straight on a road called Phoenix Street which mostly went past fields but there was also a nice section of it that was dirt and it was pretty hilly and winding and it kind of reminded me of being up north. There was hardly any other traffic, and when we got to one straight section he told me to hold on and he accelerated until the Mustang was running over a hundred miles an hour.

I don't think that was as fast as the Amtraks went, but because it was open and bumpier it felt faster.

Mister Salvatore was in a pretty good mood by the time we got to Meijer and he stayed with me while we were shopping. It took us a while to find the Nutella, and I think we would have been in there even longer if I hadn't asked one of the people putting food on the shelves where it was.

He took me right home when we were done shopping and helped me carry my flight gear upstairs and that's when I noticed how smelly my vest was getting, and I asked him if he wanted to take me to the laundromat.

He said that he had a convertible and he'd take me anywhere I wanted to drive.

So we got together all my laundry and I didn't have any baskets or anything to put it in so he wrapped it all up in my comforter and make a big sack out of it and drove me to the laundromat.

Then before we could go inside, he had me stand next to the car and he took a picture and sent it to Miss Cherilyn so that she would know where I was.

When I'd put everything in the wash he said that we ought to go get something to eat and asked if I'd like Taco Bell.

I reminded him that the last time he hadn't wanted me to have Taco Bell because I might fart and he said that he had a convertible so it didn't matter if I did. And he took a picture of us there, too, and he sent it to Miss Cherilyn, and we drove back with our food and we ate it while we were waiting for my laundry to finish washing.

He helped me put it in the dryer and then he went over to the wastebasket and picked up a folded-up copy of USA Today, and opened it up and started reading.

He asked if I wanted a section to read and slid it over to me and I just took one look at the headlines—which said that people in Maryland were missing after their apartment had exploded,and that two people had died in a skydiving accident and I decided that I'd rather watch my blankets and towels spin around in the dryer instead of read the newspaper.

The dryers that they had at the laundromat were a lot faster than the ones that they had in Trowbridge, and it wasn't even a half hour before everything was dry.

Mister Salvatore bundled it all up and asked me if there was anywhere else I wanted to go, and I said that it was probably time for me to get back to my apartment because I had to go meet Pastor Liz (and admit that I hadn't read any of the Bible over the last week) and then go practice fighting with the SCA people, so he took me back to my apartment.

And he wanted to know about how I could fight, so I got out my glaive and went to the backyard with him and showed him some practice moves. And then I let him try it but I warned him to be careful because it was sharp and when we practiced I borrowed a padded glaive so that nobody would get hurt.

He was pretty clumsy with it, and he said that he didn't understand how I could be so good when I didn't even have hands. I told him that it was a lot of practice, and we used to drop them a lot until we learned how to hold them right.

And I said that we also had archers, and I'd even learned how to shoot a bow but I wasn't very good at it.

So he wanted to know how that worked, and I showed him the easy technique (which was the one I knew) where you lay on your back and held the bow with your hind hooves and pulled the string with your forehooves. It wasn't too accurate, but it was a good way to defend a city.

He said that we ponies kept amazing him. And he said that it had been a fun weekend and then he gave me a hug and got back into his Mustang and drove off.

I didn't really have enough time to read the Bible and understand it, so when I went to see Pastor Liz I had to tell her that I was a bad pony, and she hugged me and said that it was okay; it wasn't a race to finish. She said that she'd rather have me take my time reading it and thinking about what it said than try to rush through it. And she asked me how my week had been, so I told her about going to Stratford and flying to Chicago and she said I'd been pretty busy.

I still felt bad, though. And when I was walking down to the park, I thought that maybe I should turn around and go home and sit in my papasan and at least finish Jeremiah. But then Karla saw me and waved and so I trotted over to her and gave her a nuzzle and then Stellan and everyone else showed up, and pretty soon all I could think about was my staffwork.

Especially after I got bonked a couple of times.

By the time we were done practicing, everybody was pretty tired. Stellan had gotten good at blocking most of my attacks, and I wasn't so good at blocking his. I thought that maybe next time I would try some leg-sweeps, because sometimes he left his legs unguarded.

I went over to Meghan's apartment after we were done practicing and she gave me a big hug and said that I was crazy to have flown all the way to Chicago and I told her that it had been fun. Really tiring, but fun. And I said that my wings were still pretty sore, but otherwise I felt good.

She said that she'd gotten a bottle of wine to celebrate my return, and it was called 2008 Chandelle Cabernet Sauvignon.

It had a picture on the label of a black airplane flying over the water, and she said that when she'd seen the label she knew that she needed to get it for us.

So we went out on the porch and sipped wine and I told her what it had been like flying across the lake, and how strange it had been to be out in the center where I couldn't see any land in any direction.

And then I told her about seeing the skydivers on Tuesday and asked if she wanted to go skydiving with me, 'cause that was something else I wanted to do while I was on Earth.

She said that she didn't. She said that the balloon ride had been scary enough, and she didn't think that she could bring herself to step out of an airplane at all, even if I was with her.

So that was disappointing but it was nice that she was honest about it. So I nuzzled her and told her that it was okay and maybe if I did find someone who wanted to skydive with me she could come and cheer us on from the ground, and she promised that she could do that.

We stayed out on the porch until it was dark, and then she put the cork back in the bottle and said that we'd finish it tomorrow night.

She got mostly undressed and I lay on my side so that she could curl up around me, and she kissed me on the ear and then put her head against mine and scooted her legs up against my rump. I wiggled my tail around a little bit and she said that I was tickling her with it.

Meghan yawned and then let out a little happy sigh and pulled me against her and I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

August 12 [Pancakes]

August 12

I woke up when the sad bird started singing outside Meghan's window, and it was light enough that I thought her alarm would sound pretty soon, and since now I knew that she wanted to snuggle in the morning I didn't think she'd be mad if I woke her up. So I reached over and nuzzled her cheek and then brushed her bangs back and she opened her eyes and I kissed her.

She rolled on her side and pulled me against her and kissed me back, then she started stroking my mane and we were all cuddled up when her alarm went off for the first time.

Meghan twisted onto her back to turn it off and I snuggled up against her breast and she scratched behind my ears until her alarm went off again, and we had to get out of bed.

I got out clothes for her and then went downstairs to set out breakfast and I saw that she had a box of Bisquick just like mine and for a minute I actually considered cooking pancakes for breakfast but it would take too long and I'd probably mess them up anyway, so I just got out the cereal and bowls so that we could have what we usually ate.

Then I got back upstairs just in time to brush her hair before she got dressed. She said that it was nice to have me do it in the morning because she could put on her makeup while I was doing it.

We had breakfast and washed the dishes, then her friend came to pick her up and I flew off to home. I was already thinking what I might do for the morning, 'cause I hadn't decided yet. If the farmer's market had been open, I would have gone there, but it wasn't open today.

It had been a little while since I'd just flown around Kalamazoo, and I thought that the airplane directors would be happy if I stayed low and didn't bother them, so I got on my flight gear and filled my camelback and flew around about a hundred feet above the streets, all the way around the downtown and then moving a little bit further.

Because it was fun, I raced some cars when I was downtown, but only for short stretches because I didn't want to tire myself out too much this early in the morning. I was still a little bit stiff from my long flight over Lake Michigan, and so I didn't want to push myself too hard.

When I got back to my apartment, I thought that maybe I'd try to make pancakes, 'cause I wanted to make them for Meghan tomorrow. And I know that she'd want to help, but I'd feel pretty proud if I could make them on my own.

I got out my ingredients and ran into problems right away. I didn't have any measuring cups, so I put on my saddlebags and put the Bisquick box in them and flew over to Aric's house and knocked on the door.

Angela was nice enough to loan me everything that I needed, as long as I promised to bring it back clean, and I said that I would, and she said that if I wanted to we could make them right here or she could come over and help me. But I really wanted to do it on my own, even though it was super-nice of her to offer.

So when I was back home I got out the box of Bisquick and measuring cups and spoons and then all the other ingredients that I needed, and I started mixing everything up in my bowl. Making pancakes was a lot like making waffles, really. Although the pancake recipe on the box was more complicated than the waffle recipe.

I wasn't sure exactly what medium-low heat was, but I figured that meant not too big a flame, so I stood on the counter and turned on the stove, making sure that I was away from the ring where the flames came out. And then once it was burning nicely, I turned the knob until it was just a short little flame and put the pan over it.

Once the pan got hot I sprayed it with butter and poured in my first pancake. A few would have fit in the pan at the same time, but I wanted to be sure I had figured out what I was doing before I wasted all my batter.

I took a bite out of each one when I was finished with it, just to see how it tasted. I cooked the first one too long, and then I didn't cook the second one long enough, 'cause it was still a bit raw inside. But after that I started to figure it out, and pretty soon they were all tasty pancakes.

My cooking experiment had left me with a dozen pancakes, each of which had one bite out of it. I couldn't eat them all, so I picked the worst two—the first two—and put some Nutella on them to make them taste better, and put the rest in the electric icebox so that they'd stay fresh for later.

I flew up after I was done eating and took a look at the sky. I didn't like the way it was looking and feeling—it was hot and the air was really saturated, but I couldn't see any stormclouds as far as I looked. And when I went back inside and turned on my computer and looked at the weather on it, there weren't any storms near Michigan, but the weather forecast still said that there were going to be evening thunderstorms, which meant that they might just start popping up.

I didn't like those at all—with a normal stormfront you could set up a good counterstorm if you had enough time, or at the very least work along the front to help break it up, but with weather like this you just had to deal with them as they showed up. You needed spotters stretched kinda thin across the sky, and you had to rely on them to give you an accurate assessment of how bad the storm was gonna be, because you didn't want to have your team fly off to deal with one and then be in the wrong place when a worse one came through.

And no matter what, somepony always complained about the one you did let through.

I left my computer on so that I could check on the weather later in the day and see what it was doing, and then I went and started cleaning up the hay that was scattered around the bedroom. I had to push it along with a hoof, 'cause I didn't have a broom. I knew that Meghan did, and I thought about sending her a telephone telegram so that she'd bring it when she came over tonight, but I didn't.

The one problem with haybales is once you start to pull them apart, they keep falling apart on their own. Someponies in town had baleboxes, but I didn't have one and I'd never seen one at Meijer, so if I wanted to have one made I'd have to find a carpenter.

Maybe the makers could build me one.

But I wasn't going to be in this apartment all that much longer, so it probably wasn't worth the hassle.

When Meghan came over, she told me that there was a storm coming, and I said that I knew because I'd looked at the weather forecast and seen it there.

She said that she hoped the weatherpeople were wrong about the storm coming tonight and I said that I didn't think that they were because every time I went outside it felt more and more like it was going to rain. And she took out her portable telephone and turned on her weather program which showed a map that didn't have much activity on it. But then she changed the map so that it showed what was going to come, and at first the map didn't change, but then it got some blotchy spots on it.

I asked her what that was and she said it was the futurecast, and that was kind of neat. So she showed me how to get it for my portable telephone, and after it had been put on I tried it.

So it was nice because it showed that there weren't going to be any storms for a couple of hours, which meant that we could have dinner with Jeff.

We walked to Tiffany's together to get some beer for the dinner, so that we'd have something to share, and I thought that we ought to get something that we hadn't had before. So we looked at everything that they had and so we got some Milkshake Stout and some Pine Knob Pilsner. Neither Meghan nor I had ever tried either, but the man at the counter said that they were good.

When we were going back, I thought that maybe we could invite David and Angela, too, but we'd have to ask Jeff first because it was really rude to invite your friends to someone else's party.

He said that it was okay, and so I said that I'd invite them next week.

I gave Trinity a ponyback ride around the backyard and Lindy asked me where I'd been because they hadn't seen me as much and they'd wanted to go hunting for Pokemons with me, so I said that I'd been in Canada. Lindy said that she'd been to Canada, too, and Trinity wanted to know when, and she said it was when Trinity was really small and she probably didn't remember it but they'd gone to Tobermory and looked at shipwrecks and they'd camped in the woods and that was all that she remembered.

I didn't think that I'd want to see that. It was sad seeing shipwrecks, even when you knew that everypony had survived. About an hour's flight from home, there was one that was a little ways out to sea but you could see the masts sticking up from the shore. It had scraped open its bottom and sank in a storm, and all the crew had held onto the rigging until the storm was over and somepony spotted their ship; now the seabirds liked to sit on it.

So I guess it made a good home for them, but it would have been better if it stayed a ship.

When we got home, Meghan checked her weather map again and it was showing more storms popping up as the evening went on.

Mel came to get me at nine, and Meghan came along, too. We weren't rushing this time, which was nice, and when we got to our watching spot I flew up and told him that I was seeing some storms off in the distance but there wasn't anything close. That also gave us plenty of time to test the radios and for me to set my watch so that it would remember where I was and give me directions back if I went off-course.

We set up a schedule where I went up every fifteen minutes to look around, and then came back down. And I kept that up for an hour and a half, and Meghan said that maybe it wasn't going to storm after all but I said that it was—each time I'd looked there were more storms.

It started to rain before eleven—by then it was too dark to clearly see the clouds off in the distance—and I went up and west a few miles, so that I could give Mel a warning in case something really bad was coming his way.

I got caught in heavy rain with almost no warning. I felt a little bit more of a chill in the air and then I heard the storm get louder and then it just poured on me. I had to yell into the radio to tell him that it was getting heavy, and I hope he heard me because if he said anything back I didn't hear him at all.

The storm kept on changing in intensity, and the winds were a bit confused, which made flying even more fun. I couldn't hold position very well, which I probably wouldn’t have known about since I couldn't always see the ground. Luckily, my watch knew, and I could see by my changing bearings and distances back to Mel's truck which way the storm was blowing me. I really wish that I'd had this watch all summer.

Right around midnight the storm calmed down and at first I thought that maybe it was ending, but as the rain lightened up and let me see further, I could see off in the distance another part of it coming that was just full of lightning.

Well, the second round of the storm was a whole lot worse than the first round. The wind picked back up and started blowing me off-course, and the rain was just pouring down, and when I watched my altimeter reading it was constantly going up and down. I went almost a hundred meters up and down from the very top to the very bottom altitudes.

I lost the ground again, and just rode out the storm as best as I could.

I was so happy when it had finally passed on. I could have made my watch show me the time, but I really didn't want to know.

It had calmed down at the end, and when I saw that it was clearing I didn't try to get back to my forward position at all, but instead flew back until I was near Mel and Meghan, and then I sort of circled around there until I was sure that it was clear around us.

The moon was getting full, and as the clouds thinned some I could see it through them, but they were still much too thick for me to see any stars.

The ground looked different to me and I thought that maybe my watch had gotten confused in the storm and given me bad directions, but as I got lower I could see what looked like Mel's truck—it had the blinking light on top like his. And I realized that the electricity had gone off, so the gas station sign wasn't lighted any more, and none of the big lights in the parking lot were either.

That meant that I had to be more careful, because even though they weren't giving off light, they were still poking up and I could crash into them. So when I got down to two hundred feet according to my watch, I hovered for three blinks from my light, which reflected off them and let me know how close I was.

I didn't think it would matter now if I sparked off on one of them, so once I had it clearly in view I flew over it and dragged my hind hoof across the top, then circled down and landed next to Mel's truck.

Meghan helped me up and inside and turned off my blinking light and stripped my gear off, then she bundled me up in towels. The inside of the truck was already pretty warm, which was nice, and I fell asleep on her lap as we were driving back.

She woke me up when we got home and I stumbled out of the truck and to the front door, and I asked her what time it was because I'd forgotten to look at the clock in Mel's truck after all. She told me that it was three a.m.

I stumbled up the stairs to my apartment and Meghan and I helped unfold the futon. I flopped down on my side thinking that I was going to regret it in the morning but I was completely exhausted, and I tried to stay awake until Meghan came out of the bathroom but I couldn’t.

August 13 [Sleeping In]

August13

I woke up when I felt Meghan moving around, but I really didn't want to get out of bed 'cause I was still exhausted.

She ran her fingers across my wing and I could feel her probing at bent feathers, so I stretched my wing out on her lap and she started preening it for me, and I closed my eyes and I didn't really sleep but I wasn't really awake either.

I only vaguely remember Meghan getting out of bed and moving over to my right side so she could get that wing, so it was a little weird when I really woke up enough to notice. By then she'd finished with my wings and was running a curry brush over my coat even though I hadn't taken a shower yet.

When she leaned over me, I bent around and kissed her tummy and she told me to sit still until I was done being groomed. I wanted to, 'cause it felt good, but I didn't want to 'cause I wanted to kiss and nuzzle her. She said I was being too squirmy, and I stuck my tongue out at her then licked her cheek.

She put down the brush and tackled me, then got me rolled on my back and ran her hand along my belly and I submitted pretty quickly.

We cuddled up in bed after we'd both worn each other out, and by the time we finally got up for a shower it was almost noon, and we were both hungry, too.

So I turned on the shower and let it get warm and even though we were both hungry we stayed in until the water started to get cold, and after she'd turned off the water I told her to get out first so that I could shake myself off and she said that she didn't mind if I did while she was still in the shower.

Since I was facing the front, I don't think that I splashed too much on her. And she said it wasn't fair that people couldn't do that because it would make getting dried off a lot quicker. I told her that maybe if she practiced she could.

I helped dry her off, and then I said that I was going to make breakfast for us, and she asked me what I was going to make, and I said that it was a surprise, and then she asked if it was pancakes and scrambled eggs.

I said that I hadn't planned on making scrambled eggs and how did she guess I was going to make pancakes. She said that she'd seen all the pancakes in the electric icebox that all had one bite out of them and that she'd wondered why but while she was brushing me she'd realized that I had been tasting them.

Then she said that just reheating them would be a good breakfast, and while they were warming up in the oven we could make scrambled eggs and I guess that would have been smarter but I wanted to cook, 'cause I was proud of myself for figuring it out without any help. So I got out the dishes and started mixing the batter and she asked if chefs in restaurants held the stirring spoon in their mouth.

I guess they did—I hadn't ever been in a restaurant kitchen, but at the tavern that was how Zucche Fritte always stirred the stew, and how she served it, too.

Meghan said that she'd really like to see a pony kitchen. She said that was the kind of thing that nobody ever talked about in any of the movies of Equestria that they showed on Earth. There were sometimes pictures on the internet, but you had to guess how the ponies were using the appliances in the kitchen.

I didn't know about other kitchens, but I told her that one time a ship captain I'd never seen before had tried to go into the kitchen to get his food. 'Cause my weather team had come in after him and Zucche had brought us food first and I guess he'd been mad about that. He was a jerk, though, that's why, and anyway our meal had been ready for us already 'cause we always ate dinner at the tavern after our Moon's-day patrol. He got whacked in the muzzle with a spoon before he had even made it all the way in and chased right back out of there.

I don't think that tavern cooks like having guests in their kitchens.

Meghan was laughing after I told her about that and I said that we'd never seen him in town after that happened. Zucche told me later that she'd heard that he normally sailed to Baltimare and she thought that maybe that was how ponies in Baltimare behaved.

She said that cooks on Earth were like that, too. Not friends like us but cooks who worked in actual restaurants.

I'd learned from my last time cooking and none of the pancakes got burned and they all looked like they were cooked all the way through. Meghan rinsed out the mixing bowl so I could use it to mix up the eggs, and she said that I ought to put the pancakes in the oven to keep them warm. And I didn't have to clean out the frying pan before scrambling the eggs in it.

She said that I was halfway to learning how to make omelets too and I'd never even thought about cooking my own omelet but now I wanted to.

We had to share a plate 'cause one of them had my experimental pancakes on it and the other one had all the new pancakes and I had to use another one to put the scrambled eggs on so that they wouldn't burn.

Meghan liked how the maple flavor was cooked right into the pancakes, and she ate the first one plain and then I got out the jar of Nutella and we each had a second pancake with Nutella on it and they were even better that way.

We talked about what we wanted to do for the weekend, and I said that I wanted to ride the horses again, and we decided since it was already kind of late today we could do that tomorrow, and today we'd just have a lazy day.

Well, we stayed lazy watching the birds in the papasan and talking for a little while until someone knocked on my door and Meghan said that I shouldn't answer it but I thought that I ought to. So I got up and flew around the apartment to see who it was, and it was Trinity and Lindy and Caleb. I told them to wait where they were and I'd be right back.

So I told Meghan and said that they wanted to go Pokemon hunting before dinner, and we decided that we would go with them but she had to put on clothes first. I flew back and talked to them while Meghan was getting dressed, and then she came downstairs and out the front door and we went hunting.

They found a bunch of Pokemons, but nothing new, and then when we got back to their house Caleb asked if we wanted to play some basketball with them. I'd never played before, but the concept was pretty simple: throw the ball through the hoop. Just because it seemed simple didn't make it simple, though, and I was not a very good basketball player.

We played a game called 'horse' (and Caleb snickered when he named it) which was where we each had to try and make a basket from five different spots. So we took turns like that, and Caleb and Trinity were pretty good and the rest of us weren't. Lindy said it wasn't fair being beaten by her little sister, which I thought was kind of mean since she was beating me.

We played a second time and this time the winner of the last game—which was Caleb—got to choose where the first shot was taken from, and then after that you had to throw from wherever the last person had made their shot from.

So when it was my turn, and since I was going to lose anyway, I picked up the ball and flew up above the hoop and just dropped it straight down and said that was where everyone had to throw from. And Caleb thought that was cheating but Lindy said she thought it was fair and threw him the ball and told him to try.

Well, he did run and jump, but he didn't get very high off the ground and he bounced the ball off the board and not into the hoop, and I flew off after it and caught it on its second bounce.

Trinity asked if she could ride on my back and if I could fly her up to the hoop. I didn't think I could because her legs would be over my wings, but I said that I could carry her in my forehooves. If I'd thought about it more, I probably wouldn't have offered.

She was heavier than she looked and I really strained to get her up there, but I managed and she dropped the ball through the hoop and everyone agreed that that counted as a point.

We might have kept playing longer but Jeff called them in for dinner, and he said that he could make more if we wanted something, and that was really nice of him. We said that we already had dinner plans but thanked him anyways, and went back to my apartment.

Well, we hadn't really had dinner plans at all, and so Meghan said that we could take the bus to Meijer and get some groceries so that she could teach me how to make my own omelets.

So I got on my saddlebags and we walked to the bus stop, and before too long a bus came along and picked us up, and took us out to the Meijer that I liked, and then we walked around deciding what vegetables should go in it, and what kind of cheese. She said that I ought to get some mushrooms, too, but they didn't keep for very long, so we'd have to eat them quickly.

And she also showed me that there were eggs in little cartons that were already unshelled and mixed, and so I could pour them right into the pan without having to do anything. I liked that idea, 'cause breaking the eggshell isn't that hard but not getting it in the eggs is.

We also went down the aisles of kitchen tools, because she said that she wanted a pizza-cutter since nobody in her house had one. And it was kind of intimidating looking at all the different tools and I had no idea what most of them were for, so she explained them to me and got her pizza-cutter and then after we'd paid for the food we had to sit outside until the bus came to get us. This bus was completely empty when we got on 'cause Meijer was its last stop, so everybody who had ridden it out got off, and we got to pick the seats that we wanted. I liked the ones in the very front 'cause that was the best view of the road.

Meghan pointed to the sign in front of the movie theater as we went by and said that there was a new movie called Pete's Dragon that she wanted to see. She said it was about a boy who got lost in the woods and made friends with a dragon. I asked her if it was a real dragon in the movie 'cause the last movie with a dragon had been all animated drawings and not real at all. She said that it was probably CG, and then she asked if Equestrian dragons really looked like the one in the movie.

Since I hadn't seen the movie, or very many dragons, I didn't know.

We were both hungry by the time we got back to my apartment, and went right to make the omelets. Meghan was a little bit upset that I didn't have a cutting board or a sharp knife and I said that the blade on my glaive was pretty sharp. She said she'd keep that in mind for when she needed to go medieval on the vegetables but the butter knife I had would work well enough.

I hadn't ever thought I'd need a knife for the kitchen, which was why I didn't have one.

She didn't let me start on the eggs until all the vegetables were chopped up, and then she showed me how big I needed to make the flame and how I could tell if the pan was the right temperature by putting a couple of drops of water on it and watching them dance around. And then she had me put in the eggs and told me how to push the cooked eggs gently to the center so that the raw egg could get to the pan and be cooked.

Then when it was almost done, it was time to put in the vegetables and cheese, and fold it in half. I didn't do so well and tore it but she said that the cheese would melt and hold it together.

I didn't need as much coaching when I made the second one, 'cause I'd learned a lot from the first. I still didn't get it folded right, though, and it also sort of stuck to the pan when I went to get it out and a corner came off of it.

It wasn't as good as some of the other ones I'd had, but it was really good for a first try, I thought, and so did Meghan. She said that she'd make a chef out of me, and I said wouldn't it be funny to be the only pegasus in my village who could cook.

Once we'd cleaned up the kitchen we went down to the little park between the roads and sat on the grass and we talked some more about my home. She said it was a shame that I hadn't brought any pictures of it with me. I guess I'd never thought that people would be all that interested in that kind of thing, and anyway we didn't have a lot of pictures. It wasn't like on Earth where everybody had a pocket telephone and you could take so many pictures of everything. We'd heard that sometimes humans take pictures of their food even, although I'd never seen anybody do that so maybe it wasn't really true.

It was nice sitting in the park and just relaxing outside. It was pretty peaceful, too. We saw a couple of joggers go by and a woman who was walking her dog, and a few cars drove past but not all that many. And I pointed to the trees where there had been a Pokemon once and Meghan said she thought that a lot of times they kept showing up in the same places but at different times so maybe there was one there right now and we couldn't see it because neither of our pocket telephones would show Pokemons.

Then she asked if we had any invisible creatures in Equestria, or things like ghosts and I said that I didn't think so and that I'd never seen one which she thought was really funny.

I wouldn't have minded staying outside all night, but Meghan said she was getting a little bit chilly now that the sun was going down and anyways we weren't supposed to sit outside all night. So we went back to my apartment and I helped her get undressed for bed. She said that I ought to wear clothes sometime so that we could both undress each other because that would be a lot of fun, and I didn't really want to get clothes 'cause I'd tried Gusty's on and hadn't liked them all that much. I said that she'd helped me take my flight vest off a bunch of times and she said that didn't count.

So I sat down on the bed and put her shirt on and it was still warm from her wearing it and I asked if it counted now and she said I was so cute she had to take a picture of me.

She had me get into bed still wearing her shirt and said that she'd take it off me later, and then stuck her hand under it and started petting me and it felt different because I was wearing clothes, and since we were both enjoying it she didn't take the shirt off at all, which kind of put me at a disadvantage because I couldn't use my wings for anything and so I kind of felt trapped.

I don't know why, but that made the sex even more fun, and afterwards I didn't want her to take it off. She said I was being silly, but I didn't care if I was.

August 14 [Pete's Dragon]

August 14

I felt too hot when I woke up and when I went to spread my wings out some to shed some heat they got stuck and at first I thought it was on the blankets but it was Meghan's shirt that I was still wearing.

Sleeping in clothes was really weird. I don't know how Gusty does it. I was too hot and sweaty and so I kind of worked my wings to push it up until it was just around my neck and that felt strange, too. And it also woke up Meghan.

She leaned over me and pulled the shirt over my head and then kissed me through the fabric before taking it the rest of the way off, and I got her back by pushing her breast with my hoof and she reached down and tickled my ruff.

Now that my wings were free, I could tickle back, so I got her belly and she dropped back down on her side and bit my ear gently then ran her hand down my leg and squeezed my fetlock. I nuzzled her jaw and she pulled me on top of her and ran her hand over my dock, and I couldn't get to much of her at all which wasn't fair, but I did tease her with my tail some until she finally let me go and we could both make each other happy.

We got cooled down in the shower together and then I wanted to make omelets for breakfast since I knew how now and it would be easier this time 'cause Meghan had chopped up more vegetables than we'd needed yesterday.

So I started getting everything out and then I thought that maybe I could put some hay in my omelet and so I went and got a little bit. Meghan set it on the counter and said that she'd crumble it up with her fingers after I made her omelet, because she didn't want any hay in hers. But she did say that she'd try a bite of mine.

She let me make everything by myself, and just watched to be sure that I did it right. And once I'd made her omelet, she crumbled up the hay on top of the vegetables and I put them in mine.

I wish I'd known how to make omelets at the beginning of the summer, but I'd probably have eaten too many if I did. They weren't as healthy as vegetables and pasture grasses, but I guess I'm getting enough exercise that it doesn't matter too much.

I let Meghan have the first bite of my omelet and she said that she could taste the hay but it wasn't overpowering, and it gave it kind of an interesting flavor, but she didn't think it would catch on with most people. But then she told me that there were some people that liked eating exotic things that probably would eat it just to say that they had.

And she said that they'd probably pay extra for it, too, and maybe if weather patrol didn't work out for me I could get a job as a chef. She said I could go to a big city like Chicago and drive around a food truck maybe or else open an exotic restaurant that served Equestrian food.

That wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, but it might be fun for a while. I was pretty proud that I'd learned to cook a couple of things 'cause it's always satisfying to make something with your hooves.

We washed the dishes together and while we did I started to think about other things that I could put in an omelet. I still had one little carton of unshelled eggs left. Maybe anchovies would be good in an omelet.

Once we'd finished putting the dishes in the rack, Meghan dried off her hands and a couple of splashes of soapy water that had gotten on her and when she gave me the towel she said she was getting more and more used to cooking nude and if we kept this up she wasn't going to be able to wear clothes when she cooked anymore.

I didn't see how that was a problem.

She helped me put my new storm movie on YouTube, 'cause we hadn't done that yet, and while we were waiting for it to get to the internet, she said that I ought to wear the camera whenever I went flying just in case I saw something interesting. Gates had said the same thing about when I was snowboarding. And she told me that I ought to wear it when I went on my trip out west, too.

I hadn't thought about that but she said it was a good idea. And she said that maybe I could wear it while we were horseback riding.

I wasn't sure how interesting that would be, but since it wouldn't waste any film since human cameras were filmless it wouldn't hurt anything to have it. Although that meant I'd also have to wear my camelback 'cause otherwise the straps wouldn't work right. That was okay, though; it might be nice to have water with me while we were riding the horses.

Meghan had to leave the computer on so that the movie could process, which took a long time, even though it hadn't taken all that long to put it on the computer. I guess YouTube has to think about it for a while. She said she didn't know why it took so long, since they already had the data when the upload was done. But at least we could unhook the GoPro from the computer.

She used her portable telephone to get an Uber-car, and then she started to get dressed. I told her that she should have gotten dressed first in case the Uber-car was really quick and she said that she liked to live dangerously. And I told her it didn't count as danger unless she was willing to go downstairs and finish getting dressed in the Uber-car if it arrived before she had her clothes on. She said they were quick but they weren't that quick, and just as she said it a horn honked outside.

I pushed her in the rump but she said it wasn't the Uber-car; her portable telephone had told her that the car that was coming was fifteen minutes away and she'd be dressed in plenty of time if I got my nose off her butt so she could put her pants on.

So we had plenty of time to get ready, and she was all the way dressed when the real Uber-car arrived. The movie hadn't finished processing yet (Meghan said it would take a few hours probably) and I was a little worried about leaving the computer on when nobody was there with it but she said it was no different than any of the other electrical appliances in the house and it wouldn’t hurt it to be left running. I said that the waffle iron and the electric kettle weren't supposed to be left on and she said that was different.

The driver was kind of grumpy. Maybe he didn't like mornings, or maybe he didn't like ponies. But he didn't say anything bad and he took us to the farm.

When we got there, Deanne was practicing jumps in the training field again, and so we just watched her and I had to occasionally push the dog away 'cause he kept on nosing at my legs.

I told Meghan that I knew how to do the course too and she said I ought to try it if it was okay because it would be fun to see, so when Deanne was done practicing I asked her if I could try it again and she said that I could.

Meghan started my camera and I went into the field and did a lap around the course to warm up without doing any of the jumps, and when I came back around to the beginning I did it for real.

Both Meghan and Deanne clapped when I was done which was kind of embarrassing, 'cause Henry had done it a lot better than I had, I thought and he hadn't gotten any applause.

So I went over to him and he leaned down to sniff me and I let him and then since his head was down I nuzzled his cheek and he sort of nuzzled back at me but he was so big and strong he pushed me sideways and almost knocked me over. He didn't mean to; he just didn't know how strong he was.

We told Deanne that we wanted to go riding again, and so we went to the stables with the dog right at my heels the whole way there and Deanne tied Henry up inside and he seemed kind of upset. She said that he wasn't used to going out right after he'd gotten done jumping and that was why he was restless. So she went into the tack room and came back out with some carrots and that made him happier. And she promised him more once he got done with the trail ride.

It didn't take her too long to saddle up Hoshi and Peaches, 'cause Meghan helped and I stayed out of the way except to say hi to them, and then we got up on their backs and Deanne untied Henry and I could tell he was still a little bit grouchy about wearing all his gear but he led us back out of the barn anyway.

We took our time walking around the trails, and it was past lunchtime when we finally got back to the stable. Deanne said that she was taking us on a longer ride than usual 'cause she thought I'd earned it by running the course again. She also told me that I was getting better at making Hoshi go where I wanted her to, although I think that was as much Hoshi wanting to follow Henry.

Henry started walking faster once he figured out that we were going back, and I don't blame him. He was probably hungry or else expecting his carrot. And I could see how Deanne was holding his reins and she didn't have to direct him to the little cement pad where he got washed and undressed; he went there on his own and stood in front of the railing.

She tied all of our horses up and she got Henry's tack off first. Meghan took the saddles off Peaches and Hoshi, but let Deanne put the halters on them. And then the three of us rinsed off our horses and brushed them down and Deanne got treats for all three of them 'cause they'd all been good.

Then she turned them out to pasture and as soon as he was through the gate, Henry dropped down and rolled in the field, while both Hoshi and Peaches ignored him and nibbled at the grass instead. It looked like they were having fun, so I jumped over the fence and rolled around in the grass, too, and when I got to my hooves and shook off all the dirt and thatch that had got in my coat, both Meghan and Deanne were laughing.

We had to wait around a bit for the Uber-car to come and get us, 'cause we were so far out in the country, and that gave Meghan time to rinse off my hooves and pick them with Deanne's hoof-pick.

The car which finally arrived was a little bean-shaped thing called a Prius. It was really strange 'cause the engine would turn off sometimes and then turn back on but the car kept going even when the engine was off.

I put some of the leftover pancakes in the oven to warm them up while Meghan finished putting my first movie on YouTube and then put the one that I'd just taken on my computer as well. She said that she was going to have to figure out how to edit it because she thought that the part where I was galloping around the obstacle course should be separate from the part where I was riding Hoshi.

She also said that Deanne had taken a movie of the obstacle course and that we'd have to look for that on YouTube later.

Meghan wanted to change her clothes before we went to the movie 'cause she said that they smelled like horse and I didn't mind at all but she thought that maybe other people would.

Well, I said that I thought that other people were stupid, but she said she was going to anyways and took off her pants and hung them over the back of my chair so that they could air out some, and she had me sniff at her shirt to see if that smelled like horse, too. It didn't much; not as much as her pants did.

Then she said that there was no point on putting her pants back on until it was time to go to the movie, and we sat in the papasan and snuggled and watched the birds until she had to get dressed again.

I really liked the movie, even though I didn't think that dragons were ever furry—all the ones I'd ever heard of were scaly. And I didn't understand why the people wanted to take Pete out of the woods since he obviously liked it there and was doing fine. Meghan said it was because he was so young and it wasn't right to leave a child unsupervised like that but I didn't understand how he was unsupervised because the dragon helped to take care of him since his parents were dead. I'd heard of pegasi raising a griffon chick, and Princess Twilight had raised Spike since he was a hatchling as well, so why not let a dragon raise a human?

We ate dinner at TGI Fridays and our waitress had lots of buttons on. Meghan said that was called flair and it was something that the waiters and waitresses did there. Meghan had a dragonfire chicken and I had a dragonfire salmon which was really good, and they also had a drink called Long Island Iced Tea and we probably should not have had as many of them as we did, 'cause when it came time to get back to our bus we were having trouble walking straight and the bus driver got mad at us for singing and threatened to kick us off if we didn't stop.

Once we got off the bus at our stop, though, he couldn't tell us what to do anymore and so we started singing again as we walked the rest of the way home, and I was glad we'd left the futon folded down because otherwise it would have been too much effort.

Meghan almost fell over when she was taking her pants off and forgot to take her shoes off first so she had to sit on the bed and untie them and I pulled up her shirt while she did and tried to unhook her bra and we were both surprised when I finally got it.

I helped her get the rest of the way undressed and snuggled up against her and she said that she was too drunk to fuck and started giggling, and then she nuzzled my cheek and put her hand on my back and fell asleep.

August 15 [Fire]

August 15

Meghan was not ready for her alarm this morning. As soon as it went off she blinked her eyes open said that her head hurt and that she really, really had to pee and ran off to the bathroom. I went over to my desk and got out my bottle of aspirin for her 'cause I figured she'd want that, too, and then I went into the kitchen to get her a glass of water.

My head hurt a little bit as well, but I thought once I was up and flying I'd feel a lot better. I still drank some water then refilled the glass for her.

We both kinda had to rush, 'cause she still had to walk home, and so I was thinking of everything that I could do to help her out. I made her drink the water and take the aspirin and then pushed her back into the the bathroom so she could take a shower, and then I put some pancakes in the oven to heat up, and then went into the living room and went through her bag and got out the last of her clean clothes and put all the dirty clothes in the bag for her.

She got dressed and then sat on the floor to eat her pancakes while I brushed her hair and she said that she shouldn't have had so many Long Islands last night and she should have known better. I said that we just should have done it Saturday night so we'd have had Sunday to recover and that was the mistake we'd made.

And she told me I was lucky to not have a day job.

When we started to walk to her apartment, I sniffed at the air and said that it smelled like rain, and she said that she thought so, too. And she got her portable telephone out and looked at her weather report and said that they were calling for rain in the afternoon, but not thunderstorms which was nice. I didn't think that I had to patrol in rain, although when I got back to the apartment I was going to call Mel and find out.

We got to her house a little early 'cause we'd rushed and I asked her how she was feeling and she said a lot better; her headache was almost gone and her stomach felt mostly normal again.

She told me if I did have to go out in the storm to be careful, and I said that I would, and she rubbed my mane and I leaned up against her leg until her friend came to pick her up.

I flew low back home, and did a wing-roll when I crossed Main Street, just because I could. I was already feeling pretty good about today. Even though it was getting cloudy off in the distance, it felt like a really good flying day.

I got dressed and decided that I was going to go north today, and then I called up the airplane directors and told Dori where I wanted to fly and she said that it was okay, but reminded me to keep low until I got out of town, and I told her that I would.

Right before I flew off I noticed that my birdfeeder was getting pretty low and I ought to refill it. I bet Aric's needed some more seeds, too, and I could have filled it on my way out of town but then I thought that I would do it on the way back, since Dori would be expecting me to be flying.

I made a long, slow climb, checking my watch for my altitude. It was a little bit wrong, 'cause I'd forgotten to reset it this morning, so I reminded myself to assume I was a couple of hundred feet higher than I actually was, just to be safe.

There was one field off to my left that had sort of an island in it and I had never figured out why. Each time I saw it I thought about asking Aquamarine if she had any guesses about what it was, but I never remembered to. Some ponies kept a little piece of land that meant something to them fallow, so maybe humans did, too.

I didn't have any particular destination in mind today, and I decided I wanted to not fly too far, 'cause I was worried about tiring myself out in the morning and not being able to do storm patrol if I was needed, so I just flew along north, occasionally flying a little detour if something on the ground caught my eye.

I'd gone far enough away from Kalamazoo that I could climb higher if I wanted to, but I was kind of happy where I was.

The river was getting pretty close on my right, so I angled over that way, and I was looking down at it and thinking about maybe trying to catch a fish because while it was really convenient to have them in a can when I wanted them, they weren't as good as fresh. I know I was supposed to have my license with me, but there were lots of trees around the river and probably nobody would know if I just took one and besides the birds did and I bet they didn't have a license. I could see a blue heron down below me, soaring over the river and he was probably looking for lunch, too.

I made a big circle, just to stay over him and see if he found anything. But I guess the fishing wasn't good where we were, 'cause instead of diving down to the river, he picked up some altitude, and just went a little bit further upriver and I didn't have my heart so set on a fresh fish that I wanted to follow him.

Rather than keep turning in the same direction, I banked around the other way and just as I was straightening back out again I smelled a little bit of smoke. At first, I didn't think that much of it. Lots of people cooked food outside, so it wasn't that weird to be smelling it. But as I got a little bit closer to town, it didn't smell right to me. It didn't smell like a cooking fire; it was a little too sharp for that.

And just after that I saw smoke coming up from behind a house, and my first instinct was to go up and grab a cloud. There were plenty of them around, and they were good clouds, heavy with moisture, and low, too. This wasn't a time to be neat, so I just tore a big piece loose and started pushing it down towards the ground.

Then when I was flying down I remembered that we had been told if we saw something that was an emergency we were supposed to call 911 and let the professionals deal with it, but I couldn't use my portable telephone when I was flying and anyways I had the cloud already so it wouldn't slow me down too much to bring it down with me.

As I got closer, I could see flames through the smoke. It was coming from the back of the house, and when I got my cloud around back I could see that there were flames coming out of a window.

The cloud started to come apart as soon as I dragged it through the trees, and I shoved it really fast through the window before it broke up all the way, and a whole bunch of white smoke billowed out which meant that I'd at least gotten some of it, but it was pretty unlikely that I'd gotten all of it, and it would be really dangerous to try and go inside and see.

So I galloped around front 'cause that was where houses had their numbers and then I got out my pocket telephone and called 911 and they wanted to know where the house was (which I should have thought of) and I said I didn't know the street yet but I could fly to the end where there was a sign and tell them.

I had to put the telephone in my pocket before I could fly, but the nice lady waited until I got to the sign and read it for her. Then she asked me if anyone was in the house and I told her that I didn't know; I'd only shoved a cloud through the broken window but I hadn't checked, which I ought to have. So I galloped back and started banging on the front door hard enough to chip the paint off of it and nobody came out so either there was nobody in there or they had already been overcome by smoke.

I kind of danced around on my hooves while I tried to think what I ought to do next. If there was someone inside and they couldn't get down on their own, I could carry them to the ground, but if there wasn't anyone in there I was wasting time I could be using getting another cloud to help fight the fire.

Human streets are strangely deserted in the day sometimes. I think it's because they build their houses far away from where they work, so they're all gone during the day.

Even though it might have been smarter to knock on doors and see if I could find someone to help, there might not have been anybody at all in any of the houses, so I took off again to get another cloud down.

I was on my way back down with another bit of cloud when I heard the fire engines off in the distance, but they hadn't arrived yet by the time I got down in the backyard and pushed this cloud through the window. I could see more flames inside, through the smoke, but I'd got them back far enough that they weren't coming through the window anymore. Plus, the cloud that hadn't gotten in the house had dampened down the grass in the backyard and the side of the house too which meant it was less likely the fire would spread, which was important.

I flew over the top of the house and landed on the sidewalk just as the fire engines started to arrive, and I told the first man who got out that the fire was in the back and I'd put a couple of clouds on it already and I could get some more if they needed them.

Well, he was a little confused about what I meant, and so I just pointed up to the sky, and held out my wings and I'm not sure he understood even after that, but he asked me if I could wait off to the side and let them do their work.

So I stood out of their way while they got out hoses and hooked them up to hydrants and while that was happening a couple of them went around back to see what they could, and another one of them started knocking on the door, but nobody answered.

Another man came over and asked me if I knew if anyone was home, and I told him that nobody had come when I'd knocked on the door, and he asked me to wait, as well.

And while I was waiting, I called Dori and told her that I was on the ground in Plainwell because there was a fire and I might be flying up to help get more clouds but probably not because it looked like they had lots of water.

Well, pretty soon a couple of police cars showed up too and one of the police officers wanted to see my identification card and get a statement from me, so I told him how I'd smelled the fire first and then put a couple of clouds on it and called 911 like I was supposed to and he didn't believe me about the clouds, either. So I said that I could go up and get one, but he said that I should stay on the ground, and then he started asking me about all of my equipment. Why I had a radio and why I had a watch and I didn't like him too much.

He asked if I could sit in his car while he talked to his supervisor and I was feeling a bit uneasy about him but I was supposed to do what police officers told me to, so I got in the back of his car and I thought that maybe he was going to ask me some more questions but he didn't; he just walked off which was really rude of him.

So I watched out the window as the firefighters worked, and they had ladders up and someone on the roof chopping holes to let the smoke out, and there were hoses in through the front door which they'd smashed down, but I didn't see any flames coming out of the front of it so I guess that they were doing a good job.

I'd been sitting there for a while and I was beginning to think that maybe the police officer had forgotten I was in his car. He could have been busy with other things, after all, so I tried to open the door and neither of the doors would open and there was a plastic wall between the front and the back that I couldn't get through. The window was open a little bit but I couldn't open it any further, because that switch didn't work, either.

I was trapped, at least until he came back to let me out, and I didn't like that at all. But I didn't know what I should do about it. I think I could have bucked out a window and gotten out that way, except then he'd be mad that I'd broken his car, even though it was obviously already broken since the doors didn't open and the windows didn't go down.

And I didn't want to distract him, because he must have been doing something important and that's why he forgot about me. There was a house on fire, after all, and that was more important a thing to worry about.

My watch said that I sat inside the back of the police car for almost a quarter hour before a black Suburban with flashing lights inside its window showed up and Mister Salvatore got out only instead of wearing his nice jacket like he usually did he had on a bulky black vest that said FBI in big letters on it. And he was already shouty when he went past the police car that I was in, so I looked out the window to see where he was going and I lost sight of him around the fire truck.

So I didn't see that Miss Cherilyn was there, too, until she opened the door and let me out and asked me if the police officer had taken any of my things. And I said that he hadn't; he'd just told me to sit in his car until he got back but his car was broken and I couldn't get out even when it was obvious he'd forgotten I was there.

She told me I could get in the Suburban if I wanted or I could wait out here and I was happy being outside again so I told her that I thought I'd wait out here. And even over the sound of all the fire trucks and the firemen shouting things to each other, I could hear Mister Salvatore's voice and he didn't sound happy at all.

He came storming back around the front of the fire truck and went back to the Suburban and opened the back door of it and came back with a big stack of papers and then he disappeared again and a minute later he came back without them and he had a big smile on his face and he asked me if I wanted to get ice cream.

Mister Salvatore got a lot happier when he got to yell at people.

We drove across the river to a place called Plainwell Ice Cream, and he bought us all ice cream sundaes. He told me that the police officer had detained me because I was a suspicious person and he thought that I'd started the fire.

Well, that was a stupid thing to think—why would I have done that?

And then he got a really big smile on his face and he said that he'd helpfully given the police officer state and federal arrest forms, plus a pony incident report and he'd told him that he wanted all of them faxed back to his office before he got there so that he could read them and ask followup questions and Miss Cherilyn said he was being mean and he said maybe he was but that the police officer hadn't followed protocol at all and maybe next time he'd think a little bit before he acted.

She told him not to be too antagonistic, and he said that he was calm because you couldn't be angry when you had a tin roof sundae in front of you but he was still going to let him twist in the wind a little bit and if she wanted some fun he could arrange a conference call and they could flip a coin to see who got to be good cop and who got to be bad cop.

He wanted me to tell him everything that had happened, so I told him, and he asked if the police officer had patted me down or checked my pockets or confiscated any of my things and I said that he hadn't. And he asked if I'd been put in handcuffs (which were what humans called hobbles) and I said that he hadn't done that either; he'd just asked me to sit in his car and forgotten about me there.

Mister Salvatore said that was good; and he told me that I'd done the right things. He said that maybe pushing a cloud into the house hadn't been all that smart, but it hadn't hurt anything and maybe it had made the firefighter's job easier. And he said next time to call 911 first of all, even if it meant that I had to land, and he told me that he'd have to check with the FAA but he was pretty sure I could report an on-ground emergency over my radio without breaking any rules.

I thanked him for the ice cream and thanked him and Miss Cherilyn for coming to get me out of the police car, and I said that I'd rather fly home if he didn't mind because being back in the sky would make me feel better.

So he said that was okay, and I nuzzled him and Miss Cherilyn then told Dori I was flying again, and took off.

I couldn't help but fly back over the house again, and all the fire trucks were gone so I guess they must have gotten the fire put out, which was good. It didn't look like it was too badly damaged, besides the holes they'd cut in the roof.

Being in the open sky was a relief after I'd been in the police car, and I took my time flying back home.

I ate a late lunch of leftover pancakes, and then I called Mel and asked him what he thought about the storms—it had already started to rain just a little bit, but I wasn't hearing any thunder yet, and I hadn't seen any bad clouds on my way home.

He said that the weather radar was saying that it was going to get heavy in an hour or so, and that he'd been ready to call me, so I filled my camelback up again and got a can of anchovies in case I needed a quick snack and waited for him to arrive.

We drove out to our usual spot and I flew around to get a look at the clouds and make sure that our radios were working, and then since it was still pretty light, I landed back at the truck.

It turned into a long night for both of us. Heavy rain started to come down at dinnertime, so I flew up to get a feel for the clouds and they weren't thundery at all and the winds up high weren't too strong, but the clouds were just dumping out water, but that didn't last all that long and then it went back to light rain.

We started a system where I'd fly up every hour and report on what I was seeing and feeling, and then come back down, and he showed me the radar on his computer and it was just a big blotch over the whole region with red spots and yellow spots here and there.

The winds picked up a couple of times, and sometimes the rain came down hard for a while. When it got dark and there wasn't any sign of it letting up, I napped in his truck and sometimes he did, too. He went to the Speedway and got us some food and it wasn't very good but it was better than nothing. And the storm just kept on.

August 16 [All-Night Storm]

August 16

I'd worked long storms before, but never all by myself. So all through the night I napped in Mel's truck when I could, and flew when I had to, and the whole night blurred together into a strange, almost dreamlike mix of rain and wind and me catching what sleep I could in the front seat of Mel's truck.

At one point, I was sleepy enough that I started talking on the radio in Equestrian, and there were a couple of times that I think I flew on pure instinct, because when I landed and Mel asked me how it had been I told him that I couldn't remember any more and fell asleep on his front seat.

It didn't clear out until after sunrise, and by my last flight I was really wondering if it was worth it to go back up and check the weather, but it was my duty, so I did it. And then I made a sloppy landing and zapped myself awake 'cause I'd forgotten to spark off and my tail hit first when I landed.

I didn't know that the sky had cleared until Mel shook me awake and he was in front of my apartment and it was light out. I'd slept through the whole ride home and after I blinked my eyes a few times I saw that the clock said it was nine am.

I dragged myself up to my apartment and took off my flight gear and then scratched at my forelegs where the radio strap and watch strap had been because they were both really itchy from wearing them for so long. I'd lost some hair under my weather radio from it bouncing up and down all night long, and it probably hadn't helped that I'd slept with my head on it a couple of times. I hope Mel had turned it off, or else everyone who was listening might have heard me snoring.

I think that this was the tiredest I'd ever been and I was really hungry too, so I went into the bedroom and nibbled on some hay then stretched out my wings and started to preen them because I knew I'd be sorry if I didn't. And it might not have been the best job I ever did, but it was good enough and I was going to just close my eyes for a minute to rest them and then go to bed but when I woke up again I had my head on a haybale and my neck was sore and my left hind leg was asleep.

So I did a three-legged walk to my futon and shook off as much hay as I could and then climbed up in bed and it felt pretty big and lonely. My body couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to sleep or be awake, because it was the middle of the day and if I'd had someone to snuggle with I think it would have been easier to fall asleep again.

I must have napped for a couple of hours, and I only woke up because my pocket telephone was beeping at me and I couldn't figure out why until I looked at it and the little battery was red, since I'd just left it in my pocket when I'd gotten home instead of charging it like I should have.

Even though I should have taken a shower, I didn't feel like it, so I brushed my mane and tail and then put on my saddlebags because I needed to get more food from the farmer's market.

I hated to leave without my portable telephone just because Mister Salvatore might get mad if I didn't have it with me but it wouldn't do me any good if it wasn't working, so I left it on my desk and flew off to the farmer's market.

At least the flight there woke me up, but it also made me realize how hungry I was. So everything at the farmer's market smelled a lot more tempting and I think if I hadn't had some carrots to fill my empty belly I would have gone home with overflowing saddlebags.

Probably nobody at the market would have minded, but I had to make sure that I didn't get too much food or it would go bad while I was on vacation out west.

And that reminded me I was going to have to make sure that Meghan kept the bird feeders full while I was gone.

I flew back to my apartment and put my food away in the electric icebox and then had one cold pancake with Nutella on it as a snack, and I decided that I'd done plenty of flying exercise but I ought to trot around a little bit and I could have gone around our neighborhood but I preferred not being on cement, and the closest place I knew with dirt trails was the nature center.

Of course I had to fly to get there, but since I was going to stay low I left all my flight gear at the apartment and went without, which felt kind of strange.

I'd wondered if Gusty was going to want to keep wearing clothes once she got back to Equestria, and now I was starting to think that maybe I'd have a hard time flying without any of my gear. It felt really odd to not be wearing any of it.

I landed at the top of the hill and started trotting around the path and it was alright up there but once I got further down the trail where it was lower, there was a lot of mud from all the rain.

Right as I landed in the first puddle, I heard my mom's voice in my head telling me not to splash in puddles or else I'd have to take a bath and I held my wings out and hesitated just a moment and then I landed in it anyways and went back to trotting around the trail.

It was nice and squishy and felt good on my hooves, and I was kind of sorry that I was kicking it up on my belly too. And so I made a couple of laps and by the time I was done I had mud on me nearly everywhere—it had dried into a crust on my belly and my tail was all stuck together with the mud I'd gotten on it, and my hooves were packed full, too. It wasn't going to shake off, so I flew up and over the trees and the railroad tracks, leaving a trail of falling mud-clumps behind me, and I landed in the river, right on the shore.

The river was pretty muddy and it was hard to see the bottom, so I had to kind of feel around until I got good footing, and I took short, sweeping steps out into deeper water so that I wouldn't trip myself over a snag, 'cause I really didn't want to fly back home with wet wings if I could help it.

I lifted each hoof off the bottom one at a time to let the current rinse them out, and once I figured I'd gotten most of it off I took off from the river, dipping my wings in the water just a little bit at the bottom of their stroke, until I'd gained enough height that just my hooves were in the water, dragging me along a little bit but also getting clean in the process.

When I was satisfied with how clean they were, I lifted them out of the water and with that drag gone I picked up altitude pretty quickly.

I followed the river back to downtown, and had to climb higher because there was a train on the railroad bridge and even though I could have gone under it felt like that was a lot of weight on it and I could imagine the train falling off. I'm sure it wouldn't, because the bridge must have been strong enough to hold trains up, but it still felt safer to go over.

The two big drains were foamy and white with all the water that they were letting into the river, and it was hard to imagine what they must have looked like last night when the rain was really coming down.

I flew over Main Street and back home that way. It felt a little bit strange to be on the wrong side of the road as I flew up the hill; normally I went with traffic but it was a little bit shorter to go against it and since I was up in the air it didn't really matter which way I flew.

I'd just banked into a turn to get back to my apartment when I remembered that I'd meant to fill Aric's bird feeder yesterday and I hadn't done it. So I flew to his house and landed in the backyard and I was glad I'd remembered because it was almost completely empty.

The garage door was sticking on the frame, 'cause I think all the rain had made it swell up some, and I really had to push on it before it opened.

Mister mouse had taken all his treats again, so after I filled the bird feeder I left another little pile of seeds (which was something else I was going to have to ask Meghan to do) and put the bag back in Aric's icebox.

The door didn't shut right either, and I couldn't get a good tug on the handle with my hooves. I could have pushed it closed from inside, but then how would I get back out? And I thought that I ought to tell David or Angela, so I knocked on the side door and waited until she came out, and then I told her about it and she said she'd get David to close it later.

I also remembered to tell her that she and David could come to Jeff's party on Friday, and she thanked me for the invitation and said that she was pretty sure that they weren't doing anything else, but she'd have to check with him.

When I got back home, I filled up my bird feeder, too, because it was also pretty low on seeds.

I had leftover pancakes for dinner, along with some hay and a bit of kale that I'd gotten at the farmer's market. Kale was kinda bitter but the flavor got evened out with the clover hay, and the woman who had sold it said that kale was the healthiest leaf vegetable. I'd never tried it before because nopony grew it back home.

I still hadn't gotten any bath salts, and I thought about flying out and seeing if I could find some somewhere but I didn't feel like putting that much effort into it, so I used soap to make bubbles and filled up the bathtub and that was really nice and relaxing. It would have been better if Meghan had been here to share it with me and I almost got out of the tub to get my portable telephone and call her, but even if she did want to I'd be finished before she got to my apartment.

When the water got cold, I let about half of it out and filled it back up with more hot water, which was kind of wasteful but then again there had been plenty of new water falling last night.

Getting out of the bathtub was a problem I hadn't anticipated. I was too relaxed, and just getting my hooves back under me so I could stand up took a couple of tries, and once I was standing I shook off then waited a little bit before I tried to step over the edge of the bathtub 'cause I didn't want to crash-land on the bathroom floor.

Maybe I'd have to see if there was a sticky mat like the one in the bathtub that would work on the bathroom floor. The tiles were kind of tricky especially when they were wet. Meghan had showed me how to put a floor-towel down which helped, but it could wrinkle up and skid out of the way.

I dried my mane some and then took the towel to my futon so I wouldn’t make a wet spot when I laid down, and I got out my Bible and went back to reading Jeremiah, but I didn't get very far because I was so tired that the words kept blurring together and after I'd read the same section four times in a row and still couldn't remember what it had said I knew that I ought to just sleep instead.

That was the bad thing about being up all night—it felt like I'd spent most of the day sleeping, but I hadn't gotten really rested.

So I stretched out on my futon and since I was still warm from the bath I didn't pull up my blankets at all, and even though I was really tired I didn't fall asleep all that fast.

August 17 [Almost Niles]

August 17

When I woke up in the morning, I was full of energy and ready to take on the new day, even though it was just barely light outside.

I decided that I was going to make myself an omelet, so I got out my last little carton of unshelled eggs, lit the stove, and put my frying pan on it so it would warm up, and then I thought about what I could put in it. I tried to chop up a carrot but it was really difficult and the little carrot ends kept flying everywhere, so it took me a while to get enough for my omelet.

The hay was easier to chop up, and I mixed it with the carrots and then decided I’d put anchovies in it too, along with the cheese, so I got them out and added them to the mixing bowl and it already smelled like it was going to be pretty good.

I’d misjudged the amount of filling, so I had some left over and I snacked on it while I was waiting for my omelet to cook. Then I folded it over and it hardly tore at all, and it was a little tricky to slide it out onto the plate without Meghan to help me, but I got it without dropping anything on the floor.

When I got back to Equestria, I was going to miss cooking. I was starting to get good at it.

After I’d washed the dishes and put them in the rack to dry, I got out my flight gear and got dressed.

It was clear and cloudless, and I wanted to get in a good, long flight today, so I decided that I’d go southwest and follow the railroad tracks that way. I could go all the way to Niles, maybe.

So I filled up my camelback and put on all my flight gear and called the airplane directors and got permission, and Dori told me that I’d be passing near an airport in Dowagiac, and that when I got to Niles I’d be inside South Bend’s control area, so I’d have to call them.

Well, it would be good for practice, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to fly into their airspace because it’s difficult sometimes for other airplane directors to deal with me, and I didn’t want to cause them any trouble if I could help it.

And it was really nice of Dori to tell me ahead of time. There was a lot about the airspace that I still didn’t know, and I thought that I really ought to buy a chart, so I wrote a note to myself to ask Mister Salvatore where I could get one.

I flew across Western Michigan’s campus until I got to the railroad tracks, and then turned and followed them out of town. I stayed low this time and went under the 131 Highway bridge after making sure that there weren’t any trains coming in either direction, then I started to climb.

The first part of the route was really familiar to me, and I waved at the big S sign that was at the gas station near where me and Mel watched the weather. Big signs would be useful to traveling pegasuses, but I don’t think that anypony had ever thought of that.

Then I announced on the radio that I was near Kerby Field, and a man said that he was also near it at two thousand feet flying an ultralight and asked for my position, heading, and speed.

Well, I told him that I was just past Mattewan on a heading of 232 degrees at five thousand feet and flying at about fifteen miles per hour (that was a guess, ‘cause my watch didn’t know how fast I flew) and he asked me what kind of aircraft I was again, so I told him that I was a pegasus.

He said that he’d finally found something that flew slower than his ultralight which was kind of insulting. I could go faster if I wanted to, but then I tired out more quickly.

I saw him below me as I went by the airport, and he didn’t have too much of an airplane. It was hard to be sure, but it looked like a hang-glider with a Go-Kart underneath it. And maybe it was faster than me, but I bet I could out-turn it.

I saw a few other airplanes off in the distance; a couple of small ones and there were big ones flying overhead making clouds. I'd like to get permission to fly up as high as I can one day and see what the world looks like from up there.

The tracks turned a little bit more south when they passed by Decatur, and I kept following them. I thought that maybe I was getting close to Dowagiac, so I called on my radio again to make sure that any airplanes around me knew that I was there. Off in the distance I could see an airport near a town, but I wasn't quite close enough to see if that was Dowagiac.

I could also see an Amtrak sitting on the tracks, probably at the train station since it wasn't moving. And after I'd flown on for a few more minutes, it started to move and it looked like it was going pretty slow at first but it gained speed really quickly, and by the time it passed under me it was really moving.

I passed over a pretty big forested area just south of Dowagiac, and then I saw a dirt mine with an attractive topaz lake, and I was getting a little bit sweaty, but I thought that maybe it was a bad lake like the one I'd seen at the other dirt mine.

Just south of that was a big concrete pad that had a metal gridwork that electrical wires went to. I couldn't figure out what it was for—the wires just went into it and then back out again and it didn't look like they did anything there at all, besides weave around the framework. Maybe it was a switching yard for electricity.

I could see the Niles airport ahead of me and that meant that I should either turn around now or call the South Bend airplane directors and let them know that I was here. And I decided that I didn't want to; I was still a little bit grumpy that the man with the flying Go-Kart had made fun of me, so I turned around and headed back for Kalamazoo.

I'd gotten back to Dowagiac and told any airplanes who were nearby where I was—nobody answered, so I guess there wasn't anybody—and I noticed that it was starting to get cloudier and cloudier off to the west. I hadn't looked at what the weather was supposed to be, which I probably should have.

Well, when I got to Lawton it was still a ways off but definitely getting closer, and the way the clouds were piling up it looked like it was going to be a thunderstorm. I hadn't seen any flashes of lightning yet but it was still pretty light out, so they'd be hard to see.

The wind was picking up, too, just a little bit, and it was carrying the scent of rain with it.

So I changed my radio so that I could talk to the Kalamazoo airplane directors, and I asked for a weather report. Dori said that they were predicting overcast and the possibility of an afternoon thundershower, and so I told her what I was seeing so that she could tell the other airplanes. And then I thought about what I should do.

I was pretty sure I'd beat the storm back to my house—it was still a long ways off—but then I'd have to either get a ride from Mel, or fly back out on my own. And it would be more practical to just stay out here and wait for it to arrive.

But I didn't have my weather radio, 'cause I hadn't thought I'd need it. So I could land and talk to Mel on my portable telephone, and see what he wanted to do.

That was probably the best idea, so I told Dori that I would be landing in Mattewan and that I would let her know when I was in the air again.

I landed in the parking lot of Pizza Hut and went inside to have lunch. It was a little early for me, but then I'd had an early breakfast and flown all morning so I thought I deserved it.

I got a little pizza just like last time, but I was smart and ate all of it because I knew it would get soggy if I carried it with me in a storm. And I thought about having a beer with lunch too because they had Oberon, but I thought that I probably shouldn't, and just got water instead.

The storm still hadn't come when I was done with lunch, but it was darker and I could hear distant thunder, so I called Mel and told him that I was already out in Mattewan and that I didn't have my stormwatcher radio with me. And he said that if the weather was severe I could also use my airplane radio and tell the airplane directors and that they would make sure that the right people knew.

He said that he was on his way out and would be there in a quarter hour, and he said that it didn't look like it was going to be too bad on the weather radar but you never knew.

Dori said that I could fly up again but not above the clouds, so I went diagonally out of the parking lot and angled towards the 94 Highway as I climbed. The winds were getting gusty as the storm moved in, and they kept catching me off-balance. It didn't help that I was tired from my morning flight and also had a full belly.

The first stormcloud that went by was all noise but didn't have any bite to it. It was grumbly and full of lightning but didn't have enough water in it to do more than dribble. And when it was gone I didn't see anything too close, so I flew back to the parking lot and sparked off on a tree than greeted Mel and got a look at the weather on his folding computer.

There was another stormcloud not too far behind the first one but after that it looked like there wasn't going to be anything dangerous, so I went back up just in time to get rained on by the second cloud. That one had more downdrafts, too, but they weren't too serious so I didn't think it was worth reporting on my airplane radio.

Once it had passed I followed it until I got back above Mel's truck, and then I circled down around the big S sign and then glided over to his truck. I had my sights on a tree that I was going to spark against, but I flew too low over the parking lot and got a truck with big tires instead. I hit it with a forehoof and I looked down just in time to see my airplane radio flicker for a moment, then it lit back up like normal.

I got a ride back to Kalamazoo with Mel, and started to tell him what the cloud was like and he said that since I was in the truck with him I might as well make the report myself, so I used the radio in his truck to make my report.

When I got home I took off my gear and took a shower and then I was going to call Mister Salvatore and ask where I could get an airplane map but I thought that maybe I could find one on the computer, so I turned it on and found that I could buy them from a store called Amazon and they'd send it right to my door for me which was very convenient. So I ordered one of Chicago which was the one that had Kalamazoo on it and I also ordered one of Detroit because that had the other half of the bottom of Michigan. And the computer told me that I'd have it in two days, which was really fast.

Then my computer chirped at me and I saw that the little tag for Facebook was blinking, so I chose it and it was Aric.

We were talking about things that we wanted to do and I said that I still hadn't gotten to go to the topless karaoke bar or a nudist camp and he said that there was one in Indiana that wasn't all that far from him and one of his friends had been telling him about it and he wasn't working on Saturday so maybe we could go there, but then he said it was kind of far to come up to pick me up and then go there and then go back again and maybe we should just wait until he was back in Kalamazoo.

Well, I asked him where it was and he said it was close to South Bend, and I told him that I'd almost flown there today, so I could fly down and meet him there on Saturday and he said that sounded like it would be fun. So we agreed to meet there, and he said that he'd send me a telephone telegram with the exact address when he figured out what it was.

By the time that we were done talking, it was pretty late in the afternoon so I went over to Meghan's apartment. I got there before she did and took a little nap on the porch 'cause there was a sunbeam that was in the perfect spot.

She let me help her make dinner, which was a spaghetti casserole again. She wanted me to do most of the work and I was pretty proud when I put in the oven, 'cause I'd only had to ask her a couple of times for help.

Meghan was kind of sad that I was going to be gone on Saturday and I was thinking that if she'd wanted to go to a nudist resort with me I would have, but she'd said that she didn't want to. And I promised her that we would sleep together on Friday night but I wanted to leave kind of early, and I said that I'd be back late on Saturday and we could spend all of Sunday together doing whatever she wanted to, and that made her a lot happier. She said that maybe we could go to her uncle's and use his hot tub.

I told her about the fire that I'd seen and I said that I had a movie of it, and I guess I should have brought my GoPro but I hadn't thought of it. But I told her that we could watch the movie on Friday, and then she could put it on YouTube, and she said that she was going to talk to a friend of hers who knew how to edit them because they were interesting but maybe people wouldn't want to watch three or four hours of me flying.

I thought that was pretty smart: Gates had taken lots of movies and made them shorter and just showed the fun stuff, and left out the stuff that was fun while you were doing it but not so fun to watch later, like riding the chairlift.

When it was time to get ready for bed I helped her get undressed, and I hadn't even finished yet before she pulled me into bed with her.

August 18 [Lamentations]

August 18

As soon as I woke up, I started to snuggle against Meghan to wake her up before her alarm, and when she opened her eyes I nuzzled her cheek and wished her a good morning, and she said that every day she woke up next to me was a good morning, which was really sweet. So I kissed her and lay down on her breast so she could pet my mane and scratch behind my ears until her alarm went off for the second time and we had to get up.

After I’d gotten out breakfast I went back upstairs to get her clothes and I found a really nice grey dress that was kind of stretchy like a sock and looked like it could be worn all by itself, so I put that on the bed for her and then found a nice bra and matching panties for her because she liked it when her clothes matched.

Meghan didn’t like the dress that I set out for her. She said it was too short and rode up when she was sitting and then anyone could see her underwear and it was a shame because it was such a comfortable dress. And so she picked a different skirt and a blouse instead, and she had to wear a shirt under her blouse because it was kind of translucent and she thought that maybe someone would be able to see her bra.

When we were eating breakfast I asked her why she had clothes that she couldn’t wear to work and she said that her dress was nice to wear to parties, it just didn’t get along with the chairs at work.

Once her friend had picked her up, I was going to fly home but then as I was flying over the cemetery I changed my mind and turned around and flew towards the Nature Center instead, to give my wings a bit of a break. Especially since on Saturday I’d be flying all the way to Indiana.

I got there early enough that the deer were still out grazing in the pasture grasses, and so I landed as far away from them as I could to keep from spooking them. One of the does flicked her tail a couple of times like she wasn’t sure, then when none of the others bolted, she put her head back down and went back to her meal.

I trotted around the whole path once, slowing down when I came back to where the deer were, ‘cause I didn’t want to scare them. So I kept to a walk as I went past and around the south end of the trail, then when I got on the path that ran by the railroad tracks, I cantered all the way back around until I got towards the top of the path.

The deer were gone, so I broke into a gallop on the downside and went down and around until I was along the tracks again, then slowed to a canter as I got close to the north turn.

The second time I came around, I flew up and over the trees and tracks and then circled back around so that I could land on the riverbank. The land kinda dropped down steeply so there weren’t too many good spots, but I found a little muddy section of ground and landed there, then waded out into the water.

Rivers can be treacherous because all the silt and stuff they carry along makes it really hard to see the bottom even when it’s shallow and there are sometimes trees and stuff that will snag a hoof.

I got a little drink of water, too, then I carefully waded back to shore and flew back over the railroad tracks and landed back on the path again.

There were a lot of other trails in the nature center, and while this one was the best one for landing on and galloping around, I decided I wanted to walk around one to cool down some more, so I picked the riverfront trail.

I usually didn’t get to look at woods this closely—they were something that I usually saw from the sky or maybe a couple of trees together here and there around town, but not like this. And since I wasn’t with anyone else, I paid a little more attention to how the trees grew and the undergrowth that lived wherever enough light got through.

There were mushrooms growing in some of the shadiest, moistest spots and I knew that some mushrooms were really tasty and some of them were really toxic and I didn’t know how to tell them apart, so I didn’t touch them. Especially since there are some that can spit spores at you if you’re too close, and I’ve heard that there are some kinds that can grow on your hooves, too, and I didn’t want to get those.

This trail also went along the railroad tracks and they were mostly hidden by the trees but every now and then there was an open spot where you could see them and the river really clearly.

In one of those spots I found a patch of nettles and they smelled so good I leaned down and took a mouthful before I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to eat the plants at the nature center, and so I looked around to see if anybody had noticed but there was no one else around. Maybe I could buy some at the farmer’s market—I hadn’t seen anybody selling them yet, though.

After I’d gone all the way around the river trail, I went back to the prairie path and cantered up to the top, then took off to fly back to my apartment. I decided that I’d just follow Westnedge Avenue into town, since it was a nice direct way to go.

When I got back to my apartment, I got in the shower and used up the last of my shampoo. I was almost out of conditioner, too, so I told myself that tomorrow morning I’d want to fly to Meijer and buy some more.

I had a nice salad for lunch, and when I looked at my haybales I started thinking that I wasn’t going to finish them before it was time to go back to school, and I hoped that Peggy wouldn't mind having them in the dorm room. I don’t think she would, since they smelled nice, and they didn’t take up a lot of space.

After I’d eaten, I sat down in the papasan with my Bible and picked up where I’d left off. I wasn't going to disappoint Pastor Liz again, and I had all afternoon to read.

Since it had been so long, I probably should have started back at the beginning of Jeremiah again, because it took me a little bit to remember what was happening. Besides that God was mad because His people weren’t doing what He’d told them to.

He told Jeremiah that He would punish the Israelites for seventy years because they had been bad, and let the Babylonians take over, but after that seventy years, He would give them back everything that they’d had before. And then He told Jeremiah to tell the people to change their ways and then He wouldn’t have to punish them, but the people were mad when he said that and wanted to kill Jeremiah because he had given them bad news. The elders said that it wasn’t his fault and he was just telling them what God had said.

Other men who claimed to be prophets didn’t tell the people what God had said, but instead they said what the people wanted to hear, and God found out and it made Him mad, so He said that He would punish anyone who made false prophecies.

And He promised again that after seventy years he would make a new covenant with the Israelites, because even after all the things He had done for them they still wouldn’t listen to Him and follow His rules.

Being a messenger for God wasn’t much of an honor, I don’t think, because Jeremiah kept on telling people what God said for him to tell them, and he got put in prison for a while, and then after that they put him in a well until he got rescued.

It didn’t help them, either; Babylon took Jerusalem just like God had said that they would. So instead of doing what they were told and keeping their city, they kept on misbehaving and lost it. And I think if I were Jeremiah I might have gloated a little bit, but he didn’t; he kept on doing what God told him to. And some of the people wanted to go back to Egypt, but God told them not to.

And he had Jeremiah take messages to all the other kingdoms warning them that God was going to conquer them later because they had false gods and false idols and were mean to His people.

It was still pretty early and Lamentations was not as long as Jeremiah, so I decided I would read that, too. It was pretty sad, though. I should have guessed from the name of the book. It was a poem about how their beautiful city now laid in ruins and how they had lost everything and were scattered all over begging for food and not even having water to drink, all because they had forsaken God so now He had forsaken them.

I put my Bible back away and went out for a little afternoon flight to clear my mind. I think that earth ponies would like reading Lamentations on a bitter winter day when all their fields were covered with snow and all the boats were dragged out of the water so that they didn’t get crushed in the ice and the breakers during winter storms.

And I think that maybe sometimes people in the Bible put a little too much value on their possessions and not as much as they should have on each other. Our cloud-town had been destroyed a few times in storms and we just gathered up as much as we could and then got more clouds and rebuilt it. But I guess if they’d put a whole lot of work into their city to make it really nice then it would be really sad if it was gone.

Well, I had more questions that I thought I had the answer to but maybe I was wrong, so when I got back to my apartment I got my glaive and then flew off to Stetson Chapel.

Liz offered me a cup of tea and we talked about my week and her week for a little bit and then when I’d finished my tea, we talked about the Bible. She explained how God’s love was kind of conditional and kind of unconditional, which was sort of hard to understand until she explained how it was kind of like a mother’s love. She asked me if I’d ever been punished for doing something bad and of course I had, because how else would I learn? And then she asked if Princess Celestia ever punished her subjects for disobeying her, and I said that she did, even though she was very kind and forgiving.

And Liz said that God was like that. He loved His people very much, but when they turned away from him He had to punish them so that they would learn their lesson before it was too late, and that made a lot of sense.

When I was a filly, a couple of my friends saw a big storm coming and they thought that they wanted to fly up into the cloud because it seemed really exciting to them, and they wanted me to come with them, and I did but we got caught by a pony on the weather team and my mom was furious when she found out and for the next moon I wasn’t allowed to go to market or the tavern and I had to be home by moonrise and I thought it was really unfair. But then when I got older and started working storms on the weather team I thought back to that cloud sometimes and how that was the kind of cloud that even experienced pegasuses sometimes fly into and don’t fly back out of again.

I didn’t tell her any of that, but I think she saw it in my eyes or maybe in the way that my ears drooped a little bit when I was thinking about it, because she said that at tough times you wonder if your parents really understand, if they really love you, or if they’ve forsaken you, and that’s what Lamentations was all about. The Israelites had realized that they’d been bad, and they understood that God was punishing them, but they weren’t sure if God was going to forgive them ever or if they’d broken His rules one too many times and He was done with them and was going to look for a new chosen people.

And maybe I was sometimes a little too hopeful, but I thought that since there was still a lot of the Bible yet to go that after they’d learned their lesson, God must have forgiven them like He’d promised He would.

So when we were done I thanked her and then I went off to practice fighting.

Karla changed things around a little bit, so I got to warm up with Stellan like I usually did, but then after that she wanted everyone to practice with different people, so I fought with Erik for a little bit and he wasn’t very good at defending against a polearm but if I messed up and let him get close to me I couldn’t defend myself. He was kind of reluctant to hit me, which I suppose if I’d been better I could have used to my advantage, but I couldn’t figure out how because he was far inside the reach of my weapon and I couldn’t back up fast enough to get away from him.

And then I also got to fight with another man named Micah, who had a quarterstaff which was like my glaive but without the blade so it wasn’t much of a thrusting weapon and he was really good and really quick. I hadn’t really considered how effective being able to strike with both ends of the weapon was, and I tried to copy his technique because I could use the butt end of my glaive too, if I knew how.

Mostly that meant that I dropped it a lot. But he was a good sport and wouldn’t press his attack after I’d dropped my weapon.

Then we cooled down by Stellan giving me a little demonstrating of how humans fought with their hands and feet. He said that there were a lot of different techniques and he didn’t know them all. And then he and Erik demonstrated fighting together and blocking because it was always good to know how to defend yourself against an attack.

I wanted to try, and he said that it would probably be dangerous if I did unless I had something to cover my hooves, ‘cause even without shoes they’d hurt a lot if I made contact, and I thought he was right but it was kind of disappointing. And so Stellan said that he’d think of something that he could put over my hooves to protect us and we’d try it then.

So when I flew home I was a little bit bruised and sore, but Stardancer had always said that if you weren’t hurting after a combat lesson than you hadn’t learned anything.

August 19 [Friday Fun]

August 19

I was a little bit sore from fighting when I woke up, but after a few stretches I felt pretty good, so I walked over to the balcony door and watched the birds through the glass for a bit. Some of the little chickadees saw me coming and flew into a tree but they came right back when I didn't open the door.

It was a nice day out, and I wanted to get in a morning flight so that I would be all loosened up for my trip tomorrow, so I ate a light breakfast of mostly hay and a can of anchovies for quick energy and then put on my flight gear. I called the airplane directors on the radio before I went outside, just so that the talking from the radio wouldn't scare the birds off. They didn't seem to mind too much when I flew off the balcony, I guess 'cause they'd figured out that I was a big, harmless bird.

Dori said I could fly as long as I stayed low before I got to the 131 Highway, so I was just about to open the door when I remembered that I needed more shampoo and conditioner and it would also be nice to get some beer for Jeff's party. Beer was a little cheaper at Meijer than it was at Tiffany's, although it wasn’t as convenient to get there.

So I had to get all the way out of my flight gear to put my saddlebags on, which was kind of annoying. I considered for a moment just strapping them loosely on top, but I knew that if I did that they were going to shift around when I flew and I wouldn’t' like where they wound up.

After I got my gear back on, I went out the door and scattered the birds, then dove off the balcony and by the time I'd climbed to treetop level, I could hear them chirping happily behind me like they do when they're eating.

I decided that instead of following Main Street, I'd parallel it, and just make the final adjustments to get me to Meijer after I'd crossed the 131 Highway, so I was flying over a bunch of houses, and then after that a medium-sized flat-roofed industrial building that smelled oddly spicy. Maybe it was a big kitchen of some sort—there were lots of foods you could buy at Meijer that were already made and put in boxes—or I suppose it could have been a spice cannery.

Then it was back to houses for a while until I started getting close to Drake Road, where there were lots of business buildings. I think it would be fun sometime to just land and go in each one and see what they were, because a lot of their names didn't really tell me much.

I flew past the Taco Bell and made a real shallow turn to line me up with Meijer, and then I decided that I was going to have a little bit of fun before I went shopping, so I made a steeper turn to go out to the Kal-Haven trailhead, 'cause I hadn't been along that way in a while.

The trail was pretty busy this morning. I guess people must like it more than the Nature Center, maybe because it goes somewhere instead of around and back on itself.

I flew along the trail above the trees for about a kilometer, and then I went down through a thin spot in the trees and followed about ten feet above the path, which was taller than any person.

Right after I came down through the trees I saw a couple of people riding bicycles in my direction, and they slowed down as soon as they saw me, and even more when they got close. I waved at them as I passed overhead and I thought by the way the woman was looking at me as I got close meant that she was probably staring as I went past.

A little ways further down the path I saw a cluster of joggers that were all dressed identically in black shorts and maroon shirts. They were going northwest like I was, and I was flying faster then them.

It was hard to be sure but from the back they looked like they were teenagers and when I got close I saw that the backs of their shirts all said Kalamazoo Central Cross Country.

I didn't catch up to them until the trail got to F Ave and then they had to stop and look for traffic. A lot of times joggers will keep on jogging in place while they're waiting to cross a road which looks kind of silly. I never flapped my wings while I was waiting to fly.

All of them were across the road when I got there and I didn't have to slow down because I wasn't on the ground. And I ought to have been paying more attention to how high I was flying, since although it was higher than humans were tall it was not higher than trucks and buses.

Luckily, none of them were coming. I climbed anyways just to be safe, even though I couldn’t see any of them off in the distance. I went over the wires and then dove back down along the trail until I caught up with the joggers and I greeted them as I flew over and on.

I flew until the path got to 8th Street, then I turned around and followed that back to Meijer.

I got my shampoo and conditioner and then I went to look at the beer and I decided that I would get some Angry Orchard cider and as I was going to pay for my beer and shampoo I started thinking that maybe cider would taste really good with maple pancakes. I'd have to have them for dinner, 'cause I didn't want to start out the day drinking.

The woman who tallied up my supplies was really nice and put them in my saddlebags for me, although she wouldn't take the cider out of its cardboard carrier, so that left me a little bit unbalanced with all the beer on one side and the shampoo on the other, and I was glad that I'd taken the time to put my saddlebags on right, or else they'd have slid over and probably dumped all my cider out on the ground.

On my way back, I flew a little bit more north than Main Street, behind the Maple Hill Mall and over the neighborhoods there and I wound up a little bit further north than I'd meant to, 'cause Main Street angles towards downtown. I might not have noticed, except that I remembered where the strange circle of houses is, and knew I had to turn when I saw it.

I was thinking about what I wanted for lunch and I put the cider in the electric icebox and there were still lots of pancakes there and I didn't think that Jeff would mind if one beer was missing when I came over so I lit the oven and put a couple of pancakes in to warm them up then I got out of my flight gear and took a quick shower.

After I'd dried off I ate my pancakes and drank the cider and I'd been right; it was a really good combination of flavors. Maybe I'd suggest it to Zucche and she could tell her mom.

I cleaned off my plate and then I went and got all my flight gear ready for tomorrow. All of my equipment needed to be recharged and I also put new batteries in my blinking light so that I would be ready, and then I turned on the computer and Aric had sent me a message telling me where the resort was.

I looked on the map until I found Granger, but the map wasn't detailed enough to show me exactly where I was going to go. I knew that there were maps on my computer, too, and so I tried to figure out how to find them.
I got interrupted when the doorbell rang and when I went downstairs the mailwoman was there with a long cardboard tube for me. I took it and at first I couldn't figure out why I had a long tube then I realized that the airplane maps must be rolled up inside it.

They were tricky to get out. I bet it would be easier with fingers, but I had to bang it on the floor until the maps slid right up to the very edge and then I had to bite on the very edge and pull the tube away with my hooves before they came out.

Granger wasn't on that map at all, so I went back to the computer to look.

When I found one and went back to see what the address actually was I saw that Aric had sent the address as a link, and when I clicked on it it took me to the map and I could make it bigger or smaller to orient myself.

It looked like it would be pretty easy to get to; I could either fly along the railroad tracks to Dowagiac and then go almost due south, or I could go to Schoolcraft and follow those tracks all the way to Granger. And after that it would be pretty easy to spot from the air; it was just south of a curve in the main road in a big square block of trees.

And the route back would be even easier, because my watch could tell me how to get to the Kalamazoo Airport, and when my route took me over the 131 Highway, I'd just stop following its directions and go back to my apartment the usual way.

And then I set the airplane map on my desk and it was a little bit hard to read but there were instructions that said what all the symbols were, and I found about where Granger must be which was inside of South Bend's circle, so I was either going to have to go under them or else announce myself on the radio and get permission to fly in at altitude.

I was still puzzling over the map when Meghan came in, and she was wearing the pretty dress that I'd laid out for her. I asked if she was worried about it riding up and she said that she wanted to live dangerously.

We snuggled a little bit in the papasan before we went to Jeff's, and she noticed that there were only five Angry Orchards in the electric icebox and said that it wasn't fair that I'd gotten started without her, and I said that I didn't think that Jeff would mind if another one was missing, but she said that she'd rather not start drinking until later, so we took the five beers over to Jeff's.

Angela and David came kinda late, but they had a bean casserole that they called seven layer dip and she told me that it was vegetarian, and that turned out to be really popular. By the time we were done eating and talking, there wasn't any of it left at all.

The only sour note was when Jeff and one of his friends who was called Steve started talking about the presidential candidates and pretty soon they were arguing about how Hillary was a lying cheating crook and how Donald Trump was less qualified than a retarded five year old and they got a little bit loud before someone started talking about the Detroit Tigers and how they might make the World Series this year, and pretty soon everyone was talking about baseball and it was a lot more friendly.

Me and Meghan went back to my apartment and I reminded her to keep the bird feeders full while I was gone and I told her where the seeds were for Aric's. And I said that she could leave a little bit for the mouse but she said that I shouldn't feed mice because that only encouraged them. And then she sat in my computer chair and put the movies from the GoPro on the computer. I sat on her lap for a while but it wasn't very comfortable and I was kind of in her way. She said that maybe if she used the papasan chair that would be better, but she wouldn't be too much longer. She said that tomorrow she'd put the videos on YouTube, rather than spend the time tonight.

And when she pivoted the chair back around I saw what she'd meant about her skirt 'cause it had slid up enough that I would have seen her panties if she'd been wearing any and she saw where I was looking and said that she was almost done then turned back to the computer.

Well, I could be teasing too, so I went around to the other side of the desk and then went under it and stuck my muzzle up against her knees and sort of pushed forward and I didn't think she was going to let me but she did.

August 20 [Sunny Haven]

August 20

When the alarm on my telephone went off we both agreed that it was too early, but it was going to be a long flight, just a little over three hours, and I didn't want to keep Aric waiting.

We snuggled a bit and then Meghan got up first and said she was going to start breakfast for me and she asked if there was anything that I wanted for breakfast and I told her to surprise me, so she slid her hand under my tail and I said that wasn't what I'd meant. And then she stuck her tongue out at me and went off to the kitchen and I heard her opening cupboards and the electric icebox.

I went over to my desk and unrolled the map and studied it again and I decided that I was going to fly high, so I called up the airplane directors to tell them my flight plan, which I had never done before and I was glad that Dori was the one talking on the radio because she helped me with it.

Meghan had finished warming up the last of the pancakes by the time I was done, so we folded up the futon and sat on that and ate breakfast. She said that she could also heat up some water and make me coffee but I thought that as soon as I was in the air, I wouldn't really want it.

She said that she kind of wished that she was coming with me, and I said that maybe we could get an Uber-Car to take us, but she said that while she didn't mind being naked around me the idea of being naked around other people made her nervous and she didn't think it was something that she could do and it wouldn't be fun for either of us if she got there and got cold feet and didn't want to go in. But she said that when I got back I should tell her about it.

When I'd finished eating, I carried my plate to the kitchen and I was going to wash it but she said that she'd do that for me, and said that she'd help me get dressed, which was really nice of her.

So she put on all my flight gear and then she said that maybe this one time I'd do better to leave my GoPro at home because while she was sure that people would want to see a video of a nudist colony she thought that would be incredibly rude to everyone there unless I had their permission first.

She went almost to the balcony and kissed me and wished me a safe flight and told me to have a good day, and then I dove off the balcony and under the tree.

I'd decided to follow the tracks to Dowagiac and then go south from there, because I still had the route pretty fresh in my mind, and since my watch would give me compass headings, I wasn't worried about missing it when I left the tracks behind and flew south.

It felt a little bit daring to leave the railroad tracks behind in Dowagiac but my watch had been smart enough to get me all the way to Chicago so I was sure that it would point me in the right direction now, too. And once I got past the town and was out over open fields, I glided for a bit and called the airplane directors in South Bend. I was pretty sure that I was still outside their range, but Dori had told me that they like to have some advance warning, so I let them know where I was going and where I was now and I was glad I'd done it early because it took a little while for them to really understand that I was a pegasus flying at five thousand feet on a course for Granger.

It was mostly all fields and little woodlots and there was one place that I thought might be an airport because there was an X in the trees but when I got a little bit closer it was a power line route that crossed a narrow lake instead. And then I went by a little town to my right that at first I thought must be Granger but it wasn't. I was still kind of doubting my memory, though, and really looking around to make sure that I wasn't overflying my destination.

My watch didn't let me down, though, 'cause when I looked further ahead I could see another town and as I got closer I started to see some of the landmarks that I'd found on the computer map, like the 80-90 Highway.

I had to adjust my course a little bit when I saw the field with the two parallel tree-rows in it, and then I saw the square of trees I was going towards, and I started a quick circling descent towards it. Aric had said that we were supposed to check in at the office, although he hadn't known where that was.

Well, I knew enough about humans to know that they probably mostly drove to the resort, so I dropped further down until I was along the road and I could see a little dirt road that led up to a gate and there was a sign that said I was supposed to push the button and drive through to the office.

I wasn't sure if I should just fly over the gate or if I should push the button and go through it, and maybe it was silly but humans had strange customs sometimes and since this was the first time I was ever here, I pushed the button and a bell started to ring and then the gate lurched and slid open sideways like an elevator door but it was a lot more jerky.

There was a small house on the other side with a sign that said it was the office, so I went inside and there wasn't anybody there.

But after I waited a little bit, an older lady came up on a golf cart and she was wearing a shirt but not pants or underwear, and she came inside and she was really surprised to see me and asked what I was doing, so I told her how I was going to meet Aric and she said he hadn't arrived yet, I was their first visitor today.

She told me the rules, and I had to let her put a sticker on my portable telephone so that I couldn't take pictures with it, and she was a little reluctant to let me in the pool until I assured her that I hardly shed at all unless it was the springtime and I was losing my winter coat. And I let her run her hand along my coat to prove it, and then she said that it was okay to use the pool and hot tub.

She asked me if I had a towel and I hadn't thought to bring one, which was kind of stupid of me. So she had towels that she was selling, so I bought one of those, too. It was a nice blue which almost matched my coat. And she said that when Aric came she'd let him know that I was here.

Well, I was really looking forward to getting in the pool, 'cause it had been a long flight and just standing around with all my flight gear on was making me get too hot, so she gave me directions to the pool and said that there were showers at the entrance so I could rinse off before I went in.

So I went around the park to the pool and I took my flight gear off and there wasn't really anyplace good to keep it so I left it on a picnic table. I thought that when Aric came we could put it in Winston, but for now it would be safe there.

There were three showers in a row and they were for anybody, and they even had a little white box on the wall that gave you soap when you pushed it.

I was just finishing when a couple came in and they were both surprised to see me but then they crouched down and introduced themselves. They were called Jay and Mandy, and they were also from Michigan but they lived nearer to Lansing, in a little town I'd never heard of.

They wanted to know why I'd come here since I could go around naked whenever I wanted and I said that I was curious what it was like when it was people, and they thought that was a pretty good answer.

I went through to the pool and there were a bunch of lounge chairs around it with people sunning themselves and also lots of people in the pool since it was such a nice day. I set my towel on a chair and picked a clear spot in the pool and belly-flopped in and by the time I popped my head back up above the water I think that everyone was looking at me. I guess they weren't expecting to see a pony.

I swam down to the other end, and I had to dive under the rope in the middle that told you where the shallow end and deep ends were. And then I came back up sort of in the middle and just started floating and looking around me.

There were all kinds of people there; it was sort of like being at a park except that nobody had clothes on. And I hadn't been there too long before a woman came over to the edge of the pool with her children and said that they wanted to meet me 'cause they'd never seen a real Equestrian before. So I paddled over to the side and hooked my hooves on the edge of the pool so that they could pet my mane. And the girl, who was the older one, started asking me all sorts of questions about Equestria and if I could really fly and I said that I could and I didn't want to right now because I'd flown all the way from Kalamazoo to get here but I would later on.

The boy was a little bit younger and he lost interest in me pretty quick and then ran back over to the lounge chair and his mother went after him after telling Natalie—which was a really pretty name—not to go in the pool.

She sat down on the edge next to me so that she could talk, though, and told me that she was from South Bend and that her family came here every weekend and she hoped that I would start coming here all the time too and I hated to disappoint her but it wasn’t nice to lie, either, so I told Natalie that on Monday I was leaving for a trip out west and then after that I was going to have to start school again and I wasn’t sure that I would have time but maybe I could get a bunch of my friends together and come down for a weekend.

I had to swim to the shallow end of the pool to get back out—I could have pulled myself over the edge but it was a lot easier to walk out the stairs down there. She followed along on the edge of the pool and there really wasn't a good place to shake off without splashing everyone so I just stretched out on a lounge chair to let the sun dry my coat off and I stretched out my wings which she thought was really amazing.

Since Natalie still wanted to talk to me, I decided that it would be smart to go over to the cluster of lounge chairs where her family was so that her mother wouldn't worry, and so I got my towel and sat down there and talked for a little while longer. Her mom said that they'd taken a nude cruise in the Mediterranean earlier this year and that next year they were thinking about going to Equestria because she'd heard that it was okay to be nude there and I said I didn't know but I couldn't think of any reason why it would be a problem except maybe in some of the unicorn cities 'cause they liked to wear clothes to show off, I'd heard.

I didn't need for the woman at the gate to tell me that Aric had arrived, 'cause I could hear Winston when he came in and I excused myself and then flew up and over the building to greet him, and I think that Natalie was probably pretty happy that she got to see me fly.

I flew around and landed on the hood of Winston and waved at him—if he'd still been moving I wouldn't have, but he was stopped. And he waved back and then unfastened his seat belt and took off his shirt.

Then I remembered my flight gear, so I flew off the hood and over to the picnic table and picked it up and carried it back, and by the time I got back he had everything off but his underwear.

Aric said it felt really weird to get undressed like this outside and he kept expecting someone to call the police on him or something, and it wasn't until he saw an old man walk by with nothing but a towel over his shoulder that Aric finally slid off his underwear and threw them in Winston.

We took a quick shower together (you were supposed to use the shower every time you left the pool area) and I said that there was a little door off to the side that was called a sauna and I wondered what that was and he said that it was a hot room that you could also fill with steam and I wanted to try that out.

So we went in there and it was really hot and really dry and I started sweating as soon as he closed the door.

There were wooden benches around the walls to sit on, and I picked the lower one 'cause I knew it would be a little bit cooler there, and he sat down next to me.

After a little bit, I kind of got used to the heat, and I said that I thought it would feel really nice in the wintertime, and he said that in Scandinavia they sit in saunas until they can't take the heat anymore and then they jump into a frozen lake, and they keep on switching back and forth like that.

So when we both thought we'd spent enough time in the sauna we got up and I watched as a pony-shaped patch of sweat evaporated, then he opened the door and we both jumped into the pool.

He said that he could swim the whole length of the pool underwater and I told him to try, so he dove in and did it, not coming back up until he was at the wall at the other end, then he came back the other way and I watched him swim under me like a weird pink dolphin.

We played around in the water a little bit and then he asked if I wanted to go back in the sauna and I didn't, 'cause it was nice outside and too hot in there. So we went to the hot tub instead, which was a lot bigger than the one Meghan's uncle had, and it was pretty popular, too. Jay and Mandy were in there, and so was the older man we'd seen walking by earlier, and there was still lots of room for us to get in, too.

Everyone sat in the hot tub long enough that the water jets turned off and then the old man got up to turn them back on.

After that we both sat in the lounge chairs around the pool for a while, and I introduced Aric to Natalie and her mother. And after she'd left Aric said that that had been the weirdest part of the day yet and I asked him why and he said that he couldn't tell me because I was too innocent. So I don't know what he meant by that.

He said that he was getting kind of hot from all the sun and his back was turning pretty red, so we went back in the pool for another swim. He asked me if I could dive to the very bottom and I said that I could so I stuck my head under and used my wings like fins until my forehooves touched the bottom of the pool. Then I tried to stand on all fours and that was a little bit harder, 'cause my body wanted to float back up to the top and it wasn't like being in the air at all. Everything I did was a lot slower but it felt like there was more force when it happened, which sounds really odd.

I came up for air and then tried it again, and did a little bit better. Then we made a game of it—who could stand on the bottom for the longest—and I won easily, although Aric said that he thought me flapping my wings was cheating. I said that he was using his arms so why couldn't I use my wings, and he said that it wasn't the same. So then he said that he'd try landing on the bottom on his arms and legs or knees, and I would try it on my hooves but without using my wings.

Well, that didn't work out for either of us; as soon as we touched the bottom and stopped moving we floated back up again. But it was fun to try.

Then the two of us sat back in our lounge chairs and Aric lay on his back and so I did, too, although after a little while it started to feel weird so I rolled back over onto my stomach.

I heard a couple of older women at the other end of the pool laughing about a man's Prince Albert and they said that he had a pull-toy, so I poked Aric with a hoof and asked him what a Prince Albert was and he told me and I didn't believe him until the man got out of the water and I saw that it was true.

He said that it was supposed to make sex more fun but I didn't see how it would. And he told me that I should ask Angela if it did because he was pretty sure that David had one, too, although he hadn't seen it for himself and had never asked because it was one of those things where he couldn't decide if he wanted to know or not.

So I said that I would ask her and that I'd tell her that he'd told me to and Aric said that he didn't want to be involved in the conversation at all.

Both of us took a little nap—it was really easy to fall asleep in the sun—and then we sat in the hot tub one more time, and this time there wasn't anybody else in the tub with us, which I thought was kind of lonely. It was more fun when there were lots of people, but most of them had left to make dinner.

Well, when we were done in the hot tub we walked around the resort, and Natalie saw us and said she was going to ask her mom if there was enough dinner to share, but Aric said that we didn't want to be a bother. Still, we followed her home—she lived in a big silver trailer called an Airstream—and we sat and talked on the lounge chairs out front for a little while. We met her father, who was cooking dinner on a grill, and her brother came over and hugged me once before going back to pushing toy cars along the edge of the deck and occasionally shoving them off the edge.

Aric had to get dressed before we left, but I didn't, so I just got up in the cab of Winston, and when he had his clothes on we drove into town, because we were both really hungry.

There was a little restaurant called the Copper Creek Cafe that he thought would be good, but they were closed so we went to Yesterday's Food instead. I asked him if they only served leftovers and he said that he hoped not.

Their food was kind of expensive, but it was really good. I got a whitefish, and he got a hamburger which the menu claimed was the best hamburger in a hundred mile radius. So I asked him if he'd ever had a better one in Kalamazoo and he said that he hadn't, but he hadn't tried them all. And he said that there was a restaurant in Lansing that made the same claim, and he wondered how far Lansing was from Granger.

We didn't want to split up right away, so he drove around until he found a back road that looked pretty deserted and was in Michigan (because he said if we got caught he'd rather be in his home state because Indiana was really conservative) and we climbed into the back of Winston for some fun.

I wasn't looking forward to the flight home, and Aric offered to drive me but that was a long ways out of his way. So after he'd gotten dressed again he helped me put on my flight gear and I told my watch to direct me back to Kalamazoo.

We'd stayed out later than I meant to, and it got dark long before I was home, and I had to trust in my watch to tell me which way to go because nothing on the ground looked familiar at all after dark. But I could see airplanes a lot further away, and they could probably see me too becuase of my blinking light.

It was really interesting to do a long-distance flight at night, though, 'cause even though I couldn't see any features on the ground there were lots of lights from moving cars and a train, and stationary lights clustered in towns or all alone on farms.

I was really happy when I got to Schoolcraft, because from there it wasn't too long a flight back to my apartment. I'd been getting worried that I wouldn't have enough energy to get all the way there, and I'd been yawning for half an hour, but I kind of got a second wind once I knew I was close, and while I was still tired I didn't feel exhausted anymore.

I couldn't remember if Meghan was going to be at my apartment or if I was supposed to meet her at hers, but when I got close to mine I saw that the lights were on even though it was really late, and I didn't think that Meghan would have forgotten them.

She was sitting at the computer, and she kind of jerked around when I opened the balcony door, 'cause I guess she'd been so focused on what she was doing that she hadn't seen me and my blinking light when I landed.

Meghan said that she'd lost track of time or else she would have been worried about how late I was and I said that I hadn't left until it was almost completely dark and that I was covered in lather so I was going to get in the shower and rinse off and cool down some. And she said that she'd join me 'cause she hadn't taken a shower all day.

I told her all about my day and how nice everyone was and said that she really ought to try it, and she said that she'd think about it.

We dried each other off and she asked if I needed my wings preened and I said that it had been a pretty easy flight so it could wait until the morning 'cause it was pretty late. And she said that it was but it wasn't too late to have some fun in bed especially since we didn't have to get up early tomorrow and I thought that it was really nice to have sex at the beginning of a long flight and again at the end of it.

August 21 [Meghan's Toy]

August 21

Meghan woke me up by nibbling on my ear and I slapped her with my tail but she didn't stop, so I licked her and then pushed her away with my hoof so that I could rest my head on her breast. As soon as I did, she started chewing on my other ear and ran her finger over my fetlock, tickling me right at the joint. I mumbled that she was too eager this morning and she said that she'd been good until ten, but now she thought it was time to wake up even if we didn't get out of bed yet.

So I told her to make me and she slid her hand long my back and then ran her finger along the underside of my dock and I slapped her with my tail again and then rolled on my back and said that I didn't feel like doing anything yet this morning so she'd have to motivate me and she said she could do that and got on all fours and started kissing her way down my belly.

Then she said that she had something in her bag that she wanted to show and I said that this was a very strange time, but she said that I should trust her. So she reached down in her bag and got out a toy that was shaped just like a stallion and she said that if I wanted to we could take turns.

It looked like a real Equestrian stallion and she said that it was modeled after one so I was kind of curious where she'd gotten it and she said that she'd show me later but now wasn't a good time and I said that I'd told her the same thing about playing show-and-tell while her hand was under my tail, so she stuck her tongue out at me and said that we'd look later after I'd decided if it felt as good as it looked.

We didn't get out of bed until almost noon, and after we took a shower together she said that we ought to make breakfast and I said that I didn't have much food left, 'cause I was leaving on my trip tomorrow and I hadn't wanted my food to spoil while I was gone, and I'd been thinking that we could go to Nina's. She said that she'd noticed that yesterday and so she'd bought some more for me.

So she taught me to make hash browns, which was pretty easy, and we also made scrambled eggs and waffles too. It was too much for both of us to eat, so she put the leftovers in the electric icebox and then asked me if I still wanted to go to her uncle's hot tub even after I'd gotten to use one at the resort.

I said that if she didn't want to we could do something else, but that it would be nice to relax and talk together and that was a fun place to do it although I had spent so much time in the water yesterday that I was a little worried that I might turn into a seapony.

Meghan said that she still wanted to, so she used her portable telephone to order an Uber-car to take us there and since the Uber-car wasn't coming for an hour, she turned on my computer and said that she'd show me where she'd found her stallion-toy.

The company was called Bad Dragon, and they had all sorts of different shapes and sizes and they even had artificial mares as well, which I was sort of curious about, so she opened that page and it had a description of the mare it was modeled after. I was kind of surprised that it wasn't Cayenne.

Maybe she doesn't know about these, and I said that I ought to tell her because she'd probably like it if people were buying toys that looked like her.

I decided that I wanted one, too, and Meghan said that she'd buy it for me and she showed me all the different options, and I said that I liked the one that she had. There were a couple of different colors to choose from, and also different sizes as well. And so she ordered one that I thought I'd like, and said that when I got back from my trip it would be waiting for me.

She put her stretchy sock-dress back on without underwear again and tugged it down over her thighs and I waited until her portable telephone said that the Uber-Car was almost outside and then pushed it back up with my muzzle and she said that I was being mean and if I wasn't going to behave myself she was going to put on panties and I said that I couldn't help myself and when she pulled it down again I pushed it back up then kissed her and went out the front door holding my tail up.

Sometimes it was good to be bad.

When she got into the Uber-Car, her face was pretty red and she punched me lightly on the shoulder and then folded down the little armrest that was between the seats. And she mouthed the word 'behave' at me, so I stuck out my tongue at her.

She had to wiggle around a little bit in the seat to get her skirt to cover her all the way, and I think that the driver noticed, 'cause he kept looking back in the mirror.

He dropped us off at her uncle's house and she waited until he'd turned around in the driveway and gone back down the street before she opened the gate to the back and we walked around to the hot tub, and then the two of us got the cover off of it and I hopped right in and sat on the little bench. Meghan leaned down and kissed my forehead and then said that now that she was outside she wasn't as sure about this as she had been, 'cause the sky was overcast and it was a little bit windy and maybe it was going to rain.

I didn't think it would, and I told her so. Then she reminded me that I hadn't checked the weather and I said that I could probably fly up and look although the house was pretty close to the airport, so I'd have to be really careful since I didn't have any of my flight gear with me. I didn't even have my portable telephone; I'd left that back at the apartment.

Then she said that if I wasn't worried about the weather, than she wasn't either, so she pulled off her dress and got into the hot tub and sat down next to me and we leaned back and watched the clouds rolling overhead for a little bit.

She asked if this was really what it was like at the resort, and I said that the hot tub was bigger and there were more people in it but that they just sat around talking and sunning themselves. I said that in a lot of ways people and ponies were mostly the same, and when we were relaxing it seemed like conversations were just gossip or nothing that was really important.

Meghan said that she was going to miss the summer—that when I got back from vacation it would almost be time to go to school and she didn't know what we were going to do then. So my ears dropped and I thought that she was thinking she didn't want to sleep with me any more, but she said she wasn't going to have her apartment any more, and I wouldn't have mine, either, and it wasn't fair to our roommates to kick them out so we could have sex.

Well, I hadn't really thought about that. But I said that we'd think of something when the time came. Maybe we could get a hotel room on the weekend like Peggy and her boyfriend had, and that would be a lot of fun because it would be kind of like being in the sky if we had the windows open. Or just hide somewhere out in the woods like my sister sometimes did, and like me and Aric had.

And I said that we shouldn't think about that right now anyway; I said I'd rather snuggle with her in the hot tub and not think about the future, and she said that she thought that was a good idea.

Then I said that if I had my flight gear and if there was only one layer of clouds that was not too thick and if the wind wasn't blowing them along I could clear out a spot so that we'd have sunshine, and Meghan said that if her aunt had wheels she'd be a wagon and then she started giggling.

We stayed in the hot tub for a couple of hours and then when we decided that it was probably time to get out and go home so that we could get dinner and I could get ready for my trip, neither of us wanted to. She thought that we'd get cold pretty quickly once we were out of the hot tub and there wasn't a good way to warm up, and I'd been thinking the same thing. I think if the water had been cooler it wouldn't have been so bad, but it was so nice and warm.

So I said that I'd get out first and I could get a robe for her and put it on right as she got out of the water and before she could stop me I jumped over the edge and took a couple of steps away from the hot tub so I wouldn't splash her as I shook off.

I brought over a towel for her, and put a second one across my back to help dry me off, and then I got out a robe and I carried it over and she said it was like having her own personal butler. And she climbed out and put the robe on, then started drying her legs off with the towel.

If her uncle had had a sauna we could have gone in there and that would have dried us off really quick.

Once she was mostly dry and had put her boots back on, she crouched down and dried me off, then she said that it shouldn't feel this cold since it was in the seventies but it felt a lot colder without the sun. And she took off her robe and hung it back up and then put on her dress again and asked me if I was going to be good and leave it down or if I wanted to push it up again.

I told her that I'd be good and wait for it to go up on its own this time, and she said that she hoped it didn't happen when she didn't want it to.

We had to wait a little bit until the Uber-Car came to get us and she braided my tail while we were waiting and tied it with a hair-tie she had in her purse. Then she said that we should go to dinner somewhere and said that we could decide where now or when we were in the car. I said that I would be happy going anywhere she wanted to as long as she didn't drink too many Long Island Ice Teas because she had to work in the morning. And she said that we could go to Olde Peninsula and only have one beer each, and maybe a second for dessert and that would be plenty, so when the Uber-Car came she told him that we were going somewhere else and he was a little bit grumpy about that but he took us anyway.

Their food was just as good as before, and we shared a vegetarian pizza because we'd both decided that we wanted to have dessert after the meal and didn't want to be too full. I had a dark and stormy drink and Meghan had a Moscow Mule, and we almost didn't get drinks at all because I didn't have my identification but one of the waiters remembered me from before and said that it was okay for me to drink.

And since our dinner had been a little bit light, we got two desserts and shared them: a chocolate cake and a peanut butter pie and we both agreed that that was a little too sweet and sugary. Meghan said that we'd have to walk home to work off all the extra energy.

So we did, and it was really nice evening for walking. The sky was pretty dark 'cause of all the clouds so the street lights were on even though it was early for them. And once we got off the main road and were walking up Academy Street, it was pretty peaceful.

She said that she wanted to rest her legs a little bit since her boots weren't made for walking, and so we sat on the lawn just in front of the crabs fucking, and I thought how strange it was that Meghan had a pair of boots that weren't comfortable to walk in. If I got a set of shoes, I'd be pretty mad if they weren't comfortable on my hooves. So I asked her why she had them and she said that they were sexy.

We sat there for a little bit until she said that now she had to pee, so we'd better hurry up and get the rest of the way to my apartment.

When we did I flew up and around to the balcony so that I could let Meghan in but I hadn't made it halfway down the stairs before she came up—I'd forgotten that she had a key.

Meghan went right to the bathroom and I set out my saddlebags and started to put my things in them. There wasn't much I was going to need, I didn't think; I wanted my Bible and so I put that in, and also my book of Kipling's poetry because that seemed like a good thing to have on a trip. And I was starting to gather up all my flight gear when Meghan came back out of the bathroom wearing just her boots and I decided that I could finish packing in the morning.

August 23 [Dodge City, Shamrock, and Oklahoma]

August 23

I didn't have any trouble being awake, 'cause we were in a different time zone now. And I didn't have anything to pack, either, since I hadn't unpacked anything.

I knocked on the connecting door so that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn would know that I was awake, and then I sat on my bed and looked out the window.

The town came up suddenly—it was all fields and prairies and then all of a sudden there were houses and the train was slowing down quickly enough that I had to widen my stance a little bit. I don't think I would have had a problem if I'd been standing on the floor, but the bed wasn't very firm footing.

I went out into the hallway and Mister Salvatore was already there, and he stayed back until Miss Cherilyn came rushing out of the room. They dragged all their bags downstairs and the conductor didn't look very happy about how long it was taking us but he did help put their bags on the platform.

The station was a pretty brick building, kind of like the Kalamazoo station but two stories instead of one. They could have had a boarding ramp on the second floor and that would have made getting out of the train cars quicker.

At the very end of the platform, there were two big sundials and there was a little sign next to them that said that in the olden days when the railroad first came through Dodge City, the dividing line between Central Time and Mountain Time went right between the two, which was why they were different. I thought that was kind of neat, and it was a shame that the sun wasn't high enough for them to actually work. Although the lights at the station did shine across the gnomon, so I guess by train-station-light time it was ten and three and four, Mountain Time.

On the other side of the platform there was a black Suburban just like the one that we'd ridden in in Chicago, and a man in a suit got out and helped with everyone's luggage, and then he shook everyone's hand and my hoof, too. He said that his name was James Dove.

He said that he was working with Lofty and I didn't know who that was, but her name sounded kinda familiar, like something that I'd heard before. And he asked if we wanted breakfast before we got on the road.

Well, we all did, so we drove across the tracks to a restaurant called Kate's and it was a bit crowded with all of us at a booth. The waitress was nice, and there was a lot of food, but it was all kind of greasy.

Mister Salvatore asked where we were going, and he said that we were going to Shamrock, Texas. And then he said that after that he didn't know, because that was as far as he was driving us.

So we got back in the Suburban and I tried to think of what there was in Texas. I knew about Texas; it was famous for how big it was and how many cowboys were in it, and there were a couple of exchange programs at Texas schools. And I'd heard that they'd gotten a lot of rain recently, so maybe I was going to help with the weather? Maybe that was why Mister Salvatore had wanted to make sure that I had all my flight gear.

We drove for a little while and then we passed a big sign that welcomed us to Oklahoma, which looked just the same as Kansas. And after a little bit we came to a town called Beaver which made both Mister Salvatore and Mister Dove snicker, and Miss Cherilyn just rolled her eyes. I didn't understand what was so funny about it; it didn't look that much different than any of the other small towns I'd been in.

There was a river called the Beaver River that ran through it, so I guess that was how it got its name. But I didn't see any beavers in town or in the river.

A lot of the fields had strange walking-beam structures in them and I asked Miss Cherilyn what they were. She said that they were oil rigs, and they pumped oil up out of the ground, and she said that when we got to Texas we'd probably see a lot more of them. She said that there were some in Michigan, too, but they weren't as common.

We hadn't been in Oklahoma very long before we got to a sign that welcomed us to Texas, and I was confused 'cause I thought that Oklahoma was pretty big, but it turned out it had a peninsula that was narrow and called a panhandle, and that was what we'd gone through.

Texas didn't look much different, either; it was mostly fields and pastures and little towns that we went right through. A police car followed us for a little while after we went through Twitty, but then he turned around and went back the way he'd come. Mister Salvatore said that he probably thought he was chasing us out of town, and asked Mister Dove if he wanted to turn around and follow the police car just for fun.

It wasn't much past that that we got to Shamrock. I could see a big highway ahead of us (it was too far to read the sign so I didn't know what number it was) and we turned into a Best Western hotel before we got there.

I could tell right away that there was something special going on at the hotel, 'cause there were another two black Suburbans, several white pickup trucks with lots of antennas, a couple of Econolines, and also a strange vehicle that was all angly and had panels covering everything, even the wheels.

Mister Salvatore had a big grin on his face when the Suburban stopped and I didn't know what to expect at all. But he opened the door for me and motioned for me to follow him. And so we went inside and I stopped right in the door 'cause I could smell other ponies and I had to trot a little bit to catch up with him 'cause he hadn't noticed that I'd stopped.

He went down a main hall and past a swimming pool that was closed for maintenance, and I knew that we were close, and he pulled open a door and the most amazing thing was there.

There were a dozen pegasuses in the room, along with a few humans, and all of them were talking or looking at folding computers. And then they saw me and pretty soon it was complete chaos in the room as everyone and everypony came up to greet me and introduce themselves.

Lofty, I found out, was the lead weathermare on what she called special Earth duty, and all the pegasuses in the room were also weatherponies. It was a lot of new ponies to meet all at once; there was Medley, and Whizzer and Skydancer and Paradise, along with Dewdrop, Stormbreaker, Electric Blue, Merry May, Flanking Line, Prism Glider, Rocky Storm, and Velvet Light, which was a whole lot of ponies to remember.

And there were also the humans—they were lead by Doctor Tetsuya, and there was also Bill and Jo Harding, and Dusty Davis and Joey. And in all the introductions I wasn't sure what they were all doing, until Lofty told me that they were an exploratory team to see if weather pegasi could do anything about tornadoes.

Well, when I heard that I hugged Mister Salvatore for thinking of it and asked him if I could fly with them and he said yes but I'd have to sign a paper first saying that I understood storms were dangerous and I thought that was really dumb, because of course I knew that. But I said that I would.

All of us ponies had a couple of rooms that connected, and Lofty said that they were looking on the weather map to see if there were any big storms coming soon.

She said that this was a good part of the country for tornadoes, although they were a little late in the season because it had taken forever to get permission. She said that she thought Cloudsdale bureaucracy was bad but they had nothing on Earth's, and that everypony had even had to get a special license just to fly which she thought was really dumb, and they had to take the van a little ways out of town where there was a special area that had been set aside for them to do practice flying.

So we talked about the weather a bit before Joey and Doctor Tetsuya found a storm that looked like it could spawn tornadoes, and then everypony got their gear together and went out to the trucks and vans. Mister Salvatore said that when we got there he'd have the paper for me to sign, and asked if I wanted to ride with him but I thought I'd rather ride with the weather team and get to know them better. Plus, they'd want to know me, too, before they really trusted me up in the sky.

We put our gear in the back of one of the pickup trucks—it had a hard cover that closed over the back to keep everything inside—and then we got in an Econoline.

The vans didn't have any seats in the back, so they were pretty comfortable for us. We could stretch out on the floor or stand and we could move around pretty easily. It was kind of fun to be in the very back, too, 'cause whenever the van hit a big bump it would bounce you off the floor.

It wasn't so good for looking out the windows, though—I had to stand on my hind hooves to really be able to see anything out them. But I didn't get to do much sightseeing anyways since I was meeting my new friends.

We went east on the 40 Highway (that was the one that went through Shamrock) and got lunch in a town called Weatherford: there was a pizza restaurant called Little Caesar’s, and we got a few boxes of pizza to share. All the drivers had radios so that they could talk to each other, so everyone stopped there.

Then we went north all the way to a town called Ringwood and stopped alongside the road next to a dirt lot that had lots of pipes up on little stands. It was called Xto Energy and none of us knew what that meant, or what pipes had to do with energy.

I could see off to the west that stormclouds were building, and so after Lofty went to the front truck to look at the weather maps, we drove a little bit west on a road called 60 412, and then all parked along the side of the road.

The trucks all had flashing yellow lights on them so that people would be warned that they were there, and we all got out and got our gear on. I had the most—they just had vests and flashing lights and Lofty, Skydancer, and Velvet Light had airplane radios, too.

Well they were curious about my watch and my GoPro and my camelback and when I showed them how it could carry water they all wanted one. So I said that we'd have to look for a Dick's on the way back, 'cause that was where I'd gotten mine.

We were allowed to fly above the clouds—Lofty's team had special permission that I didn't. I was kind of jealous, but she said it was because they were a research team sponsored by NOAA, and that was why. Plus where they were flying there weren't going to be any airplanes.

When we were all dressed, Lofty got permission for us to fly into the storm, and she said that everypony had the same wingpony as before, and since there were an odd number of us I'd fly with her and Medley.

As we were climbing, I asked if they'd broken up any tornadoes and she said that they hadn't yet. So far they'd just been flying around the edge of them and sometimes they had to carry human measuring instruments up with them. Medley said that the storms here were so big and feral they weren't sure that they could do much with just a dozen ponies but if their trial was successful than they were going to see if they could get a bigger team together.

Well, the storm didn't make any tornadoes but there was lots of thunder and lightning and rain and crosswinds and updrafts, and we got to go into the clouds and they were too high to get all the way through.

We worked some of the clouds on the front, just to see what we could do with them. Lofty said that it might not seem like much but that they'd been able to make enough difference in a couple of storms that Joey picked it up on the portable radar that he had. Dr. Tetsuya said that he didn't have enough data to be sure that they were doing it or that it wasn’t just a fluke in the atmosphere, but Lofty said that he hadn't been up in a cloud and she knew perfectly well that it had been her team.

Then we got called down really quick because Bill said that he thought there might be a storm that could make tornadoes a little bit to the north of us, and we all piled into the van still soaking wet, and drove off through the rain until we got to Helena, and we went back up again.

It was really nice to be part of a team again. I know that it's important for me to fly in storms in Kalamazoo and report what's happening but sometimes it's lonely, and there's hardly anything that I can do by myself.

When Dusty said that we were close, Lofty used her radio to announce that we were going to be flying again, and as soon as he pulled over everypony got out of the van. Lofty went back up to the truck to look at the weather maps, and then we were in the air again.

This stormcloud had some hail in it, which could damage crops and buildings, so we got right up in the cloud and tried to work the currents inside to either stop the hail or at least make it a little smaller, and I felt like we really were getting something done after we worked at it for a while. You could feel the cloud fighting us, but the longer we worked the weaker it got and while it was still pretty big it wasn't hailing anymore.

We landed after the storm had passed overhead and dried off as best we could in the back of the Econoline. A couple of ponies curled up to nap, and the rest of us talked quietly about the storm and what we thought we could do better next time and that was nice, too. Lofty asked Dusty to find out if there had been any change in the hail-cloud while we were working it, and after a while Dusty said that Doctor Tetsuya wasn't sure; he was still looking at the data. She blew a raspberry and said that they ought to take him up in a storm so he could feel the change for himself.

We had dinner in a restaurant in Clinton called Del Rancho, which had catfish and shrimp and both of them came with hushpuppies, which were fried cornbread balls and they were really tasty. Their salad wasn't as good, 'cause it wasn't too fresh, and their vegetables were kind of chewy, too. I thought about sneaking away to the Taco Bell that was almost across the street, but that wouldn't have been very polite.

Most of us lay down and dozed for the rest of the trip home, 'cause once the sun went down it was kinda boring. There wasn't anything to see except lots of traffic on the 40 Highway, and Lofty said that we were going to try and get an early start tomorrow morning, and maybe we'd see a tornado.

When we got back to the hotel we all went up to our room and hung our vests up to dry. You couldn't fit more than three in a shower at time, so it was good that there was lots of hot water for all of us. I got to take a shower first with Lofty and Medley, and then when we were done we dried each other off and sat on the bed and preened our wings. There was a big television in the room and somepony had turned it on and it was showing weather maps and weather reports, but it got interrupted a lot by little pictures of what the weather was going to be like in certain cities. I would have rather had them just showing the nationwide and local radar and pressure maps.

August 24 [Tornado]

August 24

Lofty started waking everypony up early 'cause she said that she'd been looking at the weather on her computer and there was a good chance of storms a little further down in Texas. She said that the humans were already up and that Bill and Jo had gone to get us all breakfast at Dunkin Donuts.

Dewdrop asked if there was going to be coffee, and she said that there would be boxes of it, and he said to wake him up when the coffee arrived, so Paradise pulled the covers off of him and pushed him out of bed.

I didn't like having to wait for the bathroom, especially since everypony had sorta decided on an order and since I was the newest member of the weather team I had to go last. And I thought about just going outside, but I think it would have taken the same amount of time, since our window didn't open—if it did, I would have just flown out and been done with it.

I'd just gotten done filling up my camelback when there was a knock on the door, and Dusty said that as soon as we were ready we were meeting up in the lounge and once everyone was there we were going to go to the vans. So we all got our vests and blinking lights and other equipment if we had it and walked into the hallway, all sort of joking with each other until we got to the stairs and trooped down them. The hotel had elevators but nopony liked them.

Well, we were all there and Dusty was there so he said that he was going to get started and the rest of them could catch up to us. Then when we were going out to the car he said that we were more reliable than the humans when it came to getting up in the morning, and Lofty said except for Dewdrop.

He said that he was reliable as long as he had coffee or a pony to push him out of bed in the morning.

There were bags of breakfast sandwiches and boxes of doughnuts in the back of the van, along with three boxes of coffee for us to share. Whizzer said it was best to just drink it right out of the box, 'cause if we poured it in cups they got spilled whenever the van bounced.

Dusty said that we were going to Chillicothe unless he heard something else on the way and we had to change routes. He said that there were more storms coming through but that we should beat them and that there was a lot of open land there which was good for us to practice in.

I stood on my hind hooves and watched out the windows some as we drove, but mostly I stayed on the floor talking with everypony else.

I didn't have as much weather experience as any of them, which made sense—they'd only want to have the most experienced pegasuses trying to stop an Earth tornado. But I did have lots more experience flying on Earth than any of them, so while Lofty and Stormbreaker and Rocky Storm gave me some ideas about fighting tornadoes, I could tell them about how much different flying on Earth was from flying in Equestria.

And they all thought that I was pretty brave to be flying by myself, especially when I told them about storms that had blown me so far off-course that I got lost.

None of them had ever worked storms over the sea, though, so I guess they weren't as used to it. All of us thought that as long as when you came out of the clouds there was land to be seen, you were okay, even if you didn't know where that land was. If it was nothing but water as far as the eye could see, you were in trouble and had better hope that you could get back above the clouds and ride them somewhere safe.

I told them that when my mom was a filly, Cloud Climber had gotten lost in a storm that blew offshore and after it had cleared they never found her again and everypony figured that she'd drowned, but six months later they got a letter from Prance, and it was from her. She said that she had drifted all the way across the ocean and eventually wound up in Prance.

Merry May didn't believe that; she said that a pony would starve while drifting over the ocean, especially if it took six months.

I said that there were islands out there where she could have landed and maybe she had some food in her saddlebags, too. And I told her that I'd heard of sailorponies who had been adrift for a long time in lifeboats and they'd survived, 'cause the seaponies and the merponies had helped them, and why couldn't they also help a pegasus on a cloud?

Merry May said that seaponies and merponies were a myth and I told her that they weren't; everypony knew that they were real. Then Rocky Storm wanted to know how they'd even know that a pegasus was floating by on a cloud, and I said that maybe Cloud Climber had seen them and flown down.

And I did a lot of talking, 'cause there were all sorts of things that they still didn't know about Earth that they wanted to. So I told them about flying in an airplane and how much I hated it and they said that they'd taken a bus to Texas. I said that I didn't like buses that much, 'cause the ones in the city were smelly and uncomfortable, and the one from Lansing to Kalamazoo took too long.

Flanking Line said that they'd gotten their own special bus that they had all to themselves, and they way they described it, it was smaller than the ones that I'd ridden on, and there had been a television in the front which showed a movie that instructed them in what they needed to know to get their pilot's licenses.

I wished that I'd gotten to see a movie like that. It might have been more fun than reading the book.

It took us about an hour to get to Chillicothe, and then we all got out of the van 'cause there wasn't any point in sitting in it while we waited for everyone else to arrive.

Me and Lofty decided that we'd fly up and get a look around us, since we had plenty of time. That way we'd get a good idea what the land was like before the storm came, rather than flying into it like last time.

When we were in the air, I asked her if they'd done any night storms, and she said that they hadn't because the humans thought it was too dangerous. They said that if there was a tornado we wouldn't be able to see it, and I thought that was kind of silly, 'cause we could feel it. Well, I thought that we could anyway, and Lofty said that you could. She'd worked plenty of them in Equestria, and the air currents were really distinct.

It was all farmland and pasture land around us, which meant that there really weren't any good landmarks at all. None of the fields looked more distinctive than any of the others.

We could see the gathering clouds off to the west, and I thought it would be a couple of hours before the storm got to us but Lofty said that they moved really fast out here. And she told me that if we did find a tornado and we couldn't control it to fly up and perpendicular to its direction of travel, 'cause the top of them couldn't change directions that fast and being high would also keep us safe from debris that the tornado picked up.

She said that if they spotted one forming on their weather radar, we'd fly back to the van and try to intercept it. And she said that if we got a call to get back to the van, not to dally, but to get down as quickly as we could.

A couple of them had special equipment that they would wear for a tornado, which were weather monitoring instruments, and she said that they kind of changed around who got to carry them, 'cause it was a lot of extra weight and that didn't help. Plus they got mad when you lost it, which had happened to Electric Blue. She'd told Lofty that she got hit by a bad updraft and that the bands that held her equipment package on had gotten unfastened, and by the time she leveled out it was gone.

So we circled back around and landed beside the van, and Dusty showed us the weather map on his folding computer. He had a special antenna in it so that he could get portable internet instead of having to get it in a pipe like I did.

We were still standing around by the van when the other trucks arrived, and Prism Glider and Skydancer went over to get the equipment packages 'cause it was their turn to carry them. And then Lofty got clearance for all of us to fly and we went up in groups of two or three and got to a nice comfortable altitude and started to circle. That gave us one more chance to look at the ground below us so we'd all know our place, plus it gave us a chance to get used to the air.

Lofty had been right about the storm; when we first went up it looked like it was really far off and I was memorizing the arrangement of fields, and then the wind picked up a little bit and the pressure changed some and when I drew my focus back to the clouds they were nearly on us, and full of lightning and rain.

Lofty said that we were going to go on top to start, because we could get a good eye on the really big anvil clouds that way, and she said that sometimes we could also see by how the clouds were circulating if there was a tornado in them. Then we were going to dive through, and she said she'd lead and me and Medley would follow, wing-to-wing. And the plan if it was so bad that we got separated was to dive under and regroup below the cloud.

Well, I felt bad for everypony else, 'cause they were gonna get soaked right away and Medley saw the look on my face and reminded me that we were gonna get pretty beat up when we went through the cloud.

So we went up and over, and the clouds stretched off to the north and south as far as we could see. There were lots of big towering anvil clouds and off in the distance I saw one shoot lightning out of its top and down through the clouds and I was glad that that was a long ways from us, 'cause that was the killing lightning.

Lofty wanted to know if we could trust my watch, and I said that it hadn't let me down yet, and so I made it show me the bearing and distance to the nearest airport as a reference point, and we all looked at it and remembered the numbers, 'cause that's where we were now, and then we flew off northwest to get a look around the closest anvil cloud.

It was amazing just how high it was. The top was higher than I could ever fly; we learned in class that the tops of them could be almost 12 kilometers high.

We flew halfway around the perimeter of it, and Lofty told me that there was almost always a hook at the end of a supercell cloud which was where the tornadoes formed, and when we were on the backside of it we looked for one.

Since the storm was moving east pretty quickly, we'd kind of let the cloud come to us, and Lofty said that we should go through on the backside but we'd want to be careful because maybe Prism Glider or Skydancer would be in it, getting information.

Well, that sounded good in theory but it wasn't so good when we actually went in, 'cause once we got through the thin fluffy stuff at the top it got darker and darker and then we started to get hit by conflicting winds and I could feel my coat prickling from all the lightning in the cloud. I could just barely see Lofty and she wasn't more than a couple ponylengths in front of me.

And I'd forgotten that the other advantage of staying close was that we all got hit by the same winds at the same time, 'cause all of a sudden she was going up instead of down, and then we got hit by the same gust and rose with her, until we were clear of it and she found a good downdraft which really helped us out.

We were completely soaked by the time we got through the cloud, and visibility down there wasn't much better. The ground was nearly invisible to us, and Lofty called on her radio to see if they had a position report. I guess the instrument packages knew where they were, and so by that they knew where the pony carrying them was.

Well, Joey gave us their position but we didn't know where that was. And Lofty said not to worry about it; as long as we could find the van that was what mattered.

Then I got the idea that if Joey knew where I was in relation to an airport, than he could figure out where I was, so I told him the airport code that my watch said was closest, and what my bearing and distance was and he said to give him a minute and he'd figure it out.

Well, it took longer than a minute, but he was able to tell us where everypony else was, and so I set my watch to give compass headings, and after we'd flown for a little bit but not found anypony else yet he called back and told us to get back to the van right away because there was a tornado north of us.

He started to call out bearings to the ponies with the instrument packages, and I said that we needed to turn to the south and Medley was skeptical but then he gave Lofty a heading and I was right.

We were the last group to land, and after we made sure that everypony was there he pulled off the shoulder of the road so fast that the wheels spun and the back of the van slid around. Rocky Storm got knocked off her hooves and had Electric Blue land on her.

We raced along the highway and Lofty gave everypony a pep talk. We drove out of the rain for a little bit and then we were back in it and then it was coming down so hard and fast that Dusty had to slow down some. He kept talking into his radio to find out where it was and where to go to get ahead of it, Lofty reminded him that we needed to be a few miles ahead of it in order to have enough time to fly to altitude. And she told me that the first one they'd chased they'd been too close and all they could do was get out of its way.

When we went through a little town, I could hear sirens screaming out a strange, wailing note, which Medley said was a tornado siren and it was to warn everybody that a tornado was coming. And then Dusty slid the van to a stop and said that it was to our left. Skydancer opened the back doors of the van and we all got out into the pouring rain and we were in the air already when Lofty called the airplane directors and told them where we were and she said it was kind of a formality because there was no way any small airplane could fly in this.

The sky was a sickly green, but there wasn't any rain at all coming down. I could hear a distant roaring noise and focused on that, and I didn't see the tornado at first, but then a bright blue flash caught my attention, and when I looked over that way I could see the funnel.

It was curving to the south of us but coming in our direction, and Lofty yelled to go for the south side of it and try to counter-rotate. She yelled for me to get right behind her and for Stormbreaker to take the rear and follow her lead, and so we cut across its path and started trying to set up a countercurrent to slow it down or break it, and I think it worked some; the base of the tornado wobbled and it lifted off the ground for a bit but then it dropped back down and started sucking up crops and flinging them away again.

We had a second try, although it was all we could do to catch up to it. And right as we were getting close I saw it make a big blue flash again as it went across some electrical wires, and I hoped that they wouldn't be flailing around inside of it.

We didn't succeed that time, either, although we got it to come back up off the ground for a few miles before it touched down again. And we were all exhausted from fighting it, and Lofty didn't think that we could catch it again and still have enough energy left to have another try, so she directed us down to an intersection and read the road sign so that Dusty would know where we were. She said that was easier than GPS coordinates.

Dusty picked us up and we met up with everyone else at a Domino's Pizza in Altus, Oklahoma. I was surprised that we were in a different state now but obviously storms don't know where borders are.

We had to eat outside, 'cause there weren't any tables inside, so we took our food outside and set it on the tailgate of one of the trucks and shared it there. And Lofty asked everypony if they felt like they could take on one more storm today, and most of us thought that we probably couldn't. Chasing that tornado and trying to calm it down had taken a lot out of us, especially since we hadn't managed to disperse the tornado. Stormbreaker wanted another chance at a tornado but he got voted down.

So we told Doctor Tetsuya that we were too tired to try again, and he said that we'd done a really good job and that he'd gotten lots of data from the instrument packages, and Flanking Line asked him if he'd seen how we'd slowed down the tornado and he said that the data wasn't all that clear and he really needed to check the numbers to be sure.

But we all knew that we had. And Lofty reminded me that he was like that all the time. She said that he hated to commit to anything until he was really, really sure.

Well, that sort of made an idea in my mind, although it wasn't until we were in the van riding back home that I was really sure what I thought I wanted to do, so I asked Lofty if anypony had brought down any clouds and she said not yet, 'cause that wasn’t part of his weather observations.

Since I knew how much people liked seeing clouds up close—even if they couldn't touch them—I said that tomorrow some of us ought to get up early and if there were any clouds, get one and set it outside the window of his hotel room and sit on it and then knock on his window to wake him up, and she thought that was a great idea, and so she told Dusty, and he said that he'd tell Bill so that we could have instrument packages, too, and that way Doctor Tetsuya could get his data and see the cloud with his own eyes.

It was getting dark by the time we got back and it would have been nice to swim in the pool but it was still closed for maintenance.

Most of the humans weren't back yet, so since we didn't have anything else to do we went back to our rooms and Whizzer had brought playing cards so I learned poker (which was a human game) and lost badly, then I got my revenge by teaching them Durak. And then me and Lofty and Medley and Rocky Storm all went to bed early so that we could get a cloud for Doctor Tetsuya in the morning.

August 25 [Doctor Tetsuya's Cloud]

August 25

Me and Lofty woke up the earliest and I shook Medley awake while Lofty got out of bed and went over to the other room to wake Rocky Storm up. I heard her grumble that it was too early, which was the same thing that Medley had said.

There was coffee in the lobby, which was nice. So before we went outside we all got a cup, 'cause it was kind of early. My body was still mostly on Michigan time, but it was so dark that my brain said I ought to still be in bed.

And while I was drinking the coffee I was thinking what would happen if we went outside and there weren't any clouds at all?

Lofty had to go back up to the room 'cause she'd forgotten her radio, and when she got back down we realized that none of us had our vests or blinking lights, either. It was weird; when I was in a room full of pegasuses and we were all talking Equestrian, I kinda forgot that I was on Earth and needed those things. So we all had to go back upstairs and get them, too. And we had to be quiet, 'cause other ponies were still sleeping.

My vest was still a little bit damp from last night and I had to work to get my airplane radio untangled from the collection of wires. It would have been easier if we could have turned on lights, but that might have woken up other ponies.

So now that we all had our equipment we went outside and looked up into the sky and you could barely see anything 'cause it was still dark outside. We were gonna have to find a cloud by feel, but it wasn't the first time I'd done that and I was sure everypony else on my team had, too. There was about a half-moon up, which helped a little bit, but we couldn't see any clouds between it and us.

At least we had one place to not look.

Lofty called the airplane directors for clearance to fly, and when she said that she was Pegasus 3, conducting an experimental weather flight over Shamrock, I could hear a bit of worry in the director's voice, and Lofty had to assure him that we weren't seeing or feeling anything but were just monitoring conditions, which I guess was kind of true.

Medley said that Doctor Tetsuya would be mad that we weren't taking any other instruments up with us, and Rocky Storm said that we could go back in and get the equipment packs because they were probably in the conference room and even if it was locked the desk clerk would let us in. She said that was where Prism Glider and Flanking Line went when they wanted some alone time in the middle of the night.

We flew up to ten thousand feet, and kind of circled around and spread out a bit and there wasn't a single cloud to be found, which was really disappointing. We should have gone up last night after we got back and brought one down. I think we could have kept it all night as long as a couple of pegasuses were sitting on it.

But then Medley said that since there weren't any to be found we should just make one, which was something that I'd never tried on Earth.

She said that there was enough humidity still in the air that we could condense it into a cloud, we'd just have to work a big area but since there were four of us we ought to be able to. So we dropped down a little bit to where the air was the humidest, and made a big circle to kind of draw out the boundary, and I was glad that we all had our blinking lights, 'cause we were so spread out.

And I was glad that we'd thought to start really early, 'cause it wasn't easy to work in the dark, and it took us almost half an hour to get a cloud nucleus going, but after that it got a bit easier 'cause Medley pushed it along while we got in front in a open triangle formation and started to work extra moisture into it.

If there'd been a lake, we could have made a mini-tornado and sucked up a lot of water into the cloud that way. After I suggested that, Rocky Storm said that we ought to use the swimming pool since it was broken anyway and didn't need all its water. But I think that the hotel would have been mad if we emptied their swimming pool, even if it was broken.

So we did it the hard way, and by the time the sun was over the horizon we had a cloud. It wasn't that good, and any weathermaster would probably have rejected it, but it was a lot harder to make clouds on Earth in the dark, and I'd like to see somepony do a better job.

We dragged it back down to the hotel and we had to kind of peer through a couple of windows until we found the right one because while the doors had numbers on them the windows didn't. I guess they figured that it didn't matter, since they didn't open anyways.

We pushed the cloud right up in the lee of the hotel and got it close enough that it made a couple of sparks against the windowframe, then we played a quick game of hoof-wing-horn to decide who got to knock on his window and Medley won.

So we all sat on the cloud while she flew over and knocked on the window and Doctor Tetsuya sort of rolled over away from us and picked his portable telephone up from the nightstand and then lifted the regular telephone and then got up and started walking towards the door before he realized that the noise was coming from behind him.

It was light enough that he ought to have been able to see our cloud pretty clearly, and he blinked and rubbed at his eyes a little bit and then went right over to the window and just stared at it.

Then he tried to say something but we really couldn't hear him through the window, and so none of us understood what he wanted. Lofty flew over to be close to the window, 'cause she spoke English almost as well as I did, and put her ear right up against the window, and he turned off the humming temperature fan box that the hotel rooms had, and when he got done talking she turned to us and said that he wanted us to wait.

So we did, and he put on shoes and his suit jacket and came outside and then we could hear him so we brought the cloud down but warned him not to touch it, and he went around it studying it and he asked how we'd gotten it, and Medley explained that we'd made it. And then he did touch it anyways, and jerked his hand back when he got zapped.

Well, he said we had to keep our cloud until everybody had looked at it, and a couple of the other tornadoponies that had gotten up early also came down and bounced on it and played with it a little bit and Flanking Line carried some weather instruments over to it, and as the morning went on there were more and more clouds, and pretty soon a couple of other pegasuses had brought down clouds of their own and we'd moved them all to the parking lot, out of the way of all the cars. Stormbreaker was giving a ground-level demonstration of how to break up a cloud, while Rocky Storm and Prism Glider were showing how to put them back together again. Whizzer and Paradise and me flew up and kept bringing down more, and we wound up getting a bunch of other hotel guests watching us, too.

We didn't get done playing with the clouds until it was afternoon, and everyone decided that we wouldn’t go anywhere today unless there was a really promising storm. Joey said that there wasn't anything nearby on the radar that looked too worrying, but he was fairly sure that there would be thunderstorms forming in the afternoon, and a couple of us looked at the computer pictures and agreed.

We broke up most of our clouds and when we were about to break up the last one, Jo said we all ought to sit on it and she could take a group photograph, so we did, and everyone on our team plus a couple of guests and the hotel clerk also took pictures of all of us, then we decided it would be a shame to break up this cloud, and so we pushed it up into the sky and let it go.

We went into town for lunch, and there was a little green building called Burrito Hut, and that's where most of us ate except for Flanking Line and Prism Glider who went across the street to get pizza.

There wasn't anyplace to sit down inside it, but it was a pretty nice day outside so we just ate our lunch in the parking lot. Mister Salvatore said that tomorrow we were going to go to Colorado so that I could see Peggy but we weren't going to take the train. He said that Mister Dove was going to drive us to Amarillo and we'd get a car there and take it to Colorado. And he said that I didn't have to get up too early, so I'd have plenty of time to say goodbye to everyone and everypony tomorrow.

It was kind of sad that I'd be leaving them because I wouldn't have minded spending the rest of the year with a proper weather team, but then when I thought about it some more I decided that if I had to choose between my friends at college or staying here in Texas, I would rather be back in Kalamazoo, so that made it a bit easier.

After we'd finished eating, Joey said that looking at the maps there was going to be a thunderstorm coming in this afternoon and that we ought to watch it, but it was still a ways out.

So we went back to the hotel and some ponies went back to our rooms to relax, while I went through the conference room and Lofty and Joey showed me more of the equipment and what it could do. And then he explained what the stuff in the instrument packages were, and there were devices that measured airspeed and humidity and position and pressure and basically everything that humans liked to measure in the air.

And Joey also helped me put the movies from my GoPro on the internet. He said that he could put them on YouTube for me, which was really nice of him, but I thought that it would be better if Meghan did it because she'd put the other ones on YouTube. He was kind of disappointed, but he did it.

Lofty also told Mister Dove that she wanted camelbacks for her whole team and he said that he'd see what he could do. Mister Salvatore said that I was a bad influence, but I told him that once he'd spent all day up in the sky he'd want one too.

The storm didn't come until after dinner, and it was different than what I was used to with Mel, because instead of trying to keep my position and report what I was seeing, Doctor Tetsuya wanted us to let the storm push us along and we had the van and one of the trucks following us.

So we drifted along the front of a thunderstorm, and I could see that most of the rain wasn't even getting to the ground. Humans call that virga, when rain falls out of a cloud and doesn't actually land on the ground. My weather instructors didn't have a fancy name for it; they said that it was a mistake when that happened, because when you make the rainclouds and they don't get the ground wet you messed up. Nopony wants a raincloud that doesn't water their crops.

We mostly kept our position over roads, and we could see the van on the ground under us. Lofty ordered Velvet Light and Merry May to take turns in the clouds with their wingponies, 'cause they were the ones who had the instrument package this time. And by the time the sun was setting, we'd drifted all the way to Kansas, I found out.

Everyone was kind of sad that I'd be leaving tomorrow, and suggested that we ought to have a goodbye party before I left, and so Dusty stopped at a beer and liquor store and we got lots of drinks and Skydancer wanted to start celebrating in the van but Dusty said that we weren't allowed to open any alcohol inside a moving vehicle at all, even if we weren't driving. I thought that was kind of silly; I could drink on the train if I wanted to, even if Mister Salvatore disapproved. But he said that if we drank in the van we would get arrested and go to jail.

Once we were back at the hotel, we were allowed, so we did, and Doctor Tetsuya had a few drinks with us and told us what a great job we were doing. And Mister Salvatore got in a poker game with Electric Blue and Prism Glider and Velvet Light and Bill Harding and he did really well. Miss Cherilyn said that he wasn't supposed to be gambling with ponies and he said that he was instructing and that was okay. She said that he was winning actual money, and he said it was instructional and besides the house rule was that the chips were only worth a quarter each and that was hardly real money.

She started counting his chips and he told her that you never count your chips when you're sitting at the table.

Me and Lofty and Whizzer and Paradise spent a little bit of time talking about storms and after a while Jo and Doctor Tetsuya came over and also listened to us, and I had to help translate some weather terms that nopony else knew how to say in English. I was really glad I'd taken my climate science class and learned them all.

Doctor Tetsuya was really interested in how we set up counterstorms and so was Lofty 'cause that wasn't something that she did much being inland like she was. That was mostly a coastal thing, because we couldn't control what came in from over the ocean, so we had to manage it the best we could.

The hardest part was the winds—big storms messed with them and if you didn't calculate right, the feral storm would suck up all your hard work and just get bigger. Even though it wasn't our fault when we miscalculated, we felt like it was, and I told him about one time that we'd kept on fighting until the whole weather team dropped out of the sky from pure exhaustion because the storm was so big that it kept on pulling all our clouds in sometimes even when we were trying to position them.

It was close to midnight when we finally broke off our party and went back to our rooms, and since there was still some beer left we finished it upstairs and Merry May decided that she was going to order room service but they weren't bringing up any more food for the night so she had to call and order a pizza instead and by the time it got there everypony was hungry so we called and got more.

I had trouble falling asleep because I was sad that I was leaving my new friends behind but happy that I was going to see Peggy tomorrow, and also I ate too much pizza and my stomach wasn't happy about that at all. And it turned out that Paradise couldn't sleep either so we both went outside and flew northwest for a while until the lights of Shamrock were a ways behind us, and then we laid on a low cloud and looked up at the stars.

August 26 [Colorado Springs]

August 26

So that we wouldn't wake anypony up, me and Paradise had found a spot on the floor where we could sleep, and it was a little bit chilly when I woke up, 'cause we didn't have a blanket. Also the hotel carpet smelled kind of funny, but I couldn't really identify the smell.

Almost everypony else was up, except for Dewdrop 'cause Paradise wasn't there to push him out of bed. But when she got up and stretched she went there first and yanked the covers off of him and he pawed for them but couldn't reach them and he finally opened his eyes and saw her standing there with the covers in her mouth and said that she was cruel.

So she turned around and whacked him in the muzzle with her tail, then dropped the blankets on the floor and said that he'd better hurry up 'cause there was a big storm coming, and the last ponies downstairs had to wear the instruments today. And that got him motivated, and when he was in the bathroom I asked her if that was true. She said that there would probably be a storm somewhere but they all took turns with the instruments and he'd remember that sooner or later.

It was nice meeting up with everypony and everyone one last time in the lobby. And they couldn't stay around too long because they were forecasting severe storms in Kansas in the afternoon and evening, so they were going to go out that way after breakfast. And I didn't want to delay them, at least not too much.

I didn't wind up eating much breakfast, 'cause I went around and said my goodbyes to everypony and Lofty gave me a tornado-chaser badge and she said that she would have Mister Dove send me an official weather vest, too, but they didn't have any extras right now.

Doctor Tetsuya shook my hoof and said that it had been a pleasure to meet me, and I hugged Jo and Bill; Dusty and Joey both made fists and bumped my hoof.

Then I went back upstairs to our room to get my saddlebags and flight vest, and then me and my helpers and Mister Dove all got in the Suburban and I wanted to know if he was going to drive us all the way to Colorado. Mister Salvatore said only as far as Amarillo because that was the closest place that you could rent a car, unless you wanted a U-Haul.

I asked if those were the big white vans that had murals on the side, and he said that they were. So I told him that I thought it would be fun to have one of those and he said he hadn't been serious and we were not taking a U-Haul to Colorado.

Miss Cherilyn said that she thought it would be fun, too, and Mister Salvatore crossed his arms and sulked for a while. But he cheered up when we got close to Amarillo, and we got off the 40 Highway and I thought we were about to get our rental car but he said that this was a little detour on the way to the car.

I thought that we were going to Love's (which had a big heart and I wanted to go there) but we stopped too soon and he pointed to row of cars that had their noses stuck in the dirt and their hindquarters up in the air.

He said it was an American Icon, and both Miss Cherilyn and I agreed that it looked like cars stuck in the dirt. Maybe if that was a thing that Americans did Aric could put not-Winston in the dirt like that (although not-Winston made a good picnic table, so maybe that wasn't a good idea).

We didn't get back on the highway, but went to an Enterprise which is a place that rents cars. He said that he hoped they had something suitable for the mountains like a Jeep, and we waited inside until he came back out with a set of keys and said that he got us a pickup truck.

She said it wasn't practical, and he said that she wouldn't think that if we got into snow up in the mountains, and she said that Colorado Springs wasn't exactly in the mountains, and he said that if he made a wrong turn we could be in the mountains.

Well, I said that I was happy with it because I liked trucks. So that settled the argument and we loaded all of our luggage in the back of the cab, and that meant that I was sharing space with all their luggage but I didn't mind. I got the center seat again which let me see through the windshield. There was also a little window right behind me that I could slide open and that let some fresh air in.

We had to stop for fuel before we left Amarillo, and Mister Salvatore did stop at a Love's, and I went in with Miss Cherilyn and it was kind of neat because they had a whole section of radios and other things for big trucks. I didn't know that some people live in their trucks, 'cause there's a big space in the back called a 'sleeper' which has a bed and other things. So maybe when I saw big semi-trucks sitting at rest areas, their drivers really were resting.

It wasn't too long after that that we were on the road and even though I was eager to see everything, I was also tired 'cause I hadn't gotten enough sleep last night and after a while all the fields got boring and so I dozed off.

Mister Salvatore woke me up and I thought that we were in Colorado but when I looked around there weren't any mountains to be seen, just grass stretching off as far as I could see. And he told me that this was the Rita Blanca National Grasslands, and that if I wanted to stretch out and fly around them a little bit I could.

I did, just to stretch my wings, but they weren't all that appealing, 'cause they were kind of dry and brown and I thought that the grassy prairies that I'd seen in Kansas looked a lot more interesting.

And I thought that off in the distance, I could see mountains but they could have been a cloud front. Sometimes from a long ways away it was hard to tell the two apart.

As we drove on, though, I could tell that we were getting higher and we started to see hills around us, and then mountains.

And Mister Salvatore stopped in Raton, so that we could get out of the truck and stretch out, and he said that we were near where the train had gone into the tunnel between Colorado and New Mexico. It was still outside now, 'cause when I flew up just a little bit I could see the tracks running alongside the highway.

We passed by a nice sign that welcomed us to Colorado, and Mister Salvatore pointed off to the left and asked me to imagine the train being under all of that rock, and I didn't really want to think about it too much. I liked it up here where I could see the sky and clouds and trees.

The road went down out of the pass and then after a little while we were on flatter ground with the mountains all off to our left, and mostly dry prairie land to our right. And we kept angling further and further away from them until we got to Pueblo, which was where we stopped for lunch. There was a shopping mall with a cluster of restaurants around it including one called Wingstop and he said that I wouldn't want to eat there but he had Miss Cherilyn take a picture of me and him out in front of their sign.

So he wanted to go to Denny's, and Miss Cherilyn said only if she got to drive the rest of the way to Colorado Springs, and I thought that Red Lobster would be fun. He said that Red Lobster was for dates, not road trips, but we went there anyway. I had a Salmon New Orleans which was really tasty, and Mister Salvatore gave the keys to the truck to Miss Cherilyn and had beer with his lunch. She said that she couldn't decide if he was being responsible in giving her the keys or irresponsible in drinking for lunch, and he said that he could be both.

And when we got back on the road, he dozed in the front seat for a little bit, until she woke him up to find the directions to Peggy's house.

Peggy lived in a two-story house on Hawk Meadow Drive, and I knew it was her house when we got close, 'cause Cobalt was parked out in front.

She came running out when I knocked on the door and we hugged and I nuzzled her and we both said how much we'd missed each other.

Mister Salvatore carried my saddlebags in and he and Miss Cherilyn introduced themselves to Peggy's parents, who were called John and Chrissie. My helpers were staying at a hotel nearby, so after they made sure that I didn't need anything else, they left for their hotel.

We sat in the living room and talked and Chrissie offered to order some food if I was hungry, but I said that I was okay.

Peggy had been sort of following along with what I'd been doing, as much as she could. But we'd both kind of been bad friends and not written to each other as much as we should have, so I hadn't known about her vacation to Costa Rica, and she hadn't known that I flew all the way to Chicago. And I told her about the storms I'd been flying in and she told me that she'd gotten to go parachuting, so we had a lot to catch up on.

Her parents wanted to know what it was like where I lived, so I told them about our little cloudtown and the village, and they said it sounded like something in rural England or maybe the northeastern part of the United States. Since I hadn't been to either place, I wasn't sure if it was or not.

She said that tomorrow we'd go to Pikes Peak, because it was pretty close and she said that if I went flying above it, I'd be breaking the FAA's rules without breaking them. Chrissie thought that would be fun, and she also said that I would have to come over to the Air Force base and visit. She said that we might need for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn to lean on some people and I said that Mister Salvatore liked doing that, so it would make him happy.

Her dad showed me some computer pages that he had designed—he had made an entire family photo album and Peggy was really embarrassed by some of the pictures of her as a filly but I thought that she was really cute. And I told her about my neighbors and how we'd go hunting for Pokemons.

John said that he'd heard that there was a pegasus team in Texas that was chasing tornadoes and asked if I'd heard of them and I said that I'd flown with them and helped fight a tornado but it hadn't worked 'cause it was too big and there weren't enough of us. So we went looking on the computer to see if there were any movies of it but there weren't.

I didn't have it on my GoPro anymore, 'cause I'd had Joey send it to Meghan, and when I looked at her YouTube account she hadn't put that up yet. But she had made the movie of me putting the clouds on the fire so we watched that. I guess she's figured out how to edit them, 'cause it wasn't that long, and it only started when I was pretty close to the house.

Peggy's bedroom was a lot like her dorm room except that she had more things in it, and the floor had carpet, too. There was a little cot that her mom had set up for me, which was really nice of her to have done.

Peggy went into the bathroom and put on her sleeping clothes and then I had my turn, and we didn't go to bed right away. She wanted to know about how things were working out with me and Aric and so I said that I'd taken the train to Lafayette to meet him and also we'd spent a day at a nudist resort, which she thought was an odd date.

I reminded her that she'd spent all of Valentine's Day naked with her boyfriend, and she said that was different, because it was only them and nobody else.

And I told her that I'd also been spending a lot of time with Meghan 'cause she was still in town and now we were having sex and that Aric didn't mind. She said that he was probably hoping for a threesome when he got back to Kalamazoo.

Well, that was something that I hadn't thought about. I asked Peggy if she'd ever tried it and she said that she hadn't.

The cot wasn't as comfortable as it had looked at first because there was a metal rod in the middle and no matter how I moved around, it always seemed to poke me somewhere, until I finally turned around so that my head was over it, with the pillow between us, and that left my tail hanging down off the end of the cot but at least I didn't have a rod poking me.

I woke up a couple of times in the night to a distant roaring noise which was airplanes flying away from the airport that was almost next door to us. I think I could have seen it out the back windows if I'd gotten up and gone over there.

August 27 [Pikes Peak]

August 27

I think that I was the first one awake, 'cause I was in a different time zone again so it was more earlier than my body thought.

I tried to be quiet so that I wouldn't wake up Peggy, and I went and looked out her windows. Behind their house was the big open pasture that looked towards the airport, and I could see the white and green light rotating around and then I heard the distant sound of airplane engines. I couldn't see the airplane right away but I followed it with my ears, and all of a sudden I saw it come up above the buildings, and it climbed up really fast. It's amazing how something that big can get in the air so quickly.

Now that I knew more about airplanes, I almost wanted to try to fly on one again. Maybe I'd like it better this time.

Out the opposite window, as it got a little bit lighter outside, I could just see the mountains over the tops of the houses on the other side of the road. I wasn't sure if one of them was Pikes Peak, so I'd have to ask Peggy when she woke up.

I heard an alarm go off in a distant room, and pretty soon someone went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. And Peggy was just getting up when I heard a weird rumbling noise under me, and I guess she saw how I jumped out of bed and popped out my wings and she laughed and said that was the garage door going up.

I heard an engine, and then looked out the window and saw a silver car back out and into the street, then the rumbling started again as the car drove off.

Peggy said that her mom had to work, and then she asked if I needed to use the bathroom before she went into the shower, which was nice of her to ask.

When I got back she'd gathered together a pile of clothes to wear, and I asked her if we could see Pikes Peak from her bedroom and she said that you couldn't. She said when they first moved into this house she thought that maybe if she put her face right up against the glass and turned sideways she might be able to see it, but that it wasn't possible because it was almost a straight line from the front wall of their house to the mountain.

She said that if the houses next to theirs were knocked down, then maybe you could see it from her parent's bedroom, 'cause their window faced the right way. Then she took her bundle of clothes to the bathroom with her and I didn't have anything to do until she got back.

So I looked out the window some more, and watched the cars go by on the road behind her house. There was a thin stone wall between everyone's backyard and the road, which was maybe to keep cars from seeing in. I'd learned that lots of people put up walls like that so people couldn't see what they were doing in their backyards, like the one that Meghan's uncle had. Even Sunny Haven had had a big fence around it.

On the other side of her street the neighbor had a fence, too, but I could still see into his backyard from Peggy's bedroom and see that he had some wheels leaned up against his garage and a row of potted plants too.

Once Peggy was done with her shower we went downstairs and she wanted to have cereal but I told her that I knew how to cook breakfast now because Meghan had taught me and she didn't believe me so I made pancakes. And I was just finished up the batter when her dad came downstairs wearing lounging pants and a t-shirt and he saw me standing on the counter holding a spatula in my mouth and just turned around and walked back out of the kitchen.

When he came back in, he was holding a newspaper and I'd gotten off the counter 'cause I was done cooking. And I asked him if he wanted any pancakes and he said yes, then he kind of poked at it with his fork and asked me if I'd drooled in it, and that made Peggy kinda mad.

He rinsed off all the dishes and put them into a machine which would wash and dry them, and he asked how we wanted to get to the top of the peak. He said that there was a road, or we could take a train, or there was even a hiking trail.

We all decided that the train would be the most fun. I wouldn't have minded the trail, and Peggy thought it would be fun, too, but it kind of looked like it might rain today and it wasn't as much fun to hike in the rain. And she said that if we took the train up and it still looked nice, we could hike back down, which was easier anyways.

So she had to get dressed again in hiking clothes, and her dad did, too. And they both packed a backpack full of supplies that they might want and I filled up my camelback with water and she stuffed some granola bars in it and anchovies, too, and then we went and got in her dad's Highlander.

Mountains are sometimes deceptive 'cause they look closer than they really are, and we had to drive for a little while through Colorado Springs and then sorta up into the foothills before we got to a parking lot where we could get on the train.

We had to wait a little while before it came, and so I had time to kind of look around at the tracks. There was a notched third rail down the middle, and John explained that that was how the train drove itself, because the track was too steep for the wheels on the train to have traction. He said it was called a cog railway, and that there was a gear on the train which meshed with the rail in the center.

I asked him what would happen if the gear slipped, if the train would just stop, and he said maybe, or maybe it would slide backwards down the mountain until it got to the bottom or fell off the tracks. And he said that that had never happened, so I shouldn't worry about it.

The train itself was about the same size as a bus, and it was bright red with a white roof and said Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway on it.

When it started moving out of the station, the lady who was driving told us that we couldn't stand in the aisle because if the train had to stop it would stop immediately and send us flying. She said that the flying part was fun until we hit something, and I agreed with her. Flying was fun unless you hit something.

After passing by red barns and another train in a little yard, we got into the forest, and for a long time were just in trees. As we got higher up, there were some shady spots where there was still a little bit of snow, even though it was late August. So that was either left from last winter, or it had fallen over the summer.

We went by another train that was sitting on a siding, and then as we got higher and higher, the ground started really sloping away on the right, and you could see a long ways through breaks in the trees. And then the trees themselves got thinner and thinner until there just weren't any more of them. Peggy said that we'd crossed the treeline, and that trees wouldn’t grow any further up the mountain. She wasn't sure why, though. She said that she kind of remembered from middle school that she'd learned it was because it was too cold for them, and maybe there was too much snow, too. Which I thought was strange, because there shouldn't have been that much of a difference in snow cover over a few hundred feet.

John said that he thought the soil was probably too poor, as well, and maybe the winds blew away trees. He pointed to a few stragglers that were short and twisted and looked more like bushes than proper trees.

Looking to the left, it was just like flying, 'cause Colorado stretched out below us. Although there were a lot of other mountains blocking some of the view, so I couldn't see Colorado Springs from the train.

When we got to the train station it was just a short walk to the very top of the mountain and there was a sign that said the mountain was named for Zebulon Pike, who couldn't find a way to get to the top. And that was kind of humbling to think about, 'cause now even the fat man who had ridden the train with us and was posing by the sign could get to the top, easily. But without the train and road I bet it had been a lot harder, at least for a human.

There were earth ponies who tried to climb mountains, too. And that was something that I'd never really understood, but I guess that they liked the challenge of it.

It was kind of crowded with tourists, which I guess I should have expected. John said that Pikes Peak was the most visited summit in the world except for Mt. Fuji in Japan. Even though there were a lot of people, it was still a great view and people tended to cluster, so it wasn't that difficult to move away from all of them.

We were looking around at the other mountain peaks—there were helpful signs which identified them—when I got the idea that I'd fly to another one. So I pointed at one that was sticking up in the distance and was really easy to identify, and I said that I wanted to fly there. I wasn't sure what the rules were for flying to other mountaintops—did I have to tell the airplane directors that I was? Or could I stay not too far above the trees and be safe like that? I didn't think that there would be any airplanes going between the peaks, but there could have been. But I wasn’t seeing any, so I thought I'd give it a try. And Peggy said that it was probably okay.

I kind of wished that I'd brought my vest and blinking light, but I hadn't thought that I'd need them. I did have my GoPro—I'd almost left that behind, too, but Peggy had suggested that I might want to to take pictures with it.

Flying off the top of a mountain was weird because the air was thinner and I couldn't get as much lift from it, but that didn't matter all that much since the mountain fell away from me. On a cloud, even this high, it's easier, 'cause you can drop off it to get airspeed and then turn the airspeed into lift, but you can't do that off of land. Unless it's a cliff.

Since that peak—which was called Cameron Cone—was a little bit lower than Pikes Peak, it was really easy to get to it. I looked back once and saw that there were a lot of people watching me, so I did a wing roll just for fun and then kept on going. And since I hadn't told any airplanes that might be around where I was, I kept a good watch for them, but I didn't see any.

This one had trees almost to the very top, but I found a nice empty spot right at the peak and landed there.

It was reasonable to believe that there had been other pony tourists to Pikes Peak—if it was that popular with humans, surely some pony had already been to the summit. And anypony could have done it; all it took was buying one train ticket and you were there. But here . . . without a doubt, I was the first pony who had ever put her hooves on the top of this mountain and it was kind of strange to think about that. There couldn't have even been all that many humans who had: I didn't see any signs of them, and I couldn't smell anything that had even a vague human scent to it. A lot of places, people wrote messages on things but there weren't any here as far as I could see.

And even though it was only a short flight back to Pikes Peak, I could barely see any of the buildings and I couldn't see any people at all and in a way I was completely isolated on top of my mountain.

I wished that I'd had some kind of a marker that I could leave behind me, but other than leaving a can of anchovies, I had nothing that I wanted to part with. So I picked up some flat rocks and I made a little stack out of them and unless someone knocked them over, they might be there for years or even centuries. And maybe some day somebody would see them and wonder who had put them there and I suppose they'd never know.

It was odd how I felt so big and so small at the same time. And when I flew off, I looked back until my little rock pile had disappeared completely, then I focused on my flying.

I circled over the top of Pikes Peak before I landed, and when Peggy asked why I said that it was so that I could find them, but it was really because I felt like showing off.

We decided that we'd have a light lunch at their restaurant and then go down the trail, which ended not too far from where the cog railroad started. They had doughnuts which they said were special because no other doughnuts were made at such a high elevation, but I didn't think those would be very good trail food. And they had hamburgers and hot dogs too and I didn't want to eat those, either, so I finally managed to get them to just give me a hot dog bun and I put my anchovies in it and made an anchovy sandwich.

The trail down looped back on itself a lot so that it wasn't too steep, and especially when we were above the treeline I could easily see where it went and thought about just taking a shortcut across it but that wouldn't have been fair to Peggy and her dad, 'cause they couldn't fly.

There were lots of pretty lavender flowers which Peggy said was called columbine and that they had first been discovered on Pikes Peak. They smelled really nice and I wondered what they tasted like and so when nobody was looking I ate one.

It was really sweet.

Even though we were going down the mountain, it felt colder when we got back to the trees just because we were in shade. And Peggy went a little ways off the trail and came back with a snowball and threw it at me because she said it was fun to throw snowballs in the summertime. I flew up and got a pine cone and said that since hooves weren't too good for making snowballs we threw pine cones and she actually believed me.

Every now and then when we found a nice, scenic spot, we'd sit down and take in the view and have a little drink of water. There weren't any other climbers coming up—John said that anyone who wasn't an idiot would start first thing in the morning because the weather often changed quickly, and even though the trail wasn't technically challenging, the altitude gain was too much for a lot of people, since the trail climbed 7500 feet from bottom to top. He said that we'd be coming to a cabin soon that was where burro tours used to take people to the top of the mountain, but that there hadn't been any burro tours since the sixties.

He said it was also dangerous because of lightning strikes, and we should have left earlier to avoid the risk while we were exposed on the slope, but while I'd been flying Peggy had told him that I could sense lightning and resist it, so he thought that we'd be safe.

After we'd passed the former burro camp, we started to see more people on the trail, mostly hiking up, and we also had a group of people on bicycles pass by us going down.

Peggy spotted a little striped chipmunk and we watched him for a while and then she managed to lure him kind of close with a little bit of a granola bar. We didn't think he was going to take it, 'cause he apparently hadn't learned that sometimes humans offer treats, and it wasn't until we'd moved a little ways down the trail that he got bold enough to run up and pick it up off the rock that she'd put it on. Then he scampered off into the brush again and she thought about putting another piece there for him but didn't.

We took a little side-path to a section of trail called The Incline, which was a straight path up the mountain that had originally been a railroad but it had been washed out in the rain. Peggy said that we weren't supposed to go down it, because climbers going down got in the way of people going up, but at the very top we had a chance to look at Colorado Springs, and could also see our destination at the base and when we were looking straight down it looked like it wasn't far at all.

It was steep enough that I think I could have just jumped and held out my wings and glided all the way down and I kind of wanted to try that.

And she saw me kind of calculating it out in my mind and pawing at the ground a little bit and so I told her what I wanted to do and she asked if I could fly back when I got to the bottom. I said that I could, so she agreed to wait at the top. And she got out her portable telephone and said that she wanted to record my launch.

If there had been a wind blowing up the mountain, I could have just held out my wings but there wasn't, and there were also some people that were pretty close and I didn't want to hit them, either.

It was kind of the opposite of the snowboarding slopes, where you weren't supposed to climb up because you'd get in the way of people going down.

I got a little bit of a galloping start when there was an opening and then lifted off from the trail and glided all the way down to the base, picking up speed as I went. And when I got to the bottom I did a nearly vertical climb, rotating as I went, so when I leveled back off I was facing back towards the top of the incline. In a perfect, frictionless world, I'd have had enough altitude and airspeed to glide all the way back, but I had to fly a little bit of the way.

When I got back to the top, John said that the official record for humans was just under seventeen minutes and my round trip had been less than that. But I didn't think it should count, since I hadn't been on the trail.

We only had to walk a little ways down the road to get back to his Highlander, and when we got back home Chrissie had made us all a nice casserole for dinner although it had a little more sauce than I liked. And we told her about our day and Peggy showed the movie she'd made of me flying down the Incline.

Chrissie hadn't gotten permission for me to go to her Air Force base yet, but she said she'd talked to some people and made some progress and that they would probably want my helpers to come with me. Peggy thought that was kind of silly, since it wasn't like I'd be selling military secrets to Equestria. And we thought that maybe if we could think of some kind of demonstration I could do that would change their minds, 'cause people liked demonstrations.

I couldn't think of anything that I could demonstrate besides that I could fly, unless I brought them a cloud. And since they were right next to an airport I probably wouldn't be allowed to, since I'd get in the way of the other airplanes.

We had a nice, relaxing evening and sort of planned out what we wanted to do tomorrow. She said that depending on what the weather was like we could go up into the mountains or shop in Colorado Springs or maybe do both and she said that we'd ought to try and meet up with some of her high school friends for lunch, too. And she said that since I was in Colorado I ought to visit a marijuana dispensary just to have done it, even though I shouldn't buy any.

When we'd gone upstairs for the night, Peggy saw me moving my pillow to the middle of the cot and she asked me why so I told her about the metal rod and she decided that unless I really wanted to sleep in the cot her bed was plenty big enough for us to share, and it was a lot more comfortable than the cot had been.

August 28 [Zoo and Peggy's Friends]

August 28

I was eager to get going when I woke up, so I got out of bed carefully so I wouldn't wake up Peggy and went to the shower. I'd kind of gotten spoiled by mine, and while hers was nice 'cause it was just a shower without a bathtub, it didn't have a mat and the floor was really slippery.

I shook off before I got out and put my towel around my mane, and then went back to her bedroom. She was still asleep so I went to her desk and sat in her chair and wrote in my journal. She had a really cute red lamp that was on wheels, and made a little pool of light just over the desk so it wouldn't wake her up.

I looked up when I heard another airplane taking off and I thought that that would wake her up, too, but it didn't.

It was already pretty light when Peggy finally woke up and when I wasn't in bed she first looked over at the cot and then saw me sitting at her desk.

She got out of bed and petted my mane and asked me if I'd been writing all summer long, and I said that I had. She said that it must be pretty long by now, and I suppose it was.

I asked her if she wanted me to get breakfast for her, and she said that we could get it together. And then I asked if she wanted me to get out clothes for her, 'cause Meghan let me pick out her clothes. She said I could pick a shirt, so I started to look through her dresser for shirts. It was easier to pick for Meghan 'cause I knew what she had.

I finally found one I liked that said 'I love them double Ds' and had two diamonds on it, which was how they marked snowboard trails.

Peggy thought it was a funny choice, and she said if anyone asked she was going to tell them that I'd picked it. And when she put it on she said it was a little bit tight, which was appropriate enough.

She checked on the weather, and said that there were probably going to be afternoon thunderstorms. I asked her if I should go and patrol during them, but she said that she didn't think it would be necessary. And then she asked if I'd ever been to a zoo.

I said that I hadn't, and she said that it would be fun. I could get a quick look and then we could go meet up with her friends downtown for lunch and maybe visit the park and a dispensary and then after that we could figure out what else we wanted to do. She said that there was also an airplane museum that wasn't too far but she thought that her mom would want to go there with me.

So we had a quick breakfast of cereal and then she went into the garage and got her wheeled snowboard and put that in the back of Cobalt, 'cause she said that there was a park near downtown where you could ride them, which wasn't as good as snowboarding but it was almost as good. And she got her helmet, too.

The park was towards Pikes Peak, and Peggy said it was famous for being the only zoo on the side of a mountain. That seemed like an odd thing to be famous for, and Peggy agreed. She said it wasn't as big or as good as the Denver Zoo, but it was a lot closer, which was nice, and we were also allowed to feed giraffes.

The giraffes were a lot of fun—the lettuce was overpriced and I said that we should have just brought our own, but Peggy said that we weren't allowed to. I guess the giraffes were used to people feeding them, 'cause when we got over to the boardwalk a couple of them came right over and put their heads down so that they could reach the food and she said that you could even pet them if they'd let you. So I nuzzled one on the cheek and he drooled on me a little bit and she said that she wished she'd gotten that on camera. And I found out that they didn't like it so much when you blew into their nostrils. I guess that's not how giraffes make friends.

We also saw some lions, who were kind of boring, 'cause they were all napping, and we weren't allowed to bang on the glass to wake them up. But the other African animals were fun to watch—the elephants played around in their pool and sometimes blew water out of their trunks, and we got to look at the rhinos from inside an airplane that was mounted on a pole. Peggy said it was kind of strange, and that they hadn't had the airplane when she was younger.

There was an enclosure that had meerkats, too, and they were a lot of fun to watch. They ran around and stood up a lot, so that they could see better. Their favorite food was termites, and in Africa instead of living in trees, the termites built mounds on the ground that the meerkats dug through to get their dinner.

I asked Peggy how the animals liked living in Colorado, since all the pictures of Africa made it look like it was warm and flat, and I couldn't remember what we'd learned all the different continents were like but I didn't think that Africa got cold and snowy in the wintertime. I guess the lion's shaggy mane would keep him warm if it did.

She said that they kept them inside when it was really bad out, but that the zoo stayed open all year and most of the animals that were outside didn't mind the cold too much, and they had warm places they could go if they were too cold.

We went and saw the Colorado animals next. They had some mooses, which looked a lot like horses, but with bigger faces and huge horns. They stayed away from us and just went on grazing in their boggy pasture.

There was a mountain lion that was prowling around its habitat, going right up to the glass and then jumping over the rocks that it had, and it looked like it was trying to figure out if there was a way to escape and eat someone, and I didn't trust it at all. At least if it did get out, I could fly away.

They had a little display with otters, who were like meerkats that lived in the water. They liked floating on their backs which was really cute, and the sign said that different kinds of otters lived in rivers and streams and lakes all over the United States, so I was going to have to keep an eye out for them when I was back in Kalamazoo.

Once we'd gotten done looking at the animals, we took a chairlift across the park and then we went up to the Will Rogers shrine, which was a tall building that overlooked Colorado Springs. I could see the airport, but not Peggy's house, even though I knew about where it was. She said that maybe if we'd had binoculars we'd have been able to spot it.

When we were back in Cobalt she said that none of her friends could make it for lunch, but that some of them were free for dinner, and so we'd meet up then for a late night at the pub, and that sounded like it would be fun to me.

So we went to a Taco Bell for a light lunch, and then we drove over to Memorial Park. She had to park her car a little ways away because there were so many cars parked close, and she got out her wheeled snowboard and her helmet and we started walking towards the park.

Well, when we got there there was a big crowd of people, and a bunch of police cars, too, and she didn't know what was going on. So I offered to fly up and see, but she said that might not be safe until we knew what was happening.

When we got closer, there were a bunch of people standing around without shirts and holding signs that said #freethenipple and some of them had that painted on them, too. Some people were talking to them and one woman was talking to a man with a microphone.

I wanted to go over and talk to them, too, and so Peggy followed along, and there was this really nice girl named Leah who I thought was a boy when I first saw her because she had short hair and really small breasts. She said that they were protesting how it was unfair that men could go around without shirts on but women couldn't.

Well, I thought that was unfair, too.

Then she told me that all over the United States people were having protests and parades to draw attention to it, and she asked if we wanted to join with them.

Well, I did want to stay with them for a little bit especially because Leah had started to scratch my ears. Peggy didn't really want to until she saw one of her friends who was named Gina. And she asked Gina if this was why she wasn’t free for lunch, and Gina said it was, and then said that she liked Peggy's shirt, and Peggy got all red and said that I'd picked it for her.

So then Gina and Peggy sat down with us and Gina tried to convince Peggy to take off her shirt but Peggy said that she wasn't going to show her boobs to all of Colorado Springs and anyone with an internet connection as well.

After they'd caught up and Gina had met me, we walked more towards the center where a skinny man with long, tangled hair who smelled kind of skunky painted their slogan on my belly so that you could see it when you saw my belly and then after we'd met a few more people we went off to the other end of the park. And Peggy asked if it was okay if I posed with Gina and Leah and she took my picture, and I said that it was.

There were some things that Peggy called half-pipes, and then a big, recessed area that you could ride in, and there were already some people playing there but not too many. Peggy said that most of them were boys and that they were probably gawking at all the topless girls but that was fine because it was more space for us.

She rode down first and it was just like snowboarding, although the sides were steeper and there were more frequent obstacles. And there were things that she could do with her board that she couldn't do with a normal snowboard, 'cause it would have been strapped to her shoes.

So the most basic thing was to ride down one side and then back up the other, and I got the hang of that pretty quickly. And as long as I kept some weight down on the board, I could use my wings to help me with some tricks, so I was having lots of fun. I couldn't make the board flip around; I tried a few times but I never managed to get my hooves on it in the right place at the right time and usually if it did flip, it just landed on its back and skidded off.

She also showed me how to jump for height and that was a lot of fun except that I lost the board every time, and she said that didn't really matter. And then she told me that people compete for how high they can go, and she shouldn't have said that right when I was at the edge, 'cause the next time I went I used my wings to get extra speed on the downside, and after the board fell out from under my hooves I kept flying up, until I was about a hundred feet high and I said that I won.

She said that using my wings was cheating, and I said that she was just jealous because she didn't have wings of her own. And I guess I shouldn't have been so boasty, because she went over to the other course and just flew around it, flipping her board around and landing back on it and then when she'd finally jumped over every obstacle and gone around all the banks, she got off the board and said that it was my turn. I did make the first jump but the board didn't.

After that we went back to Cobalt, because it was getting really dark and cloudy and it felt like it was going to rain soon. Everyone was still out in the park with their nipples free, and they'd put up a small pavilion for shelter if it rained. I waved to Leah and then flew up a bit so that she could see the message on my belly, then looped back around and down.

When we got to the corner, I saw Miss Cherilyn standing there, and she waved at me. Peggy asked her what she was doing, and she said she was keeping an eye on things, just in case. And I asked her if Mister Salvatore was around, and she said that she'd suggested he take a two-day Jeep trip up in the mountains, just to keep him away because she was sure he'd find a way to get himself in trouble if he was watching a topless protest.

I thought that he was going to be kind of mad that he'd missed it, and she smiled and said she thought so too.

Peggy asked if it was okay for us to go to a dispensary, and Miss Cherilyn said that she was going to be here, and Mister Salvatore was somewhere in the mountains, so she had no problem with it, but she advised against letting me try anything that they had for sale, and Peggy said that we weren't buying, just looking around.

She raised her eyebrow, and then told me and Peggy not to do anything stupid, and then went back to watching the protest.

We got to Cobalt just before it started to rain, and Peggy used her portable telephone to get us directions to a dispensary. She said that she had never imagined that she would tell a federal officer that she was going to look at drugs and that that was a story which was never going to grow old.

We had to drive all the way through town but we finally got to a little brick shop that was called The Dankery, which was a brown brick building with a green stripe and all the windows covered up.

She said that it looked kind of sketchy, but we went in anyways, and inside it was a lot nicer although the smell was pretty intense. Peggy said that she thought she might get a contact buzz just from being in here, and after we looked around a little bit and had a nice girl with blue hair that was almost the same color as my coat tell us about all the different kinds they had, we left without buying anything. I was glad it was raining because that helped wash some of the scent off of me and clear out my nostrils.

We had a little bit of time before we were supposed to meet everyone for dinner, so we went back to Peggy's house and she took another shower and changed into clean clothes, and she also gave me a washcloth so that I could clean the paint off my belly.

It had stopped raining by the time we got back in Cobalt and went to the Jack Quinn Irish Alehouse and Pub. Which was kind of like Olde Peninsula inside.

Gina was already there, along with another friend who was named Clive. When they saw us, we all got a big table 'cause Peggy said some more of her friends were coming to visit, and we ordered some appetizers and beer for before they got there.

Peggy asked Gina how the rest of the protest had gone, and she said it had gotten cold when it started raining and a lot of people had wimped out and gone home which was too bad. But she thought that there was going to be some coverage on the news tonight, although they'd probably edit it so that nobody could see a single nipple.

We were still snacking on our appetizers when Heather and Lindsay arrived, and Lindsay was another snowboarder, so the first thing she said when she met me was that she'd seen the video of me snowboarding and that I had good style.

We'd ordered our dinner by the time her last friend arrived who was named Victoria and brought her boyfriend who was named Blake. And they were also snowboarders, too. I don't know if everyone in Colorado Springs was or if just Peggy's friends were. But that was mostly what we talked about at first, and then after a while we talked about lots of stuff like college and what we were gonna do after it. Lindsay said unless she broke something bad she was going to the Winter Olympics, and everyone said that they'd cheer her on.

It was funny—once Peggy told me what the Olympics were, I thought it was pretty amazing to be talking to someone who might be good enough to actually compete in them, and at the same time Lindsay thought it was really amazing that she was talking to a pony. And I don't know how we got on the topic, but someone brought up Orange is the New Black and nobody but Peggy believed that I actually knew Gusty. Peggy said that she'd met her, too, the last time we'd been through on a train.

It was really late when we left the bar, and I'd had too many beers to drink. I started singing along with the radio on the way home because they were playing Renegade, and we had to go in to a gas station so that I could pee. Peggy said that she should have told me that the altitude would make me drunker, and I said that I wasn’t at all because altitude didn't affect pegasuses. And then I must have fallen asleep because I don't remember the rest of the ride home.

Peggy woke me up in front of her house and we walked upstairs together, and got in her bed and curled up on the pillow and told her that I'd had a really fun time today.

August 29 [Air Force Base]

August 29

I think that the same airplane takes off at the same time every morning, and I don't know how Peggy sleeps through it.

I got out of bed and took a shower, and then since I smelled coffee brewing I went downstairs to look, 'cause I didn't think that Peggy needed me to wake her up, and if she did I could always go back upstairs.

John and Chrissie were both in the kitchen already—they were both wearing sleeping clothes, and she went upstairs to use the shower. John poured me a cup of coffee and then said that I'd gotten my picture in the newspaper, and when I sat down he slid it over to me.

There was a big picture of everyone holding up their signs, and I thought that if any of the #freethenipple protesters were reading it they'd probably be mad that it only showed them from the shoulders up. And then there was a little picture alongside the article of me flying up to where you could see my belly.

We both thought it was pretty funny that I'd gotten in the newspaper for protesting but not for flying down The Incline or flying to Cameron Cone.

He asked if I was ready to go see the Air Force Base, and I said that I was. And I said that Peggy had mentioned that there was an airplane museum nearby, too, and he said that we could go to that as well.

It would be kind of boring waiting around until everyone else was ready to go. I guess that's what I get for being an early riser. So I asked if it was okay to walk around the neighborhood and maybe fly a little bit, too—since I'd already taken a shower, I didn't want to work up a lather. He said that it would be okay, and told me not to get lost.

Well, I didn't think that I would get lost but just in case I went upstairs and got my flight vest and put my portable telephone in the pocket, 'cause I knew that if I did get lost I could just land and read the street signs and then Peggy would know where I was and could tell me how to get back home.

I kinda had an idea of the shape of the neighborhood from driving in and out of it, so I went sort of north along their road until I got to the end of it and then turned west, and followed that road until it ended.

The next road ended at a little park, and I thought I'd fly over that, so I did. And I didn't land right away; I kept on flying, and since I was already flying I started to just circle around the neighborhood from the air.

All the houses were really clustered together, more than in Kalamazoo, I thought. And it made it really easy to get confused when I was in the air, and I was trying to focus in too much on the roofs to see which house was hers when I should have just gone to a landmark I knew: the big open pasture that was behind her house. So I went that way, and as soon as I was close I saw her house.

I landed right in front and went back inside and everyone was almost ready. John was in the shower, and Peggy and Chrissie were in the kitchen drinking coffee.

Peggy asked if I knew that I was in the paper, and I said that John had showed me. Then she asked if I'd noticed that they'd cut me off just above the teats and I hadn't but when I saw that it bothered me.

Chrissie told me that I ought to make sure to have all my flight gear, because she said that she thought I'd probably be asked to give a flying demonstration, so I went and got that. And then once John came down we all got in Chrissie's car, which was called a Challenger. It was kind of crowded for us to sit in the back but she said that it was more practical because her car had a special sticker which let it park at the base, and John's Highlander didn't.

The engine was rumbly and I thought that Mister Salvatore would really like the car. I bet he didn't know she had it, since she kept it in the garage where people couldn't see it.

When we got to the Air Force base, we had to go through a gate and Chrissie had to talk to some men called SFs who guarded the gate, and then when we were inside we all had to have special badges except for her because she already had one that was better than ours.

The inside parts of the Air Force base were pretty boring. There was a man who led us through the base and I could tell that he was keeping an eye on us. Then he asked if I wanted to go out on the field, first, or if I wanted to see the space command center.

I thought that the space command center would be really interesting, so he took us to a room that was full of computers and there were lots of people working at them and it kind of reminded me a little bit of the airplane directors, although it wasn't in a tower. They couldn't use binoculars to see the spaceships that they commanded, so they had to rely on their computers to tell them where they were.

He said that they helped to put satellites in orbit and kept the ones that we had safe. And then he asked how much I knew about them and I didn't really know a lot, so he explained how satellites could talk to my watch and that's how it knew where it was—that was how GPS worked—and that there were also radio messages that went through a satellite, and space internet, and so many other things.

They monitored the weather—I knew about that, but I didn't exactly know how they did it, so he explained a little bit about the different types of orbits that they could use and also how they had different kinds of cameras and sensors so that they could see different things.

I asked him how many there were, and he said that the United States had 658 in orbit and overall there were 2,271 which sounded like a whole lot. And he said that there were some even orbiting the sun, but that those weren't under their command.

I told him that I'd seen the International Space Station, although it had just looked like a little star moving across the sky. And that was pretty amazing, to think that there were people living up there.

He let me go into the room and sit down in one of the chairs and he put a headset on me which didn't really fit over my ears at all, but that was okay because if it had I wouldn't have known what to say anyway. And he asked if I minded if he took a picture on my portable telephone and I didn't mind at all.

We went into another room next and there were lots of pictures on the wall of long rockets and funny-looking little things that had a shiny wrinkled cover and little black panels and dishes on sticks jutting out from them and that was what satellites looked like. The black panels were satellite leaves, which is how they got their energy. Other ones, he said, had little bits of plutonium in them which was what made them work but that the US only had one left and it didn't work anymore and was just orbiting around and hopefully would stay up there for a long, long time.

We went outside next, and he showed me some of the airplanes that they had. The biggest ones were called C-130s, and they were huge. They had gigantic propellers to make them go, and I found out that the design was over sixty years old but they kept on flying them because they couldn't find anything better. He said that they could land on dirt runways, which was something that most big airplanes couldn't do, and he said that one had even landed and taken off from an aircraft carrier, which was a big floating runway. I wanted to go inside one just to look around but I wasn't allowed to.

I could tell from the outside that my whole village would have fit inside of it, though.

Then he said that if I would give a little flying demonstration, after that they'd fly one of the C-130s around the airport so that I could see it. And that sounded like it would be fun.

He said that we'd have lunch first, to give everyone time to prepare, and then I could demonstrate for the pilots.

So we ate in their cafeteria, which was a lot like the cafeteria at college except that it was much cleaner and everyone there was in really good shape. And a lot of them came over to see me, especially after word got around that I'd be doing a flying demonstration. I hadn't heard anybody announce it but I guess it was just like every other kind of gossip where when a couple of ponies know pretty soon everypony does.

I had to wait for permission to fly because the main airport had a couple of airplanes that needed to leave, but once they were gone I was allowed to fly, as long as I kept towards the Air Force's end of the airport and didn't go too high, and they told me that I had to monitor their air traffic control frequency and if they told me to get out of the way I had to. So I told them that I understood all of that, and I decided that I was going to gallop down the runway a little bit before I took off.

When I was galloping as fast as I could, I put out my wings and jumped, and then started flapping to gain altitude. And I kept kind of low so that everyone could see me, and I did some wing rolls and loops and even a backflip, then I flew the length of the runway and did a rolling drop turn, until I was only a few feet above the ground, and I glided the whole length of the runway, then did a really sharp climb at the top.

I lost all my airspeed and then did a tail-first fall which was something that I rarely ever tried because it was only good for showing off. And when I got close to the ground I dropped my muzzle back down and went right alongside the row of men and women who were watching me, and landed kind of in the middle. Then, just to show them that I could, I took off almost straight up, did a circle over the field, and landed again.

I called the airplane directors and told them that I was back on the ground and they thanked me for letting them know. I wonder if they were watching from their tower with binoculars? I bet they were.

Well, everyone who wasn't getting their airplane ready wanted to talk to me, and they asked if all pegasuses could fly like I did and I had to admit that a lot of them could fly better because I wasn't a stunt flyer, I was a cloud-puncher, and pretty soon I found myself talking to a lot of pilots about flying in bad weather and that was a lot like talking to other weatherponies.

I think we could have spent all afternoon talking except that they got their airplane ready to fly and so we all lined back up to watch it take off. And it was a big, loud, ungainly thing, and when it started its takeoff roll I didn't think that it would ever get airborne. But for something as big as it was it got in the air pretty quickly. I don't think that the airplane I flew in to Michigan took off that fast.

They flew it up and around the airport and it didn't do any of the things that I had done but that was probably for the best. One of the pilots told me that it was a shame that we weren't further out of the city, because then maybe they'd do a flare drop and that was really something to see. He said that some people called it angel's wings, 'cause that's what it looked like out behind the airplane.

It lumbered around the airport and then came back in for a landing and it came down really so steeply I thought it might crash, especially since the propellers were hardly turning. And as soon as the wheels touched, the engines sped up and the whole nose of the airplane dropped down as it came to a stop and it was amazing to see something that big stop that quickly.

It came back around to the taxiway and then it backed up into its spot and they turned off the engines.

Before we left the air force base, everybody shook my hoof and they gave me a patch that showed their insignia, and I thought that I ought to put it on my flight vest, and then we went to the airplane and spaceship museum.

We went around the inside first, and there were exhibits that talked about the missiles—which were rockets—that defended America from its enemies, and there was some equipment from the old base which this base had replaced. It had been located in a mountain to keep it safe because humans had big bombs which could get through anything else.

And I got to do a training simulation for a Peacekeeper missile launch, which was fun. There was a computer voice which told me what I had to do, and I had a lot of trouble with it because none of the buttons were hoof-friendly, and the computer didn't listen when I talked back to it. So I tried a couple of times but I didn't get it right any of the times and Peggy said that if ponies were defending the US we'd all be dead, and I said that ponies would put bigger buttons and switches on the equipment. And I said I didn't think she could do better so of course she proved me wrong.

There were a lot more airplanes outside but we had to stay inside because while we'd been playing with the practice missile, it had started raining and hailing and I felt really guilty that I wasn't in the air. I even had all my flight gear with me and I was sure I could have gotten permission to fly and see what the clouds were doing and maybe move some of them out of the way.

We never got a break in the rain, and finally me and Peggy decided that we'd run outside and at least look at the EC-121, which you were allowed to go inside. John and Chrissie had seen it before and didn't want to get wet, so they stayed inside.

By the time we got there we were soaking wet and it was like being in a drum inside the airplane, but since we were already there we looked around at all the radars and radios that it had. She said that it was kind of funny to think that the airplane radio that was strapped to my foreleg was better than any of the radios inside this airplane, and my watch was a better navigational tool than anything this airplane had on it.

Neither of us was looking forward to the run back to the museum, and Peggy said that I should use my Silver-sense to tell her when the rain was going to be the lightest and I said that on the ground, in a place where I didn't know the weather patterns, it wouldn't be much more than a guess.

She said that she thought it would be a better guess than she'd make, so we waited at the back of the airplane until a slight clear spot and we ran back and just made it inside before a fresh cluster of hailstones came down.

The curators at the museum were really nice and kept it open a little bit late until the lightning and hail had stopped, and Peggy bought me a pilot's hat at the gift store.

We drove to Sandy's Restaurant which was right by the air force base for dinner. John ordered a coyote burger and I asked him if it was made of actual coyotes, and he said it was and that was why he hadn't ordered the cowboy burger. But then I looked at the menu and it said that it was made out of beef, not coyote.

It was still raining when we got back home, and after me and Peggy got dried off and Peggy put on new clothes, we sat in the living room together and played a game called Monopoly. I couldn't roll the dice, so Peggy did that for me. And some of it was luck, because you didn't know how far you were going to move, but some of it was skill, too, and they let me read all the property cards and I figured out that the best things to own were the railroads, and also the orange and light blue properties, and so while Chrissie and Peggy focused on getting the expensive properties on the far side of the board, I tried to build my empire on the near side.

I didn't win, but I came in second, and everyone including me was kind of surprised by that. But the railroads had been a really good investment for me, and I hadn't lost anything by trading away Ventnor Ave. to get the Short Line.

Then Peggy told them that I was really smart at math, and I'd probably figured out what the best odds were and Chrissie said that using math was cheating. I didn't think so; the numbers were printed right on the cards and anybody could look at them.

But Peggy was laughing, so it was okay.

We had hot chocolate for a snack, and then Peggy and I went upstairs to bed. Tomorrow was going to be my last day in Colorado, so we wanted to be well-rested.

August 30 [Garden of the Gods]

August 30

I kinda felt bad waking Peggy up, but I thought that we ought to enjoy the whole day together, since it was gonna be our last before school started again. And she was a little bit grumpy about being woken up before the sun rose, until I persuaded her to go out to the pasture and watch the sun rise with me.

So she put on her shoes and a sweatshirt 'cause it was a little chilly for her, and we went through the backyard to the fence, 'cause she said that she could jump over it.

It wasn't exactly a jump—she got ahold of the top and then swung her leg up and over, then dropped down on the other side and said it reminded her of being in high school and sneaking out of the house to parties.

We had to wait a little bit for a break in traffic, 'cause the road behind her house was kinda busy, and then we ran across and out into the empty pasture.

You could see all the airport spread out in front of us and that was really pretty with all the different colored lights along the runways and taxiways so that the airplanes would know where to go. And we sat down on the grass, leaning into each other, and watched as the sun came up over the horizon.

We sat there for a little bit, until the sun had climbed a little ways into the sky, and then she hugged me and said that we ought to get some coffee and I thought that was a good idea.

I helped push her back up over the wall and then I flew over myself and we went back inside and she started a pot of coffee than went upstairs to take a shower and I started making pancakes for everyone.

Me and Peggy had to wait a little bit for her parents to get up, 'cause they liked sleeping in when they didn't have to work. She said that her dad could work whenever he wanted to mostly, but she said sometimes when he was working on a big project he'd be up all night, especially because he had clients all over the world.

So we talked about the school year which would be starting soon. Peggy was going to be a senior, which meant that she'd get to graduate next year and she said that meant she'd have to figure out what she was going to do with her life after she graduated and that was a depressingly adult thing to have to figure out.

Next year was also my last, but I already knew that I'd be leading a weather team, I just didn't know where. I liked being on the coast and working with feral weather, so I would probably do that, but at the same time there was a lot of Equestria and maybe I would also like being somewhere else.

She said that we both would just have to play it by ear, and flicked my ear and I bumped my nose into her thigh and we were both still laughing when her parents came down.

After they ate breakfast they asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to do while I was still in Colorado and I said that I was open to anything that they thought would be interesting. So Chrissie packed us a lunch and said that we'd go to the Garden of the Gods first, which sounded like a really interesting place to visit. The Bible had said lots of things about other gods but not much about their gardens.

I hadn't known but we'd gone by it on our way to the cog railroad which took us up to Pikes Peak, and I thought that we were going further in the mountains, but then he turned down a road and pretty soon we got to a parking lot and all got out of the car.

The park was amazing! There were big rocks that jutted up and out of the landscape and the most interesting thing about them was that they had all gotten the way they were naturally. Nobody had balanced them on top of each other like I had on the top of Cameron Cone; they'd just gotten that way by centuries upon centuries of slow erosion by the wind and rain and by freezing and thawing. They were a beautiful red-orange color, and all around the trails in the park there were little signs that said what they were called, like the Kissing Camels or the Tower of Babel or even the White Rock.

People were allowed to climb some of the rocks, and we saw a couple of them working their way up one, which was really slow going for them. They had harnesses around them that were attached to ropes so that if they fell they wouldn't get hurt, and I asked Peggy if she'd ever done that. She said that she had a couple of times but it wasn't really her thing; she liked going fast, not slowly working her way up a rock face.

And all the rocks made a really good course for me when I flew, and I zoomed around the park for a little bit, being careful not to get too close to the climbers because I didn't want to make them nervous. I did think about landing on top of their rock but I don't think they would have liked it if I had.

We went to Red Rock Canyon next, and we ate our lunch in Highlander because there was a thunderstorm and even though it wound up not raining at all, there was a lot of lightning.

Once the storm had stopped, we got out of the car and walked around the paths that wound by big rock walls, and there was even one that was stepped and it looked kind of unnatural but I wasn't sure because the piled rocks in the Garden of the Gods had too. John told me that it had once been a quarry, and that's why the rocks were stepped like that, because people had cut them out. And I flew around it and there were odd little half-circles that ran down the edges of the rocks, and when I asked him about it he said that was where they'd drilled to put blasting powder in to explode the rocks loose. And he said that before people had explosives they would also drill boreholes and freeze the rocks off by putting water in them and then letting it freeze and expand to break loose the rocks, which was really clever.

After we'd gone around one of the trails and I'd flown though the gap in the ridge, we went back to Highlander and went on to the Cave of the Wind because John thought that I might enjoy that too and it wasn't too far away. And he said that they had a tour and I don't know what I was expecting but it went inside a big cave and that was really scary and I didn't like being in there much at all. At first it wasn't so bad but then we got further and further in and I started to think about all the rocks that were pushing down on top of us and I was getting more and more nervous and then they turned off all the lights and the tour guide said that this was what pitch black was like.

If I hadn't been right next to Peggy I would have galloped or flown off in terror and probably smashed into one of the walls or the stone icicles which stuck out of the ceiling and floor. This was not the place for me any more than an earth pony belonged on a cloud. I closed my eyes and at least then I could pretend that was why I didn't see anything but the air was wrong and the sounds were all wrong and when the lights finally came back on after an eternity of darkness I had to leave.

Peggy came with me and she said she was sorry, she should have thought about how I'd feel underground and I said I didn't have anypony to blame but myself because I knew what caves were but it hadn't seemed scary at first until we got a little ways in and I started to think about how we might get lost or the rocks might fall down on us or there could even be a monster lurking in the depths of the cave and we'd never know until it was too late.

When we finally got to the entrance I was so happy to be outside again that I took off and did a loop in the sky and it was so good to feel proper air under my wings again. And then I felt bad for leaving Peggy behind on the ground and because she'd followed me out of the cave instead of finishing the tour but when I landed she hugged me and said that it was okay and that she didn't mind at all and I could have told her sooner that I was uncomfortable and we would have left.

Then John and Chrissie came back out, too, and they said that they were sorry too and that they should have thought about how I might feel in a cave. But I didn't blame them; they couldn't have known.

And we did have other fun while we were there. They had a zipline that they called the Batapult, and there was a chair that you rode down in and then it pushed you back up. And I had to get special permission to ride it because the park ranger didn't think that the seat belt would hold me in the right way and I might fall off but they eventually decided that since I could fly and knew not to run into the wires that held it up, it was okay. It was almost like I was flying with Peggy.

They also had an obstacle course that was called the Wind Walker and our tickets that we'd bought for the Batapult were supposed to let us do that, too, but they wouldn't let me because they said I would be too dangerous for the other climbers if I was flying around. Which I guess was fair but I would have liked to try it anyway. I bet if Mister Salvatore had been there he could have made them let me.

Everyone else got to try it, though. I could see that Peggy wanted to, and I didn't want to hold her back especially after she'd been so nice to come out of the cave with me, so I said that I'd be happy to just sit on the ground and watch her do it. And we both persuaded John and Chrissie to try it, too.

It was actually more fun that I'd thought watching them climb. And there was a part of it that went over the edge of a canyon and when Peggy got close I went over the fence and flew around under her.

When she got back off the course she said that it had been very strange to look down at me and she said that she had taken a picture of me and showed me on her portable telephone. It was very strange to see because I had never seen a picture of me from above when I was flying.

We ended our trip there by panning for gold. They had a sluiceway and you'd pick up some soil in your pan and slosh it around with some water from there and then since the gold was so heavy it sank to the bottom and if you were really careful you'd get out all the other soil and only have gold left. We all had some gold flakes in our dirt but they were tiny, no bigger than a grain of sand.

Then John said that he'd found a gold nugget and held up a shiny rock and we were all really amazed until Chrissie said that the edges were too flat to actually be gold and she asked him if he'd bought some Iron Pyrite at the gift shop when he'd said that he was going to the bathroom.

And so after he'd been caught cheating he was more careful and it turned out that he was the only one who was any good at panning for gold because he actually got a couple of small flakes and he said that he was going to keep them so he had Chrissie pour out a water bottle into the sluiceway and he dumped his gold and some sand into the bottle, and he said that he'd sort it out the rest of the way when he got home.

Nobody felt like cooking but we didn't want to go to a restaurant either so John ordered pizzas for us and we ate pizza. Then Chrissie said that since we'd exercised our muscles all day it was time to exercise our minds and we played a game called Scrabble which is where you make words on squares and Chrissie won and I said she was cheating because she knew more English words than I did. So they asked me if I could make an Equestrian word and I said that the alphabets weren't the same but I could come close and I picked up some of the letter-squares and made a word that was worth a hundred points 'cause it had all the valuable letters in it. I told them that that was the word for a lumpy shade cloud and I would have made the word for a big thundercloud but they didn't have enough Qs. And then John asked me if that was actually a real word and I said that it ought to be.

We had root-beer floats for dessert, which were really good although the root beer made my nose tickly. And then we talked for a little bit longer until Chrissie had to go to bed so that she could get up for work in the morning, and before she did she hugged me and said how nice it had been to spend time with me.

John promised that he'd say his goodbyes in the morning, and that he'd like to stay up a little bit longer and chat but he probably had about a thousand computer letters that he had to answer and he was too old to stay up all night anymore.

So Peggy and I got a couple of beers out of the electric icebox and drank them at the kitchen table and they were kind of watery but she said that Coors was a Colorado tradition, even if it was bad. And she said that when her dad was in college, they weren't sold much east of the Rockies, and so whenever he went and visited his friend in Chicago, he'd take a couple of cases of beer for him.

After we'd finished them, we went up to her room and snuggled up in bed together.

August 31 [Colorado Springs to Wichita]

August 31

I woke up when that airplane took off again, and I stayed awake when Chrissie got in the shower and left in her car.

I was kinda eager to go but at the same time I didn't want to leave so I just stayed in bed and dozed a little bit while I waited for Peggy to wake up.

When she did, she wished me a good morning and then went off to take her shower and I went downstairs to make breakfast again but there wasn't any pancake mix left 'cause I'd used up the last of it. And there weren't any boxes of unshelled eggs, so it would have been really hard for me to make omelets especially since I didn't know where the knives were kept.

There was cereal, though, and so I poured each of us a bowl but I left the milk out of Peggy's 'cause if the cereal sat in it too long it got soggy.

She came downstairs before too long and she made coffee and we ate breakfast and then we went upstairs and made sure that I had everything in my saddlebags including my new pilot's hat, and then we brought them down with me so that I'd be ready when Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn arrived.

I saw the newspaper that had my picture on top of a pile in the recycling bin and I asked her if I could have that, too, and she said I could and wondered why I wanted it. I said I thought it would be funny to show Mister Salvatore if he hadn't seen it yet.

We'd just put that in my saddlebags, too, when John came downstairs, rubbing his eyes and he went right into the kitchen and came back out with a cup of coffee and he looked more awake. He said that both of us were too chipper for this early in the morning.

He said how much fun it had had to have me visit and he said that if I wanted to come out to Colorado for Thanksgiving they'd be happy to have me. He said that he'd even make me a tofurky, which was something that I'd never heard of. And Peggy said that there was usually snow up in the mountains and we could go snowboarding on real mountains if I came.

So we talked in the living room until I saw Mister Salvatore stop in front of the house in his Dodge Ram, and I hugged Peggy and John and I said that I was looking forward to school starting again.

I sat in the middle of the back again, between their bags, and once we left the airport behind we passed by another military base and then we were out in the prairie. There were a few houses and farms here and there but mostly it was just prairie land as far as I could see.

I think if I couldn't have flown I would have really liked it. When I looked out the back window I could still see the mountains off in the distance, but it was mostly open and just the perfect place for a pony who had to stay on the ground.

Mister Salvatore slowed down when we go to a town called Punkin Center and he said that he wasn't sure if the people who founded the town couldn't spell, if it was a joke on travelers, or if it was named for something else. There wasn't much of anything there, so there wasn't anybody to ask.

We went across railroad tracks just before we got to Aroya, and then our road ended and we turned onto the 40-287 Road, which went more south and also ran alongside the railroad tracks.

After we'd been driving for almost two hours, Mister Salvatore said that we'd take a little break up ahead to stretch our legs. And I looked through the windshield and didn't see anything up ahead but he had his GPS so I thought it knew that something was coming up.

When he slowed down, though, all I could see ahead of me was a few run-down looking buildings and I didn't see anything that looked like a restaurant or a rest area or a gas station. And instead of going to them he stopped along the side of the road and I looked around but all I could see besides the buildings was a trailer with big water jugs and an arvey with its nose missing and then I saw the green sign by the side of the road that said this town was called Wild Horse.

Miss Cherilyn just glared at him, but I hopped out of the truck and stood by the sign so that Mister Salvatore could take my picture, and he finally convinced Miss Cherilyn to get out, too.

There wasn't anywhere to eat and there were big semitrucks zipping by—one of them saw us at the sign and honked at us—and so once he'd taken a picture with her and me and had her take a picture with me and him, we got back in the Ram and drove on.

We stopped a little while further down the road in a town called Kit Carson, who Mister Salvatore said was a famous cowboy. I asked if he'd built the town, and Mister Salvatore said that he didn't think so.

It was a big enough town that it had a restaurant called the Kit Carson Trading Post Restaurant and we got some strange looks when we came in. We picked a table kind of in the back and Mister Salvatore sat right next to me.

When the waitress came she said that it was kind of strange to see me there because the creek right behind the restaurant was called the Wild Horse Creek. I asked if there were wild horses in it and she said that they used to run alongside it, which is how it got its name but that that was a long time ago.

I thought it would be fun to see wild horses and Mister Salvatore thought it would be fun to take a picture of me in Wild Horse Creek and Miss Cherilyn though that if we kept stopping every time Mister Salvatore wanted to we'd never get to Wichita.

He said that getting there was half the fun, so it ought to take half as long as being there. And he promised that we'd get there an hour sooner than she expected, and she said that crossing into a new time zone didn't magically make another hour appear. And then after our drinks came she remembered that since we were going east, we were going to lose an hour, not get another one.

He said sometimes she thought too much about the little details.

I had a salad and a slice of cherry pie, which was very good. The waitress said that the pies were homemade, and that there were also peanut butter cookies that were homemade and very good and she gave me one to try and I shared it and Mister Salvatore liked it so much that he bought a whole box of them for the road.

Once we were done eating, we went out behind the restaurant and I flew down alongside the creek—it had a big, wide bed, but there was hardly any water in it at all—and Mister Salvatore took my picture and then he wanted to take another one of me looking wild, so I used my hooves to mess up my mane some and stuck some leaves and branches in it, and he took a picture of that.

Before I could take the leaves and sticks back out, a bird landed on me and pecked at the stick, then flew off again. And Mister Salvatore got a picture of that, too. I didn't think it was a good picture 'cause I was kind of cross-eyed trying to look up at the bird but he insisted that it was the best picture ever and Miss Cherilyn agreed.

Then we got back in the pickup and went back out onto the road and after a while of it being almost all plains as far as I could see I started to get a little bored, and wondered if I could crawl out the back window and ride in the open bed of the truck. Maybe if I was holding on to a rope, I could fly along behind it like a kite, although I wouldn't be able to go too high because the rope would probably hit wires.

There was just a little blue sign to tell us that we were in Kansas and nothing on the other side of the sign was any different than it had been, and I dozed until we stopped at a gas station so that Mister Salvatore could put gas in the truck. Me and Miss Cherilyn went inside and walked around a little and used the bathroom and when we got back to the truck Miss Cherilyn asked him if he wanted her to drive for a little bit but he said that he'd be fine.

We got on the 70 Highway and we could go a little bit faster, plus it was more interesting since there were lots of other cars going the same way so I could look at them for longer. We passed a house on wheels, which was pretty amazing. Mister Salvatore said that they built them in factories and then took them where they were going with trucks, and that some people really liked that because you could buy one and have it delivered in a couple of weeks rather than waiting months or years to have one built.

We had to slow down at WaKeeney because they were fixing the road, and then traffic almost completely stopped for a while. There were helpful orange signs that told us which lane we had to pick, and most people obeyed them but there were some who rushed ahead and cut the line and after five or six had gone by, one of the semi-trucks that had gotten in the correct lane went back over to the wrong one and he just stayed there, blocking everybody else. Mister Salvatore laughed as cars started to line up behind him wanting to get by but they couldn't.

Once we got up to the front of the line traffic speeded up again, and I watched out the window at all the different machines that worked on the road. Some of them I'd seen other places like the big scoop tractors, but a lot of the other ones I'd never seen before. There was a tractor with a spinning broom on the front of it that was making a really big dust cloud.

After we got out of the construction, it took a few miles for the traffic to all find its place again, and then we were back up to speed.

We stopped for dinner in Salina, and Mister Salvatore wanted to go to the Rib Crib but Miss Cherilyn said that I wouldn't like it at all. And she said that there was a sushi restaurant that I might like.

I did want to eat there but I thought we ought to go where Mister Salvatore wanted because he'd been driving all day and so he deserved to eat what he wanted. Then Miss Cherilyn suggested that we could go to the sushi restaurant and he could eat ribs by himself and she'd even let him drive the truck over there so he'd feel more manly and just to come back and get us when he was done eating.

He agreed to that pretty quickly, and it was nice for us, too. I had a seaweed salad, smoked salmon nigiri and a hamachi sashimi, and we also each had one mojito and then green tea. And we took our time with dinner and sipping our tea until Mister Salvatore finally came in to get us. He was really cheerful, so he must have had a good dinner.

We went south on the 135 Highway until we got to Wichita, which was the first big city I'd seen since we left Colorado Springs. Then we drove through town until we got to the Marriott hotel, and we had rooms on the very top floor.

It was strange to be so tired after I hadn't done anything but sit almost all day long, but I was. I was kind of sore, too, so I filled up the bathtub and soaked in it for a while and that loosened up my muscles. Then I sat crosswise on the bed so that I could look out the window and preened my wings and looked around outside.

There was a strange figure-eight of highway that pointed to the hotel, and then I could see to the east the end of a small runway, but I saw airplanes taking off not very far to the south of me and I wasn't sure why there would be two airports that close together. And when I checked my watch for what the nearest airport was it didn't point me at either, which was even stranger.

I couldn't think of any reason why there would be so many airports that close to me, until I found a visitor's guide that the hotel had put in my room and I found out that there was an Air Force base and also Cessna and Beechcraft which built small airplanes and also an airplane research facility and I started to get excited because I bet I was going to get to visit an airplane factory.

It was a little lonely being in a hotel room all by myself and the bed was too big for just me, so I took some of the blankets and put them on the chair and slept on that instead.

September 1 [Cessna]

September 1

I felt like I woke up a little bit later than normal even though the clock by the bed said it was earlier than I usually did. Changing time zones was really confusing.

I think if it hadn't been cloudy, I would have been able to see the sunrise from my hotel room, which would have been nice. But the clouds covered the whole sky as far as I could see.

And I couldn't poke my head out the window to get a feel for the weather conditions, which was too bad. I wish that hotels had windows that could be opened—my dorm room did, so why can't a hotel?

I had a little coffee-maker in my room, so I made a cup of coffee and then while it was brewing, I put the blankets and pillows back on the bed where they belonged.

I didn't know what time Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were going to come and get me which was kind of frustrating. I did know what room they were in and I could have gone and knocked on their door but if they were still sleeping I didn't want to wake them up. So instead I got out my Bible and sat in the chair and started reading Ezekiel.

He described God's chariot and the monsters which pulled it, and said that God looked like a man that looked like a rainbow that was on fire. I had a really hard time picturing exactly what that would look like, although I had once seen a fire rainbow, so maybe that was what He was like.

And then God told Ezekiel that he was supposed to tell the Israelites that He was mad at them, and to not be afraid. Instead of telling Ezekiel exactly what to say, God gave him a scroll which had the words written on it for Ezekiel to eat.

He wasn't happy that he was with the exiles, and he wasn't happy that he had to give them bad news, but he was wise enough to know that if he warned them and they didn't listen it wasn't his fault. God told Ezekiel that the Israelites were stubborn and I guess if they still didn't do what He told them to they must have been. Or maybe this book happened at the same time as another book—I'd have to ask Pastor Liz when I got back to Kalamazoo.

That reminded me that I wasn't sure that I had told her that I would miss our meeting today, so I got my telephone and sent her a telegram then I sat back down and read some more.

Then He told Ezekiel to make a clay model of Jerusalem and besiege it, and lie on his side for 390 days for the sins of Israel and 40 days for the sins of Judah and to only eat bread and drink water and to cook his bread over shit, which didn't sound like a very nice thing to have to do. And Ezekiel thought so, too, and told God that he didn't deserve that. So God said he could use cow shit and Ezekiel thought that would be okay but I wouldn't have been happy with that, either.

God also showed Ezekiel all the bad things that people were doing where they thought He couldn't see, and then He had a man mark all the good people and six other men killed all the bad people who hadn't followed His rules and who hadn't listened to Ezekiel.

God told Ezekiel that He had found out that there was a proverb in Israel that prophet's visions came to nothing, and that made God mad, so He said that he was going to make them come true right away, and then I heard a knock on my door and it was Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.

We went downstairs and had breakfast in the hotel, 'cause they had a buffet. And Mister Salvatore asked me to guess where we were going to go today and I said an airplane factory and he looked sad that I'd figured it out. But Miss Cherilyn though it was funny.

So he said that we were going to the Cessna factory and we were going to get to see where they built airplanes and that I was also going to get to use a flight simulator, which was a fake airplane.

We drove on the odd figure-eight road and then to the further-away airport that I'd seen and there were actually two right next to each other. One of them was for the air force airplanes, and the other one was for the little Cessna airplanes, and that's where we went.

When we got there we had to wait until a woman named Jodi came out to meet us, because she was going to show us around. And she was really nice and smiled a lot and I liked her.

She was really smart, too. She gave me a little bit of history about Cessna, which had been started over a hundred years ago by a man named Clyde that built the first airplane west of the Mississippi, and then had started building and testing more but when he asked the bank for money they wouldn't give it to him so he left Oklahoma and came to Wichita. And then there was what she called a great depression and the company closed for a couple of years but then it re-opened when Clyde's nephews bought the company from him.

Jodi said that they'd produced lots of airplanes over the years including what was the most-produced airplane which was called the 172, and they still made it now.

The airplanes were actually built in a town called Independence, and she said that the best way to get there was to fly.

I was a little bit nervous about that but Mister Salvatore said that it was a smaller airplane and not pressurized so it wouldn't be the same, and I guess if I was going to go skydiving I would have to be in an airplane so I might as well get used to it.

So she took us out to a two-engined airplane which she said was called a 421, and the pilots were waiting for us on the ground and both of them shook my hoof and they let me sit at the front where I could watch what they were doing.

They had a lot to do with all the controls in the airplane even before we could fly, and then they stayed busy until we'd gotten a little ways off the ground. I was really curious but I didn't want to bother them, so I just watched.

One of the pilots had little cards that he'd read things off of sometimes, and then the other one would answer them. So I asked Jodi what they were and she said that they were checklists and it was very important to do what they said.

We flew for about an hour and it was a lot nicer than being in the big airplane. It didn't hurt my ears as much and while I still didn't like how the air inside the airplane wasn't moving at all so it tricked me about how we were flying, it wasn't too bad. Maybe it helped that I could focus on the pilots and what they were doing and also see through the windshield.

They had to read off more checklists before they could land and also talk to the airplane directors but we finally got done circling the field and landed, and then they drove the airplane over to a big white building which was the factory.

Jodi led us in and told me that I wasn't allowed to fly inside because of the risk of damaging an airplane and I said that I wouldn't.

There were several different kinds of airplanes and some of them were almost put together and others of them weren't. They had lots of blue equipment which was called fixtures and jigs, and those were used to help carry things without damaging them and to help put them on the airplane in exactly the right place.

I got to look at all the inside of a wing, where they have lots of little wire ropes that make all the controls work, along with tanks for fuel. And the people who were building it had to reach through panels on the top of the wing. And I saw an airplane skeleton and watched a woman using a tool called a rivet gun to put panels on the skeleton, and a man who was inside one that was attaching the flight instruments to their wires (there were a lot of wires), and then we went over and watched as a jet engine was put on the hindquarters of a sleek-looking airplane.

All around, besides the blue fixtures and jigs, there were tool chests like Aric's but they were a lot bigger and on wheels, and all different colors. Almost everybody had one of them near where they were working.

I tried not to stay too long at any one place because I distracted the workers and I felt bad about it. They were all eager to talk to me and explain what they were doing and show me some clever little bit of the airplane that I wouldn't be able to see once it was all the way put together.

It was a bit overwhelming seeing it all at once like that, but I kind of thought of it like the makerspace just a lot bigger. And the people who were working there reminded me of the makers because they were all really enthusiastic about what they were doing.

We got to tour a room where they had lots of parts which were waiting to go on an airplane, and also another room where the airplanes were painted, and there was one in there that had covers over its engines and windows so that paint wouldn't get on those.

Once our tour was done we went to a conference room where there was some lunch waiting for us—sandwiches and potato chips. I was really hungry because it was pretty late but I hadn't been thinking about eating while we were looking at the airplanes.

Jodi apologized and said it wasn't much but the only other place that catered was a barbeque truck and Mister Salvatore was sad that we hadn't had that, but Miss Cherilyn reminded him that he'd had barbeque last night.

After we'd eaten, we flew back to Wichita and then drove across town to another airport, which was where they had the flight simulators.

Those were little pods that you got in and they moved around kind of like a real airplane. So I met my instructor who was named Chuck, and he said that we were going to get right to it. He said that he'd tell me what to do and when to do it, and then once he thought I had the hang of it he'd let me fly on my own.

It was kind of crowded inside, because Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and Jodi also wanted to be in there and there was just enough room for them at the back.

He started off by teaching me what the most important controls were for and how they worked—there were a lot of other things but he said that I didn't have to worry about them; that when something needed to be done with them he'd do it for me.

There were pedals like a car that you pushed and a steering wheel that could tilt backwards and forwards and then levers to make the engines go and more levers to make the flaps come in and out of the wing and those were the most important controls. He said that pretty much any airplane built in the last fifty years would have those controls.

Then he showed me the most important flight instruments, like the artificial horizon and the attitude indicator and the speedometer and altimeter and he said that those were the most basic ones that I needed to know and he'd call my attention to others when they became important.

When Chuck thought that I mostly knew what things were in the cockpit, he said it was time to go flying and wanted to know if I wanted to have the full training or just have fun. Well, I thought that the full training would be fun, so we had to start out by reading through lots of checklists and that was mostly work for him because he would read something then explain it to me and then usually he would be the one who pushed the button or turned the dial because they weren't hoof-friendly at all.

When I'd been concentrating on all the buttons and switches he was showing me, the windshield had gotten a picture of an airport in it and then once we started moving so did the picture, so it was like we were actually moving on the ground. And we had to wait a little bit to do one more checklist before we took off, and then I was driving the airplane!

It didn't behave quite like a go-kart, but I kept it on the runway and he told me when to pull back on the control column (I had to hook my hooves over it, since I couldn't hold the demi-wheel with my hooves like he was holding it with his hands).

He told me when I was doing something that the airplane shouldn't and sometimes the airplane told me too. I tried to climb too fast and it started shaking the control column and saying 'stall,' and I had to make the nose go back down so it could get some more speed.

Once I'd gotten some practice with the controls, he let me do the flying without his help, and he just told me every now and then what I should do. It was strange, because it was almost like flying myself except that the airplane didn't respond as fast as I did, so I had to plan ahead and be gentle with the controls or else I would flip it upside down and then crash and he had to reset it so we could start back before where I'd crashed.

It was pretty smart to have this to practice in rather than a real airplane.

He told me to call for a vector to the airport, so I did, and then used the compass to point me in the right direction, and he showed me how the airplane could see different kinds of radio beacons so that it would know where it was. I didn't have to use them but it was one way that all airplanes could know where they were when it was too cloudy to see.

I didn't land the first time I was lined up with the runway; he had me do a touch-and-go so that I could get a feel for flaring the airplane except it turned into a touch and crash because I pulled the nose up too much when he told me to pull it up. So we had to try again and the next time I was more careful on the controls and it was a little bit wobbly going along the runway but he said that it had a strong landing gear and would survive that landing.

Well, I wanted to get it right so we tried a couple more times until I finally had it figured out and made a perfect landing on the runway and he said I'd done a good job.

Getting out of the simulator and back on solid ground was a little bit disorienting because I'd gotten so into being there that it was strange to not see an airport around us when I went out the door in the back and he said that real pilots felt that all the time, especially after a really intense session.

I thought before we left they'd like to see me fly, and so we went outside and I couldn't go too high because we were right next to the airport and I didn't want to cause them any problems since there were lots of airplanes flying in and out, but I knew that as long as I stayed below a few hundred feet I wouldn't be in anybody's way, so I took off and got up some speed and then started flying around lampposts and doing wing rolls on the driving paths, and they were impressed when I finally landed.

We went out to dinner with Jodi and Chuck, at a restaurant called the Hanger One Steakhouse and it had a control tower and an airplane hanging from the ceiling inside, which was really neat. And I wound up talking a lot with Chuck because he was a very experienced pilot, and it was fun to see where our experience overlapped and where it was different. He finally admitted that in a lot of ways I was the better flier, and that I'd flown in weather that he wouldn't wish upon his worst enemy.

But a lot of our experiences were kinda the same, too, even if mine were a little bit more extreme. And I'd learned from flying the simulator that what I could do with my wings was a lot different with what an airplane could do, because once you lost control it was really hard to get it back because of the delay in response. Plus, you couldn't just fold the wings and drop until you got good air again. Although even for us, that was kind of a last resort.

When it was time to go I hugged Jodi and Chuck and thanked them for the wonderful day. And Chuck said that he'd make sure that I got my simulator time counted on my pilot's license, just in case one day I decided that I wanted to fly an actual airplane and not a simulator.

It was dark when we got back to the hotel, and I went right up to my room, put the blankets back on the chair, and curled up to sleep.

September 2 [National Institute for Aviation Research]

September 2

It was another cloudy day, but they were kind of breaking up. I'd hoped that they'd clear before the sun came up but they didn't.

I took a shower and shook myself off then sat on the bed to preen my wings. It had a white comforter and I decided that if I piled up a couple of pillows next to my head and looked straight out the window it was almost like being on a cloud.

I pushed the pillows aside and rolled around on top of the bed, stretching out my back and then hopped off the edge and made a cup of coffee, then went over to the chair with my Bible.

God promised that He would punish the false prophets with a bad storm, and that He would punish the people who had charms to trap other people. And He also was mad at a girl who He had found in a field and cleaned and clothed and then she became a prostitute.

God kept saying how He would punish everyone who was bad, and Ezekiel kept telling them what God told him to say, and he promised that the father was not responsible for the sins of the son, nor the son for the sins of the father.

Then the town elders came to talk to Ezekiel and God told him to tell them that He had done so many good things for them and they had turned their back on Him. He had given them simple rules to follow but they didn't, and so now He was mad at them. And then he told Ezekiel to tell a forest that God was going to burn it. I wasn't sure why He was mad at a forest.

I put away my Bible when Mister Salvatore knocked on my door and we went downstairs to the dining room. Since I knew where we were going, he rode the elevator while I glided down the stairs.

I had to be careful when I did that in case somebody was coming up them, so I had to stop at every landing and look to make sure that it was clear before I could go on. Human staircases are steeper than pony staircases, so it’s probably a good thing that I did because otherwise I might get going too fast by the bottom and when there are cement walls on every side there aren’t a whole lot of ways to lose extra flight speed.

We had the breakfast buffet again and then when we were done eating I had to go back up to my room in order to get my flight gear. Mister Salvatore said that I would want to bring it all, which was exciting. I still didn’t know where we were going, but I was looking forward to flying, because it had been almost a week since the last time I got to do any serious flying, and if I had my camelback that meant that I was (hopefully) going to get to do some serious flying.

I didn’t know if I should get dressed for flying right away but it was easier than trying to carry everything down with me, since I could only hold so much in my mouth.

When I came back into the lounge a couple of people gave me strange looks, I think just ‘cause they’d gotten used to me not wearing clothes and now I was wearing some.

He said that I wouldn’t need my flight gear right away, so Miss Cherilyn helped me take it off and put it in the truck. Then we drove past the airport that I could see out of my window and it was another airplane factory that made Beech airplanes and I wondered if that was where we were going but Mister Salvatore said that it wasn’t.

Instead, we drove through a couple of neighborhoods and past a cemetery and then we went through a parking lot and were on a college campus. Mister Salvatore parked in a parking lot and said that we were here, and I still wasn’t quite sure where here was, but I followed him up to a building that was called the National Institute for Aviation Research.

There were people already waiting for us in the lobby, and the first man who was Doctor Bladud came forward and shook my hoof, then introduced me to everyone else. They were all doctors, which meant that they were very smart. There was a Doctor Grimaldi, Firnas, Mozhayskiy, and Teleshov, and they all taught different things at the research center.

Doctor Bladud explained what they did at the National Institute for Aviation Research, which was a lot of things. He said that there were a lot more professors and we'd meet some of them later, but they did things that probably wouldn't interest me, like nondestructive testing and airplane crashworthiness.

He said that humans had wanted to fly for thousands of years and that there were a lot of myths of people who tried to glue feathers to their arms thinking that that would make them able to fly but of course it didn't. And then he said that over the centuries humans had moved away from trying to imitate birds and made kites and light-than-air flying machines, like balloons, and eventually they had figured out how to put a motor on an oversized kite and made the first airplanes.

And from that they'd learned all sorts of things about aerodynamics and what made things fly and he said that the Wright Brother's famous first flight was a shorter distance than the wingspan of a 747 airplane.

And he said after that humans started turning their eyes back towards birds and found out that birds had a lot in common with our machines, after all, especially birds that could glide long distances like the albatross.

We went to a classroom that was empty, and Doctor Firnas drew some sketches on the markerboard that showed how an airplane got lift, because the wind from when it flew pushed it up, and that was kind of basic stuff because every foal knew that you could tow another pegasus and she'd fly without even flapping her wings. That's how a lot of us learned after we'd graduated from short hops over the cloud.

Plus it was good to build up the wing muscles, since even though you weren't flapping, you had to keep your wings out and angle them a bit if you wanted to turn or change altitude.

So everyone wound up talking for a little bit about the fundamentals of aviation and then they all wanted to take a look at my wings, 'cause they said that there had been some studies done on pegasuses but not enough. So I asked if it was okay if I flew up onto one of the desks and they said that it was and I did. I was a little bit nervous having them all crowd around me but Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were right there with me and they wouldn't let anything bad happen.

I held my wings out and they studied them (which was kind of embarrassing; I kept thinking that I hadn't preened them this morning and what would they think if they saw some crooked feathers) and then Dr. Mozhayskiy asked if if was okay if he touched one and he promised he'd be gentle so I let him. And he said that it felt just like normal feathers which I thought was a funny thing to say because what else would it feel like?

They wanted to see if I could pretend to fly without actually flying, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be, since I wasn't moving at all. And they had me pretend that I was climbing and diving and turning and a couple of times I accidentally flew off the table and once when I did I bonked Dr. Teleshov with a hoof but he didn't mind.

So I was surprised that that had taken up the whole morning because when you really get involved in something it's easy to forget to eat, and if Dr. Bladud hadn't gotten a telephone call I think we might have been in the classroom all day without anybody noticing.

Just like at the Cessna factory, they had had lunch brought in, and it was mostly sandwiches and salad and potato chips but they also had some timothy hay that was just for me and I asked whose idea that was and Doctor Grimaldi said he had ordered the food and the woman from the caterers had been very confused by his request but had said that she could do it.

After we'd eaten we took a tour of the rest of the building, and I got to look at some of the other labs, and they were all interesting. I talked to Doctor Lomonosov, who was in charge of the aging aircraft department. That was important because as airplanes got older things wore out or broke, and it was important to discover them before something bad happened. He had pictures in his office of broken airplanes and broken airplane pieces.

He said that the information also helped the airplane manufacturers make their airplanes last a longer time and be more reliable and he said that there were commercial airplanes with over a hundred thousand hours of flight time, which he said was over eleven years.

Then we went to a wind tunnel, which was a special chamber that fans blew air into and you could see how the air went around an airplane and they asked if I was interested in trying it out for science.

I thought it would be a lot of fun, and Doctor Teleshov explained that if I was willing, they'd have me try without any gear first and then add a few pieces of gear because they were really curious about what that would do to my balance.

So Mister Salvatore went out to the truck to get it while they demonstrated the wind tunnel so I would know what it sounded like. And he said it would be louder inside of it, and that they were going to keep the wind speed low. He said that I could fly in place when I was in there, and they were going to take movies of me if I didn't mind.

It was kind of loud outside and Doctor Firnas opened a small inspection door and let me stick a hoof in (the door wasn't much bigger than that) and also let me put my ear up against it, too, so I'd hear the noise.

It was quieter than the tornado, but not by a lot.

There was also a device that let them put jets of smoke into the tunnel, and he turned that on so that I could see them. He said that made it easier to see where the air was going, and after they'd turned it off they let me go inside and smell the smoke to be sure that it wouldn't bother me.

Mister Salvatore came back with all my flight gear, and they had me get ready by standing on scales—one for each hoof—and they wrote down how much weight I carried on each leg.

So I got inside and they turned it on and it was weird because normally wind's gusty but here it went from nothing up to speed at a nice, steady rate until it got to the speed they wanted.

I flew a little bit downwind of their smoke pipes, and it was really strange to be able to fly straight and level without moving at all.

We'd agreed that they would turn the smoke on and off, so that I didn't have to breathe it in, and they'd flash a light five seconds before the smoke started, and then run the smoke for fifteen seconds. At first it was a lot to concentrate on but after a little while I got used to it.

Each time I put on a piece of gear they re-weighed me, and when we'd finally gotten done with all of that, I got undressed again and they let me rest and have a snack before we went to the next trial, which was going to be speed. This time there wouldn't be any smoke at all; they just wanted to see how I flew at different speeds. They said that they were going to let the wind slowly speed up and once I started to move backwards they would figure that was my top speed for the test and turn it off, because they were a little worried about me blowing down the tunnel and crashing against the barrier at the end.

That was really tricky because I had to concentrate really hard on my speed since the wind came up slowly, I had to move faster and faster to keep up with it and it wasn't anything I'd ever tried before. So the first run ended too soon when I overflew the marks and then coasted back a little bit to get back in place and they thought that meant I couldn't fly any faster and shut it down. Then we decided that as long as I was in the glass part it would be all right, but they said that once I got back to the halfway part of the last pane of glass, they were going to shut it down just for safety.

So we tried again and that went a lot better because I didn't have to stay as close to one spot. It was still too short—it looked plenty long enough when I wasn't inside it flying, but when I was I really got to one end or the other pretty quickly.

The last test they wanted to do was a gliding test and that was a lot more difficult to set up, because they had to get the speed just right so that I wouldn't blow too far back or go too far forwards and it worked best when I flew up at the very end of the tunnel and then glided forwards until I got to the very front.

It was a nice way to cool down, too.

When we were all done they let me rinse off outside with a garden hose, because their building didn't have any proper showers or baths in it and I didn't have my shampoo or conditioner anyway.

We got to go out to dinner again, this time to a restaurant called the Newport Grill and I had Norwegian salmon and lobster ravioli for dinner, and we talked more about flying and then before we ordered dessert they gave me an honorary degree, just for flying in their wind tunnel, which I thought was really nice of them. It was in a frame, so I could hang it on my wall. And they said that once they finished analyzing their data they'd send me copies of their research papers, even if I was back in Equestria. And then we had ice-cream for dessert, and everyone shook my hoof, and we went back to the hotel.

We had to leave in the middle of the night to get to the train, so Mister Salvatore carried my flight gear up to my room and then helped me pack everything into my saddlebags, and he said that he'd call me when it was time to wake up and if I didn't get up he'd just come into my room and get me. So I told him that I'd be sleeping in the chair so that was where he should look. And then I pulled my blankets over to the chair and curled up in them and I wanted to bring the telephone closer to make sure that I would hear it but the wire wasn't long enough to get it off the nightstand.

September 3 [Eastbound Trains]

September 3

It felt like I'd hardly fallen asleep when the telephone ringing woke me up and at first I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I remembered and I stuck my head up and jumped out of the chair to answer the telephone and got the blanket stuck around a hind hoof and had to shake it loose.

The clock said it was two, which was a really dumb time to be awake after being awake all day long. I don't know why the train didn't run at a more convenient time. Maybe nobody in Kansas ever used it.

I answered the telephone and Mister Salvatore was too cheerful. He said that Miss Cherilyn was already up and that she was ready to leave and that they were just waiting on me, so I grabbed my saddlebags and trotted down the hall to their room.

Miss Cherilyn was awake but not much more than I was. She had an old t-shirt on that said Montclair College Prep, and a pair of lounging pants. Mister Salvatore looked like he was wide awake, though, and he was wearing nice clothes.

The movement of the truck and the soft swishing noise of its tires on the road were too much for both me and Miss Cherilyn and we fell asleep again until we got to the train station, and he had to wake us up and get us out of the truck.

We sat on a bench on the platform and she put on his jacket because it was a little bit chilly for her, and I dozed off until I heard the train horn, then I sat up and watched for it.

There wasn't anybody else on the platform waiting for the train, and when it stopped the open door on the railcar was lined right up with us. I think that the conductor told the engineer where to stop, so we wouldn't have to go as far.

We got aboard and as soon as all our bags were inside, the train started moving again. I guess they didn't want to spend any extra time waiting at the station.

After he'd closed the door, the conductor led us upstairs to our rooms. Because we'd gotten on the train partway through its journey, we didn't have rooms that were beside each other, but instead we were at opposite ends of the car.

My bed had already been folded down by the conductor, and I was more than ready to be in it, so I dropped my saddlebags on the floor and snuggled up under the covers and it didn't take me very long to fall back asleep.

It was light outside my window when I woke up, and I looked out the window and tried to guess where the train was. Wherever we were was kinda big, because we kept passing houses and buildings and we were going kind of slowly, and then we crept through a big railroad yard.

There was a long train made up of flat cars that had fingers on them to hold rails, and I also saw some strange flat car pairs. One end had an octagonal piece of steel on it, and then the next car behind it had a little shed with and angled roof, and they were all coupled together in pairs like that.

The conductor announced that we were stopping in Kansas City, so I guess that's where we were. The train went over a wide river, and then it slowed down some more until it finally stopped.

We had twenty minutes at the station so we could get out and stretch, and so I did. I trotted up and down the platform and then flew up a little bit to exercise my wings a little bit.

I didn't see Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn on the platform, so I guess that they were still sleeping. I could have flown to the other side of the train and looked through their window but I didn't think I was supposed to fly over the tracks; besides, I couldn't remember what room was theirs. I hadn't been all the way awake when he told me.

When the conductor said that it was time for the train to leave, I flew back and landed on the platform at the back of the line of people boarding, and hopped aboard and once the train went out of the station I went to the dining car to get breakfast. I didn't think that Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn would mind if I ate breakfast without them.

I had a biscuit with a crab cake on it for breakfast, and then I went to the Viewliner car and watched the scenery go by. It was starting to be kind of familiar to me, since this was the third time I'd taken this train.

Miss Cherilyn came by after a while and watched out the windows with me. We were in Missouri and it was not as flat as Kansas and had more trees.

We had an early lunch which for Mister Salvatore was breakfast, and as we were finishing the train was running alongside the Mississippi river on its way to Fort Madison. Mister Salvatore said that when he was a boy he'd read Tom Sawyer and he'd always wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and I thought that might be fun, too. I guess you'd have to be careful, though, because there were a lot of big barges that we saw and at night I don't know if you'd be able to see them at all.

It was kind of sad to leave the river behind because after we left Fort Madison it wasn't too long before we were back in farmland.

When we got to the edge of Chicago, he told me that I'd better get to my room and pack my bags, but I didn't think I needed to because I hadn't unpacked them and besides the train made its last stop there, so we wouldn't have to be in a hurry to get off of it.

He said that we were going to have to get on another train when we arrived in Chicago but that it would be a few hours before it came so we could do a little bit of sightseeing in Chicago. He told me that if I wanted to drive anywhere that wasn't too far from the station to let him know and he could have a car waiting for us.

Well, I couldn't think of anything in particular that I wanted to do in Chicago, so we decided we'd just go walk around the park for a little bit and then go back to the station.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn put all their luggage in special lockers and then we walked over to the lakefront. I saw the peninsula that I'd flown to and asked if I could fly there again and he said I could and it was too bad that I didn't have my airplane radio, so he told me to stay low and not spend too much time out there, so I flew off and over all the boats, then flew around the whole perimeter of the island before coming back.

We walked around and looked at the flowers and there was a little courtyard where a man was doing magic tricks even though humans don't have magic at all and so I thought that maybe he was using enchanted props but Mister Salvatore said it was all sleight of hand. He said that a lot of it was pretty simple tricks and maybe they were but I couldn't figure out how he was doing them.

Since it was a nice day, we got ice cream from a man with a cart and sat at a bench to eat it, and then we had to go back to the station to get our next train.

Our luggage was still in the locker, and it took Mister Salvatore's key when he'd gotten our baggage. Then we went to the train platforms and found our new train, which was called the Capitol Limited. It was a two-story train just like the Southwest Chief had been, but it didn't have as many cars on it.

This time we got two rooms that were right next to each other and had a little door between them. Mister Salvatore said it was so that he could keep an eye on me and I said that I could make sure he got up for breakfast.

I'd gotten settled in and unpacked my saddlebags so that I could recharge my airplane radio and my GoPro, because even if I wasn't using them they lost their charge, and I was hoping that tomorrow I'd be able to fly some.

We left Chicago on time and I got an occasional look at the downtown and all the skyscratchers as we left town. And the first part of the trip was the same as if we were going back to Kalamazoo, but then the train took a different track and went almost due east.

We ate a late dinner and then went forward to the Viewliner car but all the seats were taken, so then we went back to our rooms.

I watched Indiana go by outside my window, and it was pretty flat and mostly fields. When the conductor announced that our next stop was South Bend, I saw the flashing beacon of an airport off in the distance and that was the South Bend airport which is the one I talked to when I was flying to Sunny Haven.

There were a couple of college-age people on the platform at South Bend and I wondered if they were on their way back to college. I would be, soon—it started next week. And it was going to be kind of sad that I wouldn't have as much free time, but it was going to be nice to see everyone again. And maybe meet some new people, too.

It was starting to get dark after we left South Bend and I was getting a little bit bored of watching farms go by, so I wrote in my journal for a while (which was kind of challenging, since the train would bump around) and then I got out my Bible and read more of Ezekiel.

God kept telling Ezekiel how bad all of the Israelites had become, and He told Ezekiel about two prostitutes and one of them liked having her breasts fondled and lusted after men who had donkey dicks and ejaculated like horses and I thought that was strangely specific. But I guess if there was a company which sold toys like that maybe lots of people liked them.

I wondered if Meghan would like having sex with an actual stallion. Or maybe she preferred girls and mares and just had the toy for fun.

God told Ezekiel that his wife was going to die, and told Ezekiel not to mourn her, and I thought about how many bad things had happened to Job and I hoped that wouldn't happen to Ezekiel. And then God started telling Ezekiel about all the bad things that were going to happen to all the other nations to punish them for being wicked, even though He said that He took no pleasure in the deaths of the wicked, and that He wanted them to turn from their evil ways and become good. He said that if they turned from their evil ways and became good, then their past deeds would not count against them.

He told Ezekiel to warn the shepherds that He was mad at them for losing all of His sheep, and said He was going to take them back and herd them into a safe pasture, which was wise of him. Sheep aren't too smart and can't really be trusted on their own.

He promised Ezekiel that He was going to bring back all the people and wash them clean and then rebuild their houses and cities and never let them go hungry again, and He said that when He did they were going to be ashamed of how bad they'd been.

That made me happy that He was bringing them back like He'd promised, and hopefully now everyone would have learned their lesson and they would follow God's rules like they were supposed to.

I put away my Bible and pushed the button so that the attendant would come and make my bed for me—I could have done it myself but he might be mad if I did.

He asked me if I wanted the top bunk or the bottom and I thought that the bottom would be better because I could see out the window and it didn't look like there was much of a view from the top one. So he folded it out and put on the sheets and blankets and pillows for me, and I thanked him and then curled up in my bed.

It would have been nice if Aric or Meghan could have come along with me. It was kind of lonely in the train car all by myself.

September 4 [More Trains]

September 4

When I woke up we were still rushing through the countryside, I didn't know where. It was hillier than it had been, and very dark. Every now and then I'd see a couple of lights flash by in the darkness, and I could hear the train's horn blow now and then and we'd pass by a flashing railroad crossing.

We went by a few small towns, and around a lot of curves. The train felt like it was going a little bit slower, maybe because the track had so many turns in it.

I got out of bed and took a shower which was really not all that pleasant because I couldn't anticipate when the train would suddenly go into a turn, and then I'd slide across the shower until I caught myself and a couple of times I had to hold out my wings for balance, too, and the shower was really too small for that. It must be really crowded for humans.

The train was slowing down by the time I finished, and the conductor announced that we were about to stop in Connellsville, Pennsylvania.

I shook myself off and then got out of the shower and sat on the bed and looked out the window. The town was nestled at the bottom of a mountain, and when I opened my door and looked out the other side, I could see a river and more town on the other side of that, so we were in a river valley.

We didn't stay there for very long, and as soon as we left town, there weren't any more houses or fields or anything except for trees on the side of the mountain, and the river on the other side. I think the other side of the car had a better view, so I propped my door open and watched out that way for a while before I decided that I wanted breakfast.

I knocked on the little connecting door and Mister Salvatore opened it. He was looking happy and cheerful, and his bed was folded away and the table was set between the chairs and already covered in papers and his folding computer. He smelled clean and I thought about asking him how he'd fit in his shower but I didn't.

He asked if I was ready for breakfast, and I said that I was, and he told me that Miss Cherilyn was getting ready and when she did we could go, or I could go by myself if I wanted to.

Well, I thought it would be rude to go if they were almost ready, so he invited me to sit over on his side and pretty soon Miss Cherilyn came out of the bathroom all dressed and ready to go. And she petted me on the head and Mister Salvatore put his papers in his briefcase and then we went to the dining car.

They didn't have the crab cake biscuit on the menu on this train, and I wasn't really in the mood for an omelet, so I had the oatmeal and croissant instead. And being in the dining car was nice because we could see out both sides and see the river that ran right next to the tracks.

Mister Salvatore said that we were in the Appalachian Mountains, and that we had to cross them to get to Washington, DC.

As we were going down a hill, a train passed us on the other track. The locomotives said CSX and all the cars it was towing were identical black cars that were full of coal. It was kind of neat to be on the second floor of the train and be able to look down inside of them.

We went through a couple of towns while we were eating, and then we went to the Viewliner car to watch from that. In the morning, the car wasn't so crowded because people didn't like to get up early.

We got to Cumberland, Maryland—which was also nestled in a valley—and the train made a long station stop so we got off and walked around some. It was a little strange having the platform not moving under my legs.

The train went out of Maryland and into West Virginia, which was almost the same as Maryland. Mister Salvatore said that the river we were alongside was the border between the two states, so when we looked out the windows on the north side of the train we were mostly seeing Maryland, which I thought was kind of interesting.

We passed a big factory that made railroad ties and telephone poles, and they were all neatly stacked along the tracks. It was very strange to see, because there hadn't been anything else around it, and it just came up all of a sudden, and then we were back in rural land again. There was a little village to the south of the tracks, and I wondered if everyone who worked there came from that village. It seemed impossible; it must have taken thousands of people to make all those railroad ties.

We went through another little town that was called Paw Paw, and right after that the train went over a bridge and we were back in Maryland again, then it went right over a second bridge and we weren't any more. Mister Salvatore said that the train would keep crossing back and forth between states as it went to Washington, DC, 'cause the train tracks were a lot straighter than the river. I thought it would have been cheaper to stay on one side, 'cause that way they wouldn't have needed as many bridges.

When we stopped in Martinsburg, the train conductor told us that the building opposite the train station used to be a railroad roundhouse, which was kind of neat. There were some in Equestria where the locomotives lived, but I had never seen one. And the ones in Equestria wouldn't have been so big. I guess their steam locomotives must have been as big as their diesel locomotives.

There was also a set of stairs that went above the train and I thought that maybe this station did have a second story boarding ramp, but Mister Salvatore said it was so people could walk across the tracks without getting hit by trains.

Before we left, a silver train called MARC stopped at the station as well. He said that we could get off our train and get on that one and it would also take us to Washington but I liked our train better.

The land was a lot flatter now and there were more fields and houses. We saw a few MARCs go by the opposite way, and when we were stopped in Harper's Ferry, one passed us going our way.

We ate lunch in the dining car, and as soon as we'd finished we had to go to our rooms and pack our things because the train was getting close to Washington. It didn't take too long for me to pack, and then I just watched out the window as we went by lots and lots of houses and businesses, then we slowed down and it was kind of like Chicago where there were lots of tracks and other passenger trains. I saw some that were smaller than the MARC even and they just had an M on them.

There were also lots of wires overhead and I saw a train go by that had a strange arrangement on its roof that ran against the wires. It said on the side that it was an Acela, and I guess it got electricity right from the wire to run, which was pretty clever.

We had a few hours, so we put all our luggage in a little locker again and then we got on one of the mini-MARCs and went to see the Capitol.

There was a big park called the Washington Mall, and it had an obelisk at one end and reflecting pools and the Capitol and lots of museums and we didn't have enough time to visit any of them which was too bad. But we did see lots of the monuments and he said that I could fly over the park but not too high and to not go all the way to the Capitol.

So I flew around and looked at all the buildings and there was one called the National Air and Space Museum which I would have liked to go to if we'd had more time. I decided that if we went through Washington on the way back I would insist on seeing it.

We walked and looked at the Lincoln memorial, and we saw the Constitution Gardens, and we looked at the Vietnam Wall, which listed the names of all the men who had been killed in the war, and that was really sad. There were some flowers and other gifts at the base of the wall. Miss Cherilyn said it had been a terrible, stupid war and Mister Salvatore didn't disagree.

Then we went off the main part of the mall to see the White House, which is where the President lives. I thought it would be neat to meet him but Miss Cherilyn said that he was in China at a trade meeting, which was too bad. I asked if he had ever met any ponies, and she said that she was sure he had. He'd probably met the Princesses, and perhaps some of our other leaders as well.

Mister Salvatore said that he was glad that he wasn't a Secret Service agent, because he couldn't even guess how hard it would be to arrange security for a meeting with Princess Celestia. I thought she'd probably bring her own guards, and he said that that wasn't what he meant.

We ate at a pub called Elephant & Castle, because Mister Salvatore said that he used to eat there all the time when he worked in DC. He said that almost everyone eating there was an important person in the government so if I wanted to, I could stick my tongue out at anyone who went by and that would make him very happy.

I thought that was kind of mean, so I didn't. One of his friends was there, a tall man he said was just named Hush, and he shook my hoof and said that he was really happy to meet me 'cause Mister Salvatore had told him about me.

I had enough time after we were done eating for another quick flight over the mall, then we got on another mini-MARC, and it took us back to the big train station.

Our train was called the Silver Meteor, and it was all one-story cars. Our car was in the back, and we only had one room. Mister Salvatore said that we were going to be getting off the train in the middle of the night, so he'd only gotten the one room for me and Miss Cherilyn, and that he would be up front in the coach car, and he'd come and get us when it was time to get off the train. And he told her to set her alarm for four AM, which I didn't like at all.

So we folded our bunks down right away so that we could get some sleep, and I took the top bunk 'cause it had a short window I could look out of.

It was a little bit claustrophobic being that close to the ceiling, and Miss Cherilyn had to help me get up there 'cause it was a little bit tight to fly into. And then after I'd looked out the window and watched the city give way to farmland, I thought that I could read my Bible some but my saddlebags were still down on the floor and I didn't want to bother Miss Cherilyn by asking her to get it, so I just closed my eyes and let the train rock me to sleep.

September 6 [National Air and Space Museum]

September 6

It was just getting light inside my room when I woke up. I was on the sunrise side of the train, but unlike the train in California we weren't right on the coast so I couldn't really see the horizon.

I had to go down the hall to use the shower, 'cause my room didn't have one of its own. And I went to the wrong end of the car first, then had to go back to the other end.

It was nicer than the Superliner shower, 'cause it was bigger, but there was only one in the whole car and 'cause people don't like sharing showers it might leave a lot of people waiting their turn in the morning.

There wasn't anybody waiting outside when I got out of the shower so I went back to my room and sat on my bed and combed my mane and tail, and then I preened my wings. Mister Salvatore had said that we were getting off the train before breakfast, so I made sure that everything was still in my saddlebags, then I sat down on the bed and looked at the scenery out the window.

I'd picked a good time to start looking out the window, 'cause we went through a little town and then some woods, and then the train crossed over a bridge and pretty soon we were running right alongside of the Potomac River. We went past an airport that had some green air force airplanes outside of it, and then pretty soon we were in the city, although still pretty close to the river.

We passed over it and then the train started to slow down and I got my saddlebags and was standing outside my door before Mister Salvatore came down to make sure I was awake.

We waited with the conductor until the train finally stopped at the station, and he helped us put our bags on the platform and then thanked us for taking Amtrak.

Mister Salvatore found a locker that we could put our bags in and then we decided that the first thing to do was to go get breakfast and then we'd go to the Air and Space Museum as soon as it opened so that we could spend all day there.

There was a restaurant called Pret A Manger right in the train station, and they had breakfast sandwiches, so I got one with egg and mushroom which was pretty good. And their coffee was good, too. They said that their coffee was fair trade and their eggs were cage-free and I didn't know exactly what that meant, so Miss Cherilyn said that meant that they paid a fair price for their coffee and that the chickens who laid the eggs weren't kept in little cages.

I had never heard of chickens being kept in cages, and I couldn't think of why anybody would want to. All you needed was a coop and maybe a fence to keep predators out.

We got on the mini-Marc and took it to the Air and Space Museum. I flew down the Mall until I got to the front doors then flew back because I was a lot faster than Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and it was rude to rush ahead of them like that. Then I flew back to the museum again because I thought I'd seen a sign on the door that said it was closed, and I was right—I had seen that. So I flew back to them and Mister Salvatore looked at his watch and then said that he hadn't remembered when they opened but he promised me that they would be open because the only day that they were closed was Christmas, or when the government was shut down because Congress couldn't agree on a federal budget.

So we had over an hour to find something else to do, and Miss Cherilyn suggested that we could go to the castle because it was open now and it might be fun.

It was neat because it told us about all the other museums and what we could see there, and the computers would try and answer your questions when you talked to them. I could get mine to do things by talking to it but it wouldn't talk back to me.

There were a lot of museums and I think I could have spent a week just looking at them if I wanted to see everything. Maybe ponies should have a week to look at museums, but I wasn't sure when would be the best time. Right after we came would probably be confusing, it would be too much all at once and a lot of it wouldn't mean anything. But right before we left could be time better spent with our friends.

Maybe they'd already thought about it and maybe there were some ponies who spent their summer vacations going from museum to museum. I guess I was kind of sad that I'd never have a chance to see them all, but I didn't regret how I'd spent my summer.

Even though it was still too early, we went back outside and I flew a big lap around the Mall, and then the second time I went around I landed next to a wedge that had marble soldiers in it, which was a monument to the Korean War. And then I flew on to an ornate marble gazebo, and when I got back to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn he said that the marble gazebo was a monument to World War One.

So that made six wars that I'd heard about and I was pretty sure that I remembered that America wasn't even three centuries old yet so I asked Mister Salvatore just how many wars they'd had and he said that it depended on how you counted, but at least eight significant wars. So then I wanted to know how come there had been so many and Miss Cherilyn said that would take weeks to explain and she was pretty sure that there had been more than eight. She said that she wasn't sure if there had ever been a time when America wasn't at war with somebody.

Mister Salvatore said that was really cynical and she said that didn't make it any less true.

I wasn't sure what to believe. I'd seen a lot of the country on my trips so far, and it didn't look like it was at war. I wasn't exactly sure what a war even looked like, though.

We were waiting on the museum steps when they opened the doors, and Mister Salvatore said that we had to leave by three to make our next train but as long as I promised to be by the main doors by then I could go around the museum by myself.

Well, that was nice of him but I didn't want to. It would have been lonely by myself. So I said that I wanted to see the airplanes first because they had the largest collection of airplanes in America including the very first one, but I didn't want to do it by myself and that made him happy. So he reached down and petted my mane and said that we'd all go see the airplanes.

We looked at the Wright Flier and it was hard to imagine how the Dreamliner had come from that. Their airplane was cloth and sticks, and now airplanes were made out of metal or fancy tape. And there were some other older airplanes that were just as simple as it was. But it was very important because it was the first real airplane that humans had invented.

There was also the Spirit of St. Louis, which was famous because the pilot was the first one to cross the Atlantic by airplane all by himself. He flew it around some after that and then he flew it to Washington and gave it to the Smithsonian and it had been here ever since then.

It was next to the Bell X-1 which was powered by a rocket and was the first airplane to fly faster than sound. I didn't think you could fly faster than sound, but Mister Salvatore told me that there were now lots of airplanes that did and there even used to be a passenger airplane which did, but it didn't fly anymore.

Then there was a strange funnel-shaped spaceship called the Columbia, which had flown to the moon atop a giant rocket. Mister Salvatore said that there had been three men inside and they'd gone to the moon in it, and had been the first humans to ever set foot on the moon. He said that the landing module was called the Eagle, and it was still on the moon or else it would be in the museum, too.

And there was also an airplane called SpaceShipOne, which was the first space rocket that hadn't been built by a government. After it had gone to space and toured America, it was also flown to Washington and donated to the Smithsonian.

I was curious how many other famous airplanes had just been flown to the Smithsonian and given to it.

A lot of the airplanes hung from wires from the ceiling and Miss Cherilyn thought that was because airplanes belonged in the air and Mister Salvatore thought that was so people couldn't touch them and it was too bad that you couldn't get a really close look at them, especially since he said that I shouldn't fly inside after I reminded him that hanging airplanes in a pegasus museum wouldn't keep pegasuses from touching them.

There was a big room full of old passenger airplanes, and they were really small compared to the modern ones I'd seen. They were probably the size of airplane that Casey had said that Boeing made which was too reliable, and I looked around for Boeings. There was a 247, and there was also a cockpit from an Airbus A320 which was not as fancy as the one in the Dreamliner but a lot more complicated than the one in the Cessna.

And in one room there was even a moon rock that you could touch, although it was under a cover that my hooves couldn't reach through which I thought was kind of unfair, 'cause Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn both got to touch it and I didn't. It was a little triangle of rock, and it didn't really look like that much but it had been brought all the way back from the moon which was pretty amazing.

We ate a really late lunch and it wasn't much but we were all kind of tired and hungry and they wanted a chance to rest their feet for a little bit. It must be hard to have to walk around on only two legs all the time.

They also had a special theater called an IMAX where we could watch a movie, and instead of being a big flat screen like I'd seen before it wrapped around and the chairs tilted back so that you could see it almost all around you. We watched a movie called To Fly!, and that was really neat. It was kind of short, but it gave a history of how humans flew, and some of it was almost like being flying. I accidentally hit both of them with my wings when the movie was flying sometimes, 'cause it was almost like flying for real, since all I could see around me was the sky.

One room had a display of flight gear, and that was kind of fun to see, since I had my own that I had to wear. And it was kind of interesting that humans wore things like hats to keep their heads warm and goggles to protect their eyes and scarves to keep their necks warm and even special suits that were almost like diving suits, but none of them had to wear bright yellow vests or blinking lights or camelbacks.

Before we left, we stopped in the gift shop and there were a couple of big books that had pictures of all the airplanes and facts about them and Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn bought them for me which was really nice of them. They said that they wanted me to have something that I could take back and show other pegasuses and I promised that I would. But I was going to read through them, too, until I knew everything about all the airplanes that were in the museum.

I didn't want to leave the museum because I still hadn't seen everything but our train wasn't going to wait for us, and Miss Cherilyn didn't approve of Mister Salvatore's idea of cancelling our train tickets, renting a car, and driving back home overnight. Even when he told her that we were going to wind up in a rental car eventually so why not now. But we did have enough time to look at the strange spaceships that had flown around the moon and looked at it to make sure it was somewhere that humans could actually land and walk, and then others that had made more detailed maps of it. Even now there were more spaceships that were looking at the moon and learning new things about it and taking new pictures of it.

On our way back to the train station, Mister Salvatore said that there were crazy people who didn't think that we'd actually landed on the moon, that it had all been made up and all the movies and pictures had been fake, and even now that there were satellites taking pictures of the moon that showed footprints and tire tracks and the moon rovers still sitting where they'd been left. And I thought that was kind of dumb but he said that some people were dumb.

Our train was waiting for us when we got to the station, and after the conductor showed us to our rooms we went to the dining car for dinner.

Mister Salvatore said that it had been one of the funnest vacations he'd ever had and Miss Cherilyn said that was just because he'd gotten to fly airplane simulators, and he said that was true and it was much more entertaining than visiting photography museums and he really felt like he'd learned something on the trip. And he said that I ought to have a beer or something to celebrate so I knew that he was in a really good mood.

He said that we'd be getting off the train in South Bend, because that was the closest stop to Kalamazoo and there was no point in going all the way to Chicago and then back again. And I knew that South Bend was pretty close to Granger, so I kind of got it in my mind that maybe I could fly back from there instead of riding in a car, as long as they were willing to take my things back to Kalamazoo for me. I thought that they probably would, and I almost asked, but I decided that maybe I'd wait until tomorrow and see how I felt then. It would be nice to get a long flight in, especially since I'd spent a lot of time riding on trains, but it might be rude to go my own way before our trip was over. Especially since I was sure they'd put a lot of effort into finding the right trains to ride and places to go, and there had been a couple of nights where Mister Salvatore hadn't gotten any sleep at all.

I should have read my Bible, but instead we all stayed in the Viewliner car watching the scenery until the sun went down, and then we went back to our rooms for the night.

September 7 [Flying to Kalamazoo]

September 7

I woke up with the train stopped in Waterloo, which was in Indiana.

After I'd taken a shower, I sat down on my bed and read more of the Bible, 'cause I wanted to finish Daniel before I got back to Kalamazoo. So I read about how King Nebuchadnezzar was having a dream and he asked his wise men to tell him what it was and what it meant and none of them could which made him angry and he wanted to kill them. But then Daniel found out and God told Daniel what King Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed, and so Daniel told the king, and the king was amazed by it.

I wondered if Princess Luna would have been able to get into his dream, if he let her. Then she maybe could have told him what it meant before he even woke up. Or God could have told him directly.

So the king appointed Daniel as an adviser and gave him three assistants. Then he built a golden image and said that everyone had to bow down to it whenever they heard music, or else they would be thrown in a furnace. But Daniel's assistants didn't want to, because they knew that God didn't want them bowing down to idols, and when King Nebuchadnezzar found out he was angry and said that he was going to throw them in a furnace.

They said that he could, because God would protect them, but if not they would still not submit, so he had them thrown in a furnace and they were unharmed and King Nebuchadnezzar was so amazed that he made them nobles.

Nebuchadnezzar had another dream about cutting down a tree, and Daniel told him that the dream meant that he was going to be cast down as king until he renounced his sins, and then King Nebuchadnezzar was driven away until he was forgiven, then he was let back in.

Later, King Belshazzar who was his son was having a feast and all of a sudden a hand appeared and began writing things on the wall, and Belshazzar didn't know what they meant so he asked all his wise men and they didn't know either. Until finally the Queen told him that Daniel would know, so he sent for Daniel, who told him that the words meant that God had measured him and found him wanting and was going to end his reign, because he hadn't followed God's rules like he should have. And that night he was killed, and Darius became king.

All the other nobles didn't like Daniel so they conspired against him and got King Darius to make a rule that nobody could pray or else they would be thrown in with lions, and then they told him that Daniel still was, and the King was sad but he had made a rule and couldn't change it. So he put Daniel in with the lions and the next morning Daniel was unharmed and told the king that God had sent an angel to protect him.

The king was mad at the other nobles, so he threw them and their families in with the lions, which was mean. I think if he had just thrown them in that would have been enough.

Daniel then talked about visions he'd had when Belshazzar was king, about four beasts that he had seen that meant that the four beasts were four kings and a fourth kingdom and that God would bring them down and their power would be given to the Israelites.

And then he had another vision of a ram and a goat with one horn, which I guess was a unicorn goat. And it defeated the ram, and Gabriel told Daniel that it was meant to symbolize a powerful king who would conquer everything in his path and nobody will be able to stop him, and that vision worried Daniel.

Then Daniel prayed and when he did Gabriel came back and told him that there were going to be seven sevens and sixty-two sevens and they would start when Jerusalem was rebuilt and when they ended it would be destroyed again and it was very confusing what the sevens were, especially since Gabriel said that in the middle of one of the sevens there would be an end to sacrifice and I tried to figure out if you were supposed to add the sevens all together, and if you were why not just say 483?

And then he talked about kings who would come and destroy and then be destroyed, and Gabriel said that the end times would happen for a time, times and half a time, which didn't make any sense at all. Then he said that it would be 1290 and 1335 days and that didn't make much sense either. Pastor Liz had said that the Old Testament had happened thousands of years ago, and that was a lot longer.

So that was a very confusing way to end and I didn't know quite what to make of it. I thought that I would have to ask Liz what it meant. Sometimes ponies use numbers for code, so maybe that's what it was and I just wasn't smart enough to figure it out.

I packed everything up when the train stopped in Elkhart, because we'd be getting off at the next station. And then I just looked out the window at the farmland going by. It wasn't as pretty as Pennsylvania and West Virginia had been, but it was familiar to me.

Mister Salvatore knocked on my door to make sure that I was ready to go, and then I went downstairs and waited, and pretty soon he and Miss Cherilyn came downstairs with all their bags.

So I said that I had been thinking about maybe flying home because I knew that I could fly the distance from South Bend to Kalamazoo and it would give me a chance to stretch out my wings and relax, and he said that I could. He said that he was going to miss me for the drive home, but if I wanted to end the trip by flying back home I could. And then even before I asked he said that he'd be happy to take my saddlebags so that I didn't have to carry them.

I stood up on my hind hooves and hugged him and he told me to be careful and make sure that I had my portable telephone with me so I could call him if I needed him.

We got off the train and there was a little black car called a Yaris there for us and Mister Salvatore said that when he got back to the field office he was going to make sure whoever had ordered the car for him got to do all pony-related paperwork for the next year.

It was bigger on the inside than it had looked, although some of the luggage had to sit beside me in the back seat.

He said that we could go out to breakfast first, so that I wouldn't be flying on a completely empty stomach, and so we stopped at a Burger King and I had oatmeal and shared a Cinnabon with Miss Cherilyn. Mister Salvatore asked if I wanted a paper crown but I said it would fall off when I was flying and he said that was a good point.

Miss Cherilyn helped me get dressed in my flight gear, and I called the South Bend airport to tell them that I was flying and they told me to stay under a thousand feet until I was across the Michigan state line. I said that I would—I wasn't exactly sure where that was, but I thought that once I got closer to it I probably would start to see some familiar towns and then I would know. And if I climbed late, that was okay.

I set my pilot's watch to show me directions to the Kalamazoo Airport, and I hugged both of them before I took off. When I was in the air, I made one circle around the parking lot and they waved at me and I waved back.

I found a road pretty quickly that was going the way I wanted to, so I followed it along. It went past a university that had a big stadium, and then past some shopping malls, and then it ended but there was another diagonal road that I could see, so I angled my course a little bit more that way, even though it wasn't quite on a straight bearing to Kalamazoo. It was pretty close, and it was easier than looking at my watch every few minutes to see if I was still flying on the best path.

Up ahead I saw a little town and a big industrial building that looked familiar and I realized that I was almost over Granger, so I turned more to the east and dropped down some and flew over Sunny Haven. It was still kinda early and I guess nudists don't get up much earlier than anybody else, 'cause there wasn't anybody by the pool and there was only one older man I saw walking across the lawn and he wasn't looking my direction but I didn't think he was anybody I'd met before, so I turned north and flew on.

I knew that the industrial building that I could still see off to my left was right at the border, so once I'd not only flown north of it, but one more road just to make absolutely sure, I called the airplane directors in South Bend and told them that I was north of the border and north of Granger and asked if I could climb and they said that I could.

I took my time on the way back, and I even landed once when I was near a town called Marcellus. I didn't have to but I wanted to, and so I wouldn't waste too much energy I made a long shallow glide down.

I sat on the edge of a cornfield and relaxed for about an hour and then I took off again.

When I got close to the 131 Highway, I called the Kalamazoo airplane directors so that they would know where I was, and then started descending so that I'd be under a thousand feet when I crossed it because that made things easier for them.

I flew straight to my house and when I went inside I found that my saddlebags were already on my futon and there was a little paper crown on top of them, too. And the other gifts I'd gotten which didn't fit like the books and the pictures were all neatly set beside that, too.

I sent Meghan a telephone telegram to let her know that I was back at my apartment, and then I had a snack of hay. There was no way I was going to finish what was left before it was time to move back into the dorm, so hopefully Peggy wouldn't mind if I had some of a hay bale in our room. I should have asked her when I was in Colorado.

I got out of my flight gear and took a shower, and I should have put all the things on the futon away but instead i sat in the papasan and fell asleep.

It was thundering when I woke up and I put on my flight gear as quickly as I could and my weather radio too and went off the balcony and I was trying to call Mel as I climbed and by the time he finally answered my radio calls the thunder had stopped, and there hadn't been any rain at all. And he said that there was nothing to worry about on the radar but he was glad that he had me back.

So I felt a little bit foalish that I'd rushed off for nothing. I should have tried to call Mel first.

On my way back I checked to make sure that the bird feeder at Aric's house was full, and it was. And I flew back home and put everything away and I was surprised to find that there was some food in my electric icebox that I didn't remember being there and also there was a bag of cooking supplies and I realized that Meghan had probably brought it over before 'cause she'd wanted to make dinner for me.

And then I thought she'd probably be surprised if I made it instead so I looked at what she had and thought she probably meant to make a pasta casserole and I thought I could remember how to do it.

I didn't have it done when she came over, but it was in the oven and I was pretty sure I'd done it right.

Well, she was surprised and a little bit disappointed because she'd wanted to make it with me, but we sat on the futon and I started telling her about my vacation while we drank some of the wine she'd brought and she liked that, too.

I'd just finished telling her about the tornado when the timer beeped and she got up and took it out of the oven so it could cool some.

She said that she'd gotten the movies that I'd sent her, and that the one of the tornado was already on YouTube and it had gone viral which sounded bad but she said it was good. She said that it already had ten million views, which was a lot.

We talked about my trip until it was dark outside, and then she folded down the futon and turned off the lights and said that she had another surprise for me. She said that since I was curious about what Brazilian waxing was she had gotten it done then she said that I was going to have to undress her to find out what it was.

I said that I wasn't sure that I'd be able to see it with the lights off and she said that she was confident I'd notice.

I had a little bit of trouble with her bra and she had to help me, and I still couldn't figure it out until I took her panties off and she was right, it was pretty obvious. So that was really different but I liked it. I asked her if that meant she wasn't a furry anymore, and she wanted to know how I'd gotten that idea, so I said that Christine had told me that she was a furry and she said that being a furry didn't have anything to do with body hair but was a term for people who liked sapient animals or ponies like me.

So then I said that maybe that made me a smoothy and she thought that was really funny.

Even though we'd gone to bed a little bit early, we didn't get to sleep until it was pretty late, 'cause we had a lot of missed time to make up for.

September 8 [Close Combat]

September 8

I woke up before Meghan and snuggled up against her until her alarm went off, then after she'd made it stop I stuck my head under the covers and when she asked what I was doing I said that I was looking at her bikini wax. It was kind of weird to see, it was like when somepony got a manecut or a new tail-style, it took a while to get used to and then after a few days you couldn't quite remember what they'd looked like before.

I'd just planned to look, but then Meghan reached under my tail and so I had to get her back, and we wound up ignoring her alarm the second time it went off, too. And then even she didn't want to and I didn't want her to, she had to get out of bed or else she would be late to work. She said that it probably wouldn't be bad if she didn't show up because tomorrow was her last day and they couldn't really fire her at this point but I reminded her that it was important to be there because other people depended on her being there and doing her job. Her friend who drove her to work would probably also be mad if she wasn't there at her house.

Meghan said that she'd still rather stay in bed with me, and I couldn't blame her for thinking that, so I kind of slid off the side of the bed and took all the blankets with me. And then Meghan had to get up not only because she was cold but also because I got stuck and she had to untangle me.

When she got the shower going I asked her if she wanted any breakfast and she said that would be nice, so I made oatmeal for both of us, and she had to eat it kind of quick (and I didn't finish mine) so that she wouldn't be late.

While we were walking to her apartment she told me that my toy had come in the mail and she had it her apartment and would bring it over tonight. And she asked if I would need any help moving into my dorm room this weekend, and I said that I was sure that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn would help, or maybe Aric would if he was back. I didn't know when he was coming back, but surely it would be by Sunday night.

Her friend was already there when we got to her apartment, and before she got in the car she unlocked the front door and asked me if I would take her bag upstairs for her and then lock up before I left and I said that I would.

I nuzzled her thigh and she pet my head and said that she'd see me tonight after work. I put her bag upstairs and then locked the door and thought about what I wanted to do today. I needed to talk to Aric and find out when he was coming back to Kalamazoo. And I also had to see Pastor Liz and then I remembered that I was also going to go to fighting practice which meant I'd be home a little bit late and I should have told Meghan.

So when I got back home the first thing I did was send her a telephone telegram to let her know that I'd be late because of fight practice and she could come by and watch me if she wanted to. And then I sent one to Aric asking him when he was going to come back to Kalamazoo, and I knew that he might not reply right away because when I wasn't there he stayed up really late and woke up late too.

Then I finished my oatmeal which wasn't as good when it was cold, and put on my flight gear. I thought that I ought to fly around town and make sure that there wasn't anything new that I needed to know about, since I'd been gone for a while. And so that meant I'd have to stay kind of low so I didn't get in the way of any airplanes.

I didn't have to tell the airplane directors, but I called them anyway and Dori said that she'd missed me and asked where I was flying today and I said just over town, and that I would stay low. And she gave me clearance for under a thousand feet, so I went out to the balcony and dove off and then climbed up over my neighborhood.

I made a nice leisurely circle around town and it all looked pretty much the same as it had before. And when I got to the east side of town I remembered that the farmer's market was open today so I flew down there even though I didn't really need to get any food since there would be plenty in the dining hall once school started again.

But it was nice to greet everyone and one of the nice women gave me some carrots for free, and I also would have bought some blueberries except that I didn't have anything but the pocket on my flight vest to carry them.

It wasn't too far from the college so maybe I could fly there for some fresh fruit and vegetables for my dorm room, although I'd have to be smart and not buy too much or else it could go bad before I ate it.

When I took off again, I flew back over downtown and then looped around the hotel building just for fun. And then I went a little bit north so I could follow over the railroad tracks until they went by campus.

There were a few cars in the parking lot already, and also parked along the street. Even though I was going to miss all the free time I had to do fun stuff, I was really looking forward to classes starting again and living in the dorm with all my friends.

I flew low over the quad, but I didn't see anybody that I knew. And I thought about flying around some of the dorms and peeking through the windows to see if any of my friends were there but that would have been rude. So once I'd passed by Trowbridge, I climbed enough to be clear of the trees and then flew back home.

I had some leftover casserole for lunch and then I sat in the papasan and read Hosea. God told him to marry a woman and have children, and then told him what to name them. And then she left him for a while but God told him to take her back, even though she liked raisin cakes. And he told her not to be a prostitute any more.

And God was mad at the Israelites again because they hadn't followed his rules even though He had just helped them rebuild Jerusalem and He warned them to change their ways or else they would be punished.

It was all very confusing, because maybe this was near the end of the days that Daniel had seen or maybe this was something that happened before. I wish that the Bible had a calendar in it so that I would know.

I hadn't thought to check my portable telephone, and I guess I hadn't heard it chirping at me when I was flying but I had a couple of new telegrams—one from Meghan saying that she would go to the park to watch me, and one from Aric saying that he would be back home late Sunday night but he didn't know how late, so it was okay if I didn't want to come over.

My ears went up when I heard a squealing noise outside and I looked out the front window and there was a big yellow bus with flashing red lights out there, and Trinity got off of it and I wanted to wave to her but I didn't get the door open in time. And a little bit later another identical bus stopped in the same place and Lindy and Caleb got off that one, and this time I was out on the balcony and Lindy saw me and waved then she hit Caleb with her elbow and he looked up and waved at me, too.

I'd missed them, so I flew down off the balcony and hugged Lindy while Caleb went in to tell Trinity I was there, and I hugged her when she came out.

They wanted to have a snack and then go Pokemon hunting with me, so I waited on my balcony until they came back out of their house and we started going around the neighborhood, but they didn't find anything good. Still, it was a lot of fun to talk with them and spend the afternoon together, and Caleb thought it was really cool that I'd gotten to fly the Dreamliner. And they were sad that I was going to move away and they said that they would tell Jeff to have one more backyard barbeque tomorrow, even though he normally didn't after Labor Day, which had been Monday.

And they said that we ought to meet up during the week, too, and I thought I'd like that. I didn't know when yet because I didn't know what everyone's schedules were, but I said that I'd figure something out. And since I knew fall was coming and then winter I wanted to know if there would still be Pokemons in the winter and Caleb said that there would be, and maybe even new types that liked snow and cold.

They had to be home for dinner and I had to go to see Pastor Liz, so I gave Trinity a ponyback ride back to their house and then hugged her and Lindy and Caleb, too, but only after he looked to see if any of his other friends were watching.

I didn't have enough time to make a proper dinner and I wasn't sure if maybe we'd want to eat leftover casserole for dinner tonight so I didn't eat any of that. I still had lots of hay left even though it was getting a little bit stale, so that's what I had for a snack and then I got my glaive and flew off to see Pastor Liz.

She explained how the Old Testament especially wasn't arranged in the order that things had happened, but in what was called the Septuagint order, which was how the ancient Greeks had decided to organize it. And she said that it was based on the style of the book, and that they were called the narrative books, then the wisdom books, then the books of the prophets. And she said that Hosea had taken place before Ezekiel and Lamentations and Daniel and lots of other books. She said if I remembered King Ahaz, it had happened about ten years before him.

And then we talked about what Daniel's vision meant and she said that it wasn't all clear. She said that some of the events he talked about were historical and some weren't, and that there were things mentioned in it that were either bad translations or wrong on purpose, like King Darius the Mede, who had never existed. She said that in Hebrew, names were sometimes encoded in numbers, but that most scholars thought that those were actual days.

I wanted to know if they'd happened yet or if they were still going to, and she said that they had not, and nobody knew when they would. She reminded me that at the end of Daniel, he was told that no one could see the whole prophecy. And then she said that there were lots of people who sometimes thought that the world was going to end because they'd made some calculation based on the Bible or something else and they were always wrong. She said that one famous man named Harold Camping had made multiple predictions and had been wrong every time.

Then she asked me if I wanted to keep on meeting on Thursdays when school started again, and I said that I did, and I wanted to make sure that I'd finished the whole Bible by the time the winter quarter was over. She said that was ambitious of me but even if I didn't it was okay.

When I got to the park, Stellan and Karla were already there, practicing with each other, and Meghan was watching, so I went over and hugged her and then watched them, too.

After they'd finished, Stellan took off his helmet and asked if I was still interested in doing some hand-to-hand fighting with him and I said that I was.

He said that he'd decided that the best thing to do was put boxing gloves on my hooves, because he couldn't think of anything better. I felt really silly with them on my hooves and I couldn't walk right and the weight was really weird, too. But it was important to keep him safe, and he said that what he wanted me to do was describe what I was going to do and then try and do it in slow motion, and then he'd take a look and see if it was something that he thought we could do together or if it was too dangerous.

Well, it was a lot harder to do some things slowed down, but I knew that he wouldn't be mad if it didn't work quite right, so we did our best.

Bucking was the most obvious thing to start with and that's really good for when someone comes up behind you although most ponies wouldn't be that stupid. And he knew about that but figured out that if I was close enough to hit him he wouldn't have very much defense against it, and that that was something where the defense was to not get in a position where you were at risk.

And he didn't know that I could also box forward with my front hooves, which I showed him next. It was really hard to do when I was standing on two boxing gloves, and I couldn't put all that much force in it because I was afraid that I'd fall. But we practiced it anyway and he decided that he could probably step aside and use an arm block to protect himself.

I showed him some dives, too, 'cause those were really effective, since you could use all your momentum to add to the attack. You had to be careful not to hurt yourself, too, though. And that was a little bit easier to do, because I could fly in slow and then lash out with one of my legs in a mock-kick.

After we'd done that a little bit he put his helmet back on and said that if I wanted to, we could try some of it for real, but he thought there was a good chance that we were both going to wind up with bruises, and I said I was willing to try, so he put on boxing gloves too to help protect me and I flew up and dove at him a couple of times while he tried to figure out what the best block would be, and then I did it still kinda slow but faster than we had been and knocked him on his back.

So he said he hadn't gotten his arms up quick enough and we tried again, and I knocked him on his back again. And then he said that even if he managed to block me he'd probably still fall down and wanted to know how other ponies had defended against attacks like that.

I said that spears planted in the ground worked really well. Or unicorn shield spells.

So then we got to talking about tactics a little bit, 'cause he wanted to know how we could get by those, and I said dropping heavy things worked pretty well, or pushing in a fog so that they couldn't see and then dropping things on them. And the techniques were pretty useful to know anyway because a lot of monsters didn't have weapons besides their size and claws and teeth and if you had a few pegasi, you could usually drive them off, even if you couldn't actually hurt them.

He showed me a couple of his punches and I didn't really have a good defense against them, especially since he was bigger than me. If he hadn't been wearing armor, and we were fighting for real, I would have bitten him.

After we were done, we did a little bit of practice with padded weapons and then we both agreed to think some more on different ways that we might be able to defend ourselves in close combat. Even though it wasn't something that I thought I'd ever really need to know, I suppose it might work against a minotaur or something. All I'd learned about fighting them was not to get close enough that they could grab you, and if they did bite and kick and hope that you've got friends close by to help you.

Meghan and I walked back to my apartment, and I asked her if she'd had any dinner yet, and she said that she hadn't, and we both agreed that the rest of the leftover casserole would be our dessert, 'cause neither of us felt like making anything else. And I told her that tomorrow maybe Jeff was going to have one last barbeque for me, and that I was going to invite David and Angela, and I'd have to get something to share with them, so I could do that tomorrow. And also get some food for the weekend, too.

She said that she had most everything packed and her uncle was going to come and help her move Sunday afternoon, but we could still have a nice weekend together before that. And she said that she could help me pack on the weekend, if I needed any help, which was really nice of her.

After we'd eaten, she sat in my chair and I sat in her lap and we watched the movie of me and the tornado team, and it was strange reliving the experience like that and after I'd hit her with my wings a couple of times and almost fallen out of the chair when I tried to bank along with the movie she said that I was going to have to stand on the floor to watch it.

Then we took a shower together, 'cause I'd never taken one after my morning flight and I'd gotten lathered during the fight practice, too. And we stayed in there until there was no more hot water, and then dried each other off and just lay on bed together and relaxed.

She asked if I wanted to watch a movie, but I didn't feel like it, and she didn't either, 'cause I wanted to snuggle with her instead and I thought that a movie might be distracting.

I was almost asleep when I remembered that she was going to bring my stallion toy and so I asked her if she had, and she said that she did and it was in her bag. And she asked if I wanted to get it and it would have been fun but it was also really nice to just be resting with my head on her breast and her arm around my back and so I said that we'd have all weekend to play with it whenever we wanted to.

September 9 [The End of Summer]

September 9

Meghan woke up before her alarm, which was kinda odd. So I asked her and she said that she was getting kind of nervous about school starting again plus it was also her last day at work and she was going to kind of miss work.

I knew what she was thinking, 'cause I was kind of thinking the same thing. Sometimes change was really uncomfortable, even when it was good. You couldn't help but be a little bit nervous about it. And so I put my head down on her chest and nuzzled her under the chin and she asked if I wanted to go horseback riding tomorrow because it might be our last chance to do it together. And I thought that would be fun, so I said that I would and maybe I'd fly out to the stables today and tell Deanne. She said that I could just call her and I guess I could but that would give me somewhere to go today. And I could get groceries on the way back, 'cause there was a Meijer that wasn't too far out of the way.

Meghan said that since she was awake she might as well get up and so she went to the bathroom and then I had a turn and when I came back out she was sitting on the papasan with a blanket around her. And I sat down on her lap, and she petted my back and said that it was a shame that the window didn't face east. I said that we could go out on the balcony but even then we wouldn't see the morning sun, and she said that she was a little bit underdressed for a trip out on the balcony.

I told her that I didn't think the birds would mind and she said they probably wouldn't, then when I turned my head away she pulled the blanket down and when I saw I leaned up against her chest and she closed the blanket around my head.

That was a pretty comfortable place to be, so I just closed my eyes and let her pet my back until her alarm went off and her pocket telephone was still near the futon, and she had to get up to turn it off.

After I let her out of the papasan she said that we might as well make breakfast and maybe we'd have time to eat it before she got ready for work. All I had left was oatmeal and hay and one piece of casserole that we hadn't eaten last night, so she filled up the electric kettle and started heating the water then leaned back against the counter and said that tomorrow we'd have a proper breakfast because it didn't feel like cooking if all she had to do was put water in a kettle.

I kind of liked that, though. I guess to her it was pretty simple but when I got back to Equestria it wasn't going to be that easy to make hot oatmeal or anything else. Not unless I got to be close to an earth pony and then maybe I could use her stove in exchange for making sure her garden always got the right amount of rain.

Meghan asked me what was going to happen to my furniture and I didn't know. I wanted to keep the papasan in the dorm room 'cause it was comfy and Peggy would like it too, but there wasn't much else that would fit in a dorm room and even if it did I couldn't take it back to Equestria with me. I'm sure that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn knew that. Maybe they would sell it to someone else, or maybe they would keep it in case the next pegasus wanted it.

It was nice to have time for breakfast without being too rushed, and when we were done eating, I brushed Meghan's hair while she was getting dressed.

I put all my flight gear in my saddlebags and she strapped them on, then filled up my camelback for me and helped me put that on. I'd have to take it off again to put on my flight vest, but that was okay.

We got to her apartment before her friend, so she helped me put on my vest and then we went out on the porch and waited for her friend to arrive.

Once she'd gone to work, I called the airplane directors and told them that I was flying out to Galesburg, and the grumpy man said it was okay as long as I stayed under his flight paths.

So I took off from the porch and climbed up and over the house, then took a fairly straight route across downtown. I climbed a little bit as I went but not too much—there wasn't any need for it.

I followed along the railroad tracks and I was almost all the way to the stables when I remembered that one time when I'd come there early, Deanne hadn't been there yet. But then I decided that was okay, because even if she wasn't I could still spend some time with the horses.

When I got to where the electric wires were, I angled north and flew kinda along their path until I could see the stables and then I went directly over there and circled above. When I was upwind of the stables I heard Henry give a friendly whinny, and then Hoshi too, so I whinnied back and dropped down into their parking lot. Deanne's red truck was there so she must have been around somewhere and since I didn't see her in the training field that meant she was probably in the barn.

I went inside and the dog followed me in and then sat down in the doorway and started thumping his tail on the ground and he looked so happy I kind of wished I had a treat to give him.

Henry was out in the aisleway, a little ways down from his stall. He was all saddled up and tied to the post outside next to Hoshi's stall, and he and Hoshi were rubbing noses which was really cute. And Deanne was in his stall with a shovel which can't have been a fun way to start her day.

Well, I probably should have greeted Deanne first but Henry noticed me and whinnied again so I trotted up to him and let him nuzzle me and I nuzzled him back, then I flew up to the stall door and nuzzled Hoshi, too, which wasn't easy at all. She pushed me back 'cause she was over-enthusiastic.

That got Deanne's attention and she came out to see what was going on so I waved at her and she asked if I wanted to help her muck out a stall. I didn't, really, but I said I could if she had a short shovel. And she said that she'd just been kidding and I didn't need to unless I really wanted to, and then she said that she was going to go around the obstacle course and I could watch if I wanted to, or she could do that later and we could ride together, and I told her that I hadn't planned on riding today but I didn't mind watching her and maybe I'd try the course, too, once she was done with it.

Just then someone called for landing clearance and Henry turned his ears and looked over at me 'cause he was trying to figure out who was talking and that was pretty funny. I lifted up my hoof and turned off my radio so that wouldn't happen again.

When she got done, she took the wheelbarrow outside and dumped it in a muck pile, then put some fresh bedding down in the stall. And she unroped Henry and led him outside, and he was kind of tugging at his lead rope when he saw the course set out.

So she ran around the course for a while and I watched from the fence and shooed the dog away a couple of times, then she walked him around the outside a few laps to cool him down and it was my turn.

I'd never tried it with all my gear on and I probably shouldn't have because the first time through I lost my airplane radio on my sixth landing and had to stop so that I could put it back in my saddlebags. But after that I did well, and I went around the course twice more for practice and then did a pretty quick run just for the fun of it.

When I was done we went back to the washing area and she asked if I wanted the hose, too, but I said that I'd rather not get undressed and then have to get dressed again.

While she was unsaddling Henry, I told her that me and Meghan wanted to come out tomorrow and ride if we could, 'cause school was about to start again and we didn't think we'd have another chance. So she said that was okay, and that she'd be here and she'd try not to wear Henry out too much before.

When she brought him back to his stall he sniffed at the new bedding and then peed on it so that all the other horses would know that it was his, then he stuck his nose in his oat bucket and started eating.

I said goodbye to Deanne and then flew out of the barn and the dog followed on the ground until I got over the trees and lost sight of him.

It was almost straight west to the Meijer—I knew that it was a little bit north, too, but I'd wait until I saw it rather than guess—and I flew over a little lake that I'd never seen before, which had a nice little park next to it.

Meijer was a little bit south of me, and I flew over the roof then looked for one of the little islands to land on. Since there weren't any right near the entrance, I landed alongside the building instead after making sure that there weren't any cars coming.

Even though all the Meijers have the same name, they're not the same inside and I was on the wrong end of the store. And when I got down to the grocery aisles, they weren't arranged the same way as I was used to either, but there were big signs at the end of every aisle that told you where some things were and I guess if you were really familiar with it you'd know what went with what, but I had to wander around a little bit to find everything that I needed.

It wasn't too smart to shop when you were hungry, 'cause you'd buy too much food. So every time I got tempted I reminded myself that unless it would keep in the dorm room or it was something that me and Meghan would eat over the weekend, not to buy it. And also that I'd be having dinner with Jeff, so I shouldn't eat too much for lunch.

I did get some beer to share and I also found they had a set of ice chests by the bakery that had some food which was already made for you and so I thought I'd try the package of sushi that they had.

I ate that out in the parking lot, and it wasn't all that good.

I followed the road back to Kalamazoo, 'cause it angled right towards downtown, and when I got back to my apartment I put all the food away and took a shower.

I sat out on the balcony to dry off and I also read Joel, which was pretty short. He said that locusts had come and eaten everything and I guess that they were like parasprites. And then he said how God was coming like a prairie fire and that all His enemies would fear Him and that God was going to give the Israelites food to replace what they had lost to the locusts, as long as they stopped being bad.

I put my Bible away and flew over to Aric's house, and Angela was in the backyard sunning herself and reading a book so I thanked her for keeping the bird feeder full and then told her that Jeff was having one more barbeque and that she and David were invited, and she said that they'd be there, and she also said that they'd used up the last of the birdseed so if I had extra they could take it back with them after dinner or else I could tell Aric to bring some back from Indiana with him.

If I'd known, I could have got some at Meijer, although then I thought about how hard it would have been to fly back carrying it so maybe it was better that I hadn't. I probably would have wound up dropping it on a car or something.

When I got back home, I saw that I had gotten a telephone telegram from Peggy, and she said that she was leaving tomorrow morning and would spend the night somewhere in Missouri and then be back sometime on Sunday and she asked if I needed anything from Colorado.

I couldn't think of anything, so I told her to have a good trip and I was really looking forward to being roommates again.

Then I went over to Jeff's a little bit early, 'cause Trinity and Lindy and Caleb were playing in the backyard, tossing a frisbee back and forth and so I joined them, and I kind of lost track of time until Jeff came out and lit the grill. And I should have gone back to my house and brought over the beer at least, but we were having too much fun for that.

Meghan found me in the backyard—she was almost to my apartment when I saw her and I called out and she went up to the fence and asked what we were doing and I said that we were playing frisbee, and I had Caleb toss it at me and then flew up in the air to catch it, and she thought that was the funniest thing ever and made us do it again so that she could take a movie with her portable telephone.

She said that she was going to drop her bag off at my apartment and I asked her if she could bring the beer back with her. She said that it wasn't fair that I was having all the fun while she had to work and I stuck my tongue out at her 'cause I knew she was joking.

It was kind of sad that this was our last barbeque together, and I was going to miss them. All the neighbors who came wished me well in school and they said that it had been fun seeing me flying around the neighborhood. And I gave Trinity another ponyback ride around the backyard, and we stayed out eating and talking for a while until it started to rain just a little bit, and then people started to leave.

When me and Meghan were the only ones left, Jeff crouched down and shook my hoof and thanked me for taking the kids Pokemon hunting, and said that whenever I wanted to come by after school I'd be welcome, which was really nice of him.

We went back to my apartment and I told Meghan that Deanne said it was okay to go riding with her tomorrow, and I told her that I'd also run the course again and then I remembered that my GoPro had probably still been filming, 'cause I hadn't thought to turn it off, and so she attached it to my computer and got the movie out of it and she had to do some looking before she found it, and that was a lot more strange to watch than any other movie I'd taken, 'cause it was really bouncy. It didn't feel like I bounced that much when I was on my hooves and I thought that maybe one of the straps had gotten loose, even though they'd been tight when I took off my flight gear.

She said that was probably normal, and it just looked weird because my mind ignored the bounciness.

And then she asked if she could put it on YouTube and I said that she could, so she started doing that and I hopped up on her lap.

While we waited for it to load I unbuttoned her blouse and she rubbed my ears and ran her fingers through my mane, and she was half-undressed by the time the movie finally was on the internet, and I had to stop 'cause there were a couple more things she had to do and I was in her way.

When she was done she turned off my computer and I got off her lap so that she could get out of the chair, and she took off her bra and hung it on the chair, and took her pants off but she kept finding excuses to not take her panties off 'cause she was teasing me and so I held my tail up and kept on teasing her, too, and then she reached into her bag and got out my new toy and said that it was time to try it out.

September 10 [Riding in the Rain]

September 10

Neither of us wanted to get out of bed right away, even though we were both awake not long after the sun came up. I put my head down on her chest for a while, until she had to get up and use the bathroom, and then when she got back in bed she laid on her side and snuggled me in her arms, and fell asleep again, and then she woke me up by rubbing my stallion toy on my belly and she'd brought hers, too, which was kind of fun and different.

We took a shower and then she had me sit on her lap and preen my wings, and then we went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

I'd bought enough food to make omelets and waffles for both breakfast today and tomorrow, and so she started chopping up vegetables while I mixed up the waffle batter and then when I thought it was good she stuck her finger in because she said that she had to test it that way, and her test was smearing a little bit on my nose so that she could lick it off.

So I stuck the mixing spoon on her nose and then licked it off her and she said that if we'd been making frosting things probably would have gotten out of control after that, but that it wasn't as fun with waffle batter.

She let me make the omelets while she cooked the waffles, and I kind of wished that I could have cooked it all by myself but it was really nice to have her in the kitchen with me.

We'd just finished eating when I heard rain, so I opened up the balcony door and went outside to see if it was a big storm or if it was just a passing raincloud, and Meghan stayed a little bit back 'cause she wasn't wearing any clothes.

After I'd seen that there weren't any nasty stormclouds on the horizon, I landed back on the balcony and shook off the rain then went back in. She had a towel for me, which was really nice of her, but it was still kind of wet from the shower so I don't know if having it draped over my back got me any drier than I had been.

Meghan used her portable telephone to check the weather and it said that it was going to rain off and on all day and maybe thunderstorm in the evening, too, and she said that that probably meant we couldn't go riding, but I wasn't sure why it would matter. I didn't mind getting wet and I didn't think that horses did, either. Aquamarine had never said that the horses at MSU went inside when it rained.

So I told her that I still wanted to even if it was raining a little bit and she said that we'd have to stop by her apartment so that she could get a raincoat and maybe also a sweatshirt but if I still wanted to so did she.

Well, we still had a little while even if we were going to go to her apartment first, so I said that we could watch the rain. So she sat in the papasan and I sat on her lap and we watched it out the window. When the rain was light, there were a couple of brave birds that came to the feeder, and I think they'd been staying in the tree, 'cause they flew back into it when the rain got a little bit heavier.

After a little while it stopped and then she said that she'd ought to get dressed so we could go to her apartment but neither of us really wanted to leave right away, so we sat a little bit longer and watched as the bigger birds came back and took their turns at the feeder. There was a blue jay who was kind of mean and he chased everyone off so that he could eat, and then he flew away again and the other birds came back.

I helped Meghan get dressed but I really wasn't much help. I think that I got in the way more than I actually helped, 'cause it was hard enough unfastening her clothes but it was nearly impossible to put them on, except for her panties and her t-shirt and her socks. She didn't mind, though.

I thought that maybe I should take my flight gear just in case a storm came up and I had to patrol, and Meghan said that she didn't think it would, but I'd been surprised by storms before and I didn't want it to happen again, so we got it all and put it in my saddlebags, and she said that she could carry them but I didn't think that was fair, so she put them on me instead and I stood on the chair so that she could tighten up my girth strap without having to lie on the floor. I bet if humans had designed saddlebags for us they'd fasten in the back where human hands could get at them more easily.

It didn't rain at all on our way to Meghan's house and it looked like the sky was clearing a little bit. And I kind of hoped that the weather on her portable telephone had been wrong, but I could still feel that there was more rain wanting to come down.

I guess she'd been busy packing, because a lot of her things were in cardboard boxes and she had to look around a little bit until she found a rain jacket and a sweatshirt. She put them in a backpack and then offered to put my flight gear in there too so I didn't have to carry my saddlebags but I thought that it would be mean to make her carry everything, so I said that I didn't mind carrying them.

She used her portable telephone to get an Uber-car, and it didn't take it too long to arrive. I really liked the Uber-cars, because it gave me a chance to ride in a lot of different kinds of car. I hadn't even imagined that there could be so many different kinds, but there were. This one was called an Encore and it was kind of ugly. It looked to me like it was supposed to be longer but that whoever had built it had just stopped before they finished the back.

It was nice on the inside, though.

Our driver wasn't all that good 'cause he got a little bit lost and then he missed the riding stables the first time he went by and had to turn around and go back. But we thanked him anyway 'cause he got us where we were going.

The dog came running over as soon as he saw me walking up the driveway, and he sort of trailed along right by my hind hooves as we walked towards the stables to find Deanne. We were a little bit early, 'cause we hadn't known how long it would take for the Uber-car to arrive, but her truck was parked out by the fence, so she was probably in the stables.

So we went inside and the dog sat at the entrance like he liked to do, and we found Deanne out in the aisle saddling up Hoshi for me. Henry already had his saddle on and I could tell by the mud on his hooves and fetlocks that he'd already been outside.

I went over to greet him and Hoshi, and when Deanne was done getting Hoshi ready she and Meghan both worked together to put on Peaches' gear. I wanted to help, too, but I thought that I'd just be in the way, so I stood back and let them do it.

It started raining just before we were ready to ride out, and Meghan reached into her backpack and put on her rain jacket. Deanne didn't have a rain jacket, but she had a light brown canvas coat that she put on.

Hoshi didn't really seem to like the rain all that much. She sort of waited at the end of the barn until she was sure that Henry really was going to go out there and not come right back, then she put her head down and followed him, and I felt a little bit bad for her, 'cause I think she would have rather stayed inside.

Once we got a little ways away from the barn, though, she turned her ears back forward and brought her head up and I petted her neck.

When we were on the trail, the trees kept most of the rain off us, and Meghan folded her hood back. Deanne led us along the path, looking back every now and then to make sure that we were still following her and shouting at Peaches when she decided to stop and eat some leaves.

When we got to a section of the path that was well-covered by trees so that it was almost dry, Deanne said that it was a good spot to run them at if they wanted to, so she sped Henry up to a canter and Hoshi got the idea, which was good because I couldn't reach far enough down with my legs to really get her attention. And I looked back and Peaches was cantering along with us, too.

When we got to a turn in the trail, Deanne said that if we wanted a longer ride, we could go along the powerline right-of-way. She said that it wasn't protected from the rain at all, but it was a pretty ride just the same, and I wanted to and then Meghan decided that she would, too.

I guess our luck was with us, 'cause the rain tapered off again not too long after we got out in the open. And it stayed away for our entire trip to where the electrical wires crossed the road, but then it came back along with some pretty gusty wind. The good thing was that the wind was at our backs, so Meghan's hood protected her pretty well, but I felt bad for Deanne 'cause she didn't have one.

And Hoshi kept wanting to run back to the barn and I had to encourage her not to and finally Deanne said that Hoshi didn't want to listen to me so we'd have to change horses. So I got to ride Henry and I think that confused him a little bit, 'cause he looked back at me a couple of times and tried to reach his head back so that he could sniff at me but he couldn't quite bend his neck far enough. Maybe if I'd sat all the way back on his rump he could have.

He didn't really listen to me, either, but he didn't need me to tell him the way back to the barn so it was okay. At least he didn't want to go galloping off.

By the time we got back to the barn we were all pretty wet, and we all had some mud on us that the horses had kicked up, too. Deanne and Meghan started unsaddling the horses and then they let me use the hose to rinse them off. And Henry shook himself off as soon as I'd moved the hose down to his legs which was kind of mean of him but Deanne thought it was really funny.

When I'd finished washing them down I used the hose on myself, too, to get the mud off, and I offered to rinse Meghan down but she said that she'd worry about that when we got back home.

Deanne said that it had been fun riding with us even if it was a little bit weird, and she hoped that we'd come back after school started. She said that it was really pretty in the fall and that there was nothing better than having a warm horse between your legs on a cold day and Meghan's face turned really red when she said that.

Meghan called for an Uber-car and then we stayed inside the barn to wait for it. It was warm and dry inside, which was nice. Deanne had gone in the tack room and put on dry clothes, and Meghan said that she wished she had some, but all she had was her sweatshirt and since her shirt was already dry that wouldn't have done her any good.

Our Uber-car back to Kalamazoo was a Sportage, which was a lot like the Encore but not as nice inside. And I thought about asking if we could stop at Meijer and get more bird food but Meghan's pants were still pretty wet and I thought she'd rather be home sooner.

She hadn't thought to bring extra pants, so she just took hers off and hung them over the shower curtain so that they'd finish drying off. And then she said that she was hungry and I was too, but I hadn't gotten any food for dinner, 'cause I didn't know what she'd want to eat or what cooking supplies she might have brought with her, so we ordered pizza instead.

She sat on the futon while we waited and I sat on her lap to keep her legs warm, and when the pizza finally arrived I went downstairs to get it 'cause she still didn't have dry pants.

After we'd gotten done eating I offered to go to her apartment and get her some and she said that she didn't mind, unless we were planning on going out again later. And I didn't have any plans for that and she didn't either. We still had lots of pizza left—we'd both been so hungry when we'd ordered it that we'd gotten too much—so later on when we got hungry again we'd have leftover pizza for dinner.

Meghan offered to help me pack if I wanted but there wasn't really much to do, and I thought that we could do it easily enough tomorrow. My papasan chair folded up and everything else fit into a few boxes that Mister Salvatore had. The only thing that was complicated was the futon and we needed that to sleep on tonight.

So we decided that we'd watch a movie, and we watched some short movies about Wallace and Gromit which were really funny. I thought maybe Meghan had thought of them because she wasn't wearing pants and in one of the movies, Wallace had special pants that would walk for him but then a penguin had taken their control and made Wallace break into a museum while he was sleeping.

I told Meghan that the National Air and Space Museum had had a moon rock and it wasn't cheese at all. And after we'd watched all of them I decided that my favorite was A Close Shave, because I thought that the sheep were really funny. And it was kind of sad at the end how Wallace and Wendolene couldn’t be together just because she didn't like cheese, which I thought was kind of a silly reason. I liked Meghan and Aric even though they couldn't fly.

We stopped watching movies long enough to have a late dinner, and then we started watching another, longer movie with them called The Curse of the Were-Rabbit when my portable telephone beeped and it was Mel and he said that there were thunderstorms coming and asked if I was able to patrol.

I kind of didn't want to so I didn't answer him right away and just laid back down on Meghan's lap but I couldn't ignore it and she noticed how I kept looking over at my portable telephone and not my computer, and she said it was okay. So I sent Mel a telegram back telling him to pick me up and then she helped me get dressed in my flight gear and put her pants back on.

I'd kind of missed our stormwatching spot, and when we got there I could see lightning off in the distance, so I took off and we checked our radios to make sure that they were still working, then I flew up into the sky.

It wasn't all that much of a storm, it turned out. There was a lot of lightning and thunder but not all that much rain, and it only lasted for an hour or so before it finally tapered off. Still, it would have been bothering me all evening if I hadn't gone out to watch it, because what if I hadn't been there and it had been bad?

We got back to my apartment around eleven and I told Meghan that I was sorry and we should have stayed home and watched the movie instead and she said it was okay because storms were my cheese and it wouldn't be fair of her to try and take that from me. She said that she worried when I flew in storms but she trusted that I knew what I was doing, and I kissed her and then we sat down on the futon and watched the rest of the movie, and when it was over she took off her shirt and put it on me, then she got undressed but instead of getting into bed she went over and turned off my computer and then she went over to the window and looked out and asked me if pegasi ever looked off at distant storms and wondered if their friends and lovers might not come back from them.

She told me that old coastal houses used to have what was called a widow's walk, where people could look out at the sea in the hopes of spotting ships, and I said that we didn't have those, 'cause we could just sit on clouds and look.

Then she got in bed and said that we'd better make tonight count because we'd be back in the dorms soon and it was hard to tell when we'd get any time to ourselves.

September 11 [Back to College]

September 11

When we woke up, Meghan said that her uncle was going to come over at noon, so we couldn't spend all day in bed. And she asked when Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were going to come by and help me move and I said that I had to call them when I was ready, so she didn't have to worry about them showing up unexpectedly.

So we snuggled up in bed together for a while and then she took the shirt off me 'cause she said that I was meant to be naked, and after I'd stretched out my wings I pulled the covers back and kissed her in the stomach and then I said that we'd ought to get up and start making breakfast 'cause the sun was already over the horizon and we both had a lot to do today.

Meghan chopped up the vegetables again and also chopped up a little bit of hay for my omelet, and we watched the birds eating their breakfast while we ate ours. Then she offered to do all the dishes for me and since I didn't have anything else to do and it was a little bit earlier than I'd thought, I sneaked up behind her and tickled her with my wing and she almost dropped the plate she was washing, and she said I was being bad but she didn't stop me either. She leaned over the sink and I made her forget about the dishes for a while.

Then she chased me to the futon and I let her pin me down, and when we finally got done she looked at her portable telephone and said that we'd better hurry up and take our shower so that she could get back to her apartment.

She got dressed and put away her clothes and said that I ought to hide my stallion toy in something so that my helpers didn't get the wrong idea and I wasn't sure how they'd get the wrong idea, because what else would it be for? But she said that maybe they wouldn't be understanding and I thought that they would be, but I put it in my pillowcase anyway to make her happy. And then we snuggled in the papasan for a little bit until it was half to noon, and she said that she'd better get to her apartment and we'd catch up back on campus.

Me and Peggy were going to be in the same room we'd had before, which was nice. And Meghan said that they'd also gotten rooms in Trowbridge, but they were a floor down and in the farthest-away wing. Still, we'd be close enough that we could hang out a lot.

While I waited for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, I took all the blankets off the futon and bundled them up and then I folded up my papasan chair and there wasn't much more that I could do because I didn't have any boxes to put things in and I didn't want to start taking the wires out of my computer because there were a lot of them and I didn't know where they all went.

So I pushed the futon kind of close to the balcony and watched the birds. And I wasn't sure what would happen to my bird feeder. I didn't know if I was allowed to have it outside the dorm, and even if I did these birds wouldn't be visiting me any more.

I could have given it to Tina who lived downstairs, maybe. Although I didn't know her very well—it was kind of odd to think about how we'd shared the same house but hardly ever talked at all. And maybe she didn't like birds. Then I thought that maybe Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity would like it, so I flew over to their house and knocked on their door and asked if they would adopt my bird feeder and my birds.

Jeff said that he would, so I flew back to my balcony and unhooked the birdfeeder and he was in the backyard when he was done and he decided that there were a couple of branches of the tree that hung over his backyard and he could hang it from that if he had a ladder. I didn't need a ladder, though, so he got me some rope and I went up and tied it around the branch and then we put it down low enough that he could fill it with seeds pretty easily.

By the time we were done with that, Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had arrived in Sienna, and they helped me pack everything up, which didn't take all that long. And it was kind of sad when we were all done to see the apartment empty except for my futon and my desk and my chair—he said he was going to come back and get them later.

I asked him what he was going to do with it, and he said that the easiest thing would be to just donate them to Goodwill but that the government's accountability program wouldn't let him, and he had to list them as surplus equipment and then any other government office that wanted them could ask for them and it was really kind of dumb but it gave him something to do when he was bored. And he said that he could do the same thing with the bathtub mat and the drain plug and the shower curtain and everything else that I didn't need in the dorm room.

Well, I thought that was nice that everything was going to get to be reused by somebody else. I hoped that they liked it. And then I thought that maybe I could have gotten a bed from them instead of having to buy a new one, and he said that mostly when beds were available they were either left over from a prison or a mental institution and I didn't want those.

When we got to college, there were lots of cars and trucks parked in the wrong place and people carrying in furniture and boxes and everything else, and we sort of had to work our way through them all. I felt like I wasn't putting in as much work as he and Miss Cherilyn were, 'cause they wouldn't let me carry any boxes, and after they'd taken the first ones up they told me that I ought to start setting up the room the way I liked it.

Peggy's side of the room was empty, and after we'd unloaded everything and I gave Mister Salvatore the key to my apartment (Meghan still had the other one) he asked if I wanted to go out for pizza together or if I'd rather hang out with my friends.

I thought that I'd rather hang out with my friends, but it would be rude to turn him down after he'd spent so much time helping me move, even carrying up a couple of boxes of what was left of my hay bales, so we went together to Bilbo’s.

While we were eating lunch, I asked him if it might be possible to get the tornado team to come to Kalamazoo before they went back to Equestria, 'cause it would be fun to fly with them and I think there were a lot of people in town who would want to see them.

He said that he would have to look into it but he wasn't sure how he could justify it, and then Miss Cherilyn said that it could be educational and she thought he could try to work that angle, and she'd talk to the college administration and see if they could also push for it, and maybe also the airport since I was friends with the airplane directors.

So then I said that we could get Doctor Thomas Thompson to come along and measure things, if there were clouds in the sky, and so he started taking some notes and he said he'd do his best to get the team up here for a weekend but he couldn't make absolute promises because he didn't know what kind of agreements they'd worked out with the National Weather Service and NOAA and however many other agencies they'd had to go through before they'd even gotten permission to come to the US.

It was even more crowded in the afternoon, and a bunch of people who were coming in were staring at me. They were all people that I didn't know, so I guess they must have been new students who maybe weren't expecting to have a pony in their dorm. And after Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn left I went upstairs to see if Peggy was there yet but she wasn't. I could have called her but you weren't supposed to use your telephone when you were driving, and if she knew I was calling she would probably want to.

So I thought that I'd fly to the quad and see if any of my friends were out there, and Luke waved at me and I waved back at him, and I heard a shout as I was getting close to Hoben, so I flew over there to see who it was and Cedric stuck his fist up against the window screen and so I gave him a hoofbump. Then he turned around and told Leon that his marefriend was back and I said that I wasn't his marefriend, and Cedric told me that Leon had been wasting away all summer because he was pining for me and my ears dropped and I felt really bad that I hadn't known, and then he started laughing and said that he was just pulling my leg but that he'd missed me.

I didn't have to use my plastic badge to get into the building, 'cause the door was held open with a brick someone had taken out of the road, so I just went inside and up to their room and sat down on Cedric's bed and we talked for a little bit.

They'd both been back for almost a month, because they had to go to football camp, and they'd already played some games, too. And I asked how they'd done and he said that they'd won the first game but lost in the second by a little bit, and Leon said they'd lost by 54 points and that sounded like a lot. Cedric said it was Leon's fault for not making more touchdowns, and Leon said that he never had a chance to catch the ball because the offensive line was so weak that the quarterback never had time to throw it. But I could tell they were just kidding around, and Cedric asked if I wanted to see their next game and I could cheer them on. It was at Rockford, which was near Grand Rapids, and he said that they had buses that went there for people who wanted to watch.

I said I didn't know yet but I thought it would be a lot of fun, and then I hugged them and said that I was going to see how many of my other friends were on campus, although I felt like I could have spent the rest of the day hanging out with them.

So I flew back to Trowbridge and since I didn't want to go inside if Peggy wasn't there, I flew up and looked through the window, and I saw that some of her bags were on her bed, even though she wasn't in the room.

I went up and over, and only when I was landing on Pebble Beach did I remember I could have just dropped down and gone through the front door. But I was here now, so I opened up the door and went inside, and then upstairs to our room. Probably Peggy had called me when she'd gotten back and I bet she'd laughed when she heard my portable telephone ringing in our dorm room.

She still wasn't in the room when I opened the door, and I looked and saw that I'd gotten a call from her. So I told my telephone to call her back and I heard it ringing out in the hallway, then she came in the door and dropped her bag and hugged me.

I helped her bring up her last bags, and then the two of us spent the rest of the afternoon putting away our things and catching up. She thought that the boxes of hay were really funny and said that it was okay with her if I had them, so long as they didn't attract mice. But she was pretty sure that mice couldn't get in to our dorm room anyways since all the walls were big cement bricks and the ceiling was plaster.

I thought about washing my laundry before we went to dinner, but I decided that I could do it later, either tonight or tomorrow. Peggy said that there probably wasn't anybody else on campus who'd brought dirty laundry back with them, so there wouldn't be much competition for the washing machines.

We sat down at our usual table and dinner took a really long time because everyone including me kept getting up and saying hello to their friends as they got back. And I got lots of hugs from all my friends, and gave lots of hugs and nuzzles, too and it was really good to be back on campus and have all my friends around me.

It was kind of stressful, too, 'cause a bunch of different people were all having parties in their dorm rooms and invited me and I couldn't be everywhere, but Peggy said that it was okay to show up for a little while and then move on somewhere else. So we went to visit Christine and her friends in their suite first—they weren't in the same place as before, but when we got inside their room arrangement was the same. And we sat around and talked for a bit, and Peggy showed some pictures she had on her portable telephone of when I was in Colorado Springs with her.

Amanda had been in New York City, and she'd taken lots of pictures of it. Some of them were really pretty and others of them were really gritty and dirty but they were all interesting. There was even a picture of her sleeping on a stack of cardboard boxes and she said that her friend Grant had taken that one, and she really liked how it had come out even though he was normally a terrible photographer.

Christine had pictures of New Orleans, and it was really pretty, too. I wish that I'd had time to go down there and visit her, and I wish that I'd taken some pictures of my own, although I did have some movies and I knew how to find them, so before we left I had Christine find the YouTube movie of our team fighting the tornado. And Sean noticed that it had over twelve thousand comments, which was a lot.

I thought that we were going to wind up staying there all night, so I asked Peggy if she minded if I went and visited with Meghan and Lisa and Amy and Becky and she said that she didn't mind, and she was going to go hang out with Rebekka and Cat and Ruth, who were all in DeWaters this year. So we walked together up through the quad and stopped partway across 'cause we ran into Gates, and he congratulated me on my YouTube videos and said that he'd known that they'd be popular, and he said that if I wanted to make another one with him where we had filming on the ground and in the sky that would be awesome, so I said maybe we could do one with me catching a cloud and bringing it down.

Then I hung out with the girls for a while and I could have spent all night with them but I hadn't seen Aric in a while and maybe he was back. He'd be happy if I waited for him at his house, but then maybe Peggy would be lonely so I didn't know what I should do.

If everyone still wanted to play Durak on Monday, then I'd go to Aric's after that, or even if we didn't play. And I'd stay with Peggy tonight, 'cause that was fair, and it would also give me time to figure out the shower schedule in the morning. So I hugged everyone and went back to our room and I sat on my bed and sent a telegram to Aric.

He answered back a little bit later and said that he was somewhere in Indiana and he wouldn't be back for a couple more hours at least because he'd finished up in the the theatre late in the afternoon and at least he'd had the foresight to have all his important stuff in Winston already but he had to go back and pick up another load. And he said that I shouldn't wait up for him because there wasn't a bed in his room anyways, that was in Winston. So I told him that I'd see him tomorrow after Durak if I didn't see him sooner during the day, and then I put my portable telephone away and lay down in bed.

It took a while to get to sleep, though, 'cause it was noisy in the dorm with everyone still talking and being social, and I was also kind of eager about my new classes and seeing Aric tomorrow night.

September 12 [Fall Quarter Begins]

September 12

I didn't sleep all that well, and when I woke up I decided that I wanted to fly, because I was feeling kind of twitchy and eager and unfocused, like a filly on Hearth's Warming, and I didn't have my first class until ten anyway.

It was a little strange to not hear the usual bird-chatter in the morning.

So I looked out the window and it was a nice, clear day outside, and would be perfect for flying. So I went into the bathroom to fill up my camelback and then got dressed back in our room, trying to be quiet so that I wouldn't wake up Peggy. And I had a little snack out of the box of hay.

It had been a lot more convenient to fly right off my balcony, and it felt strange to have to go away from the outside to get to the outside, but I knew that before too long I'd be used to it. And I went down one flight of stairs and then out onto the boardwalk, and I called up the airplane directors.

I made sure to tell Dori that I was back at Kalamazoo College and not my apartment on Grove Street. And she gave me the usual instructions and I thought I'd go to the Nature Center, which meant I had to stay low anyway.

I went off the boardwalk and gained speed flying down the hill and over the quad, and then picked up a little altitude before I crossed the brick road in front of Hoben, just in case there was a car coming. And then I started picking up more altitude as I cut diagonally across the eastern end of the cemetery and the neighborhood where Meghan used to live.

My flight peaked just after I crossed the 131 bus Highway, and then I started to glide down towards the Nature Center.

The deer were out in their usual little prairie, but they were really close to the treeline and I didn't see them as I came in, until I got over the trees and they saw me too, and I scared them off which made me feel bad. I hadn't meant to—I should have stayed higher and curved around towards the river, rather than chase them from breakfast. I wouldn't like it if I was sitting down eating my breakfast and a roc came into the dining hall.

So I landed on the high point of the trail and took a couple of sips of water from my camelback, then pawed at the ground a little bit to get myself in the mood, and galloped down the incline and around the curve at the end, and I did the section of the trail that paralleled the river at a canter.

I slowed to a trot on the upside, and after I'd crested the hill again I didn't gallop because I should have warmed my legs up a little bit before, but I'd just been too eager.

I did a whole lap at an easy trot, which loosened all my muscles up and I galloped down the hill then cantered the rest of the way around, until I was at the very top again, and this time I just took off and aimed myself back towards Kalamazoo College.

This time I decided I was going to try and do a slow climb, rather than climb and descend. So I kept my eyes mostly focused on the bell tower, which I could just see poking up above the trees. It was pretty much all uphill to get to it, and it occurred to me that a pegasus who was really good at gliding could probably launch herself from the top of the bell tower and glide all the way to the Nature Center.

I did a descending turn to land back on the boardwalk, then let myself in and went upstairs to our room, but before I went in I poked my nose in the bathroom to see if anyone was in the shower.

There wasn't, and as long as I didn't dally too much I could have a turn right away, so I went in our room just long enough to grab my shampoo and the nice blue towel I'd gotten from Sunny Haven, and then went back into the bathroom.

It felt kind of strange to be getting undressed in the shower.

I set all my flight gear on the little bench and then turned on the water and once it got nice and warm stepped in and rinsed myself off, and I was just washing my mane when someone came into the bathroom—even if you didn't hear the door open over the noise of the shower, you could feel how the air currents in the room suddenly changed.

When I'd finished and shaken myself off, I had to figure out how to get all my flight gear back to my room and I didn't have my saddlebags to put it in, so I laid out my towel and made it into a makeshift sack.

It was Kat, and she was sitting on the little bench outside, waiting for her turn in the shower. I would have said hello but my mouth was full, but I just nodded at her 'cause sometimes humans nod in greeting.

Peggy was awake when I got back to our room, and she was still in her sleeping clothes but she'd brushed her hair already. And I said that Kat was in the shower right now, if she'd been thinking of taking one.

She said she'd wait until after breakfast, because she didn't have an early class, and she said that she wanted to start the school year off right by going to breakfast in her sleeping clothes the very first day.

So while I finished drying off and brushed my mane and tail, she put on a bra and shoes, and then we went to breakfast together.

Their waffle-maker was broken already, but I still had mine back at the dorm. Mister Salvatore had asked me when we'd packed if I was allowed to have it and I didn't see why not. So I wasn't all that disappointed that it didn't work. And the person who made omelets wasn't there, either, and there was nothing on his table. I hope that he just had the day off.

We sat down with Sean and Christine, and she wasn't very awake. Sean looked a little bit more alert, but maybe that was because he had an empty coffee cup on his plate and was drinking out of a second. She was eating her Fruit Loops and I would have been bouncing off the walls if I had that much sugar for breakfast.

Everyone talked about their class schedules, and I found out that Sean and I had a class together in the afternoon, which was nice. And I told Sean about visiting the Air Force base that controlled the satellites and he thought that was really cool. He asked me if I'd heard about the Space-X rocket that had exploded on the launch pad a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn't. I also hadn't seen the new Star Trek movie that had been in the theaters, and that made him sad. He said that we'd have to find a way to get me to see it, and Christine said that maybe I'd decided that Star Wars was the better franchise after having all summer to think about it. But I told her that wasn't true, I'd just done other stuff and not really thought about it.

I had a little free time after breakfast, so while Peggy was in the shower, I read Amos, which was the vision a shepherd had had two years before an earthquake.

God said that He would punish all the nations around Israel, so I think that Amos had his visions before that happened. And he said how he was going to punish the Israelites for being bad, too, And when he showed Amos visions, Amos said that it was too much, and so God relented a little bit. He didn't have locusts eat the crops or destroy the land with fire.

And then in the end He promised that after they had learned their lesson, He was going to build Jerusalem back up again. I knew from what Pastor Liz had told me that He had, but that must have happened after Amos.

So God had told lots of prophets to warn everyone that if they didn't change their ways, He was going to punish them and nobody had listened to them.

I left for class a little bit early, 'cause I didn't know where the classroom was. Since most of the buildings on campus were built on hillsides, sometimes it wasn't so obvious which floor was which, and I didn't want to be late for my class just because I didn't know where it was. So I went in through the front door and wandered around in the hallway until I'd gotten a sense of how the rooms were numbered, and after that it was really easy to find the room I wanted.

It was already being used by a morning class, so I had to stand around and wait. And pretty soon other people started showing up, too, and started forming a line along the wall. Some people sat down to wait, and I kept looking for people who I was friends with, and finally I saw Lisa, who also ran the spotlight in the theatre.

She was kind of surprised to see me there and asked if I was waiting for the next class and I said I was, and so she asked why I was taking it, and I told her that most of what made clouds work was thermal physics, and an understanding of atmospheric thermodynamics was essential for anypony who wanted to advance beyond being a cloud-pusher or a cloud-puncher.

Lisa said that she'd never thought of it that way.

The room was a little too big for the number of people in the class, and I wasn't sure where the best place to sit would be. Too close, and I'd be straining my neck to see everything on the markerboard, and too far away and I wouldn't be able to see it all. So I just followed Lisa and sat next to her, 'cause she probably knew the best place and it was good to sit close to a friend.

Crystal Dawn was in the class, too, and when she saw me she sat on my other side.

We'd all gotten comfortable in our seats when the professor showed up and he introduced himself as Professor Carnot Brown, and he said that if anybody called him Encyclopedia they'd lose points. I hadn't thought of calling him that, and now I would be sure not to.

He told us what the class was going to be about, and gave everyone a copy of the course syllabus and the books that we'd need—I hadn't gotten them yet, but you weren't expected to have them on the first day anyway. I needed more notebooks, too, and I could get all that at the bookstore before lunch.

Then he had us all introduce ourselves, 'cause he said that was more friendly than him reading off an attendance book. And once we'd done that, he asked who wanted to go down to the lab and set something on fire, and almost everybody raised their hand.

He told us to bring our things with us, 'cause once we'd toured the lab he was going to set us free. And so we went downstairs and to a big room with lots of heavy tables that had strange faucets on them, along with normal sinks. And he showed us where all the safety equipment was, and he said that was the most important thing to know.

He said that we could expect to have a lab every Tuesday, and he said that anyone who blew up the lab or broke physics would automatically fail their lab grade. And then someone asked him if he'd been lying about setting something on fire, and he went over to the front desk and opened the strange faucet and I could smell gas coming out almost immediately.

Professor Brown squeezed a little metal tool that spit sparks, and it lit the gas and made a nice little flame, and he adjusted the knob a little bit to make it a different size, then he reached into the desk and got out a brown paper bag and he put it over the flame and pretty soon it started floating away, just like a hot air balloon.

He said that was our first lesson, and tomorrow in lab if everybody was good he would teach us how to make a Cincinnati Fire Kite, as long as we promised to never ever launch one on campus. And then he told us that class was dismissed, and we should go buy our books now.

So I went right to the bookstore, and it was nice because they sorted all the textbooks based on what the class was, so once you found your class you found your book, too. And since I was there, I bought all the rest of my books, too, and I got notebooks for all my classes and new clicky pens.

Since Professor Brown had let us out early, I had plenty of time to go back to my dorm room and drop off my new school supplies before lunch, and I had time to write in my journal, too.

I'd been so excited meeting everyone in the morning that I hadn't really noticed that Joe had never come back, 'cause he'd graduated and moved to Japan, and it was a little bit lonelier without him.

I hadn't remembered to earlier, but I asked if anyone wanted to come see the football game on Friday, and Sean said he didn't know that we had a football team and Christine punched him in the shoulder. She said that they'd been playing for over a hundred years, and Sean asked if they'd won a game yet. I said that they'd won their first game this year, 'cause that's what Cedric had told me.

He said that he hadn't been to a football game since he was in band in high school, so why not. And Peggy thought it would be fun, too, and so all of us decided to go but instead of riding in the bus we'd take Cobalt.

Me and Sean went to math class together, and it was in Dewing. I was hoping that we'd have Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee again, but we didn't. It was a man with really curly dark hair and a beard, and he said that his name was Professor Pampena, and he hoped that we all loved math as much as he did. And he explained to all of us what vector calculus was about and told us how he graded and how important it was for us to show our work especially on tests. And he said that he didn't need to take attendance 'cause he kinda knew everyone in class already either because they'd had a class with him before or he knew them by reputation. I'd never had a class with him before, although I'd seen him around campus, so I guess he just knew me by reputation.

I wondered if he'd had Peggy.

We got out of class a little bit early and that meant that we had the whole afternoon free. And I wanted to fly over to Aric's house but I thought before I did I'd look around campus to see if he was in class, and I'm glad I did, because I saw Winston parked by the theatre building.

I thought about surprising him by waiting in the back, but when I looked in there it was full of boxes and there wasn't enough room for me to fit.

So I got in the front instead, 'cause he never locked Winston, and I stretched out on the seat and after a little while I got kinda bored so I closed my eyes and then I fell asleep and he wound up surprising me instead. Although I bet he was a little bit surprised when he saw me sleeping in Winston.

We drove to his house and I spent the rest of the afternoon helping him unpack Winston. David said that we should all have pizza for dinner and Aric thought that was a good idea, and he ordered some from Papa John's, and I asked if we'd have time to go to Meijer and get birdseed before the pizza was ready. He said that we could make time, so we drove to Meijer and bought one big bag, and got the pizza on the way back.

I hoped that nobody in the dining hall was missing me.

When we were done with dinner, me and Aric went to Fourth Coast to play Durak, and I hadn't forgotten everything over the summer. I told everyone there about how I'd taught the tornado pegasuses to play the game, and then I had to tell about fighting the tornado, too, 'cause everyone wanted to hear about that.

Aric said that I'd gotten busted for stealing a cloud in Indiana, and everyone thought that was really funny. And Keith said he hadn't done anything that exciting over the summer, just worked at a candy shop in Indianapolis. Aric said how come he'd just found out about that now, since he'd been in Lafayette all summer and the towns weren't even an hour apart.

Malcolm told us about going to Pennsic Border War, and at first I thought that was bad but he said that it was a play-war, like the sparring I'd seen at Val Day, only bigger. Seth had spent the summer rock climbing, and Kenneth had toured castles in England and Scotland, and Alex had gone sailing a lot. So it sounded like everyone had had lots of fun.

When we were done playing, Aric offered people a ride home, but everyone agreed it was a nice night out and they could walk, so me and him got back in Winston and I told him that I'd gotten to fly airplane simulators on my vacation and then asked if I could drive and he said no. But after he stopped at the corner of Academy and Dartmouth, he said that I could sit on his lap and steer the rest of the way home.

I kept my head off to the side so that I wouldn't block his view, 'cause he had to know what to do with the pedals. And he drove kinda slow, but I didn't mind.

When we got into the driveway he turned off Winston and then kissed me on the head and said that I'd done a good job.

It was a little weird at first, 'cause we'd been apart for most of the summer, so we kind of had to work to remember what we each liked, and we were also both kinda fighting to get in our favorite positions which didn't work out all that well, and finally he let me pin him down and be on top, and afterwards I lay on his chest and put my head down right under his chin, and he ran his hands through my mane and scratched behind my ears.

September 13 [Physics Lab and Astronomy Class]

September 13

I woke up Aric by nuzzling his chest, and he leaned down and kissed me on the ear, then he said that it was too early to be awake, so I slid my hoof under the blankets and said that wasn't what his body was telling me but I could let him fall back asleep if that was what he wanted.

He asked me if I was going to go on a morning flight and I said I had planned on it, but I didn't have to start early. I was kind of lucky this quarter because I didn't have any classes before ten. I was going to get as lazy as a human.

So Aric asked me what classes I was taking, and I told him and he thought that I was crazy to be taking a math and physics class and he said I was going to be up to my ears in homework. But that was okay because it was fun homework and stuff I needed to know.

He told me he was taking two theatre classes and also class on science-fiction books, which sounded like it would be fun. He said that he didn't know what to expect but that it would probably be easy because that was all stuff that he liked to read anyway. And then I slid my rump over and started tickling him with my tail, in case he'd forgotten what I wanted.

I was feeling really good when we were done and I flew out the window and raided the bird feeder for sunflower seeds so I'd have a snack. Aric threw a pair of balled-up socks at me, but he missed. Then I took off, even though I couldn't go too high 'cause I hadn't brought any of my flight gear with me.

It was nice and sunshiny and I was already having a good morning and I was really looking forward to my lab and class today. And I didn't feel like going back to the dorm to put on my flight gear, so I'd just stay low and alert.

So I flew over his street and then past the end, where the cars couldn't go, and that put me right over one of Western Michigan's parking lots.

I flew south over their campus, keeping low enough that I was out of the way of any airplanes, and zig-zagging around light posts for the fun of it. Then I curved to follow the railroad tracks out of town, gaining a bit more altitude so I was above any trains that happened to come by.

I started having second thoughts by the time I got to the 131 bridge, 'cause I really wasn't supposed to be flying off-campus without my flight gear even if I was staying a lot lower than the airplanes, and I didn't want to get in trouble for it, so turned around and headed back to campus.

The tracks ran right next to Arcadia Creek, so I flew over that instead, and went even lower. I had to be careful, 'cause it wasn't a very big creek and there were trees and snags across it, and I lost it a couple of times when it went underground. I guess that people had decided that they didn't want to let it run naturally, but I bet nobody asked the fish what they thought.

Fish are kinda dumb, though, so they probably didn't care.

When I saw the first road that actually went to college, I followed it and then once I was on campus it was okay to fly around without wearing my flight gear if I wanted to. But I was ready for a shower and then breakfast.

Since I was right by the dining hall, I flew up to one of the windows and looked in—I could see our table, but there wasn't anybody sitting at it yet. Then I went over the building and across the quad until I got to the boardwalk and landed.

I had to wait for the shower—Rebekka was waiting and she said that Ruth was who was inside. So while I waited I told her how over the summer the makers had made me a rope that I could tie to a cloud and she thought that was really cool. She wanted to know what I did with the cloud after it was tied up and I said I could sit on it and maybe on the weekend if there were clouds I'd catch one and tie it up over the quad because that would be fun.

It didn't take too long before Ruth was done with the shower and Rebekka went in for her turn, and while she was in the shower Peggy came in too and I offered to let her go next, 'cause she'd have to get dressed afterwards and I didn't.

She said that she'd feel bad taking my place since I'd been waiting, but I didn't mind. So she hugged me and when Rebekka came out she went in, and then after she came out I took my turn.

Since nobody had come in to wait after me, I could have taken a little bit longer, but then I would have gotten to breakfast late, and I didn't want that. And now I knew the Tuesday morning routine, so I could fly a little bit longer.

It was kind of strange how everyone sort of figured out the shower order on their own. We'd never all gotten together and had a group meeting with all the girls in our wing; the schedule just sort of made itself.

Peggy was all dressed and ready to go when I got back to our room, and she had her backpack with her, too, 'cause she had a class after breakfast just like me.

I thought about taking my saddlebags, but my barrel was still wet, and if I wore them it would take forever to dry off. I bet if humans were covered in a proper coat they'd never wear clothes, just because sometimes it was really inconvenient to get dry.

The man was there making omelets this morning, and he even remembered what I liked. So I had that and some fruit too and that was more than enough for breakfast.

Sean wasn't there because he didn't have any classes until the afternoon and Christine said that made him a lazy bum but that was okay because we could talk about boys and periods and the latest fashion and other fun girl stuff. Well, I didn't know how fun that would be but I said that I was probably only going to have one more estrus before the end of the the year and Christine said that was really unfair. I told her she ought to have been born a pony.

She said if she could have been, she would have wanted to be a unicorn 'cause then she could do all sorts of fun magic with her horn. I guess that would have been nice but I said that I liked being a pegasus because flying was better than magic.

Peggy asked her if she'd worry about being caught by virgins, and she said that she'd let them lure her in and then stab them with her horn and gallop off, and eventually her story would end when an angry mob armed with pitchforks and torches finally cornered her in her forest glen.

Me and Peggy both thought she was thinking about it a little too much.

Then she asked if I'd ever tried to toss a ring on a unicorn's horn, and that was something I'd never thought of doing.

When I got to my physics lab, we were supposed to partner up and I wasn't sure who I ought to pair with, 'cause I liked both Crystal Dawn and Lisa, and I could only pick one. But then Crystal Dawn picked a boy named Austin for her lab partner, and so I asked Lisa if she would be my lab partner.

Well, she wanted to know if I could pull my weight, and I said that I could pull almost twice my weight, 'cause I'd tried it a pony pull once.

And she said that wasn't what she meant. She wanted to know if I was smart enough, and I said that I hoped so but I wasn't sure because I'd never taken the class before. So she said that I was a silly pony but I could be her lab partner.

We each got to go to our own table and Professor Brown said that we were going to play with fire today because he always started with that because everybody liked it and kept hoping that we'd get the chance to set something else on fire. And he said that I was supposed to be wearing a lab coat and safety glasses but I didn't have either and I hadn't seen them with the books for class.

So he took me out in the hall to talk to because he'd never taught physics to a pony before, and he wasn't sure how flammable I was, and we both agreed that we didn't want to find out. And he told me that I could hurry and go down to the physics department offices which were at the end of the hallway and around the corner and I could talk to them and they would see what they thought.

Well, I was kinda upset about that because if I couldn't do the lab I couldn't do the class, but one of the professors found a lab coat that I could wear, and I managed to convince them that if I closed my third eyelid that would protect my eyes. And another professor loaned me a sparkly scrunchie and pulled my mane back so that it wouldn't be in danger, and then they said that I could go to the lab like that but I needed to have my own lab coat for next week.

And I thanked them and promised that I would get it, and then I went back to the lab feeling kind of silly at how the coat was hanging and how the sleeves had been rolled up so that they would fit my forelegs. And my mane felt weird, too, 'cause I almost never tied it back.

Professor Brown thought it was pretty funny, too, but he said that if the department head had said it was okay, that was good enough for him.

The lab was kinda basic, but the main purpose of it was to get us used to how to use the equipment we had to take measurements and he demonstrated a thermal camera for us, which was really neat, and then he showed us how to make a Cincinnati Fire Kite, which was basically folding a sheet of newspaper into a diamond-shape and then you lit the corners and it flew up like a hot air balloon. He put his in a special chamber so it couldn't get away and set the paper on fire, and at first it didn't do anything except burn and smoke a lot, but then it suddenly lifted off until it hit the top of the chamber, where it kind of disintegrated and fell down in embers.

Then we all had to make our own, and not everyone could do it right, so most of them didn't fly at all. Ours did, kind of, but it didn't make it all the way up to the top before it came apart. He said that they were tricky to make correctly, and that he could always tell who the pyromaniacs in class were by how well they did with their kites. And he reminded us again not to make them and fly them unless we were well away from anything that was remotely flammable, because he said he'd lose his tenure if one of his students burned down the college.

After class, I went back to the physics office and gave back the scrunchie and lab coat and thanked them again, then I went right to the bookstore and found where they sold lab coats—there was a little section with clothes which I had never paid much attention to, and that's where they were. They came in little bags that were just marked with letters and I wasn't sure how to know what one would fit me. One of the salesgirls thought that a M would be right, so she took one out of its package and she helped me try it on and it didn't work at all. She said that I was broader around the shoulders than she'd thought, and I finally had to get an XXL which was way too baggy some places and too tight in others and the sleeves were way too long.

But I knew that Kathleen could make it fit better, so I brought it with me to lunch and sat in the dark room and when Donald came to lunch I asked him for her telephone number. And then before I went to my next class I called her and she said that she could make it fit me, but we wouldn't be able to get together for a couple of weeks since she didn't even live in Michigan, and she was sorry she couldn't help.

Well, I was sorry, too, but I couldn't expect her to come rushing up here and make a lab coat fit me, so I called Mister Salvatore and he said that he would find a way to make it happen somehow. And I felt kind of bad making him have extra work like that. I guess I learned that I ought to plan some things better.

My next class was also in the Dow building, and it was about the physics of space, which was going to be really interesting. Humans had discovered lots of things about space that ponies hadn't, and so I was sure I'd learn lots of exciting new stuff.

It was all the way up on the top floor, and it was a smaller classroom than the physics class. And I didn't see anyone that I knew, so I guess I was going to have to make new friends.

The woman who had loaned me the scrunchie was our professor, and she wrote her name on the board which was Professor Mitchell, and she explained all the things that we were going to learn in class and I was really looking forward to it. She said that later in the year, we'd get to go on a field trip to an observatory and that wasn't mandatory but it was highly encouraged because it was always better to see things with your own eyes.

She also told us that there was an astronomy club which met at the Nature Center, and that they had a big telescope that we could look through, and she gave us a schedule of their meetings.

I was kind of disappointed when she let us go early since it was our first day, 'cause I wanted to learn more.

I had a little time before dinner so I read Obadiah which was really short. He only had one vision, where God said that the people of Edom thought they were safe because they lived up on mountains and soared like eagles, but that He would bring them down, and He would give their land to the Israelites, because they'd stolen it and been mean to the Israelites.

Then I wrote in my journal and before I went to dinner I went down the hallway and to Meghan's room, 'cause I wanted to know if I could sleep with her tonight. And she said I could but that we couldn't do anything since Amy would be there so that was kind of disappointing. But it would still be nice to snuggle with her.

She asked if I wanted to go to dinner with her and I said that I would, so we went to the dining hall together and decided to sit in the farthest-away room. I hoped that nobody at my table was missing me too much, or that her friends were missing her. Sometimes it was hard to spend enough time with all your friends—I still hadn't had a meal with Leon and Cedric and Trevor, so maybe I would do that at lunch tomorrow. I wasn't sure what their schedules were like.

Meghan said that it was too bad that there weren't any places on campus that we could hide and be private and I thought so, too. But it wouldn't be nice for either of us to kick out our roommates, so I guess we'd just have to think of something.

I said that I thought it would be fun to get a room at the hotel all the way towards the top, and she thought so, too, and so we started to think about when we could do that. It wouldn't be this weekend, 'cause we were going to the football game on Friday and I didn't know when we'd be back, and she said that we probably wouldn't be able to get a room at a good rate on such short notice anyway but if nothing else we should make plans to do it after mid-terms because we'd want the stress relief.

And she said maybe we could go to the nature trail and sneak off into the woods some day and I thought that would be fun.

She had to go to bell choir after dinner, and so I went back to my dorm room and I had a telegram from Mister Salvatore. He said that he'd found a seamstress who could fix my lab coat but she'd need to take lots of measurements and he wondered when would be a good time. So I said that tomorrow after dinner I could or otherwise it wouldn't be until the weekend. And I had to wait a little bit until he replied again and he said that tomorrow would work and he'd pick me up before dinner.

I hung out with Peggy and Ruth and Kat for a while and then I went down the hall to Meghan's room. I didn't take my flight gear, 'cause I'd just walk back and get it in the morning.

All the girls were there, and pretty soon we started talking in Equestrian 'cause it was good practice for them and for me, too. It's weird how when you're off in a foreign land you can forget how to speak your own language if you don't use it much, and at first it felt really weird speaking it, but then it started seeming more natural.

And after a while Amy started to ignore us, 'cause she didn't speak it at all and I felt bad that we were having a conversation she couldn't participate in but she said it was okay, she had some reading she needed to do for her English class anyway because her professor had decided to assign eighty pages on the first day of class. I thought that was pretty mean, and I was kind of glad that all my professors had decided to start things off slower.

We probably could have stayed up all night, but when Amy closed her book and said that she was going to get ready for bed, we all decided that we ought to think about it ourselves. But we didn't wind up going to bed for almost another hour—we just moved over to Becky and Lisa's room, until the conversation sort of wound down.

Me and Meghan went back over to her room and she still got into her sleeping clothes in the bathroom in case Amy wasn't all the way asleep, but she left the door open, and then she sat on the edge of the bed and set her alarm clock to wake her up. And she said that it was later than she thought, and when I asked how late she said it was after midnight.

She laid on her back so I could put my head on her breast, and I pushed her shirt up a little bit so that I could rest my wing on her belly, and she put her hand on top of it and it didn't take me too long to fall asleep.

September 14 [Jonah]

September 14

I woke up just before Meghan's alarm clock, and we snuggled until she said that she had to get up, and we both had to be kind of quiet because Amy was still sleeping in her bed.

We kissed goodbye, and she went into the shower and I went back to my room and quietly got dressed in my flight gear, 'cause Peggy was sleeping, too. And then I went out to Pebble Beach and called the airplane directors and said that I was flying to the Nature Center again, and she gave me permission if I stayed low.

This time when I came around to land in the pasture, I stayed close to the river and didn't spook the deer. And when I was going around the trail, I made sure to walk on the northern side of the trail, so they wouldn't get scared. On the third time around, they were gone, so either they'd gotten done eating or something else had scared them off.

By the time landed back at campus, I was pretty well lathered, and when I went in the bathroom Kat was already in the shower so I went to our room to get out of my flight gear.

Peggy was awake but still in bed, looking at her portable telephone. So I nuzzled her, and then said that I was going to the shower and if she wanted to take one before breakfast she could join me, and she thanked me for offering but she'd wait until after breakfast.

There weren't waffles or omelets this morning; they just had the basic breakfast food that they always had. And when I'd gotten some scrambled eggs and fruit and a small bowl of shredded wheat cubes I asked if they'd ever had a special breakfast like they had special dinners sometimes and Christine said that they hadn't and she hoped that they never did because changing a morning breakfast routine only led to a day of regret.

Sean agreed, and he said that he liked having mostly the same thing for breakfast. And he said that there were occasional changes, but it mostly stayed the same menu every morning and he thought that was for the best, too.

Now that everyone in class knew that we had to wait for another class to leave, there wasn't as much of a line outside the classroom, and I hadn't been standing around for very long before the class before ours ended and everyone left. Once the door was clear, we went in, and I sat in the same seat I had before.

When Lisa sat next to me, I thought about how I knew two Lisas, and maybe I should give them an extra name to tell them apart. But I guess when I was talking to one of them about the other, it wouldn't be confusing, probably.

Professor Brown started off by telling us the four laws of thermodynamics, and I thought it was really funny that the first was numbered zero. Then we learned about the different types of system, which were open, closed, and isolated. And that was important to know when you did calculations, because if you were wrong about what it was, the math wouldn't work or it would give you a wrong result. And then he said that there usually weren't a lot of variables, and explained how it was important to know if your system was homogenous or heterogenous, and I knew about that because when you had a clump of clouds it was all cloud, but when you started putting them in the sky then they became a mixed system and so you had to think about that when you were doing your calculations.

Humans probably didn't have standard tables for that but we did.

He also said that if you had a system with only one component like water, you needed the number of moles, the phase, and two variables, but it didn't matter which two. And I had to ask him what a mole was, 'cause I didn't think he was talking about the kind that make little dirt tunnels when they're looking for worms.

One student in the class snickered when I asked, but Professor Brown said that the mole was a measure of quantity, and he could explain after class more specifically exactly what the quantity was.

Then we learned about it going from one equilibrium state to another and how you had to know the path you took to get there, because some kinds of paths were reversible and it worked both ways and other paths it didn't, or it couldn't without a lot of extra work added into the system. Which was something weatherponies knew all about, 'cause the cloud-pushers always wound up flying their tails off whenever someone in the weather office made a mistake. And there were a lot of definitions that we needed to know, so I paid lots of attention to those.

After class was over, he told me out in the hallway what a mole was, and what Avogadro's number was, and he said that it must be difficult for me to use units I wasn't familiar with at all, and I admitted that it was. But I was figuring them out, and I knew that a lot of times it didn't matter anyways as long as you kept measuring the same thing throughout the entire equation. I could invent a heat scale called Silvers and assign my values however I wanted, and as long as I kept the scale constant I could use it in equations.

When I went to lunch, I looked around for Cedric and Leon and Trevor but I didn't see them, so I got my food and went to our usual table. Sean and Christine were involved in an argument about Star Trek and Star Wars, so I sat next to Peggy and we talked about snowboarding. She said that it wouldn't be too long before there was snow in the mountains in Colorado and it had been a little weird to her how when she'd come to Kalamazoo it had taken so long before there was any snowfall, even though she'd kind of known to expect it. And she said that she'd heard that it was going to be a snowy year, and then she wanted to know if I could bring a snowcloud down and make just a little patch of snow on the grass.

I wasn't sure if that would work, but it would be interesting to try.

When Sean and Christine had settled their debate, we walked to math class together, and he asked if I had my calculator with me, and I said that I had it and my weather wheel.

Professor Pampena started us out by reminding us about what vectors were, just in case anybody had forgotten over the summer, and what symbols used to draw and define them. It wasn't the same as we did it in Equestria, but the basic concept was the same.

As I was drawing out the letters with hats, I got to thinking how Cayenne probably knew this, too, and lots of other ponies did, and maybe there was an Earth-math club back in Equestria which would be pretty fun.

He gave us a problem to start, which made me happy. It was more fun to be challenged while you were learning instead of just sitting and being talked to. And it was a really easy problem, so I didn't even have to write anything down to solve it, then he reminded us how to add vectors together, and that was pretty easy too, but he drew a picture on the markerboard anyway just so that everyone understood what he was doing.

He said that when you multiplied vectors together, that was called a dot product, 'cause he used a dot to say that he was multiplying, and that gave a scalar. And he showed us how it worked geometrically, and then he proved it first and by the time he was done he'd filled the entire markerboard with his equations and then he had to wait until everyone had finished writing it down before he could erase the board and continue on.

What I thought was really nice was while he was done explaining it he told us what we could use it for, and that was something that some of my teachers had never done, and sometimes it was hard to pay attention to something when you didn't know it would be the foundation of something else later on. It was a lot easier to just go out and shove around clouds without really understanding how you got them to do exactly what you wanted.

So we could use them to compute lengths and angles, and he drew another problem and I worked it out before he was done explaining it. It was pretty basic, though; there wasn't any number bigger than two in the coordinates.

And then he gave us another question, where we had to figure out what a set of points made, like a plane or a sphere and that was pretty basic, too, and most people figured it out. It was a little bit discouraging that class was starting out so simple, but it was smarter to start out simply and make sure that everyone understood before moving on to more complicated things.

Class went by a lot quicker than I thought it would, and after we'd solved that problem and discussed it a little bit for people who had got it wrong, Professor Pampena said that we were done and we'd continue with where we'd left off on Friday.

I had time to write in my journal and also to read Jonah, which I really liked. God told him to go prophesy against Nineveh because they'd made Him mad but Jonah didn't want to so he got on a boat and fled instead. And then after he'd been at sea for a while a terrible storm came up and when the crew found out it was Jonah's fault, they threw him overboard. The storm stopped and a huge fish swallowed Jonah.

When he was inside the fish, he asked God to forgive him, and so God had the fish vomit him onto dry land, so he went to Nineveh like he was supposed to, and everyone there believed him, and they changed their ways and so God forgave them too.

Jonah was mad about that, and he sat outside and sulked and God grew up a plant to shade him then the next day he had a worm eat it, and Jonah was mad about that, too, but I think that God was right and Jonah should have been happy that God had forgiven him and let him out of the fish, and that everyone in Nineveh had changed their ways and God had forgiven them, too.

At dinner, me and Sean were talking about math and science, and he laughed when I said that I didn't know what a mole was, so I asked if anyone had a piece of paper and a pen, and when Christine gave them to me, I drew out the same equation that we'd done in calculus but I used Equestrian math symbols, and asked him to solve it, 'cause I knew he'd gotten it correct in class.

Well, of course he couldn't, and then he passed the paper around and nobody else could make any sense of it, either. Christine said that Aba looked like a monkey fucking a coconut, and I guess it kind of did. It wasn't my fault—the unicorns had decided to use their symbols for math and now we were stuck with them.

So then I solved it for him and turned it into human numbers and moved things around so that they were in the human order, too, and he said that wasn't fair, so I stuck out my tongue at him. And I thought it would be funny to translate one problem on my first math paper and then work it out in Equestrian and translate my answer back. I think that Professor Pampena would like that.

I left dinner a little early than I would have just so that I wouldn't be late, and I got my lab coat and I could have put it on I guess but it wasn't very comfortable so I just draped it across my back and then I went down to the parking lot to wait, 'cause I knew that they'd be there pretty soon.

Well, we had to go all the way into Parchment and the road the seamstress lived on was called Random Road, which I thought was pretty funny. She lived in a little red house on the north side of the road, and Miss Cherilyn knocked and pretty soon a heavy woman came to the door and she was really excited to see me 'cause I was the first pony she'd ever seen up close, and she said that her name was Christina.

She led us down into her basement and it was kind of crowded with everyone there and her piles of fabric for sewing and she also had some dress forms but of course they were shaped like a person and not a pony, and they were only the torso, which I thought was weird.

She had to take lots of measurements and a couple of times I saw Mister Salvatore get tense 'cause I guess he didn't like her getting that close to me and measuring around under my barrel and everything so I don't think he'd like going to the salon with me very much either.

And then I had to do it again but this time with the coat on and she pinned parts of it in place and she had me move around a little bit to see how I moved, 'cause it's no good making clothes that you can't move around in.

She trimmed some of it of and re-pinned it and then I had to try again, and eventually she was happy with how it was fitting, and she said that she'd give Mister Salvatore a call when she was done sewing it up, and he reminded her that I needed it for Tuesday.

When we were back in Sienna, I asked if we could stop somewhere to buy scrunchies for my mane, 'cause I was supposed to have it pulled back and we drove a little bit out of our way to go to a Dollar General and they didn't have all that many but I found one that I liked and Miss Cherilyn said I ought to get a couple because scrunchies had a way of going missing, so I picked out a couple more.

On our way back to campus, Mister Salvatore said that he was still negotiating with the tornado team but so far he didn't have anything to report. He said that they had a bunch of things already planned and he wasn't sure if there was any way he could change the schedule but he wasn't going to give up yet; maybe we'd just have to go meet them.

I was really happy he was putting that much effort into it—he could have just said no—and I would have hugged him but he was driving.

He let me out behind Trowbridge and that was when I got my chance. He stopped Sienna and opened the sliding door to let me out and so I just wrapped my hooves around him and then I let go and hopped out of the van and went inside.

This time, I got together my flight gear, but while I did, I was thinking about Peggy and I wondered if it bothered her that if I kept up this schedule I'd never be sleeping in our room and she'd be roommates with an empty bed, and I didn't think that was fair to her. So I had to figure something out, but by the time I got to Aric's I hadn't thought of anything. I could have Aric or Meghan come to my room sometimes but I wasn't sure that Peggy would like that if it became a regular thing.

I didn't have to come up with an answer right away, but it would be smart to think about it now.

I let myself in with the key that was under the mat, cause I could see through the front window that everyone was sitting on the couch watching a movie. It was called pi, and it was kind of about math the main character was trying to figure out a number that everyone thought explained everything and then he drilled a hole in his head because he thought it would let the numbers get out of his head. I didn't like that very much, and when we went upstairs Aric said that David had picked the movie and he liked strange movies and strange bands and Aric wasn't sure if he was a genius or just plain crazy.

I wasn't sure either. But he was nice, and I liked both him and Angela.

And I'd never asked David if he had a Prince Albert. I should have done that while we were sitting on the couch, because I think that would have made Aric a little uncomfortable and that would have been funny.

We snuggled and talked in bed for a little while, and he reminded me that he had to go back to Lafayette this weekend to finish things up there and so I'd have to survive without him for the weekend, and I said that I was going to Rockford to watch the football team play, and we probably wouldn't get back until late anyway.

He said that we'd better make tonight last until Monday, and I thought that was a good idea, too.

September 15 [Relaxed Thursday]

September 15

I snuggled against Aric until he woke up, and he said it was too early to be awake but that didn't stop him from running his hand along my back and over my dock, and I climbed on top of him and told him that he wouldn't have to do anything if he didn't want to, but he did want to and he had an advantage because I needed my hooves to stand on but since he was just lying on his back he could use both of his hands.

Since I didn't have a lab in the morning and my first class wasn't until after lunch, it was kind of tempting to just stay in bed and maybe snooze a little bit and have sex again later, but it was also a good day to go on a longer flight, and that was another good way to start the day. So me and Aric went downstairs and he made me some oatmeal, just so I wouldn't have to fly on an empty stomach.

He also filled up my camelback while I was eating, and then we went back to his room and he helped me put on my flight gear. Then I called the airplane directors and told them that I was going flying, and they gave me permission.

I went out his bedroom window which was a little bit trickier now that I was wearing all my flight gear, and stopped at the bird feeder long enough to get a mouthful of sunflower seeds. Aric didn't throw anything at me this time which was kind of disappointing.

It was partially cloudy, but the temperature was nice and there wasn't much wind. It was a very good day to go on a long flight, so I headed west.

I kept about seven hundred feet up and followed Main Street all the way to the 131 Highway, then I turned northwest to get to the Kal-Haven trail.

I'd planned to cross over it a few miles outside of Kalamazoo and then follow it for a bit, but after I'd flown a couple of miles out of town I remembered that it curved pretty far north at first, and I wasn't gonna be crossing it for a few miles. I should have remembered that.

So when I got to the next road, I turned due north and followed it a little ways until I could see the path of the trail, and then I angled off on a diagonal course to intercept it.

I didn't have time to go all the way to South Haven and back again, so when I got to Gobles I turned around to head back to campus. But I didn’t want to take the same way back, so I decided that I'd fly due east and when I got to the 131 Highway, I'd follow that south.

The clouds had been breaking up the whole time I was flying west, and there were hardly any left in the sky when I turned around, although it was still a bit hazy from all the moisture that the clouds had left behind.

I should have brought my saddlebags, 'cause then I could stop at Meijer and buy some groceries but I was limited to what would fit in my camelback and the pockets on my flight vest, and I didn't feel like spending a lot of time at the store and not coming back with much of anything and have to do it again a couple of days later.

There wasn't anything too interesting on the ground once I passed Kendall—lots of fields and some forests. And I was kind of surprised that there was a lot of corn still standing, because it looked like it was ripe and ready to be harvested, but I guess that human farmers would know better than I did, and maybe their corn kept on getting bigger.

When I got to the 131 Highway, I made a sharp turn and stayed right over it, on the western side, and I slowly started to lose altitude. By the time I'd passed the 131 bus Highway entrance, I was just over a thousand feet, so I banked off towards Kalamazoo and took a direct path back to campus and landed on the boardwalk on Pebble Beach.

There wasn't anyone waiting for the showers when I went in, which was nice. And I didn't think that anybody would be coming, either, since anyone who wanted to take a shower would have already, so I took my time.

Even so, by the time I got dried off I was a little bit early for lunch, and I suppose I could have read some of the Bible or written in my journal or read a little bit ahead in my math book, but instead I just went to lunch.

I was glad that people tended to not want to change things, 'cause I found Cedric and Leon and Trevor at the same table that they'd always sat at, and they still had lots of food left, so I went and got my lunch and then went over to their table.

Cedric had to move his tray over, 'cause he'd kind of pushed it off to the side, but he didn't mind, and he even put mine on the table for me even though I could have done it.

Leon asked if I was taking another poetry class and I shook my head. There hadn't been any offered, or else I would have. I said that I was taking a physics class and a math class and an astronomy class and they were all fun so far. And he thought that I was crazy—I don't know why everyone thinks that.

Trevor said he was taking Shakespeare and that was a kind of poetry, and I agreed. I told them about seeing Gusty in Stratford and they all thought that sounded pretty amazing. And Cedric was impressed when I told them that we'd had lunch with Uzo and Zelda, who were both pretty famous I guess. I said that Gusty knew them from when she had acted in Orange is the New Black.

Leon said that he didn't like that show because it reminded him too much of his time in prison, and Cedric crossed his arms and said that a charter school wasn't a prison, and Leon said it wasn't a very nice charter school, because you had to take a bus there instead of a limousine which meant it counted.

Cedric said that when he was working with Habitat for Humanity, he'd met Jimmy Carter, who used to be president. I wanted to know if all the former presidents went on to build houses and he said that only the classy ones did. And I asked him if he'd seen Aquamarine at all over summer break and he sighed and said that nothing had ever worked out, but they'd written to each other, and he'd discovered that he sort of liked writing letters.

I was kinda expecting Leon to say something sarcastic, but he didn't.

Before we had to go to class, Cedric asked me if I was still planning on coming to the football game, and I said that I was gonna come with Peggy and Christine and Sean, and we were gonna take Cobalt instead of the bus, because it would be more fun.

He told me to make sure that someone stayed sober enough to drive back home, and if I didn't think that anyone was, to take the campus bus or else find him and he'd get me on the team bus, which was nice of him. I didn't think that Peggy was that unresponsible, but if she was I wouldn't get stranded in Grand Rapids or have to fly back home at night.

We walked across campus together, until we had to split up before we crossed Academy Street, and I continued on to the Dow building and took the stairs all the way up to the top floor.

I still hadn't figured out who I wanted to sit with, so I picked a seat that was in the middle where I had a good view.

Professor Miller started out by telling us about extrasolar planets, and said that everyone in the class was old enough to know that there were lots of planets around other stars but only twenty years ago, nobody had found a single one yet, even though most people knew that they were out there.

She started off by saying that she was going to tell us about planetary orbits, and how planets orbited the sun, usually, and she looked right at me when she said that. Well, it wasn't my fault that Discord had broken our system, and we had to fix it on our own.

So she explained how normally a geocentric system wouldn't work at all, and back in ancient times people started to think that it was wrong, because in order to make the observations fit the theory, they had to put in little epicycles where planets and other objects had to move in loops on their orbits. And then Copernicus said that the sun was in the middle and things circled it on their own, but his circle orbits didn't quite work, either, so he had to have epicycles, too. And so then Kepler had better observations and he figured out that the planets actually move in an ellipse rather than a circle.

She said that Kepler didn't know why they were ellipses and not some other shape, but then Newton came along and explained it with math, and figured out that he could derive Kepler's laws, and she said that was why he'd invented calculus.

I wondered if ponies had had to invent calculus sooner, because on Earth everything worked without help, but it didn't in Equestria. And that worked for a while, until they had to extend Newton's Laws with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and that one day the Theory of Everything would explain it all.

And she said that now that we'd made contact with aliens—and she looked at me again—some of these theories were kind of in flux, and there were a lot of scientists working to figure it all out but there weren't any firm answers yet, and it was beyond the scope of this class anyway.

At the very end she gave us a formula which she said was very important because we'd be using it a lot, and it was a little bit awkward but there was a way to make it shorter using astronomical units and a symbol that meant the mass of the sun. And she showed us a quick way to approximate the orbit of Jupiter using her simplified equation, and then class was over.

It was really weird when you thought about how the Earth was actually spinning around and also zooming around the sun, but it wasn't that different than drifting along on a cloud. If you just looked at the cloud itself, you'd think you weren't moving at all, then you'd look over the edge and see that you'd drifted a long way away from where you'd started, even though you thought you hadn't moved.

When I got back to our room, I asked Peggy if she wanted to go play with Caleb and Lindy and Trinity until dinnertime, and she thought that sounded like fun, so we walked over to their house, and I introduced Peggy to them, and they all wanted to go hunting Pokemons, so we went looking around the neighborhood. Trinity convinced Peggy to put the game on her portable telephone, too, and then when we spotted a Squirtle she helped Peggy catch it. And then Peggy caught a Weedle all on her own.

Once we were done hunting them, I gave Trinity a ponyback ride back to her house, and then we walked back to campus. Peggy said that she liked all three of them, and that she thought I made good friends. And she said someday when she had kids of her own she hoped they were like that and I said I thought that they probably would be.

We'd stayed out longer than I meant to and so I didn't have time to go to dinner before my meeting with Pastor Liz, so I snacked on some of the hay that was in my makeshift haybox, and then I went to the chapel and met her in her office.

We talked about all the prophets that I'd read since the last time I saw her, and she asked if I thought I'd be done with the Old Testament by our meeting next week. I said I thought that I might, because I didn't have much farther to go, and I said that I was sorry I hadn't finished it over the summer like I should have, but she said it was okay, and I was doing really really well and she was very proud of me.

Since I was back on campus now, I had time to go back to my room and get my glaive before going down to practice fight, but I was still a little bit late because a couple of people stopped me as I walked across the quad and asked me where I was going, and so I had to explain that I was going to practice fighting, and by the fifth time I was getting a little impatient because I knew I was late and so I wasn't going to get as much practice, and so I just told him to follow me and find out, and he did. And then a couple other people kind of joined in and when I finally got to the little park I had a rump herd trailing along behind me.

Most of them stuck around through our warmup, and a couple stayed through the whole thing and Stellan tried to get them to join in, but they didn't. And Kennith and Seth and Keith were all there, and some other new people that I didn't know. And when me and Stellan started actually fighting with our padded weapons almost everyone else stopped to watch.

I think he would have beat me in a real fight, 'cause he'd gotten pretty good at defending against my glaive, and kept me far enough back most of the time that I couldn't have used my hooves even if I'd wanted to. I might have had him if it had been a serious fight and I'd been able to dive at him but he'd probably thought about that more since we'd practiced that, and he might have come up with better defenses.

By the time we were done, I was limping 'cause he'd got my right fore-knee, and I had a bunch of new bruises, but so did he.

So I flew back to my dorm but I had to walk into our room and Peggy noticed that I was limping, too, and she asked what had happened, so I told her all about fighting and she said that I should have told her so that she could watch next time.

I snacked on a little bit more hay, then I went and took another shower to rinse off, and I was hoping that the hot water would also help make my knee feel better but it didn't really help at all, so I was probably going to have a limp for a couple of days as it healed. At least it wasn't a wing-sprain; that would have kept me down for a week or more and even after that I wouldn't be able to do any serious flying for a while as it healed the rest of the way. We'd lost one of our weathermares for a whole spring after she crash-landed in rocks and sprained her wing.

I'd decided that I would stay in our room tonight, and it was kind of strange how I spent the rest of the evening writing in my journal and Peggy was on her computer looking at her Facebook and also talking to one of her snowboarding friends, but when we both finally decided that it was time for bed, I felt like we'd had a good evening together even though we hadn't talked all that much. I think sometimes it's really nice when you're so comfortable with a person that just spending time together makes you happy, even if you both do your own thing.

It was a little bit hard to get comfortable in bed, because no matter how I lay down, after a while my knee would decide it didn't like it, and I'd have to try something else, and I finally just laid on my side and ignored it when it started to protest.

September 16 [Football Game]

September 16

My knee still hurt when I woke up, and I had trouble getting into a position where I could get up. My leg really didn't want to straighten out, and I had to be careful when I got out of bed to not put too much weight on it, just in case it decided that it didn't want to support me.

When I was out of bed, I started flexing it a little bit at a time to work the stiffness out of the joint, and then I experimented with how much weight it could carry. So I figured out that I could stand in a normal position but after I stayed still for a while it started to get a little painful, and I'd have to shift my weight but that wasn't so bad. And I could walk, and it hardly hurt if I didn't put much weight on that hoof and then got right back off it again.

I didn't think it was serious enough that I should see a doctor, but I would want to pay attention to it and see—if it didn't start feeling better in a couple of days, or started feeling a lot worse, I'd want to.

Putting on my flight vest would be difficult if not impossible, and I'd have trouble using my airplane radio, too, which limited where I could fly. So it was kind of tempting to just get back in bed and sleep in some but that was a bad habit to get into, and I could fly around campus. It would be a little bit boring to just be flying circles, but there were lots of ways I could make it more interesting.

So I limped down the hallway and glided down the stairs and went out to Pebble Beach. I had a really sloppy launch, ‘cause I forgot to consider my leg, and I almost clipped the railing, but I cleared it and then after that I was two stories up so I had a little time to catch myself.

I glided down the hill, zagging around a couple of trees, and I remembered to keep about ten feet above the sidewalk just in case some person come by—I didn’t want to accidentally crash into anyone.

I climbed over Hoben—the lights in Cedric and Leon’s room were out, or else I would have waved—and then flew over the Fac Man building and the little park where we practiced fighting, then came back around and went over Crissy and Severn, then followed the hill up, going above the top of the Dow Science building before I turned back towards the central part of campus. I knew that there were some houses behind it that were college houses, but I didn’t know which ones. And then I cut along the second floor of Trowbridge, right by Meghan and Amy’s room. There weren’t any lights on in their room either, so I guess they weren’t up yet.

I did a few more laps that way, and then after I’d gone down the side of Trowbridge—coming close enough that my feathers almost touched the bricks—I decided that I’d had enough fun for one day and landed back on Pebble Beach, reminding myself that I needed to not put weight on my right foreleg.

When I got to the bathroom there wasn't anybody in the shower and I considered if I should wait but I decided not to, and went right in. After I'd gotten clean, I made the water as hot as I could stand and held my leg up in it because I thought that might help make it feel better, and it sort of worked, until it cooled down again.

I was out of the bathroom before Kat showed up to take her shower, and when I got back to our room Peggy had just woke up. So I packed up my saddlebags while I was waiting for her to get dressed; that way I'd be able to go right to class after breakfast.

She saw that I was still limping and I promised her that I was all right, nothing was broken and in a couple of days it would be fine, and she said that I'd better be. And then she said that she could carry my saddlebags for me and that was really nice of her, but I said I'd be fine 'cause I had three more legs and two wings besides.

Well, Christine and Sean asked about my leg, too, so I had to tell them how I'd gotten hurt and then Christine said that I lived in a fishing village with sailing ships, and I said that was true. So she asked if there were any ponies with wooden legs, and I said that I didn't know any although there was an earth pony on the Sea Star who'd lost a hoof when she got tangled up in some rigging. It was important to make sure that you stayed clear of all the lines on a ship.

So Peggy wanted to know if she had a fake hoof or anything like that and I said that she wore a special shoe on that leg, and she walked kind of funny, 'cause it couldn't bend like a real hoof.

Sitting around for breakfast hadn't helped my leg, and both Christine and Peggy offered to take my tray back for me and I wanted to do it myself but I let them.

I flew across the quad and over Olds-Upton, and landed right in front of Dow Science, then went inside and walked up the stairs to physics. I had to kind of slow down on the steps—they were tricky enough with four good legs. But I'd left early enough to still have to wait a little bit for the next class to get out.

Professor Brown started explaining to us the Ideal Gas Theorem, and how there was an absolute zero which you couldn't go below, and that was the bottom of the Kelvin temperature scale, which was the one that scientists used. I wasn't too happy about having to learn another way to measure, but luckily it was based on the metric Celsius scale, it just started a different way. So all you had to do was add 273.15 and you had Kelvins.

Then he warned us that the ideal gasses and their equations only applied to some gasses at really low pressures and if we were working with actual gasses we had to put in what he said was a fudge factor, which was the letter Z, and there were tables that showed what they were.

Then he showed us Van der Waals Equation of State which he said was really useful to anybody who was building or making things, and my ears perked up 'cause that was the kind of thing that I most needed to know. Making ideal clouds wasn't the same as making real clouds. And it was how gas molecules sometimes when they were in a space together tried to keep together and not get away, so when they bounced off the walls of their container they wouldn't have as much energy.

What I really liked was that even when he was explaining stuff that was still pretty basic, he was giving us equations for everything as he went, like how we would calculate the force pushing down on a piston that was squishing our ideal gas.

He worked through equations to figure out how much work you were doing changing argon from an initial pressure and volume to a smaller volume with more pressure, and he showed us two different ways to do it, and then shaded in under the graphs to show us where work was done, and taught us that if you put a circle on the integral that means it's a closed path where you start and end at the same point.

He finished the class by telling us about heat, and what it did to our ideal systems, and then he said that next time we'd get to learn how heat and work are the same thing. Then he gave us some homework, where we would figure out how much work was being done when we changed the pressure or the volume of different ideal gasses.

I wanted to fly down the stairs but there were too many people for me to try it, and I didn't really feel like waiting, so as much as I didn't like it, I took the elevator because it was only one floor so it wouldn't be that bad. And when it started moving I popped my wings out and had to shift around 'cause it changed my balance when the floor dropped.

I flew back to the dorm and took my physics stuff out of my saddlebags and set them on my desk then put my math things in my bag so that I wouldn't forget them. Then since I had time I started to work on my physics homework.

It was pretty basic so far, but we were just getting started. The calculations in it were pretty straightforward, too.

I didn't have enough time before lunch to get it all done, but it was mostly done and that meant I wasn't going to have to do it over the weekend, which was nice.

Peggy had some stretchy bandage that she said might help my knee—she said that she'd bought it from Walgreen's, and I thought it wouldn't hurt to try, so she wrapped it up and then used clever metal clips with teeth to hold it in place. Sean said that all I needed now was a bloodstained bandage around my head and I'd look like a real war hero, and I said that I didn't really want to look like a war hero.

Then we talked about when we were going to go to the game. Peggy had checked the weather and said it was going to be pretty warm so we probably wouldn't need any blankets or anything, but maybe it would be smart to bring sweatshirts. And she said that we could stop for beer on our way there, but if we did we might want to eat dinner on the road instead of at the dining hall, since it was going to be an hour drive and she was fairly sure that the game started at seven.

So everyone agreed that was a good idea, but nobody could agree on where we should eat dinner. I wanted Taco Bell food but nobody else did.

Peggy said we'd all meet up in our room after class and if we hadn't figured it out by then we'd just go to Jimmy John's because it was the closest.

Me and Sean walked to math together, and he said that if I changed my vote to Burger King, he'd be in my debt, and I said I'd think about it.

Professor Pampena said that you could compute area using vectors, then drew a pentagon on the markerboard. I thought that was kind of a dumb way to figure it out, because there was a formula for that (although I couldn’t remember what it was). We had to figure out an a-prime to make it work, and he showed us on the graph where it went and then let us figure out what it was on our own. And when he wrote out the equation, he told us that was called a determinant. And depending on how you counted your angles, you could get a negative answer, but you just ignored the negative sign. That was a good thing to remember, though, 'cause if I was doing lots of calculating I might forget and then I'd get a very wrong answer.

He said we'd had fun in our two dimensions and now we were going to move back to three again. So determinants in space could find volumes and that was very useful. And when he started writing it on the marker board it made a lovely equation that he said we should learn because it was helpful for lots of things.

Next, he told us about cross product, which could be drawn the same way as the determinants, and drawn in a matrix the same way and then the same formula applied to it, and what the right-hand rule said about it, which was moving your right hand and fingers so that it pointed to vectors A and B and which direction your thumb pointed was which way the cross-product vector pointed.

Well, that wasn't very helpful for me, since I didn't have a thumb or fingers to point with, and he gave us another problem to try and figure out and I got it wrong 'cause I lost track of where my thumb was supposed to be. Sean said it was because human fingers couldn't actually bend backwards, and that's why I'd made a mistake.

The last thing he taught us was how we could use cross product and dot product together to figure out the area of a box in space, and that was really neat, because the equation was really simple and easy to remember. And then it got even simpler, when he showed us how the determinant equaled a dot product and cross product of A, B, and C.

And we got lots of fun calculating homework, which Sean didn't seem too enthusiastic about at all. But I was looking forward to it.

When we left class, I said that I'd decided in class that since he helped me get my cloud rope, I owed him a favor, so I would change my vote, and he said that I was awesome.

I spent the afternoon first finishing my physics homework, then I did my math, and after that I still had a little bit of time so I wrote in my journal, and then when it was close to five, I opened the door so that people could just come right in, including Peggy who wasn't back yet.

Well, she got back first and she had Christine with her and she said that they'd gone and bought beer to save time, and she said that she hoped I didn't mind, and I said it was okay. They'd bought Oberon and also some Edmund Fitzgerald porter.

We had to wait a little bit for Sean to show up, then we all went down to Cobalt. I sat in the back with Christine and Peggy asked us where we wanted to go for dinner, and all three of us said Burger King, which wasn't what Christine had said before either. So I asked her if Sean had bribed her and she said yes but she wouldn't tell me what it was.

So we went through the drive-through, and I got a veggie burger which wasn't very good and had too much sauce on it, and also a side salad which Christine had to hold so I could eat.

We had to take the 131 Highway all the way through Grand Rapids, and the college that we were going to was called Rockford University, and it wasn't any bigger than Kalamazoo College.

The football stadium was on the far side of campus, and we parked in a lot for visitors and Sean opened the trunk to get the cooler out which had the beer. And I reminded Peggy that she wasn't supposed to have any or else I would have to drive home.

We had to buy tickets to get in, and then there was a whole set of benches just for us—they kept the visitors and the residents apart from each other in case of fights, I guess.

There wasn't a lot to do before the game except talk and look at the cheerleaders, who were mostly trying to entertain their audience. And everyone except Peggy had a beer. She'd brought soft drinks for herself.

It wasn't all that long before the football teams came out, and our players were wearing black while the other team had purple. It took me a little while to find Cedric and Leon, but I did, and after they'd talked a little bit among themselves they all sat down on benches and Cedric turned around and waved at us.

The game was really fun to watch. Since we were seeing it for real, there weren't any slow-motion replays, and you kind of had to pay close attention and sometimes it wasn't real clear who had the ball. I thought Leon was really good at catching the football, and he was pretty good at running, too. He weaved all over the field and when the quarterback had a clear shot, he'd catch the football and sometimes he could run with it, too; other times he got tackled right away.

And I also got to see Cedric's sack, which was impressive. Right after Rockford stepped back to throw the football, Cedric went through their line and got their quarterback in the side, and I don't think he saw it coming because he was looking down the field for someone to catch the ball but nobody was clear.

At halftime, their marching band came out and made patterns in the field and played a couple of songs, then the cheerleaders tried to bring up the team spirit, because they were losing by eleven points.

I asked Peggy if she thought I could be a cheerleader, and she said that I might make a good cheerleader. She said that she thought if they tossed me I could go a lot higher, and she asked if we had pony cheerleaders, and I said that I'd seen some before but usually it was just a few ponies, not a whole team of them.

The cheering up didn't help Rockford, 'cause they only scored one more touchdown and they didn't kick the ball between the goal. Cedric made another sack, and by the end of the game Kalamazoo had won by thirty-six points, and there weren't too many people left in the benches towards the end of the game, because they were so far behind that there was almost no chance of them making a comeback. Even the cheerleaders weren't all that peppy at the end, although they did get excited when one of Rockford's players tackled Leon just short of the goal line.

I wanted to wait for Cedric and Leon so that I could congratulate them, but Peggy said that after the game they had to go to the locker room and shower and get changed and it would be a while before they came out again, and she really didn't want to stay all that much longer.

Peggy made us all stop in the bathroom before we went home because she said she didn't want to hear us complaining every five miles about how we had to pee because of all the beer we'd had.

It was a little bit after midnight when we finally got home, and Peggy was the only one who wasn't tired by then. My voice was hoarse from all the shouting and cheering I'd done, and my knee ached from all the sitting, plus I had to pee again.

Christine said that we could hang out in her lounge for a little while if we wanted, and finish the rest of the beer. So she parked down in their parking lot and Peggy took the beer that was left out of the cooler and put it back in its cardboard box so it was easier to carry, and then we went up to Christine's room.

We all had to take turns in the bathroom, and then I got in the papasan chair and curled up and I thought about having another beer but I didn't.

We talked about the game and complained about our classes and everyone but me took turns playing Mario Kart. I could have if I'd wanted to but I wasn't good at it because the buttons were too small for me and I didn't mind watching.

After Peggy had had her second turn she asked if I was ready to go home or if I was happy in the papasan, and I was happy where I was. So she decided that we'd have a sleepover in Christine's room. Christine brought out a blanket for her, and she laid on the couch, and I stayed on the papasan.

September 17 [Happy Saturday]

September 17

I slept in a little bit, 'cause it was Saturday, and because I didn't want to leave Peggy behind so I waited until she woke up and got out of bed. It was raining outside, but it was a good, steady, soaking rain, not a storm, so I didn't think I really needed to watch it unless it took a turn for the worse.

Peggy had slept in her clothes and they were all pretty wrinkled up. And when she sat up in bed she rolled around her head and I could hear her neck cracking, then she stood up and went to the bathroom.

When she came back out, I was perched on the edge of the papasan thinking about whether or not my leg would be good for a landing, and she brushed my mane back over my ear and said we should go get some breakfast.

So I took the safe route and backed off the papasan, then flexed and tested my leg. It was still kind of sore and stiff from sleeping, too, but it felt a little bit better. I was sure it would be all right in a few more days.

Peggy put on her bra under her shirt and got her boots on, and then she sniffed at her shirt and decided it was clean enough to go to breakfast first and then shower and put on different clothes later. I said she was going to get a shower whether she wanted it or not, and she looked out the window and sighed, then said that she was glad she'd brought her jacket but it was unfortunate it was still in Cobalt.

I said that I could fly over her and block the rain and she said that would be really funny. She said if she held onto a hind leg I'd be kind of like an umbrella, and I thought it might be worth trying, but she said she didn't mind getting a little wet, and anyways she ought to move the car up to our parking lot.

There wasn't all that much rain, so she changed her mind and just got her jacket, and we walked up to the dining hall together. They opened late on Saturdays but that was okay because we had both gotten up late. And there weren't a lot of people in there, either, so they didn't have very much different food out yet. They did have some cream-filled chocolate eclairs, which were really good and I had two of them even though I shouldn't have.

We were just finishing up when Christine and Sean arrived. Christine had an umbrella and was still wearing her sleeping clothes, but Sean had put on the same clothes he wore last night. Even though we were done eating, we stayed for a little bit longer so that they wouldn't be lonely. I thought about going and getting another chocolate eclair, and Peggy did go and get a bagel to nibble on while we sat there.

Sean asked if I wanted to go over the math homework with him when I was done, and I said that I was already done with it, which he thought was unfair. I told him that all the problems were really easy to solve, especially when you had a weather wheel, 'cause instead of pushing all those tiny little buttons all you had to do was turn a dial and read a scale. So he decided that he really wanted to see that work. I wasn't looking forward to that, 'cause I hadn't really used it much for the math. So I had to tell him that I didn't really use it to solve the problems, I had just had the afternoon free and that had been enough time.

He still wanted to see me working it, though, and said that maybe I could figure out the kind of problems which it was best at solving, write them down in our notation, and then demonstrate it for Professor Pampena. He said I might even get some extra credit for that, and if I did he wanted me to share it because it was his idea.

When we were back at our room and Peggy was finding clean clothes for after her shower, I turned on my computer and went to the Weather Service maps to see if it was going to get worse. And that distracted her for a little bit, and she looked over my shoulder as I checked a couple of the maps and wrote down a couple of notes. I was going to have to start getting back in the habit of figuring weather because it wasn't going to be all that long before I was back in Equestria.

I didn't think that the weather was going to do anything more than rain and I could have flown in it, but if a storm did come up, I didn't want to have worn myself out with morning flying, so I decided that I'd read the Bible instead.

Micah also got a vision and was supposed to warn the people of Jerusalem and Samaria that God was mad, and he was smart and didn't try to run off and get swallowed by a fish. He said that God was going to destroy the horses, though, and I didn't like that. What had they done to Him to make Him mad? They were probably just obeying their humans 'cause they didn't know any better.

Peggy was a little bit surprised when I was still in the room when she came back and she said that she thought I was going to go flying and I told her that I was going to wait, and she asked if that was the case if I wanted to help her with laundry once she got dressed, and I said that I would.

She put on lounging clothes and then got all her clothes together into a basket, and then I thought that I ought to wash my blankets, too, so I put away my Bible and started pulling my blankets off the bed and I'd kind of forgotten that my toy was in my pillowcase and it fell out and bounced across the floor.

Peggy just started laughing when she saw it, and then she asked if that was what a real stallion in Equestria looked like, and I said that it was, so she crouched down so that she could study it more closely.

She wanted to know if I'd brought it from Equestria and I said that I had got it here and there was a company that made them and this one was modeled after a real stallion, although I didn't know who it was.

So I picked it up off the floor and put it in my dresser and I think it was kind of lonely 'cause there wasn't anything else in there. And I guess Peggy thought so too because she gave me a sock that I could put it in.

I piled my blankets up on top of her basket, and she got her jug of soap and we went downstairs to do our laundry. I should have done it as soon as I had got back, and maybe not on a Saturday, either, 'cause there was only one washing machine that was available although the other one was almost done.

I put my blankets on top of the one that was being used so Peggy could put her clothes in the open washing machine, and then once she had it running I moved them over, and then sat down on top of them to wait for the other one to be emptied.

Nobody showed up when the washing machine had finished and Peggy said that we ought to take the clothes out and put them on the table, so we made a neat little stack of them and then put my blankets in, and then I sat on top of the washing machines and she sat on the clothes-folding table and we just talked until the washing machines were finished.

We had to take someone's clothes out of the dryer, too—people just leave them behind a lot, I guess. Whoever it was really liked Abercrombie and Fitch, 'cause that's what all the shirts said on them. So Peggy put them in a neat pile then asked if I wanted to go to a late lunch.

I said that I didn't need to; I had hay in the room if I wanted a snack, so she ought to decide.

She said that she could wait until dinner but it was strange how when you weren't doing anything you kept thinking about how hungry you were and when you were doing something really fun you'd forget to eat.

Since it would take a while for our laundry to dry, we went back upstairs to our room and Peggy used her Facebook while I read Nahum, which was only three chapters and was another prophecy against Nineveh. Which I knew that God had forgiven, because they'd changed their ways after Jonah had told them that God was mad at them. So then I also read Habakkuk, who complained to God that he was calling for help but God wasn't giving him any, and God told him all the things that He had done, and at the end, Habakkuk was amazed and wrote a prayer of praise.

I thought about reading more, but I needed to write in my journal, too, so I did that until Peggy was sure that our laundry was dry, and she went downstairs to get it.

She changed into clean clothes, because she said that they felt the best when they'd come right out of the dryer, and I made my bed, and the sheets were nice when they were clean.

We left for dinner a little bit earlier than usual since we were both hungry, and we got there while they were still setting out the food, so a lot of the buffets only had hot water in them. They had the salads out, though, so that's what I got and Peggy said that she'd wait until they were done actually putting the food out before she chose, because she didn't know what they were going to have and maybe I was going to be sorry I'd filled up on salad.

I didn't think I would be sorry, though. But I waited to eat it until Peggy got her food—not because I thought I'd find something that I wanted more, but because it would be rude to eat when she didn't have anything of her own.

After she looked around, she was kinda disappointed with what they had to offer, and she came back with a hamburger and a salad. And she told me that I hadn't missed anything after all.

When Sean came in he said that it looked like the kitchen was already giving up for the year, because the only thing that made this dinner interesting was how plain and boring it was, and he said that they'd even managed to burn one of the pizzas and he wasn't sure how you could even do that because pizzas went on a little conveyor through the oven just like the bread did to toast it.

Christine was the only one who was happy about dinner, because they had perogies which she really liked. Those were kind of like raviolis, except they were half-circles instead of square. Sean said that the cooks had probably found a way to mess them up, but when Christine tried one she said it was good.

I was curious if they tasted the same as the raviolis, so I asked her if I could have one, and she picked one up and set it on my salad plate. It was pretty good—it had cheese inside it, and it did taste a lot like a ravioli.

Peggy asked if I was regretting having all that salad now, but I wasn't.

Sean said that he still hadn't done his math homework but he would do it tomorrow and then we could go over our answers together, and I said to stop by in the afternoon 'cause I planned to fly in the morning.

When we got back to our dorm room, I asked Peggy if she'd be lonely if I spent the night with Meghan and she said it was okay. I was hoping that maybe Amy would be away with her boyfriend 'cause sometimes she was on the weekends. And it was early in the year and so she probably didn't have much homework and maybe I'd get lucky.

So I went down the hall to her room and knocked on the door and she opened it up and I pounced on her and gave her a big hug and she invited me in and then noticed that my leg had the stretchy-bandage on it, and she asked me what had happened so I told her that I'd taken a hard hit in fighting practice but it was getting better.

She said that I should soak it in hot water and that would probably help, and it had in the shower until I got out, but she had a bathtub, so I asked if I could use it and she said that I could but she wouldn't let me use it alone.

Meghan had to ask Lisa and Becky if they needed to use the bathroom before we filled up the bathtub, and she put some soap in it so it would make bubbles then unwrapped my leg, and it felt weird because it had been wrapped up for so long. I asked Meghan if her feet felt funny when she took off her socks at the end of the day and she said that sometimes they did.

She let me get in the tub first, while she was getting undressed, and I stood at the end by the faucet so that she could get in and slide her legs around me, then I kind of stretched out on her chest and I could leave my hurt leg all the way in the water.

I had to move once so that she could turn off the water before the bathtub overflowed, and then we just relaxed until the water started to get cold, and then she drained some out and topped it off with warm water again.

Calculating how long it took the water in the bathtub to get cold would have been a fun thermodynamics problem. It lost heat to the walls of the bathtub and the air in the room and then I suppose everything in the bathroom got a little bit warmer, but that would be a lot of variables. So if I just figured the tub itself and me and her all heating up and the water losing its heat that way, it would be a solvable problem. I would also need to know our volumes but we could approximate that with displacement. If I had a marker which would draw on the bathtub, and a thermometer, I could figure it all out and that would be a lot of fun.

Meghan interrupted me and said that I had my thinking face on, so I told her what I was thinking about and she said that was a strange thing to be thinking about when I was in a bathtub with her. I said that I thought she'd told me she was interested in experimenting, and she said that she hadn't meant it like that.

When the water started getting cold again we got out, and my leg did feel a lot better. She dried off and then put on her robe and I stayed in the tub when the water drained out and when it was down to my fetlocks I pulled the curtain shut so that I could shake myself off.

She helped me dry off and then said that she didn't feel like getting dressed again, and I said that I didn't either and stuck my tongue out at her. And since Amy was gone for the weekend, she didn't have to.

September 18 [Cloverdale]

September 18

I snuggled up against Meghan when I woke up, and since it was a Sunday she didn't have her alarm set at all, so I waited until she was starting to wake up and then I kissed and nuzzled her the rest of the way awake, and I was going to get out of bed and go flying but then she started to rub my neck, and so I started teasing her with my wing, and she said that since we had the opportunity right now we'd better use it, and I agreed with her. I didn't have to go flying right away.

While we were cuddling in bed after, Meghan re-wrapped my knee, 'cause I'd gotten a bit too enthusiastic and the little metal clips had come off and then the whole bandage had gotten unwrapped and so I'd just pushed it aside and luckily neither of us had rolled on the metal teeth.

Meghan said that she could stay in bed with me all day, and I said that I could, too, but I wanted to go flying and she had homework that she had to do, so we finally got out of bed.

I kissed Meghan goodbye and she opened the door and let me out into the hall, and then I went upstairs to get my flight gear. My knee felt a lot better; I could put my weight on it and it only hurt a little bit. I thought I'd keep it wrapped for the rest of the day but tomorrow I probably wouldn't need it any more.

I had to be quiet when I was in our room 'cause Peggy was still sleeping, so I put on my radio and watch and flight vest and tossed the rest of the gear on my back, then I went back out and to the bathroom so I could fill up my camelback. And then I thought that I should have had a snack before I left, so after I'd gotten the rest of the way dressed I went back to our room and ate some hay. I thought that I ought to buy some oatmeal packets because with my electric kettle I could make that for breakfast, too, and that would be pretty good.

While I was walking down to Pebble Beach, I started to think about which direction I wanted to fly today, and I decided that I'd go northeast, 'cause that was the one direction that I'd never gone too far in. There was a big lake that was a good flight target, plus there was also a road that went that way.

I'd have to stay low for a while longer than I usually did, but that was okay. So I called the airplane directors and Dori gave me permission and asked if I could stay low until I got to the golf course on the M43 road, and I told her I would. I didn't know exactly where that was but golf courses were really easy to spot from the air, so I knew that I would find it.

So I took off from the boardwalk and after I cleared the railing, I didn't have to put any effort into gaining altitude at all because the hill fell away from me, and I went around the south end of Hoben and over the parking lot and railroad tracks, then turned a bit north to go over Main Street as it went through Kalamazoo and then I started to climb a little bit. And when I crossed over the Kalamazoo River I was about three hundred feet up and I thought I'd stay there until I saw the golf course and then I could decide how fast I wanted to climb.

Of course, flying lower means you don't see as much, so I didn't see it until I'd passed by the hospital, and then I felt kind of stupid for not remembering that it was almost across the road from Meijer. So it was okay to climb some, and I started to get more altitude, and I was at eight hundred feet when I passed over the golf course.

Pretty soon I saw Gull Lake, too, and I turned to cut the corner on the M43 road because it turned before it got to the lake.

It went straight north for a while and then made a couple of zig-zags as it went around the top of the lake before it kind of straightened out again. And I went past a big cluster of buildings that had circling roads around them, and I wasn't sure what that was supposed to be. I was a little too high up to read the signs that were in front of it, and I didn't feel like diving down to see.

All the clouds above me were breaking up and so I decided that I'd climb a bit higher and play with one before they all went away, and they were a little higher than I'd thought but I found a straggler that was lower than the rest.

It took me a few minutes of flying to catch up to it, and when I finally did it was in pretty sorry shape, so I went around it a couple of times and kind of condensed it down into a smaller, thicker cloud, and I pushed it down some and then sat on top and looked around at the ground slowly drifting by under me. I'd kind of kept an eye on where I was so that I wouldn't get lost, and I had my watch to lead me back to Kalamazoo if I did lose my position, but the cloud wasn't moving all that fast and I wasn't more than three or four miles off of the M43 road, and if I flew slightly northwest, I'd intersect it again.

I let the cloud carry me along for a sixth of an hour, then I jumped back off and headed north again. I couldn't quite see where the road was in front of me but I could make a pretty good guess where it probably was. There was a cluster of lakes and I thought that the road probably went between them, so I picked a spot on the northwestern shore of the lake and flew in that direction.

I looked back every now and then to see how my cloud was doing. I'd given it a little bit of new life by compacting it down and riding on it, but it was definitely thinning out, and unless I flew back and brought it some new water, it was going to fade out like all of its brothers had. But maybe it would be one of the last clouds in my part of the sky, and maybe someone on the ground would look up at it and wonder why it was the last one.

My guess about where the road was had been correct, and I followed it all the way to the next town which was Cloverdale, then turned back around. I couldn't see my cloud at all, which meant that either it had drifted out of my sight or it had finally evaporated completely.

When I was flying back I heard a couple of airplanes talking on the radio so I made sure to tell them where I was, and when I got to Gull Lake, instead of following the road, I went over the lake and made my turn there, and I started descending, too. And even though the wind was against me, I mostly glided down.

I called Dori just to let her know that I was back in her territory, and then I followed the road as it dipped down by the river, and when I got there I changed to following the railroad tracks instead.

I followed them through downtown and then when the tracks turned I kept going straight until I was over the cemetery, and I angled off to fly by Aric's house and see if he was home, but he wasn't. Only not-Winston was in the the driveway, so I circled back to campus and landed on the boardwalk again.

Peggy wasn't in our room, and when I went into the bathroom to take a shower she wasn't there, either. So I guess I wasn't going to get my knee wrapped back up again, because I didn't think that I could do it by myself.

I'd almost finished my shower when I heard the bathroom door open and then there was a knock on the stall door so I opened it to see who wanted to get in and it was Ruth and she kinda jumped back because she hadn't expected me to open the door, 'cause probably none of the other girls would have done it.

So I told her that I was almost done, and then I rinsed out my mane and tail and shook off and let her have her turn.

When I got to the dining hall they had brunch out and none of my good friends were at their tables, which was disappointing. So I sat at my usual table but in Christine's seat so that I could see if anyone I knew came in to eat. I thought that I'd probably missed everyone who wanted breakfast and was too early for anyone who wanted to eat lunch.

I'd almost finished up eating when Ruth came in, and she waved at me and I waved back and I hoped that when she got her food she'd come and sit with me but she didn't, and so I ate the rest of my scrambled eggs and then took my tray back and then went back outside.

It was kind of strange not having anything to do in the afternoon and not knowing where any of my friends were, and it felt a little bit lonely even though there were a few people out on the quad, and so I went back to my room to see if Peggy was there but she wasn’t.

So I picked up my Bible and I went back outside 'cause it was a nice day, and I found a tree with a nice, big crotch in it where I could sit comfortably and read. And I read Zephaniah, who had also gotten a message from God about how He was going to destroy Jerusalem because they had been bad, and then all of Jerusalem's enemies, and then He was going to take everyone who was good and give them back what they'd lost. I wondered since this must have taken place earlier if Zephaniah had told everyone what God had told him and if they'd listened.

And since Zephaniah was short, I read Haggai, too, and God told him to tell the people to rebuild His house because they hadn't done that yet, and God was mad at them and made their crops go bad. So Haggai told them and they all got together and started rebuilding His house. And then after a couple of months when they had rebuilt His house, He said that he would bless them from that day forth, and he would destroy their enemies.

I closed my Bible and flew back to our room, but Peggy still wasn't there. My portable telephone was blinking, though, so I checked and saw that Sean had sent me a telephone telegram saying that he was done with the math homework and that we could meet in his room if we wanted to go over it together.

So I put my math notebook and homework in my saddlebags and my portable telephone too and I flew down to Hoben and went to his room but when I knocked on the door a complete stranger answered it and she didn't know where Sean was or who he was, so I guess he had gotten a different room and I didn't know where it was. So I went up to the lounge and sat on one of the couches and sent him another telegram to find out where he lived now.

He told me he was in Harmon which was the next dorm over, and he said that he was in room 374, which was on the top floor right by the stairs, and he thought that he'd told me that he had a new room but he must have forgotten.

I went out and around to the front door of Harmon which I had never been in before, and then I found the stairs and flew up to the top and just like he said he was right next to them and had a pretty good view from his room.

I borrowed his roommate's chair and we put both of our homeworks on the desk and looked over them and we'd mostly gotten the same answers, which was good, but on the fourth problem we hadn't, and since we weren't sure who was right, we both re-did it and it turned out I'd made a dumb mistake, so I was glad that we'd decided to compare.

And then he decided that since neither of us had any other plans for the afternoon, we'd work together on coming up with a couple of problems in Equestrian notation that I could demonstrate how to solve with my weather wheel.

That turned into a bigger project than I'd expected, 'cause he wanted me to explain what I was doing and what all the symbols meant, but that was good practice 'cause I was sure that the professor would want to know, too. And so I filled a couple of sheets of paper with Equestrian calculus and showed him how the weather wheel worked, and we decided that we'd try to meet with the professor after class tomorrow to show him.

So by the time we were done it was getting close to dinnertime, and I could have stayed at his room but I thought that maybe Peggy was back now and she might be missing me, so I told him that I'd see him at dinner and flew back down the stairs and then up the quad to Trowbridge.

Peggy was in our room, and she said that she'd been at the library most of the afternoon, looking at pictures of art for her art appreciation class. She said that she'd taken the class because she thought it would be easy and because she liked art but she was having second thoughts now, since she thought the professor was a little bit weird. She told me that Rebekka had said she was good but Rebekka was a little bit weird, too, so maybe she should have taken that into account when she'd picked the class.

But she needed it to graduate, so she said she was going to have to tough it out and maybe by the end of class she'd find herself appreciating art more.

Dinner wasn't anything special, but it was nice to eat a meal with everyone again. I said that we needed a new friend to fill the empty spot at the table where Joe used to fit, and Christine said that people weren't like pets, where you could just get a new one after you flushed the old one down the toilet, and I had no idea what she was talking about, but Sean and Peggy thought it was funny.

Then Peggy said that freshmen were intimidated by seniors, especially this early in the year, but maybe we could try to lure some lost freshman to the table and I said that sounded kind of predatory, and Christine grinned and said that was the point. And then she asked if me and Sean had had fun with math, and I wish I'd had our problems with us, because I could have showed them what we'd done, but I'd left them in my room. Sean had a pen so he tried to recreate one of the problems on his napkin but he had trouble with the symbols and when I tried to write them out the pen tore through the napkin.

After we were done eating and talking, me and Peggy went back to our room, and since we'd both gotten done with all our homework, we left the door open in case anybody wanted to stop by, and at first nobody did, but then after a while Ruth came in and sat on the bed and asked us what color we thought she should make her hair next, and she had a really pretty maroon dye that both Peggy and me agreed would look really nice on her.

She said that everyone had picked that color, so she went off to the bathroom to put it in her hair.

Peggy and I talked for a while, until it got towards bedtime, and I'd forgotten about how Ruth was going to dye her hair and I saw the maroon streaks all over the bathroom sink and it looked like somebody had gotten in a bad fight in the bathroom. And I thought it was kind of rude to have left the sink looking like that, but when I scrubbed at it a little bit with my towel it wouldn't come off at all, so maybe she'd tried to clean it up and it wouldn't come off.

I thought that whoever cleaned our bathroom was going to be really mad about that.

So when I got back to our room I told Peggy about it and she went to look and she thought the same thing, and she said that maybe nail polish remover would take it off, so she got a bottle of it and went into the bathroom and then she came back into our room and said it had worked and she was going to go give it to Ruth so she could clean up her mess.

She was a little less angry when she came back, even though she still had the bottle with her, because she said that Ruth wasn't there because she'd walked to Walgreen's to buy her own bottle of nail polish remover, since she'd run out before she got the sink clean.

She stayed up after I went to bed, so that she could look at her Facebook, but she turned off the lights in the room so that I could sleep.

September 20 [Racing Cars]

September 20

Aric was really tired and after we'd had sex he kind of rolled back over and by the time I was out of bed and at the window he was almost asleep again. He'd pulled up the covers and he told me to have a good day and then when I went and got sunflower seeds out of the feeder he didn't throw anything at me again.

I was a little frustrated—Aric seemed kinda distant but he said that everything was okay, and I wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He might have just been tired, though. He'd told me that he hadn't gotten back to Kalamazoo until early Monday morning, so that might be why.

I flew low back towards campus, and I went by Jeff's house so I could see the birds and my bird feeder. I wondered if some of them ate out of both different feeders but I didn’t think they would—a lot of birds have pretty small territories.

So I circled around and watched them for a bit, and some of the sparrows must have forgotten who I was already and maybe thought I was a hawk or something, 'cause they took off for the trees chirping in alarm when I went overhead. And that was kind of sad.

When I got back to Trowbridge, I landed on the boardwalk and went in the back then got my flight gear together really quietly so I wouldn't bother Peggy. She was really cute; she was lying on her side and had her arms around her pillow and was hugging it.

I wasn't going to fly for too long and I thought about leaving my camelback behind but the one time I did I'd wish I had it, so I filled it up in the bathroom and got the rest of the way dressed then went back outside.

I told the airplane directors that I was going to fly over downtown but stay low, and the grumpy man said that I could, so I got some altitude as I went over the quad, so I was high enough to clear cars and trucks and wires. When I went by Hoben, I waved at Cedric and Leon's room, and then I turned down Academy so that I could fly downtown.

I decided that I was going to do a couple of laps around downtown and race some cars because that was fun. But the cars didn't know that they were playing the game so I had to wait for the signal lights to be red and then had to time it so I would get to them when they turned green, because it would be cheating to get a head start.

I beat a yellow truck that said Ryder but it wasn't much of a contest—the truck wasn't very fast. Then I raced a green Fiesta through the rest of downtown, until it turned towards the 94 Highway after crossing the river, and then I turned around and went back west. I kept pace with a Lexus that was pretty quick. Instead of slowly accelerating from the signal light, he would jump ahead and roar to the next one to get there faster than anyone else, and he made it through one just as it was changing from yellow to red and I couldn't catch him.

I cut across Westnedge Avenue to try again, and I heard a horn honk behind me and it was a blue Dodge Challenger like Peggy's mom had, and when we got to the next traffic light he stuck his head out the window and asked if I was racing and I said that I was, so he waited at the next light until I had caught up.

He made the tires spin and smoke and that actually gave me a bit of an advantage because he wasn't moving anywhere, and I was ahead when I got to the next traffic signal, which was green, but then he passed me and I couldn't catch up.

Then he turned into the parking lot for the Water Street Coffee Shop, and when I landed next to him I was breathing pretty hard from the race, and he said I'd done really well, 'cause I only had one horsepower and he had 375.

When I went back to campus, I didn't race any cars, 'cause I'd tired myself out a little bit. And I was glad that I'd thought to bring the camelback, 'cause I was pretty thirsty, so I sipped at it while I glided.

I landed and went up to our room to get undressed, and Peggy was still sleeping, but she'd rolled over the other way. And I hung my vest over my chair so that it would dry off some, then I went to the shower. I was glad I'd cooled down on the flight back or else I'd have been dripping sweat in our room and the hallway.

I got lucky again and there wasn't anybody in the shower, but maybe that was because it was a little bit earlier than I usually took my shower, and I was just finishing when Ruth came in the bathroom.

Peggy was awake when I came back to our room and she said that she wanted breakfast more than a shower and if we hurried to breakfast and back she hoped that there wouldn't be a line, so even though I was a little damp and un-preened, we went to breakfast and the waffle-maker was working, which was nice.

When we were back at our room after breakfast, Peggy helped me put my mane back, and then I put on my lab coat and strapped my safety glasses over my head and I couldn't fly with the coat on but I didn't know if Lisa would be willing to help me so it was smarter to wear it to class.

It was really weird wearing my saddlebags over it, 'cause the girth strap dug into one of the buttons and pushed it into my belly and I didn't like that but there wasn't any good way to avoid it.

Our lab was lots of fun: we had to heat up and chill closed bottles of gas and record the pressure that was on the gauge, and observe the results. I had to let Lisa do a lot of the work that hooves weren't good for, but I took all the notes and I did what I could. It turned out that I could grab the pressure bottle when it was hotter than she could, because the side of my hooves weren't as sensitive as her hands.

For a bonus, Professor Brown also had a special bottle for each pair which was full of mystery gas, and after we'd gotten practice with the other bottles we got to experiment with that and he had a chart of different gasses that it could be and we were supposed to figure out which one we had by matching it up with different temperatures and pressures that were on the chart, which meant that we had to be pretty precise. But when we were done, both Lisa and I agreed that our mystery bottle had neon in it.

I stopped at the Mail Hut on my way to lunch to see if I'd gotten anything, and I had a letter from my sister, which made me feel kinda guilty, 'cause I hadn't sent her one in a long time, so I put it in my saddlebags with my astronomy books and then I decided that I'd sit with Cedric and Leon and Trevor.

Well, I got to lunch a little earlier than they did, so after I'd gotten my food and sat down at the table I took out the letter and opened it up and started to read it, 'cause I was curious what she had to say.

She told me how things were back in Chonamare, and said that I'd missed the leading end of a hurricane coming through, which had made landfall further south and the ponies down there had set up a counterstorm to push it back out to sea but then it had decided to come back and nopony was ready for it. She said that half the fishing boats had been bashed open on the rocks but luckily everypony had stayed in port so nopony had to be rescued, and the boats got hauled ashore and most of them had been fixed again and were back out in the ocean where they belonged except for a couple of dories which had been smashed to bits.

And said that she'd heard that an Equestrian weather team had been sent to Earth to help fight storms and she wondered if I'd met them. She said that she would have rather had them stay in Equestria where they could be helpful because she was sure that Earth had so much technology that storms weren't an issue, and I snorted when I read that, 'cause I thought about some of the storms I'd flown in.

Then she said that she hoped that I had a good birthday, whether her letter got to me before or after, and said now that I was gone Cloud Climber had the latest birthday and they'd just celebrated down at the pub.

Cedric saw the envelope on the table and I guess it looked kind of funny because the address was in English but the return address was in Equestrian so he asked who it was from and I told him and he said it was nice of her to think of me and write a letter like that.

Leon said that Cedric had all the letters that Aquamarine had sent him in a little box and he admitted that it was true and he'd put an effort into improving his handwriting because she could write better with her mouth than he could with his hands and he thought that was unfair.

I really wanted to know if they'd done more than just write letters to each other but I didn't think he'd tell me if they had, and I wasn't sure that she would, either.

It was funny, 'cause usually Cedric and Leon were pretty jokey but this time he looked kind of serious and Leon didn't say much. So I asked Leon when Cedric went to get more food, and he said that Cedric was his teammate and friend and that they laughed around about things that didn't matter but not the things that really did, and that made a lot of sense to me.

I still hadn't figured out who I wanted to be friends with in Astronomy class, so I sat kind of in the center and watched people as they came in. There was a short girl with long blonde hair that looked friendly and I think she was a freshman because I hadn't seen her before, and there was also a boy who'd taken pictures of me when I was rolling around in the snow last winter and he seemed kind of shy but if he'd taken pictures of me then he must be interested. He liked to sit in the back, though, and I didn't like being that far away from the professor.

Professor Miller went back to talking about planets and their orbits, and she explained how hard it was to find planets that were around other stars despite how easy it seemed in science-fiction, and she showed us a picture of Sirius, which was the brightest star in the human sky, and showed us a little spot next to it and asked everyone if it was a planet, and we thought maybe it was but it was actually another star that was farther away, and that the problem with finding them was that planets were too close to their star to easily find, which was part of the reason why humans hadn't found any earlier. For us, unicorns had used magic and that had been more successful, but only for close stars: we'd had no idea if there were planets at farther stars or not and nopony had figured out how to find them if there were.

Then she showed us how to use scientific notation, which was a way of making big numbers smaller, and instead of the easy formula she'd taught us before she expanded it back out with new variables and that made the equations a lot bulkier. And then she had to explain how significant digits worked because with numbers this big they only had to be reasonably close. And she said that we had to do it without calculators and that made a lot of people upset but I didn't mind. We did that all the time with our weather wheels, especially since our observations weren't all that precise to begin with.

But she had to explain it more, because a lot of the people in the class really didn't quite understand.

Which brought us back to her question about how far away planets were from stars, and it wasn't figured out by distance, but angles instead, and that was really interesting. And it was trigonometry, which was fun, so I was looking forward to that. I wish that we'd had a lab where we could look for planets.

She taught us the small angle formula, and how the angles were measured in radians and not degrees and then she simplified the formula with AUs and parsecs and arc seconds which was useful with really small angles that were used in astronomy. And she showed us how to calculate how close in arc seconds a planet orbiting Sirius would be, and that was the end of the class, and she said it was our last day to not have homework.

When I got back to our room the first thing I did was write a letter to my sister telling her about all the things that I'd done on my last vacation and when I'd finished Peggy asked me about it so I told her how my sister had sent me a letter for my birthday and she wanted to know when that was and I wasn't sure because humans have a different calendar but I figured that it was this Friday and she was mad that I hadn't told her sooner and she said that we had to have a party to celebrate.

I didn't want that because we hadn't had a party for anybody else's birthday and I didn't want everyone to feel like they had to go to the trouble, especially since I wasn't sure it was the exact same date anyway, but she insisted and said that we'd have a party in the lounge because our room wasn't big enough.

So at dinner that was all that anyone wanted to talk about, especially since there hadn't been a special dinner at all. And they were confused about how I didn't know any ponies who had birthdays in the fall or winter, and I said that ponies weren't born then because of the estrus season and then I kind of had to explain how a mare couldn't get pregnant in the late fall or all of winter, at least not where I lived, but further south some ponies stayed fertile longer.

I guess it was weird for them because they could get pregnant whenever they wanted to.

And Sean was kind of embarrassed about the conversation, and so he tried to ignore us and eat his dinner and he said that there were things that men were not supposed to know at all, things that were supposed to be secret, and Christine said that even if he hadn't learned it in health class she had told him pretty much everything about her estrus cycles and he said that he had made an effort to forget them, and then he said that he'd really rather talk about anything else and he would even admit that light sabers were cooler than phasers if only she would change the subject.

She said that she would never let him forget that he had said that, and then said that she thought the Chicago Cubs were going to make the World Series this year and everyone laughed at that except for me because I didn't know who the Chicago Cubs were or what a World Series was.

Sean wanted to go over math homework after dinner, and then Peggy and Christine wanted to plan out what they were going to do for me, so we both left a little bit early and I got my homework and took it to his room and we went through the problems and this time we'd both gotten all the same answers, which was nice. He said that I should have skipped the hard problem and just put something in Equestrian math, but I told him that that wasn't right, and if I skipped problems that were hard I'd never get good at math, and he said that a lot of what we learned in school didn't really have an application in real life, but I thought that he was wrong. Maybe humans had gotten lazy because they had computers to think for them, but when I figured out weather schedules, all I had was tables and formulas and my weather wheel.

We stayed in his room a little bit late because I was sure that Peggy and Christine were still planning, and he asked when I was going to tie a cloud to a tree which was something that I should do, and I said maybe I could do it over the weekend if the weather cooperated.

It was kind of late when I got back to my room, and I still had to write down what I'd learned in the lab today, which I should have done sooner, so I got out all our notes and started working on them. Me and Lisa would have to meet sometime to get final results for our work, and we'd agreed to figure out a time tomorrow after class, but that was no excuse to not do the work before our meeting.

I was still working on it when Peggy came back and she wouldn't tell me what they'd decided just that I'd like it. And I asked if we were going to go skydiving, and she said that wasn't what they'd planned because that would take more than a couple of days to arrange and she wasn't sure who'd want to anyways. I said that Meghan didn't, and Peggy smiled and said that she was an adrenaline junkie and would be happy to skydive with me. So that made me really happy 'cause it was one of the last things on my bucket list.

I spent the rest of the evening with my lab work and writing in my journal and I'd meant to read another book in the Bible but hadn't had time, and when I went to bed it was a little bit later than I would have liked.

September 21 [Taco Wednesday]

September 21

I wanted to do something different this morning because it was nice to have a routine but it was also nice to sometimes change the routine. So I decided that I would fly through downtown and then along the river trail instead of the nature center.

I got permission from Dori and went the same way I had yesterday, except that I didn't race any cars. Then when I got to the river, I started to follow the trail, until I decided that it would be even more fun to follow the river instead.

So I went about ten feet above the water but I had to dive down a little bit when I got to bridges because a lot of them weren't that high above the water. And a lot of them had rock doves nesting on the bridge beams, 'cause it was a nice strong shelter for them. They didn't mind me 'cause I was in the center and not getting too close to their nests.

There was a big cement field that I'd seen before but had never quite figured out but this time when I went by I realized that buildings had been on top of it once and that was why there were strange shapes with roads connecting them all. It had been big, whatever it was, and it must have been gone for a long time, since there were some trees growing through the cement.

Then I went around the little island that had the topless Karaoke bar where I'd never gotten to go, and underneath another bridge, and then I came to a parking lot that had a ramp into the water which was where people launched their boats. There was a van in the parking lot that had a skeleton-trailer behind it that a boat had been on, so I would have to pay attention and make sure that I didn't run into the boat.

It might have been downriver from me and I hadn't seen it, because it couldn't be much further upriver, since I was getting close to the dam.

I went under another bridge, and then a couple more curves in the river and I heard the dam before I saw it, and I started paying really close attention for wires, because there were lots of them around the dam. They went way overhead, and the dam wasn't that tall, so as long as I wasn't really careless, I didn't have to worry about them too much.

I went up and over the levee that was next to the dam and then kept flying over Morrow Lake, and then I flew down the lake all the way until it turned river-sized again, and there was a bridge so I turned around at that and headed back.

When I got back to the dam again, the wires looked a lot closer, 'cause they were built on lower ground, and even though I knew that I'd clear them I slowed down a bit as I went across the levee.

Then I followed the river all the way back until I got to the railroad bridge, and I climbed up and followed over the railroad tracks, plenty high enough to avoid any wires.

I had a shower and I was done before Kat came in so either she was sleeping late or I'd gotten back before I usually did. So I had to wait for Peggy to have her turn, which was after Kat, but that was okay because it gave me a chance to look over my homework one more time, and also make sure that I had all my lab notes.

For breakfast I had an omelet, and also a little bowl of fresh fruit, and then I went to physics class. Professor Brown told us that the constant volume process wasn't as useful as it seemed, but the constant pressure processes were very helpful, and that was what he started to teach us. And he told us that we needed to remember delta-H equaled Qp and we should never ever forget it and so I also wrote it down how ponies would. And he told us about an experiment using two pistons and a plug with holes and we had to figure out if it was reversible and irreversible, and I thought it was reversable but I was wrong, and that was the Joule-Thompson experiment. And he reminded us again that this only worked for ideal gasses and not real gasses. And he told us about inversion temperature, which was very important in weather work. But it was kind of confusing how he kept telling us about ideal gasses and then how that wasn't true for real gasses, because even Socrates knew that there weren't any ideal forms in the world.

Since we were both already in the building together and neither of us had to go to a class right after this one, me and Lisa went to one of the science lounges and sat down to go over our notes. And I'd done a lot of the work already, so there wasn't much more for us to do before the lab next Tuesday. She said that she would type it up and print it out, and after class on Friday we could look at it one more time together and see if there were any changes that we wanted to make. And she said that the next labs might be more challenging, and I hoped that they were.

So I had a little bit of free time before lunch and it probably wasn't enough to do my thermodynamics homework so I started to read Zechariah, who had had visions. He saw four horses in a grove of trees, and they were the horses that God had sent to go through the Earth. And he saw the horns that God had scared the people with and craftsmen who broke the horns so that the people wouldn't be scared anymore.

He saw a man with a measuring line who was going to measure Jerusalem, and he saw how God gave the high priest Joshua new clothes because his old clothes were dirty, and God also washed away all his sins.

There was a woman in a basket that was bad, so angels carried her to Babylon, and then he saw four horses pulling four chariots and they were going to go through the Earth, too. And the God said that when He had been mad at the Israelites for breaking His rules, He had punished them but now He wasn't mad at them anymore and He was going to bless them and protect them.

And Zechariah also was told how God would punish the other nations who had not followed His rules, and said that He was going to live in Jerusalem and protect it, and then one day after He had defeated all of Israel's enemies, they would all come and pay tribute to Him.

So I thought that this had probably also taken place before, especially since an angel told the man with the measuring line that there were no walls in Jerusalem and I remembered that they had been re-built.

I got my math things and made sure that I had my homework, too, and then I went to lunch. They had mostly leftovers from last night, and none of it looked very appealing. They had some fish that was new and it was called scrod and I didn't know what that was, but it smelled like it might be okay, so I took one and I also had a salad and some macaroni and cheese.

The fish wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as the ones I'd gotten at restaurants over the summer. They'd overcooked it so it was too dry, which was disappointing. If they'd had a good sauce to go with it that might have made up for it, too, but they didn't.

Christine said that it was funny that I was complaining about my food when I had a box of hay tucked away in my dorm room, and I said that it was good hay (although it was getting kind of dry and stale). And Sean I guess hadn't heard about my hay, and he wanted me to tell him that I was talking about actual hay and that this wasn't some kind of weird pony slang for something else.

I told him that next time he came to my room I'd show him my haybox, and he said that we weren't that close of friends and Christine had to put her head down on the table she was laughing so hard. So at first I thought that maybe humans kept their food hidden so that nobody would steal it, but then Peggy said why Christine found it funny and Sean said that the joke wasn't funny if you had to explain it and Christine said that his face wasn't funny if he had to explain it and that didn't make much sense but she started laughing again right after she said it, and she was a little bit giggly for the rest of lunch.

Me and Sean went to math class together and he said that he was sorry for making a bad joke but I said that I didn't mind, and I would have laughed if I'd got the joke right away.

Professor Pempena said he was going to tell us equations of planes today, and he started by telling us how to move a plane from one place to another place using math, and to make sure that we were paying attention and learning he defined a plane and had us figure out if the vector he gave was parallel, perpendicular, or neither. I liked how he’d ask us questions right in class to make sure that we understood what he was doing before he moved on.

He showed us a set of partial equations and we had to find a point which was on all three planes, and we didn’t actually have to solve them which was disappointing, but I wrote the numbers down anyway so that I could try later, and just when I finished he challenged us with another problem, and it was kind of tricky because you could have an infinite number of solutions or no solutions or only one solution, depending on how the planes were arranged, then he told us about homogenous cases where all the equations equalled zero, and the easy way to do them was to make all the variables zero, which he said was the trivial case. Then when you had three parallel planes you had either infinite solutions or no solutions and the easy way to tell was if when you did your calculations you discovered that one equalled two.

I had to stay a little bit late just so that I could explain to Professor Pampena how the problem I'd done in Equestrian math worked, but he was pretty smart and by the fourth step he was able to figure out what I was doing.

And then I had the rest of the afternoon free, and I thought I'd do my math homework first because that way me and Sean could meet after dinner if he had his done, and if not than I would be ready for him whenever he wanted to review it with me. So that took a little bit longer than I'd hoped, but I was still done early enough to get started on my physics homework.

Me and Peggy went to dinner together, 'cause she'd come back after her class and changed into a different t-shirt that she liked better but didn't like wearing to class even though she wore it to dinner and I didn't understand at all what the difference was but it made sense to her.

It had a picture of the sun and it said Hollister and I asked if that was a name that humans called the sun and she said that she didn't think so, that it was just the name of a company that made shirts and that usually they had a seagull on them but for some reason this one had a sun and she liked it because the fabric was really soft but she'd worn it for too long and it was getting really thin and you could kind of see through it.

They did have a special dinner tonight, which had a table of tacos that you could make yourself, and I had Peggy make me a burrito and a hard taco and she put a little guacamole on my plate and some sour cream too so that I could put that on them if I wanted to, and we'd had to wait in line to get ours because that was what everyone wanted to get, even though there was also other food.

I wanted another taco after I'd finished the ones I had and Peggy wanted to know why ponies loved tacos so much and I said it was because they were good, and Sean gave me a hoofbump. So he helped me make this one and he put more fillings in it than Peggy had so he could barely roll up my burrito.

I shouldn't have eaten all of it, but it was really tasty and so I did, and then me and Peggy went back to our room so that we could do homework. I wanted to get mine done so that I could sleep with Meghan tonight.

After a while I started to fart, 'cause of the tacos, and Peggy kicked me out of the room. I really couldn't blame her. So I sat outside on one the benches in front of the chapel and did my physics there and I could fart all I wanted without bothering anybody.

It was kinda Sean's fault anyway for making me a burrito that was that big, and I thought about flying down to his room but I didn't.

I got all my physics homework done and then I flew back up outside our room and knocked on the window and Peggy said that she felt bad for kicking me out and I could come back in if I wanted to and I said that I thought I should probably stay outside for a while longer and I didn't mind but I was done with my physics homework and could write in my journal except that I didn't have it with me, and she went over to my desk and got it and then figured out how to make the screen open, and she passed it under and then I flew back to the bench with my journal in my mouth.

And I wrote in that until it started getting dark, and then I walked back to Trowbridge and let myself in through the front door and went to our room that way so that I could take off my saddlebags.

I thought about washing my flight vest because it was pretty dirty and decided that I could do that tomorrow after Astronomy class, since I really didn't want to spend a couple of hours in the laundry room tonight. If' I'd been smart, I would have done it while I was doing my homework. I could have even done my homework in the laundry room—it was kind of relaxing in there because of the smell of the soap and the swishing noises that the washing machines made.

I went down to Meghan's room and knocked on the door and she let me in and she'd been in the middle of her homework so I insisted that she finish it up first because school was important, and I sat on her bed and watched her work. She had little speakers in her ears that were called earbuds and she took the one out that was next to me so that she could hear if I said anything and that was nice because I could also hear her music which she said was a nineties mix. And she'd look over at me every now and then and rub my ears or pet my mane and I nuzzled her neck.

She couldn't listen to her music out loud because Amy was also doing homework and it might have distracted her.

Meghan finished up first so she put her books away and we went outside and walked around on the quad for a little while then sat down against a tree and she said it would be nice to look up at the sky but there were so many lights on campus that you could hardly see it at all, which was too bad. And I said that we should go somewhere dark where we could look at the sky together because it had been really pretty up north and you could see millions of stars. I didn't think that the Nature Center was quite far enough away but they did have telescope so maybe it was.

I could have fallen asleep outside, 'cause I felt safe with her next to me, but we went back to her room instead and Amy was in bed but not asleep yet. And so Meghan got her sleeping clothes and went into the bathroom and got ready for bed, and I climbed up into bed and when she was dressed she got in next to me and kissed me on the forehead and I kissed her back on the lips, and then she laid on her back so that I could put my head on her breast.

September 22 [The Planets]

September 22

Meghan's alarm woke me up which was a little strange, 'cause I was used to waking up before it. And she had to let go of me to turn it off, and I was looking out the window to figure out what time it was and I realized it was still pretty dark outside.

Meghan said that she'd set her alarm for earlier so that we'd have more time in the morning which I thought was really nice of her, even though we couldn't do much more than snuggle together because Amy was sleeping and it would have been rude to wake her up.

I pushed Meghan's shirt up a little bit and rested my wing on her stomach, and she rubbed my neck and we cuddled until her alarm went off again, and after she'd turned it off, she kind of dozed off until the third time her alarm went off. Then I thought that I should get ready to go flying again and she said that she might as well get up and face the day, too, so we got out of bed and she went to the bathroom to get dressed and said that she'd walk out with me until I took off if I didn't mind and I thought that was really nice of her.

I had to go back to my room and get my flight gear and Meghan waited outside while I got it and then helped me get dressed in the bathroom. Then we went down to the boardwalk and she asked me where I was going to fly and I wasn't entirely sure. I told her last week I'd flown to Cloverdale and I'd pretty much seen everything around Kalamazoo that was a medium flying distance, and since I'd mostly gone north and east the last few times I'd probably go south and west, so I called the airplane directors and Dori said I could and to stay low until I crossed the 131 Highway. And then I kissed Meghan and took off. I climbed over all the buildings on campus and then circled around and waved at her before I looked at my watch and followed its directions southwest.

I could have kept up a perfectly straight course just looking at my watch but that was a bad habit to get into when there were other things to see on the ground, especially since it wouldn't work when I got back to Equestria, and if I got out of the habit of navigating properly I might find myself in trouble when I got back home. I knew that the watch got told where I was by satellites way up in the sky and there weren't any of them in Equestria.

Everything was pretty familiar until I crossed over the 94 Highway, and after that I was going off in a direction that I hadn't flown too much—I'd mostly stayed near the 131 highway when I went southwest.

There was a chain of lakes that were kind of along my path, and they made really good landmarks to follow. And a lot of fields below me, too, and some of them were being worked by big machines, some of them almost as big as locomotives. One wheat field was being mowed by a giant rotary mower, and it had a tube that was dumping grain into an open cart that was being towed next to it, while a whole bunch of dust was being spit out the back, and that was really neat to see. I guess it could sort out what it wanted to keep and what it didn't all inside the machine.

I could see the railroad tracks off to my right, and we weren't quite parallel. And I could see the grass airport that was near to them and then the little town that was called Lawton that had been my last stop one day when I was flying.

And when I got further southwest, I couldn't see the tracks any more. I crossed over an important road but I didn't know which one, since I was too high to read the signs along the side of it. I'd figured out that most roads just had signs at intersections but the more important roads had signs along their sides in case you forgot which road you were on.

I was starting to think about turning around, but there were some strange-shaped fields that I wanted to get a look at before I did. When I got closer it looked like it was caused by the water-spraying bridge that the farmers had, and their fields having odd, wide borders around them, too.

I was pretty hungry because I hadn't wanted to keep Meghan waiting so I hadn't had a snack before I left but there was still a can of anchovies in my vest pocket, so I turned around to be pointing back towards Kalamazoo but instead of flying I started to glide down. There was a lake ahead of me that I could reach and a big field next to it with lots of wrapped-up hay rolls, and that would be a good place to land and have a snack.

There were cows in the field so I had to watch where I landed, and the closer I got the bigger they looked. Cows were really big but Earth-cows were a little bit bigger than ours, I thought, and I'd never really paid much attention to them before.

They weren't too bothered by me—they put their heads up to look and then went back to grazing, and I opened up my anchovies and rested my wings a little bit and drank some water and a couple of the cows had gotten curious about what was in their pasture and were coming over my way and I didn't think that they'd be territorial or aggressive, but I didn't really want to stay and find out because not only were they a lot bigger but there were also a lot more of them, too.

When I saw Lawton off to my left I kind of thought about changing course that way a little bit in case an Amtrak went by, 'cause they were fun to watch since they were so fast, but that could add a few miles to my flight. So I looked at my watch to see what time it was, since I didn't want to miss lunch, and I had the time, so I followed a road that went north until it got to the railroad tracks and then I turned along them and looked behind me to see if there was an Amtrak coming that way but I didn't see any.

I stayed high as I crossed over the 94 Highway and I kept paying attention to if there were any Amtraks but I didn't hear any or see any.

I started losing altitude so I'd be low enough when I got to the 131 Highway bridge, and took one more look behind me as the track started to curve, but there weren't any Amtraks, which was kind of disappointing. And I called up Dori to tell her where I was, and that I was descending, and then I decided that since I hadn't heard or seen any Amtraks I'd fly straight from the 131 Highway back to campus, 'cause that was really easy to navigate.

When I finally landed on the boardwalk I was hungry and a little bit tired and I went up to our room and got undressed then before I took my shower I went downstairs and put my flight vest in the washing machine.

There wasn't anybody in the shower, so I took my time and when I was done I went downstairs and both of the dryers were being used and I could have waited but my flight vest would dry on its own if I hung it up, so I put it over my back and went upstairs and hung it over the back of my computer chair, then went to lunch.

I sat with Cedric and Leon and Trevor again and Trevor had a book with a bunch of Shakespeare's sonnets in it and he let me read some of them, and I said that I really missed having poetry class. And Cedric asked if I could read one that I liked out loud and Leon thought that was really funny, but I read his 94th sonnet, and then Cedric asked if he could have the book and Trevor said it was okay, so he looked through it and finally read the 33rd and it was kind of sad and I thought that he had the perfect voice for it and I think even Leon did too 'cause he didn't say anything after Cedric was done reading, and then Cedric said that it was his turn to read, and Leon said that he'd never learned how and I believed him until Cedric said that his butler probably fed him, too.

Leon said it was the maid that fed him and he was lucky that he had picked up how to eat on his own here at college or else he'd be starving right now and Cedric got a spoonful of mashed potatoes and pulled it back like a spoon catapult and said that he was always willing to help a friend.

So Leon took the book and read the 71st sonnet and that one was supposed to be sad, too, but the way he read it was kind of funny, especially since Cedric had just been mocking him.

On my way to astronomy class I was thinking about how I ought to find time to read more poetry, and maybe I could go to the library and get more poetry books. They had lots of books about everything there, so there must have been dozens and dozens of poetry books on the shelves.

Professor Miller started by telling us more about planets and how you couldn't see the ones that were at far-away stars directly, and how even the ones in the human solar system couldn't all be seen at first, and there was one called Pluto which had been discovered by math before it had been discovered by a telescope, although it wasn't a planet anymore because it was too small. And she started telling us how vector calculus could be used to figure out from the movement of stars (because the planet pulled the star along a little bit). And she also taught us a new math symbol which meant much much less, which was kind of neat.

And she showed us pictures of all the planets in order, and what we'd learned from them, like how humans had landed machines on Venus but they didn't last long because it was hot and rained sulfur. And Mars had what looked like river deltas and people thought that there was water on it then that there wasn't and then maybe there was and nobody was sure, and humans wanted to land there and get a better look at it like they had with the moon. It was really far away, though, and would take a really long time to get there and nobody was sure if astronauts could survive in a spaceship long enough to get there, or if they did, how they would get back.

Jupiter was big and had moons and weather like hurricanes that went on for centuries and that would be a kind of fun place to fly if it were possible. She told us that Galileo had discovered Jupiter's moons, and she showed us a picture of the four biggest ones and they were all different.

Saturn had big rings around it, and one of its moons had a giant crater in the side that she said looked like it had gotten hit by something that was not quite big enough to break it apart but almost and to me it looked a lot like the Death Star in Star Wars. And then we saw pictures of Uranus which had been taken by a space telescope, and it had a moon that had all sorts of jagged edges and Professor Miller said that it looked like this moon had been smashed apart and then fallen back together.

Neptune was blue and had weather too which was odd because it was so far away from the sun that it didn't have much energy and then we went on to Pluto how it had been made not a planet anymore because humans had discovered another, bigger planet that was further away called Eris, and then they found more and they decided that instead of calling them all planets they'd just say that they weren't really planets any more. And a couple of people in class booed that, and Professor Miller said that when they were all famous astronomers they could decide to make Pluto a planet again.

She told us about comets, too, and showed us pictures of one that had broken up and some of it had crashed into Jupiter, and said that just recently there had been a special spaceship which had landed on a comet, and she had pictures of that. It had had a little lander which was supposed to ride the comet but it had landed badly and couldn't get any sun for its leaves, so it ran out of electricity and later on they found out that it had fallen into a gulley.

And she told us that the Voyagers, which had been launched more than forty years ago, were now outside of what was considered their solar system and still going on, studying what was outside their solar system.

Then she told us the different categories of things in the solar system, which were the sun, the inner planets, the asteroids, the outer planets, the Kuiper Belt objects, and the Oort cloud which was where the comets came from, and then she passed out our homework.

When I was done with class I went back to our room and it was a really nice day outside and Peggy wasn't there, so I took my Bible and flew to a tree in front of Trowbridge and read Malachi which was the last book of the Old Testament.

And it was a vision that Malachi had and God said how much He loved Israel and how they didn't return His love like they should, and He warned the priests that they'd tried to cheat Him by giving Him bad offerings, and that the people were always complaining, and they thought that they could get away with being bad and He wouldn't notice but He had. So then some people got together and wrote a scroll while He watched, and then at the very end He said that He was going to send Elijah to them, and I remembered him from before.

It was very strange to be done with the Old Testament and I guess I kind of knew who God was now, and so I sat on my branch and thought about Him. I think it would have been a little bit easier to understand if the books had all been in order, because even though Liz had showed me how they weren't and explained it to me, I thought there was a little bit less use in a book that you couldn't figure out on your own. But I guess that when they'd gathered up all the writings and visions and prophecies and psalms and proverbs that everyone had, they all knew who God was so they thought it would be best to arrange it by theme.

So I was still thinking when I heard Peggy and she was under my tree so I flew down and nuzzled her hip and she said that she'd seen me in the tree from our window. And we walked back to our room and she told me that in her art class they'd watched a movie called Koyaanisqatsi, which was a very strange word that she had to spell for me. The professor had told her that it was a Hopi word and it meant a life out of balance but it could also mean a life of moral corruption and turmoil, which was kind of funny because that's what God was complaining about, too.

I asked her if she wanted to go to dinner early 'cause I'd missed it last Thursday since we'd been catching Pokemons, and maybe that was why I hadn't been quick enough to dodge Stellan and gotten my knee bashed, and she said that we could. But we didn't want to go too early or else all that would be left was what hadn't gotten eaten at lunch, so we sat in the room with our door open in case anybody wanted to come by and then Peggy helped me hang up my picture of the changing tree and the degree I'd gotten for flying in a wind tunnel and she thought that was really funny and that I was probably the only student who already had a diploma.

We were too early for Sean and Christine, and I'd already finished eating when they finally arrived. Peggy said that she'd stay but I had to go so that I wouldn't miss my meeting.

So I got my glaive and went to Liz's office and we talked about the Bible and I kind of thought that maybe God hadn't quite figured out people yet and Liz said that was kind of an interesting thought. Some of my year-mates had had their first foals and they all said that being a mother was a lot different than they thought it would be and Liz said that was an interesting interpretation and she wasn't sure if I was right but she wasn't sure I was wrong, either.

She also said that some people thought that God was too vengeful and there had been times that I thought so, too, but it was important to follow rules even if you didn't always understand why they were rules because they'd usually been figured out by somepony older and wiser, and if you didn't follow the rules you might not be the only one killed. So sometimes He had to be harsh and His people were like foals that didn't understand why.

I went to fighting practice next and warmed up with my glaive before switching to a padded one. This time I was more alert and I didn't get hit in the leg. And I'd started to get pretty good at figuring out what Stellan was going to do, so the two of us had some pretty good mock-battles, and after a while he decided to change things up a bit and I got to fight with Karla, who had a very different style. She was more defensive but when she moved in for an attack she was really fast, and so I had to be careful. She was shorter than he was, too, and that changed things, and she'd also give more ground up before pressing her counterattack.

That was one thing that usually gave us the advantage because unicorns especially didn't want to lose their cities so in the past they'd fought to defend them even when it would have been smarter to give up and regroup somewhere else. Earth ponies didn't like losing land, either, but they were more sensible and would retreat when they were outnumbered and get their land back later, and back in the tribal days one of our iles had been completely wiped out because they'd all been getting fat on the farmland they'd just taken and then the earth ponies caught them still on the ground which I guess was stupid of them, but I guess they'd thought that since all the earth ponies had run off they weren't going to come back.

Between the long flight in the morning and then fighting practice I was pretty tired by the time I flew back to my room, and I realized that I hadn't gotten a chance to meet with Sean and go over our math homework at all, so I sent him a telephone telegram and we agreed that we could do it at lunch tomorrow. Peggy wasn't there which was a little bit unusual, and she didn't come back until I was already in bed.

She said that she'd been busy with things but she wouldn't tell me what, and then she said that we were going to have dinner in the lounge for my birthday and we were going to get pizza and I thought that was really nice of her and I said that she didn't have to but she said that she wanted to, and a birthday was a fun excuse for a party.

Peggy said that Christine had wanted it to be more of a surprise but then they were worried I might fly off somewhere and we'd have a surprise party without me which would be disappointing for everyone.

She got in her sleeping clothes but didn't go to bed right away, because she said that she still had to talk to some of her friends on Facebook, and I curled up in my bed and I was still kind of awake when she finally closed her computer and got in bed, 'cause I was looking forward to tomorrow.

September 23 [Birthday Party]

September 23

When I woke up, I decided that I was going to fly north along the river for a little while to get my morning exercise, so I got my flight gear and filled up my camelback and then when I got out to the boardwalk it was cloudy and felt like it was going to rain, so I went back to our room and got my weather radio, too. And then I ate some hay and got my fishing license just in case I felt like catching some fish.

I should remember to always take that when I was flying.

I went back out to the boardwalk and told Dori where I was flying, and she warned me that it was going to rain, but probably not for a little while, and asked if I was going to be patrolling and I wasn't sure if I could, because of my classes. I would have to decide if it was a really bad storm—I think my professors would understand—but I couldn't just go up in any storm.

So I flew down over the quad and followed the railroad tracks all the way to the river, and then I turned north. I stayed kind of high to begin with, because I knew that I'd be flying over the stinky shit-factory and I didn't want to start my day smelling it.

A thousand feet up was enough that it was barely smellable, especially with the slight wind and the humid, almost-raining air, so when I was a ways past it I dove back down to be closer to the river and I thought about Mister Salvatore wanting to drift down the Mississippi. The Kalamazoo River wasn't as wide, but there weren't any big barges in it either, so maybe he could start here for practice. He'd eventually get to Lake Michigan, although he might have to go around some dams on his way, since there was at least one more downstream.

When I got by the Nature Center, I climbed up a little bit and flew over the pasture there, and looked at the deer all nibbling at the grass. I wonder if some people feed them, too? It would be nice to look out your window in the morning and see deer snacking at your deer feeder.

I flew all the way to a big island at a curve in the river, and then I decided that I would turn around and head back. I could have gone a little bit further and then taken a direct route back to campus, but I wanted to stay above the river.

It felt like I was going faster on the way back, just because I was flying against the current.

If I'd had all morning free, it would have been fun to fly all the way to Plainwell or Allegen, but I didn't have enough time before my class. Maybe I could do it on the weekend.

When I got back to campus, I landed back on the boardwalk and went inside to take off my gear and take a shower. I couldn't exactly feel how soon the rain was gonna come, so when I was done with my shower I turned on my computer and looked at the maps and thought that it would be a few more hours before it got here. But I kept my weather radio on and put the rest of my flight gear into my saddlebags, just in case.

Me and Peggy went to breakfast together and she was kind of yawny but had a couple of cups of coffee with her breakfast and that woke her up. She said that maybe she should try some morning exercise and I said that if she wanted to go trotting around the neighborhood with me I'd be happy to. I knew she could run 'cause she'd run in the race at the Nature Center with me.

So she said maybe we could do that one day a week, and maybe Monday mornings would be the best, because it would motivate her to not stay awake so late on the weekend. And I asked if I could wake her up and she said that I could. Christine told her she was going to regret it, which was probably true.

And Peggy asked if I had any plans for the weekend and I said that I didn't yet. So she told me to not make any for Saturday but wouldn't tell me why which was a little frustrating. I guess it makes people happy to surprise me with things.

I flew across campus to the Dow building and landed a little ways back from the front doors, just so that I wouldn't accidentally crash into a student coming out, then went up and waited until it was time to go into the classroom.

Lisa asked me why I had a radio strapped to my leg, and so I told her it was in case I needed to go stormwatching.

Professor Brown started telling us about thermodynamic cycles, and he showed us equations to get Cv and Cp and that was really neat because instead of a math equation where there was one equal sign and parts of the equation on either side, he could use three equals signs for all the different equations where you changed the volume or the pressure and it would all work out and it took him a lot of writing on the markerboard to prove it but he did. And I heard Crystal whisper to Austin that he could just have showed us the relationship without doing all that but I thought that it was a lot smarter to show how he got it because then we'd understand the principles behind it rather than just be told that was the way it was.

As he took us through the equations, he reminded us to start out by writing everything we knew down because that would always be helpful.

And then after he'd gone through all his equations he asked us if T2 reversible was cooler than T2 irreversible and I remembered that work was smaller if it was irreversible so I thought it would probably be the same but I wasn't sure, and it turned out that I was wrong.

When we came out of class, it was raining and I didn't know if it would get worse so I called Mel and there was a lot of static but he was out at our usual place, and he said that it didn't look like there were going to be any thunderstorms but probably just rain. Well, looking at the pictures wasn't the same as being there and feeling it, so I put on my gear in the lobby and asked for permission to fly, and I told Lisa that we'd have to meet later.

It came down heavy at first and then calmed down and I had a chance to fly back to my dorm and snack on some hay and put my math homework in my bag so that I could keep in the air as long as possible. And I realized that I was going to miss going over it with Sean and I felt bad but we should have gotten together yesterday.

I sent Peggy a telephone telegram to tell her why I was missing lunch and then I saw that I had a telegram from Mister Salvatore, too, but I didn't have time to see what it was, because it sounded like the rain and wind was picking up again, so I galloped down the hallway and glided down the stairs and was flying when I hit the door to the balcony. The little hissing arm on it didn't let it open as fast as I thought it would and I caught the end of my wing on it and broke a primary.

It was always better to be up in the sky before the heavy rain came down, and I wasn't, so it was harder to get up to altitude and of course I couldn't see much of anything, but I could feel it, and the way the air currents were behaving. And I didn't feel a lot of charge in the air, which meant that the storm didn't have much electricity in it and probably wouldn't produce much lightning.

I kept looking at my watch every time I reported to Mel, and I finally told him that I had to go to math, and he said it was okay because it was beginning to clear where he was. And I had to drop pretty low before I could see where I was and I'd drifted off to the east some, but not too much. My watch had helped keep me on station, and I landed on the quad right next to a big mud puddle.

I couldn't shake off the water because it was raining hard enough it wouldn't have done me any good outside and it would be really rude to do it inside, so I pushed my mane back and out of my eyes and then went in and upstairs to my class.

Sean was kind of surprised by how I was soaking wet and dripping all over my chair and he took off his sweatshirt and let me wear it even though I was going to get it wet. And he said that Peggy had told him I was up flying and also that I should turn off my blinking light 'cause it was kind of distracting.

So I put that in my saddlebags and my radios, too, and got out my things for class, which was a little bit harder with his sweatshirt on.

Professor Pampena told us to think of a line as the trajectory of a moving point, which was a parametric equation, which could be used to figure out if a line intersected a plane and where it intersected, and he gave us the equation of a plane and we had to figure out if his Q-line points were on the plane or went through it or never crossed it And since one equation solved as bigger and one solved as smaller, then they must be on opposite sides and go through it, which most people in the class figured out, and then he showed us how to calculate where it passed through the plane.

Then he taught us about cycloids, which were things that moved on circles, but made arches along a graph, and how we could calculate where the point was and he showed us how to find it with vectors.

He told us that we needed to use Taylor approximation to figure out what the point was doing right at the x-axis—which was the road—and I didn't know what that was and nobody else in the class remembered it, either, so he had to explain it, and how it showed that the point moved mostly down and then back up without moving much forward at all, and after we understood that he gave us all our homework.

I hadn't done any of my physics homework and I still had to meet with Lisa, too. I thought that maybe Peggy was getting things ready for my party and I'd be in the way, so we went to Sean's room to do math homework because he said that Christine was probably helping, too. And I gave him back his sweatshirt, and he tossed it into a basket of dirty clothes.

His roommate wasn't using his chair or his desk, so I sat there on a towel and Sean sat at his desk and we did our homework and I finished first and then nipped off my broken primary a little bit shorter, to neaten up the split end. And I had a bunch more feathers that really weren't where they ought to be, either, so I started preening my wings and I guess I got a little bit too focused on that 'cause I suddenly noticed that he was staring at me.

I hadn't quite finished but it was good enough for now, so I got my math homework and pushed my chair over and we went over the problems together, and there were a couple that we hadn't gotten the same answer for so we both re-worked them and I'd gotten one wrong and he'd gotten one wrong.

Even though I probably could have, it didn't seem right to stay in his room and do my thermodynamics homework, and I didn't have it with me anyway, so I went back to our room and Peggy wasn't there. I bet she was down in the lounge but I didn't stick my muzzle in to find out, 'cause I think she wanted to get everything set up before I arrived. And there were some bags on her bed that I was curious about but I didn't look inside; I just got my homework and I went outside and found a bench that was dry enough that I could work on it there.

The bench had gotten warmer from the sun shining on it after the rainstorm, and it got even warmer from me stretching out on it and that was all thermodynamics. If I had been colder than the bench it would have warmed me up.

I had to hold a hoof on my worksheet a couple of times 'cause every now and then a gust of wind would try to take it away.

Since I was close to the front of the dorm, I could see when a pizza car arrived, and the driver brought a bunch of pizzas up to the front door and he must have been new because usually they went in the back. And I saw Peggy open the door for him and I bet that meant she was almost ready for me, so I packed up my homework and flew around to the boardwalk and took off my saddlebags and then noticed that I was still damp under them, and my coat was all matted, so I brushed my coat out.

I thought it would be more fun to go in the front, so I flew around the dorm one more time and came in through the front door, and Peggy and Christine and Rebekka were all there and still hanging up some balloons and streamers on the wall. And there was a big stack of pizzas and a cake and some cupcakes and a brown grocery bag with a bow on the top of it.

So they weren't quite ready yet but they didn't mind that I was there, and I helped hang up some of the streamers since they'd had to stand on a chair to do it.

And then people started showing up, and it was just about all my friends. We ate pizza and talked and they had me open the bag and it was a big album with lots of pictures of everyone including me and Peggy said that humans had a thing called a yearbook that they used to remember school so they made me one and I could show all my friends back in Equestria.

It was hard to even know where they'd found all the pictures. I guess that a lot of times people were talking pictures and I didn't even know it, 'cause there were a couple of me playing Durak and giving the girl at Val Day a ponyback ride, and some of me snowboarding and wearing all my flight gear and there were also lots of pictures of my friends either with me or doing things on their own, and it was just really amazing to see all of it. They must have gotten some from our helpers, because there was a picture of me flying over Lake Michigan with the skyscratchers in Chicago in front of me, and another picture of me sniffing a draft horse's nose. I was sure it must have been a lot of work to get all the pictures and put them in a book like that, and Peggy promised that they'd make a second one for me at the end of the year, because there was still a lot of time to do things. And she said that there were some pictures she hadn't been able to get either, and told me I should have told her it was my birthday sooner.

Everyone had written in it, too; some of them had signed their names in the back and written under some of the pictures, too, and Peggy said that was also a thing that humans did for their friends. And since there were a lot of people and not everyone had seen all the pictures they all had to look at the book and it was kind of funny how I got questions from my friends about things that they didn't know I'd done, like how I'd had #freethenipple painted on my belly in Colorado Springs (Peggy said that she'd had to copy the picture from the internet).

She also said that we were going to go skydiving tomorrow, in the afternoon, and that was something I was looking forward to.

So after everyone had talked and gotten their chance to see the picture book, Peggy said that human birthday cakes have candles on them and it's usually one for how old they are, but she had run out of candles at sixteen so each one would have to measure more than a year, and I did the math real quick and told her how much time each one represented, and Sean gave me a hoofbump and said that I was a proper nerd.

I had to make a wish and not tell anybody and then if I blew out all the candles maybe my wish would come true, and it was hard to think what the right thing to wish for was, but I finally figured it out and flapped my wings to blow out the candles and Peggy said that wasn't how you were supposed to do it but it probably counted.

The cake was a nice, dark chocolate with a vanilla frosting and it was really good. The frosting was a little too sugary, but since it was my birthday it was okay.

We all stayed in the lounge talking and we weren't supposed to be drinking but we did some anyway. Aric had brought a bunch of cans of beer and also paper cups with lids and bendy straws, and you could put the can inside and stick the straw through the lid and into the can and it looked like you were just drinking a soda (and there was also soda for people who didn't want to break the rules) and I think that probably the RA knew but never bothered us since we didn't get too loud.

Once all the pizza and cake and cupcakes were all eaten, people started to go back to their rooms, and when almost everyone was gone we went up to our room and continued the party there and we didn't have to pretend with the paper cups any more.

When it was getting close to bedtime, though, it got awkward because both Aric and Meghan were there and I couldn't decide who I ought to sleep with, because I couldn't choose both and I didn't want to hurt either of them so I didn't know what I should do, and I could tell both Aric and Meghan were waiting for me to decide and I just couldn't pick, and I finally went to pee to give myself some time to think and Peggy went with me and she said that she could maybe lie and tell them that we were doing something early in the morning so I didn't have to decide but that wasn't fair to them either. And I still hadn't thought of anything when I got back to our room and finally Aric said that he was going to give Angela and David a ride back home and that I was welcome to fly over if I wanted to after I'd said all my goodbyes, so I went out in the hall with him and hugged him and kissed him and I was pretty sure that he knew I wasn't going to be coming over tonight.

Peggy said that it was okay if Meghan stayed in our room but the no sex rule applied when it was a girl, too, but I didn't mind, because I didn't really want to anyway, because it didn't feel right to me.

Meghan had to go back to her room to get her sleeping clothes but promised that she'd be back, and when she'd left Peggy hugged me and said that she should have thought of that when she told people about my party but it wasn't her fault and her and Christine had told me and I hadn't listened to them when I should have, and maybe all three of us needed to have a talk about what we were expecting from each other.

And it was kind of frustrating because there were other things that I did with one person and not another like go to the salon with Meghan or go watch plays with Aric, and even things that I did with other people that nobody got jealous about like stormwatching and math homework and it just wasn't fair. And I should have gone with Aric, 'cause I'd spent most of the summer with Meghan but it wasn't right to ration out the time with your friends like you'd measure out rain, either.

So when Meghan came back in her sleeping clothes I think she could tell that I was kind of tense and she got into bed and I got in next to her and rested my head on her chest and I was still awake when she went to sleep and I didn't think I was going to sleep much at all.

September 24 [Sleepless Night]

September 24

I dozed off a little but I couldn't really fall asleep and finally I got up and put on my flight gear and went outside to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors. It wasn't anybody that I knew on the radio and there was a little bit of confusion but finally I got permission to fly, and I took off and went north.

Kalamazoo was all lit up underneath me; all the street lights and house lights and I could see the lights of the cars on the road and blinking lights from airplanes in the sky, too. But off to the north, the lights ended, and then there were just a few scattered lights here and there that were farms.

And I could see way off to the north of me a kind of glow on the horizon which I suppose was Grand Rapids.

Sometimes the best way to think was to talk things over with your friends, and sometimes the best way was to get away and be by yourself for a little while and so I flew and I concentrated on flying and not thinking about Aric or Meghan, but instead the feel of the air under my wings and the slight bit I was off-balance from my freshly-broken primary. I concentrated on the wind ruffling my coat and the way my tail bounced with each wingbeat and I looked up at the stars above and the lights below and the flashing red lights that warned of towers.

As my eyes got used to the darkness, I could make out the shadow-shapes of the ground below me. I was past the dirt mines, past the 131 bus Highway, and over open fields and little woodlots north of town and probably if I'd focused on them I could have figured out exactly where I was but it didn't matter.

The thought was in my mind that I could just keep on flying. I could live off the land well enough; there were plenty of grasses and fields with food in them and a farmer probably wouldn't miss a little bit of it. I could get fish from streams and rivers and lakes, and I could find a cloud and make it into a little house and nobody would bother me up there or I could go down on the ground and live with the deer and graze with them. Or I could turn west and if I took a nap and rested on the shore of Lake Michigan I could fly to Chicago and stay with Cayenne, or maybe go east to Lansing but that wouldn't solve anything and Mister Salvatore was clever and he would find me and he would probably be mad. Maybe he'd make me do paperwork.

It wasn't a mature thing to do, either. A foal could be excused for trying to fly away from trouble of her own making, but I wasn't a foal and just because I maybe didn't want to have to make a decision didn't mean that I could avoid it.

We had to all sit down together and decide what was fair for everyone but I was so afraid that when we did I would lose one of them and I didn't want to.

I don't know how long I flew because I never looked at my watch, but it was getting light in the sky when I finally landed back on the boardwalk and my head was drooping and I could barely keep my eyes open and I staggered back up to our room and I took off my radio and my flight vest and my camelback and just left them lying on the floor and I couldn't get my watch off. And I shouldn't have gotten in bed without at least rinsing the sweat off of me but I was too tired, so I climbed into bed next to Meghan and as I put my head down on her chest I thought what if this was the last time that we could ever sleep together, and I cried myself to sleep.

I didn't wake back up again until it was well into the day, and I was a little disoriented by that. Meghan was still in bed but she was dressed in day-clothes, and was sitting against the wall, and had her hand resting on my back. My head was in her lap and I didn't remember anything about her getting up or leaving to get her clothes unless she had had them last night and I hadn't noticed. I didn't think she had, though.

Peggy was sitting in the papasan chair and said she wondered when I was going to wake up and asked if I wanted to go to breakfast and if I still wanted to go skydiving today.

I nodded my head and then closed my eyes again because Meghan had started scratching behind my ears and it felt really good. I felt better than I had last night, maybe because I’d cleared my mind by flying or maybe because I’d woken up with Meghan.

I asked Peggy what time we were going and she said that she'd scheduled us for three but she could try to reschedule if that was too soon and I thought it was plenty of time but then I thought to ask what time it was now and it was already past noon. So that wasn't much time at all and I'd have to hurry.

Meghan said that she had to go back to her room and do things but she hadn't wanted to leave before I got up, and then she kissed me on the forehead before she left. And Peggy said that we were really cute together and then when we were at breakfast she asked if I'd been gone all night, and where had I been, because when she got up in the night to use the bathroom I hadn't been there and then when she'd woke up in the morning my flight gear had been scattered all over the floor.

And I told her that I'd gone flying to clear my head, and she asked if that was something pegasuses did and I said sometimes.

I said that I thought it would be best if me and Meghan and Aric all met together and worked things out between us and she thought that was a good idea and said that we should make sure to choose someplace that was close to campus and also private so that we could have a good, honest talk.

Then she said that no matter what happened she would stay by my side, and that I could always tell her anything and that I'd better have one more chocolate eclair because I'd need the energy for today.

I felt a lot better when we went back to our room and so while she changed into her adventure clothes I got my portable telephone and was going to send a telegram to Aric but then I saw the one that I had gotten from Mister Salvatore and never read.

He said that he couldn't get the tornado team to come to Kalamazoo, but that they were coming to Indianapolis to fly in an airshow and if I wanted we could go down there. So I told Peggy and she came over and read the message too and said that sounded like it would be a fun road trip. She thought that Indianapolis was about six hours away but she wasn't sure.

So I sent him a telegram back saying that I wanted to go and some of my friends did too and I didn't know how many but we should probably get a hotel room and after a few minutes he sent me a telegram back and said that he would make the arrangements.

Then I couldn't think of who I should invite and maybe it would be smarter to not make a final decision until after me and Aric and Meghan had had our talk.

I thought that it would be better to invite each of them personally, so I asked Peggy if she had any suggestions of a good place to meet and she said that Waldo’s might be good because it wasn't too far from campus and it would probably be pretty empty if we met Sunday for lunch, and so I went to tell Meghan and at first she didn't want to but she finally agreed.

When I got back Peggy asked if she could borrow my camera or if I wanted to use it, and I didn’t feel like putting on any flight gear so I told her that she could. My straps wouldn’t fit her, but she said that she could clip it to her parachute harness with one of the clips that came with it, so I found the box it had come in and Peggy got out the clip she needed.

Then on our way to Allegan Peggy stopped at Aric's house so I could tell him, too, and he said that he would and I promised that it would just be us three and nobody else. Then I told him that me and Peggy were going skydiving and I kissed him and went back out to Cobalt.

We went all the way to Allegan, and she just took the 131 Highway because that was the way her GPS suggested she go. And it gave her directions all the way up to the building where the skydiving airplane lived but it wasn't smart enough to tell us how to get off the main road and get to it, but that was okay because there were signs that said.

I was glad that we'd gotten there early because when you skydived for the first time you were supposed to be attached to someone who knew how to do it, but Peggy had done it a bunch of times before so she was allowed to skydive on her own.

They had trouble figuring out what to do with me, though, because there weren't any human parachutes that would work on me and I hadn't brought a pony parachute with me. And they weren't sure that their harnesses would fit on me and tie me to another skydiver which I didn't want anyway, but it took a lot of convincing and talking and arguing even though Peggy had already called them and talked to them and thought that they understood that I would just be jumping out of the airplane naked and gliding to the ground with my wings.

But they finally agree to let me after I flew around their parking lot and then got on the roof of their building and jumped off and didn't crashland, and Peggy showed them some of the YouTube movie of me fighting a storm to prove that the turbulence from the airplane wouldn't confuse me. And they said I had to talk to the pilot too and reassure him that I wasn't dumb enough to fly into his airplane or any others but that didn't take too long because he recognized me from the airplane radio and shook my hoof and he said that I was probably a better pilot than he was and he was really honored to meet me.

I had to sign a paper saying that I knew skydiving was dangerous and that I could fall to the ground and die and if I did it was my own fault, and since I was kind of annoyed by all the questions that they'd been asking me I said that ponies signed things by inking our forehooves and stamping on the paper and they actually managed to find some dark paint and put it on the bottom of my hoof and I stomped on their paper and I could see Peggy was trying not to laugh.

There were a bunch of people in the airplane besides us and they had decided that we would go out first, I guess so that if I somehow forgot how to fly I wouldn't hit anyone else on the way down. And Peggy was kind of bothered by that but I said it was okay.

The airplane wasn't as nice inside as the Cessna I'd flown in to the airplane factory, and it was noisier, too. You could really hear the sound of the propellers through the metal skin.

It was a little unsettling that there weren't any windows I could see through, either, and once it got up in the air I got out on the floor so that I could face forward and that helped. A couple of the other skydivers looked at me and how I had my wings out and I probably did look a little bit silly but I didn't care.

We went up and around and it seemed like a really long time before we finally got to where we'd be jumping out. The guide wouldn't open the door until I was back in my seat which I thought was kind of silly since I was about to jump out the back, but I tucked my wings in and hopped back in my seat and then he opened the door and I felt a lot better now that I could see out the back.

We were almost a mile higher than I was normally allowed to fly, and I had a little bit of time to admire the view before Peggy went out the back and then I jumped out after her. And I had to dive a little bit to catch up, but she'd stretched herself out flat so that she would fly for longer, and it didn't take me very long to get to her and we fell together, which was a really strange feeling.

All the wind noise as we sped up made it impossible to talk, but that was okay. She was looking around at the land stretching off to the horizon. You could almost make out the shoreline (it was hard to be sure it wasn't just a mirage), and you could see Kalamazoo off in the distance and Grand Rapids, too.

It seemed like it was too soon that we had to separate so that she could open her parachute and I had to slow myself down, too, which was actually a lot harder for me because I couldn't just pop my wings right open all at once, and so I got a ways below her, but then I could shed some of my airspeed by flying back up to her, and then I circled around her until we got close to the ground and she had to focus on landing.

Humans didn't land very gracefully but I guess they don't have all that much practice at it. And then the parachute drifted out behind her and she had to kind of rein it in.

There were a couple of helpers on the ground who came out and they helped her get out of her parachute harness and then collected it and bundled it up because there was a special way that you had to put it in the backpack or else it got all tangled.

We had to wait until everyone had landed before the van would take us back to the airport, and Peggy said that it had really been an interesting experience to go parachuting with a pegasus, and that she'd been thinking about how this was how I saw the world most of the time and that it kind of helped put things in my perspective.

Peggy wanted to go again, and there was enough room on the airplane that we could go one more time, but we had to wait as they packaged the parachutes up again, so we relaxed in their lounge and looked at pictures of skydivers making patterns in the sky.

There was also a picture of a couple of people in a strange suit who were making smoke from their hind legs, and she said that was called a wingsuit and it let people sort of glide on their own and I thought that would be lots of fun because then we could spend some more time in the air together. And she said she was willing to try it but wasn't sure if it was possible to rent one or even if you could normally fly them around here. She said that there were people in Colorado who did, though, and they liked flying off cliffs and by mountains and that was called BASE jumping.

When they were ready for us, Peggy got her parachute on again and we went back out to the airplane and this time we were allowed to jump last, so we sat in the front and that was a lot better because even in my seat I could see through the windshield and watch the pilots working to make it fly. And I knew what most of their controls did now, too.

I wonder if Mark would let me fly his airplane?

I was paying attention out the front so it was surprising when the guide opened the back door, and I turned around to see people going out the back, and I could feel how the airplane got lighter as they went.

Everyone but me had to move kind of hunched over because the airplane wasn't that tall inside. And then we were at the back and she got her signal and jumped and then it was my turn and I jumped, too, and I could see all the other skydivers below us, just a string of dots stretched out behind the airplane like it had been pooping out people, and I dove down until I was beside Peggy and she reached out and held my hoof and we fell together.

There were a few small clouds drifting around that we passed by and it would have really been neat if we could have landed on them but I wasn't sure what would happen to Peggy if she tried to land on a cloud. If I worked it some I think she could have stood on it but I wasn't entirely sure, and that might be something that was better to experiment with close to the ground instead of all the way up in the sky.

I had to move away from her so that she could open her parachute and this time since I knew what was going to happen I started my slowdown as I turned clear, and this time we stayed a lot closer.

People below us were getting off the field, but there were still a few parachutes stretched out on the ground, and she had to go to the very end of the field to avoid them. There were ropes she could pull to steer her parachute.

I came down almost right next to her, and the helpers took off her parachute for her and then we got in the van and went back to the airport.

I got a certificate for it being my first time skydiving even though it wasn't my first time at all. But it was still nice of them.

When we got back to campus we were a little bit late for dinner, but that was okay. Sean thought it was really funny that I'd gotten a certificate for skydiving and said that Peggy should have gotten one because she was way less experienced than I was. And I'd been thinking that was true and maybe I should give her my certificate but she said it was okay, and it would be something really funny to have back in Equestria because I was probably the only pegasus who had one.

Christine said that I was the only pegasus who had a pilot's license, too, but that wasn't true, and so I told her how everypony on the tornado team had one, too, and then how they were going to be in Indianapolis next weekend for an airshow, and Sean looked at Peggy and begged her to go, and she said that we were going, and he said 'thanks Mom,' which was really funny.

I said that Mister Salvatore was going to get a room and I bet he was probably going to go and then I thought that I ought to tell Aquamarine and Gusty and Cayenne, too, because we could all meet there.

So when we were done with our dinner and got back to our room Peggy said she was going to free the girls and got into her lounging clothes, and I told her that if she really wanted her boobs to be free she wouldn't have put on a shirt. And then I turned on my computer and wrote letters to all of my pony-friends to let them know about the airshow, and I was hoping that they would all want to come.

Peggy said that we could leave Friday after class, and she could take the three of us in Cobalt, and I thought that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn might want to go, too, so we could ride with them, and Peggy said that she wasn't sure that anyone really wanted to ride in a van with the feds.

I said that they were a lot of fun when you knew them, and I thought I should ask, because more people fit into Sienna, plus Mister Salvatore was really good at getting other cars, too.

So I sent him a computer letter, too, just to see.

We had some leftover beer from my party and Peggy didn't feel like doing her homework, so we sat on her bed and I told her how nervous I was about tomorrow and she said that no matter what it was going to be better to have the conversation and get everything worked out rather than wind up having some spectacular breakup during mid-terms and I guess that was true. And I thought maybe it was my fault, because I'd spent so much time with Meghan over the summer and almost none with Aric and I could have; he hadn't been all that far away, and I might have just been taking him for granted and assuming that he wouldn't mind at all. Even though he'd said that he didn't, maybe he didn't really mean it.

And even now I wasn't spending that much time with him, except for Durak and sex, and so he was probably feeling left out and maybe he thought that I spend every other night with Meghan even though I didn't.

Peggy told me I should tell him all those things, because he wouldn't know if I didn't tell him and that was really smart of her.

I still wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow, but I was hoping that it would be all right, and I was glad that we’d still gone skydiving because that had let me think about something else.

September 25 [Waldo's]

September 25

I got up a little bit late, 'cause I was comfortable in bed and it was nice to just not have to get up at all. But after a while I started to feel really lazy, and even though Peggy was still in bed and might not be up for a while I didn't want to spend all morning being lazy, so I got up and went over and nuzzled her then I started thinking about our meeting and getting nervous again.

So I decided that I'd go on a long flight, and I went to the bathroom and filled up my camelback and got the rest of my flight gear on. My GoPro was still in Cobalt because Peggy had forgotten to bring it back in but that was okay, I didn't think I'd really need it for today. The sky was clear so there wouldn't be any cloud-wrangling, so it would be a pretty boring flight, not anything worth making a movie out of.

It still kind of nagged at my mind that I should have it, and I guess I could have woken Peggy up or looked for her keys, but I thought she'd be mad if I did, so I didn't.

I called the airplane directors to tell them what I was going to do, and Dori asked if I could keep clear of downtown for a little bit because there was a big airplane coming and she didn't want me to get in its way, and I said that I would go west.

So I went back to our room and got my saddlebags because I did need to get some groceries and more shampoo, and if I was going west I'd be right by Meijer. And then I went back out to the boardwalk and took off.

I kept low until I got to the 131 Highway, and I'd decided as I was flying that way that I would go north again, just kind of following the highway, but I wouldn't fly as far as Grand Rapids so that I wouldn't get in the way of their airplanes. And she said that was okay, so I turned across the highway and started climbing.

There wasn't anything new to see at first—the cars were different but everything else was the same as I'd seen before along the road and I kind of wished I'd gone off a different way. It would be fun to fly to East Lansing and see Aquamarine some weekend, and I think I could do it. I don't think it was farther than Chicago, but I guess I'd have to look at a map to be sure. She'd probably be happy if I flew there, and I could just follow the railroad tracks all the way to her dorm.

When I got close to the car runway that was by the highway, I could see that there were cars on it and cars parked near it, so I dropped down some so that I could get a closer look and see what they were doing. And when I got nearer I saw that they were doing sprints. The cars were lined up on the taxiway and then two of them would go side-by-side on the runway, and at a signal, they'd rush off to the other end and stop before they got to the end of the pavement, then they'd turn back on the taxiway and get back in line. And some of them were sitting in the grass between the taxiways with their hoods open, and people working inside, so I guess those were the ones that had to be fixed before they could race.

There were grandstands up at the front of the runway, but not at the end, and that was kind of strange because I thought that people would want to watch who finished first. Every race I'd ever seen the winner was the first one to cross under the finish banner, and nobody cared how you started unless you cheated and started too early.

So I circled over and watched that for a little bit, and then after I'd seen a bunch of cars get to the end and either go back in line or go sit on the grass, I straightened up and kept going north.

I went almost all the way to Moline, which was inside the Grand Rapids airplane director’s territory, and then I crossed over the highway as I turned around. I thought that I'd come back on the inside of it, at least until I got close to Kalamazoo, then I'd cross back over and go to Meijer.

There was a little town below me called Wayland, and it had a big oval train track south of it and I couldn't figure out why. It just went in a big loop, and then back where it started. I'd seen one that was kind of like that on our trip out west, but there were big silos where the train got loaded, and there weren't any here. There were a couple of big blue silos nearby, but a different track went to them.

Maybe people raced trains around in circles, although I thought if they were racing they'd want to have more than one track, unless the trains took turns. And there weren't any grandstands where people could watch a train-race anyway. Just a big field in the center that didn't look like anything too special.

Since there weren't any trains there right now, I couldn't even guess what it was for. But I could see enough of the main tracks that I was sure that this went to Kalamazoo and by the Nature Center, so maybe if I saw a train going by I could get a good look at the cars and figure it out.

Just a little bit south of the train oval was the casino where we'd had lunch after I learned how to use my weather radio, and I thought that I could land there and go inside, but I think Miss Cherilyn would be mad if I didn't go with Mister Salvatore at least. Or maybe her; maybe she thought it was something that I shouldn't do with him, but it would be okay with her.

When I got close enough to Kalamazoo that I could clearly see cars on the 131 bus Highway, I angled back across the highway and towards Meijer, and I had to change my course a little bit as I got close enough that I could actually see the building, and I came around the side where the truck trailers were backed up against doors, and then landed right near the front after making sure that there weren't any cars that were going to run into me.

It didn't take me too long to get some cans of anchovies and a box of waffle mix for my waffle maker and two cartons of unshelled eggs, and some shampoo and conditioner. I got one bottle of the kind that Peggy used, because I liked how it smelled. I wasn't sure if it would work right on me but if it didn't I could give it to her.

I shouldn't have gone shopping right after flying because the inside of the store was too cold. I guess humans don't like it too hot, but it was making me too chilly 'cause my coat was all damp.

I paid for my food and shampoo and then went outside and put away the cart and put everything in my saddlebags, and then I called Dori just to let her know that I was in the air again, and went back along Main Street all the way back to campus.

I detoured off the road to fly over Aric's house and I thought that I could go see him but maybe it was better to wait until after we had our talk, so I flew down to Grove Street and by my old apartment. There were new curtains in the windows so I guess that somebody else was living there now.

I landed on the sidewalk and after a few minutes the birds that I'd scared off came back to the feeder and I watched them for a few minutes but I couldn't watch for too long because unshelled eggs had to be kept cold or else they would go bad.

Peggy had a little electric icebox that she kept beer in and I was sure she wouldn't mind if my eggs went in there, too.

Instead of flying, I trotted the rest of the way back to campus, and I went in through the front door of Trowbridge. There was a corkboard there that had advertisements on it and sometimes told you things that were going to happen soon and I noticed that there was one for a cuddle party today and that sounded like something that would be fun and I wish I'd noticed it sooner.

I went upstairs to our room and put away my food and shampoo. Peggy was sitting at her computer and she asked if I'd had a good flight, and I said I had, and she said it was okay to put my unshelled eggs in her electric icebox.

I actually had to wait a little bit for the shower, which was kind of annoying, just 'cause I'd gotten used to nobody using it when I wanted to on the weekend, and when it eventually opened it was Rebekka, and she leaned down and petted my head before going out and back to her room.

Me and Peggy went to breakfast after I was done showering and grooming, and I didn't eat too much because I was nervous and she said that she could come with me if I wanted, but I told her that I'd promised that nobody else would be there, so she said she'd wait outside instead, and if I needed her I could just call her portable telephone and she would come to save me.

So that made me more nervous because I didn't expect that I would need saving, and she said that was just a figure of speech.

And I said that I wished I'd done it earlier so it would be done already, or maybe later, and there was still time to call both of them and change the time, and she crossed her arms and said that if I was going to do it I should do it when I said I was and if I was going to wimp out I didn't deserve to be sleeping with either of them, and she was right, so I sat back down in my seat and glared at her and she threw a shredded wheat at my nose, and then I ate it off my tray. It was one of the ones that had sugar on it and it was pretty tasty.

It was kind of frustrating to have an hour after lunch before our meeting. I thought I could walk there with Meghan but Peggy said it would be better to show up by myself because that way Aric wouldn't get jealous right away, and she said that I should sit at a round table and not a booth so that they could both sit next to me and they'd also have to sit next to each other, and it all sounded really complicated and I asked Peggy if this was the kind of thing that humans had to do often enough that there were social rules for it. She said that maybe there was something in a book of etiquette but she thought it was just common sense.

We sat outside on the quad and watched the squirrels run around and watched the fat ones by the stairs to the dining hall beg for food as people came out, and every now and then somebody tossed them something.

I kind of wanted to sit up in the tree but since Peggy couldn't get up there with me it would be kind of rude, so I stayed where I was until she said that it was probably time for me to get going so that I would be the first one there.

So I flew over the dining hall and then went down the hill in back of it, and over the top of the little stretch of buildings that was right next to Western's campus, and landed in the parking lot of Waldo's. There were only a couple of cars there and Winston wasn't one of them.

I went inside and found a round table that was near enough to the door that they'd see me but far enough away that we wouldn't be interrupted by lots of people, and a waitress came over and asked if I wanted an appetizer or a drink and I did want a drink but I knew I shouldn't have one.

I got one anyway, and it was called Founders Breakfast Ale. I didn't like the name Founders, but the waitress said it was really good and I looked like I needed a drink. And it gave me something to do with my hooves while I waited, but my stomach wasn't too happy with it. Maybe I should have eaten more for breakfast.

I was halfway done when I saw Aric come in the front door and so I waved him over and then when he sat down I leaned over and kissed him and he asked if he could have a sip of my beer because it looked really good so I let him and he ordered one, and we kinda didn't say much until Meghan arrived, and so I kissed her too. She didn't order a beer; she just had a glass of water.

So at first nobody really wanted to talk. Meghan was sticking her finger in her water and twirling around the ice cubes, and Aric was sipping his beer and both of them were looking more at the table than each other or me. So there wasn't much point in just flying around the sky and not getting anything done, even though I wasn't exactly sure what the best way to start the conversation was. And so I asked if either of them thought that there wasn't any way that we could keep this working, 'cause if there wasn't than there wasn't a lot of point in having the rest of the conversation. And they they both said that they thought we could make it work if we tried, which made me happy.

I wasn't really sure what to ask next. I should have thought of some questions before I came over, like I had to do in Anthropology, 'cause this was kind of the same thing. But I hadn't done that so I asked if it bothered either of them that I was sometimes sleeping with the other one, and both of them said that it kind of did, but for different reasons. Aric said that he'd be more upset if it was another guy, but since it was a girl it didn't bother him all that much, except that he felt like I was spending a lot more time with her than I was with him. He said that over the summer, he'd kind of expected that when he got back to Kalamazoo he expected that I'd be spending half my nights with him, and I wasn't.

But he said that the other thing that bothered him was that since school had started, I'd just come over to spend the night and have sex and then I left again, and it almost felt like I was using him and that made my ears drop 'cause it was true. The only other thing that we'd done together was play Durak, and that was with a lot of other friends so it wasn't the same. He thought that we should spend some more time with just us together, doing something that was fun for both of us.

And Meghan said that I hadn't spent a lot of time with her since school started, either, and she thought that I was doing all the fun things that I'd used to do with her with Aric now, and she said she felt kind of guilty for thinking that now that she knew it wasn't true. I wasn't doing anything fun with either of them any more.

Some of it was school, we all agreed with that. We all had new schedules and were still kind of figuring them out, but it was almost three weeks into the year, so we knew what our classes were and when we had free time.

So the first thing I thought was that I could also see Aric on Wednesday nights, 'cause I could go over after my classes were done, and then I had Thursday mornings free, too. And so I told him that, and he said he liked that idea, and he didn't think that there would be anything to interfere on Wednesdays until it was tech week for the play, when he'd probably be at the theatre late, but that wasn't for a while yet.

And Monday was going to be a short night anyway, because we had Durak and then my lab in the morning, but we could keep that the same.

For Meghan, Friday nights and Saturday nights were the best because Amy was gone a lot, but not always. So we'd just have to hope that it worked out sometimes, but then Aric didn't like the idea that she got weekends and he didn't, and I wasn't sure what would be fairer, unless I wanted to do things on Saturday with Meghan and on Sunday with Aric, but then there were lots of times that there were other things happening on the weekends like the airshow next weekend that neither of them knew about yet, so that wouldn't work out.

Aric said that it was starting to sound like we were debating custody of a kid, so Meghan said that we all ought to get another drink before we said something that we'd regret and she got one, too. And we drank a little bit before we started talking again, and I said that I thought the fact that we were trying to figure out what was fair was good, and Meghan asked if that was something that we did in Equestria, too.

I said that a lot of mares shared stallions 'cause there weren't enough for everymare to have one of her own, but usually it was more spontaneous, if you wanted to have some fun or get pregnant and so Aric thought that meant that we just picked up strangers in pubs and took them home but it wasn't like that. Most ponies wouldn't be interested in a stallion that they weren't friends with, and had known at least for a while, although there were some mares that found the best stallion that they could when they wanted a foal, even if it was somepony that they didn't know very well. And there was almost always one mare that got pregnant during Winter Wrap-Up, 'cause there were a lot of migrating stallions that came up the coast to help out.

Meghan thought that was really weird, but I thought it was a good way to get new blood in town, 'cause everypony knew that if you kept having sex with the same ponies pretty soon you got bad foals. I was surprised that she didn't know that. I guess a city like Kalamazoo is big enough that it isn't a problem, and people at college came from all over the world, too.

So we still hadn't figured out a good schedule, and I had to tell them before we got to arguing again about the air show that was next weekend, and I said that Mister Salvatore was getting us a hotel room and Meghan and Aric looked at each other and Meghan got kind of mad and said that I was making a pretty big assumption and I said that I thought they'd like to see it and even if they didn't, I did, so I was going to go and so was Peggy and Christine and Sean and I guess if they wanted to go too we'd need to get a bigger room, or one that had a door to another room with more beds.

And then Meghan said that she'd thought I'd meant something else, like I was trying to get a threesome and be sneaky about it and I said that I hadn't thought about it because I didn't know if that was something that I would like but if they both wanted to I'd try it. And so Meghan asked Aric what he thought and he said that she should answer first.

She said that she'd kind of been wondering if I would bring it up but she'd never figured out an answer, and she said that she had always kind of liked him when they were in bell choir together but not enough to want to have sex with him but maybe it was different now because of me, and he crossed his arms and asked if she could be any more flattering and she said she was sorry but it was true.

So when we'd finished our drinks Aric paid for everyone even though I said that I would, 'cause I'd been the one who'd wanted to meet here, and we agreed that for this week, I'd stay with Aric on Monday and Wednesday, and Meghan on Tuesday only and we'd take some more time to think about what the most fair thing was. And I don't think that anybody was totally happy with that, especially since it felt wrong to be planning out a schedule for who got to spend time with who.

I didn't feel like going to the dining hall to eat, 'cause I thought I'd probably be in a gloomy mood and spoil everyone's dinner, so when we left, I hugged and kissed both of them, and then I went to Jimmy John's because it was close and got a sandwich, then I flew back and sat in a tree and then I remembered that Peggy said she was going to be near Waldo's in case I needed her so I called her and told her that we had had our meeting and it was over now and I had gotten dinner because I didn't feel like eating with everyone but I was fine and I would see her in our room later.

Then I ate my sandwich and just people-watched for a while. I don't think that anybody knew I was up in the tree, because humans don't think to look up very much unless something is moving or making noise above them.

I think the thing that I liked the least about a set schedule was that it would make us all feel like we had to have sex or else we'd wasted our turn, and sometimes you didn't want to. And that was going to be harder for Meghan, I thought, because she had to share her room and so we couldn't always count on there being an opportunity, and I didn't think that Aric really understood that because he didn't have to share a room.

And maybe there were other things that they hadn't wanted to talk about in public, either, but would it be fair to kind of go behind their backs and ask? I didn't know.

So I sat in the tree until the lights started coming on, and then I flew back to our room. I hadn't come up with any more smart ideas while I was in my tree, so it wasn't much of a thinking tree. I should have picked the one that was in front of our dorm.

Peggy wanted to know what we'd decided, and so I told her that it still wasn't all certain, but that we wanted to try and make it work and for now we had a schedule so that no one got jealous but I kinda didn't think that would work out in the long run. And she said that at least we'd had this talk, and that was something that we could build on later, because we'd dealt with it before things were too broken to fix, and I guess that was true.

But it didn't feel the same as it had before, and maybe that was just because of the stress of thinking about it and all sitting around talking about it and then thinking about it some more afterwards. And I wanted to go to Meghan's room and snuggle but that would be against the rules we'd just decided on, so I hugged Peggy instead and then I got in bed and she said it was kind of early and I said I knew it was but I didn't have anything else to do, and maybe Princess Luna would send me a happy dream.

And then I remembered that she'd said she wanted some more exercise and asked her if she still wanted to go trotting in the morning and she said she'd forgotten but she would as long as I promised to wake her up nicely.

September 26 [Trotting with Peggy]

September 26

When I woke up Peggy was still sleeping and so I went to the bathroom, and filled up my camelback, and when I came back she hadn't gotten up yet.

So I tugged the covers off her and shook her shoulder gently to wake her up, and she kind of reached for the blankets but I'd put them out of her reach. And then she opened her eyes and looked at me and then picked up her portable telephone and looked at, then she said I was evil.

I thought she was being mean, so I put my ears down and backed up and then she sat up in bed and said that she didn't mean it; she'd told me to wake her up and she'd just stayed on her computer too late and wasn't all the way awake yet.

Our dorm room didn't have a small coffee maker like a lot of the hotel rooms I'd been in, so I couldn't make coffee for her but she stretched and said that once we started trotting she'd wake up pretty quick.

She started getting out clothes and asked me what the weather was like outside, and I said that it was raining, and she looked out the window herself and saw that it was, and told me I was evil again, first for waking her up and then for making her go out in the rain. But this time I knew that she didn't mean it so it was okay.

When she was getting dressed she said that she'd always wondered about the people who exercised in the rain and now she knew that each one of them probably had a pegasus goading them on and I told her that she could go back to bed and be a lazy human and I'd fly on my own, and she said that she was just griping but once we got outside it would be fun.

She had some bottles of water that she wanted to put in my camelback so that she wouldn't have to carry them herself and I didn't mind. It wasn't much extra weight, and I thought that I kind of owed her a favor 'cause I'd gotten her up so early.

So we went out the front and to Academy Street, and then back into Aric's neighborhood. It felt a little bit weird for me to be trotting on cement, 'cause I'd been trying to not do it to keep my hooves from wearing down too much. And it took us a little bit before we figured out a pace that we both liked.

We hadn't gotten too far before the rain stopped, but we were both pretty wet by then. And as we got further into the neighborhood we started to see kids coming out of their houses and at first I thought that maybe they were coming to watch us but they were really waiting for the school bus.

I decided to turn towards my old apartment and maybe Caleb and Lindy and Trinity would be out waiting, and it would be nice to see them. And Peggy didn't ask why I crossed the street; she just stayed by my side.

All three of them were out in front of their house, and Caleb and Lindy were looking the other way because that was the way the bus came from, but Trinity was looking around and she saw us and waved, then she got their attention and they waved too.

We didn't have much time to talk but I nuzzled Lindy and Trinity and Peggy stretched out some and rubbed the backs of her legs. Then when the bus came we stayed out of its way and Trinity waved at both of us from the bus window as it left.

We went along Western's campus on the way back, and had to kind of zig-zag back and forth because none of the roads went straight but I knew what went where better than Peggy did. She was kind of curious about how far we'd gone but neither of us knew for sure. I thought it had been a couple of miles and she said maybe closer to three.

When we were back in our room she took off her shirt and used it to dry herself off some, then she got her shower things and we went to the bathroom together and we had to wait for Kat to get done, then I let her go first.

She was dressed when I got back to the room and so I put my shower basket away and while we were walking out of the building she said that trotting together had been fun and we should do it every Monday. And then when we got to the back door she said she'd race me to the dining hall, and I asked if she was sure, because I knew I'd beat her. And she told me that I had to keep my hooves on the ground, and I said that I wouldn't fly, and she started running.

I hadn't expected her to start so quick, so she was ahead of me around the corner of the building, but after that it was straight, and I switched to a canter and then a gallop and even with my saddlebags on I was leading by the time we got to the corner of Hicks, and I beat her to the front entrance by almost six seconds.

Humans have longer legs, but they don't seem to have as good a gait for running.

The waffle-maker was working, so me and Peggy both had waffles for breakfast and I got some fruit to go with them, too. Christine said that her fruit loops had all the vitamins and minerals that my actual fruit did, and that they were an important part of a balanced breakfast. Peggy said that the only part of them that was important was the box, and that was only if it had a maze on it or some game you could play.

And Sean asked why adult cereals didn't have adult games on them, and both Christine and Peggy thought that would be a really good idea.

When I was done with breakfast, I flew a lap around campus just to exercise my wings some and then I landed in front of the science building.

Professor Brown started by telling us about thermodynamic cycles because unlike math, sometimes you couldn't figure out every point on a graph, and if it was a repeating cycle it was best to figure out the parts that you could calculate and not always worry about the middle part. And I thought that the water cycle was kind of like that—maybe you couldn't figure out where all the clouds were all the time but it didn't always matter.

Then after he'd explained all that he started to talk about alchemical reactions, because a lot of time they changed temperature. And he said that you could buy little packs that got hot or cold which I thought was really interesting.

He started writing out alchemical math which I didn't know at all because humans have different symbols for alchemy, but even if I knew what they were I wouldn't know what they made because I'd never done any work like that before.

So it was really interesting but kind of confusing, although the way you figured it out using tables was pretty straightforward. And it turned out that there was a chart called a periodic table that said what all the different letters were for, which was something that I would have to memorize.

Since we hadn't over the weekend, me and Lisa sat in the lounge and went over our lab homework one more time. He had been nice and not given us any today because he said that he knew some of us were slackers and hadn't finished our labs yet and I felt really guilty about that because we'd had plenty of time but hadn't used it wisely.

Fortunately, there wasn't much more that we needed to do on ours. I saw a couple of mistakes, but they were probably from when Lisa typed it in and maybe she hadn't been paying enough attention, or else the computer had thought she meant something else. Mine did a lot when I talked to it.

When we were both satisfied, she said that she'd make the corrections and print it out again, and we'd turn it in tomorrow. And then I flew back to our dorm room to put away my books and get my math books, and I still had a little bit of time before lunch but not enough to do anything worthwhile, so I went down the hall to Ruth's room and sat on her bed and she drew little hearts on my hooves with a glitter marker.

There was a decent lunch, especially since everything at the salad bar was fresh. There had been a truck that had been backed up to the building earlier in the day and maybe that was the truck that brought fresh food. They had some nice leafy spinach, and so I got a bunch of that because they usually just had bad lettuce that wasn't even worth eating.

Christine was happy that they had a chocolate cream pie for dessert, until she discovered that it was still frozen, but she ate it anyway. And she said that she knew it was pre-made so all they had to do was put it out until it thawed and they couldn't even get that right.

And Peggy noticed my glittery hearts and asked if Rebekka had done that and I said it was Ruth and they were very pretty. And she said that she sometimes thought that Ruth acted like a kindergartner, and Sean said that there was a lot of that going around because his girlfriend sometimes pretended to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex and so she punched him in the shoulder.

Me and Sean went to math together, and Professor Pampena kept teaching us about the point on the wheel, and he explained how speed should be a vector, because it mattered not only how fast you were going but what direction you were going in, too. And he started by proving that at one point on each rotation, the point on the wheel didn't move at all, and at the very top the point was moving twice as fast as the wheel. It was kind of strange to think of how points on the wheel could move at different speeds but it didn't come apart.

There was a really neat formula for the length of an arch of a cycloid, because you had to measure it from zero to two pi, and Sean muttered that that was called tau and it would be easier to just say tau instead of two pi.

He told us about Kepler's second law and I knew who he was because we'd learned about him in astronomy, and how it told you how fast a planet moved on an orbit once you know what the orbit was. But he explained the math behind how it worked, which Professor Miller hadn't. I guess we didn't really need to know that for her class, but it was nice to know how he'd figured it out.

It was really windy outside when we left class, and Sean asked if there were ever any days where it was so windy that I could just hold out my wings and fly, and I said that sometimes that happened but that wasn't the kind of wind you wanted to fly in if you could help it, because you'd just get blown along and didn't have a whole lot of choice where you went, and then I told him about how a couple of months ago, a downdraft had made me crash-land on a roof.

We decided that we'd do our math homework together, so we went up to his room and I borrowed his roommate's chair again, and he asked if I minded listening to music because he usually did when he worked, and I didn't mind. It was a little distracting, because it was a woman I'd never heard before called Loreena McKennett, who had a very pretty voice, and I kept forgetting to do math because I was paying attention to her. So Sean finished up a lot before I did and then he started working on other homework.

But I finally got done and double-checked all my work, then we compared our answers, and either we'd gotten them all right or we'd both made the same mistakes.

We went to dinner together even though it was a bit early. Sean said that way we'd get all the good food, and he went to the dessert table before even picking dinner, and got a piece of chocolate cream cake, and he poked it with a fork to make sure that it was melted.

It felt a little bit weird to be done with my dinner before either Peggy or Christine showed up, and so me and Sean just talked and he didn't eat the pie because he said he was saving it for Christine, which was really nice of him.

I had to remind myself not to get more food, but watching them eat made me a little bit hungry again and I did get another salad.

We stayed at dinner until it was almost time to go to Durak, and I had to go back to my room first and empty out my saddlebags and put my flight gear inside them.

I flew over to Fourth Coast, and Kennith and Seth were already there but nobody else was, so we played a fast game with only three and that went a lot quicker than usual because it was a different strategy. You couldn't really hold on to cards and hope that they'd be useful later.

We hadn't quite finished when other people started showing up, and there were two new people. They were both freshmen, and one was Anna and she was the girl with the long blonde hair that was in my astronomy class. The other one was called Reese, and he looked kind of like Sean but with longer hair. When Malcolm asked him how he'd gotten his name, he said that his parents had really liked the Terminator movie, and they'd decided on Reese for a boy or Sarah for a girl and I thought it was strange to name someone after a character in a movie.

Seth said that Reese was named Kyle Reese, and he said that neither of his parents had liked the name Kyle, and anyway in the movie he had always just been called Reese.

So then everyone talked about their names while we played, and there were a lot of different reasons that people had gotten their names, just like ponies, but I thought that it was strange that people decided on names before the baby was even born.

We played until it was kinda late, and then me and Aric drove home. And when we got to Dartmouth Street, he stopped Winston and let me sit on his lap and drive the rest of the way, and he did let me shift but I wasn't very good at it because it had a slippery round knob on top that wasn't hoof-friendly at all, and nothing told you which gear you'd picked. Most of the other cars I'd been in had a little lighted letters and numbers so that you'd know.

But I did pretty well, and he thought so too, because even though he had to fix it for me once Winston didn't stall.

And then I turned in the driveway and he stopped the truck and shifted it into no gear, and said it was too bad it was cloudy because otherwise we could go out and look at stars. And I thought it was kind of late for that but it would be fun to just drive around some, and so I said that we should go looking for a little bit, so I got off of his lap and we drove north of town.

It never got less cloudy, so we didn't see any stars, but it was nice and relaxing and I leaned up against him and he put his arm around my withers when he didn't have to use it to pick gears. And then we decided that I'd try to pick the gears again and it was a little easier with me in the center, and after a little while I started to get it right almost all the time. It wouldn't let me put it into a really wrong gear, which helped.

And we had to stop on the side of the road by a big empty field because he'd had too much coffee and he told me not to look because there weren't any trees.

So it was really late when we got back home but we'd both had fun. And we went upstairs and I helped him get undressed and even though I was tired we didn't want to rush, so we took our time kissing and touching and nuzzling and then after he laid on his side and stroked my mane until I fell asleep.

September 27 [Hot Jupiters]

September 27

When I woke up, Aric was still asleep and had his back to me, so I nuzzled him between his shoulders but that didn't wake him up. I thought maybe he doesn't like being woken up early in the morning, but I didn't want to stay in bed forever waiting for him to wake up.

So I got out of bed and went to the window and watched the birds and smelled the sky. It was another clear day out and the birds were all crowded at the feeder except for the sparrows who were smart enough to not wait in line. They were down on the lawn, picking up all the seeds that the other birds had dropped.

I thought about going downstairs and seeing what he had for breakfast, and maybe I could make him something. But Aric might want to cook with me like Meghan did. So I watched the birds a little while longer and then when I heard him moving around I climbed back into bed and nuzzled him in the back, then brushed my wing down his side.

Aric rolled onto his back and I tickled his chest until he put his hand on my wing to stop me, and he must have noticed my broken primary for the first time 'cause he wanted to know what had happened, so I told him about getting it caught in the door.

He said he was sorry for touching it because it must hurt, and I said that it only hurt when it got tugged on, 'cause the feather itself wasn't alive. If it got pulled out, that hurt a lot, but if it just got broken it only hurt for a moment, and then it was over.

It wouldn't be any good to have feathers that hurt when they got broken, or else we'd never be able to fly anywhere. I didn't know anypony who had all their feathers intact when they moulted. Maybe some really prissy pegasus who never flew might, but some of them always seemed to get bent or broken somehow.

He didn't believe me, so I reached up on one of my wings and bit half of a covert off and spit it out on the bed. I was gonna moult soon anyway and that was always one of the first ones to fall out. It already felt a little bit loose.

He picked up the half-feather and ran his fingers along it, then looked at the edge where I'd nipped it off. And then he said that maybe I'd better keep my head above the waist because he was feeling a little bit intimidated.

I promised not to bite him, and then kissed his neck, and he ran his finger along my leg and pretty soon I had him pinned down to the bed and even though he probably could have pushed me off, he let me be on top.

He didn't have a lot of food in the kitchen but there was some oatmeal, so he heated up some water and while we were waiting for it to boil Angela came upstairs and she said that she hadn't seen me for a while so she crouched down and hugged me and then asked Aric why he was up so early, and he said that it was my fault. Then he asked her if the weiner-dog boxers she was wearing were David's, and she said that they were.

I wanted to stay around longer, but after we'd eaten I had to leave so that I could get dressed for my lab class. So I kissed Aric, and then I went out the side door and trotted over to his birdfeeder and stood on my hind legs so I could shake some seeds out of it, then I took off for school.

I probably should have taken a shower but I didn't have time, so I emptied out my saddlebags and put my physics things in them and my science gear, too. I was hoping that Lisa would button it for me when I got to the lab, 'cause Peggy wasn't in the room and I couldn't wait much longer or else I would be late.

I was lucky, 'cause Lisa did help me, not only with my lab coat but she also put my mane back for me, and then I got out my notebook and clicky pens and waited for Professor Brown to arrive.

We got to play with alchemical hot packs and cold packs in class and we had to take lots of measurements and then we could figure out what was in them from tables if we got our measurements correct, and then after we'd done that we also got to make our own little reaction in a test tube which was really neat. It was a lot like potions, 'cause you mixed the ingredients together the right way and then they would do something which in this case was just get hot.

And then after we'd all done our reactions he said that he was going to show us another one that was fun but that we weren't allowed to do. So he took a plastic eyedropper and dipped it in a small bottle of yellow liquid and squirted it out on some paper, and when the liquid evaporated it left a white crust on the paper and all of a sudden it burst into flames on its own.

Before we left, Lisa offered to take off my lab coat, so I didn't have to fight with the buttons, and then we went to the lounge and went over our notes for a little bit just to make sure that we both agreed on what our data was and what it meant and what formulas we'd need to use on it. And then I went back to our room and got my astronomy things, and just as I was about to go to lunch, I remembered that today was Tuesday so I was gonna sit with Cedric and Leon and Trevor, so I looked through my poetry books until I found The Rain in the Trees. And I put that on top and went to lunch.

Leon thought it was really funny that I still had my mane in a ponytail, which is what it's called when you have your mane pulled back. And I said I could let it down but I hadn't brushed it yet today so it was kind of messy.

They wanted to know if I'd seen the game on Friday, and I said I hadn't, 'cause I'd had a birthday party instead. And then Cedric said that he didn't know it had been my birthday and then he asked if I knew when Aquamarine's was and I didn't but I thought it was probably in March or April. He wanted to know why I was so sure, and so I explained how most foals are born in the springtime.

Both Leon and Cedric got kinda quiet and thought about that, and then Cedric said that it didn't seem right, although I didn't know what wasn't right about it. It was just the way things worked, and there were lots of other animals that didn't have babies all year round.

Then Trevor asked how many astrological signs we had, and I didn't know what those were so he had to explain. And he said that I was a Libra but didn't know for sure what that meant, so he looked it up on his pocket telephone and said that it was also called the Air sign. And Leon said that he was making that up, so he showed Leon, and then Cedric because Cedric didn't believe either of them.

He said that human astrology probably wouldn't really apply to a pony anyway because it was based on what constellations were in the sky and he was sure that we had different ones, which we did. And I didn't think that it was considered a good omen to be born under one or another, just to be the first foal born in a year.

I got out my book and Leon laughed and said that it was funny that I missed poetry, and Cedric crossed his arms and told me to hug Leon, so I got up and he kind of backed off a little bit and said that it wasn't fair, but he couldn't go anywhere without getting up and running away, so I hugged him kind of off to the side, which wasn't all that comfortable, and Cedric said that it was good to lose a hug war.

Then he slid my book across the table and started looking through it while Leon tried to push me off and then gave up and hugged me back. And he read a poem called The Superstition which was about cars, and it was kind of sad.

Trevor read one called The Lost Originals, and he got kinda thoughtful at the end of it, and said that it was kind of sobering to think that he didn't even know where he'd come from and there was probably no way to ever find out. And then it would have been Leon's turn but he said that he was going to be late to class and Cedric looked at his watch and we realized that we'd been talking longer than we thought and we were all going to be late for class.

So I galloped across the quad and flew over Academy Street so I didn't have to look for traffic, and then when I found a clear spot on the sidewalk I landed at a trot.

There were more people in the hall than I would have liked because everybody was hurrying to class and it was rude to fly over them but I had to be careful in the hallway because I could trip somebody by mistake.

I made it to my class in time, and I sat down next to Anna and she was happy because I think she'd been lonely, too.

Professor Miller started by telling us more about the inner planets, 'cause she said that now that we'd learned about the solar system in general we'd start to take a closer look at how people thought they'd come about. And she said that it started out as a disc of little things around the sun and then they all started sticking to each other in regions, which would turn out to be the orbits.

And she said that the inner planets were close to the sun, so they didn't have much ice and gas, because the heat from the sun drove it off; the outer planets got more gas and ice, and therefore were bigger, and that probably other solar systems would be the same.

Then a bunch of people raised their hands and I raised my hoof and she said that she would get to the problems with that idea, but people had thought of it before they had found any other planets.

She told us about wavelengths and how they got squished together when things moved towards you and stretched out when they moved away, and why that was really important was because distant stars moved towards us and away from us as the planets went around them.

And then she gave us all the calculations for the first planet that humans found, which orbited a sun called Pegasus 51 (and a lot of people thought that was funny), and it was all wrong because it was big like Jupiter and really really close to the sun. And astronomers thought that maybe their measurements there had been wrong, but then they found more just like it around other planets and they called them hot Jupiters, and she ended the lesson before she told us why, which was kind of disappointing, but she promised she'd tell us more about them in the next class.

I went back to our room and worked on the physics lab so that me and Lisa could meet tomorrow after class, and I got done a little bit before dinner so I started to read Matthew, which is the first book of the New Testament. It started out talking about Jesus's lineage, because a lot of people also care about that, and then it said that Mary got pregnant before she was married to Joseph and he was going to divorce her, but the Holy Spirit told him not to.

Then after the baby was born, mages went looking for him to give him presents, and Herod found out and was scared, so he ordered that all the young boys in Judah be killed, but and angel had warned them and so they went to Egypt, and then after Herod died they came back to Nazareth.

And then Jesus went to get baptized by John the Baptist, and I couldn't read anything past that because it was time for dinner.

I kind of knew how Jesus's story ended, because of the Easter service, but now I wondered why God had let people do that. Maybe Matthew would say.

I just picked at my dinner 'cause I was a little worried about how things were going to go with Meghan. She was a little bit more skittish than Aric, and I hadn't had a chance to talk to her after our talk at Waldo's, and I know I was being kind of foalish. And everyone noticed, and Peggy hugged me and said it would be okay, and Sean was really confused, but Christine said it was girl stuff and then he stopped being curious.

I should have had dinner with her. We could have even gone out to dinner together; that would have been fun.

I should have taken a shower, too, but I hadn't, and then I thought that maybe I could use her bathtub or we might be able to get an Uber-car and go over to her uncle's house and use his hot tub and that would be nice and relaxing.

I knew I wasn't going to finish my dinner so I asked if anybody else wanted to eat it because I hated to waste food, but nobody did. And Peggy asked if I was going back to our room and I said I was, so she said that she was done with dinner, too, and she'd come with me and we could talk on the way.

And so while we walked back to the dorm I told her how I was nervous even though I shouldn't be and Peggy said that she thought Meghan would be happy to see me and she was really proud that we'd had our conversation together, and then she said that if I wanted to use our room tonight she'd go sleep at Christine's.

I didn't want her to have to give up her bed, 'cause that wasn't fair, but she said that was something that roommates did for each other. So I hugged her and helped her put her sleeping clothes and homework in her backpack and then I hugged her again and I was feeling in a lot better mood when I went to Meghan's room.

So when I told Meghan she was really happy, and when Amy came out of the bathroom Meghan told her that she was going to my room to watch movies and Amy told her to have fun, and I didn't think that we were really going to watch movies.

It was still light out, so we decided to go walking around a little bit before it got dark, and we wound up at a little playground, which had swings and a strange little play-structure that had a slide and some balconies that you could look over and it was a little bit too small for Meghan but she climbed up it anyway and we sat together on it and watched the sun go behind the trees, then we both swung on the swings.

We walked back to campus together and I thought I should take a shower before we went to bed, because I hadn't had one all day, and she said that she wished she'd brought her shower supplies or at least a towel, and I said that I had extras.

There wasn't anybody who wanted the shower at night, so we had it all to ourselves, and when we were done we dried each other off and she said that she'd preen me back in my room.

Since we were just going back to my room she just put on her outer clothes and left her underwear off, but she had to wrap them up in her towel so that nobody would know she wasn't wearing them which I thought was kind of silly. And I pranced back to the room with my tail high just to tease her.

Then when we were safely back in my room she hung up our towels in my closet so that they could dry and she got undressed again and sat on the bed with her legs crossed and I sat next to her and stretched a wing out on her lap so that she could preen it, and she found my broken primary right away and she said that I was getting really beaten up this quarter.

When she was done with my wings I got out my brush and brushed her hair, and then she brushed my mane and tail and groomed my coat too and I was kind of sad that she didn't have a coat that I could groom.

It was also sad that none of my friends could fly, 'cause it would be a lot of fun to go flying with someone else.

I asked her if she was looking forward to going to Indianapolis, and she said that she was, and I told her some about all the ponies who were gonna be there, and she remembered most of their names from the movie of us fighting the tornado, 'cause I'd told her who they were then.

She said that I should see if the weather people wanted to make a movie of me flying in a storm, and I thought that was a good idea. I bet they'd like it, and so I said that I hadn't, but I would try to remember to do it before the next time there was a storm.

We snuggled up under the covers, and then after a little while she asked me if we could use my toy, so I got out of bed and got it out of my dresser.

Author's Note

The Superstition

The Lost Originals (first poem)

September 28 [Functions of Several Variables]

September 28

I woke up when Meghan started to move around and I yawned and then moved my head to her breast. She opened her eyes and then started scratching my ear, then asked me when Peggy was coming back.

I said I didn't know, but she usually got up kind of late on Wednesdays and she'd taken her clothes with her to Christine's, so she probably wasn't coming back before breakfast.

So we had plenty of time for snuggles before Meghan's alarm went off the first time, and we probably could have had sex, too, but we both decided to get up after the second time her alarm went off. I think that Meghan was a little bit nervous that Peggy might come back and catch us.

Meghan got dressed and then I went to the bathroom and filled up my camelback, and she helped me put on my flight gear and said that before I left I ought to put my toy away. So I grabbed it and carried it back to my drawer and Meghan said it was really weird seeing me carry it in my mouth but how else was I going to carry it?

She walked with me down to the boardwalk, and I called the airplane directors to tell them that I was flying to the Nature Center, and the grumpy man reminded me to stay under a thousand feet.

So I went over the quad and waved to Leon and Cedric's room, then flew by Sean's room and waved in that direction, too. The lights were off, so he probably wasn't awake either.

Instead of taking a direct route, I flew to the hotel first and did one close lap of it, and then part of a second until I was pointed in the direction of the Nature Center, and then I flew off. If it had been a sun and I was a planet, I would have been stuck in my orbit, and since it was a close fast orbit, I would be a hot Silver Glow.

Since I was approaching from the river side already, I didn't have to worry about scaring off the deer, and I thought I'd go under the trees for fun. That meant I had to get low over the railroad tracks, so I looked both ways to make sure that there weren't any trains in sight, before ducking under the crowns of the trees.

I almost made a perfect turn to line up with the path, which wasn't bad for going in kind of blind. I had to cheat and tighten it up when I saw the path, then I leveled my wings and flared for a landing, and I hit the ground trotting, then broke right into a canter.

After three laps around the path, I did one whole lap at a slow trot to cool down, then I took off again on the river-side of the path 'cause the deer were still eating in the pasture, and that meant I had to do a turn over the river, since I'd been facing north when I took off.

I followed Westnedge part of the way back into town, angling off when I got over the 131 Bus Highway. I hardly ever see buses on it, and cars and trucks are allowed to drive on it, so I don't know why they call it that. Aric called it 'the Penetrator' once.

When I got back to campus, I circled around Trowbridge and looked through Meghan's window but I didn't see her on a flyby and I thought about stopping and sticking my muzzle up to the window, but if Amy was in there she might think it was rude.

So I landed on the boardwalk and went back up to our room and then while I was taking off my flight gear I thought that maybe I should send Peggy a telephone telegram just so that she knew that she could come back if she wanted to.

She didn't send me one back, so I took a shower and then groomed myself back in the room and went to breakfast.

Peggy was already there along with Christine and Sean, and I thought maybe she hadn't gotten my telegram but she said that she had but she'd taken a shower in Christine's suite. And Sean said that he was going to assume that they had taken a shower together and he would be very disappointed if it hadn't happened.

Christine told him that life was disappointment, and I said that I was disappointed that the waffle-maker was broken again and the man wasn't making omelets today and the scrambled eggs hadn't looked like they were all the way cooked.

Even so, there was lots of other good food, and I was still in a happy mood anyway. So I told him that he should eat some Lucky Charms, and Christine said that I had to be careful not to turn into a corporate shill, which meant someone who was paid to say something was good. And so I said that if somebody gave me a lot of bits I would say that Lucky Charms were tasty, even though they really had too much sugar, especially for breakfast.

Sean thought that ponies were probably too honest for advertising. Well, I didn't think that was true because there were some ponies who would tell you all sorts of things that weren't true at all but usually they were pretty easy to spot. Nopony who lived in town could get away with that for very long, 'cause somepony would find out and then everypony would know.

I wanted to stay around longer and talk, but I hadn't brought my saddlebags with me 'cause I didn't like wearing them over a wet coat if I could help it. So I had to go back to my room and get my physics things, and then go to class. It was clouding up and it felt like the pressure was changing, so I reminded myself that after class I should check the weather maps on my computer.

When we sat down, I told Lisa that I had the calculations for our lab assignment, and I got them out of my bag and gave them to her so that she could type them up.

Professor Brown reviewed the equations for the reactants and products, which is the two sides of alchemy, and this time he started by giving us an equation for burning methane, and Austin asked him if this was what happened when you lit a fart, and he said only if you passed ideal gas, which made everyone chuckle. And he also showed us how you could calculate even things that couldn't actually react with each other.

It was called calorimetry when you figured all that out, and drew out how you could put it in a box to measure it, and then he wrote out on the markerboard how you set up the equations which was kind of what we'd done in the lab already although our process had been more basic. We hadn't had a box full of oil to put our reaction in.

It took most of class for him to demonstrate all the alchemical calorimetric equations, and he said we were going to be learning more of the same on Friday, and then after that we'd move on to the second law of thermodynamics, which he said was the most difficult. And then he passed out homework papers for us.

Since I'd already given Lisa the calculations, we didn't have to meet, so I flew back to our room and checked on the weather. The weather maps suggested rain in the evening, and possibly severe storms, and then I checked the human predictions and it said the same thing.

That was a bit of a dilemma, since I was supposed to be spending the night with Aric but if there was bad weather I'd need to fly in it.

I tapped my hind hoof on the floor while I was thinking, and then decided that I'd worry about it when it happened, and I got out my thermodynamics homework.

There wasn't quite enough time before lunch to finish it all, so I put it aside and packed for math, then went to lunch.

They had leftovers from dinner, which Sean and Peggy complained about but I didn't mind because I hadn't really paid attention to it last night and now I had a second chance to enjoy it.

It turned out I hadn't missed much, though.

Christine had fun with her lunch, at least. She made a little mountain out of her mashed potatoes and then put peas on the side that she said were the innocent natives living on Mount Potato and they were not expecting a landslide, then she ran her spoon down the side until all the peas were buried except for one that rolled off, and she stabbed that one with her fork.

Then she smoothed her potatoes out on her plate and said that it was an ocean and all the peas were fish in the ocean and that her dinner roll was a boat. And Sean asked her if she'd ever considered psychotherapy.

She said she had but it was boring to be normal, and the world's problem was that nobody had a good sense of imagination any more. She said if more people played with their food the world would be a better place.

Peggy got up and came back with a couple of green beans in a bowl, and Christine put them in her potato-ocean in little arches and said that it was the Loch Ness Monster, and she took a picture of it with her portable telephone. She said that she could photoshop it and it would look like the real thing. Then she 'killed' the monster with her fork and ate it.

While we were walking to class, Sean said that Christine got really weird sometimes. I thought it was fun, though. You couldn't be serious all the time, or else you would go crazy.

Professor Pampena said that we were going to move on to functions of several variables, and that perked my ears up because the more variables the function had the more fun it was.

He drew some graphs on the markerboard and a couple of people complained that they were hard to visualize. When I'd been a filly, our teachers had usually used little clouds in the corner of the room 'cause you could move them in all three dimensions and that made it a lot easier to understand, but since humans couldn't do it they had to use their imagination.

Professor Pampena had some computer pictures that he put up on a screen like Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee had, which showed some of the graphs and one of them kind of looked like a saddle, and he apologized to me for showing it, and then he asked if we were bothered by the thought of saddles, and I said that I didn't know anypony who was.

Then he showed us contour plots, and one was a map that showed elevations, and another was a weather map. And then he showed us how to do that on a two-dimensional contour plot, which was where you ignored the vertical axis and pretended that you were looking down at the top of it, and from that you could get an easy idea of what things were going to look like when you put them in three dimensions and that was easier for people to understand.

And when everyone had figured that out, he explained how to use derivatives to determine rate of change, which was really neat, and I was a little bit disappointed when the class ended.

We went back to Sean's room so that we could do our math homework together. He said that he usually put it off and it was really nice to have a friend to do homework with and keep him motivated to do it right away.

And it was also nice 'cause if either of us had forgotten something from the lecture, we could ask. And we could look over our homework while the lecture was still fresh in our minds, and when we reviewed that helped, too, 'cause sometimes he'd explain how he'd gotten his answer or I'd explain how I'd gotten mine, and you learned best by telling someone else how it was done.

Then when we'd gotten it all done, I worked on changing one of the problems to Equestrian, and that was good, too, because I had to really think about what the math was doing, and I kind of explained step-by-step to Sean what I was doing so he would have a chance to correct me if I got mixed up.

When I was done, I put everything back in my bag and flew back to my room so that I could finish my thermodynamics homework.

I ought to have read some more of Matthew when I'd finished my homework, but I could go and see Aric a little bit early, so I got my flight gear together and my weather radio as well and I put it all in my saddlebags, then I flew over to his house.

Of course, when I got there he wasn't home—not-Winston was in the driveway, but Winston wasn't. And there was a new car parked in front of the house called Alero that I didn't recognize, so instead of letting myself in I knocked on the door and after a little while Angela came out and let me in.

Well, it turned out to be her car, sort of. It had belonged to her grandmother and then her grandmother had gotten a new car so she gave this one to Angela. And she'd just gotten it yesterday—she said that her parents had brought it to Kalamazoo and left it for her.

She told me that Aric usually didn't come home until about five, and it was only four thirty, so I said that I would be back and put on my flight vest and blinking light and airplane radio and flew up so I could get a look at the clouds and maybe get a better feeling for what they were going to do. The airplane directors were a little bit confused at my really short flight.

When I landed again, Winston was in the driveway, so I went inside and Aric said that we could go out to dinner if I wanted to.

And I told him that I might have to fly if it was stormy and he said that he'd been wondering about that, but he hadn't seen me flying in a storm yet and that might be fun to watch.

So I sent Mel a telephone telegram and he said that he was about to head out because it looked like it was going to hit in about an hour.

I told Aric, and he said that we should just go, and we filled up my camelback and then he drove out to our weather-watching bridge and parked, and then helped me put on my flight gear.

I was ready to go when Mel came in, and the sky was looking pretty black off to the west but I didn't see any lightning. Mel showed me the latest weather radar data on his computer, and there were lots of big red cells, including one that was pretty close to Kalamazoo, and that was the one I was seeing. So I called the airplane directors and told them that I was going up, and then took off from the parking lot and climbed up to altitude.

It started raining just a little bit as I was reaching the top of my patrol area, and I could see street lights and parking lot lights starting to come on as the clouds got in the way of the sun—the lights have little sensors in them that lets them know when it's dark. And then it just got darker and darker and the rain got heavier and heavier, and for about half an hour it was really intense rain and sharp gusts of wind, then it dropped off and turned into normal rain.

I followed the heavy cell back, 'cause Mel said that the radar was clear after that, and when I got on the ground Aric asked if we'd be out here all night. I hoped not, but Mel said that he didn't know, and maybe it would be smart to at least stay in the area and see what developed.

Well, there was nothing right on the horizon, so me and Aric went to Pizza Hut for dinner, 'cause I knew where that was. And they had a crust made of pretzel which was pretty good.

I only had two pieces 'cause I might be flying some more if the weather started to look bad again. Aric said that he didn't mind spending all night in a thunderstorm if he had to, and we could nap in the cab of Winston. He said that if he'd known we were going to be out here he could have put the top on the truck, but by the time I'd told him it was already too late for that.

I was kind of surprised but he said that he liked a good storm and doing things that were kind of crazy, and besides it was a pretty memorable thing to do for a date.

So when we were done eating we got back in Winston and when we drove back he asked if I'd mind if he drove around some when I had to be up in the air for a long time, 'cause he also really liked driving in thunderstorms, and that was okay with me.

When we got back to the parking lot, I checked with Mel, and he said it might be another few hours before the next heavy storm came in, so me and Aric snuggled up in Winston and talked and looked at the cars going by on the highway and watched some YouTube movies on his portable telephone and then we dozed a little bit until my weather radio woke me up, and Mel said that I should probably be getting ready to go up again.

The radio had woken Aric up, too, and so he kissed me and told me to be safe, and I called the airplane directors again and pretty soon I was in the air.

This time, not only was there heavy rain but the cloud was grumbly and had lots of charge in it, but not quite enough to make any lightning. I could tell that it wanted to, though, and it was just looking to pick up some more electricity to throw at the ground, but as it passed over there just wasn't any coming from behind it, so I told Mel that it might develop into a proper thundercloud if it could get more energy but the sun was down so it probably wouldn't.

Winston was gone when I landed, so I sat in the cab of Mel's truck and we looked at weather maps together until Aric came back, and then I went over to Winston, and he laid down on his back and I climbed up on his chest and we dozed off while waiting for the next storm to come.

September 29 [Anna and Reese]

September 29

I don't know how long we were asleep, but Mel called me on the radio and said that there was another cloud coming, so I carefully climbed off Aric, trying not to wake him up, but I did anyway.

I stretched out in the parking lot then told the airplane directors that I was going up again.

I took off and waved to Aric, who was watching me through the windshield, and then climbed back up into the sky. I could hear occasional distant crashes of thunder but I didn't see any lightning. Sometimes it stays way up in the cloud and it's high enough that you might not see it, even at night.

But I could feel it; my coat was bristling and I got up and closer to the clouds. They wanted to be proper thunderclouds but were a little too weary—either they'd formed recently and were still picking up energy, or else they'd tired themselves out on the way here.

So I flew around the bottom of them, getting a feel for them and decided that they were mature clouds, and had just worn out already, which was good for Kalamazoo.

But the clouds weren't all one mass, and the next one felt a lot more prickly as I got to its edges, and that one was dumping out rain like crazy. It had more electricity in it, too, but it wasn't strong enough to get to the ground, so it was just flickering inside the cloud as it tried to find a way out.

I told Mel what I was seeing and feeling, and he said that it looked a little bit calmer after that one had passed, but I stayed up anyways for a little while so I could get a feel for the next cluster of clouds.

Nothing about them felt dangerous, so I glided back down to the parking lot and sparked off on a light post then shook off as well as I could in the rain. I went back to Mel's truck long enough to get a look at the maps on his folding computer, then walked back to Winston.

I should have thought to bring towels, 'cause I was still pretty wet and when I got back to Winston, Aric was still sitting up and opened the door for me.

He'd turned on Winston so it would make heat, and he kissed me after the door was closed. Then he said that he'd seen the spark from my hooves when I got close to the lamppost and so I started explaining how the air was charged, but I kind of cut my explanation a little short 'cause he was yawning—not from being bored, but just from being tired and up in the middle of the night.

He told me he couldn't lie down right away because Winston didn't have a parking brake and might roll away while it was running in neutral, and that I should stretch out on the seat and let the heat dry me off. So I put my tail towards the door and rested my chin on his thigh and closed my eyes.

The radio was on softly, but it wasn't playing any music, just soft static, and between that and the heat and the purring vibrations in the seat, I fell asleep pretty quickly.

I got woken up again by my radio, and Aric was still sitting in the same place but Winston was off and the windows were all covered in fog. He said that he had been napping, until my radio woke him up.

So I told him I was sorry and he said that it was okay.

I went up one more time and patrolled another cluster of almost-thunderclouds, and then Mel said that the weather map looked clear now, so I came back down and looked at the computer with him and we both agreed that the storm was finished but it would still be raining for a while.

The roads were slick and shiny from the water and even Winston looked glossier because of it. I stayed awake while Aric drove us home and he asked if I wanted to take a shower to warm up, but I didn't like going to bed wet, and the heat had mostly dried me off.

When we got out of the truck Aric stretched and said that he was too old for this shit, and I said that I thought humans lived eighty to a hundred years and I didn't think he was all that old and he laughed and said it was a figure of speech.

We went upstairs and he got some towels out of the bathroom and helped me dry off, and we hung my camelback and flight vest on the back of his chair 'cause they were still soaked, too, and then we climbed into bed together. And I felt kind of bad that we were both too tired to have sex, because he'd probably been looking forward to his turn all day.

Aric set an alarm for eleven so that we would have time to get up and eat something before class, and then he curled up next to me and put his arm around my barrel.

I didn't sleep all that well and neither did he because our bodies were confused by being in bed when we should have been awake. And we both woke up before the alarm went off, and he started stroking my belly and I could feel him pressing up against my rump.

His alarm went off while he was on top of me and he couldn't reach it without getting off my back, so we just ignored it and eventually his portable telephone gave up.

And when we finally got out of bed, I said that we could take a shower together, and he asked me to look down the hallway and see if there was anyone in it because he didn't feel like getting dressed.

There wasn't anybody in the hall or the bathroom, so he scurried down towards the open door and I thought about blocking him but that would be mean. It was kind of strange that he'd be worried about one of his housemates seeing him naked when he was comfortable going to Sunny Haven and being naked with a bunch of strangers. I thought that if I wore clothes I wouldn’t mind not wearing them around my friends, like how Meghan didn't mind being nude around me even before we started having sex.

I guess humans have lots of weird rules about that.

Aric didn't have enough shampoo for me to wash my whole coat, so he had to wash most of my body with a bar of soap, which wasn't as good but it was better than nothing. And he still had trouble with my wings, just 'cause he'd never got much practice. Which was something that we'd have to work on together.

And he insisted on washing himself, too, 'cause he didn't think I should have to try and hold a bar of soap in my mouth. It wasn't my favorite taste—human soap tastes really bitter—but I would have done it anyway.

And since he'd had to do all the work in the shower, and stayed with me all night last night and not complained that he'd had to spend most of the night in Winston by himself while I was off flying, I thought he deserved more attention, so after we'd rinsed all the soap off ourselves I asked him if he wanted to get right out of the shower or if he wanted to have a little more fun first, and he did.

I was lucky that Aric had a brush, 'cause my mane and tail were a mess. It wasn't hoof-friendly, so he had to brush my mane but he didn't mind, and when he was done I got on his bed and preened my wings, and he didn't put on his clothes until I was almost done, and we walked to Nina's for lunch.

I hadn't realized how hungry I was until we walked in and I smelled the food and I ordered a big omelet, and some extra toast, and I probably shouldn't have but I was eating breakfast and lunch together.

When we were walking back to Aric's house, I remembered I was gonna sit with Leon and Cedric and Trevor and read poetry and I'd completely forgotten. Leon probably wouldn't be sad that he didn't have to read poetry but I hoped that they weren't worried about me.

We were running out of time, so I packed everything in my saddlebags while Aric got his back for class, and then we got in Winston and he drove us to campus. He had to drop me off at my dorm, because I didn't have my books for astronomy, and I kissed him goodbye and then trotted up to my room, dumped out my flight gear and packed in my astronomy things, and flew to class.

Professor Miller taught us about orbits and the center of mass, which was a place that didn't move, and the star and planet would always be on opposite sides, and it was pretty simple when there was only one planet and one star but when there were a lot it got more complex and the star got more wiggly. And she told us that was how Neptune got discovered, because scientists saw Uranus wiggling and figure out that Neptune must be what was causing it and where it must be and then astronomers found it.

She showed us pictures of one star and how the observations lined up with the predictions on the graph, and when one planet didn't fit then they added in another and another until they decided that it had three planets going around it.

And hot Jupiters were the easiest thing to find, and the first one was found by the Swiss, but the Americans had all the data already but they weren't looking at the right thing and she said they felt really dumb when they found out that they'd already had the data but hadn't thought to look for big planets with short periods.

She told us about how scientists had thought of other theories to explain them, like binary star systems or pulsating stars or edge-on orbits, but as more and more hot Jupiters were found it became less and less likely that that would explain all of them, or more than a few, and then she showed us spectrums, which is where the scientists turned starlight into rainbows and that was how they knew if the light was red-shifted or blue-shifted, and how they were able to test that it wasn't pulsation.

The list of problems that Professor Miller gave us for homework looked like it was going to be pretty easy, which was nice. So I flew back to my room and worked on them until I'd solved them all and then went back through and checked my work again. It was a little strange to be switching back to numbers where close approximations were good enough, but that was something that the weather wheel was really good at, so long as I remembered to convert the numbers correctly. And a couple of the problems I could do in my head, too. It was still a bit confusing using radians instead of degrees, especially since that was one measurement that coincidentally was the same for us and humans.

When I got finished with that I got out my Bible and read some more of Matthew. He said how Jesus found some fishermen to come with him, Simon and Peter, and he filled their nets with fish; and then he also found James and John who were mending nets, which was something that ponies were always doing. Matthew said that Jesus went around healing the sick, and then also he gave sermons of his wisdom and some of it was really smart, like how you weren't supposed to stay mad at your brother, and that people who looked for things found them. And it was a little odd when he asked why people worried about clothing, because I thought maybe he was saying that they shouldn't wear it any more but people still did.

And it had the Lord's Prayer in it, too, which we had said at Easter.

I wanted to read more, but I needed to go have dinner before my meeting with Pastor Liz, and I told myself that I was going to finish Matthew by the next time we met and maybe the next book, too.

The first thing I did when I went to dinner was look for Leon and Cedric and Trevor, to apologize for not being at lunch, but they weren't there yet so I went to our usual table, and much to my surprise Anna and Reese were there. He said that Christine had invited them to our table because he also played Dungeons and Dragons, which was like LARPing but you didn't have to wear a costume unless you wanted to and you sat at a table.

I was pretty happy that there were new friends to eat with and also that I wasn't going to have to eat alone just 'cause I'd come early.

She said that she was going to study art and biology, and that she wanted to be a paleontologist working at a museum putting together monster bones and figuring out what the monster had looked like when it was still alive. And Reese wanted to design role-playing games, so he was studying English because you had to write all the rules, and also history and language because he said that he thought that would make his game more interesting.

So I told them what I was studying, and they thought that that was pretty amazing. That was one thing that felt good being on Earth, 'cause in Equestria when you said that you worked in the weather, a lot of groundponies didn't know anything about it and assumed that everypony just pushed rainclouds around and that was all there was to do in the sky. And since we had to work a lot at night, like I had done last night, lots of pegasuses took naps in the day and then they thought we were lazy, too.

I was just finishing up my meal when Peggy and Christine and Sean arrived, and I apologized for being gone all day but there was a rainstorm last night and Peggy said that she'd wondered if I'd been up in it.

I did find Cedric and Leon on the way out but Trevor hadn't arrived yet. And I told them that I was sorry for missing lunch and they said that was okay, and Cedric asked if I was coming to their game tomorrow night and I wanted to, but I couldn't because we were going to Indianapolis to see the air show, and I said that Aquamarine was going to be there, and Cedric said that they were going, too. And Leon asked if he got any choice in the matter, and Cedric said that it would be good for him to see how the working class lived. Leon said that didn't make any sense, and Cedric said that was why he needed to go.

So I was really happy that they'd be there and I bet Aquamarine was going to be happy, too. And surprised.

I went back to my room and got my glaive and went to talk to Pastor Liz. She was happy that I was keeping up with my reading, but I felt bad that I hadn't gotten more done.

We talked about Jesus and she told me that Mary had been faithful to Joseph, and it was God who made her pregnant and it was a bit confusing but she eventually got me to understand that nobody had actually had sex with Mary; God had just put the baby inside her which for humans was a miracle.

She told me to pay attention because Jesus liked to tell parables, which were stories that sounded like they were about one thing but were really about something else, 'cause I asked her about the clothing, and she said that that meant to not worry about material things like what kind of clothes you wore because just having better clothes didn't make you a better person.

And she said that the Simon and Peter weren't supposed to actually throw nets over people and catch them; that they were meant to be fishers of men in a metaphorical sense.

After we were done talking, I flew down the hill and saw that Winston was parked there along with all the other cars, and Aric was putting on his armor and so was Keith and Seth and Kennith and I'd kind of forgotten that they fought, too, because they had been gone all summer. And so Karla had everybody do practice drills for the first half and then after that she said that we were going to do an actual exercise and she went to her car and got out some flags and put them in the ground and that was the 'bridge' that one team was supposed to defend and the other team was supposed to capture.

She divided up everyone and said that we had five minutes to plan our strategy and that the bridge crossed over a bottomless chasm so we couldn't climb under it. Well, that wasn't a problem for me, and since my team was supposed to take the bridge, they should distract everyone and then I'd fly around and get people from behind and it took us all of five minutes to discuss that.

Seth thought it would work, and he said that I should wait until everyone was engaged and then they might not notice me flying around. So when Karla said it was time to begin, everyone came together and I stayed in the back, jabbing with my padded glaive, until everyone was pretty involved and then I took off and flew over the imaginary chasm, and I went along the bridge and got Keith in the back, and then I killed Aric, too, and the bridge was ours.

They thought it wasn't fair that I could fly, because they couldn't, and Karla said it was good to keep them on their toes and maybe next time they'd think to look behind them. And we did the exercise again and this time we switched who was attacking and who was defending and being able to fly didn't help me that much, until I realized that I could fly off the 'bridge' and around to the side and maybe flank them but they were expecting it and I got hit and killed by Keith, 'cause he had been watching me and he was ready.

I kind of wanted to debate my death, 'cause a hit on the rump shouldn't have killed me, but the rules were that any clean hit on the body was fatal.

We lined up after and Karla told us what she'd seen that was effective and what wasn't. And she said it was clever of me to fly off the bridge for an attack, but that I should not have left my backside open, and I agreed with her. I was a little bit sore where his sword had got me, 'cause I think he hit me harder than he needed to, 'cause he was still a little mad that I'd killed him in the last fight.

At least I'd remembered not to buck him, 'cause my hooves weren't padded at all.

Everyone got undressed and I nuzzled Aric and asked him if he was going to be coming to the rest of the practices and he said that as long as plays didn't interfere he would.

I was starting to feel pretty tired by the time I landed back at the dorm and got up to our room, and I thought that I might not get all that much sleep over the weekend, so I decided that I would go to bed really early and try to sleep a little bit late.

September 30 [Trip to Indianapolis]

September 30

For once, I wasn't looking forward to my classes, 'cause I knew we were going to Indianapolis right after dinner and I was really excited for that.

If I'd still been a filly, I would have bounced up and down on Peggy's bed until she woke up. I didn't think she'd appreciate that, 'cause adults are supposed to be more reserved.

So I went to the bathroom and filled up my camelback and then put on my flight gear. I was gonna have to wash my flight vest today if I had time.

I called the airplane directors and Dori gave me permission to fly and warned me that there was going to be a helicopter flying in to the hospital from the west soon, so I should watch out for it.

So I stayed pretty low, just a meter above the trees or so. There was a gentle rain falling—almost a mist, really—and I hoped it wasn't going to get worse. I thought about flying up and getting a feel for the clouds, but I'd told Dori I was gonna stay low and I didn't want to call her back and tell her that I'd changed my mind, because then maybe she'd have to tell the helicopter to move.

It was fun to stay right above the trees like that, although I felt kinda bad for scaring a bunch of sparrows who were huddling in a tree to keep out of the rain.

I almost forgot about the deer, but at the last minute I remembered and made a hard turn to keep from scaring them, and I got close enough to a tree that I brushed some of the leaves in its crown. And I went over the river and curved back in, dropping on the path.

I did a couple of laps around the trail, switching between a trot and a canter, and then I took off on the river side and flew along the trail that followed by the river and went through the woods. Instead of walking I flew along it, not too far above the ground, and that was a lot of fun. Then when I got back to where it connected with the prairie path, I just started climbing and flew back to campus. Dori said that the helicopter had landed so I could fly higher this time, and I did.

When I got back to the dorm I poked my head into the bathroom and somebody was already in the shower, so I went back to our room and took off my flight gear and then went down to the laundry room with my vest. There was an empty washing machine, so I put it in and went back upstairs, and the shower was empty.

Once I was done I shook off my coat then went back to our room to groom. Peggy was just waking up and I nuzzled her hip when she got out of bed and she petted my mane.

She went to the shower and I packed up my books for class, and then went downstairs to check on my flight vest but it wasn't done washing yet, so I decided I'd get it after breakfast, on my way to thermodynamics.

I had to wait a few minutes for Peggy to get out of the shower and get dressed, then we went to breakfast together. And when we got there a man was making omelets and the waffle maker worked again and I didn't know which to choose. I had a waffle maker of my own if I really wanted some but I'd had an omelet yesterday and I couldn't decide which would be a better breakfast. Both would have been nice but too much food, so I finally got a waffle and then as I was carrying it over to the table I kept thinking that maybe I should have had the omelet instead.

Anna and Reese both came in while we were eating, and he liked Fruit Loops too, 'cause he also had a bowl of them. Anna had an omelet and I regretted my choice until I bit into my waffle.

I had to leave breakfast early, so that I could get my flight vest, and when I got the the laundry room someone had taken it out of the washing machine and put it on the folding table, so I took it upstairs and hung it over my chair, then went out the back and flew over to the science building.

Professor Brown told us about bond energies and before he got started he said that we'd probably never use it since there were already tables. But he said that it could be useful to think about especially in biochemistry. And we had to kind of imagine that some of the molecules and atoms weren't changing states even though in real life they would, so I though that those must be ideal molecules.

And I tried to pay attention, but it was hard especially since I wasn't sure if I would ever need to know this after the class, and my ears really perked when he finally said that we were going to move to a new topic.

We were going to talk about what kinds of things happen on their own, like alchemical reactions sometimes do when you just mix two ingredients, or how weather could just do things on its own because of the sun and air currents, and when he was explaining it he said that the first law of thermodynamics didn't explain why all the air in the room didn't just go off and sit in the corner by itself and suffocate all of us.

I wasn't so sure about air, but I did know that if you left clouds to their own devices they mostly liked to spread out and cover the skies, as long as there was enough moisture in the air to let them. If there wasn't enough, they evaporated, and if there was too much, they rained, and if there was a lot too much, they became thunderclouds and it seemed like everything might work on that same basic principle.

But Professor Brown didn't start by talking about clouds; he talked about steam engines and how they couldn't be a hundred percent efficient no matter how hard anybody tried. And so he showed us the math behind how steam engines worked, and then he also told us that all spontaneous processes were irreversible. Clouds were like that, too—you set them out but they never came back to you.

Me and Lisa went to the lounge again and went over our lab homework, and it all looked pretty good, and we both agreed that it was ready to be turned in. So after that I flew back to my room to do homework and it was really hard to focus 'cause I kept thinking about how pretty soon we'd be on the way to the airshow and I'd get to see Aquamarine and Gusty and Cayenne and also all the ponies from the tornado team and all my friends who could come would get to meet them, too, and it was probably going to be a really exhausting but fun weekend.

But I couldn't let my homework suffer, and if it was done I wouldn't have to think about it, so I tried to put everything else out of my mind and work on it. At least I'd be with Sean when I did my math homework, and he'd help me focus.

Sometimes when you were working by yourself it was hard to keep motivated, especially if you were looking forward to something fun that you were going to do later.

I had all but one of the problems done when it was time to go to lunch, and I couldn't decide if I should do it now or go to lunch. I knew I wasn't gonna be in the mood in the afternoon, so I took a deep breath and stretched out my wings and then let them sag as I exhaled and I told myself that the problem wasn't hard; I'd already done a bunch and this was just the same.

And it wasn't really hard, just lots of figuring and then I had it. So I closed my notebook and textbook and packed my math things in my saddlebags, and since I didn't feel like strapping them on I grabbed the backstrap in my mouth and flew off to lunch.

Humans are lucky because they can put on their backpacks while they're moving. I guess maybe I could put on my saddlebags while I was flying but it would be really, really tricky and I'd probably wind up just dropping them or crashing into something because I was paying too much attention to getting the girth strap pulled tight.

Of course, that meant that I had to set them at the table before I could get any food, but at least that gave me a chance to greet everybody. And Peggy said that I was late and I said that I was doing homework and she said that I had all weekend to do it and then she remembered that we were going to the airshow and I think she realized that she would have homework to do and she couldn't do it while she was driving.

I kinda wanted to invite Anna and Reese but there wasn't enough room in Cobalt for them unless we got really crowded in there and it would be rude anyway if I hadn't asked Peggy first. So I kept my mouth shut and thought if I had a chance later I could ask her.

I didn't have time to have much lunch, but that didn't matter because I wasn't too hungry, so I just got some salad and they had some breaded cod patties but they were square and I didn't trust a square fish.

I trusted that Sean would watch the time, and not let us be late to class, and I just focused on eating my lunch before it was time to go, and when he got up and picked up his tray I stopped eating, too, and I followed him to the window where you returned your dishes and trays.

Sean asked if I was eager for class, and I was because Professor Pampena was a lot of fun and so was multivariable calculus. I think it was my most fun class this quarter.

The first thing he taught us was the approximation formula, because we needed to know that before he taught us about optimization and critical points, which were for working on three-dimensional shapes. And he showed us how to solve at critical points, which was actually pretty easy although at first it seemed odd that you could add two different equations together.

And once he showed us critical minimum points and maximum points, he showed us the picture of the saddle where its critical point was only local and it made a difference which way you came at it from. And then he taught us about experiments and least-squares interpolation, which was where you had a bunch of data and you tried to figure out the function that best fit and that was kind of like what we'd learned in astronomy about finding distant planets, so it was neat to see more of the math behind how that worked, and how you figured out what was a good line.

Me and Sean went back to his dorm room to work on our homework together, and while we were walking I started to wonder if maybe I should suggest that me and Lisa could work on our homework together. I'd have to ask her after class on Monday, 'cause I didn't know when she did it. Maybe she stayed up late at night working on her homework like some people did.

With him working and with Loreena McKennitt singing I kept pretty focused on my math homework, plus it was lots of fun. And I got done with it before he did, so I went back through and re-checked my answers, and then I started working on a new problem in Equestrian math. I didn't want to just copy one that was on the answer sheet, but make up a new one on my own where I really didn't know the answer. And I was still working on that when Sean finally finished, so we took a break and compared our answers, and then went back and worked on the one problem where we'd gotten different answers.

I was confident I'd gotten it right and Sean was a little bit less sure, and it turned out that I had.

He didn't think that it was fair that I was better at math than he was, and I told him that pegasuses had invented proper math, and that's why we were good at it.

I let Sean try and solve my problem, too, and he did pretty well, although I had to explain a couple of things to him just because he wasn't very familiar with the symbols. And I wondered what Professor Pampena was thinking about my problems, 'cause I hadn't explained all that much of them, but I think he probably enjoyed puzzling through them. I guess he'd know—or at least think—that it was similar to the ones that we were working on, so he might be able to figure them out from that.

Sean said that he still had to pack for the weekend, and then he mentioned that maybe we should bring some beer and I can't believe I hadn't thought of that. And I knew it was a long trip down to Indianapolis 'cause Peggy had said that we wouldn't get there until after midnight, so she wouldn't want to stop on the way.

So I thanked him for reminding me and I flew back to my dorm room long enough to empty out my saddlebags, then I flew to Tiffany's and bought three carriers of different kinds of beer, which was all that I could fit in my saddlebags at once. And eighteen beers should have been enough but maybe other ponies would want some, too, so I made three more trips and by the second time the clerk was helping me load them in my saddlebags and asked if I was planning a big party and so I told her that I was going to an airshow with all my friends and I was going to see more of my friends there so I wanted to make sure I had enough to share. And she thought that was really nice of me.

Peggy came back while I was packing my flight gear into my saddlebags and I asked her if we should invite Anna and Reese, but she said that we didn't know them all that well yet and it was really last-minute and there wasn't enough room in the car anyway unless people were riding on laps. And I didn't mind if I had to—I could stretch out across their legs, and three people could fit in the back (especially because Anna was small for a human) but I did understand why she might be wary, and our hotel room was already going to be crowded.

And it was kind of annoying that everybody wanted to talk at dinner, 'cause I wanted to be on my way, but I thought I'd let Peggy decide when it was time to go. And she finally said that it was if we wanted to get there at a decent hour, so we went back to our room and she carried all the beer I'd bought down to Cobalt and arranged it neatly in the trunk and I felt bad for her having to do all that work, but she said she didn't mind and she'd probably burned at least one beer's worth of calories doing it.

I got in the back seat, 'cause Sean would probably want to ride in the front, and we drove down the hill to Christine's room, and she and Sean came out with their bags and packed them in the trunk of Cobalt, and then Christine got in the back. She sat behind Peggy, 'cause Peggy drove with her seat forward farther and that gave her more room for her legs.

We drove through town and then went east on the 94 Highway until we got to the 69 Highway, and we took that south. It didn't take us all that long to get to Indiana, and we passed around a big city called Fort Wayne, and then after that it got really boring outside because there was only farmland for a while.

But everybody in the car wanted to talk, and that helped pass the time, plus Peggy had the radio on and it was fun every time we got too far away from one radio station and had to pick another one to listen to. And there were radio stations about Christians and I wanted to listen to one of those for a little while but nobody else in Cobalt did, and I was kind of sad that I got outvoted but I guess it was fair, and it was important to listen to what Peggy wanted to so that she'd stay alert.

We stopped at rest areas so we could get out and stretch our legs and pee, and all of them had machines which would let you buy snacks, and the most interesting one was a machine that sold ice cream treats and a little hose went out to pick them up and then drop them in the tray for you. Sean loaned me some money so that I could buy a Klondike Bar, and he got one of his own, too.

Peggy hadn't needed her GPS to find Indianapolis, but when we got close she needed it to find our hotel, which was called a Marriott.

It was a pretty sleek building, with shiny glass walls and a big open lobby and elevators that had windows which I thought I wouldn't mind riding in. And Mister Salvatore had gotten us a big suite which had a lounge with couches and two connected bedrooms and that was really nice. So a helpful man got all of our luggage out of Cobalt and helped us take it upstairs and when I looked out the windows on the elevator it was pretty pleasant. It still scared me a little bit when it started moving up, but then I could see that I was moving and that was a lot better than being trapped in a little silver box.

Jenny and Aquamarine were already there, and Gusty and Cayenne were going to arrive really late. I think that Mister Salvatore had thought he'd have one bed for each pony and her human, but he probably hadn't known that I was bringing friends with me.

We thought that Gusty would probably have Nikky with her, and they'd want a bed to themselves, and Sean and Christine would want to sleep together, and so that left two more beds for three ponies and at least two humans. So Peggy offered to sleep on the couch, and then Jenny said that that wasn't right, but Peggy thought that since she'd been the one to bring extra people she ought to.

I thought that since the couch was pretty wide, me and Aquamarine and Cayenne could share it, and that would leave a bed for each Jenny and Peggy, and we finally agreed on that, and said that if more people came we'd have to think of some other arrangement.

So we sat and drank beer for a while, but it was pretty late and we were all tired and we kind of wanted to stay up until everypony had arrived, but we didn't. Aquamarine said that she'd wake up when they came in and could tell everybody the sleeping arrangements, and we agreed that we'd all have breakfast at nine and then go out to the airshow and then after the first day was over we might have to re-arrange who got what beds, but we would figure that out later.

I said that I wanted to go looking for the tornado team, because they might be in the same hotel as us, but I was yawning as I said it and Peggy told me I was too tired to do that and I guess she was right.

Me and Aquamarine stretched out on the couch, kind of nose-to-nose since it was narrow, and I made her promise to wake me up when our friends got here. And we also agreed that if Cayenne wouldn't get up in the morning we'd drag her into the bathroom for another cold shower.

October 1 [Red Bull Air Race: Qualifying]

October 1

Cayenne and Gusty and Nicky arrived a few hours after we'd gone to bed, and so me and Aquamarine both got up to greet them and show Gusty and Nicky where their bed was. Cayenne was kind of mad that she didn't get a real bed but said that it was better than sleeping in a van, which she'd done on the way here.

She was happy that we had lots of beer, though and asked if we were going to bring any to watch the airshow. I didn't think that we were allowed to, but I was hoping that we'd have a chance to meet up with all the weatherponies afterwards and that was what it was for.

So the three of us got up on the couch and I said that everyone was meeting for breakfast at nine and if she wasn't awake by 8:30 we were going to drag her into a cold shower again, and then we snuggled up and fell back asleep.

Morning came a little bit too soon, and I was already thinking that I was going to be tired on Monday, 'cause I thought that we probably wouldn't get to sleep until late tonight, either. And we were the first ones awake, but I knew that with only one shower in the room there was going to be some competition to use it, so me and Aquamarine took our turn first before anyone else woke up.

And I wasn't going to tell her about Cedric, 'cause I wanted that to be a surprise, but then I wound up telling her about watching him at the football game and she was looking kind of sad that she hadn't gotten to see him play yet, and so I did tell her. And I saw her cock her ear out towards the lounge room just in case her portable telephone was ringing right now.

I thought he would probably not arrive until the afternoon since he'd had a game last night.

We got groomed in the lounge so that Jenny could use the shower, and by the time she was done Sean and Christine were waiting to have a turn, and I went in to wake up Peggy, and it was a pretty chaotic morning. The room had a coffee maker in it but only enough coffee to make two cups, so we had to decide who wanted it the most and who was willing to wait for it. And Sean had to get dressed pretty quickly and then got kicked out of his room so that Peggy could get dressed after she got out of the shower.

Gusty and Nicky came out of the bedroom together and they were both wearing identical sleeping clothes, which was really cute. When they got in the shower we decided that it was time to wake up Cayenne, so me and Aquamarine started shaking her until she opened her eyes and stuck her head up and then looked over at the coffee maker hopefully, but there wasn't any coffee left, so she was gonna have to wait until she went downstairs to breakfast.

It was almost nine when Cayenne finally got in to the shower and we didn't want to abandon her in our room but we didn't want to be late for breakfast either. It wasn't her fault that she'd been the very last one to shower and we ought to have woken her up when we got up and made her shower then.

We were twenty minutes late by the time she was done, and then we all crowded into an elevator and rode it down to the restaurant. I made sure to get in first so that I could be up against the windows and look out, and we stopped on a floor partway down but when the people waiting saw how crowded the elevator was they didn't want to get on.

There was a restaurant where everyone was getting together, and the tables weren't big enough for everyone so ponies and people were just taking tables that were close together. And almost all the weatherponies were already there, and when Lofty saw me she put down her food and trotted over to nuzzle me. And pretty soon it got kind of confusing to keep track of everything that was going on, 'cause Lofty and Paradise were telling me about the tornado they'd stopped, and Meghan and her friends had all come by and were talking to a couple of pegasuses. Prism Glider got yelled at for getting excited and flying inside, but only after he'd bumped his head on a chandelier. And everpony's helpers were there except for Cayenne's, and there really wasn't any order to it at all. But that was okay, because everyone was enjoying themselves, and there was a little buffet that had hot food and pastries and bread and cereal so everybody could get what they wanted. Sean got lots of bacon and Christine had to find a different cereal, because they didn't have any Fruit Loops.

Some of the other hotel guests who were eating breakfast came over, too, and the first man was disappointed when he found out that none of us were Wonderbolts, 'cause he said that he'd heard that they were going to be in the airshow, and I hoped that was true. Flanking Line wanted to give him an autograph anyway, 'cause she said that they were heroes for stopping a tornado but he wasn't impressed.

The next people that came over were, though. I guess Paradise had been on television and they recognized her and they asked if it was true that they were the first ponies to have earned flight licenses, and I said that I was the first and I could go up to my room and show them. And I thought about telling them that I'd gotten to fly a Dreamliner simulator but that felt like bragging.

I overheard someone talking to Gusty, too, who had seen her on Orange is the New Black, and there were a couple of people down at the other end of the table talking to Stormbreaker and Velvet Light.

So they talked to us for a while and we probably could have stayed in the restaurant for a couple more hours just getting caught up but we had to go get anything that we wanted for the day and then we were going to ride the tornado team's bus to the airfield.

The bus was like a short school bus, not flat in front like the buses I'd been riding on before, but instead of being yellow it was black, and inside it was really nice. We let all the helpers sit up in the front and everybody else got in the back and some ponies had to share seats or sit on laps but nobody minded.

I found out that we weren’t actually going to an airport but to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which was a race track for cars but also a good place for airplanes to race. And we got special parking, too, that was pretty close, and we had a big room at the top of a building instead of having seats in the grandstands with everyone else, and it had a really good view of the course. So we got to go by all the people who were waiting in line, and Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow stayed down at the bottom so that they could check in our friends as they arrived. He hadn't been able to arrange for more hotel rooms, but he could put as many people as would fit here, so everyone's friends were welcome.

There were lots of signs and pictures for Red Bull, and I hoped that it wasn't the same red bull as in The Last Unicorn, because then Cayenne and Gusty would be in danger. But we'd protect them from it if it was, and I didn't think our helpers would take us someplace that was dangerous anyway.

We hadn't been there all that long when they announced that there was going to be a bit of a delay in qualifying because of the rain, and there was some grumbling at that but most of us were having so much fun talking that we weren't too disappointed. Flanking Line said that we'd ought to go up there and clear away the rainclouds so that the airplanes could race, and she told Lofty who went and asked Mister Dove if they could, and he said that they didn't have permission and there was no chance he could get it before the race was over.

We thought that was kind of dumb, since we could have just gone up there and it probably wouldn't have taken much more than an hour or two to clear the skies over the whole race track, and then have a small group of ponies stay up there to break up the clouds as they came in.

More people started showing up—Meghan and her roommates were first, and they all came over and greeted me and Meghan crouched down so we could nuzzle each other, and then I introduced them to the other college ponies and all the weather ponies, and pretty soon I had to do it again when Aric and David and Angela arrived. And there were other people, too; a couple of Cayenne's friends had come, and so had a bunch of people that Gusty knew, and I tried to remember everybody's names but there were just so many that I couldn't keep track of them all.

The race course was set out with giant cones, and it wasn't that different from a pegasus race course, although we used clouds, of course. Lofty said that after the qualifying was done that they were going to do a demonstration race around the course as a team and I could join if I wanted to. I'd have to be in the back, since they'd practiced the course yesterday but I hadn't, and that was okay.

We found a stack of books that told us about the race and all the different pilots and there was a little picture of each of them in the back, along with a picture of a weather team fighting a storm in Equestria, and it didn't look like any of them were actually in that picture. I guess they hadn't had a chance to take a picture of them in Oklahoma or Texas.

Every now and then another person would show up, and I saw Aquamarine look hopefully at the door each time, but there was no sign of Cedric or Leon by the time the qualifying started, and we all turned our attention to the windows or went out on the balcony so that we could watch.

I don't think the other ponies really appreciated it quite as much as I did, because I'd actually flown almost-real airplanes and I'd been in a couple, too, and they were quick but they didn't turn very well. But these did; they flew a lot like a pegasus might. They banked all the way over on their sides to clear the cones, or to make really sharp turns, and then they'd snap back level and go on to the next one.

They were different colors so you could easily tell them apart, and some had names on the wings like Breitling or Red Bull (there was a human flying it, not a bull). And they took turns racing around the course, 'cause there wasn't a lot of room for all the airplanes so only the best ones were gonna get to be in the good race, Lofty said.

I didn't see Cedric come in, but all of a sudden, Aquamarine dropped her hooves off the railing and ran through the room and I kind of lost her with all the people, but it didn't matter, 'cause Cedric was easy to see, since he was the biggest person in the room.

Leon went over to the snack table and started making himself a plate and it was a little strange because Mister Dove had a bit of a frown on his face when he went over to talk to him, but then Leon straightened up and I thought I could see a little bit of a change in him. I couldn't really describe what it was, but Mister Dove's frown went away and I could see him relax, and then pretty soon the two of them were talking, and it was like they were best friends all of a sudden.

Most of the afternoon, the different airplanes were qualifying, and we sort of took turns watching them or talking and getting snacks. Lofty had to keep reminding her team to not eat so much that they couldn't fly, and she insisted that nopony could have more than one or two beers or else they weren't going to be able to race because she said that we were supposed to be setting a good example. And then an official from the race track came in and told us that there was one more qualifying run and then it was time for us to fly, and Lofty told him that I'd be flying with them, if they wanted to announce my name, too.

She led us to a little waiting paddock that had a little tunnel that led out to the main course, and when the airplane got done running the course it landed and the announcer told everyone about us, and he said my name at the very end and that was pretty exciting.

Lofty had lined us all up in order, and the track official leaned over and she nodded, then turned back to make sure everypony was ready, then we took off, one after another.

I was glad I was in the back, 'cause I could see that everypony was flying about one ponylength apart and it was pretty simple, basic flight camp stuff. But I don't think that anybody in the crowd had ever seen anything like it before, and I heard a lot of applause as we peaked and dove, then went around the course like a long snake. We mimicked some of the stuff the airplanes did, like turning on our sides when we went through the cones, and when we'd gotten to the end of the course Lofty went up and then looped back down so that we could do it again backwards, and she'd kind of forgotten that I was at the very end of the line and I could see where she had to drop a little bit further than she'd planned but I don't think anybody watching would have noticed.

The second time around, instead of being in a line, we did a behind-and-up formation, where everypony was in pairs and the wingmare flew behind and above her partner, and since there was an odd number of ponies I just flew the same path as Electric Blue was. And when we got back to the beginning of the course, everypony fell back into a straight line and we did one pass above the runway, about mid-level on the grandstands, then we looped around at the very end and spread out along the course and just stopped facing everyone and then did a mostly coordinated landing on the track in front of the grandstands.

There were lots of cheers and claps as we bowed on the ground, then Lofty called for everypony to take off straight up, and when we were all in the air again, she turned and led us back out of the race course.

That was a lot of fun because I hadn't done any formation flying in a long time, but it was kind of intimidating to see all those people in front of us.

When we went back up to our lounge, we all got champagne which was bubblier than I liked and tickled my nose but tasted pretty good. There wasn't much more to watch outside, 'cause all the pilots had already raced, so we mostly stayed inside and talked, and Stormbreaker and Merry May went out to the balcony and flew off of it and raced in circles around our building.

Meghan and Lisa and Becky were really popular with the weatherponies, 'cause they could speak Equestrian and there were a few ponies on the team who weren't very good at English at all, so they were a lot happier talking to the girls. And I told Meghan that if she wanted to try and get a stallion, I wouldn't be mad at her, 'cause I saw how she was looking at Stormbreaker, and her face got really red and she said that it wasn't like that but I thought that maybe if I had a chance I'd tell Stormbreaker she was interested. The toys were nice but they weren't the same as a real stallion.

We had a chance to go see the Red Bull airplane, and that was really fun. We weren't allowed to touch it, or get in it, because it had to race tomorrow and they were a little bit worried that we might accidentally break it. But they did let us fly over it, and Paradise thought it was fun to fly over its wings and be dominant when it was stuck on the ground. I thought it was kind of silly to get in a territorial fight over an airplane, since it wasn't anything more than a machine, and I told her I'd seen an airplane when it was just a big roll of tape, but it made her happy anyways.

And I got to meet the pilot, too. He'd talked to most of the other ponies yesterday, but it was his first time meeting me and he shook my hoof and said that it was an honor to meet the first pegasus with a pilot's license.

We talked about flying a little bit and I'd thought from watching him that he had instincts almost as good as a pegasus. He'd been around airplanes for almost forty years, and done lots of flying although I still had more hours in the air than he did.

Medley invited everybody back to their suite to have a party, and she had to give directions to people who were staying in different hotels, 'cause they couldn't ride in the bus with us. And while we were riding back Mister Dove reminded everypony that we had to respect the other guests at the hotel, so we couldn't be too loud and then Paradise asked if they could sleep in the bus if they got kicked out of the hotel, and he said that we were not allowed to and nobody was supposed to nest on the roof of the hotel, either.

Flanking Line said that was a dumb rule and humans just had that rule because they were jealous that they couldn't fly.

So it turned out that they had a suite like ours, just a few floors down, which was really convenient for everybody. And the whole evening kind of turned into a blur; there were lots of people and ponies going back and forth between our rooms and then we found out that our helpers had room on the same floor, too, and I don't think that they really wanted to join the party but they kind of got dragged into it anyways.

And after a while they kind of got in the spirit of it, and Mister Salvatore had some playing cards so he played some poker with a couple of the weatherponies until Miss Cherilyn saw and made him stop. Cedric left early and took Aquamarine with him, and Leon went down to the swimming pool with a couple of ponies who wanted to swim. Cayenne drank too much and then went away with a couple of her friends, and I wasn't sure that we'd even see her tomorrow, especially if we weren't there to wake her up.

There were a couple of times that somebody from the hotel stopped by to remind us to be quiet, and we were for a while but there were a lot of people and a lot of ponies and we were all having fun.

Some of us went downstairs for a race in the parking lot, and we dragged Peggy along as a judge. I didn't win, 'cause Merry May was faster than she looked. And then we decided that we'd fly back up along the side of the hotel and knock on the window of their room until somepony noticed us, so we did that and it was a little while before anypony did, 'cause nopony was looking out the windows and it was dark outside.

They had a hot tub in their room which wasn't fair, 'cause we didn't, and as the night went on that started to be more and more popular, but it wasn't big enough for everypony and we had to take turns in it.

Most of the humans didn't want to use it because they didn't have swimming clothes with them, but after Angela went in in her underwear, Aric decided that he would, too, and I went in with him and after a while Meghan joined us and that was really nice. I wouldn't have minded staying in there for a couple of hours but other ponies wanted a turn and I was a little light-headed 'cause I'd had a little more to drink than I should have.

I don't know what time it was but it was pretty late, and the party was kind of breaking up, and ponies and people had just kind of found anyplace that they could to sleep. Aric had had to go back to his hotel with Angela and David, but Meghan had gotten left behind by her friends, so she was still around somewhere but I didn't know where for sure. I thought about going back to my room, but I was pretty sure that neither Aquamarine or Cayenne would be there, and if everybody else was sleeping in the same beds as before, that meant that I would be alone on the couch and I didn't really want to be, so I poked my nose into one of the bedrooms and got into bed with Lofty and Paradise and Rocky Storm, and it didn't take too long for me to fall asleep.

October 2 [Red Bull Air Race]

October 2

I'd picked a good bed, 'cause aside from Rocky Storm, everypony was an early riser, and we got out of bed and all three of us went over to the window so that we could look out and see what the weather was like.

It was cloudy outside, and so Lofty got out her folding computer and made it show us all the weather charts—she'd gotten pretty good at using it, 'cause she had a little pen with a rubber tip that she could use on the screen to move things around with and she could also use the letter buttons with it. And we all thought that it didn't seem like it was going to rain, and I sniffed at the little vents at the heater but you couldn't smell the outside through it.

Paradise said that there should be a way to get on the roof, besides going downstairs and flying up. She said that Merry May had told her that there was a door up there but you could only go off the roof and into the hotel through it; it wouldn't open up the other way without a plastic key.

Then Lofty started making coffee for everyone—they had lots and lots of little packets for their coffee maker, and lots of cups, too, and she said that you just had to ask and the hotel would give them to you. They'd had to get plenty of extra towels, too, because the room hadn't come with enough for everypony.

We went and got in the shower, and we were washing each other's tails when Prism Glider stuck his nose in the bathroom and got in with us, and we moved out of the way to let him get his coat wet, then had to shuffle around so that we could rinse out our tails. It was getting a little bit crowded with four ponies, 'cause the shower stall was long and narrow, so we had to move around a lot to stay under the spray.

But you could go right to the very back and shake off in it before opening the door, and that kept all the water inside, which was smart. And they'd laid down a bunch of floor-towels outside of it, 'cause the tile floor was kinda slippery.

Electric Blue came in when we were drying off, yawning and stretching, and when we got back into the lounge, Rocky Storm had got up, too, and she was sitting next to the coffee maker, with a cup of coffee in her hooves. And I saw Dewdrop come out of the bedroom, too, and he just went straight for the shower.

Paradise went over and took the cup that was full of coffee out of the machine and then refilled it and put another cup in. There was already a little row of filled-up cups, so Electric Blue must have made a couple before he went into the shower.

Lofty said that she was gonna make sure that everypony was awake or almost awake, and she went into the bedrooms and then went out of the second bedroom and said that she'd found Meghan and that she was really cute. So I went in to look, too, and Meghan was asleep on her back, and Stormbreaker had his head on her breast and a wing stretched out over her bare belly, and Flanking Line was snuggled up against her side, with Meghan's arm around her barrel and it was really cute. I didn't have my camera to take a picture but Paradise had hers and so we really quietly took a picture of them all snuggled up together and then Lofty woke them up while I was brushing Paradise's mane for her.

When she came out of the bedroom she had her shirt on, and she looked around to see if there were any other people in the room, then she got a cup of coffee and sat down on one of the chairs and asked how soon the shower would be available.

I said that there were only a couple of ponies in it now so there was probably enough room for her, and it kind of took her a moment to think about it and then she drank the rest of her coffee and went into the bathroom.

She had a couple of minutes alone, 'cause Dewdrop and Electric Blue both came out of the bathroom and then Rocky Storm went in and Stormbreaker followed her.

When she came back out, I said that she was really good at preening and I didn't think that anypony was going to trust her too much, so I had her sit down on the bed and I stuck my left wing in her lap and let her preen it—Paradise had already done my right wing—and once the other pegasuses saw what a good job she was doing, Flanking Line got on the bed to take my place and Dewdrop lined up behind her.

She wasn't going to have enough time to do everypony's, though, which was too bad. I think she would have liked to.

So about a half hour before we had to go downstairs for breakfast, everypony who was still in line had to preen their own wings, except for Velvet Light who said that she'd just wait and have Meghan do it on the bus, and she didn't mind going to breakfast with her feathers ruffled from sleep.

Meghan almost didn't have time to dress at all, and she had to do a little hunting in the bedroom 'cause her bra had gotten tangled up in the sheets last night but she finally found all her clothes and I brushed her hair for her, and then everyone went downstairs to breakfast.

They had the same breakfast as before and when everybody except for Aquamarine had arrived and eaten, we got back in the bus to ride out to the race track again, and Meghan sat in the back and I sat next to her and Velvet Light sat on the other side and Meghan preened her wing, then we switched seats so that Meghan could get her other wing.

We were all watching from the same place as before, and so most of us didn't bother going through the door and up the stairs but just flew around to the balcony and went in that way. I stayed with Meghan, though, 'cause she couldn't fly up, and she said it was really strange to see a flock of pegasuses all take off at once like that.

They had food for us again today and so we all got comfortable while waiting for everybody else to arrive, and looked out over the crowd, too.

They had big televisions in the room and someone was taking pictures of the crowd, and I saw a woman who was wearing a blue shirt with a horseshoe on it, so I guess she was a pony fan. It had the number 12 on it, too, but I didn't know what that meant, except that there were 12 weatherponies, so maybe she'd really liked seeing us yesterday. Of course, we'd flown with thirteen but maybe she hadn't known we would and had gotten the shirt before.

Even though it was cloudy and overcast it wasn't raining, and so there weren't any delays today. Almost everybody had arrived by the time the race started, but Cayenne and her friends hadn't arrived yet. I thought that maybe they were having fun back at her hotel room, and so I asked Gusty if they'd ridden down together, and she said that they'd come in an airplane, and none of Cayenne's friends had.

Watching the airplanes race was a lot like watching them practice. They couldn't go all at once or they might crash into each other and fall out of the sky—Aric said that in car races, the cars crashed a lot, and he didn't think that they'd want to have that happen with airplanes.

Prism Bolt and Velvet light were both out on the balcony with their wings out and it was kind of funny to see them banking along with the airplanes. They didn't tilt as far, but you could see them dip their wingtips down each time the airplanes turned.

People who were inside could see pictures on the televisions and sometimes that was better 'cause you got a closer view than we could from the balcony and also they had cameras inside the airplanes, too, but overall I thought it was better to see them outside.

There were only a few airplanes that flew in the Challenger class, which was the first competition, and then when that was done they announced that there was going to be a special performance by the Wonderbolts before the next race started, and there was a lot of cheering for that.

I was really excited, too, 'cause I hadn't seen a Wonderbolt show in years.

Everybody crowded out on the balcony and some of the pegasuses flew up to the roof or hovered just in front of the balcony, so that everybody would have lots of room to see. Cedric lifted Aquamarine up on his shoulders so that she'd have a better view, and then the Wonderbolts dove into the stadium.

They must have been waiting for their cue somewhere outside of the stadium, 'cause they all had pretty good speed when they dropped over the center field, and they didn't run the course like we had, but they just did their own routine. I recognized a couple of moves like the Buccaneer Blaze, which they did right down the middle of the runway, but there were a lot of moves I hadn't seen before. They'd probably had to change the show a little bit for Earth, 'cause it wasn't as easy to fly here.

Everybody in the crowd seemed impressed, though. There were lots of cheers and so much applause that it sounded like thunder when they did their last fly-by and zoomed out under the same bridge we'd used.

Their smoke hadn't quite cleared when the first airplane that was competing in the Master Class took off. The pegasuses on the roof flew back down and landed, and I saw Stormbreaker inside begging Mister Dove for a chance to meet the Wonderbolts, and he had a little smile on his face that told me that they were probably going to get the chance. Mister Salvatore got that smile a lot when he knew something that I didn't.

I was disappointed that we didn't get to see Kirby get to fly again, but I found out that he'd gotten disqualified for making his engine go too fast. I would have hated to have come all the way to a race and then not be able to actually race, but I guess if they let everybody race it might take days to get it all done. And if that was a rule he should have obeyed it.

While the afternoon races were still going on, a woman called Mélanie who was another pilot came by to visit us. We'd seen her race in the morning, and she'd finished in second place in the morning races. She had a friend with her who could translate for her, because she didn't know any English or Equestrian, and none of us knew any French.

Even so, she was really fun, and she loved watching us fly. Every time somepony flew off the balcony she'd look right over at them and even stop talking in the middle of her sentence, and watch as they flew around the balcony and then landed again. And I heard her translator ask Paradise what they were doing, and she shrugged and said that they were just flying around 'cause it was no fun to have your hooves on the ground all the time, and Mélanie smiled when she heard that.

She stayed with us and watched the race out on the balcony for a little while, and we all saw when one of the airplanes clipped a cone and tore the top off of it. They weren't supposed to do that, but at least the airplane was okay. The cones were really soft so that they wouldn't hurt the airplanes if they crashed into them.

Before she left, though, she autographed the schedule books for all of us, and we autographed one for her, too—everypony on the weather team signed by their biography, and I signed on the bottom of the page 'cause I hadn't gotten a biography.

So when all the races were over, they announced that Matthias Doldere had won, and there was a little bit of debate about whether he'd really earned it or not, and I thought back to how me and Aquamarine had argued about whether the team who won the wagon hauling competition had really deserved their win.

Some people said their goodbyes at the race track, 'cause they had to get back home. Cayenne and Gusty and Nicky had to get to the airport so that they could fly back home, and so we all hugged and nuzzled them, and I promised that next time we'd meet up in Chicago, maybe in a couple of weeks if that worked out for everypony. And Cedric and Leon had to leave, too, and Aquamarine was kind of sad to see Cedric go, and she hugged him and nuzzled his cheek, and then she left with Jenny and Mister Barrow and Miss Parker.

Then Aric said that they were leaving, so I hugged him and kissed him and thanked him for coming, and I said my goodbyes to Meghan and her roommates, too, 'cause they were also driving back from the stadium.

Peggy and Sean and Christine and me were gonna ride back in the bus, 'cause she'd left Cobalt at the hotel, and then we found out on the way back that the tornado team was gonna meet the Wonderbolts for dinner, and I really wanted to do that.

So there was a bit of negotiating but finally Miss Cherilyn convinced Mister Dove to let us, so we got to go, too.

We had a private section all to ourselves, and I was kind of sad that Meghan hadn't gotten to be here, too, because she really would have liked it.

They had lots of fish, and they also had some pasture grass salads that they'd probably made special just for us. And we all got to eat at a big round table, and mostly talk about the weather and I did feel kind of bad for Peggy and Christine and Sean, 'cause everypony mostly talked in Equestrian the whole time. The only Wonderbolt who could speak any English at all was Sassaflash, and she wasn't very good at it.

Rainbow Dash said that she was impressed that I'd gotten to fly a Dreamliner simulator, after I'd told her that it was a really big airplane, hundreds of times bigger than the ones we'd seen flying at the airshow. And I also knew Pizelle's youngest sister, 'cause she was a sailorpony on the Sea Spray, which sometimes delivered supplies to Chonamare. I didn't know her very well, but I'd seen her around a couple of times.

There was a lot of talk about the weather on Earth, because before she'd become a Wonderbolt, Rainbow Dash had been the lead weathermare in Ponyville, and I wondered if Aquamarine had known her. So we got Miss Cherilyn to show Rainbow the movie of me and the rest of the weather team fighting the tornado, which she thought was really cool. And she asked a lot of questions about our flight gear, and so we had to explain what it all was and what it was for.

I told her how I'd gotten to fly in a wind tunnel and when I said what it was, Rainbow said that she could probably beat it, so I had to explain how it wasn't a race. But she was really determined to beat it anyway.

So we stayed there probably later than we should have, and there were lots of hugs and nuzzles and promises to meet up back in Equestria. I got an extra program autographed by all the Wonderbolts, and I thought I'd give that to Meghan 'cause I knew that she'd like it. Misty Fly had the biggest signature, which she said was so that everypony would know it was her. And Blaze just drew her cutie mark, like a lot of older ponies did. I think she was the oldest Wonderbolt who was still an active flier; she'd been performing since I was a filly.

When we got back to Cobalt, it was pretty late and we still had a long drive ahead of us, and I was a little bit worried that Peggy might fall asleep while she was driving. She said that I should sit in the front seat and make sure that she stayed awake, so I told her that I would. Sean helped slide my seat forward to make more room in the back, and then he got in behind me and Christine put her head on his shoulder and we hadn't made it very far out of Indianapolis before she fell asleep.

Peggy said that it had been a crazy weekend but a lot of fun, and I agreed. I thought that everybody had had a good time, and I was really happy that they'd all gotten to meet the Wonderbolts. And I said that I just wished that we'd taken an airplane, and she said that I didn't like to fly in them and that was true, but I said that I felt bad that she had to do all this driving all by herself.

So she told me it wasn't the craziest thing she'd ever done.

We didn't get back to Michigan until almost one AM, and she was yawning a lot so we finally stopped at a rest area so that she could run around the car a few times to get her blood circulating again. And she said that we shouldn't trot through the neighborhood tomorrow, and I agreed with her. We both would want to sleep in as late as we could.

Once we finally got back to school, she had to wake up Christine and Sean, and she let them out at their dorm, then she went up to our parking lot and hunted until she found a parking space. We didn't feel like unpacking our stuff from Cobalt and there wasn't anything that we needed anyways, so we went up to our dorm room and Peggy took off her pants and bra and said that was good enough, and she got in bed.

Before I got in my bed, I reached over the edge of hers and nuzzled her arm and thanked her for driving us all that way, and she scratched my ears and said that she’d been glad to do it.

October 3 [Morning Fog]

October 3

I woke up kinda late, because we'd gotten home so late last night. And I thought it was earlier than it actually was, 'cause it was still kinda dusky in the room, but when I got out of bed and looked out the window, I saw that everything was fogbound.

I wasn't sure if I was allowed to fly in fog, although it was late enough in the morning that I wouldn't really have much time to fly anyway, not if I wanted to eat breakfast and take a shower. Although I thought I might skip the shower, since I hadn't done anything too physical all yesterday.

But even if I couldn't fly up in the air, because airplanes wouldn't be able to see me in the fog, I could go out and play with it, under the tops of the trees where the airplanes couldn't go, so I trotted down the hall and out the back door and onto the boardwalk and then flew over the edge of it, and started gathering up fog.

It was the thickest under trees and in shadows, where the sun hadn't started to evaporate it, so that's where I went, clumping it up into little clouds, and there wasn't any wind at all, so they just stayed where I left them.

A lot of ponies don't like the fog because it makes sound behave wrong, and masks scents and your vision, too, and that can be dangerous, but most pegasuses don't mind it because it's not very different from a normal cloud, it's just lower.

If you have to clear it, it's a lot of trouble, because when it's really thick you have to work slow so you don't bump into things. But we got coastal fogs a lot, and everypony was used to them, so we mostly left them alone, and they dispersed on their own.

Just like when I'd gotten my cloud stuck in a tree, the little clouds would stick to trees, too, if you got them tangled in enough branches, so I stuck a bunch of them to the trees in front of the chapel and then I got more ambitious and started to group them together into a bigger cloud, and then I decided that it would be a perfect time to try out my cloud-rope again. Since there was a lot of moisture down low, on account of the fog, it ought to last for longer.

So I flew up to our window and Peggy was awake, so I knocked on the glass, and she went and looked out the spyhole in the door before figuring out that the noise was coming from behind her, and then she came to the window and I had her lift up the screen and pass my cloud-rope through. She asked me what I was going to do with it so I told her I was going to tie a cloud to a tree like I'd wanted to do last quarter.

She said she was going to take a shower and then she'd come and look, so I looked around for a good tree and then I thought that maybe I could have the cloud be low enough for people to get on it, although I was a little bit worried it could be dangerous, and I couldn't decide if I should let anyone risk it.

Since I couldn't decide, I tied it to a lamppost instead, high enough up that nobody could grab the rope, and then I went and gathered more cloud pieces out of the fog to add to it. And it wasn't until I was looking around my cloud to see how well-formed it was and if I needed to add any more to the trailing edge ('cause I'd kind of been ignoring that) that I realized that there were a bunch of people watching me work and taking pictures and movies with their portable telephones. So I stuck my tongue out at them and jumped up on top of my cloud and bounced up and down on it a little bit to make a nice flat spot, then I looked down over the edge at everyone.

Someone asked me if people could ride the cloud, too,and I said that I didn't know what would happen, and I explained how clouds from above often have a lot of energy in them and so they can be dangerous for a pony to touch from the ground. I knew it wasn't safe with a normal cloud from up high, but this one had been made by myself from ground fog, so it should have the same potential as the ground, I thought.

Nobody who was watching knew, so I decided that it was safest not to let anybody on my cloud until we'd figured that out. I think the best way to try it would be to put the cloud over a swimming pool, and have people jump onto it, that way they'd never be touching the cloud and the ground at the same time, and if it didn't hold them, they'd just fall into the swimming pool.

We should have tried that at the hotel. I bet we could have got enough water up off the pool to make a cloud with a whole weather team working at it. Or maybe that was a bad idea—maybe that was why the pool at the hotel in Texas had been broken. Maybe the weather team had tried it.

I probably would have kept playing with my cloud except that Peggy reminded me that I had to go to class. And I wanted to leave my cloud and see how long it might last, but I wasn't sure that I should leave it tied to a light pole. Somebody might go up with a pair of scissors and cut my rope off and let the cloud drift away, and then I'd lose my rope, too. So I untied it and then flew up to let the cloud out of its lasso. It stayed put, 'cause there wasn't any wind to blow it away, although I figured that it would probably be gone after class.

When I landed again Peggy said that we didn't really have time to eat, since it was only about fifteen minutes until class started. I guess I should have been paying better attention to the time instead of playing with my cloud.

So I went up to our room and snacked on a little bit of hay which was definitely past its prime, and then gathered my books and went off to thermodynamics class.

Professor Brown started class by telling us more about heat engines, and the first engine he told us about was called the Carnot engine, and Austin raised his hand and asked if he'd invented it. He said that he had, and that it was patented, and every time we mentioned it in homework or put it in our notes we owed him a dollar.

Then he drew out a graph of the engine, and showed us all the equations for all the different points, and explained how the only way you could make the efficiency reach one was if the cold reservoir was at absolute zero, which you couldn't get to.

The next thing he showed us was the equations for an electric icebox, and how we could figure out its efficiency, because that was a real application of the heat engine. And that was really neat, because I didn't know how they worked and I still didn't know exactly how but now I knew the rules that let it make cold.

And then he tricked us by drawing a diagram of two heat engines side-by-side, and one's output ran the other backwards, which he said made it seem like the two engines would cancel each other out and then the work would be zero, but heat was moving the wrong way and that meant that it couldn't be zero. I couldn't figure out why just by looking at his formula, and I thought that professors ought not write up formulas that weren't true because that could confuse ponies.

At least he had enough time before class was over to show us why it wasn't true. But I was still kind of mad that he'd tried to trick us. And I wasn't sure if I actually owed him a dollar for putting it in my notes, either, so I asked him on the way out of class and he said that he'd made that up, it was just coincidence that he had the same name as the cycle, which had been invented well over a hundred years before he was born.

When I got out of the Dow building, I flew up and over Dewing, and when I got high enough to see where my cloud had been, it was gone. I'd kind of expected it to be, but it was still kind of sad that it had disappeared. There were plenty more clouds in the sky, but no more fog on the ground.

I had a little bit of a stomach ache, 'cause the hay I'd eaten for a morning snack had been kind of stale, plus I'd eaten it a lot quicker than I should have, and that kept distracting me as I worked on my thermodynamics homework. I should have known better; I could have sat through thermodynamics hungry and then eaten a normal lunch like a smart pony. Everypony always said to not bolt your food, and I'd even told new weathermares that before. You could give yourself colic, maybe even bad enough that you couldn't fly until you got better.

Stretching out and relaxing my wings helped, plus walking around the room, so I flexed my wings while I was working on a problem, then I'd get out of the chair and walk a couple of laps around the room, and then sit back down to do the next problem.

And when lunchtime came, I wasn't sure if I should eat. I'd be kind of miserable in the afternoon if I didn't, but I might be even more miserable if I did, so I didn't know what to do.

When I sat down, Peggy and Christine both noticed that I didn't have much food on my plate—just some salad and a piece of bread—and asked about it and so I said that I had a stomachache, and Peggy swore that the best thing for that was a Jamocha milkshake from Arby's, but it wasn't something that we could get in the dining hall. Christine thought that ginger was good, and she said that maybe I could drink some Vernors because that had lots of ginger in it. And Sean said that bland food was the best, and I already had the cure on my plate.

So I picked at my food and Christine brought me a cup of Vernors and I sipped at it but the bubbles were too tingly for my nose, and so she tapped it on the table a couple of times to let the bubbles get away, and it was a lot better then, although it was still too sugary.

And after that everyone got to talking, and that distracted me from my grumbling stomach. Since Anna and Reese hadn't gone to the airshow, we had to tell them all about it, and both Christine and Sean had taken some movies with their portable telephones that they could show everyone.

I had to help with the names of the ponies on the weather team, 'cause nobody else could remember all of them.

When Sean showed a movie that he had taken from inside of us all watching the race, Anna said that we looked kind of like big pigeons, the way that we were all lined up at the balcony and sometimes a pony or two would fly off to get a different position, or up to the roof or wherever, and I thought that was kind of insulting but I guess we did do that, and now that she'd pointed it out, it was a lot like watching the birds at the feeder, all changing around their order all the time.

They also found some movies of the Wonderbolts performing, and it was neat to see it from a different angle. And their cameras had lenses on them that let them look really close at ponies, even when they were flying, and so they'd gotten a couple of closeups of everypony on the team.

I felt a little better after lunch, even though I hadn't eaten much, so maybe the Vernors had worked.

Me and Sean went to math class together, and we were still working with the same contour plots. Sean said that the figure-eight plot looked kind of like Madonna's boobs. I hadn't seen them, so I didn't know if that was true. But I guess from the top they did look kind of like breasts, and I kind of wondered if I could figure out an equation for my teats. Maybe I could figure that out and put it into Equestrian, just for fun.

He spent most of the class talking about saddle points and critical points and degenerate critical points, and there were lots of equations to write down, which meant he had to wipe off the markerboard a lot.

So he told us how we wanted to look at second derivatives, and how we could use them to figure out local minimums and maximums, or if it was a saddle point, or if we couldn't decide from them, because sometimes you couldn't tell.

And that led us to what humans called the quadratic equation and the quadratic approximation, which I knew but not the way that humans did it, and I felt like a genius when I finally realized what he was explaining.

After he'd gotten done explaining it all, he put up another equation that we had to figure out to make sure that everyone understood, and it didn't take too long for me to calculate it out. He'd used easy numbers, so I didn't have to write anything down, which was nice.

We went back to Sean's room after class so that we could work on homework, and he finished before me 'cause it was hard to focus when my stomach kept grumbling at me, and 'cause I got up a couple times and walked up and down the hall. I don't know why, but moving around when you've got a stomachache really helps with it. Maybe it moves stuff around inside, or something. You can't go fast, but a nice slow walk really helps.

So when it was time to go over our homework I didn't pull the chair across, but I stayed on my hooves instead, and I kind of walked in place a little bit. Not too much,' cause he said that the clopping of my hooves on the tile was a little distracting. And I had to put my forelegs up on the desk anyways to really look at the problems.

I must have been more distracted than I thought, 'cause I'd gotten three problems wrong, and so I had to go back and fix them.

Once we were both satisfied with our answers, I left and I should have gone back to my room and read more of Matthew, but I thought that a nice long walk would make my belly feel better, so I walked up the hill and then through my old neighborhood and I wasn't really planning to but I wound up at Jeff's house, and it was late enough in the afternoon that all the kids were home, so they got permission to go Pokemon-hunting with me. And I told them all about the airshow and Caleb thought it was really cool that I'd gotten to meet some of the Wonderbolts because he'd seen a whole program about them on television.

We didn't find anything new in the neighborhood, which was too bad. Caleb said that somebody had put out a lure near one of Western's dorms, but they weren't allowed to go there, although when his sisters weren't paying attention he said that he had once anyways but I shouldn't tell anyone. So I promised that I wouldn't.

After we'd wandered around for a while, Lindy got a telephone telegram from Jeff saying that it was time for them to go back home for dinner and homework, so I went with them back to their house and I was feeling a lot better so I gave Trinity a ponyback ride most of the way there. It was a little awkward since I was still wearing my saddlebags, but it worked out okay.

And once I'd said my goodbyes and promised to come by again soon, I went back to campus and I could have taken off my saddlebags in our room, especially since I walked right by Trowbridge, but my coat was kind of matted and sweaty under them, so I decided to leave them on instead, and worry about it after dinner.

Even though my stomach felt a lot better, I ate a pretty light dinner, too, since I didn't want it to start hurting again. Hopefully in the morning, I'd be back to normal.

When me and Peggy were walking back to our room, she asked me why I'd still been wearing my saddlebags, and so I told her it was because I'd gone straight from Sean's room to go looking for Pokemons and hadn't had time to take them off after. And then when we got up into our room and the door was closed and I'd taken my saddlebags off, she crouched down in front of me and asked me if I was trying to move in on Sean.

That kind of took me by surprise. He was kind of cute, I guess, and he was funny and I liked him as a friend, but I'd never considered him like that. Until recently, I hadn't really known him all that well anyway, and we hadn't really spent much time together, although we'd spent a lot more time together since we were both taking the same math class and doing homework with each other.

And I didn't think that he was giving me any signs that he was interested in me like that, although it was kind of hard to tell with humans.

So I explained to Peggy that it wasn't like that at all, and she said that was what she thought but she just wanted to hear it from me. And she said that I couldn't tell anyone that we'd had this conversation because sometimes for humans just rumors of being unfaithful or thinking unfaithful thoughts could damage the relationship, and she also said that she thought some girls might get upset that I was spending time alone with their men especially because I was naked all the time and showing off my junk.

I promised her that I wouldn't tell anybody and that I wasn't trying to have sex with Sean, because I'd found out it was hard enough with just Aric and Meghan.

And then I thanked her again for driving us all the way to the airshow and back and letting me have dinner with the Wonderbolts, and she got kind of embarrassed and said that it had been a lot of fun although a little bit chaotic, and she said that Gusty was really cute in the morning and it was really strange seeing her in underwear.

I said that I'd tried on a pair of her underwear and I didn't like it, 'cause it made me too hot, and Peggy found that really funny.

Then I packed up my flying gear, and went to the closet and sniffed my haybox and I must have been really starving and stupid to not have noticed the smell in the morning, because it wasn't just stale, but it was just starting to turn bad, so I took the box outside and shook out what was left on the grass—it wouldn't mind the hay at all—and I asked her if it would be okay to get a new bale that would last me for the rest of the year.

She said that I could but wanted to know how I was going to get it to the dorm, and I said that the woman who grew it had a big truck that could carry lots of haybales and last time she'd just brought them to my apartment. Or I could go to the Farmer's Market with Aric, and he could bring one back in Winston and then help carry it up for me. And I could ask him tonight.

I put my saddlebags back on, and nuzzled her goodbye, 'cause I was going to Durak and then Aric's house and so I wouldn't be back until the morning.

I walked most of the way there, but I did fly a couple of blocks just to stretch out my wings. Not too high; right about at human head-level. And when I got close to Westnedge, I saw a whole group of my friends all walking together, so flew just over them and then landed in front of them and we all walked the rest of the way there together.

Instead of getting anything to drink, I got a blueberry scone instead, and I kind of picked at it a little bit while we were playing. It was kind of dry, but tasted pretty good.

Me and Aric got to tell everyone about our weekend, too, which was a lot of fun. It might have been a little bit boring for Reese and Anna, 'cause they'd heard about it at lunch and dinner, but for everyone else it was new.

I got too distracted talking about the airshow and wound up losing a game when I forgot that the trump kings were still out there, and Alex had a pretty big smile on his face when he dropped one on me and then when I played my last trump card he put the second one down and then I had to pick everything back up again, and he played a three of clubs and went out, because he had been waiting for me to make that mistake. But I hadn't had a choice; all I'd had left were the kings and a couple of trump cards.

We left kinda late, and when we were driving home I asked Aric if he wanted to come to the Farmer's Market with me on Thursday and pick up a haybale, or if he'd rather have me have the lady who grew the hay just deliver it, and he said that he could go with me because what was the fun of having a pickup truck if you could never carry things in it.

And he let me steer and shift when we got to Dartmouth, and I did better this time. I still thought he needed a grippier knob on the end of the stick.

Both of us were pretty tired, even though he'd gotten home earlier than me he said that he hadn't slept all that much at the hotel because he never slept really well at hotels. But we weren't too tired to have some fun before we went to sleep, and so I helped him get undressed and then pushed him into bed and pushed him down and nipped his shoulder when he tried to get up.

October 4 [Transits]

October 4

I woke up early, and just listened to the birds chirping and Aric snoring for a little bit, and then I put my head down on his chest and that woke him up a little bit. He reached up and put his hand around my fetlock and then he sort of drifted off to sleep again, and so did I for a little bit, until I felt him moving around under me and so that woke me up and it was kind of unfair that it didn't wake him up, so I tickled him with my wing and when I felt him reaching for it, I stopped, and then when he'd relaxed a little bit I did it again, and finally he woke up and blinked at me and said that he'd had the weirdest dream that he was being attacked by birds. And I said that it was probably because he was hearing them all chirping outside, and he thought that was probably right. And then I kissed him and tickled his stomach with my wing again, and he looked at me and said that it was probably my fault.

He reached his hand down along my flank, and I swatted him with my tail but that didn't stop him, and pretty soon his hands were all over me, and I reminded him to turn off his alarm before it was too late, and while he was doing that, I rolled on my back to expose my belly to him, and he teased me for a little while before he got on top of me.

We snuggled for a little bit after, and then I asked if he'd be mad if I got a little flying in this morning before class, and he said that he didn't mind, as long as I wasn't mad thinking about how he might sleep for another couple of hours before actually getting up. So I pulled back the covers and looked at him and said that I'd think about it when I was in my physics lab.

I got my flight gear on and then flew out of Aric's bedroom window and to his bird feeder, and I kept an eye on his window but he waited until I'd put my head down to get a mouthful of sunflower seeds before he threw a balled-up sock at me, and he missed me but he caught the top of the bird feeder and rocked it back and forth.

So once I'd had my snack, I flew down and picked up his sock for him and flew it back up to his window, so he wouldn't have to go down and get it, and he leaned out the window a little bit so I kissed him before flying off.

There wasn't enough time before my thermodynamics lab to go to the Farmer's Market, but I was sure I had the hay-woman's telephone number somewhere, and I could call her so that she would know to have a haybale ready at the market for me on Thursday.

I kept low over the trees so that I wouldn't have to bother the airplane directors, and I circled over my old bird feeder once, just to see how many birds were still around it, and I scared off the sparrows again. But when I'd flown by and looked back, they were all flying back. Sparrows don't stay scared for too long.

I flew low over downtown, then I turned to follow the river towards the dam, although I wasn't going to get in enough flight time today to make it there and back again, 'cause I hadn't wanted to make Aric mad by leaving too early.

I went as far as Sprinkle Road, then I turned around and flew back towards home.

Peggy was just waking up when I got back to our room, and I asked her if she wanted to take the first shower, but she said I could because she needed time to wake all the way up.

She was in the bathroom waiting for the shower when I came out and I told her she could have just come in 'cause I wouldn’t have minded, and she laughed and then said that maybe we should have another shower party, which I thought would be a lot of fun. I wasn't sure if it would be okay, though, because Sean didn't live in the same place anymore, and so it might not be polite to just go use somebody else's shower when you weren't even visiting them. Peggy said that probably nobody would care.

I was trying to button my lab coat when Peggy came back from the shower, and she helped me. She said that maybe if humans still had fur and as much trouble with fasteners as I did, they'd still be going around naked.

I was kind of curious about that, because it was pretty useful to have a coat, and Peggy didn't know. She said that humans' ancestors had had coats like monkeys, but somewhere along the line they lost most of them, and she thought maybe it was because they'd lived somewhere warm and hadn't needed them.

While Peggy finished getting dressed, I got my saddlebags on and then Peggy put my mane back, and we went to breakfast together. The omelet cook was there today, and I got one, and also a couple of pieces of toast 'cause I was pretty hungry from all the food I hadn't eaten yesterday.

When I sat down, Christine asked me if I was playing doctor today, and I shook my head and said it was for my lab and I had to have somebody help me put it on because I couldn't work the buttons with my hooves, and there were a couple I couldn't get with my mouth, either. And then Anna said it must be kind of strange to have to have someone help you dress all the time, and Reese said that a lot of woman's fashion was like that back in the old days, and that's why women's buttons were on the opposite side as men's.

Sean wasn't there because he was sleeping in, so it wasn't as crowded for Anna and Reese, but it was kind of lonely without him. Christine said that he'd stayed up late because the new Star Trek movie had come out on Netflix at midnight, and he'd wanted to watch it even though he'd already seen it in the theater. She said that it was probably all he was going to talk about the rest of the day, and that he'd probably want me to watch it.

I couldn't tonight because I was going to Meghan's room. But I did want to see it—I thought another movie night at Christine's would be fun. We hadn't watched a movie together in a long time.

It's not fair that there's still so much that I want to do but never enough time.

We had special pistons to experiment with the Carnot cycle on our own, so that we could see it working on our own. And we got to do it a couple of times, so that we could make sure that we got good data points, because we were going to do a lot of calculating from them. And it was kind of complicated to set up and Lisa had to do a lot of it, just because my hooves weren't too good with really small plugs and wires. But I did get to put the heatpack in the microwave, and I was the only one in class who could take it out without gloves, because of my hooves, and that was a silly thing to be proud of, but it was something that nobody else could do.

Once everyone was done with their experiments, Professor Brown showed us a working heat engine that had two metal legs, and one of them went into hot water and the other into cold, and after a few minutes, it started spinning a fan, which was really neat to see.

Me and Lisa sat in the lounge and went over my notes on the experiment. It was kind of frustrating to have so much of the lab equipment not be hoof-friendly; maybe that was why unicorns were better at this kind of stuff. I don't think I'd want to take a whole bunch of physics classes and labs like Cayenne.

I suppose I was still learning by watching and taking notes, but I'd rather be doing.

On my way back to the dorm, I stopped by the library and I got a couple of funny looks because I still had my lab coat on and my goggles up on my forehead, but I didn't care.

The first thing I found was the World War I book that I had started reading, because maybe if I had it I'd be more likely to actually read it like I was gonna. And then I used the computer to try and find a book of poetry for lunch—something new that I hadn't read before.

Even with a pen in my mouth, I wasn't a very good typer. The computer had too many little buttons, and they weren't arranged in a sensible order.

I found a book of poems by Edward George Dyson that sounded interesting, and I kind of wanted to look through it before lunch but it was better for it to be a surprise. I'd always liked how Conrad had never let us know what we were going to read next.

When I was back in my room, I took off my saddlebags and lab coat and then scratched at the spot on my belly where the girth strap made the button dig in, then I started looking through the things from the apartment until I found the hay-woman's calling card, and when I talked to her she said that she would have a bale of last-cut mixed clover and alfalfa for me, which was about all that she had left.

I hoped that Peggy wouldn't be mad that it wouldn't all fit in the box, not until I'd eaten some of it.

Then I packed up my things for astronomy class and the poetry book for lunch and then I put my saddlebags back on but left them a little bit loose, and reminded myself to be careful because I didn't want them to slide off me.

Trevor had beaten me to the table, so after I'd picked my food I got out my poetry book and he started looking through it to see what looked interesting. And then Cedric and Leon arrived, and Leon let out a big groan when he saw the book but he didn't mean it.

Cedric thanked me again for telling him about the airshow and said that he'd had a real good time there. Leon said that they'd had to stay at a bad hotel, though, and I felt bad until Cedric said that Leon's idea of a crappy hotel was one that wasn't internationally known, and that had rooms which were smaller than a tennis court. Leon said that he needed space to stretch out.

He was kind of impressed with the booth we'd gotten to watch from, though, 'cause he said that private box seats were really expensive, and wondered who'd paid for it. I said that I didn't know—Mister Salvatore had made the arrangements, but I figured that the tornado team had already gotten permission to use it, and we just joined them later.

Then he said that he'd invited Aquamarine to come to the homecoming football game, which was in a couple of Fridays, and than said the day after there was a dance in Old Wells and it would be fun if I came, too. He said it was for everyone, not just football players.

Trevor gave the book to Leon, and he pointed to a poem, and Leon kind of scowled, but then he got a smile, and he started to read it. It was called A Friendly Game of Football, and even though it was about a different kind of football, he thought it was pretty funny, especially at the end.

There was just enough time for one more poem, and Trevor said that Leon could pick it, since he'd read that one, so he turned through the book until he found one he liked and he gave it to Cedric. And the poem was called Cleaning Up, and it was about sluicing for gold, but Leon said that he'd picked it just for the first line.

It would have been fun to stay and read some more poems, but I had to go to astronomy, so I took my book back and went to the Dow building and sat down next to Anna.

Professor Miller taught us that there was another way to find planets by transits, which is where a planet goes in front of its sun, and how it could be seen because when the planet crossed in front of its star it blocked a little bit of light. And she told us about the first one they'd proven that way, which they knew was there because of the Doppler method, but this was another kind of way of finding them or proving that they were there and the other measurements were correct.

But she said that didn't work on everything because you had to be exactly edge-on to the orbit of the planet you were looking for, and she said that there was a new satellite that was going to be launched soon which was going to be looking for that.

And she said that the exciting thing about that was that the radial velocity was really hard to measure, and took very special equipment, but that anybody with a decent telescope could find them, although it worked most efficiently when you could look at a lot of stars at once, and so they used the Hubble Space Telescope for that, and they predicted thirty but didn't find any, and so she explained how it turned out in star clusters (which was what they looked at) didn't usually have planets in regular orbits, because all the stars were so close together that they wrecked the orbits.

Everyone learned from their mistake, though, so next time they picked better stars and they found sixteen. And she showed us a picture of where it had looked, and there were so many stars! It was more stars than empty space, and I was hoping that maybe we'd get to look through a telescope and find that, because I'd never seen that many stars in one place before.

I couldn't help myself and when we got out of class, I looked up for stars but of course there were none to be seen since it was the middle of the day.

It was a nice afternoon and I didn't feel like being cooped up in my dorm room, so I unstrapped my saddlebags and sat on the grass under a tree, and did my astronomy homework there. This time there was hardly any wind at all, so I didn't have to worry about my homework blowing away.

I'd gotten to the third problem when I saw Anna walking across the quad and she saw me, too, so she came over and sat down next to me, with her back against the tree. And she had a big pad of paper for drawing, and she got out a pen and started making sketches, and when she'd finished each one she'd show them to me. They were all imaginary creatures called elves, which were slender and had pointy ears like Vulcans.

I left to go up to my room and get my Bible, then I came back and read Matthew, and after a while Reese showed up, too, and he sat down beside us and read his book.

I learned how Jesus went around and taught people wisdom, and how He healed the sick and cast out demons, which was really nice of Him. And He also even raised the dead, which I didn't think was a very smart thing to do. I'd heard stories about what happens to unicorns who try that.

And He got eight more disciples, and He taught them how to heal people, too, and how to teach people wisdom.

But the scribes and Pharisees didn't like that, and neither did Herod, who was a bad man, and they kept asking Jesus questions and hoping that He would say the wrong thing. And Matthew said that Jesus fed an entire crowd of people who had come to listen to Him speak, with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish and when they had all eaten there was more left over than when they'd started.

And more and more people followed Jesus, because of all the good things He was doing for them.

I could probably have finished Matthew, but Anna and Reese were packing their things away so that they could go to dinner, and I kinda didn't want to put my saddlebags back on, but I thought it would be a little bit rude to leave them to go to my room, so I wore them to dinner.

Just like Christine had predicted, Sean kept talking about how great the Star Trek movie had been, although not to the point that it was annoying. And he said that I needed to watch it, and so I said that I would but I didn't know when. He told me he could get it on Netflix whenever he wanted.

Peggy grumbled about her art class a little bit and said it was hard to believe that it was only Tuesday; it felt later than that. And everyone except for me agreed that the cooks couldn't make a proper meatloaf, but then they started arguing over whether a proper meatloaf had oats in it or if you should use catsup, and it sounded like one of those things that everybody had a different way to make, and maybe they were all right.

When I got back to my room, I was really glad to finally shed my saddlebags. They weren't fun to wear all day, although I had taken them off a couple of times. Some ponies had bags that were sort of like my camelback, and I'd tried one once but it got in the way of my wings, so it wasn't very practical.

So I brushed out my coat where the girth strap had been, and then I went down the hall to Meghan's room.

Amy was at her desk studying, and Meghan said that since it was a nice day we'd ought to go walking or something, and I thought that was a good plan. I hadn't gotten all that much exercise yesterday or today anyway. So she said goodbye to Amy and then we went out and walked through downtown, and all the way to Southerland Park, which was along the river across from the railroad yard, and then we took the people-bridge across the river, which was right next to a train bridge that didn't connect to any tracks, and she saw all the cement foundations with trees growing up through them and said that this had once been a paper mill, but it got torn down a long time ago. And she said that the soil under it was probably still kind of toxic and I should never eat any plants that grew in a place like this, because chemicals might have leached up into them.

We stayed on the trail until it got to the 96 Road and then turned around, and decided that we wanted to explore the foundations. We probably weren't supposed to, because there was a fence, but there was also a big hole in the fence. There really wasn't anything to see besides broken concrete and trees, but it was still fun, because there was always the chance that we would find something interesting.

And then when we were walking back I told her about the railroad bridge that went nowhere, and so she wanted to go over that, too. It was kind of scary for her because there were a couple of places where the crossties were missing, and she couldn’t just fly over them like I could. We both had to watch our footing, though, because we could slip between them and get hurt or get trapped.

There was just a big fence on the other side, and I flew up to look over it and it was another big yard full of broken cars.

Then we went back to the trail and crossed over the proper bridge, and went back through town again, and she wanted to stop at McDonald's which was right by the railroad tracks so that she could get something to drink, because she hadn't thought to bring her backpack with her. I was kind of thirsty, too, so we sat down and I had a milkshake, which was okay but it tasted a little bit wrong, sort of like the soft ice cream that the college has.

It was starting to get dark when we finally got back to campus, and Meghan said it was too bad that there weren't any rooms where we could have some alone time together.

I said that I could ask Peggy if we could use our room again, but Meghan thought that was kind of mean to kick her out like that. She thought it was nice if she offered, but that it wasn't polite to ask.

So we sat down under a tree, and just relaxed for a little while, until she said that she was getting a bit chilly, because all she had was a t-shirt.

So the two of us went back to her dorm, and since Amy was still studying we had to be quiet so that we wouldn't bother her.

Meghan said that we could watch a short movie on her computer before we went to bed, and she said that she had some earbuds and if I wore one and she wore the other, that wouldn't bother Amy. So she unfolded her computer, and while it was starting the two of us lay down side-by-side on our bellies, so that the earbuds could reach both of us.

We looked through all the choices that Netflix had to try and find something fun to watch. I saw the Star Trek movie listed as a new movie and I bet Sean would be mad if I watched it with Meghan.

Well, there were a whole lot of choices and it was really hard to decide on one, but we finally decided on Shrek. I thought Donkey was pretty silly most of the time, but every now and then he said something really smart, plus he was really loyal to Shrek. And Farquaad was a jerk, and deserved to be eaten by a dragon.

Meghan said that her favorite scene was when Princess Fiona fought all of Robin Hood's merry men, and that was pretty funny. Although if she was that good at fighting all along, I don't know why she didn't fight the dragon in the first place.

Meghan told me that fairy tales didn't work like that, and that she was cursed to be unable to leave the dragon until a prince rescued her, and I thought that was a silly curse, but I guess that she didn't have a choice.

My ear felt a little bit weird from having the earbud in it, so I kind of twitched it for a little while and Meghan thought that was really funny.

Amy was still studying—she was completely focused in the book she was reading and every now and then she'd mark something with a bright yellow marker. Meghan got out of bed to put her computer away and then asked Amy if it was okay to turn off the lights in the room, and she said it was.

Meghan went to the bathroom to put on her sleeping clothes, and then she got in bed next to the wall, and after she had turned on the alarm on her telephone I got in bed with her, and she curled up with her arm over my back and her head pressed against my cheek.

Author's Note

A Friendly Game of Football

Cleaning Up

October 5 [Topless Karaoke Bar]

October 5

Me and Meghan both were up before her alarm went off—I woke up first then I woke her up when I put my head on her breast. And she looked over at Amy, who was still asleep, and then she reached down and pulled up her shirt, and so I lifted my head and she took it all the way off for me.

I stayed snuggled up on her breast with her petting my mane until her alarm went off, and then I had to move so she could reach over me and turn it off. Then she saw that Amy was moving around, so she ducked back behind me and pulled the covers over her until I told her that Amy had rolled over and was facing the other way and looked like she was asleep again. Then she pushed the covers back down a little bit so that I could get my pillow back.

We stayed in bed until her alarm went off a second time, and since she'd kept her portable telephone after she'd stopped the first alarm, she got it turned off before it could disturb Amy too much.

She asked if I wanted to take a shower with her and I did want to but I also wanted to fly, and I said that I didn't like flying with wet wings if I could help it. So she leaned down and kissed me, then I got out of bed and she looked to make sure that Amy was still asleep before getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.

She said that I could pick out clothes for her before I left, so I looked through her dresser until I found a nice shirt that said Old Navy on it and a pair of pants, then I went through another drawer and found a pink panty and a lacy red bra that went well together, and I took them into the bathroom for her.

Then I went back to my room to get my flight gear and when I was dressed, I went out to the boardwalk and got permission to fly.

I flew over the cemetery and then the neighborhoods that were past it, and all the way to the dirt mines before I angled east to get to the Nature Center. And I came in more to the north than I usually did, and I spooked the deer when I came over the tops of the trees. I hadn't meant to, but they looked up and saw me and must have decided that I was some kind of predator, and they hopped off into the woods.

I guess some good came of it, though, because I didn't have to worry about scaring them away any more, so I landed at a trot, and broke into a canter on the downslope of the path, and kept it up all the way around the trail and back up to where I'd started from, and then the next time I went down the hill I broke into a full gallop, and I kept it up until I got to the curve where the trail started to rise, 'cause I had to slow down.

So I trotted up and down and around, to cool myself off a little bit, and then when I got to the junction with the trail through the trees, I flew through the woods. There was a funny little white animal which I thought maybe was a cat when I first saw it, but then I got closer and saw it was actually an opossum, which is a big rat, I think. Their tails look like rat tails.

When I got back out of the woods, I climbed up and over the prairie. I was a little bit overheated 'cause the flight vest held sweat and body heat in, but once I got in the open air it felt a lot better, especially when I glided.

It kinda felt like it was going to rain, so I thought I'd better check the weather when I got back to the dorm.

I landed back on the boardwalk and got undressed in our room, then went to the shower, and I started off with just cold water to rinse me off and finish cooling me down.

Kat was waiting for her turn when I got out, and in our room Peggy was just getting up. She said that she'd figured out that she could get the most sleep if she didn't actually get out of bed until I got back to the room after my morning shower.

I told her that I thought she was being kinda lazy, and she'd feel better if she started the day with exercise instead of more sleep, and offered to wake her up to go trotting on Friday.

Then I turned on my computer and looked at the weather, and I was still doing calculations when Peggy came back from the shower. She still thought it was funny that I didn't just use a forecast to find out what the weather was going to be, and I could have but it was good practice, especially since humans had so much data to work with.

It didn't look like it was gonna rain until the afternoon, and it looked like there might be a thunderstorm, too, depending on how much energy the air picked up during the day.

Me and Peggy went to breakfast together, and I was really happy that the waffle maker was still working, and I got a waffle and strawberry gravy.

Anna had a bowl of cereal and an orange, and she was peeling a sun-shape into it, and that was really clever of her. I like oranges, but the skin is bitter if you eat it, and it's really hard to get off. You have to grip it in your hooves and tear pieces of it off with your teeth.

When she was done, she set it in the center of the table and said that it was the sun god, then she started eating her cereal. It seemed kind of wasteful to just leave it there and not eat it, but it did kinda brighten up the table, and when she was done eating, she made a little sign to put in front of it.

I licked off my plate when I was done with my waffle, 'cause the strawberry gravy had been really good, and when I was done Christine picked up her Fruit Loops bowl and licked that out.

Professor Brown taught us about entropy, and showed us how in an isolated process, you could go one way irreversibly, and that didn't make any work, but you needed to use work and have a non-isolated process to get it back, and explained the equations that might show which way a system would go on its own if you didn't do anything to it.

And he showed us how there was even an equation for what the whole universe did, and that the universe was technically an isolated system, and he showed how over time its entropy could never get smaller but it could get bigger.

Then he showed us entropy equations for a bunch of different processes, like heating and cooling and even mixing, and then at the end of class he gave us our homework and warned us that by completing it we would increase the entropy of the universe. So Austin raised his hand and said that if we didn't do the homework maybe the universe would last a little bit longer, and Professor Brown said that if he wanted to calculate the difference in entropy between doing homework and not doing it, he was welcome to do that instead.

When we were walking out of class, I told Lisa that I'd been a bad pony and hadn't done the lab work yet, even though I should have. I'd just gotten distracted with other things. And she said it was okay, because it wasn't due until our next lab, but I still felt bad about it. So instead of doing my new homework right away, I did the lab work, and I confused myself since I knew that the Carnot cycle was supposed to be the most efficient one but my numbers didn't show it being all that efficient. Then I looked through the notes some and did a little bit more calculating by putting in some new numbers, and figured out that the more the heat difference, the more efficient it was, and that was why my answers had seemed so wrong.

Then I checked the weather again, 'cause now I could see what had changed in the morning, and it looked like there probably would be thunderstorms, so I sent a telephone telegram to Mel, to let him know that I would be free after math class and could go stormwatching with him. I thought I might be able to get a ride back from Aric, too, but it depended on when the storms came through.

I had a chance to start on my thermodynamics homework, but I wasn't done in time for lunch, so I left it out on my desk, filled my saddlebags with my math supplies, and went to lunch.

The sun god was still on the table when I got to lunch, but the little sign was gone. And just after I sat down, Meghan came over and sat next to me, and then when everybody else had arrived, that made it a little more crowded. Sean said that we needed a bigger table.

Christine said that the better solution was to better use the resources that we had, and she got out of her chair and sat on his lap, and then since he couldn't reach his lunch, she started eating it instead, and when he started to complain she wiggled her hips a little bit.

Peggy said that as much fun as it would be to see two of her friends having sex, she didn't want to see it while she was eating, and so Anna and Reese got up and pulled over another table, and Anna said that now this was the sun god's territory, too, and she moved her orange to the middle. Christine stayed on Sean's lap anyways, until she'd eaten most of his food, then she said that she was full, and sat back in her seat. She pushed her plate over to him, and told him that he could finish it, too, if he wanted to.

We didn't put the table back when we were done eating, and Sean said that he hoped that the dining hall people would leave it alone. And then me and Sean walked to class together, and when I got out my homework, he saw that I hadn't done a problem in Equestrian. And I said that I was still trying to figure out a good one, but I didn't tell him what. He'd been paying more attention to what I'd been doing, so he might be able to figure it out on his own.

Professor Pampena warned us that there was going to be a mid-term next week, and he said that he would write down on the markerboard what was going to be on the test, and so he wrote EVERYTHING in big black letters and underlined it.

Then he started to teach us about differentials to relate changes in y and x, and he told us that it was important to know that differentials weren't numbers or variables or vectors which was kind of confusing because I thought that they had to be something, since everything was something.

He also showed us a formula that was called the chain rule, and then he showed the proof for how it worked, which he said wasn't the best proof, and then he said that he was going to show us a better one. But at least he hadn't lied about the first proof, it just wasn't as good as the second.

Then he started to show how to use it, and how to use it on systems with lots of variables, and it was a little bit confusing at first, but the more he explained it the more sense it made.

Sean said that it was giving him a headache and he wished that he had decided to major in basket-weaving instead. So I started to tell him how complicated it was, 'cause there were a bunch of ponies in town who made baskets and lobster traps and Sean said that there was a joke about people getting to college and getting a major in basket-weaving because everyone thought it was easy.

We went to his room after class to do homework together again. And I'd hardly gotten started when my portable telephone chirped and it was a telephone telegram from Mel, saying that he could pick me up from my dorm at four. He said that the thunderstorms were very likely, but at least it looked like it was going to be a small system, so I wouldn’t be out there all night this time.

So I thought I'd better tell Aric, so I sent him a telephone telegram, too, and then I got back to work, but I had to stop one more time, 'cause I got a telegram back from Aric, and he said that he'd meet me out at the Speedway station.

Me and Sean went over our math homework after we were done solving the problems, and I wrote a new one in Equestrian, and then I went back to my room and got all my flight gear ready first, then I went and finished up my thermodynamics homework.

I was putting on my gear when Peggy came back from her class, and she said that she'd noticed that the clouds were looking darker and she'd wondered if I was going to have to go stormwatching tonight.

So I told her that Mel was picking me up at four, and then I was going to get a ride home from Aric, and I'd see her at lunch tomorrow or maybe sooner because we were going to pick up a new haybale and bring it back here. And then I thought I should go out and wait for Mel, 'cause it was getting pretty close to time.

I was in the hallway when I remembered that I might want towels, so I took mine and put them over my back.

We drove out to our stormwatching spot, and we didn't have a lot of time to get ready, because the storm front was moving faster than Mel had thought it would. So I got permission to fly, and then when I was up in the air I tested out my radio, and then I flew off west, and I didn't make it much more than a mile before the storm hit me.

The clouds had kept getting darker and thicker and pricklier, and I could see the thunderclouds moving towards me, but even so it made my coat stand on end when they came by, and I got soaked pretty quick then tumbled around by the cloud some before I got my bearings back and flew out of it, and I think the cloud was really mad at me because it almost got my tail with a lightning bolt. It was close enough that I could smell the electricity, and I got my eyes closed just in time, but it still hurt a little bit anyways because lightning was really bright when you were right next to it. That was another reason why it was better to be on top of the clouds rather than underneath them.

Well, I saw lots of ground strikes, so I told Mel to watch out, because it was a mean storm, and then I just did my best to keep track of all of it. As far as I could see to the north and south, it was producing lightning, but it kind of tapered off to the west, because it was the kind of storm that went at a gallop but then tired itself out pretty fast.

So I wasn't in the air for much more than an hour by the time we'd both decided that it had passed by and there wasn't going to be anything else bad on its tail, and I could come back down.

I sparked off against a lamppost and then landed in the parking lot and went to Mel's truck to get my towels. And I just tossed them over my back again, 'cause it was still raining, and when I got to Winston and opened the door, I saw that he already had towels across the seat, 'cause he'd thought of it, too.

So I threw mine in, and then I got undressed in the parking lot because it was a lot harder to do in Winston.

I was pretty hungry since I hadn't had any dinner, and Aric said that we could go to a restaurant for dinner, but I thought I was too wet for that, so we went to a Jimmy John's and he went in to get us sandwiches, and then we brought them home for us.

While we were eating, he asked me what I wanted to do for the evening, and I said that it would be fun to go to the topless karaoke bar. He said that he didn't like the karaoke part but that the topless part would probably offset it, and he said that it would be more fun if more people went, so he got up and went to the top of the basement stairs and asked Angela and David if they wanted to go to a topless karaoke bar, and they said that they would.

He thought it might be too crowded for all four of us in Winston, although I wouldn't have minded being all scrunched up on the seat. But Angela had her Alero, so we took that instead.

Aric had to ride in the back, which didn't seem too comfortable for him, because his legs hardly fit behind Angela's seat.

She didn't know where it was, so we gave her directions and they weren't very good directions, because we missed it at first, and had to turn around and go back.

Before we could go in, we had to pay a man at the door, and at first he wasn't sure if he should let me in or not. I told him that I could go in restaurants and then he asked if I was even old enough, and he looked at my passport and had some trouble figuring it out and finally he said it was okay, as long as I paid.

It was smaller inside than it had looked on the outside, and it was kind of dim, too, like the dark room at the dining hall. There were big televisions on the wall, and they were mostly showing pictures of sports but there was also one that was showing a news show called CNN. You had to read what it said, because there wasn't any sound from it, and whoever had written the words couldn't spell very well, because I saw a lot of mistakes. Or maybe the newspeople were saying it wrong.

All the waitresses were shirtless, and so they couldn't wear the little tags that had their names on them. The one who came over to our table said that her name was Daisy, and she was pretty cute.

After we'd all ordered beer, David asked where the karaoke was and our waitress said that that was only on the weekends. And Aric looked up towards the ceiling and said that there was a god, which I thought was a really funny thing to say.

When the waitress came back with our drinks, Angela asked if it was okay if customers took off their shirts, too, and she said that if she wanted to, she could, so Angela took off her shirt and bra and gave them to David to hold for her, and he put her shirt on over his but not her bra.

We stayed there for a couple of beers, and Daisy wanted to get a picture of her with me and Angela, so she had one of the other waitresses come over and take the picture. Daisy asked both of us if it would be okay to put it up on the wall and I didn't mind, and Angela thought about it for a little bit and then asked if it was all right if she had David take a picture of me and her and Daisy all together and Daisy said that we could. So we posed again, and David took the picture, and Angela decided that it would be okay for Daisy to put the picture that the other waitress had taken up on the wall.

I was kind of disappointed that there was no karaoke, because I'd been looking forward to that. Aric said that there were other karaoke places in town if I really really wanted to sing, or we could come back here on the weekend, which I thought was a better idea.

Before we left, Angela had to put her shirt back on, and then we drove back home and stopped at Tiffany's for some more beer, and then we sat in the living room and drank a little bit more and talked about school and weather and David said that we could watch some of the YouTube movies of me on the big television in their living room because he knew how to make it connect to his computer.

And then we also watched the one from the storm from today, because he could hook his computer to my GoPro, and he speeded up some of the boring parts, but watched the rest in normal time.

Angela said that I was a tough little pony to fly in storms like that, which made me really proud.

When we were done watching movies, me and Aric went upstairs to his room, and he said that it had been fun going to the bar, and he hadn't expected Angela to go shirtless. I said that I'd seen her sunbathing without her swimming bra and he said that he'd never seen that, and I think he was kind of disappointed that he hadn't.

He got undressed, and then he laid down beside me and started running his fingers through my coat, which felt really nice. And I reminded him that tomorrow morning we had to go pick up my haybale.

Then I nuzzled his chest and ran my hoof up his leg, and he slid his hand down my back and around my dock, and pretty soon we were fighting for position on the bed, and he finally pinned me down on my belly. He was a little bit rougher than usual, but I'd been nipping him, so maybe that was why.

October 7 [Olivet]

October 7

As soon as I got up, I ate a little bit of hay for energy and then put on my flight gear. It was a beautiful clear day outside, and I was ready to go flying.

I went down to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors to get permission, then I took off and did a wing roll right after I cleared the railing, which actually wasn't that smart, 'cause I lost almost all of my altitude, since I hardly had any airspeed. Probably if anybody saw they wouldn't have known what a proper wing roll looked like anyway so they wouldn't know I'd almost crashed.

I did like starting flying at the top of the hill, because it made for really easy, lazy takeoffs. Any pegasus would rather jump from a cloud than fly from the ground.

When I got down to Hoben, I banked and turned along the front of the dorm, then followed the road out to Academy Street, and picked up altitude as I continued down the hill.

And once I got to Main Street, I was flying about six stories up, which kept me clear of the wires. There were a few people out on the sidewalks, and lots of cars on their way to work. I considered racing them,but I didn't want to use up all my energy right away, so I let them pass under me unchallenged.

I flew all the way down to the end of Kalamazoo, and then followed the road as it curved under the railroad bridge, then I followed the tracks east. I thought that I'd have enough time to get to Galesburg and back again, but I was gonna check my watch to be sure—I didn't want to have to miss breakfast or a shower because I'd flown too far.

I had to pay attention when I got to where the big electricity wires from the dam crossed over the tracks, because they were above me, and I thought about flying up and over them but decided that I'd rather keep my altitude on the way out, then on the way back I could do a long, slow climb so that would put me almost straight back at the bell tower.

I probably should have gone west first, 'cause the wind was on my tail. It was always smartest to fly into the wind first, 'cause otherwise you'd have to fight it on the way back when you were tired.

Off in the distance, I heard a train horn, and I turned my ear back towards it. The second time it sounded, I knew that it was behind me, so after I made sure that there weren't any wires in front of me, I turned my head back to look but I didn't see it. And I was sure that I was high enough to be above it, since I'd flown above a bunch of wires that all went above the track, and they' wouldn't be there if trains could hit them.

The train horn was getting louder and more frequent, and I was passing a park on my right side when it went under me, and a moment later I got a hot smokey updraft from its exhaust stacks. I should have been expecting it, but I wasn't, and I didn't realize until I breathed in. And then the smell lingered in the air and in my nostrils, too, even though I tried a couple of times to blow them clear.

It was always neat seeing down into the open cars. There were a bunch with the stacked boxes on them, but some of them were empty, and they just had little support beams on the bottom, so you could see the track underneath them. And there were also some empty gondolas, and I wondered what it would be like to land inside one and ride the train. You'd never be sure where you were going or when you'd get there, but it might be fun to try after school some day, 'cause I could always have Aric come and get me when the train got where it was going.

Once the last car finally passed, I slowed back down, 'cause I'd unintentionally sped up as it went under. And then I looked at my watch, and thought that it would be smarter to turn around and go back now, rather than go all the way to Galesburg. I'd rather spend a little bit more time at breakfast than get to class late.

So I looped around over a park, and then started flying back towards the college. When I got the the dam wires, I had to decide whether to go over or under, 'cause in between probably wasn't smart, so I picked up a little bit more altitude and went over the top of them.

That meant I didn't have to do too much more climbing, so I stayed fairly level over Sprinkle Road, and along over town. And instead of following the tracks all the way in, I started angling for campus once I crossed the river, which put me really close to the hotel, and I got hit by a gust of wind as I went by, 'cause it was blowing around the building. If somebody was looking out their window, they might have seen me go a little bit sideways as I passed.

I landed on the boardwalk and went inside, and put my flight gear back in our room before I went to the bathroom for my shower. I was almost out of shampoo and conditioner, so maybe tomorrow I could get some more.

I had gotten back a little bit earlier than I'd intended, and so I completely missed Kat. Peggy was getting out of bed and so I told her, then sat on the bed and started preening my wings. I had some secondaries that were starting to feel loose, and I'd probably lose them in the next week or so.

Peggy left for her shower while I was still preening, and I was all packed for class and ready to go and I thought about getting out some clothes for her but she hadn't asked me to. Sometimes people don't like it when you try to help them but they don't want help. So I just looked out the window instead and thought some more about putting a bird feeder in the tree outside. I wasn't sure that the birds would find it in there, but I think they would.

After she'd gotten dressed, we went to breakfast together and the waffle-maker was still working, which was pretty surprising. So I had a plain waffle and some eggs, too, and we talked about the football game and after I'd eaten I went and looked for Leon or Cedric to find out if Aquamarine was going to be there, but neither of them were at breakfast.

Professor Brown told us that our midterm would be on Wednesday next week, and he gave us all a handout to remind us what we'd learned so far and he said that everything would be on the test. And some people were pretty unhappy that we'd be having it, and he said he'd set fire to something in the lab on Tuesday to cheer people up.

Then he told us more about how entropy varied in different processes, and the formulas we'd need to figure it out. And he reminded us how so far we'd been just assigning our own zero point but for entropy it was different, and we could calculate it, and he showed us how. And the formula got kind of long and he filled up the whole markerboard with it, and then he drew it all out in a graph, which kind of had little steps in it as the substance went from a solid at zero Kelvin, and a gas at some point, and we knew how to calculate everything except for the first part.

But Professor Brown said that Planck had already figured it out, and at zero Kelvin its entropy was also zero, if it was a pure crystal in perfect form.

He also told us that it was possible to get almost to absolute zero, and told us that scientists had discovered that a lot of materials had strange properties when they were really close, and that they'd also verified what Planck had thought.

After class, me and Lisa sat in the lounge and went over the calculations I'd done, and she did some of the calculations on her portable telephone, just to make sure that I'd gotten them right. And then when we were both satisfied with it, she took my answers so that she could write up the final report for class, and she said that we'd go over it on Monday, just to make sure that we were both happy with how it had turned out.

I didn't want to go back to my room, 'cause it was nice out, so I sat on the quad under a tree and did my homework there. And a dumb squirrel I guess thought that I might have treats for him, so he started coming over and chattering at me, and then he looked like he was going to try and get into my saddlebags so I yelled at him and he scampered off to a tree, but he kept looking for his opportunity.

He tried a couple more times, and I figured out that just stretching out my wings scared him off, at least for a little while.

When I got done, I just put my books back in my bag and I was gonna doze a little bit but probably when I did the dumb squirrel would take my homework to line his nest with, since there wasn't any food in there for him, so I got up and took my things back to my room, then I flew back out and found a nice crotch in a tree and took a little nap.

Before I left for lunch, I had to go back to our room and pack my bags for math, then I glided to the dining hall and before I got my food I went looking for Cedric and Leon, and when I found them I told them again that I was sorry for not sitting with them yesterday. Cedric said I didn't have to apologize, but I still felt bad. I should be remembering a routine, not forgetting it.

He said that Aquamarine and Jenny were coming to the game, and I promised that we'd all cheer them on. I wasn't sure where we'd meet but I could always fly over the crowd until I found her.

I went and got some food, then sat down at our table and Meghan asked if she could ride with us to the football game, because she'd asked her roommates and they weren't too interested in seeing the game. And Peggy said that was okay but we'd be a little bit crowded in Cobalt and Christine said that I'd probably have to ride in the trunk.

I had my magnetic snowboard boots, and I could ride on the trunk, like Peggy had threatened me with, and Christine said that would be really funny to see, and I thought that maybe it would be fun to try, too. Peggy said it would probably scratch up the paint on the car, which was probably true. But I did kinda want to try.

After lunch, me and Sean walked to math together, and when he reviewed the chain rule for us, I realized that it was the same chain rule in thermodynamics, which meant that everything else would also apply. So when Professor Pampena was telling us about gradients, I started thinking of other things I could use them for. Probably smart people had figured it out already, but I still felt pretty clever for thinking of it.

He told us about gradient vectors, and how we could use them to find the tangent plane to anything, and showed us how, and he had a picture of a hourglass-shaped figure called a hyperboloid that had a flat plane stuck through it. And he gave us two different formulas to figure it out.

Then he taught us directional derivatives, and how to draw them on contour plots, and when he was done someone asked if that would also be on the mid-term, and he wrote EVERYTHING in big letters on the markerboard again.

We went back to Sean's room to do homework, and I concentrated a lot better than I had on Wednesday, 'cause I wasn't thinking about an upcoming storm. And so I got done with my homework faster than Sean did, and I had time to check back over it and then work out part of a problem in Equestrian before he'd finished, then we sat side-by-side at his desk and went over the problems together.

He asked if I wanted to watch the Star Trek movie before dinner, but I said it would be more fun to do with more people, and I wanted to get some beer to share anyway, and it would take me a couple of trips.

He offered to go with me, so we went back to my room first so that I could unpack my saddlebags, and then walked to Tiffany's. It felt like a lot further when I was walking, 'cause that was slower than flying. But it meant we only had to make one trip, because after I filled up my saddlebags he could carry more and so we got enough for both of us in only one trip.

We took it back to my room, 'cause it was closer, and then we sat down and talked to Peggy, and since the door was open, Ruth stopped by, too, and we decided that we should play a game of euchre, since we hadn't played in a while.

Peggy asked me who I wanted to be on a team with, and I thought I could play with Sean, so we moved around so that we were sitting across from each other, and we won by five points. Peggy thought that we had an unfair advantage since we were good at math, and Sean said that we didn't because he hadn't taken any statistics or probability classes.

We were a little late to dinner, 'cause we thought we had time for a second game but we really hadn't, and when we got there Peggy told Christine that we'd borrowed her boyfriend for the afternoon, and she wanted a refund. And he said that he wasn't gonna give her any beer, and she said that she shouldn't have any anyways because she was driving, or maybe only one, and Christine said that since I was the responsible one, I should make sure that Peggy didn't have too much to drink, and I promised that I would.

We went right from dinner to Cobalt, and it was crowded in back but I didn't mind, 'cause I got to sit between Christine and Meghan, and since I was in the middle I could see out the windshield, too, and I could read on the radio where it said who was singing. And when Renegades came on, I started singing along with it. And then everyone else joined in, too.

Peggy's GPS knew right where the football field was, but we all thought it was wrong when it told us, because there wasn't anything but fields, and then we came up on an intersection that had a car repair shop on one side and a gas station diagonally across, and then on the other side was the football field.

So we parked and went in, and it didn't take us too long to find Jenny and Aquamarine, and we went down and sat next to them, and me and Aquamarine nuzzled, then she hugged everyone else and I hugged Jenny.

Christine had thought to bring a blanket, which was good, 'cause it started to get kind of chilly. Jenny kind of bundled herself up in her clothes, until Sean let Christine sit on his lap, to give Jenny enough room to also be under the blanket. And me and Aquamarine stayed out, 'cause we were both warm enough without it, and didn't want to crowd anyone too much.

We shared our beer—Jenny didn't want one, 'cause she was driving and she said she wasn't old enough anyway.

Kalamazoo didn't score any points in the first half, but they were pretty close a couple of times, and we were up and cheering a lot, and me and Aquamarine were stomping our hooves on the bleachers. Aquamarine got a lot of noise out of them, 'cause of her shoes, until we realized that she was denting them, and then she tried to be a little bit quieter.

Cedric had a good sack early in the third quarter, and they got the ball after that, and Leon made a good catch that got them a touchdown, and I thought that we might catch up, but we never did, and at the end we lost by 29 points.

It was disappointing to lose, but Aquamarine was really happy that she got to see Cedric play, 'cause it was her first time, and we all went down to the edge of the field to congratulate them after the game was over. Cedric picked up Aquamarine for a big hug, and Leon gave me a hoof-bump, and gave her one too.

We talked a little while in the parking lot, until people started to get cold, and then we got back in our cars and drove home, and instead of going back to our dorm, we went to Christine's room instead and finished all the beers that we had plus some that she had, too. And someone put on a movie but I don't really remember what it was, 'cause I was curled up in the papasan with Meghan, and I was kind of tired, and having a little bit of trouble focusing because I'd had too much beer.

Meghan finally said that we ought to go back to her room, and I thought that was a good idea, so we walked together for a little bit but I wasn't liking walking so much 'cause my hooves felt clumsy, so then I flew up the hill just a little bit above the ground, and when I got to the dorm I couldn't make my card work to let me in.

After a little while, though, someone who was coming out to smoke offered to let me in, but by then I'd remembered that I was supposed to be with Meghan, and I'd kind of lost her. And I was wondering what it might be like to smoke a cigarette when Meghan got to the door and I said that I was sorry for flying off like I had, but I'd forgotten that she couldn't fly with me.

She said I shouldn't have had as many beers as I'd had, and she was probably right.

So we went up to her room together, and I had to pee again so I went in her bathroom, and when I came out she was almost all the way undressed, so I helped her by taking her panties off and then jumped into bed, and as soon as she got in I put my head on her breast and stretched my wing across her stomach and fell asleep.

October 8 [Meghan and Aric]

October 8

I was on my back when I woke up, and Meghan had her arm across my belly. And I didn't want to wake her up, but I really had to pee, so I pushed her arm off and rolled back to my hooves and kind of jumped out of bed over her in a little short glide.

She was awake when I came back out of the bathroom, and said that since I'd gotten her up she might as well go, too, and then we could sleep in some more, which sounded pretty good to me, 'cause I was still kinda tired. It was dark out, and I guess the only reason I'd woken up was because I'd had too much beer last night.

When she got back to bed, I put my head on her chest and she pulled the covers up over us, and I fell back asleep pretty quick.

It was light out when I woke up again, and Meghan had woken up before me and was petting my mane, so I turned my head and kissed her, and pretty soon I'd climbed up on top of her and at first she wouldn't let me move, 'cause she had her arm around my back, and as we were kissing her other hand went under my tail.

When she finally let me go, I crawled under the covers and flicked her head with my tail, and we had to push the covers off when we got too hot but we were alone in her room, so that was okay. And I had to remember to not nip at her anywhere, even when she had one of her hands down by my face.

Once we were both satisfied, I snuggled up next to her again and she asked if I wanted to take a shower with her and I nodded, but we didn't get out of bed right away. She had her fingers in my mane, kind of twisting them around in it, and I had my head on her chest, with my ear right above her heart, and neither of us wanted to move too much. I was keeping her warm with a wing, and she'd hooked the blankets with her feet and pulled them most of the way up to her waist.

After she was done playing with my mane, she reached down and started to play with my feathers, then she asked me if preening got stallions horny, and I said it kind of depended. Sometimes pegasuses like to use preening as foreplay, but it was also something that we'd do for each other when we were together, and I said that everypony on weather teams preened each other. So she said that Dewdrop seemed to really like it, and I said it was just 'cause he was relaxed, and lots of stallions did that. And I said that it meant that she was really good at preening, and that made her happy.

So then I asked her if she'd had sex with Stormbreaker, and she said that it hadn't worked out like she'd wanted it to, and she didn't know if he wasn't interested in humans or if she hadn't been obvious enough about what she wanted, and so I nuzzled her 'cause I felt kind of bad about that. And she said it was okay; she'd had a whole lot of fun being with all of us, and as the party had ended and the next morning it had been almost like she was in Equestria, 'cause there were only other ponies in the room, and everyone was talking in Equestrian.

I said that I'd been speaking English, and she shook her head and said that I hadn't. Which was odd, because I thought I remembered that I was, but maybe that was just me thinking I had because I knew I was on Earth, and I guess if everypony else had been speaking Equestrian I would have answered in it.

While we were in the shower, we talked about what we wanted to do today. She said it was too cold for the beach to be comfortable, and besides an Uber-car would cost too much. And so I told her my idea about doing something fun with Aric, too, because then nobody would be mad about who I was spending time with.

She said she wasn't so sure about that but it wouldn't hurt to try. And I said that maybe we could try horseback riding together, because they had a lot of horses at the stables.

Meghan thought that if he wanted to, that would be fun, and she said that after breakfast I could find out if Aric was interested and then we could go do it in the afternoon.

When we were done with our shower, we sat on the bed and groomed each other. Meghan had her robe on so that she wouldn't get too cold, and even though it was kind of disappointing for her to be mostly covered up, I could still stick my head in the front and nuzzle her if I wanted to, and it was soft and fluffy to lean against, too.

She braided my tail for me, and I found her clothes to wear, and before we went to breakfast she used her portable telephone to see if the stables were open today.

When we got to breakfast, I could tell that I wasn't the only one who'd had too much to drink last night. Sean only had toast on his plate, and there were only a couple of bites out of it. He had his head down on the table and when Meghan asked if he was okay, Christine said that he'd told her that the light burned him, and she'd been looking around for garlic since then but hadn't found any yet.

I wasn't sure why she'd want garlic, so she told me about how vampires didn't like the smell and it was to protect her in case he was a vampire. And then she poked him in the shoulder and asked him if he was all right, and he said that he could hear the sunlight trying to get him.

Anna went and got an orange and peeled it so that it had sharp teeth, and set it right by his head. And she said that it was the vengeful sun god. Then Sean reached around for a fork, and when he finally found one he stabbed it at the table until he'd stuck the orange, and he let it roll on its side with the fork still in it.

I thought that was kind of mean, but everyone else thought it was funny.

We stayed in the dining hall until they started putting out food for lunch, and Sean had finally sat up and finished his toast and had a couple of glasses of water to drink.

I told Meghan that I was going to fly over to Aric's house and see if he was awake yet and if he was I'd ask him if he wanted to go horseback riding, and she said that I could just call him, and I guess I could but it was always more polite to talk face-to-face. And I promised her that I'd come back and if he didn't want to we'd find something else fun to do.

And she sighed and said that if he was interested we should plan on three or four in the afternoon, and that if she was going to call and get us reservations she needed to know right away and I could call her or fly back and tell her.

So I flew over to Aric's house, and I stayed low so that I wouldn't have to tell the airplane directors what I was doing.

I came around the back, and shook some seeds out of the feeder, even though I'd just had breakfast. And I kept an eye out at his window, in case he was watching and wanted to throw something at me.

He didn't, so I flew up to his window and looked through and he wasn't in his bed, but the covers were all tossed off, so he probably hadn't gotten up all that long ago. So then I went around to the other side of the house and peeked in the bathroom window, in case he was in there, and it was all foggy like someone was taking a shower, but I couldn't see anything through it, so I went around front and knocked on the door, and Aric came out of the kitchen and let me in.

I told him about my idea to all go horseback riding together, and he said that he hadn't ridden a horse in a few years and he might fall off, and I said that he hadn't fallen off me yet and he said that was true, and he said it would be fun, then he kind of lowered his voice and asked if I was thinking of inviting Angela and David.

Well, I hadn't really thought about that. It might be more fun with more people, but then if there was only me and him and Meghan, we could talk about anything, especially when we were in Winston.

So I said that I thought it would be better with just the three of us, and that if he said yes, Meghan was going to try and get us horses at three or four and that I should tell her as soon as I could. So he nodded and said that he'd be ready, and he could come by and pick us up. And he said that he didn't know where Meghan lived, and I said she was in the same dorm as me.

And then I kissed him and flew back to campus to tell Meghan.

She said she was sort of having second thoughts, and she made me promise that I wouldn't try to get the three of us in bed together and I said that I promised. I told her that I didn't think I was ready for that either.

So Meghan called and managed to get us an appointment at four. And then I called Aric and told him, and he asked us how long it took to get out there, and Meghan said that it took about twenty minutes, and he said that he'd pick us up at half-to four.

That gave us some of the afternoon free, and so we went outside and walked around campus a little bit and then Meghan said that she was kind of hungry for lunch but didn't want to eat right before going riding but she wouldn't mind a little snack, so we went to Walgreen's and I kept an eye out for the angry man but I didn't see him there.

Meghan bought a red can of Pringles, which were potato chips that came in a tube instead of a bag, and we sat under a tree and shared them. She had to get them out of the tube for me, 'cause I couldn't get to them at all, but her hand fit in the tube just fine, which I thought was kind of unfair.

They were pretty tasty, and between us we ate the whole tube of them. Then we went back up the hill to her dorm room so that she could put on horseback riding clothes, and she had a really hard time figuring out what kind of underwear she wanted to wear. I didn't mind too much, 'cause she'd taken off her old clothes before she went looking, and I finally said that if she couldn't decide she shouldn’t wear any, and she said that she didn't want her boobs bouncing all over the place while she was riding.

So she finally found underwear that she liked and put it on, and it was easier for her to pick overwear, 'cause she had one pair of pants that she didn't mind if they got dirty, and then she put on the same t-shirt and sweatshirt that she'd been wearing all day.

We were waiting by the door when Winston came in the parking lot, and he had to go slow because there were a lot of cars parked in the middle where they weren't supposed to be, and he had to get around them. And when he got by the door, we came out and Meghan opened the door for me and I got in the middle and she got on the other side.

She had to give Aric directions, 'cause he'd never been out there before, and the best way I knew to get there was flying along where the electric wires went, and that wasn't a road.

He parked next to Deanne's truck, and I thought that the two trucks looked good together. I think Winston would be happier on a farm.

As soon as we got out, I whinnied to let everyone know that I was there, and I heard a couple of whinnys back from the barn, and as we walked towards the barn, the dog came out and got behind us and sort of edged up on my hind hooves a little bit. Aric stopped and asked Meghan if he was friendly, and I said that he always liked following me.

We got to the barn, and Deanne was finishing up saddling the horses for us. There was a new one for Aric, a white horse the size of Henry who she said was called Moonlight. And I went around to make friends with Moonlight while Deanne asked Aric if he knew how to ride a horse.

I shouldn't have put my rump to Henry, cause he leaned down and sniffed at me, and then he snorted and sniffed again, and nipped at my withers, but I got out of the way in time and hit him in the nose, and he backed up and shook his head and looked kind of confused by it.

Deanne told him to stop being bad, and then she had us get our reins and lead our horses out of the stable. She said that she was going to have Aric ride second, and she'd be in the front because at least if Henry was in the lead, she wouldn't have to worry about Moonlight getting ideas if Aric couldn't get him to go where he wanted. And she said that me and Meghan could ride in whatever order we wanted to.

So we all got on our horses, and she led us out on the trail. Aric either remembered how to make Moonlight go where he should, or else he just liked following Henry. I found out which it was when we'd gotten a little ways into the woods and Moonlight stopped to eat a bush, and Aric couldn't get him going again. Deanne stopped and told him to be more firm, and not take crap from his horse. So he hit him in the side with his heels again, and Moonlight finally pulled his head up and started moving again.

We went all the way to the trail under the wires, and rode down that for a while, until we got to the next road, and then we turned around to head back. Deanne said that we could try a bit of a faster pace, and got Henry to trot, and it took Aric a minute to convince Moonlight to trot, too, but then he was off and Hoshi didn't need my encouragement; she went off after Moonlight. It was kind of bouncy for me, but at least if I slid off the saddle I could just fly clear.

I kind of liked racing on my own, though. It was a lot easier than staying on the back of a bouncing horse, even if I used my wings to help keep my balance.

We slowed down before we got to where we'd go back on the other path, I think because Deanne probably thought that if we went around the corner at speed we'd slide off our horses. She wouldn't—I think Henry would have a hard time shaking her off—but I would, and Aric might, too. I wasn't so sure about Meghan, 'cause she had more experience.

And we walked the rest of the way through the woods, and the horses were a little bit eager to get home and be done with us, and Moonlight kept getting too close to Henry's rump, and I thought that maybe they were going to fight, 'cause you could see that Henry wasn't too happy about being crowded. Plus, sometimes stallions will fight over the dumbest things.

But he didn't, and when we got back to the stables, Henry stuck his nose right into the treat bucket even though there wasn't anything in there yet.

Meghan and Deanne both got their gear off, and then Deanne had to show Aric how to wash down a horse after riding, and then after that she showed him how to groom Moonlight, too. Meghan said that he was really happy about being groomed, and Aric asked if he had gotten a gay horse. Deanne asked if he was feeling intimidated, and he said that he might be just a little bit.

The dog sat down and watched us while we were working, and he followed us into the stables when we led the horses back to the pasture—Deanne said that they'd earned some time to be free horses, and as soon as he was inside the fence, Henry sniffed at the ground and then rolled in the dirt, while the other three horses just sniffed around and looked for tasty plants.

We watched them for a little bit and the dog watched us, and then we went back to Winston, and the dog kept running in front of me and when I ignored him, he went off to the side, and then back in front, and he didn't stop until I got in Winston. Then he sat down in front and barked at the truck once, but when Aric started it, he wandered off and walked around the corner of the stables.

All of us were hungry for dinner, so Aric asked where we wanted to eat, and I said Taco Bell, and Meghan said that she wouldn't mind it either. We had to hunt a little bit to find one, 'cause there wasn't one in Galesburg or Comstock, but he found one on Sprinkle Road that wasn't too far from the Denny's.

And we found a little booth that was near the windows and ate our tacos, and then Aric asked where I was planning to spend the night, and I didn't know, and neither he nor Meghan wanted to discuss it too much at Taco Bell, so after we'd finished eating, he said that we could go to his house and decide there, but Meghan thought that it would be better to be on campus, and she said that we should go to one of the lounges or maybe even her room and talk about it there, and Aric asked which plan I thought was better.

I hated to be the one to choose, and so since I knew that humans liked to use thrown coins to make choices, I suggested that, and Aric got out a quarter and said that if it was heads he got to pick and if it was tails she got to pick, and she said that was fair, and he said to make it more fair, he'd let her flip the coin, so he slid it across the table to her and she flicked it up with her thumb and missed the catch but it landed in the middle of the table and we all saw it, and it was heads.

So Aric tapped his fingers on the table, and then told Meghan that he chose to have her decide. So she said that we'd go to his house because he'd won fair and square.

When we got there, Angela's Alero was gone, and Aric looked and there was a note on the corkboard that said that they'd gone to see a movie and then were going to The Zoo, which was a bar, and if he wanted to he could join them.

Aric got out some beer and we sat on the couch and he said that we could watch a movie if she wanted, and she said that he was trying to get out of having a serious conversation, and he said that she'd probably do the same thing if we were in her position, and she finally admitted that was true. And she said that just because she was over here didn't mean that anything was going to happen, and he said that he hadn't expected it, and he said that he hadn't expected Angela and David to be gone, either.

And so we kind of sat in silence for a little bit, just drinking our beer, and then Aric said that his butt hurt from riding horses. And then Meghan said that he should be used to it, and pointed to me, and he said that I'd hurt his wrist, and I said that I was sorry. Well, she wanted to know why and I said that I'd bitten him a couple of times, and he said that it was more than a couple of times, and I was lucky that that was the only one that had bled, and then Meghan said that I'd never bitten her and I think she was kind of jealous, so I leaned over and nipped her wrist.

Then I said it was 'cause I was in estrus, and that I'd forgotten that humans didn't like to be bitten, and Meghan asked if that was why Henry had tried to nip me, and I said that it probably was, and if he hadn't been gelded he might have tried mounting me, too.

So Aric asked what would happen if I was around a stallion, and I said that had happened to Aquamarine, and at least I could fly away if a stallion got too interested.

And I held out my wings to demonstrate, and Meghan pinched me right at the wing root, and I almost dropped my beer, and Aric asked her what she'd just done, and so she showed him which wasn't fair at all, and she laughed and asked how he hadn't figured that out yet.

He said that he always tried to be careful of my wings because he thought they were pretty fragile, and I'd never known that, and pretty soon Meghan was telling him everything she knew about ponies and I had to correct a couple of things plus there was some stuff that she didn't know, and she finally admitted that she'd been thinking about ponies a lot longer than he had, and she'd read some things on the internet.

We kept talking pretty late into the night, and Meghan said that she really didn't feel like walking home, and I couldn't really decide where I'd rather spend the night, and finally Aric suggested that we could all sleep on the couch. And I didn't think she'd want to, but she finally said that she would. And he said that she could take the smaller couch with me and he'd take the big one, and she agreed to it.

I was kind of disappointed because that meant I probably wasn't going to get any sex, but I was happy that we'd at least managed to work things out well enough that they were comfortable enough with each other to sleep in the same room, although Meghan did leave all her clothes on except for her sweatshirt.

October 9 [ArtPrize]

October 9

I woke up kinda early and I was pinned between Meghan and the back of the couch, which was a little bit uncomfortable, and a little bit too warm. I could barely stretch out anything, and I didn't want to wake her up if I could help it.

I had enough room to stick my head up, and I turned an ear and could hear Aric sleeping, and every now and then he'd make a funny little snorting noise. I couldn't turn quite far enough to see him except just out of the corner of my eye.

So I stuck my head back down between Meghan and the couch, and that was enough to sort of wake her up.

She was a little bit confused about where she was, and she slid over just a little bit and then pulled at her bra, 'cause she said that the wire was digging in. And then she said that she had to pee, too, and I told her where the bathroom was.

And then when she was gone I took the opportunity to stretch out a little bit, 'cause my wings were kinda cramped, and one of my legs was asleep 'cause of how it had been folded under me.

When she came back she was holding her bra, and she said that she shouldn't have worn it to bed, and then she said that it was really weird how it had a window in the door, and I said I thought it was to let in light because there weren't any windows to the outside. But maybe I should have told her where the bathroom upstairs was, 'cause it didn't have a window in the door, just the one to outside.

She laid back down on the couch, and we kind of had to wiggle into position together. She said that she was a bit chilly because she didn't have a blanket, and it was kind of cold in the house, so I said that we could go up to Aric's room and take his blankets and bring one down for him, too. It was probably something that we should have thought of last night but we'd all been warmer then.

Meghan said that she kind of didn't want to move, but she'd be happier when she was warmer, so we went to his room to get his blankets, and she put one of them over him and then we got back on the couch together and she pulled it over us, and then sniffed at the edge and said that she wondered if he knew that you could wash blankets, because it smelled like him.

I didn't mind, though. It was almost like sleeping with him. And she didn't take the blanket back off, either.

It was just starting to get light when Aric got up and I think he was trying to be quiet, but when he got off the couch he knocked over a bunch of beer bottles, and they clanked and clanged around on the floor, and I heard him swear quietly, then he managed to kick one more when he started walking. And he saw that I was awake, so he waved at me and he was still trying to be quiet even though Meghan had woken up, too. But I didn't tell him, because I thought he'd rather think he was being sneaky, because it was kind of cute.

Meghan started snickering when the bathroom door closed, though, and she said that maybe we should put the bottles back so he'd knock them over again. I thought that was kind of mean, but it would be funny.

She asked if I wanted to sleep some more, and I said that I was done with sleeping, so she sat up but kept the blanket wrapped around her to keep her warm, and I leaned up against her side. And when Aric came back he saw us and asked if we were both early risers, and Meghan said that she loved to get up at first light, and I slapped her with my wing and said that wasn't true at all.

So Aric went back to the kitchen to make some coffee, and then while it was brewing we tried to decide what we wanted to do today. I wanted to go flying, but I didn't want to leave them behind, so I didn't suggest it right away.

Meghan said since he had Winston, we could go to Grand Rapids and see ArtPrize, which was a contest where lots of artists displayed their art all through town, and I thought that might be fun to see. And that sounded like it would be pretty fun, especially after Meghan said that she knew one of the artists, but she wouldn't tell us which one. And I asked if it was Rebekka, and she said that it wasn't, but maybe Rebekka had also made art, and we wouldn't know unless we looked.

So Aric said that he was going to go upstairs to change his clothes, and he asked Meghan if she wanted him to drive her to campus first so she could take a shower and put on something new, and she said that she probably should, but she didn't mind walking home.

And I said that I'd go with her, which made Aric kind of sad, but I told him it was 'cause he didn't have any good shampoo for me, and he had to admit it was true. And he said that he didn't mind giving us a ride, but Meghan thought he shouldn't waste the gas just to drive to college and back, so he promised to meet us back at Trowbridge in an hour, and I kissed him before we left.

If it had been a school day, I would have had us go down Grove Street, just in case Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were waiting for the bus, but since it was a Sunday I knew that they wouldn't be, so we just stayed on Academy Street all the way back to our dorm.

Meghan asked me if I wanted to take a shower with her, and I said that I kind of had to because I was almost out of shampoo and conditioner, and she laughed and said that I'd probably want to even if I had lots of it, and that was true. And I said that on the way back we should stop at Meijer so I could get more, and she thought that was a good idea.

She went in the bathroom and turned on the shower, and then went back out into her room to get undressed, and I looked through her drawers to see what I could find her to wear today, and after I'd found a shirt and pants, we both looked through her underwear drawer together and decided on red. And before we could go in she had to unbraid my tail, too, so it wouldn't get all knotted.

We couldn't take too long in the shower, because otherwise Aric might have to wait for us, so we were pretty quick, and then when we were done, I brushed Meghan's hair, and she brushed me, and I would have liked to have her preen my wings but there wasn't enough time, and she said that she could do it in Winston. And then she packed a jacket and sweatshirt and some water into her backpack, so that we would have that, too.

Meghan said that she hoped he was planning on stopping somewhere to eat, 'cause she was a little bit hungry, and I was, too. It was still a little too early for the dining hall to be open, and we didn't have time anyway. So we went downstairs and she leaned against the wall until we saw Winston pull into the parking lot, then we walked out to meet him so that he wouldn't have to drive around the cars. A lot of them had penalty flags on their windshields, but they were still there.

I guess Aric was hungry, too, 'cause once we got in Winston he asked if we wanted to go somewhere to eat before we went to Grand Rapids.

Meghan didn't really want to stop at a fast food restaurant, so we went to Steak and Shake which was kind of like Denny's, but it was a little bit smaller and looked newer inside. And there weren't too many people there, so we got our food pretty quick. I had a breakfast taco, which wasn't very good, and an egg and cheese sandwich, and when we were done eating we all used the bathroom and then got on the 131 Highway.

I stretched my right wing out over Meghan's lap so she could preen it, and then after we'd passed by Plainwell, she had it done she said that she could do my left wing but it wasn't going to be easy for her with it stretched out over Aric's lap, so we switched places instead, and that was a little bit difficult to manage.

We were passing under the road that we'd taken to get to the airport when she got that one done, and I shook it out a little bit, then tucked them in and leaned against Meghan's shoulder.

Since the art exhibit was right downtown, we had to get off the 131 Highway where it crossed the 196 Highway, and that was really weird because everything was on bridges, and it was a good thing that there were lots of signs or else cars would have been getting confused about where to go.

We went into a stack of parking lots, which was kind of fun. There was a little stand like the one at restaurants where you could order food from your car, but this one just spit out a ticket. And there was a bar across the top and if you hit it you were too tall, and Winston didn't hit but the antenna on the roof did, and it made weird scraping and springing noises as it bounced across the concrete rafters.

Aric got a spot on the top level, because he said that it was easier to find later if it was on top, and Meghan said that all the floors had had big numbers and colored squares, so as long as he could remember a color or a number he would know where he had parked. He said that she was overthinking it.

They went to the elevators but I didn't want to take an elevator, so I jumped off the edge and glided down, and waited for them by the entrance. And when they came down, Meghan was looking at her portable telephone to figure out where the art was.

I'd kind of expected it to be out on the street, like a market, but I guess since humans can't control the weather maybe it's smarter to have it inside where everyone can see it no matter what the weather is.

She said that it was all over businesses downtown, and so we went into the big building that was right across the street from us, which was called the DeVos convention center, and they had a lot of art inside, so it had been a good place to start.

Meghan got us some playbills from the front that said where all the art was and how to vote, only it was the last day so she said that she didn't think we could vote anymore, but we could still enjoy it.

There were pictures and paintings and sculptures, and some of them even moved. There was one called and on her horse she flies, which was a woman riding a horse that was surrounded by birds and I liked that one. Aric and Meghan both looked at a torso sculpture of a man called Emasculation, and he had a gun for a penis, which was kind of odd, but there was a story under the sculpture that explained it.

We spent the whole day looking at art, which was a lot of fun, 'cause it wasn't all in one place, so you could look at some and think about it and then move on to the next place to see the next art. And not everything was in the kind of place that you'd expect; we saw a bunch of art at an inn called Peaches, including a mosaic bench that you could sit on if you wanted to, and a painting of a horse called Smokey at a yoghurt store.

Aric said that we should have lunch somewhere that had art, too, and he said that we could eat at the Horseshoe Smokehouse or the One Trick Pony Grill and Taproom, and Meghan looked at her playbill to see if he was making those names up.

I thought that people might get the wrong idea if we went to One Trick Pony, 'cause I knew more than one trick, and then Meghan said she wondered if there would come a point where we ponies started to get offended by names of places.

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, because I thought it was nice that humans thought so highly of horses and ponies that they named things after them, and they'd been doing it even before they met us. She said that there were lots of sports teams that were named for groups of people and now some of those groups were bothered by it, because it put their group in a bad light.

I guess if they had insulting names, then maybe I'd be bothered by it. I said that Mister Salvatore had had me pose in Wild Horse Creek when we were coming back from Peggy's, and that had been a lot of fun.

They both wanted to see that picture, but I didn't have it—I'd have to get it from Mister Salvatore.

And then I told Meghan that Paradise had taken a picture of her while she was snuggling with Stormbreaker and Flanking Line, and she said she wanted to see that picture.

I told her that I didn't know if Paradise had a Facebook, or computer mail, so I wasn't too sure about how to get it until I remembered that Joey had sent Meghan the tornado video and he probably knew a way to reach Paradise. And so while we were walking to One Trick Pony, she typed him a computer message on her portable telephone.

There was a little sign out front that said that it was Grand Rapids' oldest business, although it had been a general store before it became a restaurant. And it was kind of crowded with all the people looking at art and eating, so we had to wait a little bit before we got a seat.

Our waiter was really happy to see me, and he said that I was the first pony who'd ever been in their restaurant and if I didn't mind he wanted to take a picture, and then a lot of other people did, too, so I got lots of pictures taken of me, and that was kind of annoying, because I was hungry, but it was worth it because the waiter said that they'd decided to comp our meal, which meant that we didn't have to pay for it.

So we all shared spinach dip, and I got a whitefish burger, while Aric and Meghan shared a One Trick Pizza. And they had a lot of good beer, too. I got the breakfast stout, even though it was lunch, because I liked it.

One of the paintings I thought was of a sad clown, but Aric said it was Alice Cooper, who was a famous musician from Michigan.

We spent all afternoon looking at more art, and it was really amazing how many different ways humans made art. I'd kind of thought that after a while it might all start to look the same, but we kept on being surprised by what people had come up with, like mosaics of tiny pictures to make a big picture, or a sculpture made out of clear cubes. There was another sculpture called Waffleman that was made out of old bits of machines and house appliances, and there were rugs and a beautiful painting of a woman nursing her baby. A lot of them had clever names, too—Aric laughed at a mosiac called Antisocial Butterfly, and I also found a collage called Hope is the thing with feathers, which was an art interpretation of the poem we'd read in Conrad's class.

Finally when it was dinnertime, Aric said that we could stay in town and then look at more art after dinner, or go back to Kalamazoo and relax.

I thought since we were here we should look at some more, and Meghan thought so, too, but she admitted that her legs were getting tired from all the walking.

Aric said he wanted to see if the Horseshoe Smokehouse would give us a special deal, too, but they didn't. Maybe because I didn't have any horseshoes. And it wasn't a very good place for me to eat, 'cause almost everything they had on their menu was meat, but they did have waffle fries, and also an alfalfa sprout salad, which was kind of small so I had two of them. And they had Founders beer, too, so I had another breakfast stout.

When we were all relaxed, we walked around for a couple more hours and looked at more art, and Meghan had gotten a computer letter back from Joey, so she sent a computer letter to Paradise.

We saw a plant on wheels called Plant Bot—plants that drive, and I thought that Aquamarine might like that. Or maybe not, since if plants drove she'd have to be chasing after them all the time. And we saw a strange humankin that Meghan said looked like a robot, and it was holding a silvery fish-shaped thing, and was called Madonna and Child, and we even saw a bunch of old boards on a gallery floor that I guess was art but it kind of looked like the building had been fixed up and the construction people had left some of the old lumber behind.

It was getting dark when we all decided that we'd seen enough art for one day, and Meghan and Aric sat down on a bench that looked over the Grand River, and I was going to sit down with them, but then I thought I could fly a little ways up and down the river and even though I didn't have my flight gear, it would be okay because there weren’t any airplanes down there. So while they relaxed I flew north to the dam, and then back south and I waved as I went by them, and then kept going a little bit further I passed an island and then went under a railroad bridge, and then I turned around and when I landed back on the shore, we all walked together to the parking lot stack.

I flew up and was waiting in the back of Winston when they finally got there, and we didn't get in right away, 'cause you could see the sun setting off to the west, and we had a pretty good view of it from our spot. And it wasn't until it had gone below the horizon that Aric finally opened up Winston.

He had to pay to get out of the garage—that was what the little ticket was for, so it would know how long he had been in there. And he got a little bit confused with all the road signs and wound up being in the wrong lane on the 196 Highway to get onto the south 131 Highway, and we had to turn around, and he said it was really confusing because the lanes on the 131 Highway were on the wrong side, which was why he'd made the mistake.

Meghan didn't believe him until we got back on the highway and were going south, and we went over a bridge and then the north traffic was on her side of Winston instead of Aric's, and it didn't go back to the correct side until we'd gone under a bridge and she asked him what kind of crazy person had thought of that, and he said maybe it made sense when you looked at it from above.

Meghan fell asleep on the way home, and it didn't look like it was too comfortable for her to have her head leaning against the doorframe like that. Aric said that when there were people sleeping in the car it was fun to jerk the steering wheel and scream really loud to wake them up, but I thought that would be mean. And I said that she'd been nice and brought him a blanket last night so he wouldn't be cold, and I rested my wing on her lap and she was just awake enough to hold on to it.

We probably shouldn't have stayed out so late, 'cause it was a school night. Even Aric was yawning when we were getting close to Kalamazoo, and Meghan finally woke up when he turned off the highway. And it took her a minute to figure out where we were.

Aric asked if we wanted to be dropped off at the dorms or hang out at his house, and Meghan said that since we had to go to class in the morning it was probably smartest to go to the dorm, and then Aric asked if we wanted to hang out for a bit, and she said that she'd love to hang out but she had a nasty midterm next week and hadn't done any studying at all, and I'd kind of put them out of my mind, but I had them, too, and I hadn't done any studying, either.

I remembered while we were sitting at the traffic signal on Howard Street that I'd meant to ask Aric to go to Meijer and I'd forgotten, but it was too late to do it now. I'd thought we'd be back sooner. But that was okay, because tomorrow morning I could take a shower with Meghan, and use hers.

Aric dropped us off behind Trowbridge and I leaned over and kissed him, and Meghan squeezed his shoulder and said that she'd had a great time today, and that we should think about something fun to do for next weekend, and then we went up to her room.

We were both really tired, and Amy was back, too. Meghan told her that we'd gone to see ArtPrize, and she said that her boyfriend hadn't won anything this year, but maybe next year he would, and she asked if we'd seen his pictures, but we hadn't. There was a lot of art we hadn't had time to see, because one day wasn't enough, and I was thinking that next year we should spend the whole weekend, but then I remembered that I wouldn't be here next year.

Meghan got into her sleeping clothes in the bathroom, and the two of us snuggled up in her bed, and while she was turning on her alarm I asked her if she'd gotten the picture from Paradise yet, and she checked her telephone but she hadn't yet.

I think I fell asleep almost as soon as I put my head down on her chest.

October 10 [Meijer Morning]

October 10

I woke up and nuzzled Meghan, and when she opened her eyes and looked at me and asked what time it was, and I said that I didn't know, but the sun wasn't quite up yet, and I thought that I could go flying and then come back and take a shower with her. Which was a new idea, but I thought that it might work.

And she thought so, too, so we kissed and then I left her room and went down the hall to my room. I had to be really quiet so I wouldn't wake up Peggy, and it was a little hard to see, because the lights in the hallway had taken away all my night vision.

I stuffed everything in my saddlebags, 'cause I was gonna go to Meijer and get my shampoo and conditioner, and then I went out in the hallway to get dressed.

Dori gave me permission to fly to Meijer, as long as I stayed under a thousand feet until I got to the 131 Highway, and I said that I would. And then I took off and flew kinda low until I’d passed Jeff’s house—I think I was a little bit too early to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity.

Since I was already flying low, I went over Aric’s house, too, but there weren’t any lights on. Then I climbed up and flew parallel to Main Street until I crossed over Drake, and then I angled across the road, ‘cause Meijer would be on the north side.

There wasn’t any point in climbing higher, since it wasn’t even a mile past the 131 Highway, so I stayed at about 500 feet until I got close enough to see their parking lot, and came in for a landing on one of the little parking lot islands.

It was still pretty early, so there weren’t a lot of people there, which was nice.

I thought about getting a new kind of shampoo, because there were so many different smells and colors of it, but then I decided that I liked the kind I’d been using, and it was on the very bottom shelf which was convenient.

So I got as many bottles as I thought would fit in my saddlebags, and carried the basket up front. There were little kiosks at both ends that let you tally up your purchases by yourself, but I didn’t know how to use them, and I had to look until I found a normal sales stand that was open.

I put my bottles right in my saddlebags and he took the basket from me and wiped off the handle, and then I went back outside and looked for cars, and since there weren’t any, I flew off right from the entrance.

I landed back on the boardwalk and went upstairs to my dorm room first, because Peggy kind of depended on me to wake her up in the morning. And then I remembered that I was supposed to have woken her up sooner so we could go trotting together, and I felt bad about that.

So I took off my flight gear and then I nuzzled her back and I said that it was time to get up for the shower, and I told her I was sorry I'd forgotten that we were supposed to go trotting this morning.

And she said that was okay, but she'd been a little bit worried about me when I'd disappeared all weekend, and I put my ears down and said that I was really sorry and I should have stopped by and checked in with her, and she said just a telephone telegram would have been fine; I didn't have to come all the way back and tell her face-to-face.

I said I'd try to do better, and she asked if I'd had a fun weekend, and I nodded and said that I'd tell her about it later, because I was supposed to go to Meghan's room for a shower, and she was probably waiting for me, and that meant that I was giving up my turn in the bathroom.

When I got to Meghan's, I knocked really quietly on the door so that I wouldn't wake Amy up if she was still asleep, and Meghan was kind of surprised by how much lather I had on me, and I said that I'd kind of hurried, so I wouldn't be late for the shower, 'cause I didn't know what her morning routine was.

She said that Amy went to her first class a little bit late, which was why she stayed up late studying a lot of the time. So it was free now, and she'd already picked out her clothes, so we went into the bathroom and she turned on the shower and I hopped in before it had even started to warm up, so that I could cool off a little bit and rinse some of the lather off.

Meghan said that she didn't think that our plan of relaxing after mid-terms at the hotel was going to work out after all, because the trip to Indianapolis had cost more than she'd expected, and it turned out that the hotel in town was more expensive than she'd thought, and she was a bit reluctant to put more on her credit card. And I said that was okay; I thought that she'd kind of gotten her weekend with the weather ponies, and she said that she sort of had. It hadn't been a full day, but we would probably have gotten bored in a hotel room anyways.

And I thought that we could do something else fun instead, and she thought so, too.

I helped her dry off and she put on her robe, and we went back to her room to finish getting ready, in case anyone else wanted to use the bathroom. Then we groomed each other and went off to breakfast.

I said that was a pretty good way to start the morning, and she thought so too. I wish I'd thought of it sooner.

Somebody had broken the waffle-maker over the weekend, but I was still in a pretty cheery mood. And me and Meghan told everyone about everything we'd seen at ArtPrize, and Meghan could show some of the art on her portable telephone, even though she hadn't taken pictures of it.

I hadn't remembered to put my physics things in my saddlebags, or even have them with me, so I had to leave breakfast a little bit early and go back to my room and get them. And Peggy went with me, 'cause she said she'd forgotten something in her bag, too, but it turned out that wasn't true, and she'd just wanted to ask me more questions about the weekend.

So I told her some of the stuff I hadn't said at breakfast, and she kind of darted around for a bit before finally asking if the three of us had all had sex together, and I said that we hadn't and I didn't know if we would or not because I still wasn't sure how everyone felt about it, but I thought that Aric and Meghan had had a lot of fun together, and I'd had fun, too, except when they'd both picked on me.

I wasn't sure if it was faster to go out the back and fly off the boardwalk, or out the front and fly from there, so I went out the front and took off and flew over Dewing, and then dove down to land on the sidewalk behind a cluster of students, and I was so late that people were already going into class when I got there.

Professor Brown started teaching us how to figure out spontaneous change, which was something that I knew about from weather work. If you calculated really badly, you could push out clouds and then just watch them vanish into thin air. It was pretty rare for that to happen, because the tables were really good, but sometimes a new supervisor who thought she knew everything wouldn't check the tables before calculating a weather order.

It was more common with feral weather, and sometimes we got coastal clouds like that, but we didn't worry too much about them because they mostly stayed out over the ocean, in the marine layer, or if they came inland they didn't go too far.

So we had to learn the equilibrium state first, before we could learn whether it would change, and he gave us the formulas for that. And he told us that the equilibrium point was where the entropy was the highest, which made sense.

And he went through all the equations, and and it was kinda like rolling a cart down between a pair of hills, 'cause it wanted to eventually stop at the lowest point, since that's where it had the least potential energy. So if any of our ideal gasses were at a place where they could get more entropy, they wanted to, but once they got there, they'd stay there and be stable.

After class, I met with Lisa and we went over the lab work one more time, just to make sure that there weren't any mistakes on it. And that didn't take too long, since we'd already discussed it before, so all we had to do was make sure that she hadn't accidentally typed a wrong thing.

And I didn't have any homework, which was nice, but that was because of the mid-term, which I hadn't studied for at all.

I thought it was a pretty nice day outside, so I found a tree and flew up into its branches and then got my book out and I thought I'd start by just looking through it at the headings of each section, and seeing if I could remember the formulas, because that would be a quick way to figure out what I needed to study more and what I already knew.

It didn't take too long before I needed a little break, so I looked away from the book and studied the leaves on the tree. I knew that on Earth the leaves fell off on their own, but I wondered if maybe I could help. They weren't ready yet—the trees had started turning, and a few leaves were already falling, but it looked to me like it would be a few more weeks before they were actually ready to fall. If Aquamarine was here, I bet she could tell me exactly.

I stayed up in the tree until lunch, and I was pretty confident that I knew most of what I'd have to for the mid-term, and also that I needed to be really careful with my formulas. There were almost always little letters or words on top or bottom, and those were very important, and I'd forgotten about them a couple of times.

It always seemed to be a little bit harder to get out of a tree than it was to get in it, and I had to wiggle around a little bit to get in a good position where I could drop out from the branches, then I flew to our dorm room and put away my physics stuff and got my things for math class.

I had a salad for lunch and I wanted some fish but they didn’t have any at all. And Reese said that he had a test in the afternoon and so we all wished him good luck. Anna said that she had one too, but she thought it would be pretty easy, because it was in her first-year seminar. Everyone else agreed that those were kind of easy classes, and Peggy asked what it was about, and she said it was about monsters. Reese said he’d wanted to get in that class, too, but all the slots had been filled.

I would have liked to take it, but I couldn’t because it was for freshmen.

Professor Pampena was gonna teach us about minimum and maximum when the variables weren't independent, which were called Lagrange multipliers, and that applied to thermodynamics as well, which was nice. And he showed us a picture of a hyperbola that was on a circular contour plot that looked kind of like a record, and what we were trying to figure out was where the circle only touched the hyperbola at two points.

We had to add a third variable to make it work, and then we had to put it in a matrix, and lambda could equal positive or negative two, so we had to solve for both, and only one would give us a proper answer. And we also wouldn't know if it was a minimum or maximum, just that it was a critical point; we had to do more math to find out. We couldn't use a second derivative test.

Then he gave us a problem where we had to figure out a golden pyramid where we knew the size of the base and the volume but we had to figure out how to have the minimum surface area. And it turned out that the best solution was to have all three sides the same, which I'd kind of thought from the beginning, but it was really neat to see how his complicated equation with lots of points and lines and variables and square roots all simplified so nicely at the end.

He didn’t give us any homework, either, but we still went back to Sean’s room so that we could study, and we spent all afternoon quizzing each other on all the different formulas and, then Sean found a place on the internet that had sample questions that you could figure out, so that was good practice. You had to go to a different page to get the answers, to keep us from cheating.

It was a little bit different than having Professor Pampena grade it, though, because when you got an answer wrong the computer didn’t know and so it couldn’t tell you what mistake you’d made. So there were a couple of problems that we had to review carefully to see what had gone wrong.

By the time we were done, I was feeling pretty good about the math test at least, as long as I didn’t get confused about how to make my matrixes.

So I flew back to my room, and I practiced drawing some of the math alphabet a little bit, because my mouthwriting wasn’t that good, and then I had time to write in my journal before dinner, too.

They didn’t have a very good dinner, and Christine said that they probably wouldn’t have good food until Friday, ‘cause it was Homecoming, and sometimes alumnis liked to eat at the dining hall. Sean thought that if they wanted the real experience, they ought to have leftovers.

Reese said that his high school had had a big parade for Homecoming, and he asked if Kalamazoo College had one, too. Peggy said that they didn’t but a lot of people went streaking, and sometimes some of the alumnis would, too. She said that supposedly two years ago the CEO of Stryker had streaked the quad.

Me and Peggy went back to our dorm room together, and I got out my thermodynamics notes and studied until it was time to leave for Durak, then I put my flight gear in my saddlebags and nuzzled Peggy and told her that I was going to spend the night at Aric's house.

She asked me when the last time I'd stayed at the dorm on a Monday night, and I couldn't remember. But I’d wanted to be sure she knew so she wouldn’t worry.

So I went down to the boardwalk and flew across the quad, and instead of following the street, I climbed high enough to go over Hoben, and stayed above the trees all the way to Westnedge.

I dropped in behind Fourth Coast, and I went in the side door instead of the front. And I got my drink and went upstairs, and I was a little bit early. Maybe I shouldn't have taken a shortcut.

Since no one else was there, I pushed our two tables together, then sat down at the end next to the wall where I could see who was coming upstairs. And I kind of felt like a princess, with the long table stretching out in front of me.

Kennith and Seth arrived first, and they sat midways down the table, across from each other. And then Aric arrived and he sat next to me, and a whole cluster of people came after him, so we started to play.

I did well all night long, and so did Aric. Alex had a really bad night; he ended one game with what looked like half of the cards still in his hand, and I thought that Keith was kind of mean to be smiling so much as he put the last cards in his hand on the table one at a time.

We stopped a little bit earlier than we normally did, because almost everyone had big tests. Aric didn't, because theatre classes don't have mid-terms.

Anna and Reese wanted to ride back to college in Winston, so we all crowded together in the cab and he dropped them off at their dorm, and when we got to the corner of Dartmouth street I slid over to his side before he even said that I could drive.

I was getting pretty good at driving Winston. I got all the correct gears with the shifter and only slipped off the stick once, and if I thought I could reach the control pedals I would see if I could drive it all by myself.

After I'd guided Winston into the driveway, he shut it off and I got out his side so I didn't have to slide across, and we went in through the kitchen door.

David and Angela were in the living room, watching a movie, and we waved at them, and Aric said that I would probably enjoy the movie they were watching which was called Labyrinth, but I said that I had lab in the morning and wanted to fly and also had to study some more tomorrow, and maybe we could watch it later. Plus they'd already watched part of it and it wouldn't be polite to ask them to start again, or wait until we got caught up.

I think that Aric was kind of eager to go upstairs too because he hadn't gotten any sex all weekend long and was feeling kind of lonely. So as soon as he'd closed the door in his room, I hopped up on the bed and flicked my tail off to the side, and it didn't take him very long to get undressed and get in bed with me.

October 11 [Black Holes]

October 11

It was still a little bit dark out when I first woke up, so I snuggled up with Aric for a little bit, and then he woke up, too, ‘cause he had to pee, and when he came back to the room I told him that I had to leave pretty soon so I had time to fly before my lab.

And he asked me how soon, and I told him not that soon, and I rolled on my back and he got the hint, and got back in bed with me.

Before he got on top of me, though, he made me promise not to bite him this time, and I said that I probably wouldn’t, and I kept my promise.

Then he helped me put on my flight gear, and I kissed him goodbye, and I flew out his window and went around to the far side of the birdfeeder to get a snack, and I kept an eye up at the window but he didn't throw anything at me right away. He waited until my guard was down, and he almost got me—I did get hit in the muzzle with the birdfeeder when it rocked, and when I looked up there was another sock coming right at my face, so I dropped down and got a shower of birdseed across my back, 'cause I didn't quite get under the feeder.

I landed and shook off the seeds and then picked up his socks and flew back up to his window and tossed them inside, and he leaned out of the window so that I could kiss him.

I called the airplane directors when I was already in the air, but I was just barely above the trees so it would be okay, and the grumpy man asked me where I was going and I said to the Nature Center, and he said that there wasn't any reported air traffic, so I could fly above a thousand feet if I wanted to.

So I thanked him and started climbing, even though I didn't really have to. And I got about four thousand feet up by the time I was getting near the Nature Center, and I dove down kinda fast. Not a full-speed dive, but pretty fast just the same, and I was going to overshoot, so I flattened it out a little bit and went kind of wide for a turn.

And I came in over the high part of the path about a meter above the ground, and followed the ground partway down, which flattened out my dive even more, then I had to get a little more altitude so I could bank for the turn at the end and not crash into the trees. Then on the stretch next to the river, I flared my wings to slow down some more, and by the time I'd gotten a little bit past the halfway point I was slow enough that I could make a good landing and not have to try galloping as I hit the ground.

I've seen the Wonderbolts do it and every pegasus thinks she can but it's a lot harder than it looks, and I'd given up on trying after the fourth time I got a muzzleful of dirt.

My fast landing had scared off the deer, but they probably would have been scared off by something else anyways, so I didn't feel too bad about it. If they hadn't learned by now that I wasn't gonna try and hurt them, that wasn't my fault. Maybe if I spoke deer, I could have made friends with them.

I alternated between trotting and cantering until I'd done three whole circuits, and then I went and started flying the trail through the woods again, and I was about halfway around when I thought to look at my watch and it was a bit later than I thought, and I guess I wasn't all the way awake again, because instead of flying up like a sensible pony, I took a shortcut through the woods.

Wild woods are usually not a good place to fly in, because of all the sticks and branches and other obstacles which always seem to be less than a wingspan apart. They're good obstacle courses, and a good place to practice really precise flying, but when you're kind of in a hurry, they're about the worst place to be. I didn't think about that until I was halfway through, and I thought that the path was right in front of me but it wasn't, it was just a little natural depression. And I had to go a little bit off-course to get around a cluster of pine trees, and then I remembered that I should just go up and over, so I climbed to the top of the trees and then flew back to campus kinda low, just so I wouldn't have to call up the grumpy man again.

I hadn't made it all the way through my shortcut without brushing against anything, and when I was in the shower, I rinsed off some leaves and short bits of stick, as well as some birdseed that had gotten caught in my feathers.

Peggy helped me get dressed in my lab clothes, and we went to breakfast together. The omelet cook was there, so I had an omelet, and Peggy decided that she'd have one, too.

We got to experiment with entropy, and we mixed colored fluids until they blended together but some of them wouldn’t, or they’d come back apart again, and we had to record our observations on that. And then we also got to do some alchemy as well, and carry out some spontaneous reactions, which was fun.

Professor Brown also let us watch as he used a calorimeter, because he said it was important to know about them, but there weren’t enough of them for everyone to have, so we just had to observe it working and take notes on what it said was happening.

And then he said that he had one more experiment for us, and so we had to go over to the fume hood, and he took a beaker of water and put some silvery metal called sodium in it, and when it landed on the water it sputtered and then caught fire, and drove itself around until it was all gone, and that was really neat to see.

Me and Lisa went to the lounge again to go over my notes for the lab, and when we’d gotten done with that, I asked her if she wanted to be my study buddy. She looked at her portable telephone and said that we couldn’t do it right now, but if I wanted to come over to her room at seven, we could study together for a while. She lived in DeWaters, all the way up on the top floor.

So I went back to my room and got out my notes for math, and I looked them over until lunch, and drew each of the math letters a couple of more times just to make sure that I had them all memorized. Lambda was the hardest one, because it looked a lot like one of our letters.

I sat with Cedric and Leon and Trevor for lunch, and they were all a little more quiet than usual because they were gonna have to take tests this week, too. And they were probably a little bit worried about them.

Cedric and Leon were also both kind of upset by how they’d lost their game, and Cedric was especially because Aquamarine had watched it. But I told him that she wouldn’t think less of him because of that; sometimes you lost and that was that. There wasn’t any point in worrying about it forever.

He said that he thought maybe they’d do better in the next game, but the Leon said that he wasn’t expecting to win. Then they got in an argument about how important it was to win the homecoming game, and I thought it was kind of silly. If the other team was better than them, that’s just the way it was, and I thought it was better to have fun.

Cedric said I sounded like a t-ball coach encouraging the team, and I didn’t know what a t-ball was. So he said it was a ball on a stick that you hit with a bat, and that didn’t sound like much of a sport to me, but I guess it was something that children played.

And then I asked him if he’d told Aquamarine that there was a dance, ‘cause she’d want to bring a nice dress, and he said that he didn’t know that ponies wore dresses. And I told him that I was gonna wear one and he’d better tell Aquamarine or she’d be mad if she had to go to a dance naked.

I didn't expect it, but Leon agreed with me, and insisted that Cedric had to tell Aquamarine, and said that he hadn’t realized how ignorant Cedric was about the things that mattered to women, and he said he was going to have to teach him even if he only had a couple of days, and then he asked if Cedric could dance.

Cedric said that he could, and Leon asked if he could waltz, and he said he couldn’t, then Leon asked him if he knew the box step, and he didn’t know that either, and Leon hit him and said that he had a lot of learning to do.

Trevor thought that we had enough time to read one poem, so he took my book and found one called My Typewriter, and I liked that one. Cedric said that Aquamarine wrote with a quill sometimes, and she was properly authentic because of it. And Leon told him that was another skill he was going to have to learn in a few days.

When I was walking to astronomy class, Anna caught up with me and we walked to astronomy together, and Professor Miller told us about black holes, which were giant whirlpools of gravity. But before we could learn about them, she told us about escape velocity, and she told us that if we threw a football up at ten kilometers per second, it would not come back down, and she said that we should try it as an experiment.

Black holes had such a high escape velocity, that even light wasn’t fast enough to get out. And therefore they were really really dense, to have that much gravity.

They were made from stars that had gone wrong, and humans had known that they must exist for eighty years, but you couldn’t see them because they were black, and you couldn’t tell them apart from the blackness of space very easily.

But you could find them the same way you found planets, because their gravity affects everything around them. And she told us that they might emit Hawking radiation, but nobody knew for sure, and that there was a telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope which was run by the Haystack Observatory which might almost see one in the next couple of years.

After astronomy class, I flew over Dewing and landed on the boardwalk, then went up to my room to get my math books, ‘cause I wanted to study with Sean some more.

I flew over to Harmon and went up to his room, and he was kind of surprised to see me, ‘cause we hadn’t talked about studying together. And he said I should have sent him a telephone telegram or told him earlier. I said that I had meant to, but I hadn’t known until after breakfast that I was going to be studying with Lisa tonight.

So we took turns quizzing each other from the book and from our notes, and I was feeling pretty confident by the time we got done.

I asked Sean if he felt ready, and he sighed and said he wished he was taking the monster class instead. I said that I liked math, because math was fun, and Sean said I should watch Numberphile movies on YouTube.

I didn’t know what that was, so he opened his folding computer and showed me a movie about Wilson Primes, which were special kinds of prime numbers that could be run through a formula that proved that they were prime, and the result was also divisible by the same prime, which was really neat, and there were only three of them that people knew of. James looked really young, but he sounded like he was really smart.

Sean said that they had lots of movies, and he showed me a page where they listed them all, and I wanted to watch another one, so he said that I could but after that he had to go to Christine’s because he was going to help her study before dinner.

So we watched James discuss whether or not the number zero was an even number, And his friend Roger explained how zero got discovered, and James said that zero was even.

After I left, I needed a little bit of a break, to let all the studying sink in, and so I flew around campus before dinner, zig-zagging between trees and hopping from building to building, making a game of touching a hoof to every roof once before I moved on to the next one, and then I went back to my room and as I flew close to Trowbridge, I saw Peggy in there moving around, so I flew up and knocked on the window until she looked out, then I waved at her and after she waved back, I flew to the boardwalk and came in the usual way.

Dinner wasn’t very good again, but at least they had fish. It didn’t look too appealing, but my body wanted it ‘cause of all the energy, so I got a couple of little fillets. And they were overcooked and bony, but I ate them anyways.

Anna noticed that one of the feathers on my wing was kinda sticking out and asked if she could push it back down, and I told her it was gonna fall out. It had felt loose when I was preening, and I think being under the lab coat had worked it almost all the way free.

She asked why it was coming out, and so I told her that I’d just come off my last estrus and now it was time to grow new feathers, so over the next moon they’d be falling out and new ones would come in. And I told her that she could pull that one out and have it if she wanted, so she came around the table and looked at my wing and asked me if I was sure, or if it was some strange pegasus prank.

Meghan said it was true, so Anna grabbed it by the shaft and pulled and it hung up for a moment then popped out, and I twitched my wing, ‘cause it had been stuck in a little bit more than I’d thought, and I had to reassure Anna that she hadn’t hurt me.

And it felt a little bit funny to have that empty socket there all of a sudden. It was almost like it was cold in there because now air could get where it couldn’t before. By the time I was done eating, though, the feeling was gone.

I went back to our room with Peggy, and started gathering up my books, and she asked if I was going over to Meghan’s for the night. I told her I was going to go study thermodynamics with Lisa, and then I’d be back.

So I went across to DeWaters and found Lisa’s room. Her roommate, who was named Jessica answered, and she looked kind of familiar but I didn’t know why, until I remembered that she’d been a dancer in Frelon.

Since she was there, there weren’t any extra chairs, but Lisa said that she could sit on her bed. And she had a big yellow Pokemon plushie called Pikachu.

We studied together for a couple of hours, not only quizzing each other, but also just reading our own notes and chapters in the book to make sure that we were really familiar with everything, and by the time we were done, I was starting to get tired. So I went back to Trowbridge, and Peggy was dressed in her sleeping clothes and sitting on her bed reading through her notebook.

She asked me if I was ready for my mid-terms tomorrow and I said that I was as ready as I could be but maybe I should sleep with my books under my pillow just in case, and she laughed and said that it probably wouldn’t hurt.

I didn’t, because that wouldn’t have been very comfortable. But when I was drifting off to sleep, I did have formulas and equations dancing in my vision.

Author's Note

My Typewriter
ROBCakeran53 will particularly appreciate this poem.

October 12 [Mid-terms]

October 12

I woke up a little bit later than I'd meant to, ‘cause I’d kind of had a hard time falling asleep, and I wasn’t sure that I was remembering the Gibbs free energy formula properly, so I got out my book and looked through it to be sure that I was right. Then I started thinking that I was a silly pony, and I’d studied enough and if I didn’t know it now then looking through the book one last time wasn’t going to make me know it.

So I snacked on some hay from the bale, and then I put on all my flight gear and filled up my camelback in the bathroom, and went outside to go flying.

It was kind of cloudy and felt like it wanted to rain.

I called the airplane directors and Dori said that I could go flying up to the clouds, as long as I didn’t cross east of Westnedge Avenue, so I decided that I was going to go west, so that I could get a good feel for them.

The base of the clouds turned out to be just a little more than 2500 feet up, and I explored around their edges. They were fairly new clouds, but they didn’t have enough water in them to rain out, and they all looked about the same as far as I could see. If there’d been a break, I would have tried to get a little bit above them just to make sure that there wasn’t a big anvil towering over one, but I didn’t see any openings in the cloud at all.

When we make storms, we always like to leave some in for pegasuses to fly through, ‘cause that prevents two ponies crashing into each other inside a cloud. It would seem like with all that space in the sky it couldn’t happen, but I’d had a close call once, when a mare going off duty was coming through the middle of a cloud just as I was going on duty. We dodged around each other and shouted apologies and I don't know about her but I was a little more careful when I was passing through clouds after that.

I flew along the 131 Highway all the way until the railroad tracks went under it, and then turned to follow them, descending most of the way back, and I followed them all the way to Academy Street before going up to Trowbridge.

I landed back on the boardwalk just as a boy was coming out, and I think I scared him a little bit. He must not have been expecting me to land. I didn’t recognize him, so I think he was a freshman.

I went back upstairs and made sure that Peggy was awake, then I got undressed and went to the shower, and I reviewed in my head as many equations as I could remember which I hoped was all of them.

Peggy got out of bed when I came back in our dorm room, and she got ready for her shower, and when she was getting dressed, she put on a old t-shirt that she said was her lucky test t-shirt. It was pretty worn out, and really tight on her. She said she’d gotten it her last year of middle school and had worn it to a history test and gotten a hundred percent on it, and since then she’d only worn it for tests. And she said that she’d filled out a little bit since she’d gotten it, but nobody ever complained about that.

We went to breakfast together, and I had scrambled eggs and toast because the waffle maker was still broken and nobody was making omelets. And Christine complained about her mid-terms for most of breakfast, because she thought it was unfair that she had two on the same day, and I wasn’t too happy about it either but then again tonight they’d be done and I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and I thought that she ought to feel the same.

She said that she had another one tomorrow morning, and that did seem cruel.

I started getting a little bit nervous towards the end of breakfast, ‘cause it was getting close to time and I didn’t want to be late but I didn’t want to be too early, either, and just be standing out in the hall. And it was dumb, because I knew what I needed to know, and as soon as I got the test I was going to do well on it, but I couldn’t help worrying just a little bit.

I was glad I’d thought to bring extra clicky pens so I didn’t have to worry about running out of ink. If I had a knife, I could pull out a feather and make an emergency quill, too, and use the ink out of the tubes in the pens if their tips broke.

When I felt like I couldn’t wait any longer, I flew across the quad and to the Dow building, and then had to stand in the hallway until everybody had left the other class. And I couldn’t sit right next to Lisa, ‘cause if we sat too close we could cheat off each other.

Professor Brown passed out the test booklets, and he said that we had until the end of class and we were not allowed to use our books, which I already knew because he’d told us before. And then he wished us luck.

It took me most of the class period to complete my test, because I made sure to read each question very carefully. Sometimes mean professors put in questions that were tricks, to make you give a wrong answer, but he hadn’t. I’d been a bit worried that he might because he’d given us the bad formula in class.

And then I had to check over my answers again, just to make sure that I hadn’t made any dumb mistakes, and that the little writing was easy to read. Maybe unicorns would write equations that needed little words and letters above and below the variables and constants, but nopony else would, ‘cause it was really hard to write that small and still have it be neat. Even some of the people were struggling with it.

After I turned the test in, I was free to go, but I decided that I would wait for Lisa, since she was my lab partner and study buddy and maybe wanted the support. I’d be mad if one of my friends left before I was done, although humans didn’t think like that. So I just sat back in my seat and waited until she’d finished and then the two of us went out in the hall together.

We both agreed that it hadn’t been all that hard of a mid-term, and we shared our answers on a couple of questions, and she sighed in relief when I’d gotten the same answer for the fifth question as she had. She said that she hadn’t been completely sure on it.

She said she was going to go to her room to relax, and I thought I’d fly around a little bit to clear my head. I shouldn’t have, because if there was a bad rainstorm after my next mid-term, I’d have to fly in it, but I needed to do something.

I didn’t feel like putting on my flight gear, especially since it was probably still a bit damp from the morning, so I just went around campus and a little ways over Western’s campus, too, and I let all the thermodynamics go back in my mind so that I’d have room in there for the math.

I tried not to push myself too much, because I didn’t want to have to take another shower, and after I’d been up for almost an hour, mostly lazily gliding around, I landed back on campus and went back to my room long enough to get my notes and math book, and then I went to lunch.

There wasn’t any very good food for lunch, either. I made myself a sandwich, which would have been a lot better if they’d had any flowers to put in it. I hadn’t bought any at Meijer in a long time because they were so expensive and not very good. They had violets but you had to buy the pot and the dirt with them, too, and when I’d looked at them they wanted four dollars for it and there were only three blooms. I guess since it was in the dirt it would grow some more, but if you wanted a good sandwich, you’d need to get a bunch of them.

Everybody was a little bit stressed out, and I leaned up against Meghan and let her pet my mane ‘cause that relaxed both of us, and it seemed like lunch just went by in an instant, and then it was time for me and Sean to leave.

I shouldn’t have been worried about my math mid-term—there wasn’t anything that was too hard or too tricky on it. Sean must have thought so, too, because he was actually done before I was, but I don’t think he went back and checked his answers again. And he didn’t stay behind, but he did nod his head at me when he left the classroom.

So since I didn’t have to rush, I took the time to re-write one of the problems in Equestrian, just for Professor Pampena, and then I turned my test in and left the class.

I went right back to the dorm room because it was getting a little bit cloudier and darker, and I could feel that the humidity was going up, so there was a chance I was going to be flying in a storm tonight which I guess would be a good way to end my mid-terms.

I got out all my flight gear and made sure it was ready, and then I used my portable telephone to send a telegram to Mel, to see if he was going to go stormspotting, and if he needed me. Then I turned on my own computer and looked at the maps, and it was kind of a tricky thing, because rain was almost certain, but it was harder to estimate how much there would be, or whether or not there would be a thunderstorm. It kind of depended on what the clouds did while they were over Lake Michigan.

He sent me a telegram back saying that there was only a ten percent chance of thunderstorms and they weren’t expected to be severe, and that he thought that I didn’t need to come out.

I said that I would, ‘cause I didn’t want to let him down, but he said that unless the forecast changed suddenly, to let this one pass and if it did change, he’d tell me.

So I took a nap, and I woke up when Peggy came back in and she took off her t-shirt and folded it up and said that her lucky t-shirt had done the job again and it was time to give it a break until finals. And she put on a new one that I hadn’t seen her wear before, which said The North Face on it and had a half-rainbow next to it.

She opened up our door in case people wanted to come by and relax, and she opened up the bottom drawer of her dresser which had Oberon bottles in it, and she offered me one, and had one for herself.

It wasn’t too long before Rebekka stopped in, and then Kat came over, too, and we sat around and talked until it was dinnertime.

I thought that I’d better take my flight gear with me just in case, and I was glad that I did, because it started to rain, and then the rain just got heavier and heavier, and even though I hadn’t heard anything from Mel, I decided that I should leave dinner and go flying just to make sure that there wasn’t anything bad coming. Peggy said that I didn’t need to, but I wanted to, and told her that if it lasted for a while I would probably go over to Aric’s house after it had calmed down.

Meghan helped me get dressed and asked if I should be flying on a full stomach, and I told her that I hadn’t eaten all that much, and I would be okay. And then I went outside and called up the airplane directors while I was still on the porch of Hicks, but I was still getting wet because the wind was pushing the rain around.

After I got permission, I flew out and I hadn’t gotten too high before I could barely see the college because of how fast it was coming down. And since I’d gone late, after it had started, I wouldn’t be able to see what was coming next until it was right on top of me, unless the airplane directors let me go through the clouds, but I didn’t think that they would.

I flew mostly into the wind, both so I wouldn’t lose too much ground position and so I would have the most amount of time to report if something bad was coming. And I went all the way up to the base of the clouds and felt around them until I knew them, and then I just lost myself in the sky and the storm.

It never got too bad. There were bursts of intense rain, but it was mostly fairly steady, and sometimes when it wasn’t really coming down, I had pretty good visibility.

I had to pay close attention to my watch, just to make sure that it wasn’t blowing me towards the airport. A lot of airplanes were allowed to go through the clouds, and while they probably wouldn’t be flying by the college, an airplane had special instruments so that it could land at the airport in weather like this, and I wouldn’t see it coming at all. If the rain was heavy enough, I might not even hear it.

With my watch giving me the bearing and distance to the airport, I had a pretty good idea where I was, so when the rain finally lightened up and I could feel the clouds towards the tail end of the storm that hardly had any energy or rain in them, I dropped back down until I could see enough of the ground to figure out exactly where I was, and then flew over to Aric’s house.

I was completely soaked, and a little bit tired from all the flying, but I felt pretty good anyway, and i got most of the water shaken off outside of his house.

He got out some towels for me and put them on the couch, and we watched a movie that he had which was called The Great Escape, and it was about a bunch of prisoners who were being held by the Nazis that wanted to escape, and so they dug tunnels under their bunkhouses and hid the dirt in gardens, and they also tried to sneak out in trucks and by making fake Nazi uniforms and they were all very clever. I wouldn’t like the tunnel, but maybe if that was the only way to get out, I would try it.

He told me it was a classic movie and it was based on a true story. And he said that it wasn’t the only big wartime escape, because American and British soldiers thought it was their duty to try and escape to make the Nazis spend as much time and effort as possible to find them again.

We went up to his room after the movie was over. I was mostly dried off, and I had to preen my wings, ‘cause being wrapped up in a towel like that had messed up some of the feathers.

They were gonna get messed up a little bit again, but at least they’d have been mostly right to start with.

I asked him if he minded if I left before lunch tomorrow, ‘cause I wanted to sit with Leon and Cedric and find out for sure what the plan for the weekend was, plus I had to read some of the Bible because I didn’t want to have to admit to Pastor Liz that I’d had a week and hadn’t even opened it. And he said that that was okay, and to let him know what the weekend plan was, too, and I said that I would. He said that he’d like to do something fun with me and Meghan again.

Then I helped him get undressed for bed, and I didn’t even wait for him to get in bed; I stretched out with my hindquarters hanging off and he asked me if I was sure, because this was a new thing, and I said that I was, so he got behind me and got into position. He could lean over and rest his hands on the bed if he had to, but he also ran them down my back and sides and across my flanks, and I didn’t really have any control of what he did at all, which made it more exciting.

He was a little bit cold when he finally got in bed with me, though, and my rear legs were a little bit numb from dangling off the bed like that. He said next time we tried that maybe he’d want to wear at least a shirt, so I got on top of him and he asked if I wanted to go again, because he wasn’t really ready at all, and I said that I was helping to warm him back up.

And he put his arms around me to help hold me in place, and I tucked my head right against his chin, and fell asleep like that.

October 13 [Kings]

October 13

I woke up a little bit early and I was a bit sore from last night, but in a good way. And I snuggled up to Aric and kissed his chest and then put my head down on his chest and dozed for a little bit, until he started to wake up, and then I perked my ears back up and kissed my way down his belly and under the covers and that woke him all the way up.

He didn't let me finish, 'cause he said that it wasn't fair to have me do all the work, and he used his hands until I was really close, and then I finally got up on top of him and we tried to stretch it out as long as we could.

We stayed in bed a little while longer before going down to breakfast. Aric had oatmeal so we made that and I was kind of hoping that Angela would come upstairs and cook eggs for us, too, but she didn't. Still, it was nice to be by ourselves, too.

I helped him wash the dishes once we were done eating, and then he kissed me and said that it looked like a good day for flying, and to let him know what the plan for the weekend was. He said that he'd let people or ponies come here if they wanted, and maybe we could even have a party one night, which I thought would be fun.

I had to go upstairs to put on my flight gear, 'cause it was still in his room, and he helped me dress, and then I kissed him goodbye and flew out his window.

On my way through the yard, I stopped at the birdfeeder, because I think he'd be sad if I didn't. And I dodged the sock that he threw at me, and I tried to throw it back but I missed and I had to fly over to the house and pick it up, and then as I went by his window I just threw it in and kept climbing.

Since I had the rest of the morning free, I thought I'd go on a little bit longer flight than usual, but not too long so that I would have time to read Mark. So the best way to go for medium flights was west, because that got me out of the way of airplanes the quickest, and I decided that I'd go out towards Mattewan and then follow Stadium Drive on the way back and maybe stop at the Doughnut Mill to get a doughnut.

So I got permission from Dori, and I kept low until after I'd crossed the 131 Highway. I'd gone almost due west, just to get there quicker, and I turned a little bit to the south as I climbed. I couldn't see Mattewan yet, but once I got a little bit higher it would be really easy to follow the path of the 94 Highway and then I'd be able to see familiar landmarks.

I hadn't even gotten high enough to see Mattewan yet when I saw the railroad tracks, and those ran right by it, and I knew from following them before that they ran nearly straight all the way there, and it was a little bit lazier to follow them than to look for landmarks, but any smart mare knew that there were some landmarks that were almost permanent and others that were bad to follow because they could change easily. Railroad tracks did not change very easily, so it was okay to follow them.

And I might get to see an Amtrak whizzing past me and that was always fun.

I stayed just to the west of them, and after a little while I could see the red sign with the white S poking above the trees, so I angled off just a bit more to the west to line up with it, and when I got closer I thought that it was such a good landmark, that it deserved some love, so I started descending, keeping it directly in front of me, and when I got there I was just a little bit above it and it was not difficult at all to flare and land right on top.

The top of the sign was kind of narrow, so it wasn't the best place to stand, but if I kept my wings out a little bit for balance it wasn't bad at all, and it was a great place to look around, just the kind of place a bird might like, too.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to land on it—I knew I wasn't allowed to land on buildings off-campus without permission, but nobody had said anything about signs, so it was probably okay. Just the same, after I'd rested for a couple minutes, I took off again.

I picked up altitude over the 94 Highway, and then when it crossed the railroad tracks, I followed them instead, until they crossed Stadium Highway, and then I followed that.

Even if I hadn't had to descend before crossing the 131 Highway, I would have had to anyways to get my doughnut, so I dropped down and when I was close enough to spot the Doughnut Mill, I angled straight for it, and landed in their parking lot.

I thought it would be kind of greedy for me to just get a doughnut for myself, so I bought one for Peggy, too, and I had them put them into two different bags because the pockets on my camelback weren't big enough for both in one pocket without squishing them.

I was kinda hungry on the way back, just because I'd gotten the smell of fresh doughnuts in my nose and I knew that I had them in my camelback, and I kind of wanted to land and eat one but I resisted the urge. And I went back inside and up to our room.

I'd forgotten if Peggy got up early on Thursdays, and so I didn't know for sure if she'd be there or not. I felt like a bad roommate for not remembering.

She was, and she had gotten out of bed but not put on any of her daytime clothes or taken a shower yet. She was looking at her Facebook and was kind of surprised when I came in, and she said she was sorry for not wearing any pants.

I said I had doughnuts, and so she turned around and I gave her one, and they had gotten a little bit squished but tasted just fine.

She told me that the king of Thailand had died, and that was sad, even though I didn't know where Thailand was. She told me he had been the king for over seventy years, and I couldn't imagine what it would be like for him to suddenly be gone.

When we were done eating, she asked if I was going to go into the shower right away, and I said that I could wait for her if she needed to use it, but she said that I'd better because my coat was still pretty damp.

I said that it was drying off, and it didn't bother me, but she insisted that I go first, so I got my shampoo and conditioner and went into the bathroom, and I had to wait a little bit for Ruth to finish and then I went in. I tried to be quick, 'cause I felt bad that Peggy was waiting for me.

And when I got back to my room, she went in the shower while I groomed myself and preened my wings. I lost a couple of feathers on the other side, but not the one I'd nipped off for Aric.

I got my Bible and sat in the papasan chair and started reading it while Peggy was in the shower. Mark was a lot like Matthew, but much shorter. He just described what had happened in one or two paragraphs, which kind of made it easier to follow. And I learned that Jesus didn't always listen to His mother, who was worried that if He broke God's laws, they'd hurt Him, even though He had said that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath. And it said that when He talked to lots of people, He used parables, but He explained it to his disciples so that they would understand exactly what He was saying.

And He told his disciples how it didn't matter what went in them but what came out of them, and said that that meant that the rules about what you could eat from the Old Testament didn't matter any more, and that if you stopped people from coming to Him, you would be better off drowning yourself with a millstone around your neck.

So it was mostly all the same as Matthew but a lot shorter, and it kind of made more sense, but I wasn't sure if that was because I knew from Matthew most of what happened, or if it was because it wasn't as detailed and easier to follow.

Me and Peggy walked to lunch together, even though I was going to be sitting with Leon and Cedric and Trevor. And when I got there everybody was kind of in a more lighthearted mood, 'cause for them and me mid-terms were over. So Leon and Cedric talked a little bit about the game, and Cedric said that Aquamarine and Jenny were planning on driving out after their classes on Friday, which should get them here in plenty of time for the game but they weren't really sure where Jenny could sleep, and so I said that she and Peggy had seemed to get along, so she could use my bed and I'd find somewhere else.

Cedric held out his fist and I bumped it with my hoof, and then Leon did too so he wouldn't feel left out.

Leon asked me if I'd heard about the king of Thailand dying, and I said that I had, 'cause Peggy had told me since she'd seen it on Facebook, and Cedric pointed to Leon and said that he listened to NPR in the morning, and Leon said that he wasn't supposed to tell anyone that because the brothers didn't listen to talk radio, and then Cedric said that he even had a membership, and a signed picture of Cokie Roberts and he said that it was Ophira Eisenberg, and he'd met her and her husband once.

And he told Cedric that if anybody else found out he'd probably be laughed off the football team, but I didn't see why if that was something he was interested in. Unless football players weren't supposed to know what a NPR was.

Trevor said that he'd seen a poem that was appropriate for the day when he was looking through the book before, and it was called The Old Whim Horse.

Cedric read through it and it was really sad. I thought about my great-grandmare and how even when she was too weak to get out of bed anymore, her ears perked whenever a storm rolled off the sea, and I saw Leon wiping his eyes. He said he'd gotten a little bit of dirt in them, but he wasn't fooling anyone, and when we got up to take our trays back, I gave him a hug.

Professor Miller told us more about black holes, and she said that astronomers think about the Ideal Gas Law in terms of density, which was something that Professor Brown hadn't taught us, but she also told us how the laws of thermodynamics said that things went from hot places to cold places and Professor Brown had said that.

And then she told us about how stars die when they run out of fuel, different things happen, and the human sun would turn into a very dense broken thing that had lost all of its electrons, and if it was bigger than our sun and died, it would turn into a black hole.

She told us more about how light couldn't get outside of it and reminded us of the formula for the escape velocity, and the edge of the black hole where the speed of light was equal to the escape velocity was called the event horizon. And she said that black holes were kind of holes in the universe.

It was kind of weird to wrap my head around, because things became strange inside the event horizon, and you could move through time just like you'd move through space, but she said that you couldn't get back out again.

And she started to teach us about relativity, and how time was the fourth dimension, and I wondered if she knew about unicorn spells that let you move through time, although usually bad things happened when ponies tried it.

She finished up by telling us that we'd be learning about special and general relativity next.

Me and Anna walked out of class together and I'd kind of felt that there was a lot in the class that I didn't know because ponies hadn't studied the sky as well as humans, but there was a lot she didn't know, either, so I guess at the end we were both equally confused, but in different ways.

When I got back to my room, I told Peggy that I'd told Cedric that Jenny could have my bed for the weekend, and I'd just find someplace else to sleep, and she said that was okay. And I also told her that Aric had said that we could have a party at his house, and she thought that sounded like fun, too, and wanted to know if he was coming to the football game, and I said that I thought he was. And she asked if I was going to the homecoming dance, and I said I would, and she said that she was going to try and hook up with someone for at least one night of fun, 'cause it had been too long.

So then I thought that maybe she'd want our room to herself, and she said that she'd rather go over to his room, 'cause that way she could get a better idea of who he was by what he had and it would give her a chance for second thoughts, but if she changed her mind she'd let me know and she was sure that Jenny would understand if we had to change plans a little bit.

When it was time, I went over to Stetson Chapel to talk to Pastor Liz.

We talked about Mark, and she said that scholars believed that it was the oldest gospel, and probably the most accurate. She said that nothing that was the same in Matthew and Luke didn't also appear in Mark, and she asked me what I thought about it so far.

And it was kind of hard to remember everything that I'd read before and where it was, but I thought that Jesus was making the rules simpler for people, and He was also doing lots of good things for them like healing them, but I was kind of wondering if I'd find out later that God was sort of mad at Jesus for telling people that they didn't have to follow all of His rules anymore. And she said that she didn't think that was the case because God wouldn't have sent Him if He hadn't been speaking for God, and I guess that was true.

I said that I also liked how Jesus kept telling people to do good things, that it wasn't enough to just make offerings at the temple any more, and she said that was one of the most important messages of Christianity and one that some people forgot.

After we were done talking, I went down the quad to fighting practice, and when we warmed up, Karla wanted to pair me with other people just for the fun of it, so I got to fight with Keith and also Seth, and they both had different styles. Keith was sometimes a little bit hesitant, and I thought that maybe if you knew that you could use it to your advantage, and get in while he was deciding if he wanted to commit or not. And Seth was kind of the opposite, he went straight in, and maybe you could use that, too, and fake him out with an attack and then get him when he responded to the wrong threat.

It was a lot harder to figure out when you had a lot of people or ponies fighting, because when they were all together they kind of had a group strategy and if you spent time trying to decide what anyone was likely to do, someone else would kill you. But when it was only two, you could figure it out, and I wondered if either of them were trying to decide my weaknesses when I fought. If they were smart, they were.

Then Karla said that she had a special surprise in the trunk of her car, and brought out a bunch of foam weapons and said that we could play with them and nobody would get hurt.

She underestimated us.

By the time we were done, most of the weapons had gotten broken, and we all had bruises. We'd stayed on our teams, at least, but it wasn't really clear who had won, if anybody had. And the weapons hadn't been up to the challenge. Karla said that was because they were meant for kids and while we might have acted like children, we were still stronger than her swords.

And we all felt kind of bad for breaking them, but she said we shouldn't, and she hoped that we'd all gotten the fight out of us, and de-stressed from our exams, and everyone nodded and said that it had been lots of fun and by next week most of the bruises would be healed.

I had a stiff wing from a hit to the side of the body, and Seth had gotten me in the backside hard enough to break his sword in two places. And I felt bad about bucking him in response, but he'd been wearing some of his armor, and he said that it hadn't hurt too much, and anyways it was kind of an instinctive response, and he shouldn't have been that close.

The best way to deal with my wing was to fly back to Trowbridge and see how well it worked. It was a little bit painful, but I could fly like that and it wasn’t the worst wing injury I'd had. I just had to remember to not trust it when I was too close to something to recover, and I'd be fine. And probably in a couple of days it would just be a little bit annoying, or I'd be used to it. I didn't think it was going to bother me as much as my leg had.

I hadn't done my lab work, and so I spent the rest of the evening figuring it out so that me and Lisa could go over it tomorrow, and then I stretched my wings a couple of times and got in bed and it took a little while for me to find a comfortable position, because I had a lot of other bruises, too, which I hadn't really noticed until I stretched out in bed.

Author's Note

The Old Whim Horse.

Credit goes to Fana Farouch for suggesting it.

October 14 [Homecoming]

October 14

I was a little bit stiff and sore when I woke up, and my hurt wing had a cramp in it, which was really annoying, especially when I forgot I was under the blanket and got tangled up stretching it out. After I got the covers off and flexed it a few times, it felt a lot better. I couldn't do much about the bruises I had, but they weren't too annoying.

I thought about waking Peggy up so that we could go trotting together, especially 'cause I'd forgotten on Monday. If she didn't want to, she could go back to sleep again.

She was a little bit grumpy when I shook her awake, and she said that I was too cheerful for so early in the morning. And she said that when she fell asleep in class today it would be all my fault, and then she went to her dresser and put her sports bra on and her trotting clothes and she said that I had to carry her water for her, which I didn't mind doing.

So we went out the front and to Academy Street, and then we turned towards my old apartment, and we got out to Caleb and Lindy and Trinity's house in time to meet them while they waited for their bus. I gave Trinity a short ponyback ride and Caleb showed Peggy all the Pokemons he'd caught, and when their bus came Trinity was still on my back, and she hopped off and scratched right behind my ear then climbed up the steps and the bus went on its way.

Peggy said I ought to go to school with her one day for Show and Tell, and I thought that would be a fun idea. Then she said that she wasn't being serious, but it still sounded like fun.

We went to Main Street then back down Dartmouth, past Aric's house, and she said that I should go wake him up, too. And I said that I could and I could see if he wanted to go trotting with us, but I didn't think he would, and she said that she was only joking but it would be funny to wake him up first thing in the morning.

We went around to the end of Dartmouth Street, and then worked our way back to campus. I saw the bus one more time, but we were a little too far away from it for anyone riding it to see us.

Peggy said that she was taking first shower this time because she'd gotten all sweaty and I thought that was fair. So she got her shower supplies and went off to the bathroom and I didn't have anything to do. I thought about starting to read Luke, but then I might have to stop right in the middle of it, so I went to the bathroom instead and sat down on the bench to wait. Maybe Kat would be late and I could take a shower before her.

And it gave me a chance to talk to Peggy, too, about our plans for tonight. We thought that Jenny and Aquamarine would arrive in time for dinner, so we were going to meet them at Trowbridge and then go to dinner with them. Peggy said that we'd want to make sure that we got beer for tonight and she could make a beer run. The stadium was really close, so she said that she could drink, too, and just walk back.

Kat hadn't come back by the time Peggy was done with her shower, so I took the next one, and I let the hot water beat on my sore wing for a little bit to help loosen it up.

I was just finishing when she came for her shower, and I told her she could take her time 'cause Peggy had already taken a shower.

Preening my one wing was a little bit uncomfortable, but the hot water had really helped, and I got almost all of it. I probably could have if I'd stretched a little bit, but I didn't want to hurt it any more.

We both had scrambled eggs for breakfast, and I shared a raisin bagel with Anna. She and Reese hadn't been planning on coming to the game, but the rest of us insisted that she should, because it would be more fun with more people, and I thought that they'd like Aquamarine, too.

And I got Meghan to preen the little bit of my wing that I'd missed, and then I nuzzled her cheek before I had to go off to class.

Professor Brown taught us more about direction of spontaneous change, and he reminded us of the equations, and then how those applied when we were figuring out equations of state. And that led us to the fundamental equations of thermodynamics.

Then we got to look at the derivatives of them, which could tell us even more about how things behaved, even when you changed the quantities or the temperature.

It was a really fun class, because he filled the whole markerboard with equations several times and had to wait for us to get them all in our notes before he erased the board and started again.

Me and Lisa met in the lounge and we went over all the calculations I'd made for our lab, and she promised that she'd get it all typed up over the weekend and we could look at it one more time on Monday.

I went back to my room to do my homework, and when I'd spread it all out on my desk, I thought that maybe I should check the weather predictions for the next week. It had felt kind of rainy in the morning, although it hadn't rained at all. So I turned on my computer and looked and it said that there would maybe be thunderstorms on Sunday, and that reminded me that someone had said that I should tell Cyndi the weathergirl about flying in storms, so I sent her a computer letter and said that if there was a storm on Sunday, I'd be flying in it.

Then I started in on my homework. Maybe on Monday I'd see if Lisa liked to do hers right after class, 'cause we could do it together if she did.

Peggy came back a little bit before lunch and said that we could go get beer right now if we wanted, so the two of us got in Cobalt and went out to Tiffany's, and since she had her car we could put as much beer as we could buy into the back. So we got four carriers of different kinds of beer and also a couple of bottles of liquor which she thought should be enough, especially since Aric would have some over at his house.

When she got back, somebody had taken her space so she had to look around and she couldn't find one that was near Trowbridge and had to park down the hill next to Christine's dorm, so we got to lunch a little bit late.

They had a lot of good food for lunch, like Christine had said, and I saw some older people who were sitting in the dining hall and they all had name badges and numbers, which was the year that they had graduated. Sean said that it was fun to see who had been graduated the longest. The oldest one I saw was 88, but he said that he'd seen 67 one year. It wasn't this year, though, so I didn't think it counted.

Once we were done with lunch, me and Sean went to math together, and Professor Pampena taught us more about non-independent variables.

It was a little bit strange how if the equation was constant you could set it to zero, but that was how you figured out how one thing changed in relationship to the others.

We had to be careful, though, because even when our variables equaled each other, their partial derivatives wouldn't be equal, which didn't seem obvious until he explained how in his example one was when we were changing y and keeping x constant and in the other equation we were doing the opposite, and therefore they could not be equal.

He gave us an example with the area of a triangle, which was pretty basic geometry, except that he wanted us to figure it out how it changed when the angle of theta changed, and there were three answers depending on whether it stayed a right triangle or not and which side changed lengths.

Professor Pampena said that there were two different methods and we should use the one that we liked the best, and then he showed us each one. We could use differentials or we could use the chain rule. And I kind of liked the differential method better, because I knew it better, but then I thought that I should practice with the chain rule more because maybe if I did I would prefer it.

We went back to Sean’s room together to work on our math homework, and I told him that I couldn't stay past three, because I had to be back to my room so that I could meet Aquamarine. So he said that we'd just have to hurry, and he said that if I didn't mind he was going to play music by Lisa Gerrard, which was kind of like Loreena McKennitt.

She had a really beautiful voice, too, and it was perfect for doing homework, although some of her songs were kind of sad.

Humans like to have music everywhere, which is really nice. And there are so many different kinds of music that you can listen to whatever fits your mood. I think that's one thing that I'm going to miss when I go back to Equestria.

We got finished, but didn't have time to go through all of our answers together before I had to leave. I probably could have stayed until we had, but I didn't want to risk Aquamarine and Jenny arriving and there being nobody to meet them.

So I went back to my room and read through Luke while I waited. Luke was written for Theophilus, although I didn’t know who that was.

It started out with the birth of John the Baptist, and then it said again how Jesus was born, then said that He had visited temples when He was a boy and impressed everyone with how wise He was, but then He had made people in another temple mad at Him and they wanted to throw Him off a cliff, but He just walked away from them.

And He got a little bit older and called his disciples to Him, and Luke had written down more details than Mark had, like what lake Jesus had visited and even His lineage all the way back to God.

And then Luke said how after Judas had betrayed Jesus, He healed the ear of one of the priest's servants who had been injured, and when He was taken before Pilate and Herod, they wanted to release Him because they could find no crime which He had committed, but the people in the crowd insisted that He be crucified.

I'd almost finished Luke when my portable telephone rang, and it was Jenny and she said that they were just coming into Kalamazoo now, and I could have gone back to reading, but I was getting eager to see them, so I put my Bible away and waited for them to arrive.

Jenny called again and said that they'd found a parking spot and were walking up to our dorm, so I went down front to meet them and hugged both of them and then we went upstairs and Aquamarine smelled the hay right away and so I let her have some. She said that she could get lots at MSU, and that was one of the real benefits of being a student there. Plus, she said that she'd gotten to model for some of the veterinary students who were studying Equestrian ponies, which she thought was a big honor.

Jenny said that it had been really weird and it had made her a little uncomfortable.

Me and Aquamarine were sitting on my bed and Jenny was in the papasan when Peggy came back, and she hugged Jenny and Aquamarine, and we all got caught up before it was time to go to dinner.

I couldn't decide if I should sit at the usual table or with Cedric and Leon and Trevor, and Peggy said that probably the best choice would be to do what Aquamarine wanted, and I thought that would be a good idea.

So I just sort of kept an eye on her, and I could tell that she wanted to be alone with them, so I went off with Peggy and Jenny and we sat at our table which was still big enough for all of us.

Meghan told me that she'd seen Aquamarine and Cedric together and it was really cute, and I wondered what Leon thought about it. I couldn't decide if he'd pretend that he didn't like it, or if he'd be happy because Cedric was happy.

I thought that it would be a good omen for them tonight, too, since Cedric would want to impress her.

We stayed at dinner a little bit late, because everyone wanted to talk, and because the food was really good. They even had an ice cream buffet, where you could make your own ice cream sundaes, and it wasn't the strange-tasting kind that squirted out of the machine, but proper ice cream that had to be scooped.

Aquamarine came over while we were finishing up, and she said that Cedric and Leon had had to leave to go to their game, and said that they were going to have a party after the game and said that she was going to go, and I asked if she wanted company even though I wanted to spend time with Meghan and Aric, and she said that she would be fine on her own.

The game wasn't for a little while yet, so we all went to Christine's room because it was the biggest, and we had a little party before the game. We played euchre and drank beer and then I had to fly to my room to get my saddlebags so that I could fill them with beer.

When I got back, we split up what was left and I think that all the beer together weighed more than Trinity. I couldn't get the top flaps all the way shut, because of all the beer, but that didn't matter because I wasn't going to be flying.

Aquamarine offered to carry it instead, since she was stronger, and I said that if I got too tired I'd just let her carry me. And Christine said that she really wanted to see a pony riding a pony, so I said maybe we'd do it on the way back.

It felt kind of crowded, but maybe that's because there weren't all that many seats. We sat towards the middle, all in one big crowd, and I set down my saddlebags so everyone could have beer, and then I flew around looking for Aric and Angela and David.

They got there about ten minutes before the game started, and had managed to fit in with all of us by the time the cheerleaders came out to encourage us.

It got kind of chilly for people after dark, but Peggy and Christine and Angela had all brought blankets, so everyone could snuggle up under them. And it was really fun to be in a big crowd with so many people who were really excited about the game, even though we lost. But everyone tried really hard; the other team was just better at catching the ball and carrying it over the goal line and stopping us.

Aquamarine cheered every time that Cedric made a tackle, and he'd hit one man so hard that he'd knocked the football away and he'd picked it up and ran with it and he'd made it halfway back to our side before he'd gotten stopped. That really got the cheerleaders excited, too, and I thought it might be fun to be down there with them, right close to the field. It looked like one of them was Jessica—I'd have to ask Lisa for sure, though.

We went down front so that we could congratulate our team for having a good game, and Aquamarine nuzzled Cedric on the cheek.

Everyone said that they'd had a good time at the game, and Peggy said that she was glad she didn't have to drive home. I said that I wouldn't have let her because she'd had too much to drink and she said that I was one to talk; I couldn't even fly straight. And I told her that was because my wing was hurt and had nothing to do with the five beers I'd had so far, which was only partially true.

Aquamarine said that we could leave her behind and she'd go with Cedric when he got out of the locker room, but it didn't seem right to just leave her by herself, so everyone took turns using the bathroom, and then a bunch of people went off with Aric, to start the party at his house, while Peggy and Jenny and me stayed behind with her.

And we were all standing around waiting when some jerk who I didn't recognize started yelling mean things at us and calling Peggy and Jenny horse-fuckers and I saw Peggy get out her portable telephone, and he started coming over towards us and I saw Aquamarine look over at the locker room door, but there was nobody out there.

I got up in the air and Aquamarine pinned her ears and scraped her hoof on the ground and arched her neck and flicked her tail and he moved in a little bit closer. I could see Peggy and Jenny moving back towards the building, but he'd focused on Aquamarine and you could tell that he was drunk, and she started to turn which I think he thought was cowardice but she was really just getting a good stance, and he moved in and tried to grab her and she let him have it with both hind legs, and he just folded up and collapsed on the ground, moaning.

I heard Peggy say 'Jesus,' but I didn't think He was around. Jenny said we should be careful because he could be faking, but I doubted that he was. She'd hit solid and he'd been coming at her, and being on the receiving end of a buck was no fun at all.

We were still around him when the football players started coming out, and Cedric saw him on the ground—he was sitting up, so we were staying far enough back that he couldn't grab at us—and he asked what had happened, and we told him, and Cedric bunched up his fist and said that he ought to give him a beating that he'd really remember, and I said that Aquamarine already had. So then Cedric calmed down a little bit and he leaned over the guy and said that if he ever came close to Aquamarine or any of us ever again he would regret it for the rest of his miserable life, and asked if he was perfectly clear.

The guy tried to scoot backwards to get away, but Leon moved in to stop him. And then Leon said that it was over, and Cedric just leaned down and helped him up, and he could walk with a little bit of help, so she hadn't broken anything.

Cedric and Leon escorted him back to his car, and when they came back Aquamarine said that she ought to apologize to him but we all thought he'd deserved what he'd gotten and she didn't owe him an apology.

She went off with the two of them, and we walked over to Aric's house together. I kept looking around just in case he'd noticed that we'd split up and thought that maybe he could try again, but I didn't see him.

The party was already started when we arrived, and we sat around drinking and talking and David put on a movie about muppets, but nobody really paid it that much attention. Me and Peggy told everyone what had happened out in the parking lot, and David said he wondered if the man had thought that we were stallions, and I said if he couldn't tell the difference than he was a bigger idiot than I thought.

Aric thought it would be hilarious if he'd been so drunk that he didn't remember what had happened until he saw the hoof-shaped bruises. And Meghan said that he ought to be thanking his lucky stars that she'd gotten him in the legs and not somewhere a little bit higher and more centered.

Anna said that from the sounds of the guy, that was a really small target, and I said that most earth ponies had really good aim, and if she'd wanted to geld him, she probably could have.

It was after midnight when Anna and Reese and Peggy and Jenny left, and I said that I'd be back sometime tomorrow, at the latest before the dance.

Then we had a little bit more to drink and after a while Christine suggested that we could play a game of spin the bottle, and that was a lot of fun. It was really cute when Aric and David had to kiss, and then Aric said that David had used his tongue and that it had been weird. Angela asked if he'd liked it and he said maybe. Then David offered to try again, and Aric said that we'd let the bottle decide.

Christine told Sean that if he enjoyed kissing any other women she'd divorce him, and he said that they weren't married, and she crossed her arms and said that he was no fun.

By the time the game was over, I think everybody had gotten to kiss everybody else, although I'd had a little too many drinks and been up too late to remember for sure. And Christine and Sean were in no shape to walk back home, so they went to the bigger couch and Aric went upstairs to get a blanket for them.

Aric said that he could take the other couch and Meghan could have his bed if she wanted, and she said that it wouldn't be fair to make him sleep on the couch while she got a bed and so then I said that I'd sleep on the couch and they could take the bed and she laughed and said that I was kind of missing the point, and then told Aric that she didn't like him that much yet, and he said that he understood.

So we went up to his room and he took off his shirt but left his pants on and got into bed, and I got in next to him, then Meghan took the outside and I put my head on Aric's chest and Meghan had her back up against me.

October 15 [Homecoming Dance]

October 15

It was kinda hot sleeping between Aric and Meghan. And I couldn't push any of the covers off me, 'cause then one of them would get cold, but I did push myself up in bed a little bit so that more of me was outside the covers until I'd cooled down some, and then I wiggled back down a little.

Meghan woke up first, and I nuzzled her neck and she turned to look at me but she had to be careful not to fall out because the bed was narrow. And she kissed me on the nose then got up to use the bathroom and I got out of bed, too, and I was a little bit unsteady on my hooves because I'd had more to drink than I should have.

So when she came back in the room I took my turn in the bathroom and when I got back she was sitting on the side of the bed, looking out the window at the birds crowding around the feeder. And I stood next to her and looked, too, and I guess us not being in bed woke up Aric, cause he sat up in bed and then came over to see what was going on outside, before going off to the bathroom himself.

Meghan said that now was the perfect time to steal his spot, and got back in bed, with her back against the wall, and I decided that since I was still a little bit tired, too, I'd get some more sleep, so I snuggled in next to her, and she put her arms around me and pulled me in a little bit closer, so that Aric would have room.

I hoped he wasn't going to be mad that we'd taken his space, and he wasn't. He just sat down on the edge of bed and got back in and laid down on his back. And I put my foreleg over his chest, and stretched out enough to nuzzle his cheek, and he turned and kissed me and rested his hand on my pastern, and before too long, we were all drifting back off to sleep.

It was pretty late when we finally got up. Aric had turned on his side and I'd rolled on my belly, and me and Meghan had woken up first but we didn't want to disturb him too much, so we were whispering to each other, and she said that she was a little bit too hot, too, so she had pushed down the covers and pulled up her shirt to just below her bra to let herself cool off some. And I guess Aric had forgotten how close he was to the edge, 'cause he opened his eyes and went to roll over and fell right out of bed, which was really funny.

Meghan used her fingers to comb her hair and then she untangled my mane and tail, too, and Aric went to the bathroom to change his clothes. Meghan didn't have any new clothes with her, so she said that she wasn't going to bother to shower until later, when she got ready for the dance. And she put on her socks and shoes and then when Aric came back we all went downstairs.

David and Angela were in the kitchen, drinking coffee, and they had made a whole pot so there was enough for us, too. David said that we'd just missed Sean and Christine; they'd left about a half hour ago.

Their table didn't have enough room for all of us to sit, so Aric leaned against the counter and drank his coffee and asked what we wanted to do for breakfast. David wanted to go to Blake's, which was downtown, and he said it was really good, and Aric agreed, and he said that I'd like it, but he wouldn't tell me why. Meghan didn't know, because she hadn't been there before.

So we all got in Angela's Alero, and we drove downtown and had to look around a little bit for a place to park, and we didn't find one until about a block away.

But walking was a good way to wake up, and so we went around the block and as soon as we got in, I saw what Aric thought I'd like: there were pictures of airplanes all over the walls and models of airplanes hanging from the ceiling.

I got an omelet and hash browns and rye toast, and it was really good. We were a little bit crowded in our booth, 'cause it was only meant for four, and Meghan told Aric to be careful and not fall out of the booth. He said that if he felt himself slipping, he could grab for the table and he'd be all right.

Angela dropped me and Meghan off on campus, and Aric said that he'd meet us at the dance.

Peggy and Jenny were both in my room, and they said that they hadn't seen Aquamarine yet, and Peggy said that she had called Mister Salvatore and told him what had happened last night, and that I should probably tell him my side of the story when I got a chance, just in case the jerk said that it was our fault. She said that sometimes that happened.

I thought there wasn't too much to say; he'd been mean and he'd tried to grab at Aquamarine and he'd gotten exactly what he'd deserved. But humans have strange rules about things sometimes, so I wrote a computer letter to Mister Salvatore, and I saw that Cyndi had written me one back, and so I told her everything about where we met to watch storms and how much before and I also gave her my portable telephone number because I couldn't remember if I had before or not.

It was pretty quiet on campus, because I think that everybody had been partying after the football game and mid-terms, and I didn't mind.

Peggy said that the shower was going to be in high demand before the dance, so maybe it would be smart to use it now if I was planning on taking one, and I thought I'd fly around a little bit first and then use it to relax.

So I got out my flight gear and went out to the boardwalk, and I got permission from the grumpy airplane director. And so I took my usual route out to the Nature Center, but since I was out there so late, there were no deer, and there were lots of people walking around which I hadn't expected.

I decided that I'd put on a bit of a show for them, so I flew over the pasture and did a wing-roll, then dove down and came up on the path kind of fast, and I flared at the last second to lose my lift but still hit a little bit faster than I'd planned and stumbled a bit on the trail before I got my legs sorted out, and then I was off cantering down the trail.

I slowed down to a trot as I went around the corner, and then I picked up a canter again down the whole length of the trail that ran parallel to the river. And once I got to the top, I did the same thing again, although I had to slow down to get around a group of people who were taking up the whole width of the path and didn't seem to have noticed me.

When I got back up to the top of the hill, I took off and flew back towards campus, and I couldn't resist doing one more wing roll once I was high enough to clear the trees.

There wasn't anyone in the bathroom, so I took my time in the shower, and then I sat on my bed and groomed myself. Peggy had left a note saying that she was giving Jenny a tour of campus, and that they would meet me for dinner, if they weren't back before then. I thought about flying around until I found them, but I decided that I'd relax and read my Bible instead.

So I opened it up to John, and started reading. It was mostly the same as the other three books, but it mentioned some things in specific detail and left others out, and it also mentioned that Pilate and Herod hadn’t found Jesus guilty of any crime, but the people wanted him executed to prove their loyalty to Caesar. And the way it was written felt a little bit different than any of the other books.

And I thought that the last verse was kind of funny, because there was a whole lot more of the New Testament I hadn’t read yet, but maybe John hadn’t known that was going to be there. Or maybe he had, and it wasn’t about Jesus.

So now I'd read the story that was told four different ways, and had different details, which kind of reminded me of how whenever there was a bit of good gossip, everypony would want to share it, but after a while in all the different tellings some of the details got a little bit mixed up or exaggerated. And sea stories did, too, and so did weather stories. And I'd heard that there were ponies who liked to collect the stories and see what was different about them or write them down so that other ponies could read them later.

But I wondered if sometimes it didn't really matter if the details changed a little bit. Everypony knew that the fish was never as big or the storm wasn't as bad in all those stories. And you knew what the worst storms had been, 'cause nopony really talked about them in any detail, at least not to anypony else.

That made me think about the football game last night, and I wondered what the talk in the locker room had been like, and if Cedric or Leon said any of the things they might have said in there to Aquamarine.

When I went to the dining hall for dinner, since I was going by myself, I flew most of the way, and I landed on the sidewalk next to a man who had a badge that said 'Thomas Davis 99.' He said that I was the first pony he'd seen up close, and asked me how I liked it so far, and I said that it was really pretty and almost everyone there was nice, and he said that he'd been worried after he left because there had been a couple of incidents and he thought that maybe the college was changing for the worst, but it sounded like they'd gotten past it.

Then he said that somewhere on campus, there was still a copy of the novel he'd written as his senior project, and he'd always wondered if anybody else had ever read it.

I asked him if he was going to go to the dining hall, and he said that he didn't want to relive that experience of his youth, and then he asked if people still called it Saga. And I said that I'd heard people calling it that, and he smiled and said that was good.

And then he walked off across campus.

When I was getting my food, I saw Aquamarine and I waved to her, and her and Cedric waved back at me, then Leon noticed me and waved, too. And so I went over and we talked for a couple of minutes, and Aquamarine said that she'd be coming over to my room after dinner to get ready for the dance, and Cedric turned to her and Leon just shook his head and that was a little strange.

Everyone was looking forward to the dance, and Anna said that last night they’d seen a bunch of streakers, and she told Reese to go join them but he wouldn’t. Reese said that was because he didn’t want to embarrass them, because he had a lot to be proud of, and she held up her fingers about an inch apart.

I got Aquamarine on our way out, and we went back to my room, which was a little bit crowded with four of us getting ready for the dance together. Peggy couldn't decide between two of her dresses, because she said that she wanted one that would get attention but not be trashy and she finally picked a really pretty blue one that showed a lot of her boobs but not too much. Jenny had a nice red skirt that went all the way to the floor and a silk blouse to go with it.

Aquamarine had a really beautiful dress with lots of ruffles and a nice saddle on the back, and it had a bunch of gems sewn in the trim to highlight the gold embroidery. Mine was a little more subdued; it was a light blue that matched my coat, and I had a breastpiece with my cutie mark on it, which I'd gotten for my cute-cenera.

Everyone had to do their hair, too, and so Peggy put my mane back in a bun because she said that my dress make me look kind of like a naughty librarian, and then Jenny braided Aquamarine's mane but left some hanging down, and she had a curling iron in her suitcase, which she used to make the loose parts of Aquamarine's mane curly, and then she used it on the ends of her own hair, too.

And everyone except me had to put on makeup, and then Aquamarine had a set of formal hoof-boots that fit over her shoes, and she put those on as well, which made her even taller than me.

If I had some silver dust, I'd have sprinkled a little bit on my wings, but I didn't. I hadn't brought any makeup with me.

Peggy said that maybe I could use a little bit of glitter, and said that Rebekka had some because she'd heard Kat complain about it before. So I went down to their room and Rebekka put some in, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought I looked really good.

Jenny and Peggy had to take lots of pictures of us all dressed up, and they also took a couple of selfies and then she decided that we were ready to go.

I wanted to go down to see if Meghan was still in her room and if she was ready to go to the dance, so even though it was a little bit out of our way, we walked down the hall to her room. She had a green dress that came down to her knees, and heeled shoes that matched it.

The dance was across from the dining hall, in a big ballroom called Old Welles. And it was all decorated with garlands and flowers and it was really pretty.

It was kind of odd seeing all the people that I knew wearing fancy clothes, and I guess they thought the same about me and Aquamarine, 'cause there were a lot of people looking at us as we walked in.

We found Cedric and Leon right away, and Aquamarine trotted to him and gave him a big hug. He looked kind of uncomfortable in his suit, and it looked like it was just a little bit too small for him, but it did look nice. But Leon—his suit fit him perfectly, and he looked really good in it. And he looked comfortable, too, like he was used to wearing them.

They had a couple of tables with snacks on them, and a few seats around the edge for people who wanted to sit down, and there was a man on a little podium who made the music, and you could ask him to play a song for you.

I wanted him to play Renegades, but I didn't know how to do a human dance, and it wouldn't be fair for me to ask for a song when I didn't know how to dance to it, I thought, so I wanted to watch and see how other people did it.

Meghan had a different idea, though, and she just sort of pulled me into the crowd and said that if I didn't know any actual dances I could just move my hooves and nod my head, and I said that I knew lots of dances but they were all pony dances and a bunch of them were pegasus dances.

She asked how pegasus dances were different than other pony dances, and I held out my wings. And then she said that she was an idiot for not thinking about dancing in three dimensions.

I kind of got the hang of it after a little while, and I don't know when Aric showed up, but he wanted to dance with me, too. He looked pretty nice—he had pants that he called Dockers and the ugliest tie I'd ever seen but I didn't want to say that and insult him because maybe it looked good to humans.

When we got a little bit tired, we went over to the snack table and had some punch. Aric said he was surprised that it wasn't spiked yet, and if he'd known he would have brought a bottle.

I'd just finished up a couple of really flakey cookies when Leon came over and bowed to me and asked if he could have the honor of a dance. And I didn't really know what to say, so I went out on the floor with him and he took my fore pasterns and had me stand on my hind legs with my forehooves around his waist and on his shoulder, and he put his hands on me and told me to just follow along with what he did.

He bowed to me when the song was over, and he thanked me again, so I nuzzled his chin and he got a kind of silly smile.

Aric got a bunch of people together and said that they were going to dance a SCA dance, and they found a clear spot so that they had enough room. He picked Angela as his partner and then when the song started, and there was some really complicated foot movements which were called the grapevine and then everyone marched forward and turned around and came back, and the girls got to spin which looked like a lot of fun.

Then he asked if I wanted to try it but I didn't think I could do the spins. I couldn't do the grapevine either, it turned out, and if he hadn't been holding on to my fetlocks I would have fallen down.

Meghan was a lot better at it than I was, and she got it right on the second try, and then she kicked off her shoes so she could do the spins right, because she said if she tried to do them in heels, she'd break her ankles.

The dance went until ten, and people stayed a little bit after it was over. My hips were kind of sore from trying to do too many dances on my hind hooves, and Meghan said that her heels were killing her, so when we finally left the dance hall, she kicked them off and walked back to the dorm without them.

We went back to her room and she went into the bathroom to change out of her dress, while Aric helped me with mine. I had to give him instructions on how to unfasten it, 'cause he didn't know. And he was still struggling with it a bit when she came back out of the bathroom in sleeping clothes and she shook her head, and Aric said it was really complicated.

I said that Aquamarine had put it on me and she didn't even have fingers, and Meghan said it was because boys didn't know anything about clothes, and helped me get the rest of the way undressed. And she got my hair out of the bun and put the scrunchie around my foreleg like a bracelet.

He took off his shirt and tie and put them on her desk chair, and I folded up my dress and put it on top.

She had a bottle of wine, and we all sat on her bed and shared it and talked about the night, and she'd gotten pictures of all of us in our fancy clothes, and a really nice picture of me dancing with Leon, too.

I kind of didn't want the night to end, but I knew that I was going to have to get up tomorrow and fly in the storm and I didn't want to disappoint Cyndi, so I'd need to be rested and alert and also we were out of wine.

Meghan told Aric he could stay because it was only fair and he said that he didn't have anything to sleep in because he didn't want to sleep in his pants, and she said if he wanted to he could sleep in his underwear because there was going to be a chastity pony between him and her, and I said that I didn't know much about chastity, which she thought was really funny.

She got in bed next to the wall and had me get in next, and then Aric squeezed in on the outside, and he said that he was really going to be pissed if he fell out of her bed, too. She said that she could use his tie to tie him to the bed, and he said that he didn't think we were at the experimentation stage yet, and she told me to bump him out of bed, but I didn't.

October 16 [Sunday Morning Storm]

October 16

It was my portable telephone which woke everyone up this morning, and Aric had to get up to find it. I'd put it in the bit pocket in my dress, just in case Cyndi called, and I'd kind of forgotten it was there.

He got it and answered and he said that it was Mel, and he wanted to know if I was going to come stormwatching and I started cursing the stupid storm for being so early, then told Aric to tell him that I would, and we'd be out there as quick as we could.

By then Meghan had woken up, too, and it was kind of chaos as everybody used the bathroom and got dressed and I told Aric I'd meet him by Winston, and galloped to my room and then grabbed all my flight gear as quietly as I could, but I still woke up Peggy and told her where I was going, and she told me to be safe then laid back down in bed.

I didn't have time to put anything on, so I held it all in my mouth and charged down the hallway and one flight of stairs, then crashed out the balcony door and took off. Aric was already in Winston and Meghan was standing by the door, waiting for me.

I jumped up inside and Meghan got in after me, and we took off down Academy Street, bouncing over the bricks.

There wasn't much traffic, which was good. And Aric really pushed Winston to go, while Meghan helped me get my flight gear on. She hadn't even gotten all the way dressed herself; she'd put on a sweatshirt and shoes but was still wearing her sleeping pants.

I'd seen the clouds out of the corner of my eye when I flew over Trowbridge, but Aric and Meghan hadn't until he turned onto the 94 Highway, and they were right in front of us, a towering pile of angry black thunderclouds.

He was going faster than he should have, and he came up the exit ramp in Mattewan really fast and then slowed down really late and I had to brace myself on the dashboard when he stopped. Then he pulled into the parking lot next to Mel's truck and an Escape with the WMMT logo on the side.

I didn't want to be rude to Cyndi, but I didn't have much time to talk, 'cause I could see that the storm was moving in pretty quickly, so I told her what I was going to do and that I could answer more questions afterwards and probably Mel could, too, since we'd been working together for so long.

I called the airplane directors and told them that I was going to be up at the stormfront, and Dori told me to be careful because it looked really bad on the weather radar, and I said it looked really bad to my eyeballs, too.

Then I took off and I circled around so that me and Mel could check our radios, and the man with the camera kept it focused on me, and when we were satisfied and I started to climb, I'm sure that he was still recording me.

So I stayed a little bit closer than I would have normally, which meant that I wasn't going to be able to give Mel as much warning, but I didn't think he was going to mind.

I felt the pressure change just before the wind hit me, and I went tumbling through the sky 'cause I hadn't expected it. Then I got right side up again and flew into the wind, and at first I didn't make any progress, but then I broke through and started getting close to the clouds.

I didn't need to touch them to know that they were bad news; they were towering above me, tens of thousands of feet in the air, and I think that if they'd come later in the day when the sun had warmed things up, they might have been able to make tornadoes.

I could smell all the ozone in the air as the storm rumbled and grumbled in front of me, and for just a moment I was right in front of the clouds, and on my left it was sunny and clear, and on my right it was dark and black, and I was alone in the no mare's land between the two, and then I dropped and let the storm come over me like a wave.

For a few minutes, I was soaked by rain but the ground far below my hooves stayed dry, because it took time for the raindrops to make it all the way down. I'd seen how far behind the front the rain was because it was pretty clear on the 94 Highway—there was an advancing line of wet pavement trailing behind the front.

I flew out in front of it long enough to tell Mel what I'd felt and seen so far, and then I let it come over me again, and whatever had stayed dry on my first trip under the cloud got soaked this time around.

The leading cluster of clouds were still building strength and didn't have much lightning in them, but the next ones along did, and I did my best to report where I could see it hitting and how frequent the flashes were, but I couldn't see all that much through the rain. I'd lost the ground, so I was relying on my watch and rough estimations. It was times like this that I kind of wished I'd gotten a bigger navigation map, but my forelegs were already cluttered with equipment.

There were a couple of times that there was enough lightning in the air that I completely lost communication with Mel, 'cause all my radio would do was make static, and by the time it had finally lightened up a little bit, I'd lost some ground position that I hadn't been able to make up, but my watch had kept me mostly where I needed to be. As long as I could keep the bearing and distance roughly the same, I knew I was pretty close to where I needed to be.

He said that the worst of it had passed, so I started coming back down and I lost a thousand meters of altitude before I could vaguely make out the ground, and it wasn't until I'd gotten even lower that I saw the gas station and their big sign, and then I knew where everything was, so I'd already aimed for my landing point before I could see it, and only had to make a minor change as I got closer.

I'd come around so that I was into the wind and I let it help bleed off the forward speed from my descent, which is something that airplanes also know how to do. And I aimed for a lamppost and I was close enough to see that the man with the camera was looking at me again.

I had a moment to think that maybe I shouldn't spark off on lampposts, but they were so convenient and trees weren't because of all the little branches and you had to get closer to them because they didn't conduct as well. And then it was too late, and I reached out my forehoof and a bright blue spark jumped off and the light flickered for a moment and then it was okay.

It was still raining, but it was a gentle, soaking rain. And before I went to talk to Cyndi, I checked the maps on Mel's folding computer, and we both agreed that the bad part of the storm had passed and that there wasn't anything else coming behind it, although it was going to be raining for a while before it stopped.

Then Cyndi gave me a cup of coffee and told me to take a breather and then she had a lot of questions for me. So I sat down on the pavement which was still soaking wet but so was I so it didn't matter.

And when I'd finished the coffee, we had to move around so that the background was right, because that mattered to the man with the camera, and I thought it was kind of silly, but I guess he knew more about making movies than I did. And she had me explain all my gear and then what I did, and what we did in Equestria and it was lot longer of an interview than I'd expected.

She asked me how it felt to be up in the sky alone, and I admitted that sometimes it was kind of scary, especially because I didn't have a wingmare and the storms were too big for me to have any real effect on them, but it was my duty, and she thought that was odd, but I said that this is what pegasuses are born to do.

And after she'd gotten done asking me questions and the man with the camera had turned off his light and put his camera back in the Escape, she asked me if she could have the movie my GoPro had made, and said that she'd give me credit. She said that they hadn't been able to get much footage of me actually up in the storm, which made sense—if I couldn't see the ground, than they couldn't see me. So I said that she could, and we went to the Escape and she attached it to her folding computer and then got the movie out of it.

She said that they'd have a teaser knocked together by the evening broadcast and tomorrow morning they would show the whole segment, and then she said that I was a very brave pony, and she thanked me for my time.

I was starving and soaking wet and a little bit cold, and even though it was raining, Meghan got out of Winston and helped undress me but we hadn't had time to get any towels, so she took off her sweatshirt and let me wear that to help warm up.

I wanted to go into the Speedway and get some food, but Aric said that if I could hold on a little bit longer we'd get better food, and so he drove back into Kalamazoo on Stadium and we stopped at the doughnut mill. It wasn't a breakfast that would stay with us, 'cause doughnuts were quick energy, but I was too hungry to care. And after I'd had a giant cinnamon roll and another cup of coffee, I felt a lot better, even though I was still pretty wet.

Meghan said that we ought to warm up in her uncle's hot tub, and me and Aric liked that idea, too, so when we were done eating he drove across town and followed Meghan's directions to get to her uncle's house. Aric parked Winston in the street in front of the house and Aric asked Meghan if it was okay to use the hot tub, and she said that her uncle didn't mind. I said that we'd used it a bunch of times before, and so Aric shrugged and we went into the backyard.

We got undressed and got into the tub. Aric had just his underwear on and Meghan wore her panties and shirt but she could have taken off the shirt since when it got wet it became almost invisible.

Aric was a little bit uncomfortable at first, which I thought was kind of funny because he didn't seem to be uncomfortable at Sunny Haven except around Natalie. But after we'd sat there for a while and I'd warmed up and the hot water had relaxed all my muscles, he started to seem less distracted.

Both Aric and Meghan were really interested to see what Cyndi made, and Aric promised that he would find a way to record it tomorrow. And he said that we could probably go to their internet page tonight and see the teaser, because that would be the kind of thing that would make people want to watch. Meghan said that the footage from my GoPro was probably going to be what made their segment, because humans didn't get many pictures from that close to storms, and I said that if we could equip all the weathermares in Equestria with cameras, they'd get all the movies they could ever watch.

Both Meghan and Aric agreed that if you equipped a bunch of ponies with GoPros, it wouldn't matter what they were doing—people would watch. He wasn't sure why there weren't more movies from Equestria, and Meghan said it had to do with the export regulations and there was a lot of stuff that people and ponies were still negotiating, and that ponies didn't have very good infrastructure either, but she heard that National Geographic had funded a major expedition to Equestria, and that next year they were going to start a television series.

She said that she'd heard one of the big problems film crews had had was that they couldn't get trucks full of equipment into Equestria.

Then we got quiet for a little while because a couple of deer came out of the woods and started grazing right at the edge of the trees. Aric said it was kind of strange for them to be out during the day, and I thought maybe they were hungry and getting ready for the winter, and maybe they hadn't had a chance to eat earlier when it was pouring down rain. I didn't know if deer would graze in the rain.

We finally got out of the hot tub when we started to get hungry for lunch. I got out first so that I could shake off and not get either of them wet, and then Meghan and Aric got out and she gave him a towel and used another one to dry her legs off.

She turned away from Aric and took off her t-shirt and then put on her sweatshirt, and stretched it down as far as she could before she took off her underwear and put on her lounging pants, and Aric kind of did the same thing, and then he said it felt really weird to be wearing his Dockers without any underwear.

If there had been sun out, I would have liked to relax on the benches for a little bit and let the sun dry me off, but it was still completely overcast, so I couldn't do that. So Meghan dried me with her towel, and then she hung them up in the little closet that they'd come from.

We got back in Winston and drove back into town, and Aric said that we'd ought to stop for some real food somewhere and I wanted to go to Taco Bell, he wanted to go to Jimmy John's, and Meghan said she wanted a hamburger.

So Aric said that we could decide between us, and Meghan laughed when I changed my vote to Jimmy Johns, so we went there.

I thought that I ought to check on Jenny and Aquamarine, 'cause I felt like I'd kind of abandoned them, so Aric dropped us off at our dorm and said that he was going to go home and get new clothes and maybe take a nap, because he was really tired from getting up so early. And Meghan said that a nap sounded like a good idea, and she didn't know how I was so awake, and I said that it was all the flying around I'd done in the morning. So we agreed that we'd meet up for dinner, and then I went back to my room and Meghan went to hers.

I hung up all my flight gear and then I tried to figure out where Jenny and Peggy might be. I thought maybe they would be at Christine's, and Aquamarine was probably still with Cedric, and then I decided that they would probably come back before they left, and I really didn't have anything to do so I laid on my bed and preened my wings and then I went flying around campus looking for Jenny and Peggy.

I didn't find them all afternoon, and it was really funny how on such a small campus two people could disappear so completely. And I'd pretty much given up when I finally saw the two of them walking across the quad, and so I landed next to them, and Jenny said that she was getting ready to go and she'd sent a message to Aquamarine.

Peggy wanted to know if I was coming to dinner, but I said that I would be going out with Aric and Meghan to dinner, and then she asked me about the storm so I told her all about it.

Jenny had everything packed by the time Aquamarine came back, and we nuzzled before she left. She said she'd had a really fun weekend, and Jenny had too. And we both thought that Gusty would have a play soon, and we should go see it, and maybe we could also spend some time in Chicago with Cayenne.

Peggy helped carry their bags to Jenny's car, and we all hugged and nuzzled one more time before they left, and when we were walking back I asked Peggy if she'd found a boy at the dance, and she nodded, but she wouldn't tell me who.

Meghan came by my room before Aric showed up, and when he arrived we decided that we should go to Olde Peninsula together, and Aric said that since they had lots of beer and it was pretty cheap, we'd be better off walking instead of driving. I offered to not drink and drive Winston back, and he said that was a kind of tempting idea, but he wasn't being serious, and besides he'd walked from home, so he'd have to go back to get Winston.

So we walked through town and had a really nice dinner together and all of us drank more beer than we should have, and when we were done eating none of us wanted the evening to end so quickly, so we went down to the little boardwalk that was by the river and sat there and talked for a little bit, and when we started to get cold, we all cuddled up together until Aric said he had to pee, and he went down under the railroad bridge where we couldn't see him.

While he was gone, Meghan asked where I was planning to sleep tonight and I said that I didn't know and it was hard to decide.

She said that Amy would probably be back, which meant that she couldn't have Aric over, but it would be okay if it was just me, and I said that I wasn't sure if Peggy would be happy with the three of us in our room, either, which only left Aric's house if we all wanted to stay together, which I wanted to do. And I asked if that meant she was ready and she said she wasn't sure and we'd just see what happened. She said that she was getting more comfortable with him but she didn't think that tonight was the night and I didn't either, but maybe I'd feel different later.

So we walked back to his house, and he said he'd found the teaser on his computer and bookmarked it, and we watched it and Cyndi said a lot of wonderful things about me. And there was a little short clip where you could just see my blinking light right in front of that big storm front, and it looked kind of intimidating from their view on the ground, and I guess that was what Mel saw every time I went flying in storms.

And Meghan went off to the bathroom to pee and when she came back she said that she wished that she'd thought to bring some sleeping clothes, and Aric said he probably had a pair of lounging pants if she wanted to wear them but they'd be too big, and she was welcome to borrow one of his shirts, and so she thought about that and then said that she'd appreciate that, so he rummaged around in his dresser until he found a fuzzy pair of pants and a grey t-shirt, and she went back to the bathroom to change, and while she was gone Aric took the opportunity to take off his clothes and put on a clean pair of underwear.

He asked her if she wanted the inside or the outside of the bed, and she said that it was his bed so he ought to get to decide, and so he said he'd take the outside again because he'd feel really bad if she fell out.

So she got in bed and put her back up against the wall, and I got in and snuggled up against her and she put her hand over my back and then Aric turned out the lights and joined us in bed, and he put his hand across my back, too.

October 18 [Relativities]

October 18

I woke up Aric by climbing on top of him and he said that I was eager this morning, and I told him that I'd get off if he didn't want to, and he kissed my muzzle and said that he did. And I laid on top of him for a little while after we'd finished and he ran his fingers along my wings and kissed me, and asked if I was going to go flying, and I told him that I was but we could snuggle a little bit more because it was hardly even light out yet, since the days were getting shorter.

I got dressed and then kissed Aric one more time before I went out his window. Instead of going straight for the bird feeder, I went up and landed on the roof and I waited until I saw him stick his head out the window and look around to see where I'd gone, but he didn't think to look straight up. And then when he pulled his head back in, I dove off the roof and got to the bird feeder and was happily chewing on sunflower seeds when he realized, but he hadn't thought to grab a sock, and I was back in the air before he had any ammunition. He didn't bother to throw, 'cause he knew I could dodge it.

So I stuck my tongue out at him and flew over top of his house, and then called the airplane directors to let them know that I was in the air. I probably should have said so before I actually started flying, but I was pretty low to the trees and I didn't see any airplanes around.

The grumpy man said that I could fly to the Nature Center, but to keep low, and so I skimmed over the trees and I took a more westerly course, and circled around one of the dirt mines, because their bucket tractor was driving around making a dirt pile and that was kind of fun to watch, even if I didn't know the purpose of it.

I waved at the tractor before I flew off, and then I continued on my way.

I landed next to the pond, 'cause it was pretty easy to find now that I knew where it was, and I didn't have to worry about scaring the deer off. I did make a bunch of frogs jump in, 'cause they're not so smart and think that anything that's bigger than them is a threat. They're too slimy and too quick to catch, anyway, although I've heard that some Prench ponies think they're a delicacy.

The duckweed on the pond was kinda tasty, and if it hadn't been against the rules I might have landed and had a little bit of it, but I guess that was another thing that the deer got to eat that I didn't.

I did one whole lap of the trail at a trot, then I picked up speed and cantered for a little bit. When I got close to the pond, I could hear lots of splashes as frogs jumped in, and I thought about slowing down and waiting once I got past the pond until I heard them croaking again and then galloping at them to flush them back into the water, but that would be kind of mean, so I didn't.

I slowed down when I got close to the tunnel, and this time instead of flying through it, I trotted through, and my hooves made weird echoes up and down the tunnel.

When I was on the other side, I went up to a short gallop, and when I got to the junction near my normal trail, I lifted off and climbed up to the tops of the trees, then went over them and flew above the railroad tracks.

A couple of the deer looked up at me, then they put their heads back down to their breakfast, and I turned my attention back forward, and followed the tracks until I was close to the 131 Bus Highway, and then I flew a direct route back to campus.

I landed on the boardwalk and went upstairs to my room and got undressed and made sure Peggy was awake, then I went off to the shower, and when I was done, I first took my flight vest downstairs to put it in the washing machine, because nobody got up early to do laundry.

I went back up to my room and preened my wings, and then scratched a couple of loose downy feathers off from the underside of my wings, along my barrel. Those ones were the most annoying when they grew back in, 'cause they'd kind of poke at me and I had to sort of push them back when I tucked my wings in.

Then I got my lab coat on and struggled with the buttons until Peggy finally decided to help me. And I'd almost had it, but it kept slipping out of my mouth at the very last second.

She also put my mane in a ponytail for me, and then I put my lab goggles and notebook and textbook into my saddlebags while she got the rest of the way dressed.

We went to breakfast together and the waffle-maker was still broken and there were no omelets, either, so I got some scrambled eggs and a bagel to share with Anna. Sean wasn't at the breakfast table, and Christine said that he was sleeping in. I offered to go to his room and knock on the window on my way to lab, but she said that now wasn't the right time and asked me if I knew what a Super Soaker was. I didn't, but I kind of got the idea from the name.

Christine said it wasn't as mean as putting his hand in a bowl of warm water so he'd pee the bed, and Peggy asked her if that actually worked. She said that there was only one way to find out.

Meghan said that when she was at Camp Kinawind, one of the girls in her cabin said she'd done it to a cabinmate the year before and it worked, but she'd never tried it herself. And Reese said he knew a guy who was in Boy Scouts who swore it worked, and pranked all the Tenderfeet like that at every summer camp.

I didn't think it would work on ponies, 'cause I couldn't imagine how getting my hoof wet would make me want to pee, and Peggy and Christine looked at each other and I could guess what they were planning on trying.

Since my flight vest was in the washing machine, I had to leave breakfast a little bit early so I could get it and I could have taken it back up to my room to air-dry, but I was feeling a little bit lazy, so I just put it in the dryer, and it would either be there when I got back or else somebody else who needed the dryer would put it on the table for me.

I went out the front door, 'cause that was closer to Dow, and I went down to the lab and set out my notebook and put my goggles on my forehead, then waited for Lisa to show up.

Our lab was about Gibbs Free Energy, and we had to do alchemy in a little calorimeter, and Lisa did a lot of the work because Professor Brown didn't think it would be safe for me to handle chemicals by mouth, which was disappointing. I didn't even get to stir our solutions, but I did get to record all the data.

After the lab was over, I went back to the dorm and got my flight vest out of the dryer, and then I had to walk up all the flights of stairs 'cause I couldn't fly with my lab coat on.

I don't know why but it was easier to get the buttons undone than it was to fasten them. Maybe it was because I'd only really practiced taking off Meghan and Aric's clothes and not putting them on. But it was a lot more fun to take them off.

Once I'd put away my clothes, I decided that I probably ought to wash my blanket, too, 'cause I hadn't done that in a while, so I took them all off the bed and went back down to the laundry room and luckily there was still an empty washing machine, so I put them in and tried not to get any laundry soap in my mouth when I added it in. And then I went back upstairs and started doing the lab calculations, and I'd finished most of them by lunchtime.

I flew down to the ground, and went in the back entrance which was kind of annoying because I had to use my plastic card to get in. And there weren't any dryers that were free anymore, but one of them had stopped so I took all the clothes out of it and piled them on the table, then put my blankets in, and I thought about trying to fold everything up but I wasn't very good at folding clothes and I'd probably do it wrong and ruin them.

Whoever owned them really liked Victoria's Secret, 'cause all the underwear and some of the shirts and pants said that on them. I didn't think it was much of a secret if you printed it on your clothes.

I trotted over to the dining hall and looked around to see what they'd had, but the bounty from the weekend had run out and nothing smelled all that appetizing. They had some more of the square fish, but I really didn't want to try them, so I just got a salad and thought about how next time I went to Meijer I was going to get a lot more anchovies, and I hoped that they'd have something better for dinner, and then I carried my tray over to Cedric and Leon and Trevor's table.

I told Leon that he was a really good dancer, and I hadn't expected that he would be. And he bowed his head and said that he'd taken dance lessons for years, and he even knew how to do ballet dancing. I thought Cedric was going to say something mean about that, but he just shrugged and said that you couldn't tackle a ballerina. Leon said that was true, that they were just like Weebles, and he thought it was part of the reason why he was so good as a wide receiver. He said that several football players had taken ballet to make them better, and he said that Cedric would benefit from it, too.

Cedric said the reason he didn't was that they didn't make ballet clothes in his size, and Leon told him that leotards were very stretchy, and once he tried one he'd want to wear it all the time.

Trevor found a poem for us, which was called Peter Simson's Farm, and he said that it reminded him of Aquamarine, and maybe Cedric could quote some of it to her next time he wrote her a letter. And so Cedric took the book and started reading the poem to us, and then he said it was kind of sad and melancholy in the end, and I thought no earth pony would stand for her farm to be destroyed by a bunch of pests. Not even a monster.

Before I went to Astronomy, I went back to the dorm and got my sheets, and I took them upstairs and made my bed.

Professor Miller started to teach us about relativity, which had both a special kind and a general kind. Special was for motion and general was for gravity. And in special relativity there was a special factor called gamma, and she gave us a formula for it, and it showed how you couldn't accelerate faster than the speed of light.

And she explained how when you stopped a photon of light, it disappeared because it didn't have any rest mass, and how when you went faster and faster, time slowed down but you had to go really, really fast for it to be noticeable.

So what it meant was that time and length didn't always stay the same, which some people had trouble believing, but it made sense to me. And someone asked her why the speed of light was what it was, and she said that was where physics turned into theology, because humans knew how it worked but not why it worked the way that it did.

There was magic that we didn't fully understand, so I didn't think humans should feel bad about not knowing everything.

At the end of class, she told us that she would be driving a van to the Nature Center tomorrow night so that we could look through the telescope and she said that it wasn't required but it was encouraged, and I really wanted to go so I hoped that Aric wouldn't be mad if I did, because it would probably mean I couldn't spend the night with him.

It was a really warm day, and when me and Anna walked across campus she noticed how many people were sitting out on the quad. She said that nice days in October were kind of rare, which I'd thought too, and she said that we ought to make the best of it, so she found a tree that hadn't been taken yet and got out her sketchbook, and I had to go to my room to get my Bible but I promised her that I'd be back.

And when I landed back next to her, she was really focused on her drawing, and I didn't think that she'd noticed me, but when she got done making a couple of lines, she reached out her hand and petted my mane a couple of times before she went back to her art.

I learned that Saul, who had been bad, got blinded by Jesus then healed by Him, and turned into a disciple, and Peter went and raised a woman from the dead, and then a centurion looked for him, and Peter baptized him. That made the other apostles angry, but Peter said that it was what God wanted, and then they understood.

Herod put Peter in prison, but an angel got Peter out of prison and then struck Herod and he fell down and got eaten by worms.

And the whole rest of Acts was mostly about all the places that Paul and his friends went and how more and more people were following them but also other people were angry with them and tried to get them in trouble, and it was kind of like an adventure story. So it turned out that I was the one who got lost in my work, 'cause when I'd finished up Acts, I closed my Bible and was surprised to see that she'd finished her drawing and started on another one.

When it was dinnertime, she showed me her drawings before she put them away—one of them was a dragon, and it looked pretty fierce, and the other one I didn't know and she said it was a Nixie, which is a human breezie. And since she had room, she said that she could carry my Bible for me, too, so I wouldn't have to take it back to my room.

I looked around, but there wasn't any good fish for dinner, either. So I decided to get pizza instead because they had some that smelled really good. And while I was getting a slice, Sean saw the pizzas and took four pieces for himself. And then he said that he was sad that I hadn't seen Star Trek yet, and my ears fell and I told him that I was sorry but I just couldn't seem to find the time.

So Sean mentioned it when we got to the table, and Christine said that we could watch it in her room sometime, but I didn't know when. I didn't like watching movies when it was still light outside. Maybe if we got back from our astronomy field trip early enough, I could watch it tomorrow night.

After dinner, I flew over to Aric's house so that I could tell him that I wasn't coming over Wednesday night because of the field trip but because I didn't have any classes on Friday I could come over on Thursday night and I asked him if he minded if Meghan came too, if she wanted to. And he said that would be all right.

I said that I was going to spend the night with her, and he told me to have fun, then we kissed and when I went to the front door he told me I wasn't going to fool him again by hiding on the roof to get sunflower seeds. I said we'd find out, and took off back for campus.

I flew up to Meghan's window and peeked inside, and she was sitting on her bed reading a book, so I knocked on the window and she turned around and saw me and opened the window and asked what I was doing outside and I said that I'd come in, so I flew around to the boardwalk and landed and went down the hallway to her room.

Since I'd gotten all my homework done, I could afford to be lazy, but she hadn't gotten hers done yet and she said that maybe she could do it in the morning after I went out flying, and I told her it was bad to wait until the last minute, and insisted that she keep reading her book until she was done, and I'd just stretch out on the bed next to her.

And she held her book with one hand and ran her other through my mane and along my back and it felt really good and I must have dozed off, because all of a sudden I felt her really shift around on the bed and I stuck my head back up and it was dark outside.

She said that she was done with her homework now and ready for bed, so she went to the bathroom and put on her sleeping clothes, and Amy turned on the bendy light on her desk and turned off the lights in the room.

Meghan got in bed next to the wall and I snuggled up next to her, and when she was sure that I was between her and Amy, and that the covers were over both of us, she pulled her shirt most of the way up, and I put my wing across her bare stomach, and rested my chin on her shoulder.

Author's Note

Peter Simson's Farm

October 19 [Double Integrals]

October 19

We might not have been able to have too much fun when Amy was still up studying, but she slept pretty soundly in the morning, and so Meghan took off her shirt and let me put my head on her breast until her alarm went off for the second time, then she said that we should probably get up.

I asked her if she wanted to come with me to Aric's house on Thursday, and she said that she would, and that she was really looking forward to the three-day weekend. And then she asked if I wanted to shower with her after I got done flying, and I said that I was going to go trotting with Peggy instead of flying, and that I did want to.

So I kissed her and she put her shirt back on and I told her I'd knock on her door when I was done, and then I went back to our room and shook Peggy awake.

She said that it wasn't even light out, and she was an idiot for agreeing to have a pegasus personal trainer, but she didn't really mean it. And I snacked on a little bit of hay while she was getting dressed, and then the two of us walked out the front door and before we started to run she did some stretches.

We went by Caleb and Lindy and Trinity's house first, and we talked to them a little bit. Lindy had gotten a new Pokemon that nobody else had, which was called an Abra and it looked like a cat in armor. Caleb said it wasn't that great, but I thought he was just jealous of it.

I gave Trinity a little ponyback ride and she asked me if I could go trick or treating on Halloween and she said she was going to be Elsa, and would be really happy if we could go, and I said that maybe I could.

Their bus came and took them away, and me and Peggy waved at them as it left, then we went around the neighborhood and past Aric's house and around almost to Western's dorms, then back along the road between Western and Kalamazoo College until we were back at Trowbridge. And since we came up around the side, we went in the back and upstairs that way.

Peggy said I could have the first shower if I wanted but I said that I was going to Meghan's room, and we'd see her at breakfast.

I knocked really softly on her door and she must have been waiting for me, 'cause she opened the door right up. I think she'd lied about having all her homework done last night—her bendy desk light was on and her book was under it, but I didn't say anything. Maybe she was reading ahead.

We went into the bathroom and she started taking off her clothes as soon as the door was closed, and I got right in the shower and turned it on and stood in the water while it warmed up, to cool me down a little bit and to rinse most of the lather off.

I nuzzled her when she got in and then I sneezed, 'cause her hair was kinda bristly and it tickled my nose, and she said that maybe she should get another Brazilian wax before we did anything, and I said that I didn't mind, I just hadn't expected it, and I said that I thought she ought to do whatever made her comfortable.

And I had to warn her to be careful under my wings, 'cause she might get poked by a pinfeather, if she moved against the way that they normally lay. And she kind of didn't believe me, so she stuck her hand under my wing and very gently pushed back and then said that they felt really weird and sharper than she'd thought, and I said that was why they were called pinfeathers.

We stayed in the shower a little while after we were done just because we were having fun, and then when we got out we dried each other off and Meghan put on her robe and she let me help her pick out clothes.

She groomed me and preened my wings, and I showed her how to tell if a feather was loose enough to come out, and let her work a secondary loose. She was a little bit reluctant, just because of how I'd twitched when Anna had pulled one, but I said it was okay.

I still twitched my wing, even though it was easily loose enough to come out and I wonder if it just felt worse 'cause she was doing it instead of me doing it. I'd pulled out damaged feathers earlier than I probably should have and it hadn't felt as sudden and alarming.

We went to breakfast together, and I decided that I'd have one strip of bacon just for the protein, since they still didn't have any breakfast fish. Maybe we were allowed to make suggestions; maybe they didn't have them because they didn't think that anybody would eat them.

I tried a little bit of their oatmeal, but I didn't like it too much because it was all mushy and you could hardly chew the oats at all, so it wasn't very satisfying. And Sean said that I was turning into a real American, since I had bacon, and I told him to try shedding his feathers and grow them back and then he'd understand. And then Christine said she wondered if angels moulted.

While we were at breakfast, I asked everyone about trick or treating, and Anna insisted that I had to go. Christine explained that it was a special holiday where you got dressed up as something that you wanted to pretend to be, which sounded almost exactly like Nightmare Night. I asked what people did with their treats, since they didn't have a princess of the moon, and Sean said that they ate them all unless they were Milk Duds because those were terrible.

So I decided that I would go trick or treating with Caleb and Lindy and Trinity and I hoped that some of my friends would want to go with me, because it was after school so I knew that I could.

And then I flew across the quad to my thermodynamics class, and Professor Brown told us more about gas alchemy and Gibbs Free Energy and how a lonely gas in a chamber would try to get out and mix with two gasses on the other side of the chamber, even though that would make one side of the chamber have more pressure than the other side. And there was a law about figuring that out called Dalton's Law.

Then he told us about the Haber Process, which made ammonia, and he went on to explain how the entire German chemical industry had gotten started because of it, because in World War One they hadn't been able to get the ingredients that they needed so they had to improvise and then even though they lost the war the companies got really big and were really important. And I still needed to read my World War One book.

That wasn't in the textbook, and so he went back to talking about how we figured out how the reaction worked, and how to take samples during parts of the reaction to find a couple of points on the graph to know what it was doing and what it wanted to do. And then he started writing out the equations and one of them took up the entire length of the markerboard, and I had to put it on two lines in my notebook. I saw that Lisa turned hers sideways to fit it all in in one long row, but I didn't like to go across all the lines like that.

What was really interesting about it was that the product went to equilibrium before it went to completion because of entropy.

Me and Lisa went over my calculations from the lab, and then I gave her all my notes and equations so that she could type them up neatly, and then I flew back to the quad and sat down on the grass to do my homework, because it was a really beautiful day out and I didn't want to be inside if I could help it.

I didn't get them all done before lunch, because I kept getting distracted by the squirrels. They were all out on the lawn today, gathering up nuts and whatever snacks they could beg from other students. You could tell who the best beggars were, because they were the fattest.

I went up to my room long enough to put away my thermodynamics things and get my math things, and then I went to lunch.

They must have run out of square fish, because they actually had normal fish fillets, and it was scrod again, which I'd liked, so I got that and a salad. Everyone was kind of making plans for the weekend coming up. Anna was going to take a train home to Chicago for the weekend, and Christine and Sean were going to visit some friends. Me and Meghan didn't have any specific plans to share, but we'd figure out something by the weekend. And she said that she was going to try and get a spa date for after class on Thursday and I could join her if I wanted to, which sounded like fun. I said that she should see if the farrier could come out and file my hooves, and she said that she'd ask.

Me and Sean went to math together, and Professor Pampena told us we were going to learn about double integrals, which we could use to find the area of irregular shapes by making them into little boxes and adding them all together, and the smaller the pieces the more accurate the area was, like trying to figure out a circle using polygons instead of pi.

And double integrals took iterated integrals to work, and so he drew out the equations on the markerboard and gave us an example problem to show us how to solve it, and we had to solve the inner integral before we could do the outer, and we had to do trigonometry substitution to figure that out, and instead of getting easier, the equation got bigger and uglier as you started solving it, but he promised that he would teach us another way that was simpler but he wasn't going to teach us that until later.

I wanted to do our math outside, but Sean said that it was a little bit chilly, and then he sighed and said that he'd get a sweatshirt. So he went up to his room and when he came back down he was wearing a Kalamazoo College sweatshirt and we sat on the quad by the Olds-Upton building and did our math homework together. He said it was kind of strange to be doing it outside and without music, and he got distracted by the squirrels, too.

That made it take longer for both of us to finish our homework, but we finally got it done, and went over our answers together, and we'd both done pretty well and hadn't made very many mistakes at all.

I told him that I was going on an astronomy field trip after dinner, and he said that that sounded like fun and asked if it was open to everyone. I told him that I thought Professor Miller had said that anyone could come to the astronomy club, but I didn't think that she'd drive him there.

He got a kind of determined look on his face and he said that he'd find a way to get there, and I hoped he did, because I thought it would be fun if he was there.

Then I went back to my room and got my thermodynamics homework again, so that I could finish that. I probably could have not done it until later, since we didn't have class on Friday, but I knew if I did then I'd put it off most of the weekend and be scrambling to finish it when I wanted to be doing something fun with Meghan and Aric, but if I finished it now, I wouldn't have to worry about it at all.

Dinner was almost exactly the same as lunch, which Sean and Christine grumbled about but I didn't mind because I got more fish. And Sean told me that he and Christine were going to come out in an Uber-Car, and he asked what time it was and I told him that we were meeting in the parking lot by the theatre at 7:30, so that we'd have time to get out there and she could teach us a little bit about the instruments, but that the good astronomy wouldn't start until after dark.

But I was a little bit worried because it was getting kind of cloudy and it felt like it was going to rain. And I didn't think that we could see anything if it was cloudy or raining, unless human telescopes could see through clouds.

And when we were done eating, it was even cloudier and there were a few drops of rain coming down. So when I got back to my room, I checked my computer in case Professor Miller had sent us a computer letter saying that the astronomy was canceled, and she hadn't, but I'd gotten a telephone telegram from Pastor Liz who said that she wasn't going to be able to meet with me tomorrow since she was going to be attending a protest, and she said that she was sorry but it had come up at the last minute.

That was kind of disappointing, but I guess it just meant that we'd have more to talk about next week, and anyways I hadn't always been able to make the meetings, either.

Since my computer was already on, I looked at the weather maps and it looked like there weren't going to be any storms at least, but it looked like it would probably stay at least partially cloudy for the rest of the night. So before I went to the theatre parking lot, I got all my flight gear together, because if the clouds were broken and scattered, I might be able to push some of them out of the way if I needed to.

About half the students in the class had come to the field trip, and Anna sat next to me. It was a little bit strange to be driving to the Nature Center, since I was so used to flying there. And Anna asked me why I'd brought my vest and radios and I said it was in case I had to move some clouds. And I heard someone behind me snicker when I'd said that.

I'd seen the building where the telescope lived, but I'd never actually seen the telescope. It sat inside where it would be protected from the weather, but they could move the building off of it when they were looking, and I thought that was almost as amazing as the telescope itself. It was called a Meade 12" LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope, and they had the roof off on its supports so that we could take turns looking through it, at least until it started to rain, and then they had to put the roof back so it wouldn't get damaged.

But there were lots of other telescopes set up outside, which were smaller, and the people out there did their best despite the weather. They looked for what they could find between breaks in the clouds, and I did get permission to fly up and move a couple of clouds out of the way so that they could focus on Mars. It was kind of complicated to figure out which cloud to move at first, until someone on the ground pointed a green laser at the path of where they wanted to look, and then I knew what to keep clear.

I didn't get to do a whole lot of astronomy because I was moving clouds, but everyone else in the class did, and that made me feel pretty good about my work. And when I finally landed, I got to look through the best telescope that they had out for as long as I wanted, and so I got to see Mars, which was really neat. It didn't look like all that much, just a dusty red ball that had lots of craters like the moon did, and I'd seen better pictures in class, but it was still really fascinating to have it go from a little point of light in the sky that I could see by myself to an actual image in a telescope.

And there were a couple of stars that you couldn't really tell from the ground that they were a different color, but you could see that with a telescope, too. And it also was a good lesson in how much things were moving even though it didn't seem like it, because they had to keep refocusing the telescopes to keep looking at them.

So when we finally got back in the van, I sat back where I'd been and when everyone was in, I said to Anna that I was glad I'd brought my flight gear, and I felt pretty smug.

I hadn't had much time to talk to Sean or Christine, 'cause our class had kind of stayed together, but I had waved to them, and I'd seen Sean showing something he'd found in the sky to Christine.

Professor Miller thanked me for helping, and she said she was sorry it had been cloudy and a little bit rainy and next time she'd try to schedule better but the weather forecast had said that there was only a ten percent chance. But everyone had had lots of fun anyways, and we all just hoped that next time we went the weather would be better.

When I got back to my room, Peggy was on her Facebook, and she asked me how my field trip had been, so I told her all about it, and then I checked my portable telephone and I'd gotten a message from Meghan, and she said that we could go the salon tomorrow after class.

I probably could have stayed up a little bit later, since I didn't have any classes right in the morning, but it was late and I was kind of tired, so I just got in my bed and Peggy said she'd forgotten what it was like having me sleep in my own bed, and I stuck my tongue out at her and said that I was going to wake her up at five to go trotting, and she said that I'd better not.

I said that I wasn't really—I was going to go on a nice long flight instead, and I promised I'd be quiet in the morning when I got up.

October 20 [Labyrinth]

October 20

I woke up kinda early and I had a bit of hay for a snack, then I went to the bathroom and filled my camelback, then got in my flight gear. I thought about putting my saddlebags on, but anchovy cans were pretty small, and I could fit a bunch of them in my vest pockets and camelback pouches.

I went down to the boardwalk and turned on my blinking light, then called the airplane directors. I said that I was going to go west over the 43 road, and Dori told me that I could and reminded me of the little grass airport that was west of town.

So I took off and climbed over the trees at the end of the parking lot, and I would have liked to visit with Caleb and Lindy and Trinity but it was too early, and I didn't want to wait, 'cause I wanted to get a good long flight in before lunch.

I think I was in the air before the sun came over the horizon, but it was completely overcast, so I couldn't be sure.

I flew west over Main Street, and I didn't start climbing when I crossed the 131 Highway because I thought they'd be happier if I went to Meijer before I flew and not after when I was all lathered. And the anchovies didn't weigh that much anyway.

I got a basket and carried it back to the canned fish and I had to fly up and get the anchovies because they kept them on the very top shelf. I got a dozen tins and took them up front and I tried to used the computer cashier. I wasn't very good at it, and it kept telling me to put my anchovies on the belt and to get my hooves off the scale and I had to keep apologizing to it when I did something wrong.

The screen was really annoying to use too, because I had to push the buttons with my muzzle and I kept pushing the wrong thing and finally a man came over and helped me out but I decided that I wasn't going to try using it again. It was so much easier and faster to have a cashier do it for me.

I tucked all the cans away and then went out and sat down on the front porch and ate one of my cans of anchovies for energy, then I put the empty can in the wastebasket and flew off, curving over the parking lot once I'd gotten higher than the lampposts.

As I went west, I climbed until I was right at the base of the clouds, close enough that sometimes I broke off the little misty bits hanging down from the bottoms of the cloud. And that gave me a really good feel for the cloud, and there wasn't really enough moisture in it to rain out, and I thought that maybe they'd break up in the afternoon, if they were the tail end of a storm. I'd smelled just a little bit of rain, so probably it had rained last night and these were all that was left.

Or they could have been the leading edge of a slow front that was pushing its way through.

As I got close to the grass airport, I called out on my radio to small airplanes, but there weren't any of them near me, and when I flew by, I saw that the one airplane that was sitting outside still had covers over its windows.

A little bit past that I went by Gene the Pumpkin Man's pumpkin patch, and his fields were full of big, ripe pumpkins that looked pretty tasty. The seeds were really good, too, if you roasted them. Zucche did that every year, and it was a nice treat to celebrate the end of the season.

Sometimes she'd also make a nice vegetable stew and bring it out inside of a pumpkin.

When I got all the way out to the 40 road, I decided I'd got a little bit north, so I told Dori and then followed the road all the way to Gobles. And when I got over town I circled around and checked my watch, and I had plenty of time to get back, so instead of taking the roads or using my watch to give me an almost direct bearing, I decided to follow above the Kal-Haven trail instead.

I was a little bit north of the trail, and from my altitude I could easily see how it bent south and then back north, so I didn't follow it at first, but flew above the road out of town, and when I was to the next little town which was Kendall, the trail was almost right next to the road, and so then when it bent away I stayed over it.

Past a rectangular forest, it crossed over an electric wire path, and then curved a little bit north, and I stayed over it until it made its final turn south to get to the trailhead, and by then I could easily see the 131 Bus highway so I started descending and aimed for that, and flew along it until I got to the dirt mines, and then I turned south to get back to campus.

I landed on the boardwalk and went inside and put away my flight gear and anchovies and then I ate some more hay before getting into the shower.

I sat on my bed and groomed myself and got some more loose feathers off, then I took my book of poetry back to the library, because I thought I should exchange it for a different book. And I looked around until I found one by Alice Walker that looked good, and the librarian asked if I was going to return my World War One book or if I wanted to renew it which meant I could keep it longer and I thought that was a good idea, so I did.

If I had been smarter I would have had my saddlebags with my astronomy things but I wasn't, and I didn't. So I had to go back to my room with my new poetry book in my mouth, and then I packed everything for my class and went to lunch.

I wasn't too upset that they didn't have any good fish again, since I had all my anchovies, and so I just got a salad and also a piece of pumpkin pie, and I went and sat down with Leon and Cedric and Trevor.

They were really happy to see me, and both Leon and Cedric bumped my hoof with their fists, and they mostly talked about football and I said that I thought it would be fun to be a cheerleader at one of their games, and they both said that I should try. So I was going to have to ask Jessica about it, and soon, too, because we were getting close to the end of the quarter.

I didn't like the whipped cream that was on top of my pie; it didn't taste very good at all, and after one bite I scraped it off even though I hated wasting food. And then I got out my poetry book and Leon laughed when he saw the title, but Cedric said that it was true; and not only did horses make a landscape look more beautiful, but ponies also make life more beautiful.

I gave the book to Trevor so he could pick a poem, and he chose one about the fall called These Mornings of Rain, and I read it and I really liked it. I'd never really thought about how rain might feel and sound in the city, but Cedric said it was just like the poem.

After lunch, I went to astronomy, and Professor Miller thanked me in front of class for helping to push clouds out of the way, and she said that everyone else in the class had missed it. And then she told us a little bit about Einstein and how he had come up with his theories and how they had been all published in the same year and they were all very important, and she explained how experiments had proved that light couldn't move any faster than its top speed even if it got a running start.

Then she told us about general relativity and how it included gravity. And she said it was weird because all things responded the same way to gravity, and Newton didn't know why, so Einstein figured it out and said that gravity wasn't a force, but it was a curve in space-time instead and that was kind of strange to think about. And that added a fourth dimension which was time, and she said that the Earth moved ten thousand times further in space-time as it did in just plain distance, which was strange to think about. And there was an equation that used a distance called the Schwarzschild Radius, and when it was small the old physics worked but when it was big they didn't.

And she ended class by saying that how time appeared depended on who did the measuring and that we'd start talking more about black holes next.

I had a little bit of free time after astronomy class before I had to meet Meghan, so I turned on my computer and I studied the weather for a little bit, then I checked my computer mailbox and I'd gotten a computer letter from Miss Cherilyn saying that Gusty's next play was next weekend if I wanted to go, and so I wrote her a letter back saying that I did.

Meghan came over to my room while I was still telling my computer what to write, and I had to stop to let her in and then I told her that I needed to finish if I had time and she said that we did. So I finished it and sent it and then Meghan asked what it was about so I told her.

She called for an Uber-Car and while we were waiting for it she said that Maura had said that the farrier would be there, too.

So we went downstairs to wait for the Uber-Car and it arrived a few minutes after we got there. It was sleek car called a Camry Hybrid, and it could run on a normal engine or electricity or both and so it wasn't broken when the engine turned off at traffic signals.

He dropped us off at the salon and we went inside and first me and Meghan sat in the chairs so that Meghan could get her hair trimmed and I could get my mane and tail trimmed, and we gossipped with the stylists. The one who was doing Meghan's hair had seen me on the television and said that it was kind of scary seeing all the footage from my camera, and I told her that it wasn't the worst storm I'd flown in, and Meghan told her how to find my movies on YouTube and she said that she would look for them.

Stefan came in while we were still getting trimmed, and so he waited around until we were finished and then we went into the little side room. He noticed right away that I was moulting, because he had chickens and they did that too, and he ran his fingers over my pinfeathers and said that was something he'd never expected to see on an equine.

Maura asked Meghan if she wanted to go into the other room right now or if she wanted to stay with me, and she said that she'd rather that we stay together.

Even though she'd seen it before, Meghan looked a little bit uncomfortable when he was trimming my hooves, although he didn't have to do very much since I went shoeless. And he said that my hooves looked a little bit better than last time and I told him I'd been doing more flying and less walking and that had probably helped, and I was trotting mostly on dirt now, which didn't wear them down the same as concrete did.

He said that he was going to file them the same as last time if I didn't mind, and I said that that had worked well, so I gave him one hoof at a time to work on. It always feels a little bit strange after having my hooves filed to stand on them again, and it would probably take a couple of days before they started to feel normal again.

When he'd finished, he reached into his pocket and got me a carrot which I'd been smelling the whole time he'd been working, and he started to offer it to me and then he kind of pulled it back and said that he was sorry, he'd forgotten I wasn't a horse, and I said that I'd still eat the carrot, so he gave it back, and Maura laughed and said that he had quite the way with the ladies.

I hugged him and thanked him, and then we all went to a different room and it smelled kind of waxy in the room, and Meghan asked me if I wanted to see how a Brazilian wax was done, or if I'd rather not watch. I was curious, so I said that I'd stay and Maura offered to bring me a chair because there weren't any extras but I didn't mind standing on my hooves and getting used to how they felt now. And so Maura put on a pair of gloves and Meghan took off her pants and panties and it looked like it was really painful and I don't know why anybody would want to do that.

And so I moved right next to Meghan and she put her hand on my back and squeezed every time Maura pulled another strip of wax off, and we were both really glad when it was over.

After Meghan had gotten dressed again we both thanked Maura, and Meghan ordered another Uber-Car to come and get us. And it took about a half hour, so we sat in the front and chatted and made plans for the weekend. The weather was supposed to be really nice and so we thought it would be fun to go to the beach tomorrow if Aric wanted to.

The car we got to go back to campus in was called a Sonic, and it wasn't as nice as the Camry had been.

We had enough time for dinner together, and everyone was kind of surprised to see me, so I explained how Pastor Liz had had to cancel our meeting because she was going to a protest.

I'd gotten a kind of light dinner, because afterwards I'd be fighting, and I hated doing a lot of exercise on a full belly.

Me and Peggy and Meghan walked back to our dorm together, and Meghan asked if Aric would pick her up after bell choir, and I said that I'd tell him to, and then she crouched down and nuzzled me, which Peggy thought was really funny. And she said that maybe Meghan was turning into a pony, and Meghan said back in Equestrian that Peggy was just jealous.

So I got my glaive and then I walked down to the park so that I could get more used to the new feel of my hooves. And we all stretched out and went through the warmups, and then we got to do one-on-one fighting and I got to practice with Stellan and Seth and Karla and Aric, and when we took a break before she set up a little challenge, I told them about the little fight that me and Aquamarine had gotten into last weekend (it was mostly Aquamarine). So then I had to explain how obvious it was that she was trying to make him back down but he hadn't figured it out and nobody else really knew either, so Stellan got his boxing gloves and we put them on my hind hooves and so I demonstrated. He knew what was coming, since we'd done it together before.

But he let me hit him anyway, since it was a learning opportunity for everyone else. And I didn't put as much force into it as I could have, and only used one hind leg, and aimed for the thick muscle in his thigh which also had armor over it. Even if I had gone for a full kick, I couldn't hit as hard as an earth pony.

So then everyone else wanted to try, even Aric, and Karla had to remind everyone to move slow the first time, and I said that if they were trying to dodge I couldn't be sure I'd hit where I meant to, but we did it anyway.

The boxing shoes made it really weird, because my nose was down a bit and my hind hooves didn't move like they usually did, but I did pretty well, so everyone got the opportunity to feel what it was like. And then they were curious just how hard I could kick if I really wanted to, so we found a board in the back of Stellan's car, and he fastened it to the side of a tree so it stuck out and was a decent target for me, and Aric helped me get the boxing gloves off, and then I tried a practice kick at it to make sure that it was at a good height, and then I got it a second time and I didn't break it all the way off but I cracked the wood, and I said that Aquamarine probably would have broken it off if she'd kicked it, 'cause she was a lot stronger than I was.

That had taken up most of the time that Karla had planned for a battle, and I told her I was sorry, but she said that it was okay, because it had been very educational, and everyone now knew how to tell if a pony was about to kick them. And Aric said that the best thing to do was get out of the way, which I agreed with.

Aric and I got in Winston and I told him that we needed to pick up Meghan, so he drove up to Trowbridge and since we weren't going to be inside for very long, and there weren't any spaces to park in anyway, he stopped right by the door and turned on the flashing lights, and we went inside to her room.

This time, she'd packed a duffel bag, and so the three of us went down and got in Winston and I told Aric about our plan to go to the beach and he liked that plan. And just as soon as we'd said that it started raining, and he said that was a good omen.

When he got to Dartmouth Street, he stopped Winston and asked me if I wanted to drive the rest of the way, and Meghan said that that was a dumb idea, and I told her that we'd done it a bunch of times and I could even pick gears, and she shook her head and asked him if her seat belt worked right. He said that there was no way to know for sure unless we tried it, and he'd rather not find out, and he explained that he was working the pedals, so if I messed up, he could stop Winston, and I don't think that reassured her too much but I got all the way to his driveway without crashing again.

I asked if the movie of me that Cyndi had made was on the internet and Aric said that we could find it, so we went up to his room and I sat on his lap and Meghan stood behind him and he found the movie and played it a couple of times.

It was kind of embarrassing how many nice things Cyndi said about me, and they weren't all quite true, either, but I guess they were close enough for most people who would watch the movie. And it was really neat how cleverly she'd mixed everything together, from her talking to me and the view from the ground and the view from the GoPro. And Mel looked like he was a little uncomfortable being interviewed but also enthusiastic, and he also had a lot of nice things to say about me.

Then Aric said that we should get some beer, and we didn't feel like taking Winston, so we walked to Tiffany's and picked some out, and when we got back home he looked through all the movie-records that were by the television, and he asked Meghan how she felt about watching Labyrinth. And she said that she liked that movie, and I'd wanted to watch it, too, so he put that in and we all sat on the couch with me in the middle.

I thought that the goblin king was kind of mean, but I don't think he could help himself, and that Sarah kind of deserved it for being bad and not taking care of her little brother like she should have. Sometimes younger siblings are annoying but you need to watch out for them and take care of them and keep them safe.

It was really neat how he moved the glass balls in his hand, and Meghan said that she'd forgotten just how much of David Bowie you could see in the movie and how had they gotten away with letting him wear pants like that, and Aric said it made him a little uncomfortable, and Meghan asked if he was worried that he couldn't measure up. And Aric admitted that it was true, but he said that in his defense not many men could measure up to David Bowie.

We talked for a little bit about how in the human world almost everything in the movie was make-believe, and that was kind of strange to me because there wasn't a lot in the movie that I thought was made-up. I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from the human perspective, and I could imagine Discord being a goblin king and I think he would do almost the same things if he were. I don't think he'd want a baby, though, but he might pretend he did just to annoy somepony else.

It was kinda late when we finally went upstairs but it didn't matter because we didn't have any classes tomorrow. And after Aric had peed, Meghan went to the bathroom to put on her sleeping clothes, and Aric put on the fuzzy pants she'd borrowed last weekend while she was in there. The button that held the front shut was unbuttoned and I was thinking about taking advantage of that but I knew that I probably shouldn't because when Meghan came back she wouldn't want to see that.

She got on the inside again, and I got up next to her and snuggled against her, and then Aric laid down on the outside of the bed and they banged their legs together and Aric apologized and she said it was okay, and it took a couple of minutes before we were all comfortable, and then when we were I kissed both of them and Meghan put her hand on the top of my head and scratched me behind the ears.

October 21 [South Haven]

October 21

The three of us were kind of lazy in the morning, and even after we had all woken up, we stayed in bed snuggling. I had to push the covers down some, ‘cause I was too hot, and since I didn’t want either of them to get too cold, I stretched my wing out over both of them.

After we got out of bed, Aric looked at the weather prediction on his portable telephone and said that it still looked like a good day to go to the beach like me and Meghan had been thinking.

So we all took turns in the bathroom, and Meghan went last so that she could get dressed. Then she came back to our room and the three of us went downstairs, and instead of eating food at his house, we walked to Nina’s to have breakfast.

When we were done eating, we walked back to his house and Aric said that we could have a picnic lunch in South Haven, he just needed to buy picnic supplies. And so he went into the garage and got his ice chest and put that in the back of Winston, but he didn’t have any food for it yet. And he asked Meghan if she wanted him to put the top on the back of Winston, in case she wanted it so that she could change into her swimming clothes on the beach. She said that it probably wasn’t worth the effort to move it to Winston.

Aric went and got his swimming clothes together, and Meghan got her duffel bag, and then we all got in Winston and drove through town to Meijer, and he and Meghan picked out sliced meat and sliced cheese and sliced bread for sandwiches and two bags of potato chips, and then we went to the front to check out.

Aric didn't have as much trouble with the computer cashier as I'd had, but I still think a real human cashier would be faster.

When we got out to the parking lot, I almost took flight, just out of habit. I looked both ways for cars then up and then I had my wings out before I remembered that we'd driven to Meijer and were driving together to South Haven.

Aric sorted out the food and put most of it in the icebox, along with the ice, but he had one bag that he needed to keep in the cab, and so it was a bit crowded.

Before he started Winston, Aric asked if we wanted to take the direct route or the scenic route, and both me and Meghan thought the scenic route would be more fun, so instead of getting on the 43 road, he drove on 9th Street until he got to H Avenue, and drove that way until we'd gotten to the dirt road with the little clearing and after that I got a little bit lost and Meghan did, too. But Aric knew where he was going.

There were a lot of dirt roads we went down and one was really twisty and was on the side of a hill in a couple of places, so there was a drop-off to the side. He drove in the middle of the road and had to slow down on the turns in case someone was coming the other way.

It was really pretty and we had lots of time to enjoy all the trees and plants that were right up to the edge of the road, and there were a few sections of the road that went quite a while without going by any houses.

We came in south of South Haven, and had to drive on the Blue Star Highway to get into town. I thought that was a good name for a road; I even knew a pony who was named that. I think he would have liked to know that there was an important road with the same name as him.

Aric parked next to the beach, but we couldn't get out of Winston yet because both Meghan and Aric had to change into their swimming clothes. And they both decided that they would do it in Winston rather than go to the beach bathroom. It was easiest on the right side, so Aric got out and waited until Meghan had changed, and then he got in her side and also changed clothes.

She went to the beach still wearing her normal clothes over her swimming clothes and didn't get all the way undressed until we'd found a spot that we liked that was close to the water and not too crowded.

I wanted to go swimming and I wanted to go flying, and neither Aric or Meghan wanted to go in the water right away, so I said that I was going to fly over the lake for a little bit, and I left them together on the beach.

I hadn't brought any of my flight gear, so I couldn't go very high, but I knew that if I stayed a few hundred feet above the water and kept a good watch, I'd be safe from airplanes, so I flew out over the water and then across the harbor entrance, and then I kept going south along the shoreline.

There were lots of houses on the bluff that overlooked the lake, and some of them had small boats up on the beach. And a couple of houses where the owners weren't very neighborly had wooden fences across the beach so that you'd have to walk in the water to get around them, or fly like I did.

I don't know how far south I flew, but I got to another beach that a lot of people were enjoying and I could see Arveys and tents a little bit further in, which meant that it was a campsite, and just beyond that there was a big cylindrical cement tower, and that was a power plant that I wasn't allowed to fly near.

I thought that since I hadn't gotten to the end of the public beach, I wasn't too close yet, but I didn't want to fly on any further, so I turned around and went back north.

This time, instead of staying along the shore, I flew almost due north, which put me a little ways out over the lake but not so far that I couldn't easily see the shore, which would keep me from getting lost. And even if I hadn't paid attention to any other landmark on my way, the lighthouse at the end of the jetty was really hard to miss, and when I got perpendicular to it, I dove down a little bit until I was only a couple of meters above the wavetops and came in to shore that way. It meant that I had to be alert in case there were boats, because a lot of them were tall enough to run into me.

I saw one coming out of the harbor so I dropped down a little more, until if I'd dropped my hooves they would have gotten wet on the tops of waves, and I tried to sneak up on it. It might have worked if the waves were bigger—I'd been able to sneak up on fishing boats that way, by following in the trough behind a wave, and aiming for its mast, but I don't think I fooled anyone on this boat, and when I got kind of close to it, I broke off and climbed up a little bit to get over the swimming area, then I landed next to Meghan and Aric.

Aric got me a beer out of the icebox and I sat down next to them and let the wind dry me off a little bit, then I said that I was going to go swimming.

So the three of us went down to the water and started playing around in it, first where it was shallow, and then I went a little bit further out until the waves lifted my hooves off the bottom, which wasn't very deep for Meghan or Aric. And then they wanted to go out further, and so I paddled along beside them until Aric decided that I was going too slow, and then he towed me by a foreleg, until he was in water up to his nipples.

He dove under and started swimming around underwater, then came back up and splashed me and Meghan, and then disappeared again.

I thought that maybe he was going to try and sneak up on us, because that was always fun to do, so I held my breath and dove under the water, flapping my wings to move me through it, and it was kind of murky and I didn't see him because I couldn't see too far. And I kind of moved off a little bit further out in the lake, and when I came back up, he was standing next to Meghan and they were both looking around for me.

Since I knew where they were, I went back under and aimed in that direction but I missed them and came up behind Meghan and off to the side, and I didn't see Aric again, and I thought it would be funny if the two of us ran into each other underwater.

We didn't, though, and this time my aim was better and I came up right behind Meghan and I bumped right into her on purpose, then popped out of the water as she turned around.

Then Aric managed to grab her legs, and he pushed her up a little bit in the water before coming to the surface next to her, and so then it was kind of a game to see who could grab who and the last person down was kind of the target.

Since I couldn't reach the ground, I turned into one of the easiest targets, and Aric picked me up on his back once, and Meghan also managed to get my legs once, and I had to resist the urge to kick down, 'cause it wasn't good to be grabbed by something in the water. But there weren't any sea monsters in Lake Michigan; there weren't even any sharks. Aric claimed that there were sturgeon in Lake Superior that were big enough to eat a man, but I wasn't sure I believed him.

After we'd gotten done playing in the water, we went back to shore to have some lunch and dry off, and after we'd eaten we couldn't go right back in the water because Aric and Meghan both agreed that if people did, they'd get cramps and drown. I said that didn't happen to ponies, but it was nice to have a little nap in the sun after eating.

When we went back down to the water, we stayed at the edge at first and built little castles that the waves would dissolve, and then we moved a little bit further up the beach and Aric started to dig a hole until it got deep enough that the sand was wet, and pretty soon it started collapsing, and so he couldn't dig any further. And I got down in the hole, and Aric said that he could bury me but I didn't want to be buried in sand. Meghan sat down in there and pulled some over her legs, but she didn't want to get covered up, either.

And then all of us had sand stuck all over ourselves, so we went back in the water to rinse it off, and then when we went out further in the water, Aric let me ride his back instead of towing me along, and when he was up to his shoulders in water he asked if he could toss me off, and I thought that would be fun, so he held his breath and crouched down and then pushed up and right as he got to the top of his jump, I flew off and I went up about twenty feet and then I dove into the water from there, like I was a bird trying to catch a fish.

I had to angle off as soon as I hit the water, or else I might hit the bottom, and I had a little bit of forward speed because of the dive but the water slowed me down pretty quick.

I came up and tried again, and this time I did my best to go under and then pop back up and out while still having some momentum, and it almost worked. Dolphins and seaponies made it look really easy, but it wasn't.

Aric let Meghan sit on his shoulders and he carried her a little ways, and I flew around her and then I thought that I could land right on her shoulders, so I did and she held me for a moment until we went off-balance and she started to fall back and I didn't get out of her way fast enough and the two of us both splashed into the water together.

We kept playing around in the water until late in the afternoon, and then we went back and sat on the beach to dry out and have some more food.

Since it was a nice clear day, Aric said that it would be fun to stay until the sun set, and we could watch it, so we sat on the beach talking as the sun got lower and lower, and Meghan and Aric both put their street clothes on over their swimsuits because it was getting a bit chilly for them.

Most of the boats were coming in, because they didn't want to be out in the dark, I guess. And I took another little flight, this time going north, but not too far. It was getting close to sunset time, plus I didn't want to leave them behind for too long.

So when I got back, all three of us sat on the blanket together and we watched as the sun turned a reddish-orange, and pretty soon it was right at the surface of the lake, and then it started dipping underneath it, and then it was gone, and it wasn't too long before you could see the brightest stars and planets appearing.

We picked up all our gear and took it back to Winston, and Aric stuck all the food that was left in the icebox, and then he said that we'd take the normal route home.

Meghan said that she was going to change back into normal clothes, so she got in Winston and me and Aric just looked up at stars and I pointed to the ones I'd seen while on our astronomy field trip. And he said that he had an app on his portable telephone called Google Skymap that was supposed to show you were the stars were but for some reason it didn't work right on his telephone and always thought that he was looking north.

He showed it to me anyways, and he was right; no matter where he turned it always thought he was looking north. But it was pretty useful when he actually was looking north.

Then he said that he saw a boat coming in, and we got in the back of Winston and he could lean his arms on the roof, but it was more of a stretch for me. I could put my forehooves on the front of the back, though, and that got my head high enough to be over the top of the cab and so I could see the boat, too.

Meghan opened the sliding window and scratched my belly, and then she got out and joined us in the back. Aric had to help her climb over the tailgate, 'cause he hadn't put it down and she didn't want to slip.

The three of us watched the boat until we lost sight of it behind the jetty, and then he said that we might as well head for home.

We'd gotten almost to Bangor when he started complaining about his swimming shorts, and he said that he should have taken them off back at the beach but now he couldn't because he was driving. And then he said that it hadn't been a problem at Sunny Haven, because he hadn't worn any, and he said that he wished that there was a good nude beach in Michigan but as far as he'd ever been able to find out, there weren't, which was really dumb since Michigan had so much coastline.

Once we were on the other side of Bangor, he decided that he was going to stop by the side of the road and change, but he didn't want to stop on the 43 Road because there was too much traffic, so he turned off on 52nd Street and there were a few houses, and then when he turned on the next road east which was called 34th Avenue, there was a big section of trees with no houses.

He had to turn off Winston because otherwise it might roll away, but he turned on the blinking lights so that nobody would run into us, and he got out and he told Meghan not to look and he went around to the right flank of Winston and took off his shoes and pants and swimming shorts and then put his pants and shoes back on—I looked 'cause he hadn't told me not to, but Meghan kept looking forward. And then when he walked around the back of Winston again, she said that you could really see everything just fine in the mirror on her door, but to not tell him.

So I didn't, but I was kind of tempted to.

We drove to the end of the road and Meghan asked Aric what it was like skinny dipping, and he said that it was really fun and liberating, and she thought about that for a little bit and then said that she wished that her uncle was gone this weekend, because we could have gone to his house and used the hot tub, and Aric said that he knew the perfect place if she really wanted to.

And she said that she wasn't sure, and she put her hand on my back and started playing around with my mane and finally she said that if it was close it wouldn't hurt to at least take a look.

So when he got by the fish-ponds, he turned down a little road that lead to a parking lot and a ramp into the water for boats and he said that it was Wolf Lake and there weren't any cars in the parking lot and it was a little ways off the main road.

He turned off Winston and turned off the lights, too, and we just sat there for a little while as Meghan thought about it. And then she asked him to get a bit closer, so he moved Winston until it was across the ramp, and she could open her door and she'd almost be in the water.

He showed her that he could turn off the inside lights so that when you opened the door they didn't come on, and she thought about it a little bit more, and then she reached through the sliding window and got a beer out of the icebox and she said she was going to have a little bit of Dutch courage first, and she drank the beer and then when she'd finished it, she took off her pants and reached under her shirt and took off her bra, and then took off her panties, and she looked around one more time and then opened the door and told Aric that she'd get in the water after he did.

So he got out and got undressed on her side of the truck, and he was standing right behind the door, and then he went into the water and waded in until his butt was under, and turned around and asked her if she was going to make good on her promise, and she told him to turn around, and once he did, she pulled her shirt over her head and got out of the truck and went into the water, too, and then I joined them.

I kept my ears alert, just in case another car came, but none did. And we all stayed pretty close to the shore and at first Meghan stayed with her shoulders under the water so you could only see her head, even where it was shallow enough that she could have stood up if she'd wanted to. But I could tell she was getting a bit more relaxed after we'd been in the lake for a little while, and when it was time to get out, she walked up the ramp all the way to Winston and she didn't tell Aric that he had to look the other way.

She put her shirt on and then her pants and she said that she wasn't going to worry about her underwear and Aric said that was a good choice, and he was going commando, too. And she said that she knew.

We hadn't dried ourselves off, but the heater in Winston did that for us as we drove the rest of the way into Kalamazoo, and when we crossed Drake Road and went by a semi-truck, Aric asked if she'd ever thought about flashing a truck driver, she told him not to push his luck, and then she said if he did, she would.

He said that he didn't think that would work, especially with him driving.

Aric parked in the driveway and we got the icebox out of the back and brought it in to the kitchen so he could put everything away, and then he tore open the bag with the ice in it and dumped it out in the lawn where it would melt and I thought that if some animal came by and found it, it was going to be very confused.

We went inside and sat on the couch and drank beer and Aric said that we could watch a movie, but we didn't really feel like it, so we just talked for a while, and I was the first one to get yawny, and I leaned against Meghan and she scratched behind my ears and Aric scratched my back and that was really nice and if I could have fallen asleep sitting on the couch between them, I think I would have.

When they'd finished their beers and Aric had finished mine, too, we got up and went upstairs, and Meghan sat down on the bed and then she remembered that she'd forgotten her duffel bag in Winston and that had her sleeping clothes in it. And so Aric said that he could go down and get it but she thought that was too much work, and then he said that she could borrow his sleeping clothes again and he would just wear underwear because it was pretty warm.

And she said that was nice of him, and so he got them out and gave them to her, and she took off her pants and put them on and then she sort of tugged at the hem of her shirt a couple of times and finally she said that he'd seen them already and she'd be more comfortable anyways, so she took off her shirt and climbed into bed and scooted up against the wall. And I got in next to her and it was a lot nicer to be against her skin.

Aric got out a clean pair of underwear and he put them on, and then he got in bed, too, and he laid on his back even though he was right up against the edge of the bed, and he folded his hands over his chest and asked me to promise to catch him if he was going to fall out of bed and I promised to try but I didn't think I could.

He said that was good enough, and I leaned over and kissed him, then Meghan said that it had been a fun day, and she reached across me and held onto his shoulder and she must have felt how he was hanging a little ways off the bed, 'cause she pulled on him until he rolled on his side up against me, and then she picked up his hand and set it across my back, and then she held onto me as well.

October 22 [Threesome]

October 22

It was a little bit cooler this morning, but I was nice and snug between Aric and Meghan. I was the first one awake but after I'd started moving around a bit I woke her up, too, and she started petting my mane. Then she whispered that her sleeping pants had slid off again and she also had to use the bathroom and she said that she was going to try and get out of bed without waking up Aric or pushing him off the bed by mistake.

He wasn't too close to the edge, so I moved a little bit away from her and kind of pushed him off to the side and she had enough room to push off the covers and scoot out of bed, and that kind of put her pants up a little bit but she still had to tug them over her butt when she stood up.

She wasn't successful in not waking Aric up, but she was out of the room before he opened his eyes, and then he cuddled up against me and kind of grabbed at the covers to pull them back down over me and his right arm.

Aric put his head against my cheek and said that I was really warm, and that the best part of cuddling with me in the morning was how warm I was. And I would have put my wing over him but he was too close to me so I couldn't get it out.

I turned my ear when Meghan came back in the room, and she had to lift the blankets back off to get in bed and Aric grumbled a little bit about that and she told him if he kept complaining she was going to pull them all the way off and give him something to really complain about. Then she wiggled back into bed and we gave her a little bit of extra room to get into bed.

None of us really wanted to get up. Meghan said it was cold in the house and colder in the bathroom, and Aric said that he'd noticed.

We were all awake, though, so we talked about what we wanted to do today. Aric got his portable telephone and said that today was supposed to be cool and overcast, and he said that we could just stay in bed all day, but that didn't sound like too much fun. And Meghan said that the trees were turning and it might be nice to walk on one of the trails for a while at least, and I kind of wanted to go flying, although of course they couldn't go with me if I did.

Aric said that he didn't care too much but that this was going to be his last free weekend for a couple of weeks, until the play was over, and I told him that I was going to Wisconsin next weekend to see Gusty's play.

He asked me what it was and I said that I didn't know—Miss Cherilyn hadn't told me. But I didn't think it really mattered; whatever it was I was sure that Gusty was going to be amazing.

So Aric picked up his portable telephone and started looking, and he said that they were doing Sweeny Todd, with Gusty as Mrs. Lovett, and he said that would be interesting to see. And then he found pictures of the cast and showed me and Meghan who was going to be playing each major role. And they had a picture of Gusty in her costume and she looked kind of scary. I think if I didn't know her I'd be afraid of her.

Aric thought that she had a really beautiful costume, and Meghan said that until just now, she'd never thought about how gorgeous ponies looked in Victorian costumes. She said it was a pity that it would take way too long to make one, and probably I wasn't going to have much luck finding a Halloween costume.

Then she said that maybe we could find enough things at a costume store to turn me into something, and she asked what I wanted to be, and I didn't know. So we decided that we'd go to a costume store for inspiration today, too.

Then Aric got up to use the bathroom, and Meghan laid down on her back and I put my head on her breast and my wing over her stomach and she said that we were probably hogging the bed now and I said that there was room enough for Aric on the side probably.

She was scratching behind my ears when he came back in, and he stopped in the doorway and just looked at us, and he said that we were too cute. And I put my head up long enough to stick my tongue out at him.

He was kind of crowded when he got back in bed with us, and I don't think he was very comfortable, because he got back up after a few minutes and so we tried to figure out a way to rearrange ourselves so that Aric would have enough room that he could be comfortable, and I said that we could slide over and he could be by the wall and that way he wouldn't have to worry about falling off the bed at least. He'd still be a bit crowded though.

Meghan wasn't sure about that but I thought it would work, so I got out of bed and she slid over and pulled her sleeping pants back up 'cause I guess they'd come down when she had gotten back in bed, and then Aric got in and put his back to the wall, and I climbed in the other side and put my head back down on her breast.

Aric looked kind of uncomfortable, and Meghan finally stopped scratching behind my ear and took his hand and put it across her stomach, then went back to scratching my ears, and I fell back asleep.

I kind of drifted in and out of sleep for the next hour or so, and I think that Aric and Meghan did, too, and then we decided that it was time to get out of bed.

Aric put on pants and a shirt and then Meghan asked if he could go down to Winston and get her duffel bag because she didn't want to parade through the house without a shirt, and so he went outside and got it for her, and she got dressed.

We had sandwiches for breakfast, although it was late enough that it could have been lunch. And then Aric asked if we wanted to go walking first or go to the costume store, and we decided that the costume store would be more fun.

He had to look on his portable telephone to find where it was, because he said that they were only around for a couple of months and they took a short lease on a commercial building that nobody else was using, so it wasn't like other stores like Meijer where they were always the same place all the time.

I thought that was kind of like market, 'cause sometimes if a pony didn't have anything to sell, she wouldn't set up a stand because there was no point, so you had to go to market to find out who was there and who wasn't.

So Aric said that he was going to get the toolboxes in case we got lots of swag, and he went into the back of not-Winston and pulled out a long metal case that was notched at the ends, and Meghan offered to help but he said that he could get them in, and he hooked one side over the edge of the bed then lifted the other side up and slid them forward until they were right up against the back window. And she asked why he didn't leave them in all the time and he said that they slid around a lot because they weren't bolted down, and it got kind of annoying so he only put them in when he needed to carry things around.

She didn't think it would be too hard to mount it in and he said that he didn't want to drill holes in the bedrails and damage them, and she said that he was silly to worry about damaging the truck.

We drove all the way down into Portage, and then found the big building which had a banner across the front that said it was Halloween USA, and it was a pretty amazing place. There were a lot of really creepy statues that moved and they had whole collections of fake animals like giant spiders and snakes and bats on one side, and then rows and rows of costumes and accessories in little bags, and Meghan said that the aisles were organized by theme although it wasn't obvious to me what the themes were.

So we looked around at everything and there was so much it was impossible to choose something, and I couldn't decide what I ought to wear because I'd see one thing that I thought was a good costume and then I'd find something else that was different, but I thought that I should pick something so we didn't have to make another trip. It was overwhelming to have so many choices. Usually when I got dressed up for Nightmare Night, I picked something that was pretty easy or that I could borrow from someone else.

Aric said that I didn't have to pick today because we could go back another day after classes, and after he said that we just went around looking. Meghan said she didn't know what she wanted to be, either. Aric said that he'd probably be lazy and just wear medieval garb, since he had lots of it to pick from.

Meghan said she'd wait to make her final choice until it was closer to Halloween so she'd know what the weather was going to be like, because it wasn't fun wearing a costume that was too hot or too cold.

The cashier was kind of disappointed that we hadn't bought anything, but I promised that we would be back later.

We had to go back home to get some food and water for the trail, and I was kind of hungry for a meal, and so was Meghan, and Aric said that we'd stop somewhere for food. And I wanted to go to Taco Bell, and so after we decided that we were going to walk on the river trail, we went to Taco Bell first and got food, and then we drove through downtown and he parked Winston in the little park that was across from the railroad yard, and he said that was the beginning of the trail.

Me and Meghan both knew that it wasn't, even though he thought it was, so we showed him how it went east and past the factory foundation and the railroad bridge to nowhere, and he wanted to walk over the bridge like we had and also look around the foundations of the old factory, even though there wasn't anything too interesting there. And after we'd poked around for a little bit he said that the soil there was probably toxic, which was why they hadn't done anything with it. And he said that he'd heard on the radio that some of the paper mills around Parchment used to have big holding ponds full of bad paper and water and in the wintertime they'd crust over and some people even played on them but now people knew better.

I thought it was dumb that humans would poison their land and water, because how could they use it then? And Meghan said that a lot of people thought more about making money in the short term than the long term consequences of their actions, and Aric said that things were changing but he didn't think they were changing fast enough and he hoped that when Hillary got elected she'd help push through some better environmental regulations.

I hadn't been paying that much attention to the election, but I was pretty sure that Mister Trump was still a candidate, but Aric said that he had no chance of winning because he was so far behind in every poll.

Then I remembered what Meghan had said when I'd gone to the primary election and I said that I wanted to vote for Vermin Supreme and he thought that was really funny. And he said that he would have to look and see if he could find a Vermin Supreme campaign sticker that I could put on my rump.

We walked along the trail towards Comstock for a while and went past the topless Karaoke bar, and I thought that maybe we could go there again, on a weekend when we could sing. And Aric said that maybe we could go tonight, if Meghan wanted to, and she said that she'd think about it.

Then we turned around and went back, and I flew along over the river just to stretch out my wings some. I could fly a lot faster than they walked, so I flew all the way to the bridge where the main road went over the river, then back past them to where another road crossed, and did that loop a couple of times until they had gotten back to the park.

We kept on going along the river, and the walking path went under the road and I flew along next to it, and when we got by the storm drain Aric said that if he had his flashlight we could go in there, but I didn't want to because I didn't like it at all, and Meghan said she wasn't too interested in it, either. She said that it smelled funny and it was probably dangerous and Aric said that was why it was fun.

Well, maybe fun for him, but I reminded him that he had said that he wasn't going to jump out of an airplane with me and I thought that was lots of fun, and humans just had different things that they didn't like than pegasuses and Meghan said that I had settled that argument.

We followed the trail all the way up to the park with the island, and they went across the people bridge to the island and sat on one of the benches there and had a snack from Aric's backpack, and we rested there a while before going back to Winston.

I wanted to do a little bit more flying, even though I didn't have my flight gear, so I said that I'd meet them back at Aric's house and then I took off and flew around downtown for a little bit, just high enough to be above most of the buildings and trees and all the wires. And when I went over Bronson Park, I heard a strange buzzing noise like a giant angry bee, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was, but then I saw a strange little helicopter flying around and so I flew over to get a closer look at it.

At first, it was moving away from me but then it changed directions and I had to turn to catch up to it again, and it kind of darted away and then dropped down and it was kind of frustrating to chase, 'cause it moved a lot like a dragonfly. And then I thought that I wouldn't know what to do with it if I did catch up to it and maybe I'd hurt myself on the little propellers it had, so I kind of circled around and watched it from a distance, and then I saw that there was someone on the ground who had a box in his hands and was moving levers and looking up in my direction, so I dove down and landed next to him and the little helicopter followed me down and hovered just in front of me before it landed.

It was called a drone, and it had a little camera on it, and so you could fly it around and see what it could see, and that was really neat. He said that he'd been a little bit worried that I was going to try and grab at it, and I admitted that I'd thought about it, but hadn't seen a good way to catch it. And he said that sometimes eagles grabbed drones, and he'd wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen to his.

And then he flew it back up in the air again and around the park and I just watched from the ground as it zipped around the trees, and after he'd landed it again, I flew up and went around the trees, too. I didn't have my GoPro; that was back with the rest of my flight gear.

I landed and watched him fly it around a couple more times, and then he landed it again and he said that the battery was getting low so it couldn't fly anymore, which was too bad, because it was a lot of fun to watch.

When I got back to Aric's house, he asked if I'd had a fun flight, and I told him and Meghan about the drone.

Aric and Meghan had both decided that it was a good night for pizza and a movie, and so we ordered a couple of pizzas from Papa John's and then went to Tiffany's to get beer, and by the time we'd picked out what we wanted, our pizza was ready. Aric put the beer in the back of Winston, and Meghan carried the pizza on her lap.

The first movie we watched was called The Great Train Robbery, and that was about some men who wanted to steal a bunch of gold from a railroad train without anybody knowing how they had done it. And when Edward was running along the top of the train I told Aric how I wanted to ride on a freight train, and he said that was dangerous and also illegal and I'd get in trouble if anyone found out.

Then we watched another movie which was called The Incredibles and that was really funny. And after we'd watched it, Aric said that he had the bonus movie that showed what had happened when baby Jack Jack was being babysat, and I really felt bad for Kari. I'd heard that unicorn foals were like that sometimes, and I didn't know how their moms could deal with that. I guess that they could just use their magic to stop the foal, kind of like how my Mom had to fly after me sometimes when I was a foal.

None of us really wanted to get off the couch, 'cause we were all comfy, and so we just sat for a while and finished up our beer, and then we got up and Aric put what was left of the pizza in the electric icebox.

We went upstairs to Aric's room, and since Meghan had her duffel bag she put on her own sleeping pants that wouldn't fall off and Aric said that was kind of disappointing, and she told him that was too bad.

She went to the bathroom to get dressed for bed, and Aric put on his sleeping clothes in his room, and when she came back he said that he'd liked it better when she wasn't wearing a shirt and I agreed and she said it was too cold to be topless right now but maybe once we were in bed and she's warmed up a little bit she'd take off her shirt.

I said she'd warm up faster if she didn't have it on, 'cause then my coat and feathers would be right against her skin, and she said that I had more of a boob fetish than most guys, and took off her shirt and threw it at Aric, then crossed her arms and asked if I was happy, and I nodded.

As we settled in, Meghan and Aric both reached across my back, and they squeezed each other’s hands and then they both started scratching between my wings and it felt really good. And then she started moving her hand further down my back and he did, too, and I was thinking that Meghan was really hot and maybe I should try to move over some and let her cool down a little bit. And then before I could say anything, Aric slid down in the bed a little and he bit my withers as Meghan ran her fingernails down my neck and asked if I was ready.

I said I was, but I was still a little worried about how it was going to work out with all three of us and that if I gave too much attention to Meghan, Aric would get jealous, and if I gave him too much, she’d be mad.

And then Aric said that they’d talked about it while I was flying around, and they’d both agreed to just let things play out as they did.

Aric said that I was the only one dressed for it, and he reached down to take off his sleeping pants but I told him to let Meghan do it, ‘cause I knew that both of them liked it when I helped undress them. So he had to get out of bed because I was between them, and he went around to the bottom of the bed and Meghan pushed the covers off herself and sat up, and I turned around so that I could watch, and I nuzzled her leg, too, ‘cause I could feel she was a little bit nervous.

She scratched my shoulder and then she slowly reached out and then touched her hand to the waistband of his pants and tugged at them a little bit, and then she said that we should do it together. So I crawled a little bit down the bed and leaned in and pulled the string of the bow-knot loose, and then I took one side of his sleeping pants in my mouth and Meghan tucked her finger under them and we both pulled them down together.

Aric had to step back to get them off his ankles, and then he moved back to the foot of the bed and she ran a finger down his leg but didn’t quite touch him. I thought it was okay if I did, though, so I gave him a little kiss, and then it was his turn to undress Meghan. And he asked if I could help, so I had to turn around and I kissed her on the belly and then I held on to her sleeping pants and Aric grabbed onto the other side and she lifted herself off the bed just a little bit to make it easier for us, and we slid her pants down her legs, then she shook them off her ankles and onto the floor.

Then he went and climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up a little bit, and I moved back up into my spot in the center, and Aric and Meghan both stroked down to my dock and then their hands came together under my tail and it was like nothing I’d ever felt before. And pretty soon we were all moving around in bed, trying to get into positions that worked and sometimes it was kind of awkward or just didn’t work at all, and then we’d find something that did and it was amazing.

And when it came to an end, Meghan was the lucky person in the middle of the bed. Me and Aric were both resting on her chest, our foreheads touching, he had his arm on her hip and I had my wing over both of them, and we didn’t say anything because we didn’t have to. Meghan was still breathing a little bit hard and I was a little bit sore, and Aric had some fresh scratches on his back from her and a love-bite from me, and that was okay.

October 23 [Gilmore Car Museum]

October 23

All of us woke up kinda early, and at first we were just snuggling but it didn't take too long for it to turn into fondling, and then everyone was moving around trying to find a good position again, and I got to be in the middle for a little while, which was the funnest place to be but it was also kind of overwhelming because you didn't know what to focus on.

And then we dozed off for a little while—I was on top of Aric, and Meghan had her arms around both of us—and when I woke up again, I leaned over and kissed Meghan, 'cause she was petting my mane, and me moving around woke up Aric, and pretty soon we were trying a new position that we hadn't thought of last night.

The three of us snuggled up and this time Aric was in the middle, and the whole room smelled of sex and sweat and Meghan said that if we were getting up we'd ought to take a shower. I wanted to take a shower together but Aric wasn't sure if we'd all fit, and he reminded me that it had been crowded with just the two of us.

I said that the bed was crowded with just the two of us, too, and that hadn't stopped us from making it work for three, and he said that that was true, and asked Meghan what she thought. She said that she was willing to try it, and then she asked if David or Angela were home.

Aric didn't think that they were, but he said that he'd check, so he put on his underwear and went downstairs to look. And when he came back he said that they were gone and he said that it wasn't fair for the two of us to be kissing when he wasn't there, and Meghan held up her middle finger, which is a human gesture that's sometimes funny and sometimes mean. Aric said that if she was offering, he would, and she said that she thought we were all going to take a cold shower together and calm things down while we were still capable of walking.

So he went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, and I got off Meghan and followed him in and took off his underwear for him, and then Meghan joined us, and she said that maybe we should get clothes just in case David and Angela did come back while we were in the shower, and Aric said not to worry about it, that they weren't morning people and so if Angela's car was gone, that meant that they went somewhere overnight, because there's no way they would have left this early in the morning.

Meghan reminded him that it was almost eleven, and Aric said that that was technically still in the morning.

Well, it was super-crowded in the shower. I think that both of them together would have fit a lot better than I did with anybody, and I wasn't sure how we were going to get clean. And then Aric took hold of my forehooves and picked me up so that I was standing on my hind legs and it was something that I didn't like to do in his bathtub or Meghan's because it was so slippery underhoof, but with him holding on to me, I could balance just fine, and that left Meghan free to wash me.

It took too long for the three of us to wash, although we weren't completely focused on getting clean, and when the water started to get colder, Aric said that the unlimited hot water was one thing that he missed from living in the dorm. Meghan said that it was really nice, except when Becky had had a bad day and took a two-hour long shower, and nobody else could use the bathroom.

They should have washed me last, 'cause I didn't mind the cold water as much as they did.

Aric let Meghan rinse the shampoo out of her hair before he finished washing his own, and he missed a little soap, 'cause he was hurrying to finish while there was still a little heat in the water. And then the two of them got out of the shower and started to dry off, and I rinsed off last and shook myself off behind the curtain before I got out.

Meghan kept her towel wrapped around her until after Aric had opened the bathroom door and she could see that there was nobody in the hallway. And then Aric went down the hall to the bedroom and he walked really slow and sort of blocked her way and I think she would have been flicking her tail if she had one.

The two of them started to get dressed and I sat on the bed and started preening my wings, and then Meghan sat down next to me even though she'd only put on her bra and shirt so far. She stretched my wing out over her leg and said that my wing would cover everything else and keep her warm. It would have done a better job of keeping her warm if it had been dry, but she didn't complain.

She gently worked a couple of loose feathers out, and tickled Aric's arm with one of them, then she put on her underwear and pants and I brushed her hair and she brushed my mane and Aric brushed my tail because he was feeling left out. He wasn't as good at that as Meghan was, and he got caught in a couple of tangles and pulled some of my tail-hair out, which was kind of annoying. But he just needed more practice, and he'd get better at it.

We all went downstairs and Aric made us coffee, and then he opened the kitchen windows because it was really nice outside. I stuck my nose right up to the screen so that I could get the best smell of the outside.

Aric started looking through the kitchen for food, but there wasn't much there. Meghan said that it proved that men were really terrible at shopping, and that she'd never been lacking for food in her electric icebox over the summer. Aric said it was important to have lots of empty space in there for beer, because nobody liked warm beer, and Meghan told him that he could fit about thirty bottles in each of the vegetable crispers and probably another forty on the door and that left the main part available for food, and Aric said that if you had a really good party that wasn't enough, and she rolled her eyes and asked him if he'd ever had a party at this house that required a hundred beers.

He said he hadn't yet, but it might happen, and it was best to be prepared.

She said that it was too bad that nobody delivered breakfast food, because that would be really convenient. And then she said that we could got to Nina's again since it was so close, and so they put their shoes on and we walked over to Nina's and got a booth.

I didn't need to look at the menu, 'cause I knew what I wanted, but then I thought that maybe I'd try something a little bit different, so instead of getting raisin toast with my omelet, I asked for rye. That was a fun bread, 'cause it had swirls in it.

We sipped at our coffee and tried to decide what we were going to do today. Aric said that just going back home and staying in bed all day was an option, and it would have been a fun option, but I wasn't sure that I really wanted to spend all day in bed, and Meghan told Aric she didn't think he could keep going for that long anyways.

He said that she was probably right, but he wasn't against trying. And then he had to be quiet because the waitress came over and it wasn't polite to talk about sex at a restaurant.

So we all had a couple of suggestions while we were eating, and Aric checked his portable telephone to see what kinds of events were happening in Kalamazoo today, and he said that we'd missed the Holeween Cornhole tournament. And when he said that Meghan spit out some coffee and then she didn't believe it was a real thing until he showed it to her on his portable telephone.

Aric said that it was nice enough that we could go to Sunny Haven, but Meghan said that she didn't think she could deal with a nudist resort, and we wouldn't get there until kind of late in the day, anyways, so it would hardly be worth the trip. I said that it was a lot of fun, and it would be nice to see Natalie again if she was there, but I had to agree that we'd probably get there so late we wouldn't be able to spend all that much time there.

We kept on thinking about it while we were eating and finally Aric said that he thought it might be nice to go to the Gilmore Car Museum, because he'd never been there before. Meghan admitted that that wouldn't have been her first choice, but it might be interesting, and if we didn't like it we could go somewhere else. And I thought I'd like it, because even though I saw lots of them on the road all the time, I didn't really know that much about cars, and there would probably be signs that told you things about them.

Meghan paid for breakfast for all of us, which was really nice of her, and then we went back to Aric's house. It was a pretty nice day out, and I wanted to get a chance to fly today, even though I'd already taken a shower. But I didn't know when I would get a chance—I didn't want to leave them behind.

We all got in Winston, and Aric drove through town and out on Gull Road, which was also the 43 Road. And even though I'd flown that way a couple of times, I didn't really recognize it until we passed by the Meijer, and then I remembered that we would be going out by Gull Lake.

I'd seen the museum before, too, from the air. But everything looked a little bit different from the ground, so I didn't make the connection until we turned down the road to the museum, and I kind of imagined how it would look from above.

It was kind of like the airplane museum in Washington, DC, except that all the cars had their wheels on the ground. And there were some special displays that they changed every now and then, and we saw a display of sports cars. Aric said that the one he liked the most was a gull-winged Mercedes, and he said that when he was a boy he imagined that if they folded out the doors the car could fly. The wings didn't look to me like they were too short for it to be possible, although without magic it would be very difficult, and I guess I didn't know how much cars weighed, which would make a difference.

Then we went to another section, and we got to see the first car ever sold in Kalamazoo, which was over a hundred years old and looked a lot like a wagon that didn't have any shafts on it. The helpful signs said that the first cars were built by coach-builders and wagonwrights, and that they were basically wagons that had an engine to make them go, and they used to be called 'horseless carriages,' which made sense.

Newer cars that were still very old were partially metal and partially wood, and then after a while they were all metal, and they didn't use wood in cars at all. And you could see how over the years the cars had gotten bigger and sleeker, and a lot of them had all sorts of shiny brightwork, which was something that the cars I was used to seeing didn't have. I guess it had gone out of style because it would have been a lot of work to keep polishing it.

There were more displays outside, and we got to see a store for the Franklin, which was a kind of car that wasn't made any more. And there was also a diner called the Blue Moon, which was where we had a late lunch. There weren't a lot of choices and I didn't think that it was that good, but Aric said that this used to be a common kind of restaurant but almost all of them had gotten replaced with fast food restaurants.

We went back inside and looked at more of their cars, and Aric pointed out a race car called an Indy Car, and he said that they raced at the track in Indianapolis where the Red Bull air race had been. It had wings on it, but they weren't supposed to make it fly; they helped hold it down to the race track because sometimes when they got going fast enough they could come off the race track and then they'd crash.

It was a lot different from the Studebaker race car that they had nearby, which had big spoked wheels and a flat front and no wings at all.

The museum closed before we could see all the exhibits, which was too bad. Meghan said that lots of places had short hours on Sundays, and probably even if we begged they wouldn't stay open any longer.

So we went back out to Winston and Aric asked if there was anything else we wanted to do for the evening, since we were already out and about.

Meghan asked me if I'd come to a decision about a costume yet and I said that it was too soon; we'd only looked at them yesterday and then after that I'd gotten distracted and hadn't really thought about it at all. And Meghan said that she wouldn't mind having a real meal, since she'd only eaten French Fries at the diner, and of course when she said something my stomach started to tell me it wanted food, too.

I wouldn't have minded Taco Bell again, but Meghan and Aric both wanted real food, so we went to Olde Peninsula and had dinner there, and Aric got two growlers, which was what they called bottles of beer. He said that it was cheaper and better than anything else we could buy in town, and that between them and the beer we had at home it was more than enough for tonight, especially since we had school in the morning.

He hadn't had too much to drink, because he had to drive us home, but me and Meghan had both had three beers and I started complaining that I had to pee before we were even all the way through downtown. Meghan said that I should have gone at the restaurant and I said that I hadn't thought that we were going to sit around talking for so long after we'd finished eating our food, and then it had taken the waitress a little while to get our growlers.

But she'd distracted me and we were turning into the driveway, and when Aric stopped Winston I'd kind of forgotten about it until we got inside, and then I went to the little bathroom off the kitchen.

When I came out, Meghan and Aric were both sitting on the couch together and he had his arm around her back and she had her hand on his thigh, and I didn't really want to break them up by trying to sit in the middle, so I stretched out on the couch and put my head down in Meghan's lap, and Aric drank most of one of the growlers by himself, but we helped him with the second.

Me and Meghan wanted to go to bed a little bit early, and at first Aric protested because he said that the night was still young, and Meghan reminded him that we wouldn't actually get to sleep for a while, and he thought that was a good point but we ought to finish the beer first because he thought it might go bad if we left it overnight.

So we passed the second bottle back and forth, and he finally emptied it and he was a little bit unsteady on his feet, and me and Meghan got up, too, and she said that we should go upstairs, and that we'd meet him up there. And so we went to his room and Meghan said that we ought to put on new sheets if he had them, but we had to wait until he got upstairs because I didn't know where they were and Meghan didn't want to go through his drawers.

She started to get undressed and I stopped her and said that she should let Aric do it, so we waited for him to get upstairs.

He had a little bit of trouble with her bra, and I was about to offer to help when he finally got it unfastened. And she took her turn undressing him before he'd gotten all her clothes off, and then she let him undress her the rest of the way, and the two of them were hugging and kissing and I felt kinda left out, so I tickled them with my wing and nuzzled their hips and then Aric reached down and scratched my ears, and he said that we'd better get in bed before I got too impatient, and then he asked us what time we wanted to leave next morning, and if we wanted a ride.

I thought I'd rather walk or fly back to campus, and Meghan agreed, even though that meant that we had to set the alarm a little bit earlier and probably we wouldn't have any time for sex unless we all woke up before the alarm went off.

The three of us got in bed, and we let Aric be in the middle first, and we finished with me in the middle, and me and Meghan were still kind of giggly when we snuggled up for the night, and I felt kind of bad for Aric, 'cause he only had a pillow to sleep on, and I had enough room to sleep on Meghan.

October 24 [Week 7]

October 24

Meghan was petting my mane when I woke up, and I was still mostly across her chest, 'cause I guess I couldn't have rolled off last night with Aric right up next to us.

Someone had pushed the blankets down off my back, but Meghan had pulled them up across her where I wasn't covering, 'cause I must have pulled my wings in while I was sleeping, and she'd gotten cold.

I nuzzled her cheek, and she asked if I knew what time it was.

Aric didn't have a clock in his room where I could see it, and I thought that I might wake him up if I got his portable telephone, but I did anyway and I gave it to Meghan so that she could look at it because I was still sleepy enough that I would probably drop it if I tried to turn it on.

And getting it cost me my space on the bed; Aric had moved over to hug Meghan and I was kind of mad at that but not really.

She looked at the time and said that if I wanted to fly we'd better be leaving before too long. And I did, but I also didn't want to leave, so I got in bed and leaned up against Aric's side which wasn't all that comfortable but I wasn't planning on going back to sleep, so it was all right, and it let me look at both him and Meghan, which was nice.

Meghan reached up and started rubbing my muzzle with her hand, and I gently stroked her belly with my hoof, and brushed up against Aric's chin with my fetlock and he wrinkled his nose which was kind of cute so I did it again and he sneezed, and then he opened his eyes.

Meghan gave him his portable telephone back and he looked at it and then put it beside the bed, and he started stroking his hand down her stomach and I did the same with my wing and kissed his cheek, and for just a moment I thought that if we went any further I wasn't going to have time to go flying this morning, but then I decided that I didn't care.

Since I'd already missed flying, me and Meghan decided that we'd both take a shower with Aric, too, because even though it was crowded it was fun, and this time I made sure that they both got washed first before the hot water ran out, so the shower was getting kind of chilly by the time that I was finishing and I had to tell them to get out because I didn't want them to be uncomfortable.

Both of them stayed in the bathroom until I was done, though, and then Aric asked Meghan if she wanted to see if David and Angela were home, and she said that at this point she didn't really care, but she kinda opened the bathroom door slowly and I think she would have pulled it right back shut if she'd seen either of them outside in the hallway.

They got dressed in his room and I pulled the blanket back up over the bed and preened my wings. The feather that I'd bit off still hadn't decided to fall out, which was starting to annoy me. It would eventually but it was going to bother me until it did.

Meghan brushed my mane for me and Aric used his fingers to go through my tail, since we only had one brush. And he also teased me a little bit just because his hand was right there, and I was stretched out on the bed with my legs tucked under me so I couldn't do anything about it even if I'd wanted to.

When Meghan figured out what he was doing, she threw the brush at him, and he claimed that it had happened by accident and I'd had a knot in my tail just under my dock. And he said that he hadn't meant anything by it, and I told him that he'd better have meant something by it.

He said the problem with having two girlfriends was that we ganged up on him. And Meghan said that she was going to gang up on somebody, and got on the bed behind him and reached around and said that she was going to help groom my tail, too, but that wasn't what she did.

We finally said our goodbyes to Aric and we both kissed him and then when we were walking back, Meghan asked me how I'd feel if she decided to have sex with Aric by herself some time that I wasn't free to come over, like this weekend when I was gone. And I said that that would be really nice, because that way neither of them would be lonely, and the two of them were really cute together, too. And she thought about that while we were walking, and finally when we were getting close to campus she asked me if I really meant that, and I said that I did. I thought I'd probably be a little bit upset if they wouldn't let me come over because they wanted to have sex without me, but if I was somewhere else, I didn't think it would be fair to make the two of them stay apart, and I also thought that the more comfortable they were together the more fun we'd have when we were all together.

Meghan asked what had happened to the me that had been at Waldo's and not sure if she wanted to try a threesome, and I said that I'd changed my mind and maybe it had been unfair to ask me when both her and Aric were fondling me because they both knew that right at the base of my wings was one of my weak spots, and she laughed and said that she shouldn't have told Aric about that, but I wasn't sorry that she had.

We got to breakfast late, and a lot of the food was already gone when we arrived. The waffle-maker was on its table with a bowl of batter next to it, but it wasn't working and I thought that if I'd gotten there sooner maybe I could have had a waffle, but morning sex was better than waffles anyway.

Peggy and Christine and Sean were gone, too, but Anna and Reese were still there, although they were done with their food. And we didn't have a whole lot of time to eat ourselves, 'cause I still had to get my books for thermodynamics class, so I kind of bolted down my food and then flew back to my room to get my saddlebags and then flew over to the Dow building.

We learned more about alchemy and reactions in class today, and this time he told us about pressure and put the equation for a reaction out on the markerboard and he said that it was a common reaction in places which had smog. And he wrote the alchemical equation and then the moles for it under that, so we could figure out the ratio of change.

There was a principle called Le Chatelier's Principle, and it said that the system wanted to stay like it was before, and it didn't like change, and it applied to pressure and temperature.

And when he was done showing us the heat equations, he told us that if we were designing an alchemical factory, we needed to use the equation he had worked through to at the very end, and it might make the difference between our factory running smoothly or exploding.

Me and Lisa met in the lounge again, and we both went through the lab notes to make sure that there weren't any mistakes, and then I went back to my room to do homework.

Peggy was there, and I hugged her and said that I'd missed her all weekend, and she said that she hoped I'd had a good weekend. And I told her that the three of us had finally all had sex together and she asked how that had gone, and I didn't understand exactly what she was asking until she said that she didn't really need to know the technical details of who was where, but she wanted to know how we'd felt about it.

I said that I thought that everyone had liked it, and I hoped that that was true. It was a little bit strange being there especially when Aric and Meghan were more focusing on each other instead of me, and some things hadn't quite worked out like we'd hoped they would, but mostly it had gone pretty well and after the first time it got a lot easier for all of us.

I didn't get my thermodynamics homework done but I figured I could do it later in the day, and I switched my books and notebook so I would be ready for math class after lunch.

Me and Peggy walked to lunch together, and I got a decent salad and so did she. And she said it felt weird to be back in class again because the whole weekend had seemed kind of long but had also gone by really quick if that made any sense and I said that it did.

It felt like it had been a really long time since I'd been to class or to lunch with everyone, even though the weekend had only been one day longer than normal. And I'd thought that maybe it was because me and Aric and Meghan had spent so much time together, and done so many things, but maybe everyone was feeling the same.

I'd missed finding out how everyone else's weekend had been since I'd missed them at breakfast, and the lunch conversation was kind of subdued anyway because I think a lot of people had spent most of the weekend having fun and playing and less of it resting than they should have. Which was something I was guilty of, too. Meghan looked tired but happy, and I probably looked the same.

When we were done eating, me and Sean carried our dishes back to the rollers and I got up on my hind hooves and watched as a hand pulled the trays along. I wondered what it would be like to work back there—maybe the same person had taken my tray every time, but I didn't know who she was, and she probably didn't know any of us, either.

We went to math together and Professor Pampena reminded us about double integrals and then said that we could use polar coordinates instead, and I wasn't really sure what those were, but it made me think of the frozen north where the Crystal Empire was and Yakyakistan, too. But it was actually about using rays to cut into arcs like you'd cut a pie.

It used radians to work which I didn't really like all that much, but it made a neater equation when he was done, and I trusted him when he said that it was simpler than what he'd taught us last Wednesday. I think if I knew radians better it would have been simpler.

Then he said that since he'd showed double integrals to us he had to tell us what they were good for, and we could find the area with it or density and we could also find center of mass or the moment of inertia which was about how things resisted changing direction, and so I thought that if I wanted to, I could figure out how hard it was for me to turn when I was flying.

His first example was an arc around the origin of the graph, and that was pretty easy, but it got more complicated when the circle wasn't centered on the origin, because we had to figure out what the bounds of the equation were, and if we went off the wrong side of the graph, our rays would never touch our circle.

After class was over, we went back to his room to do homework, and we listened to Lisa Gerrard while we did. And after we'd gone over our answers together, I wrote out an equation in Equestrian for Professor Pampena.

I didn't go right back to my room after leaving his—I went down to the basement instead and went by Sean's old room and poked my nose in the bathroom even though I probably shouldn't have. It had been on my mind since the three of us had showered together because it was a lot roomier here than it was in Aric's shower and I really wanted to do some social bathing again.

It looked just the same as it had before, and I thought that we could maybe get together after finals or something because it would be a great way for people to relax.

I flew around campus a little bit to work my wings, because it felt like forever since I'd gotten a decent flight in. And since I didn't have any of my flight gear, I didn't want to go too far off-campus, even though I probably could have flown around as long as I stayed low, but I didn't. I still had my thermodynamics homework to do, and I didn't want to wait until tomorrow to finish it.

So after I'd stretched my wings for a while, I landed back on the boardwalk and went inside the dorm and up to my room, and I got out my physics homework. I hadn't gotten too far along when Peggy arrived and she sat at her desk and started doing her own homework.

She had her ear-speakers in, but I could still faintly hear her music, which was a nice accompaniment while I worked.

I got pretty focused on it, and when I was done, I saw that Peggy was looking at me and she said it was really weird how my ears were always moving around, and asked if it was something that I noticed because she thought it would bother her.

I said that I kind of did sometimes but usually it was like breathing or walking or flying and I didn't really have to pay any attention to my ears, and they just did what they wanted to and heard what they needed to.

There wasn't enough time to read Romans, so I just relaxed on the bed until Peggy was done with her work and ready for dinner.

They had scrod fillets which were pretty good, and they also had put out spinach at the salad buffet, and they also had clam chowder for soup, so I thought it was a pretty good dinner, even though almost everyone else at the table complained about it.

Christine said that the next weekend was parent's weekend and they'd probably have something good for dinner on Friday night, so that was something to look forward to.

I asked Meghan if she wanted to come with me to Durak tonight and she said she didn't know how to play, but I said that I could explain it to her on the way over. And she hadn't gotten all of her homework done, so I went to her room and stretched out on her bed and she sat down next to me, and I put my head on her lap while she read her homework and scratched behind my ears sometimes.

Then the two of us walked to Fourth Coast together, and I told her how the game was played, and she lost the first time 'cause she didn't really understand, and then after that she was a little bit better and she didn't lose her second hand.

Aric took the two of us back to his house in Winston and let me steer and choose the gears for the last part, and we'd both decided that we were going to leave kind of early tomorrow morning so that we would be ready for class.

So we went upstairs and while Meghan was in the bathroom I asked Aric how he felt about me and her having sex without him sometimes, and he said that I'd been doing it before, so it wouldn't be that different if we kept on doing it like that. And I said that I had hoped he'd think that way, 'cause Meghan had also asked me if it was okay for her to have sex with him when I wasn't around, and he said he hadn't expected her to ask that.

When she came back to the room, she said she was kind of surprised that Aric was still wearing his clothes, and he said that he'd kind of been waiting for her to come back and undress him and I said that I wanted to this time.

I got up on the bed so I could take their shirts off, 'cause that was the easiest way, and then I got Meghan's bra off, too, and then got out of bed to take their pants and underwear off, and then the three of us got in bed together, and Meghan thought that since it was usually Aric's night he ought to be in the middle first.

October 25 [Train Ride]

October 25

When I woke up, I was stretched out on Aric's chest, and Meghan was curled up against the wall. I could feel Aric pressing up against me and I thought about waking him up the fun way, but then I thought that maybe Meghan would be mad.

I couldn't help teasing him a little bit, though, and when I started moving around, it woke up Meghan, and so I leaned over and kissed her good morning, and she started to work her way out of bed and that woke Aric up, and I had to get off him so that he could move over and let Meghan out of bed.

She went to the bathroom and Aric pulled the covers up over himself and said that he was going to sleep in some more because he was expecting a late night at the theatre tonight and probably for the next two weeks, and he wanted to get sleep while he could. He said that they were behind and he shouldn't have come to Durak last night but he had anyways. Then he said that he could go downstairs and get some coffee for us if we wanted, but I said that he should stay in bed.

He stayed awake while Meghan got dressed, and we both kissed him goodbye, and I almost went out the window before I remembered that Meghan couldn’t do that.

While we were walking back, I told Meghan that I'd thought about waking him up by mounting him, and she said that I should have, because she thought it would be really funny and it was every guy's dream anyways, and she was sure that it would make him really happy, and she admitted that she was kind of curious about how far you could go with a guy in the morning before you woke him up.

I said that I'd be disappointed if I didn't wake him up.

I told Meghan that I was going to fly around a little bit and then I would come over to her room for a shower, and so I went up to my room and had some hay and then filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear and went down to the boardwalk.

The grumpy man gave me permission to fly if I stayed low on this side of the 131 Highway, so I took off and flew along the treetops until I got to the Nature Center, and it felt like it had been so long since I went around my usual trail, I thought that I would do that. So when I got close, I flew out and over the river so that I wouldn't scare off the deer, and then I came over the trees and the deer looked up at me and then went back to grazing.

I landed on the trail and started trotting to stretch out my legs, and when I got to the top of the hill I broke into a canter on the descending trail. And I kept up my pace as I rounded the end of the trail, and then I galloped along the river, all the way to the junction, and then I slowed down to a trot to get back up to the top of the trail.

I trotted all the way around the trail once and then went back to a canter, and when I got back to the junction I took off and started flying through the trail in the woods, and to make it more fun I flew as close to trees as I could.

When I made it back around, I climbed out over the trees and flew back to campus, then landed on the boardwalk and went inside.

I stopped in my room long enough to take off my flight gear and then went down the hall to Meghan's room and knocked on her door quietly until she opened it. I nuzzled her hip and she petted my back even though I was covered in lather.

The two of us went into her shower, and I got in and turned it on while she got undressed, just so I could rinse myself off, and then she got in the shower with me.

We took turns washing each other, and then I got to pick out her clothes while she was drying off. So I found her a nice shirt and pants and a lacy pair of panties and a silky silver-grey bra, and then I brought it into the bathroom for her, and she said that she really liked my choices.

I should have brought my lab coat, but I had forgotten it in my room, so after she was dressed, we went to my room and got my lab supplies and then Meghan was helping me put my lab coat on when Peggy came back from the shower and she was surprised to see Meghan in our room. And Meghan said that she could go back out in the hall and wait while Peggy got dressed, but she said that she didn't care all that much.

All three of us went to breakfast together, and they had omelets, so I got one, and Meghan thought it looked really good so she got one, too.

After breakfast, I walked across campus to the science building and went downstairs to the lab. Professor Brown had us doing alchemical reactions under different temperatures and pressures and it was kind of complicated to set each experiment up and we had lots of data to record, so even though I couldn't use any of the potions, I had a lot of observing and recording to do, and that kept me busy for the class.

It was kind of frustrating in one gas experiment because it was hard to tell when everything had reacted since there wasn't any obvious change in the gas. Our temperature solution had changed colors so we knew that the reaction had happened, but our gas just stayed gas, and so I recorded a lot more just to make sure that it had reached a stable point and I wasn't missing anything. I knew that with clouds, sometimes it took a while before they started to do things like rain, and sometimes they were so stubborn that even when you jumped up and down on them they didn't change too quick.

Me and Lisa went to the lobby and I took off my saddlebags and set them on the table then took off my lab coat and put it in my saddlebags and rubbed my belly where the button had dug in. And I took off my sparkly scrunchy, too, and put it on my foreleg to keep it safe.

Then I got out my notebook and we went over the notes I'd taken, and I promised Lisa that I'd do all the calculations today and then give them to her tomorrow.

So I went back to my room and worked on calculations until lunchtime, then I packed up my books for astronomy. And when I got there they had leftovers from last night but since I'd liked what they had last night, I didn't mind having it again, even if the scrod was a little bit dryer than it had been.

Reese said that his parents had decided not to come out for Parent's Weekend after all, and Christine said that was because they didn't love him any more. She said that when he tried to go home for winter break, he'd find out that they'd turned his room into an office or something to prevent him from coming back, and they'd probably give him a horrible cot to sleep on or something, and they'd make sure that he had the coldest room in the house.

Sean said that when he'd gone to college, his parents had moved without telling him, so when he got home for winter break, they didn't live there anymore and he'd had to spend the whole winter break as the guest of Jehovah's Witnesses that tried to convert him.

And I said that sometimes when it was really stormy, my house drifted away while we were at school, and so me and my sister had to find it again after school. That was one of the problems with living in a cloudhouse; it wasn't always where it had been when you left it.

Well, it turned out that everyone else had been lying and I'd believed them, but cloudhouses did drift around, and there were a few young mares who hadn't gotten the knack of putting them in the right place so that they'd stay who had lost their homes at sea. And maybe somepony in Prance one day had found a new home that drifted in from the ocean.

I didn't remember until me and Anna were walking out of the dining hall to astronomy class that I was supposed to have sat with Leon and Trevor and Cedric. And I felt really bad about that, so I had to stop by their table to apologize to them.

Professor Miller told us more about black holes, and she said that we were going to talk about ones that were the same mass as the sun, and that later we'd talk about the supermassive ones. And she first had to tell us more about how space-time worked, and how you would see things if you rode along on a photon, which was a particle of light. And there were space-like intervals and time-like intervals which had to do with how far light particles moved and how far things physically traveled. And she also wanted to write down her equation in polar coordinates, too, so I was glad that I was figuring them out for math.

And it took her half the class to just explain all the math that we needed to know to begin understanding them, but that was important so that we'd be able to understand what happened near black holes. And she said that you couldn't actually test that inside the Schwarzschild radius, because it wasn't possible to see anything across it.

Then Professor Miller started telling us about the things that we could observe that demonstrated general relativity, and the closest thing that humans had found first was the planet Mercury, and they'd predicted another planet because of problems with Mercury's orbit. But there wasn't really one there after all, and it wasn't until Einstein figured out general relativity that it could be explained.

She didn't tell us how that helped people find black holes, 'cause I guess that was for the next class, but I could guess how it would, because the problem with black holes was that you couldn't see them but I bet that you could see things that orbited near them and you'd see if their orbits had problems.

Even though I should have been doing work, my wings were restless, and I decided that I'd be a bad pony and spend the rest of the afternoon flying, so I went back to my room and put away my astronomy things and I didn't normally fly in the afternoon so it took a few minutes to get permission to fly, and then I took off from the boardwalk and zoomed low over the quad, picking up enough altitude to just scrape over the top of Hoben.

I turned at the railroad tracks and followed them through town and then I decided when I got to the railroad intersection, I'd go south, just to see where the tracks went.

They wound through town, sometimes alongside a creek that I think was called Portage Creek, and I knew that I'd be coming to the trail through the woods that was by Meghan's uncle's house, and then I saw Meijer off to my right, which was near where the trail started.

I had to dive down some to get under the 94 Highway, and I went parallel to the tracks just in case a train was trying to sneak up on me. And then I kept heading south, and they turned and ran alongside a road for a little while, and then they got out of Kalamazoo and I followed them all the way to Schoolcraft, where they crossed another set of railroad tracks.

I looked up and down both sets of tracks but the ones I was following curved a little bit and I couldn't see all that far, so I got some more altitude and then I could see further, and I saw a train coming in my direction that was a few miles away.

And even though Aric said that I shouldn't, I knew that it had to be going back to Kalamazoo, because there was nowhere else it could go, so I circled around and waited for it to come under me.

It had to stop before it got to the train crossing, and I didn't know why until I heard a train horn off in the distance, and pretty soon a train loaded with stacked boxes roared by on the crossing track. And I watched it until it was past, then remembered that I was thinking of riding the train that was going back to Kalamazoo, so I flew down its length looking for a good place to land, and I finally found a gondola that was empty inside.

The train had started moving while I was looking, but it wasn’t going very fast, so I didn't have any trouble coming in for a landing. And at first it wasn’t too bad, but as the train got going faster and faster, it got really bumpy and I had a hard time staying on my hooves. Plus I was thinking about how what I was doing was against the rules, so I couldn't stick my head over the edge to see where we were, and I wasn't sure I could fly up fast enough to get clear of the box car that was behind my gondola. So mostly all I could see was the top halves of trees and then when we got closer to Kalamazoo, I started to see buildings, too.

I had paid enough attention on my flight over to know when we were passing under the 94 Highway, and I looked out the side a little bit after that, because I knew that we were passing through the little forest and there probably weren't going to be any people that could see me. But before I expected it, we went across a road and I was looking right through the windshield of a car that was waiting into the surprised face of the driver.

I was getting worried that the train would keep going fast and I couldn't get off, but then I started to hear a banging getting closer to me and I should have braced myself, because I got knocked off my hooves and got a scrape on my leg when my gondola slowed down all of a sudden. And it was a good thing that it had ends on it, because if I'd been standing closer to the front of the car, I might have rolled all the way off of it.

But the train started to slow down, and then I heard a constant thump-thump that was moving towards me, too, and I spread out my hooves and braced, and pointed myself at the front of the train, expecting to be thrown off my hooves again, but it was just the noise the train made as it went across the crossing in Kalamazoo that was right near the train station. And I thought that it was going slow enough now that I could fly out, so I went up and to the side, to make sure that I didn't get hit by the box car, and I got a little bit tumbled by the turbulence off of the box car but it wasn't even close to getting me.

Anybody who had been looking would have seen me fly out of the gondola, and I was already trying to think of an excuse in case Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn found out, but I couldn't think of anything that was believable, so I thought I'd just have to admit that I'd been a bad pony and hope that they weren't too mad.

I hadn't been paying attention to time when I was on the train, but when I landed I looked down at my pilot's watch and saw that I'd missed dinner with my friends.

So I landed right by the dining hall and turned off my radio and blinking light and then went in to get some food. And I looked around for someone I could sit with and I finally saw Lisa and Jessica eating together so I sat down with them.

Lisa wanted to know what had happened to my leg, so I told her that I'd fallen down and she was satisfied with that. And then I asked Jessica if I could cheerlead, because I thought it would be fun, and she said that she'd have to ask their captain, but she thought it would be fun if I did, but she said that it wasn't easy and I'd have to practice a lot until I got it right.

I didn't mind practicing, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to know how to do human cheers.

I went back to my room, and Peggy wanted to know what I'd done to my leg, too, and so I told her the truth, and she said that I was an idiot, and I didn't think she was wrong. Especially since Aric had also told me the same thing. So I guess I'd got what I deserved.

And when I looked at my portable telephone, I saw that I'd gotten a message from Miss Cherilyn, and my ears fell, 'cause I thought that she had found out, and I didn't want to call her back but I had to, so I did and I told her that I was sorry and I wouldn’t do it again, and she had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to tell her, and she yelled at me a little and I deserved it. And then she said that the reason she was actually calling was to tell me that we would be leaving early Saturday morning to go see Gusty's play, and this time we'd be taking Sienna and we'd have Aquamarine with us and then pick up Cayenne in Chicago.

We'd be getting back home late on Sunday, so she said that I needed to make sure that I had all my homework done or to bring it with me, and then she told me not to do anything stupid like ride on trains again. And she got a little bit more sympathetic when I told her that I'd cut my leg and she asked if I needed a doctor to look at it and I didn't think that I did, 'cause it hadn't bled too much.

Peggy didn't have any homework that she had to do and I didn't, either, so she opened up our door and Ruth and Kat and Rebekka came over and we played euchre for a while, and me and Peggy came close to getting skunked one time, and Ruth was getting excited because she said that she wanted to see me gallop down the quad wearing pants.

I wasn't totally against the idea, and I told her as long as she rolled up the cuffs and let me wear a pair of pants that my tail would fit through, I'd do it, and she said that she was going to get some from her room, and I said that I'd only do it if we got skunked, and then I played both bowers to win us a game and stuck my tongue out at her.

When everyone had finally gone home, it was really relaxing to go to sleep in my own bed, and even though I missed snuggling and sex, I hadn't gotten as much sleep as I ought to have over the last few days, and I was asleep almost as soon as I lay down.

October 26 [Romans]

October 26

I should have asked Peggy if she wanted to go trotting, but I'd forgotten to, 'cause we were having so much fun playing cards last night. And I didn't know if I should wake her up or not. She might be mad that I did, or she might be mad that I left without her.

So I gently shook her awake, and asked her if she wanted to go trotting with me and she asked if the sun was up yet and I looked out the window but of course I couldn't see it outside. Even if it hadn't been cloudy, I wouldn’t have been able to see it because the window looked the wrong way.

But she got out of bed anyways and started getting dressed, and said she hated it now but when snowboarding season started again she'd be glad for the exercise, or at least she was going to tell herself that.

So she put on her clothes and I filled up my camelback, and then the two of us went outside tho trot. She said because it was cold out, she was going to be extra motivated this morning.

It was kind of chilly outside, and it felt like it was going to rain, and I thought that I'd better check the weather when we got back to our room, so I could plan for thunderstorms, if there were going to be any.

We went up Academy Street and followed it around, then continued until we got to Grove Street, and we stopped at Jeff's house because Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity were waiting for their bus. And I got a hug from both Lindy and Trinity, and Trinity asked if I was going to go trick-or-treating with them and I had to say yes because she was too cute to refuse. So I would have to figure out a costume and who wanted to go with me.

There wasn’t enough time to give Trinity a ponyback ride before their bus came to get them, and Peggy said it was just as well because she was starting to get cold just standing around. So we went up Grove Street the rest of the way to Dartmouth, and then past Aric's house and all the way to Main Street, and turned around and followed along the edge of the neighborhood that was alongside Western Michigan University, and then back to Trowbridge.

All of that trotting had split open the scabs on my leg in a couple of places, so I used a bottle of Peggy's water to rinse it off before I went inside.

I told Peggy that she could use the shower first, and while I was waiting for my turn I packed up my books for thermodynamics and then I went to the bathroom and sat on the little bench and waited for Peggy to get out of the shower.

I tugged at a couple of loose feathers while I waited, and the nipped-off one was finally coming loose. I had been wondering if it ever would.

I got in as soon as Peggy came out, and it was kind of lonely being in the shower all by myself. The soap burned on my cut leg, but it was important to keep the wound clean, otherwise it could get infected, so I gritted my teeth and washed it really well, even though that made it bleed a little bit more.

When I was back in our room, I dried off and then preened my wings, and I didn't have time to look up the weather on my computer so Peggy did on her portable telephone. It wasn't as good as seeing the raw numbers myself, but it did give me an idea what they were expecting, and she said that it was going to start raining pretty soon but there wouldn’t be any thunderstorms.

And she said that maybe I should take the first shower in the future, because while she had to get dressed, I had to groom my whole body and also preen my wings, and it seemed like it was taking me forever to get it done. So I said that I was sorry and I tried to hurry as much as I could, just getting my feathers mostly straight. She was right; I wasn't trying to impress anybody, so I didn't have to take as much time.

The two of us walked to breakfast together, and I was disappointed that there weren't any waffles or omelets, and I didn't feel like plain scrambled eggs, so I got shredded wheats instead. And when I put them down on the table, Anna saw them and said that I was supposed to put milk in the bowl to soften them up, but I said that I liked them crunchy.

Meghan saw that my wings weren't as neat as usual, and I said that I'd kind of rushed and she pushed her chair back a little bit and tapped her hand on her thigh and at first I didn't get it, but then I realized that she wanted to fix them, so I held out my wing and let her work on it while I ate.

Once she'd finished that one, she switched sides and that was when she saw my leg, and I told her that it looked worse than it was; foreleg wounds always did. And I'd just washed it, too, so it looked fresher than it really was.

She shook her head and said that sometimes I was such a boy, and then started preening my other wing with her fingers.

When she was done, she went back to her seat to finish her meal and I kissed her on the cheek, 'cause she hadn't had to do that.

Sean and Reese started talking about the election until Christine stopped them by throwing fruit loops at them, and she said she'd rather talk about something cheerier, like PMS, and Sean got up and when he came back he had a plastic flower which he stuck in her fruit loops and said that he hoped that that had helped. And she picked it back out and hit him with it and said that her mood had just gotten a lot better.

I nuzzled Meghan one more time before I had to get up and go to class, and when I went outside it was raining—a cold, steady rain—and it was kind of exhilarating, so I took off and flew a lap of the quad before crossing over the roof of Dewing and gliding down in front of the Dow building.

Professor Brown told us how we were going to use calculating delta-G in a real-world example, which was about a drug that worked better than normal drugs. And he had to tell us a little bit of biology first, and I didn't really understand most of that, although I did know that bone marrow also made blood cells.

It was really complicated when he started talking about membranes and ligands and other things that I didn't know what they were, and he drew out how it worked with radioactive ligands so you could find them later because they were very small.

And you'd put your results on a Scratchard plot which was a kind of graph, and then he explained how you wanted the artificial protein to hold on to the receptor until the cell decided it was time to chew it up and then you wanted to to let go so it could find another cell to activate, and then there were lots of calculations showing how they figured it out using Gibbs Free Energy and the ratios of how the wild protein worked compared to the one that they had built in the lab.

By the end of class, I still didn't understand all the biology, but that didn't matter, 'cause it was the thermodynamics we were worried about, and that part all made sense and I could follow along with it.

We didn't really have anything to go over, so I just gave Lisa all the notes and calculations I'd done for our lab when the class was finished, and she put them in her bookbag and it was still raining when I went outside, and I flew up into it and circled around in the rain for a little bit and then I landed at the top of the quad and galloped down the hill, and once I got to the bottom I flew around so that I could do it again. There's nothing quite like the feel of mud in your hooves and it had been too long since the last time it had rained.

If I hadn't been wearing my saddlebags and it had been a little bit wetter, I could have belly-slid down the hill.

I got a little bit more dirty than I'd meant to, so after I'd taken off my saddlebags, I got in the shower long enough to just rinse the mud off my legs, then I sat down at my desk and turned on my bendy light to make it a little more cheerful, and I started working on my homework.

When I was done, I started to read Romans, which was a letter which had been written by Paul. And he said that people who judged other people in the place of God would be punished, and that people who preached the laws but did not practice them were bad, while people who hadn't been circumcised but practiced the law anyway were good. And that made sense—there were ponies who said one thing but then did another and after a while they found out that nopony liked them or would talk to them, and they were cast off and always had to wander around finding new ponies who didn't know them.

And he went on to explain how Adam's sin had made all people sinners, but Jesus being crucified had cleansed them all, which I thought was kind of strange. How could a foal be born bad? She would only become bad if she learned bad things and nopony ever taught her the right things, that seemed pretty obvious to me. But maybe it was more complicated than that.

Paul also said that they had been freed from the old laws, like a married woman was freed from her husband if he died. And so that meant that a lot of the laws I'd read long ago didn't matter any more, which was why people could eat so many things and be witches and I wondered why they had left it in the Bible if they weren't the laws anymore, so I'd have to try and remember to ask Pastor Liz that tomorrow.

I didn't finish Romans, 'cause I left for lunch a little bit early so I could enjoy the rain some more, because it was still coming down and making all the plants happy. I wondered if some of the clouds I'd seen above me at the beginning of the day were now over East Lansing, raining on it. Maybe Aquamarine was looking up at the same clouds.

When I sat down, Sean said that I was too cheerful for such a gloomy day, but I thought it was nice, and I said that there were probably a lot of farmers who were welcoming it, although maybe not 'cause it was kind of late in the season and they'd probably gotten all their crops in already.

Then I said that towards the end of the year I wanted to have another group shower in Hoben, and Christine said that we should do it because last time was so much fun. And then Reese asked what we were talking about so I told him, and he asked if people were actually naked, and Christine told him that that was the idea, and he said that he didn't know how he felt about it.

Christine said that Sean had loved it, and he said that she'd pulled off his underwear and everyone saw his dick, and she nodded and said that it wouldn't have been as much fun if he'd kept his pants on.

Anna wasn't sure if she wanted to, either, and Christine said that we wouldn’t make fun of her dick, and Reese almost fell out of his chair 'cause he was laughing so hard. And she just crossed her arms and glared at Christine.

Meghan said that she was in, and I knew that she would be. And I wasn't sure if I should invite Aric, just 'cause I wasn't sure if everyone else at the table would be comfortable with him there, especially Reese and Anna. I thought maybe it was something that should only be done with table-mates, but I'd have to ask Meghan what she thought about it later.

Me and Sean walked to math together, and Professor Pampena taught us about changing variables in double integrals, like if you were trying to figure out the area of an ellipse. And that one we couldn't use polar coordinates which was kind of a relief, but since Professor Pampena had brought them up I was sure that we'd be using them later.

He showed us how it worked on a moving rectangle, and then he said that he was going to do it on a square but if we didn't believe what he had told us, we could try on our own rectangle while he was talking about the square. I believed him, but Sean apparently didn't, because he drew a rectangle in his notebook.

It was something that we could use for linear approximations, and the scaling factor was the determinant. And then like I thought he would, he started doing equations with polar coordinates and using Jacobians.

It was still raining when we got out of class, but it was more of a mist than raindrops, and Sean asked if I could make it go away, and I said that if I got permission to fly up in the clouds, I could, but with just me working alone on feral weather it might take me all week to clear it off, and by then the rain would have ended on its own.

We went up to his room and he turned on his music and the two of us worked on our math problems. And I was still having a bit of trouble with polar coordinates and radians, so it took me a little bit longer to finish than him, and I would have skipped re-checking my work, except that he had started looking at Facebook on his folding computer, and he didn't look like he was impatient at all, so I went back through and had to fix one really dumb mistake, but otherwise it looked pretty good.

So we compared answers and both went and re-tried the problem where we'd gotten a different answer and then when we were done we still both had different answers, so the two of us worked on the problem together so that we could figure out what had gone wrong, because there couldn't be four different answers for it that were all correct. And I'd messed up the radians and he'd gotten the chain rule wrong and it turned out that his first answer had been the right one, but he'd overthought it when I'd gotten something else, 'cause he said that I was better at math than him so he'd assumed that he had been the one to make a mistake.

I figured out another equation in Equestrian, and I had to admit to myself that it wasn't as tidy as his had been because it didn't use polar coordinates, and I wondered if pony mathematicians were figuring out how to use them and maybe in a few years, foals would be learning about them in school, and maybe I'd be the dumb one for not liking them.

Then he asked if I was ever going to watch Star Trek with him, and I said that I would but I just didn't know when. He said that we could Friday night, but I was leaving for Madison pretty early on Saturday morning and I wasn't sure if I should stay up too late.

I went back to my room and got out my Bible and read through the rest of Romans. Paul thought that a lot of the Israelites had made the mistake of pursuing works rather than faith, and that that had caused them to stumble. And he said that Gentiles shouldn't feel superior, because they were like an olive shoot grafted onto the roots of an olive, and that they were supported by the root which had been there before them.

He explained how people were supposed to be humble, and how they should not return hate with hate, but with love, and he said that if your enemy was hungry or naked, you should feed and clothe him, and that was how you overcame evil. And he said that all the commandments could be summed up by just saying 'love,' which was a lot simpler. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Paul said that it didn't matter what you ate or if you kept a day holy, but that if someone else did you should honor that, and not place stumbling blocks in front of them, and he finished his letter by greeting all of his friends, and asking for them to give each other kisses which was really nice.

Me and Peggy went to dinner together, and the food wasn't very good at all. They'd taken away the spinach and just had the watery lettuce, and there wasn't any fish at all, except for a strange mash that was called a crab salad and didn't smell very good. Peggy said that a lot of times they used fake crab in those, and it was really something else. And I didn't think that they should be allowed to do that, because what if you didn't know?

Then she told me that the blueberries in some kinds of baking mixes were actually apples which had been dyed and given blueberry flavoring and I said that I thought something had been off with the blueberry muffins but I wasn't sure what. And she said that most commercial muffins, probably the fake blueberries was the least off part of them.

So I didn't have a very good dinner, but there was hay back at my dorm room that I could snack on, and maybe some anchovies as well.

Since it was still raining, I thought that I'd take an evening flight, but not too far, 'cause I didn't want to get all sweaty. So I put on my flight gear and called the airplane directors and told them that I was going to be flying around downtown but below the tops of the buildings, and they said that I could. So I took off and flew over the city for a while, kind of in a oval pattern that was almost a perturbed orbit with the hotel at its center. I went as far south as the Crosstown Parkway, and then I turned back around and followed Park Street back to downtown, and went a couple of blocks north to finish my orbit around the hotel.

When I got back to the railroad tracks, I followed them partway back and then took a shortcut through the little neighborhood that was between Stadium Drive and Kalamazoo Avenue. And I went over the Fine Arts building, and I saw that Winston was there and I thought about landing on the roof and knocking on the hatch there but it wasn't right over the light shop, so Aric probably wouldn't hear me and he'd told me that he wasn't supposed to go up there anyways and there were probably lots of other people working with him. He said that he had a whole crew that helped him put up the lights.

I landed back at Trowbridge and went upstairs to take off my flight gear, and I didn't really have to rinse off 'cause the rain had done that for me, so I just hung up my flight gear so that it could dry and then went down the hall to Meghan's room to get her so that we could go to Aric's. I thought that even though he wasn't there yet he wouldn't mind if he got home and we were in his bed.

I had to wait until Meghan got done with her homework but I didn't mind, even though I thought she should have done it earlier in the day. Maybe she had other things to do, and she couldn't. And she put on a windbreaker that she wore in the rain, 'cause I guess it was also a rainbreaker, and we walked to his house together.

On the way, I asked her what she thought about inviting Aric to the shower party, and she said that she'd have to think about it. She said that she didn't think Christine would care, and Peggy probably wouldn't, either, but she wasn't sure about Sean or Anna and Reese, and she thought that if I invited him I might lose the other three, and maybe Christine, too, because she might not want to if Sean didn't, and then it would just be the three of us and Peggy, which would be uncomfortable for Peggy.

She said that she wasn't afraid that he'd do anything bad—if she had been worried about that, she wouldn't have spent the night with him even on his couch. But she said that she'd had to get comfortable with him first even though she'd known him for years, and Anna and Reese hardly knew him.

I said that the two of them went to Durak, and she asked me if I knew everyone there well enough that I'd want to sleep with them, and I said it wasn't the same, but she said that it was kind of like that for people. I thought it was dumb, but that's just the way people were, I guess.

When we got to Aric's house, I looked through the front windows but David and Angela weren't there, so I went under the mat and got out the key and unlocked the front door and let us in, and Meghan said that it felt like we were breaking into his house sort of, but I promised her it was okay and Aric wouldn't be mad.

We went upstairs to his room and Meghan said that the best thing about walking on a cold, rainy day was snuggling up to your lover, but after I'd helped her get undressed and we got in bed, she said that she'd changed her mind because she hadn't thought about wet fur and feathers. She said I wasn't as snuggly when I was wet.

So I got up and went to the bathroom and got some towels and she dried me off as much as she could, so I was just a damp pony, and then she was a little bit chilly 'cause she was naked, so I snuggled up against her and then I started kissing and nuzzling her and pretty soon I was all the way under the covers and then we were both getting kind of hot so she pushed them off and said that she hoped that Aric wouldn't be mad if he came in and caught us and I said that he had said it was okay.

I'd wanted to stay awake until Aric got home, but Meghan had kind of tired me out, and I was so cozy snuggled up on her breast that I couldn’t stay awake, especially after she'd fallen asleep. So I closed my eyes, too, and I told myself to just sleep lightly so that I'd wake up when he got home, even though I wasn't sure if that would actually work.

October 27 [I Said to Poetry]

October 27

I woke up when Aric was trying to get into bed, and I don't know if that was because I'd told myself to wake up when he came in or if it was because Meghan hadn't pushed herself all the way up against the wall and I'd kind of stuck my rump out in the middle of the bed, too, so he couldn't easily fit in. He smelled like dust and theatre electricity.

I didn't really wake all the way up, but enough that I kind of helped as he got into bed and pulled me up and over him some, and I stood on all fours long enough for him to slide right up against Meghan, and then I stretched out on his chest and he put one hand over my back and reached over for Meghan with his other, and I think I kissed him and then I closed my eyes again and fell back asleep.

When I woke up in the actual morning, I was still stretched out on his chest, and I remembered what Meghan had said on Monday, so I moved around a little bit to get myself into position and I was careful 'cause I wanted to not wake him up too early and spoil the surprise. And it was a little bit tricky to get everything lined up without him helping, but I did.

Even though I was moving really slow, I still woke Meghan up, so I leaned over and kissed her before focusing back on Aric. And he kept his eyes closed for longer than I thought he would, and then he finally blinked them open and I kissed him on the nose. And he said that he thought he had been having the best dream ever and I said that I was better than a dream.

Since he was awake, I could move a little bit faster, which was good 'cause I was close, and it turned out he was, too.

I snuggled on his chest for a little bit after, and both he and Meghan were petting me, and I thought about staying with him but I also wanted to fly, and I didn't want to have to make Meghan walk back to campus alone, either.

Meghan got out of bed and started getting dressed, but I stayed on top of him until she was ready to go, and then I kissed him one more time and then climbed out of bed, 'cause aside from my feathers being all ruffled, I was ready to go.

Meghan pulled the covers back up over him and kissed him and then the two of us walked downstairs and when we were out on the porch she bumped my hoof and said that she'd never noticed how cute I was when I was having sex. And I told her that I was cute all the time and she laughed and said it was true, then asked if I wanted my wings preened when we got back to campus, and I said that that would be nice if she had time, but she didn't have to.

She said that her backup plan for getting to Equestria could be wing-preener, and I said that I thought that the tornado ponies would also speak highly of her skilled hands. And then I asked if it would help her if we talked Equestrian the rest of the way home, and she said that it couldn't hurt.

It was kind of weird to switch languages, and I wondered how long it would take before English felt strange and Equestrian felt normal again.

Since she didn't want to wake up Amy and I didn't want to wake up Peggy, we sat on the floor in the lounge and she leaned her back up against one of the chairs, and I stretched out my wings on her lap one at a time and she straightened up all my feathers and I almost felt bad that they might get a little bit messed up when I flew.

I walked with her all the way back to her room and then I went up to mine and got ready to fly, and when I was out on the balcony and calling the airplane directors, I forgot for a moment that I should switch back to English and Dori was very confused but at least she knew it was me.

It was overcast and so I couldn’t fly as high as I wanted to, ‘cause I couldn’t go into the clouds. So I skimmed along at their base and I could feel that they didn’t have enough moisture in them to rain out, and even as I got further west, I still didn’t feel that there was much extra.

If I could have gone through them, I might have felt something different higher up, but I didn’t think I would. Usually if there’s a lot of extra energy up above, it comes down into the clouds below, although I’d heard of a few feral storms that had a front line that was made up of dull clouds that masked the big stormclouds that were trailing along behind and above them. Which was why it was so important to see both sides of the cloud, not just one.

I flew all the way out to Lawton, and landed in a park for a snack of anchovies. There were little play-houses with slides and swings and so before I left I went over there and flew up to the balcony on one of them and slid down the slide on my rump, then made a pretty sloppy landing and flew off before anybody could laugh at me.

Once I got close to the 131 Highway, I started descending and called Dori to tell her where I was, and then I followed Stadium all the way back.

I took off my flight gear and took a long shower and washed off my leg really well, then went back into my room and groomed myself and pulled out a loose primary, which was the one I’d broken before. So I was glad to see that one go, although I was gonna be a little bit off-balance until the other one fell out. I think this one had gotten a little bit loosened when I broke it, which is why it fell out first.

Then I got my books for Astronomy and also my poetry book, and I went to lunch and sat down with Leon and Cedric and Trevor, and I told them again that I was sorry for forgetting on Tuesday. I’d still had my mind on the weekend and the night before, but I didn’t tell them that.

And I told them how we were going to Madison to see Gusty’s play, and that I was going to meet with Aquamarine on Saturday morning, and he wanted to know when and if he could see her. I said that I didn’t know exactly but I could find out from Miss Cherilyn and that she would be happy to see him.

He said that he didn’t care if it was four AM, he’d be there.

Leon said that he wasn’t looking forward to playing Hope, because they were really good, and we were going to lose and he didn’t think he could take another loss on top of the last one, and Cedric said that he just needed to think positive thoughts, and he said that he was positive that they would lose.

Cedric said that Holland was a nice town, and Leon claimed that instead of chalk, they marked their football field with tulips. I thought that would look really pretty, but I guess you’ve have to have a few gardeners ready to replant after some of the plays.

While we were talking, Trevor had been looking through the book, and when we were done eating he gave it to Leon and had him read a poem called Every Morning, ‘cause it had ballet in it. And it was kind of a sad poem, and the one that he asked Cedric to read which was called Killers was also sad. And then he had me read one which was called I Said to Poetry, and I liked that one. Cedric said that Trevor shouldn’t have made me read it, though, ‘cause of the swear at the end, and I said that I was allowed to swear if I wanted to.

He said it just seemed wrong for a pony to swear, and he asked Leon if he thought the same, and Leon didn’t say anything, he was just kind of blankly looking ahead, and then he looked at me as if he hadn’t even heard Cedric and said that I’d said a bad word, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

I went across campus to Astronomy class and sat down next to Anna, and Professor Miller told us more about black holes. First were post-Newtonian gravitational effects, and not only were perturbed orbits part of it, but it could also bend light because light was attracted by gravity if there was enough of it. And she said that sometimes light went around an object on two or more sides, and that was called a gravitational lens. And a couple of years after Einstein figured it out, a British expedition went to Brazil to watch during an eclipse, and proved that Einstein’s theory was correct.

And gravity could shift light, too, just like moving objects did, and she gave us an equation for it. So that meant that both motion and gravity could change the color of light, and I wondered how the astronomers figured out which was which, and if something could be moving fast enough to blueshift and then be affected by enough gravity to redshift back to the color it had started out as.

I thought that it that was probably a good way to find black holes, but it turned out that it was more important than I’d thought, because it was the reason that light couldn’t get out—it didn’t pull the light back to it, but it redshifted the light so much that it just disappeared.

Then at the end of class she told us about gravitational waves, which were kind of like the wake of a boat, except that they moved at the speed of light. And the energy in them was extracted from the orbit of the object that made them, which made its orbit smaller, just like a boat’s wake was from it moving against the water, and that slowed it down some.

She said that we couldn’t see that in our Solar System, because it was such a small effect, but she said that we did see it in binary star systems and that was what we were going to talk about next.

When class was over, I flew across the quad and landed on the boardwalk and then I relaxed in my room and thought about what I wanted to be for Halloween, 'cause if me and Aric and Meghan were all going to get costumes we'd have to do it tomorrow. And then I remembered that he was doing tech week, and I didn't even know if he'd be free on Friday at all, or on Monday to go trick-or-treating, so I might have to come up with a different plan.

I nibbled on some hay and thought about it. I didn't think that I was going to find any costumes that were designed for humans that were very comfortable, but they sold accessories for the costumes, too, so I could get things like a clown wig without the rest of the clown suit if I wanted.

It was kind of hard to choose, because there had been so many choices at the Halloween store. I think it would have been easier if there hadn't been as many.

I suppose I could have just gone as myself; I probably would be the only pony in all of Kalamazoo trick-or-treating, but that felt really lazy.

Then I thought I could just wear my dress and maybe a little necklace or something and go as a princess. Or I could stick on a fake horn and be a unicorn. Maybe a golden bridle, too, if I could find one.

I was still thinking about it when Peggy came back, and she said that I should go as a snowboarder. I could wear some of her gear, even though I didn’t really when I snowboarded, and maybe my boots if that wouldn’t ruin them, and I thought that was a good idea. Especially since I didn’t think I was going to have much time to go shopping before Halloween.

Since I wasn’t going to have any time for dinner, I stuck my head in the closet and started snacking out of my haybox. And I ate enough that I’d be full.

Peggy said that most college students just ordered pizza or Chinese takeout instead of keeping a salad in their closet.

I knew about the pizza, but I didn't know that you could get Chinese food delivered to you and I thought that sounded pretty good, so I said that we should do that sometime. And Peggy said that she was going over to Christine’s after dinner and maybe if a bunch of us were hungry we could do it tonight.

I got my Bible and my fighting gear and went to the chapel and met Liz in her office. She was proud that I’d got all the way to Romans, but I felt like I should have gotten further. And before we started talking about it I asked her how her protest had gone and if she’d gotten arrested like Cayenne had, and she said that she didn’t although a lot of people had said bad things to her, and she had just ignored them.

She wanted to know what I thought about God’s new covenant, and I said that I liked it so far, and I thought it was a lot friendlier.

I said that it was interesting reading the same account of Jesus four different ways, and she said that scholars could tell what most interested the writer of each gospel, and that Mark was the oldest. She said that a lot of it had been passed down orally, and then written down later on, decades or centuries after Jesus had been crucified, although it was possible that there were earlier manuscripts that just hadn’t been found yet. And she said that even now there was some debate about some of the translations, which was something I understood, ‘casue sometimes it was hard to translate things. There were words in English for things that we didn’t have in Equestria, so I had to learn them all new, and Miss Chestnut had had a really hard time telling us exactly what the word meant. And there were also concepts that didn’t quite translate between the two languages, too.

Even though I’d learned English pretty well, I still had to ask people all the time how to say something or how to spell something, because that was confusing a lot, and I suppose when I’m back home I’m gonna have to give long, complicated explanations for some of the things I saw and did on Earth.

I asked Liz about why they’d left the old Law in the Bible even though Paul said that it wasn’t important anymore, and she explained how it was important historically, and she said that I wouldn’t take something out of my journal just because I knew something new and different now, which was a good point.

And then she said that different branches of Christianity had different thoughts on how important some of the old laws were, and even which books should be in the Bible, and some churches were more liberal and others were more conservative. But she said that I didn’t really have to worry about that too much.

So I wanted to know who was right, and she said that she thought I'd already read what Paul had to say about it, and then I remembered what he had said in Romans about different ways of practicing the faith, and so I told her that Paul had said not to put stumbling blocks in front of other people, and she nodded and said that was right. She said that everyone comes to God in a different way, and Paul had seen that and made sure to write it down, because it was so important.

When our time was over, I hugged her and then I got my glaive and went down the hill to the park to practice fighting.

Aric never showed up, ‘cause he was probably busy in the theatre. So I got to warm up by fighting with Stellan and Karla, and then she set out flags for another bridge battle that I couldn’t do, but then Stellan said that since we had an odd number of people he was going to step out of the group battle, too, and he’d keep practicing with me.

He wanted to try grappling, and he said that he was going to be really careful, especially since he’d seen the cut on my leg, and I agreed, but it turned out that I didn’t like it too much. I didn’t like the feeling of being grabbed onto or him pinning me, and it was really hard to not really struggle and maybe hurt him by mistake.

For me, there weren’t a lot of good ways to break free once he’d got ahold of me. If it had been for real, I could have done a weak strike with my forehooves, and maybe got him somewhere sensitive, and I could also bite, and so after we’d done it for a little bit he backed off ‘cause I think he could tell that it wasn’t working out like he’d planned.

Then he asked if we ever practiced anything like that, and I said that usually when something got you, it was gonna try and eat you, so you had to figure out ways to either outsmart it which worked sometimes, fool it into dropping you so you could fly or gallop away and hide, or else hurt it badly enough that it wanted to move on to some other prey. And I told him how I hadn’t been able to do the last one because I was afraid of hurting him.

So he said that he wanted to try it in really slow motion, and he said that he’d try and react like an actual human would, and I wasn’t really sure about how that was going to work. But we tried again and he got me in what he called a bear hug, and I could move my foreleg down enough that I could probably get him in the crotch, and I could also reach close enough to his face to bite, so I leaned in and opened my mouth and he let go pretty quick and said that he’d never noticed that I had fangs before. And I said that most pegasuses and most stallions of every tribe had them, and some other mares did, too, but a lot of them had them filed down ‘cause they didn’t look pretty but we pegasuses kept them for fishing and fighting. And I didn't know why people thought it was strange, anyway, 'cause they had canine teeth, too.

Then I guess that worried him a bit, because he put on some of his armor and we went back to sparring for the rest of class, which I liked better anyways.

Even though he tried not to, he did land one hit on my cut leg, and made it bleed a little bit, which was kind of annoying. Karla had a first-aid kit in her car and she wrapped it up in some gauze so I wouldn’t be dripping on people.

When fighting was over, everyone put away their weapons, and I went back up to the hill to our room, and Peggy was doing homework but I didn’t have to do any, and so I called Miss Cherilyn and found out when Aquamarine was supposed to come, and then I spent a little bit of time looking at the weather maps, and wrote out what I thought it was going to do for practice—I was starting to worry that when I went back to Equestria, I might be the worst weathermare ever—and then I turned off my computer and got out my journal and wrote in it for a while.

When Peggy was done with her homework, she asked if I wanted to do anything or just have an early night, and I said that I wasn’t against having an early night. But then she said that maybe before we went to bed, she could get out some of her snowboarding gear and see what fit, and so she went through her bag and found me a pair of goggles which wouldn’t really fit my eyes but I could wear up on my forehead. And in the bottom of the bag, she had a Salomon t-shirt that had some holes and she said she didn’t wear it any more and I should, ‘cause we could cut holes in it for my wings.

So I got all dressed up and even put on my hoof-boots, which were really clicky on the tile floor, and she said that I looked really good. It was kind of slippery wearing them, though, ‘cause the magnets didn’t grab on to the floor at all, and she said that we should put a few layers of duct tape over them and that would help.

She helped me get undressed and said that she would have to borrow a pair of scissors from someone to cut wing-holes in the shirt, and I set everything in front of my dresser so that I would know where it was on Halloween.

Author's Note

I Said to Poetry

This was the only one I could find online; if anyone finds links to the other poems, put 'em in the comments.

October 28 [Vector Fields]

October 28

I woke up at my usual time, and I realized that I'd forgotten to ask Peggy if she wanted to go trotting again, and I was gonna but then I looked out the window and saw all the clouds and I hoped that she'd want to sleep in, 'cause I really wanted to fly in them.

I told myself that next week I was going to begin remembering to ask her the night before, and maybe we could get a schedule going, even though it was almost the end of the year.

Or maybe I was just fooling myself, and I wouldn't remember.

I filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear then had some hay for a snack, and I was thinking how earlier in the year it hadn't even fit in a box and now the box wasn't full all the way to the top and pretty soon there wouldn't be any more. So maybe next week I should go to the farmer's market in the morning and get enough more to last for the rest of the year. Maybe not a whole bale; maybe the lady sells them in half-bales, too. I could also get more from the internet, but it was more expensive that way.

I went out to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors, and the grumpy man said that I could fly, but to stay low until I got to the 131 Highway, and so I took off and flew low to Jeff's house and I landed there long enough to greet Caleb and Lindy and Trinity. Caleb kept looking around for Peggy, but I said that she wasn't with me today, and he was kind of disappointed.

All of them thought that my flight gear was kind of strange, so I showed it off to them really quick. They'd probably seen me through a window in their house when I was wearing it, but never up close.

I told Trinity that I would go trick-or-treating with them, and then I asked if I could tell what my costume was going to be, or if I had to keep it a secret. And she said that I could tell, so I told her that I was going to be a snowboarder, because Peggy had the right clothes for me and also I had snowboarded before with Peggy and I was pretty good at it. I said that there were videos on YouTube, and Caleb said that he'd look for them, and started poking at his portable telephone.

She was kind of sad that she didn't get a ponyback ride today, either, because I thought if she sat on the camelback she'd squirt all the water out of it. But I promised that I would when I was trick-or-treating, and then I nuzzled her and Lindy before their bus came. And I wanted to nuzzle Caleb, but he was kinda distracted with his portable telephone.

So I took off again and I stayed low still and flew by Aric's house and looked in his window and he was asleep and if the window had been open I would have crawled in to give him a kiss but it wasn't.

Then I took off and climbed a few hundred feet above the trees and headed west. I went all the way over the 131 Highway and then angled north to get to the beginning of the Kal-Haven trail, but instead of following it, I just climbed higher and higher until I was up in the clouds. They'd started to break up so they weren't a solid mass and there was clear air between them and I could fly in that—that wasn't against the rules. So I raced around the clouds and then shoved a couple of them around and mashed two of them together and then bucked my new cloud to make it rain, and then I took a bunch of wispy cloudstuff from the edges of one of them and made a target ring in the sky, and I flew through it a couple of times, once with my eyes closed. I couldn't be sure that I'd actually hit it but I thought I had: if I'd been close to the edge, I would have felt it on my wing, and I didn't think that my aim was far enough off for me to have missed completely.

Playing around with the clouds might not have been the best exercise, but it was fun. And when I had had enough fun, and my watch said that I ought to get back to campus soon, I dove down and skimmed right above the trail for a little bit and then after I'd lost most of my momentum, I made a broad turn and started flying back towards campus.

I went over the 131 Highway not that far above the tops of the big trucks, and it was probably closer than I ought to have been, cause I got buffeted by the wind from one of them as it roared under me. And then I was actually below the big electricity wires when I got to the other side, and I climbed up a little bit and flew back towards campus.

Even though I didn't have to, I cut across Main Street and flew right above Taco Bell, and a seagull who was standing on top of a lamppost took off and started following me, and I think that he was the one who had gotten food from me over the summer. If he was, it was strange of him to remember—I didn't think seagulls were that smart. And maybe he was just mad at me and thought that I was trying to claim his territory for my own, but he followed me all the way back to campus, and when I descended by Trowbridge, he matched me almost all the way down, until he decided to land in the big trash bin rather than on the boardwalk. I hope he was happy there. Maybe he'd gotten tired of Taco Bell, although I didn't think that you could get tired of it.

I went inside and got undressed and made sure that Peggy was getting up, and then I went into the bathroom and I had to wait because there was someone in there and when she came out it was someone that I didn't know. She said that she'd spent the night with her boyfriend, who lived just down the hall, and I didn't know him very well either although I'd seen him a few times. He was a sophomore and I think he was kind of scared of me.

I would have liked to chat longer and make a new friend, but I could tell that she was impatient; maybe she had a class first thing in the morning. So I got in the shower and got cleaned up and washed my leg really well, and then when I was done, Peggy was waiting on the bench and so was Kat, so I was glad that I hadn't dallied.

Peggy must have gotten there first, 'cause she went in as soon as I came out.

I was still preening my wings when Peggy came back in and she asked if I was going to be staying in the room tonight, and I told her that I was, 'cause we were leaving early tomorrow morning, but then I wouldn't be back until Sunday, and she said that that meant she could have someone over Saturday night, and I said that she couldn't use my bed if she did, and she laughed and said that she wouldn't but might it be okay to use the papasan chair. And I said that would be okay.

They had the wafflemaker working for breakfast, but otherwise it was the same things as always. I guess they didn't expect parents to eat breakfast.

So I had a waffle and I had some of the strawberry gravy on it, too, and almost everyone at breakfast was kind of tired and yawny except for me. Sean ate his food and then put his head down on the table for a nap, and Christine started to take people's napkins and put them on his head. And then when it was time to go, he was still napping on the table with his napkin-hat, and Christine said that she could wake him up and she reached under the table and all of a sudden he jerked up and I could see that her hand was under his shirt.

He rubbed his chest and said that that had been mean, and she said he should have woken up when she was poking him and he said that he hadn't been asleep and she had never poked him. Then she said that she'd thought about poking him and that was basically the same as having done it, even though it really wasn't.

Professor Brown started to teach us about phase equilibrium which was something that was very important in weather work, 'cause it was about how things changed from one state to another, like water turning into a vapor or ice.

At first it was pretty basic, 'cause he was just explaining to everyone what we were gonna be figuring out, and he didn't have to tell me what water did, but then he started drawing phase diagrams on the markerboard and it had coexistant curves on it which was where the water could exist in two phases at the same time.

The endpoint of the lines were the critical points, and the point where they all came together was the triple point, which I thought was going to be a very important point.

And it was all really good to know, because even for us there was still some guesswork with the weather, and we never seemed to have enough pegasuses to control it all, so any ways that we could make it a little more efficient would help, because maybe the weather factories could make a few more clouds with a little less work or maybe they could be moved more efficiently, or maybe even we could stop a storm with fewer weatherponies.

So I really paid close attention when he was writing out all the equations, and I made sure to copy them exactly into my notebook, even though they were also in my textbook. I was really glad that I'd spent time practicing math letters, 'cause there were a lot of them.

Me and Lisa went over the lab notes that she had typed up in the lounge, and I didn't see any mistakes in them. And then I flew back to the dorm and sat at my desk and did all my homework until it was lunchtime.

They had tacos for lunch which I think was going to make for interesting classes in the afternoon. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, but I got two of the crunchy ones and a burrito as well, although I had to leave it open and then when I sat down at the table I tried to fold it and roll it up myself, and I didn't get it right, which made me feel kind of stupid. It was just a geometry problem, after all, and I couldn't figure it out.

But I guess it didn't really matter, 'cause it still tasted good, even if it was kind of sloppily wrapped.

Sean was more awake, and every time Christine reached in his direction, he crossed his hands over his chest and finally she said that they could be even and he could give her a purple nurple and he said that there was no way he was going to do that at the dinner table with everyone watching. Then he said for everyone to cover their eyes, and I put a foreleg over mine and I heard Christine yelp and I couldn't help but look and he had a really smug look on his face and she hit him in the shoulder hard, and he said it was worth it.

After lunch, me and Sean went to math class together, and Professor Pampena said that now we'd be learning about vector fields and line integrals. He said that vector fields had vectors everywhere, and he showed us examples which were wind maps, and I'd seen those before in climate class, and so I understood right away what we were going to be learning.

He showed us how to draw them, to start with. 'Cause you couldn't draw the whole thing or you wouldn’t be able to see anything, so you needed enough vectors to know what things were looking like, but then you could stop.

Line integrals, which he taught us next, were about the work done by a force during the motion, and at first when he was drawing straight lines it seemed pretty easy to calculate but then when he started to draw curved lines it got a lot more complicated.

But I bet that this was one of the things that astronomers used to figure out how much planets and stars and stuff should move by gravity, and it would be even more complicated because Professor Pampena was only drawing in two dimensions.

So he showed us how to calculate it out by getting the dot product of the force and the velocity, which made sense, and then how to substitute another variable in so that you could actually solve the equation.

We went to Sean's room after class and did homework, and I had a little trouble concentrating, 'cause I was thinking about the weekend, but I had to focus and get my math done, 'cause if I didn't, then me and Sean wouldn't be able to check it together and then I'd have to do it on the weekend when I wanted to be having fun, so I just tried to push the thought of the weekend to the back of my mind, and just concentrate on math.

It was easier in class, 'cause Professor Pampena was entertaining and there wasn't anything else to focus on, either, although I had noticed that some students didn't take notes but doodled in their notebooks instead.

I think if I'd been concentrating more on my homework, I would have beat Sean, but I wasn't, so I didn't. And then when he saw that he was done and I wasn't, he asked me if I was having trouble with the work, 'cause he could help explain it to me, and I said that wasn't it, but I just was thinking of other things.

He said that he could change the music back to Loreena McKennitt because sometimes when he listened to something new he focused more on that than the work he was supposed to be doing, and I thought that wasn't a bad idea, so he did, and I think he was right, 'cause at first I was listening but then I sort of let the music move to the back of my mind and finished up the problems.

We went through and checked them together, and I guess I had been distracted, because on the two where we'd gotten different answers, I'd been the one to make the mistake. And then I felt really dumb, but he said that he knew what would cheer me up, and so we watched two Numberphile movies.

I really liked them because not only was James so smart, but even when it was something that I didn't really know very well or even had never heard of before, he explained it so I could understand.

So I learned about a formula that used all the numbers from one through nine, and it made a number which was called Euler's constant, or e for short, and the formula was accurate to the first eighteen trillion trillion digits, and that was really neat, except that I didn't quite understand the rules for powers that let him get those numbers in the first place, but I was sure that if James said it was true, it must be. I'd never seen a power to a power before.

And in the second video, James' friend Matt got three books that had the longest prime number ever discovered so far which was one less than two to the power of 74,207,281, and he said it was over twenty two million digits long.

I thought it was kind of silly to print that all out, because who would actually read it, and I also wasn't sure what use a number like that was anyway. But when Matt talked about it, and how it was found, it sounded kind of neat, and I wondered if the computer that figured it out got any credit for discovering it.

Sean told me that there were other computer programs that helped look for alien life, and the program was called SETI, and he showed me how to find it so that I could install it on my computer and maybe it would find sapient species somewhere out in the universe.

Sean said that it would be kind of ironic if that happened, but he said that I should do it anyway.

I went back to my room and I should probably have read my Bible, 'cause I was getting close to the end. There were a bunch of books still left, but they all must have been pretty short. And next there were two Corinthians.

But I wasn't really in the mood for it, so instead I packed everything that I'd need for the weekend in my saddlebags (which wasn't much) and then I thought that I should get something nice for Gusty, so I went to the bookstore and found a Kalamazoo College sweatshirt. I wouldn't have got that for anypony, but I thought that since she liked to wear clothes, she'd really like it.

I hoped that I wasn't the only one who had thought of getting her something, 'cause I didn't want to make everypony else look bad. But it just felt like the right thing to do.

And then I went back to the room and when Peggy came in she had to open the window and I said that I was sorry and I shouldn’t have eaten so many tacos and she said it was okay because that way if she farted she could just blame it on me.

She opened the door, too, so we had a little breeze coming through the room, and I could also fan my wings and that helped, too. And I said that I was kind of sad that we weren't taking Amtrak 'cause the train was a lot of fun, but I guess that we didn't really have time for it.

Kat and Rebekka stopped by and talked for a little while, 'cause our door was open, and Rebekka put some small braids in my mane, and even though she didn't have anything to tie them with, they stayed 'cause they were so tight. She said that they'd work out after a while or if I decided that I really didn't like them I could have her or Peggy or anyone un-braid them, but I did like them.

And since she was there, I put on the Solomon shirt and she went to her room and got scissors and a Sharpie marker and drew the cutouts for my wings and put them in the shirt for me, and it was a lot more comfortable that way.

All four of us went to dinner together, although Rebekka and Kat went to their own table rather than eat with us. And dinner was really nice, 'cause there were some parents who had come to dinner, but we all agreed that their kids didn't look all that comfortable to have them there, and Meghan said that she was glad that her parents hadn't come, and everyone agreed.

A couple of them came over and wanted to meet me, and that was kind of awkward, 'cause I didn't know them or their child, plus I had to stop eating and answer their questions so I was kind of glad that I'd be gone for the rest of the weekend. It was just natural curiosity, but I would have rather had them stop and talk to me out on the quad or something.

Still, they were really friendly and outgoing and the man even gave me a little paper card with his name and telephone number on it and I set it on the table at first and then after they'd left Meghan said that she'd keep it safe for me and stuck it down her shirt.

Christine said that she wanted to have a gathering in her room and we could play games on the television and card games, too, and have some beer and have a fun time and be thankful that our parents trusted us enough to be left unsupervised.

So we all went down to her room together and Sean said that we could watch Star Trek, but she said that the television was going to be used for games and that Star Trek was for another time, and he was kind of grumbly about it until she said that he owed her a re-match in Mario Kart and then he said that he was going to beat her again and there was nothing she could do about it.

She said that she still had to get him back for what he'd done at lunch, and he said that he'd still win, and she said that sounded like a challenge.

I wasn't any good at video games, so I played euchre with Meghan and Anna and Reese, and then after the first game had gotten done, Anna and Reese wanted to play Mario Kart and so Christine and Sean played euchre with us, and me and Meghan skunked them. Sean threw down his cards in disgust, 'cause he'd gotten a really good last hand, and we'd just called up something else that made it worthless.

Christine claimed that that was her revenge, although she really had nothing to do with it. And then we all agreed that they had to streak in the next twenty-four hours and they had to have a witness to prove that they had, and Christine said that there was no time like the present, so she announced to everyone that she and Sean were going to streak the quad and anyone who wanted to watch could. And he just looked really embarrassed by it, which I think was why she wanted to.

But he agreed that that was the penalty, and he had to do it, and it would be better to do it with her than to do it alone. So everyone had another beer first, except for Anna and Reese, 'cause they were racing, and then we all got up and went to the top of the hill and sat on the benches by Stetson Chapel and Christine said that anyone else who wanted to could join, and I said that I would, just because it was fun. But nobody else wanted to, which was too bad.

So the two of them got undressed and then all three of us ran down the quad and when we got back to the top Peggy admitted that she'd thought about hiding Sean's clothes, but she had decided that that was mean, so she'd just hidden his underwear. And then when he picked up his shirt he found out that she had tied his pant legs in a knot so he had to untie them before he could get dressed again. And after he had, she got up and she had been sitting on his underwear the whole time.

Peggy went back to Christine's room afterwards, but I thought I should get to bed a little bit early especially 'cause Madison was in a different time zone, and unicorns stayed up late and woke up late. So I asked Meghan for the card back and she reached into her shirt and got it out for me, and then I went back to my room and remembered to put the sweatshirt that I'd bought into my bag.

It was kind of lonely in my bed, since Peggy wasn't back, and between that and being eager for tomorrow I had a little trouble falling asleep, and for a long time I just had my eyes closed but my ears were still listening to all the sounds of the dorm.

October 29 [Sweeney Todd]

October 29

I woke up a little early, 'cause I wanted to get a quick flight in before we went to Madison. Aquamarine wasn't supposed to arrive for a couple of hours anyway, so I thought I had time.

Since I wasn't gonna be going too far, I decided that I wouldn't take my camelback, and so I got dressed in my flight gear really quiet so I wouldn't wake up Peggy, who had come back sometime last night. And I ate a little bit of hay and then I went out to the boardwalk and I didn't plan on flying too high, so I didn't have to tell the airplane directors.

I went over downtown, and I did a couple of laps of the central part of Kalamazoo, and then I decided that I'd fly out a little bit further east, and so I crossed the river and flew along over the railroad tracks, past the railroad yard and then when I got to Sprinkle Road, I looked behind me and in front of me and I didn't see any trains so I went under the bridge, and climbed a little ways back up on the other side so that I'd be well above them if one tried to sneak up on me.

I followed the tracks all the way out to Galesburg, and I probably could have flown higher but I didn't want to bother the airplane directors, so I stayed only a couple of hundred feet up, and instead of going back along the tracks, I went a little bit south along 35th Street until it crossed the Kalamazoo River, and then I followed along the river. It broadened out into the lake almost right away, and there was a cluster of low islands that I thought it would be fun to explore sometime. Islands were kind of like land-clouds, 'cause they were off by themselves and unless you had a ship or could fly, you couldn't get to them.

I had enough time to land at one, which looked like an upside-down G, and there were some trees on it, but that was all. And I couldn't do a lot of exploring, but I didn't have to because I could see all of it.

Sometimes islands could be dangerous, 'cause some predators liked the isolation, but there weren't any lake monsters on Earth, so I wasn't too worried about there being one there.

Once I was satisfied that I'd seen all of the island, I flew over the rest of the lake just above the water until I started to get close to the dam, then I climbed up high enough to get over the electricity wires, and then when I was on the other side I dropped back down until I was just above the surface of the river.

When I got to the abandoned railroad bridge, I had to climb up and over it because there were too many support beams for me to go under. There was a man on the bridge who was fishing, and I waved to him as I went over. He had a bucket which was up on the railroad ties next to him and it had a couple of fish swimming around in it and I didn't get a close enough look to know what they were.

I turned and flew more direct back to campus, 'cause I needed to have time to take a shower before Aquamarine arrived. And so I landed on the boardwalk and went back inside and got out of my flight gear and since it was still pretty early on a Saturday morning there wasn't anyone else who wanted to use the shower, and I took my time to make sure that I was really clean.

When I was done I sat on the bed and brushed my coat, mane, and tail and then preened my wings, and of course I was right in the middle of it when my portable telephone started ringing, and I should have had it on the bed with me so I could get to it quicker but I hadn't thought to, and by the time I'd answered it, it had also woke up Peggy.

It was Aquamarine and so I said that I'd meet her downstairs and apologized to Peggy for waking her up, then I got my saddlebags and nuzzled Peggy and went down to let Aquamarine in.

I hugged Miss Parker and Mister Barrow and thanked them for bringing her, and we got her saddlebags out of their van, and then the two of us went inside and they drove off.

The two of us walked down the hill to Hoben, which was Cedric and Leon's dorm, and he was already in the lounge when we arrived, and he gave Aquamarine a big hug, then the two of them sat down on a couch together and since I didn’t want to interrupt, I sat on another couch and finished preening my wings, and I also kept an eye out for Sienna, 'cause I'd told Miss Cherilyn to pick us up here.

It took her almost an hour to arrive, and we should have all gone to breakfast together, but I think that Aquamarine and Cedric were happy to spend the time together and they could snuggle better on the couch than they could in the dining hall anyway.

Aquamarine had taken her saddlebags off and she didn't want to put them back on, so she just picked them up in her mouth and then had to drop them again so that she could nuzzle Cedric and give him another hug, and then the two of us went outside and Miss Cherilyn opened the door for us and we got in the van.

We got them to agree to stop for breakfast, and Mister Salvatore decided that we could go to Tim Horton's because he said he wanted to get a cup of coffee for the road and they had the best coffee. And Miss Cherilyn said that he really wanted a box of Timbits, but he just didn't want to admit it.

So we sat down and had a nice breakfast, although it was a little bit hurried because Mister Salvatore said that he didn't want to get into Chicago too late because the Cubs were playing in a World Series and people were getting a little bit crazy about the games, even though everyone knew that they'd wind up losing.

We got a box of Timbits to take with us and Mister Salvatore got his coffee and we got on the 131 Highway just long enough to get to the 94 Highway, and Mister Salvatore said that he wished that we still had the Mustang, and I said that I'd liked the truck that we had when we came back from Peggy's house, too. Miss Cherilyn said that neither of those were good options for two people and three ponies, and I said that we wouldn't mind scrunching up so that we'd all fit, and Mister Salvatore said that ponies were smart because we knew that style was more important than comfort when it came to a car.

The traffic wasn't too bad until we started to get close to Chicago, and then it wasn't too long before we really had to slow down because it was so crowded on the road. Mister Salvatore said that as much as he liked driving, this was the part of it that he hated, and he wished that we could have avoided Chicago entirely but that there wasn't really a practical way around it, and anyways we still had to get Cayenne.

He had to stop a bunch of times to pay to drive on the road, and then we got off the highway and went right down to the lakefront, and I pointed out Northerly Island to Aquamarine, 'cause that was where I'd landed when I flew across the lake, and it was really slow and I thought that I could get out and fly faster, if I knew where we were going.

Miss Cherilyn said that he should have stayed on the highway for longer, because this way was really slow, and he said that it was more scenic, and he was also opposed to paying tolls if he could help it, and we had a little bit of extra time because of the change in time zones.

She said that that didn't make it a better route, but I did like being able to look out at the lake, and I thought it was a pretty good route even if it wasn't the fastest.

It took us almost a half hour to get from downtown to Northwestern University, and it took us a little while to find the building where we were supposed to meet her, which was called Bobb Hall. Mister Salvatore finally found it and me and Aquamarine went in to get her.

Cayenne was in a little lounge with two suitcases packed and when she saw us, she said goodbye to the boy she was talking to and picked up her suitcases in her field and trotted towards us, and she kind of kept her tail high as she came across the room.

All three of us went out to Sienna together and Miss Cherilyn opened the back so that she could put her suitcases in, and we all moved to the back seat, 'cause it was too crowded in the middle seat for all three of us together. They made the middle seat narrower so that you could get by it to get to the back seat, 'cause the back seat didn't have its own doors.

Before we got back on the 94 Highway, we stopped at Five Guys for lunch. They had veggie sandwiches which were good, and Cayenne also had some Cajun fries and let each of us try one and I didn't like them very much because they were too spicy. They had milkshakes, too, and they even had bacon-flavored ones, and Miss Cherilyn wondered if anybody actually ever ordered it, or if it was just on the menu so that they could say that they had it.

Mister Salvatore said that he was kind of tempted to try it because it was a manly drink, and she said that putting together two things that never should have been put together wasn't manly, it was dumb.

And he said that was practically the definition of manly.

The 94 Highway went north until we got to Milwaukee, then it turned back west and went almost straight to Madison, and it was different from the way we'd come in before, so Mister Salvatore had to look at the GPS map to get directions to the university. We were on the wrong side of the lake.

We drove around until we found the hotel, which was called the Doubletree, and Miss Cherilyn went inside to get our rooms while Mister Salvatore unloaded all the suitcases and saddlebags and we all carried them inside. He said that he could get a cart, but I didn't think that we needed one, 'cause their bags had wheels and Cayenne could carry a few bags in her field.

He had to park Sienna in a proper spot, so he had to go back outside, and we got our room cards from Miss Cherilyn and went upstairs to our room before he got in. I rode in the elevator because they wanted to, but I still didn't like them all that much.

We didn't have a good view of the lake from our room, which was too bad. But I guess it didn't matter that much, 'cause I didn't think we were going to be spending a lot of time in it.

We hadn't been in our room for too long before Miss Cherilyn knocked on the door and Aquamarine let her in. She said that we probably weren't going to be able to meet with Gusty before the play, but that we were going to go out to a late dinner afterwards, with her and Nicky. And so we had some time to do whatever we wanted to before we went to the play, and so we all decided that it would be fun to walk around Madison a little bit and see more of it. And maybe we could have a light dinner before the play started, 'cause it was a pretty nice day. It was cloudy out, but pretty warm.

The hotel wasn't too far from the Arboretum, which was a tree zoo, and we all wanted to go there. Cayenne suggested it, 'cause she'd come up to Madison to see Gusty a couple of times, and she thought it was really pretty and peaceful and a nice change from the city, and Aquamarine was interested to see if there were any kinds of trees that didn't exist in Michigan.

While we were walking over there we thought it might be fun to see if we could run some leaves off of the trees, because we didn't know if that would work on Earth. And there would be lots of trees to choose from, in case some of them were more receptive than others.

The Arboretum was a lot bigger than I'd thought, and they had some prairies, too. It was a lot like the Nature Center, but maybe ten times bigger or maybe even more. And I was kind of jealous that Gusty had that so close to her, but I shouldn't have been because there was lots around Kalamazoo, too, and I still hadn't explored it all.

At first, we just walked around and talked about school and our classes and what we were going to do when they were over. It was something I was trying not to think about—I was going to go visit Peggy for Thanksgiving, which was at the end of November, and then after that I didn't know what I'd do. I guess I'd find a place to stay in Kalamazoo for the rest of the year, or else I could have a vacation and go visit other places I hadn't been yet.

Cayenne insisted that we all had to get together for shopping in Chicago some time after school ended, 'cause there were so many good stores that we could spend a whole weekend and not run out of places to see. And I thought that I'd like to go on one more trip, especially if someone else wanted to go with me.

We found a trail that went through a forest, and Cayenne asked Aquamarine if she had tried it back in Lansing, and she said that she had, but it didn't work all that well with Earth trees. She said that she'd thought maybe she could focus better on just one tree and tried running circles around a sidewalk tree and that had made her pretty dizzy and not too many leaves had come off of it. But then she said that there were three of us, one from each tribe, and that might make it work better.

So we went down the trail a little bit and Aquamarine kept a close look at the trees, and I knew that she was feeling them in her hooves, 'cause their roots were everywhere and an earth pony could feel that just like I could feel the air in my wings. And then she stopped in the middle of the trail and sort of concentrated a little bit, and then she said that this was the place to try, and we had a good half-mile stretch where the trees were really close to the path.

She scraped a line in the dirt that she said was our starting point, and then she had me fly down and mark the ending point, and she said that she'd tell me where it was. And after I'd flown a half-mile or so, I heard her whistle and so I dropped down and made a line that was the finish point, and then flew back to them.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had been trailing a little bit behind us, but they caught up while we were marking out our course, and we decided that we ought to have one of them at the finish line, so we sent Miss Cherilyn ahead, and I said that she'd see the line, and pointed to the big, gnarled tree that was right by where I'd marked.

Mister Salvatore wanted to know what we were doing, and Aquamarine said that we were doing a running of the leaves, and he didn't know what that was, and she said to just watch, and he'd figure it out.

Miss Cherilyn waved when she got to the end, and Cayenne told Mister Salvatore to start us off, so we all lined up and he told us to go and we all started trotting and we let Aquamarine set the pace, 'cause she had to figure out which was best for the trees.

And at first I wasn't feeling anything, and then Aquamarine picked up the pace a little bit and we were right on the edge of a canter and still nothing. Then I started to feel a little bit of energy, and she got going faster and it was uncomfortable for me to trot and I started falling behind and finally had to break into a canter. Aquamarine kept her stride, 'cause she had longer legs so it was easier for her, and Cayenne was keeping up at a trot, too, but she looked a little uncomfortable with it.

Then she had to change gaits, too, 'cause Aquamarine went even faster, and I could start to feel the energy around us, and I wanted to look back and see if leaves were falling yet, but that would have been dumb. So I kept my focus on Aquamarine's tail and legs, and tried to keep a couple ponylengths behind her and not vary my speed too much. I thought that with only us three, we'd have to be really coordinated for it to work.

Right towards the end she finally switched to a canter, and I felt a little more of a tug almost, and I knew that we were doing it, and then we crossed the finish line and slowed down and turned around to see what we'd managed to do.

By Equestrian standards, it wasn't too impressive. There were a bunch of leaves falling, but I thought that we could do better.

Cayenne was a little bit more winded than I was, and she said it was because she spent so much time riding the Metra and in buses and taxis and Uber-cars and not exercising like she should. She said it was too easy in Chicago to get a ride anywhere so you didn't have to walk.

Miss Cherilyn wanted to know what we were doing, too, and so Aquamarine told her and then she said that once we caught our breath we were going to gallop back. She said that the trees had been fighting her, and they weren't too receptive, and she thought that maybe she could improve it a little bit by laying her hooves on every one and getting to know it but that would have taken forever, 'cause there were so many trees, so she was doing like I did with clouds, and feeling a few to get a general idea and hoping that it was a good guess.

I knew that if she had had a farm back in Equestria, she probably would have known every plant on it, but she couldn't very well do that here.

So when we were ready again, we lined up and this time Miss Cherilyn told us when to start and Aquamarine got into a fast canter right away, and when we'd matched stride with her, she broke into a gallop, and we raced down the path and this time I could really feel that we were getting something done, and right as we got close to the finish line I galloped as fast as I could, but it wasn't quite enough to catch Aquamarine.

Mister Salvatore had been looking up the path rather than at us when we crossed, so I knew that we'd managed to make it work, and sure enough when I turned back around, thousands and thousands of leaves were drifting down, so many that I couldn't see Miss Cherilyn through them any more.

The four of us walked back to her, and there were still some leaves falling by the time we caught up with her. And she said that she'd never seen anything quite like that before, so we told her how we did that every autumn in Equestria to encourage the leaves to fall to make way for the new.

We probably shouldn't have put so much effort into galloping, cause we all had gotten a bit lathered, so we had to go back to the hotel and take a shower before we went to the play. And we got room service, which is where they deliver the food right to your room, but it's kind of expensive. Mister Salvatore had said that it was okay, though.

The three of us all groomed each other, and we shared the food we'd gotten, and then Cayenne got a bottle out of her suitcase and we all had just a little bit for luck.

We drove to the theatre, and we had some really good seats right towards the front. All of us looked through the program and there was Gusty's name and biography, and now it said that she'd guest-starred on Orange is the New Black, which was really neat. It didn't look like anybody else had been in a movie.

There was also a page that said how they'd gotten invited to the Shakespeare festival, and they had a picture from that play, with Gusty at the center.

Cayenne said that her being a pony had probably helped them, and she felt sometimes that she got to do stuff that other students might not get to 'cause she was a unicorn, and I was about to say something kinda mean, but then I thought about how I got to do things that other airplanes didn't get to do, and it was probably true. Aquamarine said that she was a really good actress, though, and Cayenne said that it was true, and she didn't mean to say that she hadn't deserved it, but Gusty had even told her that Hollywood casting people didn't normally pick someone who had played one part in one play and put them in a TV series.

I hadn't know that the play was going to be a musical, but I was really glad that it was, because I thought that plays were a lot better when there was singing in them.

Right at the very beginning, there was a shrieking whistle that set my ears on edge, and that kind of wound up setting the tone for the whole play.

Gusty was really creepy in the play, and I almost didn't know her. If there had been other ponies in the play I don't think I would have recognized her at first. Her clothes were raggedy and filthy, and her mane was in a really sloppy bun. And she had a sort of strange twitchiness, and I didn't trust her for an instant, and I didn't think that Sweeney should, either.

The whole play was really tense, and it was also horrible—Sweeney got his revenge by killing people and then Gusty disposed of their bodies by grinding them up and baking them into pies, which everyone really liked, 'cause they didn't know what was in them.

There was blood everywhere, and even though I knew it was fake, it didn't feel fake when he cut someone's throat and they dropped limply to the floor. And even though I knew it was fake, I wanted to get out of the theatre and it just kept getting worse and worse, and I thought that maybe humans didn't need monsters because sometimes humans were monsters.

I felt horrible for thinking it, but Gusty got what she deserved in the end, 'cause she'd betrayed him, but her final scream as he pushed her into the oven stood my coat right on end.

And when everyone bowed at the end, most of them were bloodied, 'cause they'd died in the play, and seeing them all at once like that was a little bit shocking, and I was really glad when the lights finally came up again.

Everyone was standing and applauding and it was nearly enough to bring down the auditorium, and so they all came out and bowed again, and then people started to make their way out of the theatre.

It was really strange to see all the actors standing there to greet us with blood all over them, and I was still feeling a little bit skittish—I think that we all were. And there was a really big crowd around Gusty, but people let us through and we all went up and hugged and nuzzled her and I heard some people applauding that, too.

We had to wait for her to finish greeting everyone who wanted to meet her and shake her hoof and get an autograph, and I realized that the strangest thing about everyone in the line was that they were still wearing their costumes but they were totally different. Judge Turpin had a big smile on his face and he was happily greeting his friends, but throughout the play I'd wanted to buck him right in his smug face. And Lucy was still wearing her bloody rag-dress, and still had her creepy doll, but she was as normal as any other college girl that I knew.

All of us went to the Madison Blind for dinner again, just like last time, and she'd taken off her makeup but her mane was still in the sloppy bun, 'cause she hadn't wanted to spend the time to comb it out. And she told us that it was a really hard role to play but once she'd figured out Miss Lovett's motivation it had been a lot easier and sort of come naturally, and Nicky said it was kind of creepy to watch her practice, especially as she started to get more and more into her character. And I did tell her that I thought she'd gotten what she deserved in the end and she laughed and said if I thought that than she had done a really good job.

Then she told us how the gun had been switched in the fight because they couldn't risk dropping a real, loaded black powder pistol on the stage, and what they had done was give Anthony a fake one while the real one was just behind the desk, and when Anthony and Mister Fogg were fighting, Joanna had been off to the side and switched guns, and she bet that nobody had noticed. And she was especially proud when Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn said that they hadn't.

We stayed eating snacks and drinking beer until they closed, and then we all went back to Gusty and Nicky's apartment with them. I'd forgotten to bring the sweatshirt, but we'd see her again tomorrow and so I could give it to her then.

And when we got back to the hotel, we were all pretty tired from running in the Arboretum and also emotionally exhausted from the play, but we didn't go to bed right away like we should have, because sometimes you're so exhausted that you can't sleep, and this was one of those times, so I was really glad that Cayenne had brought her bottle, 'cause we all sat on the bed and passed it around and talked some more about the play and then we started talking about sex and Cayenne gave me a couple of good ideas and said that there was a book called the Kama Sutra that I should definitely look at.

I told her about my toy and when I said that I'd seen one modeled after a real pony, Cayenne asked if I thought they might make one that looked like her, and I said that she should, and maybe they'd even give her one for free. So she got out her folding computer, 'cause she'd brought it with her, and she found their internet page, and figured out how to send them a message, and she wasn't very good at typing when she'd been drinking, so she had to fix a lot of mistakes but the computer was smart and underlined them all in red for her, just like mine did.

And then she said that she ought to include pictures, so she took her portable telephone and tried to take them herself but I don't think she would have done very well even if she hadn't been drinking and I finally took pity on her and did it for her.

She got them put on her computer by sending them to a computer-cloud and then bringing them back with her portable computer, and then she picked the two that she liked best, plus she also had some other pictures of herself that she thought were pretty sexy, and she put them in the computer letter, too, and then sent it.

And we were all kinda giggling by the time she was done, and I think that helped relax us as much as anything had.

We'd gotten a room that just had one big bed, and it was really too much for just the three of us, and so it felt kind of empty because there was so much space that we weren't using.

We all cuddled up in the center of the bed, and I thought that I probably should have drank some water 'cause I was going to have a sore head in the morning, but I didn't want to get up and out of bed now, so I just put my head down against Aquamarine and closed my eyes and hoped that I didn't have nightmares of a murdering barber and his evil landlord.

October 30 [Earth Ponies Make the Grass Grow]

October 30

Aquamarine woke me up, 'cause earth ponies are better drinkers than pegasuses. And I had a headache and a dry mouth and I was a little too hot and I really didn't want to move, but I knew that I couldn't stay in bed all day, so I staggered to the shower and turned the water on cold and stuck my head under it and that helped wake me up some.

I wasn't quite ready to actually to get in the shower, so when I felt a little bit better I turned off the shower and then had a couple of glasses of water to drink and Aquamarine filled the coffee maker and started a cup for us to share, and while it was brewing we sat in the chairs that were by the windows and looked out at the cars driving around on the dark streets below.

There were a few people walking around, too, and we tried to think of where they might be going so early in the morning. They couldn't be bakers, 'cause bakers would already be at work, but there were lots of other places that people could be going that we could only guess at, and it was kind of a fun game to see if we could figure it out. Even though we probably got every one of them wrong.

When the sky started to get light outside, we drank our cup of coffee and then took a shower together and groomed each other and went downstairs to find the room with breakfast. They had a waffle maker and it worked, which made me really happy.

And when we were done eating, we thought it would be nice to take a plate of food up to Cayenne, so that she didn't have to come downstairs to eat it but the woman who was watching over the food said that we weren't allowed to and that we could only eat food in the room and if Cayenne wanted any she'd have to come down and get it herself.

But we pleaded and begged and eventually she decided that we could, even though we weren't supposed to, and we got her a nice plate with a waffle and scrambled eggs and an English muffin with lots of butter on it, and Aquamarine carried it on her back, 'cause she was better at balancing things back there than I was. It was a lot trickier than it looked, and unicorns were really lucky that they could just carry whatever they wanted in their aura.

I helped hold it in place while we were in the elevator, 'cause it kind of moved unpredictably, and I wished that we'd had one of the metal dishes that went over the food and helped to keep it warm, 'cause it was probably going to get cold before she could eat it and wouldn't be as good.

As soon as we were back in our room, Aquamarine set the food down on the desk and started another cup of coffee and I shook Cayenne awake and she swore at me and I said that we could put her in the shower again, and that got her out of bed.

And after she'd gone in the bathroom to pee and run some cold water over her face, she ate her breakfast and drank her coffee, and she had some aspirins in her suitcase and she had a couple and so did I.

We offered to help her in the shower if she wanted help, but she said that she'd be okay by herself. And she said that we were terrible for waking her up so early, and then she said that she was glad we'd brought her breakfast, 'cause it had helped settle her stomach.

I sat on the bed and preened my wings, 'cause neither Aquamarine or Cayenne was any good at that, and Aquamarine was laying on the bed on her back, just looking up at the ceiling, and it was kind of an awkward moment, but then Cayenne came out of the bathroom and Aquamarine asked her if she'd got an answer back from the sex toy company yet and at first she hadn't remembered that she'd sent them a computer letter, so she opened up her computer and looked at what she'd written and she was kind of embarrassed 'cause she said that she sounded like a filly trying to get a first date and it did sort of sound like that. Me and Aquamarine thought it was funny, but she said it wasn't because maybe they'd read the letter and wouldn't want to because she sounded like a drunken idiot, but I said that the pictures looked really good and maybe they would focus more on that and less on what she'd written.

She said that she hoped so. And she hoped that she could get her helpers to take her if the company said that they could, and then she got kind of enthusiastic again and said that it would be really neat to think of everyone buying a toy that looked like her, and she hoped that they'd also take pictures and put them with the toy and let her write a biography and I thought that was a sort of strange thing to want, and she said that I woudn't really understand because I was a pegasus and we weren't that big on leaving a legacy, and I said that wasn't true but we just cared about other things and the sky would be really boring if we just set clouds in place and they stayed there forever.

We had to pack up our things before we went downstairs to meet Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, 'cause we wouldn't be coming back to the hotel after we left, and it was kind of surprising how much stuff Cayenne had got out of her bag even though we hadn't spent a whole day in our hotel room. Me and Aquamarine hadn't had to get out much except for our brushes and shampoos.

Once she'd gotten packed, we looked over the room one more time to make sure that we weren't forgetting anything, and then they went in the elevator and I flew down the stairs and they beat me to the bottom, but only 'cause I had to make lots of turns and go slow in case someone else was in the stairs.

Miss Cherilyn gave our keys and their keys back to the clerk while Mister Salvatore got the van ready, and we drove to a little coffee shop to meet Gusty and Nicky for breakfast. We could have gotten tickets to see the play again, but we all thought it would be best to let other people have our seats, especially since the play was so popular.

We just had coffee, 'cause everyone had already eaten breakfast, and we all decided that we were gonna meet in Chicago sometime after Thanksgiving but we didn't know when, yet. And Cayenne said that she wanted to go to Florida if she had the chance, because it was supposed to have really nice beaches. Gusty said that there was a big resort there called Walt Disney World that we could see, too. And she thought that it would make for a nice trip in the winter time when it was all snowy and gloomy but I was looking forward to the snow 'cause it was fun to play in.

After a little while we decided that we wanted to walk around, 'cause we'd all had too much coffee and Gusty was starting to get nervous and fidgety since it was getting close to time for her to go and get ready for the play, and so we drove back to campus, and I gave her the sweatshirt that I'd bought. And she thanked me and said that it was a little too warm to wear it right now and I said that she didn't have to but when it got colder she might want to.

She didn't want to go too far from the theatre because she was worried that she might lose track of time and be late, and Miss Cherilyn promised her that she would make sure that she was on time to the theater.

So she gave us a little tour of campus, and we ended up at their botanical gardens. They weren't as pretty as they would have been earlier in the year, since almost everything had gone dormant for the winter, but Aquamarine really liked it just the same and she kept getting distracted looking at the plants, and then Gusty would tell her what they looked like when it was in bloom and it was funny to think how Aquamarine probably could picture in her head what it looked like every season of the year but to me it was kind of barren.

Too soon it was time for Gusty to get ready for the play, so we walked back to the theatre together, and we all hugged and kissed and told her to break a leg even though we didn't really want her to.

The three of us all got in the back seat of the van, and Mister Salvatore told his GPS where he wanted to go, and it took it a moment to figure it out and then it told him to drive to a road, which I thought was a good first step.

Cayenne wanted to see if she'd gotten a computer letter back, but she couldn't use her folding computer in the van, so she used her portable telephone because that could get computer letters, too. And I asked if mine could do that, too, and she said that it could and she'd show me how once she was done.

And she hadn't gotten a letter back from them, and she started to pout, 'cause she thought that maybe they had decided to ignore her letter, but Aquamarine reminded her that it was Sunday and maybe they didn't look at their computer mail on Sundays, since real mail didn't arrive on Sundays.

So she said that she hoped that that was true, and then she put her portable telephone away and I reached over the back of the seat to get mine out of my saddlebags and there was an app that looked at my mail, and she showed me how to set it up and that was pretty convenient that I could look at my computer letters wherever I wanted to. I could even write them if I wanted to, because if I pushed the right place on the screen it let me talk and it would put down whatever it thought I had said, but I had to talk really slow 'cause it was kind of dumb at figuring out what I meant.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Mars Cheese Castle, because Mister Salvatore said that we were legally obligated to since we were in Wisconsin. And then he said that he was going to have beer for lunch and that Miss Cherilyn was the designated driver for the rest of the trip.

Cayenne didn't like it too much 'cause she didn't like cheese, but me and Aquamarine did, and they even had free samples of the different cheeses but we couldn't have too many or we would have ruined our appetite for lunch, so we just picked the ones that looked the most interesting.

Almost all of their food had cheese, too, and we got some squeaky cheese curds and me and Aquamarine got grilled cheese sandwiches, and Cayenne just had a salad and said that she didn't understand how we could like fermented milk so much when there were lots of other good things to eat.

And Mister Salvatore said he didn't understand how ponies could really live without eating delicious meat, and Aquamarine said that there were plants everywhere but you couldn't just find hamburgers growing wild in a field and that she found it hard to understand how humans had ever survived and thrived on just what they could catch and that they were so bad at it that they had to keep their animals penned up so that they wouldn't get away, and she said that she could keep a farm without a single fence if she wanted to. And so then the two of them started arguing about where she could grow things and Mister Salvatore lost the argument because she could grow something that she could eat anywhere.

So then he asked me what we could grow on clouds, I said that we didn't have to because there were lots of wild plants to eat and rivers and ponds with fish in them and crabs by the seashore and also any earth pony would be happy to give us some food in exchange for the right kind of weather and Miss Cherilyn told him that he hadn't had a chance trying to debate an earth pony.

We went through their gift store before we left and they had lots of cheese and also cheese-hats, which were something that people in Wisconsin wore although I'd never seen anyone actually doing it and thought that maybe that was something made-up for tourists.

In the parking lot, Aquamarine had her head down and was kind of lagging behind the rest of us and I didn't know why until she stopped at a crack in the pavement that had some grass growing through it and she told Mister Salvatore to look and then she put her hoof down right next to the grass and then gently brushed it through the stumpy blades and a moment later it grew a couple of inches taller and she nipped off the very tops of it and then told him to try that with a hamburger, and he sighed and said that he couldn't and she'd won, and that made her really happy.

Then she told us in Equestrian that it had tasted terrible, and pushing a plant like that wasn't good for the plant and that usually they didn't taste very good when you did but it had been worth it to prove him wrong.

And he said back that he also knew Equestrian and he'd heard what she'd said, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

Miss Cherilyn did drive us the rest of the way to Chicago, and I could tell that Mister Salvatore was getting a bit restless 'cause she didn't drive as fast as he did. And we stopped at Cayenne's dorm and helped her get her bags out of Sienna then hugged her and told her to let us know if she got a model of her vagina made, and she said that she would.

We moved up to the middle seats for the rest of the ride, 'cause the view was a little better and it didn't feel as bumpy in the middle. And instead of going along the lake like Mister Salvatore had, Miss Cherilyn reversed our route, and we went back to the 94 Highway, and we stayed on that so we didn't have to stop and pay to use the road.

When we were going through Chicago, Mister Salvatore told us that the Cubs had lost their game last night, and he said that there were going to be a lot of sad people in Chicago after they lost the game tonight and he hoped that Cayenne wasn't a Cubs fan. I didn't think she was, because she hadn't said anything about them.

I'd liked going along the lake, and the scenery along the 94 Highway was a lot more boring, and Mister Salvatore said it was a little bit slower route as well, and Miss Cherilyn reminded him that driving through Chicago at five was going to be slow no matter what route you took.

When we crossed into Michigan, Mister Salvatore called Aquamarine's helpers, so that they could meet up with us, and it was getting dark by the time we finally got to Kalamazoo. Aquamarine wanted to at least give Cedric a hug before she had to leave, so we convinced Miss Cherilyn to stop at Hoben and Mister Salvatore had to call Aquamarine's helpers again to give them new directions, and Aquamarine called Cedric and he was waiting for us when we arrived.

She got up between the seats and nuzzled Mister Salvatore before he could get out of his seat, and then Miss Cherilyn, and he got her saddlebags and mine out of the back of the van, but she ignored hers so that she could go hug Cedric and kiss him before she had to get in her van and leave.

And the two of us nuzzled and then she got into her van and Mister Salvatore got back in Sienna, and the two drove off together.

I flew back to my room and talked to Peggy for a little bit and then I went down to Meghan's room and the two of us decided to go to Aric's for the night even though we knew that he wouldn't be home yet. And so she packed some clothes in her duffel bag and then the two of us walked through the neighborhood to his house, and I told her about how Cayenne was trying to get a toy made that looked like her, and Meghan thought that was really funny and said that she'd have to look at their internet page to see when it became available.

I told her that she hadn't found out yet if they were really going to do it, but Meghan thought that they would. And then she said that she thought it would be weird to know that people were buying silicone replicas of her and I said that I kind of thought so, too.

All the lights upstairs were off, but the lights in the basement were on and Angela's Alero was parked out front so I guess that they were home. And Meghan said that she thought we should be sort of sneaky, which I thought was silly. I was sure that they were used to me walking on the floor above them 'cause of all the nights I'd spent here, but she took off her shoes before going inside and tried to walk extra-quiet. She might have got away with it, too, except that the stairs were kind of creaky.

I helped her get undressed and we both got in bed and she said that she felt like she was being extra-bad when we were in his bed without him, and we'd just started when I heard Winston turn into the driveway and I thought that maybe we should wait until he came upstairs, but she said that it would be fun to pretend that we didn't know he was coming, and it was hard to argue when she was under my tail.

I was facing the door, 'cause it was more comfortable for Meghan to rest her head on the pillows, and I looked up when he came in and he saw us and started getting undressed right away so that he could join us.

Afterwards, Meghan said that she hadn't expected him back so soon, and he said that now that they were just doing partial dress rehearsals and the lights were all hung and the cues all programmed, it was pretty quick, but he said that tomorrow was a full dress rehearsal and it would run really long because the actors would forget their props and take longer to get into costume than they should, and he told me he wasn't going to be able to be at Durak tomorrow, but if we wanted to we could come over, and Meghan said that we could.

October 31 [Halloween]

October 31

I was the first one awake, and I'd wound up on the outside. Meghan was in the middle and she had her arms around me and Aric had his arms around her, and so I nuzzled her and when she started waking up and moving around she also woke up Aric, and it was still kind of dark outside, so we had plenty of time to have morning sex, especially after I decided that I would skip flying.

After Meghan had gotten out of bed and started to get dressed, I got out and looked out the window at the bird feeder to see who was there. And there were a couple of blue jays who were fighting and so I thought I'd fly down there and scare them off, 'cause I looked kind of like a blue jay.

So I pushed the window open and jumped out and dove down and that scared them off, so I took the sunflower seeds that they would have eaten and when I looked back up Aric and Meghan were both standing by the window watching me, so I got some more and then I flew back up to the window and I wasn't as good at getting in as I was at getting out, so I hung over the sill for a moment and then told Meghan that I'd meet her downstairs when she had put the rest of her clothes on.

Aric leaned down and kissed me, and then I dropped off the sill and flew back a little bit before going down and around to the front. And I didn't go on the porch, but I landed on the roof instead. There was the window that went into Sara's old room, and I thought about how much easier it would be to get in and out this window, since I could just walk through. But I suppose if Aric had that room he wouldn't want to stand at the window naked because the neighbors would see.

I went right to the edge of the roof and leaned down to see if Meghan was on the porch yet, 'cause that was probably where she'd look for me. And I didn't see her but I did slide off the roof and didn't have enough time to really fly out of it, and I crashed into the bush in front of the house and felt like the biggest idiot ever.

Bushes looked a lot softer than they really were.

I climbed out of it and hoped that it would fluff back up, 'cause I hadn't done it any good at all. And then I went and sat on the porch like a normal pony would and when Meghan came downstairs she asked why there were bits of yew stuck in my mane and tail and I said that I didn't know how it had gotten there.

And when we went out the front door and she saw the bush she looked down at me and asked if I'd fallen off the roof and I tried to pretend I hadn't, but then I started giggling and that gave me away. I said that I'd tried to look over the edge and I'd leaned too far forward and then gravity did the rest.

She reminded me how I'd bragged that I could catch her if she fell off a balcony but apparently I couldn't stop myself from falling off a roof and I said it was because I wasn't expecting to fall off the roof and it's really hard to fly upside-down when you're only a few meters above a bush.

She said that I was lucky that I hadn't hurt myself, and I kind of thought that I was, too.

When I got back to my room, Peggy was already awake, 'cause I was kind of late, and she was getting dressed so she was done with her shower. And I decided that I wasn't gonna take one until later, 'cause I hadn't really exercised this morning, so I packed up my books for class and preened my wings and found some more yew needles in there, and when I brushed them off of the bed Peggy asked if I'd gotten in a fight with a tree, and I said it was actually a bush.

She wanted to know who won, and I said that it was too early to tell, but right now it was looking like it was me. But I hadn't looked to see if the yew had broken branches or if it was just bent.

We went to breakfast together and there were already some people wearing costumes for Halloween. When I got to the table, I saw Anna and Reese were wearing medieval clothes, and she had pointy ears like Spock. They were both talking with funny accents, too.

Christine said that she couldn't wear her Princess Leia costume 'cause it was too cold in it and Sean said that he wouldn't mind, and he said that he was going to dress as Captain Kirk just to balance things out.

I told everyone about my weekend and Sean found some pictures of the play on his portable telephone and showed them to everyone. And it wasn't the same as being there, but everyone thought that she looked really creepy and maybe if I hadn't already decided on a costume I would have got a costume like Gusty's.

I nuzzled Meghan when I was done with breakfast, and then flew over the quad to the Dow building and went to thermodynamics class.

Professor Brown told us that the secret of life was that water and silicon had a negative slope. And then he told us more about the formulas for changes in state, and how you could use that in machines. And it was still stuff that I mostly knew because of weather work—the formulas were different and more complex than some of the ones we had, 'cause they had to apply to materials besides water, but I understood everything that he was teaching.

And he asked us what the vapor pressure in a glass of water at one bar was, and he gave us time to think about it even though I knew right away, since he didn't want a specific value, just to know if it was less or more or the same, and then he did the formulas on the markerboard for people who hadn't figured it out.

Then he started talking about colligative properties, where you had a not-pure liquid, and that changed the vapor pressure. And I'd never heard them called that before, but he said it was why salt water froze at a lower temperature than pure water, and he didn't get too far before class ended but he did have time to teach us Gibbs' phase rule.

Since me and Lisa didn't have any work to do together, I flew back to my room and did my homework there, and when I was done I got out my Bible and started reading Corinthians.

It was another letter by Paul, and he said that he was worried that people were saying that they followed different leaders and that he was glad he'd only baptized a few people but he couldn't remember how many.

And he warned to be careful about picking leaders because God would know bad leaders, and he said that he was sending his son Timothy to them to teach them.

He had a lot to say about sex, because the Corinthians were having sex with the wrong people, and he said that God didn't like that, and that if you weren't married you shouldn't seek marriage, which I thought was pretty smart, but he also said that if you weren't married you shouldn't have sex, and he said that having sex defiled your body. And that didn't seem right to me, and I thought that I should remember to ask Pastor Liz.

There were a lot of rules, and he said that women shouldn't speak in church, and I guess some of his rules must have been changed after he wrote his letter, 'cause Pastor Liz talked a lot in church. And he also said that love never failed and that faith, hope, and love were the three things that remained and the greatest of them was love, and I really liked that verse.

I'd finished up the first letter to the Corinthians when it was time for lunch, so I packed up everything that I needed for math and once I'd put my saddlebags on, picked a little bit at a loose feather that was annoying me 'cause it didn't want to fall out like it ought to. And it stayed in and so I gave up and hoped that it would hurry up and fall out.

Maybe I needed to have a bunch of pegasuses run by me, and that would make my feathers fall out when they were being stubborn.

They had some fun Halloween snacks and treats for lunch, like little hearts that had messages on them and were called conversation hearts, and they also had some candy that was shaped like pumpkins and also some little wedge-shaped striped ones that were supposed to be corn. And they also had cookies that looked like pumpkins and had orange frosting on them, and others that looked like ghosts. Human ghosts were apparently pretty shapeless, and didn't look like humans at all which was kind of strange.

Christine was wearing a long coat and she said that her costume was under it and once everyone was at the table she opened up her coat and all she had on was a bra with copper loops on it and a panty and loincloth which was what Leia had been wearing when she was a slave, and Christine said it was the Hutt Slayer costume and she had made it herself.

Sean said it was much sexier than his Captain Kirk Starfleet uniform, and Christine said that no one ever wanted to see that much of William Shatner.

He said that that wasn't what she'd said last night and she said he hadn't been wearing his Starfleet uniform last night and if he had been he would have been sleeping alone. Then she closed up her coat and sat down and started writing new messages on the conversation hearts she had, and pretty soon almost everyone at the table was doing it.

I wanted to know what they tasted like, because they didn't smell very appealing and Christine said that they tasted like chalk and loneliness, and Peggy started laughing so hard that she was crying. And I tried one and I thought that was a fairly good description.

Meghan said that there were some foods that only got sold once a year because they were actually terrible but everyone forgot in the space of a year, and she said that the candy corn I had gotten was the same way, so I had a piece of that and I didn't like it either.

I thought it was really dumb to make a food that nobody liked, and Christine said that they were meant to serve as projectiles, and started throwing conversation hearts at Sean and then he started to throw candy corn and candy pumpkins back at her.

Anna held up her tray as a shield, and Reese reached over and took their bowl of candy away from them until they promised not to fight with candy any more.

Sean had somehow gotten some conversation hearts in his coat pocket and he found them as we were walking to math class, and all of them said 'fuck you' in Christine's writing. And he thought that was really funny.

Professor Pampena told us how to use vector fields to figure out the work done by a particular vector, and that was fun because there was lots of calculating to do, and then he told us the fundamental theorem of calculus for line integrals, and proved that it worked.

And he also showed us a different way to solve the first problem he had given us, because it was a gradient, but he warned us that not all vector fields were gradient fields and we'd got the wrong answer if our vector field wasn't also a gradient field.

We went back to Sean's room after class and did our homework together and he ate the rest of his conversation hearts while he was working and I kind of wished that I had one even though they tasted terrible, so I think that Christine was right about them.

After we'd checked to make sure that we'd both gotten the same answers on our homework, he found some more Numberphile movies on his computer, and we watched one that was about how to put eight queens on a chessboard so that none of them could capture any of the other ones, and that was pretty neat, especially because he not only gave a solution to the problem, but worked out how many solutions there were.

And then he did another one with a magic hexagon, which was where all the rows and columns added up to the same number and there was only one real magic hexagon which was size three, and there was only one way to put the numbers in it.

When I got back to my room, I didn't know if I should put my costume on before dinner or after and I decided that it would be smarter to wait in case anyone was throwing food again. And so when Peggy came we went to dinner together and Meghan was already there and we were a bit too early for them to have all the different foods that they normally did but they still had the salad bar out so that was what I had.

We kind of ate quickly and then Meghan said that she'd meet us at our room and we could go to find Caleb and Lindy and Trinity.

So I put on my snowboarder costume and Peggy got dressed in what she said was a vampire costume and she had fake fangs that went in her mouth and she said that it really turned some guys on. And she had a really nice lacy bra under her shirt and she said that after we were done trick-or-treating with the kids she was going to unbutton a few more buttons on her shirt because she'd get more candy or maybe even pick up a guy that way.

When Meghan came to our room, she was dressed as a cat, and she had little furry cat-ears on her head that were moving and I didn't notice right away but Peggy did, and Meghan explained how they responded to her emotions because there was a little sensing probe that touched her head and knew what she was thinking.

While we were walking to Jeff's house, Meghan said that she had thought about going as a pony but that that might offend me, because sometimes people got offended when you took something from their culture and used it as a costume, but I said that I thought it would be cute if she'd done that, and then I think she was kind of disappointed that she hadn't, so I nuzzled her and said that she was a really cute cat, too. And that made her ears go forward.

I rang the doorbell when we got there, and pretty soon Caleb and Lindy and Trinity came out and they all had sacks to carry their candy in and I should have worn my saddlebags. And when Jeff saw that we didn't have anything for candy he found us some plastic pumpkins that we could carry it in. He only had two, but that was okay, because I didn't want to carry one around in my mouth so I thought that Meghan or Peggy could carry my candy and we could share it later if there was anything that I wanted.

There were lots of kids, some of them with their parents and some of them with older brothers and sisters, and some people kind of assumed that Peggy or Meghan were related to the kids, and after a while they just stopped explaining that they weren't. And some houses had spooky figures on the lawn or in the trees, and they had fake cobwebs, and there were carved pumpkins with candles inside of them that were called Jack-o-lanterns.

We walked all through the neighborhood, and I let Trinity ride on my back some of the way, although it was kind of hard for her because her skirt was pretty long.

Caleb was dressed as Ash, who he said caught Pokemons, and Lindy had dressed up as Usagi, who was a character from a television movie series, and who had a cat which Meghan thought was really funny, and so she pretended to be Lindy's cat.

We stayed out for a couple of hours, and everyone had gotten more candy than they could possibly eat, and it was a really fun night, although I started to get a little bit hot because of the shirt I was wearing and my hoof-boots started to hurt my legs by the end, 'cause they weren't really meant for me to walk in that much, and especially not with Trinity on my back.

When we got back to Jeff's house, he invited us in for a little bit but I was worried that my boots might damage his floor, 'cause it was wooden and I'd seen what horseshoes could do to a wood floor. So we went around to the back instead, and he thanked us for taking his kids trick-or-treating, and said that Trinity especially had been really looking forward to it.

And he brought us all what he called adult treats, which was beer, and we drank them and just inside, everyone was sorting through their candies and then trying to trade some of them that they didn't like for candy that they did want.

So we each wound up drinking a couple of beers with Jeff, and then he said that he hated to cut the evening short but it was time to get the kids to bed since they had school in the morning.

Well, we all did, too, but we didn't go to bed. Instead, we walked back to campus and there was a Halloween party in Old Wells, which was the same place that they had had the homecoming dance. Peggy unbuttoned her shirt most of the way, and I took off my hoof boots and Meghan set them with our stuff, and there was music and dancing, but we'd come kind of late so we didn't get to have too much fun.

And we were just getting ready to leave, and Peggy came over and asked if I could do her a really big favor and sleep with Meghan tonight, and I thought about telling her that I didn't want to just to make her mad, but I said that I would, and she leaned down and kissed my forehead and said that I was the best roommate ever.

We went back to Meghan's room so she could change out of her costume, and I took mine off, too, and she asked Lisa and Becky if they knew where Amy was, 'cause she wasn't in the room, and they said that she'd gone to Grand Rapids with her boyfriend and she'd said that she wasn't coming back tonight.

Meghan didn't feel like getting dressed again just to have to take it off in a couple of hours, and I knew that Aric probably wouldn't be back until really late, so we decided to just stay in her room, and she took off the rest of her clothes that she had been wearing under her costume and we snuggled up under the covers and I teased her with my wing and she reached under my tail and pretty soon we had to push off the blankets because we were too hot and they were getting in the way, and even after she only pulled them back up to her waist, ‘cause I was lying on her side with my wing over her belly and that was keeping her warm.

November 1 [Dancing Magnetic Stars]

November 1

When I woke up, I stuck my head up and looked around and Amy wasn't in the room and I couldn’t smell any new scent from her, so I guess she hadn't come back yet. Which meant it was okay to pull the covers down a little bit and nuzzle Meghan's stomach, and kiss her on her not-furry skin.

Then when she started to wake up, I put my head back up on her breast and kissed her chin, and she started rubbing my ears. She said that they were a lot nicer than the fake ones she had. I'd liked them 'cause it was still kind of weird how human ears couldn't move at all. I guess humans have so much movement in their hands and feet that there isn't any left for ears or tails.

Meghan wanted to put them on me, but the headband was too small to fit my head, so she held it right up next to me and figured out how to push the sensor against my forehead while she held the ears. That was weird, 'cause I couldn’t see them but I could hear them whirring and that got my attention so my real ears started to move around and then Meghan started laughing and that was another thing to point my ears at.

Then she put them back on her head again and we couldn't get too frisky 'cause she said they were really delicate, and it was fun to see how they reacted when I teased her with my wingtip and when I nuzzled her breast.

She had to take them off for the shower 'cause they couldn't get wet. So I started the water going and then the two of us took a shower together and when we were finished we sat on the bed and groomed each other and she preened my wings. And she got the loose feather out that had been annoying me.

I should have taken my lab coat and stuff with me last night, so I didn't have to go back to my room, but I'd forgot. So when I got back to the room I put my ear up against the door just to hear if Peggy was having sex, and I didn't hear anything. So I opened it and stuck my head in and Peggy was asleep in bed, draped over her boy, so I tried to be quiet as I got together my things for lab but I think I woke them up anyway. My hooves are really loud on the tiles even when I try to be quiet.

They had omelets again today so I got one and sat down at our table next to Meghan. Christine was eating a bowl of Lucky Charms because there weren't any fruit loops, and when she got up to see if they'd put out any more chocolate eclairs, Sean reached into his pocket and got a couple of conversation hearts and put them in her cereal. They didn't look quite the same as the normal marshmallows but they were kind of close, and he was curious to see if it would fool her.

She didn't notice when she ate the first one, but she did complain that it was too crunchy, and then she picked one out and the milk had made it shrink a little bit so you couldn’t read the original message, but it still said 'fuck you' on the other side 'cause I guess the pen was waterproof. So she threw it at Sean, and said she'd wondered why he was so eager to get to breakfast. And then she asked if he'd somehow made all the fruit loops disappear and he swore that he had nothing to do with that; that was just coincidence. I didn’t think she believed him.

So I kept a good watch on my omelet, 'cause I didn't want it to suddenly have conversation hearts in it.

When I was done eating, I walked across the quad to Dow and then went to the lab and I got there a little bit before Lisa, so I took the notes that we had for the class and went through them to see what we were gonna do today.

We experimented with phase changes, and then Professor Brown said that we were going to finish up by learning about the supercritical state, so he took some solid carbon dioxide which was called dry ice, and put it in a sealed container that we could look into and at first it just looked like there was water with a little bit of ice in it (and the ice didn't float) and then all the ice melted and then he started heating it and explained how at the supercritical point the boundary between liquid and gas would disappear and nobody really believed him until it happened, and it sort of hurt my brain 'cause it just was kind of cloudy and you could see that things were moving around in the pressure container but you couldn't really tell exactly what was happening.

All of us had to write down our observations for that, too, because even though we didn't do the experiment ourselves, it was important data for us.

Before I went back to my room, I stopped at the library and I returned my Alice Walker book and then I asked if I could renew my World War One book again, and they said I could because apparently nobody wanted it. Then I went and looked for more books on poetry, and I found an assortment book that looked promising, so I checked that one out and then went back to my room.

I listened at the door again 'cause I hadn't seen Peggy yet and she might still be spending time with her boy, but I didn't hear anything so I opened the door.

She was there, and she was just wearing a pair of shorts and a bra and she had her portable telephone tucked into the waistband of her pants and the ear-speakers in her ears and she was dancing in the middle of the room. And when she saw me she kind of stopped and I said that I'd dance with her if she'd help me take my lab coat off.

So she unstrapped my saddlebags and unbuttoned my lab coat and I fluffed out my wings a little bit and then she put her portable telephone in a little cradle on top of a speaker so that we could both hear it, and we started dancing together.

And by the time we were both tired of dancing, it was too late to do any labwork, but I didn't feel bad about it at all.

She was really cheerful, so I guess she'd had lots of fun with her boy. The room still smelled like sex, maybe a little bit more than it had this morning, and I thought that maybe she had spent all morning after I left playing with her boy.

The two of us walked to lunch together and they had leftovers from last night's dinner, and even some more Halloween candy and cookies, so I guess they hadn't been all that popular with everyone. I stayed with fish and salad, 'cause that was a good healthy lunch, and once I'd got my food I went over to Cedric and Leon and Trevor's table and I sat down and pulled the poetry book out of my bag and set it on the table and Trevor picked it up and started looking through it.

Cedric thanked me again for rearranging the schedule so that he could have a little time with Aquamarine, and then Leon asked what we'd done for the weekend, so I told them about the play, and he said that sounded really dark, and Trevor looked up from the poetry book and said that the play that Kalamazoo was doing was Rocky Horror Show and that that had cannibalism in it, too.

Leon said that he was making that up, and he shook his head and said that they eat Eddie. And Cedric said that he thought he remembered that in the movie Meat Loaf played Eddie and Trevor said that he did and that was what made it especially funny.

Leon said that he thought the Cubs were going to win the World Series, and I said that Mister Salvatore had said that they weren't, and he said that he just had a feeling in his gut. And I asked if it was ever wrong and he said it wasn't and then Cedric said what about that blonde girl that he'd dated his freshman year that he swore was the one, and he said he was young and dumb then and he should have known better. Cedric said that he'd warned him about her and Leon said that he just hadn't appreciated how crazy she was and that he'd thought that Cedric had been trying to cock-block him. And then he covered his mouth and I just started laughing.

Trevor found us two short poems, and the first one he read, and it was called Euclid and it was by Vachel Lindsay, and it was a poem about math, which I thought was really clever. Then he turned back in the book and said that he had found one for me, and it was called I saw a man pursuing the horizon, by Stephen Crane. And I liked that one a lot, and Leon said that he thought it was just like me.

Well, I said that I'd never caught the horizon yet, but it didn't stop me from trying.

Professor Miller showed us a picture of a quasar that was hiding behind a galaxy, but the light got bent by gravitational lensing so you could see four bits of light that weren't actually where it was and it was called an Einstein Cross. And she said that it wasn't a star but it was actually a black hole and why we saw light from it was because of all the stuff it was pulling into itself.

And then there was a picture of a castle and what it would look like if there were a black hole between it and the camera, which was really weird.

She gave us the formula for redshift, and then explained what we would see if things were far away, or if they were closer, and how to calculate it which seemed kind of backwards when she started explaining it but then made sense when she had finished.

Then she started telling us about pulsars, which were discovered because they emitted radio waves in a pulse. And after they'd been discovered at first people thought that they might be aliens because of the frequency of the signal, but it turned out that they were actually magnetic stars called neutron stars. And they were kind of like lighthouses, 'cause as they rotated they sent a radio signal when they were aimed one way and then you didn't see it when they'd turned the other way, and scientists had figured out that you could use the Doppler shift in the signal to know if it was moving towards you or away from you, and how fast.

And when they found two of them that were orbiting each other, they could measure the precession and the gravitational redshift, and that proved a bunch of stuff that Einstein had thought, so it was really important.

So it was strange to think that somewhere up in the sky there were stars that were making regular radio waves, and when I was flying back to the dorm I looked up but I didn't see any of them.

Since I hadn't done it before, I got out my lab notes and started working on them, and that took me almost until dinner time to make sure that I had gotten all the right answers. Peggy came in while I was looking up a formula and she said that she'd heard about kids looking up the experiment on the computer and faking their results and I said that Professor Brown was really smart and he'd probably know if I did; besides, I wouldn't learn anything if I just pretended to do the experiments.

I'd kind of thought when I was a filly and went to my first cloud lab that we were gonna be making new meteorological science in the lab but what we really did was repeat experiments that had been done dozens or hundreds of years ago, and at first that had been really disappointing but then I'd realized that we were learning the foundations of the science by doing things instead of just reading about them or having somepony lecture us about them, and I think we learned more by doing it on our own, 'cause we actually got to see the principles in action, and that's what I told Peggy. And she said that she wasn't suggesting that I try it, just that it was something that people had done.

Once I'd finished up with my homework, we sat on our beds and talked and I pulled out a feather that had been bothering me since I'd been wearing my lab coat, but I hadn't had enough time to really root for it and it was being clever at hiding, and I found out that it had pulled partway out and then had gotten caught in a couple of others which was why it was so annoying.

They had German food for dinner, which was kind of odd because it was the middle of the week and it wasn't a special day as far as any of us knew. Then Sean said that they'd had a pretty bad meal Saturday night and he wondered if this was what they were supposed to have and somebody had made a mistake, and Reese wanted to know how you could make that kind of mistake, and Sean said that they'd had buffalo wing soup once, and if they'd come up with that any other mistake was believable.

The whole table smelled like the fermented cabbage, 'cause Reese and Anna both had some, and so did Meghan, and that made me kind of lose my appetite 'cause it made my food sort of taste like that, too, so I just poked at my dinner and had a stale ghost cookie for dessert and then after dinner I went back to my room and thought about reading my Bible and then I thought about how I hadn't had a proper flight in a couple of days. So I filled up my camelback and got my flight gear and since it wasn't morning and Peggy was already awake I called on the radio to get my flight clearance from the room.

And she asked me where I was going and so I told her that I was going to fly out to Galesburg, and asked if she wanted me to bring back anything but she said that I didn't need to, and she was just curious.

So I went down to the boardwalk and flew off of it, and then climbed up across the quad and didn't follow the railroad tracks right away because I liked going by the hotel. I guess that all the buildings might have people in them who would look out the windows and maybe see me, but people from the hotel might not know that there was a pegasus in Kalamazoo, so they'd be surprised.

I took a bit of a northerly angle once I passed the hotel and got above the railroad tracks just before the river. And I went over a locomotive that was pushing cars around the yard, and then I was back over the main line and I could see signals ahead of me that were green, and that meant that there might be a train coming along because I'd noticed that a lot of the signals weren't even turned on if there wasn't going to be a train, just to save electricity.

So I listened and looked behind me when I got close to Sprinkle Road, and then I decided that I'd stick to the edge anyway just to be safe, 'cause there were angled slopes on both sides where the dirt came back up to the road. I had to go over a tree and then drop down and bank a little bit to fit, but I knew that trains couldn't get me there 'cause I was on the other side of the posts that held the bridge up.

Then I picked up a little bit more altitude and kept on going, and pretty soon I started to hear the train but it was still a ways off. And each time its horn sounded it was closer to me, and I kept looking back but didn't see it, 'cause the tracks didn't get straight until after Comstock.

And I was well past the big electricity wires and almost to Galesburg before I saw its headlight behind me, and I'd said I was going to turn around, but I was below where airplanes flew and I was curious how long it would take the train to catch up to me, so I followed the tracks around the curve in Galesburg and kept on flying.

I'd almost made it to where the 96 road angles away from the tracks when the train passed under me. It had been able to sneak up 'cause there weren't any roads it had to blow its horn for.

I was high enough up that I didn't get buffeted by the air off the train cars, but I dropped down and landed on the roof of a building that was over the tracks. It was an ugly concrete thing on legs and it had some kind of an enclosed ramp that went down to the ground and it looked like it was some way to load something into trains that went under it, but I could tell it wasn’t used anymore.

I stayed up there and made sure that I kept my hooves under me, 'cause this was a lot taller than the roof over Aric's porch, and I didn't want to fall off. And I took a drink from my camelback and then when the last car of the train had gone by under me I took off again and flew back towards Kalamazoo.

I'd made it past Galesburg and then there was a park on the south side of the road and a car parked right near the entrance which wasn't where cars were supposed to park, but I knew that people liked to put their cars where they weren't supposed to, so it didn't really stick out until I got a bit closer and it looked like Cobalt.

So I flew down and when I got close I could see Meghan was standing outside looking in my direction, and I waved to her and then glided down and landed on the grass next to it. And Peggy got out and said that she had wanted to come out and watch me fly when I wasn't trying to show off, and I guess I did do that on campus a lot. Probably more than I should, but it was fun to play and zip around trees and do rolls.

And since there was a park where we could do that, Peggy drove Cobalt in to where it was supposed to park and I zipped around the trees and did some rolls, and then I flew out over the lake a little bit and I spotted a tasty-looking fish right close to shore, and I was kinda hungry 'cause I hadn't eaten much for dinner, and I almost dove in to get him but then I remembered that I had my airplane radio on one foreleg and my flight watch on the other and I couldn't remember how waterproof it was although it had survived plenty of rainstorms so it would probably be okay.

I waited until he was right close to the shore and dove down and he must have seen my shadow 'cause he got away before I could grab him, and when I flew back up and looked I didn't see him anywhere anymore, so he'd found some kind of hiding spot, which was too bad for me but good for him.

So I landed and Meghan asked what I'd been doing and I said that I was fishing but I was really out of practice and I'd missed and the fish had gotten away, and I didn't think he'd be back. And she said that if I was hungry we could just go to Taco Bell, and I said that I knew but it was more satisfying to catch dinner yourself sometimes.

And then we decided that we'd meet at the Taco Bell on Sprinkle Road and have a snack, although neither of them were too hungry, and then I'd fly back home after that. So they let me have a head start, 'cause Peggy's GPS said that it was six miles.

Well, I beat them there, because I didn't follow the road. I knew about where it was, so I knew the best heading to get there, and I was pretty close; I only had to change course a little bit when I actually spotted the big sign in front of the building.

There were lots of cars in the parking lot, so I was really careful when I landed, 'cause cars didn't always pay attention, and then I waited outside 'cause I thought it would be rude to get my food before they got there. If I’d known what they wanted, I could have ordered it for them and it would have been ready when they arrived.

And so the three of us went in and got our food and sat down at a booth to eat it. I had two bean burritos with sour cream; Peggy and Meghan shared a quesadilla, 'cause they weren't too hungry. Then I went back outside and took off again and I thought about following Cobalt but unless she drove slow I wouldn’t be able to keep up unless she got stopped at all the traffic signals. So I didn't stay over the road, but instead went back to the railroad tracks and followed them through town and all the way to the base of campus and then flew up the hill and landed back on the boardwalk.

I went back upstairs to my room and put away all my flight gear and I read some poetry and then wrote in my journal. I could have taken a shower to rinse off, but I didn't feel like it, especially 'cause I was going to take one in the morning.

When Peggy changed into her sleeping clothes, I was starting to yawn, so I slid under my covers and she asked if I wanted the light turned off and I said that I didn't think I was going to go to sleep right away, but she turned the light off anyways because she's so nice.

Author's Note

Euclid

I saw a man pursuing the horizon

November 2 [Calm Thunderstorm]

November 2

I woke up early and even though I'd just gone flying last night, I wanted to fly again, and I thought that I'd go south along the 131 Highway this time. Maybe all the way to Schoolcraft but that was kind of far for a flight before class, unless I flew really fast, or had a good tailwind both ways.

So I put on my flight gear and went out to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors and Dori said that I was up kind of early this morning and when I told her I wanted to fly south she asked if I was migrating and then started to laugh. But she gave me permission and said that if I stayed on the west side of the 131 Highway I could go all the way up to the bottoms of the clouds.

I flew off the boardwalk and after I'd made it all the way across the parking lot I was high enough to easily get over the trees. And I aimed mostly for where the 131 and 94 Highways crossed each other, 'cause that was a good triangular leg and I knew right where it was.

I focused a little bit more on speed, 'cause I really wanted to make it all the way there and back again. And I calculated in my head how long each leg of the journey ought to take if I really wanted to make the time, and what my waypoints were going to be and when I should get there, and that way I'd know if I had to turn around early.

The downside was that I was pushing myself a little bit harder to make it, so I was a little bit tireder than I ought to have been when I crossed over the 131 Highway and climbed a bit higher in the hopes of finding better winds. At least I knew that when I was lower, they were blowing from the southwest, which would help me on the way back.

I concentrated on keeping the straightest course possible, but I also had to stay on the west side of the 131 Highway, which curved to the west to get around some lakes, so I had to choose between the shorter flight path or the more favorable winds.

As I was flying, I was picturing the sky as a big three-dimensional vector field and thought about how I'd figure out the force acting on me. I was pretty sure that in principle it was the same as a two-dimensional vector field, but there was just another axis so it got more complicated.

I wasn't smart enough to figure it out in my head, so after a little while I turned my attention back to flying.

There was a traffic signal at the beginning of Schoolcraft, and that was my goal, so as I was getting closer I kept looking at my watch to make sure that I was going to make it on time. And I would, but only just, and I was gonna have to rush my shower, and if the winds were against me on the way back I was going to be in trouble.

I started my descent when I was near the signal, and made a big, broad turn which crossed right overtop of the intersection, and when I was east of the 131 Highway I was a bit too high, but I was losing altitude pretty quickly and that helped me pick up some speed, but I couldn't keep up that pace forever, and when I leveled off I slowed back down again.

Since the winds were better for me lower, I dropped under a thousand feet and aimed almost directly for Kalamazoo College, even though I couldn't see it yet. But I'd flown this way enough times to know where it ought to be—that was why getting a good idea of your whole territory was important.

I was a little bit behind when I crossed over the 94 Highway on the way back, but not too much, and I was only ten minutes late when I landed on the boardwalk.

I was also kind of tired.

So I went inside and took off my flight clothes as quick as I could and then I did have to wait for the shower 'cause Kat was in there and that meant Peggy was next, and she came into the bathroom before Kat had got out, and said that I hadn't woken her up and I told her I was sorry and I'd flown further than I should have.

And she saw all the lather on me and let me take the first shower, so I was really quick and just mostly rinsed off all the lather and didn't use any shampoo or conditioner. And then I shook myself off and let Peggy have her turn.

I didn't groom as well as I should have, either, 'cause Peggy was kind of rushing, too, since I'd slowed her down. And when we got to breakfast, I didn't think that I had time to wait for an omelet, so I had some shredded wheats and scrambled eggs.

Then I had to leave early 'cause I'd been in such a hurry to get breakfast that I'd forgotten about my lab stuff, and I needed that so I could meet with Lisa after class. I'd just left it on my desk yesterday and never put it with everything else.

I wished that I could just jump out the window and fly from there, and now that it was getting cold and the window wasn't open all that often, Peggy probably wouldn't miss the screen if I took it away so I could get out. The window was a kind of tight fit, though.

I made it to class with a couple of minutes to spare, and I sat down next to Lisa, and Professor Brown told us more about colligative properties. And he reminded us how everything had to have the same alchemical potential through its phases.

Then he taught us Raoult’s law, which was about mixing things like sugar in water, and how it changed the vapor pressure and I wondered if that was why you really needed little nucleuses for water to condense on before it would rain.

And he showed us a composition graph which was like the phase graph, but Professor Brown warned us that above the coexistance line—which was also called the bubble line—it would be all liquid, but you couldn’t know what was under it. And when you reversed it, the line was called the dew line and that’s where the liquid started to make droplets, and then above that line you didn’t know what was there. So it was two different ways to look at it, and then he said that we could mix the two diagrams together, and he made two x-axises but then it was the end of class and we didn’t learn how to use it.

We met in the lounge and went through all of the notes I'd taken and the calculations I'd done, and Lisa checked through them to make sure that they were right, and then she put them in her bag and I asked if Jessica was going to be in her room, so that I could find out about cheerleading for sure, and she said that she should be, so we went over to her room together.

And Jessica was there and suggested that I come with her to the practice tonight because the coach had thought it would be a cool idea but didn't know what I could do or how I might be able to work in a routine. And that was after dinner, and it was in the low building at the bottom of campus, so I said that I would.

I did my thermodynamics homework until it was time for lunch, and then went to the dining hall and got a little bit more food than I usually did, 'cause I hadn't had enough for breakfast, and I got lucky 'cause they had some of the tasty scrod again so I made a little pile of fillets on my plate and then filled the rest with salad and was a happy pony.

Me and Sean walked to math class together after lunch, and Professor Pampena taught us how to tell if a vector field was a gradient field, and it was pretty easy because if the field was defined and differentiable everywhere then it was a gradient field, and he showed us the looping vector field that we’d looked at before to see if it was a gradient, and it wasn’t.

And so the next thing he taught us was how to find the potential, if we had a gradient field, and we could do it by computing line integrals, and that was a lot of fun because we got some really long equations to figure out, which looked complicated but they really weren’t so difficult to solve.

Or we could also use antiderivatives, but he said that we had to be careful how we did it. He said that it was kind of tempting to differentiate both equations but if we did we’d get a different constant and if we tried to mix them all together it wouldn’t work right.

He finished up class by telling us about curl, which measured the rotation of the vectors on the field, and drew the looping vector field again and showed us how to calculate the curl in that.

We went back to Sean's room and did our homework together and then he showed me two new Numberphile movies that were about puzzles, and these had different people who were explaining things. One was about pebbling a chessboard with clones and whether it was possible for them to all get out of prison and I thought it must be, but then Miss Stankova explained how it was proved that it wasn't. And then the other one he said reminded him of me, and it was called the Knight's Tour on a chessboard, and was where the knight visited every space on the board only once. And that one was explained by Brady, and there were two kinds, one that was open and just ended, and one that was closed where the knight could move from her last place to the one where she'd started from and do it again. And since there were so many possibilities, he showed how you could make a semi-magic square with a Knight’s Tour.

There was a gentle rain outside when I went back to my room, and it was really nice to be in, so I got my Bible and went back outside and flew to the porch behind Dewing so that I could have enough cover that my Bible wouldn’t get rained on, but still be outside.

2 Corinthians was a second letter, and Paul said that he was sorry he hadn’t been able to come after all, so I guess it was written a while after the first. And he said how now the words of faith were written on hearts and not stone, and then when I got partway though I got the idea that maybe the Corinthians hadn’t wanted to see Paul, ‘cause he said that they had opened their hearts to the Corinthians but the Corinthians had withheld their affection.

But then in the next chapter he was happy because they had repented, so maybe it was another letter that was later, and they had just taken out the dates when they put it in the Bible. And he said that the church at Macedonia had been more generous, and that he was going to send Titus to get it from the Corinthians.

And Paul also said that they shouldn’t think he was timid, and he boasted about how many times he’d been in prison and how many times he’d been beaten and I thought that was a little braggy, but maybe the Corinthians didn’t know. Sometimes during Winter Wrap-Up, we’d have some pegasuses who had never seen or fought feral weather and they thought that since we had a little town and not so many farms that it would be really easy for us, and I guess we kind of bragged when we told them what it was actually like fighting a feral storm.

Plus you always had to tell a new weathermare the first time she went out to fight a feral storm that it was going to be worse than she imagined. So maybe Paul was justified in boasting a little bit.

The rain kind of came and went, and when I was back in my room I turned on my computer and studied the weather maps to figure out if there were going to be any severe storms and I didn't think that there would. But I decided that to be on the safe side, I'd take my flight gear with me whenever I left the room, so I packed it all in my saddlebags and I strapped my weather radio on my foreleg so I would have it in case Mel called me.

And I also sent him a telegram on my portable telephone and he sent one back and said that he didn't think that the weather was going to be bad enough tonight to need to be watched, and I'd kind of thought the same thing, but I made sure that he knew I was ready in case it changed.

I guess Anna and Reese hadn't seen my radio, 'cause they were really curious about it at dinner, and so I told them how I watched storms and then Sean found the movie that Cyndi had made and showed it to them, and Anna said that I was crazy.

Meghan said that that wasn't crazy and she had a better movie and so she got the one of me fighting the tornado with the tornado team, and they had a hard time believing that that was what we did back in Equestria. Although there usually weren't feral tornadoes in any settled area, 'cause everypony tried to make sure to not let that much energy build up in the atmosphere and any weathermare who was so bad at controlling her territory that feral tornadoes sprouted up would lose her job.

But when there was lots of feral weather, they could happen, and frontier teams had to deal with them. I'd never thought to ask, but I bet everypony on the tornado team had a lot of experience working near feral weather.

There were still a few Halloween cookies left and so I had one and it was pretty stale. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Christine said that she'd taken one at lunch and after she'd taken one bite out of it she'd decided she didn't want it anymore and tried to give it to a squirrel, but he didn't want it, either.

I had a little bit of time to relax in my room before I had to go practice cheerleading, because they didn't practice right after dinner. And then when I got up to go Peggy asked if I was going to Aric's early and I told her that I was going to go cheerleading and then after that I'd go to Aric's. And I remembered to take my saddlebags with all my flight gear.

So when I got down there I found Jessica and she introduced me to the coach, who was called Sandra, and while they were warming up and stretching out she asked me some questions about what I could do and it turned out that flying was the most useful thing that I could do. I could also wave around pom-poms if they were strapped to my forelegs.

Sandra didn't think that there was any way that I could do any of their normal routines, but she said that we could make a special one for me and then I could also do some of the other cheering routines but she thought that I'd be more effective as an extra rather than trying to match everything else that the team was doing. And she said that if she had all summer, maybe she could come up with some routines that I could do in unison with the girls, but she didn't think that trying to introduce significant new choreography right at the end of the season was too smart, and I thought she was right, even though it was a little disappointing.

But at least I'd get to do something.

So we spent the first half of the practice with me watching what the cheerleaders were doing and trying to keep up and match their positions and mostly failing miserably. Ponies just didn't bend like cheerleaders did, although it was at least some consolation that ponies could do things that they couldn't.

And I did see Sandra's concern—I would have just looked silly trying to do the same thing that they did.

Then in the second half she had them practice throwing me up into the air, 'cause they did that to each other but when they tossed someone in the air, she came right back down and I didn't have to if I didn't want to.

I could have just flown up but it was more fun to be thrown, and it took us a little bit to figure out what the best positions were for everyone, but we got it eventually. The hardest part was figuring out where to put my hind hooves so I wouldn’t hurt their arms or hands. And once I got into position, I had to be careful to not move too much, until I was clear of them.

When we took water breaks, I checked my portable telephone just in case Mel had called or sent me a telegram, but he hadn’t.

When we were done practicing, a bunch of the girls went to the locker room to change clothes and I would have gone with them except that I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

I went outside and I could hear thunder way off in the distance I thought, so I flew up to investigate. I still hadn’t heard from Mel, so I thought I might be imagining it. But when I got up above the trees I could see flashes of lightning off to the west, too, so I landed again in front of the gym and put on my flight gear, then I called Mel on my radio and it took him a little while to answer. When he did, he said that it was a really gentle thunderstorm so he hadn’t called me.

It was still my duty to be up there, ‘cause sometimes they started out gentle and then got bad, so I took off and started flying towards Mattewan. I didn’t think I’d get there before the storm did, but I could give him reports on the way.

I got permission from the airplane directors while I was in the air, but since I was under a thousand feet it was okay.

I followed Stadium Drive out because it was the fastest way, and I hadn’t gotten too far past the 131 Highway before the storm caught me.

I climbed up to the bottoms of the clouds, and it was a pretty gentle thunderstorm. There was lots of lightning in the clouds but it didn’t have enough energy to get to the ground, so it just flashed around inside the clouds. And there was hardly any wind and the rain wasn’t any heavier than it had been when it was just raining before.

By the time I got to the gas station, the storm had stopped and it didn’t look like there was too much more out to the west, so I sparked off on a lamppost and then landed next to Mel’s truck, and he gave me a ride back to campus.

I should have had him let me off at Aric’s house instead, but I didn’t think of it until I was back in my room. I knew that he’d probably be out at the theatre late tonight, ‘cause the play opened tomorrow and so anything that they needed to fix had to be done tonight. And I thought he’d be really happy if I was there when he got home, and I thought about having Meghan join me, but then I thought that maybe he would be happier if it was just me, especially since I’d spent Monday night with just Meghan.

So I flew back to his house and I hung up my flight vest over the back of his desk chair so it would dry out, and then I got in his bed. It was kind of strange to be there all by myself, ‘cause the house made some strange noises as it settled and I’d probably heard them before but never paid them any attention.

I thought about trying to stay awake until he got home, but I knew it might not be until really late, and then I’d be super-tired, and I’d wake up when he got in bed and we could have fun then if he wanted to.

November 3 [Accretion Discs]

November 3

It was the middle of the night when Aric came in, and I did wake up. I must have been sleeping pretty lightly, 'cause I heard Winston in the driveway and then the kitchen door open and footsteps coming up the stairs and towards the bedroom.

I didn't let on that I was awake, and I think that Aric was really tired, 'cause he almost sat on me when he sat down in bed to take off his boots. And I think he didn't know I was there until he leaned back when he was pulling off one of them, and when he had it off he petted my side and I turned my head and kissed his hand.

He got his other boot off and his socks and then he had to stand up to take off his pants and underwear, and then he took off his shirt and laid down in bed next to me. I had to scoot over a little bit, 'cause I guess I must have moved towards the center when I was asleep, and then he got on his back so I could rest my head on his chest.

Aric was too tired to have sex, so he ran his hand through my mane a little bit and it was kind of funny 'cause he was falling asleep as he did it, and he'd pet me a little bit then his hand would go limp and then he'd kind of jerk and pet me some more. I nuzzled his chest and rested my snout against his chin, and he fell asleep for good.

It was light outside when I woke up again—I guess I'd been tired, too—and I didn't want to disturb him if I could help it, so I just stayed curled up with him until I finally had to get up to pee.

When I got back in bed, he was sort of awake and I started kissing and nuzzling him and pretty soon I was on top of him and it was kind of selfish but I just focused on me.

I just collapsed on his chest when we were finally done, 'cause he'd tired me out, and I drifted back to sleep for a couple of hours and when I woke up again the sun was well above the trees.

I didn't think he'd be in the mood again but he was, and this time he rolled me over on my back and pinned me to to the bed and I let him.

The two of us took a shower together and when we went downstairs, David or Angela must have been up already 'cause there was half a pot of fresh coffee for us to share. I hoped we hadn't woken them up, but they live all the way in the basement and we weren't that loud.

We both sat on the porch and drank it, and he told me about the dress rehearsal last night and how the director had decided that a couple of the lights needed to be changed and so he had to move them and they'd had problems with the costumes and the sound cues and it had been a pretty terrible rehearsal but usually when that happened opening night would go well because everyone would remember what had gone wrong and then they would not make the same mistakes again. And he said that to top it off one of the lighting instruments had failed in the last scene and he'd thought it was the lamp but it turned out to be something else and he wound up having to hang and focus another one, which sounded like it would be a lot of work.

He said that he was sure that when he tore into it in the light shop, it was going to be something simple and dumb, but everyone was too tired last night to figure it out.

I told him that I wasn't gonna be able to see it tonight, 'cause I had cheerleading practice, and then asked if he wanted me and Meghan to come over on Friday night so we could do stuff on Saturday and he said that he wasn't sure if he'd have time, because of the play. He said that if everything went well he'd be free but that you never could tell in the theatre, plus he had some homework that he had to finish up on over the weekend.

I thought it was kind of dumb for the theatre professors to assign homework the same weekend as the play, and he admitted that it had been assigned earlier and he just hadn't done it yet because he'd been so busy working on the play. He said that half the volunteers who were supposed to show up and help him hang lights hadn't shown up at all, and so he'd had to do most of it by himself.

So I promised that I'd call him and see how things were going, and we'd figure things out as they came up. And then I got together my flight gear and kissed him and I went back to college. I was feeling kinda lazy, so I walked some and then flew a little bit but not too high.

We'd spent so much time in bed that it was almost lunchtime, and even though I probably shouldn't have, I snacked on a little bit of hay just to make my stomach happy.

I sat with Leon and Cedric and Trevor and told them that I was gonna be a cheerleader at a football game but not the next one 'cause we weren't ready for that yet, and Cedric said that he was sure that would help lead them to victory. And he said that he was going to tell Aquamarine so she could be at the game too, and then she could cheer both of us on from the grandstands.

Trevor looked through the book and found us some poems again, and he had Leon read a poem called Misgivings by Herman Melville, and that one was kind of sad, but a good poem for the autumn. And then he had me read one called Old Ironsides, which was about a ship that was at the end of its life. And I liked that one, even though it was sad, because it made me think of home.

Then he had Cedric read the Emily Dickinson poem Hope is the thing with feathers, which we had also read in Conrad's class. And when Cedric got to the end of the poem he nodded and reached across the table and brushed my mane back and said that Miss Dickinson had been a really smart lady, and Leon agreed.

He said that he never could have imagined that one day he'd be reading poetry with a pegasus while he ate lunch, and that even when he'd heard about how there were ponies now at first he hadn't believed it was real; he thought that it was just the news media lying. And after he'd gotten his head around the fact that we were real, he'd still never expected to get out of the city and get to a nice college and actually meet a pony in the flesh, and wind up eating lunch with her and reading poetry with her.

Leon said that he had better be careful or the football coach might think he was going soft, and I could tell he didn't mean it 'cause there was laughter in his eyes. Cedric said he was going to suggest that the team recite poetry during drills, or maybe in the showers after. Leon said as long as the hugging waited until he had clothes back on he was in support of the idea, and Cedric wrapped an arm around Leon's shoulder and pulled him into a sideways hug, and Leon pretended to try and get away, but he didn't try too hard.

I thought it wasn't fair that they were hugging and I wasn't, so I went around the table and hugged both of them, and Trevor, too.

I must have left lunch earlier than Anna, 'cause I didn't see her on the quad and when I got to class she wasn't there yet, and she came in almost before class started.

Professor Miller told us that there were supermassive black holes in the center of most galaxies, including our own, and nobody knew why, but scientist thought that maybe when the universe was formed stars were thousands of times bigger than they were now, and they'd collapsed into these black holes.

She said that there wasn't going to be enough time to talk more about them so we were going to talk more about normal-sized black holes, and she started by telling us how scientists in the sixties had discovered space X-rays and at first didn't know what they were coming from, and then they figured out that they might be neutron stars (which were small and energetic) or a black hole.

She told us how there were binary star systems where this happened, and the compact object was pulling gas off of the star and that was what caused it to make x-rays. And astronomers could tell by making observations if the compact object was a neutron star or a black hole.

It was a little bit harder to find black holes this way than it seemed, because the accretion disc was sometimes brighter than the star, but sometimes they were bright and sometimes they were dimmer and then you could see them with a telescope, and you could use that to figure out if it might be a black hole because of how much mass it would have to have.

And she also said that since black holes didn't have a surface, they didn't emit X-rays themselves, which was another way that you could know that they were there.

It was all kind of hard to wrap my head around.

After class, I brought my Bible outside with me and the benches by Stetson Chapel were being used, so I went up in a tree, and I started reading Galatians, which was another letter from Paul. And I guess the Galatians were being bad, 'cause he started out by telling them that, and then he told them about how he'd come to be accepted by the apostles, and then after that he spent the rest of the letter telling them how to be good instead of bad.

It was a pretty short book, and so I read the next one, which was Ephesians, and that was another letter from Paul. And it sounded like they were just starting to follow Jesus, 'cause he was giving them lots of advice on what they should do, and it was like the rules that God had given his prophets to tell the people, and I hoped that the Ephesians followed them. Because God got mad when people didn't follow His rules.

Paul talked a lot in both books about circumcision which didn't make a lot of sense to me, especially because he said that it wasn't supposed to be done but Aric had been circumcised, so did that make him a bad person? I didn't think that it did, and it didn't sound like what Jesus had said.

I went back to my room to have a snack before my meeting with Liz, and I'd actually picked up my glaive and was on my way out of the room when I remembered that I was supposed to be cheerleading and not fighting, so I wouldn't need it today.

I met Pastor Liz in her office, and told her how far I'd gotten, and I was getting close to the end—there were a lot of books left but most of them were pretty short. And then I asked her about Paul's rules that he'd said in all his letters, and how she could talk in church even though Paul said that she shouldn't.

Liz explained to me that there were a lot of different branches of Christianity, and they all had a slightly different focus. It was something that we'd talked about before, but she went into a little bit more detail and explained how some churches thought that women couldn’t be priests or pastors, while others said it was okay. She said that some religions liked tradition and keeping things the same forever, while others thought that the church ought to serve people now, and not the people who Paul had originally written his letters to, because the world had changed a lot since Paul's time.

She said that it was really complicated and that there were people who believed that the King James version of the Bible was the only correct version, even though there were multiple versions and they were all a translation anyway because English hadn't been a language when the Bible was written. And she said that for a long time the Catholic church had had their services in Latin, even though not many people spoke it anymore, because of tradition. And in some churches, priests were supposed to be celibate, while in others that wasn't important.

So it was all kind of confusing to me, 'cause it had seemed like everyone would agree what Jesus had said and what He had meant when He said it, but I guess that people might see what they wanted when they read it and not think of other ideas.

And when it was the end of our meeting I asked her how much of the New Testament was letters from Paul, and she said seven to fourteen books. She told me that there were seven books that almost everyone agreed had been written by Paul, and that some of the remaining seven certainly weren't, and people weren't completely sure on some of the rest.

I did stop by fighting practice long enough to tell Stellan and Karla where I was gonna be so they didn't worry when I wasn't there. And Karla said that I ought to bring my glaive to cheerleading practice because that would spice things up a little bit, and she told me that she was a flag girl in high school and it had been lots of fun. She said it was kind of like cheerleading except that she got to carry a big flag. And that sounded like it would be fun, too.

I went back up to the gym and I was a little bit late but they were still stretching out and so I thought I ought to do some stretches, too, especially since I'd been pretty lazy and not done any real flying today at all. And I was glad that I did, 'cause after I'd gotten done stretching my body felt a lot looser and more relaxed.

Then they started with their normal routines, and I stayed off to the side and tried to follow along as best as I could, 'cause I thought that maybe if there was one or two things that I could figure out how to do really well, I'd be able to do more than get tossed in the air. It was probably a fool's hope, but I thought that I'd try anyway.

When they were taking a water break, Sandra asked me if I could wear a uniform, so she told them to practice one of their routines when she was gone, and we went into the locker room, which was an interesting place. There were rows of lockers, where people could keep their things, and little benches that they could sit on while they got dressed, and then off to one side there was also a big shower room that would fit lots of people. She saw that I was looking and said that the teams usually took showers together but I wouldn't have to if I didn't want to, and I said that I would, 'cause group showers were fun and that was how we always did it but I hadn't thought that humans liked that.

There were some extra cheerleading outfits in a back room and she helped me try some of them on. I liked the skirt—it was short enough that it wouldn't get in the way at all. She had a vest that fit, too, but there weren't any holes for my wings and it was only gonna work if she had holes cut in it, and she said that if I was doing good by next Wednesday, she'd have it done. She said that I'd want to practice in uniform at least once because it was different than exercise clothes and then she caught herself and added 'or nothing.'

And she was a little bit upset that I didn't like the uniform panties, but there wasn't a tail-hole, so they weren't going to work for me and I said that when I'd worn Gusty's they were really uncomfortable and made me too hot.

She said she'd have to figure out if I could cheer without them, and she said that we weren't supposed to be flashing the audience even though everyone hoped that would actually happen and I thought that was kind of dumb. Nobody cared that I went around without clothes on and if somebody else wanted to, why would they care? And why would it make a difference that I was in a cheerleader uniform when the last football game I was at I was up in the bleachers cheering with Aquamarine and neither of us were wearing any clothes at all?

But I guess if I had to wear them, I would, even though I wouldn't like them. I had to wear my flight clothes even though I didn't want to because that was the rule. And I was kind of used to them now, so it didn't bother me any more.

When we went back to the practice room, Sandra started directing the cheerleaders, and I just watched until it was time for me to practice with them, and we'd gotten pretty good at the tosses so she had me try to flip in the air and it was harder than I thought it would be because I had to make it look really smooth, and so she had me do it lots of times until she said it looked natural.

I wondered if Cedric and Leon had to practice that, too.

I hadn't thought we'd spent that much time at it, but after I'd gotten good at it, Sandra called a stop and said that we were done for the night, and reminded everyone to be ready for the game tomorrow, except for me, 'cause I didn't have to cheer along with them.

Then everyone went into the locker room to change and I couldn't decide if I should or not, 'cause I wasn't really part of the team yet and I didn't know all of them all that well yet, but on another hoof it was something that teams were supposed to do together.

And if everyone had, I would have, too, but there were a couple of girls who didn't, and just left the gym in their exercise clothes.

So I started to fly towards Trowbridge but then I decided that it was a nice night and I hadn't gotten a proper morning flight in, and then I turned around and went over the downtown and when I got to the river I followed it along. It was kind of strange at night, because it was a ribbon of darkness with lights on either side of it.

I didn't have my watch on and hadn't called the airplane directors, so I had to be careful to be high enough that I wouldn't get snagged on wires—'cause I couldn't see them very well in the night—but not so high that airplanes might run into me.

I didn't go all the way out to Galesburg, but I did go over the lake a little bit and then I turned around over it and dove down until I was right above the water, and I trailed a hoof through it for fun before I started to climb back up. There were lots of lights at the dam, so I could see those wires at least.

Because it was getting towards winter, the days were getting shorter, and I thought it would be fun to take one long night flight, as long as I went along a route I was familiar with. I wasn't sure when I'd have time, though.

I landed back on the boardwalk and went inside and I was kind of tired, even though I'd spent half the morning in bed. Sometimes when you spend too much of a day being lazy, it makes you more tired than if you're actually doing stuff. So I thought I'd go to bed a little bit early, but I didn't want to right away, 'cause I needed to cool down a bit first.

So I got out my poetry collection and read through the rest of it, and I decided that I'd get a different poetry book from the library for next week.

Author's Note

Misgivings

Old Ironsides

Hope is the thing with feathers

November 4 [Seafood salad is bad]

November 4

When I got up I was thinking about trotting with Peggy again although I hadn't asked her last night like I should have, and since I'd gone to sleep before her I didn't know how late she was up. And I didn't want her to be mad that I'd woke her up, so I decided to let her stay sleeping, and then when I got back I'd ask her.

So I filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear, and then I went down to the boardwalk and got permission from the grumpy man to fly to the Nature Center.

This time instead of flying across the quad like I usually did, I went the other way, over the parking lot, and I stayed low as I flew around the end of Trowbridge, right by Meghan's window. She probably wasn't awake, 'cause there weren't any lights on in her room or in the bathroom, and I suppose I could have stopped and knocked at the window, but she might not have woken up.

I flew straight across the cemetery and kept flying north until I had gotten to the dirt mines, and when there wasn't anything interesting going on there, I curved east towards the Nature Center.

My aim was a little bit off, and I was a bit further to the west than I'd meant to be, so I landed at the pond and started trotting around that trail. And when I got to the tunnel, I trotted right through that and then started galloping, and I kept up that pace until I got to the intersection of trails.

I went around the junction at a canter and back onto my normal trail, except this time I did it backwards, going along the river and railroad tracks first. And as I got around the curve at the south end, I slowed down to a gentle trot, so that I wouldn't scare off the deer. I hadn't seen them yet, 'cause the ridge blocked my view of them, but I was downwind of them and could smell them.

When I got up to the top of the hill, I spotted them, a ways back in the prairie grass, and their heads went up when they saw me but I was far enough away and moving slowly enough that I didn't bother them, and they went back to grazing.

I went down the hill and stopped at the bottom so that I could turn around. It didn't feel right to be going the wrong way on the trail, even though it was okay to go both ways. I think it was just 'cause I was so used to going around it in one direction that it felt wrong to go in the other direction.

So I went a lap the normal way, and when I got back to the intersection I took off there and started to fly into the woods before I got it into my head that I wanted to fly through the tunnel, so I looped up and around and went back to the intersection and turned west, and then got up as much speed as I could before the tunnel entrance was right in front of me.

It was a little bit confining especially with wings out, 'cause even though they were a ways from the wall, I couldn't help but think that if I went off-course I'd crash into a wall or the ceiling. And that kind of made it more fun, too.

When I came out on the west side, I climbed up and turned back to campus, and I took a pretty straight route back.

I got out of my flight gear and went to the bathroom to take a shower, and I was just getting finished up when Kat came in the bathroom, and she was waiting on the bench when I came out of the shower.

Peggy was awake, too, and before she went to take a shower I asked her if she wanted to be woken up to go trotting in the morning because I still wasn't sure. And she said that we might as well, 'cause she hadn't been exercising enough and was going to pay for it when it was snowboarding time. So we decided on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 'cause she thought that three days worth of exercise was enough.

Then I groomed myself while she was in the shower and I didn't have any feathers come out this time, but there were a couple more primaries that were getting loose.

When Peggy was ready, the two of us went to breakfast, and they had the waffle maker working again, so I had a waffle for breakfast, and some eggs too for the protein.

Reese was studying, 'cause he was in a class that had two mid-terms and so he had a test right after breakfast and he didn't think that was fair to have two. And then Christine said that he didn't know how lucky he was because when she'd started they'd had a mid-term every week and each one counted for fifty percent of the grade and I was trying to figure out how that would even work when Sean started laughing and I realized that she was lying.

Anna was in a pretty happy mood, 'cause the Cubs had won the World Series, even though Mister Salvatore had said that they wouldn't. She said that she could only imagine what it was like back in Chicago—she said that she almost wished she was there. And I thought maybe I could ask Cayenne, because probably if there was a big party, she'd want to go to it.

Sean said that the Cubs winning was one of the signs of the Apocalypse in the Bible, and I said that I hadn't gotten to that part yet. He said that it was in Revelations, which was the very last book. I was getting close, but I thought that the Bible had been written really long ago, so it was surprising that that would be mentioned. And Meghan said that the Lions winning a Super Bowl was another sign.

There had been prophecies in the Old Testament that had come true, though, so maybe someone had prophesied that. I didn't like the idea that it was going to bring an apocalypse, though, and I asked if there was any way to prevent it, and Meghan said that we didn't have to worry because the Lions had built all of their fields on ancient Indian burial grounds and so the team was forever cursed to never win a Superbowl game.

And then they all started laughing, and so I knew that they'd made it all up. Which was kind of a relief.

I flew across the quad and landed in front of Dow, and I'd gotten there a bit early, so I waited around in the hallway until everyone had left the class before I could go in and take my seat.

When class started, Lisa wasn't there. Professor Brown reviewed some of the stuff about mixtures that we'd learned before to make sure we all knew it, and he used alcohol as an example which made some people snicker, but he said that this weekend when we were drinking responsibly, he wanted us to think about how thermodynamics made our liquor.

Then he explained more about the graphs with the coexistance curves, and how we could figure out what happened and then the coexistance curve went away because we didn't have any liquid anymore, and all the liquid moles had become gas moles, and since it was all in a box you had the same amount that you'd had to start with, but it was all in a bigger box. And you could reverse it and when you had a big box of gas, you could add pressure and turn it back into liquid, which was pretty obvious.

But you could also purify things that way, 'cause if you had two things with different volatility, you could figure out just how much pressure you needed to make the less volatile one to turn into a liquid while the more volatile one stayed a gas.

He showed us how to do the calculation and figure out on the graph how much you'd get, and it was called the Lever Rule.

I was worried about Lisa, and so I decided that I'd go to her room to check on her. Maybe she'd slept too late and missed class, or maybe she was sick and would want a friend to comfort her. So even though I'd meant to go to the library and get a new poetry book and I even went by the library, I didn't go in, because she was more important than a poetry book.

So I went to her dorm and then up to her room and I knocked on the door and for a while nobody answered, but then finally Lisa opened the door and she was still in her sleeping clothes, and she looked kind of pale and I didn't know what to do when humans were sick, so I nuzzled her and told her that if she wanted to borrow my notes from class she could, and then I asked if there was anything else I could do, and she said it was just the twenty-four hour flu and she'd be better by Monday.

I offered to type up the lab notes, but she said that she could do it. And then she said that she was going to go back to bed, so I nuzzled her again before she could close the door.

I went back to my room and did my thermodynamics homework, and that took me until lunch, so I didn't get to stop by the library like I'd meant to.

So I packed up my math homework and went to lunch, and it wasn't very good. Anna and Christine were both playing with their food, and only Sean seemed to really be enjoying what he had. Meghan had made a sandwich. I hadn't been able to find any fish that was worth eating, so I'd tried the crab salad that they had and it had too much dressing in it and I wasn't sure what the seafood actually was, 'cause it didn't quite taste like fish—which is what Peggy said it was—and it didn't quite taste like crab, either. But there were a lot of different tastes in the salad and it was kind of hard to sort them all out, so I finally had Peggy pick a piece of fake crab out of my salad and wipe all the sauce off of it so it was as plain as it could be, and then I tried it just by itself but I couldn't figure out what it was.

Sean looked on his portable telephone and found out that it was a lot of different fish that were all ground up and mixed together and that was why I couldn't identify it. And that sounded like cheating to me—they ought to have used real crab, 'cause they weren't that hard to catch. You had to be careful of the claws, but if you put out traps they'd scuttle inside, and they couldn't get back out again.

Me and Sean walked to math class together and Professor Pampena taught us Green's theorem which was a way to avoid calculating line integrals if we didn't want to. And it was a little odd because the formula only worked for closed, counterclockwise curves the way it was written, but he said that was just because the convention for curl was for it to go in a counterclockwise direction.

And then after he'd showed us how to use it and where we couldn't use it and what to do if the curve went clockwise, he said that he wanted to show us how to prove Green's theorem, and it was kind of complicated but I liked that he did because that really helped me understand why it worked the way he said it did.

Then at the end of class, he showed us pictures of a device that used the theorem, and it was called a planimeter, and it could measure the curve around an area and when you got back to the beginning it would tell you how much area you had, and it was really clever but he said that computers did it now and nobody needed a planimeter anymore.

I wasn't feeling too good by the end of math class—my tummy hadn't liked the crab salad that much, and I decided that I wasn't going to have it again. Sometimes it was worth being adventurous with food and other times it was a really bad idea, and this looked like one of the other times.

But I went with him to his room anyway so that we could do our homework together and I got about halfway done with mine before I had to ask him where the bathroom was, and luckily it wasn't too far.

I spent a lot longer than I'd hoped to in there, and I guess Sean had gotten worried, 'cause a girl came in and knocked on the stall door and asked if I was okay or if I was dying and I said that I was pretty sure that I was going to be okay but right now I kind of wished that I was dying, and that got her to chuckle at least.

Miss Chestnut had warned us that this might happen, and I guess I was lucky that this had been the first time.

When my insides had finally calmed down, I went back to Sean's room and said that I was never ever going to eat the seafood salad again and he said that was probably a good idea. And then he said that he was lucky that a girl had come by, 'cause he'd been standing by the bathroom door debating whether he should go in or not.

We finished up our homework and then checked our answers, and I'd gotten a couple of the first problems wrong, probably 'cause I hadn't been focused on math. It was hard to think when your insides were unhappy.

So I didn't have a lot of time before dinner, but on my way back I did go to the library, and returned my little poetry collection and went around looking for something new. And I found a big thick book of poems by Ogden Nash that looked like it would be pretty good, 'cause it had birds on the cover.

And I also went and looked at their computer to see if I could find a Kama Sutra, and they did have that. It was all the way on the top floor, and it took me a little bit of hunting to find it. It wasn't where it was supposed to be, but it was close, and all the way on the top shelf and I had to fly up to get it.

I brought both books to the front desk and the clerk had a little frown as she checked them out but she gave them to me just the same, and I took them back to my room and then I unpacked my saddlebags and went to dinner.

I had to be quick, 'cause there was a football game tonight, and I wasn't going to be able to cheer, 'cause we hadn't worked out the routines yet, but I thought that I could give the cheerleaders support. And when I said that at the dinner table Christine asked if that meant I was cheering on the cheerleaders and I said that it did. And she thought that was really funny.

I was also still kind of worried about my stomach, 'cause sometimes when you've had one bad meal, your stomach doesn't want another one, and isn't going to be happy with much of anything, so I only had vegetables even though I was kind of hungry. I thought I'd be better off eating a few smaller snack-sized meals rather than have a big dinner and then have to trot off during the football game, especially 'cause there were usually lines at the girl's bathroom.

And Meghan noticed that I wasn't eating all that much and asked if I felt all right, so I told her that the seafood salad hadn't been good for me and then Christine asked if it had given me the trots and then just started laughing and pretty soon everyone at the table was laughing. Meghan tried really hard not to, but she couldn't help herself.

Meghan wanted to go to the game with me, and I said that I wasn't sure if I'd be sitting in the grandstands, 'cause the cheerleaders were out on the field and maybe they'd let me be that close, and she said that even if we didn't get to sit together she'd still like to be with me, so we went over to the football field together and we were kind of early, and there wasn't anybody there yet.

After a while, though, people started to arrive and when I saw Sandra, she had me come with her, and so I said goodbye to Meghan and followed her.

She asked if I'd help out with anything that the cheerleaders might need before the game and I said that I would, but it turned out that they didn't need my help for anything, which was kind of a disappointment. I felt sort of useless.

Still, it was a good experience to see them get ready for the game, 'cause at first everyone was gossiping as they got dressed in their uniforms and put on makeup and styled their hair, and then they started to focus more and more on the game. And Sandra came in when there were fifteen minutes to go and again when there were five to make sure that everyone was ready, and then they all lined up at the door.

I wasn't going to get to go out with them, but after they'd welcomed the football team, Sandra said that I could go with her to the sidelines and watch them and the game from there.

It was a lot different seeing the game from the field. Sometimes I lost track of where the ball was or couldn't see what had happened on a play, and she said it was hard to get used to. And I watched how the cheerleaders reacted, and one time Cedric tackled someone right on the edge of the field really near me and as he was getting back up he waved at me.

They did a special routine at halftime, which I hadn't really noticed before, 'cause I'd been talking with everyone I was watching the game with, but this time I paid close attention to it. And I thought it was kind of unfair how the cheerleaders had to be out for the whole football game but the players got a break.

And when it was over and we'd lost by a lot of points, I got to go with them back to the locker room and I was really tempted to join them in the showers even though I hadn't gotten all sweaty, but it still didn't feel quite right, and while I was trying to figure out what the right thing to do was, Sandra called me aside and asked me if I still wanted to cheer in the last game, and I said that I did.

So she said that on Monday, she'd have someone measure me for the uniform and get that taken care of. And then she said that she was still figuring out choreography but she thought that she had a good idea of what she wanted, and that that would be ready for us to practice on Monday, too, and since it was something totally new she wanted me to be sure and tell her if I didn't think it was going to work or if it didn't feel right, and I said that I would.

She said that it was going to be a lot of work for everyone over the next week, but that it would be worth it, because Albion didn't have a pony cheerleader and they were gonna be really jealous.

I went outside and Meghan had waited for me, which was nice of her. And she said that she wasn't going to be available tomorrow 'cause she had a really big project that she had to get done over the weekend, but that she would like to spend the night with me and Aric if I wanted to, and I did.

And I asked her if she was going to come to the play tomorrow, and she said she would, and it would be lots of fun. She said that we should try and get as many people from our table to come as we could and we could all sit together.

We had to go back to her room first so that she could get her clothes for tomorrow and then I thought that I should get my flight gear, too, so I did, and then we went to Tiffany's, because I thought if we beat Aric home he'd be really happy if we had beer and if we didn't, he'd still be happy that we had beer.

She had to carry it, 'cause my saddlebags were full, and I felt kind of bad about that, and so she balanced her duffel bag on my back and then I felt like that was a fairer solution. And she said that there wasn't anything in it that would get damaged if it fell off, but I didn't drop it anyway.

Aric wasn't there when we got to his house, and David and Angela were gone, too, so Meghan looked through the movies that he had on his shelf until she found one that she liked which was called Run Lola Run, and it was in German but there were English words at the bottom so you could understand what they were saying.

It was kind of a strange movie, 'cause the same things kept happening but a little bit differently each time depending on how fast she ran and where she went. And Aric came in before we'd gotten too far in the movie, and he sat on the couch with us.

We didn't go upstairs until most of the beer was gone and Aric said that he could finish it if we wanted to stay up a little bit later, and Meghan started sliding her hand down my belly and said that while he was downstairs drinking beer we'd be amusing ourselves upstairs and so then he changed his mind and decided that it would be smart to save the beer until later, and the three of us went up to his bedroom.

November 5 [Fort Custer]

November 5

We all got out of bed kinda late because even though I'd forgotten to bring the Kama Sutra we still had a lot of fun, and then the three of us took a shower together even though it wasn't all that comfortable in Aric's shower. And then they got dressed and we walked to Nina's for breakfast together, and Meghan said that she had to leave after breakfast, 'cause she had a big homework assignment that she needed to work on.

I didn't have any homework to do, 'cause I was a good pony and had done it all yesterday, so when he got to Trowbridge both of us kissed Meghan goodbye and then I stayed in Winston and he said that we should figure out what we wanted to do for the day.

I'd thought he'd told me earlier that he had a project to do, and so I asked him, and he said that it was too nice a day to do homework and he'd rather have fun. And I said that he should do it first and then we could have fun, and he said that it really wasn't all that much, and besides it was a really nice day and it would be a shame to be indoors.

Well, I thought so, too, and I said it might be fun to go to the beach, and then he said that we could go to Fort Custer, which was closer and had lots of trails in the woods. I'd flown over it but never been in it, so that sounded like a good place to go.

He didn't have any food for lunch, except for the beer that he hadn't drank last night, so he said that we would have to stop and get some, and he thought that the Meijer on Westnedge Road would be the best place, even though I think it was farther away than the one on Main Street. But he didn't like going the wrong way when he was going somewhere, which was kind of silly.

So he put the icebox in the back of Winston and put the leftover beer inside, even though there wasn't any ice to keep it cold. There were little trays in the electric icebox that had ice in them, but it wasn't enough.

We drove through town and all the way to Meijer, and it was pretty crowded and we had to park a little ways away from the door.

He got a shopping cart even though we weren't going to be getting that much, I didn't think. And then we went through and got bread and cheese and slices of meat for him, and I got two cans of anchovies for me, and he also bought some water and Gatorade which had nothing to do with alligators. He said that it had electrolytes in it and plants loved electrolytes and if plants liked it people would too and I said that I didn't think that was true. I told him that plants liked eating manure, and he didn't have a good reply to that.

He thought that we also needed some cookies, and instead of getting them from the cookie aisle, where they had lots and lots of packages of cookies, he got them from the bakery, because they were bigger and better than the other cookies. He said that they made them right in the store, unlike the others which were made in big cookie factories somewhere. I was kind of curious about what a big cookie factory would look like. I thought that it would just be lots and lots of ovens and bakers all working under one roof, but Aric said that it was all automated and there were machines that did it all, and it was a continuous moving belt where raw cookies started on one and and full boxes came out on the other.

That was kind of hard to believe, and I don't think I would have if I hadn't seen the factory where Dreamliners were made. If they made an airplane from rolls of tape and glue, I guess that a cookie conveyor belt wasn't impossible, either.

I wonder if there are tourists who just visit factories to see how things are made?

He paid for all our food and put the shopping cart back where it belonged, and then when he went and put things in the cooler he realized that he had forgotten to get any ice, and I said that we could go back and get some but he said that he didn't want to turn around and he'd get some at a gas station on the way out. That was kind of silly—we were right here, so why not go back? But he said that a real man never turned back, and got in Winston, and I got in and said maybe real men were dumb sometimes, and that Meghan would have gone back.

When he got to the top of Park Street, he said that we should have some fun, and he turned off Winston's engine to let it coast down the big hill. He said that that was called Georgian Overdrive, and it was illegal in big trucks because it was dangerous, but it was okay in little trucks like Winston. And when we got to the bottom of the hill, he turned the key back on and all the lights on the dashboard came on, and when he let his foot off the clutch Winston started itself with a little bit of a jerk.

Aric told me that he'd used to do it in a lower gear, because he could get the tires to screech a little bit, but after he'd had to put a clutch in Winston he hadn't wanted to try that again. And then as we were going through town he told me about his first truck, which was older and he didn't have any more because it had caught on fire.

One time late at night he was driving down Academy Street by campus, and he had thought that it would be much simpler to just turn the key off and not push down on the clutch, because when he got to the bottom all he would have to do is turn the key on again. And he said that he hadn't thought about the mechanical fuel pump, which was still filling the engine with gasoline even though it wasn't actually running.

He said that when he got to the bottom of the hill, he'd turned the key on and he had never even heard the engine start, because there was a huge explosion from under the truck as all the gas that it had pumped through the engine, which had collected in the muffler, had ignited and blown the muffler completely apart. He said that it had sounded like a shotgun went off underneath the truck, and heard it echoing off the buildings, and he'd hoped that no one had called the police, thinking that there was someone shooting a gun on campus.

We stopped at the gas station in Comstock, right where the 96 Road and Michigan Avenue came together, and he got a bag of ice and put it in the icebox with the rest of the food.

Then while we were driving along the railroad tracks, I told him about how in the wintertime lots of earth ponies who didn't have to farm because all their fields were fallow would go out on the lakes every few days and cut ice and bring it back on stone-boats, and that there was a big ice-house that was mostly buried and had big, thick walls that were lined with straw and sawdust, and a nice thick sod roof to keep the sun off, and that was where most of the ice for our village came from.

Some of the big cities just made ice out of hail and had pegasus specialists who did it but that was a lot of work and I thought it would be boring after a while.

When we'd passed through Galesburg, I told Aric about the building I'd seen over the railroad tracks and he said that it was a coaling tower, because back when human trains had all run on steam, they'd used coal as fuel and they put big towers over the tracks so that freight trains could stop and put more in. He said that he didn't think that they used them for passenger trains, because they had to stop at stations anyways and that was a good place to add more, but he wasn't sure.

After we went through Augusta, he turned into the park, and we drove around for a little bit until he found where the trails were. I didn't see any forts and asked him about it and he said that there weren't any, and never had been, and it used to be called Camp Custer but then when they'd made it into a park they'd changed the name.

He said that when he was a Boy Scout, they'd camped there a couple of times, in the summer and the winter. He said that winter camping was fun when he was younger and he'd even gotten a special badge for spending a full day outside in the winter, but now that he was older and wiser he thought it was better to stay inside in the wintertime.

We had to drive a ways through the park before we got to a parking lot, and it was near the Equestrian trailhead, and he said that we should use those trails just because it would be funny.

There were lots of trucks with big trailers that horses rode around in, and most of them weren't as nice as the one that me and Aquamarine had seen at the draft horse show. I couldn't help going up to them and sniffing them to see who was around, even though I didn't know any of the horses who were here, I didn't think. None of them smelled like anyone that I knew, although I thought it would be neat to see Deanne and Henry out here.

We went along the trail and pretty soon we came across a pair of horses and riders and I knew that they had come in the blue trailer that was behind the silver truck, and we stayed off to the side to be out of their way. The stallion kind of slowed down when he got close to me and he lowered his head and we sniffed at each other and made friends, and then his rider encouraged him to go on. And the second horse was more interested in following the stallion than coming over and being friends, so she just passed by me but her rider waved at both of us.

I wound up meeting a dozen horses, and it was kind of strange how some people didn't want their horse to sniff at me and other ones thought it was okay. One woman yelled at us for being on the horse trail, and Aric said that I was an Equestrian and therefore I should be on this trail, and she said that it wasn't the same thing because I wasn't being ridden, and stuck up her nose and rode off. Her horse was nice, though, and I felt bad that he had to put up with her.

Aric asked what truck she'd brought, and I told him, and he said that maybe when we were on our way out we should key her truck. I didn't know what that was, but it didn't sound like it was a nice thing to do. I bet Aquamarine could have told her horse to buck her off, though.

When we'd gone around the whole trail, we got back in Winston and drove over to another parking lot, and then sat on the tailgate of the truck and ate lunch. I made an anchovy sandwich and I wanted to have one of the beers that was left over, but there had been a sign which said that we weren't supposed to drink alcohol in the park.

Aric said that just meant that we had to be sure that nobody noticed that we were doing it, and he said that he'd take the beer with us on the next trail.

So we went around the trail that surrounded the antenna farm. The name was kind of misleading, because the antennas had been built there at full size; they didn't grow out of the ground. And there were lots of signs that told us not to go inside, and a fence, too.

I thought that was kind of a strange thing to put in a park, but I guess they had to put them somewhere. Aric thought that they'd probably been built back when this was still an Army training ground, and that they had some military purpose, but he didn't know what. He said a lot of times the government tried to keep things like that secret, so that our enemies wouldn't know what they were for, but probably they did anyway. And I thought that having antennas sticking up with blinking lights on them wasn't all that much of a secret. They would have been smarter to disguise them as really tall trees or something.

When we were on a section of the path that nobody else was on, we drank our beer, and Aric kept looking around to make sure that nobody was coming. I just flew up and sat in a tree, 'cause I didn't think anybody would look up there.

He put the empty bottles in his pocket and we went the rest of the way around that trail, and then he said that he wanted to go on one of the trails through the oak barrens before we had to leave. So we drove back to the other end of the park and since there weren't any parking lots Aric left Winston on the side of the road with its turn signals blinking.

When we'd gotten a little ways back on the trail, Aric thought it would be fun to have sex in the woods, and I thought so, too, so we kept going until we'd found a little path that went off the trail and into the woods, and we went a ways back there until we'd gone far enough that nobody would see us or hear us. And he found a nice cluster of bushes and scrubby trees and a fallen-down tree that made for even better cover, and so we went behind that, and it was a little bit hard to find a good position because he didn't want to lie down on the ground and I didn't, either. So he had to crouch down a little bit and rest his hands on my back, to help balance himself, and I didn't think it was too comfortable a position for him but I couldn't think of anything better.

On the way back, we couldn't find the path that we'd taken to get in, 'cause it all looked kind of the same, so I flew up above the trees and it wasn't too hard to find the road from the sky. I could have flown right to Winston, but I wouldn't have been able to find Aric again and I didn't want us to be lost in the woods apart again, so I went back down in the trees and then led him out. We weren't actually that far off the trail, it turned out, although I hadn't been able to see it through the canopy of trees. So when we ran into it, we just followed it back to Winston rather than make our way through the woods.

Aric had to go back to get ready for the play, but I didn't have to be back so soon, and I said that I wanted to fly back if he didn't mind. I had my flight gear in Winston, so he helped me get dressed and filled up my camelback with water out of the water bottles he'd bought. Then he said that I should have a Gatorade for the electrolytes, and it tasted kind of funny and mineraly, but it wasn't bad. I kissed him and then called the airplane directors and told them that I was flying from Fort Custer to Kalamazoo and that I was gonna follow the railroad tracks most of the way.

I took off and flew due west, 'cause that would intersect the railroad tracks, and Aric went the other way 'cause that's how Winston was pointed. And I flew over a couple of lakes and then the Kalamazoo River, and right after that I turned to follow the tracks—I'd come over them a little ways past the coaling tower.

I was only a couple of hundred feet up, and I had been following the tracks for a few minutes when I heard a horn honking behind me and I looked down just in time to see Winston pass by on the 96 Road—I guess that I had taken a much shorter route than he had. We'd gone on a lot of roads in the park, so it made sense that my direct route was quicker.

I was able to keep an eye on Winston until it crossed the tracks outside of Galesburg, and I kept my eye on the 96 Road on the other side of Galesburg, but the buildings blocked a lot of my view and I couldn't see clearly that far anyway.

It took me almost an hour to get back to campus, 'cause I wasn’t particularly hurrying, and when I got to campus, instead of landing on the boardwalk like I usually did, I flew low over the quad and zoomed around some trees and then stopped in front of Trowbridge and went in the normal way.

I felt a little more energetic than I usually did after a flight, and I wondered if it was the sex in the woods or the electrolytes in the Gatorade that had given me more energy.

I went up to my room and took off my flight gear, and then took a quick shower just to rinse off. And since it was still a nice day out, I didn't bother to dry off, just shook off what water I could in the shower, and then I went back outside to the quad to sit in the sun.

There were a lot of people out because the weather was so nice. I didn't think it was supposed to be this warm in November. And when I went to dinner, they had the windows in the dining hall open, to let in fresh air.

When I first sat down, Sean said to 'remember remember the fifth of November,' and then Christine said 'gunpowder treason and plot.' And I looked between the two of them in confusion, and then Anna said that she 'could think of no reason that gunpowder treason should ever be forgot,' and then they explained that November fifth was Guy Fawkes Day, which was when a man had tried to blow up Parliament in England. And I asked when that had happened, and Reese said that it was in 1605, which was over four hundred years ago, so I guess people really weren't forgetting. Sean said that there had been a movie made about it kind of recently, and that I should see it someday, but only after I'd watched Star Trek. And I told him that I hadn't forgotten, I'd just been busy, and I promised that I would.

I asked Meghan if she'd gotten done with her homework, and she said that she hadn't. She said that she was probably going to have to work on it tomorrow, too, which was kinda disappointing. Then I asked if she was going to come to the play tonight and she said that she would.

Everyone else decided that they wanted to go see it tonight, too, and Christine asked if it was audience participation and I didn't know. I wasn't sure what that was, and she said that there were things that you were supposed to say and do during the movie, and maybe also in the play but she'd never seen it as a play before.

Aric hadn't told me anything about that, so I said that maybe it would be best to ask someone when we got there.

So we all agreed to meet up a half hour before the play started, and we took our time at dinner but there was still some free time left after that.

I ought to have read my Bible or done something else productive, but I didn't—people were playing on the quad and I wanted to play, too. I got to watch a game of Red Rover, and I also stole someone's frisbee just for fun: Christine had told me to fly by and grab it, and so I did and then I flew up in a tree with it, and he was kind of mad but all of his friends were laughing, and I offered to give it back to him, but he wanted me to hit a tree with it before I dropped it, and then they argued about whether that counted as a point or not.

He said that it did, because he hadn't touched the frisbee after the throw, and his friends said it didn't because I'd helped it hit the tree and it wouldn't have otherwise, and he said that he hadn't expected me to catch it and in real golf that would have counted. So they finally agreed to let him have the point, and he gave me a hoof-bump.

Christine had to leave a little bit before we went to see the play so that she could put on a different shirt, and she said that she'd meet us at the theatre and told Sean to get her a seat. So we all went over there and got a bunch of seats all together, and there was a sign saying that they were doing the audience participation version tomorrow.

Well, Christine was kind of disappointed but then she said that she would just have to come back tomorrow and it was probably just as well because she didn't have any of the things she needed.

It was a little bit strange to be sitting down in the seats instead of up in the booth, and I wondered if Aric had seen me come in, and I thought that he probably had. Then I wondered who was running the spotlight if Lisa was sick. Maybe they had someone else who did it.

This play was a musical play, too, and it wasn't bad like Sweeny Todd had been, but it was kind of strange. People were dancing in their underwear, and Frank N. Furter wore a bra even though he didn't have any boobs. And Trevor was right; they killed and ate Eddie, and at the end they killed Doctor Furter and Columbia and Rocky, but they didn't eat them.

It was a very strange play, and a little bit harder to follow than Sweeny Todd had been, but the songs were really catchy, and Christine leaned over and said that when they did the audience participation version everybody got to dance the Time Warp, which sounded like it would be a lot of fun.

Just like in Madison, we got to greet the actors out in the lobby, and Doctor Furter looked a little bit cold in just his underwear, so Columbia gave him her sparkly gold coat to wear.

Me and Meghan waited in the lobby until Aric came down, and by then the whole lobby had emptied out and so we were sitting on the benches by ourselves. The one side of the building was built on the edge of a hill and had really big windows and it was kind of like being up in the sky when you looked out it, and we were just watching the traffic go down the hill, and so Aric kind of sneaked up on us.

Aric said that he was going to stay up all night and work on his project that he hadn't worked on all day because it had been nice and he had gone out to Fort Custer with me. And Meghan laughed and said that she was going to say the same thing, because she had to finish up her project tomorrow and if she was with us she wouldn't want to. I told Aric that he should have done his work today if he had that much to do, and he said that sometimes it was best to put off homework when you had a really nice day, and I guess that was true. Then I asked him how long he'd had the project, and he said for three weeks, and I asked how much of it he'd done, and he shrugged and then admitted that he hadn't even started yet but said that he worked really well under pressure.

And so I hit him in the shoulder, 'cause that was dumb. He could have been done with it a week ago and made sure that it was the best work that he could do and instead he was going to turn in something that he had just cobbled together in a couple of hours.

Meghan said boys were irresponsible, and I agreed.

So we kissed goodbye, and he got into Winston and drove off to his house, and me and Meghan walked back to Trowbridge together, and then she kissed me goodnight in the hallway, and I went up one more floor to my room. Peggy wasn't there, but she'd left a note for me saying that she'd gone off to the bar and might not be back until really late. So I wrote in my journal and then I went to bed, and I hoped that she'd be back in the morning.

November 7 [Flux]

November 7

I woke up at the usual time, because while my portable telephone might have known that it was supposed to change times, my body didn't, and it was very confusing.

I guess humans adapt to it much easier than ponies, because Aric and Meghan were still both fast asleep, and so I snuggled back down with them but I couldn't go to sleep, so I just listened to them breathing and the birds outside—who probably also didn't know anything about Daylight Saving Time—chirping as they had their breakfast.

And I was kind of starting to doze off again when Meghan woke up enough to start scratching my back, and I pushed my head against her and gave off a happy sigh.

She leaned up on one elbow and looked over at Aric and asked if we should wake him up, and I thought that would be kind of rude, so we let him sleep until Meghan's alarm started going off, and even that didn't wake him up. She was kind of quick to turn it off, so maybe that was why.

I thought that her alarm had gone off at the wrong time and I had to look at it and make sure that it was correct, 'cause it didn't feel right to me. She said that in a few days things would go to normal and I hoped that was true. I didn't think I'd been this confused when Daylight Saving Time had started, but maybe that was because I had to get up earlier, and so it hadn't seemed so strange.

Us moving around in bed was what finally woke him up, and he was pretty out of it, and I thought that maybe he was having trouble with the time change, too, but Meghan said it was probably because he'd stayed up all Saturday night working on his paper, and it turned out that was why.

Even though it was his own fault for not getting it done sooner—I wouldn't have been mad if he'd done it on Saturday instead of going to Fort Custer with me—I felt kinda bad for him.

So after we'd kissed him goodbye, Meghan got dressed, and the two of us walked back to school, and I went right up to my room and woke up Peggy so that she could have a morning trot with me. She was a little bit more cheerful because of the time change, and she got dressed while I was in the bathroom filling up my camelback.

We went around Academy Street to Grove and even though we'd left kinda late because I'd been at Aric's, we got close enough to wave to Caleb and Lindy and Trinity before they got on their bus.

And then we went around the rest of the neighborhood the usual way, and it was really strange for it to be so light out when we'd finished our morning exercise. And I kept thinking that I was missing my class, even though I wasn't.

After Kat got out of the shower, I took a really quick shower and then let Peggy take hers, and I went back to the room and groomed myself and preened my wings. The summer brush I used was starting to tangle in my coat now, 'cause I was starting to grow in a winter coat, so it was about time to put it away and get out my winter brush. Pretty soon I was gonna be fluffy instead of sleek, and I hoped that the weather got cold pretty soon, 'cause if it stayed warm like it had been, I was gonna be too hot.

Peggy got dressed and I packed up my things for thermodynamics, and I hoped that Lisa was at the class, or else I was going to have to go to her room and get the lab notes and figure out how to put them in the computer myself, 'cause she might have had an excuse for not getting them done but I didn't.

I guess the extra hour in the morning had given the kitchen more time to get ready, because there were omelets and waffles and lots of other good food, and so I got both an omelet and then I shared a waffle with Peggy, 'cause neither of us wanted a whole one. And everyone was a little bit cheerier and more awake at the breakfast table, and when I got there Christine and Sean were telling Meghan how much fun we'd had at the second Rocky Horror.

Sean got up and went off looking for more food, and when he came back he had a whole plate full of chocolate eclairs, and he said that they'd just put them out and he'd gotten enough for everyone, and he passed them around. I didn't want one, 'cause I was full, so he had one extra, and he gave that to Christine, and she kissed him even though she had chocolate frosting all over her lips.

Everyone got done eating a little bit early, so we didn't have to rush off, and we just sat and talked for a little bit, and then I got up so that I could get to class on time and I nuzzled Meghan before I took my tray back to the conveyor.

I flew across the quad, and landed in front of Dow and I got there early enough that the last class hadn't left yet, and Lisa was there although she still looked kind of sick and maybe should have stayed in bed.

Professor Brown taught us more about mixes and the Lever rule, because it was so important how it worked because most things were solutions of one kind or another, and after he'd reviewed what we'd learned before he started to talk about alchemical potential, and he gave us equations for all the different parts of the pressure diagram, and some of them got so long that they were crowded on the markerboard and so I was careful not to scrunch them up in my notes.

He also told us that the achemical potential of a mixture was always lower than the alchemical potential of a pure liquid, and then we moved on to non-ideal liquids, and he gave us a formula for that, and then how there might be positive or negative deviations from it, if the two liquids really liked each other or didn't get along at all.

He drew out a phase diagram for acetone and carbon disulphide, and I didn't know what either of those were. Carbon was on the periodic table, but acetone and disulphide wasn't, and he said that when you mixed them together they tried to become a gas. But if you took away the carbon disulphide and replaced it with chloroform (which also wasn't on the table) than they liked each other and would stay a liquid that was lower than it should have been on the ideal phase diagram.

After class was over, me and Lisa went to the lounge and she got out our lab work and we both looked over it for mistakes, and we didn't find any, which was good. She said that she was going to go back to her room and get some more sleep, and I went back to my room.

I sat at my desk and did my homework, then when I was done I picked up the Bible without really thinking about it and then I remembered that I had finished it. And I ought to have started the World War One book—I was going to start over, 'cause I couldn't remember what I'd read—but the window was open and it was a really nice day again and people were playing out on the quad, and I thought it would be more fun to join them. I could start on the book in the afternoon.

So I went out and galloped down the quad, then when I got to the bottom I flew up almost against the wall of Hoben and then flew to the top and landed and did it again, and that was a lot of fun. And then I laid on the hill and rolled on my back in the grass, which cooled me down a little bit, and when I got back up again, I had lots of grass clippings stuck in my coat, 'cause they'd trimmed the lawn while I'd been in class, and so I shook them off and that made me think of a tree shedding its leaves.

And there were trees that hadn't shed their leaves yet, maybe because it was still pretty warm, but they were mostly turned, so I started to gallop around one and I didn't think that I was accomplishing anything at first, but then I started to feel the pull from the tree, and pretty soon I had leaves raining down around me.

I was only one pony, and I wasn't very good with trees at all, so by the time I'd started to get dizzy, the tree still had a lot of leaves on it, but there was a pretty respectable pile of leaves around it, too. And there were also a few people who'd watched me, and also got to watch me stagger around a little bit while my body tried to figure out straight again.

I had to go back to my room to get my things for math, and when I got there Peggy asked me what I'd been doing on the quad, because someone had texted her and said that I was running in circles, and I said that I'd explain at lunch, because I thought maybe other people would want to know, too.

So after we'd gotten our food, I explained how we ran to help the leaves come off the trees so that they would be ready for winter, and Sean said that on Earth the leaves just fell off on their own and nobody needed to help them. And I thought that maybe they would in Equestria, too, but it was also a sign to everyone that winter was coming, and it was time to get ready to hibernate or to fly south if they were birds, plus it was just a fun thing that everypony could do, even pegasuses and unicorns.

Christine said that in America the sign of fall was pumpkin spice, and when animals smelled it in the air that was how they knew it was time to leave. Anna asked her what the animals had done before Starbucks, and she said that there was no civilization before Starbucks, just people living in caves trying to invent pumpkin spice lattes.

So I wanted to go to Starbucks and try one since they were apparently so good.

When we were done eating, me and Sean went to math class together, and I was still feeling pretty frisky, so instead of walking I cantered across the quad, and he just kept walking, so I cantered all the way back to the dining hall and then back, and I might have been able to do it a third time but instead I just stayed by the door until Sean arrived.

Professor Pampena taught us about flux, which was another line integral. And it was kind of similar to work, but not the same. And it was really useful because it could be used to figure out how fluids moved.

He showed us how to calculate it on a circle first, and it was kind of easy because a lot of things got to cancel out, and then he showed us on another vector field how it was just zero, and then when he was sure we understood that, he said that instead of solving it geometrically it was easier to use coordinates when things got complicated, and showed us how to do it that way. And at first it seemed like it was going to be more difficult, but then he reminded us how to rotate vectors, and then it was a lot easier.

He wrote an equation for it on the markerboard and told us that we had to remember it, so I underlined it in my notes, and then told us that there was a Green's theorem for flux, too, and put that on the markerboard, too.

We went to Sean's room to do our math homework together, and he had the window open and there was a little bit of a breeze blowing through it and it got better when he cracked his door open some to give the wind a place to go. And I stretched out my wings and let it ruffle my feathers a little bit before I started to focus on my math homework. At least this time I'd be doing it without my insides trying to get out.

He finished up while I was still double-checking all my answers, and he asked if I minded if he changed the music to another beautiful song, and I said that he could. And the woman who was singing had a really beautiful voice, and I kind of lost track of checking my work, 'cause I was focused on what she was singing. And I didn't know any of the words, and he said that they were Bulgarian, and that the song was called Zaidi Zaidi. And he didn't know what the words meant, but I didn't think it mattered too much.

I wish that I could sing like that.

The two of us went over our problems together, and then we wrote out one of them in Equestrian, and I was glad I'd thought to write down what symbols I'd been using for the math letters, because I'd forgotten one of them, and I didn't want to confuse Professor Pampena by changing math letters from one problem to the next.

And he played the song for me one more time before we watched a Numberphile movie. It was about a math problem that had been on a math Olympics test, and it had been so difficult that the mathematicians who had picked the questions for the test couldn't solve it, and I thought that that was kind of unfair, but they'd thought that maybe some of the contestants could figure it out. And it was actually two movies, because the first one explained the question and then the second one gave the answer.

At the very end, he also revealed that one of the other people who had solved it correctly and gotten all seven points was Zvezdelina Stankova, who had been in one of the other movies I'd seen. So she was really really smart. And she was Bulgarian and so was the song that I liked that Sean had just played for me which was also an interesting coincidence.

I went back to my room and got out my World War One book and started reading it, just to familiarize myself again with how it had started, and then it said how all the different European nations declared war with each other just because Archduke Ferdinand got assassinated and Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for it.

And the Germans went through Belgium and started massacring people on their way to France, and then Germany pushed through and into France and hundreds of thousands of people got killed.

And in the sea, the British sank German ships and blockaded them to force surrender, and that only worked until the Germans started sinking their ships with submarines.

The Russians attacked in Prussia and the Germans defeated them, but Austria-Hungary didn't do so well, until the Germans helped them, and they fought all winter and nobody won.

Turkey decided to fight Russia, too, and their warships bombed ports. And in Africa, all the European nations started to fight against enemy colonies there, too.

Japan declared war on Germany, and Australia defeated a German colony that was nearby, and they started to fight around South America, too.

And the book kept telling me how many people died in each battle and the numbers were impossible to imagine. It seemed like everybody was fighting everybody else and nobody was getting anything from it. I guess it was important for friends to stand by each other, but I thought that everyone should have already figured out that the fighting wasn't working and nobody was winning and maybe they should just stop.

I wasn't enjoying the book very much, so I was pretty happy when I got to put it down and go to dinner. And I ate a pretty light dinner, even though I was hungry, 'cause I had to practice cheerleading tonight and I didn't want to do it with a full stomach.

Which was too bad, because they had a pretty good dinner, and I had a couple of fish fillets, and also some salad, and then I told Reese and Anna that I wasn't going to be able to come to Durak tonight because of cheerleading practice, and I thought that I should probably tell Aric, too, so he didn't worry.

I got there a little bit early, and so I had to wait around the entrance, and Sandra wound up arriving a little bit late, so everyone was already there and even though she hadn't been there to coach them, they started to do their stretches. I'd worked with weatherponies who weren't that motivated.

While they were doing their normal routines, Sandra took me into another room so that I could get measured for the uniform, and she had a woman named Elaine take the measurements, because she had been the same one who made the costumes for the play. And she kind of fussed about a bit and had me hold out my wings and flap them and flex them, and then move around my tail. My legs weren't too much of a problem, because the vest didn't have sleeves and the skirt at the back let my hind legs move freely.

And I thought it would be like with my lab coat where I would get it back in a couple of days to see how it fit, but she'd brought a whole sewing kit with her in a toolbox, and she got to work right away.

So I got interrupted a couple of times while I was practicing, just so that I could try it on and try to move in it and then she'd make a couple of marks and take my clothes back off and I could practice some more, and then I had to be fitted again.

But it was worth it, because by the end of practice she'd made me a cheerleading uniform that fit me, although I had to be careful because some of the seams were still held together with pins that would poke me if I moved too much. And she'd even made underwear with a tail-hole which I didn't like very much but Sandra had decided that I would have to wear it, even though I didn't really want to.

While the girls went off to the locker room to change, I went back into the other room and Elaine helped me take off my uniform, and then she also measured around my fore fetlocks so that she could make straps for pom-poms for me.

She said that she should have it all ready for tomorrow, and I could practice with it on, since it would be my first time wearing it.

I was happy to have it off, 'cause it was hot wearing clothes. I didn't know how Gusty managed. She was probably gonna have to clip her coat really short, especially if the weather stayed like this.

I walked back up the quad to my dorm, and I was glad that the temperature had dropped. I guess that was one nice thing about it being later sooner—the temperature got a little bit cooler. And I was getting kind of tired, 'cause my body still hadn't figured out the new time, and thought that it was bedtime.

I probably should have taken a shower to rinse out my coat, but I didn't really feel like it, and I'd be taking one in the morning anyway. And so I went and started to pack up my flight gear so that I could go to Aric's, and then I went to get Meghan, and the two of us walked over to his house together, and I told her about my cheerleading outfit.

We were a little early and he hadn't got back from Durak yet, and I was kind of tired, so I just got in bed and I scooted over up against the wall, and I was mostly asleep by the time that Meghan was undressed and in bed with me. And she was kind of worried that maybe I was getting sick, but I told her that it was just the time change messing with me, because my body was telling me that it was time to sleep.

I felt kind of bad disappointing her, but she rubbed my ears and told me that it was okay, it was better to let my body get accustomed to the new time, and then she put her arm around my belly and snuggled up to my back.

Author's Note

This is the best summary of World War One I have ever read:

"No war in the history of the world has equalled this conflict in mere stupendousness. In number of nations actually engaged; in its reckless abandon of human lives, destruction of wealth and the treasured creations of the ages; in titanic battles and sieges; fury of martial combat; prostitution of every known achievement of science to death-dealing devices and instrumentalities; in its subversion of the civilizing processes of morals and mind to justify the extremities and perversions of racial and human passions; in the overturning of law and order; and in the undermining of human confidence in the higher institutions of society, it stands naked and alone in its saturnalia of destruction."

—The Circle of Knowledge (c) 1921

Poor bastard who wrote that didn't know that in two decades there'd be another.

November 8 [Election Day]

November 8

I hadn't been asleep all that long before Meghan started moving against me and at first I couldn't figure out why, and then I realized that her and Aric were having sex and trying to be sneaky about it so that they didn't wake me up, and that was really cute. Especially since Meghan was still hugging me with one arm and petting my mane with the other, so I pretended that I was still asleep and probably if she'd been paying attention, she wouldn't have been fooled, but she was more focused on herself and on Aric.

And she hugged me a little bit tighter and kissed my head, and I listened to her breathing slow back down, and I flicked my tail against her leg just once and then laid still again. I was glad that they'd been able to have fun without me.

I woke up too early again, and I was really hot and pushed the covers off me as best as I could, and I sort of pushed against Meghan some just so I could move my hooves, but I was kind of careful because I knew that if I pushed against the wall too hard, I would probably push Aric out of bed.

I estimated the time as best as I could, and when I thought it was pretty close to when Meghan's alarm would start to go off, I started tickling her with my tail, 'cause I couldn't move my wing very much with her arm on top of it. And once she'd started to wake up, she loosened her grip a little bit and I was able to roll onto my belly, and my wing was stiff and numb, and it kind of hurt to stretch it out especially since I was up against the wall and couldn't open my other wing.

I got my hooves under me and hooked one over her shoulder and tried to pull her a little bit closer to the wall, but that didn't work too well until she finally woke up and then she had to get up and go to the bathroom.

When she came back, she looked at her portable telephone and said that she still had a little bit of time left to sleep, and she got back in bed and went right up against the wall and that didn't look too comfortable, so I got out of bed to give her room and she rolled on her belly, and all that movement woke Aric up enough that he rolled over onto his back, and that didn't really leave anyplace for me to be in bed except for on top of them.

And that wound up not being comfortable for anyone, and pretty soon we were all awake, and I got on top of Aric and then Meghan did, too, and that was a fun way to start the morning.

I didn't want to take a shower because I was gonna go flying and Aric said that Meghan could use his shower if she wanted to, but she saw that I was getting kind of impatient to get in the sky, so she said that she'd do it back at campus, and after she'd gotten dressed we both kissed him goodbye and he said he was going to sleep in for a couple of more hours.

The two of us walked back to campus together and I told Meghan that she'd woken me up last night and she got really embarrassed and said she didn't mean anything by it, which was a kind of funny thing to say. Maybe she thought I'd be mad, so I told her that I wasn't.

When we got to campus, I didn't go inside. Meghan helped me put on my flight gear in front of the dorm, and I took off for the Nature Center. I stayed low so that I didn't have to call the airplane directors, and when I got close, I went out over the river so I wouldn't scared the deer but they were gone. I guess they didn't know about Daylight Saving Time, either.

I landed on the path and went around it once at a trot, then when I got to the top, I cantered down the hill and around the end and then galloped along the riverside. When I got to the junction, I took off and flew around the path through the trees, and when I came out the other end, I took off and flew back to campus.

Once I was in the dorm, I stuck my head in the bathroom and there was someone in the shower, so I went back to my room to get undressed and made sure Peggy was awake, then I went back into the bathroom and waited until Ruth came out of the shower.

I had my turn, and I tried to be quick but still when I got out, Peggy was waiting for her turn.

She came back in the room and got dressed while I finished preening—a couple of primaries towards my wingtip were getting loose, but not loose enough to come out yet, I hoped. The outer ones hadn't grown all the way back in yet, and if I lost too many, it was gonna be hard to turn.

Peggy helped me put on my lab coat and then I put my saddlebags over it with my thermodynamics things and goggles and my scrunchie.

When we got to the dining hall, the wafflemaker was still working, and the omelet chef was there, too, so I had one of each again, and shared half a waffle with Peggy.

Everybody was talking about the election, because it was today. And I guess besides the President, people got to choose lots of other new representatives as well, which was kind of confusing to me. It seemed dumb to change everyone like that all at once.

Reese had some charts on his portable telephone that had been written by a man who worked with statistics, and it showed that Donald Trump didn't have a very good chance of winning—not even a thirty percent chance.

Anna said that she had already voted by mail, and she said that Chicago's motto was 'vote early, vote often.' And Peggy and Christine had, too, but Sean said that he hadn't, because he had forgotten to, and Christine hit him and called him an idiot.

And Meghan said that the college was driving people to the polls like they had for the primary, and she was going to do that. I wanted to go with Meghan to see what it was like, but she said I'd probably be bored, because it was mostly standing in line and I would have to wait outside until she was done, and it was just like the primary, anyway.

I walked across the quad to Dow, and it had started to rain just a little bit, and I wished that I had time to fly up and see if it was going to get worse.

In the lab, we got to mix solutions together and watch what they did when we changed the temperature or the pressure, and some of the solutions smelled really bad. I found out that acetone is the same smell that is in nail polish remover, and I didn't like that smell too much. And chloroform didn't smell too good, either. I wish we'd done our lab with things that smelled better. At first I'd thought that humans couldn't smell it, 'cause there were a lot of things that I smelled but none of my friends did, but then I saw Crystal Dawn wrinkling her nose when she took the stopper off her bottle of chloroform, so I guess that they could smell it, too.

And the smells stuck with me when I left class, 'cause they'd gotten on my lab coat and in my mane and tail.

I went back to my room and got out of my lab coat—it was too hot, and it made my belly itch where the buttons dug at my coat. I was kind of glad that I was only going to have to wear one more time. Then maybe Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn could keep it for the next pony who needed a lab coat.

I took out my notes and put them on the desk and then started to do the calculations for the lab. It was always kind of peaceful doing calculations, although I think if I had to do them all the time I would get bored of it. But when it was just enough that my rump didn't start to get sore or my eyes start to hurt from focusing on the paper, it was perfect.

When I got done and had checked over my work, I put the papers away with my class notes, and got out my World War One book again, and read it until lunchtime.

People had taken a little break for Christmas, but when the new year began they started fighting again, and the Germans sent airships to drop bombs on Britain, and decided that they would use their submarines to sink any allied ships around Britain.

The British tried to bombard Constantinople, but their ships got sank, and so they prepared an invasion, and the Turks decided to kill the Armenians who lived in Turkey because they thought that they were working with the Allies.

In Europe, nobody was going anywhere because they were dug into their trenches and couldn't get very far in either direction.

The Germans sunk a passenger ship, and then started using airplanes to fight, and then Italy joined the Allied forces and attacked Austria-Hungary and lost the battle. And then Germany sunk another passenger ship and America got mad so they stopped.

Both the British and Germans were also using poison gas, and Bulgaria decided to join Austria-Hungary and the two countries together conquered Serbia, and when winter finally came despite how many people had gotten killed they made plans for bigger more glorious battles in the next year.

I was relieved to put the book down and get my astronomy book and poetry book for lunch, 'cause those were happier things.

Cedric and Leon were both sad that they'd lost the game on Friday, and I said that next Friday I'd cheer so loud that they'd be sure to win. And Leon said with a pegasus to inspire them, they probably would. And we decided that we should invite Aquamarine to the game, especially because it was the last one of the year. So I said that I could, and Leon shook his head and said that it would mean more if it came from Cedric, which was true.

He said that he would like to write her a letter but it would probably arrive too late, and I said that he could write a letter and then put it in his computer and send it that way. So it would be in his writing, but get to her lots faster, and he said that I was very clever for thinking of it, and I had to admit it wasn't originally my idea.

Trevor had been looking through the book, and he'd found a couple of poems that he thought were good for today. One of them was for me, and it was called Fly Now and Pay Later, and I liked that one. I thought it was good advice to do things when you were young and could enjoy them, although Cedric said that he thought you could think of it the other way, because football players sometimes had to live with injuries and pain for the rest of their lives. And I told him that some weatherponies did, too, and some of us never got old.

And then in honor of the day, Trevor read Election Day is a Holiday, and said that Christine had gotten mad at Sean 'cause he hadn't voted. Leon said that that disrespected everyone who'd fought and died to give people the right to vote. Then Cedric asked if we had elections, and I said that in our village, when we decided that the mayor wasn't doing a good job any more we picked somepony who we thought would do better. I guess that wouldn't work for a really big city or a whole country, though, but it was okay for a small cloud town.

I was a little bit behind when I got out of the dining hall, and Anna was halfway across the quad, so I trotted along until I caught up to her, and then we walked to class together. And Professor Miller introduced the last part of our class which was cosmology, and she said that humans had no idea what the universe was made of.

She told us about spiral nebulae, which had been discovered almost a hundred years ago, and some people back then thought that maybe they were other galaxies that were very far away and it turned out that they were. But it took a while until people knew and they finally figured it out when they built better telescopes.

A man named Hubble had figured it out, and they named a constant after him and also a space telescope.

Professor Miller told us how you measured distance in space, because you couldn't just fly there and bring a measuring chain back, but since the earth moved around the sun, the stars were in slightly different positions when they were observed at different times, and so it was a fairly simple trigonometry, and called the parallax method. But that didn't work when things were so far away, because the angles were so small, so they used the candle method instead.

And that was pretty simple, 'cause you looked at something that you knew how bright it was and then just figured how much less bright the distant thing was, and they had an equation for brightness that she showed us. And it used logarithms, which was nice 'cause they were easy to use.

It was kind of confusing how it wasn't expanding into anything that humans could understand. But then she said to imagine that we were sitting on the surface of a balloon, and if it got inflated bigger, everything moved away from everything else.

So that was a lot to get my head around, but that was how humans understood the universe working.

At the end of class, Professor Miller told us that we could go to the telescope again on Thursday night, and I raised my hoof and asked if we could come late, 'cause I had cheerleading practice, and she said that we could but we'd have to get there on our own.

When we got done with class Anna said that she wished she'd brought a coat, but it hadn't been as chilly or windy when she went to lunch.

I said that it was a good wind, even though it was bringing some cold air with it. And I decided that I was gonna go flying again, not to really get anywhere but just to play around in the wind. There was a lot that you could let it do for you.

So I went back to my room and got my vest and radio and blinking light, but I left the rest of the gear off, 'cause I wasn't going to need it. And while I was there I also checked on my computer just to make sure that there wasn't a storm coming that I didn't know about.

And then I called the airplane directors and said that I was going to fly above the college mostly and asked how high I could go, and they said that I shouldn't go above a thousand feet, which was disappointing. But I guess since I was just having fun in the sky and airplanes needed to get where they were going, I couldn't complain.

I took off from the quad and I had to be a little bit careful down low, since the wind made eddies and vortexes as it went around the buildings, but once I was above it the wind was more direct and predictable.

So I flew into it and then let it carry me up and back until I'd drifted the whole length of campus, and then I dove down a little bit and got a bit of speed into the wind and then tucked my nose down and let it tumble me over, and I didn't do it right the first time and made a really sloppy recovery, because I was out of practice. But then when I tried a second time I got my timing right, and came out of my tumble with my hooves down, and I was even pointed the way I wanted to be.

On really windy days, if you set your wings just right, the wind would pick you up and you didn't have to fly at all, but it wasn't that windy today.

There were a lot of other fun rolls you could do with the wind, and I did them all, and then when I was up there someone started to fly a kite, and I danced with that for a little bit, but not too close—I didn't want to break the kite or get tangled up in its strings.

I had to rinse off before I went to dinner, and then when I got there they had decorated the dining hall with red, white, and blue decorations and the dinner was a special American meal.

When I looked at the choices, though, it looked like that just meant that they had more meat, and more fried things that I wasn't that interested in. Everyone else was, though. Sean was excited that they had bacon for dinner, and Reese had a plate of tater tots that he had drown in catsup. Christine had something that she said were chicken fingers, and I didn't know what those would have been, because chickens didn't have fingers, any more than buffalos had wings. Then the more I thought about what they had, the more I thought that it was all made-up foods, because none of them had what they said they had in them.

At least they still had the salad bar, and nothing in that had changed too much.

I relaxed in our room for a little bit and then I went to cheerleading practice. Elaine hadn't brought my uniform yet, and Sandra said that she'd gotten a telephone telegram from her, and she was in line waiting to vote, and she'd be over with it as soon as that was done.

So I didn't get to try it on until the very end of practice, because even though she showed up during our last section, none of us wanted to stop to let me put it on, since we were all working together really well. I was being tossed up in the air high enough that I could almost reach the ceiling without even flapping my wings, and I was kind of imitating the moves of the team's other fliers, but also doing a couple of twists and tumbles that only I could do.

And when we were done with practice and the team went off to the locker room, I got to try on my new uniform, and even though the fabric was stretchy it was hard to get my wings in, and I also had to have Elaine help me with the underwear, but when I was dressed it felt pretty good. It was a little bit loose in the chest, 'cause it had been made for a human girl, but it pulled in pretty tight and Elaine said that nobody would notice.

So I moved around in it and flew around the gymnasium once, just to make sure that it didn't interfere with my movement at all, and it didn't, so me and Sandra both thanked Elaine for her work and she said that she was lucky she'd asked after the play and not before.

I had to be helped back out of it, and then Sandra folded it up and put it with the rest of the team uniforms. She said that I should wear it tomorrow and Thursday to get used to the routines while I was wearing it.

I went back up the hill to our room, and Peggy was sitting on her bed, and she was doing homework but she also had her folding computer open and there were people talking about the election. Peggy said that they would get the election results as each county counted the ballots, and then they'd add them together and figure out who had won.

Trump was ahead, but she said that was to be expected, because a lot of states that were going to vote for him had had their votes counted already, and that there were some big states that the votes hadn't all been tallied in yet, like Florida and North Carolina and Michigan and Pennsylvania, and she said that things would change soon.

But she started to get worried when Florida was called for Donald Trump, and as the night went on, Clinton never caught up. I could hear people yelling and cursing in some other rooms in the dorm when states were called, and I was starting to get a little bit nervous, because I could kind of feel a sort of tension and Peggy finally slammed her computer closed, and just fell back on her bed and said that she didn't understand people sometimes.

And I was worried, too, 'cause the angry man at Walgreens had said that Mister Trump was going to build a wall to keep ponies out and so I thought that might mean that I'd have to leave and I didn't want to leave. So I told Peggy and she hugged me and she said that I was going to be safe at least, because even though it looked like he'd won, he didn't get to actually be president until January, and I'd be back in Equestria by then.

She said that she couldn't believe that people could be so stupid, and now all she had to hope for was that Trump got caught doing something that he shouldn't and got impeached. And then she sighed and said that she wondered if her parents had felt the same way when President Bush won over Al Gore.

I thought that maybe things could change because not all the states had been counted yet, but she said that it didn't matter; even if every state in the West voted for Clinton, it wouldn't be enough for her to get the victory. Then she said that tomorrow I'd be seeing a lot of really unhappy people on campus, and maybe I'd even get a chance to see a protest.

I told her that I wanted to avoid those, 'cause Cayenne had gotten arrested at one and wasn't allowed to go to political events any more, and Peggy thought that was really funny.

She said that tonight would be a good night to get really drunk, but I didn't think so, because of class tomorrow. And then she said that tomorrow we'd have to see who the first person was that said that they were going to move to Canada.

It was still noisy in the dorms, and I was having trouble sleeping, 'cause all of a sudden someone would shout and I'd stick my head up and try and figure out where it had come from, and Peggy was having trouble, too, and she said that she could sit with me until I fell asleep, and I think that she just wanted to not be alone, so I turned back the covers and she sat with her back against the wall and my head on her lap until I convinced her to lie down and be comfortable, and I nuzzled her cheek and then put my wing over her and she put her head against mine and the two of us fell asleep together.

Author's Note

I was unable to find either of these Ogden Nash poems online.

November 9 [The Day After]

November 9

I was a little bit confused at first that Peggy was in bed with me, and then I remembered last night and I was glad that she was there 'cause the first thing I thought of was the angry man at Walgreen's, and I bet he was happy.

I wanted to go flying to help clear my head but I also didn't want to leave Peggy, although maybe she felt better after a night's sleep. And I still wasn’t sure what time it was, but it was pretty light out so I was fairly sure it was late enough to wake her up. I couldn't remember if she'd set her alarm.

And then I remembered that it was a Wednesday and so we were supposed to go trotting anyway, so I shook her shoulder with my hoof and when she woke up I said that it was time to go trotting, and she said that maybe that would help clear her mind, and she was glad now that she hadn't drunk herself to oblivion last night even though it had been kinda tempting.

So she got up and we went to the bathroom—there was only one shower but there were a bunch of toilet stalls so you usually didn't have to wait—and then she got dressed and we went downstairs and headed towards Jeff's house first.

We must have gotten her up a little bit earlier than usual, because nobody was out waiting for the bus and I thought at first that we'd missed them even though I hadn't heard the bus in the neighborhood yet, and I usually did because it had screechy brakes and a rumbly engine, and then Peggy looked at her portable telephone and said that we were early.

I guess they must have seen us out on the corner, 'cause Trinity came running out of the house and wrapped her arms around my neck in a big hug, and then Lindy came out and she was carrying Trinity's backpack.

When Caleb came out, he wanted to show Peggy the new Pokemons he'd caught, and I took Trinity down the block on my back, and then I thought I could trot back, and that turned out to be more work than I'd expected it to be. I could really feel the pavement in all my leg-bones each time they landed, and it was strange how easy it was when I was walking but not so easy with her on my back. She wasn't all that heavy.

We had extra time to hang out and talk, because they'd come out early when they saw us, and even Jeff came outside, and it was fun to just stand on a street corner in the morning and have fun.

Lindy and Trinity waved goodbye when they got on the bus, and then Caleb did, too, and once the bus had left, Jeff asked me how much longer I was going to be in America, and I told him that I was going back to Equestria at the end of the year. And he nodded and then he told me to be careful and stay safe, and then he went back inside.

I thought that was kind of a strange thing for him to say.

We went around the rest of the neighborhood, and then Peggy wanted to race the last block and I said that she wouldn't beat me. She said that she knew, but she still wanted to, so I waited until she started running, and then I started trotting and when I hit a canter I was starting to catch up and I probably could have stayed at that gait and it would have been a pretty even match, but she would know that I was holding back, so I changed to a gallop, and passed her with over a third of the block left to go.

I was panting a little bit, and Peggy was a bit winded, too, so we walked the rest of the way back to the dorm, and while we were on our way my portable telephone started ringing and Peggy answered it since she could get it out of my pocket quicker than I could.

It was Mister Salvatore, and he said that he wanted to come over and talk to me, and so I told him that I had free time between my thermodynamics class and lunch, and I told him when, and he said that he'd meet me up at my dorm room.

So I told Peggy, even though she'd probably heard some of what he said, just so she wouldn't be surprised when he showed up.

She insisted that I have the first shower, until I started to push her into the bathroom 'cause I thought that we ought to take turns at having the first shower. Even if it did take me longer to get ready in the morning 'cause I had a lot more grooming to do.

And I had to wait for Kat, 'cause she came in while Peggy was in the shower and it wouldn't be fair to steal her turn, so when I got out I was a little bit later than usual and I told Peggy to go ahead and go to the dining hall without me, but she said that she'd wait, and she even helped brush my coat while I was preening my wings, which was really nice of her.

I didn't do a thorough preening, 'cause I could tell that Peggy was getting a little bit impatient even though she was pretending not to be, and then we went to breakfast together.

Everyone at our table was in a kind of gloomy mood, and Reese said that he was never going to trust statistics again. Then Anna said that sometimes the monster scores a critical hit, and that made him laugh a little bit.

Meghan saw my wings and shook her head, then tapped her hand on her lap so I stuck out a wing and let her finish preening it. She said that when she'd seen how things were going, she'd spent the night filling out forms that would let her work in Equestria and she was hoping she'd get lucky, and Sean said that he'd heard that the Canadian emigration internet page had crashed because so many people were using it.

Christine told me to stay away from my Facebook for a couple of days, because her Facebook wall had been filled with all sorts of angry people and she thought that I probably didn't want to see it on mine. And then she said that Joe had been smart to go to Japan, and she thought that he would probably stay away for the next few years.

Well, it wasn't a very happy breakfast conversation, but at least Meghan distracted me by preening my wings and it made her happy to do it, too, and when she'd done both I leaned up and kissed her and I didn't care who saw.

Professor Brown was still teaching us about alchemical solutions. I'd figured out what chloroform and acetone and carbon disulphide were even though I didn't really need to know for the class. Humans had different ways of writing the names of alchemical compounds than we did, and sometimes it made it not obvious what it was made of. Plus there were a whole lot of them and I didn't know all that many.

He showed us how to change molar fractions in solutions and figure out what the new vapor pressure was, and it combined Raoult's law, Henry's law, and Dalton's law so that was a lot of things I had to make sure to remember.

And then he warned us that sometimes there was a place where the bubble line and the dew line met in the middle with some components, which was called an azeotrope, and that was important to know because sometimes if you were trying to purify something, you'd find that point and then you couldn't separate it anymore until you'd got past it.

We also learned the four colligative properties, which were the vapor pressure, boiling point elevation, freezing point depression, and osmotic pressure, and I used the first three of them all the time with weatherwork.

I gave Lisa my calculations right after class, and then I had to rush back to my dorm so that I wouldn't be late to meet with Mister Salvatore. And him and Miss Cherilyn were both at my door when I got there and I said that I was sorry I hadn't gotten there sooner, and they said that it was okay, and then asked if they could come in my dorm room with me, and since I'd told Peggy and she knew they were going to be coming I said it was okay.

I sat down on the bed and Miss Cherilyn sat down next to me but Mister Salvatore stayed standing. And she told me that because of the things that Mister Trump had said while he was campaigning, there were a lot of racists who had become more bold, because they thought that the election results were a sign that they were right and that they could do what they wanted to do, even if it was wrong, and she said that that meant that people might paint anti-pony messages on buildings or send me angry letters or worse, or even try and hurt me.

She said that there were always people like that and most of them hid away and stewed in their own poison until they went out and did something bad, but now they'd be a little bit more confident, and that there were people out there who didn't like ponies very much, like the angry man at Walgreen's.

Then Mister Salvatore said that despite what she said, the majority of people who had voted for Trump had done so for other reasons, and were not bad people, but he said that this election had been one of the nastiest he'd ever experienced and that there were a lot of people who were mad about a lot of things and just wanted an excuse to strike out at someone.

He said that they were going to stay closer to me, and he told me that he wanted me to promise I'd tell him whenever I was traveling anywhere very far, even if I was with my friends, and he also said that I should do my best not to be alone except when I was flying.

And he said that if I got the feeling that I was in a bad situation, I should just fly away and call him as quickly as I could.

I said that I could hold my own in a fight, and Miss Cherilyn said not if the person had a gun.

Mister Salvatore said that he knew I was smart and resourceful, and he was sure that I'd be smart and do the right thing, and he said that he hoped that in a few weeks things would get back to normal, but until then he didn't want to take any chances, and he told me again that I could call him any time, day or night.

So I told him that I was going to go to Peggy's for Thanksgiving and we hadn't really made any plans after that, and he said that that was fine, and that they were still working on what we were going to do after Thanksgiving, and that the election had changed things a little bit.

He said that I should tell Peggy that she could call him anytime, too.

I got up when Miss Cherilyn did, and I hugged her and then I hugged Mister Salvatore, too, before he left.

It was kind of hard to concentrate on my homework after they'd said all that, and I kept making dumb mistakes and losing track of where I'd been, and so I still hadn't finished it by lunchtime.

People were still kind of gloomy at lunch, and I overheard a couple of people talking about wanting to start a protest. And it was hard to be cheery when everyone else was in a bad mood, plus I was still thinking about what Mister Salvatore had said. So I wasn't really in that much of a mood to eat, and so none of the food looked very good and it didn't taste that good, either, but I think that was just me, 'cause it was the same food as always.

Peggy wanted to know what Mister Salvatore had said, so I told her, and she said that he was really smart, and she was worried about the crazies seeing this as a sign that it was okay to do bad things and she hoped that it didn't happen.

I was glad that I could walk to class with Sean, and I stayed close to him even though I didn't think that there were any bad people on campus.

Professor Pampena told us that we were going to start learning about doing triple integrals and flux and work in space, which meant three dimensions not outer space. Although I suppose they would still work in outer space.

We started with triple integrals, and it was a lot like double integrals but we had to be careful not to get confused about what went where in our equation, and we had to determine an order to integrate in.

He drew us a picture on the markerboard and solved an equation to show us how it was done, and I tried to keep one step ahead of him while still paying attention to what he said, and then when he was done he said that we didn't like how the answer looked and it was better to use polar coordinates. And in space polar coordinates were cylindrical coordinates instead, but they were pretty much the same.

Professor Pampena told us how to figure out mass using triple integrals, and how we could calculate the center of mass, and the moment of inertia which he said was easier in three dimensions, and then he did an equation on the markerboard for us.

Me and Sean did our homework together in his room again, and when we were done, we watched a Numberphile movie where Matt Parker built an adding machine that worked by knocking over dominoes, which was really clever, and he explained how the logic gates worked. The computer was in binary, and that was an even smaller number base than decimal, but that was all that computers could think in so that was what they had to use. And Sean told me how my portable telephone and my watch and my radios all worked like this on the inside, too.

Then Sean said that he'd love it if I watched the new Star Trek movie with him this weekend. He said that we could go to Christine's suite and make it a party, which did sound like it would be fun. And I still wanted to, but I also wanted to have fun with Aric and Meghan, and it was hard to choose which I should do.

I went back to my room and finished up my thermodynamics homework and then I got out the World War One book and read some more of it.

The Germans attacked Verdun in an attempt to make the French use all their troops defend it until they ran out of soldiers elsewhere, and the British had a million men volunteer for the army but it wasn't enough so they started to just make people join. And Portugal had stayed neutral but kind of sided with Britain, so Germany declared war on them.

The Russians tried to divert the Germans but it didn't work, and the Irish rebelled against the British, since the British were busy in Europe, but their Easter Rising didn't work.

The Arabs launched a revolt against Turkey, and the Germans and British fought a major sea battle and lost more ships but won the battle because the Germans ran away. And the Russians finally broke through the lines in the east, and the British tried it in the west and had 57,000 casualties in a couple of hours.

Romania declared war against the central powers and advanced into Transylvania, but didn't get much further than that, and the Germans finally gave up at Verdun, after seven hundred thousand people were hurt or killed between both sides.

The allies advanced only ten miles at Somme, at the cost of a million dead and injured, and they thought that that was a winning strategy. And during that winter, when they couldn't have big battles because of the snow, a bunch of leaders on both sides got replaced. Woodrow Wilson, who was the President of America, tried to get the countries to make peace but they wouldn't.

I didn't understand how people could think that the war was worth fighting. Nobody had really gained anything by it, and it seemed like most countries had actually lost more than they'd had at the beginning of the war. And when I looked at the maps, I couldn't understand why countries like Portugal would even want to get involved, especially after a few years when it became obvious that the only thing the war was good for was killing people. Did nobody have any sense?

I ate a light dinner so that I wouldn't have a full belly when I was cheerleading, and me and Peggy walked back to our room together, and I just sat on my bed and watched Peggy doing her homework until it was time for me to go to practice.

She said that she could walk down there with me if I wanted, and I said that I'd fly, and so I went downstairs to the boardwalk and I glided down the quad and then the rest of the way down Academy Street.

Sandra had me warm up with everyone else even though I couldn't do all the same stretches that they did, and they didn't have wings to stretch out. Then Sandra helped me put my cheerleading uniform on, so that I could practice while wearing it. It was important to find out now if it was going to get in the way when I was thrown in the air or if I might accidentally step on the skirt when I landed, and we also had to practice with the pom-poms, 'cause I needed to know how to shake them just right and also find out how quickly I could get them on and off.

And I even got to be thrown in the air with them on, which was fun. I could shake them while I was flying, and then tuck them in before coming in for a landing.

After we'd practiced for a while, I wasn't liking the uniform very much 'cause it held in too much heat, and I wasn't used to that. I couldn't even get a good breeze under my tail, since I was wearing the underwear, too. They had lots of water and Gatorade too, and so I drank some at every opportunity because getting too thirsty while exercising could make you faint.

I hoped that it was going to be a cool day on Friday.

It felt like practice was longer than it actually was, and I was happy when Sandra said that we were done. And I didn't even think about it but I went right into the locker room and tried to pull off my cheerleading uniform and the skirt and underwear wasn't too hard but the vest was more of a challenge and I finally had to have Jessica help me.

I felt a lot better when it was off, 'cause now my body could cool itself off, and I trotted into the showers. Some of the girls were already there and I found a showerhead that wasn't taken yet and turned on the cold water and rinsed myself off, and the girl next to me complained 'cause some of the cold water was splashing her, which I hadn't meant to. But instead of having shower-columns like in Hoben, they were all arranged on the wall, which meant that you were more likely to splash your neighbor. Also it wasn't as friendly, 'cause you had to turn your head to look at anyone else.

I hadn't brought any shower supplies, but I hadn't expected for it to be so much of a workout. But just rinsing off made me feel a lot better, and when I was done, I went into the changing area so I could shake off without splashing anyone. And I wasn't sure if I should stay until they were all done with their showers, too, but I decided that I would because I didn't really feel like flying with wet wings, and since Jessica lived in DeWaters, I could walk back with her.

I started to walk across the parking lot and I had never realized how many shadows and hiding places there were in a parking lot and it started to make me nervous, so I flew up to the boardwalk and let myself in that door, and then I went upstairs to my room to say goodnight to Peggy before I went to Aric's house.

I nuzzled her and told her that I'd see her at lunch tomorrow, and then I got my flight gear and went to Meghan's room.

We walked to Aric's house together and when we got there Aric had beer, and Angela and David were sitting on the couch with him and complaining about the election, so we joined them and we wound up staying up kind of late, probably later than we should have, 'cause no one was really paying attention to the time. And it was finally Meghan who noticed when she went to the bathroom and saw a clock in the kitchen, and she said that she ought to get some sleep before tomorrow.

The three of us went upstairs and got undressed, and neither of them really felt like having sex, so we just all cuddled together, and I liked that 'cause I was in the middle, although it got a little bit too warm after a while and I had to push the covers down some and stretch out my wings over them so that they'd stay warm.

November 10 [The expanding universe]

November 10

We'd stayed up too late last night and so everyone woke up a little bit later than we should have. Meghan said that she couldn't stay for too long because she had some things that she had to do before class, and she said that she could walk back herself if me and Aric wanted to have some fun, but I thought it would be better to include her and Aric said that he'd give her a ride, and she asked if he meant a ride to campus and he said that he would do that, too.

That was a nice way to start the morning, and then while they were getting dressed I went downstairs and started coffee for them, and for me, too, and even though Meghan was on a kind of tight schedule, we had five minutes to enjoy our coffee before Aric drove me and her back to campus.

I got in my flight gear and I couldn't decide if I should go to the Nature Center or go on a longer flight instead. There had never been anyone there who had given me any trouble, but I was still thinking about what Mister Salvatore had said, and I was safer in the air 'cause people couldn't get me when I was in the sky, and I thought it would be good to exercise my wings, anyways, so I had to pick a direction, too, and this time I was gonna fly into the sunrise, even if it meant I had to talk to the airplane directors in Battle Creek.

So I got permission to fly and I had to stay low until I got to Galesburg and then I was probably gonna have to go down in Augusta, too, but maybe not. I wouldn't know until I asked. And when I had my permission from the airplane directors, I also sent a telephone telegram to Mister Salvatore so he would know where I was going, too.

I took off and followed Main Street through town until I got to the railroad bridge, and then flew over the tracks and followed them east.

My watch said that I was at five hundred feet and that was a good altitude, because I was well clear of electrical wires but also lower than airplanes were supposed to go.

I was over Galesburg when I saw the sun poking above the distant horizon, and I glided along so that I could enjoy it. That also made it last a little bit longer, 'cause I was losing altitude while I glided, but I had enough to spend on a sunrise without being in any danger.

Then I climbed up a bit higher, cresting at a thousand feet, and then I thought that I'd call the Battle Creek airplane directors before I got too close, so I could plan what I wanted to do. And my watch was smart and knew what frequency they were on, and I called them and told them that I was following the railroad tracks, and they said that I could continue on my course but to hold my altitude until I was at the 194 Highway, and to let them know when I got close and they'd decide what to do with me then.

I wasn't quite sure how far I'd go before I crossed it, although I'd been over it before when I'd followed the 94 Highway to Battle Creek. And I was thinking that maybe when I got there I could follow it south to the 94 Highway and then follow that back to Kalamazoo, but I'd decide how I felt when I got there, 'cause it might be a longer way back.

There were some other airplanes talking, and so I listened carefully to find out where they were. Some of them wanted to land at the airport and so that meant that they might be crossing my path, so I'd have to keep a good watch.

I was getting close to the end of the runway when I heard them tell a FedEx airplane that it could fly, and those were big airplanes, so I looked down the runway and saw it lined up and pointing in my direction, and I watched it take off and at first it was kind of slow and then it started to get bigger and closer really fast and I thought for sure it was going to hit me, so I went into a panic dive, and I'd lost almost half my altitude when it roared over my head.

I think it looked closer than it was, just because it was so big and powerful, and I'd just started to climb again when its wake hit me and tumbled me in the air, and when I'd gotten level again I swore at it even though it couldn't hear me. And then I looked down the runway just to make sure that there weren't any more of them that wanted to take off before I started to climb again.

The 194 Highway was pretty obvious, and when I looked off to my right, I could see the 94 Highway as well, so I decided that I'd go back that way, and called the Battle Creek airplane directors to tell them.

And I didn't follow over it exactly, but made a big, broad curve over the highway that had me flying back west by the time I was over the 94 Highway.

It was kind of fun watching the cars and trucks go by underneath me, and I played the game again where I tried to see how long I could follow a particular one with my eyes before I lost clear sight of it.

From my altitude, I could see past the minor bends in the road, so I could keep track of them pretty far, and I'd usually wind up losing them when I looked around to see something on the ground or make sure that there weren't any other airplanes trying to sneak up on me or fly over my head and knock me out of the air.

And when I was looking down I saw a black car that was going east cross out of its lane without looking to see if there were any cars next to it, and the two of them bumped into each other, and then the black car turned too far and went sideways with a loud screeching of its tires.

The other cars around it, who had been paying better attention, darted around it to either side if they could or just stopped where they were at, and I wasn't sure who I should tell. I'd never tried using my portable telephone while I was flying, and I thought I'd probably drop it if I did, and I didn't think I should tell the airplane directors, either, because they had a lot of airplanes that they were directing and cars weren't their responsibility. And the people down there probably had portable telephones of their own and knew who they were supposed to call.

Traffic was slowing down in the east lanes faster than I was flying, so it was kind of odd to see the line of traffic in front of me stopping, and it took a while before I got past where it was slowing down and stopping, but by the time I got to Galesburg it was moving at the normal speed again.

I could see Morrow Lake off to my right, and when I got to the western end of it, where the dam was, I turned off the highway and took a straighter path back to campus, 'cause I was starting to get tired. At least all the water I drank while I was flying made me get lighter.

I remembered to call Dori when I was crossing towards Comstock, and just to be safe I dropped down to five hundred feet. And she said that there weren't any airplanes that were taking off any time soon, and I complained about the one that had flown over my head in Battle Creek and she asked if I wanted her to call them and yell at them, and I said that she probably shouldn't. I didn't think that they'd done it on purpose, and I'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By the time I finally landed on the boardwalk, my wings were aching and my camelback was completely empty. I hadn't been as careful about conserving water as I had been when I flew across Lake Michigan, 'cause I hadn't really thought about how far I was flying, but I bet it had been almost fifty miles. And my winter coat growing in along with some missing feathers hadn't helped, either.

At least there was no one in the shower, so I could get right in and rinse myself off with cold water, and I only warmed it up a bit when I was ready to use soap, 'cause it worked better in warmer water. Humans don't have a lot of cold-water soap, 'cause they like to take warm showers, which are nice for relaxing muscles but don't help for cooling down.

I shook myself off and then went back to my room to brush my coat and preen my wings, and I had enough time to do a good job, then I put my Ogden Nash book and my astronomy book in my saddlebags and went to lunch.

Cedric was really looking forward to Aquamarine coming, and he told me that her helpers were bringing her because Jenny was busy for the weekend, and I thought that was really nice of them.

I asked if they thought that they were going to win, and Cedric said with Aquamarine watching he'd play his very best, and Leon said with me cheering them on, he would play his best, too, and that since they were the two greatest players on the football team, that was all it would take to win.

Trevor said that they were being too cocky, and Leon said that Albion had had a terrible season, and if they didn't win against them, then they might as well hang up their helmets and give up.

I got out my poetry book but Cedric held up his hand and said that I was bringing poetry to them and now it was their turn to do it for me, and he said that the two of them had chosen poems on their own that they liked, and they were going to read them for me.

So Leon read his poem first, and it was called A Psalm of Life, and at first it was kind of depressing but then it got a lot more hopeful, and Leon said that his father had a framed copy of the poem above his desk at work, because it had been his grandfather's favorite poem, and I thought that that was really nice that a poem could be passed down through generations like that.

And then Cedric said that he'd had picked one by Leonard Cohen, who he said had died just a couple of days ago. It was called The Ballad of the Absent Mare, and it was really sweet. He said that it was actually a song, and he wasn't sure if it counted, but I thought that it did, and I said that he should read it for Aquamarine because I thought she'd really like it, too.

Then I went around the table and I hugged Cedric first, and Leon said that when people saw they were going to think that the best players on the football team had turned into sissies, and then he leaned down and hugged me anyway.

Cedric walked with me to return my tray and dishes to the kitchen, and he offered to carry it, too, but I said that I would. And he said that maybe he was getting sentimental, but he was going to miss our poetry days and I said that I was going to, as well.

I beat Anna to class, and I sat down in my usual seat and I'd already gotten out my notebook and opened it to a blank page before she arrived.

Professor Miller reminded us again that we were going to meet to go to the Nature Center and look through telescopes, and then she told us more about how the universe was expanding and that it meant that in the past it was denser and hotter.

And she said that in theory you could find that out by looking at things that were very, very far away, because they should look different since it took so long for the light to get to us. And the first thing that they found that helped people figure it out were called quasars, which were supermassive black holes that were moving away very quickly.

She also told us how galaxies from then were different than now, and our telescopes had gotten good enough that humans could see them.

Professor Miller told us that we could figure out how old the universe was from what astronomers could see, and it could be measured like you could figure out how long you'd been in a train if you knew how fast it was going and how far it had gone, but she said that it also turned out that Hubble's Law described it, and it was about seventeen billion years old, and that humans had found stars that were between twelve and thirteen billion years old.

And then she told us that the end of the universe could be that it fell back in on itself, and that could only happen if it weighed enough and it turned out that it was really close to that weight, which was called the critical density.

So they had to measure what the average density was, and you could figure out how much mass it took to make a certain amount of light, or you could also measure orbits because that could give you the mass of it.

Neither of those calculations gave good answers, though, so astronomers started calling it dark matter, and she said that she was going to tell us more about that in our next class.

I was too tired to fly around even though it was a nice clear day, and so I read some more of my World War One book, even though I really didn't want to, 'cause I knew it would make me sad.

Germany knew that they would lose a war of attrition, so they used their submarines to blockade Britain, trying to starve them, and Germany told Mexico to go to war with America, but they didn't. Food was running out in Russia, and the Tsar fled, and then America decided to join the war, but the German blockade was working.

In the sky, the early airplanes were scouting around like pegasuses would, and other airplanes were trying to shoot them down, and the air war got so bad in one month it was called Bloody April, and that was also the same month that the German submarines were sinking seventeen ships a day.

French soldiers started to refuse to fight, but Greece decided to join the war. And the Russians gave up, too, and ships started to move in convoys with warships to keep them safe from submarines.

The German Chancellor considered a peace treaty, but the army said that he couldn't and kept on fighting. And Italy and Austria-Hungary fought the eleventh battle of Isonzo until everyone got tired, and I thought that they should have given up long before.

A bunch of countries who weren't fighting yet all declared war on Germany just because of the submarine attacks or because they thought that the Allies were going to win. And the British got Jerusalem, but the Italian front collapsed and Lenin took power in Russia and the United States hadn't sent anyone to fight yet, so it looked like the Allies might lose.

And then the British sent a whole battalion of tanks in and they made a big advance and then broke or were destroyed, and the Germans pushed them back.

Finland declared independence from Russia, and then Romania and Russia signed an armistice, which meant that they weren't going to fight anymore.

They were the smart ones, I thought, and anyone else who wanted to fight was dumb. I didn't understand how humans could be so clever about lots of things and so dumb about other stuff. They needed to think more about making friends, and if Princess Twilight had been there I think she would have taught them an important lesson. It was almost like they were repeating the mistakes we'd made so many years ago, when ponies almost destroyed themselves fighting between tribes.

People must have thought that they were doing the right thing even though it was kind of obvious looking back at it that they were being dumb, and would have been a lot further ahead if they'd just kept talking to each other instead of fighting. And not only were they dying in the fighting, but so many things were being built just to be destroyed on the battlefield, and that also seemed like a real waste of effort. Plus all the fields that were ruined and couldn't grow a crop any more, and homes that were destroyed, and as far as I could tell it hadn't really accomplished anything worthwhile.

I almost had forgotten that I was supposed to meet with Pastor Liz, and I was a little bit late but she wasn't mad at me. And when I told her that I'd gotten done with the whole Bible, she was really proud, and so we talked about what it all meant. She asked me if reading the Bible had answered my questions about who God was, and I said that I thought it mostly had.

I said that I thought He was kind of like Princess Celestia in a way, and that He had gone to live in heaven now instead of His house in Jerusalem, and now He didn’t come down to talk to people too much anymore, but sent angels instead.

Pastor Liz said that she didn’t know a whole lot about Princess Celestia, but that God wasn’t the same. She said that Princess Celestia was very much like a pony, but God wasn’t really like a human, even though the Bible said that He had created man in His own image.

And then I remembered what we’d learned in Astronomy about how the universe had more dimensions than we could see, and I asked her if she meant that God lived outside the universe that we knew and sometimes He had come down to Earth to talk to people but mostly He just watched from beyond, and she said that that was true.

And even Professor Miller had said that God could have made the Big Bang, and I said I wondered if He had gotten lonely with a big empty universe below Him, and that was why He had created humans and cared about them so much, and Pastor Liz said maybe it was.

I got to dinner really late because of my meeting, and almost everyone was gone from our table, except for Anna and Reese, and they weren't eating any more but they were just talking, and I didn't want to ask them to stay just for me, but they did. And Reese got out his notebook and showed me a character he had made for Pathfinder, which was like LARPing but you could do it while sitting at a table. And on the page next to it, there was a drawing of the character that Anna had made for him.

I didn't eat too much, because I had to go to cheerleading practice. And I kind of wasn't looking forward to it, because the uniform was too hot, but it would be worth it tomorrow when I got to cheer on the football team.

I'd looked at the weather, and it was supposed to be warm but windy, and hopefully the wind would help cool me off. And maybe I'd forget about the weather when I was out there, anyway, because I'd be doing something fun.

I had just a little bit of time before cheerleading practice, and I decided that instead of going back to my room I'd just relax on the quad a bit, and Reese and Anna went out with me and she got out her sketch pad even though it was dark out and started to draw, while he laid on his back in the grass and said that if there weren't all the lights in town he could probably see a million stars, and then he said that the college had been around for hundreds of years and there weren't street lights when it was first built, and he said that sometimes he tried to imagine what it had been like back then. He said that maybe the tree we were under was just a little sapling then, and now it towered over the quad.

I probably should have taken my flight gear with me, but I didn't want to put clothes back on after I got out of my cheerleading outfit, so I just walked down the quad to the gym, and I didn't see anybody suspicious.

We did our warmups, and then Sandra helped me get dressed again. The uniform smelled clean so she must have washed it after practice, 'cause most of it had been soaked through.

We went through all of our routines, and then they practiced throwing me some more, and we even decided that we'd even try a coordinated throw with two fliers, and that took a bit of practice to get the timing right, but I could just watch what the other girl—who was named Caroline—did and match her. It looked kind of funny, though, because she did the splits in the air and I couldn't do that, so even after we'd practiced it, Sandra decided that it looked kind of silly.

I was completely lathered by the time we were done, and as soon as I got into the locker room I asked Jessica to help me get undressed. And while she was helping me get my wings through the slits in my vest, I asked her if it was okay to get the uniform wet with water.

She said that they'd cheered in the rain, so it was probably okay, and I decided that tomorrow I was going to cool off in the shower before I took my uniform off, and then I'd get undressed and shower properly.

I just left my uniform draped over the bench and went to the showers, and I picked the one next to Caroline 'cause I'd seen that she wasn't so happy that I was gonna get thrown in the air. She probably thought that I was coming to take her place, and that wasn't true, but I could see why she'd think that.

So I made sure not to splash her with cold water because that would probably make her madder, and at first she didn't really want to talk but then she opened up a little bit after I told her how impressive it was what she could do with her body without being able to fly at all. I said that if I didn't have wings, I'd probably just crashland after I was thrown up, and even though I'd been flying all my life there was stuff she could do that I couldn't do.

And she told me how she thought it wasn't right that I just had come on the team like that and only attended practice for the last week and everyone was letting me have almost anything I wanted, and I didn't really understand all the work that went into being a good cheerleader, and I admitted that she was right, and I think she was surprised by that.

She said that I was too cute and too nice to stay mad at, and I nuzzled her hip which kind of surprised her because she was still in the shower and slippery with soap. And some of the bubbles went in my nose and made me sneeze.

I kept talking to her while she got dried off and got dressed, and we still weren't exactly friends, but she wasn't mad at me anymore.

When I left the gym, I took off for the Nature Center so I could look at stars. And since I didn't have any of my flight gear, I had to stay low and be careful in case there were helicopters flying around. I knew the route really well, and so I knew how high I had to be to clear all the trees and wires, and even though when I got closer to the Nature Center there were hardly any lights on the ground to guide me, I could see well enough to know where I was going, and I landed near the clearing and the cluster of telescopes.

It was perfectly clear outside, so I didn't have to fly up and shift clouds around, so I got to look through the big telescope at the nearby planets, and then we started to look at stars. And some of them that looked like stars from the ground really weren't. I got to see a galaxy called Andromeda, which was really pretty. And with the telescope you could also see that some stars were a different color than the rest, because they were burning at different temperatures.

There was one star called Betelgeuse, which was going to explode into a supernova someday, and people didn't know when for sure, and Professor Miller told me it was possible that it had already and we weren't aware of it, because it took the light over six hundred years to get to Earth. But she said that she thought it hadn't yet.

When my turn at the big telescope was over, she also pointed out a constellation which humans called Pegasus. I said that it didn't look like me at all, and she said that I just needed to use my imagination.

When we were done looking at stars, I could have flown back but I thought it was smarter to ride back in the van. She drove us up the hill and stopped near each dorm so that people who lived there could get out and not have to walk as far. And so I had a little cluster of astronomy students with me all the way to the door of Trowbridge, and it was only when we got inside that we split up and went our separate ways.

Peggy was looking at her computer when I got back, but she must have been almost ready for bed, because she was in her sleeping clothes already, and she told me that she'd been thinking of going to bed a little bit early but then she'd gotten on Facebook and she'd gotten sucked into all the different articles and what her friends were saying about the election. And she said that at least Colorado hadn't voted for Trump which made her feel a little bit better about it.

She said that she was looking forward to the football game and asked if I was ready for it and I said that I thought I was but we'd find out tomorrow. And then I told her how hot the uniform was and she laughed and said that that was the price I had to pay for being a cheerleader, and she was right. Even when I didn't like it, I had to obey the rules if I wanted to do things.

Author's Note

A Psalm of Life
--suggested by Cynewulf

Ballad of the Lonely Mare
--brought to my attention by arancaytar

November 11 [Cheerleading]

November 11

I was really excited when I woke up, 'cause I was going to get to cheerlead today, and I wondered if the mix of excitement and nervousness I felt was the same kind of feeling the Gusty had before she had a play, or maybe how Leon and Cedric felt before their football games, too.

Sometimes before weather work I got a little edgy, but weather work wasn't quite the same as cheerleading—we did what we had to do to fight storms, and nopony cared if our moves weren't synchronized.

I knew I was going to burn a lot of energy cheerleading, and I knew it might not be the smartest plan to go out trotting this morning, especially on the tail of yesterday's long flight, but I knew if I didn't I was going to be all fidgety in class.

Besides, I was using my legs, so my wings could still relax.

I shook Peggy with a hoof until she woke up, and then she looked at her portable telephone and sighed.

But she got up and got dressed, and she said if she'd known I was going to get a wild hair up my butt about making her exercise, she would have packed more sports bras. And then she said that women in the old days must have had smaller boobs, because it was hard to imagine how they could have run with big ones.

She put on a t-shirt and a sweatshirt, 'cause it was kind of chilly outside, and after I'd filled up my camelback, she put her extra water bottles in it. I wouldn't have minded if she wanted to drink out of the camelback, but she didn't want to because she said that was a good way to get germs.

We went out the front and along Academy Street, then to Jeff's house, and we were a little bit early again. Peggy trotted in place while we waited for Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity to come out for the bus.

And I think that Trinity was watching out the window for us, 'cause she came running out of the house pretty quickly, and I nuzzled her when she got to me, and pretty soon Lindy and Caleb came out, too.

I told them that I was cheerleading at the game tonight, and so they all wanted to come and see me. Caleb asked Peggy if she was a cheerleader, too, and he was kinda disappointed when she said that she wasn't.

Since I'd been talking a little too much, there wasn't time to give Trinity a ponyback ride before their bus arrived, but I did get to hug her and Lindy. Caleb didn't want a hug from me, but he would give me a hoof-bump. I think he would have hugged Peggy if she'd offered.

We went around the rest of the neighborhood and by the time we were on our way back down Dartmouth, Peggy was getting too hot so she took off her sweatshirt and tied it to my camelback, and it kind of looked like I was wearing a cape.

We didn't race each other this time, because Peggy said that I'd win anyway, and she was getting kind of tired, and I said that I was, too, but I was kind of disappointed. It was fun to race the last little part, and it didn't matter if you tired yourself out doing it.

I took the first shower and when I was done, Kat wasn't waiting outside for her turn, so when I went back to the room I told Peggy and she went right into the bathroom.

While I was preening, one of my loose primaries fell out, but the other one didn't, and that was really annoying because now my wings didn't match. It probably wouldn't have too much effect on cheerleading, though, since I wasn't going to be flying all that high.

I wiggled it a little bit but it stayed stuck, so I left it alone. Some mares would have nipped it off short, but that made the shaft a lot harder to get out if it didn't fall out on its own, plus then you couldn't re-use that feather for anything so it was kind of wasteful.

My winter coat hadn't quite gotten thick enough to be obvious, but I could really feel it as I ran the brush through my coat. The weather was really too warm for it still, because humans didn't have neat season changes, so right now I was wishing that I didn't have it yet, but it was going to be nice when I went to Colorado with Peggy, 'cause even in the summer it was colder up in the mountains.

I was still grooming when Peggy came back, and she asked me if I was going to do anything special with my mane and tail for cheerleading. I said that I hadn't planned to, and she said that I ought to put my mane in a ponytail, like I did for lab class. And she said that she could do it at dinner so that I wouldn't have to have it like that all day, and so I said that I would.

I put my things for thermodynamics in my saddlebags and then we walked together to breakfast. And the waffle-maker was broken again, and Peggy said that she didn't think that it would be fixed before the end of the year, and I thought that she was probably right. And I said that maybe I should get out mine and we could have waffles in the dorm room some morning, and we could even invite friends over that wanted waffles.

And she liked that idea, and said that maybe it would be something to do before finals.

I looked at all the food they had before deciding to have some eggs for the protein, 'cause that would help my winter coat and feathers grow, and oatmeal for the energy. Even though humans made it too soggy.

When I sat down, Meghan asked me what my plans for tonight and the weekend were, because she knew that Aquamarine was coming, and I said that I didn't know for sure. I thought that she'd be staying with Cedric, but I hadn't found out from him, and I said that I'd ask him at lunch.

Christine told us that there was an anti-Trump protest on Monday in Bronson Park, and I said that I wasn't allowed to go to political protests, even though it sounded like it would be interesting to see. I had thought that once there was an election and the votes were counted than that was all that there was, but I guess that even afterwards people wanted to make their opinions known. I think it was kind of like complaining at the pub when your favorite hoofball team lost a game.

I really wanted to see it, and so I thought that I could fly over it. But I should probably ask Mister Salvatore first, because he might not like that.

Professor Brown told us about the fourth colligative property, which was called osmotic pressure, and it was how things got into cells, which were what made up our bodies, so that happened on its own. It could also be used as another way to purify things like water, because the water could get through the membrane but the impurities couldn't. And then he taught us a really important formula called the van 't Hoff formula, and showed us how to derive it from what we already knew.

And that meant that we knew all the colligative properties, and so for the last week we were going to learn something new before the final exam.

Me and Lisa went to the lounge together, and we went over our thermodynamics lab assignment together. I didn't see any mistakes, which was good, so it was ready to turn in.

She said that we would have to be prepared because after next week's lab we might have to finish more quickly, since next week was the last week of class. And I said that I was free on Thursday morning, so if we had to we could finish it together then.

And we also agreed that we'd be study-buddies again, and so we went through our notes and kind of split the class in half, so that each of us could prepare to quiz the other on their half of the material, which was good because you learned a lot by trying to teach it to someone else.

We weren't gonna have time to do it today, but she said that Monday after class we could meet in the lounge again and go over what we'd prepared, and then decide after that if we were going to need extra time, depending on what he did with the lab.

And then I went back to my room and did the homework, and I was in a pretty good mood so I didn't want to read any more of the World War One book today because it would make me sad. So I decided that I'd just go out and play on the quad instead. And I trotted up and down the hill a couple of times to warm up, then I started to fly, going right alongside Hoben and Olds-Upton, until I thought that maybe I was disturbing the classes inside who could see me through the window, and so then I just started to fly around the trees, getting almost close enough to the trunks to touch them with a wingtip.

Then I flew up into the sky, which was clear as far as I could see. There were some airplanes way up high that were leaving little airplane-clouds behind them, but the conditions up there must not have been right, because instead of forming into proper clouds, they just dissolved a little ways behind the airplane.

I played until lunchtime, and then when I started to see a lot of people walking to the dining hall, I landed and went in myself. I stopped to see Cedric before I got my food, and he didn't know any more about Aquamarine's plans than I did. But Leon said that he'd been kicked out of the room for Friday night.

I said that it sounded like The Man was putting him down, and he said that this was different, because he was helping a brother out.

I ate a kind of big lunch, because I was going to have a light dinner. And I wasn't really focused on the conversation at the table until Meghan poked me in the side and asked if there was anybody home. And I said that I was sorry I was gathering clouds but I'd been thinking about tonight. And then I remembered that she wanted to know what the plan for the weekend was and I said that Aquamarine was staying with Cedric, so we could probably do something on our own if we wanted to. But I wanted to mostly be on campus, just so that I could see her some.

Since I'd forgotten my math things, I told Sean that I would meet him in class, and then I had to fly back to my dorm room to get them.

Professor Pampena taught us how to do triple integrals in spherical coordinates, and he said that it was a lot of fun, but I had to learn two new math letters for it, which were phi and rho. And so I drew them really carefully in my notes and I knew that I was going to have to practice them later.

And that was a lot of stuff that he had to introduce to us before we could even start with our triple integrals, but it was important to understand exactly how it worked or else it would be confusing afterwards. Especially 'cause a lot of the students had trouble thinking in three dimensions like that, which I think was because they couldn't fly and just imagined everything as if it was flat, even though it really wasn't.

Once he was sure that everyone understood how spherical coordinates worked, he showed us how to find the surface area of a section of the sphere, and then the volume of a sphere that had been sliced off by a plane, and he had been right; it was a lot of fun to calculate even if I was a little bit slow at it since we had the new letters to remember. But they actually made the calculations a lot simpler, which was nice.

He ended class by showing us an example where we had to calculate the gravitational force on an object, and it was interesting because he wanted to be a lot more precise with the calculations than Professor Miller was. Since it was measuring something small and close, it was okay to have really precise calculations, and it was also interesting because this kind of calculation was probably where the ones Professor Miller had used came from, but they'd just been turned into formulas that got rid of a lot of the variables.

Afterwards, we went to his room to do homework, and when we were done, I asked him if we were gonna be study-buddies for the final and he said that he assumed that that was what we would do. I'd hoped so, too, but I had just wanted to make sure.

I thought that we should start now, even though Sean didn't really want to, because it was better to be more prepared. So I turned back in my notes and we took turns reviewing for an hour, and we only stopped when Sean's roommate came back. And then Sean had to introduce me to him—his name was Curt—and we'd both seen each other around on campus but didn't know each other too well.

I thought I should take my saddlebags back to my room before dinner, so I told him that I'd see him there and went outside then flew over to my room. And when I got there, I remembered that Peggy wanted to put my hair in a ponytail so I got my scrunchie and put it around my foreleg. It still smelled a little bit chemically from the lab but I didn't think anyone would notice.

They had a special Chinese dinner, and it all looked and smelled really good, and it was really frustrating knowing that I shouldn't have much to eat or else I was going to be sorry during the football game. So the only thing that I took besides a small salad was a spring roll.

And when I was done with my meal, Peggy gave me a fortune cookie, because she said that I had to have it. So I cracked it open with my hoof and got out my fortune and it said that I was going to meet interesting people, and Christine added 'in bed,' and then I said that I already had, so maybe I was going to meet more interesting people. Peggy said that she was going to get lucky in bed, and Christine said that if she rested on her laurels she was going to get a thorn in her backside in bed, and Sean said that wasn't a thorn. Anna said that a great fortune awaited her in bed, and Reese said that he should look before he leaped or wear a parachute in bed. Sean said that his cookie said that he would find a thing and it may be important in bed, and then they argued about if the 'in bed' had to be at the end, or if Sean could find a thing in bed which might be important, because that was a little bit of a different meaning.

I flew over to the football field and circled over it once, already picturing the crowd of people there even though there wasn't anybody there now. And then I landed in front of the building and went inside. There wasn't anyone in the girl's locker room yet, and I didn't have anything to do because I didn't have my uniform and even if I had, I couldn't put it on my self. So I just sat on a bench and waited, and I could hear some boys go by and faintly hear them in their locker room, and it was kind of dumb that humans had to separate locker rooms like that.

I didn't like sitting around, 'cause it made me antsy, but it wasn't too long before the girls started showing up and then we started chatting and some of them went to the mirrors and started putting their makeup on. And then Sandra showed up and she gave us a pep talk, and also said that at halftime, they were going to recognize all the graduating seniors on the football team and I didn't have to do anything special except wave my pom-poms.

Jessica and Caroline helped me get dressed, and then Janelle, who was the team leader, had us do stretches once everyone was in their uniforms. And then everyone started to concentrate on the game and take one more look in the mirror to be sure that they looked good and that the uniform was on right, and then it was time to go out in the hallway and get ready for the game.

When Janelle told us it was time, we went out on the field and welcomed the football team onto the field, and then we took our place in front of the grandstands. And I got a chance to look up there, and I saw all my friends from dinner pretty quick, 'cause they'd picked seats all by themselves down in front, and Aquamarine was with them, too, and I wanted to wave but I wasn't supposed to.

I also saw my helpers and Aquamarine's helpers, 'cause they were sitting together near the top of the bleachers, where there weren't too many other people. I didn't see Jeff and his kids, and I hoped that they'd decided to come to the game. There were a lot of people, though, and I didn't have time to really study the crowd, 'cause I had to focus on what Janelle was telling us to do.

It was a little strange to not be watching the field, but we could hear what the announcer said was happening out there. Even so, it was kind of odd to only hear occasional whistles from the referees, and crashes and grunts from the players on the field.

Lindy and Trinity came down to the front in the first quarter, and they stood in the front row of the bleachers where they were right by me, and I was really happy to see them there.

Sooner than I expected it was halftime, and the announcer started to call off the names of the seniors, and we all waved our pom-poms enthusiastically, even though it was kind of sad that this was their last football game. And then we had a little break so we could drink some water or pee if we had to. And even though I'd been cheering for the whole first half, it was pretty cool outside, so I wasn't as hot as I'd been in practice, and it was also a little bit less intense than practice, 'cause we always had a little bit of rest time between cheers. I guess Sandra made everyone work a little bit harder during practice so that they'd have the endurance for the actual game, which made sense.

Caroline had noticed my little fan club, and I said that they had been my neighbors over the summer, and we'd gone hunting for Pokemons together and trick-or-treating together and that sometimes I gave Trinity ponyback rides, and she thought that was really cute.

Janelle told us when it was time to get ready to go back on the field, and we didn't have to welcome the football players in again, but we did do some cheers to get the audience ready for when they came back out. And a lot of people were up and out of their seats, and they'd gotten food from the food-booths.

And I was so focused on what we were doing that I almost didn't hear when the football game started up again, and I hadn't noticed when people came out onto the field at all.

The cheering from the crowd got really intense, and it was kind of intimidating to be right in front of all of it like that. And the second half of the game just flew by, and all of a sudden it was over and people started to get up and leave, and we stayed a little bit longer to cheer because we'd won just like Leon and Cedric had said we were going to.

We went back to the locker rooms and while we were getting undressed, Sandra came in and said how good a job everyone had done, and how well her girls had done to fit me in at the last minute like that, which made them really happy. And even Caroline said that she hoped the next exchange student was another pegasus who wanted to cheer.

Sandra also told me that I could keep the uniform because they couldn't use it for a person any more. And I thought that that was really nice of her.

Everyone kind of took their time in the showers, 'cause we all wanted to talk about the game, and afterwards I dried off as much as I could and had Jessica help me put my uniform back on, 'cause that was easier than carrying it with me. And I hugged everyone and I really didn't want to leave, but my friends were outside, waiting for me.

When I got to the parking lot, I thought that I was going to have to fly up to find them, but they were all pretty close to the building, and I trotted over and nuzzled Aquamarine and Peggy asked why I was still wearing my uniform, so I told her that I was getting to keep it. And my voice was kinda husky from all the cheering I'd done, and Sean said that I was a little hoarse and Christine punched him.

Aric thought that we ought to go to Waldo's to celebrate even though it was probably going to be really full since it was a Friday night. But it was close by, which was nice. We couldn't go right away, though, 'cause we didn't want to leave Aquamarine alone. So we all waited until Cedric and Leon came out, and I waved my pom-poms at them, and Cedric leaned down and hugged her.

They wanted to come to Waldo's with us, too, and so we all walked down there together and it was really nice having Cedric with us, because he was so big that people just moved out of his way, and we could follow behind him.

We had to crowd up to the bar to get our drinks, and Aric carried mine for me. There wasn't a booth that was big enough for all of us, so I sat on Aric's lap and Aquamarine sat on Cedric's, and Christine sat on Sean's, and that helped, but Leon and Peggy still had to stand, until we scrunched up enough for them to fit in if Peggy sat on Leon's lap.

And our one drink turned into two and then three, and Peggy said that Aric shouldn't be drinking because he still had to drive home, and he said that he'd walked from his house so he could get as shitfaced as he wanted.

When I had to run off to use the bathroom, I asked Peggy to come with me, 'cause I couldn't get my underwear off on my own, and she said that nobody had ever warned her that she was going to have to help her roommate get undressed, but she did anyways. And I tucked it down the front of my vest, because I didn't feel like putting it back on, and Peggy asked if I was going to go over to Aric's for the night.

I said that I was, and I said that we didn't know what our plans for tomorrow were yet but we'd think of something.

So we had a couple more drinks and then finally everyone decided that they were done for the night. And I was feeling pretty sleepy because of all the beer on a mostly-empty belly, plus it was warm inside Waldo's and even warmer sitting on Aric's lap, but when I got outside it was chilly enough to wake me right back up.

We had to walk together to Lovell Street, and then everyone who was going back to campus went one way and we went the other. And when we got there, we went right upstairs and Aric and Meghan both wanted me to leave my uniform on, and then Aric said that I should put my underwear back on, too, and I thought that was kind of silly because I'd just have to take it off again, but Meghan said it was a good idea, too, so we did and it was a totally different feeling when they had their hands under my tail but on top of my underwear.

And both of them focused on me and it was really, really intense, and Meghan was the one who finally took my underwear back off, but Aric wanted me to keep the rest of my uniform on, 'cause he said that he'd always wanted to have sex with a cheerleader.

November 12 [Catching a fish]

November 12

I had a sore head and dry mouth when I woke up, and I was too hot and I thought my bladder was gonna burst, so I untangled myself from Aric and Meghan and the sheets as quick as I could and went down the hall to the bathroom, and I thought I might wind up peeing forever, and wondered if you could pee so much that the toilet overflowed. I hoped not.

Then I had a drink of water out of the bathtub faucet, 'cause I couldn't get my muzzle under the one in the sink and there weren't any cups. Humans can make a cup out of their hands, but that didn't work with hooves at all.

While I was drinking, I heard Meghan in the hall and she came in and sat down on the toilet and rested her head on her hands and muttered that she probably should have quit two beers earlier last night. And I told her that I felt the same way, and we both agreed that the next time we'd be smarter and remember to drink some water, too, so that way we wouldn't be dried out.

She got up and opened the mirror and there was a secret cabinet behind it that had a bunch of bottles of pills and tubes and hair ties and other little boxes in it, and she found one that was full of aspirin. She looked at it and said that it had expired a year ago but she was going to risk it, and she asked me if I wanted any.

I thought it was probably smarter to not take a chance, and I thought the water would make me feel better anyway, so I shook my head and had one last drink of water.

When Meghan opened the door, Aric was waiting outside, and me and Meghan went back to the bedroom while he was peeing.

Meghan said that she was cold and I was still a little bit too hot, so I stayed by the edge of the bed and let her have the middle spot. And when Aric came back, he got in by the wall and put his arms around Meghan to hold her close to him.

And then all three of us fell back asleep, and then when we woke up again, we snuggled for a little bit and then we had sex.

All three of us took a shower together, even though his bathtub was a little bit too small for it. He had some decent shampoo and conditioner now, and I asked if he'd bought it special for us, and he said that Meghan had brought it over one time that she had her duffel bag and had just left it for when we needed it next. And I thought that was really nice of her to think of.

Meghan was feeling pretty bold, 'cause after we were done showering she walked back to his room without putting on any clothes or even wrapping a towel around herself.

They took their time getting dressed, and then Meghan sat on the bed with me and preened my wings and she managed to tease that stubborn primary loose, and then the three of us went downstairs and had a little snack, and we didn't want to have too much, 'cause we were all going to have brunch together in the dining hall.

We left a little bit early, 'cause Meghan wanted to put clean clothes on—she hadn't brought any with her to Aric's, since we'd all left together after the football game. And Aric said that we could meet her in the dining hall.

He had to drive around a bit until he finally found a parking spot for Winston that wasn't on too much of a hill, because the parking brake didn't work and he said that Winston would roll away if it was on a hill. I asked him if he was going to fix it, and he said that when he'd replaced the back brakes he'd left the equalizer bar out so even if he put new cables on, it still wouldn't work unless he also rebuilt the rear brakes again.

So by the time we'd gotten Winston parked and walked back to the dining hall, Meghan had gotten dressed, and she'd beat us there.

Since it was a weekend, they still had breakfast even though it was lunchtime, and they had the cook making omelets, and when I sat down I found out that they had had chocolate eclairs, too, but they didn't anymore because they'd all gotten eaten.

They'd had to get an extra table so that we had enough room for Cedric, Leon, Aric, and Aquamarine, and they'd pulled that up along with the rest of them, but it wasn't quite as good as one table, since the extra one they'd gotten had a top that was slightly lower than the rest.

We all took our time eating, and Sean kept getting up to see if there were any more chocolate eclairs, but there never were.

It was nice, too, that it was the first time since the election that we'd all gotten together and nobody was griping about Donald Trump and everyone seemed happy.

Outside, it was another beautiful clear day, so when we were done eating we went outside and sat on the quad and talked some more. Everybody was trying to figure out what they wanted to do for the weekend, 'cause the weather was so nice and even though everyone should have been thinking about how the finals were after next week, it was the kind of day where it's really hard to think about anything other than having fun.

Meghan said that if the weather was going to stay like this than we ought to go horseback riding tomorrow, and I said that that would be fun. I wouldn't mind if it was a little bit colder, even.

Aquamarine had to go back tomorrow morning, though, so she couldn't. And Anna said that instead we could go to Meijer, because they had a mechanical horse called Sandy and it only cost a penny to ride. That wasn't the same as riding a real horse, though, and I thought that it was supposed to be for children anyways, but Anna said anyone that wanted to ride Sandy counted as a child.

Then Peggy said that I'd claimed that I was going to ride Aquamarine but I never had, and we looked at each other and then I got up on her back and she took off across the quad at a slow trot, and it wasn't so easy to stay on her back, 'cause it was a lot smaller than Hoshi's. Plus Aquamarine had short legs and so her gait was shorter, and I had to shift around a lot to keep my balance.

And it seemed like everyone wanted to make a movie of it, so we went around a little bit at the same pace and then when we were both used to how it felt, Aquamarine picked up the pace a little bit to a fast trot and then she switched to a canter. And then when we came around by the sidewalk again, she went to a gallop, and I almost lost my balance and really had to work my wings to steady myself.

Once we got done showing off, I flew up and off her back and then the two of us just collapsed on the grass and started giggling like a couple of schoolfillies.

Then Cedric had to prove that he was strong enough to carry Leon, and the two of them went tearing off across the quad together. And Aric said that since we were doing piggyback rides, he'd give one to Meghan, but she said that she didn't want to right after she'd eaten.

Cedric wanted to show Aquamarine around town, and Aric said that me and Meghan could visit Fort Custer again. Although it wasn't 'again' for Meghan, 'cause she'd never been there before.

I wanted to go get my flight gear in case I wanted to fly some while I was out there and Meghan wanted to get a sweatshirt in case she got cold, so Aric said that he'd go get Winston and then meet us in the parking lot of Trowbridge. And before everyone went off, we agreed that we'd meet again for dinner at six.

I walked with Peggy and Meghan back to our dorm, and then when we got up to my room Peggy opened the door, and I could smell a familiar scent in the room, and I was about to ask Peggy if her boy spent the night but it wasn't his scent; it was one that I knew better but I couldn't quite remember who it belonged to. So then I didn't say anything but Peggy noticed how I had my nostrils wide and my ears perked, and she said it was my fault because I'd been the one who suggested she sit on his lap.

So I guess that's why they were both in a cheery mood this morning.

I got my flight gear and filled up my camelback, and then went out to the parking lot. Meghan had beaten me there and when I got to Winston, she opened the door and got out so I could sit in the middle.

While we were on the way to Fort Custer, Meghan used her portable telephone to look at the weather prediction and then she called Deanne to find out if we could ride the horses tomorrow, and Deanne said that we could. And then Aric told Meghan to find out if we could ride them at Fort Custer, and she did, and then she told Aric that Deanne had said that it would cost extra but I thought it was worth it. Maybe that mean lady would be out on the trail again and this time she wouldn’t be able to say anything because I would be on an Earth-horse.

So we decided that that was what we were going to do tomorrow. And Aric said that maybe we should go somewhere else today, just so that we didn’t get bored of the same place two days in a row, but I thought that there was a lot of Fort Custer and we hadn’t seen all of it, so seeing it two days in a row was okay.

And then I told him that when we were riding the horses we probably shouldn’t sneak off into the woods like last time.

Aric drove us around past the antenna farm and then he asked if we wanted to go hiking through the woods or just relax by one of the lakes or in a picnic area, and I thought that either would be okay, so I said that Meghan could decide. And she said that we should walk around first and then we could relax, so we took a trail that went around the lakes at the south end of the park, which was close to the horse trail.

And there was an intersection and we could choose if we wanted to go around the second lake or if we just wanted to go around the first one we’d started going around, and since it was a nice day we decided that we’d go around both.

We were almost all the way back when we came to where the path crossed the outlet of Jackson Hole Lake, and I went to the very edge and looked in the water and I saw a fish swim by and I decided that I wanted to catch one since we were here.

The lake was really murky and had lots of seaweed and cattails and lily pads growing, so when I flew over it low I couldn’t really see much of anything and I’d have to have a fish practically jump up at me before I’d be able to catch it. But the first lake we’d gone around, which was Whitford Lake, was a lot clearer and so I flew off that way.

I was circling around hoping to spot one that was shallow enough that I had a chance to get it, and I got lucky—there was a T-shaped dock that stuck out into the water and there were a lot of fish swimming around it, and I was sure that I’d catch one of them, especially since they were right up at the surface and sometimes even coming above it.

So I dove down and I was really out of practice and the fish were strong and slippery, but I got one by the tail and he was flopping around and struggling and I wasn’t sure that I could keep hold of him for very long ‘cause ponies don’t have good gripping talons like hawky birds, so I tossed him ashore ‘cause he couldn’t get away when he was on land.

And he was bigger than I’d thought. Aric came running over with Meghan following him, and I put my hoof on his tail so that he couldn’t flop too far away.

A bunch more people started to come over, too, ‘cause they’d seen me catch my fish, and I was really proud of myself for having caught him, but I actually wasn’t very hungry ‘cause it hadn’t been that long since we ate breakfast, so after Aric and Meghan got to admire him, I took my hoof off his tail and Aric picked him up and carried him back to the water and threw him back in.

Aric said that he hadn’t believed me when I told him that I could catch fish, but I guess that he did, now.

While we were walking the rest of the way around the path, Meghan asked me if that was how we caught fish in Equestria, and I said that most ponies just bought them from fish markets but it was still good to know that you could if you had to. And I said that it was a lot easier to catch smaller fish in streams, ‘cause if the water was shallow enough you could just stomp on them, and then eat them.

I’d also learned from a fisherpony in Chonamare that if you were going to have to live near a stream for a while, there were lots of ways you could trap the fish and then let them stay in the water where they’d be easy to catch until you were hungry.

It had taken us a bit longer to walk around the trail than we’d thought, especially since I’d gone fishing, and we didn’t have enough time to walk any more trails, so we went back by Lawler Lake and walked through the trees until we were close enough that the ground was getting squishy, and we sat on a log there and just looked over the lake. And after we’d watched for a while, Aric saw a cormorant diving down towards the lake and he came up with a fish, and he was much better at catching them than I was.

When we were driving back, Meghan asked me what I would have done with the fish if I had been hungry, and I said that I would eat the good parts and then leave the rest for other scavengers, who would be happy for the meal. And she said that fish were supposed to be cooked, but there were sushi restaurants that sold raw fish, so I couldn’t see what the difference was.

We paced a freight train on our way back to Kalamazoo— we had to wait for the very tail end to pass before we could turn on the 96 Road, and then we’d caught up to the front but weren’t far enough ahead by the time we had to cross the tracks again, so we had to wait for the whole train to go by again before we could go through Galesburg, and we got caught up a second time but then had to wait where the road crossed the tracks near Comstock, and it was slowing down then, so we caught up to the front one more time before we got downtown, and beat it under the bridge, but then we had to wait at a traffic light over the Kalamazoo River, and I saw the train coming onto the river bridge before we got moving again.

This time when Aric didn't see any spots that were open right away, he parked in the theatre parking lot, even though he wasn't supposed to. He said that campus security saw the truck there so often they probably wouldn't give him a ticket.

When we got to the dining hall, we found out that they had moved the extra table away so we had to move it back, and then everyone sat down and it was really nice to have Cedric and Leon at the table with us but I thought that Trevor might be lonely, and so I got up and went over to their table. He was reading a book of haikus and I didn't know what those were, so he explained how it was a type of poetry that had a very specific meter, and they were all really short. And he told me that before people had Twitter they had haikus, and then he closed his book and got his tray of food and followed me over to our table.

Sean was trying to convince everyone to watch the Star Trek movie with him tonight, and I said that I would and Aquamarine was interested in it, too, and then Aric said that maybe before we watched the movie we could watch real stars instead, because it was not very far out of town where you were clear of a lot of the lights and could see a lot, and everyone wanted to do that.

There wasn't enough seats for all of us to fit in Winston and Cobalt, unless Anna and Reese and Trevor stayed behind, but then I thought that if me and Aquamarine rode in the back of Winston and maybe someone else who wouldn't mind if it was a little cold, we'd probably all fit. And Cedric said that he could ride in the back, too.

It was already getting dark by the time we got out of the dining hall, and Aric told Peggy where Winston was parked, and me and Aquamarine and Cedric and Anna and Reese walked to Winston, while everyone else went to Cobalt with Peggy.

Cedric helped Aquamarine up onto the tailgate, even though she could have made it on her own with a little bit of a running start, and I just flew in.

And I told Cedric and Aquamarine about what I'd learned from riding in a railroad car and I thought the principle would be the same in the back of Winston.

Then me and her stood with our forelegs on the side rail of Winston, until Peggy arrived with Cobalt, and then we moved to the front so that any sudden stops wouldn't send us flying, and Aric drove out of the parking lot with Peggy following.

And it was a little bit disorienting to be looking at where we'd been rather than where we were going, and if I didn't know Kalamazoo really well, I think I would have gotten lost.

I thought maybe we'd go to a park like the Nature Center, but instead he drove northwest out of Kalamazoo until we got to a spot that was between two big fields and just stopped on the side of the road, and we all got out and walked into the field and looked up at the stars.

I pointed out all the constellations and stars that I'd learned last Thursday, and Aquamarine thought it was unfair that there was a pegasus but not an earth pony constellation. And Sean said that wasn't true, that there was one called Equuleus which was right by Pegasus, and he pointed it out to us, and it was very faint. And he said that there was one for unicorns, too, which was called Monoceros, and he showed us where it was, too.

Sean actually knew a lot about the stars, and he was happy to help people find things in the sky. And some of my friends who had always lived in cities were really amazed by how many stars they could see this close to Kalamazoo.

We stayed out there until people started to get chilly, and then we all got back in Winston and Cobalt.

On the way back, Aric went through the drive-through at Tim Horton's, and it was really funny when the woman at the window passed the coffee cups into Winston and Aric passed them right out the back window for us. And she must not have seen that we were there at first, 'cause she looked really surprised when he pulled ahead and I waved at her.

Aric parked Winston up at the theatre again and we all walked down the hill to Christine's dorm. Aquamarine was really impressed by the size of her room, because she'd never seen one like that at Michigan State.

It was a bit crowded with all of us, though, and a bunch of us had to sit on the floor, either leaning up against the couch or stretched out on the floor.

The movie was a little strange, since it was also set before most of the other ones I'd seen, so when Captain Kirk said that he was going to quit and let Spock be captain, I already knew that he wouldn't, because he'd been captain in the past movies, which were in the future. And then Krall broke the Enterprise with his swarm of little spaceships, and they had to find a way to get off the planet without their ship and they had to rescue their crew, too. And both me and Aquamarine saw South Pole who was one of the crew members who had been captured and we thought that they should have given him a bigger role. Leon said that he was the token pony, and he was kind of out of place because most of their aliens looked a lot like humans.

And in the end the crew of the Enterprise won, although they were on the Franklin now, and Kirk decided to stay as Captain after they built him a new spaceship, and Spock started dating Uhura again, so it kind of ended where it had started.

I thought it was pretty good, and Aquamarine liked it, too. And I was glad that I got to watch it.

Christine told me that there was another Star Wars movie coming out near Christmas, and she said that no matter where I was, I had to promise her to watch it, and I said that I would try. She told me that she would haunt me forever if I didn't and Sean told her that she wasn't a ghost so she couldn't haunt me, and she said that she'd find a way.

The three of us walked back to the theatre parking lot and got in Winston, and we had to wait a little bit for it to warm up, ‘cause the temperature had dropped and made all the windows foggy. And while we were waiting for the windows to clear, Aric said that we could stop at Tiffany’s and get some beer, but me and Meghan both thought that we’d had too much last night and maybe tonight we’d skip having anything to drink.

When he got to the end of Academy Street, Aric asked me if I wanted to drive, and I said that I would, which kind of disappointed Meghan, ‘cause she’d had her hand under my tail. So I nuzzled Meghan and then sat on his lap and put my hooves on the wheel and he ran the pedals while I used the shifter and steering wheel, and I got us into the driveway without running into anything.

We went inside the side door, and when I went up the stairs to the kitchen, Meghan got her hand on my rump again and I slowed down a little bit to make it easier for her.

The nice thing about not wearing clothes was that I didn’t have to get undressed, and as soon as I got in bed, Meghan pounced on me, and Aric was kind of left out until he got his pants off, and I slid over a little bit on the bed so that I could reach him.

November 13 [Trail Ride]

November 13

Meghan was already awake when I woke up. She had her hand resting on the base of my neck, under my mane, and she was just looking at me.

I yawned and then nuzzled her cheek, and she said I was really cute when I was sleeping.

She brushed my mane back over my ears and I kissed her and then snuggled up against her. It wasn't as comfortable as I liked because I couldn't rest my head on her breast when she was on her side like that.

Meghan shifted around in bed and I started climbing up on her so that I wouldn't accidentally push Aric out of bed, and we managed to move around until I was laying on top of her, and we hadn't knocked Aric off the edge of the bed.

I put my head down on her breast, and she nuzzled the top of my head with her chin and then started scratching behind my ears and we just cuddled with each other while Aric slept.

I wouldn’t have minded staying in bed all morning, but we had to get up so that we could say goodbye to Aquamarine before she went back to Michigan State.

So I started to tickle Aric's back and butt with my wing, until he finally slapped at me and then rolled over onto his back and looked at me and Meghan and asked us what time it was. That was a silly thing for him to ask, because he was closer to everyone's portable telephones than I was.

He didn't seem motivated to turn back over and look, so I got out of bed and bumped Meghan's portable telephone with my muzzle until it told me what time it was, and when I turned around to tell him, he'd taken my spot and had his head on Meghan's breast, which wasn't fair at all.

So I pushed open the window and glided down to the bird feeder and started shaking out sunflower seeds.

He came to the window after I'd gotten a second mouthful, and then Meghan did, too, but she stayed a little bit behind him so that nobody could see that she was naked.

Once I'd finished snacking, I flew back up to the window and I tried to pull in my wings at the last second so I could glide in and land nicely on his floor, but that didn't work out like I'd planned for it to, and I only made it two thirds of the way in and got stuck on the windowsill. I pushed myself forward a bit with my forelegs, but that only worked until my hind legs hit the wall outside, and I couldn't get enough of a grip on the wall to push them up and over, and I didn't get any help until Aric and Meghan were done laughing at me.

I smacked both of them with a wing, but I wasn't really mad, 'cause I would have laughed if I'd seen another pegasus stuck like that. Everypony learns to be careful flying through windows, 'cause if you've got to pull in your wings, this can happen, and if there isn't anypony to help you, the only way to get unstuck is to drop out tail-first and then fly out of it.

We took a shower together and then Meghan helped me groom as best as she could—she hadn't brought her duffel bag, so she didn't have any brushes. Aric had one that wasn’t very good, but it was good enough to make sure that there weren’t any big tangles, but it didn’t get my coat as smooth as a proper brush would have.

When Meghan was done using it on me, I took it in my mouth and brushed her hair with it, and then I made Aric sit down so I could do his hair, too. And he said that it was really weird having someone else brush his hair for him, but I think he liked it. Meghan said that I should see if I could brush the hair on his chest, but it was too short for the brush to do any good, and he said that it tickled, so we didn’t experiment with it any more.

Aric put on pants and went downstairs to make us coffee, and then he came back upstairs while Meghan was preening my wings for me.

By the time Aric and Meghan had gotten dressed, the coffee was ready, and we sat in the kitchen and drank a cup to finish waking ourselves up.

Aric went outside to start up Winston so that it could melt the frost off the windows, and me and Meghan went back upstairs to get my cheerleading uniform which was still in his room from Friday night, and also her bra, because she said it was a good morning to go braless, especially since she had her sweatshirt on so people wouldn't be able to see that she wasn't wearing one.

She carried my uniform for me, and we got in Winston and Aric drove us back to campus, and on the way he asked us to remind him before we went to Fort Custer that he needed to put gas in the truck, and we said that we would.

He parked behind the dining hall and we went in the back way, and instead of going right upstairs he took us down a little hallway that was by WJMD, which was a radio station. He said that he had been a DJ there for a while, but now he didn't do it any more. He said it had been kind of disappointing that not too many people listened to the station, but it had also been fun because he could do almost anything he wanted, and one time he’d spent two hours only playing the Moody Blues.

We went upstairs and they didn't have a whole lot of food out yet because I guess the food people like sleeping in, too. And then I wondered if the food people slept in because the students did, so there was no need to get up early, or if the students slept in because there was no food, so there was no point in getting up early.

They had left our extra table, which was nice of them, and we were the first ones in, so we took our time eating the food that we'd picked.

Cedric and Aquamarine showed up next, and then everyone else came, mostly in pairs. Cedric thanked Aric again for taking him out to see the stars, and he said that he'd never really had a chance to see them when he was growing up, because all the city lights had blocked out the view of the sky, and I thought that was really sad.

Everyone took their time eating, 'cause nobody wanted Aquamarine to leave, and it kind of felt like as long as we stayed in the dining hall she was safe with us.

But Mister Barrow and Miss Parker were probably waiting for her, so we finally got up and she hugged everyone and kissed Cedric and nuzzled me, and then we all took our trays back and walked down to Hoben in a big group.

She had to go up to Cedric's room to get her saddlebags, and I talked to Miss Parker while we were waiting for them to come back down.

And they hugged one more time before she got into the van, and Mister Barrow blinked the brake lights at us as he drove off.

We had some free time before we had to go to Fort Custer, so we went back to Winston and got my cheerleading uniform and Meghan's bra, then we walked up to her room.

We sat on her bed and talked and snuggled for a little while, and then Meghan changed into her horseback riding clothes. Aric said she should leave her bra off, but she said that it would be too bouncy and it might be fun to watch but then they'd be sore and we'd both be sad that she wouldn't let us touch them.

We walked back to Winston, and Meghan reminded Aric that he needed to put gas in it, and so he drove to the Shell which was on the corner of Westnedge and I went over to his side and stuck my head out the window so that I could watch. The gas hose went in behind a little door and he squeezed the handle and that was all that he had to know because the pump was smart and knew how much went in and when it was full.

I didn't like the smell of gas—it was stinky and sharp and stayed in my nose even after he'd hung the hose back up, and I wished that they could have made cars and trucks run on something that smelled a little bit nicer, or maybe put some kind of scent in the gas to make it smell different, like they did with soap.

We drove all the way out there without seeing any trains, and drove though Fort Custer until we got to the parking lot by the horse trail. We'd beaten Deanne there, so we sat in Winston and waited, and we'd only been there for a few minutes before a big white Ford that was almost as big as a semi-tractor turned into the parking lot, and as it nosed towards a spot the engine note changed and it spit out a cloud of black smoke, then stopped and made a loud hiss.

Deanne shut off the engine and climbed down out of the cab and came over to Winston and said that she was sorry for being late but Peaches didn't like getting in the trailer.

The horses already had their heads stuck out the side windows, and she went and opened up the doors and let them out one-by-one and then tied them to the side of the trailer so that they couldn't run off, and then she got their saddles and bits out of a room in the front of the trailer.

Meghan helped her put their tack on, while I went around by the trailer and greeted all of them.

With both Deanne and Meghan working, it didn't take too long to get the horses ready to ride, and she untied them after we'd gotten on and taken the reins.

She let Meghan lead and set the pace on the trail, and it was kind of strange but it looked kind of different when I was on the back of a horse.

We were about halfway around the trail when I saw the grouchy lady who'd yelled at me before coming towards us, and I stuck my tongue out at her as we walked past. And she couldn't say anything bad to me, 'cause I was on a horse.

I think that Hoshi was a better horse, too, 'cause she was a little bit bigger and more muscled.

The trail just went in a big loop that started and ended at the parking lot, and once we got to the end of it we decided that we wanted to ride around it again, even though Henry was slowly moving back towards the trailer, thinking that Deanne didn't notice.

And so we turned around the line and went back the other way, so this time Deanne was in the front and when we got to a long, mostly-straight section, she sped up to a canter and we kept that pace until we got to a sharp turn. I was sure that the horses could do it, 'cause I'd seen Henry turn tighter at a faster pace, but I knew I'd slide off Hoshi if she turned like that.

It was kind of sad to think that this was the last time I'd get to ride Hoshi, and when we got back to the parking lot, I didn't want to get off her, but I had to.

So I leaned forward and nuzzled the back of her neck, then flew off of her and I asked Deanne if she had a treat that I could give Hoshi, 'cause I hadn't thought to bring anything. And she said that she had carrots in the cab of the truck, so I went up and opened the door while Deanne was taking off Hoshi's saddle, and I got a carrot and offered it to her, and when she took it, Meghan said it looked like we were kissing.

There was a faucet near the parking lot, and Deanne had Aric fill up the buckets which were in each stall so that the horses would have something to drink, and then another couple of buckets so that she could rinse them down.

They were hot enough and it was cold enough that they started to steam as she sponged them off, and I bet that cool water felt really good to them.

I stuck my head inside one of the stalls just to see what it was like, and it was kind of crowded and it seemed like it would be strange to be riding sideways to where you were going. But I guess that they didn't mind, 'cause they could stick their heads out the window and look forward. And if they got hungry they also had net-bags that were full of hay for them to snack on, and the water buckets had a place to hang, too, in case they got thirsty.

When Deanne and Meghan were done rinsing off the horses and cleaning their hooves, Deanne started putting them in the trailer, and Peaches really didn't want to go in. She flicked her tail and flattened her ears and Deanne had to push her a little bit to motivate her to get into her stall.

Aric gave Deanne some money for our ride and she folded it up and put it in her pocket, and then she shook his hand and hugged Meghan and me, and got back up in her truck. And after she'd started it she didn't drive off right away, and Aric said that was because she had to wait for it to get enough air pressure to release the brakes.

And after a minute or so, I heard the truck hiss, and then she drove out of the parking lot, and Aric said that he really admired a woman who could drive a truck like that.

We got back in Winston, and Aric asked if we wanted to go somewhere for dinner or if we wanted to spend more time at the park. And I liked both choices, even though I was a little bit hungry 'cause we hadn't eaten lunch. But I could find some pasture grass to snack on if I had to, so I let Meghan decide.

She said that she'd like dinner, and said that after that she should go back to her dorm and do homework, and Aric said that he had homework to do as well. And I said that I'd been a responsible pony and had done all mine already.

So we decided that we'd go to Chipotle together for dinner. And the only one that Aric knew was the one that was near the movie theater, so we had to drive all the way through Kalamazoo to get to it. A lot of restaurants had more than one location, and I was kind of surprised that Chipotle didn’t, and Aric said that they probably had a store in Portage, but that wouldn't be any closer.

My stomach was eager for the food as soon as I smelled it, but I had to wait 'cause a lot of other people were also hungry and were in line in front of us.

I was worried that we weren't going to get a seat, 'cause most of the restaurant was filled, but luckily most of the people in front of us wanted to take their food away in a bag rather than eat it there, so we got the last table that there was.

I had a little trouble getting into my chair, 'cause the table we got had high chairs. Aric thought it was funny, and he offered to help me up, but I made it on my own.

Even though I was hungry, I reminded myself to eat slowly so I wouldn't give myself colic by bolting my food. But I still finished before Aric or Meghan had finished theirs.

When we were going back out to Winston, I noticed a sign for Starbucks across the street at the Maple Hill Mall, and Christine said that they had the best pumpkin spice, so I begged Aric to go there so that we could get one, and he said that it was overpriced but he took us there anyway, and I got a pumpkin spice latte, which was too hot to drink right away, so I gave it to Meghan to hold.

Aric told me if I spilled some on my lap and got burned I could sue Starbucks for millions of dollars and they would give it to me because I was so cute that the jury would fall over themselves awarding me with money, but that sounded painful and I didn't have any use for millions of dollars anyways.

Meghan told Aric he was a bad influence sometimes, and he got kind of offended and said that he tried to be a bad influence all the time, not just sometimes.

We drove back to campus, and Aric stopped in the Trowbridge parking lot for us, and said that he was going to be up late doing his homework but if we wanted to come over for the night we could and he'd just join us when he got done.

Meghan said she didn't know when she was going to be done, either, and I was going to get up and go trotting with Peggy tomorrow, so we decided that we'd just sleep in our own rooms tonight and then have fun tomorrow night.

My latte had cooled down enough that I could drink it, so I took a sip and it was a little bit sweeter than I liked but not too much.

It tasted kind of like a pumpkin pie, and after I'd drunk a little bit more, I got used to the sweetness and so I drank the rest. And when Aric kissed me goodbye, he said that I had a pumpkin spice kiss, and I kissed Meghan too, to see if she agreed.

And then she kissed Aric goodbye as well, and we got out of Winston and went up to our rooms. I got out my thermodynamics notes and went through them, especially the formulas and laws, because there were a lot of them and they were all important. I needed to know the name and how it was written and what it was for.

I also spent a little bit more time with the periodic table, just so I was sure that I was familiar with it. It probably wasn’t going to be that important on the test, because I thought that if he gave us any alchemical solutions, he’d just tell us what their properties were and wouldn’t expect us to have it memorized, but I thought it was better to put the extra effort in, rather than find out when I took the test that I should have known more than I did.

It was kind of annoying how most of the elements had letters which were in their names, but some of them didn’t, like lead and gold.

I kept studying until the words in my notes started to look blurry ‘cause my eyes were tired, and then I turned off my light and got ready for bed, and before I went to sleep, I nuzzled Peggy and asked her if she wanted to get up in the morning to go trotting, and she said that she was going to say yes now but she’d be grumpy tomorrow morning and I should just drag her out of bed anyway.

November 14 [Tupper's self-referential formula]

November 14

I got up a little bit early and I didn't want to wake up Peggy right away, so I got my camelback and I went to the bathroom and filled it up. And I was thinking that it might be smart to get some more of them before I went back to Equestria, because I could give them to my family as late Hearth's Warming gifts, 'cause I knew that they'd like them.

I sat at my desk and turned on my bendy lamp and studied my thermodynamics notes a little bit more so it would all be fresh in my head when me and Lisa reviewed it after class. And when I was sure that it was all sticking in my head, I shook Peggy until she woke up, and she picked up her portable telephone and looked at it and sighed and then sat up in bed and said that she could count the number of hours of sleep she'd gotten on one hand. Then she stretched her arms and twisted her back until it cracked and got out of bed and looked through her dresser for clothes.

While she was dressing, I put my camelback on, and then I stood next to her so that she could put her water bottles in the pockets on it.

We went to Jeff's house first, and we were a little bit late, so Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were already outside waiting for their bus. And I gave Trinity a real quick ponyback ride, and then we talked until their bus came, and I hugged the girls and gave Caleb a hoof-bump before they got on to go to school, and once the bus had left me and Peggy continued with our morning exercise.

She got too hot again by the time we'd trotted to the end of Dartmouth, and tied her sweatshirt around me, and then we headed towards the other side of the neighborhood.

I asked Peggy if she was dating Leon now, and she said it had been one of those one-time things that you do after a night of drinking at the bar and she didn’t think that it would go any further than that.

Well, I said that that didn't explain how he'd been over Saturday night, too, and she said that he'd still needed a place to sleep and they'd wanted to see if they had as much fun when they hadn't been drinking, so they wanted to try again, and she said that it had been even better the second time.

I thought that if they were having fun together than they ought to continue, and Peggy said that they might but she didn't want to make any firm commitments before Winter Break. She said she wanted to focus on her finals and then the break and going snowboarding with me, but when she got back she'd think about seeing if it went somewhere serious.

We went around the rest of the neighborhood, and then I offered to race her the rest of the last block and she said that she would if I gave her a head start, which I thought was fair.

So I let her get past the first driveway before I started, and that made it more of a challenge, and I didn't beat her until we were only a couple of dozen meters short of the end of the block.

Peggy didn't stop when we got to the corner, though, but she did slow down and I trotted to catch up to her as she went around the corner and up the sidewalk towards Trowbridge.

She took a bottle of water out of my camelback and poured some over her head and then drank the rest, then she used her plastic card to open the door for us.

We walked upstairs together and I stuck my nose in the bathroom and there wasn't anybody in the shower, and I told her that she could use it first if she wanted. She said that she had to get her shower things and I told her that I would get them for her, and push them under the door.

So she went into the shower and I went to our room and got her basket of shower supplies and took them in and pushed them under the stall door, then I went back and got a towel for her, and she opened the door a little bit to take that so it wouldn't get wet on the floor, and then I went back to our room and got my stuff, and I sat on the bench and waited for her to finish. And once she got out, I went right in 'cause Kat hadn't come for her morning shower yet.

When I got done, Kat was sitting outside, waiting for her turn, and I wished her a good morning before going back to my room to groom and preen.

Peggy was almost dressed when I got in, and I told her I wouldn’t be mad if she went to breakfast without me, but she insisted on waiting. So I skipped preening my wings, 'cause I knew that Meghan would preen them for me, and then I got my thermodynamics books and notebook and went to breakfast with Peggy.

I got some eggs and oatmeal and sat down at our table, which looked more empty than usual because we still had the extra one there but we didn't need it now. Meghan wasn't there yet, and I'd finished my eggs and half my oatmeal when she finally arrived.

And then I wasn't going to say anything about my wings, 'cause I didn't want her to miss breakfast because she was preening me, but she noticed that I hadn't done it and put down her spoon and told me to put my wing on her lap. Then she said that she was going to have to come back to Equestria with me since I didn't know how to preen myself anymore, and I stuck my tongue out at her.

She said that on Earth, they had helper ponies, so maybe she could try and explain how I needed a helper human, and then she could live in Equestria with me.

I got to class a little bit early, and I'd sat down and gotten out my notebook and clicky pens before Lisa came in and sat down next to me. Professor Brown said that we were going to spend the last week talking about kinetics, which was about rates of reactions and why things didn't get to their equilibrium. And he said that it could work for time scales as fast as femtoseconds, or as long as millions of years and anything in between.

So clouds disappearing in the sky could be kinetics. And the basic idea was that A plus B became C eventually, and I wrote that down even though it wasn't much of an equation, but then he started to put better equations on the markerboard.

There was a letter k that was the kinetic constant, and then there were more math letters called alpha and beta, and they were kinda hard to draw. Curvey letters were always hard with mouthwriting, and of course humans had lots of them, so it took a lot of practice to make them look good.

He started by showing us a zero order reaction, which was one that took the same time no matter how concentrated your reactants were, and they were rare. And next came first order, which were common, and it was a similar equation that we had to integrate, and we figured out that they had an exponential decay. The common one he said was radioactive decay, and he told us that that was something that people could use to find out how old something was.

Professor Brown also told us to try and express it logarithmically, 'cause is was easier to draw straight lines than curved ones.

And then when we did second order reactions, and he showed us how to change around our As and Bs so that we could solve it by using limiting cases, and also how we could figure by graphing if it was a first order or second order reaction.

Then when we had learned all of that, he said that we were going to learn complicated reactions in our next class.

Me and Lisa met in the lounge downstairs and first we looked over the lab report, and when we both agreed that it was all done, we started reviewing some more. And I was glad that I'd spent the time last night and this morning to study, 'cause we'd learned a lot of stuff and a lot of formulas.

Lisa thought that Professor Brown would probably give us some of the longer formulas on the test so we didn't have to remember them, but I wasn't so sure, and it was still good to know them anyways. And she said that he'd probably tell us on Wednesday or Friday exactly what was going to be on the test so that we could study the right things.

We studied together until Lisa had to go to her next class, and I walked with her as far as Dewing, then I went up to my own room. And I got out my homework assignment and started working on that.

It took me until lunch, and I didn't quite get it all done, and I thought about working through, but then I would be hungry and grumpy all afternoon, plus Sean might worry that I wasn't going to be in class, so I set my work aside and put my math things in my saddlebags.

I went out to the boardwalk and glided down the quad and landed just short of the dining hall and then went inside.

They had spinach again at the salad table, so I got a bunch of that and I also found some fish fillets that looked good, so I took the two biggest ones.

The fish didn't taste quite as good as it looked, and Anna said that they'd had the same fish for dinner last night and not too many people had wanted it, and after eating one of the fillets, I could see why.

Sean wanted to know what I was going to do for Winter Break—he asked if we were going to go back to Equestria right after classes were over, and I said that we would stay until the end of the year, 'cause we could travel and see things, and I was going to go to Peggy's house for Thanksgiving and then also go snowboarding up in the mountains. And then us four ponies were going to go shopping in Chicago, and we also wanted to go to Disneyland, which is in Florida, and maybe we'd see some other stuff while we were down there, too.

Sean said that they launched space ships from Cape Canaveral, which wasn't too far from Disneyland, and he said that we should see that. He said that he'd gotten a chance to watch an actual Space Shuttle launch, but now they didn't fly them any more.

Christine said that she didn't like Florida, and Sean said that was because she'd grown up next to it, but to everyone up north, it was like a magical land full of cartoon mice and sunshine all year long, and Reese said that he always imagined that Florida was really Xanth, which is an imaginary place in a book.

Me and Sean went to math class together, and Professor Pampena taught us more about objects in space, and how to use cross product to get normal direction and area element, and he wrote out the formula for that and then showed how he'd gotten it. And then he did an example on the markerboard with his paraboloid, and let us work through it with him, to make sure that everyone understood the concept, because that was the formula which worked on ninety percent of the cases. Since it wasn't all of them, he started to show us the next method. And that got pretty complicated and the equation started to cover the entire markerboard, and then he said that we could prove to ourselves that this equation worked by substituting in the values we'd used in the last example and we could make this equation into the other one, so I wrote them both down in my notebook next to each other so that I could solve them later. I was sure he was telling the truth, but it would still be good practice to do.

Then he started to tell us about the divergence theorem, and he told us a new math letter which was called del, and was like an upside-down delta, and you could use it to get dot products, too. He said it wasn't that useful yet but when we got to curl it would be.

He showed us how to use what we knew to figure out a vertically simple region, and we could make it into a double integral times a single integral which was a lot simpler. And we could use our flux integral in it, and it had lots of fun calculating in it.

And once we'd learned how to do all of that, then he said that if we had a region that wasn't vertically simple, we just had to slice it into simple parts so that we could basically do the same thing.

Me and Sean went back to his room to do our homework, and when we were done he said that we should watch another Numberphile movie and I thought so, too, but I said that we should study some first.

And he didn't really want to, but I put my hoof down and so we spent the next hour reviewing all the math that Professor Pampena had taught us.

I knew I needed to do more review to make sure that I had everything down perfectly, but we had both gotten to the point where we reached our limit of reviewing for one day. Studying is kind of like exercise: if you do too much all at once, you don't gain anything and you can even lose progress if you push too hard.

So Sean found a Numberphile movie for us to watch, which was about Tupper's self-referential formula, which when you plotted it on a graph made itself. But he was kind of cheating because you had to go a really really really long ways up the y-axis before you got there, and there was a lot more stuff above it. And he showed how you could figure out from your picture what your k value would be, and I was still thinking about it when I went back to my room. You could put my name in both English and Equestrian in the plot, and I'd have to do a lot of calculating and write out a really big number, but I could do it if I really wanted to, and then a computer could do the work of converting it to decimal and multiplying by seventeen and drawing it out, and everyone back in Equestria would be really amazed.

I sat at my desk and finished up my thermodynamics homework, even though I probably could have put it off until tomorrow, and then I got my World War One book so that I could find out what happened next, even though I didn't really want to know. But I was getting near the end so hopefully they were going to figure out that their war was stupid.

Germany had an advantage until the United States entered the fight, so they needed a quick victory on the Western Front, but they didn’t get it.

Thousands of airplanes were fighting in the sky, and the Allies started winning, 'cause they could build more airplanes.

The United States was adding ten thousand troops a day, and they started fighting the Germans, while Austria-Hungary was losing to the Italians. And the British and French decided to invade Russia to help stop their revolution.

The Allies finally started advancing after years of not really going anywhere, and the Germans began to surrender, and in the south, Bulgaria surrendered, and the Allies took Aleppo from the Ottomans.

The Ottomans signed an armistice, and four days later the Austro-Hungarians did, too. And the Kaiser fled, and an armistice was declared by the Germans, too, on the 11th of November, and then in Africa, the German general Von Lettow-Vorbek surrendered exactly ninety-nine years ago.

Everyone signed an armistice at the Paris Peace Conference which Marshall Foch said would last for only twenty years, and I guess that was why they had to have a second war.

The book said that nine and a half million soldiers were killed, and twenty one million were wounded, and seven million civilians were killed, and as far as I could tell nobody really got anything out of it at the end. I thought it would have been better if Serbia had just accepted the concessions that Austria-Hungary had wanted, or if everyone else had just told their friends to think before they did something stupid. But they hadn't; they'd just rushed in, and then everyone was so determined to win that they didn't care what they lost, and so everyone weakened themselves. I wasn’t sure how many people there had been in Europe before the war, but there were a lot less of them after.

I had a little while left before it was dinnertime, so I went out to the boardwalk and flew off, and then I headed out over downtown.

I had to stay pretty low and watch out for helicopters, since I hadn't told the airplane directors that I was flying, and I wasn't wearing any of my flight gear.

So I circled around the hotel below the roof level, and then I flew right up to the big g on the Gilmore building, and I went around it but didn't touch it, and I had to be careful because there were antennas and other obstacles on the roof. And then I went back down and over the parking lot stack, and I thought about flying into one of the lower levels but I might get hit by a car that was coming up and couldn't see me, and there wasn't a whole lot of room between the tops of cars and the bottom of the parking lot above.

Then I flew back to campus and went to the dining hall and they still had the same fish again but this time I knew better than to eat it, and I got lots of salad and they had one kind of salad that was green peas and peanuts and I tried that because I thought it would probably have lots of protein in it. I didn't think that it was left over, 'cause it looked like it was popular, since the bowl of it was mostly empty when I got there. And it turned out that it was pretty tasty.

After dinner, I walked with Meghan and Peggy back to our dorm, and I didn’t really have anything to do before Durak and Meghan didn't either, so she came back to our room with us, and we all watched a YouTube movie called True Facts about the Octopus, which was very strange. Octopuses were very strange, and male octopuses had their penises on the end of a tentacle. Also he said that clams were dumb as hell, which was true. Clams were easy to catch, and I think that they thought that their shells kept them safe, but you could just put them on a rock and crack it open to get at the clam.

Peggy said that we could watch another one, but Meghan remembered that she should pack some clothes to take to Aric's house before we went to Durak.

I thought I ought to take the World War One book back to the library in case anyone needed it for their finals, so I picked it up, 'cause we could stop at the library on the way to Fourth Coast. And that reminded me that I should put the Kama Sutra in her duffel bag, too, and we could look through it and find something fun to do, so I got that, too.

I went with Meghan to her room, and she packed up her bag with clean clothes for tomorrow and brushes and more shampoo because there wasn't much left at Aric's house, and then we went out and stopped by the library and I gave the book back to the librarian, and then we walked to the coffee shop.

We played a couple of games of Durak, and when we were done, I made sure to hug everyone, 'cause I didn't know if we'd play next week because of finals. And Keith said that I should teach ponies how to play the game when I got back to Equestria, and so he gave me the cards to take back with me.

Me and Meghan got in Winston and Aric drove us back, and when we got to Dartmouth, he said that I could ride on his lap and drive the rest of the way home, and I was just about to move over when Meghan asked if she could instead. And Aric thought that was a really silly idea, which is why he decided to do it.

I had to switch places with Meghan, and I was going to get on her lap and slide over but she opened her door and said it was a Chinese Fire Drill, and she went around the front of Winston and then got in on Aric's side and sat on his lap, and we drove the rest of the way to his house with her sitting on his lap and steering and using the stick while he controlled the pedals.

When he'd shut off Winston, Meghan said that he hadn't had to hold her boobs while she drove, and Aric said that he had wanted to make sure that she didn't fall off his lap and that was why he'd done it. Which I didn't think was true.

We went inside and went right upstairs since I had my lab in the morning, and the two of them got undressed for bed and I got in bed and waited for them and I was thinking that it had been more fun when they got each other undressed, and so I decided that next Wednesday we'd do that, although I didn't tell them. Sometimes it was more fun to have things be a surprise in the bedroom.

But it was still lots of fun because Meghan got the book out of her duffel bag and the three of us sat in bed together looking through it and thinking about what we should try, and then when we found something that looked interesting, we tried to figure out if it would work with a pony and where the third person should be, and so we finally picked one that looked adventurous and fun, although it was going to be a little tough for me but Meghan promised that she'd help hold me, so then Aric turned out the lights and we snuggled for a little bit before trying it out. And it was kind of strange and not something that a pony normally would even try, but it felt really amazing.

November 15 [Dark Energy]

November 15

I'd wound up on the outside of the bed this time, and Aric was in the middle and he had his arm around my barrel so that I wouldn't fall out. My back and dock were a little bit sore from last night, 'cause I don't think that either of them was supposed to bend quite like that, but it had been worth it.

I flicked my tail against Aric's leg and he loosened his arm enough that I could slide sideways out of bed and make a graceful cat-like landing on the floor, and that worked out well enough but I got some of the blanket tangled up in my hoof and pulled that off of them, too.

Meghan must not have known I slid out of bed on purpose, 'cause she stuck her head up over Aric's shoulder and asked if I was okay, and I told her that I was, and then I lifted my hoof off the blanket so that they could pull it back up over them. And I stuck my nose back in bed and nuzzled Aric's chest and then kissed his stomach and I would have kissed Meghan, too, but she was too far away.

I stretched out my back and wings, which were also kinda cramped from me sleeping on my side, and then I flew up and landed on the bed kind of diagonally across Aric and Meghan, and I had my head towards her so I could kiss her good morning, and just then her telephone alarm went off and Aric reached over to get it and was bringing it back to her but dropped it and it fell down between the bed and the wall. Aric got out and said that he could move the bed back, and then Meghan got out of bed too and crouched down and reached underneath. She asked Aric if she was going to find any magazines that she shouldn't find under there and he said that if she did she'd better share them with him.

I'd gotten out, too, 'cause I'd been on top of both of them, and Meghan's rump was right in front of me so I stuck my nose forward and goosed her and when she got her head back out from under the bed, I said that Aric had done it, but I don't think that she believed me.

She turned off her telephone and got the shampoo out of her duffel bag and then went down the hall to the bathroom and a moment later I heard the water turn on, and I looked at Aric and he shrugged and said that he guessed that we were taking a shower now and that girls were weird and maybe I should go in there first.

Meghan had left the door open, though, so she must have meant for us to go in, but I hopped up over the edge anyways and she'd already started to soap herself, and she leaned down and kissed me, and then started putting soap on my back and I asked if she was mad that I'd goosed her and she laughed and said that she was going to get me back sometime when I didn't expect it and I might regret going around pantsless all the time, and so I nuzzled her hip and then she started soaping up my back and then Aric asked if it was okay for him to come in, too, and she pulled back the curtain and let him come in, and he had to stand at the back until she was done washing me and then she washed him, too.

I got out last so that I could shake off, and then I went back to the room. Aric was just sitting on the bed and Meghan had a towel wrapped around her head and she told me to get up next to her and then started to preen my wings, and when she was done she got one of the brushes out of her bag and groomed my coat, too.

She told Aric that he needed to buy a hairdryer, and he said that there wasn't much point to it because his hair was short enough that it dried on its own so he wouldn't have much use for it, and Meghan said that if he bought one she'd show him something really sexy that he could do with it, and I was curious what that might be but she wouldn't tell me, either.

I brushed her hair for her, and Aric went down and made coffee, and then Meghan got dressed and picked up her duffel bag and we had a cup of coffee before getting into Winston, and I wanted to ride in the back 'cause it felt like a good day to be outside, so I flew up and landed in the back and I stuck my hooves up on the front of the bed, 'cause Meghan had opened the sliding windows.

Aric drove kind of slow so that I wouldn't slide around, and it was a lot of fun riding in the back. It was like the Mustang that Mister Salvatore had gotten, but even more open, and I thought that if I could bring down a cloud and put it in the back it would be really comfortable. I wasn't sure what would happen to a cloud if it was in the back of a truck, but maybe if we had time someday I could find out.

He turned into the Trowbridge parking lot, and I thought of flying out and meeting him on the other side of the building, but I didn't, 'cause maybe he'd worry if I suddenly disappeared. So I waited until he was parked and then got out, and Meghan did too, and we both kissed him goodbye before going inside.

I was sure that Peggy would help me with my lab coat but I didn't know if she was awake yet, and then I thought that I might as well not fasten it until I was at breakfast, and I told Meghan I'd meet her there—she had to leave her duffel bag and get her class books, and I had to get ready for the lab.

Peggy wasn't in the room, so I put on my lab coat by myself and left it open, which meant that I wasn't going to be able to get my saddlebags on very easily, so I just carried them to breakfast in my mouth.

Meghan had beat me to breakfast, so before I went to get food I put down my saddlebags and let her button up my coat, then put my saddlebags on and everyone at the table who hadn't seen it before was kind of amazed by how I did it. I didn't think it was that amazing; after all, foals could do it with just a little bit of practice. But then I thought it was pretty clever how they could work all the different kinds of fasteners on their clothes by themselves, so I guess it was just being in awe of somebody or somepony who could easily do something that you couldn't.

The waffle-maker was still broken and there was no omelet chef, so I just had eggs and oatmeal again, and that was going to be all until I found that they had a bunch of sliced fruits as well and that was something that they didn't have all that often, and I kind of wished that I hadn't gotten so much other food, 'cause fresh fruit was really good. I got some red melon and orange melon and green melon, and some strawberries, too, and I piled them on my plate around my eggs, then went back to the table to eat.

I was really full by the time I was done eating and it felt even worse 'cause of the lab coat wrapping me up, and the girth strap on my saddlebags, too. And I probably shouldn't have eaten that much, but I wasn't that sorry that I had, and after I'd leaned down and loosened my girth strap a bit, I felt better.

I walked across the quad to the Dow building, and went downstairs to the lab. And we did some more alchemical experiments about the colligative properties, and we had lots of data to record so I was pretty busy.

Professor Brown stopped us while we still had a while to go and said that it was time to blow something up, so he took a pumpkin that he had and said it was a little late for Halloween but he hadn't wanted us to get bad ideas for our decorating. You could see where it was cut, but he hadn't taken any of the pumpkin out, so it looked like a normal pumpkin if you didn't look too close. And then he took off the top and put a cup full of crystals that he said were calcium carbide inside, and poured some water in that, then stuck a fuse inside and put the top back on. And he asked if anyone in the class knew what was going to happen next, and a couple of people raised their hands and said that his reaction was making acetylene gas. And so he told us all to stand back and he lit the fuse then closed the glass shield, and we watched as it burned down and went into the pumpkin, and then there was a really loud bang, and the mouth and eyes blew out of the pumpkin and what was left of the cup was burning, and it looked just like a Jack-O-Lantern, which was really neat.

He said that our final lab report was due on Friday, at the end of class, and that was the end of the lab.

I was so happy that I was done with my lab coat forever that I took it off in the hallway outside class, even though that meant that I had to take off my saddlebags and put them back on again. And I kind of wanted to leave it there, but I thought I'd better give it to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn in case there was another pegasus who wanted to take a lab and was about my size. So I folded it up and put it across my back, and I told Lisa that I'd have the calculations done tonight and I could come by her room after dinner and give them to her, and she said that was a good idea, because we could go over them then and she could write it up tonight and then tomorrow we could look over the lab report and make sure that everything was correct.

And when we got up outside, I forgot that I had the lab coat on my back and took off, and it stayed on for a little while and then slid off my back and came unfolded and I dove down and grabbed it in my teeth before it could hit the ground or get tangled in a tree, then climbed back up and over Dewing, flew over Trowbridge, too, and landed on the boardwalk and went inside.

I got about halfway done with the physics lab and I didn't want to get started on the next problem, because I'd have to stop halfway through before I could go to lunch, so instead I went to the library and took the Ogden Nash book back and found another poetry assortment that looked interesting, so I took that to lunch with me.

I sat down with Trevor and Cedric and Leon, and we talked about how classes were ending soon and Cedric said that Aquamarine still had classes after Thanksgiving, so he was going to stay with some friends in Lansing to be with her before she had to leave, which I thought was really nice of him. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that their classes would end at a different time than ours did, although they'd started at a different time, so I should have thought of that.

Leon said that he was going back home, and he was going to just relax until at least the Monday after Thanksgiving, and then he was going to get bored and find something to occupy his mind over the rest of break but he didn't know what yet, and he said that maybe he'd drive to Lansing to pester Cedric, or else he'd buy a plane ticket to the Caribbean where he could sit on a beach and be bored while looking at pretty girls in bikinis. And Trevor said that he was going to catch up with his family, and one of his brothers had decided to get married and was having the wedding in December, because that was when the whole family would be back home. And he said that I'd inspired him to find out if there was a library where he could give poetry readings, and that he might even write some of his own.

And I told them what I was going to be doing before I went back to Equestria, and then admitted that I didn't know where I was going to live, but I was sure that my helpers had figured out something and if they hadn't, that my friends would give me a place to stay, and Leon said that I could add one more to that list of friends, because his mansion got lonely sometimes. Cedric said that he didn't see how that was possible with a butler and a groundskeeper and a maid and a chauffeur, and Leon said that they were too serious all the time and none of them knew poetry and he'd also forgotten to mention the cook.

Trevor had been looking through my book, and he said that he had found some poems that were good for today, and he read the first one, which was called Clouded Morning, which was about a foggy morning. And then he gave it to Leon, to read Who Has Seen the Wind, and Cedric said that I could see the wind, but that wasn't true; I couldn't see it. I knew what it was doing, but I never saw it.

Cedric got to read a poem called Lost, and then I got to read one called Radar Data #12, which was kind of strange, 'cause I kept picturing the weather but it was about more than that, and Cedric said that he thought it was sad, but he wasn't sure why.

I flew across the quad again to Astronomy class, and sat down next to Anna who had gotten there before me.

Professor Miller taught us more about the beginnings and end of the universe, and how to show it on a graph, and there was a new letter called omega which was the density of the universe and depending on what it was would depend on what the universe would eventually do.

And she explained how we could look in the past to figure out which line the universe was on, but you had to have a different view of redshift, because light could also expand with the universe. And she said that distance could be converted to time which sounded completely wrong, even though she'd explained how it worked. But then I thought about it some more, and I suppose I could say that I'd flown for a day or I'd flown a certain distance and if I always flew at the same speed, it would be the same thing.

She said that for it to work, astronomers needed to find really bright stars, and they had. Those were called supernovas, and they were stars that were sometimes brighter than whole galaxies, and then she showed us a new graph which was the first one but it had been changed around, so she had to explain what they'd done before she could show us observations.

That graph had lots of bars on it which were called error bars, because of things that astronomers didn't know, but you could see how none of them were on the lines she'd showed us first, which had been a surprise and astronomers had to figure out what it meant. And it was that the universe was getting bigger faster.

The reason why, she said, was because only four percent was matter and light, and about a quarter of it was dark matter that we didn't know exactly what it was, and the last three-quarters were dark energy and nobody knew much about that, although Einstein had thought that it existed but nobody believed him back then.

Then she told us more about supernovas, which were gigantic exploding stars in space that were sometimes so bright that you could see them during the day. She said that there hadn't been any nearby since the telescope had been invented, but in case there were, they would be too bright and blind human telescopes, so there were special blinders that some telescopes had just in case one happened that was close.

And that had given them a problem, because while the universe got less dense as it expanded, the dark energy stayed exactly the same, or maybe there was even more of it and so the universe kept expanding faster and faster, until there got to be so much dark energy that galaxies came apart and then stars and then everything would come apart, and that was called the Big Rip. And that was kind of worrying, although if it was true it would be billions of years in the future before it happened.

When I got back to my room, I finished up the lab and then I went back through and looked for mistakes, not only in calculations but also in moving my work from the notes to the formulas, 'cause I wasn't sure that we were going to have a lot of time to go over it. Lisa probably had other finals that she had to study for. And then I started reading through my Astronomy notes, just to make sure that I wasn't gonna forget anything for the finals.

I stayed on my bed reading through my notes until my neck started to get sore, and then I decided that I'd fly around a little bit before dinner, because I hadn't done that today. And I thought I'd just go over downtown again, but this time I put on my flight gear and took my radio so that I could tell the airplane directors what I was doing.

I went out along Lovell Street, instead of along Main like I usually did, and as I got close to Bronson Park, I saw a bunch of police cars with flashing lights, and also the WWMT van was there with its antenna up.

I couldn't figure out what was going on until I got closer and saw people holding up signs that said things like Love Trumps Hate and Commit to the Common Good, and there was a woman with a bullhorn that was leading the crowd in chants, and I remembered that there was supposed to be a protest, and I had never asked Mister Salvatore if I could go see it.

Hopefully, he wasn't down there, and if he was, hopefully he wasn't looking up.

I circled around the perimeter of the park and looked down at all the people there, and it reminded me of the #freethenipple protest that I'd gone to in Colorado Springs, except that these people looked angrier and they all had their shirts on.

There were metal fences set up along the edge of the park, and there were some people on the other side of the fence yelling at the protesters. And the police were patrolling the fence in case any fights broke out.

I didn't want to get involved with them, so I flew back to campus and landed in front of the dining hall and went inside for dinner.

Once I'd gotten my food, I sat down at the table and told everyone what I'd seen.

Christine asked if I could pee while I was flying, and I said that I could, and she said I should have flown over the fence-line and peed on the Trump supporters but I thought that that would be really mean, and I'd get in trouble, too. The only one I might have done that to was the angry man from Walgreens, and I hadn't seen him.

Peggy said that instead I could have gone to Taco Bell and had a bunch of bean burritos and cropdusted them, and she said that I wouldn't get in trouble because I couldn’t really be blamed for having gas. But I said that I wasn't supposed to have gone at all, so I'd get in trouble for doing that, too, and I didn't want Mister Salvatore to yell at me.

Christine said that it might be fun to go after dinner, because one thing she'd always wanted to do was incite a riot, and Sean said if she did, he wasn’t going to bail her out of jail, because violence wouldn't change anything, and I thought back to the World War One book and said that I agreed. She told him that he wasn't any fun, but she wasn't being serious.

I left dinner a little bit early, so that I could go to Lisa's, 'cause I didn't know what time she usually finished dinner.

I hadn't seen her when I returned my tray, and when I was going back to my room to get my notes, I looked up at her window and saw that the lights were on, so either Jessica or her were home.

It didn't take me very long to get my notes and I didn't want to bother with my saddlebags, so I just grabbed them all in my mouth and went across to DeWaters, then knocked on Lisa's door, and a moment later Jessica answered, and I nuzzled her and then she invited me inside. Lisa was sitting at her desk working on her folding computer and she had ear-speakers in but she took them out and turned around and I came over and sat on her bed and put my work on her desk, where we could look at it together.

She didn't find any mistakes, so the extra time I'd taken had paid off. And she said that she'd finish it tonight and have it ready for us to look at tomorrow, and I kind of wanted to stay around a little bit longer but she was working and Jessica had gone back to her desk and she was working, too, so I thanked her and went back out to my dorm.

I didn't really have anything else to do tonight, so I practiced making all the math letters until I was good at them, and then I made cards with all the formulas that we had learned on them, because that would help us review tomorrow. And I had to re-make a bunch of them because I'd started out making the formula too big and had run out of room, and when I'd written it on more than one line it just got confusing. It took me a while, but I got every formula done, and I could take them with me tomorrow to math class for when me and Sean were studying.

And then when I was done with that I got kind of fidgety, 'cause I still didn't know exactly what I was gonna do after Thanksgiving, since my helpers hadn't told me yet. I didn't think that I was going to be able to live in the dorm, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to because there wouldn’t be anybody else there and it would be really lonely. I probably should have called him or else sent him a computer letter, but I didn't, 'cause I was sort of thinking that if we didn't talk about it it wouldn't happen. That was really a foal's way of thinking, but I couldn't help myself.

So I got out of my chair and went over and nuzzled Peggy, and she reached her hand down and petted my mane, and I sat down next to her and rested my head against her side and whenever she didn't need both hands to work, she'd pet my mane or scratch behind my ears and that was really comforting.

It was pretty late when she finally got done with all her homework and she asked me if I we were going to go trotting tomorrow, and I said that we should, and promised to wake her up.

Author's Note

The Clouded Morning

Lost

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Radar Data #12

November 16 [Lost in the Fog]

November 16

Even though I'd gotten to bed a little bit late, I woke up early and got ready to go trotting, and when I looked out the window it was all foggy outside, which was really exciting. It was thick enough that I couldn’t see Academy Street from our window, even though it wasn't very far away. And I could see the little bits of mist drifting around in the lights, and I watched that for a little bit until I remembered that I needed to wake Peggy up.

I went over to her bed and shook her until she rolled on her back and turned her head towards me and she sighed and pushed the covers back but when she looked out the window she was pretty excited for the fog, too. And she opened the window to feel how cold it was, even though her portable telephone could have told her.

She was running out of t-shirts, so she just put her sweatshirt on over her sports bra, and then stuck some water bottles in my camelback, and the two of us went outside.

We had to be a little bit more careful, because even with their lights, cars could get a lot closer to us before we'd see them, and the fog made their noise kind of deceptive, too—sometimes we didn't hear them at all until they were close enough to see, and other times we'd hear them but never see them at all, so they must have been further away.

And we went around to Jeff's house first, and when we got there we had extra time with Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity, 'cause it turned out that the bus was going slower than usual. So I gave Trinity a ponyback ride a little ways, and Caleb showed Peggy some more Pokemons that he'd caught, and he asked if we were going to be able to go Pokemon hunting with him any more. Peggy said that she wasn't sure because we would have final exams soon and then everyone would be going back home, but that maybe we could this weekend. And I thought that that would be nice, and Peggy said that she thought so, too.

Their bus had a blinking light on top like the one that I wore when I flew, and we could see it before we could see the rest of the bus or hear it, but they knew what it meant and picked up their backpacks and Trinity hugged me and I nuzzled her cheek, then nuzzled Lindy, too, and even Caleb gave me a little hug before getting on the bus.

It went around the corner, and faded off into the fog, and Peggy took a drink from one of her water bottles and then we started to trot again.

When we went by Aric's house, I kind of wanted to fly up to his window to wake him up, 'cause I knew that he liked fog, and Peggy said that I should, so I did. The window was open just enough for me to get my hooves under it and I kind of balanced on the edge of it and could stretch out a forehoof far enough to shake the side of the bed, and he didn't wake up right away and he was kind of groggy when he did, but then he saw it was me and got out of bed.

I warned him that Peggy was outside, in case he didn't want her to see him naked, and so he stayed back from the window a little bit and I told him how nice and foggy it was outside and said that I'd wanted to wake him up before the sun made it all go away. And he said that he was going to get some coffee and then go driving around in it and he said that I could come, but I couldn't abandon Peggy, plus I had class, so I had to tell him no.

And I pushed myself back out of the window and caught with my wings, and it was always strange to get flying right by a building like that because you'd instinctively go forwards but if you did, you'd run into the wall, so I had to get far enough back from it that I had room to turn around, and then I could fly normally.

I landed on the lawn next to Peggy, and told her that I'd gotten him up and then we went back out to the street and by the time we were at the end of the block, she was too hot so she took off her sweatshirt and tied it around me, and then we followed the road along the edge of Western's campus for a little bit before going back into the neighborhood.

When we got to the little triangle park, I started thinking how nice a roll in the grass would feel, so when we were passing by the high point, I turned towards it and then rolled down the hill, which wasn't as comfortable with my camelback on as it would have been if I hadn't been wearing it. And I went back up to the top and did it again, and then Peggy decided that she'd try, too, and so she rolled down the hill and said that the dew on the grass was a lot colder and wetter than she'd expected, and she was dizzier than she'd remembered being when she'd done it as a little girl.

She wiped some grass clippings off of herself and took another drink of water. The bottles that she had were really tough, because I'd forgotten that they were there when I rolled down the hill and it was lucky that none of them had broken.

I scraped at the ground a little bit, and nibbled a little bit of the short grass but it wasn't very good, 'cause it was cut too short. Humans cared more about how their lawns looked than how they tasted.

And then we got back on the sidewalk and kept on trotting until we had gotten back to Trowbridge, and before we went in, Peggy put her sweatshirt back on even though she didn't need to.

She made me take the first shower, because she said that I took forever to groom myself, and so I took off my camelback and took in my shower supplies, and I kind of hurried washing myself off, and I got out before Kat came into the bathroom, so Peggy could go right in.

I'd gotten my wings all the way preened and pulled almost a dozen loose feathers out between the two—sometimes I'd lose secondaries a whole bunch at a time—and I also got some grass clippings that hadn't rinsed out in the shower. And when I was grooming my coat, I found a few more, and so after I'd finished, I had to use my wingtip to sweep them into a wastebasket, so that I didn't have grass in my bed.

I was combing out my tail, which was getting too long and shaggy, when she came back in, and she got dressed over on her side of the room and said that today she was going to do laundry and she could do mine if I wanted, but I didn't really have anything that I needed to wash right away, plus I'd feel guilty if she was washing my things for me.

We walked to breakfast together and there were still no omelets and no waffle-maker, and I looked around and found more fresh fruit so I had that and oatmeal. And they had blueberries that weren't fake and so I put them in my oatmeal because I thought that they'd add a little bit of flavor to it.

Anna and Reese weren't there, and Sean wasn't, either. Christine said that he'd been up most of the night working on a project and so she'd let him sleep in and she said she was going to wake him up and stick a Pop Tart in his mouth before she left for her first class.

I think Meghan was a little bit disappointed that I'd preened my own wings, but she brightened up when I asked if we could go to the spa one more time before Thanksgiving, and she said she'd see what she could set up, and then I had to go to class.

Professor Brown told us how we could use flooding or the initial rate method to figure out complex reactions. The first one used lots of one reactant so it basically wouldn't get used up in the reaction, and the other involved measuring what you got right as soon as the reaction started, and then do it again with a different amount of one of your reactants.

Then he told us how to build mechanisms, which was where you decided that you had elementary steps before you got the finished solution, and he showed us how we'd figure out the steps.

He said that next we were going to go through a more complicated example, but that we weren't going to do the algebra in class because it was boring, and my ears fell. Algebra wasn't boring. And then he said that we'd have to do the algebra in our homework, and my ears perked back up.

He wrote out all the equations and then just wrote the answer without integrating, and told us that we wanted to look at limiting cases because they would give us more information.

Professor Brown also said that we should trust our intuition, because if things didn't look like they were supposed to maybe we'd made a mistake that we couldn't find, and it was better to admit that than to keep on working and get a completely wrong answer. And after he'd told us that, he set up another example which started with three differential equations and then filled up the whole markerboard, and he had to wait until everyone had written everything in their notes before he could erase it and put up more equations. But each one individually was still pretty basic; there were just a lot of them.

After class was over, me and Lisa went to the lounge. There were really big windows to let the light in except that there wasn't a lot because it was still very foggy outside, and I got a bit distracted looking out the windows, because we were high enough up that I should have been able to see downtown and the traffic on Main Street, too, but instead I couldn't see much beyond the theatre building.

Lisa got out the lab notes that she'd typed up and we both looked through it to make sure that there weren't any mistakes. And then we had time to review, and I'd been a bad pony and hadn't done any last night, 'cause I'd been too busy with math and then with getting petted by Peggy, so it wasn't as fresh in my head as it should have been. Fortunately, after we'd been going over the class notes for a little bit it all started to sound familiar to me again, and I did a lot better.

We studied until Lisa had to leave for her class, and then I flew across campus and just because I was curious, I flew up high enough until I couldn't see the ground any more. I didn't know how high I was, but I didn't think that I was too high, because I was sure that Severn was closer than a thousand feet to the Dow building, and I hadn't been able to see it. So I thought that I probably wasn't more than a few hundred feet up.

Then I did something really dumb, and instead of going right back down I flew a little bit in what I thought was east, or mostly east, and when I descended low enough to see the ground, I didn't recognize where I was. I'd flown further and not in the direction I thought.

And if I'd been more clever with my portable telephone, I could have used it to give me a map and read the street signs down on the ground, but I wasn't very good at making it do that, and I thought that I'd just follow a road until it went somewhere that I knew, but the roads that I could see were kind of angly and one of them was just a big loop that didn't go anywhere, and there was a lot more forest than I remembered that close to downtown, which meant that I'd flown further off-course than I'd thought, and now I was even farther from where I thought I should be.

But then I remembered house numbers, and I knew that they got smaller the closer that you got to the middle of Kalamazoo, so that gave me a direction, and once I'd found some houses on a straight road, I figured out which way I had to go so that the numbers would be descending, and if there hadn't been as much fog, I would have seen familiar landmarks right away. And I should have spent more time flying low over the area around campus, so that I knew the territory better, but I hadn't.

My plan worked, even though I had to make a couple of jogs where roads ended, and I was really feeling stupid for losing my way in the fog, especially since I had my watch that always knew where I was, but it couldn't tell me when it was sitting on my desk.

So I didn't get all my thermodynamics work done before lunch again, but this time I stayed a little bit later so that I could get more of it finished.

They had dinner leftovers again, and everyone hoped that meant that there would be a really good meal soon, but I kind of thought that they were trying to use up all the food that they had. 'Cause in a week, everything was going to close and there wouldn't be any more meals, and the food might go bad before people came back to campus.

But I was still hoping for a good meal, too. Sean said that last year they'd had a Thanksgiving dinner before finals, and maybe they would again. I hoped for another Chinese dinner, but I thought that was unlikely, since we'd had one not that long ago. Or maybe they could have a fish buffet; that would be pretty good.

Everyone was starting to get a little bit worried about their finals, and I was a little bit worried, too, although I was sure that I'd do well. I wasn't sure that I should say that, though, because everyone else might think that I was bragging, and I didn't want to do that. Nobody liked a bragger. Even when you really were the best at something, you shouldn't brag about it.

I walked with Sean to math, and Professor Pampena started by telling us how you could use flux to solve the diffusion equation, which was how materials diffused into air or liquids, and I knew about that, although I'd never learned the math behind it. And then we got to learn laplacian, which was del squared. And it could also be used for heat in still air.

Then he moved to line integrals in space, and said how when we were figuring out work the first thing we needed to do was decide the best variable to use to express it, and he gave us an example where either time or z would have given easy answers, and he calculated it with time, then I figured it out with z as well. And since he got one for the answer both times, it was also a gradient field.

We had to check three conditions instead of just one, if we wanted to know if we had a gradient field, and he showed us how to set it up and then how to solve it. And just like in two dimensions, there were two different ways to solve it, and he said that we could use whichever one we preferred, but we would be smart to practice both techniques.

Then he gave us the formula for curl in three dimensions and he said that nobody could remember that formula which was why del was so important, because instead of writing out the whole formula, you could simplify it all the way down to del cross F, which was a lot easier to remember, because then we could derive all the terms that we needed.

Before Professor Pampena let us out of class, he said that this homework was special because it was our last, and I was kind of disappointed, because math was so much fun. But I guess that for everyone who hadn't been studying, they were going to be happy that they could focus on that over the weekend, although I bet that anyone who hadn't studied yet wasn't going to until right before the test.

Me and Sean went to his room and did our homework together, and I wrote out one more problem in Equestrian, and then he asked if I was going to insist that we study before watching Numberphile movies, and I nodded and got my cards out of my saddlebags, and we spent an hour going through them and I thought it was time well spent, 'cause at the end of it, both of us could say what a formula was used for, or we could give a formula when we knew what we needed to calculate, and that was the most important part. The rest of it was pretty simple, as long as you didn't make any dumb math mistakes.

Sean found a video first about prime numbers, and how Earth scientists had discovered an interesting trend in consecutive primes, which was that it was most likely to end in one and not any other digit. And James said that they had checked the first hundred million prime numbers, and I thought that that must have taken forever before remembering that there was probably a computer that could do it in a few minutes.

James made a matrix which showed the probabilities, and then explained why some of the more obvious theories weren't any good, and he said that it happened in any base, which was interesting. I bet that was something that ponies didn't know, so I had Sean stop the movie a couple of times so that I could take notes to make sure that I got everything right.

And then he decided to show me a movie about dots and boxes next, which was a game, and there was an old man who had been playing the game for seventy years so he was very good at it, and showed the strategy to win.

I would have liked to watch another, but I still had my thermodynamics homework to do, so I went back to my room and finished it. And I guess that that was my last homework for thermodynamics, probably, although Professor Brown hadn't said so for sure.

Peggy came in and said that she had the dumbest final project for her art class and she couldn't think of anything to do, and so I asked her what it was. She said that she had to drop an egg off the balcony in the Fine Arts building and have it not break, but it had to be 'visually interesting,' because it was art and not physics.

She said that she'd done it in high school, and you got points for having the smallest container or the lightest, but nobody in physics cared how visually interesting it was, and she said that she'd been thinking about it all week and hadn't come up with anything.

I thought that I could carry it down, and that way it would land safely, but I wasn't sure if I was visually interesting, and anyway it might be cheating if I carried it.

Peggy said that if it was on fire, that would be interesting, and I said maybe she could hang it from Cincinnati Fire Kites, although maybe that wasn't a smart thing to do inside. And then I said that she could use a cable at an angle, and she said that she'd thought of that but wasn't sure it would be interesting enough, and she also wasn't sure about what she could tie it to.

So I asked her if she'd asked Rebekka yet, and she hadn't. I thought that Rebekka knew more about art than I did, so I said that maybe she would have a good idea. So she went down the hall to talk to Rebekka, and I thought about ways to keep eggs from being broken when they were dropped. Maybe I could make a little cloud, but would that count? Was I allowed to help build her egg-basket?

When she came back, it was time for dinner, and on our way there Peggy told me that Rebekka had said that she needed to think outside the box, whatever that meant. And Peggy had told Rebekka all her ideas, and Rebekka had said that they all sounded interesting and that was the problem with art, that there weren't rules about what was good and what wasn't.

So I told her my idea about the cloud, and she liked that but she also wasn't sure that it would be allowed. Although she said that there was an artist who had made fake clouds and they hung in a gallery somewhere, and I wondered if anypony had put real clouds in a gallery and called it art.

There wasn't anything special for dinner, which was disappointing. And I thought that I'd probably be seeing the same thing for lunch tomorrow, which was even more disappointing. It was kind of funny, because most of the year I'd liked eating the same thing all the time, but now that it was almost over I wanted to be a bit adventurous.

When I saw the hamburger patties floating in a little pool of oil, though, I decided that I didn't want to be that adventurous.

Christine said that if they didn't have proper food by Friday night, she was going to mutiny. And she said that they'd even taken the fruit loops away, so she couldn't have those for dinner.

I said that the salad that they had was pretty good, although I would have liked it if they'd had spinach instead of the watery lettuce that they usually put out.

Sean was hoping that they would have the real ice cream, maybe on Monday, because it would be nice after our first day of finals.

After dinner, I reviewed my astronomy some more, and it was kind of lonely doing it by myself. I should have asked Anna if we could study together, but I'd forgotten to, and I didn't know her portable telephone number and neither did Peggy. So I told myself I was going to ask her tomorrow, and we could do it in the afternoon.

When I was done studying, I got my Kama Sutra and my flight gear, and I packed them all into my saddlebags, then I went downstairs to Meghan's room, and knocked on her door. And she opened it and asked if I was ready to go, and I said that I was.

She picked up her duffel bag and put on her coat, 'cause it was getting colder out, and the two of us walked to Aric's house. She told me while we were on the way that she had gotten us an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, and she'd only been able to get a late appointment, so we'd have to go to dinner early or else eat at a restaurant late.

And then she asked me if I'd be mad if she stayed with Aric over some of winter break, because if she stayed in Kalamazoo she'd have the best chance to see me, but she didn't think that she could get a short-term lease anywhere else and she also wasn't sure that she could afford it. She said that she hadn't asked Aric yet, because she had been trying other options but she was out of ideas.

I thought that that was a smart idea, and I said that I didn't mind, especially since the two of them were getting along so well now. And that way neither of them would be lonely while I was off visiting Florida or Colorado or anywhere else that we went, so that would be something that I didn't have to feel guilty about.

So she said that she'd ask him later, and not to bring it up, so I said that I wouldn't.

We let ourselves in, and Aric was up in his room doing homework, which he said was his final project and it wasn't due until Tuesday, and asked if we minded if he kept on working until he got to a good place to stop. So Meghan sat on the bed and I laid down on her lap and I guess I must have been tired, 'cause I sort of dozed off and only woke back up when I heard his chair scraping on the floor as he got up from his desk.

I didn't let them get undressed yet, 'cause I said that it was more fun if they undressed each other, and Aric said that it wasn't fair that I got away without wearing clothes, so he found me a pair of underwear that I could put on backwards and stick my tail through the hole, and a t-shirt that didn't fit very well. And I felt pretty silly, but I'd made the rule so it was only fair that I followed it, too.

And I hadn't expected it, but it made me feel more aroused and more eager, so maybe there was more to wearing clothes than I'd thought.

Once we'd found a position that looked like fun, we all had to get undressed and that was just as much fun, because everyone took their time, and we were all really eager to start but didn't want to rush getting undressed, and the anticipation was half of the fun.

November 17 [The Big Rip]

November 17

Since none of us had to be to class too early, we had some time to play in bed, and we didn't get the book out and it was still lots of fun.

Then we took a shower, and after we were done, Aric said that he had a surprise for Meghan in his room and he was going to get it, and he came back a minute later with a hairdryer. And he reminded her that she'd told him that there was a sexy way that she could use it, and she nodded and plugged it in and started to dry her hair, and he frowned at her and said that she was trolling him.

Meghan told him that she was standing in front of the mirror drying her hair naked and wasn't that sexy enough for him and he said that he guessed that it was.

There wasn't really enough room in the bathroom for all three of us to stand around in it, so Aric had left the door open and I saw Angela come up around the stairs and when she saw us she turned around and went back downstairs although we weren't doing anything that we shouldn't have been.

And later on, when they'd gotten dressed, we were sitting at the breakfast table waiting for the coffee to be done, and asked if we were wearing clothes yet and I said no, so then she asked if everyone else was, and Aric said she'd have to come up and see.

Meghan was kind of embarrassed, and she sort of hid her face with the coffee cup even though there wasn't anything in it, although I didn't see any reason why she should be. I think people would be a lot happier if they weren't worried about being naked all the time.

Aric drove us back to the dorm together, and then Meghan and Aric helped me get into my flight gear, and I kissed them both goodbye and got out of the truck. Meghan said that she'd take my saddlebags so I wouldn't have to carry them when I was flying, which was nice of her.

I called the airplane directors and told Dori where I was going, and she said it was okay, so then I kissed Meghan and Aric again, and took off.

It was a really nice morning for flying—it was a little bit hazy and gusty and the temperature was still low, so I wouldn’t get too hot while I was flying, although I might on the way back, 'cause it felt like it was going to get pretty warm today. My winter coat still wasn't grown all the way in, but underneath the flight gear it really held in a lot more heat.

Instead of going over Trowbridge, I flew through the gap between the dorms and by the time I got to Hoben, I was high enough to clear its roof, so I did and then angled towards the hotel, picking up some more altitude as I flew. On longer flights, you usually used up less energy if you took your time climbing, and while I wasn't going far enough for it to really matter, it was still a good habit to keep.

I was around the top floor of the hotel when I went by, and I couldn't help but look inside, and I saw an older couple who were holding hands and looking out the window, which was really cute. So I waved at them before I continued on.

My course took me over the railroad tracks just past the river, and I followed them out East, past Sprinkle Road, but instead of flying on I landed by the fuel station that was right on the point and went inside to get some carrots, 'cause I'd seen that they had big bags of them outside. The clerk inside was surprised that I wanted some and he let me pick a few of the biggest, freshest ones, and let me have them for free, even though I offered to pay. So that was really nice of him.

I had to watch three ways for traffic before I could take off again, and I didn't get all that much altitude before I got to the electricity wires that came from the dam, and I turned to follow them, until I got to the stables.

I hadn't told Deanne that I was coming, so I was glad to see her truck parked along by the fence, and when I got closer, I also saw that she was practicing the obstacle course with Henry, so I circled and came in for a landing right by the fence.

Deanne and Henry were both focused on their routine, but they saw me, and so did the dog. He kept circling around my sides and rump, even when I started flicking my tail at him and telling him to back off. Even though I knew he was harmless, sometimes he made me a little nervous, and I kept side-stepping a little bit to my right, to put some distance between him and me. Which didn't work, 'cause he'd just crowd me again.

Deanne had Henry do a couple more laps before she walked him around the perimeter to let him cool down some. Then she came over to the fence and me and Henry sniffed at each other, then he stuck his head over my back and started trying to get into my camelback, 'cause he smelled the carrots and didn't know that it was rude to try and get at them.

Deanne asked me if I'd stopped by to watch or if I wanted to ride, and I said that either was fine. And I told her how school was ending soon and then I'd be going back home to Equestria not too long after that, and I hadn't wanted to leave without saying goodbye.

She said that in that case I ought to have one more horseback ride, so we went to the barn and she got Hoshi out of her stall, then she saddled her up while I took off all my flight gear in the tack room, 'cause there wasn't any sense in my wearing it.

I got up on Hoshi's back and when Deanne got back on Henry, he snorted and looked back at her. I think he was expecting to get unsaddled, not ridden again and I felt kind of bad for messing up his routine.

We went back into the woods and Deanne looked back a couple of times to make sure that I was still there.

We turned around when we were back at the electricity trail, and I was in the lead most of the way back, although I didn't really do much, 'cause Hoshi knew where to go.

Deanne unsaddled the horses and rinsed them down, and I went into the tack room to get the carrots for them. I had one for Peaches, too, so she wouldn't feel left out.

I gave them their carrots and then before Deanne turned them out to pasture, I gave both of them a nuzzle and gave Hoshi a little kiss, too. I was going to miss them.

When she opened the gate, Henry trotted out into the field and then started sniffing around in it a little bit and then he dropped down and rolled on his back, while Hoshi just looked at him like he was an idiot.

Deanne followed me over to the obstacle course, and I hopped over the fence and walked around the course once to make sure that I still remembered it, and then I got to the starting line and wiggled my rump then launched myself around it.

I went a little bit slow the first time, 'cause I just wanted to refresh my memory of when the jumps were and where my hooves had to be, and then when I got back to the start I was already moving, so I just sped up into a full gallop, and tore around the course. And I did use my wings to carry my jumps a little bit farther than I could have got on my own, but that wasn't cheating, I didn't think.

When I finished the second time, I was panting a bit, and I had mud on my legs and a little bit of poop which I hadn't quite been able to avoid on one of my hooves, and so I went over to the washing area and turned on the hose and was using it to wash myself until Deanne took it from me and rinsed me off, and she made sure to clean my hooves, which was nice of her.

She offered to get a towel to dry me off with, but I'd dry enough on the flight back home, I thought. Maybe not under where my gear was, but that was okay. I was going to take a proper shower when I got back anyways.

So I went in the tack room and got dressed and then I called Dori before I came out. And I nuzzled Deanne and told her that I was going to miss her, and she said that she'd miss me too.

I nuzzled her one more time and then I flew off over the parking lot, and the dog followed on the ground until I got over the barn. He barked at me once, and then I was over the pasture and I waved at Henry and Hoshi, and then turned towards the railroad tracks.

I flew due south until I got there, and then I followed them back towards Kalamazoo. And I went all the way along them until I got to Academy Street, then I turned west towards the top of the hill. I'd been dropping altitude as I went through town, and I'd estimated pretty well, 'cause it felt like I didn't have to correct much to come in for a landing on the boardwalk.

Peggy wasn't in our room, and I got undressed and then went to the shower. I didn't think that there would be anybody waiting their turn, 'cause it was almost lunchtime, so I took a really long shower and thought about when the best time to have our group shower would be. I thought that tomorrow night was one option, but maybe it would be better on the weekend. People might like going a little bit later, and everyone probably would have spent all of Saturday studying and would want a break from it.

When I got back to my room, I took my time grooming, too, so that I wouldn't be all messy when I went to the salon. Then I got my astronomy books and my poetry assortment, and I also called Pastor Liz to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to meet with her today but I could do it Tuesday morning, which she said was a good time, and then I went to lunch.

Everyone was kind of studying while they ate, 'cause they'd put it off until the last minute like humans like to do, but Cedric put down his notebook and said that he was going to miss me, and that it was going to feel strange next year to not have a pegasus to read poetry with.

And I said that there would be a new pony and maybe she'd also like poetry and they could make friends, and Cedric said that she wouldn't be the same as the SG, and made a fist and bumped my hoof.

We each picked our own poems this time. I found one called Into Bad Weather Bounding, and it wasn't really exactly about the weather but I liked it because I bounded into bad weather, and Leon said that if I ever got business cards, that was what they should say.

Trevor read a poem called Great Sleeps I Have Known, and then Leon read Sonnet 73, which was by Shakespeare. And then Cedric took the book and he flipped through it and it took a while before he chose his poem, and it was called The Sun Sets in Molten Gold and it was really beautiful.

I hugged them all before I left for Astronomy class, and my heart was kind of heavy when I went across campus, because it was almost the last time we'd get to read poetry together.

Professor Miller started by telling us what was going to be on the final exam and reminding us what her office hours were, and then she said that we were going to finish up by talking about how the universe might end by tearing itself apart.

I thought that was an appropriate way to end the class.

So she told us more about how the universe was expanding, and it was speeding up because there was more dark energy than there was matter or dark matter, but that that balance changed with time. She said that the matter density changed with time, because when the universe was smaller it was denser, and that the dark matter and regular matter had more of an effect than the dark energy.

She drew us graphs that showed how it looked, and that by extrapolating from the data points we knew that the universe was about 13.8 billion years old.

And you could look at further-away stars and find out when it had been slower, she said, and that space telescopes were able to see far enough back to know when it was moving slower, if you could find highly redshifted supernovas.

They were really faint, though, and you needed to be able to see in infrared, and she also said that when they were that far away gravitational lensing might be making them look brighter than they actually were.

She said that there was going to be a Joint Dark Energy Mission that was going to find supernovas, although it hadn't been built or launched yet, and there was also the LSST (they called it that because it was easier to say than the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), which was going to take a survey of the sky every three days, but that hadn't been built yet, either.

So she said that we didn't know exactly how the universe was going to end but soon we might have a better idea, and then class was over, so on my way out I thanked her for everything she'd taught me.

And when we were in the hall, I asked Anna if she wanted to be my study buddy for astronomy. She couldn't do it right away, but she said that in an hour, we could meet and study. And we had to decide where, and she suggested that since it was warm we should go out on the quad and I liked that. It was too nice a day to be inside.

So I went back to my room and got my books, and I carried them out to the quad so that I would have them, and then I started to fly around, 'cause it was a nice day, and then I started galloping around and having a lot of fun until I remembered that I had meant to keep myself looking well-groomed, but it was too late now. My coat was damp and my mane was messed up, and I didn't have my brush and didn't want to miss Anna, so I just pushed it back with my hoof and thought that I could brush it real quick before me and Meghan left.

And then I stretched out on the grass right where the sun could shine on me, and I kept a hoof across my astronomy book and notebook just in case a squirrel tried to steal it.

I closed my eyes and I dozed off just a little bit—I never really fell asleep, I don't think, because there were too many noises and it wasn't really safe to sleep on the ground alone anyways. So even when my eyes were shut, my ears were alert, and I heard Anna coming before she got too close and opened my eyes and lifted my head up, then I yawned and stretched out my wings a little bit before sitting up.

There was a whole lot for us to review, and we didn't get all the way through it. Luckily, there weren't all that many formulas to remember, so that was one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about, but there were lots of other terms that I needed to make sure that I knew.

I thought if I had time, it would be good to make cards, and I probably could have done that instead of playing around on the quad.

We were trying to figure out when we could meet again when my portable telephone rang, and it was Meghan and she said that she was ready and we ought to leave soon. So I told Anna that I wouldn't be at dinner tonight, and tomorrow we could figure out when we wanted to meet to study again.

Then I flew up to the boardwalk and left my books in my room and I told Peggy that I was going to the salon, and then I went downstairs and met Meghan at her room, and we went down to the parking lot to wait for our Uber-car, which was a little boxy thing that was called a Soul.

It seemed kind of cheap inside, and the seat wasn't all that comfortable, but it was pretty quiet, and the driver asked if we minded if he played music, and we didn't. So before he left he picked up his little music-box and picked out some music, and I didn't really like the first song all that much, but the next one was called The Sound of Silence, which was by Disturbed. Meghan said that it was a newer version of the song.

He dropped us off at the salon, and we were a little bit late, so I apologized to Maura and she said that she didn't mind. And she saw that I was getting fluffy, and asked if I wanted to be trimmed down, but I told her that I just wanted my mane and tail cut. Even though I didn't really need it now, when I went back to Equestria it was going to be in the winter and I'd be cold if I got it shaved off.

So me and Meghan sat down in chairs that were next to each other, and I'd never had a chance to comb my mane, so the woman who was trimming it had to. Her name was Conni, and she had very pretty dark skin, and her hair was in lots of little braids.

She was kind of quiet, 'cause she was doing a really good job and just focusing on that. But she said that my mane felt really soft and full, and she was kind of jealous of it, so I told her that I really liked her hair, too.

It didn't take as long as I'd thought before we were done, and Meghan didn't go in the back room this time to get waxed. She said that she might make another appointment for that later. And then she used her portable telephone to get another Uber-car to come and pick us up, and it happened to be the same Soul, so he knew right where to go.

He was playing the same kind of music this time, and it was kind of hard to follow some of the words. There was one where the singer kept saying pogo over and over again, which was kind of odd. But I could understand the words in that one at least.

Meghan asked if we wanted to see what they had left for food, and I asked if we could get Chinese food delivered, and she thought that was a great idea. So we went back to my room, and Peggy was there, and she wanted some, too, but not too much because she'd just had dinner.

So she used her computer to find their menu and they knew what they liked and I didn't know what most of it was, so Peggy and Meghan both helped me decide what I wanted to eat.

We talked while we were waiting for our food to arrive, and Peggy complained some more about her art project, because she still didn't have any ideas, and it had to be something pretty simple that she could do in a couple of days, and she said that she might look at her computer and see if she could find something that would inspire her.

And she didn't right away, but then she found a movie where people were using giant cannons and siege engines to launch pumpkins, which was really neat to see. And she said that something like that would be visually interesting, although the egg would probably break.

Then she kind of stopped and blinked and reached into her bag and got her notebook out and pulled out a piece of paper and she sat up and said that it never said that the egg had to survive, just that it had to be visually interesting, and she said that nothing was more visually interesting than a catapult firing the egg straight down into the floor and that was what she was going to do.

Meghan said that she ought to put something else in the basket that it could fire, and at first she thought paint, but then decided that she'd get in trouble for splattering paint all over the lobby of the Fine Arts building, and said that glitter would be good, too.

She had to go downstairs to get the food, because the deliveryperson couldn't bring it right up to our room, which was kind of dumb. And she came back with a big plastic sack and she opened it up and it was full of little cardboard boxes of food, and also some fortune cookies and packets of soy sauce, which was really salty. They also had napkins and plastic utensils and wrapped-up chopsticks.

Meghan asked if I was going to use mine, and I said that I couldn't with hooves, so she took them out of their package and rolled up my mane into a loose bun and stuck the chopsticks in to hold it in place.

Peggy knew how to fold out the containers to make little plates, and we ate on the floor, 'cause we didn't have a table and it wouldn’t have been social to sit at our desks. I had Kung Pao shrimp as my main course, and I'd also gotten some spring rolls to eat, 'cause they were good. And then when we were done eating our food we opened up our cookies. Mine told me that the secret to getting ahead was getting started in bed, and I said that I was gonna save my fortune until tomorrow.

Peggy's said that love was for the lucky and the brave in bed, and Meghan said that she should be mischievous and she would not be lonesome in bed, and she slid her hand under my tail before I could swat it away and Peggy pretended not to notice, but then she started laughing and that gave her away.

Even though I had a full belly and it was kind of late, I wanted to go and see if people were fighting in the park, 'cause it would probably be my last chance to see Karla and Stellan, so I flew down there, and there were more people than I thought. I guess maybe fighting was a good way to work out the stress from finals.

So I had to spar with Stellan and with Karla, and pretty soon I wasn't thinking of anything else, and by the time we were done, I was lathered again and I'd lost both of the chopsticks, too. And we found one, which was broken, and we had no idea where the other one had gone.

I hugged both of them and thanked them for everything that they'd taught me, and I wish that there had been some gift that I could have given them, but I hadn't thought of anything. And then I remembered that everyone seemed to like my feathers, and I had a few more secondaries that were working loose, so I reached back and pulled them out and gave one to each of them.

Karla thought that was kind of a strange thing, until Stellan told her to remember what Gimli had asked for, and then she laughed, and she leaned down and hugged me again.

I flew back to Trowbridge and when I got back up to our room, everyone else was gone. Peggy was looking at pictures of catapults trying to figure out what she could build—she said that she wasn't that much of a carpenter but people had built catapults in the Middle Ages so how hard could it be?

I had time to make cards with all the important astronomy terms and also the formulas that we'd learned, and then I wrote in my journal, too, before I went to bed.

Author's Note

Into Bad Weather Bounding

Great Sleeps I Have Known

Sonnet 73

The Sun Sets in Molten Gold

November 18 [Last Day of Class]

November 18

I got up Peggy to go trotting, and as soon as we got outside, I could feel that there was a storm coming, so I looked up in the sky, and it was clear. Peggy said that it was really warm for November, and I didn't like that, 'cause that meant that the storm would have more energy. So I was kinda distracted when we were trotting towards Jeff's house, 'cause I was thinking about how warm the lakes might be and how much moisture a storm could suck up off of them. I thought if it came early, it wouldn't be so bad, but if it waited until later in the day it could be a bad storm, and as soon as I got back to the room I was going to look at the weather predictions and the weather maps.

Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were enjoying it. They all had coats but they weren't wearing them, and Caleb said that it was going to snow tomorrow, and they were looking forward to that. Trinity said that he was wrong; it was too warm to snow, and he said that she'd see. He said it was going to rain tonight and then it was going to snow.

So when I gave her a short ponyback ride she asked me what I thought, and I said that it might snow. I said that I hadn't seen the weather maps, so I couldn't predict it for sure, but that the temperature could drop enough for snow. And she got excited by that, because snow was fun to play in.

Me and Peggy decided that we'd go Pokemon hunting with them, but not until tomorrow afternoon. Peggy said that she'd want a break from studying by then, and I wanted to know if Pokemons would be out in the snow. Lindy said that she thought that they would be and maybe there would be new kinds who liked the cold.

The girls hugged me before they got on the bus, and Caleb gave me a hoof-bump, and then me and Peggy finished up our morning trot.

I told Peggy to use the shower first, 'cause I wanted to figure out what the weather might do before I took my shower, and she didn't argue, 'cause I sat right down at my computer and looked at the weather, and decided that there wouldn't be rain until the afternoon, and then it did look like it was gonna get a lot colder.

And then I checked the human predictions, which said mostly the same thing.

I sent a telephone telegram to Mel, telling him that I would be able to stormwatch but he'd have to pick me up if he could. And then I packed all of my flight gear into my saddlebags so I would have it, and my thermodynamics things, too, and also a couple of cans of anchovies. I didn't have any hay left, 'cause I'd finished it a while ago.

I filled up my camelback, too, but I didn't put that on. It wasn't convenient to have it along with my saddlebags, although I thought that I could wear it over them if I had to. I could fly without it, but if I had time after class, I'd get it.

When Peggy came back in the room, I went into the bathroom and took my shower, then sat on my bed and groomed myself, and then the two of us went to breakfast together.

They had some waffles, but they were thin square ones that didn't look very good. Peggy said that she thought that they were probably pre-made frozen waffles that they'd gotten. So I got some oatmeal and scrambled eggs, and sat down at our table.

Everyone was looking forward to the weekend, even though it meant a lot of studying and finishing up projects that should have been done sooner. I'd been smart and I thought that if any of my professors decided to have the final exam today instead of waiting for next week, I'd be ready for them, but it didn't sound like anybody else would be.

I said that I thought tomorrow night would be perfect for our group shower, because that would be a perfect break from studying, and everyone else thought so, too. We decided that we'd meet a couple of hours after dinner in Christine's room, and then when everyone was all there, we'd go to Hoben and borrow their shower for a little while. Reese asked if he could wear a bathing suit and Meghan said that that wasn't the point of it.

When I was done eating, I left for thermodynamics, and I got there early and had to wait in the hall. I'd wanted to be there a little bit early in case Lisa had any last-minute changes to our lab assignment, but she didn't. Crystal Dawn came up, though, and she asked if I could help her review, 'cause Austin wasn't too interested and she knew that I was really smart, and I said that she should have asked sooner, since it was really late to start studying now. But I said that I would, and told her that she could sit with us in the lounge after class.

After the other class had left, we went in and sat down next to each other, and then Lisa came in and she gave me an odd look, but she took the seat on the other side of me without saying anything.

Professor Brown said that we were going to learn in the first part of the class, and then we'd have some review, so he started by telling us about equilibrium problems, and it was a bit different, 'cause you had two starting elements which joined in the middle. And then the next thing that he talked about was reversible reactions, and showed us how we could use a limiting case to help solve it. And that was the three basic types of alchemical reactions, which were parallel, series, or reversible, and he told us that we knew that we could use the steady state approximation or the equilibrium approximation.

He gave us an example of a series-reversible reaction, just to show us how to combine everything that we already knew into a new type of problem, and reminded us how important it was to break things down into simple parts, and then he moved on to review, where we could ask him questions and he'd answer them.

There wasn't a lot that I thought I needed to know that I didn't already, and it was kind of frustrating listening to other people ask for clarification on things I thought he'd explained pretty well during class. But I listened anyways, because there was a chance that he'd answer a question that I didn't know I should have had.

When class was over, I went and shook his hand, and thanked him for teaching me, and then me and Lisa and Crystal Dawn went down to the lounge and got out our notes. And I felt bad for Crystal, 'cause as we took turns giving answers, it was obvious that she was behind, and I didn't know if she'd catch up. She should have thought about that sooner, but I guess it was too late for should haves. So we did our best to help her, because you couldn't let a friend down when she needed you, even if it was her own fault that she did.

And by the end of it, she knew a lot more than she had when we started, and me and Lisa had both benefited, too, because re-explaining things helped us remember it.

I flew up into the sky and looked around. It was still clear out as far as I could see in all directions, and it was a lot warmer—the temperature had come up by almost ten degrees since me and Peggy had gone trotting.

I landed and relaxed until lunchtime, 'cause I didn't have any homework to do, and I might need a lot of energy this afternoon.

On my way to lunch, I saw Peggy walking across campus, and she was wearing some dirty clothes and had sawdust in her hair. She said that she'd been working in the art shop on her project, and she had most of the main parts of it in place, even though she wasn't much of a carpenter. She said that she was going to have to go out and get something for the spring, and she was thinking about using bungee cords.

I found some fish that looked edible at least, and I also got some bread and salad. And when I sat down, Christine said she'd given up on their hot food because she was fairly sure that they were trying to poison everyone, so she just had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then when Sean sat down, he reached in his pocket and got out a plastic bag of fruit loops, and Christine grabbed it out of his hand and clutched it to her chest.

Sean said that he'd heard rumors that there was going to be a Thanksgiving dinner Sunday night, so then everyone was talking about what they had for Thanksgiving dinner, and some of it sounded kind of strange. Cranberries weren't very good; they were really sour. If you didn't have anything else you could eat them, but why would you want to if you had better food? And why would you put bread inside the turkey and not eat it by itself?

They wanted to know what we did for Thanksgiving in my village, or if we even had it, and I said that we had a Harvest Festival, and ate the last of the fresh summer crops that wouldn't keep for too long, and there were lots of cakes and pies and there was a big dance, and it was one of the few times even all of the fishermen would show up.

And I told them how one year when I was a filly, a rogue storm came in and so everypony left to secure their boats or go up in the sky and fight the storm, and we got left behind on the ground but didn't mind too much because the older ponies who were watching us let us eat as much pie and cake as we wanted. I had a really sore belly after that, and I never liked sweets as much afterwards.

Me and Sean walked to math class, and I looked up at the sky. I could feel the pressure changing and I knew that off in the distance there was a storm coming, and I hoped that it would wait until classes were over. I thought that Professor Pampena would understand if I had to leave, but I didn't think he'd be too happy if I galloped out of his last lecture.

He told us more about curl and how we could use it to figure out if a vector field was conservative, but also to convert line integrals into double integrals, and that was Stokes' theorem, and he showed us how that worked, and also that we could use the principle to convert surface integrals into line integrals or the other way around.

We had to decide which way our work was going, so we'd know if it was positive or negative, and he said that it didn't really matter which we chose, but we just had to make sure it stayed the same in all our calculations.

He showed us a couple of pictures to remind us of the right-hand rule, although I had to remember it on my own 'cause I didn't have a thumb or fingers to use. And then he showed us how to use Stokes' theorem by comparing it to Green's theorem, which we already knew, and told us that work, flux, and curl were independent of coordinates, and showed us how we could break a three-dimensional object down into lots of little two-dimensional ones that proved it was true.

Then he had a little bit of review, too, just to make sure that everyone knew everything that we'd learned, and we finished up a little bit early, because everybody seemed to understand. And I shook his hand on the way out, too, and he thanked me for giving him the equations in Equestrian for him to puzzle out.

We didn't have any homework, so I studied instead, and I was feeling pretty good by the time we were done, and I hadn't heard from Mel yet, which meant that I still had time before the storm.

Sean's portable telephone made a funny noise, and he got it out and looked at it and said that it was a weather update, and it said that there was a severe storm watch for Kalamazoo County that would be starting soon, and he hadn't even finished reading it when my portable telephone beeped, and it was Mel and he said that he was on his way to get me. So I got my gear out of my saddlebags and got dressed, and Sean was nice and filled up my camelback for me, and then I took my saddlebags in my mouth and carried them back to the dorm. I could have had had Mel pick me up from Harmon, but I didn't think that he knew where it was, so it was smarter to have him get me from Trowbridge.

I didn't have to wait too long for him to arrive, and when I got in Mel's truck, I saw that on his dashboard he had a sticker that said that he'd voted, so I asked him if he was disappointed in how Trump had gotten elected, too, and he sighed and said that he should have known, with me being at a liberal college that I'd only ever heard bad things about him and only good things about Hillary.

Well, I said that I hadn't really heard as much as I ought to have, 'cause I'd watched a couple of the debates and I'd gone to the primary to see what it was like, but I hadn't paid as much attention as I guess I ought to have.

He opened his mouth like he was gonna talk, and then he just rubbed his chin with his hand, and for a minute he just kept driving without saying anything, but when we had to stop for a traffic signal, he said that to start with, he'd never liked Hillary. Mel said he didn't like how she'd kept her own computer mail server instead of using the one that came with her job, because it seemed like she was doing that to keep her computer letters private. I thought that they should be, but he said that when you were a government employee, people had the right to read them.

Then he told me that even that wasn’t the most important thing about it, but she also had done important work on it, and she hadn’t kept it safe enough, so people had been able to read her mail that shouldn’t have been, and then they published her mail on the internet so that anybody could read it, even things that were important to the safety of the country, and then everybody got to look through them, and they’d found lots of bad things in them that showed how what she said in public wasn’t the same as what she said in her computer letters.

He said that he also thought that she represented how politics was corrupt: Hillary had been a politician for thirty years, and he said that he thought that she was a bit two-faced. He told me that she kept talking about how she represented the common man, but at the same time she got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak privately to bankers, and so maybe she was a little bit two-faced, since she'd say one thing in public and another thing in private.

So he said that he didn't like her because he didn't trust her, and he wasn't sure that she had the honesty and integrity that a president ought to have.

Then he said that she had some policies that he did like, and maybe if the democrats had had a different person running for president, he would have voted for them. They'd had Bernie Sanders, but Mel said that he thought Mister Sanders was a little bit too socialist.

So I asked him if there was stuff that he liked about Donald Trump, because I thought it would be kind of petty to have just voted for him because he didn't like Hillary. And he told me that some people thought it was a problem that he didn't have any experience, but that he thought that was an advantage, and said that Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower hadn’t had any experience and they'd been good presidents.

He said that he liked Trump's stance on immigration, which was to get people who were in the country illegally out and back where they had come from. He said that because they would work more cheaply than Americans, people would hire them instead of Americans who needed jobs, plus there were violent and dangerous immigrants who shouldn't be in the country.

He told me that in Europe they were having a big problem with that, and it wasn't bad over here yet, and Trump was going to make sure that it stayed that way.

Mel told me that he was also going to renegotiate some of the bad trade deals that the country had gotten into, and that that would mean that there would be more work in America. He said that factories moved to other countries because it was cheaper and then sold their products in America, and that put people out of work, and he said if I'd ever seen the big factory on Sprinkle Road, that used to be a factory where lots of people built cars but General Motors had moved it to Mexico and everybody had lost their jobs. He said lots of his friends had lost their jobs when they'd been moved overseas, and Trump was going to fix that.

And he also told me how he thought that overall Trump had more in common with the feelings of the lower and middle-class people than Hillary did, and Mel liked how he said what was on his mind, instead of weaseling like politicians did when you asked them a question.

Then when we got to the parking lot, he said that he was sorry for bending my ear but I didn't mind. Sometimes the best way to learn stuff is to just listen to what other people have to say.

As soon as he parked, he unfolded his computer and looked at the weather maps, and said that we were cutting it a little bit close if I wanted to get up in front of the storm. So I had a drink of water and then I got out of the truck and looked up into the sky but I couldn't really see where the storm started from here on the ground, since it was overcast as far as I could see.

When I got up in the air, I could see the dark clouds off in the distance, and they were still a ways off, but they were getting closer. And it was a solid mass of darkness as far as I could see in both directions, and on the weather map it had been red, so that gave me an idea what it was going to be like.

I had time to check and make sure that my radio was working, and I also told Mel what I was seeing, and then I circled around and waited for the storm to come.

It was as bad as I'd thought it would be, 'cause of all the energy it had picked up all day. I kept watch on the ground while I was waiting for it to get to me, and I could see the trees bending and moving around in the wind gusts, and all the lightning flashing off in the distance, and then I started to see cars coming along the 94 Highway that were dripping wet and had their windshield squeegees on, and I started preparing myself for the storm front.

I had just enough time to get one more message to Mel, and then I got hit by it, and I was ready but it still pushed me back and down, and I fought the clouds to get my altitude and position back even though I couldn't see the ground any more. And I took one look back at Kalamazoo glittering in the distance, and then it was also swallowed up in the curtains of rain, and there was just me and my little light freezing the raindrops in the air every time that it blinked.

When the weather was like this, it was hard to tell sometimes where the clouds ended, and I probably went up into them a few times by mistake. I was flying completely by feel, getting a sense of the storm and shouting at Mel on the radio whenever I got the chance.

The first part of it went by me and then it got a little calmer, and I could sometimes see lights on the ground, when the squalls eased off a little bit, and then the wind would gust and the cloud would dump out more rain and it was gone.

There was a lot of lightning in the storm, and that was something that I could see, although a lot of times the sky just lit up and I didn't see the bolt, but there were a bunch of them that were close enough to me to see, and I called those out, too. And I checked my watch a couple of times to make sure that I was still holding my position, although since it only measured the distance to the airport, I could have been anywhere on that arc, so whenever I got a chance, I looked down in the hopes of seeing the cars on the 94 Highway, 'cause with their headlights on they were like a long lighted snake.

I'd been in the storm for over an hour when it started to thin out a little bit, and I asked Mel if it was passing or if I needed to hold my station. He said that the weather radar showed that it was moving by, so I turned and flew back towards the Speedway, just on the tail of the rain. And as I got down a little bit lower, I noticed that most of the trees had had their fall leaves stripped off of them by the storm, so I guess that was how trees did it on Earth. They just waited for a big storm to take their leaves.

I landed on top of the giant S, and I almost forgot to spark off and had to do a really awkward landing so that I wouldn't zap my tail, and then I sat up there for a minute, looking around at the rain-soaked ground, before I jumped off and glided down to Mel's truck.

He said that the weather looked clear and there weren't any reports from spotters of other storms behind this one, so I shook off and got in, and he said he could take me back to campus, but I convinced him to take me to Taco Bell instead, 'cause I hadn't had dinner.

So we went through the drive-through, and he ordered food for me and then he even paid for it which was really nice of him, and then he let me eat it in his truck, so I was really careful not to make a mess by mistake, and when we got back to campus, I nuzzled him and he said that I was the best spotter he'd ever worked with, and he said that he was going to miss me when I went back to Equestria. And I told him that I was going to miss him, too, and I hugged him and thanked him one more time for dinner, and then I hopped out of his truck and went across the lawn and back to the dorm.

I wasn't sure if Meghan was still in her room or if she'd gone to Aric's already, so I went there first, and she was busy studying so I said that she should come up to my room when she was done. And then I went back upstairs, and I guess Peggy had gotten tired of studying, 'cause she was playing euchre with Ruth and Kat and Rebekka. And she also had some vodka, and everyone had a White Russian, and she made one for me, too.

I was pretty wet still, so after I'd hung up my flight gear, I put a towel on my bed and sat on it so that I could dry off. And I watched them play until they were done, and then Kat said that she didn't want to play another game, so I took her place, and Ruth had to go to her room and get a glitter marker and a pair of lounging pants, which she said I should wear so I wouldn't get cold. And after I'd put them on, she drew hearts on my hooves again.

Me and Rebekka lost, 'cause she wasn't very good at the game, but it didn't matter, because we'd had fun. And then we just sat and talked, even after Meghan had come up to the room. So it was pretty late when we finally decided to go to Aric's, and I'd been good and not had too much to drink.

He was already in bed when we got there, and I felt kind of bad for spending so much time with Peggy and our hallmates when Aric had been alone, but he said that he didn't mind—he said that he'd gone to bed a bit early because he'd had a headache from studying so much, and Meghan asked if he was trying to make an excuse for not having sex, and he laughed and said that he was never too tired for sex.

But even though he'd said that, he wasn't as frisky as he normally was, and I think we overwhelmed him, and when he was done, he snuggled up with his head on Meghan's breast and he fell asleep pretty quickly, and I couldn't be mad 'cause it was pretty cute.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Johnny Walker for research and editing, mostly at the last minute (which is totally my fault).

November 19 [Group Shower]

November 19

Meghan woke me up in the middle of the night when she started moving around, 'cause she was cold. The temperature had dropped in the night, and while it had been comfortable with the blankets we'd had when we went to bed last night, it wasn't enough now. And it didn't help that the window was open, either, so I got out of bed and closed it, and then I got back in and huddled up against Meghan.

She put her arm around my barrel and pulled me in close, and said that she wished she knew where the thermostat for the house was, because then she could go and make it warmer. I didn't know, either, and even if I had, I didn't know how to work it. Meghan said it was really simple, and she said that it was probably downstairs somewhere, but she wasn't sure it was worth getting out of bed just to find it. And she said that I was plenty warm and now that there wasn't an arctic wind blowing through the window, she'd warm up pretty quickly.

And I guess she did, 'cause she was a bit restless at first as she was trying to get warm, and then she fell asleep again. And I thought that I could get up and go looking for the thermostat and figure out how to work it, but then I decided that she'd probably get cold again if I left the bed, and I didn't really want to anyways.

It didn't take me that long to fall asleep again, and when I woke up in the morning, she was still asleep and still had her arm pretty tight around my barrel. So I turned my head and nuzzled her cheek until she woke up, and then when she let go of me, I stuck my head over the side of the bed and nosed around in her duffel bag until I found her sweatshirt. I liked it when she went without clothes, but I didn't want her to be cold, either.

She managed to put it on without getting too much out from under the covers, and then she asked if I was getting up and leaving, and I shook my head. I guess that I was picking up some human habits, 'cause I didn't really want to leave the bed for good just yet. But the little filly in me did want to see if it had snowed overnight and if I'd be greeted by a blanket of white in the morning, so I got out of bed and looked out the window.

I guess Meghan wanted to know, too, 'cause she asked me what I saw, and I said that there was just rain outside, and no sign of snow. And she was kind of disappointed in that.

All of our moving around woke Aric up, and pretty soon the three of us were all having sex which was a bit different 'cause both of them were trying to stay as much under the covers as they could, so they wouldn't get cold.

Meghan put on her pants before going to the bathroom, and Aric went downstairs to close more windows and make the furnace warm up the house, and I knew when he did it 'cause I could hear some clicking noises from downstairs and then pretty soon warm air started to come out of the vents in the floor. Our dorm room doesn't get warm like that; it's got a radiator filled with hot water, which all comes from pipes that are kept underneath the sidewalks.

Meghan was already in the shower when I went to the bathroom, and Aric joined us last, and we stayed until the hot water started to run out, and then they got out and left the bathroom door closed to dry off, even though it was crowded, 'cause all the steam kept the bathroom warmer than the rest of the house.

When we got back to his room, I looked out the window and the rain had turned to snow. There wasn't any sticking on the ground, 'cause it was still warm and wet, but I wanted to go out and play in the falling snow, so I pushed the window open and flew out and started flying around in it.

It wasn't good, fluffy snow, probably ‘cause it had just changed—they were big, wet flakes, but it was still the first snowfall of the season and that was exciting. It was very strange that it had been seventy degrees yesterday and now it was thirty and snowing. I think humans would do a lot better to have proper weather ponies managing their weather so that this doesn't happen, unless they like the sudden changes.

I didn't fly too far, 'cause I didn't want to abandon Aric and Meghan, and I still had to groom myself, although I could wait until I got back to campus to do that. And when I circled back to his house, the bedroom window was closed, which I guess I should have expected, so I hovered right up beside it and knocked on the wall, and when Meghan turned around and saw me, I made lifting motions with my hooves so she'd open the window, and she pulled up her sweatshirt instead which wasn't what I wanted, although it was nice to see.

Then she came over and actually opened the window, and I didn't try to make a graceful entrance, but just got my forehooves over the sill and let them pull me the rest of the way in.

The ends of my mane and tail were frozen, and I had a lot of snow in my feathers and on my back, 'cause I couldn't shake it off while I was flying, so I went back into the bathroom, 'cause I didn't want to drip on Aric's floor, and I got back in the shower and shook off as much as I could, and Meghan came in with a towel and dried me off some.

Aric started Winston and made us coffee to drink, and he said that he was going to be studying and working on homework all day, and Meghan was, too. I was going to study some and also play with Caleb, Lindy, and Trinity.

So once we'd drunk our coffee and Winston was warmed up, we got our things and Aric dropped us off on campus. It was a little bit late for a proper breakfast, but me and Meghan went anyway, and had a quick meal so that we wouldn't be hungry all day, and then she kissed me and said she was going to go study, and I said that I was going to fly first, 'cause my little flight around Aric's had only made me want to fly more.

I put on my flight gear, which was still wet from last night, and then I went outside and called the airplane directors. The grumpy man gave me permission to fly, and he wasn't too happy that I was just going to stay over Kalamazoo, until I promised to stay under a thousand feet, and then he said it was okay, and he'd warn me if there were any helicopters coming.

I didn't want to fly over downtown this time, so instead I went south, and kind of flew the same route that had gotten me lost in the fog. And in the daytime, even with the snow blocking some of my visibility, it was kind of hard to believe that I'd managed to fly that far off-course without knowing it. From now on, I was going to remember to at least wear my watch whenever I went flying, 'cause it wasn't too hard to put on, and as long as I remembered to look at the distance and bearing to the nearest airport, I could get back to where I had been.

I went all the way down to the 94 Highway, and I'd picked up a lot of ice and snow and wanted to shake it off, but I couldn't do that very well when I was flying, so when I turned around, I landed at the far end of a golf course, even though the golfers didn't like it when I did that. But there weren't any of them out there today. I don't think you'd want to play a game with a small, white ball when it was snowing, 'cause you'd never find it after you hit it. And I landed right next to one of the little flags that marked the holes, and shook off and when I flew back into the air, I felt a lot lighter.

The snow was starting to stick to things, and it was making the city look a lot prettier. There was some stuff that it just melted right off, like the roads, but houses and trees and lawns were getting covered, and it had started to turn to lighter, fluffier snow, which was nice.

I took off again and nobody yelled at me even though I stayed low over the whole golf course until I got towards their resort house at the front, and then I climbed up until I was a few hundred feet up and made my way back to campus.

When I landed on the balcony, I shook off and stomped my hooves to knock all the snow off my legs, then I went inside and got undressed in our room. Peggy wasn't there, so she must have been in the art shop working on her project, and I thought that maybe if I had time I'd see if I could find her. I wasn't exactly sure where the art shop was, though, except that it was in the Fine Arts building.

I got together all my notes for thermodynamics and I called Crystal Dawn and then went over to her room, and we studied together until it was lunch time. She had a really nice room on the corner of the top floor of Hoben, and it had windows on two sides, so you had a really good view from her room. And I was kind of jealous of it, but I did like my room, too.

It was kind of distracting, though, because I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye and wanted to look closer and had to remind myself to focus on studying. I guess we could have pulled down the shades, although it would have been darker and gloomier in her room.

We studied until lunch, and I thought she was doing pretty well, especially for having started out so late, and she asked if we could do one more study session, and I thought that we could tomorrow. I didn't think that today would be any good, 'cause I didn't know how long it would take to hunt Pokemons, and I was gonna study more astronomy with Anna this afternoon anyways.

I went right to lunch, and there weren't very many people in the dining hall. I guess almost everyone was out studying or maybe playing in the snow. Anna and Reese were there, and so I talked to them, and we agreed to meet in my room to study astronomy, because Anna had been smart and had brought her things with her, and I hadn't been smart and had left mine in my room.

We were just getting ready to leave when Peggy arrived, and she had paint spots all over her arms and her clothes. She showed us a little movie of her catapult working—she said that she hadn't put the glitter in it yet because she didn't want to make a mess, and she also was using a wad of paper with a bunch of pennies in it so it weighed as much as an egg, because that meant she didn't have to clean that up, either. She said she had lost some pennies, but she didn't care because they weren't worth anything.

And it was really neat to watch—instead of having a stop-bar in the middle like most catapults did, its was on the base, so it would swing through a half-circle, and it slammed the paper down hard enough to tear it open and send some pennies flying off. She said that an egg didn't stand a chance.

Reese was a little confused about what the purpose of it was, and she said that it was supposed to be visually interesting, and there was nothing more visually interesting than making a mess. Reese said that it reminded him of the Rube Goldberg machine in the OK Go movie, and I didn't know what that was so he showed me on his portable telephone.

It was neat to see, but I didn't understand what the point of it was, and he said that that was the point, and I still didn't get it, until he explained that the machines were supposed to perform a very simple task in a very complicated manner. It seemed kind of silly to me, but it was fun to watch. And I guess that was the visually interesting part.

Me and Anna went outside and we didn't go to my room right away, 'cause there was snow on the quad and it was still snowing. So I started to play in the snow and roll around in it and she took off her backpack and made a snow angel, then she started making snowballs and throwing them at me, and I scooped some up with my wings and flung it at her, and that was a lot harder for her to dodge. But I had to be closer, so it was a good trade-off.

If the snowclouds had been lower, I could have flown up and gotten one and brought it back down, but I was having lots of fun playing down on the ground.

There wasn't enough snow on the ground yet and so after a little while, my hooves had started to make the snow muddy, and we decided that we needed to study anyway, so she used her hands to dust the snow off her clothes, and I shook myself off, and we went up to my room.

The two of us sat on my bed and we reviewed all the cards again, to make sure that we both knew everything that might be on the test. And then Anna thought that we might have pictures on the test, too, because astronomy was an observational science, and that was a lot harder to study, because even though we had our textbooks, the pictures had captions under them that said what they were, and even if we covered them, you could make a good guess about what it must be from where it was in the book.

But maybe that didn't matter, because it was just important to associate the picture with what it showed, and make sure that we knew all the details from it. So we looked through all the pictures in the book a couple of times, until Peggy came back and said that if I still wanted to, it was time to go meet Caleb and Lindy and Trinity.

She got dressed in her snow clothes, and when she was ready, she called Jeff to tell him that we were coming over. She said that way they'd be ready for when we got there, which was pretty smart of her to think of, although I wouldn't have minded waiting outside in the snow while they got their snow clothes on.

It was still snowing, and also a little bit foggy, which was really fun. We walked on the road, because it was clearer than the sidewalks, although I didn't like it as much because there was gritty salt on the road that kept poking at my frogs, and I finally said that I was going to walk on the sidewalk instead 'cause I'd rather be in snow than on sharp salt. And at first, I still had a little bit of pain in my left hind hoof, until I figured out that somehow a little bit of salt had gotten stuck between my frog and hoof wall, and I had to bend around and get it out, and it was a lot better after that.

I guess the salt doesn't bother people, because they've got shoes on when they walk in the snow. I bet if they had to walk around without shoes they'd grind the salt more finely.

When we got over to Jeff's house, Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were playing in the backyard, and I just flew over the fence, but Peggy had to go around to the gate to get in. It wasn't as strong a fence as the one behind her house, so she couldn't climb over it because she'd break it if she tried.

We all played in the snow for a little while—they were trying to make a snowman even though the snow wasn't very good for it, and I saw pretty quickly that they were also spending more time throwing snow at each other than working together, but they were having fun so that was what mattered. And Peggy helped them focus, 'cause Caleb would do what she told him to, instead of throwing snowballs.

So we did get a snowman made, although it didn't look much like a man, or a woman for that matter. But it was almost as tall as my head, and they stuck some branches in it for arms, and then Jeff gave them some prunes that they could use for eyes and a mouth, and a carrot for a nose. Peggy said that coal was the traditional thing to use for eyes and mouth, but these days most people didn't have coal any more. She said that only big power plants bought it any more, but it used to be that houses were heated with it, and people would get it delivered by the truckload and shovel it into their furnace.

Jeff brought us all hot chocolate so we could warm up some, and then he gave the kids their portable telephones and we all went out looking for Pokemons.

We split up a little bit, because Caleb and Peggy walked in the street and I walked on the sidewalk carrying Trinity, and Lindy walked with us. But they all worked as a team to find the Pokemons, and it didn't take them too long to find the first one, which was in the front lawn of a house. It was called an Articuno, which was pretty rare. It reminded me of a cockatrice, sort of, so I wasn't sure that it was safe to catch, but Lindy said that the Pokemons couldn't hurt them. It was pretty clever, though, and only Caleb was actually able to catch it.

Later, when we were close to Main Street, they also found a Vulpix, which was a cute fox-like thing, but he wasn't as crafty as a real fox, and all three of them caught him.

My legs were getting tired from carrying around Trinity, so she walked for a while, and we went onto campus and found a few more Pokemons which were pretty common ones that they already had. And up by Harmon, Trinity said that someone had put out a lure, but it hadn't attracted anything too exciting for them. They waited a little bit to see if something new would show up, but it didn't, and they were starting to get a little bit chilly from not moving around, even though they were wearing their snow clothes.

So we walked back to their house, and when we got to the top of the hill, I let Trinity get back on me, and ride ponyback the rest of the way back to her house. And Jeff had more hot chocolate, and he invited us to come in, so we sat at his kitchen table and drank hot chocolate, and he thanked me and Peggy for taking the kids around the neighborhood and said that he'd miss us. He said that we were always welcome at his house.

Me and Peggy hugged everyone before we left, 'cause neither of us knew when the next time we'd see them was, although I was determined that I'd visit them more before I went back to Equestria.

We had a few minutes back in our dorm to warm up, and Peggy said that I was making her feel cold, because on the way back home, I'd gathered some snow on my back. I explained how my undercoat kept the heat in, and if the snow was sticking to me and not melting, it meant that my coat was doing its job.

It was still snowing, and the ground was getting pretty well-covered. There were people on sleds and plastic trays who were sliding down the hill from the chapel, and they crashed a lot, but they didn't seem to mind—they'd get back up and brush themselves off and then go back up the hill to try again. Peggy said that she'd snowboarded it one winter but it wasn't all that much fun, because it wasn't much of a hill, and you had to be careful crossing the sidewalk, because it wasn't very good for the snowboard to go across it.

She said that one spring, a bunch of seniors had built a giant slip-and-slide on the hill, which was a plastic sheet that got covered with water, so you'd slide down it. And she said that had been a fun Saturday.

They had a pretty decent dinner, and they had scrod fillets to eat, which made me happy.

Everyone said that they hadn't gotten as much studying done as they'd wanted to, although I thought I was almost ready. I told Sean that we should study math one more time tomorrow, and told Anna that we should study some more astronomy, and that way it would all be fresh in my head for the finals, especially since I was studying with Crystal Dawn again tomorrow, and maybe thermodynamics with Lisa too.

And then we said that we'd all meet in Christine's room around eight, and get ready to go to the showers.

I didn't really have anything that I had to do before that, so I went with Peggy back to our room, and while she was studying, I was writing in my journal. And then I got started on a letter to my sister, too, 'cause I hadn't written her in a while. She'd probably been really busy with the late summer and fall storms; that was when you got hurricanes on the coast and even if they weren't coming towards your weather territory, they often spawned other storms that did, plus all the waves that came out of the storm meant that there were sometimes more rescue patrols. So I told her about what I'd been doing, and it felt really strange to be writing in Equestrian. I was out of practice at it, and I wondered if it would be possible if I stayed on Earth long enough, I'd completely forget how.

Before we went to Christine's, Peggy said that she wondered if she should put on a swimming underwear instead of her normal underwear, and I asked her what the point was if she was going to be taking it off anyway. And she said that she wasn't sure if she was going to take off her panties this time either, but I said that she should because it would be more relaxing, and she'd get used to it pretty quickly, and I said that if anyone tried anything bad I'd kick them. She decided she wanted to change anyways, but instead of wearing swimming underwear, she was going to wear a different set of normal underwear.

And we both remembered to take our towels, too, and then we went down to Christine's room. Sean and Meghan were already there, but it was a little while before Anna and Reese came, and it smelled like they'd been drinking a little bit, and Reese said he'd had to work up his courage a little bit and that was why.

Christine went to her bedroom and brought out the sign from last time, which she had kept in case we needed it again, and then all of us went over to Sean's dorm together.

She taped the sign to the door again, and then we went into the showers, and Christine went around and turned them on to let them warm up and start filling the room with steam, and then people started to get undressed.

Anna and Reese were kind of hesitant, and Christine said that if they were uncomfortable they could just wear their underwear and take it off later, and then Anna said that they hadn't known that that was an option, and so they'd made sure that they wouldn't wimp out by not wearing any, which Peggy thought was really funny. And I said that I should have suggested that to her.

Christine said she wasn't going to get out-nakeded by a pair of freshmen, and took off her underwear and went into the shower, and that kind of got everyone moving again. Sean was still wearing his, until Christine asked if she had to start explaining why Star Wars was better than Star Trek would ever be, and then Reese said that she should talk about Firefly instead, because Mal had actually been naked in one episode. And that was one that I hadn't seen.

So he took off his underwear, and Meghan finished getting undressed, too, and she went in the showers. Reese and Anna were really taking their time with getting their clothes off, and it was funny how Reese had taken off his shirt but not his pants, while Anna had done the opposite, 'cause her shirt was long enough to cover some of her legs.

Peggy decided that she wasn't going to be the last one wearing any clothes, so she took off her underwear and went into the showers, too, and that just left Reese and Anna standing by the bench, and they sort of waited until we weren't looking over in their direction before they joined us.

It was a little uncomfortable for everyone at first, until Christine started a water fight but holding her thumb over the nozzle of her shower so that she could make it spray in different directions, and pretty soon everyone was doing that. And Peggy went over and changed one of the showers so it was only making cold water and tried to spray people with that, until she miscalculated and got herself when she moved her thumb too far, and pretty soon everyone was laughing and giggling and having a good time.

The best part was that there was an unlimited supply of hot water, so we didn't have to hurry and finish up. We could play around as long as we wanted to.

Everyone was a lot more relaxed when we got done, and since the room was still nice and steamy, nobody hurried getting dressed. Both Anna and Reese said that once you got used to it it was a nice way to relax, and I said that I thought humans were dumb for not doing it more often, especially since the college had such nice big showers in some of the dorms.

Me and Meghan had to stop back at Trowbridge so that she could get clothes for tomorrow and I could get the Kama Sutra, and then we walked to Aric's house. It was really peaceful 'cause the snow kind of muted sounds, almost like fog would, and it was also brighter, since the snow was reflecting the street lights.

When we got there, Aric wasn't home, and I realized that I should have gone to the theatre, to see if Winston was there in the parking lot.

The key to his house was still under the mat, so we let ourselves in, and we went up to his room.

I got Meghan undressed and then she put her sweatshirt back on so she wouldn't get cold while we were looking through the Kama Sutra.

Most of the positions weren't too good for just two girls, but it gave us ideas for when Aric showed up.

She said we should get started without him, 'cause she was horny now, and she didn't think that Aric would mind if we were already having sex when he arrived.

We didn't get to find out, ' cause we were done and snuggling and talking when he finally came home, and after he'd gotten undressed, Meghan said that he'd arrived too late, and was gonna have to go to bed without sex.

But she was kidding, and it turned out well for Aric, 'cause we'd already had our pleasure, so we just focused on making him happy.

November 20 [Night Flight]

November 20

I'd wound up on the outside of the bed again, which I didn't mind because it meant that I could push the covers back to keep from overheating. If his room hadn't been heated, it would have been a nice temperature for me, but they would have been cold. Aric had a lot of hair on his body but it wasn't enough to be a proper coat. And Meghan had hardly any at all.

Even though it was still a little early, I started teasing Aric with my wing, which woke him up, and he looked at me and said that I was insatiable, and I said that he couldn't talk, 'cause he was hard, and then I rolled over so my rump was pressing against him and it didn't take any more convincing to get what I wanted.

We tried to be quiet and not move too much so Meghan wouldn't wake up, and it worked, 'cause she didn't until Aric got out of bed to go to the bathroom.

And she was kind of mad that we hadn't woke her up, so I let her have Aric all to herself when he came back, while I went downstairs and figured out how to make the coffee machine make coffee. It was a little more complicated than the one at the hotel, but not too much more difficult to use.

While it was brewing, we took a shower together and even though it was warmer in the house than it had been yesterday, Meghan thought it was still too cold to go to Aric's room without clothes, so she dried off in the bathroom. He thought it was too crowded in there, so he went to his room, and I stayed in the bathtub to give Meghan room to dry off.

After we'd gotten groomed and they'd gotten dressed, we decided that we'd go to Nina's for breakfast. Everyone got omelets and toast, and I let Aric have all my hash browns, 'cause I didn't like them all that much, and because the omelets that they had were lots bigger than the ones that they made at the dining hall, so it filled me up.

We stopped back at his house long enough to get our things, and we decided that we all ought to sleep in our own rooms tonight so that we'd be well-rested for our finals, especially since Aric didn't have one in the morning so he planned to stay up late and finish working on one of his assignments that he really should have finished sooner.

Aric drove us back to campus in Winston, and we kissed him goodbye and then went up to our rooms. And I put all of my class books and notebooks in my saddlebags, and then went to meet with Crystal Dawn again. When I got to her room, I also sent a telephone telegram to Lisa, to tell her that she could join us if she wanted to.

We'd studied for about an hour before Lisa sent a telegram back, and since we were still studying, I said that she should come over.

So then the three of us worked together until it was lunchtime, and when we finally put our notes and cards away, I told Crystal Dawn that I was proud of how much she'd improved in the little time we'd spent studying together, and Lisa thought so, too.

I went to lunch without taking off my saddlebags, and they had leftovers from yesterday's dinner, but I didn't mind too much, 'cause the scrod was still pretty good, although not as good as it had been when it was fresher.

Me and Sean and Anna figured out when we were gonna study, and it was a little bit complicated to figure out, 'cause they both had study groups for other classes that they were supposed to go to, so we had to plan around that. But we got it figured out: I was gonna study with Anna first and then Sean before dinner.

Peggy told us that her project was done but now she was a little bit worried that the professor might not like it. Christine said that anyone sensible would like it, because it was fun to watch, and I said that she was putting glitter in it, too, and that was fun.

Anna told her that that would make a huge mess, and Peggy shrugged and said that as long as it was a visually interesting mess, that was all that mattered.

I had a little bit of time in my room before going to Anna's, so I finished writing my letter to my sister, and then I sealed it up and put it in my saddlebags so that I could mail it at the mail hut later. Then I wrote in my journal until it was time to go to Anna's room.

She lived on the bottom floor of Crissy, in a suite like Christine had.

Her bedroom had half the walls covered with art that she'd drawn herself, mostly just pen and pencil sketches. It was mostly make-believe humans like elves and dwarves and fairies, but there were also a few monsters. There was also a plastic drinking cup which was filled with paper flowers, and she said that she made them when she was bored, which is why they were made out of playbills and not colored paper.

I thought that they were really pretty, so she gave me one, and I tucked it into my saddlebags carefully because it was really fragile.

We sat down on her bed and got out our astronomy, and spend the next hour reviewing the formulas and vocabulary one more time, and then looked through the pictures in the book until we were both certain that we knew what all the objects in space looked like, and then it was time for me to go to Sean's room and study calculus.

So I went up the hill to his room and I had to wait a little bit before he got there—he said that his last study session had been a little bit longer than he'd expected, and he hadn't wanted to be rude and leave early.

I hadn't minded, 'cause while I was waiting in the hallway for him to arrive, I'd had a nice conversation with a woman named Allison, who was a freshman that said she was going to get a degree in social justice, and I wasn't sure what that was, so she explained how it was making sure that everyone got equal rights, which I agreed was important.

Of all my classes, I think that I was the most prepared for the math class, 'cause there hadn't been any tables of elements that I'd had to learn, or things above the sky that I'd never dreamed of, and a lot of the formulas were pretty self-evident if you sort of took a minute to think about what you were trying to do, but it was still good to have the review, and our textbooks had other problems in them which we had never done as homework, since the answers were printed in the back. But that was good for us, 'cause we could practice them and then see for ourselves if we'd gotten the correct answer. I could have done that on my own, but it was more fun to do it with someone else, and since it wasn't homework, we both worked through the problems together, which let us discuss how we were going to solve them if there was more than one way, and why we needed to use the solution we'd found.

And since it was tradition, once we'd finished with our math, we watched a couple of short Numberphile movies. The first one was a foolproof test for primes, called the AKS test. And James explained how mathematicians had used a Fermat test which was good, but not always right, while this one was always right but not as fast.

After that, we watched Matt Parker try to make a magic square and fail. He said that nobody had ever found a true magic square made up of square numbers, and there was a prize for the first person who did, which I thought was a pretty clever idea because it would make people interested in trying, like he had. And then he got a little mad at the end, 'cause Brady decided to call his imperfect square the Parker Square. I thought he should still be proud of it, because I couldn't make a magic square.

I went back to my room long enough to take off my saddlebags, and I put my math and physics textbooks on the desk, because after dinner I was going to try to draw the math letters one more time, just to be sure that I could get them all right, and then I was going to fly around some.

Sean had been right; they had a Thanksgiving dinner, and they'd made the dining hall all nice, too. There were cloths on the tables, and candles, too, and they'd turned down the lights. They had their omelet cook cutting off pieces of ham and turkey for people who wanted it, and then they had all sorts of other Thanksgiving food, and I decided that I'd try most of it, and even without trying any of the meat, I still managed to completely fill my plate with the different kinds of mashed potatoes and green bean salad and cheese grits and a dinner roll and a little bit of cranberry sauce, and it was all really good.

Everyone at the table had plates loaded with food, and nobody was complaining about any of it for once, except that Reese said that we were all going to eat so much food that when we got back to the dorms we'd just fall asleep and then not be able to finish studying and we'd all fail our classes and have to come back an extra year, and Christine told him that it was worth the risk.

I was pretty full by the time I'd finished my plate but everyone said that I couldn't skip dessert, especially because it turned out that the pumpkin pies and sweet potato pies had actually been properly made—Peggy said that they had never before had actual, home-made pies for dessert and it was some sort of a miracle. And they were really tasty. I had a little bit of each one, just small slices because if I ate much more I wasn't going to be able to fly at all. I'd just be stuck on the ground, flapping my wings uselessly and trying to get airborne.

After dinner, I was kind of sleepy, just 'cause I was so full, and my room was too hot and I almost fell asleep while I was practicing my math letters, and if I had I would have swallowed my clicky pen.

So after the third time my head dropped and made a mess of my math letter, I got up and went outside and rolled around in the snow a little bit which cooled me off a little bit, but also just moving around some really helped wake me up, at least enough to finish up practicing all my math letters.

Then I put on my flight gear and went outside for an evening flight. I got permission from the airplane directors, and I left from the balcony and flew north of town, towards the Nature Center. It was a beautiful night, although it was overcast so I couldn't see any stars, which was too bad. But all the lights of Kalamazoo looked really pretty, and the snow-cover on the trees and ground, too.

It was a little odd to not have my usual landmarks to navigate by—everything looked a bit different by night, and once I got out of town, there weren't so many lights to help me, and either the moon hadn't come up yet or else the clouds were covering it completely. I wasn't sure which, because the Earth moon didn't follow the same rules as the Equestrian moon.

There were tables of when it would rise, and I guess I could have observed it and predicted it using the formulas that Professor Miller had taught us, although if I was going to make my own lunar chart I ought to have started working on it a lot sooner. I couldn't even remember when I'd last seen the moon in the sky. It wasn't yesterday, 'cause it had rained or snowed or been overcast all day long, and it hadn't been Friday, 'cause there had been the storm that I'd flown in, and I couldn't remember if I'd noticed it on Thursday before I went to bed or after I woke up.

I thought that it probably comforted humans to know that it followed rules of the universe which kept it in the sky and kept it predictable, and I wondered if Luna stopped helping our moon if it would just orbit harmlessly on its own. Or what if Celestia stopped moving the sun? But those were worrisome thoughts, because when I was a filly they had stopped moving, until Princess Twilight got them moving again. And everypony had lost their cutie marks, and their magic too, and it was a really scary time until they all came back again. I didn't like to think about it, even though I'd been too young to have a cutie mark to lose.

My navigation was a little bit off, 'cause I was following lights on the wrong road, but once I got close, I saw the big snow-covered prairie patches, and I angled off to my right to fly over them.

The deer were grazing below me, even though it was dark and they should have been asleep in their beds. So I was glad that I was high enough that I wasn't scaring them off, and I went northeast along the river a little bit before dropping down and coming over the trees that way.

And I had to be careful not to fly too close to the trees, 'cause it would have been easy to accidentally get tangled in their branches in the dark. Then when I was reaching down for my landing, I realized that I couldn't see the path at all, but I could kind of guess where it was, because there weren't lumps of grass sticking up where the path went, but nobody had been around it since it had snowed, so I guess I was going to be the first.

I turned my blinking light off, and then just waited for the spots in my eyes to disappear, 'cause I hadn't been able to turn the light off without looking at it. And then I could faintly make out the path in front of me, from the lights of the city reflecting off the clouds, so I make my way around it, first at a walk, because I could take my time and make sure I was actually on it, and then the second time around I trotted, since I could follow my own hoofprints.

I didn't want to go any faster than that, although I could have—it was really easy to see the disturbed snow where I'd been. But too much exercise might actually wake me up, and then I'd have trouble falling asleep when I got back to college, plus I didn't want to go to bed all lathered up, and I didn't want to take a shower tonight, either.

So I slowed back down to a walk until I got to the top of the hill, and then I just stood there for a few minutes, listening to the distant noises of the city and the closer noise of a car driving by on Westnedge. If I focused my ears to the east, I could hear the river gurgling along the bank, and the wind making the trees creak and groan, and I also heard the distant howl of a dog or maybe a coyote.

Then I turned my blinking light back on and took off, but I didn't go back to college. I flew north and west, all the way to D Avenue and the 131 Highway, and then I followed the 131 Highway south. I saw a tow truck with its lights blinking on the side of the road, trying to pull a car out of the ditch. It must have gone in yesterday, 'cause the car was pretty well covered with snow, and it hadn't snowed at all today.

It was probably smarter to work at night anyways, 'cause there weren't so many cars on the highway, and the truck wouldn't get in anyone's way.

I went south, past Main Street, and all the way to the railroad bridge, and then I turned to follow the tracks back to campus. And even though it was a little ways off, a gust of wind brought me the smell of donuts from the Donut Mill, and for a moment I thought about going there and getting a snack for me and Peggy, except I'd eaten a really big dinner, and two pieces of pie, so I didn't need more food today, even if it did smell really good.

I kept high, just to make sure that I didn't run into any wires by mistake—the only other way I could be sure to avoid them was to go so low that I was at train-level, and that wouldn't be smart, 'cause a train could sneak up on me.

I could see the top of Stetson Chapel's bell tower by the time I got to Howard Street, so I angled away from the tracks and flew a direct path over Western's campus to get to it. And I mostly glided the last bit and then when I got over the quad I forgot that humans aren't used to looking up for ponies or other humans when someone who was pulling his sled up the hill turned around and saw me coming and dived to the ground while all his friends at the top of the hill laughed at him. But I felt bad, and I landed and gave him a hoof up.

He was drunk and laughing, too, so he wasn't mad at me. And I used my wing to help brush the snow off his jacket and pants, and we walked up the hill together.

They convinced me to join them and try sledding, so I turned off my blinking light and tried, and I stood up like I would on a snowboard which wasn't how they were doing it at all, but it worked until the sled slowed down and I didn't. But I did manage to get my wings out quick enough to get clear of it, although I hit the bow of the sled with my hooves, and when I turned around I saw that I'd flipped it upside-down.

All of them thought that I'd done it on purpose, and wanted me to do it again, so I grabbed hold of the tow-rope the sled had, and carried it back up to the top of the hill, and then I did the same thing again, only this time I went down with my wings already out, and cleared it completely. And then I said that I was going back to my room and they were kind of disappointed.

The flying and trotting and sledding had done me good, and by the time I got up to the room, my mind was clear of any distractions, and I looked at all my books and thought about studying some more, but I felt like I was as ready for the finals as I was going to get, so I took off my flight gear and stretched out on top of the covers.

Peggy set her book down on her bed and asked me if I wanted to have one drink for luck before tomorrow, and I said that I probably shouldn't, but I did anyway because she made me a white Russian. When I get back to Equestria, I'm going to have to teach Zucche how to make them.

She asked if I was ready for my finals, and I nodded, then asked her if she was ready for hers, and she said that she hoped so. And she said that she was too old for all-nighters, so she was just going to hope that when tomorrow came, she'd studied enough.

I asked her if she wanted to get up early and trot around the neighborhood, and she had to think about that for a while, until she decided that morning exercise might help her focus on her test, so she said that she would like to go trotting with me. So before she turned the lights out, she looked for clothes that she could wear for tomorrow that were clean enough—she said that she wasn't going to do any more laundry until she got back to Colorado Springs.

And once she'd found them, she took my glass and her own and rinsed them out in the little kitchen that was down the hall from our room, so they wouldn't get mold overnight, and then she turned out the lights and we went to bed.

November 21 [Monday Finals]

November 21

When I woke up, I felt like I was all ready to take my finals, and I almost wish that I could have gone straight to Dow and started right away, 'cause I wouldn't have time to get nervous if I went right now. But I couldn't; nobody would be there. And I'd just be standing in the hallway outside of the classroom, getting more and more worried about my final until Professor Brown showed up, so I was just going to have to wait and go to class at the normal time. It wasn't a lot of fun to have to wait when you were all ready to do something.

I looked over at my desk and thought that maybe I could do just a little bit more studying before I woke Peggy up to go trotting, but that was a foolish thought. If I wasn't ready now, I wasn't going to be, and looking through the book a little bit wasn't going to change that. Maybe humans could cram a bunch of knowledge in their head and have it stick long enough to take the final exam, but I couldn’t.

So I looked out the window and thought about opening it, but that would make Peggy cold. And then I felt like I couldn't wait any more, 'cause I was starting to get restless, so I got my camelback and went into the bathroom and filled it up, then I put it on and decided to put on my watch, too, just in case I went flying somewhere and got lost. Plus that way I would be sure to be to class on time. And then I shook Peggy's shoulder until she woke up.

She yawned and then got out of bed and started to get dressed, and she gave me a couple of her water bottles that I could stick in the extra pockets in my camelback so she'd have something to drink, and then she stretched out and said that she was ready to go.

We went our usual way, and we got to Jeff's kind of early, since we'd left earlier than usual. So we went back around to Grand Avenue and back up, and then when we got back, there still wasn't anyone outside, but I looked at my watch and it said that it was almost time for them to be waiting for the bus.

Peggy said that maybe they didn't have school this week because of the holiday, but just then Trinity came running out the door and practically tackled me in a hug. She said that she'd seen us go by the first time and had wanted to come out but they were still eating breakfast and Jeff wouldn't let her and he'd said that we'd be back and now we were.

Lindy and Caleb came out too, and we talked and I gave Trinity a short ponyback ride. Caleb really wanted Peggy to go Pokemon hunting again, but she shook her head and said that we were leaving Wednesday morning for Colorado and she wouldn't be back until next year.

I told them that I would be, at least some, until the end of the year, and then I had to go back to Equestria. Caleb wanted to know if there were any Pokemons in Equestria and I said that I hadn't seen any, but I'd look and see. And then I hugged the girls and hoof-bumped Caleb, 'cause their bus had come, and me and Peggy stood there and watched as it went away.

It took me a minute to focus back on trotting, and I kind of wanted to chase the bus just to maybe see them a little bit longer. But I was sure that there would be another time in December.

I got a bit ahead of Peggy, 'cause I'd slipped into a slow canter since it was a little bit easier on my hooves, and I had to concentrate to slow back down, so for the next couple of blocks, I just paid attention to them, and matching them up with Peggy's foot-falls.

We didn't talk too much, 'cause both of us were thinking about our finals and the year coming to an end, and it seemed like it was all of a sudden, and we weren't really prepared for it. And I think that we went a little bit further than we usually did, but neither of us was paying very much attention to our route.

I was panting and pretty well lathered by the time we finally got to Trowbridge, and Peggy's shirt was completely soaked in sweat, and it felt nice to stand outside the door and cool off for just a minute, but then she started to get cold and let us in the dorm.

When we got up to the bathroom, the shower was in use, and Kat was waiting. She said that it seemed like everyone had morning finals today, so we both sat down and Peggy took off her shirt and used it to wipe the sweat off her.

Ruth came out of the shower and she waved to us, and while we were waiting for Kat, Rebekka showed up, and she said that she might have to skip a shower, since everyone was waiting. Peggy said that the two of us could save her some time, and when Kat got out Peggy told me to come in with her, which I hadn't expected.

She didn't help wash me, and I didn't help wash her, either, 'cause I wasn't sure that she'd like that, but it was still nice to not be alone, and Peggy said that it was good for the environment, too, 'cause we were using less water, and we were also saving time, which was good for Rebekka.

Peggy finished a little bit before I did, 'cause soap rinsed off her faster than it rinsed off me, especially since I had my winter coat growing in, so she dried herself off and waited off to the side until I'd finished. Then I told her that she should get out before I shook off, or else I'd get her wet.

Rebekka was happy that we'd left her with enough time to take a shower, and she went in as soon as I went out, and I groomed myself but when I'd started preening my wings I thought that if Meghan was at breakfast she might like to do it, so I only tidied them up some. I guess if she wasn't at breakfast, I'd do them myself in the lobby.

I got my saddlebags and checked one more time to make sure that I had enough pens, and also a notebook with lots of blank pages in case Professor Brown ran out of paper and I needed to provide my own.

Then we went to breakfast, and there were omelets, so I got one, and Peggy did, too. And when we sat down, Anna and Sean were both studying, and Reese wasn't there, 'cause he didn't have a final in the morning, and Christine was making stacks out of her fruit loops. They were kind of soggy, 'cause she was fishing them out of her bowl. She said that they stuck together better when they were wet, but sometimes they'd just fall apart in her spoon. And they left pretty colored trails on the plate.

Meghan only had a few crumbs left on her plate, and she said that she hadn't been all that hungry. Then she asked if she could preen my wings for me, so I stuck one on her lap and let her work on it while I ate my omelet. That was kind of rude of me, but omelets weren't as good when they were cold, and I don't think she minded.

I'd finished my food by the time she was done, so I moved to the chair on the other side of her and let her do that one, too. And I thought that she was a little bit more relaxed when she'd finished, 'cause she started petting my coat, and then just leaned down and nuzzled my forehead.

Christine finally demolished her fruit loop towers, but she didn't eat too many of them, and her tray was half-covered with soggy fruit loops when she took it back. She said she'd lost her appetite when she started eating, 'cause she'd started to worry about her final.

I was a little bit nervous about mine, and when I went into class I had to resist the temptation to take out my textbook and start looking through it, so I got out all of my pens and put them in a neat little row and waited for Professor Brown to arrive.

I was glad I'd brought extras, 'cause Crystal Dawn had to borrow one, since she only had blue pens and those weren't allowed on the final exam.

All the studying I'd done had been worth it, 'cause as soon as Professor Brown passed out the test and I started reading it, everything was familiar. There were a couple of questions that were kind of tricky, and I made sure to mark every one where I wasn't absolutely sure of the answer so that I could check them first when I was reviewing my test. It was always smart to get everything done first and then go back and fix the things that you weren't sure about, rather than spend half the class worrying about one question and then not finishing the rest of it.

It did take me a little bit longer than I thought it would, but I had enough time to complete it and double-check every question and also think over the ones that I wasn't completely sure about until I was satisfied with the answer I had. Lisa finished before me, so I guess she was either more sure about her answers or else she didn't go back and check again.

I did feel kind of smug, though, 'cause when I was ready to turn in my test, I looked over and Crystal Dawn looked pretty confident, but Austin looked like he was completely lost. He had his forehead all scrunched up and was chewing on his pen. I guess he should have been studying with us, too, but now it was too late. Hopefully he'd learn for next time.

Before I left, I made sure to thank Professor Brown for teaching me about thermodynamics, and he said that it was his pleasure, and he hoped that I could use what I'd learned back in Equestria.

I didn't even go back to my room to take off my saddlebags, but just flew up from the Dow building and into the sky, and I did a big loop in the sky even though I probably should have been a little bit higher before I started. It was a good thing that the campus was on a hill, 'cause my loop bottomed out just over the tennis courts, and if the ground had been flat all around, I'd have made a hard landing. But that was okay; I was happy, so I got some altitude back and then did a big loop around campus and a wing roll when I went over each building, and then I came in fast across the quad and zig-zagged around the trees until I was in front of Trowbridge.

When I landed, I just held my hooves out and skidded to a stop on the snow, and then I went inside and pranced down the hallway.

I stripped off my saddlebags and put my math books inside, so I'd have them ready for later. And I realized that I hadn't gotten my pen back from Crystal Dawn, but that was okay because I had extras.

I also put the letter to my sister in my bag so that I could mail it, and then I turned on my computer to see what the weather was going to be. I was feeling kind of lazy and didn't calculate it myself, but just looked at the prediction, which said that tomorrow was going to be a lot like today, except clear instead of cloudy.

And I also checked my computer letters, and I'd gotten one from Mister Salvatore that said that I could stay on campus if I wanted or else they would find me an apartment or hotel room for when I was in Kalamazoo, and that I could leave everything that I didn't need to take with me to Colorado Springs in my dorm room and they would move it for me, which was really nice of them, 'cause it was one less thing that I had to think about.

Well, I didn't want to stay on campus, because I thought that it would be lonely with no one there. Maybe there would be some other people that I knew but I wasn't sure; everyone I'd talked to said that they were leaving until next year. So I thought it would be better to live somewhere else, as long as it was close, and I told him that. I was sure that Miss Cherilyn and him would find something that I'd like.

I went to lunch a little bit early and gave my letter to the clerk at the Mail Hut on my way in. And I was the first one to arrive at our table and so I could have sat wherever I wanted to, but I decided that I liked the seat I usually got, so I sat there, and I took my time eating, 'cause I didn't want to be all finished before anyone else arrived.

Reese showed up next, and he looked like he'd just woke up. And when I asked, he said that he had, 'cause he'd been up all night studying for his final. I didn't think that was too smart, because I thought he'd be tired now and maybe make dumb mistakes.

Peggy got there kinda late because she'd waited for me in the room, and then she'd figured out that I was already here, so I told her I was sorry and she said it was okay.

She had a movie of her art project that someone else had taken, and so she showed us all, and I thought it was really neat to see. It had flung the glitter in a really big arc, and smashed the egg right into the ground like she was hoping it would, and then the glitter all drifted down around it. And she said that her art professor had loved it, and had actually been clapping before all the glitter had landed on the ground. Peggy said she'd had to try really hard not to laugh, because inside she felt like she was cheating, since she'd made extra effort to be sure that the egg was smashed.

Me and Sean got to math a little bit early, so I thanked Professor Pampena before class started, and then we took our seats.

We had to sit down a little bit apart so that we couldn’t cheat. I pushed the pens kinda towards the middle just so that he'd have one if he needed it, and then we waited for everyone else to arrive so we could start the test.

I was a little bit more relaxed for this one, and there wasn't anything on it that I didn't know. And it was kind of strange, but when I read some of the questions I could hear Loreena McKennitt or Lisa Gerrard or Zaidi Zaidi in my head.

I got done and had checked over all my answers before Sean did, and I wanted to stay with him, but Professor Pampena wouldn't let me, in case I whispered answers to him, so I packed up my things but I left an extra pen for him just in case he needed it. And then I could have gone away, but I stayed in the hallway in case he needed a hug or a nuzzle when he was done with his test.

But when he came out he looked pretty satisfied with himself. And he said it hadn't been as hard as he'd thought it might be, and he gave me back my pen and asked me what I was going to do before dinner.

I said that I thought I'd send a telegram to Anna and see if she wanted to study more astronomy with me, unless there was something special that he wanted to do.

He said that he was going to go to his room and watch a couple of episodes of Star Trek before dinner and begin the process of forgetting all the math he knew until next quarter began. So I told him to have fun and got out my portable telephone and sent a telegram to Anna.

She answered right away, and told me to come over to her room, so I did. I probably should have gone back to mine and gotten my astronomy books, but I knew that she'd have hers, and we could study with those.

We worked until it was dinnertime, mostly looking at pictures one more time to make sure that we remembered what everything in the sky looked like up close, and also reviewing some of the vocabulary for me, and the formulas for her.

Reese came back from his final before we were done studying, and she had to let him in, 'cause he didn't have a key, and she was kinda distracted after that, but it was okay because I thought that we knew everything that we'd have to, and he looked like he needed a hug.

He said that his history test had been brutal, and he thought that Thucydides would be happy to know that he was still causing pain to students thousands of years after writing his book.

The three of us went to dinner together, and the food was decent, but what had everyone excited was that they had taken away one of the normal hot food tables and replaced it with a whole long table of ice cream and sauces to put on top of the ice cream, and they had almost a dozen different flavors of ice cream, and even one that wasn't made out of milk for people who couldn't have milk.

So everyone ate a kind of light dinner, and then we all had ice cream. I got mint chocolate chip which was very good, especially with some hot fudge on it, and Christine had gotten some Superman, and let me have a spoonful. I wasn't quite sure what flavor it was supposed to be, and she said that that was a mystery for the ages. Then Sean looked it up on his portable telephone and started to tell her, but she punched him in the shoulder and told him that it was supposed to remain a mystery and sometimes the internet took the fun out of things.

Peggy had gotten one called Moose Tracks, and that not only had chunks of chocolate in it but also little peanut butter cups and if I had known what that was when I was looking at all the flavors, I might have picked it instead.

Before I left the table, I made sure that no one was leaving tonight, 'cause I didn't want anyone to sneak away without me saying goodbye, and everyone promised that they'd be at breakfast tomorrow.

Me and Peggy went back to our dorm room together, and I told her that Mister Salvatore had said that I could leave behind anything that I didn't want to take with us, and she said that I was really lucky he was doing that for me. Then she asked if I wanted to pack up anything tonight and I probably should have, but I didn't have too much, and decided that I could do it tomorrow. And Peggy thought the same thing, so the two of us relaxed in our room together, and she made us both white Russians.

We'd emptied the bottle by the time that Meghan came by, so I gave her what was left of mine—I had maybe a half glass left—and the three of us talked about what we were doing for winter break, and then I packed up my flight gear and me and Meghan left for Aric's a little bit earlier than usual, 'cause she had a final in the morning.

When we got to his house, he was sitting on the couch with David and Angela, so we joined them. It was kind of crowded with five of us, so I stretched out on Aric and Meghan's laps.

They were watching a movie called Gone in 60 Seconds, and it was about a man who stole a yellow Mustang. Pretty much the whole movie was about him being chased by the police, and Aric said that the movie's fame came from the fact that the car chase lasted over forty minutes, and they had used the same car for the entire movie, even though it got kind of wrecked in the end. It was sort of exciting and sort of strange at the same time, and when I found out that Mister Pace had stolen the car that he was driving I felt bad for hoping that he would get away with it.

When the movie was over, Angela and David went downstairs, and me and Meghan and Aric went upstairs, and then got undressed for bed. Me and Meghan just wanted to snuggle for a while, and then we never wound up actually having sex, but we didn't mind. It was nice to just cuddle and fall asleep together.

November 23 [Road Trip to Colorado]

November 23

Peggy let me sleep in a little bit late, and she was all ready to go when she finally woke me up. She said that we could eat at the dining hall if we wanted to, or else we could just get some food on the road.

I asked her if she thought that anybody would be there, and she said that she didn't think that there would be. So I decided that it would be best to just leave, because it would be really depressing to be eating breakfast in an empty dining hall. So I went to the bathroom and then when I came back Peggy helped me fold up my sheets and put them in another box, and we put all my things on the bed so that Mister Salvatore could find them. I thought about folding up the papasan chair and putting it there, too, but then I thought that if they didn't notice it, maybe Peggy could use it, so I left it where it was.

And it didn't take all that long to put everything in its place, and my side of the room looked really empty all of a sudden.

Mister Salvatore had told me to leave my room key on my desk, so I did, and I wasn't sure how he would get in with my key on the desk, but he was clever and would find a way.

I put on my saddlebags, even though I'd be taking them back off again when I got to Cobalt, and on my way out of the room I took one last look at it, and I had a sudden urge to write my name on something so that people would know that I'd been there.

Peggy said I wasn't supposed to, but she opened her backpack and got out a Sharpie pen, and said that if I wanted to get away with it I had to put it somewhere that was not too obvious, but not too hidden either. So I looked around the room and I couldn’t think of anywhere to put it, until Peggy suggested that I pull my desk drawer all the way out, and write on the bottom of that.

She had to help me, because it had little latches that stopped it, and when we turned it over, some other students already had. There was a signature for Gillian Curtis ‘00 and also George Shipley ‘09, so I added Silver Glow ‘16. Then Peggy told me that I should have put the year in that I was actually graduating, but it was too late.

I felt a lot better after I’d done that, even though it was something that I really shouldn't have done. Sometimes it's nice to leave your mark on something that's going to stay around, and I was kind of thinking about who Gillian Curtis and George Shipley were.

The parking lot was really crowded, ‘cause people were all packing up and leaving and their parents had come to take them home.

I still had to go to the library to return my poetry book and the Kama Sutra, and I took them out of my bag so I wouldn’t forget. And I had to say goodbye to Meghan, too, so Peggy said that she’d take the books back to the library for me and then I could just meet her in front of it.

So I went back into the dorm so that I could say goodbye to Meghan before we left. At least I'd get to see her again, after I got back from Colorado, but it was still nice to let her know that I was leaving.

She was in the middle of packing, 'cause I guess she'd put it off a little bit longer than she should have. But she was mostly done, and she said that Aric was going to come over to help her finish up, and I asked if he'd left yet, and she said that she didn't think he had. So I hugged her and kissed her and promised that I'd come over as soon as I got back, and told her to have a happy Thanksgiving.

I went out the upstairs back door and flew off the balcony, and up and over Trowbridge and the front of the quad, and then I dropped down on the sidewalk in front of the library. Peggy was sitting a little ways back from the stop sign, and she had made the lights on Cobalt blink so that people would know to go around her. She had to do that because she wasn’t in a proper parking spot.

On our way out of Kalamazoo, we stopped by Aric's house, too, and I went upstairs and woke him up, and then I told him that Meghan was waiting for him, and he looked at his portable telephone and said that he'd forgotten to set his alarm. Then he told me to have fun on my trip, and I said that I would. And we kissed, and then I flew out his window and got a mouthful of sunflower seeds before he could stop me.

I felt kind of guilty that Peggy couldn't eat them, or else I’d have gotten her some, but when I got back to Cobalt, she was snacking on a granola bar, and then I didn't feel so bad.

She said that we ought to put some miles behind us before we stopped for a real breakfast, and so we drove along Main Street until we got to the 131 Highway, and then we took that to the 94 Highway, because it was just like we were going to Chicago at first, except that we weren't going to stop there.

We drove for almost an hour and then stopped for breakfast in a town called New Buffalo, and I asked Peggy if she knew where old Buffalo was. She said that there was one in New York, but she didn't know if that was the one it was named after or if there was another Buffalo somewhere, but she thought that that was probably the one, because it was a big city, and it was also near the end of one of the Great Lakes, and it snowed a lot there because of that.

There was a pancake restaurant there called Flip's, and they had waffles, so I got one with pecans. Peggy had pancakes, and she shared one of them with me in exchange for a quarter of my waffle, which I thought was fair. And it was kind of close to the railroad tracks, and I heard an Amtrak go by while we were eating. It sounded like it was heading to Kalamazoo.

She also got gas for Cobalt at a Speedway, and some drinks and snacks for us, in case we wanted something to snack on while we were driving.

Peggy told me that in the wintertime, she liked to make sure that she never went below a half-tank of gas, because you never knew when you might get caught in a snowstorm or be stuck in traffic because people had crashed their cars. She said that once we got into the plains, there could be a blizzard and so far the weather looked like it would cooperate, but that it could change pretty quickly, and it was good to be prepared.

When we got to the sign that welcomed us to Indiana, she said that one of the highlights of the trip was going to be those signs, and unfortunately after the one for Iowa, we were going to not see another one for a real long time.

I was familiar enough with the route to Chicago that it felt like we'd missed our turn when she went straight instead of heading into Chicago, and I looked out my window at the skyscratchers that I could sort of see off in the distance, and I wondered what Cayenne was doing right now. And then the view of Chicago was gone, and after a little bit we got onto the 80 Highway, and Peggy told me that we'd be staying on it for about forever. I wanted to know if we were going all the way to the end, and she said we wouldn't be, but it would feel like it by tomorrow.

We got slowed down by traffic—there were cars and trucks as far as I could see, all pressing in around us and just slowly crawling along the road. I really didn't like when we were right next to big semi-trucks, 'cause you'd just look out the side and see their underbellies that were as high as the roof of Cobalt, and it felt like if they wanted to, they could just trample us under their tires. They didn't bother me as much when we were moving quickly, because we'd just zip right past them.

Peggy told me that this was the part of the trip that she hated the most, because there was never any time that you could go around Chicago quickly. She said that there was always lots of traffic.

And it took us more than an hour before we finally got free of it, and could pick up speed again. The road was still pretty crowded, but there was enough room to move around and get by the slower cars and trucks, and once we got past the 55 Highway, it got a little bit clearer.

There was a rest area just past Minooka, and we stopped there so that we could pee and stretch our legs out some, because it got uncomfortable to sit in the car for too long. Peggy said we'd have a longer break when we got lunch but it was important for her to stretch out because it kept her alert.

That was when we got back into farmland, too. There had been little patches of farms before, but mostly since we'd gotten to Indiana it had been all the towns that clustered around Chicago, one right after the other, and I guess Minooka was the last of them.

We passed by an airport that was on our left, and that was really fun because there were big airplanes going over the highway as they took off and landed, and then we got to a long bridge that had an arched section in the middle, and that took us over the Mississippi River, which was the border between Illinois and Iowa, and we had to go through a big interchange and not too long after that there was a farm that had a round barn, and then a bunch of signs for gas, and Peggy said that this was where we were stopping for lunch and more fuel for Cobalt.

She said that this was the biggest truck stop in the world, and I could believe it. There were trucks everywhere, coming and going, and giant parking lots full of them. I think that a pony could learn a lot about trucks just by watching them here, because there were so many different kinds of them. And a lot of them were really colorful and had silver plating all over them, and lots and lots of lights, too, although the lights were kinda hard to see in the day.

They had lots of restaurants inside, even a Taco Bell, but Peggy said that I couldn't eat there. She said that we were going to have a proper, sit-down meal, so we went to the Iowa Kitchen instead. And I had catfish, which was pretty good, and Peggy had a meatloaf which the menu said was just like Mama made. I asked her if her Mom made meatloaf like that because mine had never tried. And she said that this was better than her Mom's, because she burned it every time and put too much catsup on it. But she told me not to tell her that, if it happened to come up in conversation.

After we'd eaten, we walked around a little bit. They had a big store that sold food and stuffed animals and movies and all sorts of things that you could put in or on your truck, and they also had a museum that had old trucks in it, and that was really neat, too. Some of them didn't look like much more than a farm wagon with a motor, and then as they got more modern, they were bigger and bigger.

We probably could have spent a couple of hours looking at all the displays, and I kind of wanted to, but I knew that Peggy wanted to get home, so after I'd seen all the trucks and some of the more interesting displays, I told her that I was ready to go if she was, so we went back outside and she said that she had to put gas in Cobalt, and if I stayed close I could fly just a little bit and stretch out my wings but I had to watch and be careful of all the cars and trucks.

So I just circled around the gas pavilion, high enough up that I wasn't in any danger of being hit by a passing truck, and watched the traffic rush by on the 80 Highway.

When she drove away from the pump, I looked for cars and then landed next to Cobalt, and she opened the door so I could get it, and we got back on the highway.

And after we were past it, Iowa got kind of boring, because it was mostly lots and lots of fields, and since it was the winter, there wasn't much to see. Plus it was kind of a gloomy day, but Peggy said it was a lot nicer than doing this drive when it was snowing. She said one year it had taken her three days to get to Colorado Springs, because the weather had been bad.

We had to wait to pass a truck that was carrying a big metal drum, and it had another little truck behind us to warn people who were coming up behind it, and then when we got in front of it, there was another truck with a big pole on its front. Peggy said that was so they would know if the pole hit something that the load wouldn't fit, which is why the pole-truck was so far in front. It had flashing lights to warn people, too.

We stopped at a rest area before we got to Iowa City, and had a short break, and then she drove on. There was a little bit more traffic there, but the city wasn't all that big, and before too long we were back out in farmland again, and we stayed in farmland until we got to Des Moines, which was the biggest city in all of Iowa, and the traffic got thick again, but it wasn't as slow as it had been in Chicago.

She stopped outside Des Moines so that she could get more gas for Cobalt and so we could get food. There was a gas station called Kum and Go, and she said that she didn't know if they'd named it that on purpose, or if they had never thought of the alternate meaning. But she said that she liked to stop at them when she was driving through Iowa, 'cause it made her laugh.

They had pre-made sandwiches in plastic bags, and I looked at them when we went inside, 'cause I thought that was what we were going to get to eat, but she said that gas station sandwiches gave you worms, and I didn't want worms.

There were a bunch of other restaurants, though, and so we went to one called Quiznos, which had toasted subs. And we ate them there, then walked around the parking lot a little bit to stretch out our legs before getting back in Cobalt.

She asked me how much further I wanted to go today—she said that she liked to get into Nebraska before stopping for the night, but she'd stop now if I wanted to. And I told her that we should get to Nebraska before stopping, so we got back in Cobalt and got back on the 80 Highway.

We'd only driven a little while before I started to see wind turbines poking up south of the highway, and there were lots and lots of them. Peggy said that Iowa was one of the biggest wind producers in the United States, and at first I thought she meant that they made the wind, and I didn't think humans could do that, and then she said that she meant that they made electricity from the wind. Which was what I had thought wind turbines were for.

It was getting towards dusk, and all of them had a blinking red light so airplanes and pegasuses would know not to fly into them and get chopped up by the blades. Lots of towers did, but what made these strange was that all the red lights blinked at exactly the same time.

There was also a rest area on the other side which had an extra blade from one of the turbines, and it was really big. I hadn't ever gotten close enough to one to realize how big they were, but the blade towered over the building.

Peggy said that when they were building it, she saw trucks carrying those blades and pieces of the tower on the highway all the time, but now that it was finished she didn't see them as much any more.

We crossed over another bridge to get into Nebraska, because the Missouri River was between it and Iowa. And we were in a pretty big city that was called Omaha, which was the biggest city in Nebraska.

The road got a bit crowded again, but Peggy said that it wasn't as bad as it could be, because we'd missed the evening rush hour. And I thought that we were going to stop there, but she wanted to go a little bit farther, because she said that in the morning there would be lots of people rushing to get to work and we didn't want to be there for that, so she kept on driving until she got to Lincoln, which is the capital of Nebraska.

We got off the highway there, and drove down a city road, and we passed a restaurant called Sonic, where you ate in your car, and I thought that looked kind of funny because all the cars were nosed up under an awning like they were feeding from a trough.

Peggy stopped at a hotel called the Red Roof Inn, although it looked like it had a flat roof, so I couldn't see if it was actually red or not. Humans like to name things for what they aren't, so you can't always be sure that something is what it says it is.

We got a room on the second floor, and it wasn't as nice as some of the hotels I'd been at, but I liked it because it had windows that actually opened so I could go in and out that way if I wanted to. Although it would have been kind of crowded to get in, and there was also a screen on it.

I wanted to fly, but Peggy said that I probably shouldn't in town, and she promised me that tomorrow we'd stop at a nice, open rest area and I could fly around there. And she said that she should have thought of that today, but I knew she'd been focused on getting as far as we could in one day, so I hadn't asked her.

Peggy said that she was going to take a long shower to relax, and so she got her bag and went into the bathroom, and I didn't have anything to do so I got on the bed next to the window and stretched out and it felt good to be on my belly instead of my rump. And the bed was plenty big enough, so I rolled over on my back and stretched out and then I got into my saddlebags and got my brush so I could get the tangles out of my tail.

There was a big flat television on the wall, and a controller for it by the beds, so I turned it on and looked through the channels and I found one that called itself the weather channel, but instead of showing the weather they had a movie about women and men who were looking for gems, and I guess that humans had a really hard time finding them, and when they did they didn't look like proper gems at all.

There were a lot of commercials, too, and I was kind of proud of myself that I knew what most of the things were that they wanted me to buy.

When Peggy came back out of the bathroom, she looked a lot more relaxed. She had her sleeping clothes on already, and she said that she felt a lot better now, then she asked if this was the best thing I'd found to watch, and I said that I hadn't really looked. So I gave her the control and she found a movie about fishermen in Alaska, and that was pretty exciting, and made me think of home.

We watched that until it ended and a movie about Moonshiners came on. Neither of us were very interested in it, and it was pretty late anyway, so we decided that we'd just go to bed, and we could get up early tomorrow and drive the rest of the way to Colorado.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Lord Legion for telling me what there is to see on the I-80 corridor

November 24 [Thanksgiving]

November 24

Both of us woke up early, 'cause Nebraska is in a different time zone, and Peggy said that she wanted to get on the road as soon as we could so that we'd get to her house in plenty of time for Thanksgiving dinner.

I took a shower while she was getting dressed and packing up her things, and then I groomed my coat on the bed, but I left my wings alone—I could preen them in Cobalt, as long as she didn't mind a few stray feathers. And then we looked through the room one more time to make sure that we hadn't forgotten anything, then went downstairs to check out of our room.

The morning clerk wasn't too happy to see me with her and when he put his head down to look at the computer I heard him mutter that he ought to charge extra because of me, and I thought if he did that would be really unfair, 'cause I hadn't used as much of the bed as a human would, and we hadn't used the exercise room or swimming pool, either, and we weren't going to eat their breakfast. So he should have charged us less.

But I didn't say anything until we were putting our bags in Cobalt, and Peggy said that she would check her credit card statement and if there was so much as one extra dime on it she'd call them and yell at them, and if that didn't work she'd have her Mom do it, and if they still wouldn't listen to reason than she'd tell Mister Salvatore. And I thought he'd like that, because he did like being angry at people when they were bad.

So that we could get some exercise, we walked to the International House of Pancakes, which wasn't even a kilometer away. There wasn't a sidewalk, and even though it was so early it was dark out, there was too much traffic on the road to walk on it, so we followed a thin dirt trail that ran alongside the road.

It wasn't very busy when we got there, and we sat down at a booth that was by the windows, and when our waitress came we got coffee and then we both ordered pancakes. They had lots of different kinds, and so between the two of us we got six different ones, and cut them all in half so we could each try all the different flavors.

I liked the grain and nut pancake the best, and Peggy's favorite was the New York cheesecake, which was also good. And when we were done eating, I used my plastic money-card to pay for the food, even though she said that she could pay. I thought that since she was paying for all the gas for Cobalt, it was fair for me to contribute, too. I thought about asking if I could help her out by driving some, but I didn't think I'd be very good at it, and I wasn't supposed to anyways.

When we were walking back, she told me that it was going to be a long day of driving and she hoped that I was ready for it. She said that it would be shorter than yesterday, but I was going to be really sick of Nebraska by the time we got to the end of it.

She put gas in Cobalt before we left Lincoln, and once we got past the city, it was all farmland, and even the road was almost straight for miles and miles. There weren't a lot of cars, but there were lots of trucks. Peggy said that probably most people were already home for Thanksgiving and that was actually good for us, because that meant that the road would be more open.

We passed by signs for a town that was called McCool Junction, and that sounded like an interesting place to visit. I bet Mister Salvatore would have stopped there, but Peggy didn't. And it had been a good choice to wait and preen my wings while we were on the road, 'cause there wasn't much to see. I had to be careful not to stretch out too far, though, and hit Peggy by mistake, so it was a little bit uncomfortable.

We'd been driving for almost two hours when Peggy said that it was time to stop and stretch our legs and that there was a special museum up ahead that she thought I would like to see, although we couldn't spend a whole lot of time at it. She said that it was called The Archway and it was about people traveling west before there was an 80 Highway for them to drive on.

It was really interesting because it had been built right over the highway, like a bridge, and it was really pretty inside, too. There were lots of displays that told how people had moved west along the Platte River, and all the different trails that had converged at a fort near it. And then it talked about the railroad and the Pony Express, which actually used horses to deliver the mail. I told Peggy that lots of pegasuses were also mailponies, 'cause we could carry mail almost anywhere, and there was also a special team of pegasuses for important Royal mail and messages.

They had displays about the railroad that had been built across the country, too, and the early roads that were there before there was an 80 Highway, and there was even a guest book that we could sign. There weren't any windows over the highway, though, which was too bad, because I thought it would be fun to look at cars and trucks going by from above.

We skipped the gift shop, 'cause Peggy said that we didn't have enough time to look at the things there, and then we got back in Cobalt and drove until we got to a rest area which was near Cozad.

After we'd peed, I went outside and flew around while Peggy watched. It was all fields on one side, but on the other it was forested and there was a river running along next to the 80 Highway. So I flew over there, but I made sure to keep looking back so that I could always see the rest area, 'cause I didn't want to get lost in the middle of Nebraska and make us late for Thanksgiving dinner.

So I only stayed in the air for about a quarter of an hour, and then I glided back over the highway and landed next to Cobalt, and Peggy opened the door for me, and we got back on the road.

There was a sign alongside the highway telling us that we were going into the Mountain Time Zone, and it felt a little bit strange that the time changed but the sun didn't move at all. And I wondered how confusing it was to people who lived right next to it, 'cause they could just walk a few feet one way or the other and it would change what time it was.

We stopped just before going into Colorado at a Flying J, which was also a truck stop. They didn't have a museum or as many different choices for lunch, just a Subway and a Cinnabon, so we got a footlong sub and shared it, and Peggy put more gas in Cobalt.

The Platte River was north of us now, 'cause we'd crossed over it a couple of hours ago, but it was still really close to the highway, so I went out and flew over it, and went a little ways in each direction from the bridge that crossed over it, before coming back and landing in the parking lot. Peggy had moved Cobalt all the way to the very edge of the parking lot, so I wouldn't have to watch out for traffic as much.

A few miles down the road, there was a big interchange, and we got off of the 80 Highway finally, and onto the 76 Highway. And that was going to take us all the way to Denver, and it started by taking us into Colorado. Peggy said that we were almost home, even though it was still going to be several hours before we actually were.

It was very strange, but when we got into Colorado, all the fields were on the north side of the 76 Highway, and there were almost none on the south side. Occasionally, we'd see one, but it was mostly prairie, and I asked Peggy if she knew why, and she said that she didn't. She thought that maybe it was some kind of federal land of some sort, but she wasn't sure. And she said that she'd never really thought about it, but it was more than an hour before we got to Brush, which was the first place where there were lots of fields on both sides of the road.

The car was too hot, because Peggy wanted it warm enough that she could just drive in her t-shirt, and it made me kind of sleepy, and the scenery was all the same. And I'd been fighting to stay awake since we'd left the Flying J, but it was finally too much for me, and I dozed off until we got to Denver, and I might not have woken up even then except that Peggy had to slow down and that was enough to wake me up.

I yawned and then looked out the windshield and I could see the mountains ahead of us, so I knew that we were really close. And in front of them, the city stretched out on the flat land. There was a big cluster of skyscratchers just like Chicago had, and when we got off the 76 Highway and on to the 25 Highway, we got to drive right by them.

There were lots of other cars, just like Chicago, and we had to slow down a lot as we went through it. And it was really big, too, and so it took us a pretty long time to get to the other side, and I was starting to get a little bit hungry.

I was a little bit confused about what time it was because the sun said one thing and the clock in Peggy's car said another thing, and I didn't know how long I'd been napping.

Peggy said that the clock in her car was wrong, that it was two hours earlier than what it said. Which I should have remembered, because it had never changed when we'd gone into the new time zones before.

She told me that we'd stop for lunch once we got past Denver, and that we should try to eat a light lunch because her parents would probably have lots of food for Thanksgiving dinner.

There was snow up on the mountains, but Denver itself wasn't snowy, although I thought it would be. Peggy said it was usually snowier than this when she came home, and maybe there would be more further south. But she said that her parents had told her that it was warmer than usual, and it had been in Kalamazoo, too until just last weekend.

I told her that if there were teams of weather pegasuses, there would be snow on the ground. Although after so many years of feral weather, it might take us a while to figure out the whole system so that we could tame it.

The road went through a little cut, and then on the other side Peggy got off the highway, 'cause there was a whole cluster of little restaurants, and she didn't even have to ask me where I wanted to go, 'cause there was a Taco Bell.

She turned into their parking lot and she looked at me and said that if I started farting I was going to have to fly the rest of the way to Colorado Springs, and I asked her how far it was, and she told me that it was about fifty miles, and I said that I could fly that far. It would be a little bit harder because we were higher up, so there wasn't as much air to give me lift, but if I kept a slightly lower altitude than I did in Michigan, I could make it there. And I knew that there was the airport right by her house, so I could just have my watch tell me how to get there. The last part would be tricky, because I didn't remember exactly where she lived, and I might have to call her for directions from the airport.

I kind of wanted to do it, even though it would take me a couple of hours. And Peggy saw that I'd opened the door and was just looking up at the sky, and she said that it probably wasn't really smart to do it today, because I'd get to her house too late and miss dinner and the Thanksgiving football games.

We went inside and got some burritos, and when we were done eating, I asked Peggy if I could fly to the next exit and meet her there, if it wasn't too far. And she said that it wasn't—it wasn't even two miles, and she said that if I followed the 25 Highway it would be really hard to get lost, especially if I stayed low enough to read the signs.

So after we'd finished eating, we went out to the parking lot and I put on my vest and blinking light just to be safe, and then Peggy had to use her portable telephone to figure out how to call the Denver Airport, because I thought that I was probably close enough that the airplane directors would want to know where I was.

Well, they were very confused and a grumpy-sounding director finally told me to stay under five hundred feet and I would be fine, and then another pilot who said that he was United 1575 and was I an actual pegasus, and I told him that I was, which the airplane directors seemed to have trouble understanding until he told them that I wasn't some kid messing around on the radio and he'd seen movies of me flying in storms. So then they were a lot nicer, and gave me clearance up to a thousand feet above ground level, which was nice of them. And for such a short flight, that was plenty.

I wasn't even a hundred feet up when I saw the next exit—I'd angled a little bit so I was close to the side of the 25 Highway, and I could see the signs for it, although I couldn't read them all because they were still a ways away.

I looked behind me and Peggy was still in the parking lot, watching me, and I turned around long enough to wave at her, then I focused back on the road ahead.

I was almost halfway to the exit when Peggy passed me, and I could watch her all the way until she got off at the exit. She stopped on the exit road and turned on her blinking lights, and it only took her a couple minutes until I was gliding down for a landing next to Cobalt. The road was named Happy Canyon Road, so I looked both ways to see if I could see the happy canyon, but maybe it was further away, because I didn't see it. There was a little plateau to the east that the road ran around, but I didn't think that was a proper canyon at all.

I told the airplane directors that I was back on the ground, in case any other airplanes wanted to come by, and then I got out of my flight gear and got back into Cobalt. It hadn't been all that much of a flight, but even so it had been good exercise.

Peggy got back on the highway, and we kept going south. I was getting excited, 'cause we were close, and she was, too. She said that sometimes the last leg of a trip really stretched out and other times it was quick, and she felt like this was going to be a quick time.

The highway kind of twisted and wound around like it was a river, always trying to find the lowest places to go, but unlike a river it could go up and over hills, and it did sometimes.

Pretty soon we started seeing the signs for Colorado Springs, and then we were in the city. And we had to go most of the way through it, and there was lots of traffic again, and we got slowed down. Peggy said that there wasn't exactly a direct route to her house and I was thinking that if I knew exactly where it was, I could get out and fly and maybe I'd beat her there, which would be fun, but I stayed in the car with her.

We got off of the highway and pretty soon we were at her neighborhood, and she drove through until she got to her house, and she parked in front and then we got out of the car. And she got out her travel bag and I got my saddlebags and we went up her front walk, and she had a key to let her in the house.

It smelled really nice inside, because of all the food that they were cooking. It was almost like walking into the dining hall, and I wanted to sit down at the table right then, but the food wasn't ready to eat yet.

Chrissie and John came out to greet us, and they weren't the only ones, because Peggy's grandparents had come for Thanksgiving, and also Chrissie's brother and his family. So it was a lot of new people to meet. There was Jane and Phillip, who were Chrissie's parents; Francis and Margaret, who were John's parents. Brad was Chrissie's brother, and his wife was Amy and they had two girls about Trinity's age who were called Riley and Vivian.

We went inside and they all had all sorts of questions for me and it got kind of overwhelming until Peggy said that we needed a little bit of time to get cleaned up from our long drive.

So the two of us went upstairs and Peggy said she was going to take a shower, and asked if I wanted to take one, too. I thought that since I'd taken one in the morning, and I hadn't really done much exercise today, I didn't need it, although I wanted to brush myself, 'cause my tail was kind of knotted again and my coat was a little bit clumped from sitting.

It felt a little bit unsocial to be sitting upstairs in Peggy's room while everyone else was downstairs, and I thought about going downstairs and maybe grooming myself in the living room, but I wasn't sure what her family would think about that. It was something that nobody minded when you were among friends but it was kind of rude to do when there was company over, and maybe it was the same with humans.

I'd finished with my coat and was brushing my tail when Peggy came back into the bedroom. She was still wearing the same clothes she had been driving in because all of her clothes from college were dirty, but she had lots more in her room that she hadn't taken with her. So she found some nice clothes to wear, and she said it was important to wear pants that were a little bit loose to Thanksgiving dinner.

Before we went downstairs, she said that we should try not to talk about politics at the table, and she also said that we also shouldn't talk about sex, and I probably shouldn't tell anyone about Aric and Meghan, either. She said she wasn't sure how her grandparents would react, but she said that Grandma Margaret and Grandpa Francis were kind of conservative. So I said that I wouldn't bring it up, and she said that maybe I could say that I had a stallionfriend back in Equestria. I wasn't sure that that was a good idea, though, because whenever mares were gossiping, if somepony said that then everypony else wanted to know everything about him. I guess they wouldn't know if I was making it up, though.

When we got back downstairs, dinner wasn't quite ready yet, so everyone sat in the living room and had a chance to ask me questions until Grandma Jane said that it was time to come in and sit at the table and she told everyone to wash their hands then looked at me and said I should wash my hooves, too.

Their dining room was really crowded, because they'd had to put in a bigger table since everyone couldn't fit at the one that had been there in the summer time. And all the food was already put on the table. The turkey was right at the center and it kind of bothered me to look at it, but I kind of couldn't help myself. I knew that humans cooked birds and the dining hall had chicken a lot, but it was all in pieces already and didn't look like a headless, featherless bird-body on the table.

Chrissie had gotten a special small turkey called a tofurkey for me and anybody else who wanted it, which was not actually from a turkey, and then almost everything else she had was similar to what the dining hall had had, so I knew what most of it was. The cranberry sauce was a little different, though; it was one consistent color and in little sliced discs.

I tried a little bit of almost everything except for the actual turkey, and when I'd eaten a bit of the tofurkey, John asked me how it was and I said that it tasted very strange and had an odd texture. I thought that maybe that was what normal turkey was like, so he took a piece and chewed on it and said that it was nothing like a normal turkey and that they ought to be sued for false advertising. But Vivian liked it more than the actual turkey, and Riley said that was because Vivian was weird, and then they stuck their tongues out at each other until Amy told them to stop.

Peggy's parents and grandparents had a lot of questions about college and our classes, and when she told them about her egg catapult, everyone thought that that was really funny, and she said that she had a movie of it and she'd show them later.

We didn't have dessert right away, because the pies weren't done and we also needed time for the meal to digest, Grandpa Francis said. All the men wanted to watch the football game, too, because the Dallas Cowboys were playing the Green Bay Packers, and everyone thought that the Cowboys were going to win and maybe they'd make it to the Super Bowl this year. I thought when people said things like that they were usually wrong, 'cause Mister Salvatore had said that the Cubs were going to lose and they'd won, and Aric had said that Trump would lose, and he'd won, too.

I kind of divided my attention between the game and Riley and Vivian. The girls kept asking me questions like how it felt to be covered in fur and how it felt to walk on four legs all the time, and they tried that but weren't very good at it. Human arms and legs are different lengths, so it doesn't work very well for them, although they can move on their hands and knees well enough.

They wanted to pet me, too, and Amy said that they couldn't until I said that I didn't mind. Vivian was fascinated with my wings, and my feathers, and she kept asking questions about why some of them were missing, so I told her about moulting. And if I'd had a really loose feather, I would have given it to her, but right now none of them wanted to fall out.

Pretty much everyone wanted to see me fly, so during halftime, we all went outside and I flew along the street. Not too high, because it was dark out and if I flew too high they wouldn't be able to see me any more, and I also wasn't wearing any of my flight gear and we were right next to the airport, too.

I watched a little bit of the third quarter, and the Cowboys had a good lead—they were ahead by eleven points and nobody seemed to be able to get the ball anywhere. Riley and Vivian were coloring, and they made a crayon-picture of me which was really cute. Then they decided that they wanted to play with some dolls that they had, and one of them was Elsa who I recognized because Trinity had dressed like her for Halloween. So Riley and Vivian had to tell me all about Elsa and she was from a musical movie called Frozen and had a friend who was a snowman called Olaf.

The Cowboys won the football game, which made everyone happy. The Packers had rallied in the last quarter and gotten twenty points, but Dallas had gotten fourteen, so it hadn't been the victory that Green Bay had been hoping for. And then they turned off the television when the commentators started to explain the game, although I thought it was kind of interesting to hear.

There were two kinds of pie for dinner, a pumpkin pie and also a pecan pie, because Frank liked those the best and so did everyone else. And we also had spiced cider and mulled wine, although it was a little too warm for that. Riley wanted some of the wine, but Amy said that she wasn't old enough for it, and she thought that was unfair because I could drink it, and Amy had to explain that I was older, too.

Vivian said that if I was older I'd be a horse, and Amy said that it didn't work like that, and that ponies and horses weren't the same thing.

Nobody was staying for the night, which was too bad. Brad and Amy and Riley and Vivian left first, after the girls gave me a big hug. And then the rest of us sat around the table and drank some beer to relax after dinner, although nobody wanted too much because we were all still pretty full.

It was really late by the time Peggy's grandparents left, and I was covering yawns, 'cause we'd been up early today, but I didn't want to be rude and go off to sleep. And I could see that Peggy was really tired, too, so after we'd waved goodbye to everyone, me and Peggy went upstairs, and she put on her sleeping clothes and said that I could sleep in her bed instead of on the cot.

So I curled up in bed next to her and I was almost asleep when I set my head on the pillow. It had been a really long day.

Author's Note

Special thanks to theoldenbrony for suggesting the Kearney Arch (The Great Platte River Road Archway).

November 25 [Black Friday]

November 25

Peggy woke up before me, and she woke me up even though she probably didn't mean to. I didn't know why I was so tired, 'cause mostly all I'd done yesterday was sit in Cobalt, and that wasn't too hard. And that was all I'd done on Wednesday, too. I thought that she should have been tireder, 'cause driving Cobalt for a really long time was probably a lot of work, even though she didn't have to shift because Cobalt was smart enough to do it itself.

I heard noises in the house, and Peggy said that it was Chrissie and John getting up. Then she said that today was Black Friday, which was when a lot of stores had things for sale really cheap. It was kind of like a holiday for people because they had the day off so they could go to the store and buy things. Unless they worked in a store; then I suppose they had to go to work. And Peggy's mom did, too, because the Air Force base still had to be open.

It was still kind of dark outside, because we were so far west but our bodies probably still thought that we were back in Kalamazoo. And Peggy said that she couldn't believe she was getting up this early on her day off, and if she had any sense she'd go back to sleep.

I told her that she could if she wanted to, but she shook her head and said that since she was awake she might as well actually get out of bed and maybe tonight we'd stay up a little bit late to help get our bodies accustomed to Colorado time. And then she looked at her portable telephone to see what the weather was going to be, and she said that it was supposed to be over sixty today, which was unusually hot for Colorado Springs.

So then she said that she hoped it was cooler up in the mountains, so that we could play there. And she started to check her portable telephone for snow reports. I knew that if they didn't have real snow they had machines that made fake snow, which wasn't quite as good as the real thing. I thought that maybe if a bunch of pegasuses who were good with snowclouds wanted to move to Earth, they could get a job making snow for ski resorts. And they'd make much better snow than what the machines did.

After she'd looked at her portable telephone for a little while, she said that we would be able to go snowboarding, because all the resorts up in the mountains did have snow. And she said that we'd have to go to her favorite, and we could go to some other ones, too, just so I'd have a chance to see a bunch of them. She said that they were a lot better than the ones in Michigan, because they were much bigger and more mountainy and there were more difficult trails.

I wanted to leave today, but Peggy said that she wanted a day to relax, and she'd also promised her Dad to help put up Christmas decorations, and that sounded like something fun to do. Then she yawned and said that she ought to get dressed so that we could do something.

I jumped a little bit when I felt the floor shaking and heard a rumble under me, and Peggy started laughing at me. I wasn't used to Chrissie leaving for work and being right under us, even though it had happened last time I was here, too.

Me and Peggy went to the window and waved, although her Mom was looking back so she wouldn't run into anything and I don't think that she saw us.

Peggy looked through her dresser and closet until she found some clothes to wear, and we went down to the kitchen together. The big table was still in there, and John was sitting at one end with a cup of coffee and the newspaper spread out around him. And there were lots of glossy pages that had pictures of things you could buy at different stores. Peggy took the one for Best Buy and looked through it because she said that she needed a new computer, and they had one that she said was nice and also cheap. But she said that they'd all have been sold by now, because each store only had a couple of them to lure people in and only the very first people there would have a chance to get them and then other people would have to buy something else that was more expensive.

That seemed kind of unfair to me, until I thought about how at the market if you wanted the very best fish, you had to be the first one to see it or else the fisherpony would sell it to someone else. And they couldn't all be the best fish, so sometimes it was smart to be at the market early, especially when most of the fish were somewhere else at sea, and harder to catch.

So then I thought that that was actually nice of them to tell you before what they had, because that way if you really wanted that computer you could make sure that you were the first one in line. You never knew with fisherponies. You might get to a stall right when it opened and she'd had a bad catch, so there wasn't anything good to be had, and then you had to go look and see what everypony else had caught and by then usually the best fish were already gone from the other stands.

Or else you could do like Tira-Mi-Su did and fly out and find the fishing boats on their way into harbor. Everypony else thought that was kind of greedy, though, and I think if her sister hadn't been really nice, ponies would have made her leave town, 'cause she was always thinking just of herself.

John got me a cup of coffee and he got one for Peggy, too, and told her that she needed to take her car to Firestone to get snow tires put on it, and that he'd help her put them in the car once she'd gotten it unloaded. And he said that they'd emptied out the laundry room for her, too.

He said that I probably didn't have too much to do, and I said that I didn't have anything that I needed to wash. I'd left my blankets for Mister Salvatore to take care of, and my flight vest was still clean enough.

When Peggy had finished her coffee she said that she was going to go unload Cobalt, and I decided that I wanted to fly—she had a while before she had to take the car to the shop.

We ate breakfast first. I had a bowl of instant oats, and Peggy had cereal. And then I went upstairs and got my flight gear and got dressed and then I found out what frequency I needed to call to get the airplane directors, but I didn't call them yet because I had to figure out where I wanted to fly. They wouldn't like it if I called them and said I didn't know where I was going.

John had a topographical map, and he got up so that he could go find it. Peggy said that probably as long as I went towards the mountains and stayed below the tops, the airplane directors wouldn't mind, but I should let them know where I was, and she said that there were helicopters that flew around the mountains sometimes, giving tourists a pegasus-eye view of the mountains and valleys, so I would need to watch out for them.

He came back with his map after a few minutes and unfolded it on the table and it was pretty obvious that there were all sorts of river valleys that I could follow back into the mountains and be well below where any airplane might go, and I could use my watch to find my way back again, or else just fly up above a peak and look around for Colorado Springs. The airport would be really easy to see, even from a distance.

One thing that was useful with his map was that it told me what things were named, so when I called the airplane directors, I could tell them that I intended to fly a straight course to South Cheyenne Creek and then follow it up into the mountains, and they knew where that was.

It took them a minute to give me clearance, and they told me to stay at fifteen hundred feet and then fly direct to South Cheyenne Creek and then they asked which runway I intended to depart from and I said that I was going to leave from the street, which was called Hawk Meadow Drive and that confused them. Maybe they didn't know where that was.

Then they asked me to repeat my intentions and I told them where I wanted to fly and said that I could see the airport from here, which would have been true if I'd been in the air, and they asked me if I intended to land at the airport.

I said that I could if that would make it easier, but if I landed I needed the helipad and not a runway, which confused them even more, and they asked me to stand by, and then finally they asked me if I was classified as an ornithopter or a drone, and I said that I was an ornithopter, and then they said that I had clearance.

So I took off and flew over town. It was a lot bigger than Kalamazoo, so I had to be extra careful to keep track of where I was, since I didn't know it very well. And I kept looking back just to make sure that I got a good eye on the landmarks, just in case my watch stopped working.

There was a low spot in the mountains which I'd seen on the map and that was what I aimed for. I was pretty sure that that was where I wanted to go, and I knew that there was a golf course right by it, which would be a good landmark once I got close enough to see it.

I hadn't expected there to be four golf courses right next to each other, which was a little bit confusing, but then I saw the creek which was what I was going to follow, so I took the southern branch and went between the mountains.

Colorado Springs kind of just stopped where the mountains rose up, although there were occasionally houses that I saw. There was a road that ran right alongside the stream, and I followed along with it, too, until it ended at a park called Seven Falls.

When I flew a little bit further along the creek, I saw the waterfalls that the park was named for, and they were really pretty. The top was lit but the bottom was still in shadow, 'cause the mountain was blocking the sunlight from reaching the ground.

There were some people who were taking pictures of the waterfalls, and I slowed down a little bit when I went by in case they wanted to take a picture of me, too.

I followed the creek up the waterfall and there was a fork before I got too much further, so I guessed on the south branch, and followed that along until it forked again, and I went south again. I wasn't completely sure that I was still following the same creek, because I'd noticed that it had different names sometimes after forks, and I hadn't paid as much attention to the map as I should have.

As I got higher up, I started to see snow in the shadowy places, and then everywhere. There wasn't a lot of it, 'cause I wasn't all that high in the mountains, although I could see plenty further above me.

Since I might have been off-course, I paid close attention to make sure that there weren't any other airplanes or helicopters flying near me, and when I got close to where the creek ended, I found a big cluster of antenna towers on top of a peak, so I flew up just to get a closer look at them. Not too close, 'cause they could be dangerous.

I circled around them and looked at my watch to see what time it was. It didn't seem like I'd gone that far on the map, but the stream bent and twisted around, and it had taken longer than I'd thought, but I had enough time that I could reverse my route, so I circled around the antennas and then dropped back down into the valley.

I could have been a thousand miles from civilization; when I was flying along the stream I didn't see any people or signs of people. There were lots of animals out and about, and some of the smaller ones went running for cover when they saw me flying overhead, which made me feel bad. I didn't like scaring them away from their breakfast.

Going back was easier, 'cause it was all downhill, but I kept misestimating how far I could glide, since the air wasn't as thick as I was used to.

The water was really clear, and I kept seeing fish in it, and I thought about trying to catch one for a snack, although I wasn't sure if I was supposed to, and I thought I should ask John when I got back home.

When I got to the waterfalls, I felt like showing off, so I dropped down until I was practically skimming my hooves in the water, and then I shot over the top and I did have enough time to notice a couple of people stepping back from the edge as I dropped down to follow the creek.

I kept some altitude when I finally came out of the mountains, and I had to look around a bit until I found the airport, but I didn't have to look at my watch at all. And when I got back close to Peggy's house I had to circle around a little bit until I actually found it.

I took a shower and groomed myself, and then me and Peggy got in Cobalt so we could take it to Firestone to get its other tires put on. They were made out of a special kind of rubber that worked better in the cold and snow, and would make it grippier, which was important. Although Peggy said the way the weather forecast was looking she wasn't going to need them for around town anytime soon.

She said that her grandparents were in town shopping and were willing to give us a ride home, but I was kind of curious to see how they put new tires on, so we decided that we would wait for Cobalt to be done.

We weren't allowed out in the shop, which I thought was kind of unfriendly, but there was a little lounge where we could sit and it had windows so that we could watch. Peggy wasn't too interested in how they did it but since I was standing at the window with my muzzle to the glass, she decided that she was going to watch, too.

They put yellow metal arms under Cobalt and took the snow tires out of the trunk and back seat, and then they got them out of their bags and lifted Cobalt into the air and took the old ones off and put the new ones on, and it was a lot like putting a wheel on a wagon, except that they had nuts instead of a lynch pin to hold it on. And they had a tool that was kind of loud that put the nuts on, and it had a hose that went to it because it ran on air.

It didn't take very long before they put it back on the ground and put the old wheels back in the car for us. And it looked kind of different now, because the wheels had been shiny silver and now they were a dull black.

They'd looked under the hood, too, and before Peggy could pay and get her car back, the man at the counter told her that she needed to have some of her fluids flushed and he said that he could do it today while we waited, but she didn't want to, and I think that disappointed him a little bit.

We had to make our own lunch, which was just sandwiches because Peggy didn't feel like cooking anything more complicated. And the big table was gone and the little one had been put in its place, which made it a lot less crowded.

John was in the garage, sorting out the boxes of Christmas decorations, so when we were done eating we both went out to help, and he said that he wanted to start by putting lights on the house, and he said that I could help him with that, which was pretty exciting.

It took a while before we could start, though, because he couldn't find the box that had the lights. He said that he thought someone had moved it, but it turned out that it had just gotten turned so that the label was facing the wrong way and that was why he couldn't find it.

So he took it down and there were lots and lots of long strands of lights, which were all tangled together, and he and Peggy worked together to get them untangled and then they plugged them in to make sure that they still worked.

I put them out on the lawn after he'd tested them, and once he'd emptied the whole box and I had stretched rows of lights on the lawn, he came outside and he had a ladder so that he could reach up to where they could go.

He never had to use it, though, because I could just fly them up there. They were a little bit tricky to plug together while I was flying, and he finally thought to just plug them together on the ground and then have me carry them up like that. So he was helping to make a long string while I flew them where he wanted them. And there were little hooks up on the eaves that I put the strands in.

It took most of the afternoon, but we got them all hung up and then he plugged them in and I flew along to make sure that they were all still working. Then he unplugged it again because he said that there was no use wasting electricity while the sun was out and you couldn't see them.

When Chrissie got home, she was a little bit mad 'cause he hadn't gotten all the boxes out of the garage, so she couldn't park there, but after Peggy showed her some pictures she'd taken of me hanging the lights outside, Chrissie wasn't mad anymore, and even helped carry the other boxes inside. One of them even had a Christmas tree inside of it.

Well, it turned out that the tree was a fake tree, but it was kind of neat to see how it all went together. You had to put the trunk together and then stick the branches in it, and pretty soon it actually looked almost like a real tree, although it didn't smell piney at all. But John thought that it was nice because it didn't shed needles like a real tree did, and because it didn't have to be watered at all.

We had leftover Thanksgiving food for dinner, and there was even leftover pie for dessert, and then we went back in the living room and started to decorate the tree. There were lots of little glass ornaments that went on it, and it got lights, too, and sparkly garland. And right at the very top there was an angel, but it was covering its face and John said that was because it was a weeping angel.

I knew that there were angels in the Bible, although I couldn't remember any of them crying, but John explained that it was from a television movie series called Doctor Who, and he explained how they couldn't move when you looked at them but if you looked away they could. That seemed kind of strange to me, especially when he said that they covered their eyes when they were moving because if two of them looked at each other they'd be trapped.

When it was dark outside, John turned the lights on and they were very pretty. We'd put them around the eves all the way around the house and then wrapped them around the evergreen tree in the front lawn, which was real.

Chrissie said that it looked like Christmas but it didn't feel like Christmas because it was so warm she was wearing a t-shirt and there wasn't any snow on the ground at all. And I told them that we always had to make sure that there was fresh snow for Hearth's Warming, and that maybe I could bring some to them if it got colder and there were snowclouds above the mountain.

John said that they'd be the envy of all their neighbors if I did, even if it melted later.

Then we went back inside and plugged in the Christmas tree and Peggy turned down the lights in the living room, and that was really pretty, too, and we sat in the living room and drank some leftover mulled wine and admired the tree. And I kept looking at the weeping angel, just in case it tried to get off the tree, even though it probably couldn't with a branch up its butt.

Peggy spent the rest of the evening packing up everything we'd need for snowboarding, and I sat at her desk and wrote in my journal while she was doing it. She had to go downstairs and have John help her take the summer tires out of Cobalt, and she had a lot of snowboarding gear that was in the garage, because she hadn't taken most of it to Kalamazoo.

She said that she did kind of feel bad getting home and staying for one day and then going off again, but she really wanted to get some good time snowboarding with me on real mountains, and we'd get to play with her friends, and maybe they'd teach me some new tricks. She said that some of them were better at it than she was.

We went to bed at a normal time, even though it was early for Colorado, so that we could get off to a fast start tomorrow morning.

November 26 [Monarch Mountain]

November 26

I woke up before Peggy did, and I snuggled up against her back and I hadn't meant to but that woke her up. She rolled onto her back and stretched out and I think for a moment she forgot that I was there, 'cause she almost smacked me in the muzzle with her arm.

She reached out of the bed to get her portable telephone and she was kind of squinting her eyes against the bright screen when she looked to see if any of her friends had sent her a telegram to say where they were.

When Peggy saw the message, she gave a little cheer, 'cause her friend Victoria who I'd met when we had dinner together said that she and Lindsay were at Monarch Mountain, which Peggy said was her favorite ski resort. She said that it wasn't as well-known as some of the others so not as many people went there, and it had the best courses.

So she got up and she said that she was going to take a quick shower to wake herself up but not too much 'cause she was going to get all sweaty on the course, and she said that we'd have breakfast and maybe pack something for lunch today so we could eat right after we got there, and then after that we'd spend all weekend on the slopes, and we'd plan on coming back on Monday, maybe, or if the snow conditions stayed nice we could go to some of the other ski resorts. She said that there was some stuff at Breckenridge that was a lot of fun, but it would be super-crowded all weekend, which made it not as much fun because you had to be careful not to crash into other people and couldn't concentrate as much on what you were doing.

She told me that one nice thing about Kalamazoo getting done with classes early in the Fall Quarter was that everyone else was still in school, so during the week there wouldn't be as many people at the resorts.

Peggy had to wait a little bit for her shower, 'cause while we were talking, John had gotten up and he was in the shower, but that gave her time to find the clothes she was going to wear today.

I went downstairs when she went into the bathroom, and pretty soon John came down in his bathrobe. He went to the living room and turned on the Christmas tree, and then he started to make coffee and asked me if I wanted any and I said that I would like it and I bet Peggy would, too.

He got the newspaper while the coffee was brewing, and I thought that maybe I could help us out and make sandwiches for lunch. I knew where everything was, so I got out some bread and the peanut butter and jelly and I wasn't that good at making them because it was really hard to spread the peanut butter without the bread getting away from me.

I was still struggling with the sandwiches when Peggy came downstairs and she took her portable telephone out of her pocket and said that this was going to go on YouTube and made a movie of me making sandwiches which I thought was a silly thing to make a movie of, especially since I wasn't very good at it.

I thought that I should make four, 'cause that way we could each have two, and I stacked them off to the side once I'd finished each sandwich. And when I had the whole stack made, Peggy stopped taking a movie of me and opened another drawer and got out little plastic bags to put the sandwiches in so that they'd stay fresh and not drip jelly all over. Then she went looking through the refrigerator and got some carrots and celery and apples that we could also eat, and she showed me how to make ants on a log, which was celery with peanut butter and raisins.

We had cereal and oatmeal for breakfast, and we also shared a bagel with cream cheese.

Peggy noticed that the front page of the newspaper said that Fidel Castro had died yesterday, and John said that it was kind of sad. He said that when he was a kid, Castro was always saying things like 'death to America', and he thought that Castro's foreign policy strategy was to stay in power until a president came along that he could deal with.

I wanted to know if it had worked, and John said that Obama had ended the embargo, so apparently it had.

I thought it was kind of strange how human leaders kept on changing, and it seemed like people would have trouble with the lack of consistency. It was one thing to decide that you needed a new mayor because the old one wasn't good any more, but to have the whole country have to change would really bother me, so I asked John and he said that some places did have trouble with that.

He said that Castro had been old and had health problems, so nobody was too surprised, and that he had made his brother president years ago, because he wasn't strong enough to rule any more. But he thought that some things in Cuba would be changing, because Castro had still had a lot of influence.

We were getting ready to leave when Chrissie got up, and we could hear her footsteps above us, so we decided to wait until she came downstairs so that we could say goodbye. And it wasn't too long before she did. She was still wearing her sleeping clothes, and she poured herself a cup of coffee and put some milk in it before even saying a word. I guess she didn't like getting up in the morning.

Peggy told her where we were going, too, and Chrissie reminded her to warm up first before she started trying to do any crazy stunts, and then asked me if ponies knew how to splint broken bones. John said that we wouldn't need to know because everyone knew what to do with a horse that had a broken leg, and Peggy said that we were probably more civilized than that.

But I could hear some doubt in her voice, and I wasn't sure what humans did when horses broke their legs but I was thinking that it wasn't anything good. So I said that we would go to the doctor and he could fix it. Sometimes you had to stay in the hospital for a couple of days and you usually had to wear a cast, too.

Peggy promised that we would be careful and not hurt ourselves and we'd wear our helmets, and then she remembered that I didn't have one, 'cause last time I'd borrowed one from Gates, so that was something that we were going to have to get.

There was a shop near Monarch Mountain that sold skiing and snowboarding things, so she said that we'd stop there and get one, and she went out in the garage to get a folding knife so that she could put ear-holes in it. And when she got back with that, I told her that she ought to bring some tape, too, to line the edges with so I didn't cut my ears because that was what Gates had had to do with the other helmet.

Peggy had to start up Cobalt to let it warm up, and she got a little broom out of the trunk which also had a scraper on it, and she used that to get the frost off the windows, and when she was done the inside of Cobalt was starting to get warm.

We left just after the sun got up, and drove through Colorado Springs until we got to the mountains, and then Peggy took a road that followed along the edge of the mountains, which was called the 115 Road, and we followed that all the way to the US 50, which went into the mountains.

The road stayed in a bit of a gorge at first, and then it started to climb up into the mountains, following along a stream until we got to Salida, which was a mostly flat spot, and then it went alongside another river and continued through the mountains.

It reminded me of taking the train through the Cascades, ‘cause of all the trees that went almost all the way up to the road. And there was lots of snow, which was good, ‘cause real snow was better than fake snow, and i was hoping that it would be real at Monarch Mountain, too.

It took us almost three hours before we got to Monarch Mountain, and when we got there the parking lot was really full, so we had to drive around a little bit until we found a space to park Cobalt.

They had a big building where we bought our tickets, and then we went into their supply shop so that we could get a helmet. It was really amazing how many things they had. I'd kind of gotten used to it in stores like Meijer that seemed to sell anything that you could need or want, but this store only sold things for skiing and snowboarding, and it was completely full of things.

We went around until we found the helmets that they had, and I tried a bunch of them until I found one that fit me nicely, and it was a nice silver color, too, which I liked. It was a little bit uncomfortable because had to fold my ears back to wear it and it really blocked out a lot of sound, which was a bit worrying and I kept looking around, 'cause I couldn't hear what was going on around me and even then I got surprised by one of the salesmen, and jumped back when I turned my head and he was there.

I bought the helmet and I wanted to spend some more time looking around to see what else they had but that was time that we could have been snowboarding, so I didn't ask Peggy to stay.

Before we left, she borrowed a Sharpie marker and had me put on the helmet and then touch with a hoof where each ear would be, and then we went back to Cobalt and she got out the knife and tape, and I got our lunch, and we went back inside and found a bench to sit on, and I ate while she was cutting ear-holes in my helmet. It took a couple of tries before they were the right size, because she didn’t want to cut too much of the helmet away, and she also didn’t want to cut herself by mistake.

Then she dusted the little bits of helmet off her pants and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple, and sent a telephone telegram to her friends to tell them that we were here, and that we still had to get dressed but they should meet us in the lobby in about fifteen minutes.

She taped up the edges of the helmet and then we went out to Cobalt to get dressed— she had to put on her snowpants and snowjacket and boots, and I had to put on my hoof-boots and my camelback and GoPro, so that when we started to do things that were fun, we could make a movie of it.

We were a little bit late, and Lindsay and Victoria were already waiting for us in the ski lodge. They couldn’t have been waiting for too long, though, ‘cause both of them still had powdery snow stuck to their clothes.

We were gonna start off with an easy trail, just to get back in practice, and even though they’d been practicing, Victoria and Lindsay wanted to go with us. I think that they just wanted to see me snowboarding, although I kind of wish that they had wanted to wait until I’d gotten a little bit of practice in.

So we all went over to the chair lifts. They all had names, just like the trails did, and we were going to take Garfield and then go down Roundabout, which connected with a bunch of other trails. There was a big map that said what they all were, and we looked at it while we were waiting for the chair lift to come around.

They still weren’t easy for me to get in, and Peggy and Lindsay both had to help push me back into the seat. If it weren’t for the moving cable overhead I could have flown in really easily, but it was kind of a confined space and I still wasn’t completely sure about how well my wings were working in the thinner mountain air, especially since we were higher up than we had been before.

Lindsay said that she liked the chair lifts because it was like flying, and then she remembered that I was sitting right next to her, and she covered her mouth ‘cause maybe she’d thought that she’d insulted me, but it was true, it was kind of like flying. There were so many things that I was so used to that I never really thought about them but were probably strange to her, like how the chair rose up into the trees, or how you were looking down on things. I bet a lot of groundponies don’t even know what the tops of trees look like.

We got to the top and got off the chair lift and I said that next time I was going to fly up unless that was against the rules. Nobody thought that it was, although Victoria said that I might have to sign a waiver, because uphill travellers were supposed to do that.

As soon as I was on the ground at the top of the trail, I went a little bit off-course and stuck my muzzle in the snow and kind of got a feel for it, and it was all real. I hadn’t been sure at the base, ‘cause down there it had been trampled by so many people, but up here I could see that it was all genuine. And Victoria said that was what Monarch Mountain was known for—they didn’t make any snow at all.

At the beginning of the trail, I was a little bit intimidated, ‘cause Lindsay and Victoria were both keeping an eye on me, and I didn’t want to crash or fall down right in front of them. I think I would have rather had a chance to practice a couple of times before I got an audience, but there was nothing I could do about it now, so I got in a good position and I waited for Peggy to go first, then I started sliding down the hill.

I was a little bit unsteady at first and had to use my wings to keep stable, which was something that I saw people doing with their arms, too. But as I went down the hill my body started to remember what I’d learned doing it before, and by midway down I’d remembered to keep my legs loose and how to twist my body to tilt the board and turn, and I could still use my wings if I needed more stability.

And I had to use them to lift the nose or the tail of the board up—the girls could do it just by leaning their bodies, but they weren’t held down in four places like I was, so bending my forelegs a little bit more only brought my muzzle closer to the board. Luckily, my flight instincts kept me from nose-diving into the snow.

When we got down to the base of the mountain, Lindsay and Victoria both said that they had some tips for me but Peggy said that they should wait until after I had a few runs under me and had gotten used to it, and she promised them that I was a lot better at it than I’d looked the first time down, and then she said that we should look into getting the uphill pass for me.

Well, at first the man didn’t want to give me one because people with snowboards weren’t supposed to have them. But he agreed to ask his manager and pretty soon his manager came over and after finding out that I was the only one who wanted one, and I just wanted it so I could fly next to the chairlift he let me have it. I had to read a bunch of rules that told me things like how I had to be careful around Snow Cats, and that downhill travel had the right of way, and then I had to sign a paper saying that I understood, and he gave me a special tag to wear, which I clipped to my camelback next to the other tag that was to let me ride the chair lift.

So when they rode the chair lift up the next time, I flew alongside, and that was nicer for them because all three of them could sit together, and I didn’t have to worry about how to get into it.

We took the same trail down a couple more times, until I was getting good at it, and while we were going back up the mountain after the third time Lindsay and Victoria gave me some suggestions for how to get a little bit better speed and how to angle my snowboard to turn sharper. And Victoria wanted to see me stop in case there was an obstacle in front of me, so the next time I went down I tried what they’d told me and it did seem a bit quicker, and when we were close to the bottom I turned the board sideways to stop. And that was really weird—my body didn’t like it when I was moving down on my side, and I had one wing down to brace myself on the snow and so the other one was open, too, which kind of helped act as a brake as I flexed it to catch the air. And then when the snowboard came to a stop I sorta fell on my side and had to struggle to get back on my hooves which I didn't like too much. It was better to stop more slowly and controlled, or else just fly over what was in my way, I thought.

The girls could all stop quicker than I could, because they could get their boards to a steeper angle.

The next time we went down the hill I showed them how I could fly over things that were in my path without even having a ramp to jump off, and I guess neither of them had expected it even though I had been flying along next to the chair lift. I guess they hadn’t expected me to be able to make a gliding start, although I don’t know why they would think that I couldn’t. Even birds could do it if they were on something that was moving fast enough, although that didn’t happen very often because birds didn’t like standing on things that were moving too quickly.

So we all agreed that we were ready for some more difficult trails, but before we went to one, Peggy wanted to go along the Skywalker trail, which ran right along the top of the mountain.

We had to take a different chair lift to get there, and it was really neat because right at the very top you could see over the mountain and to all the mountains beyond it to the west. Peggy told me that this was the continental divide, and that all the water on the east side went to the Atlantic Ocean, and all of it on the west side went to the Pacific.

There were actually two trails that went there: Skywalker, which was the easier one that we were going to do first, and then Great Divide which was a little bit more difficult but we would do next if none of us accidentally fell off the mountain.

So we went around that trail and back down and I was starting to have more fun, because I didn’t have to concentrate that hard anymore on keeping the board under me, so I could spend more time looking around and also going exactly where I wanted to, which was good because as we got further down the trail there were more people and some of them weren’t as fast as we were so we had to go around them.

When we got back to the lift, Peggy said that it was time to move to the more difficult trails, and we’d start with some of the blue square ones and then we could move on to black diamonds or the terrain park, so we went up first and went down the Great Divide trail, and then the next time we went up Peggy took us over to the pick-a-peak, which was a little butterfly that was almost like a weathervane, and you could point it to mountain peaks that were nearby and it would tell you which one it was.

We could even make out Pikes Peak, although I wouldn’t have known it if the butterfly hadn’t showed me where it was. I hadn’t expected to be able to see it at all because we’d driven for over two hours from Colorado Springs and there were so many mountains that we’d gone by.

We spent the rest of the afternoon working our way up to the black diamond trails, and we finally had to come in when it got dark, because they didn’t have any lights on the trails, and that was kind of disappointing, but we had all day tomorrow to play, too.

Peggy got out of her snowpants and snowjacket in the parking lot and put them in the back of Cobalt then helped me get undressed, too, and we were still putting things away in the car when Lindsay drove by us and rolled down her window so that she could talk. She had a Range Rover, which was a rugged, square truck. I think they were kind of rare, because I hadn’t seen very many of them.

We decided that we’d meet back at the hotel where we'd be staying and have dinner there, and then relax in the hot tubs, which I was looking forward to.

It was a short drive to get to the hotel, which was in a town called Garfield. We’d gone by it on our way to the mountain, and that was where Lindsay and Victoria were staying. So they had to get us plastic keys at the desk so that we could use the room, too. And they took their bags up to the room and then everyone put on clean clothes but nobody really felt like showering yet, ‘cause we were all hungry. Peggy had snacked on the last peanut butter and jelly sandwich while we drove over, even though it was almost frozen because it had been in Cobalt all day long.

They had a nice restaurant right in the hotel and it was a little bit crowded, so we had to wait to get a table, and Lindsay said that if we had to wait too long she would gnaw off her own leg and eat it, but I didn’t think that she really would.

Me and Peggy got a pizza to share, and they agreed to put olives on one side for me and bacon on the other for Peggy, and we were also smart and got some spinach and artichoke dip that we could all share while we waited for our food to be cooked. There were so many people in the restaurant, I thought it might take a while.

But then we got to talking and snacking on the dip, and we also had beer to drink, so it didn’t actually seem like it was that long before we got our food.

Everyone agreed that the best thing that the hotel had was the outdoor hot tubs, so after we’d finished eating, we went back to the room so that the girls could change into their swimming underwear, and they all got hotel towels to take with them, and we went out onto the little deck and got right in the hot tub. We weren’t the only ones who were relaxing in it, either, and it was a little bit crowded with everyone in there.

Since it was outside, once our eyes got accustomed to the dark, we could see millions and millions of stars and the Milky Way, and while I kept my ears turned so that I could listen to the girls, I kept my eyes up on the sky.

We stayed in the hot tub until some college-age boys who were rude and a little bit drunk came out, and they started to say some things that weren’t too nice, and I kept my eyes on one of them who kind of reminded me of the guy that Aquamarine had bucked. I hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, because if we got in a fight someone might get knocked off the balcony by mistake. But none of them did anything but talk.

The four of us went back up to our room and now everyone wanted to shower but we had to take turns. I said that I didn’t mind going last, but Victoria though that we ought to make it fair, so she wrote numbers on a piece of paper and each picked one, and I got the third shower, after Lindsay but before Victoria and I told her that I’d switch with her if she wanted and she said that I was a silly pony and that fate had decided for us.

We had a balcony that looked over the mountain, and even though I was still wet from the hot tub I went and sat out there and looked up at the stars some more, until it was my turn in the shower.

Peggy had thought to bring drinks, so after everyone was done with her shower and dressed in sleeping clothes and groomed for bed, we sat on the beds and had a couple of drinks to relax, before we finally decided to turn out the lights and go to sleep so that we’d be in good shape for tomorrow.

November 27 [Mirkwood Bowl]

November 27

I was the first one to wake up, so I went out on the balcony and I had to close the door really quickly because I didn't want lots of cold air coming into the room and making everyone freeze. And I thought about jumping off the balcony and flying through the valley and back, and I probably would have, but I hadn't told anyone that I was going to, so they might worry, and I'd also looked down the wall of the hotel and there were lots of balconies and they all looked pretty much the same and I'd probably make someone mad if I came back to the wrong balcony.

So I stretched out my wings and yawned and then looked up at the stars. I couldn't see as many now because it was starting to get light, although since we were kind of in a valley, it was still pretty dark down at the hotel.

I'd been on the balcony for maybe ten minutes when I heard the door open and Lindsay came out. She had a thick sweatshirt on and fuzzy socks so that she'd stay warm, and a cup of coffee in her hand, and if she stayed on the balcony I could easily find the room again, so I put my hooves up on the railing and then jumped up and spread my wings and dropped off the balcony and a little bit down into the valley before I got some air under me.

I went along the wall of the hotel and down towards the little creek which was called the Arkansas River, but I stayed up high enough to avoid any wires that might have been there, 'cause I wasn't going to be able to see them in the dark.

Since I was going to be getting lots of exercise today, I didn't go too far, only to where the town ended, and then I turned back around.

There hadn't been any traffic on the US 50 Road when I flew away from the hotel, but when I turned around and went back I heard a big truck slowing down and its exhaust beats echoed across the valley. Aric had told me that that noise was called a Jake brake, and it was kind of annoying to hear so early in the morning. People should make their trucks be quiet at night.

Lindsay was still on the balcony when I flew back, so I knew right where to land. There wasn't a whole lot of space there, and it was close to the wall, so it was kind of tricky to drop right in without hitting her or the hotel. I had to do an almost vertical landing and I rotated far enough that I almost had my hind legs in front of me. If there hadn't been a railing, it would have been a lot easier, but it gave people a place to lean on, and also kept them from falling off the edge by mistake.

She said that I'd scared her when I first jumped off the edge 'cause she'd forgotten that I could fly, and told me to warn her next time when I was going to jump in an abyss. And I said that I was sorry, and then I put my hooves up on the railing and the two of us just looked over the edge for a little bit longer.

When we went back inside, both Peggy and Victoria were also awake, but neither of them had gotten out of bed yet. Lindsay told them that they were lazy and that we'd been up since five, which wasn't actually true. Victoria said that she didn't care; Monarch Mountain didn't open until nine, and so there wasn't any point in getting there much earlier than that. But she got out of bed anyways and I pulled the covers off of Peggy to help motivate her to get up.

Everyone got dressed and I sat on the bed and preened my wings. Both of Peggy's friends were watching me and it was a little bit strange, especially since they were trying to get dressed while they did, and I thought it would be funny if they put their clothes on wrong, 'cause they weren't paying attention. Humans are pretty good at putting on their clothes, though, so they didn't make any mistakes that I could see.

We went downstairs to breakfast, and everyone had waffles except for Victoria, who just had yogurt and granola, and then we went back to our room and got everything that we needed for the mountain.

Since we were all going together and coming back together, instead of taking two cars we put everything in Lindsay's Range Rover and got in that. It was really nice inside, and there was lots of room. Lindsay said that all the seats had butt-warmers, and Peggy reached over and pushed the button for mine. At first nothing happened, but then the cushion started to get warm and that was really nice.

Peggy said that the back of my seat was warm, too, so I scooted around so I could touch it, and it was. There wasn't any way that I could really sit against it, though, so I guess that was just wasted heat.

The mountain wasn't quite open yet when we got there, so we had enough time to stretch out and decide where we wanted to go. Everyone thought that starting with a long, easy run would be best, and then we'd start to move to something more complicated.

Peggy said that we should do single black diamond runs all morning, and then in the afternoon we could decide if we wanted to play in the terrain park or if I was doing really well, we could go to the Mirkwood Bowl, which had the toughest runs but was also the most fun.

So we took the Breezeway chair lift and that went to a trail called Ramble On, which was one of the longer runs, 'cause it went around and then down, and it was a good one to warm up on.

I got a little bit overeager, and flew up to the top of the mountain without waiting for their chair, and then I had to wait until they got up to the top. And we went over to the top of the trail and everyone got ready and Victoria decided that she was going to go first, so she started off down the trail and I followed her. And I hadn't forgotten anything about snowboarding overnight.

We had to go around a group of skiers who were going slower than we were, and Peggy cut to my inside and passed me 'cause I think she wanted to show off. And I wasn't good enough to catch back up to her, at least not if I kept my snowboard on the snow.

Our trail also went by the terrain park, and there were already some people playing there, and Peggy angled over towards it and she bounced off a couple of moguls, which let me get past her, 'cause I'd taken a shorter route.

Lindsay stayed behind me right until the very end, and then she cut down the very inside, right by the trees, and came back up and out and did a little jump, and when we got to the bottom she slid to a stop and I wanted to come in right next to her but I misjudged the snow a little bit and wound up overshooting. I could have used my wings to stop a little bit sooner, but I was trying not to, 'cause it felt a little bit like cheating.

When everybody had stopped, Lindsay asked if we wanted to try again, or if we wanted to move right on to the more difficult trails. And we all agreed that since we'd all come down without any trouble, we ought to move on, until Lindsay asked me if it would be possible for me to snowboard upright, just on my hind hooves, 'cause she thought that might be more controllable for me.

I wasn't sure if it would work, but I was willing to give it a try. So we experimented a bit with that, and it was really different, and my hind legs felt all funny in that position. It was one thing to have them dangling and then rotate off them when I came in for a landing, but I had to space them a little bit further apart and then I'd be coming down the hill facing sideways and my wings wouldn't work right when I was going sideways into the wind.

And I fell on my face when I dropped back down and one forehoof got magneted to the board, and they had to pull me free, and Peggy said that maybe this was a dumb idea, but I really wanted to try it, because I thought that I could make it work.

So we went back up to the top of Ramble On, and I got my hooves in position on the board and everyone said it would be a lot easier to balance when I was moving, which I hoped was true, 'cause I had to keep flapping my wings just to stay upright. Earth ponies were a lot better at standing on their hind legs than pegasuses, 'cause if we wanted to get taller we'd just fly up, and they couldn't do that.

Victoria gave me a little push to get me started, and then the three girls stayed close to me as we started down the course.

I was in trouble right away. Everything I'd learned about moving the snowboard didn't work at all when I was just on two hooves, and I wobbled off-course pretty fast, and I could see that I was going to crash into the trees, so I tried to brake the snowboard but I just fell on my belly and slid to a stop, and then when I tried to get back up, I stuck my forehoof to the snowboard again.

I wasn't willing to give up after only one fall, so they helped me get back up and looked to make sure that nobody was coming down the trail and then flew back to the center and as soon as I landed the snowboard started moving forward, which was sideways to how I'd been flying, and it almost went out from under me.

More by luck than anything, I managed to stay upright and get it a little bit under control but it wasn't very long before I started to go off-course again, and this time I tried to fly out of it, but the edge of the board dug into the snow behind me and I did a belly-flop into the snow.

Lindsay was a little bit frustrated by how much trouble I was having, so Victoria suggested that she try going down on all fours, and see how well she could do it. And she said that she would, and she unclipped one foot from her board so that she could turn better.

She'd barely gotten in position when she started sliding down the hill, and at first she was doing all right, but once she got up a little bit of speed, her course got really wobbly and pretty soon she zoomed off towards the trees and had to fall sideways off the board to keep herself from crashing. And she'd barely even gotten a hundred feet.

So Lindsay agreed that it was more difficult than it looked to change positions like that, and I probably ought to go back to doing it the way I had been.

I agreed, but I decided that I was going to try one more time with being upright, so I set my hooves on the plates again and Peggy gave me a little push, and I tried just bending my body like they did to steer, and it sort of worked until I got going a little bit faster and overcorrected and hit the snow and went tail-over-muzzle. I hit hard enough to pull the snowboard off my hooves, and it actually launched up and landed further down the trail than I did.

That made getting back up easier, at least, and I shook all the snow off me and said that I was done snowboarding the human way, and I finished the course with all four hooves on the board.

They went up the same chairlift, because it also went to a bunch of black diamond trails, and we started out on Shag Nasty, which was a medium-length run that wasn't too difficult, and it ended on another main trail.

I really focused on where I was going the first time down, and I tried to follow Victoria as best as I could, 'cause she knew the best way down. And then we had to be careful when we got close to the main trail, 'cause there were other people coming down that and if we weren't careful we could crash into them.

All of us made it down to the bottom without falling down, and so we went back and did a few more runs, going faster each time.

On our final run, I was so focused on following Victoria that I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have when we got to the main trail, and so I didn't see the man skiing down it until I heard him shout and I realized right away that I couldn't turn the board fast enough to avoid him, so I popped my wings out and did a really hard liftoff. I lost almost all of my forward speed, and I tucked my legs in as best as I could to pull the board a little bit closer to me to get more clearance, and he went right under me and down the hill.

I made sure to check around me before I landed, and then I went to the bottom of the hill on my snowboard. And I was the last one down, but that was okay. And I saw him a little bit off to the north, so I got off my board and went over and apologized to him, and he said it was all right, because we hadn't crashed after all, and he said it had been kind of amazing to see me take off like that.

Me and the girls decided that we'd have lunch and then we'd snowboard in the Mirkwood Bowl, so we put our snowboards in the little racks they had and went to the Gunbarrel Grill. They had lots of different sandwiches and I got a fish sandwich but I shouldn't have. The breading was too oily and the fish itself was kind of dry and didn't have very much flavor at all and they'd put too much sauce on it, maybe because they wanted to hide the fact that it was a bad fish.

So I didn't even finish it, even though I was hungry, and I went back up to the counter and got some nachos instead which were a lot better. And there was enough for me to share them with everyone.

When we were done eating, everyone went to the bathroom so we wouldn't have to on the trails, and then we went back outside and it had clouded over and started snowing, which was really exciting. I wanted to fly up and play with the clouds, and if I'd been alone I would have done it. But everyone else was ready to go to Mirkwood, so they went back up the mountain on the same chair lift that we'd been using, and then we went to the gate. There were lots of warning signs, because the Mirkwood Bowl was difficult, and one sign told us that hazards existed that were not marked.

Peggy said that was why it was fun.

We went down Orcs first, which was a big open bowl, and I was actually using my wings to brake the first time down because it was really steep, and I didn't want to get going too fast.

Everyone stayed a little further apart this time, so that if someone fell down she wouldn't get run into by anyone else. And that also gave us more room if we needed to maneuver.

The snow that was falling made it harder to see, and the snow wasn't as packed-down as it was on the other trails, 'cause not as many people came here. I went through a snowpile and it was a good thing that I hit it fast enough that I didn't have time to react, or else I probably would have crashed. I saw it when I was almost on top of it and I was expecting to go over and had already angled my wings a little bit so that I could glide down after I jumped off of it, and then I got a faceful of snow instead and came out the other side in powdery snow still up to my belly, which did slow me down some, and then I got into denser snow and the board came back up on top of it, where it belonged.

I wasn't the only one who had gone through a drift; Peggy was coated from the waist down, and when we got to a slightly slower section she reached up to wipe off her goggles some.

We did that a couple more times, and then we moved to a different trail, which was called Mirkwood Trees, and it wasn't quite as fast but there were lots of trees to avoid. And the snow was deep enough that you could only see the very tops of some of the shorter trees, and they looked just like they were saplings but they were probably actually a few feet tall and more solid than they looked, so we wanted to avoid them.

There was no way of knowing if there was one that was just underneath the snow, though, so all we could do was hope that we didn't sink in deep enough to do more than brush across its top branches.

All the new snow and the wind blowing it around meant that sometimes there was almost no visibility and when we were at the top of the run, we'd wait until it cleared enough that we could see where we were going, but if it came up while we were already going there was nothing that we could do but hope that it wasn't so thick that we'd crash into a tree before we saw it.

Peggy told me that that was how she'd broken her wrist, and that it had even been on this run.

One time when we were at the very top, I heard a strange engine and asked what it was, and Peggy said that it was a Snow Cat, and that there was a special skiing area right next to us. And I'd seen it on the map, but I'd thought that it was actual cats that went skiing there, and not some kind of a machine. And then I found out that the machine didn't ski, either; it took people up to the top so that they could, because there weren't any chair lifts out there. They were boxy things with tracks and blinking lights, and we'd seen them by the lodge but I hadn't really thought about what they were for.

Peggy said that they could also come rescue you if you got hurt. I asked her if she'd gotten to ride in one after she'd broken her wrist and she said that she hadn't been hurt badly enough to need it, which was lucky.

Before we left Mirkwood, they wanted to go down Orcs one more time, and I wanted to fly up and touch the snowclouds, so we agreed to split up. I left my board by the lodge, in the little racks, and then I flew up next to the chair lift and as soon as they got off of it, I took off and started flying up towards the clouds.

I kept a good watch for airplanes, even though I hadn't heard or seen any all day or yesterday, but that didn't mean that there would never be any. And it wasn't too far to get up to the clouds, 'cause of how high the mountaintop was already, so I flew around the base of them and then I went up in them a little bit.

I decided that I was going to break off a small cloud and bring it down, so I found a good-sized section that was hanging low, and I had to fight with it some to tear it loose 'cause it didn't want to cooperate, and it didn't help that the wind off the top of the mountain was a little bit unpredictable. But I got it, and then I formed it a little bit into a more convenient shape, and all the while it kept on snowing, and since it was under the main clouds it was constantly getting its moisture refreshed by the snow falling down on top of it.

When I was sure I had it under control, I started to bring it down, and I got a little bit blown off-course a couple of times. I'd meant to just let it go over Orcs, but when I started looking down for where the trails were I saw that the girls were still at the top, watching me, so I came down kind of close to them and put the cloud a little bit below the peak, where it was kind of in the lee of the mountain so it wouldn't blow away, and then I sat on top of it.

Since there was such a steep drop, I wasn't all that far away from them, and they wanted to get a closer look at it, so I pushed it over to them, and I warned them not to touch it because it might have some electricity in it. Usually snowclouds didn't have as much as thunderclouds, but they had some, and sometimes there was thundersnow, and I didn't want anyone to get hurt.

So I kind of pushed it around a little bit so that they could see it, and then I showed them how I could make it stop snowing and start again, and I even pushed it over their heads and did it again. When it covered them, it also blocked the snow from above, so I could control when they got snowed on.

I took so much time with my demonstration that a few more people who were going to Mirkwood saw and they all stopped to watch, too, and so I wound up bouncing on the cloud a few times to get it to start and stop, until it was finally almost out of snow and getting really thin, and then I finally set it free over Mirkwood.

If I'd known that they weren't going to go down the bowl while I was playing with the clouds, I would have had them bring my board and we could have all gone together, but it was back down by the lodge. So instead when they started, I glided down with them and that sort of turned into a race, but I had the advantage, 'cause they could only use gravity to pick up speed and the friction on the snow sort of slowed them down, so even with me only gliding I beat them to the base of the hill.

We only had time for one more run, because the park was closing, so I got my board and we went down Mirkwood Trees one last time, and then we went out to Lindsay's Range Rover and she started it so it could warm up some while they were getting out of their snowclothes. And we had to use the little window brooms to brush off all the snow that had fallen on it.

Peggy decided that tomorrow we'd go up to Breckenridge, and we could play in their terrain park and if there were any newbies out there they could troll them, which they said was always fun. And Peggy wanted to ride the alpine coaster, too, and she said that I'd like it, too, but she wouldn't tell me what it was.

Lindsay had to drive slowly because the snow was still falling and the roads were slippery. Her Range Rover also had snow tires on it, and it also had all-wheel drive, so it didn’t slip at all.

We had dinner at the hotel in Monarch, and I had the trout which was a proper fish. Then we all went up to our room to relax for a little bit before we went to the hot tub. Lindsay said that you couldn't even go into a hot tub for a half hour after eating because sharks could smell the food that you'd just eaten, and I didn't think that was true at all, and even if it was, there weren't sharks in hot tubs.

She said that that was how they got you, and I stuck my tongue out at her.

The hotel was emptier, 'cause lots of people had to go back to work on Monday, and so we had the hot tub to ourselves. And you couldn't see the stars this time, because it was still snowing, but that was fun, too, because when the snow picked up some our heads got a bit of a snowcover.

Peggy asked Victoria what you called blondes in a freezer, and Lindsay said frosted flakes and then brushed the snow off her head. She said that Peggy was just jealous because blondes had more fun.

Everyone was steaming when we got out of the tub, and the girls dried themselves off as quickly as they could, then they all went inside and I shook off before following them. And we still had the numbers from last night, so we picked our shower order that way again, and I got to go first this time, which was nice because it gave me plenty of time to groom and to dry all the way off while the other girls were taking theirs.

We stayed up a little bit longer and had some drinks, and we talked about how the day had gone and Peggy had brought her folding computer and we put my movies on it so that there would be room in my GoPro’s memory for new movies tomorrow.

Before we went to bed, everyone packed as much as they could so that we could leave early tomorrow, since we had to drive a ways before we got to Breckenridge, then everyone got in bed.

November 28 [Breckenridge]

November 28

It was a good thing that we had gone to bed early, 'cause Peggy and Victoria had both set their alarms early so that they could get up and go to Breckenridge first thing in the morning.

Me and Lindsay were already up—I'd gotten up first and she'd woken up right after, and she'd made some coffee for both of us to share.

We were drinking it on the balcony and talking, and I'd been looking down the valley and thinking about getting in a short morning flight when I turned my ears 'cause I heard Peggy's telephone sound an alarm, and I guess my hearing is better than Lindsay's, 'cause she asked what I heard.

So I told her and we turned around and watched Peggy fumble around until she found her portable telephone and she looked at it and then turned it off and set it down on her chest and I thought she was going to go back to sleep, but then she picked it back up again and looked at it and then pushed the covers off.

She went into the bathroom and when she came back out she'd splashed some cold water on her face to help wake her up, and gotten some of it on her shirt, too. And she got a cup of coffee and then came out to join us on the balcony even though she was only wearing a t-shirt and her sleeping pants.

Peggy said that the cold air would help wake her up. I thought she was kind of crazy, 'cause her arms got all goosebumpy and then she started shivering. But she stayed out there anyway and drank some of her coffee, even though her hand was shaking a little bit.

Lindsay said that Peggy was making her feel cold, and I thought so, too, and we both agreed that it was a kind of dumb way to wake up. But Peggy said that it had two benefits, and the second one was to wake up Victoria, and so she went back in the hotel room and touched her hand to Victoria's cheek.

Her timing was perfect, 'cause just about when Victoria started yelling at her, her alarm went off. And I could still hear her grumbling after she turned the alarm off, even through the door.

Me and Lindsay just looked at each other and I gave her my empty coffee cup and said that I was going to fly a little bit to stretch my wings but not very far, 'cause I knew that they wanted leave as soon as they could. But they still had to get dressed, so I had that much time.

I jumped off the balcony and this time instead of going downhill, I went up, and followed the river a little ways closer to its source.

It wasn't snowing anymore, but it was still overcast, and so it was a little bit hard to see. If the ground hadn't been all covered in snow, it might have been really difficult to make it out, but I could see where trees were and where the road was, plus there were lots of lights at the hotel, so it was really easy to just look back and see where it was.

The river went under the road, and then up into the mountains, and I followed it just a little ways but not all that far, because it kept disappearing under pine trees and I didn't want to get so far away by mistake that I couldn't find the hotel again. And I thought that maybe if they were really really eager to leave that they could get dressed pretty quick, and then they'd be waiting on me.

I glided most of the way back, and then I landed back on our balcony. I looked through the window to make sure that it was the right room before I went in, and I saw Peggy and Victoria were still in there, so I went in.

I put my GoPro in my saddlebags, and that was all that I had to pack, 'cause everything else was already in Lindsay's Range Rover. And then I waited until they were both ready—Lindsay had gone downstairs to brush off her truck and Cobalt, and Peggy had given her the keys to Cobalt, so that she could start it and get it warm, 'cause it didn't have butt-warmers.

They got their bags and Peggy balanced her duffel bag on my back so that I could carry it, and Victoria said that I looked like the world's cutest pack mule. And she had to stop at the front desk to check us out of the room, so Peggy took Victoria's bag and carried it to Lindsay's truck while I went over to Cobalt with Peggy's bag.

Everyone was more eager to get going than to eat breakfast, and I assumed that we'd get something on the way, but it turned out that wasn't true. There weren't any restaurants in Monarch, and the next little town we went through didn't have any, either.

We turned off onto the 285 Road, which twisted and wound through the mountains. We had to go slow, because the road still had some snow on it, although you could tell that they'd pushed a lot of it away already.

There were houses here and there on either side of the road, but not too many. And I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever pass a restaurant, especially when we got to a little town called Nathrop and went right through it because it didn't have any restaurants.

But not too far after that was Buena Vista, and we stopped there at the Evergreen Cafe, and I was looking at the menu and thinking about what I ought to order and Lindsay told me that I should get the French Toast because it was really good. I trusted her, so I got that, and it was really tasty. The bread was nice and thick and it had some cinnamon sugar on it but not too much, and it filled me right up.

It was light out when we finished eating, and we had to backtrack a little bit, 'cause we'd had to get off our road to get breakfast, but it had been a good place to do it, because there weren't too many buildings or houses on the next stretch of the road.

The scenery was really beautiful, though. We went over a pass and then down into a wide flat area that just stretched on between the mountain peaks, and every now and then we'd pass a road that seemed to go off into nowhere, or a couple of lonely houses by the road.

We didn't see another proper town until we got to Fairplay and it also had a really big rock mine. Peggy said that the TV movie South Park was kind of based off of the town. It also had the South Platte River running through it, which we'd been driving by in Nebraska, and it was really neat to see it near its source, and we followed it on the 9 Road, and then we were back in the mountains again.

It didn't take us too much longer to get to Breckenridge, which was a pretty big town, and the ski resort was huge. Even this early there were a lot of people there, and Peggy said that it was kind of terrible on the weekends, and if you didn't get there super-early you had to park miles away from the park.

I thought that there might be so many people on the trails that we wouldn't have any room, but she said that one reason that it was so popular was because there were lots and lots of trails and lifts, and so we could find a place where there weren't that many people.

Lindsay and Victoria both wanted to see what kinds of tricks I could do, and I think that they also wanted to show off the tricks that they knew, so after we got dressed and got our tickets, we went out to the terrain park first. It was so big that it actually had four different ones, although one was just for kids.

Peggy said that we ought to go to Park Lane, because it was a little bit simpler than Highway 9, and it would give me a chance to warm up.

We rode a gondola in the sky to get to the park, and that was really neat. It went over a neighborhood and then through a building so it could turn, and then it went over a big open area before it got to another building and turned again.

I was glad that they knew where things were, because all the signs confused me. It was so big! There were lots of peaks with trails running down from them and chair lifts going every which way, but the girls all knew Breckenridge, so they led me to the lift that would take us to the terrain park. And I decided that I'd sit with them, 'cause I was a little bit worried about getting lost and I thought that if I did I might never find them again.

There were a bunch of jumps, and also rails that you could slide down, and before we started going down the hill, the girls showed me exactly where we were supposed to go, and said that if there was someone else using a hill to wait, because otherwise you could land on someone who hadn't made the jump like they'd intended.

I thought that that was good advice.

So when everyone in front of us had gone, they started for the first big hill, and all three of them jumped over it one at a time, and then it was my turn, so I aimed for it and rocked my snowboard a little bit to get it going, and the liftoff went fine but I was out of practice on landings, so I just flew back to the ground and landed that way.

As we kept working our way down the hill, I got better confidence in the jumps, and carried them longer before I used my wings to land, and by the time we'd gotten to the bottom of the hill, I was landing without using my wings at all, which I would have been more proud of, except that both Lindsay and Victoria had been doing loops in the air on their jumps.

I could do loops, too, so after we rode up to the top again, I said that I was gonna go first, and I got up some good speed and when I came off the top, I used my wings to angle me almost straight up, and I did a backflip, and then landed at the base of the ramp and got out of the way.

So the rest of the way down the hill it sort of turned into a competition about who could get the most air and only Peggy didn't compete 'cause she knew that I was going to win, and she said that she wasn't going to risk killing herself to try and win a jumping contest with a pegasus, which was pretty smart of her.

I thought that flapping my wings would be cheating, but there were no rules about just holding them open, and when we got to the last jump, instead of going up like we'd been doing, I went long, and just glided down back by the chair lift. Victoria thought that it was cheating, but Lindsay said it wasn't and maybe she should hold out her arms and see if she could fly further that way. I didn't think she would unless she had feathers, too. Her snowcoat wasn't baggy enough to give her any lift at all.

After that, we just started to have fun. I experimented to find out how many different tricks I could do after jumping off the ramp, like wing rolls and I even managed a tight forward roll although that one was kind of scary. Normally, if it looked like I was going to run out of room before I landed back on the snow, I could just fly out of it, but when I tried the forward roll I knew that I wasn't going to have time if I messed up. It worked out, even though it felt really weird.

I also tried the rails, which were kind of hard because you had to be going sideways to ride on them, and it was really hard to keep my balance and I fell off that a couple of times before I got it figured out and could go the whole way down it.

Victoria and Lindsay kept looking around for boys to troll, and they finally found some teenagers who I guess hadn't seen us going down the hill before. And they were bragging about how good they were and after they got over the first jump both Victoria and Lindsay looked at each other and nodded, and took their turn over the hill.

At first I thought that maybe they'd had a bad run, 'cause they were really wobbly and made bad landings, but Peggy said that that was on purpose, and after a couple more sloppy jumps and worse landings, the boys were making fun of them, and so when it was their turn to go next, they went one right after another, made the jump easily and both flipped in the air, and then they landed next to the rail, rode it down to the next jump, and then hopped all the way down the hill like that without stopping, 'cause it was clear and nobody was waiting for their turn.

Me and Peggy went down next and she told me to follow her and not stop unless she did, so I did and I did loops and wing rolls and skipped over one of the hills 'cause I was still in the air when it went under me, and that was lots of fun. And I don't think those boys knew what had just happened, 'cause when I landed at the bottom, they were still standing there and looking down the hill at us.

I was getting kind of hungry, and so we went up a different chair lift, which took us to a restaurant called the Vista House that was right at the peak of the mountain.

They had a really good chili which was kind of messy to eat, but filled me right up. And when we were done eating I wanted to go right back outside, but Lindsay said that if we went snowboarding right after eating snow-sharks might get us, and I said that I could outfly a snow-shark if I had to, and I didn't think that those were real anyways.

Victoria said that they might be, and she threw a little salt at Lindsay so that if there were any, they'd go after her.

We went down the other side of the peak, 'cause there were trails there, and when we got to the bottom there was a lift to take us up to the other side, and I let them ride it and I flew instead. And we played around there for a little bit, which was really relaxing after all the tricks we'd done in the terrain park earlier.

Then they wanted to go over to the Freeway, which was the challenging terrain park. All the jumps were much bigger, and there were rails that you could slide on right after coming off of a jump, and they also had a big, open half-pipe. It was like the one at the wheeled snowboard park in Colorado Springs, but it was a lot bigger, and people were really going flying when they got to the top of it.

I think if I hadn't had wings, I'd have been scared when I was at the top of the hill looking down, but I knew that as long as I didn't do anything too dumb I could fly out of it.

I still let Lindsay go first.

When she had cleared all the big jumps and hadn't gotten eaten by a snow-shark, I took my turn, and I overshot on the first jump and actually had to dive a little bit to get the second one. But then I had it figured out, and I landed midway up the third ramp and made the rest perfectly, and when I cleared the last one, I glided down next to Lindsay and watched Peggy take her turn.

The second time down, all of us tried some tricks, and Peggy was the first one of the girls to jump and then land on the rail and slide down that.

We did that a bunch of times and then went to the half-pipe, and Lindsay was really good at it. She could hold in the air longer than I thought a human should be able to, and every time when she came back down she landed perfectly and then went up the other side.

I had trouble getting turned around the first time I went and had to land on the edge to try again, 'cause it felt unnatural to twist my body like I was, but I was determined to figure out how to do it without using my wings to help guide me, and it took lots of tries but I finally did. And then once I'd gotten consistent at it, Peggy made a movie of me jumping out of the half-pipe.

Peggy wanted to make sure that I got to ride the alpine slide, because she said that it was lots of fun, so we went to try it out. Lindsay and Victoria said that they'd stay at the terrain park, and we could meet them back there when we were done.

So we went over to where it was, and it was a strange little railcar that you could ride on and it would take you in a big loop. And at first they didn't want to let me on 'cause it wasn't built for ponies, but after I told them that I'd gotten a pilot's license and driven GoKarts and even flown a Dreamliner they decided that it was okay. Maybe I should have told them that I hadn't actually flown the real airplane.

It was really weird being strapped into the seat, 'cause my hind hooves didn't reach the little feet-rests that they had, and it was awkward to hold on to the levers that controlled the brakes, but I could do it. I just had to be careful that my hoof-boots didn't stick me to them.

It took its time climbing a bit of a hill, and then it went down the other side and started to pick up speed. Sometimes it was on bridges and other times it was running through a cut in the snow, and I was glad I was strapped in, because it made really sharp turns and I think I would have slid out if it hadn't been for the seat belt.

I had to use the brakes when I got to the end, and then I had to be helped out of it, 'cause I couldn't get the straps off on my own. And it was so much fun, that we did it again, before going back to the terrain park.

We played there for almost the rest of the day, until the sun was behind the mountains and the park was closing. We got the last ride up the chairlift, and we started off on Psychopath and then cut onto a bunch of different trails that eventually took us back to the gondolas.

There were lots of hotels around, and so we went to the Doubletree and got a room there. It wasn't as nice as the room we'd gotten in Monarch and it didn't have a balcony, and the hotel didn't have a hot tub, either. Which would have been nice, 'cause I was sore all over from our day.

Everyone except me wanted to change clothes. I'd already gotten undressed, so I didn't have to. I didn't want to wait in the restaurant for them, though, so I went up to the room, too, and preened my wings some while they were putting on new clothes. I had a couple of coverts come out and so I put them on the desk 'cause I hadn't brought in my saddlebags. And Lindsay picked one of them up and started looking at it so I told her that she could have it if she wanted, but it wasn't a very good feather. A bunch of the vanes were damaged, especially at the tip. She said that she thought that gave it character.

The hotel had a restaurant called the 9600 and it had a nice view of the mountain. They had a proper fish, too, so I ordered that. And the waiter seemed kind of surprised and he said that I was the first pony he'd met who had wanted to eat fish, which was how I found out that Canterlot unicorns liked to visit in the summer.

I wasn't sure how much fun the mountain would be in the summer, but he said that it was and there were all sorts of trails and other things to do in town, plus it was really beautiful.

I thought that if they were smarter they'd come in the winter when they could go snowboarding.

After we were done eating, Lindsay went out to get some alcohol, 'cause she said that it was way overpriced at the hotel. And that meant that there wasn't as much competition for the shower, and so Peggy got to go first and then I told Victoria to take the second one. And I was in the shower when Lindsay came back, and so when I came out I found out that she'd gotten a big bottle of peppermint schnapps and was making mint hot chocolate with it. She also had another kind of liquor called Fireball for making cinnamon hot hot chocolate, and she told us not to drink it all while she was in the shower.

We probably couldn't have even if we'd wanted to, 'cause the coffeemaker that we were using to heat the water up only made it one cup at a time, so we had to take turns with it. And Victoria thought it would be funny to give her one while she was in the shower, so she made a cup of it and then used a pen to unlock the bathroom door and went in and offered it to her.

Peggy said that that was a lot nicer than the time they'd all been snowboarding together and the two of them had ganged up and gotten snowballs and thrown them at her when she was in the shower. And then Victoria said that there was an icemaker down the hall, and we had a bucket by our drinking glasses. She didn't get a chance to try, though, 'cause Lindsay came out of the shower wrapped in a towel with her drink in her hand.

We sat on our beds and talked until it was late, 'cause we didn't have to get up early tomorrow. And we probably all drank more than we should have, and I was getting pretty yawny and having trouble on my hooves by the time we finally decided to go to bed. I think that being at a high altitude makes the alcohol work faster.

Peggy had to help me up in bed, and after she had I remembered that I had to pee, so I had to get back out of bed again, and then when I was done she had to help me up a second time, and she put the covers over me and told me that maybe I shouldn't have had as much to drink as I had, and she was probably right.

November 29 [Copper Mountain]

November 29

I should have drank more water and less liquor last night. I woke up with my head pounding and I didn't want to move but I was gonna wet the bed if I didn't get up so I dragged myself to the bathroom and then when I was done it felt like too much effort to try and climb back in bed, so I lay on the floor with my head on Peggy's duffel bag and I closed my eyes again and if I didn't move or think too hard it wasn't so bad.

Being outside all day plus being at a high altitude, which I wasn't used to anymore since I spent so much time down low were also surely some of the reason I felt so bad. And I'd probably not had enough water to drink while I was snowboarding and that probably hadn't helped, either. And I should have drank some water and maybe that would have helped, but I wasn't going to get back up again. It was too much effort.

I think I dozed off some but it seemed like every noise would wake me back up again and then I'd forget and lift my head up to look around and see what was going on, and then it would start throbbing again and it felt like it might explode.

By the time Lindsay got up, I'd learned my lesson and I was thinking before I moved anything and that was better. I didn't feel so bad, although I wasn't sure if the pain would come back as soon as I moved.

She turned on the bathroom lights before closing the door and even though I was just seeing them out of the corner of my eye, they hurt. Why did the bathroom light have to be so bright, and the fan so roar-y?

Lindsay saw me when she came back out and she crouched down beside me and asked me if I was okay, and I said that I'd had too much to drink and I was paying for it now. And so she got me a glass of water and once I'd drunk that she got another and asked if I could have aspirin. And I told her that I could so she got two for me and put them in my mouth and then she got a sweatshirt out of her bag and draped it across my back.

She sat down on the floor next to me and I told her that she should get back in bed, but she said she'd been meaning to get up anyways and this was sort of up. And then she asked if I'd be more comfortable with my head on her lap and I would have nodded, but I think that would have hurt my head, so I just said yes.

Lindsay scooted over next to me and took the duffel bag and let me put my head on her lap, and then she moved the duffel bag around behind her to be a sort of pillow for her back, and she put her hand on my back and started scratching me between my shoulders which felt really good. Then she told me to warn her if I had to puke, and I promised that I would. And she asked if I wanted to wake up Peggy, but I didn't want to. I'd be fine once the water and aspirin had time to work.

I drifted off to sleep then and when I woke back up I felt a lot better. My head was still sore, but it didn't throb when I moved, and my mouth didn't feel as dry. Peggy was sitting down next to Lindsay and the two of them were talking until they saw me moving, then they both asked how I felt, so I told them.

And then I said I was sorry 'cause I was probably ruining their plans for the day and they should have woken me up sooner, and Lindsay said that I didn't have to worry about that. She said that they'd wanted to get a slow start.

I was a little wobbly when I got to my hooves and I saw that I'd drooled on Lindsay and I felt bad about that, too. She said it was really cute and that I'd been talking in my sleep but nobody could make any sense of what I'd been saying, except that it wasn't in English. And I didn't remember what I'd dreamed, so I couldn't guess, either.

The smell of coffee helped wake me up, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to drink any just yet. So I went to the bathroom and then I had two more glasses of water.

I hadn't noticed until I got out of the bathroom, but they'd all packed up their things, 'cause we had to check out of the hotel and probably nobody had gotten breakfast yet, either. I wasn't sure that I wanted to eat but I thought I'd probably feel better after I had.

So I said that I was ready to go if they were even though I probably could have slept a bit longer. And Peggy asked if we wanted to eat here at the hotel or somewhere else. I said that I'd let them decide because I wasn't sure I wanted to eat all that much.

Victoria said that we should go to Crepes a la Carte, because they had the best crepes, and I didn't know what those were, and she told me that I wouldn't be sorry I'd tried them. And we could decide what we wanted to do today after we'd eaten.

Even though we weren't supposed to, we left Peggy's car in the parking lot and all got in Lindsay's Ranger Rover and the restaurant wasn't too far from us. Victoria told me that crepes were kind of like really thin pancakes and they were rolled up like a burrito and you could put sweet things or hearty things in them and they tasted really good either way. And that did sound like it would be good.

The restaurant was a house, and you had to wait outside, 'cause there wasn't an inside dining room. There was a bit of a line, too, but that gave me time to look at the menu and decide what I wanted. And finally when I still couldn't, Peggy said that she'd share with me so that way I could try two different kinds.

So all of us together got four different kinds of crepe and sat down in their little outside dining area. Someone had brushed the fresh snow off the tables, but there was still a little bit coming down and so I swept it off with my wing before sitting down.

I had half of an Atlantic, which was a salmon crepe, and then I also had half of a blue lagoon, which was really sweet and had Nutella in it. And they were both so good that I wanted another one and if there hadn't been a line I would have got one.

Victoria saw that I was looking and said that I should try another, so I got a vegetarian crepe even though I didn't know what evoo was. And when I said that back at the table Lindsay started laughing and said that it was extra virgin olive oil.

I wanted to know how it was extra virgin, and she said that normal virgins had impure thought but never acted on them, while extra virgins never even had impure thoughts.

I didn't think that an olive could have any kinds of thoughts, and I thought that she was making it up, but Victoria agreed that there was virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil and they were different.

After we were done eating, I felt a lot better, and so we decided that we'd go to Copper Mountain because it was a different kind of fun. It was pretty close as the pegasus flew, but it was a sort of long drive because the roads didn't go straight to it.

So we went back to the hotel and got Cobalt, and then drove off for Copper Mountain. We went along the mountains and then got to a big lake, and right after that we got onto the 70 Highway, which would take us back.

While we were driving, the snowclouds broke up and the sun started shining, even though we couldn't see it because we were in the shadow of the mountains to the east.

We parked next to each other and got out and got dressed, and went up the mountain. On our way up to the first hill, I saw a couple of people going down the hill in a raft, using paddles to steer, which I thought was a really crazy thing to do. But it did look like they were having fun, even after they went over a little bump and the person in the stern almost got launched out and had to drop his paddle and hold on so that he didn't go over the side.

There was a long trail called Roundabout that you could follow the way down although it was a little bit inconvenient to get to and that was what we warmed up on. It was a pretty easy trail but a nice long run and a good way to get my feel for the board back. All of my muscles were a little bit stiff from days of snowboarding, but by the time we got to the bottom they were all loosened up.

So we switched to some harder trails after that, and stayed on them until lunch. There was a restaurant at the top that sold soup, and that was a good way to warm up some.

After we'd eaten, we went back around to the harder trails. There was one that ran right next to Copper Creek, and it looked like if you weren't too careful you could fall into the creek and get wet. And then when we got further down it I saw that it crossed the creek but there wasn't a bridge; you had to jump over it. Which was really easy for me to do, and I didn't have any worry about accidentally falling in.

I took a bit of a break while they were playing and took off my snowboard and left it at the top of the trail that they were on, so that I could fly a little bit. And I got up high enough that I could see what was around us.

To the south, there were some reservoirs, I guess. They were iced over so I couldn't see what was in them, but they had big earthen dams at the end of them, and there were some buildings, too, that I couldn't guess the purpose of. There were even two domes side-by-side.

And off to the east, I could see some of the slopes at Breckenridge. It really wasn't all that far away, and I think in the summertime even a person could walk to here faster than they could drive.

There were also grey clouds coming in from the west, and it looked like we were going to be getting some more snow, and pretty soon, too. They weren't very high over the tops of the mountains to the west, so I wasn't sure that the girls knew that they were there.

I didn't stay up too long, 'cause I didn't want them to have to wait on me, so I dove back down and it took me a little bit longer than it should have to find the head of the trail where my snowboard was. If I hadn't paid attention to where it was in relation to the lifts, I probably would never have found it again.

I had to wait around until they got back to the top of the hill, but that was okay because it gave me a chance to play in the snow. And when I got off of the trail and into the trees it was really soft and powdery and I could burrow down in it some, and then it got even deeper and pretty soon I was up to my neck.

It turned out it was a lot more fun to get into than to get back out of. I had to kind of dig myself out and pack the snow down under me and I was hoping that there weren't any predators out in these woods, or else I might be an easy target, 'cause I was kind of helpless. But I managed to get myself loose and went back up to where the snow was a little bit thinner.

If there really were snow-sharks, I bet they'd burrow into the snow and jump up out of it when people walked by them.

I was happily rolling around in the shallower powder when the girls came back, and I'd pretty much managed to cover all of myself with snow, and even when I shook myself off a lot of it stayed stuck in my coat. Peggy said that I was crazy, but I thought that if she tried it she'd see how much fun it was.

One of my hoof-boots didn't stick right 'cause I'd gotten a bunch of snow packed into it and it didn't have a very good grip on the snowboard, but I kept it under control the whole way down and then we had to scrape it out for next time.

The four of us did a few more runs, and by then the clouds were obvious from anywhere. Peggy said that was going to make the drive back a lot of fun and at least we were close to the 70 Highway. Then she got her portable telephone out to see how bad it was going to be, because sometimes when the snow was really bad they closed the 70 Highway, and if they did we wouldn't be able to get back home at all.

She decided that it didn't look like it was going to be all that bad, so we kept on playing a little bit longer, than Lindsay said that I'd been getting better and better all day and asked if I wanted to have a race. She said that we could go down one of the easier trails, like Roundabout, 'cause it was long and not too difficult.

I thought that would be fun, so we went back to the start of that, and by the time we got there it had started snowing some.

We went down once for practice, and that was important because there were other trails that branched off from it and if you were racing you might not have time to read the signs and see that you were on the correct trail.

Well, I'd kind of gotten a good look from the air and knew where all the trails went and I knew that that one was shorter, and I thought about cheating a little bit. If the snow hadn't gotten heavier, I wouldn't have had my opportunity, but by the time we'd gotten back to the top, it was starting to get a little bit thicker and blowing.

Me and Lindsay were pretty close to each other when we passed over the trail mouth, and I dropped back a little bit and then when she got obscured by a gust of wind, I used it to take off and angled down the mountain over the trees. I could see the shorter trail off to my left, but I'd lost sight of Roundabout. Since they ended in the same place, it didn't really matter, and I just followed the one I could see.

I was on the wrong side of the chair lift, so when I saw it ahead of me I dove down until my board was just brushing against the tops of the trees, and I went by one of the poles 'cause the cables were highest there, and then I dropped down and landed on the trail and slid to a stop.

I hadn't beaten Lindsay by all that much, and it was kind of funny 'cause when I first saw her she was looking back like she was trying to figure out where I was, and then as soon as she turned her head forward again she saw me right away and came up to a stop right next to me.

She wanted to know how I got past her and I said that it must have happened in one of the gusts, and at first she was puzzled because she'd seen me on the right trail after we'd crossed the other one, and she bit her lip and I could tell she was really thinking about it. And I might have gotten away with it longer but Victoria came down and stopped by us and asked me why there was a branch on my snowboard, and I looked down and sure enough, there was one caught up against my forelegs, down against my hoof-boots so I hadn't known it was there. And I hadn't thought that I got that close to any of the trees but I guess I must have.

Lindsay said that I'd cheated, but she wasn’t really mad. I told her that she'd never said that I couldn't fly, and then I stuck my tongue out at her, and she reached down and threw a handful of snow back at me, which I didn't quite dodge all the way. And I admitted that she was a lot faster than I was and I'd never beat her on a snowboard.

Even though the resort was going to be open for a while longer, we all decided that we'd had lots of fun, and should try to get out of the mountains before it was dark.

So we said that we were going to meet in Denver for dinner, and that way we'd be out of the mountains.

We had to stop for gas for both cars first, and we went inside and got some food to snack on. They had sandwiches there, too, but I knew not to eat them.

Lindsay followed along behind Peggy, and we made our way through the mountains back to Denver. The road followed a valley up, so it was kind of twisty and sometimes you couldn't see too far at all because of all the blowing snow. Trucks were the hardest to see, 'cause they were white, and they didn't move too fast, so she had to stay alert so she wouldn't bump into one by mistake.

Some people who were dumb went driving by really fast, and the first time it happened, Peggy told me to always remember what kind of car it had been, so that we could look for it in the ditch later on. She said that there were lots of people who came up to the mountains to ski and they didn't have the right tires and didn't understand that the road was sometimes trickier than it looked. And she'd been right; I saw a bright red pickup which had passed us before and now was sitting in a ditch with snow up over its bumper.

Peggy hadn't warned me that there was going to be a tunnel, and so the first I knew of it was when we came around a curve and it was in front of us. And I didn't like seeing all the mountain that was on top of it and could crush it flat in a second and there would be no way out, or a rockslide could bury the entrance and so I just closed my eyes and thought about all the big open spaces at the ski resorts.

I could hear when we went into it, 'cause the sound changed, and it felt like we were in there forever, but I didn't open my eyes again until I knew that we were back out in the open again, and I asked her if there were any more tunnels, and she said that there weren't, so that was good.

We got stopped in traffic for a while, so Peggy ate some of her snack food. She said that there was probably an accident up ahead, and there was. A big truck had slid partway off the road so it couldn't get out, and its trailer was still sticking out, blocking one of the lanes of traffic. There was a really big wrecker that was behind it, and men were pulling out cables so that they could get the truck back on the road where it belonged.

So it was kind of late when we got to Denver, and Peggy said that she'd kind of wanted to go to a fancy restaurant but now that she was really hungry she'd changed her mind and would settle for something plainer and quicker. So she called Victoria and we finally decided that we'd go to a Pizza Hut, 'cause that was decent food and it wasn't too slow, and she knew where one was that was on our way home.

We stayed there and talked and relaxed for an hour, and we'd ordered too much pizza, 'cause we had some left over that our waitress put in boxes for us, and then Lindsay and Victoria both gave me a big hug in case we didn't get a chance to see each other again before I left Colorado Springs. I hoped we would, 'cause they were both a lot of fun to be with.

They were still behind us most of the way, but they finally turned off on the US 87 Road. And before they got off Lindsay flashed her lights at us.

I knew we were getting close when I spotted the beacon on the airplane control tower, and pretty soon Peggy got off the highway and we went to her neighborhood. There were lots of other houses that had Christmas lights up, but I thought that the ones at Peggy's house looked the best. Plus they were the only ones that had been hung by a pegasus.

She parked in front of the house and we got our gear and our leftover pizza out of the car, and when we were inside Peggy went to the laundry room to wash all of her clothes, and hung up her snowpants and snowjacket so that they could dry off.

Chrissie and John were in the living room, cuddling with each other and watching a movie called Sausage Party, which was very strange. It had talking food in it and there was a sausage who was trying to warn the other foods that people ate them. And they stopped the movie so that they could ask us about our weekend, and get a look to make sure that none of us had any bandages on.

Me and Peggy both wanted to take showers, and she insisted that I take the first one so that I could dry off all the way before we went to bed.

When I was done, Peggy was watching a movie in her room on her folding computer, and she said that I could watch it while she was in the shower if I wanted to, and she could even make it go back to the beginning, but I was gonna preen my wings and groom, so she folded her computer back shut and put it on her desk.

I hadn't gotten all the way done when she got out of the shower, and she sat down on the bed, too, and brushed her hair and said that tomorrow she was going to sleep in for real, and maybe not get up until noon. I didn't want to waste the whole day in bed, so I said that maybe I'd get up early and fly around some and then in the afternoon we could do fun things together, and she thought that was a good plan.

November 30 [A Day in Colorado Springs]

November 30

It was nice waking up not hung over, and while I was still kind of sore from our long weekend, I didn't mind, 'cause it had all been fun.

My hips felt a little bit strange, like they were slightly out of joint, which I think was because of all the time I'd spent on the snowboard with my hooves anchored down, and when I stretched out my leg one of them cracked and it hurt at first but then it felt a lot better, so I stretched out the other one to see if it would, too, but it didn't want to cooperate. Maybe it was because I was lying on it.

I didn't want to wake Peggy up, so I got out of bed really slowly and she moved around a bit but stayed asleep.

I wasn't the first one up; John and Chrissie were both downstairs and I must have been a little bit tireder than I thought, 'cause her hair was wet and I hadn't heard her take her shower.

I got a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with them, and Chrissie asked me what I was planning to do for the rest of the week, and I had to tell her that I didn't know, but we'd find something fun to do. And I said that I wanted to do something with all of us, if we could, and if there weren't any caves.

And then I said that I was gonna go flying this morning and enjoy the sunrise, and she said that I had better get up in the air pretty quick if I wanted to because it wasn't going to be too much longer before it was over the horizon.

She gave John a goodbye kiss and then went out to the garage so that she could go to work, and he picked his newspaper back up and started reading it, while I drank my coffee and thought about where I could fly this morning. Since I'd spent the last four days up in the mountains, it might be interesting to see something else, so maybe I'd go east. I'd have to stay kind of low, at least until I passed out of the way of the airport, but it was so close it wouldn't be much longer than if I went any other way.

So that was where I was going to go, so I went back upstairs and got my flight gear, staying really quiet so that I didn't bother Peggy. And then I went back downstairs to get dressed and I happened to think about the fish I'd seen in the stream when I was flying through the mountain and asked John if I could catch one if I wanted to. He said that my Michigan fishing license wasn't valid in any other state, but if I did catch one nobody would know. And while that was probably true I didn't want to break the rules, so I wouldn't catch them.

I didn't take my GoPro, 'cause I'd forgotten to empty its memory or charge it up, but I made sure that I had all the rest of my gear, and then I went outside to the backyard, and John did too. And this time the airplane directors were a little bit less confused when I asked for flight clearance, but they weren't too happy that I didn't have a destination in mind. But I'd given them a compass bearing, and I thought that should be good enough. And I guess it was, because they said that I could but I had to stay low until I was out of their airspace.

So I flew over the fence and turned around long enough to wave goodbye to John, and then I flew across the open meadow between their neighborhood and the airport, angling off to the south.

I looked to make sure that there weren't any airplanes coming as I got close to the end of the runways, 'cause I knew that a big one might blow me away. And I was just past them, about a hundred feet above the ground, when I saw the sun start to come up over the plain.

I made short glides while I watched it rise—I wasn't high enough to glide very far—and then I climbed a little bit, but I still stayed pretty low. I didn't want to annoy the airplane directors by pushing my clearance, even though they probably would never know if I had.

There was a little neighborhood all by itself that was a little ways past the airport, and then I was in open land. I was following a road that was off to my south which had a few farms along it, but it wasn't like Michigan or Indiana where there were lots of farms that had their fields bound by trees—here there were just thin fences here and there, and they were mostly surrounding prairie grasses. Some of the fields had cows in them, but I didn't see any barns where the cows might live. Maybe they just stayed outside all the time, or maybe their pastures were bigger than I thought, and the barns further away. It was really hard to see exactly where all the fence rows went.

It all looked kind of dry, which was funny because of all the snow up in the mountains. But a lot of times mountains stopped clouds, and they dumped out all their moisture before they got across the mountain range, so the land on the downwind side didn't get very much rain or snow. And I saw a deep creekbed that confirmed my thoughts—it was cut a ways into the soil, but there wasn't any water in it at all. I bet when the rain did come, though, it filled all the way up.

I could see a couple more dry creeks going across the prairie, and also a dry lake off in the distance. And then in front of me I saw what I thought was a crater at first: it was a little bit of a depression, and I could kind of make out lines radiating out from it. And in the center there was a windmill on a short tower.

Once I got close, though, it was obvious what it was: there was a big, low tank that had some water in it, and all the trails that I was seeing were made by the big herd of cows that was relaxing just on the other side of the hill, and I was kind of disappointed that that's all it was. It would have been really neat to find a crater, especially if nobody had found it already.

Off to the north of me, there was a bunch of big buildings and parking lots and it was a really strange place for it to be, since there wasn't much of anything around it. So I thought about flying out there to get a look at it but then I decided that since it was off all by itself like that maybe that was because they didn't want people going there, and wouldn't be too happy if a pegasus flew overhead.

So I turned around and started flying back. I was too low to really see the airport, and its control tower sort of blended into the city, and I couldn't see their beacon turning. Maybe it was only on during the nighttime.

But it didn't matter, 'cause I had a road to follow and my watch knew where the airport was, too. And so when I called the airplane directors and told them that I was flying back, they gave me permission and told me to stay under a thousand feet and to let them know when I got within a mile of the airport, and I said that I would.

I liked the view flying back better—the mountains stretched across the horizon, and the sky was clear behind them. If I had time tomorrow, I thought that instead of flying through mountain valleys, I could see if I could get permission to fly along their peaks. Maybe I could land on a couple of them.

I saw an airplane landing before I actually saw the airport, but now I knew about where the end of the runway was, so I angled a little bit more south so that I'd clear it, and when I got over the little neighborhood I called the airplane directors again to let them know where I was.

They said that there was another big airplane landing soon and I could cross over the south end of the runways if I could be clear in four minutes, and I wasn't sure that I could—I probably could but I remembered how that one airplane had almost knocked me out of the air just from its wake, and if I was only a few hundred feet above the ground that wasn't much room to recover. So I told them that I'd just circle and wait, so I did. And it was a good opportunity to drink a little bit more water, too.

Even though I knew I was far enough away to be safe, I still got nervous as the airplane came in for its landing, just 'cause it was so big and quick. It looked like it was a long ways away at first and then all of a sudden it was right there.

I started flying towards the airport as soon as I saw it slow down at the other end of the runway, just so that I'd have plenty of time to get across before the next one came. And I didn't cut north this time; I just kept heading west until I was clear of the second runway, and then when I crossed the 21 road, I was right by Peggy's neighborhood so I started gliding down until I saw her house.

I looked both ways for cars and then I landed on the street next to Cobalt.

I had to push the doorbell so that I could get in, 'cause I didn't have a key. And at first nobody came to the door and I thought about pushing it again but that was probably rude—I could hear it outside so anyone who was inside ought to be able to hear it, too.

And after about a minute, John came and opened the door and let me inside. He told me that Peggy had just gotten up and that she was in the shower now, which meant that I'd have to wait for a turn.

So I went inside and got out of my flight gear and I sat at her desk and wrote in my journal until she came in the bedroom. She said that I should have knocked on the door, 'cause if she'd known I was back she would have finished sooner, but I said that it was okay.

When I got done with my shower I groomed myself, and then I went downstairs. Peggy had made macaroni and cheese and a salad for lunch. She also said that she had a can of pineapple if I wanted to have that.

It was kind of neat how all the pineapple was in rings that fit just inside the can, and it was all in pineapple juice which she poured into a cup so that she could drink it.

I asked her what she wanted to do in the afternoon, and she said that most of her friends who had visited liked to visit the gold mine but I probably wouldn't like that because it was underground. Then she said that there was a Go-Kart track north of town and we could do that, or else we could drive back into the mountains because the weather was a little bit nicer today. There were hot springs that were a couple of hours away, and also a big gorge that she said was really nice. They had a train that you could ride, too, but it only ran on the weekends.

So I said that racing Go-Karts would be fun, and she decided to see how many of her friends wanted to do it. She told me that these were different than the ones I'd driven before, because they were electric and it was inside, but you drove them the same way so I knew how to do that.

She sent telephone telegrams to all her friends, and then we went upstairs to her room so that I could plug in my GoPro, and put all the movies it had taken on her folding computer, so if I went flying tomorrow morning I could use it then. And while we were there she got a telegram from her friend Clive who said that him and Gina could meet us at the Go-Kart place in a few hours, but they were both working right now.

Peggy decided that she wanted to change her clothes to go Go-Karting, and then we got in Cobalt and drove into town.

We didn't go to the Go-Kart place right away; she took me on a little tour of town and showed me her high school, which was called Sierra. Their mascot was a stallion, and I asked her if that was why she wanted a pony roommate and she laughed and said that she thought it would be fun, and she'd been lucky to be the one who was picked. And she reached over and pet my mane and said that I'd been the best roommate she'd ever had even if I did shed all over the place, and I told her that that wasn't true; I hardly shed at all. Except when it was time for my winter coat to fall out; then I shed a lot.

She said that she was just pulling my leg, and we drove north through town and she took me by the Olympic Training Center, which was kind of close to where the #freethenipple protest had been. Probably nobody was out there without shirts today because it was a lot colder.

Then she went and drove to a big park called Palmer Park, and it was like mini-mountains. There was a spot where you could look over Colorado Springs, and there was also a big picnic area called Lazy Land. There wasn't anyone there today, but she said in the summertime it was pretty full.

There were also riding stables near the park, because there were therapeutic horses who helped people out that weren't healthy, which I thought was really neat. Peggy said that she didn't know a lot about it but that the horses somehow could help people who had trouble walking, and it wasn't just by carrying them where they needed to go.

We stopped the car and walked along one of the trails which went through a little pass in the rocks, and I flew up to the top of one of the rocks (it wasn't very high) and said that I was princess of the mountain, and so Peggy had to climb up, too, so we both could be princesses.

She asked me if I'd ever thought about sticking Equestrian flags in things and claiming them as my own, because that's what explorers used to do—whenever they found something new, they put a flag in it and said it was theirs.

I said that I hadn't brought any Equestrian flags with me or else I would have. And she said that maybe we should get some and she was sure that there was someone who sold them in Colorado Springs.

Peggy looked at her portable telephone and then she said that she'd found a store and she sounded like she was surprised by that. It was called Flagline.com, and it wasn't very far from the park.

She said that it had a internet name so probably it was just a headquarters and they didn't have any flags there, but since it wasn't very far away it wouldn't be any trouble to go there and look at it, and maybe if they didn't have any they would know who did.

So after we'd finished walking around the trail, we drove over there and it wasn't very far at all. And when we went inside it didn't look like a store at all, but they did have lots of flags on the wall and on posts and I did see that they had an Equestrian flag.

The woman at the front desk asked us who we were coming to see, and so Peggy explained what we were looking for, and she told us that they didn't ship from there and didn't keep product in stock, which was kind of what she'd expected. But the woman said that sometimes they had samples and she could check and see if there was anything, so she picked up her telephone and made a quick call and pretty soon a man in a suit who was named Brian came out and he was really helpful. He said that they'd gotten a shipment in of miniature flags to look at—he called them 'stick flags,' cause they came on a post—and he said that it might still be in back somewhere.

We sat down in the office and waited and pretty soon he came back with a handful of flags, and said that that was all that he had. They were on little plastic posts and he said that they did come with bases normally but those hadn't been included in the shipment since they were early samples, and he could go looking to see if he could find some, but Peggy said that we wouldn't need them. And then she asked him how much they cost, and he said that he'd just give them to us, since it was the first time a pony had ever come in asking for Equestrian flags.

Well, I was so happy that I had to give him a hug, and Peggy did, too, and she put the flags in her pocket and we went back out to Cobalt.

The Go-Kart track was north of town, near the Air Force Academy and a Bass Pro Shop, which was a place that sold things for fishing. They had a big plastic bass on their building, and also a boat out front which Peggy said was a bass boat. It was sleek and sparkly and looked like it was really fast, and it had a big motor on the back.

I told her that it didn't look anything like a bass, and she said that it wasn't supposed to; it was supposed to catch them, and I told her that our lobster boats looked like lobsters, and she looked at me like she wasn't sure if I was telling the truth or not. And then I stuck my tongue out at her and she started to laugh and then when we stopped the car she showed me a picture of a Wiener Mobile, which was a car that sold hot dogs and also looked like a hot dog.

We'd gotten there later than Clive and Gina, so when we found them we went right to the desk to get our tickets, and the person there wasn't sure if he should let me, but I was expecting that so I showed him my pilot's license and he asked me if I'd even driven a Go-Kart before and I told him that I had. And Peggy used her portable telephone to find some pictures of me driving the Go-Karts in Kalamazoo.

Then he said that he wasn't sure if he had a helmet that would fit me, and she said that we had one out in the car, and so she went out and got it and he looked at it and decided that it would be okay to wear.

We had to sign a paper, too. Humans make you sign a paper before you can do anything fun. And then we got in line.

While we were waiting, Peggy's telephone chirped and she looked at the message and said that us four were going to be the only ones there, 'cause Lindsay and Victoria had already made plans. Then she told me that Lindsay was really mad about it because she wanted to see me drive.

The Go-Karts drove a lot like the ones in Kalamazoo. They were a little bit quicker to accelerate, and they were really quiet, too, 'cause of their electric motors. But all the controls were the same, and after one lap I started to remember how to drive it, and pretty soon I was racing around the track and keeping up with Peggy and Gina and Clive. He was the fastest of us. I think I could have caught him if I'd gone faster, but there were a lot of turns and they slowed me down more than him.

I got a little more aggressive the second time we raced, and I passed him but then I was going too fast for a curve and the back of my car slid out and it bumped into the barrier and by the time I got it back on the track he was too far ahead for me to catch, so I concentrated on going through turns as fast as I could for the rest of that race. I didn't really get any better at them, because whenever I went too fast the back of the go-kart would start to slide, and then it always wanted to spin and I didn't know how to straighten it out.

So I never wound up beating him in a race, even though I wanted to. Even if he did slide into the barrier, he could get his go-kart going again quickly enough that he didn't lose too much time.

After we were done racing, Peggy said that we should all go to dinner together, so we ate at the Mikado Asian Bistro, which had sushi. I was the only one who wanted it, and I would have felt bad about that, but they also had Thai food which Gina liked, and Chinese food which Peggy and Clive liked, so everyone was happy with it.

We said our goodbyes in the parking lot, and then drove back to Peggy's house and before we went to bed, we all sat at the kitchen table and John taught me how to play Blackjack, which is a card game that's played in casinos. He said that since we were playing for fun he wouldn't use real money, so he used chips like Mister Salvatore had when he was playing poker with the tornado ponies.

It wasn't that hard a game to figure out, 'cause it was based on probabilities, so all I had to do was keep track of what cards had been played already to figure out what was going to come up next. Chrissie said that I was taking too long between my moves and you weren't supposed to count the cards.

I thought that was kind of silly, because how else would you know if you had a good chance of getting a card that you wanted.

After we'd played for a while, John had most of the chips because he was the dealer and the dealer usually won. John said that that was the rules for casinos, that the House always won.

Peggy promised that she wasn't going to sleep in until noon tomorrow, and she said that we'd go back into the mountains, and that I'd have a chance to fly and plant my flags, and then on Friday it was her parents' turn to come up with what we were going to do, 'cause Chrissie had the day off.

December 1 [Royal Gorge and Valley View]

December 1

I woke up before the sun got up, and I wasn't sure what time Peggy was gonna get up. She had said that she was going to get up earlier than noon but I didn't know how much earlier and I didn't want to fly off somewhere and have her waiting on me, so I decided that maybe if John and Chrissie were up I'd go out and fly around the neighborhood and then we'd go out and do fun things. I hoped some of her friends wanted to, as well, 'cause it was always more fun with more people.

I didn't get out of bed until I heard her parents moving around, and then I got up and went downstairs and I thought I'd be helpful and make coffee for them. Their cupboards didn't have handles on them that I could pull with my mouth, so I had to hook a forehoof under the bottom of the door and pull it open that way. And then everything was crowded in there together so it was hard to get just the can of coffee and not anything else with it. But after I had it out on the counter, the rest was pretty easy, and their coffee maker was just like Aric's.

The carafe was almost full when John came downstairs and he thought I was Peggy until he came into the kitchen, and then he said that he'd thought it was strange that she was up so early. He was a little bit confused about how I'd made coffee, too, and he thought that it was leftover coffee from yesterday until he saw it was coming out of the filter basket.

He poured me a cup and one for himself and then went out and got the newspaper, and we sat and drank our coffee until Chrissie came downstairs.

She didn't believe that I'd made the coffee, either, and John had to tell her three times that he wasn't lying, that I'd done it. He said that he could dump out the pot and I could make a new pot to prove I could do it, but that was wasteful, and Chrissie thought it would take too long, anyways.

After she left for work, I snacked on some cereal that he had called Special K. I didn't know what made it so special except maybe that it had little strawberry slivers in it that melted on my tongue. The box said that they were freeze-dried, which I guess was one way that humans kept their food for later. But if you could still get fresh strawberries at the grocery store—and you could; I'd seen them—why freeze-dry them to put in cereal when you could add fresh ones yourself when you were ready to eat them?

I went upstairs long enough to put on my flight gear and I decided not to take my camelback 'cause I was just going around the neighborhood a little bit.

John followed me far enough outside so that he could turn on the Christmas lights so the house would be easier to find, and he asked if I wanted a coat or a hat or anything, since he said it was really cold, but I told him that I already had my winter coat on and I didn't mind the temperature at all. And then I called the airplane directors and I told them where I wanted to fly, and they said that I could. I think they were happy that I wasn't going to be in the way of their runways this morning.

So I took off and followed along the street until I got to the end, and then I just kept going north, parallel to the airport. I didn't turn until I got to the 24 Highway and I would have rather gone east but the airport was in my way, so I went west toward the mountains instead.

Even before I could see the sun coming over the horizon, I could see it turning the tops of the mountains orange, and as I watched it slowly worked its way down their slopes, and when it started to get close to the bottom I circled back around so that I could watch it rise, and while I waited I studied all the lights at the airport. I had had to learn what all the different colors and patterns meant so that I could get my pilot's license but I'd forgotten some of it because I hadn't ever had to land at an airport after I'd passed my test.

Once the sun was above the horizon, I went further west until I got to Academy Boulevard, which was an important road and easy to find. It had lots of businesses on it, including the Firestone, and it probably had a a college on it somewhere, too. And I followed that south for a couple of miles until I got to where it branched to the east and changed its name, and I followed that road along all the way back to Peggy's neighborhood. It was too important a road to go directly to her neighborhood, so she had to go around a bit further and come back, but I could just fly straight across the grass and fences to get back to her house.

I pushed the doorbell and John let me back in, and I went upstairs to shower.

When I was done with my shower, Peggy hadn't woken up yet, so I stood on the floor and groomed myself and then I got out my journal and wrote in it some.

She woke up while I was still writing, and she hugged me before she went off to take her shower. I kept on working until she came back into the bedroom and then I closed it up so that I'd be ready to go as soon as she was dressed.

Peggy checked what the weather was going to be on her portable telephone, and then she packed up a duffel bag with other things that she thought she might need, and she told me to make sure that I took my flight gear.

She said that we were going to meet up with Clive and Gina in the afternoon, out at Royal Gorge, and we were all going to go to the hot springs together unless the weather got bad but right now it looked like it was going to be good.

She decided that we ought to take some lunch, so after she ate a bagel for breakfast, she made some ham and cheese sandwiches for her and just cheese for me, and then she went outside and started up Cobalt so it would have time to get warm and melt the frost off the windows. And she looked through the pantry until she found a box of Triscuits that we could also snack on, and she got some apples out of the electric icebox and put it all in a plastic grocery bag.

We drove south out of town on the 115 Road, which ran alongside the mountains, and then when we got to a town called Penrose we turned onto the US 50 Road, which took us to Cañon City and then pretty quick we started driving up into the mountains. There was a bend that took us right by railroad tracks and Peggy said that was the Royal Gorge Railroad that only ran on weekends in the winter. And next to it was the Arkansas River, but I couldn't see it from my seat in Cobalt. Peggy said that we'd be seeing it in the Royal Gorge.

So we went up into the mountains and it was really pretty, 'cause all the rocks that were exposed were reds and browns. And when we got a little bit closer, I saw that there were lots of burned trees on the mountain. Peggy said that there had been a forest fire a few years ago, and that was why. And she said that a lot of the buildings in the park had burned down, too, because the firefighters couldn't save them, but now most of them had been rebuilt and the bridge had been fixed.

If we'd had a big fire like that we would have gotten lots of weatherponies to bring a really big rainstorm to put it out, 'cause the forest couldn't burn when it was all wet. But humans couldn't do that, and Peggy said that when there was a lot of wind and it was really dry, forest fires were very hard to fight, and a lot of times people had to cut firebreaks and let the fire burn everything until it got there.

She said that there were kinds of forests that needed fires to renew them, and that there were some kinds of trees that their pinecones were stuck shut until a fire burned through, and then the new trees could grow where there wasn't any competition for sunlight or nutrients.

I didn't like the idea of that. I thought that it made more sense for ponies to gather the pinecones and put them somewhere that the trees could grow, rather than letting a fire do the work, 'cause fires were dangerous. Besides burning things on the ground, they made dangerous updrafts and filled the sky with smoke.

We got off on a smaller road called 3A, and followed that back until we got to the parking area, and there weren't too many other cars there because it was early and cold. Peggy said that was why it was good to visit in the week in wintertime, because not too many tourists came.

Peggy said that there was a tram that went over the gorge which was a lot of fun and there was also a bridge that went across it, and she said that it used to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world but now there was one that was taller than it. And we could take that across, too.

Before we went inside, Peggy told me to put on my camelback and GoPro, 'cause I was going to want them. She said that I probably shouldn't wear my vest, unless I thought that I really needed it. I decided that I'd leave it off, 'cause it was more fun to fly without it when I could.

She said that it was the most fun to take the tram first and then the bridge, so that's what we did. There was a little sign saying how many people it had carried, although this was a new one because the old one had burned up in the fire.

The tram was just like the gondolas at Breckenridge, although they were a little bit squarer. And since there weren't many other people we got one all to ourselves, and I stood in the front so I had a really good view out the windshield, and Peggy stood next to me and as it went up into the air a little bit from the station, I saw more and more of the gorge, and I was starting to wonder just how deep it was, 'cause I still couldn't see the bottom, and 'cause the sides were really steep I didn't see it until we were almost overtop of it, and I wanted to go flying down in it and I would have jumped out of the tram if I knew how to work the doors.

The bridge had steel lattice towers, kind of like the kinds that held up the big electricity wires, and that was really neat to see. They weren't cement towers like the Mackinac Bridge had. And it was a really pretty silver color, and it had a nice wide deck to fly off of and land on again, and right in the middle the supporting cables were really low, so it would be easy to get over them.

It was hard to see the river and the tracks that Peggy said were right by it, 'cause they were down in shadow. And then when the tram was past the middle, we went to the other end so we could look at the other side of the canyon.

We got off in the tramhouse on the other side and there were some buildings that had displays about the canyon and some other things to do, but I was more interested in flying down off the bridge, and Peggy must have known that I would be, and that's why she told me to wear my camelback and GoPro.

So we walked back to the bridge, and then out on it, and that gave us both plenty of time to look at the scenery even though I really wanted to just gallop to the middle.

Peggy told me that sometimes people had been allowed to bungee jump off the bridge, which was a sport where you tied an elastic band to yourself and jumped off of something and then bounced back up. She said that it wasn't allowed now, though, and there was even a sign that said that nobody was supposed to jump off of the bridge. So I thought that I might get into trouble, but she said that she had a solution for that, and told me to fly above the bridge first, 'cause that way I wasn't on it. I thought maybe that was cheating a little bit, but if she said it was okay it probably was.

We went out to the center together, and then she walked over to the railing on the eastern side, and I followed her along and looked out at the canyon. She told me that she'd wait up top for me, and if she got kicked out of the park she'd stay just outside their border in Cobalt, so if I didn't see her on the bridge to fly out there instead. And then she said that I should make sure to fly under the bridge at least once so she could take a movie of me with her portable telephone, 'cause it wasn't too often that she got to look down on me when I was flying.

So I went up and over the supporting cable, and then dove down and got a little bit of forward speed before turning around and going back under the bridge, maybe twenty feet below the base of it. And then when I came out the other side I went a little ways upriver before I started descending faster.

The canyon was kind of confining, but I could still make a big spiral down it, and I stayed a little ways back from the walls in case there were Quarray Eels, even though I didn't think that they had those on Earth. And when they were adults, their burrows were pretty easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for, and I didn't see anything that looked like a burrow.

Pretty soon, I was down in the shadowed area of the canyon, and I was still a few hundred feet above the river and the railroad. And I stopped circling, and decided that I'd go upstream a little bit.

The bottom of the canyon was really pretty, and the river was wild and full of rapids. If I'd been by myself, I think I would have flown all the way to Cañon City, but I didn't want to leave Peggy behind. I didn't think of calling her on my portable telephone, but I could have landed and done that.

I went about a mile downstream, and then I turned back around and flew upstream, and once I was under the bridge I started to climb, but I went a ways upstream before I turned around and headed back towards the bridge. It was easier to make a shallow climb than a steep one, and it gave me more time to look at the scenery.

When I got closer, I could see that Peggy was still on the bridge, and she waved at me and I waved back, before I went under the bridge and back upstream some more. And I didn't turn around until I was above the lip of the canyon and the fire-scarred forest was around me.

I went a little ways above it, and I could see some fresh new evergreens poking their crowns above the ground, replacing all the ones that had burned. Maybe they were the kind that needed fire to open their pine cones.

Here and there, I saw a few little clusters of trees that had somehow survived the fire, but there weren't too many. Maybe the winds had been just right and protected them, or they'd had more water in them than their neighbors. Fortunately, I didn't have much experience with forest fires.

I was as high as the tops of the towers when I came back, and I went right over the one on the north side and then glided down, sort of following the path of the supporting cable, then I landed right next to Peggy.

She asked if I'd had fun, and I said that I would have liked to fly the whole length of it, or at least from the bridge to Cañon City.

Peggy looked at her watch and said that I could, because she could just meet up with Clive and Gina there. She said that it was probably five or six miles, and there was a train station there that I couldn't miss, so I nuzzled her and I went up and over the edge again.

This time, I just glided down. It sounded like it was going to be too far for me to make it without flying some, but I thought I'd take my time and maybe if there were some good updrafts I just might be able to make it all the way.

The canyon never really opened up until I was close to Cañon City, and the mountains were getting lower and lower. The sun had gotten high enough that even the bottom of the gorge was in full sunlight, and I was happily flying along about fifty feet above the river, keeping right over the center. But it didn't open up and flatten out until I was almost to the edge of the city.

I saw the train station right away, but I didn't see Cobalt, and since it had taken us a long time to get from the town to the bridge, I thought that maybe I'd beaten Peggy. So I landed right next to a big brown truck and I was kind of surprised when the window rolled down and Clive leaned out and asked me where Peggy was.

I said that I must have beaten her, and sure enough a couple minutes later she turned into the parking lot. It was a lot longer to drive than it was to fly, 'cause the road wound around even more than the river did.

There was another girl in the truck besides Gina and at first I didn't recognize her, then I realized that it was Leah, who I'd met in the summertime. She looked different when she was dressed in her winter clothes.

Clive said that it made the most sense for us to all go together, because he had plenty of room in his truck, and Peggy agreed, so we got our things out of Cobalt and she left it behind.

The truck was called an Excursion, and Clive said that it used to be a forest service truck. It had a big diesel motor in it, and I thought that Mister Salvatore would really like it. It was even bigger than the Suburbans that he liked to drive.

Peggy said that we were going to go to the Mount Princeton Hot Springs, and then Gina said that she thought we were going to Valley View, which she said was closer. Peggy had never heard of it, and she asked if it was nice. Gina said that you had to hike a little bit to get to the springs but they were really nice, and she said that you could even stay out after dark and see all the stars, 'cause there wasn't much of anything around them. And Leah said that there weren't as many people there usually, either.

So Peggy thought about it a little bit and said that we'd go there instead.

We drove through the mountains until we got to Poncha Springs, and we stopped for a quick meal at the Hunger Trailer, because Clive said that there wouldn't be any more restaurants when we started going south, and I was glad that he had, 'cause the food was really good there.

We went south on the US 285 Road, and it was in kind of a high valley, just the same as the road we'd gone through on the way to Breckenridge.

This was called the San Luis Valley, and Peggy said that there was a big sand dune park in it, where she'd been when she was a kid. We weren't going to get to see that, though, because it was farther south than we were going.

Clive turned off the road onto one that was called GG Road, which turned into a dirt road as soon as we went around a curve, and then just went straight across the plain, which was dry and only had little shrubby bushes. When we got closer to the mountains, though, there were bands of trees that were living where the water was, and that was also where the road finally decided it wanted to curve.

When we got up to the gate, Peggy read the sign and then looked at Gina and said that she hadn't mentioned that it was clothing optional. And Leah asked what the point of hot springs was if you had to wear clothes, and anyway she could if she really wanted to.

Peggy crossed her arms and said that it would have been nice to know that while they'd been discussing where they wanted to go, and Gina said that she was sure that me and Peggy would like it and that Clive had been nervous at first and so had she but it was totally worth it and you could wear a swimsuit if you wanted to, or not. And I told her I didn't think it would be any different than showering together, but Peggy was still a little grumbly about it.

She changed her mind when we got further back, though, 'cause it was really pretty, and probably 'cause she had time to think about it while we were walking back to the hot springs.

The springs themselves were in a little clearing that was surrounded by trees, and there was an upper and a lower one, which were different temperatures. It was made up of big rocks, and there were some rubber mats down so that people and ponies wouldn't slip when they got out with wet feet and hooves.

There were a couple little benches where we could put our clothes or sit if we didn't want to be in the water, and that was about all that there was. And I really liked it, and so did Peggy. She admitted that the ones at Mount Princeton were more like swimming pools and not as natural as these were, and she said that it had been a good choice.

Then she said that she was still going to wear her swimming clothes.

There wasn't anywhere for her to change, though, and she finally tried to drape a couple of towels over a tree branch to make a sort of screen, but they weren't cooperating and kept falling down.

I said that I could fly up to the branch and sit on it and that would hold it in place, although it was a kind of tight spot for me to fit in, and she looked at her friends who were all getting undressed on the banks of the hot spring and decided that she was being dumb.

So she went back down and she wrapped the towel around her waist and took off her pants and underwear first, and then she took off her shirt and bra and stepped into the springs and kind of shielded herself with the towel until she had her hips under the water, and then she tossed it up on shore and stretched out in the water.

It wasn't very deep—I could lie on my belly and still have my head above water, and the water really didn't hide anything, 'cause it was crystal-clear. Peggy said that she was kind of nervous because it was her first time being naked out in the open during the daytime, and Leah said that she'd get used to it, and stretched out in the sun.

I thought it was strange, because it was like being in Meghan's hot tub, or the showers together—people at first were uncomfortable with taking their clothes off and bathing together but after they'd spent a little time doing it they got more comfortable with it. And I thought that it shouldn't have been hard for Peggy, 'cause it hadn't been that long ago that we'd had our shower party together. Maybe for people it made a difference if it was people you'd been naked with before.

Everyone tried to stay as much underwater as they could, 'cause even though it was sunny and clear it wasn't very warm, and when you got out of the water you got chilly really quick, but as long as you were in it you stayed nice and warm.

Clive had been smart and had brought a big bag with food and drinks in it that we could all share, and so every now and then people would make a quick dash out of the water and get something to eat and then get back in. And we played around a little bit, splashing each other and jumping around on the rocks and running to the other pool and them coming back to this one, and as long as you weren't out of the water for too long you didn't get too cold.

We all sat next to each other to watch the sun go down over the distant mountains, and it was a really pretty sunset that painted everything orange and purple, and then after it was gone it started to get dark really quick.

Peggy asked if we should get dressed while we still had some light to see by, and Clive said that he had a lantern, and he got out of the water long enough to get it and turn it on. Then he said that we should stay for a little while and see the stars and then go, and he promised us that he had several flashlights so we wouldn't have any trouble finding our way back.

So we leaned back and watched the stars come out, and even saw a shooting star before we finally decided to get out of the water and dry off.

I shook off as well as I could, and then they all dried off and got bundled up in their clothes as quickly as they could, and Clive and Gina lead us with their flashlights.

It took Clive's Excursion a little while to warm up, and I think that while it was I was the coldest one, 'cause I didn't have any clothes to wear and my coat was still pretty damp, so Gina let me sit in the front because that seat had a butt-warmer. And then when it started to blow warm air through the vents, he started driving back to Cañon City.

I'd warmed up and dried off by the time we got back to Cobalt, and Peggy started it and then we sat in the Excursion a little bit longer and said our goodbyes, and everyone got out so that we could all hug, and we drove back to Colorado Springs together.

It was nearly midnight when we got back, and John and Chrissie were already asleep, so we went inside as quietly as we could and me and Peggy both had a beer in the kitchen and then we went upstairs and went to bed, and we both agreed that it had been a really fun day.

December 2 [Cripple Creek]

December 2

Peggy woke up when I did, which was nice, and I leaned over and nuzzled her and asked her if she knew what her parents were gonna do with us today, and she said that she didn't know at all, but she hoped that it would be something interesting.

Today was gonna be our last full day together—tomorrow I was going to go back to Kalamazoo. That was kind of exciting, 'cause I'd get to see my new apartment and I missed Meghan and Aric, but leaving Peggy would be hard.

Peggy said she'd just take a quick shower, 'cause she thought that she was pretty clean after soaking in the hot springs for hours. And I didn't think that I needed one at all, 'cause I hadn't exercised enough to work up a lather at all yesterday, and if you took too many showers it dried out your skin and washed off the oils on your coat.

So I went downstairs to make coffee, even though it was a little early. That would make Peggy happy when she came downstairs and that would make John and Chrissie happy when they got up.

I thought about finding some things for breakfast, too, but maybe we were going to go somewhere to eat and I didn't want to spoil everyone's appetite if we did. I was pretty hungry, though, 'cause we'd eaten dinner early yesterday and then had only had some snacks after that, which weren't as filling as a real meal.

Peggy was still in the shower when John came down, and this time he didn't ask about the coffee, he just poured himself a cup, and asked if I wanted any. I'd been meaning to wait until the carafe filled up but he said that it was better before that because it was stronger.

We'd both drunk some of our coffee when he said that he had something that he wanted to show me and he had meant to before but he'd forgotten. And he went into his office and he came back out with a little vial with flakes of gold floating around in it, and he said that was from when we'd gone panning, and that he'd taken the time to get most of the water out of his gold. And there was a little label on it that said it was his retirement fund, and so I was kind of curious how much it was worth, and he said probably not even a dollar. But he said that the price of gold kept going up and maybe it would be worth two dollars by the time he retired.

Back in Equestria, we had lots of gold. It wasn't good for too much, 'cause it was too soft. Earth ponies could hammer it flat with just their shoes, if they wanted to. It looked pretty, though. And we weren't allowed to bring any of it with us to Earth.

Even if it wasn't worth anything much, I thought it was still special because it was something that we'd all gotten together.

He said that he was putting it on the mantle, and he'd meant to do that before I came but he'd forgotten.

John also wanted to know where we'd gone yesterday, and I was telling him about Valley View when Peggy came down and she got kind of embarrassed especially when John said that he and Chrissie had gone there a couple of times. I guess some people don't even like talking about being naked, which doesn't make sense. It was a lot of fun, and she'd had fun there, too.

Peggy changed the subject and asked him where we were going to go today, and he said that he thought that Cripple Creek would be a fun place to visit if I didn't mind burros, which were the same as donkeys. And I told him that they were kind of smelly sometimes and had funny ears but ponies got along with them okay.

Peggy said that as long as he wasn't planning on trying to sucker me into a gold mine it would be a fun place to visit, 'cause there were lots of museums and it was really pretty even in the wintertime, and if I wanted to go flying later, it was in the mountains.

So after Chrissie had her coffee and had taken her shower, we packed up and got in John's Highlander, 'cause he said that we might as well have breakfast on the road, and we went through town and stopped at the Omelette Parlor, which he said had the best omelets and best pancakes in all of Colorado Springs.

I couldn’t decide if I should have pancakes or an omelet, ‘cause it all sounded good. I didn’t think I could eat both, because the menu said that the pancakes were the size of a plate, but Peggy said that we could share a pancake, as long as I'd give her some of my omelet.

On the last page of their menu, instead of having more food that you could buy, they had etiquette instructions which was really interesting. Chrissie said that there were lots of rules on dining etiquette, but most people didn’t pay it that much attention any more. I read over some of it but I didn't think it would apply to ponies, although maybe unicorns liked to eat like that.

A lot of their omelets had taco ingredients in them; even one that had a burrito in it, but that one also had meat, so I tried one called No Meadow Muffins Here. I wasn’t sure what a meadow muffin was, but John said that I should be happy that my omelet didn’t come with them. I’d thought about the 11-Miles omelet, but it had ‘almost’ crab in it and so was kind of scared of it.

Both the omelets and the pancake were really good—they were better than Nina’s omelets. Chrissie let me try a little piece of hers, too, which was the Cadet and had really good spinach in it.

We drove into the mountains, and it was kind of grey and gloomy, but John said that it was supposed to get nicer later on, and I hoped that it would. We had to slow down a couple times when the road rose up into low clouds, and he said that there might be ice fog, which would make the road really slippery. Sometimes the ice it made was dark-colored and very hard to see on the road, and even with snow tires, the car could still slide off the road.

We stayed on the US 24 Highway until we got to Divide, and then we went south and it kind of opened up to another high prairie for a bit, which Chrissie said was called Rainbow Valley, before we got back between a couple of mountains again, and the road twisted and wound around through the mountains.

Before we got into Cripple Creek, John took us off the main road and along to see a big gold mine, which had a spot where you could stand and look over the edge. It looked a lot like the iron mines I'd seen in the Upper Peninsula. It was a bunch of really big holes in the ground, and it sort of stepped down like an upside-down cake. And there was a road that went down the middle, and trucks full of rocks that didn't really look like too much and shovel tractors were moving around it in a constant parade. John said that the gold was in the rocks, but they had to process them to get it out, and he said that the trucks and shovel tractors were a lot bigger than they looked from up here. He said that his Highlander could easily fit in the back of one with plenty of room to spare.

There was another mine that was next to it called the Mollie Kathleen Mine, and that was an underground mine and I said that I wouldn't go in there, and he said that I didn't have to.

Then we started to drive around town, 'cause the burros could wander around freely, and we finally found them by the Double Eagle Hotel. They were standing on the sidewalk and there were some people petting them, so John stopped the Highlander and we got out and went up to them. And they were kind of interested in me and came over and we blew into each other's nostrils and pretty soon we were all friends, and there was one young jenny who started to follow me around a little bit. She stayed a little ways back, but whenever I moved she would sort of follow along, and she wouldn't eat any of the carrots that John had brought until I ate one first.

When we were finally done being friends with them, she looked kinda sad when we got in the Highlander and drove away. John told Chrissie that if she followed us home, he was going to keep her. But she didn't—once we got around the block she didn't follow any more.

John said that the first tourist attraction that we should see was the jail, and I was a little curious what they were like.

It was a two-story brick building, and inside the rooms had been made like they would have looked a hundred years ago when it was new, and there were little signs that explained what you were seeing. So there were some rooms on the bottom where the police officers worked, and there was a big square block of cells that had bars on the doors and inside they had beds or hammocks, and a shiny toilet that was made out of metal which was right out in the open, and the sign said that was so that the guards could check on you without having to go inside.

There was a cell that you could go into to see what it was like and I made sure that Peggy stayed outside so that she could let me out, 'cause I didn't like it in there at all. And when she asked if she could close the door all the way I shook my head no, and I kept my ears cocked just in case I heard the hinges squeak. She was a good guard, and put her hand between the door and frame so nobody could close it and trap me by mistake, but I was still happy to get out of there.

There was another row of cells stacked right above that, I guess if the first layer of cells got filled up, and there was a sign that said that some people reported that the jail was haunted by ghosts. I didn't see any, though.

Humans had to wear special clothes while they were in the jail, which were striped black and white like a zebra. And they had some that you could try on but none of them would fit a pony.

The prison in Orange is the New Black is a lot different. They wear orange suits and brown suits, and their rooms had cement brick walls and the whole thing was surrounded by biting fence wires, and they had a big shower, too. It looked a little bit nicer than this.

I decided to go back inside a cell so that Peggy could take a picture of me and I could show it to Gusty. She'd probably like to see it, even if I wasn't wearing the right kind of prison clothes.

Once we were done touring the jail, we went on to Fire Station #3. The town had burned down twice in 1896, which I think was why it was called #3.

It also had signs everywhere that said what you were seeing, but I knew what a lot of it was already. They had a horse-drawn pumping engine that had a big boiler on the back that ran the pumps, and they also had some big hose reels on wheels, which you could tow out to the fire and then unroll if you needed more hose. And there were water tanks, too, in case there wasn't any water near the fire. Chonamare had a wagon that could be backed into the ocean and then pulled back out but we had never used it for that, 'cause the salt water corroded the pump and it was a lot easier to just get some rainclouds and dump them into the back of it, or empty them on the fire directly which was the smartest way to do it. In the summer, it got used sometimes as a wading pool for foals. It would be handy if there was ever a fire when it was really dry, though.

They also had a human-operated pump, which had two long levers that crews could push to pump the water, and that was what they had used before they had the steam-operated pump. That was what we had—Chonamare was too small to need a steam pump—but instead of levers it had a treadmill for stallions to walk on.

The human firefighting equipment was neat to look at. They had axes and pole-arms to get at the fire, and since none of them could fly, they had different kinds of ladders and there were even pictures of big nets that people could jump into to get away from a fire. And the firemen wore special black coats and helmets to protect them when they went inside the building to fight the fire. Now they wore brown coats, but the hats were very similar. And they also had bottles to carry air in, 'cause you couldn't breathe smoke. We knew to push the clouds upwind of the smoke and get them going and then we knew that the wind was going to carry them over the fire, and we could leave the cloud before we were in any danger.

The four of us went to lunch at the Miner's Pick, which was in the Brass Ass Casino. And after we'd eaten, John agreed to go with me into the casino, 'cause I wanted to go in one and Miss Cherilyn wasn't there to tell me that I shouldn't.

I had to give them some money so that I could get chips, and John said that a wise gambler quit when she had run out of chips, instead of getting more. And he stayed with me and explained all the games that I didn't know, which was most of them. I'd learned in Texas that ponies aren't good at poker, so I avoided that. I played the roulette wheel a couple of times which was fun, even though I lost more than I won, and then I played some Blackjack, 'cause he'd taught me how, and eventually lost almost all of my chips at that, too. I think I would have done a little bit better except the dealer seemed kinda impatient when I was calculating the odds of getting a card I wanted.

I had a couple of chips left and I thought I'd keep one as a souvenir and put the other one down on the roulette table on a single number, and he said that I should put it on a lucky number, so I decided to put it on 23, 'cause that was my birthday. And the ball came up really close to my number, but I didn't win.

We went back outside and John said that if I wanted they could go to the Mollie Kathleen Mine and while they were there I could go flying.

John had his contour map, and he pointed out a bunch of peaks that were near us, and it looked like I could make a big loop and land on six or seven of them in a few hours—Nipple Mountain was a little bit further south than the rest but it looked like it wasn't that far out of the way, and John even let me keep the map so I wouldn't get lost.

We rode in the Highlander all the way to the Mollie Kathleen Mine, and that was where I'd meet them when I was done flying. And there weren't any airports too near, so I used the small airplane frequency on my radio to tell them that I was flying and where I was going.

I went to Big Bull Mountain first, which meant that I had to fly right over the gold mine, and so I got a really good view of it. From above, it was even bigger than it had looked from the little overlook, and I wondered how long it had taken them to dig it all. Even with the big trucks and shovel tractors, it seemed like it would have taken forever, 'cause they were so small compared to the mine.

In the air, it was pretty easy to spot the peaks. Cow Mountain and Big Bull Mountain had trees all the way to the very top, so I found a little clearing next to them and stuck a flag in, and then I flew south to Brind Mountain, which had aspens along with the evergreens. A sign at the fire station had said that aspens did well after forest fires, so maybe there had been one here in the past.

After I left my flag on Nipple Mountain, I looked at the map and at my watch. There was another peak a little bit south of it called Cooper and I could have gone there, but it was kind of far, especially since I hadn't started the upwind leg of my flight yet. So I went east into the wind like I'd planned before and landed on Little Pisgah Peak and then Grouse Mountain which was right next to it.

I was really glad that I'd gotten my winter coat, 'cause it was kind of chilly and the wind was really gusty. The mountains made it have all sorts of interesting currents, and I think that if I'd had lots of time to explore them, I could have really used some of them to my advantage. But as it was I could only make guesses about where the wind was likely to be in my favor, and I wasn't always right. I came around a rock formation close to Booger Red Hill, and there was a nasty gusting upwind that almost knocked me into a wall, 'cause it sort of bounced and funneled off of an outcropping that was a little ways further upwind.

And I was starting to get a little bit tired, 'cause I was out of practice at long distance flights and I'd been fighting the wind more than I should have, so I almost gave up on the last mountain.

I had to go almost to it on my way back, though, and it probably wouldn't even add a mile to my trip back, so I climbed up a bit higher where the winds were at least mostly steady, and flew to the top of Mount Pisgah, and after I planted that flag, all I had to do was get up off the mountain and then let the wind push me back to Cripple Creek.

On my way back, I passed over a little creek, and I thought I ought to rinse some of the lather off of me, so I dropped down and splashed around in it, and the water was really cold and refreshing, and I felt like I had a little bit more energy when I took off again.

When I got to the Highlander, it was already getting shadowy on the ground, 'cause the sun was creeping behind the mountain peaks off to the west. Everyone else had gotten done with their mine tour, and they were inside the gift shop.

I named off all the peaks that I'd put flags on, and I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed. Maybe no one ever would except for the pikas.

The four of us went to have dinner at Dynamite Dick's, and after dinner me and Peggy shared a piece of triple chocolate cake which was a little too sugary and I hoped that it wouldn't make me sleepy later.

John had gotten us all tickets to a play at the Butte Theatre, and he said that it was based on The Christmas Carol, which was a play by Charles Dickens. He said that it had gotten pretty good reviews and that there was a variety show after it was over.

The theatre was kind of small and cozy, and there were a few empty seats but it was mostly full. And the play was about a mean, greedy man named Scrooge who got visited by a trio of ghosts that showed him how he might have had money but he really had nothing because he didn't care for anyone at all, and then he realized what a bad person he was and that nobody would miss him when he died and so he spent Christmas with his nephew and became a better person.

Then after that they had some jugglers come out, and a cowboy showed off some lasso tricks, and then everyone sang some Christmas carols. They had the words printed in the playbills, but I still had to listen through the first time 'cause people have a kind of strange way of writing music.

It was late when we finally left the theatre, and it had been a really fun day. Peggy was yawning and she fell asleep on the way back home and I almost did, too. I think if I'd put my head down on the seat I probably would have, 'cause it was kind of comforting feeling the Highlander gently sway as it was driving. There wasn't a lot that I could really see out the windshield or through the other windows, either. Just a few cars coming the other way, and there wasn't much traffic until after we got to Divide.

Peggy woke up when we turned there, and she was awake for the rest of the trip back, but then Chrissie fell asleep until John stopped at a gas station in Woodland Park to get some coffee.

It was almost midnight when we got back home and I should have taken a shower to rinse the last bits of salt out of my coat, but I was too tired to, and I didn't want to go to bed wet.

I hopped up into the bed and had made myself comfortable before Peggy had finished putting on her sleeping clothes, and I was almost asleep when she got in bed with me.

December 3 [Leaving Colorado]

December 3

I slept in a little bit—everyone did—'cause yesterday had been such a long, fun day and we were all tired. Plus we weren't doing anything this morning, as far as I knew, so I stayed in bed curled up next to Peggy.

When I finally got out of bed, I went right to the bathroom to take an overdue shower. I could feel all the dried salt in my coat from the flying I'd done yesterday. I hoped that John and Chrissie didn't think that I was a bad groomer because of it.

It was never as much of a problem when we were working weather, 'cause we almost always got washed off by the rain, whether we wanted to or not. You couldn't wash off in the ocean, though, 'cause you'd just get saltier.

I didn't want to use up all the hot water, because probably everyone might want to take a shower too, so I started off with cold until I'd gotten my coat wet, and then I finished washing with hot.

I could hear John and Chrissie moving around in their room when I'd finished my shower, but Peggy was still sleeping. So I stood on the floor and brushed my coat and then my mane and tail, and I should have done my wings right then but I wanted to lie on the bed to do it, 'cause it was a little bit easier to groom them when I was on my belly, and the bed was more comfortable than the floor.

So I sat at her desk and wrote some more in my journal. It still felt really strange to be writing December at the top of the page. When I'd started it was December, and that name was strange to me and hard to write, and now it's familiar. But it means that I haven't got much time left before I go back to Equestria; it's the very last month.

I had to stop writing in my journal long enough to go over to the bed and nuzzle Peggy, and that woke her up and so the two of us talked for a little bit and then she got out of bed. And she saw my journal was on her desk and asked if I'd been writing in it, and I said I was but that I'd stopped so that I could nuzzle her 'cause friends were more important than writing.

She kissed me on the forehead and then went into the bathroom to take her shower, and so I took her spot on the bed and started preening my wings. I was still losing feathers, but I was getting close to being done with my moult, which was nice.

I could have gotten back up and written more, or else I could have packed my saddlebags, but I didn't do either, 'cause I was feeling kind of lazy. So I stretched out my wings and let them rest on the bed, and I just relaxed until Peggy came back in and got dressed.

She said that we were going to meet her friends for a late lunch, and then after that we'd go to Denver so I could get on the train back to Kalamazoo. And she told me that we'd all ride together in Clive's Excursion, 'cause everyone would fit in that, and that was we wouldn't have to say our goodbyes so soon.

We had all morning free, and I kind of wanted to fly, but I didn't want to spend any more time away from Peggy, so the two of us went downstairs together and went in the kitchen.

John was already down there reading his newspaper, and he'd made a pot of coffee so we both had a cup. I thought it would be nice to make breakfast, so me and Peggy looked through the electric icebox and the cupboards until we found enough ingredients to make scrambled eggs and pancakes. And I knew how to make both, so she let me do most of the cooking, and just helped out when a bunch of things got ready at once.

I don't know how they keep track of it all at the tavern, 'cause most food you can't leave for too long on the stove or it will burn. I guess it takes a lot of practice to know just how long it takes to cook everything, and I suppose it would be easier to keep watch if the stove was pony-sized.

Chrissie came downstairs just when I was finishing the last of the pancakes and starting on the scrambled eggs, and then when everything was ready, Peggy put the food on the table for everyone. I was proud of myself for making breakfast, and the food turned out to be pretty good.

We took our time eating, and when we were finished, Chrissie just stacked everything in the sink and said that it could be washed later. She didn't even feel like putting it in the washing machine.

After breakfast, we went into the living room and John turned on the Christmas tree and we sat on the couches and talked about the year I'd had and what I was going to do when I got back to Equestria, and then Chrissie told us some funny stories about working at the Air Force base. She said that one year they'd had a party that they weren't supposed to have in the back of one of the C-130s, and the base commander had thought that they were up to something, so he'd gone around looking for them, and they'd waited until he'd inspected all the airplanes at one end of the field and then taxied it down to the other end, and he'd never figured it out. I thought he should have noticed that big an airplane going by him, but she said that there had been one that was landing and that was who they switched places with.

Then she said that it would be fun to look through an old photo album, so she went to the shelf and got one out and started showing us pictures from it. That was really neat—there were pictures of Peggy when she was a baby and a yearling and I said that she was really cute and she got kind of embarrassed by it. I wish I had thought to gather together pictures of me and my family, 'cause people would have liked to see them, even though there weren't all that many.

My favorite one was with Chrissie wearing her Air Force uniform and holding up Peggy—she said that it had been taken right after she got back from Serbia, which was a country in Europe. Both Peggy and Chrissie looked so happy in the picture.

When it was almost time for us to go, I got all packed up and everyone helped put my things in Cobalt. Peggy said that I should take the snowboard to Equestria and I could use it there, which was really nice of her. And she also gave me a little plastic thing that was called a memory stick, and she'd put all of my movies on that so that I could give them to Meghan to put on YouTube when I got back to Kalamazoo.

Everyone promised that they'd come see me before I left for Equestria, and then we all hugged and I got in Cobalt with Peggy. John turned on the outside Christmas lights, even though you couldn't see them very well since it was light out. And then I had to hug everyone and thank them for letting me stay and I had to hug them again after that, and Peggy rolled down the window on Cobalt so I could stick my head out and wave as we drove off.

We went into town and went to The Airplane Restaurant, and we were the first ones there, since it was close to us. And the man who was at the podium said that he'd seen plenty of pilots here before but never a pegasus, and he wanted to take my picture, which I didn't mind.

We got a big table that was inside an actual airplane—it was called a KC-97, and it used to fly around carrying fuel for smaller airplanes so that they could get more without having to land. And our waiter was really excited to see me, too, and he promised that he'd bring us some free drinks which was really nice of him.

Peggy said that we should order some appetizers that we could share with everyone, and after we did we got up and looked around the rest of the airplane before anyone else showed up. You could look into the cockpit but you weren't supposed to go inside. And the airplane had had more of the restaurant built alongside it, and one of its wings actually stuck into the building.

Inside the other part, there were lots of pictures of airplanes and also small airplane models that hung from the ceiling. And it was kind of like a museum, except that you really couldn't see everything without getting in other people's way.

Pretty soon, Clive and Gina showed up, and then Heather did too, who I hadn't seen since over the summer, so the five of us went back to our table in the airplane, and they ordered some drinks and by the time their drinks had arrived, the appetizers were ready, too.

And Leah came and she gave me a big hug before she sat down, and then Lindsay and Victoria got there, too. And it was really nice to have a big lunch, and everyone talked about all the fun things that we'd done together, and Lindsay and Victoria both had some pictures on their portable telephones of me snowboarding which they showed everyone.

I was having so much fun talking and laughing that I really didn't pay that much attention to eating, and my lunch was cold before I finished it, but I didn't mind. It was a lot more fun to talk to everyone and re-live my trip to Colorado then think about how I was going to be leaving soon.

I hadn't known, but Peggy had taken a couple of pictures of me with the jenny who liked me, and everyone said that those were really cute, especially the one where the two of us were almost rubbing noses.

We all had to go in our own cars together to a special parking lot called Park and Ride, because it was against the rules to leave them at the restaurant when we weren't eating there anymore. And then we got my things and put them in the back of the Excursion, and Peggy asked Clive if he knew where the train station was. He said that he thought he did, but he put it in his GPS anyway. He said that it was smart and even after it had picked the best route, it could change its mind if there was a traffic accident or something else that would slow us down.

We hadn't gotten too far north of Colorado Springs when clouds started coming over the mountains and blocking the sun, and Peggy looked at her portable telephone and said that they were snowclouds, but I guess they must have left all their snow in the mountains, 'cause they never dropped any on us.

I thought that we were going to get to the train station really early, but when we got to Denver it was kind of like Chicago, and there were so many cars on the road that they didn't move very quickly, and so they honked at each other in frustration but that didn't make anyone move any faster.

It gave me a chance to look around at the city some, though, 'cause we weren't just zipping right by it. Everyone pointed out the interesting sights like the Mile High Field, which was where the Denver Broncos played football.

Once we were off the highway, the traffic moved even slower, 'cause cars had to keep stopping for the signal lights, and I was glad that we'd left for Denver a little bit early. Me and Peggy had taken a different route that went around the middle of Denver, and now I knew why she had.

The train station was really big like the one in Chicago, and it looked almost like a castle. There was a big sign that said it was called Union Station, and under that it said Travel by Train, and there was a place in front where we could get out and unload my things before Clive parked.

Mister Salvatore saw me when I got out, and he came over and helped unload. And he had to introduce himself to everyone, and then when Clive said that he needed to go park his Excursion, Mister Salvatore said that he could leave it right there and he would talk with the train station police and so he did. He went inside and I saw him talking to someone at a little desk, and he showed the man his wallet and then came back outside and said that it was taken care of, and Clive could leave it there while we waited for me to get on the train.

We all went inside and everyone wanted to help me carry something, so I didn't have to carry anything at all. And Miss Cherilyn was inside waiting for us, and she hugged me and Peggy, and then we all went in to the waiting area.

We sat and talked for about an hour, until it was time to go down to the tracks because the train would be there soon.

Once it was time to board, I hugged everyone one more time and we all said our goodbyes. Mister Salvatore told Clive how much he liked his Excursion, and gave him a card with his telephone number on it in case the people in front had changed their minds and decided to give him a parking ticket while we were inside the station.

I'd been a little bit worried about having to make a bunch of trips onto the train 'cause besides my saddlebags which I could wear, I also had my snowboard and helmet and magnetic hoof boots so I thought it would take at least a second trip, but with everyone there wanting to help, we got aboard the train really quickly. And even though we weren't really supposed to, I stayed down by the door so that I could wave at everyone when the train pulled out of the station, and then I went upstairs to find my room.

I was sharing it with Miss Cherilyn again, and she said that Mister Salvatore had gotten his own room this time instead of trying to sleep in a coach car like an idiot.

We didn't stay in our room for too long, because we didn't want to miss dinner. The dining car had the same menu as the other trains did, and the chef on this train wasn't quite as good as some of the others had been. Or maybe I'd just had so much really good food in Colorado that I was kind of spoiled. I hadn't really thought about it before, but it was probably really hard to cook food on a moving train, 'cause the kitchen would be small and pots might slide off the stove. A lot of sailorponies were really happy when they were back on land because the food on a ship wasn't very good. Even on the fishing boats, they didn't eat the best fish.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn wanted to know about what I'd done in Colorado, so I told them but I skipped the part where we'd gone to the hot springs, 'cause if Peggy had been embarrassed about me telling her parents then she probably wouldn't want me to tell my helpers, either.

Mister Salvatore was really happy that I'd gotten a chance to go to a casino, and he promised that when we got back to Kalamazoo he was going to take me to Firekeeper's for a day if I wanted to go. Miss Cherilyn still thought that it was a bad idea, but she said that she'd come too just to keep the two of us out of trouble if we did go.

By the time we'd finished dinner, it was dark outside, and we went back to our rooms but then I decided that I wanted to look out the windows in the Viewliner car. It had been full when we went to dinner but mostly empty when we left, 'cause it was dark and there wasn't a whole lot to see except car lights and house lights going by in the darkness, and sometimes we'd go through a little town and it was fun to watch the cars waiting for the train to go by, and see in the lights of the town the buildings that were close to the tracks.

If I got out of my seat and pressed my muzzle right against the glass, I could see a little bit further, but all the lights that were on in the Viewliner car reflected off the windows and I looked around but I couldn't find a switch to turn them off, and maybe that would have been rude to the other people in the train car.

So after a while I got bored and I was a little bit restless, too, since I'd not flown at all or really exercised much today. I didn't think I was supposed to fly around on the train, and there wasn't really enough room for it anyways, but I could walk from one end to the other, so first I went all the way up to the front, and I kept quiet 'cause they had turned down the lights in the coach cars so people could sleep in their chairs if they wanted to. And then went to the very back and I got up on my hind hooves and looked out the back window and when I looked down I could see the tracks rushing by and it made me kind of dizzy, so I focused my attention a little bit further away and watched Colorado disappear behind us.

That was making me sad, so I went back to my room and Miss Cherilyn was sitting at the desk reading papers, and I asked her what they were and she said that they were the papers for the next group of ponies exchange students. She said that they tried to match up the helpers with the ponies, and that all the teams of helpers got to look through the applications and figure out who they'd get along with the best. And I hadn't know that, but it made a lot of sense, and I was flattered that they'd picked me.

She said that Mister Salvatore was kind of disappointed that there weren't any pegasuses in our region next year, 'cause he'd said that I was the funnest pony he'd helped so far. And she said that he was trying to find out if there were any anywhere else in America so they'd have time to put in transfer paperwork.

Then she pushed the papers aside and said that she could show me some pictures of my new, temporary apartment, if I wanted to see it, and I was curious but I said that I'd rather see it with my own eyes first. Sometimes you could get the wrong idea from pictures, and I was going to get to see it tomorrow anyway.

We talked for a little bit longer and then she folded the beds down and went into the bathroom to change into her sleeping clothes, and I went up to my bed and let the train rock me to sleep.

December 4 [California Zephyr]

December 4

It was just getting light out when I woke up, and I stuck my muzzle up against the window to see where we were. The train was moving slowly, and we were on track that was elevated above the town we were passing through. It went over a railroad yard and then we were on a bridge over a river, and I tried to think about what rivers me and Peggy had crossed on our way to Colorado. I was sure that the train had already passed the Platte River, so maybe it was the Missouri or Mississippi. They should have put signs on the side of the bridge so that people would know. They did that on bridges for cars, so you'd know what rivers were below you, even though you usually couldn't see very much of them through the window.

The train went over a highway and then we started passing by a really big railroad yard, and we banged across a rail crossing then around a curve and pretty soon there were more tracks leading off to the south, so wherever we were must have been an important place for trains, 'cause we straightened out and went through another rail yard.

It took a sharp turn to the north and then there were fields on my side of the train, and once it straightened out again, it stayed in farmland, which was kind of boring to see in the wintertime.

I got an interesting view of the sunrise from my window, though. Sometimes it would be hidden by trees and barns and other times I'd catch a glimpse of it coming over trees that were further back, and we passed by one really big series of fields where I think I could actually see it on the horizon. If the trees had been leafed out, I wouldn't have been able to.

So I watched until it was above the distant trees, too, and then I took a little falling glide out of bed and went to pee. It was kinda crowded just with me in there, and so it must have been really tight for humans.

When I got done, Miss Cherilyn was sitting up in bed, and she took her turn then came back outside and folded the beds up and out of the way. She asked if I was going to take a shower and I told her that I hadn't planned to, 'cause I hadn't really done any exercise at all yesterday. So she got together some of her clothes and went back into the bathroom.

By the time she got back out of the bathroom, I still didn't know where we were. There hadn't been any signs and I hadn't seen any towns out my window, either. I remembered from the trip that it had been mostly open farmland, though, so that didn't really tell me anything. We could have still been in Nebraska or Iowa, or maybe we were even in a different state that I didn't know.

So I asked Miss Cherilyn, and she got out her portable telephone and looked at it and said that we were in Iowa, and she turned it around so that I could see it. And there were lots of little towns but no big ones, not until Des Moines which was still a ways away.

She used her portable telephone to send a telegram to Mister Salvatore so that he would know that we were awake, and then we both sat by the window and watched the fields go by until he came to our room and got us.

While we were walking to the dining car, he told us that the train was running about two hours late, because we'd been delayed in Nebraska. And he said that he didn't know if we were going to make our connection in Chicago, and if we didn't, we could either spend the rest of the day there or get a car and drive the last leg of the trip.

I said that since there wasn't a lot around, the engineer ought to be able to go a little bit faster and make up some of the lost time, and he started laughing. He said that usually when Amtrak got delayed, the slowdowns just kept adding up and it got later and later as the trip went on.

I just got oatmeal for breakfast, 'cause I wasn't feeling too adventurous. I was kind of happy and kind of sad at the same time, since I'd left Peggy behind but was going back to Kalamazoo and I'd get to see Aric and Meghan again.

The train stopped in Creston while we were eating our meal, and we didn't stay there too long—we had hardly come to a stop when the train started moving again, and Miss Cherilyn almost spilled her coffee on herself.

I went to the Viewliner car after breakfast, and Miss Cherilyn sat down with me for a little while and then said that if I didn't mind she was going to look at more papers, so I told her it was okay, even though I thought I'd be a little bit lonely in the car all by myself.

After I'd watched hundreds of farms go by and not much else, I finally got tired of looking out the windows and I started walking the aisle of the train from one end to the other, and when I got to the back I'd look out through the rear window for a little bit and then go to the front again.

I went downstairs in a couple of cars, too, but there wasn't anything too interesting down there. Just more rooms like the ones that were upstairs, and they blocked most of the windows, so you could only see out the little window in the door, and I didn't like leaning my hooves up on the door, 'cause if it came open, I'd fall off the train and I knew I couldn't fly fast enough to catch up with it again.

I had to get out of the way when the conductor announced that we were about to be stopping in Osceola, 'cause people needed to get through the aisles so that they could get off the train, and there would probably be new people getting on who wouldn't want to trip over a pegasus. And I couldn't sit in the Viewliner anymore, 'cause all the seats had been taken.

So I watched the train go through Des Moines and when it had stopped and everyone was busy downstairs I went out and stood in the little vestibule between cars and stuck my muzzle right down to the gangway, 'cause it wasn't sealed up so well there and I could smell the outside.

When the train was moving, the train smells had overwhelmed everything else, but here at the station it was different, and I got the scents of the station and maybe also fresh snow, but I was not so sure about that. Snow doesn't really have much of a smell to it.

There wasn't really anywhere else for me to go, so I went back to our room and Mister Salvatore was in there, too. He got out of the seat and let me sit on the window side so that I could look out. I told him that he didn't have to, 'cause it was kind of crowded for him with me right there, but he said that it was okay, and he didn't mind.

I probably could have gone to his room and had it all to myself, but I'd decided that I wasn't having any fun being alone any more, and even if they were busy and concentrating on their papers it was good to just be there.

The two of them kept looking through their piles and occasionally talking about one pony or another, and I didn't know any of them. I wondered if they'd done the same with my group. That was a little bit strange to think about. Maybe the two of them had been sitting in a train with Action Shot, and they'd been going through the applications and had decided that they wanted to help me instead of Gusty or Sundowner or some other pony who I didn't even know.

So when the two of them were debating if Sparklesnap would be a good fit, I turned around and nuzzled Mister Salvatore and told him that I knew he'd make the right choice. And I would have nuzzled Miss Cherilyn, too, but she was across the table and I couldn't get to her.

When the train left Mount Pleasant, Mister Salvatore suggested that we go to the dining car and get lunch. Miss Cherilyn said that she was getting tired of looking at paperwork anyway and that now was a good time.

They must have changed chefs, 'cause the lunch food was better. I got a glass of white wine with my bean burger, and we were still eating when the train went across the big bridge over the Mississippi.

There were big towers on the bridge, 'cause one piece of it could be lifted up so that boats could fit underneath, and I saw the tail end of one that was a ways downriver that had probably passed under before we came along. And then when we made landfall again, we were in Illinois, which was not much different than Iowa had been.

Neither of them felt like doing any more paperwork after lunch, and there still weren't any seats in the Viewliner, so we all went back to our rooms and Miss Cherilyn packed up all her things even though we still had hours to go.

We had just left Naperville when Mister Salvatore sent Miss Cherilyn a telephone telegram saying that our train back to Michigan had just left, and she asked me if I wanted to spend the day in Chicago and take the morning train tomorrow, or if I'd rather get a car and drive back home.

I was eager to see Aric and Meghan again, so I said that I'd like to get a car. And so she told Mister Salvatore what I wanted and he said that he would make some telephone calls.

It was dinnertime when we finally got to the station, and so we ate a quick meal at Au Bon Pain, and then we went to find the car that Mister Salvatore had found for us, which it turned out was the Mustang again, but it wasn't as much fun for him since it was cold and he had to keep the roof up. He said that he thought that Mister Garvin had given him the Mustang on purpose because it was probably cold and drafty, but it turned out that it wasn't.

We had to go slow on our way home, 'cause it was snowing, and the roads were slippery, even with the big snowplow trucks pushing the road clear. Most of the other cars were being cautious in it, although there were some that just went rushing past, and like Peggy had told me, I kept looking for them further up the road in case they'd slid off and fallen in a ditch.

When we got to Michigan and a little bit more inland, we went through some heavy snow a couple of times and I thought it would be really fun to put the roof down, but they said no, so I was kind of sulking in the back. I wanted to play in the snow, and it wasn't as fun to be inside the car with the snow staying outside.

Instead of going up to Main Street, we got off the 131 Highway and on Stadium Drive, and we didn't go too far before we got to my new home. They were big apartment buildings called Stadium Drive apartments, and I'd seen them before flying over but I'd never paid them any particular attention.

Mister Salvatore got a little bit lost before he found my building, 'cause they all looked the same and since it was dark out it was kind of hard to find the one that was mine, but when he did he parked right in front of it and we all got out and went inside.

They had gotten me an apartment on the third floor, and it had a balcony on the back that looked over the woods, which was nice. There was a big glass door that was hard to slide open that went to the balcony, so I could get in and out pretty easily, although finding it again might be difficult, 'cause all the apartments looked the same.

I could put something on the balcony, though, that would make it distinctive. Maybe I could get some ribbons to mark it with, or else some lights. When I peeked over the edge, I saw a couple of other balconies that had lights on their railings.

The inside had two bedrooms and a living room and a little kitchen, and there was a bathroom which was a little bit nicer than the one I'd had in my house in Grove Street.

They'd set it up as much like my apartment on Grove Street as they could, which was really nice of them. So it did feel kind of home-y. And I did like that it was closer to the 131 Highway, 'cause that meant that when I wanted to go flying from my apartment I could pretty much fly up as quickly as I wanted to, instead of staying low to keep the airplane directors happy.

Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn helped me bring in my things and then Mister Salvatore asked me if I really wanted to go around the block with the roof of the car down, and I said that I did because I thought it would be fun.

So Mister Salvatore started the car and folded down the roof, and then he told Miss Cherilyn to take pictures 'cause he was going to send them to Mister Garvin so that he would be jealous of how much fun we were having. And I thought that we were just going to drive around the apartments, but he got back on Stadium Drive and we went down the road. I saw a lot of people staring at us but I didn't care because I was having fun. The windshield kind of kept the heat in when we were moving, and the seats had butt-warmers, plus I had my winter coat, so I was pretty comfy.

We stopped at Sweetwater Donut Mill, and he went through the driving lane and we got a bag of cinnamon rolls and two cups of coffee. He would have bought a third one for me but I didn't want any coffee.

Then we drove back and he agreed it had been lots of fun, but Miss Cherilyn still made him put the roof back up before it got too much snow inside. She said that Mister Garvin would be mad if it had snow in it, and Mister Salvatore said he was going to be jealous of how much fun we'd had with it.

I hugged both of them and thanked them for bringing me home, and Mister Salvatore said that he would let me know soon what our schedule for Florida would be.

I thought that Aric and Meghan would probably want to see my new apartment, and it would feel more like home if they came and visited, but I also wanted to fly, so I decided that I would fly over to his house off of my balcony.

There wasn't anything big that I had to mark the balcony with, except my snowboard. But if I came in kind of low I'd be able to see it leaning up against the wall, so pushed the sliding door open, put my snowboard in place, and then pushed the door back shut. Most of the stores I've gone in have sliding doors that move on their own and I don't know why my balcony door won't do that. Maybe it's turned off, and that's why it's so hard to push. I should have asked Mister Salvatore.

I didn't know exactly what the best path through the trees behind my apartment was, 'cause I hadn't gotten a look at them in the daytime yet, so instead of going out perpendicular to my balcony, I paralleled the wall of the apartment house and then climbed up to rooftop level and went over.

Until I got totally oriented, it was going to be easier to follow Stadium Drive and then go up Academy or Main Street. There weren't a lot of cars, because it was Sunday night and maybe the ones that didn't have to drive around were staying home.

I took a little bit of a shortcut once I was close enough to Kalamazoo College to see the bell tower, and I flew directly at it until I could see Academy Street, and then I could easily follow that back to Aric's house

I didn't really want to look at campus, but I couldn't help myself, and it looked really lonely with most of the buildings sleeping and the parking lots nearly empty. There were a few lights on in rooms, but it was mostly dark, and they hadn't bothered to push all of the snow out of the parking lots.

Aric hadn't put any Christmas lights on his house, and I hoped he had some, 'cause I could help him hang them up tomorrow. That would be a lot of fun, and would make it look more festive. And maybe it would make the neighbors want to put up Christmas lights, too, because his street looked kind of boring.

He did have a lighted wreath on the front of Winston, which was neat. I didn't see any electrical wires going from the house to Winston, so it must have been running off a battery.

I shook off on the porch, and then I peeked in through the front window. Aric and Meghan were sitting on the couch watching a movie, so I let myself in the front door and then hopped up on the couch with them, and pretty soon we were all hugging and nuzzling and talking and kissing and not watching the movie at all.

Aric decided once we'd gotten settled back down that we'd start the movie over again. It was called Bad Santa, and it was very strange. It was hard to figure out what the moral of it was, 'cause Santa was bad but trying to be good and his elf was bad and stayed bad, and the one kid was kind of dumb.

Meghan told me that there wasn't really a moral to it. She said that most Christmas movies were a little bit sappier, and left us feeling good, and plays were like that, too. It had been a lot easier to figure out A Christmas Carol.

Aric said that he liked watching it because it put him in a Christmas mood.

We didn't go upstairs right away but stayed on the couch and cuddled for a while and none of us even wanted to move. Aric said that he could put in his other favorite Christmas movie, which was called Die Hard, but I didn't feel like staying up late and watching another movie. I would have if Meghan had wanted to see it, but she was falling asleep and so we decided that we should go to bed.

As we were going up the stairs to Aric’s bedroom, I was worried that maybe it wouldn’t be good tonight, ‘cause I was stressed and tired from travel, and a little bit disjointed ‘cause my body didn’t know what time it was.

But when I opened the door to his room it was familiar, and the scents were the same as I remembered and so I started to relax.

I could tell that Aric was eager, and so as soon as we were all in the bedroom I started to nuzzle him and then Meghan ran her fingernails across my withers and the base of my neck and then down my back and around my dock, and pretty soon I was forgetting everything except for the moment.

December 5 [Christening my Apartment]

December 5

Even though it was a Monday, nobody had to go to school or work so it felt like it was a weekend. And I slept in until the sun was in the sky and I might have slept even longer except that Meghan had to get out of bed and I was laying on her breast.

I really didn't want to move.

She grabbed the top blanket off the bed and wrapped it around herself and then went out the door, and I stretched my wing over Aric so he wouldn't get cold without it, and then I nuzzled his chin and that woke him up, so he kissed my nose and brushed back my forelock.

Meghan got back in bed still wrapped up in her blanket and I stuck my head under it and pushed it enough out of the way that I could put my head back down on her breast and Aric said that he could tell where my loyalty was, and so I hit him with my tail and said that he'd had them to himself all week and now it was my turn. And then Meghan unwrapped the blanket a little bit further and put it over me, too, and kind of pulled me in a little bit more and wrapped me up with her and Aric didn't think that was fair at all but then he got his hand on my rump and he stopped complaining.

But then Meghan got a little bit mad, until I started teasing her, and pretty soon we'd mostly kicked the covers off the bed 'cause they were in the way, and since nobody had to be anywhere this morning we took our time and then pulled the covers back up and relaxed a little bit and then had sex again.

I really wanted to go on a long flight today, so we ate breakfast at home instead of going to Nina's. Meghan cooked some eggs and Aric made toast and coffee and I didn't have to do anything, even though I wanted to. So I just stayed out of the way and watched the birds on the feeder. There was a blue jay that kept swooping in and scaring all the little birds off until he'd gotten some sunflower seeds, then he'd fly away and they'd all come back until he decided that he wanted some more. If he'd been nicer, he would have just stayed long enough to eat a good meal and then left, but I think that he liked being the boss of the feeder.

After he'd scared off the little birds for the fourth time, I decided that I was going to show him who the boss of the birdfeeder really was, and so I went out the side door and chased him off, and at first he just went up on the garage roof 'cause I guess he didn't know I could follow him. But I did, and I chased him a little ways down the block and when I got back I was going to reward myself with some sunflower seeds, but then I saw all the sparrows lined up and I didn't want to scare them off one more time. Sooner or later the blue jay was going to realize that I wasn't guarding the feeder anymore and he'd be back.

So I went back inside and Aric and Meghan had breakfast ready. Meghan said she wished she'd known that I was going to get into a birdfight, 'cause she would have made a movie of it, and I stuck my tongue out at her.

After we'd eaten, Aric offered to give me a ride to my new apartment so that I could get my flight gear, but it was a nice day and so I thought that I'd fly over there to warm up. And I said that I'd send them a telegram when I got back and we could find something to do, and tonight we could stay over at my apartment 'cause they both wanted to see it.

I kissed them goodbye and went out on the front porch and after I made sure that there weren't any cars coming, I took off and flew right over the street then started to climb.

As soon as I got above the trees, I could sort of see where I needed to go, and it was closer than I'd thought it was, at least if I didn't follow roads. There was a brick building that sort of stood by itself that was really distinctive and I needed to go just a little bit west of it to go straight to my apartment, 'cause from there I could see the signs for Zeigler Lincoln and Zeigler Honda which were right in front of the apartments.

From the backside, though, it didn't look all that distinctive at all, but I could use different landmarks to line up to Aric's house. As long as I could see the bell tower at Stetson Chapel, I could aim a bit west of that and I'd be really close.

I'd forgotten to tell him that he should put Christmas lights on his house, and I thought that I should remember to tell him tonight. Maybe we could get some if he didn't have any; I was probably going to want to go shopping once I thought of things that I'd need for my apartment.

I had to fly along the backside of the apartment complex kinda low until I found my balcony. There were a lot of apartment buildings that all looked the same and I hadn't been smart enough to count them last night to figure out which was mine, just that the backside faced south.

And there was a row of seven apartment buildings that did, so I just got between the trees and the buildings and flew along until I found my snowboard, which I didn't see as quickly as I should have, so I overshot and had to turn around and go back.

The sliding door was even more stuck than it had been last night, and it took me a couple of minutes to get it far enough open that I could jam a hoof in and work it along its tracks. There was a bunch of ice down there, 'cause I guess since it hadn't been closed quite all the way last night the snow had melted and then it had re-frozen when it got colder. Even though it didn't have as big a window, the door in my apartment on Grove Street had been more reliable.

I'd never had to open it when there was snow on the balcony, though, so maybe it didn't work in the wintertime.

I left the door open so that I wouldn't have to fight it and then I went into my bedroom and got unpacked. I was gonna move the futon to the living room later, 'cause there wasn't any point in it being in its own room. Aric and Meghan could help move it tonight—it didn't slide too easily on the carpet.

I filled up my camelback and then got dressed in my flight gear, and then I went back out on the balcony and pushed the sliding door back shut most of the way. It didn't look like it was gonna snow, so I didn't need to worry about any getting inside while I was gone, and it would help cool down the apartment some.

Then I called the airplane directors, and Dori answered. She said that she'd missed me and I told her that I'd been out in Colorado snowboarding and flying around in the mountains, even though I wasn't supposed to talk that much about things that weren't flying. And I told her where my new apartment was so that she'd know where I was flying from, and I said that I was gonna fly south along the 131 Highway maybe all the way to Indiana and then turn around and come back, and she told me that I could.

Because of the way that the 131 Highway curved, I realized that I could go almost due south and I'd cross over it pretty quick, before I could get up to a thousand feet anyways unless I really worked at it, so I didn't have to worry too much about climbing too high.

It was nice, too, that once I got through the trees I was over a little lake and that gave me plenty of room to climb before I got to the trees on the other side, and when I came back I could practically glide to my balcony.

I was just over five hundred feet up when I crossed over the 131 Highway and had just crossed a thousand when I went over the 94 Highway. And then started to follow 12th Street, 'cause instead of curving back and forth like the 131 Highway did, it went straight south.

That road ended just outside of Schoolcraft, so I kept the 131 Highway on my left and kept on going.

All the fresh snow from yesterday made everything look kinda the same when you looked right down on it from above, 'cause most houses had their roofs covered and the only places that were clear were the roads and ponds. I couldn't tell any more what kind of crops fields might have had in them.

When I was getting close enough to Three Rivers that I could see the 131 Highway curving, I angled a bit off to the west, even though I could have crossed back over it if I'd wanted to—I was far enough away from the airport now that it didn't matter.

I'd meant to go further south, but as I got close to town I heard an airplane say that it was taking off from the Three Rivers Airport and was going to be flying to South Bend and that was sort of along the same route I was taking, and I didn't want to get in his way. So I called him and told him where I was and how high I was flying so that he'd know to stay away, and then I kept a good watch over to the airport.

It wasn't too long before I saw him roll out onto the runway and his little airplane sped down the concrete and when he was about halfway down I saw the wings wobble a little bit, 'cause he had started to fly. And he steadied it out and then the airplane started to climb.

I was a ways north of him and a lot higher, but I still kept my eye on him until he'd crossed my flight path and continued southwest, and I decided that I'd follow him for a little bit, just for fun. So I turned west, too, and I stayed behind him for a few miles until I couldn't really see him anymore.

He had a bright blinking light like I did, although his was red, and I did see that one more time and he was further along than I thought he'd be, and I never saw him again after that. Finding a white airplane against a snow-covered Michigan was really hard.

Down below me was I think the 60 Road, so I went that way for a while and it was mostly farmland but then I saw a strange parking lot for houses, and I flew down a little bit lower so that I could get a closer look at it. They were all jammed together and some of them looked like they were in really bad shape, although it was hard to tell with all the snow on everything, and I thought that maybe it was a place that they fixed broken houses. I'd seen some houses being towed behind trucks, so maybe if your house got damaged you could have it towed away and a new one brought to you. That would be pretty convenient.

Right ahead of me was another important-looking road—I'd learned to recognize the signs that identified them, even when I was too far away to read them—and I thought it was probably the 40 Road, 'cause that went back north and crossed the 43 Road, so I could have followed it, but I was starting to get a little bit tired, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to fly that far, especially since I knew that if I flew straight back from where I was it was going to be close to 30 miles, and it would be more if I went north and then east.

So I used my watch to point me in the right direction to get back to the Kalamazoo airport, and then I started looking for landmarks, but with all the snow there wasn't anything too distinctive, so I had to look at my watch a lot, just to make sure that I wasn't wandering off-course too far.

The sky was kinda hazy, but my watch was smart and didn't let me down. And when I was getting close, I found the 131 Highway and that let me adjust my heading a little bit, since my watch only knew how to point to airports. And then I started descending, making sure that I was under a thousand feet when I crossed over the 131 Highway.

I glided across the little lake and slowed down when I got to the trees, and after I'd gotten through them I looked for my balcony and didn't find it and then I realized that I'd miscounted and was off by one apartment house.

I called the airplane directors to tell them that I'd landed, and then slid the door open so that I could get back in, and I took off my flight gear and just left it all piled on the futon, then I went into the kitchen to get a little snack before I washed off, and I didn't have too much food that was good for a quick snack but I did find a can of anchovies so I ate that and had a glass of water, too.

And then I thought that I ought to tell Aric and Meghan that I was home, too, so that they could come and see my new apartment. So I sent each of them a telegram and then I was about to go in the shower when I remembered that I should tell Meghan to bring her computer so that she could put all the movies on it, so I sent her another telegram and then I went into the bathroom.

I didn't start to wash right away; I just stood in the hot water and let it relax my muscles. So I was still washing off when they came over, and I had to get out of the shower to let them in, then I went back in 'cause I wasn't done washing my mane yet. I was going to show Meghan where the little memory stick that Peggy had given me was, but she said that we'd do that later, and I should finish up in the shower so she could dry me off and brush me and preen me.

Then both of them came into the bathroom so I wouldn't be lonely, and then Meghan said that she thought she ought to join me to make sure that I got clean as long as I had enough towels for her to dry off with, too.

I didn't, but I told her that she could use mine 'cause even with the sliding door open a little bit it was still pretty warm in my apartment. And then Aric said that if she was getting in he ought to as well so that he could supervise, and so the two of them got undressed and joined me in the shower.

We took our time, 'cause there was lots of hot water and it never started to run out. And then everyone shared the towels that I had and they put their clothes back on and we went and sat on my bed and while Meghan was grooming me I told them all about everything that I'd done in Colorado.

I thought that we ought to go shopping together, 'cause I needed a little bit more food and I was hungry, too. Aric said that he was too hungry to go out anywhere, unless it was to pick up a pizza, and Meghan asked him if that meant that he wanted to order a pizza and he said that he did.

She said that we ought to get it delivered, and we could eat it and then go shopping because if we went shopping when we were hungry we'd get more food than we could eat.

So we got a pizza and cheese bread, which was like pizza but it only had cheese on it, and came with a little bowl of pizza sauce to dip the bread in, and it was more food than we wanted 'cause me and Meghan didn't eat all that much of it.

We went down to Winston and I gave my key to Aric because it was easier to let him carry it, even though I was wearing my saddlebags. I didn't really need it anyway, 'cause I could always get in through my balcony.

While we were on our way to Meijer, I told him that I thought he should get some Christmas lights for his house and I also wanted some for my balcony so it would be easier for me to find at night. And something that I could see more easily in the day, too.

I also decided that I wanted another box of hay to snack on. There wasn't any sense in ordering a whole bale, 'cause I wasn't going to be on Earth long enough to eat it all and it was something that you weren't supposed to take back to Equestria.

So we went to Pet Supplies Plus first, and we got a box of timothy hay and they also had bags of it pressed into little cubes which I thought might be convenient to take with me when I was flying, so I got two bags of those, too. And then we went to Meijer, and they had a whole big aisle that was full of different kinds of Christmas lights. I didn't know that there were so many types! They came in nets and strings and dangling strings and some of them had shapes like icicles and snowmen, and there were ones that you could push different buttons to make them do different things. Some of them had really small LED bulbs and others were bigger and there were even giant bulbs that were as tall as I was but you couldn't get them in strings.

Aric bought a bunch of them for his house, and I got two for my balcony which was probably more than I needed but they were cheaper than the hay. And I also found some big red bows that I could put on the balcony so that I could find it easier during the day, too.

They had antlers for a car, so that it would look kind of like a reindeer, and also a headband that had antlers on it, and I got one for me, and then Meghan decided that she'd get one, too.

There was a little fake tree that already had lights on it and we got that, too, for my apartment, 'cause they didn't have any real trees. Aric said that they sold real trees at special lots, or there were farms where you could cut down your own, but that seemed like a lot of work.

There were lots of ornaments that you could hang on it and I looked at them but I didn't buy any. And I did get some fluffy shiny rope that was called tinsel 'cause I could put that on my balcony, too. And then I was eager to put it all up in my apartment and so I almost forgot that we were going to get some food, too.

We had to walk all the way across the store to get the food, and then after we'd loaded all of that in the cart we had to go back because I'd forgotten that I was almost out of shampoo and conditioner. And then Meghan said that she could use a new towel anyways so she was going to get one that she could leave over at my apartment and so we took a little detour and she found some that were on clearance because they were ugly. And Aric saw that it was a good deal, so he got one, too.

Then she said that she was going to get some bubblebath for my apartment, too, and got a couple of bottles that were called Mister Bubble and had a funny-looking creature on top who I guess was Mister Bubble.

It was probably more than we should have gotten, but it was going to make my apartment look really festive, and we weren't going to run out of food.

We had to do some sorting when we got to the sales counter, 'cause all three of us had things in the cart, but the woman there was really nice and patient as we arranged everything on the treadmill.

When we got back to my apartment, Aric took his lights out of the back of Winston and put them in the cab, just so they'd be safe, and he said that tomorrow we were probably going to have to stop at the hardware store and get some kind of hooks to hold them up, but there was one that was between my apartment and his house. And then we went out on the balcony and put up the ribbons and the lights and the tinsel and it looked really nice, and I flew out over the lake and I could see them through the trees.

Aric wasn't happy with the first arrangement and he said that if we had some zip ties he could make it better and he should have thought of that before, so he left to get them and me and Meghan put up the Christmas tree and moved the futon into the living room while he was gone.

When he got back, he used the zip ties to make the Christmas lights into a big white 'P' for pegasus, and he put the blue ones around it in a circle, and he said that that made it an official landing spot, and any pegasus who wanted to could land there. I didn't think that anyone besides me was going to, but if I met a new friend 'cause she landed on my balcony I wouldn't mind at all.

We ate the rest of the pizza and cheese bread for a late dinner, and we'd bought some beer, too, so we drank that. And Meghan took my desk and set up her computer on it and copied all of my movies from Colorado onto it, and she said that she'd get them put up on YouTube in the next couple of days.

Then we turned out all the lights in the apartment except for the Christmas lights and it was really pretty. Meghan said that all we were missing was a fire, and Aric said that he could find one on the computer, and so he used mine and pretty soon it was showing a movie of a fire. It wasn't as good as a real one, but if you just saw it out of the corner of your eye it looked pretty real.

The three of us sat together on the futon until it was time for bed, and then we folded it down and it was a little bit short for Aric to fit on it. His feet hit the bottom of it, and it got kind of crowded when we had to crouch, so then he decided that we could take the pad off of it and put it on the floor and sleep on that.

So he moved the futon frame out of the way and then put the mattress on the floor and that was nice, too, 'cause whoever was on the outside didn't have to worry about falling off and it was a little bit easier for me to get into as well, since I could just walk right on.

Meghan wanted to close the curtains over the sliding door and window by the balcony, but Aric convinced her that no one would be looking through it because we were on the third floor and anyways there was nothing out there and Meghan decided that she wanted to look outside just to make sure.

Aric said that we needed to christen the new apartment, and she agreed with him. I wasn't sure what that was, so he told me how when a new ship was launched you gave it a name and then broke a bottle of champagne on the bow for luck, which was how the tradition had gotten started and for apartments you christened them by having sex in them. I thought that you should be able to do the same thing with a ship instead of breaking a bottle of champagne on them, and Meghan said that ships were usually launched by some official person and it was a big ceremony, so they wouldn't want to do that and nobody would want to see it, either. And then Aric said that he thought that there used to be some ceremony in England where the king had sex with a white mare, and I thought that Cayenne would like the idea of that.

The two of them got undressed and then we all got into bed together and I asked Aric if he thought that the apartment was officially christened when we started having sex or when we finished and he said that he didn't know for sure but it was probably when we started and he and Meghan both decided that since it was my apartment I ought to be the one in the middle.

December 6 [Christmas Lights]

December 6

Waking up on the floor was a little bit strange. And I found out that when people aren't confined, sometimes they move around more in their sleep, 'cause Aric had rolled all the way off the mattress and he was on the floor right next to it, sort of snuggling up to the edge and that was cute. Meghan must have pushed him off, 'cause she was closer to the edge than the middle, and the two of them had taken the blankets with them and I didn't have any. I didn't really need them, 'cause the apartment was a little bit too warm and I still hadn't figured out how to change that.

I was kind of getting used to it, though, 'cause humans liked their houses hot, but I was a little bit worried that when I got back I wasn't going to be used to the cold and I'd be the only pegasus wearing a hat and scarf and the other ponies would make fun of me.

I scooted over and I didn't go under the covers but just nuzzled Meghan's back through them until she woke enough to roll on her back so that I could put my head on her breast, and then I dozed off again until she decided that she had to get up and pee, and that woke up Aric too, and he was really confused that he was on the floor.

Meghan kind of paused when she came back, and I saw her looking out the balcony window, even though there wasn't really anything there for her to see. And she kind of rushed back a little bit, and said that I probably should have closed the curtains, so Aric got up and went over to the window and looked out and said that nobody could have seen us because there wasn't anything over there.

So Meghan finally slid back out of bed and then got up and went over to the window, too, so that she could have a look, and she stayed behind Aric until she was sure that he wasn't lying, and then she stepped off to the side and by then I was feeling kind of lonely with both of them over by the window so I got up and went over there, too.

It was a really pretty day—the snow was still fresh, and the sun was just coming out. And you could see the lake through the trees and that was pretty, too. I thought that maybe in the summer you wouldn't be able to see much of it, though, 'cause of the leaves on the trees.

Aric said that we ought to go back to bed and welcome the morning the right way, and Meghan asked him if he could remember the last time he hadn't thought about sex, and he said that wasn't a fair question since she was naked and I was naked and anyways he was a guy and Meghan said that she was going to go out on the balcony and get a handful of snow to cool him off and he told her that it would be better if she waited until after to do that because he was worried about shrinkage. So we went back to bed, and after Meghan kept her word and got a handful of snow and even though he begged her not to she did it anyways, and that was really funny. He probably could have run away or fought her off, but he didn't.

Then the three of us crowded into the shower and Meghan was nice enough to let him warm himself up first.

After we got out, we all dried off but nobody got dressed, and me and Meghan went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Since I had lots of food at my apartment now, we had to decide what we wanted to make for breakfast. Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had gotten out my waffle maker and put it on the counter, so we could have waffles and I decided that I wanted to make an omelet, too, ‘cause we could all share that.

This stove was different than the one I’d had at my old apartment and at first I thought it was broken, ‘cause when I turned on the knob it didn’t make any little popping noises and no flame came out of it, even when I turned it all the way up. But then the coil of metal that the pans sat on started to glow, and that was how it was supposed to work. I thought that that was really clever, that the stove could work without a flame. It was probably safer for me, too, but I still thought it would have been a lot smarter to put the control knobs on the front and not behind the burners.

I had to have Meghan help me figure out how the knob should be set, ‘cause you couldn’t tell just by looking at it if it was making a lot of heat or not so much, and I didn’t want to burn the omelet. She said that it should probably be at a kind of medium heat but we’d just have to see what it did when it started cooking, because not all electric stoves were the same.

At least the waffle maker still worked like I remembered, so I didn’t have any trouble with that.

We had to make a couple of adjustments to the stove to get the temperature just right, and I let Meghan do that so I wouldn’t accidentally burn myself reaching across the burners.

Aric was planning to eat at the counter, since I didn’t have a table, but then Meghan said that we could sit on the floor and it would kind of be like they ate in Japan—I guess they don’t have tables over there, either. And then he thought that if we were going to, we could also use the futon as a table, ‘cause it didn’t have the mattress on it, so Meghan and Aric put down the ugly towels that they’d gotten to keep food from falling on the floor.

We had to be a little bit careful, ‘cause the futon frame had slats and if you set down a cup between them it would just fall through, but it worked pretty well.

Then once we were done eating Aric said that we could go to the hardware store and get some clips to hold the lights up to his house, and then we would put the lights up. And I said that I wanted to look for a birdfeeder while we were there, ‘cause I’d been looking out the big window and thought it would be a lot nicer if there were birds out there. I probably could have asked Jeff if I could have my old bird feeder back, at least until I went back to Equestria, but that would have been kind of rude.

So Meghan and Aric got dressed, and we went down to Winston and then drove down the street to the hardware store. And it was really interesting inside, ‘cause they had lots of tools and paints and whole rows of little bins that held nuts and bolts, and those had pictures on them so that you would know what was inside. There were lots of different kinds, because they were all meant to be used in different ways. I didn’t really know much about them and so it seemed kind of overwhelming to me, and Aric said that it was kind of complicated to explain, but he said that he could name every one that they had.

He looked around until he found some hooks that he thought would work, and were easy to install without using tools, and so he got some of those, and then we went looking for birdfeeders.

They had a couple of different ones but I didn’t like them that much, and he didn’t either. They were a bit smaller, so that they’d have to be filled up more often, and they didn’t have as big a perch for the birds. And I wanted one like I’d had before, anyway, so he said that later on we could go to Meijer, but first we were going to hang the lights.

So we all got back in Winston and he drove back to his house, and he went upstairs to Meghan’s room ‘cause that was the one on the front where you could open the window and walk out on the porch roof. And I told him not to walk too close to the edge ‘cause he could fall off and crash into the yew bush, especially since it was slippery with snow now.

Well, he had to go right to the edge so that he could show me how the little clips worked, although I’m sure I would have figured it out on my own eventually. So I started putting them in place while he went back through the window into her bedroom and then he came back out front with the boxes of lights that he’d bought.

He didn’t have to untangle them like John had had to, ‘cause when you got them new they were all neatly rolled up in the box. But he did stretch them out so that they wouldn’t tangle when we went to put them up, and after I’d gotten all the clips in, I flew down and started hanging the lights.

We didn’t get to test them out, ‘cause he didn’t have a cord to reach from an outlet to the lights, except for his really long extension cord that he didn’t want to use for that because he might need it for something else. So he decided that he’d get one from Meijer that he could use just for the Christmas lights, since we had to go there anyway.

David and Angela had come out while I was putting up the Christmas lights, and Meghan had taken a little movie of me flying up with strings of lights. If she kept getting movies, she was gonna be really busy putting them all on YouTube. I hoped that they wouldn't get mad for her putting up so many movies of me.

Angela had made us all lunch, which was really nice of her. And we all ate it around the kitchen table, even though they had to pull it out from the wall and Angela had to sit on David's lap 'cause there weren't enough seats for everyone. I offered to stand up but they said that I deserved a seat and she didn't mind sitting on his lap anyway.

David said that since Aric had decorated the outside of the house now he felt obligated to get a Christmas tree for inside and maybe a nice, traditional Nativity scene for the mantle. Meghan said that they didn't have a mantle, and David promised to improvise. And he said that we needed Christmas stockings, too, which are special big socks that you can put gifts in.

Aric asked if that meant that he wanted to come to Meijer, too, so that he could get everything, and David got all excited and asked Angela if we could go, and she sighed and said that we could.

So after lunch we all got in Angela's Oldsmobile—I said that we could take Winston and I'd ride in the back, and Aric said that was a good idea, but Angela said that her car would be better, and it had seats for all of us. Aric thought that if we got a lot of stuff, it wouldn't all fit, and Angela asked him how much he was planning on buying and he said he wasn't thinking of getting all that much but you never knew what you were going to find.

Aric sat in the seat behind her, 'cause she was shorter and had her seat forward, and I sat in the middle, and we went back to Meijer, and went right back to the collection of Christmas decorations.

I thought that David was going to buy a tree, but he just walked around looking at things and finally he said that his preparations must be made in absolute secrecy and told us to go somewhere else and then asked to borrow the keys to Angela's car. He said that he'd send a telephone telegram to Aric when he had gotten his materials, and then we could come back. I thought that was kind of strange, but both Angela and Aric said that that was what David was like, and it was best not to question it.

So we went looking for the birdfeeders. They had been where the Christmas decorations were now—that was called a seasonal section, and so it had themed things for sale. And I guess maybe not so many people thought about feeding birds in the wintertime, 'cause the feeders were now back with the other pets and you had to go hunting to find them, but they had the one that I liked, so we put that in the cart and also a couple of big bags of seeds, so that I wouldn't have to get more later. If I had some left over, I could give them to Aric for his feeder.

And then we all watched the fish for a little bit. They had small fish that were lots of bright colors and even some kind of glowy ones. Most of them were decorative fish that you could just watch swimming around, but there was also a big tank on the bottom that was filled with goldfish that were meant to be food. Aric said that his parents had some in a pond behind their house and the herons came down and ate them sometimes.

I'd never thought of having a pond for a bird feeder. That sounded like it would be pretty convenient, although I'd like bigger fish than goldfish to eat.

We got an extension cord, too, and then Aric went and looked at a rack of movies that they had. They'd put displays in the aisles to tempt you to buy things while you were on your way through the store, and he said that he was looking for a new copy of Lord of the Rings, 'cause he had a Blue-Ray player, which was a special movie record player. We looked, but couldn't find it and so I asked him what it was about and he just stopped and looked at me and said that I had never seen Lord of the Rings and it was his duty to change that. Meghan said that it was kind of long, and he said that it was time well spent and we were going to have to marathon it because that was an American tradition. And he said that he was going to find it.

But he didn't get his chance to right away, 'cause David sent a telegram that he had gotten his supplies and we could come back, so we went over to the Christmas aisle again and looked at the different kinds of Christmas stockings which were too big to fit anybody's feet. But that was so you could put more presents in them.

After we'd paid for our things and were walking out, David suddenly turned to Angela and asked her if he could have a penny, and she rolled her eyes and reached into her pants and found one and he went running off to the mechanical horse they have called Sandy, which is only a penny to ride. Aric said that if anybody asked, we didn't know him.

He was having fun, so I asked Angela if I could have a penny, too, and when he got done I put a penny in and rode Sandy.

It wasn't as much fun as riding Hoshi, 'cause it didn't go anywhere and just slowly rocked back and forth, plus it was made out of metal and that felt a little weird on my butt. But it was still fun, and a lot of people stopped to watch me, which was actually kind of embarrassing, especially since I had to keep shifting my wings to keep my balance. Sandy was narrower than a real horse and her saddle was slipperier than a real saddle.

And Meghan came over and as soon as Sandy had stopped she put another penny in the slot and so I got another ride, and when it was over I got off just in case somebody else who was watching wanted to ride Sandy.

A little boy came over but he wanted to ride me instead of Sandy, and his Mom grabbed him and pulled him away and scolded him which I thought was pretty mean. I would have given him a ride, and I wouldn't have even asked for a penny.

While we were walking out to the car, Aric said that it would be funny to see me on a mechanical bull, and I asked if they had them at Meijer, 'cause I was willing to try. He said that they had them at some bars and he'd have to look and see if there were any in Kalamazoo that did.

When we got back to Aric's house, David wouldn't let us see what he'd bought and then after he'd gotten it unloaded he said that we weren't allowed in the living room until he was finished with his masterpiece. Aric said that was okay because we were going to go back to my apartment so that we could hang up my birdfeeder and we were also going to go to Best Buy.

So we went back to my apartment and I hung the feeder on the balcony—there was a little hook in the rafter for it—and then I filled it up with seeds and then we all got back in Winston and drove to Portage.

He had to look around some, 'cause there weren't any where they were supposed to be on the shelf, but they had lots of other shelves that had movies on them, and it wasn't until he'd looked at them all that he decided that they didn't have any, so he said that we'd go to Target next, 'cause it wasn't too far away. Target was a lot like Meijer, but it was a little bit smaller and they didn't have as much food. They did have Lord of the Rings, though, and so he got it and then he said that maybe he should get The Hobbit, too, so I'd have the full experience.

Meghan said that it would be smarter to wait and see if I survived the first movie marathon before having a second, and he was kind of disappointed by that, but he eventually agreed that it would be smarter. He still bought it, because he said that he didn't have a Blue-Ray record of it, and even if I didn't want to watch it, he did.

It was getting towards dinnertime, and so we had to decide where we wanted to eat. Aric had food and I had food and there were also lots of restaurants if we didn't feel like cooking. Meghan said that she wanted to make something and I wanted to help, and Aric said that he'd stay out of the way if we did.

She said that she'd been planning on making a casserole, and she had all the ingredients back at Aric's house, so we went back there after Aric asked David if it was okay for us to come home. He said that the nativity scene wouldn't be ready until tomorrow but the tree was.

Well, it turned out that his idea for a tree had been one of the giant light bulbs wrapped in a daisy chain of shiny plastic trees and I thought it was actually pretty clever. It didn't look quite as pretty, 'cause there was just one big light instead of lots of little ones, but we could look at the outside of the house for the strings of lights.

Me and Meghan made the casserole, which was a vegetable bread pudding. She'd found the recipe on the internet and had thought that it sounded really good.

The boring part of making casseroles was waiting for them to cook, and you just got hungrier and hungrier as they did, 'cause you could smell them but not eat them yet. And then when it was done cooking you had to wait to eat it, and so after it had been in the oven for only five minutes I said that I was gonna go flying around the block to get a little bit of exercise.

I had to be careful, 'cause all of my flight gear was still at my apartment, and it was dark out. But the streetlights gave me enough light to see by, and I knew the neighborhood, so I stayed a little bit above the treetops and just flew a big circle out to where the dirt mines are and then back, and with the lights on the outside of Aric's house it wasn't too hard to find. And when I went back in there were only ten more minutes to wait.

The casserole was big enough that everyone could share it, and we sat the same way as we had for lunch. And it was really good, and filled me right up.

Angela and Meghan washed the dishes after dinner and I wanted to help but they wouldn't let me, which was kind of frustrating.

After dinner, Aric said that we ought to watch his other favorite Christmas movie, which was Die Hard. Angela said that it wasn't a Christmas movie, and he said that it was because it had a Christmas party and so it counted. And David agreed with him, and so we all crowded together on the couch to watch it.

Well, I didn't know what to think about the movie. There were some bad guys who took hostages and threatened them but what they really wanted was to rob the skyscratcher and then John McClane decided that he was going to fight them, and so he had to shoot them one at a time, and there were lots of explosions and McClane got hurt a lot but in the end he finally wound up killing all the bad guys, who weren't smart enough to run away when they saw that things weren't going their way. And the police mostly didn't trust him, even though the police are supposed to help people. I guess in the end it all worked out, though, 'cause the bad guys wouldn't get to hurt anyone any more, and the police finally figured out that McClane was a hero. And I also learned to stay away from helicopters because they could shoot at you.

I thought it was kind of strange that all the Christmas movies had robbers in them but the Christmas pageant I'd seen in Cripple Creek hadn't, and Meghan told me that most Christmas movies were not like these and maybe I should see a proper one, and Aric said that Scrooged was good, too, and she said that wasn't what she meant, and she was going to further my education into human Christmas customs, and Angela agreed with her and said that tomorrow night we'd watch a proper Christmas movie that everyone would enjoy.

Then Aric said that we ought to go back to my apartment and christen it again, and I said that we already had a bunch of times, and he said that one more time wouldn't hurt. Meghan said that he just wanted to see her make breakfast naked again, and he admitted that that was a big advantage to my apartment, 'cause nobody had to wear clothes if they didn't want to.

So Meghan went upstairs and got some clean clothes to wear tomorrow and when she came back down she told Aric that she'd gotten some clean clothes for him, too, and then we got in Winston and drove back over to my apartment. And once we'd turned off Stadium Drive, Aric said that I could steer and use the gearshift.

It was a little bit more difficult, 'cause none of the roads around the apartments were straight, and Winston didn't behave like a Go-Kart, but I still made it to my building without crashing and I even put Winston into a parking space but then Aric had to fix it 'cause I hadn't gotten between the lines like I was supposed to.

We went upstairs and Meghan and Aric got undressed for bed right away, and the three of us sat together under the covers for a little while just talking and then me and Meghan decided that we'd let Aric be in the middle and the two of us would see if we could wear him out.

December 7 [Snowclouds]

December 7

It was dark out when I woke up and I could have stayed in bed but I didn't feel like it. I kind of thought that I was getting a little bit lazy now that I didn't have to go to classes anymore, and I was spending more time than I ought to in bed. And so I got out of bed and went to the window and looked out over the lake but there wasn't that much to see. The moon had set and aside from some light coming from the parking lot, it was pretty dark.

I thought about flying, but it'd be kind of lonely in the dark, and Meghan and Aric might worry if they woke up and I was gone.

So I went over to the tree and I had to do a little bit of hunting on the wall but I found the electricity outlet and stuck the cord in and that really made the room look a lot more cheerful.

I went back to the bed and sat down on it—I was facing the wrong way, so that I could see the tree. And I had my side up against Aric's back, and I probably could have gotten under the covers or pushed them aside a little bit or even woken them up but it was kinda early for people, so I just sat and watched the tree until it got light out.

Then I got back out of bed and went over to my desk and got out my journal and wrote in it until I heard Meghan start to move around a little bit, and when she did, Aric stopped snoring, so I knew he was probably gonna wake up soon, too.

I thought that I ought to get back in bed with them but before I could Meghan woke up enough to notice that I was gone and she was leaning on her elbow and looking over Aric's shoulder to see if I was there when I nuzzled her on the back and made her jump. And then she fell down on her back and pulled me into a hug and I kissed her on the tip of her nose, which made her laugh.

She poked me back with her finger and made me go cross-eyed, then she sat up and looked at the Christmas tree and I laid down next to her and put my head on her leg, so that she could scratch behind my ears, and we both admired the tree together.

Meghan finally told me that she had to get up and pee, and I admitted that I did too but I hadn't wanted to move and she said that she hadn't wanted to, either and so we sat a little bit longer before I took my head off her leg so that she could get up.

Aric was still asleep when we came out of the bathroom and I thought that we should start making breakfast 'cause maybe the smell would wake him up (and I was hungry, too). So we went in the kitchen and decided that we'd have waffles and an omelet again and this time I knew how the stove was supposed to work so I didn't need as much help with it.

Meghan said that tomorrow we ought to make a quiche but we'd have to get up a little bit early and we'd also have to get some supplies that we didn't have, like a pie crust. Or she said that we could get up even earlier and make one from scratch, but then we'd need a lot of supplies that we didn't have, but we could throw flour at each other which was fun. She said that I'd look really cute with a white blaze on my nose.

Then she asked if there were any ponies with blazes or socks or stars or any of the other markings that Earth horses had. And I said that there were some but it wasn't very common, and it was mostly stallions who had markings like that but I didn't know why. There weren't any who lived in our village but one time I'd seen a unicorn stallion called Gaffer who was sailing on a navy ship that had a white blaze on his muzzle and white socks and I'd been pretty young then so I thought it was because he was old but my mom said that some stallions were like that and he was kind of cute and she wished that my aunt was there to foalsit.

I let Meghan mix up the waffle batter 'cause it was easier for her to hold it in her hands and I stuck a hoof in and gave her a blaze on her nose and she couldn't do anything about it 'cause she was cradling the bowl with one hand and had the spoon in the other and I jumped back pretty quick. And she glared at me but she kept on mixing the batter and she didn't get me back until breakfast was all done and I'd set everything on the table and when I turned around she stuck an ice cube up under my tail.

Well, I yelped loud enough that Aric woke up and I'd just smacked Meghan with my wing so she was laughing while she was rubbing her thigh, and he just looked at us and asked what he'd missed and so I told him what Meghan had done. She said she hadn't meant for it to go in me, and then he started laughing which was kind of mean, but it was funny.

After we'd eaten breakfast we had to decide what to do for the day, and I said that I wanted to go flying and maybe get a snowcloud—there were a few flakes falling lazily down and I wanted to get one and play with it.

So we decided to drive out and find an open field so that they could watch. I knew that they probably weren't gonna see much because of the clouds but it would be nice to have them with me.

I got dressed in my flight gear and they got in their clothes and then we drove out along Stadium Drive until we'd crossed the railroad tracks and there were some fields there.

I called the airplane directors and got permission to go flying, and then I got out of Winston and kind of felt at the air for a moment before I took off. And then I went out over the fallow fields and started climbing up above the trees and I glanced down at my watch just so that I would know my position, 'cause I knew I was gonna lose the ground.

And I did. I wasn't even up to the cloud deck before all the flakes that were below me pretty much blocked out my sight of the ground. Air currents sort of blew it around and so sometimes I got glimpses of it, but while the flakes were still kinda sparse, when there were lots of them between me and the ground they mostly blocked it out.

I didn't go up to get the cloud right away, 'cause I was having fun just flying through it. I made little eddies in the snow and if I flew through fast enough, I'd sort of pull it along behind me and a bunch of flakes would stick to the front of my wings until I flexed them and then it would break off.

I made a couple of circles a little bit below the clouds and if anypony had asked, I would have told them that I was looking for the right cloud, but really I was just playing.

I did find a section of cloud that had rolled down from the rest of the cloud and it wasn't too hard to cut off. There wasn't a lot of snow in it, so I kind of put it off to the side while I gathered some more cloudstuff, and that turned out not working like I'd planned, 'cause it drifted off and I lost it. I thought that I knew where it was and then I went just a little bit further and when I went to come back it wasn't there any more. I probably wasn't in the right place, but I didn't know where the right place was, so I had to start over.

It turned out to be worth it, though, 'cause I found another bit of cloud that was even better, and I cut it out and then I pushed it with me while I gathered up some other small wisps to make it bigger, plus I was catching some more flakes on it and renewing it, too.

I made it stop snowing so it wouldn't run out—even with the little bit of extra I'd given it, there wasn't a whole lot of snow in it. If' I'd had to make a snowstorm on my own, I would have tried to hold the clouds over Lake Michigan a little bit longer, 'cause I bet the lake was still warm enough to be putting lots of moisture in the air that the clouds could drink.

But this cloud was just for play, and it was what I had to work with, so I finally figured that I'd gathered up enough pieces that it would last for a while, so I checked my watch again to figure out where Aric and Meghan were, and then I started bringing it down.

It would be nice if there was some way that I could make my watch find things that weren't airports, but it didn't do that. So I only got close, and I had to follow landmarks the rest of the way back. Luckily, Aric hadn't gone all that far from the railroad tracks, and so when I saw them I knew I had to go a little bit south still and also west, and then there was a little bit of a gap in the snow and I saw Winston, so I pushed the cloud over that way.

I didn't go right by the road, but stayed over the field. And Aric and Meghan came over, so I kept the cloud high enough that they couldn't touch it just in case it had some electricity in it. I hadn't really felt much but it was kind of deceptive when I was in the air, 'cause I'd match the sky so if it built up sort of slowly I might not notice it.

And then I sat on it for a little bit and then showed them how I could make it snow and then stop it again, and I could also sort of control the size of the flakes. It was a lot easier when you were up high, 'cause the distance the snow fell and what it fell through made a difference in how the snow came out, too. But it didn't really matter all that much, 'cause they were just amazed seeing it.

I played with it until it ran out of snow and it had made a kind of deep pile on the ground right under it. And then I got curious if I could refill the cloud—that was something that I'd never tried to do. Even back in Equestria, it wasn't something that I did very often, 'cause there were other pegasuses who made the clouds.

I couldn't do it here, because there wasn't any water to put in it. So we decided that we'd drive over to a lake and try it there, and Aric said that the closest one he knew that had public access was Wolf Lake.

So we got back in Winston and he drove until he got to Van Kal Street which was the county line, and we took that north and then went a little bit west on the 43 Road until we were at Wolf Lake. And when he got to the boat launch he asked Meghan if she wanted to go skinny-dipping in the lake again and she said that maybe if he would she would too but it was really a little cold for it and the hospital probably wouldn't let us share a bed while we were recovering from hypothermia.

I didn't think I'd get it, 'cause I'd gone swimming in the wintertime. It wasn't all that pleasant but I'd never had to go to the hospital afterwards, even when it had frozen my coat.

I told the airplane directors where I was and flew up again, and after I'd looked around a little bit I found the perfect bit of cloud and brought it down. There wasn't a lot of snow in it, but that was okay because that would actually make it go faster, since there wouldn't be as much to empty out. And I brought it down and when I got over the lake I jumped on the cloud until it started snowing heavily and it didn't take it too long at all before it had dumped out everything—just long enough to push it over Aric and Meghan and then back out over the lake.

Then I stopped it before it got so empty that it dissipated, and I brought it right down to the surface of the lake.

There was an art to putting water into a cloud, 'cause if you just tried to dip it in the water it'd melt into nothing, so you had to be really slow and careful getting it in. And I wasn't so good at it because I hadn't really practiced it since cloud class, so I was even slower and carefuler than an experienced weathermare would have been, but it was working.

At the rate I was going, it would be dark again before I'd refilled it all the way, so once I thought it had enough I lifted it up a little bit higher and then sort of felt around the cloud 'cause I didn't want it to just come back out as freezing rain, and that actually took a lot more work for me to get it to behave than I thought it would. Feral Earth clouds aren't nearly as cooperative as weather factory clouds.

My weather teacher would have failed me for the snow that fell back out of my cloud, but it was pretty good for my first attempt in years, especially since I was working with a wild cloud. It was snow, even if it was coming out almost melted and not in proper crystals. And after I'd stopped it and worked the water around in it a little bit more it got better, but it still wasn't right, and I felt kind of bad about it, but both Aric and Meghan thought that it was pretty amazing.

Meghan said that maybe we should make some movies where I was explaining to people how I made clouds and made them do what I wanted. And I wish she'd thought of that sooner, like maybe in the springtime, 'cause then I would have had a lot of things that I could have taught. Now that it was December, there weren't going to be that many different kinds of weather that I could play with, although I could probably make sort of unnatural clouds with some effort.

The one I had was starting to come apart, so I said that I was going to go up and get another one. And she said that this time she'd hold the GoPro, so I had to land to give it to her, and I made sure to spark off on a tree just in case. And I was glad that I had, 'cause I had picked up enough electricity to make a weak spark to the tree.

Then I went back up and I found another cloudling that felt like I could work it, so I cut it loose and brought it back down and went through the whole process again but this time I explained what I was doing every step of the way. And I think that helped some, 'cause I didn't get impatient when I was letting it make snowflakes, so they came out a lot better.

By the time I was done I was almost completely exhausted 'cause I'd used up so much of my magic on the clouds. And I forgot to spark off but the ground did that for me when I landed.

I was almost completely covered with snow and ice, and I thought that I ought to sit in the back on Winston so I didn't get the seat wet when I melted, but Aric and Meghan insisted that I should ride in the cab. And they brushed me off as much as they could and then I got in and instead of looking out the windows I put my head down on Meghan's lap and I dozed off until we got back home.

I was too tired to be hungry, and I just wanted to warm up a bit in the shower. And I was kind of cursing myself for getting so worn out, 'cause a year ago before I came to Earth I could have done a lot better—it wasn't just a lack of practice.

Maybe if I hadn't been cold and soaking wet I wouldn't have felt so bad, so I went right into the shower and then after I turned it on I thought that maybe a bath would be better, even though there was no way all three of us could fit into the bathtub.

Meghan said that I should, though, and she put some of the Mister Bubble in and that smelled really nice and made lots and lots of bubbles. And she had Aric go to K-Mart which was not too far from my apartment, because she said that I needed some soup to warm up and that was something that we should have gotten before.

She sat with me and we talked while I was sitting in the bath, and I let it warm me up. It wasn't as good as a hot tub, 'cause after a while the water had been in there for a while it started to get cold and I had to drain some out and refill it.

I stayed in probably longer than I should have but I felt a lot better when I got out and Aric had made soup and toast that was thick and dripping butter and while I was eating it he told me about a Boy Scout leader that he used to have called Jerry who sometimes made butter-fried bagels that he called Jerry Bagels and they were really good on cold days because of all the energy they had in them and if he'd thought about it he would have made them instead of the toast.

It was still snowing outside and it had started to come down a little bit thicker than before, and after I'd dried all the way off and was warm I decided that I wanted to go out and play in it some more. This time we didn't drive anywhere; we just stayed in the parking lot and played on the little islands that they had, and we threw snowballs at each other for a bit and then once we'd trampled up all the snow on one island we moved to another one, and then we started playing on the big snow-pile that was at the end of the parking lot. It was a lot denser, 'cause all the snow had been shoved there, but you could slide down it and climb back up it and I went back to my apartment and got my last Equestrian flag and planted it at the top but I didn't leave it there.

Then we went around behind the apartment houses and we all worked together to make a snowpony, and I thought it would be fun to make one on the roof but they couldn't have joined me if I had.

We had sandwiches and hot chocolate for dinner, and Aric said that he thought the hot chocolate would be better if it had brandy in it, but he didn't feel like going out to get any. And when we were done eating we all sat on the mattress on the floor and Meghan unfolded her computer and she turned it around so that we couldn't see what movie she was looking for, but she said that it was an important Christmas movie.

It was called A Christmas Story, and Meghan said that it was a part of her childhood. Ralphie really wanted a gun even though everyone said that he'd shoot his eye out, but he eventually got it anways. And when Flick got his tongue stuck to a pole I said that nopony in Chonamare had ever tried that 'cause we'd all heard that Blue Belle had done that when she was a filly and the only way to get it off was to have somepony else pee on it and everypony said that that was why she always had a sour expression but now that I thought about it I didn't know if anypony had ever actually asked her if that had really happened and it probably would have been just as easy to get some warm water from the tavern or even have a pegasus bring down a cloud and drop some rain on it to melt it off. Then Aric admitted that he'd gotten his tongue stuck to a pole once when he was in elementary school and he said that he thought probably almost every boy had. Meghan said that that was because boys were dumb and would do things just on a bet, and he said that that wasn't true.

She said that she bet that he couldn't write his name in the snow with pee and he said that he could and he'd prove it but before he got up she grabbed his arm and told him he could sit back down because he'd just proved her point.

Then Aric told me that you could get the leg as a Christmas ornament and that he'd even seen an actual leg-lamp for sale in a Think Geek catalog once. It was kind of ugly, though, so I didn't know why anybody would want it.

And I also thought that having Chinese food for a Christmas dinner would be pretty good, and Meghan said that maybe we should do that, since the movie made it sort of traditional.

When the movie was over, we were already in bed, and so Meghan closed her computer and then took the cups back to the kitchen and said that we could leave them until the morning. And then on her way back she plugged in the Christmas tree and we snuggled up on the mattress and they both took their time undressing.

I was kinda tired, 'cause I'd spent so much energy on the cloud today and I was wanting to just go to sleep, but then Meghan got up again and went back to the kitchen and brought back some ice like she said she was going to, and I hadn't expected something as dumb as little cubes of ice to heat things up so much, and I don't think that Aric had, either.

December 8 [Again]

December 8

I woke up to the sound of birds at my feeder, and so I stuck my head up and watched them until Meghan woke up, and we cuddled for a little bit and then decided that we were going to wake up Aric the fun way, and so she used her fingers to count down and then straddled him and I think he faked being asleep a little bit because he might have thought she was gonna stop if she saw he'd woken up. But I teased him enough with my tail that he couldn't resist and he grabbed my rump and pulled me down.

Afterwards, he snuggled up against us and me and Meghan were pretty awake but I guess we'd tired him out, 'cause he fell back asleep pretty quick, and so me and Meghan snuggled with each other and watched the day break through my big balcony windows.

Lots of birds had discovered my birdfeeder, and they were all lining up on my balcony and the trees a little bit further back waiting for their turn. It was about half empty, so either there were a lot of early risers, or else they'd been busy yesterday and I'd just been too tired from moving the cloud around to notice.

Meghan asked me what I thought the birds would think about us, and I said that probably since they lived in the city they were used to humans, and they might not even be able to see through the glass all that well, anyway. As long as we moved slow we were probably far enough away that the birds didn't really think about us at all, but I said that maybe if she went right up to the window they'd be able to see her better and some of the more skittish birds would fly off and wait to see if she went outside and tried to eat one of the bold birds. If she didn't, they'd probably come back.

So she moved right up to the glass kind of slowly and it didn't seem to bother the birds at all. And then I crept up next to her, and we watched them for a couple of minutes before deciding to go into the kitchen to make breakfast.

I'd never really had to think about budgeting for food, so I was already running low after only a couple of days. We had enough eggs left over for one more omelet but I was out of waffle batter, and we never had stopped by Meijer yesterday to get ingredients for a quiche, so we couldn't have that.

I did have some shredded wheat because I liked that and I also had oatmeal and maple syrup to put in it, plus I had the hay I could eat, too, although Meghan and Aric couldn't. I had seen Meghan nibble at a piece a couple of times, though.

So I made scrambled eggs and I was gonna make oatmeal but Meghan wanted to 'cause she said that it was kind of awkward to just be standing in the kitchen watching me even though I was cute and she said that it was also warmer near the stove.

Aric woke up again before we were done cooking and he came into the kitchen to see what we were doing, and when he saw that we didn't need any help he went back out and got his portable telephone and then leaned up against the counter and started looking at it. Meghan asked him what he was doing and he said that he'd been thinking and maybe we could rent a television so that we could marathon Lord of the Rings at my apartment instead of his house.

Meghan thought that was kind of silly and he said that we'd be able to get a much bigger one than he had, and she said that boys were always thinking about size. Then she asked me if stallions were worried about their size, and I said that I'd never heard one wishing it was bigger, but they sometimes said that it was longer than it really was, as if I couldn't see with my own eyes.

Then Aric said if it wasn't worth paying for a few extra inches, it might be worth it 'cause we wouldn't have to wear clothes to watch it. And that did sound appealing, so I asked him how much a television would cost and he said it would only be sixty dollars and we could have it for a whole month. He said that they didn't do weekly rentals, but monthly was fine and they'd even deliver it to us and pick it up later so we wouldn't have to do anything.

So we decided that was a good deal, and he ordered it and then asked what time we would want it and I thought the afternoon, 'cause we could do fun stuff in the morning and then come back for lunch and relax and be home when the television arrived.

While we were talking, I'd stopped paying attention to the scrambled eggs and shouldn't have, 'cause I burned them a little bit.

We ate breakfast in the living room, watching the birds. It had started snowing again but they didn't seem to mind the snow too much. I think they were happy to get good sunflower seeds, 'cause there weren't any sunflower plants they could get them from in the winter.

Then we talked a little bit and decided that we could go to the Nature Center and play around there for the morning. I bet the deer wondered where I'd gone, although they probably didn't actually care that I hadn't been there in a while. And they were probably done with their morning grazing anyway.

Aric said that we could take a shower first or later, and me and Meghan both though that later was better, to warm up after playing outside. So they got dressed and I didn't think I'd need my flight gear, so I didn't put it on.

And then on the way out of the apartment we came across Chad, who apparently also lived in the apartment building. I was gonna wave at him, but he had a kind of mean look on his face and so I didn't.

When we were in Winston, Aric said that he didn't like him, and he was the only person working in the theatre who he didn't like. He told me that Chad was kind of person who just seemed to exude slime, and if you shook his hand you wanted to wash it off afterwards, but he couldn't think of a specific reason why.

Meghan said she felt that way about him, too, and maybe he just needed to get laid. And that made Aric snap his head around and she shrugged and I said that it was true. Sometimes that made a pony grumpy.

Since we went in in Winston, we had to stop at the little kiosk and pay. I probably should have told them how many times I'd just flown in and back out but I didn't and when I asked Aric about it he said that when I flew in I counted as wildlife but when I rode in I was a person and that was very confusing. Humans have strange rules.

People had been doing a pretty good job at keeping the snow off the parking lots and sidewalks but they hadn't done much on the trails. There were lines of sticks that marked where they were, though, so you wouldn't get lost. They should have put them there before the first snow fell, but I guess they must have forgotten about it. Maybe they hadn't been expecting it.

We went around my favorite trail first, and the deer weren't there but when I flew up, I could see lots of hoofprints where they usually grazed, and some of the snow was disturbed from them sticking their noses down to get at the plants. And when we got to the downhill side, Aric said that he wished he'd brought a sled, and Meghan suggested that he could go down on his butt.

So he sort of got a running start and then dropped to his butt and he slid for maybe ten meters before he came to a stop and when he got back up he had to brush off a lot of snow and he said that that had been a really stupid idea and Meghan said that she hadn't thought he was dumb enough to try it.

I didn't try—I'd probably have hurt my tail if I did—but I did get a short gallop and then I flew off the top of the hill and started to fly around, doing little rolls and looping up when I got close to the trees, and just having fun while Meghan and Aric watched me. And I zoomed in just over their heads and then Aric wanted to hold up his hand so I could give him a high-five as I went overhead, which is where two humans smack their palms together. So he held up his hand and I zoomed over low and brushed against him with my hoof and then flew back around and Meghan held up her hand so I did the same thing a second time.

I left my leg relaxed, 'cause hooves weren't soft like hands, and I didn't want to hurt them.

I got a bunch of snow on me from flying and when I landed Meghan brushed it off my back even though it wasn't bothering me at all. I didn't like it when I got enough on my mane that it melted and dripped down into my eyes but otherwise I didn't mind having snow on my coat.

We went around the trail by the railroad tracks and when we got done we went down the other path that went back into the woods, and walked along that through the trees.

Most of the animals were in their nests and burrows 'cause of the snow, but there were a few chickadees and sparrows who were fat with seeds flying around and chirping at us. I asked if the nature center fed them and Aric didn't know—he hadn't seen any birdfeeder, but they could have scattered seeds on the ground, too, or else there could be someone nearby who put out food for them.

Plus there were lots of winter berries that birds liked even though most of them were poison to ponies.

We were still on the side that was by the river and the railroad tracks when we heard a train coming, so we picked our way through the woods to get a bit closer to the tracks so that we could see it better. Aric got to the edge of the trees and looked both ways 'cause his ears weren't as good at telling where sound came from. I was already looking north.

He figured it out before the train got close enough to do more than see its headlight and it honked at us and Aric waved and so I did, too, and then it honked one more time as it rushed past. And we got a big blast of snow that it pushed aside, and for a moment when all the railcars were sort of obscured and shadowy in the snow I felt an urge to move forward and touch them and then the feeling passed.

There was one car that was rocking a little bit and banging really loudly as it went by, and Aric said that was because it had a flat wheel. Sometimes they slid on the rails and that was how it happened, and they didn't always notice, 'cause the trains went through the railyards so slowly that it was hard to see it there.

Then after the last car had passed and it got quieter he said that Meghan should have flashed the locomotive and she said next time she'd do it if he did. So he looked up and down the tracks but there weren't any more trains coming.

We went the rest of the way around the path and then we went along the one that went across the street, and I didn't feel as uncomfortable in the tunnel with both of them there with me. Although since I was walking, it was kind of strange how my hoofsteps echoed up and down it, and when we got out the other side Meghan said that my ears had been really twitchy in the tunnel, 'cause I kept hearing my own hoofsteps.

We passed by a woman who was skiing, and she waved at us as she went by. Walking skis are a little bit longer and narrower than downhill skis, and you need to use the poles more. They didn't seem all that practical, but Meghan said that was because I hadn't thought about how difficult it would be to get through really deep snow. I said that I'd just fly over it and stuck my tongue out at her.

And on the way back, I did fly over the road, just 'cause I didn't want to go through the tunnel again. And I thought about making an ambush at the other end, since there was a lot of snow, but before I could do anything with it, Aric and Meghan came out of the tunnel.

When we got back to Winston, Aric had to scrape off the windshield, 'cause it had been warm when he'd stopped and so the snow had melted and then re-frozen as more came down. And then we had to wait a little bit until it got warm enough to drive.

We went to Meijer to get some more food, so that Meghan could teach me how to make a quiche, and she decided on getting pre-made crusts which were really clever, 'cause they came in a pan already so all you had to do was put filling in them and then cook them in the oven. She said that they weren't as good as home-made but they were a lot cheaper and easier especially if you weren't going to be making too many pies or quiches.

She had to look at her portable telephone to remember what else she might need to put in the quiche, and she also decided that we could get extra crusts and make a pie, too, but then we got into a bit of an argument about what kind of pie to make. Aric wanted blueberry, which sounded good, but Meghan said fruit pies needed a top crust and so they weren't as good an idea, and she said that we could make a pecan pie but I wasn't as enthusiastic about that, and so we finally decided that we'd make a pumpkin pie even though it was after Thanksgiving.

They had pumpkin pie fillings in cans, which was clever of them. They had a lot of other fruits, too, and even lemon which I thought was an odd flavor to put in a pie. She said that if I tried a proper lemon meringue pie I might change my mind, so then I wanted to get that but she told me that you couldn't make a proper lemon meringue pie with canned filling.

Aric said that we ought to have something simple for lunch, so he got some Boca Burgers, which were patties made out of vegetables, and they had lots of flavors. He said that you could cook them in a microwave, and you could put everything on them that you'd put on a normal hamburger, so then we had to go get buns for them and he wanted some cheese, too and then we went back to get some fake bacon for them as well. And then he decided that we might as well have an American picnic theme, so he also got some potato salad and pickles and potato chips, and he got popcorn for tomorrow.

Then we went back home and even though we were all hungry we decided to take a shower first so that we'd be clean when we ate lunch.

We took our time in the shower, 'cause it was pretty easy to forget about being hungry when you were in a shower with your friends, but once we'd gotten clean and were drying off I started to get hungry again and Meghan said it was a good thing that the food he'd gotten didn't take too long to prepare.

So Aric went into the kitchen after he'd put on his pants, and he started making lunch, and me and Meghan groomed each other while he was preparing our food.

It didn't take him too long to make it, and then he brought everything into the living room so we could eat it and look at the Christmas tree. He said that the food would taste better if we imagined that the tree was not decorated for Christmas and that we were in a grassy field on a sunny day, which was hard to imagine 'cause whenever I looked out the window I could see snow drifting down outside.

The potato chips were too salty and too oily so I didn't have very many of them. Humans love them, though and maybe I could have gotten used to them if I'd eaten enough of them. The potato salad was pretty good, and so were the burgers, and he'd also gotten cans of Barq's, which is a kind of root beer that was really sweet and had lots of bubbles in it that tickled my nose and made me burp. Meghan showed me how I could tap the can to get some of the bubbles out of it and it was better that way.

We didn't have much to do in the afternoon while we were waiting for the television to arrive, so we just relaxed. Meghan got out her computer and started putting my movies on YouTube, and Aric used my computer to look for theatre jobs that might be available in the summer, 'cause he said now was the time to think about it. I wrote in my journal, until we finally got a knock on the door and it was the television deliverymen.

They brought it right in and we didn't have a table to put it on, so they set it on the floor by the Christmas tree and then Aric had to sign a piece of paper promising to return it or pay for it if he didn't, and then they left.

We couldn't watch anything on it, 'cause it wasn't hooked up to anything, and Aric said that he'd have to go get his Blue Ray player, and I said that I'd come along, too. Meghan couldn't because she was in the middle of loading a movie, and we promised that we'd wait but she said it was okay, she had a lot of work to do and she might as well get it done, and we were coming back before too long anyway.

When we got to Aric's house, David was a little bit disappointed that Aric wanted to take the Blue Ray player because he said that now he wouldn't be able to watch anything at all, and Aric said that he could hook up his computer to the television and see anything that his computer could show, and he said that it was important, too, because I hadn't seen Lord of the Rings and he'd rented a giant television for my apartment for that very purpose, and then David nodded and helped Aric unhook his Blue Ray player.

Once we'd gotten that put in Winston, David showed us his nativity scene. He'd used dolls that he had—which he called action figures—and made new clothes for them out of paper. And then he wanted us to guess who was what, and once Aric had named a couple of them and I knew that it was a scene from the Bible, I knew what was going on. R2D2 was baby Jesus, and Spock and Data were wise men (the third was Doctor Who, Aric told me) and there was a weeping angel that was the angel.

Aric had to pick up Mary and Joseph and then he figured out that they were Scully and Mulder from X-Files. And instead of barnyard animals, David had used an AT-AT and an AT-ST and a Lego Jeep, and he also had a cutout of a dog in a coat and hat that he said was McGruff the crime dog. I thought it was really creative, and Aric said that he should take pictures of it and put them on the internet and maybe they'd go viral and David said he had and they did.

When we got back to the apartment, Meghan was still working and I decided that I ought to write a computer letter to Aquamarine, 'cause today was her last day of school and I remembered how I'd felt as all my friends left. I was sure that Cedric was going to be there for her, but she could probably still use some encouragement, and while I was writing it I thought that she wasn't that far away and we could have gone to see her.

Maybe she'd be happier just spending the time with her friends, though. We could still visit each other when we were back in Equestria, after all. And I guess it wouldn't be too long before I saw her, 'cause we were all going together to Florida soon.

I wrote it out on normal paper in Equestrian and it was only when I was done that I remembered that Peggy had been the one who could put it in the computer and send it to her, and I was thinking that I'd have to start over and use English, but then Aric helped me out by taking a picture with his portable telephone and he put that in my computer and got it to attach to my computer letter.

Me and Meghan made dinner together, and it was pretty simple, 'cause we didn't feel like putting much effort into it, but she said that it was important to have a proper home-cooked meal tonight because tomorrow we'd be watching Lord of the Rings all day and Aric would want to be lazy and would only order food that could be delivered. He said that it was convenient and said that he had a bunch of apps on his portable telephone that let him order food with only a couple of button-pushes.

After we'd eaten dinner, Aric wanted to try out the television to make sure that it was working for tomorrow, and he'd also brought How to Train Your Dragon with him which I had already seen but it was still lots of fun to try again, and I kept telling myself to be careful when there were flying scenes in the movie 'cause I wasn't really flying and I ought to keep my wings in but even so, I forgot anyway and wound up hitting both of them the first time that Hiccup tried to fly Toothless.

And we were all lying on the mattress and pretty comfortable and both Meghan and Aric had already gotten undressed when somebody knocked on my door and that perked my ears right up, 'cause it was Mister Salvatore and he asked if I was okay, which was a strange thing to ask.

I didn't know what was going on and Meghan and Aric were both scrambling for their clothes, and Aric stopped long enough to pick up my portable telephone and there was a telegram from him saying that he was coming over and don't answer the door for anyone else, and that was kind of scary. And so Meghan ran off to the bathroom with her clothes and Aric put his pants back on and was trying to find his shirt and I didn't know if I should open the door or not but I didn't think that Mister Salvatore would come over if there wasn't a good reason for it, so I went over and opened the door for him.

He was in his suit and had his embroidered vest on, and Miss Cherilyn was in her sleeping clothes but also had a vest on like his and she came in but he stayed outside and I had no idea what was happening at all, until Miss Cherilyn said that a Western Michigan student had just been murdered at his apartment and the suspects were still at large and it probably didn't have anything to do with me but they weren't taking any chances, and Mister Salvatore was going to stay in the hallway all night until the bad men were caught and she could stay in my apartment if I wanted or else she could wait out in the hallway, too.

I thought it would be kind of rude to make her have to wait in the hallway, and I said that Mister Salvatore ought to come in, too, but she said that he'd be happy out there hoping that the bad guy might show up here and he was probably already thinking of what he was going to do if it happened, and I kind of felt sorry for anyone who was dumb enough to try and get by Mister Salvatore.

That sort of ruined our plans for the evening, though, and instead of getting into bed and having fun, we stayed alert until late and when it was finally time to sleep Aric got a pillow and one of the blankets and went over to a corner and curled up there and I could tell that Miss Cherilyn knew that we were having sex and she was sort of pretending not to know, 'cause she said that she was sorry but my safety came first.

Me and Meghan offered her the futon to sit on, or sleep on if she wanted, but she said that she was happy in my chair, and she wasn't going to sleep anyways. And she said that maybe we'd like to move the bed to one of the bedrooms and that wasn't really a suggestion, so we did and then we woke up Aric and he went into the other bedroom and I would have liked to find a way for me and Meghan to sneak over with him, but we couldn't think of any clever way to do it.

Meghan kept most of her clothes on; she only took off her bra so that she would be more comfortable. And I curled up on her chest and I did fall asleep, but it wasn't a very good sleep.

December 9 [Wandering]

December 9

I kept on waking up in the night and just looking around to make sure I was safe. In the sky you could fly away anywhere and hide easily if you had to but not as easily on the ground and for the first time I felt like my apartment was kind of confining. I could go out a window and fly away if I had to, but I couldn't leave Meghan and Aric behind.

But then I'd hear Mister Salvatore's radio talking quietly in the hallway outside, or Miss Cherilyn would shift in her seat, and that made me feel a lot safer. I even opened the door a little bit one time when it was quiet, and I could just see her leaning against the counter in the kitchen, keeping watch on the balcony in case the bad guy tried to get in there.

Meghan wasn't sleeping very well, either. She woke up a couple of times when I was awake, and I'm sure she'd woken up some times when I hadn't, too. And I really felt bad for Aric, 'cause he was in the other room and he didn't have a mattress or anypony sleeping with him and so he was probably pretty lonely. I could go to my window and fly to his and hopefully he'd open it but then Meghan would be alone 'cause she couldn't follow me.

When it was finally faintly light outside I finally got up 'cause I just couldn't sleep any more, and woke up Meghan, too, so that she wouldn't wake up to find me gone and get scared. And then the two of us went out into the living room and said good morning to Miss Cherilyn and I wanted to talk to her more but it wasn't smart to distract guards when they were doing their duty.

But then she asked me how I'd slept, and so I told her that I hadn't slept well at all and she said she was sorry for scaring us like that last night but Mister Salvatore had been worried about the tiny possibility that whoever had done it was on the run and might find himself here and think to escape by breaking into an apartment and if he was athletic enough he could get up to the third floor balcony, or else he could force his way into the building through the front door and then he could have found my apartment that way.

She said that it had worried both of them that it had happened so close in what was supposed to be a safe part of town, and that the police didn't have any idea who'd done it yet, or why.

And so I nuzzled her hip, and then Meghan asked if she wanted some breakfast, 'cause we'd been planning to make a quiche and we still could, and she thought that that sounded really good.

So me and Meghan got out the quiche ingredients and started making it. Meghan had to look at her portable telephone to get the recipe, 'cause she didn't know it from memory, and pretty soon we had a mixing bowl full of quiche ingredients.

After we'd poured it into the shells—we had enough for two whole quiches—there wasn't a lot to do while we waited for it to cook. We washed the dishes and then Meghan said that she was going to go wake Aric up and told me to guard the stove.

There wasn't much guarding to do, 'cause all the quiches had to do was sit there until the timer dinged, and then Meghan was gonna pull them out since I didn't have a hot pad that I could hold in my mouth, and I'd burn myself if I grabbed the tray with just my lips. So I asked Miss Cherilyn how dangerous Kalamazoo was, and she said that it was pretty safe, because even though there had been nineteen murders so far that was a higher than normal number because of the Uber driver and the man who had driven his truck over a bunch of bicyclists, and normally it was not so many. That still seemed like a lot to me, and she said that it was. Then she told me that Mister Salvatore would tell me if I asked that it was complicated and there were a lot of reasons but in her opinion the biggest factor was the number of guns and how there weren't enough effective regulations on them, and she said that she feared that now that there were lots more Republicans who had been elected that they'd try to weaken gun laws, because that was what the people who voted for them wanted them to do. And she said that she wished that some of the Senators had had to deal with the aftermath of a shooting and then maybe they'd think twice before trying to weaken the laws.

Then she sighed and said that it maybe wasn't a good thing to talk about first thing in the morning and she was just a little bit grumpy 'cause she'd been about to go to sleep when Mister Salvatore had called her and she hadn't had time to put on clothes.

I was kind of curious how he had had time and she said that she thought he might sleep in his clothes. Then she put her hand over her mouth and said that that had been a mean thing to say and it probably wasn't true.

I didn't think it was, 'cause both Meghan and Aric's clothes were pretty rumpled from them sleeping in them and Mister Salvatore's clothes always looked neat, even when he had to wake us up in the middle of the night so we could get on or off a train.

Aric went right into the bathroom and Meghan looked through the porthole and into the oven, which had a little light so that you could see the food better. And then she went into the living room and sat on the futon and watched the birds flying around the feeder. There weren't very many seeds left for them so I'd have to put more in today or else they'd go hungry, but since there was still some food left I wanted to wait until the flock had left, 'cause I didn't want to scare them off.

When the quiches were done they had to sit on the counter a little bit to cool them off so that we could eat them and that was kind of frustrating 'cause they smelled so good. Even Miss Cherilyn kept looking over at them and I could tell that she wanted a piece. We had plenty to share, and she deserved it after being up all night and making sure that we stayed safe.

Once it was cool, we all had some and after she'd eaten her piece she went out in the hallway and sent Mister Salvatore in so that he could have breakfast, and I noticed that despite having stayed up all night he still looked pretty alert.

He said that he'd been keeping in touch with the detectives on the case and it now appeared to have been a robbery gone wrong and they thought that the suspects had fled in a vehicle, although they weren't certain of that yet. And he said that now that it was daytime there wasn't as much risk as there had been last night but he still wanted to be cautious, and he said that maybe the best thing for us to do today was go somewhere and do something fun while things settled down here. And I thought that was a good idea, even though we'd been planning to watch Lord of the Rings today. We could do that later when it was safe.

So we had to decide where to go and Mister Salvatore thought that somewhere touristy with lots and lots of people would be good, and he said that there was a big Christmas store in Frankenmuth that might be fun to visit.

Aric didn't like that idea all that much, 'cause he thought that there would be too many people there who were all celebrating Christmas early, but he couldn't think of anyplace that was better. And he said that maybe we ought to just drive around and find something that looked interesting on our way and not have a plan at all.

Then I got to thinking that maybe I didn't really want to be cooped up in my apartment or in Winston today, and I thought I'd like to go somewhere that was outdoors where I could fly around some and stretch my wings, and play in the snow some. And Meghan said that wherever we went she was going to want a nap at some point today, 'cause she hadn't slept well last night.

Aric finally said that we could decide on the road but he wanted to go back to his house and get some clean clothes, and Meghan said that she did, too. So we all went down to Winston and Aric started it and then got out and swept off the windows and then scraped away at the ice that was under the snow, and Meghan helped him. And I felt a little bit better now that I was outside, 'cause I could look around for bad people and avoid them.

So we drove over to his house and went inside and decided that we might as well take a shower while we figured out where we wanted to go, but none of us really had any good ideas. And that helped us relax some although we were all still a bit sleepy and then Meghan said that maybe we ought to take a nap first. Aric said he wished that she'd thought of that before we'd taken the shower, 'cause I was all wet and it took me a while to dry off, especially with my winter coat, so I said that I'd stay above the covers so I wouldn't get them wet.

The two of them curled up in bed with Meghan in the middle and I squeezed in against the wall and she put her arm over my back.

It didn't take too long to fall asleep, 'cause Aric's room was familiar and safe, although I did think for a minute that maybe the bad guys might come here but it was just a passing thought and I put it out of my mind and closed my eyes and just focused on Meghan's arm around me and the sounds of her and Aric breathing and moving around a little bit as they got comfortable.

I could have told them that napping doesn't always work as well as a good night's sleep, and even though we were all tired I don't think we slept all that much. It was hard to be sure, 'cause the sun was blocked by the snowclouds that were still sprinkling a little bit of snow down, but I didn't feel all that much more rested when I woke back up.

I was dryer, though, so I guess I'd slept long enough that all the water on my back and sides had mostly evaporated. I was still damp on my belly and under my wings, 'cause that hadn't been able to evaporate.

Me moving around woke up Meghan and then Aric woke up, too, and we all decided that sleeping wasn't working but since the three of us were in bed together and all of us were naked that we might as well have some fun especially since we hadn't had a chance to last night or this morning, and then we all cuddled for a bit and then dozed back off for a little while.

When I woke up again I got out of bed and I sent a telegram to Mister Salvatore to see if they'd caught the bad guys yet and he said that they hadn't but they were working very hard to find them. And he said that he was talking to the Kalamazoo Police Department to see if he could get a patrol car to stay near my apartment which would help discourage any bad people from coming over there. He said that they were a bit reluctant because all their policemen were busy right now but he was sure that he could wear them down and get what he wanted.

Then he asked me if we'd decided to go somewhere and I told him that right now we were still at Aric's house but we were thinking of going to Taco Bell. That wasn't entirely true, 'cause I was probably the only one thinking it but I was sure that I could convince Meghan and Aric that it was the best place to have lunch.

And I did—they both agreed to it, and so after they got dressed we got back in Winston and drove off to Taco Bell, and we could have gotten the food in the truck but we decided to go inside instead.

While we were eating, Aric said that since we were already going west, we could go to South Haven, but the beach wasn't as fun when it was cold and snowy and neither of us really wanted to. We were having a hard time coming up with a plan although I guess if we spent long enough not having one than we wouldn't need one, 'cause the day would be over.

Aric said that we could go to Grand Rapids, and maybe there was something to do there and he looked at his portable telephone and then said that Donald Trump was having a rally there tonight and maybe we could go and protest and if we got arrested Mister Salvatore would bail us out. I thought that was a bad idea, and I said that Cayenne had gotten banned from anything political after she'd gotten arrested at a rally and I didn't want that to happen to me, especially because it would probably disappoint Mister Salvatore.

He said that if we weren't going to do that than we should go the opposite way and we could go to Schoolcraft and visit B & G Outlet which had lots of fun things that were cheap, and it was near the railroad tracks so if we heard a train we could flash it and if we got in trouble for that Mister Salvatore would bail us out.

Meghan said that that was a really dumb idea, and Aric said that he knew it was but she'd promised that if he did, she would, and she said that that was yesterday and she hadn't been serious.

He said that they'd never expect it in the wintertime and she admitted that that was probably true, but she wasn't going to stand in a parking lot and do it.

Aric said that there probably wouldn’t be any trains anyways.

So once we were done eating we got back in Winston and drove down to Schoolcraft, and I knew the way pretty well, 'cause of flying over it. And that was near where I'd gotten into a train for my ride, and it made my foreleg kinda itchy thinking about it.

The store didn't look like that much from outside, but once we got inside I could see why Aric liked it, 'cause they had all sorts of tools and he was really happy when I started asking him what they were and what they were for. Some of them I knew because they looked like the tools the wainwright had and some of them were like I'd used when I helped him fix Winston, but there were a lot more that I didn't know at all. He said that proper mechanics needed all of them, which seemed like it would be a really big investment to me. And he told me that a proper mechanic might have a hundred thousand dollars worth of tools, which was a lot. I was glad that I could just move around clouds with my hooves and wings.

They also had tarps and ropes and wheels and gloves and presses and vices and all sorts of things and he said that some of it was cheap Chinese junk and other stuff looked like things that they had gotten because it wouldn't sell anywhere else, and they even had some used things that you could buy cheaply like binders for papers and big cups that were called steins and were for beer. He said in Germany they had fancy lids and they were all painted like a fresco. I thought that the ones they had were really nice, though.

It wasn't the kind of store that I normally would have wanted to visit, but I was learning a lot from being there.

Aric had been wrong about the trains, too—while we were in the store, two of them had gone by, but he didn't rush out into the parking lot to go flash them, and Meghan didn't, either.

So I thought that maybe we weren't going to and he'd just been pulling Meghan's tail, until he was done looking around and explaining things to me and then he said that we ought to go find somewhere a little bit deserted and make a train engineer's day.

Meghan said that they'd be looking at him, too, and he said that maybe it would be a girl engineer and that was what she wanted to see.

She said it was cold outside and that any woman would only feel a little bit of pity and she said that she couldn't believe that she was thinking about doing this sober.

Then Aric said that was a good point and maybe the smart thing to do would be have dinner first and have a few drinks with dinner, and Meghan said it was going to take more than a few.

So we drove back to Kalamazoo and went to Olde Peninsula for dinner, 'cause it was really good and the beer was really good, too, and Meghan did have a few beers and so did I, but Aric only had one 'cause he had to drive us around afterwards. And then we got back in Winston and went to the parking lot that was by the bridge over the river and waited for a while but there weren't any trains and we got bored of waiting after a while, so Aric said that we'd go to another one of his favorite spots to see trains go by, which was on Cork Street.

There wasn't anyplace to park, so we had to just drive back and forth and wait for a train to come. And while we were circling around he told us about the time he'd had to stop there to wait for a train on a winter night that was a lot like tonight, and he said that he'd stopped his car which was a Buick Roadmaster that he had owned before Winston, and that when the train was crossing he'd seen an ambulance coming down the road and it had gotten to the tracks just when the train had finally passed and when it hit the rails it bounced all the snow off of it. And he'd jumped back in his car to see where it was going but by the time he got to the top of the hill it was gone and he'd never figured out where it went because the only thing there was the cemetery.

We didn't see or hear any trains there, either, and Aric was kind of disappointed and finally Meghan said that we might as well go home because she really had to pee and I did, too. I'd been thinking of just asking him to stop long enough for me to get out, 'cause there were lots of trees around that I could use, but if we were going home I could wait.

And we had to decide where to go home, and Aric said that if my helpers weren't still guarding my apartment he'd rather go there, but if they were he wanted to go to his house because he was a little bit nervous around them. I didn't think that he should be, 'cause they were so nice, and they wanted to make sure that I stayed safe.

So sent a telegram to Mister Salvatore and he said that starting tomorrow there would be a police car patrolling the complex and he was also having an alarm installed on the balcony door and the front door just in case, and it was something that he should have done sooner.

And then he said that he wanted me to stay at the hotel tonight and he would make arrangements to get me a room, so all I would have to do was go to the front door and ask for a key and they'd give it to me. So I told Aric and we went to the hotel and the man at the front desk was really nice and friendly and promised to get us anything that we needed.

Aric thought that maybe this was his way of apologizing, 'cause when we opened the door to the room it was really nice—it had a big bed in it and there was also a Jacuzzi bathtub and we were on the top floor which meant that we had a really good view of the city. Meghan said she thought it was one of the nicest rooms in the hotel besides the honeymoon suite, and all we were really missing was the mirrors on the ceiling and the heart-shaped bed.

Then Meghan told Aric how me and her had been planning to spend the day at the hotel during mid-terms but it hadn't worked out then but she was happy that it was working out now, even if it had kind of ruined our plans to watch Lord of the Rings.

So we filled up the Jacuzzi and it was big enough for all three of us, and we relaxed in it and had sex in it and then relaxed some more and used up all the towels drying off and Meghan also helped dry me off with the hairdryer that they had clipped to the wall, and then we relaxed on the bed for a little bit until Aric decided that it would be fun to have a pillow fight, and he was doing pretty well until the two of us ganged up on him and beat him into submission.

Then we all went to the window and looked out over Kalamazoo and watched the cars driving along below us and a few people who were out on the street and we also saw a long freight train passing by. Since none of us were wearing clothes, Meghan said that that counted as flashing the train, and Aric said that he didn't think that the engineer had seen us at all, but had to admit that he might have.

And then we all got in bed together and me and Meghan ganged up on Aric again, but he didn't mind at all, and it was really nice to have such a big bed that we didn't have to be careful not to fall out of it.

December 12 [Playing in the Snow]

December 12

I decided not to get out of bed right away ‘cause today was gonna be my last day in Kalamazoo until I got back from Florida. And I wasn’t sure exactly what I was gonna do when I got back; I didn’t want to spend Christmas alone in my apartment, and I wasn’t really sure what the human customs were with inviting friends to spend it with you. It might be a family-only holiday, although I thought it was probably a lot like Hearth’s Warming and you could spend it with anypony you wanted to.

Maybe Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had something planned and they’d be mad if I wanted to do something else.

The snow had stopped but it looked like it was still overcast outside, and a little bit windy, too, ‘cause I could see little zephyrs of snow on my balcony every now and then. That wasn’t stopping the birds, though—they’d all come out of their nests to eat. A lot of birds don’t like flying in the snow and huddle up to stay warm, but since it had been snowing for so long they were probably really hungry and they knew that I had food for them.

I was a little stiff from yesterday, ‘cause sometimes not moving around very much is just as bad as moving around too much. Especially ‘cause I’d sat on my belly a lot and so my ribs were kind of sore from that, and now I was on my belly again so I thought I’d stretch just a little bit and I pushed my forehooves up and arched my back and it felt like my breastbone cracked, which hurt at first and then it felt a lot better.

I’d wound up on the outside of the mattress and so I had enough room to roll over without waking anyone up. Aric was in the center and he wasn’t as soft to lie on, so I just laid on my back next to him and then I closed my eyes again and hoped that the birds weren’t looking through the window at me and thinking I was being lazy, even though I was.

When Meghan woke up she must not have wanted to get out of the covers right away, ‘cause she snuggled up closer to Aric and then reached across him so that she could rub my belly and I moved a little bit closer to Aric and that was enough to sort of wake him up and so he put his arm around me and pulled me in a little bit closer to him and I just rested there a little bit while he woke up, then I climbed on top of him and kissed him and Meghan both good morning.

I should have asked Meghan if she wanted the first turn, but I didn’t think about it, and I don’t think she was mad that I hadn’t, and I did share him with her.

We got up and Aric went into the kitchen and ate a piece of leftover pizza, while me and Meghan went into the bathroom and started the shower. And when he came in to join us, he had a little bit of pizza sauce stuck on his lip that Meghan wiped off for him. She thought it was funny that he couldn’t wait until we were done with the shower to eat, and he said that with the two of us we wore him out twice as fast and he needed to get his energy back.

I told him that I hoped he had, ‘cause that would make the shower a lot more fun, and it didn’t right away but after he’d been in the hot water for a while and helped me and Meghan with the soap he was ready again and so we took advantage of it and this time I let Meghan go first just to be fair.

Meghan said that we could have the rest of the leftover pizza for breakfast but I thought it would be better to save it for lunch, so we made oatmeal and toast and I had some hay and Meghan ate one piece that was on my plate when she thought I wasn’t looking. And she said that she’d meant to make pie last night before we’d started watching the last Lord of the Rings movie but she’d forgotten.

We decided that we were going to go to Fort Custer again, and so Aric got dressed and went downstairs to start brushing all the snow off Winston. Meghan went to put on her clothes, too, and then she helped me get the balcony door open and we had to really fight it ‘cause of all the snowdrifts, and so I had a tight squeeze through and then she gave me the bag of birdseed so that I could fill up their feeder before we left.

Aric had brushed off Winston and warmed it up but it wasn’t all that warm yet. He said that it would heat up quicker when it was moving, so we all got in and he had to rock it back and forth a couple of times before it climbed over the mound of snow that was behind it. And then it was strange to see an empty rectangle where it had been parked—snow had drifted under it a bit, but the center part of the parking spot was bare asphalt.

They must have worked all night, ‘cause most of the snow was brushed off the parking lot, and when we got to Stadium Drive, it was pretty clear. The tires on the cars had worn through the snow to the pavement, but there were still ridges in the center of the lanes and in the middle of the road. Aric thought that the snowplow trucks would be by before too long to scrape it off, and he was kind of surprised that they hadn't been yet. But he said that there were lots of roads for them to plow, and they had a schedule to make sure that they got everything.

We went to his house first, because he had some snow clothes there, and when we turned onto Dartmouth Street, it had hardly been plowed at all, and so we had to follow the tracks of the cars that had gone before him, 'cause you couldn't really see where the road was. And since he was worried about getting into his driveway and then back out again, he left Winston parked kind of on the street, and said that we probably shouldn't stay at the house for too long, but that there wasn't a whole lot of traffic that went by his house, so it would be okay to block the road a little bit.

He let Meghan borrow his overalls, which were called Carhart and were very warm. They were also too big for her, but that was okay because she had her other clothes on under them and there were straps on the shoulder that she could shorten to pull up the legs.

He also used his coffee maker to make hot chocolate, and filled up his thermos with it because he thought that we might want that, and Meghan looked around and found some granola bars that we could take with us and eat when we got hungry. We'd forgotten to bring the pizza with us.

After we had our supplies for the day, we got back in Winston and Aric drove a little bit slower than he usually did, and everybody else was driving slowly, too. Some people had been lazy and not brushed their cars all the way off, and so they made moving snowstorms and sometimes big chunks of snow would break off their cars and slide down the road. And I wasn’t even sure how some of them could see—their back windows were completely blocked with snow, so they wouldn’t know if anyone was behind them.

Aric was hoping that we’d get to see a train go by kicking up snow, and so when we got to where the road crossed over the tracks by Galesburg, he looked up and down to see if there were any train tracks through it, and he was kind of disappointed that there were—the train had bashed down the little mounds of snow that the snowplow trucks had pushed aside. And he looked at the signal lights and said that he thought another train might be along soon but we didn’t feel like sitting there and waiting for it.

I was glad to know that they could still get through. I hadn’t seen any train snowplows driving up and down the tracks. Aric said that they existed but that he didn’t think that there was enough snow yet that they’d need them, and he said that all the locomotives had a snowplow on them anyway. And then he told me that there were also big train snowblowers for up in the mountains, and they would chew their way through the snow and then spit it out off to the side, which sounded pretty neat.

I was kind of hoping that I’d get to see one on my next train trip. I was pretty sure that we were going to have to cross mountains to get to Florida, ‘cause we’d gone through them on the way to South Carolina, and Florida was past that.

We never saw the train, so I guess that it was going slower than Aric thought, or else the lights didn’t mean what he thought they did. I’d noticed that sometimes the signals didn’t have any lights at all, which did mean that there wasn’t a train close, but other times the lights were on even when there wasn’t a train coming. Aric said that he thought that the ones near Comstock didn’t come on unless there was a train nearby, but he wasn’t sure how close it had to be before the lights lit.

Aric drove us around to the back and it was nice because there weren’t any other people there yet, so we had the park all to ourselves. And Aric said that he wanted to walk on one of the trails and Meghan told him that was probably a stupid idea, but he thought that the ones through the woods wouldn’t have as much snow on them ‘cause the trees would block it. She said that he was probably wrong but as long as he went first she’d follow.

So we decided that we’d walk along the river trail some and see what it was like.

There was an old road that was the beginning of the trail, and it had some strange tracks down the middle which Aric said were snowmobile tracks, which was a small machine that had a tread on the back like a Snow Cat and had skis on the front. And he said that if we stayed here long enough we’d probably see some more of them, and I hoped that we did.

They’d kind of pressed down the snow so it wasn’t as deep where they'd gone, and we followed their tracks until the trail curved towards the river.

Aric had been wrong about there not being much snow under the trees, and so he kind of had to break a trail in it for us, especially where it had drifted. I could have flown over, but it was more fun to follow them along and it was good exercise, too. And since we weren't actually going on a journey somewhere, we could spend a lot of energy, 'cause when we got tired we could just go back to Winston and drive home.

Then we got to where there were thicker trees and clusters of evergreens and the snow wasn't so deep there, and it looked like there hadn't been any people by, at least not since the most recent snow. There was a sign saying that snowmobiles weren't allowed back here, which meant that they hadn't made a trail for us to travel.

You could tell by where the trees were where the trail went, though, and there were also little signs to follow. Sometimes you kind of had to guess, though, 'cause the signs weren't so close that you could see another one from the previous one, which was sort of dumb.

Aric said that they used to paint dots on trees so that you'd know where the trail was and he thought that some places still did that, but others didn't want the dots anymore, because they were really unnatural, and he said that he had taken a canoe trip up in the north part of the Upper Peninsula where they had used wire brushes to scrape the dots off of trees, 'cause that's what the forest rangers wanted.

Sometimes the trail was close enough to the river to see it, although most places you probably wouldn't have been able to if all the trees had been leafed out. And we found a little clearing where there were a couple of pine trees that were kind of drifted in, and Aric said that his Wilderness Survival manual had said that you could camp inside of them and be warm, so we thought we'd try it—at least, get inside them. So he made a trail to the trees and we followed, and he got a lot of snow on him as he tried to find a way in, since the branches went almost all the way to the ground and they were drooping from all the weight of the snow on them. But he finally figured out how to get in without getting too much more fresh snow on himself, and so the three of us crowded in there.

I guess if you were a human and couldn't fly anywhere better, it would do. Once he closed up the entrance a little bit it was actually pretty well insulated—I could tell by how it blocked out the sound from outside—but it wasn't any warmer. It would stop the wind, though, and maybe that was all that you needed.

And we did get really huddled together, too, 'cause there wasn't a whole lot of room under the tree for the three of us.

The tree must have been mad at us for hiding there, 'cause when he went back out it dumped a bunch of snow on him, and some of it got on me and Meghan, too.

We went back around to the main path and followed it all the way back to the road, and I was starting to hear a buzzing motor noise and we didn't get too far down the road before a trio of snowmobiles went past the other way. They slowed down when they saw us and then sped up once they'd passed us by, so I got to get a good look at them.

They were kind of sleek, and they were open so you could enjoy the outside, and they looked like they'd be a lot of fun to ride. They were big enough that two people could fit on, although each one only had one person riding on it.

When we got back to Winston, Aric got out his thermos and poured us each a cup of hot chocolate to warm up with, and we also had some water because it was really easy to get dry in the wintertime and not even know it, and eating snow wasn't a very good way to get water. Although I had eaten some, 'cause I liked the taste of fresh-fallen snow.

Meghan said that I had so much snow on me it was making her feel cold, but I didn't feel too cold at all. Most of the snow wasn't melting, so it was helping to keep me warm.

I wanted to play around outside some more, so once we'd finished our hot chocolate we drove over to the horse trails, and I was hoping that we might see some horses there but we didn't. There had been some before we got there, though, 'cause there were hoofprints in the snow and some of the path had green stains on it and so we decided that we didn't want to walk there, and Aric said that we'd try the path that went around Eagle Lake next. And I knew where that was, so I wanted to fly over there and stretch out my wings some, and so Aric said that they'd meet me in the parking lot.

If I'd really worked hard I might have been able to beat Winston, 'cause Aric wasn't driving that fast and it was a straighter path for me than it was for him, but I didn't have any desire to race, so I took my time and just enjoyed the snowyness.

There were some eagles standing on the ice, and so I thought I'd see if I could come down and join them before I went over to Aric. I knew that the ice would probably be thin, and they were staying close to the edge of it where they might see some fish, so I didn’t expect that the ice was gonna be able to hold my weight.

So when I landed I kept working my wings and slowly put weight on my hooves until I felt the ice shifting under me and then I didn't land any further. And I guess I annoyed the eagles, 'cause some of them started walking away from me and one took off for the ice on the other side. And I thought about chasing after him but I didn't want to get in a fight with one and there were probably enough fish in the lake for everybird. Eagles didn't like to share, though, and so the bossiest ones would eat until they couldn't eat anymore and then the other ones would get their chance.

I cracked through a little bit when I took off again, 'cause I shoved off with my legs before I could remember not to, but since I was already kinda flying I only got my hooves and a little bit of my fetlocks wet, and then I was in the air again, and I went over to the parking lot where Aric and Meghan were watching me.

We started to go around the other trail and it was pretty snowed-in, too, 'cause a lot of it was more open. It was still neat to see the spots where the wind had scoured all the snow out of it, though. I knew some stuff about how wind behaved close to the ground, but not a whole lot 'cause that wasn't really too important to us. The only time we had to work close to the ground was when there was fog, and if it was really windy there wasn't much chance of fog. All the other weather that we had to work with took place higher up. Even tornadoes and waterspouts, you didn't worry too much about what the mouth of them was doing, 'cause if you could disrupt them up in the cloud, you'd make the whole thing collapse.

There were some pegasuses who specialized in it, though, and figured out stuff like how much wingpower you needed to lift water out of a reservoir and up to a weather factory, and some of them could do things with low-level winds. Plus there were some pegasuses who liked to race right down by the ground and they knew a lot more about surface winds, too.

We found a little cut where the snow had filled it up all the way to the top and it was too deep for even Aric to get through, so he started to climb up and around. And I was gonna fly over it but then I thought it would be fun to burrow into it, so I started digging and pretty soon I'd made a big enough hole for my whole body to fit in and that was fun. I maybe could have burrowed all the way through but I didn't want to get too deep, 'cause my hole could collapse and then I'd suffocate if I didn't get dug out in time.

Meghan came back down and dug the hole a little bit bigger so she could fit into it, but that was a little bit too much and then the snow started breaking off so she got out of there before it could all collapse.

So she went around, following Aric, and I flew over it, and then on the other side there was another spot where there was nothing—the wind must have made an eddy right there and dropped the snow onto the pile that we'd been playing with.

We were all a little bit chilly when we got back to Winston—I'd finally gotten enough snow on me that it was melting against my skin—so we drank the rest of the hot chocolate and Aric started Winston to let it warm up, and at first it was blowing little ice crystals out of the vents, 'cause some of the powdery snow that was blowing around was getting sucked in, and the heater wasn't warm enough to melt it yet.

The exhaust was, though, and I went and stood by that and it melted off a patch of snow and then started my coat steaming and I would have stayed there for longer except it smelled really bad and was making me a little bit dizzy, even though I was trying not to breathe it.

Meghan had to pee, but she said that she didn't want to go into the bathrooms 'cause she'd stick to the seat and she'd just hold it until we got somewhere with proper toilets and heated bathrooms. And Aric said that it couldn't be that bad, so she told him to go into the bathroom and sit down on the seat and see how he felt, and so he did, and he came out a minute later and hugged her and said that he'd stop at the gas station in Augusta for her.

So we all got in Winston and it wasn't very warm yet but they were still wearing their clothes to keep them warm and so they didn't mind too much, and I knew that I was gonna have to get used to it because if I went back on cloud patrol and had to stop 'cause I was cold, I'd never hear the end of it. Everypony would make fun of me.

By the time we got to Augusta, there was warm air coming out of the vents, and all the snow that we hadn't brushed off ourselves was melting. And Aric kept his word and turned into the Shell, so that Meghan could pee and so he could get some more coffee for his thermos.

We were all hungry, 'cause we hadn't had lunch at all, except for a couple of granola bars that Meghan had brought, and so even though it was a little bit early Aric said that we deserved to stop somewhere that was good but would also let us in wearing our outside clothes and decided that we'd go to Blake's.

The best thing that they made was breakfast and it felt strange to be eating breakfast for dinner, but I guess since we hadn't really had lunch it was okay. And for once I didn't mind that the hash browns were greasy, 'cause they really filled me up and I ate all of them.

Meghan said that since we were all still wearing our winter clothes except for me (and I was wearing my winter coat) that we should go to the Nature Center next and maybe we'd see some stars. Aric said that since it had been cloudy all day we probably wouldn't, and I thought that he was right, but maybe the sky would clear, so we drove over there and he had to park on the road because the gate was closed.

So Aric turned on the blinking lights and opened the hood so that if anyone came by they would think that the truck had broken and not give it a ticket for being parked in the wrong place, and we went around the gate and the clouds were starting to break up.

We didn't want to just stand around and wait, so we walked along the pasture trail and we had to go slow, 'cause as the clouds broke up, there wasn't as much light from Kalamazoo reflected back down, and it actually got a little bit darker.

But that didn't matter, 'cause our eyes got used to the dark and then the stars were revealed, and we stood at the top of the hill that I liked to fly off of and looked up at them, and it wasn't as good as seeing them up north where there weren't any lights shining into the sky, but it was still really beautiful to see them all, glittering in the darkness. Even the lights of airplanes flying overhead were crystal-clear.

We'd spent a bit longer than we'd meant to and when we got back to Winston, Aric was a little bit worried about it starting and he thought he'd only have one shot at it before the battery was too weak, and right before it started the engine was turning so slowly I didn't think it was going to. And he didn't want to start moving right away because he was afraid that he might stall it and then we'd be stuck, so we had to wait a little bit longer.

When we got back to my apartment, it felt too hot when we went inside, and Meghan got out of her snowclothes right away because she thought she'd warm up faster without them on. And she took one of the blankets over to a hot air vent in the floor and made herself a little tent over it, and then Aric joined her, while I got together all my flight gear, which was pretty much all I thought I'd need for my vacation.

And once I had that in my saddlebags, I went over and crawled under their little makeshift tent, too, and it was really warm in there, and Aric said that maybe we should move our bed over by the heating vent and we could put the tail of the blanket over it.

Meghan thought that would be too warm after a while, plus it would make the rest of the room cold, so after we'd all warmed up we got out from our little blanket tent and then sat on the mattress and we each had a beer and Meghan said that we could watch another short Christmas movie but we didn't; we just snuggled together, and then they both started getting undressed a little bit at a time and then we warmed up that way.

December 13 [Magnificent Mile]

December 13

I didn't want to leave, even though I was eager to see Florida and visit with my pony friends. And I was glad that I didn't have to get to the train station first thing in the morning: the train wouldn't come until after ten, and Aric said that he'd take me to the station.

But I was as little bit worried about staying in bed too late and then having to rush, even though I shouldn't have been. I just thought that today might be the day that we stayed in bed too late and then I'd miss my train.

I watched the morning birds for a little bit, and I had to remind myself to stop swishing my tail 'cause I was going to wake up Meghan and I didn't want to yet. It was barely light out, so there was still lots of time.

As soon as the sun had come up, though, I woke up Meghan and then Aric, so that we'd have plenty of time to have sex. And Aric said that he wasn't ready yet but that wasn't what his body was saying, but since he was being mean I turned around and started kissing Meghan and she didn't mind the attention.

She thought that I should get my toy, so I got out of bed and I had to do a little bit of looking to find it, 'cause it was in a box since I didn't have a dresser to put it in. And Aric pretended not to be looking at it but he was and he said that he couldn't compete with it.

I had to reassure him that it was a fun toy but it couldn't do anything on its own and that made him feel a little bit better. He didn't want to touch it, though, even when I said that he could. Meghan said that was because boys loved lesbians but the thought of doing anything that might seem even vaguely gay terrified them.

I told him that that was dumb and he might be missing out on a lot of fun, and then I stopped 'cause it isn't nice to tease someone because they don't want to do something, even if it seems silly to you. Like me not wanting to go in caves or Gusty not liking high places.

Me and Meghan used it and it was a lot of fun even if Aric wouldn't touch it. I think he worked a little bit harder to make us both happy, too, maybe 'cause he still kind of thought that we might replace him with a toy, even though we'd said that we wouldn't.

When we were done Meghan asked if I wanted to take it with me, and I said that I probably shouldn't, so I put it away and then we went into the shower to get cleaned up.

I wanted to know if they were going to watch my apartment when I was gone, and make sure that the birdfeeder stayed full, and Aric said that they would. He asked if I minded if they spent the night when I was gone, and I didn't mind at all, but I said that maybe I should ask Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn if it was okay with them. Because maybe they'd planned for somebody else to do it.

While we were still in the shower Meghan said that she wanted to go get the toy and she could hold it up next to Aric and we could decide who was bigger, but she didn't do it. And then he said that he should buy a fleshlight and then he could compare it to one of us, and after I learned what that was, I told him that Cayenne had had an artificial mount modeled after herself and he didn't believe me, so after we were done with the shower, he got out his portable telephone and started looking.

He said that now he was going to get pop-up ads for sex toys on his portable telephone and so he probably shouldn't look, but he did and he found it and they even had pictures of Cayenne lying on her back and exposing herself, and a short biography too. I read through that and it wasn't all true, but it was mostly true.

So Aric said that he should get one, and I thought that would be fun for him to have. And he said that I wasn't supposed to be agreeing with him; I was supposed to tell him how upset I'd be which was a very strange thing to say. I'd only be mad if he got one and wanted to spend all his time with it instead of with me or Meghan.

I sat down on the mattress so that Meghan could groom me and Aric sat down too and let me rest my head on his thigh while she was preening my wings and he was trying to distract me and it worked, and then Meghan said that I had just gotten out of the shower and I promised that I'd keep my coat clean, and I said that I could make breakfast so she could play with Aric after she was done with my wings. He asked if he got any say in the matter and me and Meghan both said no at the same time.

So I kept my promises, and when Meghan had finished grooming me, I went off to the kitchen to make breakfast. We should have bought more waffle mix when we were out, but we hadn't, so all I had was oatmeal and shredded wheat, and a couple of pieces of bread for toast. So I boiled some water and started a pot of coffee for all of us to share, and it didn't take too long for me to get it all ready, plus it mostly cooked itself without my help, so I got to watch Aric and Meghan.

I had to add a little bit more water to the pot, 'cause I didn't want to interrupt them. That still left us plenty of time to eat, though, and then we had a little bit of time to relax and for them to get dressed before it was time to go to the train station.

There was a bit of fresh snow on Winston but it wasn't very thick and Aric just brushed it off with his arm, and he asked me if I was sure that I had everything, so I looked through my saddlebags one more time and then said that I did. And then we went off to the train station and Sienna was already there so I got worried that I was late, especially 'cause the radio in Aric's truck didn't show the time but it did show the radio station which was 102.5, and I misread it as 10:25 which was when the train was supposed to arrive. And I almost jumped out of Winston before it stopped but Meghan looked at her portable telephone and said that we had plenty of time, and Aric said that the train was probably going to be late anyways.

So he parked Winston and the three of us walked in, and Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were in the waiting room with their luggage around them, so Meghan and I sat down next to them and Aric kind of paced around the room and Mister Salvatore watched him while pretending not to, and so I was kind of hesitant to ask him if Aric and Meghan could stay at my apartment while I was on vacation, but I did, and he said that they could, that it was mine to use however I wanted.

Aric had been right, and the train was twenty minutes late. The station attendant announced when it was five minutes away, so we had time to get to the platform and Meghan and Aric went out with me and we had time for a hug before it arrived. And then we got onboard and I stopped in the doorway long enough to wave but I didn't want to wait too long 'cause the train was late and the conductor looked kind of impatient. Maybe it had had problems getting through the snow.

Mister Barrow and Miss Parker were on the train, too, and they'd taken a booth that had a table in the middle, and invited Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn to sit with them if Aquamarine and I wanted to ride together, and we did, so she got out of the booth and we went a little ways down the train car and found ourselves a pair of seats that were open. And we sat on the south side of the train even though that was kind of the more boring side, 'cause you didn't get to see Kalamazoo College. But we did get to go alongside the cars on Stadium Road, which was fun, 'cause we were faster than they were. And I pointed out the window when we went by about where my apartment was, although you couldn't see it from the tracks at all.

I was kinda distracted at first just because I kept looking at the familiar landmarks that the train went by on its way out of Kalamazoo, but after we'd crossed under the 94 Highway near Mattawan, I turned my attention back to Aquamarine and we had a lot of catching up to do. She told me about how she'd gone to Thanksgiving with Jenny and her family and they lived on a farm which was really nice, and Jenny was learning to be a blacksmith in her free time even though there wasn't much demand for human blacksmiths.

Aquamarine said that Jenny had a lot of friends who didn't go to college and they were mostly a lot of fun, too. She'd gotten to ride in a monster truck and she'd also gotten to play with Jenny's chickens and her cats. She had a lot of cats, Aquamarine said, to keep all the mice away, and during the summer she worked at a place that kept cats that had their blood taken in case other cats needed it. I thought she was making that up but she said that it was true; sometimes cats got hurt and you had to give them a blood transfusion, and it was just the same as it was for ponies.

And she'd also spent a lot of time with Cedric and she said that was a lot of fun too because he was so smart and thoughtful and they liked to sit on the couch together and read poetry which was really nice, and they also liked to exercise together, and Michigan State had a really nice exercise room that they could both use. She said that most of the machines weren't designed for a pony, but there was a treadmill that she could trot on, and there were also some benches with weights that she could use. She said that if she'd brought her harness from Equestria, she could have hooked it up to some of the machines to practice pulling, and she told me that they also had a really nice swimming pool that was inside like hotels had.

She had gotten an apartment that was a few miles away from her old one, so that she'd be closer to the greenhouses, and she said that when she moved out at the end of the year she was going to give all her plants to Doctor Krelborn because she knew that he'd take care of them. And I almost told her about his bonsai tree but then I remembered that he'd told me not to, 'cause she might make it grow too big.

I told her about everything I'd done and then when I'd finished she said that we were gonna have to tell it all over again when we met up with Cayenne, and that thought made us both laugh. I said that if I could work my portable telephone better, I could show her some of the movies that Meghan had put on YouTube, and we thought that Cayenne would be able to do that.

The highways have signs that let you know when you've gone into another state, but the train tracks don't, so you have to guess, and I'd never followed these tracks all the way to Indiana, so it wasn't until we stopped in Michigan City that we knew we were in Indiana.

And that was where the train started to go slow, 'cause there were so many other trains it had to get around, and since we were both kind of familiar with the route we just talked some more. We were both looking forward to going back home, but we were both gonna miss all our friends, and we were glad that we would have time back in Michigan before we had to go home.

Aquamarine said that she was going to spend Christmas at her apartment and Cedric was going to be with her, and I said that I didn't know for sure yet what I was going to do, so she said if I was lonely I could come to her apartment, which was really nice of her. I was a little worried that maybe both Meghan and Aric would want to have me at their house, and I couldn't be two places at once.

The train was almost an hour late when we finally got to Chicago, and a bunch of people were standing up and crowding in the aisles while it backed into its space. That was kind of silly of them, 'cause being impatient wouldn't make it go any faster, so they'd be better off sitting in their seats and being comfortable instead of trying to stay balanced as the train jerked to a halt.

We stayed where we were until everyone else had gotten off the train, and then we followed our helpers out and when we got upstairs, Miss Blaise and Mister Garvin were waiting for us along with Cayenne.

Even with our train arriving late, we had a lot of time before our next one so we were going to go shopping on the Magnificent Mile after we had a good lunch, 'cause Cayenne knew all the best stores. She told us that she'd gotten kicked out of a jewelry store after asking where their good diamonds were, 'cause all the ones that they had were small and overpriced and they'd been insulted by that.

Aquamarine asked if she'd slept through the class where we learned that big gems were really rare for humans 'cause they didn't have magic to make them and earth ponies to farm them and she said that she knew that but she'd expected something a little bit bigger especially for what they were charging. She said that they wanted almost two thousand dollars for a tiny little diamond on a silver chain. So then we both got curious about that 'cause neither of us had visited a jewelers on Earth, and we thought that maybe we could go into one that she hadn't been kicked out of.

Before we could go anywhere, though, we went to Burrito Beach for lunch. It wasn't very beach-y, but I didn't mind 'cause they had lots of kinds of burritos and quesadillas and we got plenty so we could all share and try some of almost everything. Me and Aquamarine got the black bean and goat cheese burrito mostly to ourselves, 'cause Cayenne took one bite of it and decided that it had too much cheese in it. I think she missed out, 'cause it was really good.

All of the Magnificent Mile was decorated for Christmas, and the stores had really big windows so that you could look inside, and it was fun to just look in even if it was a shop that we weren't too interested in—there were lots of stores that just sold clothes that were for humans, and we didn't go into any of them. And there was a store that sold Legos that had a big Lego display in their front window complete with a train going around.

We went into a store called I Love Chicago first, and it had lots of little gifts. I got some clicky pens that said Chicago on them and some postcards that had pictures of the Chicago skyscratchers and the lakefront and those were nice 'cause I could put some in a scrapbook maybe or send them to friends. And I was looking at shirts even though I didn't know anypony who would really want one when Aquamarine said that she'd found a snowglobe that had some of the skyscratchers in it so I went over and looked at that and I liked that a lot.

There were Christmas ornaments, too, and Aquamarine got one 'cause she could put it on a Hearth's Warming Tree next year.

After we'd bought that, we went to Giorgio Armani which mostly had clothes that didn't fit ponies, and Cayenne said that they also had really nice purses and handbags and me and Aquamarine couldn't really see what use one would be, 'cause saddlebags were more convenient and you could put more in them. Neither of us knew anypony who'd want one, either. But Cayenne did, and she found some that she really liked called Le Sac, but it was really expensive and they didn't want to barter at all. They said it was exclusive which was why it was so expensive and she was kind of frustrated by that and said that she was going to go somewhere else to get one there because they were a lot cheaper other places and she'd only wanted that one because the color matched her mane.

She stayed kind of grumpy until we went to Bloomingdale's and that was sort of overwhelming 'cause it was so big and they had almost everything that you could imagine. She got a handbag that complemented her coat nicely and was much cheaper than the one at Giorgio Armani, and she got some leg-warmers because her mother liked wearing them in the winter, and also a box of utensils for her father, so that he could brag about them every time he hosted a fancy dinner. And we all admired all the shiny cooking utensils but most of them wouldn't be very useful in Equestria 'cause they took electricity to run. They had a waffle-maker that was a lot nicer than the one I owned, and they even had a machine that made fresh bread for you and all you had to do was put dough in it. I found a really nice set of hair-clips that my sister would like for her mane.

Me and Aquamarine found some nice blankets that we really liked, 'cause they were made of polar fleece which was soft and warm and fluffy, so we bought a couple of those to give as gifts and we each also bought one for ourselves.

And then time was getting kind of short, so we left with our things and I'd been a little bit worried about buying a bunch of stuff because then we'd have to take it all with us, but Mister Garvin and Miss Blaise weren't going to Florida with us so they were going to keep it safe while we were gone.

We had enough time on our way back to the train station to stop in Trabert & Hoeffer, and Cayenne had been right; they wanted too much money for the little gems that they had. So we left there without buying anything. And then we went to a restaurant for dinner, 'cause we were going to get on the train too late to have dinner there.

It was called Coalfire and they cooked their pizzas over coal which I thought wouldn't be very good but Cayenne said that it was and the oven kept the fire below so the coal smell didn't get on the pizzas. She just had a salad anyway 'cause she thought she'd eaten too much for lunch and she didn't want the cheese that came on the pizza, so we got a couple to share with our helpers and it was really good and you couldn't really smell the coal at all.

When we got back to the station, we had to wait a little bit before we could get into the train, which gave us time to give the new things we'd bought to Mister Garvin and Miss Blaise, and then they got a little cart to carry all of Cayenne's bags to the train.

We had a room on the bottom with windows on both sides like we'd had when we went out west, which was nice because we could look out either side although the view wasn't quite as good as from the top of the train. Our helpers had a room upstairs that was called a suite 'cause it was two bedrooms that were attached to each other.

Since we'd gotten on early we had plenty of time to go to the Viewliner car and claim seats, but we didn't have anything to look at except the train shed and the people getting on the train, which got a little bit boring after a while so we just talked until we felt the train jolt and then it started to move out of the station and once it got out from the yard we could get a view of Chicago.

I was kind of used to leaving Chicago going east or west, but not going south, and so it was a different view as the train made its way out of the city, and for a while it turned almost due west and we got a kind of distant view of Chicago and the skyscratchers along the lakeshore, and then the train turned south again and we couldn't see them anymore.

There were lots of houses that we saw that were decorated for Christmas, and I bet that none of them had had a pegasus to help them. There was even one that had lights facing the tracks and a lighted sign that said 'Illinois Central.'

There wasn't as much snow out here as there was in Kalamazoo, and Aquamarine said that there hadn't been as much in East Lansing either, and I thought that she'd just gotten the tail end of the storm.

The sky was clear and the moon was full, so that was very pretty and I think we could have seen more stars but even though the lights in the Viewliner were turned down they were still pretty bright, and after a while we decided that we'd have a better view from our room, even though it was on the bottom and the windows didn't curve overhead.

So we went back to our car and then I wanted to go to the very back train car and look out that window for a little bit before we went downstairs, 'cause it was a fun view, so we walked all the way back there and took turns on our hind hooves watching out the back. The train was pulling some of the snow along with it, so we couldn't actually see all that far, but it was neat to see the back lights of the train shining in the snow, and when we went past roads you could watch as the cars that were waiting disappeared into the snowdust the train trailed along.

Then after we'd all had a turn looking, we went down to our room and got the conductor to come and fold down the bottom beds—we didn't need the top ones—and we all got on the mattress by the window and watched the world fly by.

Since we were lower to the ground, it looked a lot faster as we went by it, and we all jumped back in alarm as we went by a freight train that was on the other track, 'cause it was so close to us.

Cayenne got into her bags and brought out a bottle of Malibu that we could share—she said that she'd chosen it 'cause it was beachy—and we had a couple of drinks and talked a little bit more and me and Aquamarine were both kind of tired, so we cuddled up on the crosswise bed and Cayenne got out her folding computer so she could look at it for a little bit before she went to bed.

December 14 [New Orleans]

December 14

Me and Aquamarine both woke up before the sun came up, and Cayenne was curled up with us so we didn't want to get out of bed right away and leave her alone. Then we realized that we were being kind of foalish, 'cause we might be stuck in bed until noon if we didn't want to leave her by herself, at least for a little bit. And maybe if there wasn't anypony sleeping with her she'd get up a little bit sooner.

We didn't get out of bed right away, though; we looked through the windows and tried to guess where we were but you couldn't really see enough to be sure.

Aquamarine thought that we were probably in Tennessee, and she said that meant that we'd probably slept through Kentucky and we couldn't decide if it counted as being someplace if you were asleep when you went there.

It wasn't snowy on the ground, so I guess we'd gotten past where the snow was. The sky was gloomy and overcast and it looked like it might rain, but I couldn't tell for sure because the air inside the train car was changed from when it was outside and that made it hard for me to guess.

We were still sitting in bed and thinking about getting up when the conductor announced that we were going to stop in Memphis soon and that there would be twenty minutes on the platform and since neither of us were too prideful we thought we'd just go out on the platform and stretch out our legs before we took our shower.

So we got up and went to the bathroom which was on the other end of the car, and then we waited near the door as the train slowed down and went through Memphis. Aquamarine said that she thought that Elvis was from Memphis, and he had been a famous singer.

We crossed over a bridge and then all of a sudden we were in the middle of kind of run-down factories, and we saw one that had big stacks of wood and another place that had big piles of rusty metal, and then we got past them and were right alongside the river for a little bit, and over on the other side we could see lots of houses all crowded together.

We went under a bunch of car bridges over the tracks, and then all of a sudden it opened up on the west side of the train and we could see a big wide river that was the Mississippi. But before we could get too much of a look at it, the train turned inland, and that was disappointing.

It stopped not too long after that, and we waited until everyone who was detraining had gotten off and then we got out on the platform and trotted around a little bit, making sure to stay out of people's way. And I flew up some, just to stretch out my wings. I couldn't go too high because there was a canopy which went over the platform so people wouldn't get wet if it rained.

And I could feel the sky and it didn't feel like there was going to be any rain at all.

I got to the end of the platform, and since I was clear of the shed, I flew up high enough that I could see the Mississippi River, and then went back down to the platform so Aquamarine wouldn't be lonely. And then the two of us trotted around a little bit more then got back on the train a little bit earlier than we had to, 'cause we didn't want it to leave without us.

Right after we left the station, there was a railroad crossing and there was a train waiting for us, and it was kind of scary to be looking right out the window at its headlight, 'cause it wasn't that far away. And then we went past a lot of houses and a really big railroad yard and we kept looking but we didn't see the Mississippi again, which was too bad. I liked when the train went alongside it, but I didn't think it was going to again.

So me and Aquamarine got our shampoos and conditioners and went down to the other end of the train car where the bathroom was and I guess it was still too early for most people except the ones who had to get on or off the train, 'cause there wasn't anybody else up so we got to go right in.

I don't know how much hot water train cars have and we didn't want to use it all up, plus it was a bit tricky sometimes to not get knocked over with the train bumping around—they had railings that people could hold but those didn't work very well for us—so we didn't spend a whole lot of time in the shower, and after we'd rinsed off and shaken ourselves dry, we went back to our room to finish drying off and to groom each other.

Cayenne was still asleep, and so after we'd dried each other off we took the other bed and groomed. I had to preen my own wings, 'cause Aquamarine didn't know how, and she felt bad about it.

Me and her were both starting to get a little bit hungry, but we didn't want to leave Cayenne behind and we didn't think that they would deliver food right to our room like they did in hotels. We probably could have gotten one of our helpers to bring food to us but that was extra work for them and it wasn't their fault that Cayenne was being lazy. So we decided that she'd slept long enough and Aquamarine pushed the button to get the attendant, 'cause he'd bring us coffee, and we could tempt her with that.

So he brought three cups and we set them on the little table then woke Cayenne up and she was pretty grouchy until she'd had her coffee. Then she went galloping off to the bathroom, and when she came back she only stuck her head in the room so that she could get her shower things.

Me and Aquamarine thought that we should probably keep her company, even though we didn't need another shower, so we went down the hall and knocked on the door until she opened it up and let us in. It wasn't quite as social, 'cause there was the door between us, but we could talk and got to hear her swear a couple of times as the train's movement caught her off-guard.

When she was done the three of us went back to our room and we both helped her groom although she didn't need a whole lot of help 'cause she was a unicorn and they don't have any trouble brushing anywhere which is kind of unfair.

Once she was ready, we went upstairs and walked forward to the dining car and we got a table right away since it was still pretty early for humans. Also me and Aquamarine had kind of forgotten that we were in a different timezone, so it was an hour earlier than we thought it was.

They had a smaller menu than the other trains did, so we got an omelet and a breakfast blintz and a continental breakfast and shared it between us, and we ordered our omelet without cheese, too, so that Cayenne would like it better.

Outside was lots of flat fields and Aquamarine said that it looked like we were on floodplain, which was really fertile but also was sometimes underwater in the spring. That was what kept the soil good, though, so you just made sure to build things on top of little hills so that they wouldn't get wet.

It was mostly pretty open land, and we didn't see a whole lot of houses except when we passed through little towns. I tried to get a look and see if any of them had signs that I could read, but we went by so quick that I usually didn't get a chance to see.

We were just finishing up our breakfast when the conductor announced that we were going to stop in Greenwood Mississippi, and it was slowing down for the station when our helpers came in.

Cayenne wanted to know if we were close to New Orleans yet and Mister Barrow said that we had a ways to go. He said that the train wouldn't get there for another six or seven hours and we should enjoy the scenery. And he said that the further south we got, the greener it would get, which made Aquamarine happy. I guess when you're an earth pony, winter is kind of depressing, even though there's lots of fun things to do like snowboarding that you can't do in the summer.

We decided that we were gonna go to the Viewliner so that we could look at the scenery, and so we told our helpers and the three of us found some seats and it was pretty flat and mostly fields after Greenwood, and it got a little bit boring after a while.

There was a road that went right alongside the tracks for a while and it was fun to look at the cars. I saw a bunch of pickup trucks that looked a lot like Winston. Some of the trucks were very colorful because their doors and hoods weren't the same color as the rest of the truck, and I saw one that had a wooden deck for a back.

We went past a rail switching yard and an electricity switching yard on our way into Yazoo City, and when the train stopped at the station it was the worst one that I'd ever seen. I hope that there was a real one nearby that they were just fixing, because all that there was for a train station was a platform and a square pavilion.

After we left Yazoo City, we were between two roads for a while and that was fun 'cause we could look out either side at the cars and trucks that we were passing, and after a while, our helpers came to the car, and Mister Barrow and Miss Parker sat with us, while Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn went back to their rooms.

There wasn't a whole lot that was interesting to see until we got to Jackson City, and then after that it got flat and kind of boring again. It was greener, though, which was nice. And we weren't supposed to get off the train there 'cause the train didn't stop for too long, but we did go downstairs so that when the conductor opened the door we could breathe some outside air at least.

We went back to the dining car and ate lunch after the train passed through Hazelhurst, which was a kind of run-down looking town. One building near the tracks had been painted bright blue to make it look better, but it was kinda out of place.

The lunch menu was disappointing; they only had a vegetarian sandwich and nothing with fish, so all of us had the same thing. Cayenne liked the potato chips so we gave her ours, although that turned out to be too many for her to eat. And we each had a beer, too—Cayenne got a Heineken 'cause she liked that, and me and Aquamarine both had a Sam Adams Lager. And we wanted to get dessert, but they didn't have any on the train 'cause it was going to stop before dinnertime.

So after we were done eating we went back to our room and relaxed a little bit. Cayenne opened up her folding computer and I got her to show some pictures of me flying and riding a snowboard, and they both liked that. And Cayenne showed us the artificial mount that was modeled after her and she was kind of disappointed that I'd already seen it until I told her that Aric had said that he might get one and she thought that was pretty exciting. She wasn't sure how many of them had been sold yet because they wouldn't tell her but she'd heard that they were popular which made her really proud.

She had one of her own but she hadn't brought it. She said if we didn't get a chance to look at it when we were back in Chicago, we could when we were on our way back to Equestria, 'cause she was going to take it home with her.

Louisiana looked almost like Mississippi at first, but then when we got further south it was a lot wetter and swampier. Some of the houses that we saw were supported on stilts, because they were in bayous which were a lot like swamps. And that was land that I liked, 'cause I was sure that there were lots of tasty fish in all the water, and there were also lots of grasses growing that looked really good to eat, and so we decided to go back to the Viewliner so we could see it better, and Mister Barrow was still there so we took the seats next to him.

We went by some docks and there was a boat gas station that was high up on stilts although the docks were much lower, so I guess that they had big tides on the lake. And then we went out on a causeway, and right next to us was a road that sat pretty high up, and there were rows of pilings where there had been a bridge before next to it, and also some that were next to us which were in a lot better condition.

Then we went alongside a big lake which I thought might be the ocean but Mister Barrow said was Lake Pontchartrain, and there was a elevated road that ran alongside the shore, and also electricity towers that ran over it, 'cause it was pretty shallow most places and so people had thought that that was the best place to build them.

We followed the shoreline for a while, and then when we started getting inland, he told us that we should get back to our room and pack up, because we were almost in New Orleans. And then while we were walking back to our room, I remembered that Christine lived in New Orleans and if I'd been smarter I would have told her that we were coming there, 'cause maybe she'd want to see me for a little bit.

I didn't have too much to pack, so I sent her a telephone telegram, and before we got off the train she'd sent one back and said that she couldn't meet us at the station but she could meet us later for dinner and if we had time we could take a little tour of town with her, so I found out where we were going to eat and sent her a telegram back.

New Orleans was as far as we could go on the train, because Mister Barrow said that the train route from New Orleans to Orlando had been knocked down by a hurricane and it hadn't been properly fixed yet, so we were going to have to take a special bus the rest of the way. But the good part about it was that that gave us time to look around instead of having to stay at the train station waiting for the next train.

The bus was what was called an executive coach, which meant that it was smaller than a proper bus and bigger than a van like Econoline. But it had nicer seats in it and there was also a big flat television on the front that you could watch movies on if you wanted to. I thought that maybe this was the kind of bus that the tornado team had gotten to ride on when they came to Texas.

It was a little big for just the three of us and our helpers—about twenty people could have fit on it—but that did give us room to sleep, 'cause it had couches on one side and more normal seats on the other. And it even had a faucet in the back that was filled with coffee.

Mister Salvatore said that we should go to the French Quarter because that was the most popular place in New Orleans but me and Aquamarine both wanted to look at the lake first—I wanted to fly over it some and she was really curious about the plants on the shore that weren't like anything in Michigan or Equestria, and Cayenne didn't mind coming along as long as she didn't have to get her hooves muddy.

So we drove through the city until we got to the very end of the road, and the bus had to stop on a driveway that went off of it. It went up to an embankment which Mister Salvatore said was a levee and that kept the water out when there were storms.

And the one side was all swampy and wet and the lake was on the other side so I put on my flight gear and my watch told me what the frequency for the New Orleans airplane directors were, so I called them and said that I was gonna be flying, then I had to ask Mister Salvatore where we were exactly so that they would know. He wasn't sure, but his portable telephone knew, and I told them what he told me.

They said I could fly if I stayed low and over the lake and the tip of land that we were on and didn't fly over the city so I told them that I would and I took off. And they also warned me that there was a little airport just west of me so I had to be careful of little airplanes, 'cause some of them might not have radios.

Aquamarine was going down the embankment when I took off, and I just heard Mister Barrow telling her that she had to be careful of alligators and snakes.

There was a railroad track that went on the wrong side of the levee, and I think it was the track that our train was supposed to have taken. It looked like it had been fixed to me but maybe it was broken further along. It went right over the mouth of the lake, next to a road bridge, and it had a big section that was lifted up so that boats could get through.

I saw a boat going along the shore that had a man and a woman in it and I waved at them as I flew over and they waved back.

I wasn't really sure where fish liked to live in the lake; it might not be the same as it was in Equestria. But the local birds knew, so I flew over to where there was a big flock of pelicans so I could get an idea what they were eating. They mostly liked smaller fish that they could scoop up in their beaks but they'd eat bigger ones if they could find them.

I didn't want to get too close 'cause they might get mad at me, and there were a lot of them, so once they started acting a bit agitated I went a little bit further away and then I landed in the water and looked around to see what was there.

There were a bunch of little minnow-sized fish swimming around and those were pretty dumb. It took me a couple of tries to get one, and when I did he hadn't really been worth the effort, so I took off and flew all the way to shore and scraped in the mud there, hoping I could maybe find some sand crabs but the ground was too thick for them.

I did see a water snake that was as big around as a rope, so I stayed away from him.

Then once I was done exploring I flew back up and over the railroad tracks and levee until I found everyone again, and I circled over Aquamarine who was a few hundred feet in the marsh, examining all the plants.

I didn't really want to land in a swamp, so I just circled overhead, enjoying the freedom and also keeping an eye out for predators. And it was a good thing that I did, 'cause there was one who was in the marsh not too far from her and I shouted out a warning which gave her enough time to gallop to safety before the alligator started thinking that she'd make a good dinner. And I saw Cayenne come trotting up to the edge of the levee with her horn lit, and I bet if she could see him she could have made him go away.

Mister Barrow thought that was a little bit too close for his liking and said that maybe we should get back in the coach and visit somewhere safer but Aquamarine convinced him to let her spend another ten minutes here and then we'd go somewhere else.

He told her to stay where he could see her and he came down the levee until he was almost in the water, and he took out his gun and held it against his side, just pointing down at the ground, but it was there if he needed it.

It was probably closer to twenty minutes before she was done looking around, but she came back up and I looked for alligators before she waded across a stream that was just past the base of the levee. And so me and her and Mister Barrow all wound up tracking some mud into the bus, and she had to go through her bag to get a towel to sit on so that she wouldn't ruin the seat before the mud dried out and we could brush it off.

So then we took the bus to the French Quarter, and we stopped at Jefferson Park first which is almost on the Mississippi River. And there were a bunch of horse-drawn carriages there and we all wanted to ride in that. Mister Salvatore said that there were trolleys, too, but we all wanted to be behind the horses and so he grumbled a little bit and gave Mister Barrow twenty dollars for some reason and then we all got on board.

All the houses were really pretty, and there were apartment buildings that had balconies on the upper floors that wrapped all the way around, and they had lacy iron railings instead of the fat wooden ones that my apartments had had. And a lot of them had posts that went all the way down to the ground to hold the balconies up, 'cause they were so big. And during Mardi Gras that was where women would crowd and show off their breasts to get necklaces of beads.

They had lots of signs that were painted on tile, and a lot of them were pretty worn out but they were historical so they were keeping them. And most of the buildings were really fancy and there were people everywhere and I was glad that we were up here in our carriage where we could see over them and were by ourselves.

People stood on the street corners and played musical instruments for anyone who wanted to listen, and if you liked them you could give them some money, and there was just a whole lot to see and the driver kept telling us the history of everything. I think I could have stayed here for a week and still not known it all.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant called The New Orleans Creole Cookery, and we met Christine there. She said that everything was really good, and I saw that they had alligator on the menu and Mister Barrow said that he was going to have that to get back at the alligator who had wanted to eat Aquamarine. She didn't think that was funny.

There was so much to choose from, and I didn't know what half of it was, but almost all of it sounded really good. I was kinda wishing that I'd decided to go to a place on the ocean instead of Kalamazoo, just for the food.

I got shrimp and catfish and Aquamarine got a salad and hushpuppies and Cayenne had the corn maque choux and jambalaya and we shared a little bit so we could try more things. Aquamarine had a shrimp and said that it was kind of weird and chewy, but she liked it. Neither of them wanted to try my catfish but I did trade a little piece of it for half of one of Miss Parker's oysters, and Christine let me have a bit of her calamari.

And even though we were pretty full, Christine insisted that we had to have dessert, too, and so we all got something different so that we could share, so I got to try Key Lime pie and bread pudding and bourbon pecan pie and banana foster cheesecake, and they were all really good.

Christine took us around town, too, and this time we did ride on a streetcar which was fun. It made a big loop around town and we got to see some places and buildings that we hadn't gotten to see before, and Christine knew all about them. She even pointed out the building where she'd lived one summer with a bunch of other people—she said it was really expensive but it had been worth it.

Then she said that before we left we had to stop at Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, just because we had Cayenne with us. She really wanted to see the reaction of the shopkeepers.

The streetcar didn't go there, so we had to walk but it wasn't that far, and Christine told Cayenne to do some mystical unicorn stuff when she got in there. And Cayenne rolled her eyes, but when we got in there we looked around for a little bit and they had all sorts of weird things and none of it looked all that special except for their voodoo dolls. Those were kind of creepy, and I didn't like them very much at all. They were made out of moss and Aquamarine looked at them really closely to see if she could figure out what kind of moss it was.

Cayenne asked if they had any that were shaped like a pony instead of a human and if they would work back in Equestria, and the woman at the counter got a little nervous and then said that they were just a novelty and didn't really work at all and there weren't any shaped like ponies for sale, and she kept looking at all of us like she was trying to figure out what was going on. But then she relaxed a little when Cayenne found a bottle of Love Potion Number 9, and she said that that was very good and she would like it.

They had palm readings, too, but we couldn't do that. Christine could, though, so she got her palm read and we all watched and that was really interesting. The woman who did it seemed very wise, and she didn't get too distracted with all of us there asking questions. I thought she could have been a little more specific about what Christine's palm was telling her, though.

Then we said our goodbyes to Christine and we went down and sat on the riverbank for a little while, watching the barges and tugboats and even a paddlewheeler go by on the river, and that was a nice way to relax. It was really pretty at night, too, 'cause of all the lights on the boats and also all the buildings had Christmas decorations, which seemed a little bit out of place since it was so warm. But they were still pretty.

Then we went and got back on our bus, and since the moon was out, Mister Barrow said that we should go across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway because it was like being on a boat. He said that it was longer than the Lucin Cutoff in the Great Salt Lake, which was for trains and not cars.

And it was a really pretty view from it, and it seemed like we were over the water forever. If it hadn't been for being able to see lights on the other side, I might have thought that it really did go on forever. It was amazing to think how someone had been able to build all this, and Mister Barrow said that it hadn't taken that long, because they had built a factory on the shore and all the pieces were the same, and there were even some extra spare pieces in case the bridge got broken.

When we finally got to the other side and turned on the highway, us ponies settled down on the couch. Miss Parker gave us a blanket, and she said that if we needed to use the bathroom or anything the bus driver would stop, 'cause there wasn't a bathroom on the bus, and he could also stop if we wanted to stretch our legs. So we thanked her and we curled up on the couch and Cayenne lifted the blanket over us and it didn't take me too long to fall asleep.

December 15 [Playalinda Beach]

December 15

I woke up in the middle of the night when the bus stopped outside Mobile, which is in Alabama. And that was a new state so I woke both Aquamarine and Cayenne up so that we could see it because we'd decided that it only counted if you were awake in it. Cayenne was a little bit grouchy about being woken up and didn't see what was so special about being at a Valero, even if it was in Alabama. Me and Aquamarine liked it, though, and we got up and walked around the tarmac a little bit until our driver got back, and then we got back in the bus and fell asleep again.

I woke up a couple more times during the night, and I'd put my head up to see out the window, or to look around the bus. Our helpers were all asleep with their chairs tilted back some and Miss Parker was stretched out on the other couch with a blanket over her.

One time when I woke up, we were in a big city and I didn't want to move around and wake up anypony else so I couldn't really see much of it except for lots of lights and we went under a bunch of bridges and sometimes there were tall buildings close enough to the highway that I could see them and other times I couldn't see much of anything.

I finally woke up and stayed up when it was light out, and I pushed the covers off of me and got out of the couch and on the floor where I could stretch out and Mister Salvatore was already awake and he went to the coffee faucet and got me a cup to drink. And he was smart and didn't fill it up all the way, 'cause it was kind of sloshy with the bus moving.

Aquamarine got up next and it wasn't too long after that that we stopped at another gas station called Chevron so that everyone could get out and stretch and pee. The bathrooms were for one person or pony at a time, so we had to line up and wait, and we didn't wake up Cayenne until everyone else had had a turn, 'cause it would be kind of mean to wake her up and then have her wait in line.

We were just north of a town called Gainesville, and then we were going to drive a bit further and stop at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and just hearing that name made my ear twitch a little bit and Miss Cherilyn petted my mane and said that we could stop somewhere else if we wanted to, but it was okay to eat there. I'd liked the last breakfast I'd eaten at the Kalamazoo Cracker Barrel.

Cayenne thought that Cracker Barrel was neat because of all the different things that they had for sale in their little store and we bought some candy sticks there. They had all sorts of flavors and I liked the peppermint one and Cayenne liked the cinnamon flavor 'cause it was hot. Aquamarine liked the licorice one the best but I thought that it was kind of bitter. And then she also got some atomic fireballs that we could each try once we'd eaten our candy sticks, but we didn't wind up eating them because we were pretty full from breakfast and the candy sticks had been a little much sugar especially for early in the morning. Maybe if we had been able to trot around some and burn off that energy it would have been all right, but we weren't going to be able to do that until the bus arrived in Orlando.

It was a little more than an hour between the Cracker Barrel and Orlando, and it was really green and there were lots of trees and open pastures and most of them had cows and there were a couple with horses in them and we waved even though they couldn't see us. And we also saw a couple of orange groves and the trees were covered with oranges even though it was December.

Then we got into the city and it was really big like Chicago and there was a bunch of traffic so we had to slow down and we kept looking out the windows for Walt Disney World but we couldn't see it, although we did see some signs saying how to get there. Finally Mister Salvatore told us that it was a little ways south of town, and we wouldn't be going by it.

We were staying in the Aloft hotel which was in downtown Orlando near the airport. And it was a tall white hotel and inside it had writing all over the reception desk which Cayenne said was supposed to be modern, but it was silly because you couldn't read all of it. Swak wasn't even a word. The chairs that they had didn't look like they were very comfortable, either, and I thought that if you leaned back in them you'd fall over, since they were already half-tipped.

Our helpers had their own suite and we got a room that was on the top floor so that we had a good view, and it had only one big bed in it, which was nice. There was room to stretch out if we wanted and we wouldn't have to decide which bed we wanted to use. And that left us with a bit more space that wasn't beds, too.

The bathroom had one of the nice walk-in showers and we were all looking forward to that. It was kind of silly to be showering before going to the beach, but none of us felt like we were clean. I don't know why sleeping on a couch in a bus was different than sleeping in a bed, but it was. Maybe it was just because there wasn't a blanket under us, just the couch cushions.

So we put our bags over in the corner of the room and then I went and turned on the shower to give it a little bit of time to warm up and then we all took a shower together and we took our time, 'cause we'd all kind of rushed on the train and it had been crowded and now we had plenty of room, and we didn't have to worry about using up all the hot water or getting knocked over, either.

We weren't in a real big hurry, 'cause the beach was going to be nice to see but we probably weren't going to do much except for relax on it and I was going to fly some and maybe see if I could catch some sand crabs to snack on. Florida was supposed to have good beaches.

I was a little worried about being hot—Cayenne was keeping her coat short, 'cause unicorns were vain about that, but me and Aquamarine had let ours get shaggy and that was nice for Michigan but it wasn't going to be as fun here. Since we could cool down in the water whenever we wanted to, though, it wouldn't be too bad I didn't think.

When we were done washing off we groomed in front of the window so that we could look out at the city. Our room looked down on the highway which wasn't that great a view—it looked like every other highway I'd seen—but across from that there were a couple of nice ponds that we could look at, and one of them had swans paddling around on it. Swans were pretty to look at but they were kind of mean so you didn't want to get too close to them 'cause they might pick a fight.

There wasn't much that we really had to bring for a day at the beach. I thought that I should take my flight gear 'cause I knew that we were near an airport and they might want me to wear it, and if I didn't have to I could leave it behind. Aquamarine didn't think that she'd need anything at all, and Cayenne decided that she was going to pack some of her makeup and a little mirror so if it came off in the water she could put it back on, and she wanted to take her brush and she thought she should take a couple of towels, too, so she'd have something to lie on and not get sand in her coat. And she had some sunglasses that she could wear to keep the sun out of her eyes and she said that we were going to wish that we had them too, until I blinked my third eyelid down.

The towels were a smart thing to think of, so me and Aquamarine each got one, too. They were still damp from us drying off but that was okay.

So we went back downstairs to the lobby and we had to make sure we had everything out of the bus before it left, 'cause it had to go back to New Orleans to bus other people around.

Mister Salvatore was happy though because he got a big black Suburban with lots of antennas on it, and he got to drive it instead of having to ride along with anyone else. And I thought that maybe Mister Barrow would want to drive, too, but he said that Mister Salvatore could do all the driving.

So we all got in—us three ponies sat in the very back—and Mister Salvatore drove us to a Golden Corral, which was a buffet like the dining hall, and we could get whatever we wanted. They only had a couple of different kinds of fish, and one of them was the square fish that I didn't trust. They also had a seafood salad and I told Aquamarine and Cayenne to not try that because it would give you the trots.

We didn't want to eat too much 'cause it wasn't fun to be on the beach with a really full belly, and when we were done we got back on the road and stopped again at a grocery store called Winn-Dixie where we could get some snacks for the beach. Our helpers bought two cases of bottled water to drink, too, because you couldn't drink seawater without getting sick.

Orlando stretched out for a while, and then it just ended kind of suddenly, and we were in open land. There weren't very many farms; it was mostly flat grassy pastureland. Miss Parker said that most of Florida was just a big sandbar and so a lot of places if you dug down a little bit all you'd find was sand and she said that some of Florida wasn't very good for growing crops and she thought that maybe that was how it was here. But grasses looked like they were doing all right, so that was something that you could grow at least.

We passed through a couple of small towns and a white building that had lots of banners and offered airboat rides and they even had painted that on their roof. I didn't know what an airboat was and Mister Salvatore said that it was a flat-bottomed boat that used a big propeller to move around on the water and they took tours of the swamps and that sounded like it would be fun and we all wanted to do that, and he said that he'd make it happen, but it wasn't gonna be today.

Then we went through a city called Titusville and across a big causeway, and Mister Salvatore pointed to a building called the Kennedy Space Center that had a big rocket on a pedestal and they had a museum and tomorrow they were going to launch a rocket into space and we could watch that, and I was really looking forward to that. And he said that to the south was Cape Canaveral that was where the rocket launchpads were.

Then we angled off to the northeast and drove for a while, until we came to a road that paralleled the ocean and followed that past a bunch of little parking lots that were kind of crowded, but as we got further and further north there were fewer cars and we finally stopped at a parking lot that was at the very end of the road.

The beach itself was a thin stretch of land that went along the coast of Florida, and on the landward side there were pools and lagoons that had manatees in them and also they might have alligators. And there were sometimes sharks in the water, too, but there were some towers with lifeguards on them that could watch out for sharks. And even if it was true that sharks would get you if you went into the water too soon after eating, it had been longer than that since we ate.

There was plenty of room to explore, 'cause the beach ran for miles and it was all federal land, Mister Barrow said, so it wasn't like South Haven where you couldn't go too far before you got to the fences.

So we thought that we'd go up the beach a little bit until we saw a spot that looked good to us, and our helpers followed along, and after a little while we decided that maybe we shouldn't go much further 'cause they looked like they were hot and they had a lot of things that they were carrying with them.

We found a spot that nobody else had claimed and they started setting out their things. They'd brought a big umbrella that kept the sun off, and Mister Barrow stuck it in the sand, and then Miss Parker took off her clothes and she had swimming underwear under that, and then all our helpers got a little bit undressed. Mister Salvatore even took his suit jacket off.

We didn't have to take any clothes off, so we just put our towels down and me and Cayenne put our saddlebags on top of them so that they wouldn't blow away and then we galloped down the beach and went right into the water, and we got met with a wave pretty quickly which knocked us all down and then when we got back up we were all giggling like schoolfillies and waded out a little bit deeper in the water, until we were far enough out that the waves weren't breaking over us and as the swells went under they lifted our hooves all the way off the seabed.

Then we paddled out a little bit further, until we were past where we could touch the bottom at all. And I started diving and swimming around and there weren't too many fish who liked being right in the surf, so I didn't see any when my head was under the water.

After we'd had our fun, we got out of the water and shook off and then went up to where our towels were and relaxed a little bit, and then once my wings were mostly dry I wanted to explore. And I didn't feel like wearing all my flight gear so I called the Orlando airplane directors and they said that as long as I stayed below five hundred feet over the beach and the park that was behind it I could fly wherever I wanted to.

So I asked Aquamarine and Cayenne if they wanted to come with me, just to be polite, and neither of them did, so I took off and went north. Every now and then, I'd see a little cluster of people and I waved at them as I went by, and then just kept flying on.

I'd kind of drifted away from the beach a little bit 'cause there was a big pool of water just behind the beach and I was looking at that to see if I could find any manatees. I wasn't exactly sure what they looked like except that they were grey and pretty big and Mister Barrow and Miss Cherilyn had both said that I'd know one when I saw one. And I thought that maybe they were pulling my tail, 'cause I wasn't seeing anything that was very interesting, until I finally spotted a big grey manatee swimming just below the surface, and it seemed like once I'd seen the first one I just kept seeing them everywhere.

They were supposed to be kind of friendly and playful and so maybe we'd take some time away from the beach and cross over the road and see if we could get any close enough to the shore that Aquamarine and Cayenne could play with it. I didn't know what they liked to eat, but if we had anything that they wanted, we might be able to use some food to lure them closer to shore.

I turned back to the beach and flew out over the ocean some, still going north, and when I was coming back I saw a big cluster of people and they looked a little bit funny and as I got closer I saw that none of them were wearing swimming clothes or anything else, which was strange because there had been a sign as we went on the beach saying that clothing was required and Mister Salvatore said that it didn't apply to ponies but he hadn't said anything about people.

I circled over them once just to make sure that I wasn't imagining it, and they were still there and still not wearing anything. And they waved at me and I waved back and I thought that I should meet them but then I also thought that maybe Aquamarine and Cayenne would want to, too, so I flew back south to get them.

Well, they didn't believe me at first, but I convinced them that I really had seen people sunbathing and playing naked and Cayenne really wanted to see and Aquamarine was a little curious, too. And we told our helpers that we were going to go and look, and Miss Parker said that she was going to come with us.

I wanted to fly along ahead but I walked on the sand with Aquamarine and Cayenne. We kept right by the ocean's edge, 'cause it was easier to walk on the wet sand. Miss Parker stayed a little bit further up on the beach so she wouldn't get her shoes wet.

Walking, it felt like it was a lot further than it had been when I was flying, and I was starting to wonder if maybe they'd gone away, but then we came around a little curve in the beach and saw them, and they were still a ways off. Most of them were lying down on the beach which made it harder to see them from a distance, 'cause some humans sort of blend in with sand, and then when we got close they were a little bit hesitant around Miss Parker but they didn't seem to mind us.

She stayed a little ways back and set up her blanket and laid back on it, and pretty soon we'd all introduced ourselves.

They were all college kids who had come down to Florida for their winter break—they were from New Hampshire and they'd heard about this being a nude beach and they had been a little bit discouraged by the signs that they saw but they had found out on their portable telephones that nobody would bother them if they stayed out of the way, so they'd gone past everyone else and they hadn't seen anyone until I flew over.

And they wanted to know where we were from, so we told them and they were kind of disappointed that this was probably going to be our only time at this beach and that we'd be going back to Equestria really soon, so we decided that we ought to make the most of the time that we had here and so we played with them and sat on the beach and talked and they shared some of their food with us. Miss Parker just stayed where she was, and every now and then she'd talk on a little radio that she had. I think that she was reassuring the helpers that we'd left behind that everything was okay.

Me and Aquamarine kind of felt bad that she was all by herself and so I went over and told her that she could come closer if she wanted and our new friends said that she could stay in her swimsuit, and she was sort of hesitant to but she finally did.

I got to fly back to everyone else a couple of times to bring water and food, 'cause Miss Parker said that it wasn't fair to just drink their water since they hadn't planned for us to be there with them. And one time when I was coming back with full saddlebags I decided to land and catch some sand crabs to snack on, so I went right down by the water and scraped at the sand until I found some, and then I stomped on them before they could get away and ate them and they were really good.

When I got back, Aquamarine went up away from the ocean so she could look at the plants that grew there and she decided that there were a couple of grasses we could eat, too, but they were really tough and dry and none of us liked them too much. I think we'd gotten a bit spoiled eating all the good human food all the time, 'cause the beachgrasses in Equestria probably tasted about the same, and I snacked on those a lot, especially when I wasn't hungry enough to try and catch a fish or a sand crab.

We went out in the water and played some with the students, both swimming around and also floating around. They had inflatable rafts that bobbed in the water and they were only big enough for one person, but we could float next to them and talk, and Alan let me use his for a little while while he hung on to the side. It was kind of hard to get on, 'cause it kept trying to get away from me and I didn't have any ground to push against, and he wound up having to help me get on it.

They set up a sort-of volleyball game in the afternoon—they didn't have a proper net so they just made a line in the sand that was the boundary and we had to imagine where the net would be and if a shot might have gone over it or not. So there were occasional arguments about that but it was mostly pretty civil, and we even got Miss Parker to join us and she was pretty good at volleyball.

She said that she was on the varsity volleyball team when she was in high school but hadn't played it much since then, and it was good to know that she hadn't forgotten everything about the game.

It was kind of weird seeing her, just 'cause she was the only one wearing clothes.

Once we'd finished our game we rinsed off in the ocean and then we sat on towels and relaxed for a little while and looked out over the ocean, and it was weird to think that it could have been Equestria, because when I was looking out over the sea I couldn't see anything human-made. It was a strange feeling.

Cayenne said that the ocean kind of scared her because it was like looking off into a void, and she was afraid that she might drift away and nobody would ever find her again.

And even though we should have gone back sooner, we wanted to stay until the stars came out and Miss Parker said it was okay if we did as long as we didn't mind walking back in the dark. So we all gathered the blankets and towels around and sat in a loose little group watching out over the ocean as the sun set behind us, and pretty soon you could see one star then another and then they came out in the hundreds.

They started to put their clothes back on 'cause with the sun down it started to get chilly. Melanie kept hers off the longest, 'cause me and Aquamarine were sitting right next to her to help her stay warm, and it was getting pretty dark and I was a little bit worried about finding our way back. Way down on the beach I could see a fire, which looked like it was past where our other helpers had been. But we decided to wait until the moon came up and I was glad that we had, 'cause watching the moon rise over the ocean was beautiful, and it looked so big when it came up over the horizon, so we stayed and watched until it was up in the sky where it belonged.

Our new friends got dressed and Miss Parker helped them gather up their beach things, and then we all walked back down the beach to where our helpers were. And when we finally got back to there we had to say our goodbyes which was sad, but we'd had lots of fun together and we'd started out strangers and ended up friends, so it had been a good day.

We stopped in Titusville at a Tiki bar called Crackerjacks and they were right on a causeway which was kind of neat because it was almost like being on a boat. They had a lot of different kinds of seafood and I got grouper which was a local fish and it was really good. And Mister Salvatore bought us all bottles of Corona because he said it was the thing that you were supposed to drink on the beach, and it came with a wedge of lime stuck in the bottle. And then we got back in the Suburban and drove back to Orlando and we were all pretty tired when we went up to our hotel room. And when we got there we realized that we’d left our towels in the Suburban, but when we went into the bathroom we found out that the hotel had given us more.

Author's Note

Special thanks to ClosetBrony for pre-reading and suggesting Florida destinations!

December 16 [Kennedy Space Center]

December 16

I got up a little bit early and wrote in my journal some—I hated to leave bed but Aquamarine and Cayenne were both sleeping together so they probably wouldn't miss me too much and I knew that if I didn't write in my journal some today I'd get way behind and maybe never catch up and I didn't want that to happen.

And then the three of us took a shower together and groomed and then went downstairs to meet our helpers.

There wasn’t breakfast at the hotel unless we wanted to order room service, but that was okay because Mister Salvatore said that we were going to stop on the way for breakfast. And so we drove out of the center of town and took a little detour to get to a Waffle House. It turned out that Aquamarine had never eaten at one so me and Cayenne and Mister Salvatore all told her what was good there, and she got covered hash browns and Cayenne got hers peppered and I had a waffle and eggs because I didn't like hash browns all that much.

Then we went back to the road we’d been on yesterday and this time when we got to the Kennedy Space Center we turned into their parking lot and went right by the big rocket that was in front, which were the booster rockets for the Space Shuttle, which was a special airplane that could fly in space.

The first place that we went was to the Heroes and Legends wall, which was outside and was a memorial to the pioneering American Astronauts who had first orbited Earth in their little capsules and then gone all the way to the moon. I'd seen one of them at the Air and Space museum and I thought I'd go crazy if I had to be stuck inside it for days at a time, but they'd done it.

And they also had what they called a rocket garden, and it had all the different rockets which America had used to get into space, from the Juno which was the first rocket to put an American satellite in space, and the Mercury rockets which carried astronauts up into space. And there was also a Saturn IB, which was even huger than the others—it was so big it had to be on its side 'cause if it was standing up it would be too tall, and the sign by that one said that it had been set aside in case it was needed for a rescue mission on Skylab, which was a space station before the International Space Station.

There was a room called the White Room which was where astronauts got ready to go into space and we could go in that, and then walk along the gangplank that had carried them into their spaceships. There were pictures of it being used and it was actually supposed to be way above the ground, on a tower but now it was set down low where we could get to it. And it also had a mission trainer that let us try and fly the Apollo which wasn't very easy at all, and I was glad that it didn't matter when we crashed. I think if we had had a training pilot with us, we could have done it, because I'd figured out how to fly airplane simulators and this was kinda the same.

Then we went to see the little space capsules, which were used for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. They weren't real, so you were allowed to get into them and they were really crowded for us. Everything was covered in buttons and switches and gauges and controls so that they could pilot their rocket and then navigate to the moon. I guess you'd just have to sleep in your seat, 'cause there weren't any beds, and you'd have to be really careful not to reach out and touch something that you weren't supposed to.

We went to the astronaut hall of fame next, which had a replica of the Space Shuttle outside of it. And its wings looked like they were too stubby to fly, but Mister Salvatore said that it went so fast that the stubby wings were all that it needed, and he explained how it had to set up for its landing when it was half a world away and then it glided all the way in. And it had special tiles on the bottom that absorbed the heat and one time they had gotten damaged and the space shuttle Columbia had burned up in the atmosphere because it got too hot.

Inside, they had reliefs of the most famous astronauts, and it said what they were famous for, and I read all of them before I went to look at anything else. Maybe they couldn't fly on their own like I could, but they were brave enough to take tiny little rockets into space just to explore.

They had space suits on display, which looked kind of like diving suits but instead of holding pressure out they had to hold it in because there was no pressure in space. And they also had to keep the astronaut cool, because even though it got colder and colder when you flew higher, once you got to space it got hot again because there was nothing stopping the sunlight.

There was also a big moon rock, but it was fake, because the real one was too precious to put out in the open. And I said that there was also a moon rock at the Smithsonian but I hadn't been able to touch it, 'cause my hoof wouldn't fit in the display.

So when we were done looking around in there, we went to the Space Shuttle building which had a real space shuttle on display, and there were lots of other displays that explained how they had been designed and built and pictures of it riding on the back of a normal airplane which was really neat. It couldn't fly very well on Earth, because it couldn't go fast enough on its own, so it had to be carried around by a Boeing 747.

And they had a memorial to the two crews who had been lost with their shuttles, which was sad. Going to space was dangerous, and humans were really bold to try it.

They had a hooves-on simulator where you could try and fly the space shuttle and it was a lot more like a real airplane but faster, and so we all took turns and I was the best at it. You could dock with the International Space Station and land on Earth, and it was very helpful and told you what you needed to do. The controls weren't very hoof-friendly, though, and we needed a little bit of help from Mister Barrow. I thought with some practice I could probably fly the real thing, as long as there was someone telling me what I needed to do.

Then we went to a big display about the Hubble Space Telescope and I knew a bunch about that from my astronomy class. They had a model of it, too, and I hadn't expected it to be so big. I guess it made sense, though: I knew that the bigger the telescope, the further you could see with it.

And there was a short movie just about how astronauts had fixed it when it was up in space and they'd found out that it was broken, 'cause the mirror had been made wrong.

After that, we went to see the International Space Station, which let you go inside to see what it was like. And it was kind of crowded, too, and I don't think that I'd want to spend too much time inside of it, but humans were living there for months at a time until a spaceship came to take them back to Earth, and they were doing important experiments up there in space.

So I told Aquamarine and Cayenne how I'd seen it going by, 'cause Sean had showed me where it was. And there was a computer where you could look up when it was going to pass overhead and it looked like we might be able to see it on the 17th, although it would be before the sun set so it might be really hard to see. But Sean had told me that if you knew where to look you could see it during the day, so I was hopeful that we might get a chance.

Then we got to go on board the Space Shuttle Launch Simulator and got a mission briefing from an astronaut called Charles Bolden. And the seats weren't too comfortable and it was kind of bumpy inside and it was so loud when it took off that we all pinned our ears and I accidentally hit Cayenne with my wing.

And then something went wrong and red lights started flashing and for a moment I forgot that it was all fake and almost flew out of my seat to safety, and then the roof opened and we could see the Earth below us.

We ate lunch at the Rocket Garden Cafe, and I had mahi mahi tacos, which were really good. I offered to share them, ‘cause I got two, but neither Aquamarine or Cayenne wanted to try one.

After lunch, were supposed to go and see the launch from the Saturn V center, but Mister Salvatore told us that the launch had been scrubbed and they were going to have to reschedule it, which was really disappointing. But he said we could still go to the Saturn V center if we wanted to, or we could spend some more time here first.

Since we hadn’t seen everything here, I wanted to stay where we were. So we went and got to watch a movie about how NASA wanted to send people to visit Mars. They weren’t sure yet how they were going to do it because it was going to be a very long trip, and when they got to Mars there might not be any water or air—there was supposed to be some water maybe but they hadn’t found it yet, even though lots of robots were crawling around Mars looking for it. And they had a bunch of pictures from the surfaces of Mars, ‘cause the robots had cameras so you could see what they saw.

There were a lot of theories on how it could be done, but nobody was really sure if it would work. It wasn’t like Star Wars or Star Trek, where people could sail through space pretty easily.

Cayenne said that she’d seen a movie called The Martian which was about a man who was stuck on Mars and so she really paid attention to everything that they said in the museum, ‘cause we both knew that movies weren’t really real. But she said that a lot of stuff in the movie was pretty close to being real.

When we were done looking at everything that they had at the Kennedy Space Center, we went outside and waited for a bus to take us to the next part of the museum, ‘cause it was so big that they needed a bus to get from one place in it to another. And when we were outside we found a big globe that had all the constellations on it and it was floating on a little cushion of water so you could turn it easily even though it was really heavy. I guess it was supposed to be for kids to play with but it was fun for us, too. I was kinda curious who could turn it the fastest, but both Aquamarine and Cayenne were wearing shoes and thought that they might damage it by mistake, so we didn’t try.

The whole complex was pretty open, ‘cause rockets needed a lot of space. Mister Salvatore said that sometimes they exploded on the launch pad, too, so you didn’t want to have anything too close to where they took off.

When we got over there we went right inside and the building had a Saturn V rocket inside, which was what they had used to get to the moon, and it was immense. It wasn’t as big as a skyscratcher or the Mackinac Bridge, but those things didn’t move and the rocket did, and it not only moved but it flew all the way into space. And most of it fell off before it got there, ‘cause it was built in sections and when each section ran out of fuel it would fall off to make the rocket lighter which was actually really clever the more I thought about it. It was like how a diver could drop her weights when she wanted to go back up.

And they had a command module, which I had seen before, and also a lunar module which was the part of the spaceship that landed on the moon. It looked kind of like an insect, and there were pictures showing how it worked, and how part of it could fly back off of the moon and go back to the command module to return the astronauts to Earth. It was a little strange to think about how the astronauts had their big Saturn V rocket when they left Earth and when they came back they just had a little capsule. It would be like if a sailing ship left for Prance and all that came back was one dory.

Then we went and watched a movie that was about the Apollo mission to the moon, and it showed us what the command center was like. I told everyone that I’d gotten to see a space command center in Colorado, ‘cause Peggy’s mom had taken me there. That hadn’t been quite as exciting as the one in the movie, because just putting satellites in space and keeping them from crashing into each other was fairly routine for humans, but going to the moon wasn’t, especially since they were racing the Communists there.

And since they won, America got to put a flag on the moon and then nobody else could.

Then we got to look at another sliver of moon rock and this one was real and it was inside a little glass cover that let humans touch it but not ponies which was really unfair. Even when Aquamarine stuck her muzzle right up to the edge she couldn’t quite get to it and Cayenne said that maybe she could take the top cover off with her magic but Mister Barrow told her that she shouldn’t do that because we’d get kicked out of the museum. And I did get my wingtip on it but I couldn’t really feel it properly with just feathers. So we were all feeling a little bit sad about that until Miss Cherilyn reminded us that I could fly and Cayenne could use magic and Aquamarine could bring plants forth and nohuman could do any of those things, and that made us feel a lot better.

It had been really fun seeing everything and I wished that we could stay longer, but we had other plans for the evening and the museum was closing pretty soon anyway. So we went back outside and waited for the bus to take us back to the Space Center.

We had a little bit of time to look through the gift shop and they had lots of things that I liked there but I couldn’t afford to buy everything that caught my eye and even if I could I couldn’t take it all back to Equestria with me (and where would I put it when I got there?). So I got a book that was about space exploration and had lots of beautiful pictures and also some astronaut ice cream, ‘cause Mister Salvatore said that I’d probably be able to take that through the portal and my friends would like how weird it was. And maybe if I was feeling like pulling their tails, I could tell them that all human ice cream was like that.

Then we got back in the Suburban and Mister Salvatore drove us back to Orlando, and I had to decide what I wanted to do tonight.

Aquamarine was going to go see a basketball game—the Orlando Magic was playing the Brooklyn Nets in the stadium that was right by our hotel. And Cayenne had decided that instead of watching the basketball game she wanted to go to Hamburger Mary’s. That was a bar that had drag queens, who were men that dressed up to look like women, and that sounded pretty interesting, too. I couldn’t be both places at once, so I had to choose and I didn’t know which would be better.

I didn’t know much about basketball, but it was probably a lot like football, and it was really fun to be with a big group of people all cheering on the team, so that was a good reason to go with Aquamarine; on another hoof, there was still a lot I didn’t understand about human fashion and so I might learn something new if I went with Cayenne, and I also hadn’t spent a whole lot of time with her which was kinda unfriendly of me.

I wasn’t sure if she’d had as much fun on our vacation as me and Aquamarine, except for yesterday at the beach, ‘cause she was really social and playing in swamps and visiting rocket gardens wasn’t all that social.

Making a choice is really hard sometimes. Humans like to toss coins when they can’t choose things, and I suppose I could have asked one of our helpers for a coin—I could have even had them toss it for me—but I thought I’d just use the traditional pegasus method and so I closed my eyes and waited a minute and then started watching out the window to see what kind of bird I’d spot next. And it wasn’t too long before I saw a blue-grey bird soaring around and I didn’t know exactly what it was called but it looked hawky, so that meant I was going to go to Hamburger Mary’s with Cayenne.

We didn’t stop for dinner on the way back to Orlando, ‘cause me and Cayenne could get food at the bar, and Aquamarine was gonna get food at the basketball game.

The stadium and the bar were really close to each other, and to the hotel, too, so we drove back to the hotel and parked the Suburban and then we all walked to the stadium first. We had to go under the highway and across railroad tracks to get there, and it was really strange to see it while on hoof. I kind of wanted to fly up and stick my head above the barriers just for the fun of it but Mister Salvatore said I shouldn’t because I’d probably cause another traffic accident if I did.

Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow went with Aquamarine to the basketball game and us ponies all nuzzled before she went inside, and I had a moment to change my mind, if I'd wanted to and I kind of did, 'cause it looked like it would be fun, but I'd made my choice and I was gonna stick with it.

So we walked a block back to Hamburger Mary's, and they had a sign with a mermaid (which is a human seapony) on it, and it was right by the railroad tracks which was probably really convenient for people, 'cause there was a train stop right by it.

There were lots of people in there and we had to look around a bit before we found a table where we could sit, and I laughed when Miss Parker and Miss Cherilyn got out a quarter and tossed it to decide who the designated drinker was. And Miss Parker won, so when our waitress came around she ordered a Long Island Iced Tea, and Miss Cherilyn got a Coke.

Cayenne got a whiskey sour and I ordered a white russian, and then the waitress asked us if we wanted to order any appetizers but we hadn’t decided on what we wanted to eat yet, ‘cause we were still looking at the menu.

When the waitress came back with our drinks we still hadn’t decided on food yet. Cayenne ordered a second whiskey sour even though she hadn’t even started on her first, but as soon as the waitress had left she drank the whole thing at once instead of sipping at it like a sensible pony. And Miss Cherilyn took a deep breath and looked longingly at Miss Parker’s Long Island Iced Tea.

When she came back with Cayenne’s second drink, we’d figured out what we wanted for an appetizer. I got a quesadilla and Cayenne wanted to order Mary’s Hot Legs, which were spicy chicken wings. And it kind of bothered me that she wanted to eat chicken wings, more than when people ate them, because it didn’t seem right for a pony to. Cayenne insisted that it was proper bar food though, and I guess if that was what she liked it was okay. She never got mad when I ate fish, so I guess I shouldn’t be upset if she wanted wings.

Our waitress was expecting us to know what we wanted as our main course, but we hadn’t figured that out yet, so she went off to tell the chefs what to cook for us.

By the time we got our food, the bar was getting pretty packed. And then three people came up on the little stage that they had and started singing, and they were all men dressed like women but they could have fooled me. I think maybe if I’d been close enough to sniff them I might have been able to tell, but from back where we were sitting they looked exactly like women. And the three of them started singing and they all had beautiful voices. They were called Ginger Minj, The Minx, and Aysia Black. ~~She~~ He was really pretty and looked a lot like Tina who had lived downstairs from me, except that he had slightly darker skin.

By the time they’d finished their first set of songs, I’d had three drinks and was ready for some more food, and I don’t know how many Cayenne had had. The waitress kept coming over and bringing her more. And then a man (I think) wearing a big feathered cape went up and joined them on stage and they all sang a song called It’s Raining Men.

It was getting louder, ‘cause everyone was really getting into the performance, and even Miss Parker was clapping and singing along as the four of them sang, and then when the song was over Ginger Minj pointed to us and said how good it was to see ponies in the crowd and Cayenne got up and wiggled her rump and then she got invited up to the stage to sing with them.

She was a really good singer, even after she’d had a lot to drink, and I guess that she knew a lot of human songs, ‘cause she sang one called Don’t Let the Sun go Down on Me with them. That was a song that I’d never heard, and it was really beautiful.

Our main course came while she was still up on stage singing, and our helpers were both looking up there watching her, and even though I probably shouldn’t have I was curious and maybe had had a bit too much to drink already, so I took a little nibble out of the corner of her buffalo chicken sandwich and it was a bit spicier than I liked but the chicken was pretty tasty. It tasted kinda like tuna, but less fishy.

And then I felt really bad for eating a bird, even though it was okay to do that on Earth. And I also felt bad for eating her food, although when she came back she didn’t notice that the corner of her sandwich had been bitten off.

Later on, when we’d finished our meal and had more to eat she got me to come up to the stage too, and we sang Renegades and I had to hum for some of the song ‘cause I couldn’t remember the words. It’s strange how you can have a song in your head but when you go to sing it you can’t remember quite what it’s like. And then we sang Razzle Dazzle, which The Minx also knew, and he sang along with us, and there were a couple of people in the audience who did, too, even though it was in Equestrian. It was really weird to be singing that and hearing people singing along and I had tears in my eyes when it was over. And there was so much applause after we’d finished, even though none of us were as good as Countess Coloratura.

And before we left stage we got big hugs from all the drag queens and the man in the feather cape, and then on the way back to our table we got more hugs and hoofbumps and then there were new drinks waiting cause someone had bought them for us which was really nice of them.

We didn’t leave until it was pretty late and we staggered back to our hotel singing The Magic Inside, and I was glad that the hotel was really close ‘cause I was having trouble walking and I think I would have flown except that I was following Miss Cherilyn who was the only one who remembered where we were going. Cayenne had gotten a cigarette from someone and was smoking that as we walked—she’d used her magic to light it, and I thought she looked really human because of it. She was a lot drunker than I was, and could barely walk straight and I finally decided to carry her but she was heavier than she looked and I was struggling to walk with her draped over my back. I was glad that Miss Cherilyn knew where to go, ‘cause we would have gotten completely lost otherwise and maybe been wandering around Orlando until we sobered back up.

Aquamarine wasn’t back yet when we got to our room, and it took both of us to get our door open, ‘cause neither of us could remember how the plastic card was supposed to work. And then we both collapsed in bed together and I sort of wanted to stay awake until Aquamarine got back but I was too tired.

Author's Note

Once again, a special thanks to ClosetBrony, who is an invaluable font of information about Florida.

December 17 [Disney Springs]

December 17

I was still kinda drunk in the morning, and when I woke up I really had to pee, so I staggered over to the bathroom and human toilets are really dumb especially when you've had too much to drink the night before. I wish our hotel bathroom had had a urinal in it, 'cause I think that would have been a lot easier to use.

I wasn't at all ready to get up so I got back in bed and curled up with Cayenne and Aquamarine and then I fell back asleep for a bit until I heard a portable telephone ringing, and it was Cayenne's.

Her horn lit and it took her a couple of tries before she found her telephone and answered it and she was doing more listening than talking and she set her telephone back down and said that our helpers were monsters for wanting to get us up so early in the morning after we'd had a good night out.

Aquamarine said that she felt fine although she was hoarse from all the cheering she'd done last night. And she got up and started coffee and then turned on the shower and threatened to drag us both by our tails to the shower if we didn't make it on our own and I think she would have, so we got in the shower and she'd left it ice-cold to help wake us up. And me and Cayenne both took turns swearing at her but we didn't mean it, and the cold water worked and I was feeling alert at least by the time that she decided to turn the warm water on for us.

We had time to talk in the shower and she told us about how the Orlando Magic had won the game last night and it had been kind of a close game all the way through. And she said that there were enough people there when they cheered the air shook, and Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow had had a great time, too, and they'd even managed to get her to meet some of the players which was really neat, and she'd also gotten a short interview on television from a woman named Kyle Petty.

And we told her about our night, and when we were done with our shower me and Cayenne shared a cup of coffee while Aquamarine made another cup. I liked the coffee maker that Aric had better than the one the hotel had, 'cause it could make twelve cups at once and this one would only make one and if you didn't do it exactly right it wouldn't make anything at all.

Cayenne had some aspirin in her bag and she gave me a couple which also helped. And then Aquamarine said that we could share the second cup of coffee, too, but that didn't seem fair so we let her have it and Cayenne started a third and then got in a fight with the coffee maker when it didn't want to produce coffee.

We had to pack up our bags, 'cause we were going to be staying at Walt Disney World for the rest of our vacation. Luckily, I hadn't gotten that much out so it didn't take me too long. Cayenne was a little too tired to care about how she packed, so she just shoved everything she had in her bags and Aquamarine had to sit on it so she could fasten it shut.

Then when we'd all gotten groomed and packed we went downstairs to meet our helpers and we went to Waffle House for breakfast again and that helped us wake up the rest of the way. Cayenne had too many eggs and started farting before we'd even left the restaurant and Mister Salvatore said that he had been expecting a rainbow and had gotten death and she hit him with her tail and then we rode in the Suburban with the windows down all the way to the airboats, 'cause the eggs had gotten to me, too.

We drove back along the 50 road until we got to the airboat rental store that had their sign painted on the roof, and Mister Salvatore said that he was glad that the boats were open, and both me and Cayenne told him that we were sorry. And he said that it was Miss Parker and Miss Cherilyn's fault for letting us drink so much last night and I didn't think that was fair, 'cause we'd done it on our own and we were old enough to know better.

When we went inside there was a pig who came up to greet us and he oinked at us and Aquamarine oinked back and then nuzzled him, and then a white bird landed in my mane, and they were all pets that roamed around the store. Mister Salvatore seemed a little bit annoyed by them, but I thought that they were nice. And then we met Captain Ed, who was our airboat pilot, and he took us out back and told us a little bit about it and what we needed to know to stay safe. We had to wear life jackets, which are really puffy vests, and it took them a little while to find ones that fit us well. I didn't like mine that much, 'cause it kept my wings pinned against my barrel and if the boat crashed and sank I thought I'd be better off floating free, but it was a rule and we had to follow it. And we were also supposed to wear earmuffs to keep the sound down and also so that Captain Ed could talk to us, and those weren't made for a pony at all and we had a really hard time getting them to fit on and they were really uncomfortable, too, and I hoped that the airboat ride would be worth it.

The airboat was a flat-bottomed dory, with a big propeller mounted in a cage so that nobody would fall in by mistake and get chopped up, and Captain Ed had a raised-up seat that gave him a better view, while we had to stay down a little bit lower. And we all got seats right in the front, while our helpers sat behind us.

The engine on the airboat was kinda loud. So it was a good thing that we had our earmuffs on, 'cause otherwise it might have hurt our hearing. And he drove the boat out of the dock and went down the channel and everything seemed normal until he skimmed over some grass and I braced my hooves 'cause I thought that we were going to crash, but the boat had a really shallow draft and it didn't even bump as it went over the almost-land.

We drove along for a while across water and little lumps of land and scared off a bunch of birds who were trying to eat their breakfast, and then we got to a place where there were trees in the water and they had roots that stuck up above the water kinda like stilts.

Captain Ed slowed down the engines so that he could tell us about the swamp. He said some of it was man-made, ‘cause Orlando had needed a place to put their treated wastewater so they made a swamp, which was also a good habitat for all the different kinds of animals who liked living there. He said that further north, there were even monkeys living by the river and nobody knew how they’d gotten there. I would have liked to see them but our airboat didn’t go that far. Some people thought that maybe they had escaped from a circus or a zoo, and other people thought that maybe they were pets that had been set free.

We went a little bit further and he slowed down again and pretty soon the alligators were swimming around near our boat and none of us liked that too much, 'cause it didn't seem like it would be too hard for them to jump out of the water and get one of us, and we'd probably be a tasty snack for an alligator which was not how I wanted to end my time on Earth. But everybody else on the boat liked looking at them and I guess they weren’t afraid that the alligators might jump on the boat and eat them. Maybe alligators didn’t eat people.

When we got back to the docks, we had a chance to meet a baby alligator and Captain Ed said that we could even hold it if we wanted to. I didn't want to, 'cause I didn't want to get bitten, but Aquamarine did hold it and so did all of our helpers and then I thought maybe I was being a bit of a coward so I held it, too. Aquamarine said that Pinkie Pie, who lives in Ponyville, has a pet alligator of her own, who is called Gummy, 'cause he doesn't have any teeth.

My ears still hurt a little bit from the earmuffs, 'cause they'd pushed them down, and I saw that Cayenne was twitching hers a little bit. And when we walked back to the Suburban, Aquamarine reached up with a hind hoof and scratched her ear.

Plus my feathers were a little bit matted-down from the lifejacket so instead of getting right in I stretched my wings out and fluffed them a little bit—it wasn't nearly as good as preening them properly, but it was better, and I thought that maybe if we had to wait at the airport I'd have time to do them right.

We probably could have stayed a little bit longer, but we had to go back to Orlando to get another car, because when Gusty and her helpers came there wouldn't be enough room for everyone in our Suburban. I said that I thought we could crowd in, and Mister Salvatore said that we probably could if we had to but it was more practical to get another vehicle so we wouldn't be as cramped and besides if somepony wanted to do something different than everypony else it would be good to have. And Miss Cherilyn looked at him and asked him if he was going to get something sensible and he said that he had rented the most practical Florida car.

She asked if it was a convertible and he said that she could call it that.

And then we drove back the same way as if we were going to our hotel, but we got off the exit going south on the 527 Road which was also called Orange Street, and that took us through a busy part of Orlando.

There was a building that had lots of rainbow flags on it and big signs and that was the Pulse where this summer a bad man had killed a lot of people there, and I knew about it because Pastor Liz had told me, but I guess Aquamarine didn’t because she asked about it and so Miss Cherilyn told her about it and said that it was being turned into a memorial so that people wouldn’t forget what had happened there.

We drove a little bit further and then stopped at a place called Orlando Jeep Rentals and Miss Cherilyn asked him if this was what he thought a practical vehicle was and he said that the roof folded down so you could be in the sun and it had four wheel drive in case he had to rescue one of us on a beach or in a swamp so of course it was practical. And there was a bright yellow one that said Rubicon on its hood and it had a black roof and me and Aquamarine both liked it the best so he got it and then asked who wanted to ride with him, and so me and Aquamarine both did. We had to wait for a little bit while he figured out how to furl the top and he said that the doors could come off too but he didn't know where to put them.

I thought it was a lot of fun to be in even though we were in the city and that wasn't as nice as being in the country. It was bumpier than the Mustang had been, but it sat higher and so we could see more. And Aquamarine figured out that you could stand up on the seat and hook your hooves over the top bar but we weren't allowed to do that while Mister Salvatore was driving because we might fall out.

We got to go a little bit faster on the 528 Highway which took us to the airport, and when we got there, Mister Salvatore had a special badge for the Jeep and the Suburban so instead of having to park in one of the parking lots like everybody else did, he could park right by the front doors, which was really nice.

We went inside and found the restaurant which was called McCoy's Bar and Grill, and I got a crawfish chowder, 'cause the menu said it was their specialty and it was really good but a little bit messy to eat.

There were lots of restaurants and shops at the airport which there must have also been at the first airport I was at but I was new to Earth and everything was confusing and I'd been as skittish as a yearling so I hadn't paid all that much attention. And there was a hotel in the airport that had rooms that looked over the concourse and it had a big glass ceiling, so it was kind of like a little city in a greenhouse, Aquamarine said. I thought that was strange in Florida, since it was warm and sunshiny, and it might make a lot more sense in Michigan where it was cold and snowy.

They had televisions that showed you when the flights were arriving, and we found Gusty's flight and it said that it was on time and going to go to terminal A, so we wanted to go there.

Our helpers had to show their badges so that they could go to the terminal with us, because normally you weren't supposed to unless you had a ticket on an airplane. And then we got special badges that we could wear on necklaces so that everyone would know that we were allowed in the terminal even without an airplane ticket. And then we had to ride on a tram, which was an elevated train, and it took us along over the roads and a little park-like island in the middle of the concrete which had trees and ponds in it and I asked Mister Salvatore if you were allowed to have picnics there and watch the airplanes and he said that you probably weren't supposed to. I thought that was a shame.

Then the tram got to the terminal building which had covered gangways sticking out that went to the airplanes, and there were a bunch of airplanes all moored at their gates, and they all had their names on their tails. I saw Delta and Spirit and Lufthansa and Jet Blue, but no Frontier which was the airline that Gusty was flying on, 'cause we were still a little bit early and we'd beaten her airplane to the airport.

There were helpful signs that said where all the gates were and so we went to sixteen and they had a little waiting area but nobody was there yet. And there was a big window that looked over the tarmac and we decided that we could see better if we went to the next gate, 'cause with the gangway on our left it would mostly block our view of the airplane.

Mister Barrow came over with us, and we sat in the chairs and pretty soon we started seeing people coming out and preparing for the arrival of her airplane. And then it came off the runway and turned in to the terminal area and when it got close a man with a bright vest like mine walked out and he was holding sticks that looked like stubby lightsabers and he used them to tell the airplane where to go. I had to go all the way up to the window to see him as he backed up, 'cause we were off the ground and he disappeared under the edge of the window.

Then when the airplane was parked men went over and started attaching hoses and wires to it, and a truck with a conveyor belt on its back came over to the belly of the airplane and they opened up a door and started taking baggage out and loading it onto a short train, and on the other side we could see the gangway moving towards the airplane.

So we went back around to the other side to see Gusty, and she came out of the airplane first, followed by her helpers who were Mister Wayne and Miss Russi. And Gusty trotted up to us and nuzzled all of us and the men helpers shook hands while the women helpers hugged each other.

We had to go back to the main atrium to get her luggage, 'cause she had only been allowed to take her saddlebags on the airplane. And she spit out the gum that she'd been chewing which she said was to keep her ears from hurting when she was flying and she said that it helped some. And she'd gotten to sit up in the front in the nice seats and the stewardesses had given her some white wine to drink so she had to pee too, so we stopped at the bathroom before we took the tram back to the main building.

All the luggage arrived on a big conveyor and you had to watch for what was yours and Gusty also got Mister Wayne and Miss Russi's bags too, 'cause she could just pick them up with her magic and set them on the floor and then we went out to the Suburban and Jeep.

She wanted to ride in the Suburban with Cayenne and it was a little bit crowded in there with five helpers so Miss Parker got in the Jeep with us. She said that she was going to keep an eye on Mister Salvatore and make sure that he didn't do anything too reckless, and he said that he wouldn’t, and she said that she'd heard about what had happened on his Jeep tour in Colorado.

We drove out of Orlando and went past SeaWorld which was a zoo for whales, and then we drove to a place called Disney Springs. And it was pretty popular, ‘cause there were lots of cars in the parking lots and they had all sorts of Christmas decorations up. Mister Salvatore said that he was sure they had lots of lights, too, but since it was daytime we couldn’t see them.

We had to put the top up on the Jeep before we went in and Gusty started dancing around on her hooves 'cause she was so excited I thought that she might gallop off before we finished but she didn't.

Miss Russi said that we should burn off a little bit of energy by walking around the nature path, and we had to take a boat to get there. It was called the Sassagoula Steam Boat, but it wasn't a real steam boat. Mister Barrow said that it was just a pontoon boat that was a little bit dressed up. It was still fun, though. It was a lot slower than the airboat had been, but it was quieter, too, and we didn't have to wear life jackets and earmuffs to ride on it.

It took us to the Saratoga Springs Spa and Gusty and Cayenne both wanted to go there and get pampered, and Miss Cherilyn said that we would do that later. And then we went to the Saratoga Springs Nature Path which was kind of a lie, 'cause it was a path around a golf course. But it was really pretty just the same and it did let Gusty work off some of her pent-up energy. I think it was partially nervousness from being on the airplane and also eagerness at seeing Walt Disney World and everything that was there.

I kind of felt bad for her, too, 'cause her school got out really late so she hadn't had enough time for proper goodbyes before she'd left, and I hoped that she'd have time to do that when she got back from vacation.

And then when we got back we did go to the spa and they had all sorts of different kinds of massages that you could get but some of them weren't for ponies, and there was a special deluxe massage that lasted five hours and we didn't have time for that which kind of disappointed Cayenne. I wasn't sure how you could even have a massage that lasted for five hours. I think that they'd run out of things to do before the five hours was up. Gusty said I didn't know anything about fashion.

They only had two people who knew how to massage ponies, so we couldn't all go at once. So me and Aquamarine said that we'd look around and come back after Cayenne and Gusty had had theirs, and then we took the not-a-steamboat back to Disney Springs and walked around to see what was there. They had a restaurant that was on a paddleboat which didn't actually move, and another that had a dinosaur theme which looked really neat. Dinosaurs were kind of like dragons but most of them didn't fly and they couldn't breathe fire, either. And they had a really ornate carousel that we got to ride around on, and a store that sold tea and they had a couple of flavors that you could sample there, but they were in really tiny cups that me and Aquamarine couldn't use, so we had to have Miss Cherilyn help us.

Then we went and took the not-a-steamboat back to the spa for our turn and both Gusty and Cayenne looked really relaxed and smelled really nice, too.

The room smelled like sandalwood and they had some quiet music that was really relaxing and I realized that I'd never gotten a chance to preen my wings right but the man who massaged me did it for me and he put some nice oil in them too to make them all glossy. He had a strange accent that I didn't know and he said that he was from Cuba and he had fled there because it wasn't a nice place especially for a gay man and it was much better in America, but he kind of missed his home sometimes. And then he started massaging my wings and back and he was wonderful and when he was done I was so relaxed I didn't know if I'd be able to get back off the bench again or tuck my wings back up.

We didn't all have to eat at the same place if we didn't want to, so I decided I'd like to go to the Cuban Cafe and Cayenne wanted to, too. Aquamarine went with her helpers to the dinosaur restaurant, and Gusty went to Raglin Road, which she said was a real Irish pub that had been built in Ireland and then brought here on a boat. I thought that probably wasn't true, 'cause it seemed like it would be cheaper to just build it here although human ships were big enough to carry a whole building so maybe it was true.

They had a really good seafood platter that I got which was called Zarzuela de Mariscos and it was more than I could eat, so they gave me the extra in a little box for later. And Cayenne got more food than she could eat, too, so she also got a little box to carry it away in. And they had dancers and Cuban music playing and they went through the restaurant and then brought a line of people in who danced along with them and so we joined them and that was lots of fun.

And then we all met up by the Characters in Flight which was a balloon that you could ride up in. It flew with helium instead of hot air, and it was tied to the ground so it wouldn't get away. Gusty didn't want to ride on that, but the rest of us did. And we had to sign a little paper saying that we knew that balloons could fall out of the sky and then we got in and had a pegasus-eye view of the resort.

It was right around sunset, too, so it was especially pretty.

Then we went to see Cirque du Soleil, which was a troupe of acrobats.

The show started out with a woman sweeping the stage 'cause I guess it had to be clean although I thought they should have done that before the audience sat down. And then the music started and I realized that she was part of the show.

And it was kind of strange, 'cause there were people running around like a man who looked almost like he was on fire and then someone rode a bicycle through the air upside-down and the floor started lifting up taking her with it.

Then the other performers came out, and it was just one amazing act after another. There were wire-walkers and girls in green dresses that threw diabolos up in the air and around to each other, and there were clowns that pretended that they were in space and had water jugs for helmets and they were really funny. And then they had people riding around on bicycles and unicycles and a little Shriner car and a man did a bunch of balancing tricks on a bicycle and then his friend came out with another bicycle and hopped right into the audience with it and he jumped over a man that they'd found in the audience, and he left stage by falling into a smoky pit.

There was a man and a woman who rode into the sky in a door and hung from it and did acrobatics in the air and that was really beautiful. They moved around in ways that I didn't think were even possible and they made it look completely effortless. And when they rode up into the sky big red fabrics came down with people climbing them and using them to fly around on and it was just like he could fly.

They also had acrobats swinging back and forth from trapeezes and that was almost like flying. They'd switch places in midair and tumble around and they were really graceful. They had a big net below them in case they fell, but they never had to use it until the very end when they were done, and then they all took turns diving into the net and then they all hung off the front and dropped off together.

Another group of acrobats bounced off of trampolines, and that was really amazing to see 'cause I don't think I could have moved as gracefully as they did. And then a couple of them flipped off the trampolines and landed on other people's shoulders which was really amazing, and they did a jump where four of them all passed over each other in the center and then at the end everybody came out and bowed and went back off-stage and when the two clowns who had been fighting left the big rock that they'd thrown up into the sky before fell down on the stage.

After the show was over, we all went out and got in the Suburban and the Jeep and drove over to the Contemporary Resort, which was where we'd be staying because it had a monorail that went everywhere. And the monorail went right through it, which was really neat to see.

We had to get special hoof-bands called magic bands that would let us in, and there was a man who took pictures of our cutie marks so that if somebody took our magic band they wouldn't be able to use it. And the humans all got them, too, but since they didn't have cutie marks they had to put their index fingers on a portable telephone because all human fingers are different.

We got two rooms that were right next to each other, and since we had six helpers with us we shared our room with Miss Parker and Miss Russi who each got one bed. They said that Miss Cherilyn could stay with us, too, but she said that there needed to be somebody to keep the boys in line or else they'd be rappelling down the side of the tower by their neckties or something else crazy like that and Miss Russi laughed and said that if she needed backup they'd come right over and help her out.

Gusty didn't mind the height 'cause we were in a big, solid building but she didn't want to go out on the balcony at all because it was a little scary to be that close to the railing. And I wished that I could fly off of it, but I'd been told that I wasn't allowed to fly in Walt Disney World, so I had to settle for just looking over the edge.

We had mostly settled in when they started shooting off fireworks over the park to celebrate the night, and those were really pretty, and we stayed at the window and watched until they were done.

Author's Note

Once again, a huge debt of thanks to ClosetBrony, who knows WDW like the back of his hoof.

And you'd think I'd remember to put that in the author's note before clicking publish.

December 19 [Magic Kingdom]

December 19

Gusty was up before me again, and when I woke up she was stretched out on the foot of our bed, looking out over the Magic Kingdom. She was still wearing her sleeping clothes, so she must not have gotten up that long ago. Maybe her moving around was what woke me up.

I would have thought I'd be tireder from yesterday 'cause we'd seen so much it was almost overwhelming but I felt pretty awake and alert. My legs and hooves were still a bit sore from all the walking I'd done yesterday and I don't think that today was going to make it any better. Maybe it's something that Canterlot unicorns are used to, 'cause they cobble all the roads there, but I wasn't used to it at all, even after being on Earth for almost a whole year. Paved roads and sidewalks made my leg-joints all sore after a while.

I couldn't really stretch out where I was, so I wiggled out of bed and that woke Aquamarine up so she followed me out. Cayenne was still asleep, and I was starting to wonder what it took to wake her up. If there was nopony in bed with her to wake her up, would she sleep all day?

I opened up the balcony door 'cause it was a nice day outside already, and I went out to stretch. I wasn't supposed to fly over the park but nobody had said that I had to keep my hooves on the ground, either, and I thought that as long as I stayed over the balcony it wouldn't count as actually flying.

Not that that gave me very much room, but it was enough to help stretch out my wings even though all I was really doing was short hops from one side to the other with only a flap or two before I got to the other end. I had to make a bit of allowance for my one wing being stiff, and I had a kind of lopsided flight ‘cause I didn’t really have enough room to work it out, but putting my weight on it helped.

After I'd landed, Aquamarine came outside too and took a big breath of air and then stood up and put her forelegs on the balcony rail and looked around, just taking in the view.

We took our turns taking showers and then when everyone was ready we went to The Wave for breakfast, which was another buffet. Mister Salvatore said that none of us ponies were allowed to have eggs and I didn't mind 'cause they had fluffy waffles and the waiter also brought us out a bowl of mixed hay that we could share which was really nice of him. Miss Parker said that Walt Disney World had always prided itself on having something for all their guests and so they were making accommodations for ponies now.

Then we went to the monorail which was a special, sleek train that ran up in the air on just a single, wide track, and I wasn't sure that Gusty would want to ride it but she was really enthusiastic about it and got right on board as soon as it stopped for us. And when it went out of the building and into open air she tensed up a little bit but then she could see Magic Kingdom getting closer and closer and she started wagging her tail 'cause she was so happy.

She was out of the monorail as soon as the doors had opened enough to let her through, and she did gallop off to the entrance and held up her magic band so that she could get in, and the rest of us caught up to her there at least.

Once she was inside the park she slowed down a little bit, 'cause now there was so much to see that she couldn't figure out what to do. I would have thought that she would have memorized the map, but then I thought that maybe she had, only now that she was seeing it and hearing it and smelling it it was a lot different than looking at it from a map. Sometimes something that looks good on a map isn't so good when you see it yourself, and other times something that didn't look like too much on a map is better than you thought it would be.

It was a lot to take in. There were hundreds or maybe thousands of people there already, and everything was decorated for Christmas. It was almost overdecorated, but it was really pretty. And there were signs that pointed to where the different attractions were, and she looked up and down it and I think she was trying to figure out how we were going to see everything before we had to go back to the hotel for the night.

We were still there looking over the sign when a marching band went by, and that distracted her until they'd passed, and then she must have figured out where she wanted to go first, 'cause she headed off for the big central courtyard that the castle overlooked.

She told us that that was the central part of the park and that everything kind of joined up there and all the paths radiated out from it and she'd wanted to go from one side of the park to the other but she'd decided that she had to have a picture of herself in front of the castle first and maybe we'd see Mickey and Minnie there. And she also told us that we were going to have lunch at the castle with the princesses which was exciting and that was why she’d worn pretty clothes today.

She did find Mickey and Minnie there and they had a friend who was with them who offered to take our picture, which was really nice of him. So we all lined up with them and got our picture taken and then we had to decide which way we wanted to go.

Gusty thought that we could start in Fantasyland so we took a path that went off that way and we went to a little garden which had banners hanging up around it and there was a woman with curly red hair who was called Merida who we could meet. And she had some bears who were her friends but we had to call them out 'cause they were hiding behind a wall and they were fake bears that didn't smell bearish at all. And she signed a book that Gusty had and we all got our pictures taken with her and then her friends helped us shoot bows at a target. They had an earth-pony bow there for us and it didn't work the same as a pegasus bow 'cause you had to use your forehooves on it, but we all made it work and hit the target, and I was really proud of myself 'cause I'd done the best with my shot.

Then we went by a pavilion that had a tea party and went to ride a mine train and it rolled around a little bit and then went through a mine where there were singing dwarves and Gusty knew all their names, which mostly sounded like pony names. They were getting big gems out of the walls, and Cayenne said that she knew that that was made up, 'cause no jewelry store she'd been into had any gems that size, and we agreed that there weren't gems like that on Earth.

The train stopped in front of a little cottage where all the dwarves and Snow White were singing, and then it went back to its station and we got out and went across the street to Ariel's Grotto.

She was the mermaid from before and it was kind of like a cave inside but I wasn't scared 'cause I knew that it was actually a building. And Ariel was sitting on her throne and she signed Gusty's book, too, and we got our picture taken with her, and then we went to the undersea ride which I was hoping would be on a submarine 'cause that might be fun. It would be kind of scary but I knew that all the rides here were safe even if they seemed scary.

We went through a big grotto that had water falls around it and when we got inside there were bits of shipwrecks and there was a sign saying that crabs sometimes brought things that didn't belong and we had to point to them and they’d take them away, and then we saw a little blue crab who was stacking up plates and waving at people, and he was behind glass and sometimes he’d bring something that wasn’t a plate and then carry it off again when you pointed at him. He was kind of slow, and didn't always realize he was being pointed at right away.

There was an albatross who was talking to people but not really paying attention to what they said to him and then when we got closer I saw that he was fake, too. Gusty said that he was named Scuttle and he kind of reminded me of Albie.

The cars were like seashells and when we got in them there was another Scuttle who was playing a concertina and told us about Ariel and then we went 'underwater.' It wasn't really underwater but it looked like it, and it was kind of like being in the ocean and they even had fake fish 'swimming' around which was neat.

And then we saw the bad morays and it got dark and we went by Ursula and even saw magic tracing a heart around Ariel and the Prince and even though it was fake human magic, I liked it.

A little ways past that we went to the Small World ride, which had a weird white village that we passed through on our way in, and then we got in boats to take us around.

It took us past robots who were wearing costumes from all different parts of the world, and they were all dancing and singing in their languages and we were trying to guess where they were supposed to be from, and that was hard 'cause it was so stylized and cartoony. We thought that we'd gone through Europe first and then Asia and then Africa and the Pacific Islands and then our ears all turned when we heard singing in Equestrian and there was a little scene with ponies which was really neat, but also kind of strange to see. And they had greetings in several languages at the end, as well.

Right across from that was Peter Pan's flight and I thought that would be fun but that maybe Gusty wouldn't want to, but she did. And we got into little ships and they didn't really fly but hung from a track instead. But it looked like they were flying and kind of felt like it, too, by the way that they moved everything else around—it was sort of like being in the airplane simulators, and I kind of wished that I'd had a control yoke so I could make it do things, but all I could do was ride along with it.

Me and Aquamarine got our chance to go Go-Karting before lunch, 'cause Gusty wanted to see the Enchanted Tales with Belle, and Cayenne wanted to shop in the Big Top souvenirs, so we agreed that we'd meet back up in front of the castle for our lunch, and so we went off to the Tomorrowland Go-Karts and they weren't quite as fun as I'd thought because they had guide rails so you couldn't go wherever you wanted with them like you could with real Go-Karts and we had to wait for the person in front of us a couple of times when they stopped ‘cause we couldn’t go around them.

But that was okay because Aquamarine was driving and she wasn't very good at it. I guess she'd never had a chance to drive a real car before, and the extra guidance helped her.

While we were on the track, I heard a steam whistle and looked around but I didn't see any trains or steamships that might have made it, but it was close, 'cause when we got a little bit further down the road I heard a distinct chuffing, and Aquamarine did too.

We didn't have a lot of time left before lunch and Gusty would be really upset if we were late so we didn't try to get on any more rides, but we did look around for the train. And we didn't find it, but we found a train station that was not too far from us and that was where the train stopped. It made a big loop around the park so you could get from one side to the other without having to walk all the way and I really wanted to ride it.

And then on our way back to the castle, we saw a moving Equestrian banner and it took us a little while to catch up to it, and it turned out that it was a flag that a woman was wearing on a harness and she had a couple of ponies with her. She was a tour leader who was in charge of the group that Golden Wheat and Arctic Lily were in and they weren't with her. She said that she didn't know where they were, but she thought that they'd been planning to go to the Animal Kingdom today.

But we did meet the ponies who were with her, who were Pumpkin Twizzle, Buttercup, and Java Bolt. And they were all from Baltimare and I didn't know any of them but I knew Pumpkin Twizzle's mom sort of 'cause she sailed on the Red Jacket which went up and down the coast and was a pretty old ship that used to sail across the ocean but didn't any more.

We talked with them a little while and would have liked to talk a bit longer but we had to get to the castle so we all hugged and nuzzled and then we trotted off to meet with Gusty. And we had to wait a little bit to get inside because we were early for our reservation but that was better than being late and there were lots of things to look at in the castle anyways, and Gusty was a little bit late which I hadn’t expected, and when she showed up she was wearing a new dress and had had her mane and tail done. She said that she’d gone to Bibbidi Bobbidi and had a Princess makeover and she was dressed up like Jasmine and she was really pretty.

And then we went up a spiral staircase and got greeted by Princess Cinderella and she had a beautiful dress and she was really nice. And Gusty got her autograph and we all got a picture with her and then we went inside and the room kind of reminded me of the dining hall in Harry Potter but it was a lot more ornate. Cayenne said that the dining halls in the Royal Palace looked a lot like this, too.

They had lots of food for us and we got plates with spiced hay and cheese (Cayenne didn't want any of that) and I had fish to eat and I shared a little bit of it with Aquamarine but she didn't like it as much as I did. And there were other princesses there—Snow White and Rapunzel also both came over to meet us and Gusty got their autographs, too.

It was nice to sit down and have a relaxing meal before went back out in the park.

We didn't want to do anything too exciting right after eating, so we convinced Gusty that it would be fun to ride the train, and went back to the Fantasyland train station. The train locomotive was just like an Equestrian steam locomotive but it was bigger like most human things, and it was a really pretty red and green.

The cars were open, and so we could see and smell everything around the park, and the conductor told us where we were and what we were seeing. And we went by the Go-Kart tracks and then past Space Mountain and we had to wait at Main Street Station so that people could get on and off, then it went to Frontierland which was where we wanted to go.

We got on a riverboat called the Liberty Belle that took us on a tour of the important rivers of America, and we got to see some of Frontierland and the Thunder Mountain ride and there were also little scenes around on land like a Native American village with people working on canoes, and a cabin and we saw some mooses that were probably fake, 'cause they didn't run off when they saw us. And we saw the steam train pass by while we were sailing, and a little cave with a boat by it, and a wooden fort and it was a lot of fun and really relaxing.

After that we went to Thunder Mountain and it was a made-up mining camp and we stopped to look at the wagon they had that was put there as scenery. Aquamarine said that it wasn't complete, 'cause it didn't have any brakes on it at all, not even drop chains. She said that maybe if it was empty, it wouldn't need brakes, but when it was full just a breeching strap wasn't going to be enough to stop it. And we got to go past a couple of little frontier buildings that had fake gold and lots of lanterns and you could stand on your hind hooves and look out the windows and see the train going around.

The train started off going through a tunnel and climbing up a hill and there was a cave in there that looked kind of like the one I'd seen in Colorado before I got scared and ran away. And then we almost got splashed before the train went out of the cave and started rolling around the tracks and it was a lot of fun to ride.

We went to Splash Mountain next which looked about the same before the ride—it was also made up to look like a frontier town—and we got to ride in a big floating log and we went around a big thorn-patch where you could look over at people riding down on the other side. And it went slowly around through a desert and there was a little garden there with big fake plants and a strange little house in a tree and Cayenne said that she thought it might be a pegasus house and I stuck my tongue out at her. And we went through a tunnel and past some singing birds who probably lived in the treehouses, and a bear and rabbit that waved at us, and they had houses that looked like Earth Pony houses sort of. And then we went into a tunnel and saw that the bear had gotten his muzzle stuck in an bee's nest and it sort of sped up and we got into rapids and went by singing frogs that weren't Kermit. And there were lots of signs telling us to go back but we couldn't and some eagles taunted us and if I hadn't been belted in I would have flown up there and told those eagles what I thought of them.

We had a really nice view of the park just before we tipped over the edge, and then we all got splashed. Gusty was a little bit mad 'cause her clothes got wet but the rest of us didn't mind being wet, 'cause it was a warm day.

We went over to the Pirates of the Caribbean next and while we were waiting in line we saw our friends from before, so we introduced Gusty and Cayenne to them and it was fun because we could talk for a bit and then the line would move so we weren't across from them anymore and then we would be again.

And we got in little boats and it was kind of scary because sometimes it was almost completely dark and Gusty lit her horn but she wasn't supposed to and some of the other people in the boat yelled at her for it and I thought that was mean of them.

We went by a pirate ship that was shooting cannons over us, and past a little town and then by a burning building, and we saw Jack Sparrow in a rocking chair and I heard Gusty give a happy sigh when she saw him, and then Cayenne asked if she had a crush on Johnny Depp and she said so what if she did.

It hadn't been quite what I was expecting, but it was fun and then the gift shop had lots of pirate things and sailing things and so I wanted to look around at that some because maybe I would find a good Hearth's Warming present for someone, and so I stayed behind with Miss Cherilyn and Mister Salvatore while everyone else went on their way.

Most of it was fake and just meant to look nice but not be used on an actual ship, but I did find a book about pirate ships that I thought I could give Zucche and maybe she could put it in the tavern where everypony could enjoy it. And it had lots of pictures, so even if they couldn't read it they'd get an idea what human pirate ships were like. And I thought about getting a pirate flag, too, but it was bad luck to put somepony else's colors on your ship.

When I was done looking, Mister Salvatore called Mister Barrow to find out where they were and he said that everybody had split up and Gusty was going to the Country Bear Jamboree and Cayenne wanted to see the Christmas Shop, so they'd gone off that way and that they had Aquamarine who was going to go on the Jungle Boat Ride.

Well, that sounded fun to me so I wanted to go there, too, and Aquamarine was really nice and waited for me so that we could do it together. And that had a kind of Daring Do theme and we got on boats with canvas tops and chimneys that went right up the middle of them and if they were real boilers it would have been really dangerous, 'cause you could get burned if you touched them by mistake.

Our tour guide made a bunch of bad jokes and puns and there were a lot of them that me and Aquamarine didn't get but we could tell by Mister Salvatore grinning when he had. And Miss Parker just groaned at some of them, like when he said that giant butterflies were the rulers of the Amazon 'cause they had twelve-inch wingspans.

Most of the animals we saw were fake, but the plants were real. And there was a jeep that was on its back and a little bit further there were a bunch of lions eating a gazelle. Mister Barrow said that it used to be a zebra there but after they'd found out that there were sapient zebras in Equestria they changed it and that had made a lot of people mad who had said that Disney shouldn't bow to pressure from ponies, even though ponies hadn't even known about it. Which was kind of confusing. We all knew that there were lots of monsters and animals that would try to eat us if they got the chance, and you had to be smart and not let them.

We had to lean over so that the boat would miss a waterfall, and then it went past a wrecked airplane to a pool with hippos in it and past some headhunters who had skulls on their boat, and then we went into partially-sunken temple, and when we came out we went through a bunch of Indian elephants who were all bathing in the river. And that sounded pretty good to me, too, 'cause it was pretty hot and I wouldn't mind soaking in the water for a bit. We weren't supposed to get out of the boat and swim, though.

Me and Aquamarine met up with the unicorns at the Diamond Horseshoe for dinner, and Gusty rushed her way through dinner 'cause there was still a lot that we hadn't seen yet. And so we went across the central courtyard to Stitch's Great Escape, and Gusty told me that Stitch was a genetically engineered creature who escaped and got to Earth where he made friends with a girl named Lilo and so we got to see how he'd made his escape, and he splashed us with water some and when he burped it smelled like when Cayenne farted and I blamed her for it.

And then we went to Space Mountain and we had to go through a big long corridor to get there and it was almost all dark inside so we didn’t know what was going on at all except that we were going up and down and turning and then we went through a corridor of flashing lights and it was really disorienting and I didn't like it all that much. Cayenne said it was like riding the subway but darker and faster. I was really glad when we got back outside in the open air.

We were gonna see Winnie the Pooh next but then Gusty saw Donald Duck and so we had to gallop partway across the park so that she could get his autograph and get a picture of him and I didn't mind 'cause it was nice to be outside after that last ride and let my insides settle down some. It had been too much like getting caught in an updraft inside a cloud and getting disoriented by it.

It really smelled like honey when we got over close to there, too, and I was curious where the scent was coming from so me and Aquamarine started sniffing around until we found a little vent that had honey-smell coming from it. I thought that maybe there was a really big beehive behind it, so we didn't get too close, 'cause we didn't want to get stung.

We got to ride in a really big honeypot, and there were pages from a book on the wall that we could read, and the first one said that the East Wind and West Wind had switched places and I said that if I had a big enough team of pegasuses I could make that happen.

Winnie had decided to go floating off on a balloon which maybe wasn't so smart, and his friend Eeyore who was a donkey didn't look too happy about that. Gusty said that Eeyore was always moody 'cause that's how donkeys were. And at the very end of the ride there was a picture of Winnie riding Eeyore, and he didn't look too happy about that, either.

We passed by a quartet singing in the street and then we saw a show called PhilharMagic and we had to wear 3D glasses for that. And Donald was pretty yelly at the orchestra and I thought he was more of a goose than a duck. He messed up trying to conduct an orchestra and lost his magic hat and keep trying to get it back, and it was really confusing 'cause he kept winding up in new places but I guess that can happen when you teleport wrong. That never happens when you're flying. And maybe that was why Gusty and Cayenne seemed to be following along better than me and Aquamarine were.

Our last ride of the night was Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, and he was one of the toys from Toy Story. And the ride was a lot like the Midway Mania 'cause we had to aim lasers and shoot them at targets, and we got to wear special hoof-hooks again so that we could use them on the aliens who were called Zurgs. And when we got to the end and compared our scores I thought me and Aquamarine had done the best until Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow got out of their car and they had a much better score than we did and they were all braggy about it until Miss Cherilyn and Miss Parker told them how they'd done and they'd gotten the highest scores of all and were Cosmic Commanders, and Mister Salvatore was pretty grumpy about that, especially after Miss Cherilyn and Miss Parker bought pictures of each of them with their scores. She said that she was going to hang them up in the office.

The whole park had gotten lots prettier after dark with all the Christmas lights everywhere, and we got some ice cream and sat down and admired it while we were eating our ice cream, and then we went to the main courtyard to see the closing ceremonies. And they had the castle all lit up and then we saw Tinker Bell flying around, and I wanted to go up there and fly around with her, but I wasn't allowed to.

Then they started shooting fireworks up in the air around the castle and that was really beautiful to see. I'd seen fireworks on the Fourth of July but not like this—there were lots more of them and they were really pretty and exploding around it in all sorts of different colors, and they had lights on the castle to make it look different colors and it was really amazing to see.

We were all kind of tired when we were walking back to the monorail. My wing was stiffening up again and I did some flaps to help stretch it out, and Cayenne had a little bit of a limp. And we saw a lot of parents who were carrying their children and a few yawns from people. But Gusty was still pretty hyper and full of energy, and when we got to the Monorail and all were resting on the seats she had her hooves up on the windowsill and was looking out at the park still.

When we got back to our room, she was the last one in bed—she waited until everyone else had gotten ready before she went into the bathroom to change into her sleeping clothes, and Cayenne was already snoring before she got into bed, and I was almost asleep myself. It had been a really fun and really long day.

Author's Note

Special thanks to ClosetBrony, who's been tirelessly correcting my mistakes and misunderstandings of Walt Disney World.

December 20 [Epcot]

December 20

I woke up not too long after I went to bed 'cause there was a thunderstorm outside. And I got out of bed and opened up the balcony door just a little bit 'cause I didn't want anyone to get wet and went outside. And just when I stepped onto the balcony I thought that maybe if I got really wet I shouldn't get back in bed, but it was the kind of thunderstorm that was all flashing and noise and no rain. It was like pegasus fireworks over the park, and I could see the whole castle light up sometimes where there was a really bright flash.

I thought I'd been quiet and sneaky, but I'd woken up Gusty, and she got out of bed and went and stood inside the door and asked me if I thought it was gonna rain tomorrow. Well, I couldn't be absolutely sure without flying out there and seeing for myself but it didn't feel like it was gonna. And so I told her that and then I saw the look of relief on her face and she set her head on my back and watched the weather over my shoulder until I backed inside and closed the window 'cause it was calming down. And then we got back in bed together and snuggled up with our friends and fell asleep again.

It was kinda embarrassing to have a unicorn wake up before me every morning, and it happened again. At least I woke up when she got out of bed, so I didn't feel like I was being lazy. And Aquamarine got up right after me, and so did Miss Russi, so that only left Cayenne in bed, and she was lazy in the mornings.

I went out to the balcony to get some fresh air and Aquamarine followed me, and then when Gusty was in the shower we woke up Cayenne and she was a bit grumpy about getting up, but she did when we promised her that the coffee was on its way.

She stretched out and said that we'd better not be lying, and then she wiggled around a hoof and said that she thought one of her shoes was getting a little bit loose and she had been hoping to wait to get back to Equestria before she had to be shod again because the farrier in Chicago was a complete butcher. And Aquamarine said that if she could get some tools, she could fix it at least temporarily, and so Cayenne picked up the room telephone and called the front desk 'cause they had a little sign saying if we needed anything to call them.

Well, we found out that they didn't have farrier tools that we could borrow. But the man at the desk was very helpful and said that he would see if that was something that their medical staff was trained to do, and he said that if she threw a shoe they did have hoof boots available that they would be happy to loan her.

She didn't think she was gonna throw it but she decided that she'd be a little bit more careful on her forehoof. And she said it was 'cause of all the walking she'd done over the last couple of days.

Once everyone was ready we went to the Contempo Cafe and they had fast breakfasts which made Gusty really happy, 'cause if she wasn't waiting for a princess or a mouse she wanted to be in the park. And I couldn't really blame her; it was lots of fun. And we'd just finished up eating when Miss Parker's portable telephone rang and she listened for a minute and then gave it to Cayenne, and it was the nice man from the front desk, and he said that he could have hoof boots sent for her to try on if she wanted and if she needed it in the park to just stop at one of the medical centers and they would get it for her, and he also had a telephone number for a farrier if she wanted to have her shoe reattached. And we were all kind of surprised that he would have done that and Gusty got a big smile and said it was because Disney was magic.

We rode the monorail to Epcot, which was south of the hotel. And they had a really big sphere building that looked kind of like a golf ball, which we'd gone by on our way to Hollywood Studios.

There weren't as many people and I thought that maybe it was because it was still kinda early for people but Miss Parker said it was because the weekend was over, so a lot of people had had to go back home. I thought it might be nice to have a little bit more space without all the crowds, 'cause it was a bit overwhelming to have so many humans all together, especially since I wasn't supposed to fly over them.

The first place that we went was the giant golf ball which was actually a geodesic sphere and that had been invented by a man named Buckminster Fuller. And there was a ride inside it that would tell us all about the history of humanity and when we got in the little green cars there was a screen that let us pick what language we wanted to hear and it was smart so we could tell it. There wasn't Equestrian so we had to pick English, but when it asked us where we lived we could choose Equestria and it showed us where it was in the stars.

We saw how people had started off living in caves and then the Egyptians had built their own stone mountains which they called pyramids and I knew some stuff about them because of what Moses had said. And then we saw the Greeks and Romans and the Medieval scholars and artists, and then it showed how people had started inventing better and better machines and we got to see what a living room looked like and an office full of computers which were a lot bigger than mine and had lots of flashing lights. And then there was a little scene of Barack Obama meeting ponies for the first time, and then we got to go back, and while we were, the little television screen started asking us questions about us and then the television gave us a vision of our future where I would have a robot that could watch my dog while my spaceship took me to see the world.

We had to go to the character spot next so that Gusty could meet Baymax who was a big blobby thing. Cayenne said that he looked like the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters and I didn't know what that was. But he was really friendly even though he didn't talk, and he couldn't write either but his friend Hiro signed Gusty's autograph book and then we all got a picture with him. They had a whole schedule of when the important people and animals from Disney would be there, and she was determined to see them all.

And then we went to Mission: Space which was going to take us to Mars (but not really). We went through a entry room that had little model spaceships hanging up on the ceiling and posters of the first human family in space and spacesuits and it was kind of like the Kennedy Space Center. And then we had our own special spaceship module that we could get into that was pony-friendly but I had to be careful of my wings 'cause it wasn't pegasus-friendly. And it pretended to launch and it was really like being in a spaceship. It was shakey and I got pressed down by the acceleration and then got light when it stopped accelerating and we slingshotted around the moon and then bumped into some asteroids on our way to Mars and after we landed we almost fell in a pit.

I'd forgotten what they warned me about my wings and I hit Gusty and Aquamarine a couple of times by mistake. I guess that was probably why I'd had to wear a harness to hold them in when we were in the Tower of Terror. When things came up slowly I could remember but when it was quick like this my instincts took over and tried to keep me from falling.

It was a lot of fun but I was glad to get out of it because it was kinda disorienting, and it was nice to be back outside where I wasn't unexpectedly getting moved around. It was a lot better to fly on your own.

We went to the Test Track next, and we got to design our own car which was a lot of fun. We got to wear special styluses which is what humans call computer pens, because while human fingers worked on the screens our hooves didn't work very well, and horseshoes would break them. So me and Aquamarine just made suggestions and let Gusty and Cayenne use the styluses because they could hold them in their auras, and once we'd made the basic car we got to make its face and choose its wheels and what color it was and even what kind of engine it had and there were a lot of choices. And then when we'd finished our magic bracelets remembered what we'd designed, so we got to go down and drive it around. The car we got in was a SIM-car, which meant that it didn't look like ours but the computer said that it was going to behave like ours would if it was real. And then it said that it was auto-driving, and I thought that that was just their way of admitting that we couldn't really steer it but Cayenne said that there really were cars that could drive themselves and she'd gotten to ride in a Tesla which could do that.

After it went around the track and made Gusty scream when it almost ran into a SIM-truck, it went outside and raced around a course and then spiraled around the building and that was a lot of fun even though we didn't get to drive it ourselves. And instead of having a shop full of small gifts at the end of the track, it had actual cars. You weren't allowed to buy the ones that they had on display but if you were interested there were helpful people there who could tell you where you could buy one. We couldn't, though, because there weren't any Chevrolet salesponies in Equestria.

Our helpers liked looking at the cars, though. Mister Wayne liked the Corvette the best and Mister Salvatore said that he preferred the 2500 HD pickup truck. I liked the Camaro because it was yellow with black stripes and Cayenne said that that was like Bumblebee which was a car in a movie that was really a giant robot disguised as a car, which I guess made it a changeling Camaro. And Eleanor had been yellow with black stripes, too.

We had to go back to the character spot because Joy and Sadness were there. I liked Joy better 'cause she was happier and bubblier, but Sadness was almost the same color that I was and she looked like she really needed a hug so all of us ponies hugged and nuzzled her, but that didn't work. There were a lot of other people in line waiting to see her and it would be rude to take up too much of her time but I hoped that if she got enough hugs it would make her happy.

Then we went to a place called Soarin' Around the World and I thought it might be about the Wonderbolts but it wasn't. They had seats that were like a ski lift and when it started we got lifted up and then got to tour the world like we were flying and I had to remember to keep my wings in. It was a lot slower than the other rides so it was easier to remember but I did forget a couple of times and Cayenne got smart and kept her hoof up to keep my wings out of her muzzle.

And then after that we got to go on a boat that toured through the greenhouses where Disney grew all their food, and that was really neat. At first we went through a forest in a rainstorm while the announcer explained how roots worked and let the plants eat, and how buffalos used their hooves to put the food in the soil for the plants. And that was what Earth ponies did, too.

Then we went through a geodesic dome greenhouse and there were lots of tropical plants growing in there that we weren't allowed to touch. Inside the greenhouse was the first time that I saw Gusty get a little bit bored but Aquamarine was trying to see everything and for a moment I thought she was going to try and jump off the boat to get a better look at all the plants.

Then we went into a big room that had tanks of fish and that got my attention and I was the one who was looking around at all of them trying to see them all. 'Cause you could keep fish in a tank and then you'd have them when you wanted them.

They had potatoes that grew in pots in the air instead of under the ground, and then they had lettuce that grew in water pipes and Aquamarine wasn't sure what to think about that. And they had tomato trees too which were kind of strange but the announcer said that they lived longer and made more tomatoes than vines.

We ate our lunch at the Garden Grill, which was in the same building, and they had a fresh salad that came from what they grew back in their greenhouses, which meant that we were probably eating tree-tomatoes and pipe-lettuce but it smelled normal and tasted normal so I guess they were telling the truth when they said that it was a good substitute.

Aquamarine told us that she'd learned that people could genetically modify crops and that was just like selective breeding except that it was very specific and a lot faster, so you could use it to react to a new kind of pest or drought conditions or anything else that might take generations of plants to do the old-fashioned way and it was a little bit more specific with what she could do with her magic but you still had to hope you planted the right kind of crop, 'cause if you planted one that was good in droughts and then it rained a lot it might not do well. And she said that there were some that were designed to be resistant to a certain kind of poison that would kill bugs and weeds but leave the crop alone and a lot of people didn't like that idea and she wasn't really convinced that it was a good idea either because she thought it was a lot better to have your hooves on all your crops and actually know them instead of having the big machines like the humans did which practically did all the farming for you.

Me and Cayenne were listening to what she had to say but Gusty wasn't, 'cause she'd spotted Chip and Dale who were chipmunks, and when they finally came over she got them to sign her little autograph book and got a picture with them, too.

When we were done eating we went back to the Character Spot and see Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Pluto and we got to get our picture taken with each of them, and Gusty got their autographs. I kind of liked Pluto, 'cause he was sort of silly, and he bent down and rubbed snouts with us which was nice of him.

And then we went to their little lake, and there were pavilions all around it that were from different countries, and there was even an Equestrian one and we couldn't decide if we should start there or end there. Then we decided that while it would be lots of fun to see other ponies it would be too bad to miss any of the other pavilions, so we thought we'd see them last 'cause that would be a nice way to end the day.

We went over to the Mexico pavilion next, and they had a big tall pyramid with a fancy and kind of strange man on it, and then inside it was like a museum and there were all sorts of displays about how people in Mexico used to live and how they lived now, and they had buildings that were like a Mexican street and there was a mariachi band. Cayenne really liked them and she followed them around for a little bit and when they noticed they stopped and played a song just for her.

After we’d gone through their little outdoor market, we went on the Grand Fiesta Tour, and got in a little boat that took us through Mexico where caballeros were chasing after Donald Duck (I still think he's more goose despite his beak) 'cause he kept trying to get away from them, and we went through a lot of really neat Mexican scenes. They built pyramids, too, but theirs were more ornate than the Egyptian ones. And they also had a city with skyscratchers which was neat. And they finally caught him at the end of the ride.

Norway was next to Mexico, and they had a really pretty stave church, and we found a couple of Vikings and I knew what they were because of How to Train your Dragon, and I wanted to have my picture taken with them and they were really happy about that, and then they played a little game where one of them pretended to be a unicorn while I tried to throw a ring around his fake horn and I threw one around Gusty's horn, too, which everyone thought was really funny.

Some Norwegian houses were dark wood with grass roofs and Aquamarine liked those and said that maybe she'd build her house like that some day. And in their museum they had lots of displays about the vikings. I liked them, 'cause just like in How to Train Your Dragon, they were really bold and brave, and they sailed around everywhere.

When we went back outside, a pretty blonde woman in a black dress and bright red coat told us how they celebrated Christmas in Norway, and there was a man called Julenissen who was a Santa that lived in haylofts and caused her all sorts of trouble especially if people were bad.

And then we went on a ride called Frozen Ever After which was modeled like Arendelle, and that was an almost Equestrian-looking town. There was a sauna but we couldn't actually go in there. And then we got on little boats that were kind of like Viking ships and we went by a reindeer who had gotten his tongue stuck to a pole. And then we went into another room where Anna was singing and then the boat had to back out which I hadn't been expecting and it was all wintery on the way out and there was a big group of happy snowmen and then a castle with fireworks exploding over it that was kind of like what we'd seen last night.

Right next to that was a pavilion for China, and they had a big gate that was really fancy and lots of dragons on things, and a pond that was full of koi that were for looking at and not for eating. And they painted their buildings with lots of gold and had really intricate patterns on them, and we went inside a big domed building that was really beautiful and they had a movie that showed us around China, and it was really neat ‘cause it was on all the walls around us and we could move around and look at what we wanted to see.

They also had some displays about what China was like and an army of clay soldiers, and Gusty found a woman who was named Mulan and so she had to get her autograph and a picture with her. We were going to take a whole group picture but Cayenne had gotten distracted by some fans that were for sale and we had to bring her back for the picture before we could look in the store.

There were statues of Buddha, too, and Mister Salvatore said that he thought you were supposed to rub his belly for luck, so we all nuzzled it, and I went over and looked at the paper lanterns they had while Cayenne found a really pretty handbag that she liked.

We went to Germany next and Cayenne really liked that because they had an Oktoberfest tavern which had beer. I'd missed Oktoberfest which was a drinking festival, but Cayenne hadn't. And Gusty found Snow White there, 'cause she was German, so she got her picture taken and got an autograph.

They also had a doll village with a train that went around it and that was really neat to see. We got right up to the fence to watch it and Aquamarine said that if you laid down on your belly and kind of squinted your eyes it was like it was real, so all of us did that except for Gusty, 'cause she didn't want to get her clothes dirty.

I really liked the half-timbered houses and Aquamarine said that most houses in Ponyville looked like that except that they had thatch roofs. We had those in Chonamare, too, but most of our houses were just stone 'cause there was lots of it and everypony wanted to save the wood for boats and cookfires. You couldn't build a boat out of stone!

The Italian pavilion was really neat, too. They had a big bell tower and statues on big columns. One of them looked like a griffon and the other one was a person. And they had a restaurant that made pizzas from wood ovens that were named after volcanoes who were named after gods.

In the courtyard there was a man who was juggling and he was fun to see. We stopped and watched him until Gusty had to trot off to meet Pinocchio. I thought maybe she should have waited until he was done, 'cause it was rude to leave like that. He was really funny too 'cause he didn't talk but he whistled instead, and he had a boat that he kept all his things in.

Then before we left we got scared by a statue 'cause it was really a person pretending to be a statue and when we got too close she moved and I jumped back and flared out my wings and Cayenne put up a shield really quick and that made her jump and then we were all laughing and we posed with her and her friend took our picture.

The next place was America and I thought that maybe we ought to skip it and see the other places first and then come back but they had a play about American History and I thought that would be interesting. So we went inside and watched that, and Benjamin Franklin who had discovered that clouds had electricity and Mark Twain who wrote about riverboats told us some American history and they had little scenes that the two of them explained and discussed. And in the evening there was going to be a candlelight procession for Christmas and that was something we all wanted to see.

So we went to Japan next and went under an arched gate which is called a torii, and that led us to some really pretty gardens and fish ponds, and they had a restaurant which made your food right in front of you instead of back in the kitchen, and they had a sushi restaurant, too. And they had a little museum about cute things that Japan had made which were called Kawaii and Cayenne said that there ought to be a picture of her there too and I said that she wasn't cute enough and stuck my tongue out at her.

And when we came back out there were Matsuriza drummers who were really good. Aquamarine started stomping her hooves along with them and pretty soon we all were and we really had to pay attention 'cause they kept changing their rhythm a little bit. They were really funny, too, 'cause they kept fighting over who got to hit the drums in the middle and who could play the most drums at once and then they all played together faster and faster.

Morocco was next to that, and they had a museum and even a normal house where we could see how Moroccan people lived. Cayenne said that she thought Saddle Arabian houses were kind of like that, too. Aquamarine got really excited when she found a garden that had North African plants in it, but none of us liked the restaurant that served lamb. Lambs were cute, even if they were kinda dumb. But they also had hummus which was really good, and we got a little sample of that.

There was a store that sold things made out of brass and mosaics and tiles and vases and they had too much to fit in the store so it just stretched outside like in a proper market. And they also had rugs but none of them were magic flying carpets which Gusty said that they had in Arabia (and Donald and his friends had been on one, too).

There was a man called Taarji who sat outside and he told everyone about how Ramadan and Ashura were celebrated in Morocco, which was really neat. I wasn't sure that I liked the idea of fasting for Ramadan, but you got to eat after the sun went down at least. And I guess that it proved your faith, 'cause a lot of times the Israelites had done it in the Bible, too.

The streets were kind of narrow and we were a little bit walled in, and Gusty said that was the kind of place that Aladdin liked and so we looked around until we found him, and he was with Jasmine who was a princess and she had the same dress that Gusty had been wearing yesterday, and we got our pictures taken with them and Gusty got more autographs.

We went to France next and saw a movie about all the beautiful places in France and they had a store that sold wine and also one that I thought would sell casseroles, but it didn't. And they had a bakery that sold pastries and an ice cream store and we were hungry for a snack, so that was a good place to have it. They also had a tower that looked like a fancy electricity tower and it was a replica of a famous landmark in Paris called the Eiffel Tower. And Belle was there along with Princess Aurora, and Gusty got their autographs and we took pictures with them and I was wondering just how many princesses there were. I guess if each country only had a couple that wasn't too many, but it was kind of hard to keep track of all of them. Gusty didn't seem to be having any trouble with it, though.

Then we went on to England and they had a pub and Cayenne said that the snack had made her thirsty and so we went in and had a drink. I got Bass which didn't taste like fish at all and I couldn't decide if it would be better if it did. And then we went to a hedge maze and if I was allowed to fly I could have solved it really quickly, but I had to keep my hooves on the ground and wander around like everyone else.

Their houses looked the most like the ones in Ponyville, Aquamarine said, 'cause their cottage had a proper thatched roof. And we found a building called the Historical Research Center which had a sign that said that they could tell you the history of your name and that sounded like fun but they didn't know the history of any of our names. Cayenne insisted that her family had kept track of their bloodline all the way back to Princess Platinum and Gusty said that she was related to her, too, and the two of them gave each other a hoof-bump. Aquamarine's family hadn't kept track as well and their records were pretty spotty before the founding of Ponyville, but she could list off all her cousins by memory. All I could say for sure was who my Granddam was and I didn't know before that.

They also had a restaurant that sold fish and chips and that sounded pretty good. But I didn't get anything because I wanted to see what else there was to eat.

Right as we were leaving, Gusty found Mary Poppins who wasn't a princess but just a nanny and could fly around using her umbrella, and so she got her autograph.

The Canadian pavilion had the prettiest gardens, and we thought that the Canadians must be good at making gardens, 'cause the ones in Stratford had been really nice, too. There was a waterfall that would splash you if you stood close and so that cooled us down. And the little rugged parts kind of reminded me of Colorado.

They had big poles called totem poles and one of them told the story of how the Raven tricked the Sky Chief into releasing the sun, moon, and stars from a chest where he was keeping them. I bet if he'd tried to get Princess Celestia and Princess Luna in his chest they wouldn't have let him.

There were two mooses there who were called Rutt and Tuke and Gusty knew them even though they weren't princesses and we got to hoofbump them and get our picture taken with them, too. And then we went into their theatre and watched a movie about Canada that was all around us, just like the movie about China had been. There was a lot of Canada to see, and it was all really pretty, and I wondered how much of it Sterling Silver and Viola had gotten to see from their train.

We'd seen lots of restaurants in all the different pavilions, and none of us could decide which we liked the best and so we split up and all had dinner where we most wanted to. I went to Tokyo Dining, 'cause they had sushi and I thought that would be better than fish and chips.

Right after dinner we all met back up and went to the Equestrian pavilion. It was the smallest and newest one, and there were some pony houses including a half-timbered one like the ones Aquamarine said were in Ponyville and a more modern Manehattan rowhouse which we all thought was kind of ugly but Gusty said that was the kind of house she'd grown up in.

There was a little museum and there were pictures of Equestria and a model of the Canterlot castle, and I hadn't known that the Earth ponies started building Canterlot but later on they moved away 'cause there were too many buildings and not enough fields, and so they spread out in the plains in the valley below.

We stuck our noses in a gift shop that had lots of pony-themed toys and gifts, and then we found one that had more authentic things that were actually made by ponies, or at least that's what the signs said. There was a really nice chess set that was carved out of wood, and I bet that if you knew the craftsmare you could have her make you one for a fraction of the price.

There were a bunch of ponies who worked there, too. There were a couple of mares named Coral Shine and Offbeat dressed up in skirts and aprons who were at the gift store, and they were really happy to see us and we gossiped a bit in Equestrian. They told us that we had to watch the Quiet/Fluff magic show, so we said that we would and then nuzzled them and while we were going to the little pavilion we passed by a zebra in a grass skirt named Zenith who had a little cart and was selling fake potions and friendship masks. And she was really friendly and nuzzled all of us and gave us a Zebrican blessing before we went on our way.

And we also saw High Winds and Lightning Streak who I guess were allowed to fly, 'cause they were soaring over the pavilion. And when they saw us they landed and they were both Wonderbolts (I would have known that even if they weren't wearing their uniforms) so that was really exciting, and they said that I could fly with them for a little bit if I wanted to, but I had to stay with them.

So I went up and we flew around their pavilion and then went down a little bit lower and zipped over the main street and circled around the Italian bell tower before coming back and landing. It felt really good to stretch my wings some, 'cause I'd hardly gotten a chance to fly at all since we'd come to Disney World. I wish that I'd known that they were there before.

They had to trot off, 'cause they were supposed to be mingling and greeting other people in the park, and we wanted to see Quiet/Fluff, who were a pair of mares wearing dark suits and top hats.

Quiet/Fluff was really funny. Most of what they did was meant to appeal to people, so it was all glimmer and not so much real magic. Quiet Gestures never talked and she was usually the butt of the joke, but whenever Banana Fluff wasn't looking at her, she'd make faces at her, and she also sometimes fixed the trick when Banana Fluff messed it up. And at the very end they both made fireworks with their horns and then Quiet Gestures fell off the stage when she bowed and then levitated herself back to her hooves just before she hit the ground.

When we went back by Morocco, they had belly dancers and they were really pretty. Some of them had little cymbals on their fingers and they had bells on, too, so they'd jingle along with the music as they danced. It was kind of mesmerizing and there were lots of people who were watching who were swaying along with the music but only Cayenne got up on her hind hooves and tried to belly-dance herself and she was pretty good at it. Most unicorns aren't too good on their hind hooves but she could stay balanced for a really long time, and kept dancing until the song was over. And then we went back to Canada for a little bit because it was really relaxing to just look over their gardens as the sun set.

Everything got all lit up with Christmas lights and we had to walk around again just because it all looked different with the Christmas lights, and all the different pavilions had their own type of Christmas tree, which all looked better at night. And then we went to the Candlelight Processional which told the story of Christmas and it had lots of Christmas Carols which were all really beautiful. And at the very end all the singers were holding candles, and then Gusty and Cayenne both lit their horns as well which was really pretty.

They had a really big fireworks show to end the evening, too, and watching it over the lake was really pretty, because they were reflected in the lake so it was like we were seeing twice as many, and there were colored fountains and lasers shooting in the sky, and there was a lighted big globe out in the middle of the lake that moved around. At the end of the show it opened up and fireworks started coming out of it, too.

By the time we got back to the monorail station we were all pretty tired and I was looking forward to getting off my hooves, and for once I didn't really mind the elevator that much because I could just lean against the side wall and let it take me upstairs. And I felt bad for Gusty 'cause she had to get undressed and then dressed again before she could go to bed and I thought that maybe I ought to help her but that was just too much effort, so I hopped up on the bed as soon as we got back to our room and rolled on my back to stretch it out a little bit and it was too much effort to even turn over again so I just closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Author's Note

A huge shout of thanks to ClosetBrony for once again pre-reading, offering suggestions of attractions, and correcting a fair number of technical mistakes.

December 21 [Animal Kingdom]

December 21

Gusty got up before me again. She was already standing at the balcony window when I opened my eyes, so I got out of bed and joined her at the window.

It was just starting to get light out and the early sunlight was painting the walls of the Magic Kingdom castle in orange and pink and it was really pretty. And when I opened the balcony door to stretch out my wings a little bit, the air was fresh and new and that woke me right up.

I hadn't even noticed that Miss Russi was in the shower until she opened the door and came out, and that was Gusty's opportunity to take a shower and get dressed before all of us ponies were out of bed, so she took a pile of clean clothes that she'd set out and went into the bathroom.

Miss Russi ordered coffee and then woke up Miss Parker, and I woke up Aquamarine and then the two of us together woke Cayenne up after the coffee had arrived. And she took a cup right off the tray without even getting out of bed and drank most of it, then she kind of slid off the edge of the bed and landed on the floor.

Me and Aquamarine could both see her wince when she put her weight on her loose shoe and then she pulled her hoof up a little bit so it wasn't carrying any weight and that might have been okay for standing around but she was never going to be able to enjoy the park like that, especially 'cause she might break her hoof if her shoe tore the rest of the way out. Miss Parker had written down the telephone number of the farrier so she called him and he couldn't come out right away but he said he'd be out in an hour or so and could at least get the old one off and bandage her hoof and then she could have a proper shoe put back on when she got home, or he could do all four.

Cayenne thought she'd rather have one off than four new ones for walking around all day, and Gusty came out when we were still talking about it and her ears fell when she realized that we might have to wait for Cayenne. But then Cayenne said that we should go to the park and she'd meet us there, and we all gave her a big hug 'cause that was really nice of her. I bet it's scary to visit a farrier that you don't know, 'cause you don't know what they're going to do to your hooves, and I'm glad I don't wear shoes.

Me and Aquamarine had packed all our things, 'cause we were going to be leaving right from the park to get to the train station, but Gusty and Cayenne were going to stay until tomorrow because that was when their airplane left.

Mister Barrow said that if there were things that the unicorns wanted to pack up and have us take back we could so they wouldn't have to try and get it on an airplane but Gusty was too frazzled to manage and so she pushed some things that she'd bought as gifts over in a pile for us to take, but that was all. Cayenne did a little bit better and gave us a whole suitcase to take back, and we loaded that into the Suburban.

Once we were all ready, we went to the Contempo Cafe for a quick breakfast again, and then Cayenne went back up to our room with Mister Wayne and Miss Russi, who had been with Gusty when she'd been shod a couple of times so they knew what to watch out for. And Mister Salvatore was a little bit grumpy that he had to give them the keys to the Jeep, but we wouldn’t all fit in it unless everyone but him had a pony on their lap.

After we'd had our magic bands read, we had to wait for a train to go by, and it was different than the one in the Magic Kingdom—the locomotive had a flat front with bumpers on it and portholes in the front of the cab, and the sides were completely open. All the cars had wood-slat sides, and there was lots of luggage up on the roof, and I was kind of curious where it had come from if people had that much luggage with them.

We didn’t want to do anything too fun before Cayenne got to the park, so we went to the Boneyard and played around some. There was a sign saying it was for children ten and under but there were lots of adults in there, so we thought that it would be okay for us. And it was neat because there were fake dinosaur bones and little slides which you could go down but I didn’t because they were small and went through rocks. And they had some dinosaur footprints in the sidewalk around it.

Our helpers had stayed outside but Mister Barrow came in and told us that Cayenne was on her way, and she showed up a little bit later. She was wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse socks on her hind legs and had hoof boots on, ‘cause she said that she didn’t want to go around the park with just a diaper and duct-tape bandage on that hoof. And I didn’t believe that she was really wearing a diaper on her hoof and she said that the vet used them because they were a little more padded and easier to use than just bandage wrap and it was kind of embarrassing but her hoof felt a lot better already.

Then we went to the Kilimanjaro Tour, and we got to ride around in a big truck and look at the animals and they were all real instead of the pretend ones we'd seen on the boat. There were different kinds of antelopes with weird horns and weird names like bontebok, oryx, addax, kudu, and waterbuck, and a giraffe that we had to stop for, 'cause it was on the road. And there were some Earth zebras that were grazing around a little ways back from the road.

When we passed by the elephants, Calaso, our tour guide, told us that they liked to eat red clay for the minerals and Aquamarine said that it was pretty tasty. And we all snickered at her but then I was thinking about how Rebekka liked to taste her art supplies and maybe there was something to that.

They had black rhinos and white rhinos, and real hippos bathing in a pond and we also saw a little nest with big eggs in it and Calaso said that they were ostrich eggs. Cayenne said that she'd thought they were pegasus eggs and I said that if pegasuses laid eggs we'd put them in clouds to incubate, not leave them on the ground where somepony might steal them.

And we saw flamingos which are pinkish and storks and whistling ducks who didn't whistle for us. And there was another pool with crocodiles which are like alligators but they have pointier noses. And a ways back we saw a lion who was looking at us and I got kind of nervous because I didn't see any fences between him and the truck and I hoped it could go faster than he could run.

After we'd finished our truck tour, we went to the Kali River Rapids and we had a round boat and had to wear seat belts so we wouldn’t fall out and drown. And Gusty was a little upset when she got splashed with water at the entrance and we all said that proper adventurers got wet all the time. Daring Do had fallen in plenty of rivers. And the sun was out so she'd dry off pretty quick anyway.

It went around by log jams and then down some rapids and between a cliff and me and Aquamarine were on the front so we got pretty wet but I didn't mind. And then we went through a little cave and under some elephant statues spraying water and we waved at a bunch of people who were watching us from a bridge. Gusty said that they had buttons that they could push to get us wet which was probably why they were watching, and Cayenne said that they were just jealous of us because we were having fun.

We hadn't seen any wild animals, which was a little bit disappointing, but it was still lots of fun.

Then we walked through the Maharaja Jungle and got to see a giant lizard who was sunning himself and giant bats that were all hanging upside-down from ropes 'cause they were mostly trying to sleep. One of them had decided that he wanted to eat breakfast while all of his friends were sleeping, and he was sticking his face into a bucket and getting food out of it.

And we saw some tigers and a couple of them were just dozing but there was one that was patrolling around the wall and she kept looking up at us like she was waiting for the glass to suddenly break and for us to fall in. And we were a little bit nervous around her but she couldn't get us and I could fly away if she tried.

We also saw some deer and antelopes that could maybe outrun a tiger if they had to, 'cause the sign said that some of them could go fifty miles an hour which was almost as fast as Winston could go.

Being outside had gotten us dried off, so we went to the theatre to watch the Festival of the Lion King, because Gusty said that it was a really good play and we'd all like it.

There were four different sections that we could sit in and each of them had a different name. There weren't any equines but giraffe was kind of close, so we sat there. And there were four people who came out and introduced themselves and told us that we were supposed to greet the performers like animals and we were supposed to bleat like sheep 'cause that was what giraffes sounded like so we did but I think we should have whinnied instead.

Cayenne pointed to a dancer who was striped like a zebra and had a hat with a bushy mane and when she circled around to our side we waved at her just to be friendly. And then they had a bunch of acrobats dancing around and swinging from trapezes that they bounced up to from a trampoline.

They filled the theatre with fake clouds and a man started spinning around fire on the stage while everyone sang, and then two more acrobats came out and one of them was wearing a pretty blue costume and she was supposed to be a bird so she flew around on a rope and she was really good at it. If I hadn't been able to see the rope I might have thought that she was really flying.

People who wanted to could come out and circle around the stage and it was supposed to be just for children but we weren't any taller than them and the dancer dressed as a zebra gestured for us to follow her, so we did and I flew just a little bit 'cause there weren't gonna be any airplanes inside and I only had my hooves a foot or so off the floor.

And then after it was over we got to meet the cast outside and Gusty was really excited about meeting Timon but the ones I was really looking forward to seeing were the dancer in the zebra costume and the bird-lady.

The dancer was really excited to see us and she crouched down and gave each of us a hug and I asked if she knew Zenith and she said that she did and they hung out sometimes at night but she didn't wear her costume then. And she said that equines had to stick together and we all agreed that that was true, even if she was really a human.

I had to wait a little bit to meet the bird-lady, 'cause there were a bunch of other people who also wanted to shake her hand, and I told her that she flew the best of any human I'd ever seen and she was really flattered by that. And I got a picture with her and I spread my wings out, 'cause hers were out, too, and then I decided that I'd give her a feather for luck. Unfortunately, I didn't have any loose ones, so I had to nip a secondary off which meant she didn't have much of a calamus with it.

She told me that she was going to have it put on her costume, 'cause it was almost the same color, and she carefully tucked it into her costume to keep it safe. Then she gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Me and Aquamarine had to leave after that to get on our train, so we hugged and nuzzled and told Cayenne to not lose any more of her shoes and Gusty wanted to get a picture of all of us together before we left, so we lined up with our helpers in the back and one of the stilt-walkers took our picture, then we walked out to the parking lot and got in the Suburban. It was really hot inside 'cause it was black and it had just been building up heat and they should have left the windows down some and that would have helped let the heat out. It cooled down pretty quickly when he started it up, though.

The seats stayed hot the longest, and I wondered why they didn't have some kind of butt-cooler that they could put in cars for hot summer days.

Mister Salvatore had agreed to drive us to Orlando 'cause he liked driving so much, and if Mister Barrow or Miss Parker had driven, then the Suburban would be stranded at the train station.

We were hungry 'cause we hadn't had time to eat lunch at Animal Kingdom, and since we weren't sure if there was going to be lunch on the train since it was after lunchtime already, we got some food from a taco truck that was in the parking lot.

Our train was a little bit late and we looked around the station and there was a poster that said Amtrak Silver Service and Mister Salvatore took a picture of me standing next to the poster. I had to stand on Aquamarine’s back to get high enough but she didn’t mind.

Mister Salvatore stayed around until the train came so he could help load our bags. We couldn’t get a big room on the bottom ‘cause the train was only one story high, so we had a little roomette like when I went to South Carolina. And Mister Barrow and Miss Parker had one just like it that was next to ours if we needed them.

We were both really tired and worn out from all the fun that we'd had and the train rocking put us to sleep, and if we'd been smarter we would have had the conductor fold our seats down into a bed but I don't think that either of us were expecting it. I know I wasn't, 'cause I woke up with my head kind of jammed up against the window and my ear pinned and it was a little bit sore. And I was completely disoriented and at first I didn't know where we were and looking out the window didn't give me any clues.

I could have gone and found the conductor and asked, or knocked on the door to the other room, but maybe Mister Barrow and Miss Parker were also sleeping, so I just got out my journal and started writing all the things I'd done in Florida, which was a lot.

I must have written ten pages by the time Aquamarine woke back up, and she kind of jerked her head up and looked out the window and then asked me where we were and I said that we'd left Jacksonville a little while ago and I didn't know where we were now.

We sat and looked out the window for a little bit. Aquamarine said she thought that we were still in Florida, 'cause it looked sort of the same as it had around Orlando, and she said that almost all the cars had Florida license plates on them which was pretty smart of her to notice.

Both of us were hungry, and we couldn't decide if we should see if her helpers wanted to eat dinner with us or just go ourselves. If they were sleeping, we didn't want to disturb them, but it might be rude to let them sleep through dinner. So we went to their room and knocked softly on the door and Miss Parker answered and she said that they'd gone to dinner a while ago but she'd come with us if we wanted her company. And we thought it would be nice to have her but kind of rude to be eating while she wasn't, so we said we'd go to the dining car on our own.

‘Cause it was kinda late for dinner, we didn't have to wait for a table. And our waiter was fun to watch—he was really graceful and when he cleaned off the table across from ours he took off the tablecloth first by yanking it really quick and the dishes stayed where they were, rather than slide off and crash all over the floor.

We both got salads and shared a plate of vegetarian shell pasta and then we decided that we'd get dessert, too, 'cause there was a New York Cheesecake on the menu that sounded really tasty and it was.

We'd just finished eating when the train slowed down to stop in Savannah, which is in Georgia. It’s near the ocean, too, ‘cause I could faintly smell that over the train smell and the city smells.

The train was going to stay there for a little bit, so we got up and trotted up and down the platform to stretch out our legs some. And at the end of the platform there was a little food cart selling slices of pies made out of Georgia pecans and Georgia peaches and we got a slice of pecan pie to share and it was really good. I felt kinda guilty for having two desserts, though.

Mister Barrow saw us and came down the platform and he saw the pie-cart and got tempted, too, so he bought himself a piece of pie and another one to give to Miss Parker who was still on the train. And then he walked up and down the platform with us until the conductor announced that it was time to get back on the train.

So we got back aboard and went back to our room. This train didn't have a Viewliner on it or even a domed car which was disappointing because we really liked the view from the top of the train. They'd tried to make up for it by putting two windows in our sleeping room, which was nice, and you could see out from the top one when you were in your bunk which you couldn't do in the Superliner, 'cause their windows were lower.

I missed having windows on both sides of the train, too. Unless we went out and blocked the aisle, we could only see what was happening on our side.

Georgia was really pretty, and we saw lots of trees and fields and it was all green. And the sun was going down when the train stopped in South Carolina, but we stayed at the window and watched outside ‘cause the sky was clear and when we turned off the lights in our room and got used to the dark, we could see hundreds of stars, and sometimes when we went around curves, we could see the front of the train, too, and that was really neat.

We were still awake when the train stopped in Charleston, and I told Aquamarine about the day I’d gotten to see Boeing Dreamliners that were being built. And I would have liked to get out there for a little bit but the train didn’t stay in the station for very long before it started up again.

When we were ready for bed, Aquamarine didn't want to bother our conductor, in case he was trying to sleep, so she figured out how to put the bed down herself. It wasn't too complicated but the latches weren't made for ponies, either, so she had to improvise a little bit.

We looked around our room but there weren't any sheets or blankets, 'cause the conductor had them all. We didn't mind too much, though, since we both had our winter coats, so we were pretty cozy without them

Author's Note

Once again, a huge thanks to ClosetBrony! Seriously, if you've got a Disney question, he's the man to ask. Also he knows other things about that part of Florida, too--he's not just a one trick pony.

December 22 [Botanic Gardens]

December 22

Me and Aquamarine had a rude awakening. The train just stopped really fast and it was a good thing that our bed was front to back, 'cause we might have fallen out otherwise.

It was still dark outside although we were probably near a town, 'cause there were some lights I could see through the trees by the tracks, and I faintly heard a crossing signal clanging although listening through the window I couldn't tell if it was in front of the train or behind it.

Neither of us was sure why we'd stopped, and the conductor wasn't announcing that we were at a station. Aquamarine said that maybe the locomotive had broken, but I thought if it had the train would have coasted to a stop, and then I thought that maybe one of the cars had come off the tracks, but she said it was really bumpy when that happened, 'cause the wheels bounced on the wooden crossties.

So we were both a little bit confused by it. And the train didn't get moving, either; it just stayed where it was and even with our muzzles pushed up to the window we couldn't see anything.

Well, then Aquamarine thought to open our door and look out the windows on the other side which I should have thought of myself. We didn't see anything out them, either.

We knew that you couldn't see anything looking forward, 'cause there were baggage cars in front of the coaches and then the locomotives, and you weren't allowed up there. But we could go to the back and see if there was anything behind us or maybe we'd see that one of the aft cars had come off the rails and maybe they were just so big that we couldn't feel it in front. So we went down to the other end of the train and we weren't the only ones who'd had that idea, 'cause there were lots of people that were in the aisles and looking around trying to figure out why the train had stopped so suddenly.

When we got to the last car, there was a little crowd of people around the window so we weren't going to be seeing anything that way. We did notice that all the cars were level and still in line, which meant that they were probably still on the tracks.

So we went back forward towards our room, and Mister Barrow was out in the hall standing by our room and he was kind of surprised to see us coming down the aisleway.

We asked him if he knew why the train stopped and he said that he didn't but he was making calls and he had been a little bit worried when he'd knocked on our door and we hadn't been in our room, so we told him that we'd been looking around the train and that we thought that all the cars in the back were on the tracks still.

Since we didn't think we were going to find out anything on our own, we went back to our room and it was a little bit early to be up but too late to go back to sleep, so Aquamarine folded the bed back up and we sat on the chairs and looked out the window but there wasn't anything to see out there.

Mister Barrow knocked on our door after about ten minutes and he said that they thought they might have hit a trespasser on the tracks but they weren't sure, and we couldn't go until they figured it out. And then we sat there until it had started to get light out and then the train blew its horn and I heard the air hissing as the brakes were released and it started to move again.

The train crept ahead kind of slowly for a little bit and then it accelerated hard enough to rock us in our seats a little bit, and I noticed that the engineer was blowing his horn a lot more. I guess he was trying to make sure that no more trespassers got in front of the train.

I got up and went to Mister Barrow's room and knocked on the door and Miss Parker answered 'cause he wasn't there and she said that he'd gone back to talk to the conductor some more but as far as she knew they hadn't found anyone who had been hit by the train, which was good, and when he came back he said the same thing. He said that the conductor had looked first and then the police had helped him look and they hadn't found anyone.

We were glad that nobody had gotten hurt by the train, even if they shouldn't have been on the tracks in the first place.

I was kind of familiar with our route, 'cause I'd taken this train before, and I told Aquamarine that we were going to see an airport with green Air Force airplanes and pretty soon we did. And that was where we needed to make sure that we were packed and ready to go, which didn't take us too long, and we went down to the vestibule to wait.

Neither one of us had taken a shower and we probably should have but we didn't know what time the train was going to arrive in Washington, and we hadn't wanted to be half-washed and then have to leave the train.

When we were at the train station, we put all our luggage in a locker and then ate our breakfast at Pret-A-Manger again, which still had cage-free eggs and fair trade coffee. And then we had to decide what we wanted to do for some of the day, 'cause we didn't have to be back at the station until the afternoon when the next train would take us back home.

We didn't decide right away, though, 'cause the train station had a really big Christmas tree in it that was really pretty, and they had a model train, too. There was a sign that said that it was a gift from Norway, which was really nice of them. Maybe Julenissen had brought it for them.

There was a lot to see in Washington, and it was hard to decide what to do. Aquamarine wanted to see the Botanic Gardens, and that sounded like fun to me, too, so we got on the mini-Marc and rode it to the National Mall, and we got out pretty close to the Capitol and had to walk the rest of the way.

She knew it before I even saw the signs, 'cause it had big glass domes so that the plants could get light while staying warm, and the domes were even tall enough for trees to be inside.

Their front gallery was really pretty, and it had little pools down the center and then plants everywhere and it was kind of strange to think that we were inside. The tops of the trees hung over the courtyard, so they mostly hid the roof and after a little while you didn't really notice that it was there, and besides there were lots of really interesting plants to look at and smell.

They had a big model train layout there, too, and there was a blue locomotive with a face on the front who was called Thomas and was famous, because he was on television. And they also had a river serpent train which was kind of funny, 'cause his head and neck was the locomotive, and then every car after that had an arch of his body until the very last one which had his tail. If you looked from a kind of low angle you couldn't see the train cars and it looked like he was swimming through all the plants.

We went into the jungle room next and it was kind of hot and humid in there, which was how the plants liked it and I would have liked it more if I didn't have my winter coat. Lots of people had taken off their jackets because of the heat.

There were railings to keep people from getting too close to the pants, but some of them were sticking through the railings trying to spread out, and there was one called a Ferocious Blue Cycad that we thought we should stay a little bit back from. We weren't sure why it was ferocious but thought it was best to be cautious. And there was another plant called a corpse flower and I didn't like that too much but Aquamarine was pretty fascinated with it. The sign said that it only bloomed every now and then and it had last bloomed in August, and when it did it smelled like a dead animal and that would attract bugs to pollinate it. Most flowers could do that by looking pretty and smelling nice but this one wanted to bring flies and other bugs that liked dead animals.

Miss Parker told us that there was a balcony overhead so we could get a top view of the jungle room and Aquamarine said that she wanted to see that, but then she got distracted by the doors that led to the medicinal plants and went that way instead of up.

Aquamarine looked at the medicinal plants and told me what they were all for. Not all of them were good for ponies but some of them were, and she was always looking for some human plant ponies didn't know about. Each one of the plants had a little sign next to it which said what it was called in English and also gave its fancy Latin name, and then said where it came from and what it could be used for.

There was a whole room full of orchids next to that and some of them were blooming and were very pretty. They were all different colors and some of them had spotty petals and it was kind of frustrating that a lot of them were too far back from the aisle to smell them properly. We weren't supposed to go off the path but I thought that maybe I could fly over to them and not touch the ground but Mister Barrow said that that was probably against the rules. He said that we were supposed to keep our hooves on the paths.

After that was a little room that had rare and endangered plants, and there were signs that explained where they were from and why they were at risk, and said what the curators of the museum were doing to preserve them so that people would have them in the future. I thought that was really smart of them, and so did Aquamarine. Plants are not only food for us, but they also give other animals food and places to live.

That led out to the main courtyard again, and we went across it to a room of primeval plants which were mostly different kinds of ferns, and they spit spores in the air to make more plants. I told Aquamarine that I had learned how to make a fractal fern, and if I had a good picture of one I might be able to figure out the formula for its leaf. She said that plants didn't grow by math, and I said that that wasn't what Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee had said.

Some of the plants in there were a lot like the ones that the dinosaurs might have seen, and maybe even eaten! If I'd known that before, I would have told Christine that when she was being a Tyrannosaurus Rex, she should eat ferns.

And that was right next to a room with plants from Hawaii, which were all different from other plants 'cause Hawaii was a volcanic island and so the first plants had to figure out how to grow in rock, and then they had evolved all on their own without being able to breed with other plants. Aquamarine said that was why islands were so interesting because a lot of them had plants growing on them that didn't grow anywhere else. She said that Madagascar was really famous because of that.

Then we went into a room that was a desert, and it had lots of funny cactuses. I didn't like them too much 'cause most of them had spines on them so you couldn't eat them, and Aquamarine said that was because they were smart and didn't want to be eaten. And she said that there were some kinds of animals that had figured out how to eat them anyways.

Once Aquamarine was satisfied that she'd seen all the plants from downstairs we went up to the catwalks and looked down on the jungle room. And Aquamarine really liked that; she said that it gave her a different perspective on the taller plants 'cause she was used to looking at them with her hooves on the ground and not from above.

I said that I thought you could tell a lot from how they looked from up above. We could fly over a pasture and see where the best, tenderest grasses were and land right there, instead of having to go through the field and find them that way, and sometimes miss them completely. That was really important when it was early or late in the season and food was hard to find, too. Although I guess Earth ponies have a good sense of that and can probably tell by feeling the ground and talking to the plants.

She said when she got back to Ponyville she was going to get Cherry Berry to take her up in her balloon and she could look over her family's farm from a pegasus' perspective.

By the time we were done looking around the botanic gardens, we were both pretty hungry, and all the plants that we weren't allowed to eat only made it worse. If Aquamarine hadn't been so fascinated by all of them I would have suggested that we get lunch earlier, but since we'd only had a little bit of time to look at it, I thought I could skip lunch.

We didn't have a lot of time to eat a late lunch before we went back to the train station, but Mister Barrow said that there was a bar that was close to the mini-Marc stop that he liked, and it was called Bullfeathers which was a really funny name.

I got a crab cake and Aquamarine got hummus, and we also both had Angry Orchard cider with our dinner. Aquamarine said that Sweet Apple Acres made the best cider, which was a lot better than this. She said that that was one thing she missed from Ponyville and her parents sent her a couple of bottles every year but this year she hadn't gotten any 'cause you couldn't send food or drinks back and forth. That was against the rules.

When we got to our train, it was a Superliner again, and we had a suite upstairs, which meant that Aquamarine's helpers got one room and we got the other and there was a door between them so we didn't have to go out in the hallway when we wanted to talk, which was nice. It was going to be helpful in the morning, too, 'cause we were going to have to get off the train really early: they wanted to get out in Toledo, and drive us back from there, because that was the most convenient stop.

As soon as we'd taken off our saddlebags, I wanted to go to the Viewliner to look around but Aquamarine reminded me that we weren't going to have time to shower tomorrow morning and if we didn't want to go to bed with wet coats, we ought to do it now, and she was right, so we both crowded into our tiny little shower and did the best that we could. I didn't like it very much because it was tiny for one pony and with both of us together we could barely move and I don't know how humans could use it at all. At least we didn't have to worry about getting knocked off our hooves when the train jolted, 'cause there wasn't enough room to fall down.

Mister Barrow came to our room to check on us and see when we wanted to eat dinner and since Aquamarine was closest to the bathroom door she pushed it open a little bit to talk to him and he was kind of embarrassed because I guess seeing somepony in a shower is embarrassing for humans.

We thought that since we'd just eaten a late lunch, we'd eat dinner late, too, and she told him about our plan to go to the Viewliner, and he said that he'd go there and save us some seats and we could just find him when we were done.

So once we were clean and partially dry, we went up to the Viewliner and he had kept seats for us like he'd said that he would.

He could have just kept one and we could have shared but I was glad that he'd saved two because that gave me enough room to stretch out my wings and preen them.

We were following along the river and I remembered from before that the train couldn't decide if it wanted to be in Virginia or Maryland and sometimes it would cross over the river and change states and then cross again and be back where it had started, so I told Aquamarine about that and she thought it was pretty funny, and before too long we were saying which state we were in each time we crossed the river.

I pointed out the railroad tie and telephone factory to Aquamarine as we passed by it, and she'd never seen anything like it. I'd only thought about how many craftsponies it would take to make the ties and poles, but she thought about how many it would take to cut down that many trees and then bring them all to the factory and that was something I hadn't even thought about.

We got out of the train in Cumberland, 'cause it had a long stop there, and that gave us a chance to stretch out our legs some. And when we got back on, we went right to the dining car and had our dinner.

Our seats in the Viewliner had been taken while we were eating dinner, so we went back to our room and watched as the train started to climb into the mountains from there. It was following along the river mostly, 'cause that was the easiest path, and it was really pretty. There was snow on the mountains which hadn't been there when I went through a few months ago.

We didn't get to admire it for too long, though, 'cause the sun had already been down when we'd finished dinner and it didn't take very long before it was dark and you couldn't see too much out the window except for the lights of houses and the small towns that we passed through every now and then. I think it would be nice if there was a train that stopped at night, so that people could see the scenery during the day. And that way, they could have more Viewliner cars instead of sleeping cars.

Since we had to get up early tomorrow and there wasn't anything to see, me and Aquamarine got the conductor to put our bed down for us so we'd have sheets and blankets tonight, then we told Mister Barrow to wake us up in the morning and he said that he would, and then we cuddled up in bed together.

December 23 [Flying Home]

December 23

We were glad that we'd gotten to bed early, 'cause it felt like it was still the middle of the night when Mister Barrow came in our room and woke us up. I knew that the trains liked to go where there wasn't anything interesting at night, but I thought that Toledo was a kinda big city. When we'd driven through it on our way to Punxsutawney, it had seemed pretty big. I was still kind of new to Earth then so maybe I was wrong about that and there wasn't much there. Sometimes you'd think you were one place because of all the signs but they were just telling you how to get where you wanted to go.

Me and Aquamarine gathered up our saddlebags which didn't take too long and we weren't sure if we should call the conductor and have him put our bed away. I thought that if there was anybody getting on in Toledo they'd probably want the bed so it was best to leave it folded down.

Toledo looked pretty big as the train went through it, and right before we got to the station we went over a river which was the Maumee.

The station was a square brick building, and the train didn't wait there too long, 'cause there wasn't anyone else waiting on the platform for the train, so once we got off and all our luggage was on the platform, the train blew its horn and started up again.

I stayed by the tracks until I saw its taillights disappear under the bridge that was just past the station, and then we walked around to the other side where Mister Barrow said there would be a car for us.

Me and Aquamarine both knew which one was for us before Mister Barrow said, 'cause there was a black Suburban with lots of antennas on it. And Mister Barrow used his pocketknife to pry open a little door on the side, and the keys were in there, so he unlocked it and we put our bags inside and got in the back.

We couldn't go until it had warmed up, 'cause there was a little bit of ice on the outside of the windshield, and our breath made the inside of the glass foggy. They had butt-warmers in the front seats but we didn't and it was a little bit uncomfortable sitting on a chilly seat.

Mister Barrow said that the steering wheel was heated, too.

It didn't take too long to warm up, and then we got on the road. Mister Barrow said that the first place we needed to stop was Dunkin' Donuts, 'cause he wanted some coffee and he said that he'd get some for us, too. So instead of getting on the 75 Highway right away, we drove along the 51 Road through town and it was a couple of miles before we found one, and it was one of the few things that was awake at a third after five in the morning.

Their donuts weren't as big as the ones at Sweetwater's Donut Mill, but we were planning on having a real breakfast a little bit later maybe. He said that we'd be in Lansing around breakfast time and there were lots of places to eat there and it would just depend on how we felt.

So after we'd had our morning snack and coffee, we got back in the Suburban and got on the 75 Highway, and then we got back off of it pretty quick to take the 475 Highway. And it was being fixed, so there were lots of barrels to keep you off the broken parts of the road and he said that it was lucky we were getting out of Toledo before rush hour and he didn't think that we'd hit any heavy traffic at all on the way to East Lansing.

I was really happy when we passed the sign for Michigan, and for a while I was looking out the window at all the bare fields and bald trees that were along the road, but after a little while that got boring and it was still pretty dark so I couldn't see all that far, and I turned around on the seat and put my head down in the center. And Aquamarine kind of had the same idea, 'cause she stretched out too and we both fell asleep for a little while.

I woke up again when we got to the 96 Highway, 'cause Mister Barrow suddenly slowed down and rocked us forward in our seats. And it was starting to get light out and we sat back up in our seats. Aquamarine wondered if maybe we could see the sun rising behind us so we both turned around and looked out the back, and Mister Barrow made the little squeegee clean off the back window so that we could see better.

We didn't get to watch the whole sunrise, 'cause there were trees in the way and the road curved around a little bit, but we did see most of it. And it looked like a really beautiful day—there were a few fluffy clouds down pretty low and then some airplanes were leaving cirrus clouds high up in the sky.

It was about half past seven when we got to East Lansing, and when we got on the 127 Highway, Aquamarine got her portable telephone out of her saddlebags and sent a telegram to Cedric to let him know that she was almost back.

Mister Barrow drove us to her apartment and said that we could take a break there and use the bathroom if we had to and then if we wanted we could all go out to breakfast. And Aquamarine asked if Cedric could come with us, and Miss Parker said that he could and she'd even buy his breakfast which I thought was really nice of her.

Aquamarine had a little apartment which she said was called a studio and I liked it better than mine, 'cause it was cozier. There was one big room and a half-wall to the kitchen and then a small bathroom and that was all that there was. She had a futon that was a lot like mine, and it was folded down into a bed, and there were lots of plants all around the room.

She told me that when she went back to Equestria she was giving most of them to Doctor Krelborn, except for the Dumb Cane that Cedric wanted.

There was a really good restaurant that was close, but they didn't open until lunchtime, and we didn't want to wait hours for a real meal. So Mister Barrow said that there was a Denny's and an International House of Pancakes that weren't too far away and said that we could decide which we wanted to go to.

Well, those were both good, and I would like either. Aquamarine said she didn't mind which we went to, so Cedric said that we should go to Denny's because it wasn't as fancy.

When we got there, Mister Barrow parked right by the door and let us out and me and Aquamarine went in first, with Miss Parker right behind us and when we went inside the waiter started to come around the corner of his little stand and he had the same look as the man at the other Denny's that didn't want ponies in the restaurant.

He was about to open his mouth when Cedric came through the door and then the waiter backed up a little bit but me and Aquamarine could both tell that we weren't really welcome here and that was really a let-down after how nice and friendly everybody at Disney World had been.

Cedric glared at the waiter and said that he guessed that if this restaurant didn't serve ponies they probably didn't serve niggers either and we'd go somewhere that we were welcome, and turned around and went right back out the door, and me and Aquamarine trotted along behind him. And Miss Parker didn't come out right away so I turned around and she was holding her badge up in his face and he'd gotten really pale. And then she came back out, and we had to tell Mister Barrow what had happened and he said that he could go in there and straighten them out and Miss Parker told him that she already had, and that we should go get pancakes now.

So we went to the International House of Pancakes and the waitress there was really nice and friendly and brought us all free coffee because she said that we looked like we needed it.

I didn't eat too much, 'cause I'd been thinking about flying back to Kalamazoo. Mister Barrow had said that he'd drive me there, but I hadn't been able to spend much time flying and it was a really pretty day and I thought it would be fun. I was eager to see Aric and Meghan, so that was the one disadvantage to flying myself, 'cause it would take a lot longer to get there than to ride with Mister Barrow, but I think I'd be restless all day if I didn't spend some time flying.

We took our time eating and talking, and by the time we were done with breakfast I knew that I needed to fly, so I told Mister Barrow and asked if he could give all the gifts I'd bought to Mister Salvatore so that I didn't have to carry them back with me, too, and he said that he would.

We all drove back to Aquamarine's apartment first, and I filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear and then I went outside and I had to decide if I wanted to follow the train tracks or the highways to get to Kalamazoo. I thought that the train tracks would probably be a more direct route, and they ran pretty close to her apartment.

I had to tell the Lansing Airport where I was going to be flying, so I called their airplane directors and it took them a minute to give me permission, but they did, and so then I hugged everyone goodbye and nuzzled Aquamarine and everyone went down to the parking lot to watch me take off.

I followed the tracks that ran beside her apartment to the west and it turned out that those were the wrong tracks. Luckily, they passed really close to the Amtrak station and I recognized it and I could see that the platform was arranged for the other set of tracks, so I turned and followed them instead.

The tracks went past another train station and then followed a river, and they went alongside a factory with steam-making towers and tall chimneys. Then they went past a lot of factories and a cluster of buildings that looked kind of like a college campus before they got out of the city for good. And I'd just passed by a big lake when a train carrying stacked boxes went by underneath me, and it was so long I'd crossed two roads before the end went by underneath me. If it had been going slower I could have landed on it and ridden it back to Kalamazoo, but that wasn't a very good idea, 'cause I'd get hurt.

The tracks went along fallow fields mostly and passed through a lot of little towns. I'd gotten permission to fly up to ten thousand feet if I wanted to but I had decided to stay at about seven thousand, 'cause that's where the few puffy little clouds were, and every now and then one of them would drift across my path and I'd fly around it or land on top of it and ride it a little bit before moving on.

Every now and then I'd announce to the other airplanes where I was, even though there weren't any of them that were too close to me. And when I got close to Battle Creek, I had to tell the airplane directors there that I was flying into their airspace and they wanted me to go lower, or go south around them.

I thought it would be easier and faster to descend and keep going straight, so I started gliding down. I kind of needed a rest anyways; I probably should have thought about how far it was before deciding I was going to fly the whole way. It wouldn't be my longest flight, but after more than a week of not doing any distance flying, my wings were getting tired and I still had a ways to go.

I was still descending when another train went by, this one going to the east, and then I was just passing by the cereal factories when another westbound train went under me. He was going slower, and I kept up with him almost all the way to the airport.

I paid close attention to my radio as I got close to their runways, 'cause I didn't want to be flying across the end of them as a big airplane went overhead. And I dove down a little bit lower, too, to give myself more clearance, although that was kind of risky 'cause if I got hit with an airplane's wake, I'd have less altitude to recover in.

Luckily for me, there weren't any airplanes taking off and I climbed back up a little bit as I got close to Fort Custer.

By the time I got to the dam, I was getting pretty tired and I started to get tempted to land and call Aric to come and pick me up. The sky had clouded over almost completely, although I could still see some clear spots off to the east, but they wouldn't be clear for long.

I didn't want to admit defeat, though, so I told the Kalamazoo airplane directors where I was and kept going through town, and when the tracks curved away from Stadium Road, I stopped following them 'cause it was gonna be more direct to follow the road.

I could smell Sweetwater's Donut Mill a little bit before I got to it, and that gave me the last bit of energy that I needed to get to my apartment. The lights on the balcony were on so I knew exactly where to land, and when I did I flopped right down into the snowdrift and let it cool me off some.

Meghan saw me land and she came right over and opened up the door for me and let me in, but I stayed outside for a little bit longer in the snow, and she just crouched down in the entrance and petted my mane. She said that Aric was at Meijer buying food and that he'd be back pretty soon.

I rolled over on my back and stretched out my wings and made a snow-pegasus and then I got back to my hooves and shook off some of the snow and went inside, and Meghan wanted to brush it off but I was still pretty hot and wanted it to melt, 'cause that would cool me down some more.

I got some water to drink, 'cause my camelback was empty and I was pretty thirsty. And then the two of us sat together on the futon, and I had to sit on a towel 'cause I was dripping as the snow melted and ran through my coat.

Aric got back after about an hour and he brought in a bunch of bags of food and he had stopped at Petco and gotten me some more hay, too, so I had some of that for a snack, and then I thought that I ought to take a shower, 'cause I was pretty lathered from the flight and I hadn't taken one today. And Aric and Meghan said that they'd join me, and so the three of us got in the shower together and they both washed me before washing themselves and it felt really good to have their hands going through my coat and mane and tail and that was one thing that I was really going to miss when I was back in Equestria.

Once I'd gotten washed, we all kinda got distracted by each other and then I had to get washed again but it had been worth it, and the apartment had lots of hot water.

Meghan and Aric dried off and then they dried me off and wrapped me up in towels and we all sat together on the couch, and I told them about the trip to Florida and all the things I'd seen and how Gusty wanted to get everyone's autograph and I told them that there were ponies working at Epcot and how I'd seen the rocket launch and gotten to hold a baby alligator and made new friends on the beach. And then we got to talking about Christmas, and Aric said that his parents were kind of conservative and might not like me especially if they knew that we were having sex and so he and Meghan had been thinking about it and they thought that it might be best if I went with Meghan to celebrate Christmas with her and her family, and then he said that when he got back from his parent's house we could have our own little Christmas celebration together.

I was a little disappointed in that because I thought it would have been fun for all of us to be together but I guess it wouldn't be fun at all if his parents didn't want me there.

And I was a little bit offended that he hadn't told his parents about us, but then my sister had never told me about the blacksmith so I guess sometimes you wanted to keep some things private especially if you thought your friends and family might not understand. I think that usually your best friends would but maybe sometimes it was best to not really put that to the test. I knew a few ponies who had gotten kicked off their cloud 'cause they'd done something that their family didn't like, although they usually got forgiven a few days later and they knew not to do that again. So I guess if he hadn't told them yet maybe Christmas wasn't the best time.

We spent most of the afternoon snuggling on the couch and Aric said that maybe we should get up and get dressed and do something but me and Meghan didn't feel like it. She said that it was good to have a lazy Saturday together and he said that it was Friday and she said that that was close enough. And then she said that if we did want to do something she'd have to get dressed and then he'd miss out on watching us cook dinner naked and he thought that that was a good reason to be lazy on the couch.

Once my coat was dry, Meghan unwrapped me from the towel and I sat up on top of the blanket, too, and stretched out my wings so that she could preen them for me and when she was doing the second one Aric said that we should get my GoPro and make a movie of her preening me and she said that if we were going to do that she ought to put clothes on and he said that she'd get zillions more views if she didn't. And she crossed her arms and said that she didn't know how she felt about having her boobs on the internet and anyways it was probably against YouTube's rules anyways.

I told her that I liked them and nuzzled her breast.

When she was done preening me, we got up and went into the kitchen and started getting dinner ready, and Aric came in too but just leaned against the counter and waited for instructions, 'cause he said that he knew that if he got in the way of two women making dinner he'd wind up either banished or castrated and Meghan said that it was good that he knew his place.

She said that we were going to make a fake meatloaf, 'cause she'd found a recipe on the internet and it sounded like a good meal to have, and we were also going to have mashed potatoes and asparagus and it was all pretty complicated to make and there was a lot that I couldn't do, but she let me chop up the potatoes and measure out all the ingredients for the not-meatloaf and mix them together and then she formed it into a loaf and put it in the oven, and while it was cooking the potatoes were ready to be mashed so I got to do that, too.

Aric went out in the living room to take the mattress off the futon and set it on the floor, so that we could use the futon as a table, and we had a little bit of time to relax because it took the meatloaf a while to be ready, so me and Meghan sat in the futon and watched the snow falling outside while Aric sulked 'cause the futon wasn't big enough for three.

Once the not-meatloaf was cooked we had to wait a little bit for it to cool down and I wanted to put it out in the snow so we could eat it sooner but Meghan said that that might shatter the cooking dish and then we wouldn't be able to eat it at all because it would be full of glass. It was hard to be patient, though, 'cause I was really hungry. I'd used up a lot of energy on my flight back to Kalamazoo and hadn't eaten enough afterwards.

So when it did come time to eat, I had more than I should have, and after dinner we cleaned up and sat on the futon mattress and watched a movie on Meghan's computer because Aric had returned the big television while I was on vacation. It was called Braveheart, and I fell asleep, 'cause my belly was full and I was warm and I had Meghan on one side of me and Aric on the other, and Meghan was scratching behind my ears and Aric was rubbing the base of my neck and down my back and that was too much for me.

I didn't stay asleep for too long, 'cause they started moving around and that woke me back up and the computer was dark so I thought that I'd slept through the whole movie but Meghan said that they'd stopped watching it and had just been talking and they were wondering if I was going to wake up again or stay asleep. And I said that I was awake now so we could try watching the movie again and Aric said that we could but it might be more fun to just snuggle and I couldn't disagree with that. So I leaned over and kissed him and then I kissed Meghan, too, and they started petting me again and I kissed them and teased them with my wing, and pretty soon we were all fighting over who got to be in the middle and I pinned Meghan down and started kissing my way down her stomach and that made her stop fighting for dominance.

Afterward, we just stayed sort of in a pile for a little while until it got uncomfortable, and then I let Meghan be in the middle, 'cause I was a little bit too hot again. So I pushed the covers off my back and put my head down on her breast and nestled my head up against her chin, and Aric reached across her so that he could rest his hand on my forelock.

December 24 [Christmas Eve]

December 24

I woke up to birds chirping right outside which was nice. Plus I still had my head on Meghan's breast, which was also nice, and I couldn't decide if I should lift my head to look at the birds or just stay where I was.

Staying where I was won out, 'cause I thought that I'd probably seen all the birds before and anyways they were making happy bird chirps and not fighting, so everybody was getting a turn at the feeder.

I must have moved around more than I thought when I was listening to the birds, 'cause I'd woken up Meghan and she started scratching my ear and then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead, and I shifted around so that I could kiss her back and she asked me if I was looking forward to Christmas and I told her that I was. Plus I'd get to see where she lived.

She said that was going to be kind of disappointing but it was home and that was what mattered. And then she smiled and said that she'd never thought she'd get to spend Christmas with a pony and that all the years she'd wanted a pony for Christmas and now she had one, at least for a little bit longer.

And then she got kind of quiet and I think that maybe she was thinking about how I had to leave really soon and then I was thinking about it, too. And I didn't want that to make us sad during Christmas so I nuzzled her and said that we were gonna have fun together and then when she came to Equestria I'd show her everything and she sighed and said that she wasn't even sure that she'd ever get approved for a visa, 'cause there were lots of people who wanted to go and they probably had better reasons than she did. But she was going to hope for it anyways, and I said that I could ask Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and maybe they could help out.

That got me to thinking that they still had all my Christmas and Hearth's Warming presents, and I was gonna have to figure out a way to get them. I would have to call them and hope that they weren't already away with their families. I should have gotten them yesterday but I'd been so excited to be back with Aric and Meghan that I hadn't thought about it.

They'd be pretty mad if I called now, too, so I was gonna have to wait and hope it all turned out. And I guess if it didn't we could celebrate Christmas again a little bit late.

I tickled Meghan with my wing and asked her if she thought we should wake up Aric or let him sleep some more and she said that we could have some fun with each other and if he didn't wake up during that it was his own fault, and I thought that was fair. And I thought I was gonna be on top, 'cause I already was halfway on top, but Meghan grabbed me around the barrel and before I could react she had me on my back and then her hands were running down my belly and I didn't want to fight her so I leaned in for kisses whenever I could and she tried to avoid me at first and then Aric woke up and joined in and he took advantage of me being kinda pinned but I didn't mind at all. Sometimes it was fun to not be in control.

Plus I think that maybe both of them were feeling like I deserved some extra attention 'cause they'd had each other while I was gone, and even though they shouldn’t have thought that, I wasn't gonna complain.

We relaxed in bed a little bit after, and we'd kicked the sheets off 'cause everyone was too hot, but then Meghan got cold and so I moved so that she could be in the middle and she curled up against me and Aric cuddled against her back to keep her warm.

It would have been nice to stay in bed for longer, but we had to get ready to go to Meghan's house and Aric had to go to his house, so we got up and went into the shower and washed each other off and then went to make breakfast. Aric had gotten eggs and milk and cheese and waffle mix so we had plenty of food to cook and I couldn't decide what I wanted to make. Waffles were a little bit easier but if we made omelets we'd have more time to spend together, so that was what I picked, and me and Meghan made breakfast and she decided that we should let Aric help, too. She had to hit him with the spatula a couple of times 'cause he kept fondling her and she said that this was why boys shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen because they couldn't keep their hands off the chef. And so I got her with my wing and she hit me with the spatula, too, and then had to pick a mane-hair out of it, and after that I behaved and focused on actually cooking breakfast like I was supposed to be doing, and Aric mostly did too and only had to get hit with the spatula one more time.

Instead of eating in the living room, we ate in the kitchen 'cause it was warmer. I just sat on the counter and had to make sure to keep my tail away from the stove 'cause it was still hot, even though it didn't look like it was. It wasn't the best solution but unless we got a tall stool like the bars had I couldn't eat at the counter like Meghan and Aric did. If I was on my hind hooves, I'd wind up with an omelet in my nose and I didn't want that.

I wonder if there were some ponies who had had the counters in their apartments lowered so that they could use them better? Or maybe had boxes put in that they could stand on.

Aric and Meghan got dressed after breakfast, and then helped Aric carry things down to Winston. He had a big box full of presents for his family, which I took down the stairs on my back with Meghan helping me balance it—he'd said that he could take it on his own but I wanted to be helpful, and that way he only had to take one trip.

He started up Winston and I got in with him to keep him company. Meghan said that she didn't love him enough to freeze her butt off in his truck and kissed him then went back upstairs to the apartment to get the last of her things ready for the weekend.

It took a few minutes for Winston to warm up enough that the snow on the windshield started melting, and he sighed and said that he really didn't want to go but his parents would be really mad if he didn't come home for Christmas and so he didn't have too much of a choice. And he leaned over and kissed me and said that he'd be back for Boxing Day, which was the day after Christmas, and then he kissed me again and told me to have fun with Meghan and I said that I would. Then I asked if I could drive Winston to the end of the parking lot before I went back up to the apartment and he said that would be okay, so I got on his lap and put my hooves on the steering wheel and I had to back up first which was really hard and I wasn't too good at it. You couldn't see all that much with the top on and it had big mirrors on the side but it was kind of hard to judge where things were in them, and then I also had to be careful that the bow of Winston didn't swing out enough to catch the side of the car that was next to us, so it took me a few minutes to get it into the traffic lane but after that it was pretty easy.

We kissed one more time, and then he opened the driver's door for me and I hopped out and caught myself with my wings just before my hooves touched the pavement and flew back to my balcony.

Meghan really had to struggle with the door, 'cause of all the ice in its tracks, and she barely got it opened far enough for me to squeeze in. And she told me that I should pack up anything that I thought I'd need, which wasn't a lot, until she said that I should take my dress for a Christmas Eve church service.

That didn't really like fitting in my saddlebags without getting wrinkled, so we decided that we'd put it in her bag instead, and then we waited for her parents to come and get her.

While we were waiting I called Mister Salvatore and he said that he could come right by and so I asked Meghan how soon we were going to be leaving and she said that her parents had said that they'd be here at eleven and they were generally late so it probably wouldn't actually be until noon or so. Which was enough time for Mister Salvatore to come over, and so I told him to. And he asked if I thought it would ruin Christmas if he was late and I said that I didn't think it would, and he was kind of disappointed because he said that if I had said it would he could drive the Suburban really fast with the flashing lights on. And I heard Miss Cherilyn saying that Christmas was not an emergency and he said that sometimes it was, and told me he'd be over in a few minutes.

We watched out the front window and it took about twenty minutes for him to arrive and he was in Sienna and Miss Cherilyn got out of the driver's seat and he was sulking a little bit when he got up to my apartment, but he cheered up as soon as he saw me and he set the box down and gave me a hug. And he'd covered it over with a shirt, which he said was just in case there was a present for Meghan in there, and there was.

I wasn't sure if I should give it to her tomorrow or wait until Aric was back and I couldn't ask her so I asked Miss Cherilyn to come in with me so we could talk in secret and she said that if the three of us were going to have a late Christmas together than I ought to give it to her then but it might be nice if I had something else to give her when I was with her family and maybe I should have something for them, too. And I hadn't thought of that, so I was hoping that we'd have a chance to do a little bit more shopping. Maybe there were stores near Meghan's house.

We'd hardly finished talking when Meghan's telephone rang and then she knocked on the door and said that her parents were almost here so I needed to get ready and so I thanked Miss Cherilyn for her advice and the four of us waited until they arrived, which didn't take very long.

Mister Salvatore carried our bags for us and then I shook hands with Mister and Miss Wilson, who were her parents. They had a silvery-white car that was called Enclave which was pretty nice although not as roomy as a van.

While we were driving, both her parents had lots of questions about Equestria, and how I liked Michigan, and what I did for a living and what I was going to school for and they were kind of surprised that I liked math. And so I kind of lost track where we were on the road, and all of a sudden there were lots of lanes of traffic all around us and big bridges going overhead and it was very confusing to know where to go. It was kind of like being in Chicago and I was glad that they knew where they were going because I don't think I would have been able to figure it out.

We changed highways a couple of times and they kept having bigger numbers—we went from the 275 Highway to the 696 Highway and then had to go around a looping exit to get to Telegraph road, which didn't move very fast because there were a lot of cars and traffic lights that kept stopping everyone.

After we got towards the front of the pack, though, we could get through them all without stopping and we stayed on Telegraph for a few miles until we turned on Maple Road, and that took us to Birmingham where her parents house was.

It was called a condominium, which was like an apartment but fancier, and inside it was as big as a house. Plus it was right next to a bunch of stores which was really convenient.

So we didn't spend very much time at their home at first even though they wanted to give me a tour and I felt bad about that because it couldn't have taken that long but Meghan said that once her dad started talking it would be forever before he stopped again and if we were going to get some last-minute things now was the time to do it.

We did take a minute to go in the house so we could use the bathroom and set our things in her bedroom. It had a kind of disused look to it which I guess made sense 'cause she'd been in Kalamazoo most of the time. There was a big row of stuffed animals on a shelf and I recognized some of them 'cause they'd been in movies or I'd seen them at Walt Disney World, like Pooh and Eeyore.

There was a little round cushion on the floor, too, and when Meghan saw it she glared at her mom and said that I didn't sleep on the floor and even if I did she could have found something better than a dog bed for me, but I thought it looked kind of comfortable and I wouldn't have minded sleeping on it.

So she got to drive the Enclave and I sat in the front and I wasn't sure what I should get for them and she said that we could just get a card but I thought I should get something a little bit nicer and she said that her dad liked golf and her mom liked penguins, so we needed to find golf things and penguin things.

There was a golf store that wasn't very far away and if we'd had more time I would have liked to look around because I still didn't understand what the point of golf was and when I saw how much they wanted for just one golf bat, it was even more confusing to me. Aric hadn't spent that much money on Winston. So I got him some golf balls, 'cause she said that he lost them a lot. And then she said that we could go to Pier 1 next 'cause it was close and they always had interesting things, so we drove down there and there were lots of people in the store all trying to buy things at the very last minute, and we looked around but didn't see anything that looked like a good gift, and me and Meghan were getting a little bit stressed out by all the people and I had to be careful 'cause they weren't looking down and a couple of people almost tripped over me.

So she wanted to try a little out-of-the way place called The Treasure Trunk, and said that we could look there really quick and maybe we'd find something that was nice. It was a kind of run-down building but I did find a nice blue penguin statue that was really pretty, and so I had to buy it and I still couldn't think of what I should get Meghan, or how I was going to be sneaky about it. But I got lucky and she went off to look at the clothes since we were already here and so I had a chance to look around some more and I found a Judy Hopps stuffie that I thought she'd like. She was still distracted looking at blouses so I bought it and the penguin and the clerk put them in the bag for me so she couldn't see what I'd bought, and just in time 'cause she came around to the counter and asked if I was ready to go and I said that I was.

She said that we ought to have a little snack before we got home, and so we stopped at Panera Bread 'cause it was fast and they had good sandwiches and I got one with Mediterranean vegetables and she had a grilled cheese sandwich which also looked really good.

Then we went back to her condominium and once we'd brought our shopping in I got to meet Grandma and Grandpa Wilson who were Mister Wilson's parents. Miss Wilson's lived in Florida and didn't want to come up to visit because they said that they were too old for the cold and she was a little bit bitter about that.

And then I got to take the tour that Mister Wilson wanted to give me, and he showed me most of the rooms and it was kind of like a maze. He had a nice office that I liked, 'cause it had a balcony and none of the other rooms did. The living room had nice big windows but they weren't supposed to open and let you out, and they were mostly blocked with a big Christmas tree, which was very pretty. And it also had a big fireplace in it and it had a gas fire so you didn't have to bring in logs or anything, you could just turn it on and off when you wanted it.

While he was showing me around, Miss Wilson was making dinner and so his tour got interrupted by our meal. And I didn't want to be rude, 'cause she'd made a special salad just for me, so I ate it but it wasn't very good and I didn't think that you could make a salad wrong but you could. And when I'd finished she said that there was more if I wanted it, and I thanked her and said that I was full, and Mister Wilson said that I ate like a bird and started laughing.

We had to get ready for church right after dinner, 'cause we were going to a candlelight service, and Meghan helped me get in my dress. She didn't have any glitter to make my feathers sparkly which was too bad, but she did braid my mane and put in one of her scrunchies that was almost the same color as my coat, and she said she was sorry about dinner and her parents meant well but they didn't really know that much about ponies. She said that she hadn't thought that when she told her mom all the vegetables and grasses that I liked to eat that she'd put them all in one salad, and she said that she hadn't thought to tell her that I would want a proper bed and not a dog bed. But I could sleep with her so it didn't matter that I didn't have my own bed.

It was a little bit crowded with all of us in the Enclave together, and we had to climb over the seats to get in the very back which was hard for both me and Meghan since we were wearing dresses, and I wasn't looking forward to getting back out again. And when we got to the church it wasn't that far at all and we could have walked.

It was a lot bigger than Stetson Chapel, and all the stained glass windows in the sanctuary made it look like a palace. We got seats kind of in the middle and the ushers gave us little playbills and I asked Meghan if it was going to be like the Easter service and she said it would be kind of the same.

The whole inside was decorated for Christmas and people were standing around talking until the organ started to play and then everyone sat down and we had to get right back up to sing. Meghan offered to hold the hymnal so that I could sing along, and that was kind of hard 'cause I didn't know how to read human music. But it was the same every verse, so after I'd heard the first I joined in.

The pastor read us a passage from the Bible and then had a family come up to light the Christmas candles, and then we sang another hymn which I knew because they'd sung it at Disney. Then he told us about Joseph and Mary's struggle to find a place to rest and nobody wanted to give them a room even though she was pregnant until they finally were allowed to stay in a manger with the animals and the pastor was pretty upset about it, 'cause that was what the whole sermon was about.

Then after that they started to pass along candles that we could hold and it was a little bit awkward to hold pinched between my forehooves and so Meghan said she wasn't going to light it until very last.

And then they turned down the lights so there was only the Christmas tree and all the candles and Meghan lit mine and it was so beautiful, and we all sang O Holy Night together before we put out our candles and they turned the lights back up, and the pastor gave his benediction.

There was a reception afterwards in the fellowship hall and they had coffee and tea and cookies and so we went there and I met a lot more people who were all interested in me and I didn't get to eat too much 'cause I had to talk to everyone, and by the time we finally got back in the Enclave to go home I was pretty tired.

Meghan helped me get undressed and she put on her lounging clothes and I still had to wrap presents which was something that I was never very good at. The golf balls weren't too difficult because they were in a rectangular box but the penguin was hopeless and when Meghan was done laughing she offered to re-wrap it herself and so I let her.

I didn't want her to wrap her own present, though, so when she went to the bathroom I took it out of the bag and I did the best that I could, and it was even more difficult 'cause it kept squishing and tearing the paper and so I had to put a bunch of different layers around it and it wasn't all that neat but I didn't think that she'd mind.

I wished that I'd known that her grandparents were coming, though, 'cause I could have gotten them something, too.

She came in while I was still adding more tape to make sure that the wrapping didn't come apart and she asked who that was for and I said it was for her and she couldn't open it until tomorrow and she wasn't allowed to squeeze it and figure out what it was, and she promised that she wouldn't, and then she asked if I wanted to put things out tonight or if I'd rather wait until tomorrow, and I said that tomorrow was fine, so she got in bed and I was kind of disappointed that she was still wearing her clothes.

Meghan said that it didn't seem right to sleep naked at home and that seemed weird to me but I guess it was a human custom, so I snuggled up to her and pulled her shirt up just a little bit so I could rest my wing on her bare stomach, and she didn't stop me.

December 25 [Christmas]

December 25

I woke up to Meghan brushing her fingers through my hair, and I was kinda surprised that she'd woken up so early. She said that she still did on Christmas 'cause it was a holiday that always made her feel like a kid and that she just wanted to get up and go open all the presents that were under the Christmas tree.

I'd always thought that the funnest part of Hearth’s Warming was flying around town and seeing who'd left food out for the pegasuses, and in the afternoon walking around town singing Hearth's Warming songs and then the tavern would have a big outside feast in the village green with lots of fish and beer. And there was never snow scheduled, 'cause the weatherponies were supposed to have the day off, but we'd always wind up getting some extra snowclouds and bringing them over the village anyway so that we'd have fresh snowfall for the evening.

And one year we got a feral Hearth's Warming storm which we didn't want, and everypony had to fly out and fight it, and Captain Disko followed us out to sea in her fishing boat so that we could still have our Hearth's Warming feast, which was kind of a stupid thing to do and she lost the top of a mast from the wind.

Nopony was willing to let her miss the next day's fishing, so even while the storm was still going on, and the Merry Ambree was bobbing up and down on the waves, the lumberjacks and shipwrights in town felled a tree that was the right size and dragged it down to the boatyard and started working it so when she finally got back in harbor all they had to do was finish sizing it and rigging it, and they worked all night by lamplight and she left port the next morning with a boatswain still up in the rigging painting her new mast.

I thought that was the best Hearth's Warming I'd ever had, 'cause everpony in the village helped out, and a couple of foals got their cutie marks that night, too, and the storm must have disturbed all the fish, 'cause the whole fleet came back in that night with their holds full of enough to last for the rest of the winter.

Meghan said that it sounded like something out of a Charles Dickens story and that we ponies really knew how to celebrate the holidays right, and on Earth sometimes it seemed like it was more important to have the right present and the right number of presents and people made wish lists and had gift registries on Amazon to make sure that they got what they wanted and maybe too many humans had forgotten what Christmas really was all about. But then I reminded her that we were here with her family, and she said that was true and maybe once we stripped away all the commercialization of Christmas, we still remembered what was most important about it.

We got out of bed and she let me look through her dresser to find clothes for her and it was kind of strange how many she still had at home, even though she wasn't living there any more. It made sense that if you were wearing clothes every day you'd need a lot.

So I found her a nice pair of pants and a white blouse and then I asked her if she was going to take a shower and she said that we probably should and since she had her own private bathroom we could take a shower together 'cause nobody would know.

Her shower curtain had little yellow creatures called minions on it and she said that they were from a movie. I'd seen some of them at Disney World, and they were very strange creatures but they made the bathroom more cheery. And she also had a fancy shower that you could turn to make the water come out in different ways and it also came off the wall so you could move it around where you wanted it which actually made showering a lot easier except when I accidentally got tangled up in the hose.

Meghan got dried off and she put on her panties and her sleeping t-shirt and then we sat on her bed so that she could preen me and groom my coat, and when she'd finished I brushed her hair and then she got the rest of the way dressed and we went to the kitchen for breakfast.

Grandma and Grandpa Wilson were already awake and they had made coffee. The Wilsons’ coffee maker was kind of dumb because it could only make one cup at a time, and then you had to put more water in it and some more coffee grounds which came in a little pod called a K-cup. So Meghan made a cup for each of us then found breakfast cereal—they had frosted shredded wheat which was a little bit sweeter than I liked for breakfast. And we were still eating with Miss Wilson came in and she was kind of surprised to see me eating shredded wheat and said that she didn't know that I could eat human food and I thought that was kind of strange to say 'cause except for all the grasses in my salad it was human food, and I'd eaten a couple of cookies last night at the reception, too.

And Meghan told her that I could digest most human foods except for red meat and that I really liked omelets and waffles for breakfast and ate canned anchovies for a snack and Miss Wilson didn't know what to think about that and it was a little bit uncomfortable how she kept watching me eat. I don't think she was trying to be rude, so I didn't say anything.

Once we'd finished eating we went back to Meghan's room and got the presents so we could put them around the Christmas tree. There was already a pretty big pile there and it just seemed like a lot of things to have, but humans like having things. Even Jesus had gotten gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and He was just a baby. And there were also big stockings, too, which had littler gifts in them.

Mister Wilson didn't eat much for breakfast—he just made himself a cup of coffee and then turned on the fireplace and he said that it was disappointing that it wasn't snowing, and I said that I could go up and get a snowcloud maybe and put it outside the window and we'd have snow at least. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to do that, but the clouds overhead looked like they would have some snow in them and looked like they were low enough to grab.

Meghan saw me looking out the window and she said that there was an airport that was really close and we were about to start opening presents so I shouldn't and she was probably right but it kind of stayed in my mind as something that I could do, and I thought that maybe in the afternoon I would.

They had a couple of couches and a couple of armchairs and so we all got our seats and then we had to get up to get presents. And Mister Wilson brought them in front of everybody and I only had a couple, one from Meghan's parents and one from her.

I didn't want to open mine right away 'cause it was fun to watch everyone else opening their presents and see what they got. Meghan got some gift cards which were like my plastic money but you could only use them certain places, and she also got a new sweater from her grandmother and a really nice book on Equestria and the two of us got distracted looking at it. It had lots of pictures and a map that folded out and I could point to the coast where my home was, even though our village wasn't marked on the map at all. It was printed by National Geographic and she said that they had the best photographers and I thought that she was right about that. A lot of the pictures were so good it was just like being back home.

Meghan put the book down so that she could hug her parents and thank them for the wonderful book and then she sat back on the couch and she kept looking over at it to make sure that it was still there and she hadn't just been imagining it.

Miss Wilson really liked the penguin that I got her and she went and put it on a windowsill so that when there was sunlight it would shine through it, and Mister Wilson told me that the Bridgestone golf balls were a good choice. He said that the ones I'd gotten were for straight flight and that there were other balls in the series that were meant to fly higher or further but this was the best all-around ball that they made and he was going to have fun trying them out. And he took one out of the package and bounced it up and down on the coffee table to listen to its sound.

And Meghan was really happy with Judy Hopps, and set her down on the couch and then she said that I ought to open my presents.

Meghan had given me a cute necklace which was called a choker 'cause it had a wide band that was kind of tight around the neck but that was good for flying, and it had a little silver charm on it that had my cutie mark on it, and she said that she'd had a jeweler make it special. And she helped me put it on and adjust it a little bit so that it fit well without being too tight.

Her parents had gotten me a couple of cute silver barrettes with stars and crescent moons on them that were sort of like the ones in my cutie mark, and Meghan brushed my mane back a little bit and clipped them in, too.

When all the presents were opened and the stockings empty, we had sandwiches for lunch and Miss Wilson had also bought some alfalfa cubes for me and she put them in a little bowl and Meghan said that those were for rabbits but she was wrong; they were for ponies, too. And they were really tasty, and 'cause they were all squished together there was a lot of alfalfa in them and a little bit of timothy hay in, too. Then Meghan decided it was all chopped up pretty finely so she was going to try a little bit and when Miss Wilson wasn’t looking she bit a corner off of one of my alfalfa cubes and ate it and said that it tasted pretty good.

In the afternoon, Miss Wilson wanted to Skype with her parents, and she said that she thought that they'd like to see me, too, so she got out her folding computer and set it up, and then she had to call them with her portable telephone first so that they would know to go to their computer.

And it took them a couple of minutes and then we all crowded around the folding computer and it was kind of strange because the picture was a little bit jerky and so they'd kind of jump across the couch and their mouths didn't always match up with what they were saying, plus everything came out of the computer speakers and sometimes you could hear us talking too but there was a little bit of a delay.

But I guess if you couldn't be together this was the next best thing, and it was pretty clever even though it had some problems.

When we were done talking on Skype, I said that I had decided that I was going to deliver a snowcloud. I was glad that I'd thought to bring my flight gear, so I went back to Meghan's room to get dressed and then I called up the airplane directors and told them where I was going and they said that there weren't any flights scheduled into the Troy airport and as long as I stayed under ten thousand feet I could fly, so I went outside and that got Mister Wilson and Grandpa Wilson interested in something other than golf, so they came outside with me and Meghan did, too.

I tried to keep in sight of their condominium house but it wasn't easy, because there were lots of streets and tall buildings so I knew that they were losing sight of me but that couldn't be helped. Aside from the airport and parking lots, there were lots of houses and buildings crowded around as far as I could see, so there wasn't really anyplace that they were going to get a good look at the sky, and even if I started out where they could see me real well, the winds might push the cloud away, so I just did the best I could.

The clouds had a lot of moisture in them, but not quite enough to start snowing on their own. It felt like they might later on, though, so that was a hopeful sign. And even though I wasn't supposed to go up into the cloudbank I had to a little bit to cut a piece out but I looked around and listened for any airplanes that might be close to me before I did, and I didn't stay up there too long, just long enough to knock a big piece of cloud loose, and then I pushed it down a few hundred feet before I started working it. It was usually easier to do it the other way but I didn't want to break the rules any more than I had to.

I was lucky that there wasn't too much wind, so I didn't have to fight too much with the cloud. And it took me maybe a half hour to get it knocked into shape and it wasn't the best work I'd ever done but I thought it would serve its purpose.

I had to get it down kind of quick because it was warmer further down and when the cloud warmed up instead of snow it might make sleet or rain, and I really wished that I'd brought my cloud rope with me 'cause then I could have just towed it instead of pushing it in front of me.

It took me a few minutes to re-orient myself, 'cause there was so much on the ground that nothing really stood out but once I found the airport I knew more or less where I had to go, and started heading down with the cloud. And it got a little bit trickier when I got close to the ground, 'cause there were some crosswinds where the buildings were acting as funnels and speeding up the air that went by, and I almost lost the cloud when one of them caught it but I was still high enough up to catch it and recover, and then I put it right up at the top of their condominium house, above the living room window, and bounced on it a couple of times to get it going and pretty soon snowflakes started falling out of it.

I had to stay with it because it wanted to drift away and so I couldn't check the flakes for myself but they looked pretty soft and melted, and they weren't really piling up on the ground, but I'm' sure they looked nice from inside.

Mister Wilson went to get Miss Wilson and Grandma Wilson so he could show them, and Grandpa Wilson was just watching me. Meghan had her portable telephone out and was taking a movie of it.

Well, I hadn't meant to but I drew a bit of a crowd and by the time the cloud ran out there were a lot of people gathered on the sidewalk watching it snow and I felt bad when I had to let what was left of the cloud drift off but it didn't have any more moisture to give. And then I glided back down to the sidewalk and I had to tell a bunch of people that that was how we did weather in Equestria and then a couple of people asked if they could rent my services for parties and I wasn't sure if that was something I was supposed to do, and anyways I wasn't going to be on Earth for much longer. So I told them that they could call Mister Salvatore because he would probably know if there were any pegasuses on Earth offering custom cloudwork or weatherwork.

We went back inside and me and Meghan sat on the couch and looked at the book about Equestria together, and that was a lot of fun 'cause there were pictures of places that I'd been but there were also a lot more of places where I'd never gone before. And then Grandma Wilson got interested in it, too, so she came over to the couch and sat down and Meghan started back from the beginning of the book again.

They'd kind of divided it up into regions, so there were pictures of big cities like Manehattan and Baltimare and Canterlot all clustered together, and then there were more rural towns like Ponyville and Appleoosa and Rainbow Falls, and then there were pictures of Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus and a littler cloud city that I'd never heard of until Meghan sounded out the name and I realized that whoever had been asking what things were called hadn't been paying attention like he should have been, 'cause he thought the city was called 'cloudhomes.'

Meghan said that there were a lot of places in America with names like that, because the early explorers had called the Native Americans what they called things and a lot of time the Native Americans had given answers like 'a lake,' and they were probably thinking that the explorers were really dumb for asking such a basic question. I guess when you were still figuring out the language it was difficult, but I would have thought that the people who had taken all these pictures would have been smart enough to have someone with them who spoke Equestrian. Or maybe they didn't really have a name for their town.

Sometimes pegasuses would set up temporary towns, like in some of the bigger weather zones during Winter Wrap-Up, 'cause you had a whole bunch of migratory pegasuses who needed a place to stay for a little bit before they went further north to wrap up winter there. And a lot of those houses looked pretty temporary, so I told Meghan that I thought it wasn't a real town at all, and I bet that if we went there now it wouldn't be there at all, 'cause they'd probably broken the houses back down for weather and moved on.

She wanted to know how I could tell, so I turned some pages back in the book and showed her how proper building clouds weren't the same as weather clouds.

Miss Wilson had made what she said was a traditional Christmas dinner, which was almost the same as a Thanksgiving dinner except that there was ham instead of turkey. She didn't have any hamfu for me, but she did have some of the bad salad left over, and I really didn't want to refuse it even though I didn't want to eat it, either.

Luckily, there was lots of other food that I could eat, like the mashed potatoes and squash and cranberry sauce discs, and she had a bean casserole, too.

I was pretty impressed that she'd gotten it all cooked so quickly, but Meghan told me later that it was all store-bought and she'd just heated it up following the directions on the packages.

Even so, it all tasted really good, and I didn't have to eat much of the salad, 'cause I filled up on other food and we were all too full to have dessert right away, so me and Meghan went back to her room and she got on her computer—she had one at home that was like mine—and put the movie she'd taken on her portable telephone on that, and then she sent it to YouTube.

And while we were waiting for YouTube to take it, we sat on the bed and I put my head down on her lap and she petted my mane, and I told her that I didn't want to leave. I missed my friends in Equestria and being able to fly wherever I wanted whenever I wanted to, but I was really gonna miss her and Aric and all my other friends.

And she scratched my ears and told me how much she was going to miss me, too, and she couldn't believe that there was only a week left before I'd be gone.

It wasn't fair—there were other things that I still wanted to do and I wasn't gonna get a chance to now. And I thought about the time I'd spent flying and I could have spent that on the ground with my friends.

But that was a wrong thing to think. I would have gone crazy if I'd been grounded all year. I needed to fly, the same as I needed to eat. It was just too bad that my friends couldn't go flying with me, or else we could have spent all that time in the air together.

If I thought about it too much, I was gonna cry and I didn't want to, not now, 'cause if her parents saw they'd think that they were bad hosts and so I wiped my eyes and then I kissed her cheeks 'cause she'd been crying a little bit, too, and I said that maybe we should go for a walk around the block and I could see some of Birmingham and that would give us a chance to get our thoughts in order so that we'd be happy, 'cause it was Christmas.

So she got on her coat and we told her parents that we were gonna walk around the block and we'd be back in time for dinner, and we went outside.

We didn't walk very far, 'cause there was a little park that was close to the condominium house, and we just sat on a bench there and at first we didn't say anything and then she told me again that she was gonna try her best to get to Equestria but she couldn't really be sure that she would be able to. There weren't any rules in place yet for people moving and becoming citizens. She said that she was trying to get an embassy job, which might give her a chance to live in Equestria at least for a while, and she was also going to see if she could get a tourist visa for spring break.

And I said that I could probably get one, too, although not right away. I had a lot of catching up to do on the weather team, 'cause I was behind all the other mares in my class now, and I didn't want to wind up being a cloudpusher forever.

We could write, too, and send pictures to each other. And I nuzzled her and Meghan kissed my eartip and then said that sometimes the best things in life were the things that we only had for a while which seemed kind of sad to me, so I said that we ought to make that little while last as long as we could.

We got up off the bench and walked around the block and I stayed right at her side and she had her hand resting lightly on my neck. There were a lot of brick buildings that were stores and they all had pretty lights in their windows and around the tops of them, and the lightposts had wreaths on them, and when we got back near their apartment I could see their tree in the window and it looked warm and inviting.

So we went back to their condominium and we were just in time for dessert, which was mince pie. I didn't know what that was, so Meghan looked at the box it had come in and said that it had apples and raisins and orange peel and molasses and spices but no meat.

It was really good pie; it tasted a little bit like a good mulled wine. And I thanked her for dinner and dessert, and then Meghan offered to wash the dishes, and I said that I could help, but she said that it wasn't like washing dishes at my apartment, 'cause all she had to do was rinse them off and them put them into a special cupboard that washed them.

We sat around in the living room for the rest of the evening, just talking about Christmas and school and I almost accidentally said that me and Meghan and Aric were all sleeping together but at the last moment I remembered I wasn't supposed to say that.

Grandma and Grandpa Wilson went back to their room for the night, and before too long me and Meghan did, too. And she got dressed in her sleeping clothes and then I got in bed with her and just before I was going to lay down on her she said that it was too hot for a shirt anyway and took it off so I could put my head down on her bare chest.

December 26 [Boxing Day]

December 26

I woke up before Meghan and she'd pushed the covers off a little bit and so I reached down and grabbed them in my mouth and pulled them back up and I put my wing across her belly so she'd warm up more quickly.

I shouldn't have moved around so much, 'cause I almost woke her up. She yawned and reached down and brushed my cheek and then she went back into a deeper sleep for a little while before she yawned again and stretched out some and then she reached up and started scratching behind my ears.

And then she reached her hand down a bit further and set it on top of my wing which made me tense up a little bit, just 'cause I didn't like having my wings trapped, but I trusted her so I didn't try to pull my wing free.

Meghan said that it must be really weird having wings and a tail and ears that move because humans didn't have any of those things. And she said that I had muscles that she didn't, and I could feel things that she never could and that was strange to think about, and she asked me if when I moved my tail if it felt like I was moving my butt or if it was different.

Well, that wasn't something I'd ever really thought about. My tail was just there, and I didn't think a lot about how it felt when it moved. It was kind of strange when somepony or somebody was lifting it up, but that was true of every part of my body, not just my tail. And it felt different when it was heavy with snow and frost and ice, or when I was flying and the wind was catching the end and making it move around, but that was something I was also used to.

And since I couldn't really answer I asked her how it felt having fingers and if she'd ever thought about them before.

Meghan laughed and said that that was a good question and that it wasn't anything that she thought about too much most of the time, except maybe when she was trying to learn something new. She said that she remembered when she'd learned to type on a computer that had taken a little while to figure out, and that was the last time she could remember really being conscious about her fingers unless one of them hurt. And then she said that when she was a girl she'd learned that horse hooves are basically just the middle finger that had evolved into a hoof so she'd once tried to see if she could support her weight on her middle fingers but had stopped because it didn't work at all. So then she'd tried using her fists and that had worked out much better.

I told her that her hands were better as hands, 'cause they could scratch behind my ears a lot better than anypony could nuzzle or nibble, and she brought her hand back up and did scratch me some more and then brushed my mane with her fingers and then she sighed and said that she thought that sex was fun but what she was going to miss the most was cuddling. She said that nothing made her feel so right as having me resting against her.

And she said that we didn't have to get up right away because her parents would probably sleep in a little bit and then her mom would want breakfast before they drove us home, so there was no real hurry to get out of bed. And I liked that idea, so I snuggled against her, and we stayed in bed until she heard the shower turn on in her parent's bathroom.

The two of us took a shower together and then she dried me off and groomed me and preened my wings, and I brushed her hair for her and then went and picked out clothes for her to wear, then I even helped her get dressed although she had to fasten the clasp on her bra and button up her jeans herself 'cause I couldn't do that.

We went out into the kitchen and I had frosted shredded wheat for breakfast again, and Meghan just toasted herself a bagel. And then she went to the living room and gathered up her Christmas presents so that she could put them in her bag and take them back to Kalamazoo. I was glad that she wanted to take her book, 'cause me and Meghan and Aric could all look at it together.

Before we left, we said goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa Wilson, who were driving themselves back home. Grandpa Wilson offered to take us back to Kalamazoo, but Mister Wilson said that that was kind of out of their way and he hated to impose on them like that.

So we all got back in the Enclave and this time we could sit in the middle row again which was a lot better.

There wasn't much traffic until we got to Telegraph Road, and that had a lot of cars on it. And we had to turn right and then go into another lane and turn around, which meant that we missed the traffic light the first time around but we were in the very front of the pack when the light turned green.

That was kind of fun, 'cause Mister Wilson knew just how fast to drive, so we'd be coming up on a red light and if there weren't any cars waiting, he wouldn't slow down, and the light would turn green just before he got there, which was neat.

We took the same route back to Kalamazoo, and I kept looking out the windows at the somewhat familiar scenery and I was thinking about how when I got back to Equestria there wouldn't be all these big billboards advertising things and telling you where restaurants, hotels, and gas stations were, and I thought that it was going to be strange to not see them. They'd really stood out at first, and then after a while, I'd sort of gotten used to them and now I mostly didn't even read them anymore.

Things started getting pretty familiar when we got to Battle Creek, and I was looking forward to being back at my apartment again, and I wanted to fly, too. I'd spent too many days in December grounded, although I couldn't complain too much, 'cause I had had lots of fun.

But I kind of didn't want to fly, either, since that would be time away from Meghan and Aric, and I didn't have a lot of time left now.

They took the road through downtown, and Miss Wilson said that we should stop somewhere for lunch and they'd treat us and Meghan said that that would be really nice and said that we could go to Olde Peninsula since we were practically going right next to it and they had lots of good food there. And they liked that idea and that it was close, so that was where we went. And I had a garden flatbread sandwich, and a vanilla porter to drink which was very good. Miss Wilson was confused when I ordered beer, and she said that she thought beer was bad for horses.

I said that I didn't know if it was bad for horses or not but it was good for ponies and that made Mister Wilson laugh.

We took our time eating and I had a second vanilla porter and then the Wilsons wanted to drive by campus on their way to my apartment, even though it wasn't really on the way. And I kind of didn't want to look, 'cause it was sad to be going by there when it was empty.

Then they got a little bit lost trying to find the apartment, 'cause Mister Wilson was too stubborn to use the GPS and I wasn't much help, 'cause I knew how to fly there but the roads didn't go where I could, and I got lost when we were on Western's campus, since all the roads there turned and looped and were very confusing, and Miss Wilson finally turned on the GPS and it found us the way back home.

I didn't see Winston in the parking lot, so Aric wasn't home yet.

We said our goodbyes out in the parking lot and I thanked Mister and Miss Wilson for their Christmas present and for giving us a ride to and from their house and for buying us lunch, too. And they said that it had been fun to have me for Christmas especially since Meghan talked so much about ponies but they'd never actually met one up close.

Mister Wilson said that it had been really amazing seeing me bring down the cloud, too, and until he'd seen it he hadn't really believed some of the things that they said we could do in documentaries.

After they'd left, I went and refilled the birdfeeder, 'cause the birds had eaten almost everything while we were gone for Christmas. And then when I went back inside Meghan asked if I was thinking of going flying, because she saw how I'd been looking up at the sky when I was out on the balcony.

I said that I didn't want to leave her behind and she said that it was okay, and she opened up my saddlebags and helped me put on my flight gear.

So I called the airplane directors and there was someone there that I didn't know, 'cause it was in the afternoon, and I got permission to fly, and I said that I was gonna go west along Stadium Drive.

I went back to the balcony and Meghan followed me out, and I kissed her and then went over the railing and dove down under the trees then started climbing once I was over the lake. And when I looked back, she was still at the balcony rail, so I waved at her and then picked up some more altitude and headed southwest.

I stayed kind of in view of the apartment balcony as long as I could, because I was sure that Meghan was still out there watching me. Once I'd completely lost sight of it, though, I started to angle back to where I was right over Stadium Drive, and I followed along it until I could see the big white S over the trees, and then I went straight towards it.

Since I wasn't supposed to land on it (even though I had before), I circled around above it, looking down at the gas station and thinking about all the times that me and Mel had been stormwatching out here. It had been my landmark, my lighthouse back, and I think for a long time I was going to think about Mel whenever I was out fighting a storm, and he'd probably remember me when he was out here watching the weather.

I made one more big circle of the parking lot and then I flew off further to the west, climbing all the way up until I was right against the clouds. I didn't look at my watch, even though I should have—if I was a little bit above my altitude, so be it. I hadn't heard any airplanes talking on the radio in a while, so I had this part of the sky to myself.

It was kind of funny how there were so many cars but not so many people had airplanes and flew them around. I would have thought that almost everyone would want one.

I rolled on my back and dragged my hooves through the cloud, feeling a little bit of resistance as it fought me, and then I turned on my side, cutting a wing into the cloud before dropping down and picking up some speed, and I came out of my dive pretty low and pretty fast and for just a moment I felt like I was as fast as the cars on the 94 Highway, until I lost most of the speed that I'd got in my dive, and I used what was left to climb back up.

When I got back close to the clouds again, I did a couple of wing rolls, and then I dived again and porpoised through the air for a little bit. That was a lot more fun to do in clouds, and come bursting out the top. And then I thought that I could do it in reverse, so I got a bit more altitude, and at the very apex of each of my climbs, I went right up into the cloud, and then dove back out of it again.

Once I was done having my fun, I went up one more time and cut off a little bit of cloud and kind of shaped it into a crude little raincloud and then I bopped it on the top to make it rain and then just flew along behind it as it drifted on the wind. It didn't take too long before it ran out of moisture, and sort of evaporated into nothing.

Then sighted along Stadium Drive, and I started a long, slow glide back to Kalamazoo, and I stretched it out as far as I could before I had to start flying again.

I curved around to the south some so I could come almost straight across the lake behind my apartment, and I dropped so low as I went over that I could drag my hooves in the snow, and then I got the idea to slow down even more and gallop across the lake while still using my wings to keep my weight off the ice, 'cause I wasn't sure how thick it was and I didn't want to fall through, and then when I got close to the shore I lifted back off the ground and flew under the trees then up to my balcony.

Meghan wasn't still out there watching for me, but she'd left the door open. And when I came inside she said that she'd had to shoo a bird out, 'cause it had thought to come inside for more seeds, and she said that it had been kind of dumb and had flown right into the window instead of going out at first, but then it had figured it out and had got out.

Then she said that Aric had sent her a telephone telegram and said that he might not be home until kind of late because he had to give his brother a ride back to Ann Arbor which was kind of out of his way. And Meghan asked if we should celebrate Boxing Day without him but I didn't think that would be very nice of us, and I said that maybe we should just do it tomorrow.

And she said that I was just saying that because I hadn't wrapped their presents yet and I admitted that that was true, but I didn't think it would take me too long to do it. We just didn't have any wrapping paper here, or any tape.

She said that she should tell Aric to bring some with him when he came home and I thought that was a good idea, so she sent him a telephone telegram and he sent one back saying that he could just steal some from home, 'cause he still hadn't left yet.

It would have been smart of me to start packing up my things, but I didn't. Instead, me and Meghan sat on the futon and we watched the birds eating from the feeder, and some of them would wait on the balcony railing or land on the top of it to wait for their turn, while the sparrows preferred to wait in the trees behind the apartment and then all fly in at once, and then fly off just as quick when a bigger bird came in.

We sort of dozed for a little bit and when we woke up again the room was all full of strange colors 'cause of the sunset, and that was kind of disorienting at first.

The two of us went out on the balcony, and we could kind of see it through the trees, even though that was more south than west.

Once we lost sight of it behind the more distant trees, we went back inside, and started making dinner. There wasn't any food to make anything too fancy, unless we wanted breakfast food, but Meghan found a leftover box of Mac and Cheese that Aric had bought for when I was in Florida. And that was pretty easy to make, so Meghan let me do it, 'cause she said that I might as well learn how to make traditional American junk food.

I wasn't sure about the cheese, 'cause it was just a powder that came out of a bag, and I got some on my lips and it tasted more like salt than cheese, but after I'd mixed it all in it did taste more cheesy.

The box had made more than the two of us could eat, so we put what was left in the electric icebox for Aric, in case he was hungry when he got back.

Then Meghan sat at the computer and put the movie from my GoPro onto it so she could put it on YouTube later, and we got the Equestria book back out and had just started looking at it when Aric came back home.

He had a box of presents to bring up because he didn't want to leave them in Winston since it didn't lock, and he also had his bag of clothes and wrapping paper and tape and scissors, which I took into the bedroom where my presents were, and I didn't want to wrap them up right then, 'cause I'd missed Aric.

So Meghan put on her lounging clothes and then the three of us sat on the futon mattress together and looked through the book on Equestria again.

There was so much to see in all the pictures! I'd kind of thought that I'd seen it all when we'd looked through it before but then we'd find something new that we hadn't noticed before. Like in one of the pictures of Baltimare, you could see the mast-tips of ships in harbor over the tops of buildings, and he noticed that in a picture of the Ponyville green, there was a mint-colored unicorn sitting on a bench reading A Guidebook for Earth, which I recognized 'cause I'd read it, too. She looked too old to be a student, so maybe she wanted to be a tourist. I'd have to ask Aquamarine; maybe it was somepony she knew.

Aric said again that he was sorry he was late; he hadn't wanted to leave too early and be rude, especially since he couldn't lie and tell his parents that he had a job he had to get back to when he really didn't, and I said that it was important to be with your family for Christmas and I didn't mind that that meant we were going to celebrate together another day late.

And that reminded him that he needed to put presents out under the tree, so he went and got me and Meghan's Christmas presents and put them under the tree, where they were next to the ones Meghan had already put out.

It was kind of late, and I was getting kind of tired, so we decided that we'd go to bed, and so Meghan and Aric got undressed and laid down on the futon mattress on either side of me, and at first we just snuggled together which was really nice, and then Aric got up and said that we ought to have the Christmas tree on.

He had to feel around a bit to find the electrical outlet and then he got it plugged in and that was much nicer than the orangish light that came through the window from the parking lot lights.

And then when he came back, me and Meghan both grabbed onto him and pulled him down in bed and he was smart and didn't resist us.

December 27 [Second Christmas]

December 27

Aric was still sound asleep after me and Meghan had woken up, and we got out of bed for a little bit and watched the birds and he never noticed that we were gone, I don't think. And once he started moving around a bit and looked like he was waking up we went back to bed and snuggled up on either side of him and once he was awake we teased him for a little bit, and Meghan got on top of him first and I thought about trying to push her off but I didn't, 'cause I could have a turn later.

I didn't get my chance until the shower, though, 'cause we'd worn him out last night and it took him that long to recover.

We still had ingredients for omelets and waffles in the kitchen and Meghan said that I could choose which I wanted, so I picked the waffles and I got up on the counter and started mixing the batter.

Aric wanted to know if that was how all ponies made their food and I said that we had shorter counters. And then I got to thinking about some human who was in her own apartment in Equestria maybe sitting on the floor trying to make herself breakfast because the counter wasn't tall enough for her or she might be on her knees instead; I didn't know which was more comfortable for humans.

At least most pony houses had pretty tall ceilings so pegasuses could fly inside although there were some fishing huts that weren't very roomy inside.

And I started snickering as I thought about it and Meghan asked what was so funny, so I told her and pretty soon she was laughing, too, and so she took the mixing bowl from me and sat down in front of the counter and tried mixing it in her lap and said that it felt weird to do it that way and also the floor was really cold on her butt and Aric said that if she stood back up he could rub it with his hands and warm it back up for her and she told him that if he got too close she was going to whack him with the spoon, but she was laughing when she said it.

I told her that that was why we had tails, and she thought that was really funny, too. And she gave the mixing bowl back to me before she dropped it and then Aric held out his hand so she could pull herself back up more easily.

Meghan said that it was too bad we didn't have any fresh fruit or else she'd put some in the waffles, and Aric said that he hadn't thought of it but he should have because he was pretty sure that they had had a sale on blueberries when he was at Meijer.

That would have been good.

But even without blueberries, the waffles were really good and me and Meghan both had one and a half and Aric had two of them.

I'd licked most of the syrup off my muzzle when Meghan said that I'd missed a spot and so I turned to her and I thought that she was going to wipe it off with the napkin she had but instead she licked it off and Aric said that there was a spot on his face that he couldn't get, too, so she motioned for him to come over and when he did she gave him her napkin and he said that that wasn't what he was hoping for, and she told him that that was what he was going to get which I thought was kind of mean, so I kissed him and he still tasted a little bit like syrup.

Meghan said that Aric could clean up the kitchen while we wrapped presents and I said that I was gonna wrap them all by myself, and Aric stuck his tongue out at her and said that she wasn't going to get out of dishwashing duty so easily. And she took the towel off the oven door handle and said that he could wash and she'd dry and put away, and after Aric realized that he wasn't going to get out of dishwashing duty, he went over and started filling up the sink, and I went to the bedroom to get out their presents and wrap them.

What I would have liked the most would have been to bring something right from Equestria but I would have had to thought of that right from the very beginning, and I couldn't have known a year ago that I was going to meet them and then how everything else had turned out after that.

And then when I thought about it, my first journal entry had been a year ago. In some ways, it didn't seem like a year, and at the same time it seemed like it had been forever since I'd been on Equestrian soil.

That was making me feel sad, so I turned my ears, and I could hear Meghan and Aric talking out in the kitchen, and just hearing them made me happier. So I turned my attention back to the presents and wrapping them as best as I could. It was hard, especially Aric's present, 'cause it was longer than the paper was wide so I had to do it in sections and it kept tearing through the paper anyways and I wound up having to put a lot of tape on it before it would stay wrapped like it ought to.

I would have been a little bit mad to get something with so much tape on it, 'cause it was pretty easy to put on but not so easy to take off, but human fingers would do the job, I was sure.

Then once I'd gotten it all wrapped I found out that I'd accidentally taped it to the floor, too, and I had to peel that off and then fold it over so it wouldn't stick to anything else.

I did a lot better on Meghan's present although it still wasn't as neat as a human would do. But it was in a box which made it much easier as long as I didn't pull the paper too tight on the corners.

When I had them ready I opened the door and Meghan and Aric were still in the kitchen and they were fighting with the water in the sink and kind of making a mess with it but that meant that they weren't paying any attention to me, and I was able to sneak the presents under the Christmas tree and then I went into the kitchen and stomped my hooves on the floor hard enough to hurt just a little bit and both of them stopped splashing each other and looked at me kind of guiltily and Aric pointed to Meghan and said that she'd started it, and she crossed her arms and glared at him.

I said that college students ought to know better, and Aric lowered his voice and said that a wizard should know better and then he said that he was sorry and he'd clean up the water on the floor of the kitchen and I said that it would evaporate and dry on its own so it wasn't worth bothering with and Aric blinked and said that sometimes he couldn't figure me out.

Meghan said that was because I was a girl and she said that the reason that men couldn’t figure out women was because they had two heads and tried to split their thinking between them. And I said I thought maybe that was why chimeras and hydras weren't so smart, either. They were big and scary—especially hydras—but if you weren't dumb, they were pretty easy to get away from even if you couldn't fly.

And then I wondered if a hydra killed something who got to eat it? The head that killed it? Did they have a head hierarchy?

I bet some unicorn has written a whole book about hydras.

Meghan wiped herself off with the dish towel, 'cause I didn't want to lick soap bubbles off her. They smelled really nice but didn't taste good at all. And then she threw it to Aric, so he could dry himself off, too, and when he had, he stuck his arm in the sink and pulled out the plug and then he had to dry his arm again.

We went out into the living room and Aric said that we ought to take turns and before we started we should just sit on the futon together and admire the presents and I thought that was a good idea, so we all got on there together and Meghan picked up one of the blankets to cover her lap 'cause she was getting cold again, so I slid my wing under the blanket to help out.

And then Aric said that I should go first, 'cause it was my apartment, so I went and got the biggest present, which was kind of heavy, and I opened it up.

It was a camping waffle-maker, which meant that it could be used over a fire or on a stove and didn't need any electricity at all to work. So I hugged both of them, 'cause they had put both of their names on it so I didn't know whose idea it was.

Aric didn't have too much trouble guessing what I'd given him, and when he opened it he asked if I was sure, and I nodded and said that we weren't supposed to take any weapons across and I thought that he'd like to have my glaive even though the handle was a little short for him, since I'd had it cut down. And he touched the blue ribbon that I'd tied to the handle and said that it was the best gift ever, and he gave me a really big hug then kissed me.

Then it was Meghan's turn, and she opened up my gift, which was a skyglobe that had a cloudhouse in the center of it, supported on a little wire. It wasn't actually made in Equestria, but I liked it 'cause it wasn't a big fancy cloud city but just a single house and it looked a lot like mine. And it also came with a booklet that had pictures of other cloudhouses in it.

I opened a cookbook next, which Meghan and Aric had made themselves. It had instructions for making lots of food that we didn't have in Equestria, like Nutella, and even if I didn't know how to make something 'cause I still wasn't a very good cook but I bet that Zucche and her mom could figure it out. I'd have to teach her some English, but it would be worth it if the tavern could make burritos like Taco Bell. And I could taste them to make sure that they tasted right.

Aric and Meghan opened their gifts to each other next. Aric had gotten Meghan a complete set of Daring Do books in Equestrian instead of English, and he'd also bought her some flowers and a box of chocolates called Whitman Sampler, because there were lots of different kinds in there.

Meghan had gotten him a set of tools for working on Winston. He was confused how she'd known what he didn't have, and she admitted that she'd asked David because she figured that he'd know not only which ones Aric didn't have, but also which kinds were good ones.

And then there was just one more present, which was for me. And it was a really nice set of brushes for my coat and my mane and my tail, and it all came in its own bag. Meghan said that she couldn't find any preening brushes, since Earth horses didn't have wings, but that was okay, 'cause I didn't like using a brush anyways. You didn't get the same feel as you did by mouth.

Meghan took the bow from the package and stuck it in my mane, and I just left it there, 'cause it was silver and it was pretty. And I said that we ought to have sandwiches for lunch, 'cause I thought that that was a human Christmas tradition and Aric said that it wasn't, although his family had had sandwiches for Christmas lunch. And then Meghan said that hers had, too, and so that did make it a human Christmas tradition. And Aric said that there wasn't any lunch meat for sandwiches but I didn't think that we needed it 'cause we had vegetables and cheese and I had extra cans of anchovies, which I was willing to share. I had a little bit of hay, too.

Meghan said that a vegetable sandwich wouldn't hurt him, and she got up and went to the kitchen to start cutting up vegetables, and I got the cupboard open and got the bread out. Aric had put it on a tall shelf 'cause he was tall, but I'd moved it down to a bottom shelf so it was easier to get at.

And then we talked about what we wanted to do today, and I said that I wanted to get in a little bit of flying but I didn't want to leave them and Aric said that we could go to the Nature Center and I could fly around in the big open prairie and they could watch me.

I also wanted to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity, and I still had to see Rogue One as well, because I'd promised Christine that I would and I didn't want to break my promise.

It was probably going to be the last human movie that I saw, and that was kind of sad to think of.

So once we'd finished lunch, and had some of the Whitman chocolates for dessert, Aric and Meghan got dressed and he went down and started Winston so it could get warmed up, and after a couple of minutes me and Meghan went downstairs, too, and we drove across town to the Nature Center.

I still felt strange riding in instead of flying in, and Aric said that he could turn around and let me out outside the park and I could fly in if I wanted to.

I don't know why, but I liked that idea, so he went and drove back out on Westnedge Avenue and went to the next street where he could turn around and once he had he stopped the truck and let me out, and I took off and flew about a hundred feet up which was high enough to be over all the trees. And without thinking, I lifted up my hoof so I could call the airplane directors but I hadn't brought my radio with me, so I couldn't call them.

I was coming in from the wrong side and I didn't like that, and since I knew it would take them a little while to park I made a big loop around so that I was approaching from over the river and wouldn't scare off the deer, even though I knew that they probably wouldn't be out this late in the day. And then I glided over the trees and came down for a landing on the high spot.

I could just see Aric and Meghan coming along the path and I could have waited for them but instead I started trotting the other way, 'cause I always went around the trail that way and it felt wrong to go any other way.

I picked up some speed on the downside of the slope and then when I came around the corner I broke into a canter and I could feel some of the mud from the path coming up and hitting me on the belly but I didn't care. It would wash off.

Aric and Meghan had decided to go the right way around the path, too, and I caught up to them while they were still on their way up the hill, and I broke into a gallop as I passed by them and then I took flight and once I was a ways up I started to do loops and dives and rolls, and then I dropped back down over the river and glided over that until I saw a stand of trees I recognized and went up and over them to make sure that I'd clear the railroad tracks even though I didn't seen any trains. I'd almost got caught by one and I wasn't going to let that happen again.

And then I came back down the other side and it took me a moment to find them. They'd stopped on the high part of the hill, which was why I hadn't seen them right away, 'cause I'd assumed they were going to keep walking.

I went around them, still flying even though I was only a meter off the ground, and then I landed on the downslope which was actually the hardest kind of landing to make, 'cause the ground kept going away from you, and you wanted to go upslope whenever you could.

I stumbled a little bit on my hooves when I landed and then I started trotting again, all the way around the path a second time, and galloped back up the hill for another takeoff.

This time I stayed mostly over the prairie, first crossing it diagonally and then flying around the whole perimeter, and then I went around a second time and a few times I ducked back into the woods a little bit when the trees and underbrush wasn't so thick.

When I'd gotten done with my second patrol of the perimeter, I started making circles around the middle, keeping a steady radius the first couple of times and then I stretched it out into an ellipse and it was like I was orbiting Aric and Meghan.

And then I heard a train horn kind of off in the distance and it was south of us, towards the center of town and so I got a little bit more altitude and looked down the tracks to see if I could see it but I didn't. The second time I heard it, though, I got a better fix on its direction and it was coming our way, so I landed on the path next to Aric and told him.

So he decided to hurry along a little bit and maybe we could be right by the tracks when it came by, and I took a shortcut directly across the prairie where people weren't supposed to walk but it was okay to fly over. And there was a big tree that had a good view, so I landed up in its branches and settled down in the crotch and waited.

I'd told Aric in plenty of time, it turned out, 'cause they had gotten around to where I was before the train got to us, and Aric said that he wanted to make a movie of it coming, so he got out his portable telephone and pointed it down the tracks, and Meghan got hers out too and I never thought she was that interested in trains, but she turned it in my direction and took a picture of me sitting in the tree instead.

It was really strange 'cause when the train went by and I was watching all the railroad cars moving along I got a weird kind of vertigo and wanted to jump out of the tree and onto the train cars and I had to remind myself that that was a really bad idea. And I looked down at my leg where I could still faintly see the cut I'd gotten from the train I'd ridden, and that was all it took to break the spell.

If trains were predators, that's how they would get you.

Once it had gone by, I glided back out of my tree and landed and said that I thought I had one more lap and one more flight in me before we went to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity, and Aric and Meghan hadn't even made it around once. So I went off at a trot again until I was halfway around the corner and then I changed my gait up to a gallop.

I was kinda having second thoughts when I was going up the hill, but then I was at the top and I stretched my wings out and took off again and I did three quarters of a loop just above the path and then when I got over Meghan and Aric I pulled up a little bit and started climbing higher until I was about a hundred meters high, and I went all the way to D Avenue and then back south a little bit past the end of the Nature Center, then I made a big, descending turn and got up a good bit of speed on it, so I had to really flare my wings before I landed.

I rolled in the snow to cool myself off a bit and once I'd covered my coat as well as I could, I laid on my back and stretched out my wings and if I focused straight ahead it was almost like being on my back on a cloud in the sky.

I got back to my hooves and shook some of the loose snow off and then trotted over to Meghan and Aric, and Meghan said that I was steaming a little bit and she was right; I was, and that made me wonder if you could make a cloud from enough hot ponies. I bet you could if it was cold enough.

We went back to Winston and Meghan said that I should probably take another shower before we went over to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity, 'cause I'd gotten a bunch of mud on me. So we went back to Aric's house and I rinsed off in his shower, and Angela asked if we wanted to have dinner there, and I thought that that would be fun, so Aric said that we would.

I went upstairs and I left the bathroom door open so that Meghan and Aric could talk to me—it was too crowded in there for three people. And I felt kinda guilty for getting mud all over the bathtub but it rinsed off and down the drain eventually. I wish that he had a hose out back that I could have used, 'cause that would have been easier and not made so much of a mess, but you couldn't leave hoses out in the wintertime 'cause they'd freeze and burst.

He had to go fill his birdfeeder, too, 'cause it was almost empty, and when he was taking the bag back to the garage I flew up and got some seeds out of it and I guess he'd been expecting that 'cause he threw a bright yellow ball at me which was called a tennis ball and he got me right in the stomach, 'cause I wasn't paying enough attention. And then he felt bad, since he hadn't meant to hit me, but I thought it was funny that he'd finally got me.

There wasn't any point in driving over to Jeff's house, so we just walked and as we got closer I was hoping that they wouldn't be gone for Christmas, and they weren't. And Trinity especially was really happy to see me again, and she was even more happy when I told her I'd been at Disney World and met lots of princesses.

We decided to go around the neighborhood looking for Pokemons but we didn't find too many, 'cause everyone was so chatty I think we must have scared them all away. Jeff had taken all the kids to Disney World a couple of years ago, when Trinity had gotten old enough for it, and they all had liked it and we talked about what we'd seen there. There hadn't been an Equestrian pavilion back then, although it was under construction, and Lindy said that there were some ponies who stayed around Canada and had a magic show, and I asked if it was Quiet Fluff and she nodded and said that she'd liked them because they were really funny.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but I wonder what it was like to perform the same thing several times a day for months or years on end. I would think that you'd get bored of it and want to do something different.

Caleb thought that it was really cool that I'd gotten to see a rocket launch, too, and Jeff said that he wished that he'd just pulled the kids out of school to see the last Shuttle launch, but he hadn't. And he said that next time they were going to go to Florida, they ought to schedule it around the time that there was a launch.

We made a big loop around the neighborhood and it was getting dark by the time we finally got back to the house and I hugged and nuzzled everyone and I was getting a bit teary, 'cause it was probably the last time I'd ever get to see them. And then I decided that since I hadn't given Trinity a good ponyback ride in a while, I was gonna do that before we left, so she got on my back and we went trotting around the backyard and sometimes when you're sad you can forget about it at least for a while by doing something.

I was really hungry by the time we got to Aric's house, and Angela had made a nice white lasagna for dinner which was really good and I had two squares which was probably more than I should have had.

Both David and Angela also wanted to see Rogue One, so we all got in Angela's Alero and drove to the movie theater which is right by the Maple Hill Mall and we skipped the concession stand since we'd just had dinner, and got our tickets.

I thought I should probably sit on the end so that I wouldn't hit anyone with my wings in case I tried to fly during a flight scene but Aric and Meghan both said that they didn't mind, so I sat between them instead and there were a bunch of trivia questions that I couldn't answer and then also some advertisements, and then a bunch of previews before the movie, to make us want to watch something else and to put us in the mood for the movie that we were watching now.

I thought that K-2SO was funny, 'cause he was a robot and just like C-3P0 and Data he said whatever he thought without thinking what humans might think about it, and I also really liked Jyn. I think if she was a pony, she would have been a pegasus. And it was nice how the movie explained where they'd gotten the plans for the Death Star, too.

I only forgot twice that I wasn't actually flying, and I only hit Aric and Meghan once. And there were a couple more times that I put my wings out but remembered before it was too late. I couldn't help it; human movies really fool you into thinking you're flying, 'cause they move the camera around, too.

There were cheers when we saw Princess Leia, but after the movie Aric said that she had died today which was sad. And then he said that she had said that her obituary should be 'I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra,' which I thought was really poetic.

Instead of going to my apartment, we stopped at Tiffany's on the way home and then went to Aric's house and all five of us crowded on the couch in the living room and we sat and talked and drank for a few hours until it was really late and we'd almost run out of beer and I had more than I should have and I was really tired, too, from all the exercise I'd gotten all day, and I didn't want to get up from the couch but I had to 'cause there wasn't enough room for Meghan and Aric to sleep with me on it.

I managed to stumble up the stairs and I thought about flying but I was pretty sure I'd crash. And we were all too tired to do much more than lie in bed and not really fall asleep for a while 'cause everyone had to get up and pee a couple of times and I remembered that I needed to drink some water so the first time I went to the bathroom I turned on the bathtub and stuck my head under the faucet and drank some and maybe that would help me in the morning.

December 28 [Being Together]

December 28

I didn't feel that great when I woke up so maybe I should have drank more water. Or less beer.

I made my way out of bed as carefully as I could without waking up Meghan or Aric, by scooting back down the tail end of the bed and then sort of sliding down to the floor, and then when I got to my hooves I almost fell over at first but then I caught myself and I was okay after that, except that my mouth was dry and I had a headache.

I wondered if this was how Cayenne felt every morning. Maybe that's why she was always so lazy in the morning, 'cause she liked to party and drink too much.

Aric kept pills behind his mirror, so I had some water and found some aspirin in there and they didn't make the bottles for ponies, especially not ponies with headaches but I was able to grip it in my hooves and get the top off and I had two.

I was actually feeling a little bit better already, 'cause moving around always helps and I thought that maybe I could trot around the block, and I could probably be back and in bed before Aric or Meghan woke up.

But then I thought that maybe I shouldn't, 'cause if they did wake up they'd worry and also if I trotted around the block I'd be more awake and then I'd want to wake them up but if I went back to bed now I'd probably fall asleep again or at least doze, so I took one more drink of water and then went back to the bedroom and the only place I could go was up against the wall since Meghan had taken my spot, so I stuck my head under the covers on the tail of the bed and worked my way up.

Meghan's hair tickled my muzzle and I sneezed and that woke her up and I felt bad about that. She said that she'd woken up when I got out of bed so I guess I wasn't as sneaky as I thought. And she pushed Aric over a little bit so that she'd have enough room to turn on her back and let me lie on her breast.

She asked me what I wanted to do today and I said that I did want to go and get some camelbacks for ponies back home but that was all that I'd really planned on doing. And I thought that maybe I'd ought to start getting everything sorted out at my apartment although I really didn't want to because while it was still a home now it wouldn't be one anymore when my things were sorted into what I was taking back to Equestria and what I was leaving behind.

And I didn't have to tell Meghan what I was thinking, 'cause she just petted my mane and hugged me to her.

Then she asked me when I had to leave, and I said that I didn't know for sure and I ought to call Mister Salvatore today and find out. I wasn't sure exactly how it worked, 'cause if everypony and everybody was all coming and going at the same time it would be pretty confusing.

And then I started wondering if maybe I could hide and not go back to Equestria . . . but that wouldn't work, Mister Salvatore was smart and he would find me and then he'd be disappointed in me and if I tried that I'd never be allowed to come back, and probably nobody would be allowed to visit me, either. So even if I didn't want to, I had to follow the rules.

It was hard to just lie and bed and think about the future. It was a lot easier to just do things and not think about tomorrow or the tomorrow after that. So I stretched out my wing and started tickling Meghan's belly and then I climbed the rest of the way up on top of her and we started kissing and cuddling and that was finally enough to wake Aric up and he muttered something about a great dream he'd been having and then he rolled over and saw what we were doing and he asked if he was actually awake or if his dream had just gotten better. And I leaned over and kissed him and said that he was probably awake.

He said that he must be because he had a headache, and Meghan thought that that was really funny. Then he said that he'd heard that having sex was a good cure for a headache and that there was only one way to find out.

Then he said that if it didn't work we'd just have to try again, and Meghan asked if he was up for it, and he said that he hoped so.

When we were done and all lying in bed snuggling I asked Aric if it had worked and he said that right now if he was being mauled by a bear he wouldn't care, and I was feeling pretty good, too, and my headache was completely gone.

So we got up and went to the shower, and Meghan asked Aric if he had any breakfast food, and he said that he wasn't sure. He thought that there might be some oatmeal left but he hadn't been in his house in a while 'cause he'd been spending so much time at my apartment and that was where all the food was, and if we wanted something good to eat we were either going to have to go there or else go to Nina's for breakfast.

Meghan said that Nina's would be good and I thought so, too. And they served breakfast all day, so we didn't even have to hurry, so after we'd gotten out of the shower and Meghan had dried her hair with the hair dryer (and Aric's, too, 'cause he complained that he was getting cold now that all the steam had gotten out of the bathroom) we went back to the bedroom and Meghan wrapped herself loosely in a blanket and then groomed me and preened my wings.

Aric laid back down and I think he was lying a little bit about his headache being gone, and when Meghan was done grooming me she took the hairbrush and brushed Aric's hair, too, then she gave it to me so that I could brush hers.

And then I helped them get dressed and it was a nice, clear day outside although it was a little bit chilly, so we walked to Nina's 'cause that was just as fast as waiting for Winston to warm up.

Neither me or Meghan needed our menus to order our food, but Aric looked through his and then when the waitress came he ordered the same thing that he always did and I wanted to know why he'd needed the menu for that. He said that he'd thought that maybe he'd find something different that he wanted to try.

When my omelet came I wasn't really all that hungry, 'cause I was thinking again about leaving even though I'd told myself not to. So I sort of picked at my omelet and didn't wind up eating all of it and I didn't eat my hash browns either and then I felt like I was wasting food but I just couldn't bring myself to eat.

Meghan was kinda picking at her food, too, and then the two of us looked at each other and the uneaten food on our plates and Meghan put down her fork and reached across the table and petted my mane and said that it wouldn't be forever, that we'd get together again in Equestria. And I said that I knew but it was going to feel like forever and I bet that everypony was having a hard time and I suppose the humans were too.

And then there were the new exchange students. Some of them were probably already on their way, and they didn't know what they were going to see or who they were gonna meet and they were probably all pretty nervous about it.

Then I was thinking about what I might tell them, and I started to think that all of a sudden I was wiser than all of the new exchange students and that was an odd feeling to have. It was like I'd grown up some and not even realized that it was happening.

I said that when I got back to Equestria I was gonna write a flight manual for pegasuses and that way they'd know what they had to do on Earth and now that I understood a lot more I bet that I could explain some of the FAA rules in ways that made more sense to ponies. It probably wouldn't be good enough that somepony could read it and get their ornithopter license right away, but they'd understand why there were the rules that there were, and I could also put in stuff that Mark hadn't taught me like not to fly across a runway when a big airplane was taking off 'cause it would knock you out of the air.

I bet a lot of pegasuses would want to read that, even if they weren't going to Earth anytime soon.

So Aric asked me if I still had the book and I shook my head and said that I'd given it back and he said that we'd better get me another one then, and I told him that I also wanted to get some camelbacks to give my friends and family, 'cause I knew that they'd all like them.

When the waitress came back by she offered to put our food in little containers so we could have it for later and Meghan didn't want to save her food because she didn't like eggs cold and I didn't, really, either, but it was important to not waste food in the wintertime even when you thought you had plenty.

So she put Meghan's food and my food in little boxes and a sack so that we could carry it more easily, and we walked back to Aric's house and I flew a little bit ahead of them and went up and over his garage and surprised some of the birds at the feeder and I thought about taking some sunflowers out of it but it wasn't as fun when Aric wasn't watching me.

Aric put the food in the electric icebox and then went and started Winston so that we could go shopping. It was too far to walk to the stores and I could have flown but they couldn't come with me if I did, and it wouldn't be fun for them to walk all the way to Portage.

While we were waiting for Winston to warm up, I went upstairs and got my portable telephone and called Mister Salvatore and asked him when I had to leave and he said that we'd have to leave by seven on the 30th, and we'd catch the train in South Bend. And I got to thinking and said that airplanes were a lot faster, and he said that they were, and I didn't really want to fly on an airplane 'cause I didn't like it, but I could spend more time with Aric and Meghan if I took an airplane back, and so I told him that, and he said that if I wanted to be on the same flight as Aquamarine I could leave as late as ten on the 31st, and I liked that a lot better—that gave me one last night and morning with them, so I said that I'd fly.

And I could almost hear him nod on the other end of the telephone and he said that he'd get me a seat and he'd pick me up from my apartment at ten and we'd stop in East Lansing and get Aquamarine. And he also told me that I shouldn't make any plans for tomorrow night but I should be at the Radisson downtown at five because there was something important I needed to do, but he wouldn't tell me what which was kind of frustrating. But I trusted him.

Even though I wasn't looking forward to the airplane at all I felt that I'd made the better choice. And so I was a bit happier when I told Aric and Meghan that I didn't have to leave until ten on the 31st. That was still really soon, though, and I didn't like that.

Aric had to put the toolboxes back in Winston before we went, because he said that I'd want the space to put things. And then we got in the cab and he drove to Dick's first.

The store was kinda crowded, 'cause it was still Christmas break for everyone and a lot of people liked to spend their time shopping, especially since there were so many stores full of things to buy that you couldn't really see them all. And we looked around a little bit, too, just in case we found something else that I really needed.

The one thing that they had that I thought was really clever were weights that you could put around your pasterns to make it a little bit harder to walk or fly, 'cause that could build up your endurance. I'd seen diving weights that were like that, but they were heavier since they were supposed to make a pony sink. And I don't think you'd want to walk around wearing them.

After I'd looked around for a bit I found the camelbacks and then when I thought about how many ponies I knew that might want them I realized that there weren't enough in the whole store and anyways that would be really expensive so I just got enough for my family and then three more so that a weather team could give them to their two best ponies and the supervisor, and they could share them, which was all that they had.

And I thought that maybe I could ask Mister Salvatore to send some more but I wasn't sure if that was allowed. It wouldn't hurt to ask him, though.

The clerk was pretty impressed that we had a shopping cart full of camelbacks and I told him how good they were for flying, 'cause you could carry your water with you and stay up in the sky for hours without having to stop to drink, and the clever little pockets in them could carry some small things and if you had a GoPro you could hook it to the straps and he nodded politely and then the other clerk looked over and all of a sudden said that I was that pegasus from YouTube. And he said that he'd seen all of the movies and they were really amazing and I was kinda embarrassed and I couldn't really take credit for them anyways, 'cause all I did was turn on the GoPro and Meghan did all the work after that.

He insisted on using his employee discount on the order, which was really nice of him, and he also wanted to take a picture with me, so he crouched down in front of the counter and I stood right next to him and Meghan used his portable telephone to take our picture.

They had two big shopping bags that were full of camelbacks and I was glad that Aric had put the toolboxes in Winston, 'cause otherwise it would have been really crowded in the cab.

So he put them inside the back and then we went to the bookstore, which was called Barnes and Noble and it was just across the road which was really convenient. We probably could have just walked there except there was a lot of traffic so it was safer to be in Winston, at least for them. I would have just flown over to the other side.

This was much bigger than the Kalamazoo College Bookstore and it had as many books as a library. And they didn't use the dumb numbers to help you find a book; they had little signs on the top of the shelves telling you what kind of books were there, which was really smart of them.

There weren't any that said 'pilot's license' though, so we still had to look around some but at least we knew where not to look.

Aric didn't mind, 'cause he liked bookstores. And this one also had a little coffee shop in it so you could relax and read the book you'd just bought, which was nice. It also make the bookstore smell really good.

We wandered around a little bit until we found a book titled The Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge which was written by the FAA, so I thought that that would have everything that was important in it. Plus it would help me remember stuff that I'd forgotten.

So we got that and Aric said that he wanted to see if they had the Kama Sutra there, too, but he couldn't find it on the shelf. Meghan said that maybe they kept it in the back because otherwise schoolchildren might go through it and look at the pictures and he said that he was too embarrassed to ask so maybe he'd just order it online 'cause Amazon didn't judge you.

I said that I could ask and he said that maybe another time, and Meghan also said that I probably shouldn't and anyways if they did have one at the store it probably would be tamer than one that you could get on Amazon and maybe it would even be censored which I thought would make it kind of useless.

Then Meghan told me that some humans were so worried about sex that in sex ed class there were whole sections of their books that were missing, and Aric said that some schools didn't even have it because they thought that if people read about it they'd want to do it, and I thought that was really strange. I guess if humans don't like to be naked they wouldn't like to think about things that they could do when they were naked, but that meant that they were missing out on a lot of fun.

It was time to eat lunch when we were done shopping, so we went to Taco Bell, 'cause it was in the same parking lot as Barnes and Noble. And then we had to decide what to do for the afternoon and it had warmed up some, so we decided that we'd walk on the River Trail a little bit, since we were really close to it.

Aric wasn't all that familiar with where it was, and I didn't know the best way to get there by car, so Meghan gave him directions to the nearest parking lot.

There was only one other car parked in the parking lot, which meant that we probably had this part of the trail all to ourselves. And it was nice and sunny so it was really pretty, but it was kind of odd how it was warm and most of the snow had melted, except for where it was piled up in shadows. It hadn't really been winter for all that long and already the snow was going away, although I knew that it would come back.

And maybe since it was warm, there wouldn't be much ice on Lake Michigan at all, and so there'd be big snowfalls. I hoped that whoever was coming to Kalamazoo College next liked the snow.

Meghan slowed us down when we got near her uncle's house, 'cause she said that she thought we could see it from the path since there weren't any leaves on the trees but we had to be in just the right place, and I thought about trying to use the hot tub one more time, and Meghan kind of had the same idea, because once we'd seen it she tapped her foot and then got out her pocket telephone and said that she thought he had been planning to leave for Costa Rica after Christmas and so she opened up her Facebook and started looking and after a little while said that we could use it if we wanted to.

So we got off the trail and went through the woods and I flew over the creek and Aric and Meghan found some rocks they could hop across.

The ground was kind of muddy and we weren't supposed to get mud in a hot tub. That wasn't as much of a problem for them 'cause just their shoes got muddy, and they could take those off, but I couldn't take off my hooves and fetlocks.

The hose wasn't outside, either, and Meghan said that the spigot was probably shut off, too, so she stuck her hands in the hot tub and used it to rinse down my legs, and then the two of them got undressed and we all got in.

And it was really nice just sitting in the hot tub and being outside. We were far enough away from the trail that people couldn't see us although we saw a couple of them that were wearing bright-colored clothes, and we stayed in the hot tub until it started to get dark, and we would have stayed for longer except that for Meghan and Aric it would be really difficult to get across the creek in the dark, especially since neither of them had a lantern or a flashlight. Portable telephones could make some light, but not really enough for the woods at night.

I got out first so I could shake myself off, and then I went to the little cupboard and got out towels for them so they could start drying off right as they came out of the water.

They got dried off and dressed really quickly and Meghan left her bra off 'cause it was faster to just put her shirt on and then her coat over it. And she said that that was the one bad thing about using a hot tub in the winter.

It got dark pretty quick in the winter, and so there was barely any light to see by when we crossed Portage Creek again, and then it was all shadowy in the woods and Meghan said that it was kind of creepy because this was how every horror movie ever started and Aric said at least we weren't lost in the woods, because then he'd be worried, too. And he promised that he'd keep us safe from any monsters but he was the one that jumped back when a deer came out of the woods.

By the time we got back to Winston, it was almost all the way dark, and the sky had clouded over although it wouldn't have made any difference if it hadn't, 'cause the moon was almost gone.

We could have gone home and made dinner but we were feeling lazy, and there was also a Jimmy John's that was close by, so we got subs from there, and we could have eaten them at the restaurant but Aric said that their subs tasted better when you ate them at home, and Meghan agreed with him.

He drove us back to my apartment and the route he took was kind of fun 'cause we got to go under the 131 Highway twice and the 94 Highway once, and my tummy was growling, 'cause Meghan had the sandwiches on her lap and I could smell them even over the smell of Winston. But I had to wait until we got to my apartment, and then when we turned off Stadium Drive, I asked if I could drive the rest of the way until we got to parking because I didn't do that very well since the spaces were too narrow.

And Aric said that I could, so I steered into our little parking lot and then he took over to get Winston neatly in the center of the space.

Meghan said that she'd seen how I'd been looking at the sandwiches, and so she didn't trust me to carry them, so I got one bag of camelbacks and Aric took the other and the pilot's book, and we sat down on the futon to eat our dinner even though the mattress was still on the floor, so it wasn't as comfortable.

Then after we were done eating and cleaned up all the little shreds of lettuce that had fallen on the floor I said that I wanted to go flying 'cause I hadn't today.

And Aric and Meghan wanted to come with me, and Aric asked if I wanted to fly in the city or the country and I thought that the country would be nice. So he said that we could drive to his secret place and it wasn't really secret, 'cause I knew where it was.

I put my flight gear on and then we drove out to the little clearing in the woods and Aric didn't want to go all the way in there because he was afraid that Winston might get stuck because the ground was pretty soft. And he said that he'd leave it on the side of the road, and even though the road was kind of narrow not too many people ever went there.

So I turned on my blinking light and called the airplane directors and took off. I followed the road as I gained altitude, and I decided that I was going to make a big circle and then come back down 'cause I didn't want to leave them alone for too long. And I knew it was gonna be easier to see Winston if I was looking at its front lights, so I turned around and waved at Meghan and Aric as I passed by overhead although I'm not sure that they could see me waving.

I flew east until I got to Wolf Drive, and then I followed that south all the way to the 43 Road, and I remembered that there was an airport that was kinda close and since it was night I didn't have as many good landmarks as I did during the day, so I called on my radio just to make sure that there weren't any airplanes about to take off that might get in my way. And nobody answered me, which hopefully meant that there weren't.

I was worried about getting lost, 'cause I wasn't sure that I'd see the next road north in the dark. Out in the country people don't have streetlights very often, but luckily lots of houses have lights and so when I saw a row of lights I knew that that was a road (that was something I could put in my guide) and I turned north and followed it and when I thought I was getting close I started to look over to my right, in the hopes of seeing Winston's lights.

Well, I went a little further than I thought I was gonna, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe I'd somehow missed them and gone too far north, but then I saw a bright spot through the trees, and then as I went a little bit further I could tell that it was Winston, so I kind of cut the corner and started descending.

I hadn't expected the lights to be so blinding, but right as I was about to land I got them right in my eyes and I wasn't ready for that so I kind of faltered for a moment because I lost sight of the ground and I had to go off to the side a little bit to keep from crashing. I should have circled around and landed with them to my tail, 'cause they did light up the ground really nicely.

And I kept my head down until I got close enough to Winston that I was all the way out of their beams and Meghan and Aric had gotten out of the truck and both gave me a hug.

We were all kinda quiet when we drove back to my apartment and Aric asked if we wanted to stop at Tiffany's and get some more beer but I didn't want to and Meghan didn't want to, either.

So when we got back to my apartment, Aric plugged in the Christmas tree, and we all sat on the futon and admired it. I guess that was something that I wasn't gonna be able to take back with me, and so I thought that maybe I should give it to him so he could put it in his house.

I hadn't bothered taking off my flight vest when I'd gotten on the mattress and so it was kind of fun that we all needed to be undressed, and Meghan reached under my belly and unfastened it and then gently pulled it over my wings and then when we all had our clothes off we snuggled up again and for a long time we just stayed together admiring the tree and Aric said that if anyone had told him last year that he'd be lying on a futon mattress with a beautiful girl on one side and a beautiful mare on the other he wouldn't have believed them, and he squeezed my hoof and a year ago that would have made me really uncomfortable but now I knew that that was just his way of being affectionate.

And I put my wing on him and kissed him on the cheek and the three of us fell asleep in the lights of the Christmas tree.

December 29

December 29

I didn't sleep very well, even though I was with Meghan and Aric, 'cause my mind was heavy and I think maybe it's better when the end is sudden instead of taking time. Jesus said that you know not the day nor the hour but I knew both and I think that that was worse. Maybe it was better to have time to say goodbyes but what good was that if I didn't enjoy my last few days on Earth? And if I made Aric and Meghan sad, too.

I was too hot and then when I pushed the covers off and moved a little bit away from Meghan I was too cold and I kept moving around and I just couldn't get comfortable at all and it wasn't fair that they were both sleeping and I wasn't, and I wanted to wake them up and tell them that there wasn't much time left but that would be mean, so instead I got up and I went to the front window and looked out over the parking lot.

Parking lots were kind of strange, 'cause it always seemed like there was a lot of space that wasn't really used in most of them, and then they were empty a lot, too. When I was out flying in the morning they'd just be big empty fields of pavement, but then there was the one behind Trowbridge that never seemed to have enough spaces for all the cars that lived there, and the ones at Western were usually pretty full, too. And they always had lights on, even though the cars had their own lights and could see when they were on the road, so why did they have to have lights shining on them when they were parked?

That was something that we didn't have in Equestria, and it was going to be a strange thing to miss but I was going to.

Most of them had fairly square edges and sometimes little islands with gravel and stunted trees to break up the flatness and sameness of them and maybe to trip cars that weren't paying attention before they wandered out into the road, but there were some that tried to curve around and look more interesting. It didn't work, though, 'cause they all had the same regular lines in them for cars to park, and if it was too curvy then there were sometimes areas where you weren't allowed to park.

I could see Winston out the window, and I was going to miss it, too. There probably wasn't anything in Equestria that had the same smells or sounds at it did.

Then I remembered how its antifreeze had tasted and wrinkled my muzzle.

I dropped back to my hooves and thought about getting back in bed and sleeping but I knew it wasn't going to work, so I went and started looking through my poetry books until I found an Emily Dickinson book and I took that back to the bed and stretched out with my side against Meghan. The Christmas tree's lights were almost like lamplight and it was just enough light to read by.

Maybe I should have picked a happier poet to make me think of the good times but sometimes you just need a cry and so I read Emily Dickinson and pretty soon my eyes were wet and all the words got blurry and I put my head down in my hooves and cried myself back to sleep.

And when I woke up in the morning, I felt better, even though I hadn't gotten too much sleep at all, and it was overcast and kinda gloomy and my cheek hurt from where I'd fallen asleep on the book. I was glad that I'd closed it, cause otherwise I might have had ink on my coat.

Aric and Meghan were still asleep, and I didn't want to wake them up right away, 'cause they both looked so happy and peaceful and content and that felt good 'cause I knew that they'd be happy with each other once I was gone.

I got back out of bed and put my poetry book away and then sat on the floor and watched the birds darting to the feeder and some of them were sloppy and dug in and tossed seeds everywhere (which gave the sparrows good forage on the balcony) and then there were ones that would just take a seed away and go back to the trees where they could eat it in peace, and sometimes the blue jays would come in and make everyone else fly away until they'd gotten their share and then they'd fly back off.

And there was also a sad dove calling to her mate, off in the trees, but she didn't come in for seeds. Maybe she didn't like sunflowers.

I was paying too much attention to the birds and didn't notice when Meghan got up until I heard her in the bathroom and then she came and sat next to me and she had a blanket draped over her shoulders and I put a wing across her legs to help keep her warm.

We didn't talk 'cause we both had our own thoughts and sometimes you can say more by not saying anything at all. And she rested her hand on my back and scratched me between my shoulders and the birds didn't pay us any attention at all.

I was thinking about my friends, and wondering how they were spending their last days. I was kind of worried about Gusty, 'cause I thought that she'd probably be completely heartbroken and maybe it was something that we should have talked about when we were in Florida but we were all having fun and maybe trying not to think too much about the future. I was sure that Aquamarine would be okay because I think that earth ponies are the strongest of all and it's a quiet kind of strength that just endures everything. And I couldn't even guess what Cayenne was thinking. Friendships are like trees and everypony can see what's above the ground but what really matters is what's underneath, and I thought that maybe Cayenne didn't have many roots at all.

I turned around and looked at Aric and I wondered if people knew when their bedmates left, even if they didn't wake up, and I thought he might be worried if he woke up alone, so me and Meghan went back to bed even though we weren't gonna sleep anymore. And we decided that we were gonna wake him up and I didn't think he'd mind too much, so I started running my wing down his side and Meghan said that on YouTube sometimes people woke their friends up with loud horns but that seemed really mean and she said that it was but it was funny, too and it wasn't as mean as mousetraps.

So I smacked her with my wing, 'cause it was mean either way, and then I nibbled on Aric's ear a little bit and licked his cheek and that woke him up and he rolled on his back and opened his eyes and I darted in and kissed him on the lips and then he moved like a cobra and got his arms around me and pulled me on top of him but I won 'cause he couldn't get me off so easily and pretty soon everything else had gone from my mind.

We didn't give Aric much of a chance to recover, before she took his hand and started to pull him out of bed so he couldn’t be lazy, and I pushed on his rump to get him moving and the three of us went into the bathroom to take a shower and then went back to the futon mattress to groom each other. Aric finally got in the spirit of it and used some of my new brushes that Meghan had bought so that he could groom me, too, and then he said that we were like a bunch of monkeys grooming each other and I said that monkeys must be pretty smart.

Meghan said that when they were angry they threw poop and I said that that would be a good way to make people go away and I thought that was pretty clever of them, too and she said that I was a silly pony.

I let Aric and Meghan groom each other's hair, 'cause that was good bonding for them and I didn't want to interrupt, and then I said that they should dress each other, too, and it turned out that even with his clever fingers Aric wasn't any better at fastening a bra than I was.

I could take them off, though, and Aric said he could, too, and so we had a fun competition to see who do could it fastest and Aric bragged that he could do it one-handed but that wasn't so impressive, 'cause I could do it no handed and he tried to unfasten it with his mouth but couldn't, and then Meghan said that she could put on a front-fastening bra and we could see if we were any better with that.

Well, I thought it would be easy but it wasn't at all and it took Aric both hands and he had to fumble around to figure it out and he said that he thought that it would be easier but the hook was way more complicated and she said that was so it didn't come open except when you wanted it to.

Then she said that they made ones with magnets, too, but she didn't have any that were like that.

Me and Meghan went to the kitchen and used up the rest of the omelet supplies to make omelets and if we hadn't left the food from Nina's at Aric's house we could have had that, too. I hoped that it wasn't going to be forgotten in the electric icebox until it went bad.

We ate our breakfast in the living room on the futon and I said that it was probably time to start sorting out my things so it would be done and I wouldn't have to worry about it tomorrow. And I thought that I was gonna have to ask Mister Salvatore to get me boxes, but then Aric said that he could get some if we didn't mind being alone for a little bit, 'cause he had some at his house and so me and Meghan said that we'd do the dishes while he was getting them.

So he went out to get his boxes and Meghan filled up the sink and she let me dry the dishes and then put them in the little rack so that they'd dry the rest of the way on their own and I thought that probably you could just leave them there and not dry them at all but it wouldn’t be as fun to do dishes alone and sometimes it was worth making a task a little bit longer than it would have been otherwise.

And when we were done, Aric wasn't back yet so we started to sort things out and Meghan helped which made it less unpleasant to do.

I had to keep all my poetry books and my Bible and my other class books and all my notebooks and that was really the bulk of it. Most of my flight gear would be useless in Equestria, and hopefully the next pegasus exchange student could make use of it—I knew that Mister Salvatore would make sure it was in good hooves. Meghan asked if there was another pegasus coming to Kalamazoo and I said that I didn't think so; he'd said that there weren't any pegasuses in his region and that they were thinking about Sparklesnap and that I didn't know who that was. And I wasn't sure if she was coming to Kalamazoo or if they were going to her.

And I told Meghan not to overwhelm the new pony when she arrived and she said that she wouldn't. But then I told her to make sure that she was safe and had friends and to look out for her and help her when she needed help and Meghan promised that she would. And I said that the same thing went for Aric and I'd tell him but if I forgot she should tell him, too, and then I thought that I ought to write her a letter, 'cause I'd been wishing that someone had done that for me.

So I sat down at my desk and it was kind of hard to think what to write, 'cause now some of the stuff that I'd worried about seemed silly in hindsight and I guess things have a way of working out in the end. But then I thought that maybe I should tell her to be herself and to chase her dreams and that there were some bad people that she had to watch out for but a lot more good people and I wanted to tell her about all my friends but you couldn't really have somepony else make the same friends that you had. But I said that she could trust the professors 'cause every one of them I'd met were nice, even if my climate science professor hadn't liked me all that much at first. And I said that she should try to give human poetry a chance and that Conrad was the most wonderful person.

And I told her that Peggy would watch out for her, and Meghan, too, and not to get overwhelmed by the big things but focus on the little things at first and the beach at South Haven was really nice and not too far, and there were lots of fun things to do in Kalamazoo and then I thought I should tell her that if she wanted to know about God, Pastor Liz would help her and that was who she should ask first.

I was still writing my letter when Aric arrived and so I told him what I was doing and he said that maybe I should tell her about how the weather really isn't controlled by humans and I thought that was a good idea, and she'd know that I knew about it 'cause I was a pegasus.

When I got done it was longer and maybe a bit more rambly than I'd meant for it to be but I was sure she'd be happy to get it, and I knew that I could trust Meghan to give it to her, so I folded it up neatly and I put it in an envelope for her, and I gave it to Meghan and I felt a lot better after I'd done that.

I gave Aric the Christmas tree and gave Meghan my new birdfeeder, 'cause maybe she didn't need it now but she might later, and if she didn't, she would find somebody who wanted it. And I was gonna leave all the dishes and electric kettle and waffle-maker for the next pony, and the furniture and computer, too.

And I was still kind of thinking about how I'd first seen my dorm room and maybe a year before, Action Shot had been looking at her computer and wondered what pony was going to get it next and I kind of wish she'd written me an inspirational letter.

We ordered pizza for lunch, and it was nice to not have to do anything and have lunch brought right to us.

Instead of eating lunch all at once, we had a slice of pizza when we felt like it and kept sorting. I wanted to keep my picture of the tree that changed seasons even though I'd never put it up in this apartment—if I couldn't find a place for it, I could hang it in the tavern where everypony could enjoy it, and of course I also had to keep the Hearth's Warming presents I'd bought for people.

It was strange and kind of melancholy how you could put everything that you owned into boxes and just move them from one place to the next but you couldn't move the things that really mattered as easily, but then I guess that maybe you could because they weren't in boxes but they were in your heart and they'd stay there forever.

It was snowing by the time I'd finished sorting everything out and we decided that it would be easiest to take everything that I was giving to Meghan and Aric over to his house now, so we started carrying it down and putting it in Winston, and then we each had one more slice of cold pizza and then drove over to his house and unpacked it.

Angela's Alero was gone and so were David and Angela which was too bad, 'cause I'd thought that it might be my chance to say goodbye to them.

And it was getting kind of late in the afternoon but it wasn't five yet and I didn't know what to do and so Aric said that sometimes when he didn't know what to do he just drove around and it was a perfect time, 'cause the weather was great and we could go on a little mini-road trip and then wind up at the Radisson and so I thought that was a good idea, and I said that maybe while we were doing that if we found a good spot we could stop and I could fly around a little bit 'cause it was fun to fly in the snow.

So we went out west of town and Aric drove by his secret place again and stopped on the road and I didn't want to go flying too far but I did get out and soar around in the snow for a little bit and when I landed again I had snow all over me and I shook most of it off but there was some that was stuck in my feathers and so Meghan used the snow brush for Winston to get most of it off and then rest would melt on its own.

And then we all got back in Winston and drove on for a little bit more until we found a big open field and there were little stumps of corn sticking up above the snow and it was really peaceful and quiet and we got back out and I flew around over the field and I kept low and just raced across from one side to the other.

The electricity wires ran kind of through the middle of it which were probably in the way of the farmer and I wondered why they hadn't been put at the very edge of the road like most of them were. Maybe the soil was bad there and the poles would fall over.

It was getting kinda late when I landed and so we went right to the Radisson and Meghan was combing out my mane on the way there and she got some tangles out of my tail, too, and I wasn't really sure why 'cause we could always brush them out tomorrow morning and it wasn't that big a deal. I flew and my tail got tangled and that was just the way that it was.

Going into the parking building was always a little bit strange 'cause of the way that the sounds echoed and we just looped around and around until we were at the top even though we'd gone by lots of open spaces but Aric liked for Winston to be able to see the sky and even though it was just a machine and couldn't really feel I thought that that was the proper place for it to be. And then we took the stairs down to the little walkway and Meghan made me stop and kind of looked me all over before she'd let me cross.

Even though we were almost late, I stopped in the middle just so I could look out the windows at the traffic going underneath me because it was almost like I was flying even though I had my hooves on the ground.

And I didn't know what to expect so I was getting a little bit nervous and I thought I'd seen Aric using his portable telephone while Meghan was inspecting me, but I wasn't really sure. Some people were very clever with them and could send a telephone telegram and you'd never know, and that was maybe something that I should have included in my letter to the next exchange pony.

When we got to the entrance to the hotel, Mister Salvatore was waiting for me and he said that I should follow him, so we all did and went down to the first floor and then along a hallway back to some big conference rooms and it was kind of like at the hotel in Shamrock and I could hear familiar voices up ahead and I stopped and looked up at Mister Salvatore and he gave me a little smile and a nod and I'd trotted almost all the way to the room before I turned back around and give him the biggest hug ever and he whispered that I was gonna wrinkle his suit but I didn't care and I don't think that he did either.

And so the two of us went into the room together and Meghan and Aric followed us in and the whole room was full of my friends. Conrad and his wife were there and so was Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity and Peggy and Sean and Christine and John and Chrissie and David and Angela (I bet that was why they weren't at their house) and Mel and Dori and Lisa and Becky and Mark and even the grumpy airplane director and I gave him a really big hug and he admitted that he was gonna miss hearing me on the radio in the morning even if I had made him do lots of extra work he wouldn't have had to otherwise. And I went around hugging and nuzzling everyone and there was food there for us to snack on and I got to give Trinity a little ride around the room and everyone thought that that was really funny.

And the whole evening was kind of a blur and it was almost too much for me 'cause there were so many of my friends that it was really hard to keep up with them all but that was what made it so amazing, and I just went from one to another and they were all having fun talking to each other, too, and after we'd been there a while Cyndi stopped in for a little bit and so I got to tell her about how I'd fought a tornado and even if it had won we'd learned a lot from that, and I told Conrad how I was gonna share human poetry with the ponies back in Chonamare and be his golden boat, and that I'd gotten Cedric and Leon to read poetry, too, and he smiled and said that he knew from the moment that he saw me that I had the heart of a philosopher and a poet and he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a piece of paper and told me that it was for later and that I would know when it was time to read it.

Chrissie had made friends with Dori and the grumpy man, 'cause she knew about airplanes, and John was talking to Sean about careers with computers, and Peggy and Christine and David and Angela and Aric were all sitting together talking, and then Stellan and Karla showed up too and I was really happy to see them and there was a high enough ceiling that we could play-fight a little bit after we'd moved away from everyone else.

I hadn't expected it but I also got another photo album that had all my friends in it and even pictures of us at Walt Disney World 'cause a lot of the rides had cameras that took pictures while you were on the ride, and Mister Salvatore said that he'd bought some to include in the album and right on the cover there was a picture of me with a clicky pen in my mouth writing in my journal and I looked so focused on it that it was kind of embarrassing but everybody said that it was the perfect picture and it must have been Aric or Meghan who took it 'cause it was in my apartment on Grove Street.

I'd also gotten a bunch of cards and letters from my friends who couldn't make it and I couldn't help myself and I started to cry when I was reading them all 'cause I hadn't ever imagined that so many people were that interested in me and liked me so much that they wanted to give me a card, and some of those had pictures in them, too, and so I had them all spread around a table and was looking at them all and John said that the one of me at the #freethenipple protest was the funniest and I wasn't supposed to show that to Caleb, Lindy, or Trinity, 'cause it was the whole picture and you could see Leah and Gina's boobs and my teats too and I guess that kids weren't supposed to see that.

Some of us stayed up pretty late, 'cause we were having so much fun talking and I made sure to give everyone one more hug and nuzzle before they left, and then some of my other friends had got rooms at the hotel, and so they didn't have to go as soon and after a while there was only me and Peggy and Aric and Meghan and Sean and Christine and my helpers left in the room and it was starting to feel kind of big with just us there and Peggy said that she had a room with her parents and Sean and Christine had a room too and so we went up to theirs and it was not all that high up which was too bad but there was still a good view from the windows, and so we sat around on the floor and talked late into the night, and there weren't enough beds for everyone but nobody minded. Peggy made us White Russians and I was smart and only had two and I curled up on a chair 'cause that way I wasn't taking up anybody else's sleeping space, and Peggy took the other chair to sleep in and that didn't look too comfortable at all but she said that she didn't mind and that way Christine and Sean got one bed and Aric and Meghan got the other.

And I was almost asleep when Peggy said that she'd be more comfortable if she could put her feet on my chair and besides everybody in this room knew that me and Aric and Meghan were sleeping together and Sean said that he hadn't known that so Christine punched him in the shoulder, and I got out of my chair and helped Peggy push the chairs together then got in bed with Meghan and Aric and snuggled up between them.

December 30 [Goodbyes]

December 30

When I woke up, I stuck my head up so I could see out the window and the snow was still coming down and from the bed I couldn't see any buildings so it was just like I was in a cloudhouse and that was kind of a weird feeling, 'cause I was almost confused about where I was.

I yawned and then nuzzled Meghan and Aric and I got out of bed and went over to the window and sat right in front of it and I didn't look at the ground but up into the sky and I watched the flakes gently drift down and it was kind of hypnotizing.

When I looked back at our room, Peggy had her eyes open and she was watching me and so I went over to her and her hand was hanging off the side of the chairs so I nuzzled it. She said that she hadn't slept all that well, 'cause the chair was pretty uncomfortable and I said that she ought to have gotten in bed with Sean and Christine and I thought that they wouldn't have minded. And she said I was probably right, but I knew that it was different for humans, and I nodded, 'cause I did know.

Peggy said that she probably wasn't going to get any more sleep and she stretched out a little bit and pushed the second chair away from her feet and stood up and then arched her back and twisted her neck until it cracked and said that she was going to pee and then start a cup of coffee and maybe she should go downstairs and get some more, 'cause there wasn't enough for everyone.

She'd gone to bed without changing into her sleeping clothes, and so when she came back out she got a clean shirt and a bra out of her bag and then she said that maybe if she went downstairs shoeless and braless the desk clerk wouldn't wonder why she wanted so much coffee, 'cause apparently there were only supposed to be four people in the room and we were six. And she grabbed one of the plastic keys off of the desk and said she'd be back in a few minutes, and hopefully her cup of coffee would be done by then and if anybody else drank it she'd break their arm and I think she might have been serious about that, so I pushed the chair in front of the coffee maker and sat on it so that I could guard her coffee cup.

When she came back up she had a bag that was full of coffee packets and extra cups and powder cream and sugar and she said that she probably could have asked the poor boy at the desk for anything and he would have got it for her and she felt kind of guilty for using her feminine wiles on him but not really.

She'd gotten back just in time, 'cause both Christine and Meghan were starting to move around and pretty soon it was us girls who were all awake drinking coffee and looking out at the snowfall and Sean and Aric were both asleep in their beds 'cause boys don't wake up as quickly as girls.

Christine said that if there was some way to move one of them without waking him up it would be really cute to put them in bed together and see what happened and Meghan nearly choked on her coffee.

I bet if I was a unicorn, I could have done that.

We talked about me going back to Equestria then Christine asked if any exchange student had been pregnant when she came over and gave birth on Earth. And I said that they'd checked for that before we were allowed over, and it wasn't that hard to smell by the time a mare was three or four months along and if she got pregnant at the usual time she'd be pretty big and it would be obvious, and I was curious why she wanted to know and she said that it would be adorable to see a mare with a litter of foals.

I told her that we weren't dogs and only had one at a time and sometimes twins but that wasn't very common and she said that she had a picture in her head of a pony surrounded by a dozen adorable little foals and I shouldn't try and take that from her with my logic.

So I said that I was gonna imagine that humans had litters and Christine winced a little bit when I said that and she said that babies were only cute when they were somebody else's and she didn't want to ever have kids of her own. And I thought that that was kind of sad, 'cause my little sister had been cute and fun when she was still a foal and I wanted to have my own but not yet.

Then Christine complained that she was hungry and we should get something greasy to eat, 'cause she was kind of hung over, too, and she said that she was gonna wake Sean up and maybe we should wake up Aric, too, and she went and held her hand against the window for a little bit and then reached under the covers in her bed and that woke Sean right up and the first thing he said was that she was evil and she said that that was why he loved her and if he didn't get up she was going to do it again.

We were more nice when we woke up Aric, 'cause we nuzzled him awake, and Peggy made coffee for both of them while they were stretching and getting out of bed.

Aric and Meghan didn't have any clean clothes with them but that was okay. And after everybody had gotten dressed we decided that we were gonna go to Blake's for breakfast, and since it was close we decided that it would be funner to walk, so we all crowded in the elevator and I was getting used to them although it still made me feel funny when the floor dropped out from under my hooves and I had to remember not to try and fly.

The snow was tapering off when we got to Blake's, and we all brushed ourselves off and it was kind of dumb that booths were only made for four humans at a time but we took one anyways and kind of managed to crowd in, and Sean said that he was holding on by one cheek and Christine said that she bet she could push him off.

Peggy said that we should try not to get kicked out until after we'd had our breakfast. And I told them how when I'd come back from Florida the man at Denny's had been mean to me and Aquamarine and I was glad that they were nice here.

Aric said that since it was an airplane-themed restaurant and I was practically an airplane they pretty much had to let me in.

And I looked up at the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and wondered if they'd ever put a pegasus doll up there to join them. I think if there are human airplanes that fly slowly it would be kind of fun to fly in formation with them.

Maybe the Wonderbolts will figure out how to do a show with airplanes. That would be really neat.

I got an omelet and when Aric wasn't looking I took a strip of bacon off of his plate and ate it, 'cause that wasn't something that I could eat in Equestria and I'd just gotten tempted by it, and then I felt kind of bad when he looked back down at his plate and it was gone so I told him that he could have some of my omelet to make up for it and he said that he was more disappointed that he hadn't seen it and offered me his other piece of bacon but I wasn't sure if I should have two, 'cause I might regret it later.

But then he kept begging and so I couldn't refuse and so I ate the second strip of bacon, too, and he started clapping when I was done and he said that we'd finally made a real American out of me, and even if it had taken a year it had been worth it, and then I saw that Meghan had her portable telephone out and then she put it away and said that she hoped I didn't mind if she put that on YouTube.

I told her that she could but I didn't think that anybody would be too interested in me eating a strip of bacon.

Sean said that if she put it on YouTube it would probably get a billion views, and Meghan kind of blushed at that and she said that a billion was probably aiming too high.

Christine asked me what I was going to do on my last day and I said that I wanted to fly around Kalamazoo one more time and then I was going to look and make sure that I had packed everything right and I wanted to spend time with Aric and Meghan at my apartment, too, and then I said that maybe we ought to have a party at my apartment in the evening even though it was kind of sad with everything in boxes but maybe it wouldn't be quite as lonely with friends staying over.

But then I also wanted to have one last, fun night with Aric and Meghan, and I couldn't do that if everybody was over, and Peggy said that she had Cobalt and she'd be a designated driver, 'cause she was thinking the same thing that I was, and I would have nuzzled her except that she was across the table and I couldn't reach her.

We walked back to the hotel together and then everyone had to pack their things and Peggy wanted to know when a good time for them to come over was and I said that I didn't know but maybe after sundown and she said that they'd be there.

Me and Aric and Meghan left a little bit before they were all the way ready, 'cause none of us had brought anything, and then we went back to my apartment and I put on my flight gear and hugged both of them and then went out to the balcony and called the airplane directors on my radio, and Dori answered and said that I could fly.

And so I took off and I circled once around the lake and Aric and Meghan were standing at the window waving at me and I waved back and then I flew around towards downtown, and I followed Stadium Drive all the way into town and then went along Main Street until I got to where the two halves of the road joined up near Bell's brewery. And I went a little bit north there, until I was over the tracks and I followed them along the river and when I got to Sprinkle Road, I was feeling a little bit bold so I kind of dug at my memory to remember what you were supposed to say when you wanted to land at an airport, and then I called Dori and she said for me to make a left approach to runway 9 and call again on my downwind leg and she would tell me if there was any cross-traffic.

So I flew south until I got close to the airport and then I called them again as I was getting close and Dori said that I was clear to land and I knew how big airplanes landed so I lined myself up with the stripes and glided in the last little bit and then I flared out my wings right before I touched the pavement and told her that I had landed and she asked me what my intentions were now and I didn't have anything that I really wanted to do at the airport, 'cause I knew that she was busy with other airplanes, but I felt really proud for having landed at the airport and I hoped that I hadn't made too much work for her keeping other, bigger airplanes away.

And I pranced around in a little circle on the runway and then I said that I was ready to take off again and she asked if I wanted to use runway 35, which was the biggest, most important runway they had (and it was also 17 if you went the other way) and I said that I would, so she told me to trot to the runway and hold short at the threshold and then call the tower again, so I followed her instructions and there were lots of big signs so I would know where to go, and when I was close to the edge I told her and she said that I had clearance to use the runway and to climb to five hundred feet upon departure and then turn on a heading of 120 until I was two miles away and after that I could fly wherever I wanted to again.

So I stepped on the big runway and it was kind of intimidating and I thought about all the big airplanes that landed here and for right now all of it was for me. No other airplane could share it with me.

I trotted down it and then got to a canter and a gallop and took off and then I turned on a heading of 120 like she had told me to and that put me kind of close to the control tower but I didn't think that she'd mind, so I climbed kind of slow so that I could go by their big windows and I saw the grumpy man there standing at the window and he had a really big smile on his face for once, so I waved at him and he waved back.

And then I was past it and still climbing until I got to the five hundred feet they'd told me and I wasn't exactly sure how far the two miles were but my watch knew and so I just followed its instructions and once I was two miles out, I called Dori and told her that I was going to fly on a direct path to my apartment, and she said that I could and to advise her when I was back on the ground.

I'd meant to go right to my apartment and I was on an almost direct line to it, but then the smells from Sweetwater's Donut Mill tempted me and I landed in their parking lot and trotted around to their little ordering window and got some cinnamon rolls to take back with me, and we could eat them for lunch or maybe as a snack later.

And then I took off again and flew back to my balcony and I called Dori one last time to tell her that I was landing and she told me godspeed and then I landed on the balcony and turned off my radio and went inside and got undressed and hugged Aric and Meghan.

I was glad I'd got the cinnamon rolls, 'cause we didn't really feel like putting any effort into lunch, and after we'd snuggled for a little while I went through my boxes one more time just to make sure that I hadn't forgotten anything 'cause it would be bad to leave something behind that I'd wanted or to take something that I shouldn't, and a good pony makes sure not to do that. And I found my little collection of shed feathers and then I thought that I should have made a dreamcatcher for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn and I never had and there was also the one that I had made in there and I had meant to give it to Conrad along with a poem but I'd kind of forgotten about that as the summer went on and I was doing so many fun things but I couldn't leave without getting it to him, even if I had to make Mister Salvatore stop on our way to East Lansing tomorrow.

So Aric took my computer apart because I didn't need it anymore and that gave me space to work, and I kind of felt selfish making dreamcatchers and not playing with them but both Meghan and Aric told me that it was all right and it was also really fun to watch me working. Meghan said that she’d always liked watching horses in their pastures and Aric said that she’d probably never seen any who could make dreamcatchers and she admitted that she hadn’t.

I had to make the first one twice, 'cause I was out of practice and I kept forgetting what Rebekka had taught me until after I made a mistake, but then I got it figured out and the second one went a lot quicker and it only took me a couple of hours to make both of them and I set them on top of everything so that I could give them to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn tomorrow.

I was gonna fly over to Conrad’s house, but Aric said that we could take Winston 'cause we didn't have a whole lot of time left and even though it wasn't that close to when Peggy and Christine and Sean were going to come over I knew what he meant, so we all got in Winston and he let me steer until we got to Stadium Drive, and then I took my seat back in the middle and let him drive.

Since I'd only ever been to his house on hoof, I kind of got us a little bit lost and we had to go around the block once so we wouldn't be breaking the rules by going the wrong way on the road even though there wasn't any traffic, and we stopped in front of his house and I went up and knocked on his door and when he didn't answer right away I was afraid that maybe he wasn't home and I'd started to think that I could hang it on his doorknob but that wasn't as good as seeing him, and just then he opened the door and it took him a moment to look down and see me and I gave him a big hug and then I offered him the dreamcatcher and told him how I'd meant to write him a poem to go with it, but I never had thought of quite the right thing.

And he said that I should not go seeking the muse but I should wait until she whispered in my ear, and then he crouched down and hugged me and told me that it was time for me to sail, and I nodded and as I walked away my heart was heavy but my spirit was light.

When we got home the sky was clearing and the sun was setting and all of a sudden everything was alive in reds and oranges and we didn't get out of Winston right away but stayed out in the parking lot and it was warm and cozy inside the cab even if it smelled a little bit like exhaust all the time and then Aric finally turned it off and the silence was almost too loud, and I knew that when I got out of the cab I'd never get back in again and when I got out I leaned up against the side of Winston for a moment and I didn't care that I was getting salt in my coat and that the flakes of rust were kind of scratchy, and I nuzzled the fender, which was kind of silly of me but it was like a sailor leaving her ship for the very last time.

I think I would have cried away the evening if it hadn't been for Peggy and Christine and Sean being there, and I think that maybe Aric and Meghan would have, too. But it was a lot easier not to think about how close the end was with them there, and the apartment didn't seem quite so empty with their voices and scents filling it.

Peggy had brought cards and so we played some euchre and she'd brought beer with her too but nobody really drank any of it. And she'd also brought some snack food and I had a little bit of that and the rest of my leftover hay, too, but I wasn’t really all that hungry even though I hadn't eaten dinner.

And they left around midnight, and it was really hard to say goodbye to them and me and Peggy hugged for a really long time ‘cause neither of us wanted to let go, but we had to, and she said that she could come by in the morning if I wanted, and I did, but I knew that if she did that was gonna make it harder, so I shook my head ‘cause I didn’t trust myself to speak at all, and once she’d gone out the front door I went to the window and put my forehooves on the sill and watched down in the parking lot as Cobalt started up and left the parking lot and I stayed there even after it had turned onto Stadium Drive and I’d lost sight of it.

While I’d been standing at the window, Aric and Meghan had pulled the mattress back on the floor and made up the bed and then they got undressed and cuddled up with me and Meghan started crying first and I'd thought that it would be me, and so I nuzzled her cheek and put my head down on her chest and Aric had his arm around my shoulders and his head against my withers and I stretched my wing out to cover him and Meghan, and pretty soon I heard Aric kind of sniffling and I could feel that my coat was getting damp and I heard him say that boys weren't supposed to cry, and Meghan said that it was okay if men did, and she reached a hand up and squeezed his hand.

I had more than a few tears on my cheeks, too, and then Meghan sniffed and said that she wondered if it was possible for all of us to cry so much that we'd all melt together and I said that I didn't think that it was, and Aric said that he thought it could happen in Equestria. And then he got out of bed long enough to get his shirt so that we could dry our tears and then we all snuggled together on the futon mattress and I kept my wings over them and I didn't think that any of us were going to get that much sleep tonight.

December 31 [Last Day on Earth]

December 31

I hadn't thought that I'd sleep all that well, but I did. And then when I woke up it was still dark out and I got out of bed and went to the window and there weren't any birds yet 'cause it was too early for them.

And I went and got back in bed and Meghan was awake, too. And she said that she'd hardly slept at all last night and I felt bad that I'd slept pretty well, and I said that we should go back to sleep but she said she wouldn't sleep any more tonight.

It wasn't long after that that Aric woke up and he didn't even bother looking at his portable telephone, he just leaned over and kissed me and said that he was going to miss me and I told him that I'd miss him, too, and pretty soon the three of us were all hugging and crying and I don't know how long that went on but we couldn't stay sad forever and we dried off our faces and Meghan went into the bathroom and got a washcloth and wiped off her face and then mine and Aric's, too, and said said that it wasn't forever, she wasn't going to let it be.

And then she started running her hand down my back and I kissed her and teased Aric with my wing at the same time and then I got up on top of him and I told him that I didn't want our last few hours together to be sad, and that I didn't think it was possible to be sad when we were having sex and he said that he didn't think so, either.

Even though our time was short, we had all the time in the world for just us three and for a while nothing else mattered. And then we had to rush a little bit, and Aric went into the kitchen and started making coffee, and Meghan turned on the shower, and we all washed each other off and then went and sat on the futon and Meghan groomed me and preened my wings—which I was really gonna miss, too—and I brushed Aric's hair and then Meghan's, when she was done preening my wings.

I ate the last of the hay for breakfast and had a cup of coffee, and then it was nearly time for Mister Salvatore to come and so I put on my saddlebags and I put the dreamcatchers in them so that I would have them with me, and also the poem that Conrad had given me and I still hadn't read because I didn't think it was quite the right time yet.

Mister Salvatore was right on time, and instead of Sienna, he had a white Econoline van like the one that I'd ridden out to Kalamazoo in. And he and Aric both carried boxes down from my apartment and put them in the back, and it didn't take too long before everything that I owned was in the back of the van.

And then me and Aric and Meghan all hugged and kissed and I could tell that both of them were holding back tears so I did, too, but a few leaked out anyways and it was really hard to take the last few steps into the van.

I was waving at them until after we turned onto Stadium Drive, and I was kinda sad that we weren't gonna go through downtown so that I could get one more look at it, but it was a lot closer to get to the 131 Highway going to the west.

And as he drove by the stores I kept thinking about all the places I hadn't ever gone and the things I hadn't done, and it was funny but that wasn't making me sad 'cause I think that I'd gone past that and now I was just kind of numb.

The radio was playing kind of softly and it was people talking and I couldn’t really focus on it at all so it kind of sounded like gibberish to me and I just stayed stretched out on my seat and tried to guess where we were but before too long all I knew was that we were on the 94 Highway and heading east and so I finally lifted my head up and tried to focus and I watched until we went under a bridge and then there was a sign that said we were at mile 93 which I remembered was just before Battle Creek.

I put my head back on the seat and let the van whisper its road lullaby to me and then the next time I stuck my head up was when we were slowing down to turn onto the 69 Highway and I took a deep breath and told myself that I needed to stop being so mopey 'cause I might make Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn sad and then it would be hard for them. So when Miss Cherilyn asked me if I was okay I said that I was just tired 'cause I hadn't gotten too much sleep last night and that was true but that wasn't why I felt so empty inside and I think that she knew I was lying to her because she asked if I wanted her to come in the back and sit with me and I nodded, so she got out of her seat and she had to kind of twist and duck to get between the front seats but she did and then she sat down right next to me and I put my head on her lap and I didn't talk for a while, then I asked her if it was hard for them, too, and she nodded and said that it didn't get easier, either, and it made it hard when they met the new pony the next day and I hadn't thought about that.

Mister Salvatore said that he was gonna miss me 'cause I was always fun and so high-spirited and that just watching me fly made him feel free even though he'd had to do a lot of paperwork to make it happen and I told him that I was sorry, and he said that he would have done it ten times over. He said that I knew when to follow the rules and when to bend them a little bit, and he said that I had really good instincts. And he said that he'd never had to bail me out of jail which was a plus.

We got off the 69 Highway and went on the 96 Highway for a little while, past the south part of Lansing, and when we went by a Chevrolet store called Shaheen there was a big 2500HD parked right on the grass by the highway so that you could see it and it looked just the same as the one that Mister Salvatore had admired in Walt Disney World and I saw that he looked at it, too.

Then we curved around the ramp to the 127 Highway and got right back off it at the next exit, and then we went past the horse pastures and there were a bunch of big draft horses in the first pasture and then once we got by the barn and the gate there was another herd of smaller horses that were mostly snacking out of long troughs that were in the field so I guess it was their lunchtime.

It wasn't pony lunchtime yet, or human lunchtime, and even if it had been I didn't really feel like eating anything, although when we turned into the parking lot at her apartment and were right next to a little restaurant and coffee shop my stomach started grumbling and then I thought that maybe I'd feel better if I had a little food in me. So while Mister Salvatore was calling Aquamarine to tell her that we were here, me and Miss Cherilyn went into the Biggby Coffee and we each got a muffin, and she bought a cup of coffee for Mister Salvatore to drink.

Cedric and Mister Barrow and Mister Salvatore helped carry Aquamarine's things downstairs and put them in the van, and then while Aquamarine was hugging Jenny goodbye, I held out my hoof so Cedric could bump it, but he shook his head and then picked me up off the ground and gave me a big hug and I nuzzled his cheek and told him to give Leon and Trevor a hug for me, too, and he promised that he would, and he said that I had to promise that I'd teach ponies Quidditch and I told him that he could count on it.

And then I went over and hugged Jenny, too, while Aquamarine said her goodbyes to Cedric.

Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow flipped a coin to see who got to drive the van the rest of the way to the airport, and Miss Parker said that was such a guy thing to do, and I said that Aric never let anybody else drive Winston except for me and all I had to do was ask and Miss Cherilyn said I probably shouldn't tell Mister Salvatore that.

I thought that it was too late for him to get mad at me and she said that it was, but if he'd known that I knew how to drive a truck he'd be sad that he never got to take me on a Jeep adventure and if I had known I would have wanted to do that because it sounded like a lot of fun.

When Aquamarine was done nuzzling Cedric she got in the van and we ponies sat in the middle seat and the women rode in the back seat and the men were in front—Mister Barrow had won the coin toss so he was driving. And Mister Salvatore didn't seem unhappy about that.

The middle windows in the Econoline didn't roll down into the door like they did on most vehicles but they just hinged out a little bit at the bottom which didn't let too much air in but the opening was wide enough that when we went by the horse pastures, Aquamarine whinnied and the horses heard her and a couple of them whinnied back and she said that she felt a little better that she'd gotten to say goodbye to them, too.

Then we had to close the window 'cause Miss Cherilyn and Miss Parker were getting cold.

We got back on the 96 Highway and then followed it all the way to the 275 Highway, which went right to the airport, and when we got there we stopped the van right in front of the door for Delta and got all our boxes unloaded and then Mister Barrow had to go put the van away and he said that he'd meet us inside.

A porter helped out with all of our boxes, and we got to go to a special gate where there wasn't a line and we had to show the woman there our passports before she would give us the tickets for the airplane. And our helpers did, too, and that was something that I hadn't noticed that we had to do last time.

Then they got out special metal boxes and put our things in them and it seemed kind of complicated but both me and Aquamarine had a lot more than we had before we came over, so maybe that was why.

Our helpers each only had two bags and they were carrying them with them, and we got to wear our saddlebags and we could keep those on, too.

Then we went by a long line of people who were waiting to get the rest of the way inside the airport and they had to put their bags on a little belt and then go through a machine that sometimes beeped and we didn't have to do that. Our helpers just showed their wallets and a couple of men in blue shirts took us a different way instead.

Inside there were lots of stores on the ground floor and there was a big red train that ran by overhead to get you from one end of the building to the other and there were also moving floors that you could ride and we were going to go to a little lounge so that we could have a proper lunch, and it was called a SkyClub lounge and it was only for special people.

So we got to ride a moving floor which was just like the conveyor that bags went on, and when we got on it it carried us along and if you walked on it it was like trotting and I wondered what it would be like to gallop on it but it wasn't that long and if I didn't fly off of the end, I knew that I'd trip on the floor, so I stopped walking and stood there like a good pony.

The SkyClub Lounge was really nice even though it wasn't actually in the sky. There was a woman in a nice blue suit with a short skirt, and she was always smiling and offered us drinks if we wanted and I remembered that Gusty had said that chewing gum on the airplane helped and I didn't have any so I asked her if she did, and she nodded and she brought a little packet for both me and Aquamarine.

Neither of us thought it was a good idea to drink before we got on the airplane, so we just had veggie wraps, and Mister Barrow showed up after a little while and pretty soon it was time to go to our boarding area and wait to get on our airplane.

We were gonna ride the train, 'cause our airplane was gonna be at the end of the terminal. And the train didn't have a driver at all, so you could sit right in the very front and watch out the big windshield, and if we weren't kind of in a hurry it would have been fun to ride it back to the other end of the terminal, too.

Once we found our gate we went up to the little desk to check in, and then we had to wait until our airplane was ready before we could get onboard, but we got to go first 'cause we had first-class tickets.

And it was kind of fun to watch the people as they got in the airplane, but then I got distracted by a little card in the seat in front of me which told me about the airplane and what I should do if there was an emergency.

The gum was in little packages that weren't hoof-friendly at all, so Miss Parker opened it for us and we each took two pieces and it was super minty and I liked that.

People weren't getting on the airplane any more, but we had to wait to get clearance before we could leave and I knew that there were a lot of things that had to be checked, so I just kind of watched out the windows and listened to the noises that the airplane made and then I warned Aquamarine that I might forget and hit her with my wing and she said that I'd done that at Disney World, too.

The lights flickered for a moment and then it started to smell like smoke inside but that cleared up pretty quickly, and then the airplane started moving backwards and it turned away from the building and I knew it was driving down a taxiway to get to the runway.

It felt like we were driving forever, and every now and then we'd have to stop and when the airplane started moving again I thought that this was when we were going to take off, but we didn't. And I'd lost sight of the terminal and I knew what the signs meant that we passed, but I didn't have a map of the airport so I didn't know exactly where we were.

Our drive down the taxiway gave the stewardess time to tell us how to work all the safety equipment on the airplane, though, and they showed us where the exits were and how to put on our seat belts and how to use the oxygen masks if we had to.

And then we stopped again and the captain said that we were second in line for departure and that the weather in Washington DC was 41 and overcast, and that we'd be there in just a little bit under two hours.

We sat there for a couple of minutes and then the airplane moved forwards again and I was getting kind of nervous because I hadn't liked my last flight but then I'd flown a simulator and that had been fun, and I'd been in a couple of littler airplanes and that hadn't been too bad and maybe now that I knew more about it I was going to enjoy the airplane.

All of a sudden the engines sped up and I could feel the whole airplane shaking just a little bit and it started rolling forwards and going faster and faster and faster and then the nose came up and I could feel that the tail was still on the ground, and then a moment later it was off the ground and climbing really fast and I heard a couple of thumps under me which I knew were the landing gear being lifted up.

We went up so fast it made my ears hurt even though I was chewing gum, and I kept on shifting around in my seat as the airplane moved under me but I did remember to keep my wings in.

It was really neat to see Detroit from the air, 'cause it was so big and I bet Chicago was like that when you flew over it, too. I'd never gotten any higher than the top of the Sears Tower, so I hadn't gotten to see it all.

Then we went up into clouds and it got bumpy and the airplane started rocking as it went through the air currents and everything outside was just fog and when I looked back you could see a darker trail of it coming off the winglets and it was kind of like the airplane was a in a super-big wind tunnel.

And I knew that they were using all of their instruments to know where they were, and I thought about how I hadn't been allowed to fly into clouds 'cause they wouldn't have been able to see me and I never would have seen them, either. When we got close to the top and the clouds thinned out a little bit you could tell just how fast we were going by the way that the clouds blurred by the airplane.

When we got up to our cruising altitude which was 39,000 feet, we were allowed to get out of our seats and move around if we wanted to and we could also turn on our portable electronic devices but I didn't have any of those and neither did Aquamarine.

The stewardesses were preparing a little cart that had snack food and soda and beer and wine on it, and since we were in the front we got served first. And I decided that I would try a Moscow Mule, 'cause that sounded pretty good. Aquamarine got a glass of red wine, and we both agreed that we'd only have the one drink and no more.

I decided then that the airplane wasn't so bad after all. It wasn't that much noisier than Winston, and my ears had kind of adjusted to the pressure but they still kind of hurt. And it was kind of soothing to watch the clouds going by below, and I don't know if it was because I knew more about airplanes now that I knew what was happening, or if I'd just gotten used to human machines.

We talked about what we were going to do when we got back to Equestria, and I said that I was probably going to have to practice with clouds again 'cause I'd probably lost a lot of my skill and Aquamarine said that she was glad that she was still able to work with plants when she was on Earth, so she hadn't completely forgotten how.

And I wasn't totally out of practice, but I was probably going to mess up some scheduled weather. I bet I was gonna be better with feral storms, though.

Then since I was thinking about it, I turned around and asked Mister Salvatore if there was any way that I could get more camelbacks in Equestria and he said that he'd see what could be done. He said that they were still working on rules about imports and exports and technically if I was bringing them in by the dozens that would be smuggling and that was against the rules.

It didn't seem like that long before the captain told us that we were about to start our descent and that we needed to turn off our portable electronics and keep our seat belts on, and then we were closing in on the clouds again and it seemed like a really long time before we got to them and then all of a sudden little wisps were coming by the windows and then we were in the cloudtops and then we were all the way in them and we stayed in the clouds for a long time before we came back out the bottom and I could see how the clouds lit up when the lights on the airplane blinked, just like the little blinking light that I'd worn.

And we stayed in the clouds for so long that I was starting to wonder if we'd ever get out of them or maybe the plane had gone into a cloud-limbo and it was never going to land and we'd just fly on through the greyness forever, which was a kind of silly thought, 'cause I knew that clouds ended eventually. Either we'd go back over, under, or we'd get to the very front of the cloudbank and then we'd be in the clear.

I wasn't sure quite where we were when we got out of the clouds, and I didn't know what Washington DC looked like from the air, and it seemed like we were just flying over farmland and forests but maybe the airport was a little ways out of town. Kalamazoo Airport was kind of on the edge of town and so was Colorado Springs and Battle Creek so maybe that was where humans usually liked to put airports.

Then I started seeing more and more houses and buildings and a dirt mine and Aquamarine had crowded as far over in my seat as she could so that she could see the ground, too, and the airplane obliged her by making a big turn and it felt like we were banking too far—I never would have banked that far unless I was playing. But then I remembered that the airplane was going a lot faster than I could fly.

And as we got close to the ground it seemed to take a while before the airplane finally touched the ground with a loud screeching noise and then the engines screamed and I didn't think that something that big could stop so fast and I was glad that I was wearing my seat belt, or else I would have gone flying out of my seat.

We drove around to our gate and I remembered how it had looked when Gusty's airplane had arrived, so I could picture what was going on as it went into position and then I could hear people unfastening their seat belts even though the stewardesses hadn't said that we could yet.

And there was a thunk and the lights flickered again and I heard the engines turn off and then we were allowed to unfasten our seat belts and get our carry-on bags although me and Aquamarine were still wearing ours so we didn't have to do anything.

Our luggage was going to meet us at the transport center, so we didn't have to wait around for the rest of our things, and it was kind of a blur as we went through the airport and then outside to the parking area and there was a whole row of identical white Econoline vans and Mister Salvatore just picked the first one and the door was open and the keys were in it. And Aquamarine figured out that the row of vans had probably gone all the way to the walkway and now they were being taken back to the transport center one-by-one.

Me and Aquamarine were both starting to get eager to get back to Equestria, but we still looked out the window for a last look at Earth, 'cause we knew that we were going to be spending some time in there and neither of us was really looking forward to it. I don't know why they couldn't make it nice like the airport was. Maybe they hadn't had enough money, or there weren't enough travelers yet.

And I pointed to the Taco Bell that I'd seen on our first trip and Mister Salvatore said that we could stop so we did. And before we went in to get food I asked him if he was worried about us farting after we ate it and he said that it was only ten more minutes before we were at the transport center and after that we'd have some meetings with boring bureaucrats and he thought it might make the meeting more interesting or at least get over more quickly and Miss Cherilyn said that that was terrible.

But that didn't stop me and Aquamarine from enjoying our meal and reading the inspirational messages on the sauce packets. And then we got back in the Econoline and drove the rest of the way to the transport center and it was funny, 'cause I couldn't quite remember what it had looked like, but as soon as I saw it I knew it.

Mister Salvatore parked in the little fenced-in area and just like Aquamarine had thought, there were lots of other, identical Econoline vans already parked there who'd brought ponies that had already arrived.

We had to check in and I could keep my student identification card, but I had to give my Visa card and portable telephone back, and so did Aquamarine. And then we each had to have a little meeting where a man in a suit started asking me lots of questions and Mister Salvatore went there with me but Miss Cherilyn was off taking care of my luggage.

It was kind of like when we went to Canada and the border agents asked us lots of questions, but I didn't have to wear a number on my ear this time. And I was starting to feel pretty gassy from the burritos and I couldn't help myself and the man who was asking the questions pretended not to notice but I could tell that he did and I felt kind of bad but Mister Salvatore had a big smile on his face the whole time and he was enjoying it.

When I got done with the interview I met up with Miss Cherilyn so that I could go have a medical check and there were two doctors, and one was a unicorn and the other was a human. And they had a lot of questions for me, too, and I had to tell them that I'd had sex with Aric and Meghan just in case I had gotten some kind of disease that they could get, too. I thought that Cayenne was probably going to be in the room for a long time telling the doctors who all her partners had been.

And then I got to meet up with Mister Salvatore again and he said that there were some private rooms where we could be together if I wasn't ready yet, and there was also a big room where anypony could gather but humans weren't really supposed to be in there.

I wasn't quite ready to say goodbye to them yet, so we went to one of the private rooms and they had some couches and a window that had a view of a courtyard that probably looked really pretty in the spring and summer but was just snowy and dead right now and Mister Salvatore opened the window a little bit so we could get some fresh air in the room, and we sat down on the couch together and I got out the dreamcatchers that I'd made and gave them to each of them and Mister Salvatore gave me the old altimeter I'd had to wear, and he said that he'd kept it for me and it was okay to take it to Equestria because it didn't have any electronics in it and he thought that I might like it to remember what flying on Earth was like.

And then the three of us just sat there and we didn't say anything because there wasn't anything more that we needed to say.

I finally knew that it was time, so I nuzzled Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, and I got up and hugged both of them and went down the hall to the common room and I was fighting back tears all the way.

When I got there, the room was already crowded with ponies and there were some who were wearing lots of clothes like Gusty did and some of them were just wearing shirts which looked a little more normal. And I saw a couple of mares who had gotten their ears pierced and I saw some kind of familiar faces that I vaguely remembered from a year ago, and everypony was kind of in little clusters and there weren't any humans at all, and even the food table was at pony-height and that looked strange to me.

The signs in the room were in both English and Equestrian and I could hear ponies speaking both languages, and there were also a pair that were speaking something else that I didn't recognize.

I found Aquamarine pretty quick and her cheeks were kinda damp, too, and she said that she hadn't seen Cayenne or Gusty yet, and I hadn't either, and I said that I'd fly up and check, and so I did and a lot of ponies stared at me 'cause they had kind of forgotten about pegasuses I guess.

And while we were waiting for them, we found Sunrise Song, and said that we'd met her helpers in Los Angeles, but we'd never met her before, and she didn't know about us but did know about Gusty and said that she'd seen her in Orange is the New Black, and she was hoping to meet her so we promised that when she arrived we'd bring her over.

We found a pair of Earth ponies and talked to them for a while—one of them was from Vanhoover and the other lived in a little town that neither of us had heard of but it was near Dream Valley. We didn't feel bad for not knowing it, though, 'cause neither of them had ever heard of Chonamare.

And Cayenne came in first and she really looked pretty sad and so we went over to cheer her up and hugged her and nuzzled her and she just wanted to go lie in a corner, so she found a quiet spot and stretched out on the floor and said that the last few days had been really tough and she'd been late to the airport 'cause she hadn't gotten all the way packed yet and had to take a different airplane and it was good that there were a lot of them. And then she put her muzzle down and started crying and pretty soon some other mares came over to help cheer her up.

When Gusty came in she came over and nuzzled Cayenne, too, and we eventually got her back to her hooves and moving around and talking and she cheered up a little bit but you could still see that she was really sad and she got some food but didn't eat it and kept forgetting that she was holding a plate in her field and Gusty had to catch it a couple of times so she didn't make a mess on the floor and she finally took it away from Cayenne and set it out of the way.

I went and brought Sunrise Song over so that she could meet Gusty and it maybe wasn't the best of circumstances but the two of them did get to talk some, and me and Aquamarine led Cayenne away a little bit and let her sit on the floor and relax some more.

There were sleeping rooms for us to use and we were going to go through after breakfast, 'cause we had to wait for the inbound ponies to come in first and that would take a little while. And so we decided that we should find a room, 'cause we were hoping that Cayenne would be better after a night's sleep, so we led her down the hallway until we found a room that nopony was using and it had two big beds in it and we only needed one, so we left the door open so that if other ponies were looking for a place to sleep they could come in.

It was kind of like a hotel room except not as nice—the walls were the same big bricks as everything else, and the floor was tiles and Gusty said that she'd heard that the building had been an institution before it was a transfer center and maybe that was why it was like it was. But we had our own bathroom and the shower was kind of small which was too bad so only two of us at a time could fit in it.

Gusty had to change into her sleeping clothes, and then we got Cayenne into bed and the three of us groomed her and then we were all pretty exhausted so we all curled up with Cayenne in the middle.

12 After Ice Moon [Back in Equestria]

January 1 12 After Ice Moon

I was glad that we'd left the door open, 'cause when I woke up I saw that there were a couple of other ponies on the bed next to ours. I couldn't tell who it was just by looking, and there had been so many ponies all gathered together that I couldn't tell them from their scents, either, although if it had been somepony that I knew well I would have been.

I yawned and stretched out as much as I could without waking anypony else up and I didn't want to get out of bed right away, 'cause it was still just barely light outside.

So I tucked my head up against Gusty's withers and that made me a little bit heartsick, 'cause with her sleeping clothes on it was like snuggling up with a human sort of but it wasn't quite the same.

I wondered if she was going to keep on wearing clothes when she got back to Canterlot, or if she was going to slowly get out of the habit. Maybe she'd just stop bothering with her underwear after she'd been back a couple of weeks and then slowly go around less and less dressed. Or maybe not—it was gonna be winter in Equestria, too, so she might want to keep her clothes on until the springtime at least.

If it hadn't been rude, I would have asked her when she woke up.

I drifted a little bit off to sleep until I heard Aquamarine yawning and then I could feel the mattress move a little bit as she stretched out and then since she was up, I got up, too.

We were both curious so we took a look at our roommates. On the close side was a white earth pony with a blue and purple and pink mane that was really pretty even though it was kind of tangled up from sleeping, and then on her other side was a yellow earth pony with a blue mane and tail and she had a white diamond star on her face and I didn't remember seeing her last night and I would have 'cause stars and blazes and socks were really rare on mares although both me and Aquamarine had discovered that they weren't that rare on Earth horses.

Aquamarine thought that maybe they'd gotten back really late last night and so we ought to let them sleep. We could meet them at breakfast.

So we went into the shower and were happy to find out that there was proper pony shampoo and soap in there for us and they also had a hoof-pick hanging from the wall and in the cabinet were a bunch of brushes and combs which was really thoughtful of them 'cause I hadn't packed any of that in my saddlebags and Aquamarine hadn't either.

And we weren't sure how much hot water there was and so we decided that we'd take a cool shower since neither of us minded that much and that way there's be plenty of hot water for everypony else.

While we were drying off I was thinking about the ponies on the other side who were about to come through—I didn't think they'd started yet, but maybe they had. They wouldn't really know what to expect and so I told Aquamarine how I'd left a letter for whoever came after me and her ears fell and she said that she wished that she'd thought of that.

We couldn't decide if we should leave our room yet, or if we should stay a little while longer for when Cayenne woke up. So we went over and looked out the window, and it was still grey and overcast outside but it was getting light as the sun came up behind the clouds. And it was a strange thing to wonder, but I all of a sudden started thinking about what the weather would be like on the other side. It wasn't like taking a train or even an airplane where the weather changed as you went; when we went outside to get to our trains it could be completely different.

Aquamarine said that she was a little bit sad that she couldn't bring any plants with her back to Equestria, just because it wasn't safe. She said that humans had found out that some plants were invasive and they'd get away and take over everything and there were people at Michigan State who were trying to figure out the best ways to kill them because they competed with the native plants for food and water and sunlight. And she said that there were lots of them in Michigan like garlic mustard which didn't taste very good, and dame's rocket, which was kind of pretty and did taste good.

Well, we were still at the window when our roommates woke up and once they got out of bed they came over and introduced themselves. The white mare was named Gingerbread, and she came from a town called Tambelon, which was in the south part of Equestria, and the yellow mare with the star was from Grayvaile which was on the other side of the Sparkling Sea, and her name was Bubbles.

They'd both gone to school on the west coast, which was why they'd come in so late and I was kind of jealous of Bubbles, 'cause she'd gone to the Western Washington University which was practically on Puget Sound, and she said that the beach wasn't even a mile away from the university.

We would have liked to talk some more but gave them a chance to take their shower, and we decided that when they got done we'd wake up Cayenne and Gusty if they hadn't gotten up yet, 'cause they had to be ready when it was time to go back to Equestria.

So we waited until we heard the shower stop and then we both got up in bed and started nuzzling Gusty to wake her up, 'cause we thought that it would be best to wake up Cayenne last. And I guess Gusty hadn't been all that much asleep any more, 'cause she opened her eyes right away and then she stretched out and pushed the covers off of her.

The three of us had gotten Cayenne up by the time our new friends came out from the bathroom, and Bubbles had a ribbon tied around her dock. Gusty said that that was in fashion in Grayvaile but it looked kind of odd to me.

I think Cayenne had gotten all cried out yesterday but she was still pretty gloomy and also tired and we had to kind of push her into the shower, and I said that I'd go see if there was any coffee to help wake her up.

There were already a few ponies in the hall, and the table was filled with breakfast food and they had a nice selection of hays and fresh pasture grasses, along with some human foods like shredded wheat, and most importantly they had big urns of coffee and also a bunch of different kinds of tea, and all the mugs were hoof-friendly.

So I got a mug for Cayenne and then I thought that I should get one for Gusty, too, if she wanted it. Me and Aquamarine could get our own, and we were both awake enough that we probably didn't need it. I was starting to really look forward to being back home again and I wondered if maybe that was why they had us wait a little bit, so that we'd have time to get used to the idea that we were really going back.

Cayenne looked a little bit more alert when she came out of the shower, but her head was still down and her ears were drooping and the coffee didn't help with that, either.

She wanted to get back in bed and rest until it was time to go but we wouldn't let her, 'cause we didn't think that it was gonna be good for her and I thought that maybe she was thinking of trying to get out of the transfer center and she'd get in a lot of trouble if she did that, so we made her go to the dining room and Gusty got some food for her even though she said that she wasn't hungry.

And we sat down at our table with Gingerbread and Bubbles and we didn't talk about what we'd done on Earth at first, 'cause we thought that that might make Cayenne more depressed, and instead we talked about what we missed in Equestria and what we were looking forward to getting back to.

Gingerbread said that she didn't like how the weather just happened and even though she'd learned better, she still read the weather reports every morning and then they were usually wrong and after a while she'd started to see a bit of humor in it but at first it had really annoyed her, and it was going to be nice to see pegasuses up above moving clouds around.

Bubbles said she was gonna be happy with furniture that was pony-sized, 'cause it seemed like everything she wanted to get to was put up higher than she could easily reach and that it had been really frustrating to go shopping and have all the food that she wanted to eat being up on a shelf that was higher than she could get to and she'd tried standing on a shopping basket but that hadn't worked so well and she'd broken through one once.

Aquamarine was most looking forward to seeing her family again and just relaxing in Ponyville 'cause East Lansing was nice, but it was too busy for her. She said that she liked it when the town shut down for the night a couple of hours after dusk.

I was looking forward to spending the night on a cloud, which was something I hadn't been able to do on Earth. I had thought about using my rope to tie one to my balcony, but then I'd thought that it might dissolve in the middle of the night and dump me to the ground, and I didn't want that to happen. Or if it got free it could fly up and get hit by an airplane, which wouldn't have been good if I'd been sleeping on it.

Gusty said that she had bought a bunch of human plays and when she got back she was going to see if she could get ponies to perform one of them. She said that she thought that would be a good way to show what human culture was like, and she said that there had been some human plays before but nopony had really done them right, because they didn't quite understand what it was like to live on Earth.

And Cayenne said that she was gonna enjoy shopping at stores that had proper jewels instead of the sad little things that they had on Earth, and that kind of cheered her up a little bit. And she said that she was going to enjoy a proper hooficure, too, because she hadn't liked her farrier too much and when she went back to him to have him fix the shoe that she'd lost in Walt Disney World, she'd wanted to buck him in the face, 'cause she'd never lost a shoe in Equestria.

Aquamarine said that she had, 'cause sometimes they got caught under rocks and got loose, and then all of us were talking about grooming and the lack of human spas and how humans didn't like social bathing at all but then we found out that we'd all managed to convince at least one of our friends to try it.

So then we were thinking about what our human friends had gotten us to do and Cayenne said that hers had gotten her to try different kinds of meat and when I said that I had, too, Aquamarine said that didn't count 'cause I ate fish anyways but I'd tried bacon and that wasn't from a fish.

Gingerbread said that she'd had some turkey for Thanksgiving and it had been pretty good. And then she said that she was sorry and she hoped that I wasn't friends with any turkeys, and I wasn't. There were some wild turkeys that lived near Chonamare but they mostly stayed to themselves and they'd chase you off if you got in their territory, especially around mating season, and it was a good thing that they didn't fly very well.

By the end of breakfast, Cayenne was in a much better mood and she started to look around the room for the first time since we'd gotten there, and I was glad, 'cause I thought that we might have to drag her by her tail to get her to leave Earth.

We got our saddlebags on and made sure that we hadn't left anything in the room, 'cause it was almost time to go, and then we decided that everypony ought to go to the bathroom before we left just in case, and then we heard that maybe one of the Princesses was going to meet us on the other side so everypony had to make sure that they were well-groomed.

So there was a lot of talk about that and everypony was pretty excited. Aquamarine knew Princess Twilight of course, and most of the Canterlot Unicorns had met Princess Celestia and Princess Luna before or at least seen them. There weren't any crystal ponies to tell us about Princess Cadance and most of us didn't know too much about her but then we heard that there was a pony near the front of the line named Posey Pink whose sister knew Diamond Rose who had known Princess Cadance when she was a student at Canterlot Academy.

It didn't feel like we had to stand in line all that long before we were moving forward, and then I started to get a little bit nervous as I got closer and closer to the doorway and then all of a sudden I was the next one in line and then it was my turn and one moment I was on Earth and the next moment my coat and feathers bristled and I was back in Equestria and at first it didn't quite sink in but then I got a little giddy and I think I would have pranced around except as soon as I got outside the door, there was another lineup of ponies and Princess Twilight was at the head of it, greeting everypony as they went by.

When I got up to her she nuzzled my cheek and asked me a little bit about the friends I'd made on Earth, so I told her about Peggy and Aric and Meghan and said that there were lots and lots more but I didn't want to make everypony wait and she nuzzled my cheek and then told me that we could relax for a while because traveling between the worlds was kind of stressful and everypony reacted a little bit differently. And she said that there'd be a lunch and she was going to give a speech before we all got on trains and started our final journey home.

When I got into the next room which was a big open hall there were a lot more ponies in there than had been in the transfer center and I guess I hadn't really thought about it but I'd kind of noticed that there had been more ponies in line waiting to talk to Princess Twilight than I'd expected and that was because they had been in different countries that had their own transfer centers, and then I got to thinking that we were actually pretty lucky 'cause some other ponies must have had to leave in the middle of the night to get here.

And I heard a lot more foreign languages, and there were more ponies wearing clothes and there was a stallion that had a neat uniform on and a couple of mares that had really pretty wraparound dresses and I saw a couple who were napping on the chairs and I bet they'd come over in the middle of the night.

It took a while before the last of the line finally made it in, and it was pretty amazing looking at all of us all gathered together like that, 'cause we'd filled up the room and we didn't start to quiet down until Princess Twilight walked through the room and up to a little podium and she said that she had a few words that she wanted to share with us.

So she told us about how she'd hardly had any friends when she went to Ponyville and she hadn't really thought that she needed them, but it was only with the help of her friends that she was able to banish Nightmare Moon and she came to realize after that just how important friendship really was, and that her friend Sunset Shimmer had learned the same lesson, and then she said that the thing about friendships was that they'd challenge you and take you to unexpected places and she asked everypony to raise a hoof if their year on Earth had gone exactly how they expected, and nopony did, and she said that our friends teach us things and then we teach them things and we're all better for it.

She said that she wanted us to all try and remember what we'd been feeling and thinking right before we came through the first time, and then to ask ourselves if we were the same pony as we'd been a year ago, and I knew that I wasn't.

Then she told us that when we went back to our universities and colleges we might notice that they'd changed a little bit, too, because of the humans that had been there in our stead. And then she said that for most of us, there'd be a new human there now and we should do our best to help them feel welcome because we knew now what they'd given up to come here, and then she smiled and said that she probably hadn't had to tell us that, and that got a few laughs from everypony.

She looked down at the podium where I guess she'd put some notes so she didn't forget everything that she had to say, and she told us that the rest of our luggage would be at the train station for us and then she thanked us and all of us were cheering and stomping our hooves so loud that we didn't hear her at first when she said that there was food in the next room for us and we should probably eat before we went to the train station, and then she stepped away from the podium for a moment and kind of paused and came back and it got quiet and she said that just so we knew it was 12 days after Ice Moon, and I heard some ponies muttering in surprise.

I was surprised, 'cause I'd completely lost count on the Equestrian calendar.

Well, by now everypony was starting to think about getting home, plus most of us were gonna be on the train at least part of the way home with our friends, so we kind of all hurried through lunch and then when we were done we went out to the train station.

I don't know why I thought it would be the afternoon, 'cause it wasn't. I looked up in the sky real quick so that I could tell what time it was and for a moment I was really disoriented 'cause the stars were all different than they had been on Earth.

I wasn't as good at reading the stars as a sailorpony, but I could do it well enough and I saw that it was getting close to dawn. And it was funny, 'cause you could tell who'd come over from the night-side of Earth—they weren't stopping in confusion, because they'd expected it to be night. And I'd thought that Twilight looked a little tired, but I'd just assumed that was because she'd met a whole lot of ponies all at once and not because it was the middle of the night.

We had to figure out which train we wanted, so we all crowded around the timetables and then we said our goodbyes to Bubbles and Gingerbread, 'cause they were on a southbound train, and we were going north. And Bubbles was gonna have a really long trip, 'cause after she got to the coast, she was going to have to take a boat the rest of the way and that was another couple of days. There weren't any airplanes that you could take to just fly you right where you were going.

Then when we went out to the platforms the trains seemed really tiny and it was weird having to adjust to that, 'cause I'd always thought of them as being big and heavy and now I was thinking about how small it was and it almost looked like a toy, and the rails were too close together and we almost needed helpers to get us used to being ponies again.

There was a line of ponies getting on our train and we weren't in a hurry, so I brushed the snow off one of the benches with my wing and we all sat down and I got out the poem that Conrad had given me because now it seemed like the right time to read it.

It was called Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and everypony really liked it and thought that it was a good poem for today. Aquamarine said that she always liked overnight snowfalls and I didn't like them as much when I had to help make them 'cause it was dark and confusing and so we tried to put down snow during the day but every now and then we had to start a snowfall at night or it carried over, and it was pretty.

It took a while for everypony to get settled on the train and they wouldn't let us leave until everyone was accounted for, and there were ponies on the platform who were helping if somepony didn't know which train she was supposed to get on.

So the sky was light by the time the train finally pulled out of the station and it was really confusing to see the sun come up again for the second time in maybe ten hours—I couldn't really rely on my sense of time any more. And we chatted for a little while, then Cayenne fell asleep against Gusty and that was really cute. Aquamarine had her muzzle up against the window so that she could see all the familiar trees, and even though most of them were hibernating for the winter she still recognized them.

We had to make a couple of stops for water because some of the stations were too far apart for the train to make it to the next station, and when we stopped at one of the water tanks I happened to look out the window and saw a couple of railroad pegasuses pushing rainclouds over to the water tank to keep it filled up.

And I couldn't help but think that the Amtraks had been much nicer. They'd been bigger and faster and sleeker and didn't have to stop all the time to get more water. I bet they could have gone from one side of America all the way to the other without stopping if they'd wanted to.

We had a long station stop when the train got more fuel and that gave everypony a chance to get off the train and stretch out some and I got to fly around a little bit and it was strange but I felt like I could fly better than ever before, but I thought that I was just thinking that because I was tired. If anything, I ought to have been having trouble flying because I was out of practice at flying in Equestria, and it did feel strange.

But it was nice to have the winter air ruffling through my coat with no flight vest on, and I felt a lot lighter without my radio and camelback.

And it was really nice to see other pegasuses up in the air, too. They were a ways off, too far away to fly to and talk to, but that didn't really matter, because they were there, and I realized how much I'd missed having a flying partner whenever I wanted one. Even when I was at the university, which didn't have too many pegasuses, I could always find some weatherponies who were up in the air and wanted to have a quick race or just hang out on a cloud for a while.

I zipped back to the ground and I could have come in for a better landing I'm sure, but flying was still kind of feeling weird so I made a more cautious landing where there wasn't anypony standing around and I saw an enterprising stallion had set up a food cart, but I didn't have any bits, so I couldn't buy any food. Maybe they'd have some on the train, or else I'd just have to be hungry until I got to my stop.

I could see that they were finishing up with the train, 'cause the collier was pulling his wagon away from the locomotive, and the platform was starting to empty off as ponies got back in the train, so I got back aboard and found our seat and Cayenne was still asleep and I was getting kind of tired too.

So when the train started moving again, I asked Aquamarine if she minded if I stretched out on the bench and she said it was okay.

Aquamarine promised to wake me up before we got to my station, which was really nice of her. I was gonna be the first one off the train in our little group of friends.

Well, it turned out that she didn't have to because even though I'd probably been up a full day since it was light out my body insisted that it was daytime and so I only really napped a little bit and then I woke back up again and the train was stopped again because it needed more water.

And I was kinda hungry and I was sort of getting a bit of nervous anticipation in my stomach, too, 'cause what if my family had changed when I was gone? What if my mom had found another stallion that she liked and he'd never met me? Or my sister had gotten pregnant—she hadn't said anything about that in any of her letters but maybe she'd wanted to keep it a surprise.

I could be an aunt and not even know it yet.

And I got up and walked back and forth down the aisle, 'cause I wanted to be off the train; I wanted all this travel to be done with. I think it was 'cause I was still tired, but I couldn't remember how long it had been since I left Kalamazoo. Was it yesterday? Or the day before?

And then I thought about the new exchange pony and hopefully Meghan had found her already and given her the letter I'd written, or maybe it would be better if she had a day to settle in her own way before getting it, 'cause it would probably take a little bit of time before the newness of everything wore off some.

I had to force myself to sit back down on our bench and I kept fluffing my wings out 'cause I was getting impatient and Aquamarine nuzzled me which helped. And I looked out the window some but I wasn't really seeing what was going by, so it was a surprise when the train began to slow down and Aquamarine almost had to shake me out of my trance.

And I said my goodbyes to my friends and we all promised to keep in touch, and we gave each other big hugs and when the train stopped I got off and I could see up front that the baggagepony was unloading a couple of big crates that were mine—I guess that the fancy silver containers had to stay on Earth.

I waved at my friends one last time before I looked back on the platform and there was my family just like I'd remembered them, and I trotted over and hugged and nuzzled them all and there were tears in my sister's eyes 'cause she was so happy to see me again, and my mom said that I looked kind of skinny and wanted to know if they didn't have enough food on Earth.

And I had so much to show them and tell them about but first we had to get all of my things loaded onto a wagon and take it back to college, and there was a pony with a wagon there just for me which I hadn't expected at all. And he said that the dean had told him to take everything back to my dormitory, and he knew right where that was because a couple of days ago he'd been taking a human from the dormitory to the train station so that she could go back to her home.

So we decided that we'd go to the inn instead and I was glad that I didn't have to worry about my things.

It was a little bit different eating Equestrian food again and my stomach wasn't used to it at all but I guess that was kind of normal, and so even though I was hungry I didn't eat too much. And we sat and talked and I told them about some of my adventures and showed them the scar on my leg from when I fell down on the train, and I showed them the pilot's license I'd gotten and all the different places I'd been and how it was true that humans wore clothes almost all the time and that there were lots and lots of Taco Bells and people made movies of me, and there was a game called Quidditch that I was gonna teach ponies and I had books and books of poetry and human trains were so big that some of them had two stories, and I promised that it was all in photo albums and books that I'd brought back with me.

And they all found it hard to believe that humans really couldn't control the weather at all, but I swore it was true, and when my mom kept asking about that, my sister said that I'd been there and I ought to know.

We probably could have kept talking all night except that I was exhausted, and so we finally went upstairs to our room and my sister asked if I wanted to use the tub and I said that I was too tired right now and I'd probably drown myself, but in the morning we could have a nice flight together before breakfast and then relax in the tub a little bit.

She got in bed with me even though we hadn't shared a bed in a while and the last thing I thought before I fell asleep was how nice it was to be back with my family again.

Author's Note

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

13 After Ice Moon [The Wayward Pony]

13 After Ice Moon

I was the last one to wake up, 'cause I was still really tired after crossing over and the train ride and everything else, and then I felt bad for being the last pony to wake up. The sun was already up and we should have been in the air to greet it.

The first thing I really noticed was how quiet it was. I'd gotten so used to the sounds of cars going by that I'd just stopped noticing them at all, but now that they were gone, it was strange to not hear them.

And the air outside was different. It smelled a little bit fresher, but that could have been the sea breeze blowing in and mixing with the smoke from chimneys.

Using the toilet was strange, too. I'd managed okay yesterday but now that I'd had a night to sleep I think that my brain forgot that it was back in Equestria again and I didn't have to use a human-style toilet any more. And it was odd how practically everywhere I turned things weren't the same anymore. The walls looked kind of naked without having the little electricity slots that you could plug things into, and almost every human room I'd been in had had a computer or a television or both and there weren't any of those, either.

When we were all ready to fly, I opened my saddlebags and looked for my flight gear and I started to get worried when I couldn't find it, before I remembered that I didn't need it anymore. I could go wherever I wanted without wearing it and nopony could stop me, and that was actually kind of intimidating. Maybe just because I was used to having to think about other airplanes and helicopters and anything else that might be in the sky that I'd have to watch out for.

It was going to take some getting used to.

We went down the hall and they had an outside balcony for pegasuses to take off and land, or for other ponies who just wanted to be outside and kind of in the air, and when I was right at the edge I was a little bit nervous, just 'cause I thought that everypony else was gonna fly rings around me, but to my surprise when I took to the air I was actually flying faster than anypony else, even though I'd been gone for so long, and I realized that I'd built up a lot of strength while I had been on Earth, 'cause my flight magic hadn't worked as well.

As we climbed into the sky I kept looking down at my foreleg for my pilot's watch to tell me how high I was, and my sister finally noticed and asked me what I was doing, so I told my family about the rules that I'd had to follow, and how if I had been leaving from the college or my apartment I usually wasn't allowed to go over a thousand feet until I crossed over the 131 Highway or got past the airport to the east, and I wasn't allowed to fly through clouds, either, because there could be an airplane inside them that I didn't know about.

So I didn't really get to do much looking around at first because I was explaining everything to them and then when I did get a look at the ground it was really disorienting because there wasn't a grid of roads or wide paths that the electricity wires followed, and there were no towers sticking up with their blinking lights and I felt like I was completely lost without them, and I actually circled back around to make sure that I could still see the inn off in the distance, and that took me a moment to find.

It was really strange to have grown so used to Earth landmarks that I was almost helpless without them now, and I hoped that it was only temporary and my old flight instincts would start working again after I'd been back for a few days, 'cause otherwise I was gonna be a danger on the weather team when the summertime came around. They wouldn't let me go out to sea at all, because they'd be afraid I'd get lost. Maybe I could pretend that everything was all right, but if I did, there was a good chance that I'd die in the first big feral storm that we had, and then everypony would be searching for me and the storm might go on unchecked while they were searching.

Flying while you were disoriented wasn't a very good idea.

But for now I had my family with me and so long as I followed along with them, I'd be safe. I felt kind of like a filly again, though, when just making a short flight from one house to the next seemed like a hundred-mile trip.

We flew around for a while and then we found a nice fluffy cloud that was just drifting along and my sister landed on top of it, so the rest of us followed and I landed a little bit off to the side and it was strange the way it felt, more substantial than a feral cloud and more responsive to me, and I rolled around in the cloud-fluff and made myself a little depression in it and then I took one of the tufts off the edge and bounced it around in my hooves and started working with it and at first I was a bit clumsy 'cause it didn't behave like an Earth-cloud at all but then I figured it out and it was really weird. It felt like I was moving something inside me that hadn't been moved in a really long time and it knew what it had to do but it couldn't quite remember how to do it.

It was almost like if I'd slept badly on one of my wings and it had gone to sleep, and everything was numb and stiff and not working quite right but then after a little bit of stretching and flapping it started to work like it was supposed to again and then an hour later it was really hard to exactly remember how it had felt or when it had changed from being wrong to being normal.

I batted the little cloud-tuft away from me and let it drift off even though I knew it wasn't gonna last too long on its own, and then I stuck my muzzle in the cloud and felt it pushing back against me a little bit.

Then I hopped back up to where everypony else was and looked out over the landscape. It was pretty far away and kind of hazy, but you could see the ocean and even though you couldn't see any of the buildings at all, I could sort of make out where Chonamare harbor was and I felt a longing in my heart for it.

I almost suggested that we could fly there and still be back tonight in time for classes, and if I trusted my wings more I would have, but it was probably a good forty miles away. So it was better to stay here for now. But I was gonna go back next weekend, even if that meant I had to work extra hard to catch up on all the work I'd missed while I was in Kalamazoo.

Since we were sitting, it was a little bit easier to talk, and so I told them how on a good day I could fly a little ways out of Kalamazoo and then when I was high enough I could see the shore there, too.

And I said how I'd seen both of the big oceans on Earth, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and I'd also seen three of the five Great Lakes which surrounded Michigan, and about the ships that were so big that they could have held our whole village and the harbor on top of them and probably had room left over for another village, too. I said that if they imagined Canterlot Castle sailing through our harbor entrance that wasn't even close to what it had looked like when one of those ships went by.

After we'd rested a little bit, we got up off of our cloud and flew back down to the inn, and we were all kind of hungry, so instead of bathing first, we went right down to the dining room and had breakfast and they had a breakfast barley stew that was pretty good and filling, and we also got a small plate of fish to share.

I told my sister how on Earth the fish came in cans so you didn't have to eat them right away and you could take them with you when you were flying and snack on them then, and they were a little bit too salty but that was nice if you were going to be sweating a lot.

After we'd gotten done eating, mom decided that we were gonna go to the spa and get properly pampered and groomed and I said that I didn't really need that but she said that my coat was hardly groomed and my wings looked like I hadn't preened them in months and that wasn't true at all and it was just 'cause I'd been spending so much time traveling and hadn't really had time to do them right, but she put her hoof down and said that we were going, and it was going to be nice to soak in the hot tub, so we flew through town to the spa, and she insisted on paying for me, too, even though I had my own account at the spa.

I looked around the room but there wasn't anypony I knew from college in the spa today, which was kind of disappointing. But the spa ponies remembered me and they all hugged and nuzzled me and said that they'd missed me and were glad that I was back, and then Bubblecup said that I smelled a little bit different now and she didn't mean it in a mean way. I guess that I still had some of Earth stuck in my coat.

We relaxed in the hot tub for a while, and then we got dried off and stretched out on the benches and let the spa ponies preen us. I didn't think that they did as good a job as Meghan could do, 'cause they used preening brushes and Meghan could do it with her fingers and really feel to make sure that every feather was in its proper place.

But I got a better hooficure than anybody on Earth had ever given me. Sweet Sparkle was really good and she made sure that my hooves were trimmed and filed just right and at first it was a little bit weird when I got off the bench but by the time we were walking back out of the spa, it started to feel right, and some of the little aches in my legs that I'd just gotten used to faded away.

We went to the market to find something to eat for lunch, and we got a loaf of bread and some honey (which was kind of expensive since it was the winter, and the bees were dormant) and a little wheel of cheese and then there was a baker there who had cookies that looked really good so we got a half-dozen of them, too. And we could have flown up to a cloud again and eaten there but I kind of wanted to stay on the ground and just watch ponies go by and get a feel for the market again, 'cause it wasn't anything like human stores.

My family couldn't stay all day, 'cause they had to go back to Chonamare, so after we got done eating lunch we went to college and up to my dorm room, and I opened up the boxes and it was kind of like Hearth's Warming.

It didn't take me too long to find the photo albums and I got them out and we all sat on my bed and I went through them and showed them the pictures of all my friends and some of the things that I'd done. My sister thought that it was really strange that humans weren't very colorful and she said that they kind of all looked the same, and I think that it was kind of overwhelming for them to see so many things all at once, and if I'd explained everything in every picture it would have taken forever.

The one they liked best was a picture of me and the tornado team as we took off looking for tornadoes. I didn't know who had taken the picture; it must have been one of the tornado humans, but it caught us just as we were taking flight, and the whole sky was full of angry, dark clouds, and Merry May and Flanking Line were already in the air with the rest of us all clustered on the road, mostly looking at the sky, and Paradise was adjusting the straps on Skydancer’s equipment package.

She thought that we were crazy to fly in weather like that with all the equipment we were wearing, and so I got to point to the picture and say what each piece was for, although I wasn't sure what went into the instrument packages that Prism Glider and Skydancer had on, but I did know that it could talk to the ground and also measure what the weather was like.

It was kind of funny to look at, though, cause we were all wearing bright vests and had blinking lights and radios and I had my camelback on and my pilot's watch and it looked almost like we were pack mules with wings.

And you could see the front corner of the van we'd ridden in, too, and I told them that it was kind of big for a human car but there were lots of ones that were bigger than it, too, like buses which I said was like a train car that could drive itself around—I couldn't think of a better way to describe it.

My sister didn't believe me when I told her that we'd gotten to ride in one that had a sink in it and one faucet that coffee came out of, and I wished that there had been a picture of it in the album.

I knew when I got back home we were gonna spend a lot more time together going through the photo albums, but there wasn't really enough time to study and explain all the pictures now, and they wanted to get back before sundown, so we all hugged and nuzzled and then they flew off for home and left me alone.

I was getting too good at saying goodbye.

And it was kind of lonely with nopony else in my dorm room but it was also kind of a relief, because sometimes it was good to just spend time with yourself and your thoughts. So I watched ponies out the window for a little bit and then I lit a lamp and got out my journal because it was time to wrap it up. I was back in Equestria and my year on Earth was over, and now it was time to move on.

I was writing in my journal when my roommate came back. She's an earth pony called Denim Blue, and she's kind of my opposite, 'cause she'd got a white coat and blue mane but she's very nice and she's studying math, too, so we can study together.

She was a little mad at me for not coming to see her yesterday when I'd first gotten in and she said she'd been waiting when the deliverypony had brought the boxes, and I told her that I was sorry but I'd been with my family and she said that it was okay. And then she said that we had a lot of catching up to do and that was gonna be fun. I had lots of things to tell her about Earth and she had lots of things to tell me about the person who she'd been sharing a room with and she admitted that it was sort of strange to have a pony again and not a person anymore.

Denim said that she’d gotten used to having to look up at her roommate, and I laughed and I said that I had, too.

Her name had been Julia and she was also studying math, and Denim said that she hadn't really been all that well-prepared for Equestrian math and I told her that humans used completely different symbols and drew some of them out for her and she said that they looked familiar.

And then she got a picture of all of them together for Nightmare Night, and Denim had a gold mask on and Julia was wearing a plaid shirt stuffed with straw, ‘cause she was a scarecrow. And she had dark hair like Peggy, and stormy grey eyes.

And we had a lot of other things to talk about, but we also both needed a little bit of time to ourselves to sort things out in our heads, so after we went to dinner (and I spent more time talking than eating) we came back to our room and I sat down at my desk and wrote a poem and I read it for Denim and she really liked it.

The Wayward Pony

The wayward pony
Finds herself home
Her travels finished
At least for now.

Like a ship, returning to port
Cutting its prow into the familiar harbor
As it returns to its slip
And the sails are struck.

There is sadness in endings
In journeys finished
In places and friends
Left behind.

But it is tempered with the joy
Of family
Of old friends, and
Familiar places.

The seas change a ship
They bend its planks
Twist its keel
Stretch its rigging.

The ship that left port
Is not the same as the ship which returns.
And this is also true
Of the traveller.

Every friend we make
Takes a little piece of our heart
And gives us a piece back
To replace it.

I copied that over to a new piece of paper, and I wrote a little letter to Conrad to go with it, and I put it in an envelope so that I could mail it to him tomorrow, and then I spent the rest of the evening finishing my journal.

It felt kind of strange that my last goodbye would be to my journal.

2 After Storm Moon [Conrad]

2 After Storm Moon

It had taken me the better part of a moon to catch up on my schoolwork. My teachers had given me some leeway, since I'd been on Earth, but it was frustrating to be behind like that, and so I'd worked extra hard so that I wouldn't fall even further behind.

And I had lots of curious ponies who were asking me all sorts of questions about Earth, so it was never boring at lunchtime and between classes. They had some questions about Julia that they’d been too embarrassed to ask her, and even though it was kind of rude to gossip, it wasn’t really gossipping when I didn’t actually know her, I thought.

Plus there was a lot that I had to catch up on, too. A lot of things happen in a year!

The only sour part was that there were a couple of stuck-up unicorns who didn't think I'd deserved to go, which was maybe because their applications had gotten rejected.

Sometimes I did wonder if being a pegasus had given me an unfair advantage, 'cause Miss Chestnut had said that there weren't many who went. But hopefully that would change, now that I'd showed that I could get a pilot's license and fly around and follow the rules, and even help out people with stormwatching and trying to fight tornadoes.

And when I wasn't working on my schoolwork or flying and practicing with clouds—far enough away from everypony else that they wouldn't laugh at me and how clumsy I was with them at first—I was working on my guide for pegasuses so that they could go to Earth and get their own pilot's licenses like I had.

Miss Chestnut helped me with that when she could, because I wasn't so good at writing a book.

I’d gone back to Chonamare for the first weekend, just like I’d planned, and it was really good to be home. The whole weekend was a long welcome-back party, and it felt so good to sleep in a cloudhouse and to smell the sea and visit the market and the tavern. And I gave mom and dad and my sister their camelbacks. At first they were a little bit confused by them and why they’d want to wear them and if they’d chafe their wings or back and I had to show them how to make the straps work right. Mom was still a little doubtful, ‘cause she was sometimes pretty traditional, but I knew once she’d gotten a chance to use it some, she’d really like it.

The second evening that I was back, me and my sister just sat on the edge of a cloud and looked down at Chonamare below us, at the little stone houses with their thatched roofs and the winding paths that twisted between them and we didn’t talk, we just watched as the sun went down behind us and the lamps in the village got lit, one-by-one, and we finally flew back home by the light of the moon and stars.

I'd been readjusting to life back in Equestria, and while Earth was still on my mind a lot, I was getting used to not being there anymore, and the fresh pain of leaving my friends behind had kind of faded to a dull ache.

Meghan had sent me a letter saying how much she missed me and that made me cry, but there was good news ‘cause she said that she had had an interview already and it had gone really well and next time she’d get to talk to a pony and she was looking forward to that, and she said that Aric missed me too but he wasn’t so good at writing so she had to do it for him.

And I'd sent letters to Aquamarine and Gusty and Cayenne, and it was funny how we could talk about things that other ponies didn't really understand at all, 'cause they'd never lived on another world.

I'd written to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, too, and our letters must have crossed paths in the mail, 'cause it wasn't a reply to the letter I'd sent them, but just the same they told me that Wisteria was doing really well at Kalamazoo College and that they'd found out that she'd gotten the letter I'd written for her. They'd moved from Kalamazoo to Ohio to help Sparklesnap and while it didn't seem quite right for them to not be in Kalamazoo, maybe humans were nomadic.

So I hadn't been expecting to get another letter from Mister Salvatore so quickly after the first, and I was thinking that maybe he'd found out if I could get camelbacks imported into Equestria, so I was eager to to open the letter, and then when I read it it was like a buck in the ribs, 'cause he told me that Conrad had died.

He'd included a really nice obituary but I could barely read it through the tears in my eyes, and I put on my saddlebags and I was still thinking clearly enough to leave a note for Denim telling her what had happened, and then I got my journal and I grabbed the first book of poetry I saw and put it in my saddlebags, too, and the letter as well, and I flew off to the coast.

I knew right where I needed to go, and the whole flight kind of passed in a blur but once I got close to Chonamare, I knew all the landmarks, and I swooped down along the beach, towards the little cluster of rocks that had always been my thinking spot, and I sat on the sun-warmed rock and for a while I just listened to the waves booming against the coastline.

The wind gusted little spits of sand into my rock-nest, and I thought about the twisted trees that lived by the shore and got shaped by the winds and the storms and each one left its mark on the tree and it grew a little stronger after each one and put its roots down a little bit deeper and still proudly held its leaves to the sky, and the sea tried to forget but the trees always remembered.

I thought about his smile and the little twinkle in his eye, and how every day and everything seemed to be so full of wonder for him, and I remembered how much he'd loved my poems, even though they weren't as good as any of the poets who he'd taught us. And I thought about how he'd told me that I had an innate love for the sky, back when I'd thought that we'd traded a part of ourselves away when we moved the first cloud.

And I knew he wouldn’t want me to be sad, but I couldn’t help that my cheeks were wet as I read his obituary again, and then I put it aside and got out the book of poetry which was Walt Whitman and that was good; that was the first poet I’d learned about. So I read Leaves of Grass and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, and then Song of Myself.

It was getting dark enough that it was hard to read anymore, so I put the book back in my saddlebags and went out of my little tumble of rocks and flew up to the top and perched there and let the wind blow through my coat and ruffle my feathers and watched the distant sails bob and the waves crash upon a shore that Conrad would never see.

But I would see it for him.

Author's Note

August 22 [West Again]

August 22

Neither of us were ready for when Meghan's alarm went off, and I lay on top of her and she asked if I was trying to keep her from getting up and I nodded my head. She brushed back my forelock and kissed me on the forehead and said that she had to get up and go to work but we could snuggle for a little bit longer.

We delayed a little bit after the second time her alarm went off but she finally pushed me back a little bit and I hopped off the futon and asked her if she wanted me to make some oatmeal for breakfast because I was pretty sure I still had some left.

She said that she would just get a granola bar from home if I wanted to join her in the shower. I'd been thinking of getting in a morning flight before Mister Salvatore came to pick me up, but I didn't have to, and I'd rather spend the time with Meghan anyway, so I followed her into the bathroom and turned on the shower and once it got nice and warm we got in.

We had to hurry a little but it was still a nice way to spend our last morning together for a while and she took her time getting dressed when she was done. I put the rest of her clothes in her bag and she asked if I wanted to borrow her toy for the trip and it was kinda tempting but I said that I could do without it even though it would be kinda lonely on the train.

Meghan said that I didn't have to walk back to her apartment with her but I wanted to, and I still had time to finish packing anyway, so we went down Main Street alongside the cemetery and then through to her neighborhood. She had to get out her telephone and send a telephone telegram to her friend to say that she was late, and I felt bad about that but she said that I shouldn't.

She ran inside the house to leave her bag behind and get her granola bar and her friend turned into the driveway just as Meghan came running back out of her apartment. I thought that she was going to run all the way to her friend's car, but she stopped and ran her hand through my mane and told me to have a good trip, and I nuzzled her thigh and then she went down the stairs and got in the car.

I was already missing her when I flew back home.

It didn't take me too long to pack the rest of my things for the trip, even when I unpacked and double-checked to make sure that I had everything I'd need. And I slipped my last cans of anchovies into my camelback and filled the bird feeder and then I didn't have anything to do until Mister Salvatore came.

I was sitting out on the balcony waiting when he drove up the street, and Miss Cherilyn saw me and waved so he stopped the car right out front, and I jumped off the balcony.

I could have landed right in the Mustang but that was rude, so I landed next to it and Miss Cherilyn got out of her seat and said that I could ride in front or back, whichever I preferred. The back was kind a crowded with their luggage—Mister Salvatore said that the trunk looked big but when the roof was in there it wasn't as big.

My saddlebags tucked nicely on the floor, and I moved their bags around a bit until I had a nice spot in the center because that had the best view forward. And then he said something about a full tank of gas and a half a pack of cigarettes and that it was only a hundred six miles to Chicago, which wasn't true—it was longer.

He unfolded his sunglasses and put them on his face and then he made the rear tires spin as he pulled away from my apartment. And when he got to the corner Miss Cherilyn said if he was going to behave like that she was going to take away the keys.

He told her that he only had a few more hours to enjoy the car before he had to give it back, so she ought to cut him a little slack.

We made good time until we got to the outskirts of Chicago, and Mister Salvatore asked if we wanted to stop and get something to eat that wasn't as fancy as we'd get downtown, and I said that I kinda liked the vegetarian wraps that they had at Au Bon Pain, and Mister Salvatore sighed and said that we could eat there if I wanted to but we'd get a lot more good food at Denny's.

She said he only wanted Denny's because we were on a road trip. And he admitted that was true, but he reminded her that it was customary to eat at Denny's and Waffle House on road trips.

So I said that I didn't mind Denny's as long as they didn't ask if I was housebroken and Mister Salvatore said that he almost hoped that they did, because that would be fun, and we turned off the highway and drove on a side road for a little while until we found the Denny's.

He got out of the car first and then opened the door for us, and he had to reach back inside and put up the roof so that nobody took our luggage while we were inside. While he was doing that, Miss Cherilyn said that he'd programmed the GPS to only show Denny's and I asked if she could change it to show Taco Bells. She said that she probably could.

Well, I had a lemon pepper grilled tilapia which was pretty good, and I gave my fries to Mister Salvatore because I had too much food to eat.

Traffic wasn't any better when we got back on the highway and there were a couple of times where I think I could have trotted faster and I thought about jumping out and racing him to the next exit but I don't think that he would have liked that too much. Plus it was too crowded along the road anyway.

It was about one in the afternoon when we finally got to the train station, and Mister Salvatore parked the Mustang at the front of the station. Miss Blaise came out to help us unload our bags and get the keys back to the Mustang. I was kind of surprised to see her, 'cause I didn't think that Cayenne was back in town yet, and she said that she was back in Chicago doing paperwork.

We had a little while before we could get on our train, and Mister Salvatore got a newspaper from a stall; Miss Cherilyn and Miss Blaise sat on a bench and talked and I kinda felt left out because I had nopony to talk to.

But there were still lots of people to watch and that was fun.

I knew what to expect from last time we'd taken this train, although when we got on I didn't have a room on the bottom; I had a smaller room on the top, right next to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn. There was even a door between our rooms, which was nice. I didn't like that it only had windows on one side, but if I left my door open I could look out the other side, too.

So I set my saddlebags on the chair and then stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes to rest for just a bit and I must have fallen asleep 'cause the train woke me up when it started to move out of the station.

Mister Salvatore knocked on the door and then opened it and told me that I should plan to get up really early tomorrow because our first stop was going to be at six am, and we were getting off the train in Dodge City and I asked him why and he smiled but he wouldn't tell me. He just said that if everything went well I'd have a fun time and if it didn't he'd be doing paperwork until the day he died.

So that wasn't a very long trip at all. We probably could have let someone else have the room and just sleep in the normal chairs.

I went to the Viewliner car and watched Chicago go by. It still boggled my mind just how big it was: the train made its first stop without ever having left the city behind, and it was almost an hour into the trip before I finally started seeing more farmland and woods than street after street of houses.

We crossed over the Mississippi just before we got to Fort Madison, and the train stayed alongside the river for a couple of miles before the river curved away from it. I saw a long train of boats going along the river and I wasn't sure why they would make it like that rather than just build a bigger boat.

We went over another, smaller river and then Miss Cherilyn found me and sat down next to me and I asked her where we were and she took out her timetable and said that we were probably in Missouri now.

She sat and watched the farms go by for a little while, then we went downstairs to have dinner. I thought that the fish was kind of tempting but I'd had fish for lunch so I got the Gemelli pasta instead, and I also got a bottle of beer called The Illinois Imperial IPA.

It was still strange to be sitting at a table and eating our dinner while watching the farms and towns go by outside.

When we were finished up, Mister Salvatore told me that the train makes a long stop in Kansas City and I could get out and stretch my legs if I wanted to, and he reminded me again that we had to get off the train at six tomorrow morning.

I spent the rest of the evening sitting in the Viewliner and watching Missouri go by. And I went back downstairs and got another beer, too.

I couldn't think of what I was going to get to do in Kansas. Miss Parker had said that there were airplanes made there and so maybe I was going to get to go to an airplane factory. I didn't think that Mister Salvatore would take me to one, though. But sometimes he did things I didn't expect.

It was mostly dark when the train stopped in Kansas City, and I got out and trotted up and down the length of the train a couple of times before I went back inside and up to my room.

My bed had been folded down and made for me, which was nice. And my little bathroom didn't have a window at all so I left the door open because it was too confined to be in there by myself.

I got in bed but I didn't fall asleep until the train started to move, and it kind of rocked me to sleep.

September 5 [Dreamliner]

September 5

Four AM was no time to wake up. Miss Cherilyn's alarm work me up and the first thing she said when it went off was 'shit,' and I kinda agreed with her. I banged my head on the ceiling when I sat up and was rubbing a hoof against my ear when she stuck her head up over the edge to see if I was awake.

She asked if it was okay if she turned on the lights and I said that it was, and then she helped me get out of bed. And she put on pants and shoes and then sat on the bed with her head in her hands and said that it was too early and train schedules were dumb. And I agreed with her, train schedules were dumb.

She said that she needed a few minutes to wake up and she was going to find the shower and get properly dressed and told me to hold down the fort, which I guess meant to watch the room because we didn't have a fort, not even a pillow fort. So I said that I would and she got clean clothes out of her bag and went out of the room in search of the showers and I got out my Bible and sat on her bed and started reading from where I'd left off in Ezekiel.

God took Ezekiel to a valley of bones, and He made them come back to life, putting muscle and skin on them, and then He said that He would do the same for the people of Israel, and He said that He would make David king over all them. And then He said that He was going to get back at all the nations who had scattered His people and put them into slavery, and He said that the temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt. He showed Ezekiel a vision of the city, and had a bronze man measure it out so that Ezekiel could tell everyone how big it was supposed to be.

Then after Ezekiel had seen all that, God told him how the priests must behave, and what they should do. And I hoped that they'd listen to Him and follow His rules. Then He described how the land would be given to the tribes once they had returned, and even where they could fish. And that was the end of Ezekiel, and the next book was Daniel, which started by saying that Babylon had besieged Jerusalem. Which confused me, but then when I got to the end I realized that it was taking place earlier, because King Nebuchadnezzar and King Cyrus had already been mentioned before.

I had just started reading about Nebuchadnezzar's dreams when Mister Salvatore came in, and he said he was checking on us and he had coffee from the dining car, which he set down on our little table and then he sat on her bed next to me and said he was sorry that we had to get off the train so early, but it would be worth it when we got where we were going. I wanted to know where that was but he wouldn't tell me.

He said that we'd pick up our rental car once we got to the train station and then we'd stop somewhere for a real breakfast, and tonight we'd get back on the train but it would be at a more reasonable time.

I asked if we were going back to Washington, DC, and he said we were, so I told him that when we got there if we had time I wanted to see the Air and Space museum, and he said that we could, because we had almost all day between trains.

Then Miss Cherilyn came in and she was kind of surprised to see him in our room, but she was really happy that he'd brought coffee.

Since it was the middle of the night, the conductor didn't announce the stop over the train's speakers, but he did come to our room to make sure that we were awake and ready to go, and he helped us carry all our bags to the door. Then he told us to stay back and he opened the door and leaned his head out and it was kind of hot and humid and I could faintly smell salt air, too.

He was kind of disappointed when he found out that we'd gotten an Equinox, but I liked it. It was kinda like Pastor Liz's Rav-4, and there was lots of room in the back for our luggage so I wouldn't have it all crowded around me.

We drove on a highway and stopped at a Waffle House for breakfast. Mister Salvatore said that was the best place to eat breakfast on a road trip, because there was lots of grease on everything and that gave you the energy you needed to get through the day.

Well, I wasn't sure I wanted to have lots of grease, so I just had waffles. I had one with pecans in it and one with peanut butter and those were both really good.

And then we didn't have anything to do for a while because it was so early and the sun was barely up. So he decided that we'd drive down to the harbor and I could fly out over the ocean if I wanted to.

I thought that would be a lot of fun, so we went back on the highway until it ended, then drove past a bunch of nice houses until we got to a park that was right on the shore, and he told me to not take too long.

Miss Cherilyn helped me put on my flight vest and he said that I should stay low and I wouldn't need to warn any airplanes, but I put on my radio anyway. I'd seen seaplanes at the Air Zoo, and I wouldn't want to be in the way if one of them wanted to land in the harbor.

It was a few miles out to the harbor entrance, and it didn't take me too long to cover the distance. I looked back a couple of times to make sure that I would know what landmarks to head for when I came back in, because what I'd thought was obvious on the way out might not be so obvious on the way back in.

There were already a few boats and one ship in the harbor as well, and I waved as I flew over a cargo ship that was on its way in. I had to gain a little bit more altitude as I went over it because the deckhouse in the back was so tall. It said No Smoking in big letters across the deckhouse but I don't think that was actually its name.

I angled for the southern tip of land that separated the harbor from the ocean, and then I landed there and took off my radio so I could splash in the surf a little bit. Then I saw a sand crab, so I started digging in the sand until I'd caught a couple of them.

I would have liked to spend more time on the shore—Lake Michigan was nice, but it wasn't the same as a proper ocean.

The wind was coming off the land, so it took me a little bit longer to fly back in, and the city had definitely woken up by the time I landed. There were lots more boats leaving their docks, and there was more traffic on the road, too.

I landed on the little boardwalk and Miss Cherilyn helped me take off my vest and then I kicked the sand off my hooves and we got back in the Equinox and drove back the way we'd come.

There were lots of signs on the highway for an airport, and Mister Salvatore was going where they said, and I wasn't sure why he'd brought me to this airport when there were lots of airports which were closer, unless there was something very special here.

Well, instead of going to the airport itself, we went around back where there was a really, really big building that said Boeing on it, and he said that now that I'd seen how the little airplanes were made, I was going to get to see how the really big ones were. He said that the best part was that it was a holiday so I could see what I wanted without getting in anyone's way.

We were met in the lobby by a woman named Casey Singleton, who shook my hoof and then gave me a little history of Boeing. She said that their founder had first flown in Curtiss biplanes but after he crashed one and found out it would take months to get replacement parts, he realized that he could build his own airplane faster, so he did. And she said that in the early days, the airplanes were built mostly out of wood, which was why he had decided to have his company in Washington, because there was lots of wood there.

They had built training seaplanes, which were airplanes that could land on water, which they sold to the government in World War One. And then after the war there were a surplus of airplanes, so for a while they'd sold furniture, until they started to build fighter airplanes and mail airplanes.

She said that they'd next built passenger airplanes for their own airline, which was called United Airlines, and that was now the biggest airline in the world. She told us that Boeing didn't own them anymore, because the government had thought that Boeing's airplanes were too safe and reliable, which gave United an unfair advantage over the competition.

During World War Two, they had designed and built some of the best bombers, like the B-17 and the B-29, and after that they built B-47s and B-52s, which she said were still in service with the Air Force. And they'd started making better and better passenger jets, too, from the 707 all the way up to the 787 Dreamliner, which was what they built here.

It was the first passenger jet to be built out of composite materials instead of aluminum, which made it lighter and more efficient than other airplanes. She said it also had special engines, which used less fuel and made it quieter than other similar airplanes.

She said that the factory was special, too, because it was designed to not have any waste. She said that everything that could be recycled was, and that the roof was covered with solar panels that provided a fifth of all their electricity needs.

The room where they built the airplanes was huge, and it was hard to take it all in. It was a lot like the Cessna factory; they had big blue jigs that held things in place, but everything was so much larger it was unbelievable. There were scaffolding systems that went up and over the airplanes, and they had working platforms at different levels. I bet they would have liked to have a bunch of pegasuses helping them build the airplanes, 'cause then they wouldn't have needed as many scaffoldings.

Casey took us to what she said was the very beginning of construction, and it was a section of fuselage mounted on a giant machine. She showed me a machine which had rolls that looked like tape on it, and she said that the machine would rotate the fuselage and the other machine would put the tape on, which was special carbon fiber tape, and that was how they made it. Then it had to go in a big oven to be heated, which made it strong. She said that in principle, it was kind of like a clay pot.

Since nobody was working, I couldn't see it in action, but she showed me a video on her portable telephone of the fuselage being turned and having the tape put on, and I just couldn't imagine how you could do that with something so big.

Then she showed me where they put all the sections of the airplane together, and how the jigs would line everything up so that they could bolt it together just like a bunch of lengths of pipe. And there was also a big thing that looked like a bridge with wheels, which held the airplane's wings.

Casey told me that the wings came all the way from Japan, and they were carried inside an airplane called the Dreamlifter, which was a modified 747. I couldn't imagine how they could fit inside another airplane but she said that they did.

We went a little bit further along, and she showed me the engines, which had openings that were big enough I could have flown into them if they hadn't had covers. I suppose that they didn't want anybody or anything going into the engines that wasn't supposed to be there.

After she'd showed me all the other big parts of the airplane, we went over to one that was partially assembled so that I could see the inside of it. She said that I was allowed to go inside, but she would tell me where I had to walk and I couldn't touch anything and that Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn would have to stay outside. So I climbed up the stairs and let her go first. It looked a lot bigger inside than the airplane I'd flown on, which was because there wasn't anything on the inside yet.

We went all the way to the cockpit in front, and then back to the tail of the airplane where she showed me a big panel that she said was called the aft pressure bulkhead. She said that everything in front of it was pressurized and nothing behind it was.

We had to go back outside to go down to the cargo compartment, which was just as empty as the upstairs had been. Just like above, there were lots of wires running everywhere, and little compartments full of different electric machines.

I waited on the ground while Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn took a tour of it, one at a time. Then Casey came back down and said that we could all go and look at one further down that was nearly complete.

It looked a lot more like an airplane inside, because it had the walls and ceiling finished, and most of the seats were in it, too. She opened up the pilot's door and let me look around inside there, and after telling me not to touch anything, she said that I could sit in the pilot's seat.

Casey asked if I would mind having my picture taken, and I didn't mind at all, so she took a couple of pictures of me sitting there and then went around the scaffolding to the front of the airplane and took a picture through the windshield of me sitting at the controls.

Once Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had also gotten their turn looking at the airplane, Casey said that we could fly the Dreamliner simulator if we wanted to, and then she asked me if I'd ever used one before. I said that I had at Cessna, and she said that this was going to be a completely different experience for me.

So she made a telephone call and Mister Salvatore convinced her to let him be the co-pilot and I wish I'd thought to bring my pilot's hat with me—it was out in the Equinox, but I didn't want to leave to go get it.

While we were waiting for the flight instructor to arrive, we had pizzas for lunch, and then it was time to go in the simulator.

This was just like the Cessna one, except that it was a lot bigger and there were lots more buttons and knobs. And the instructor, who was named Ted, along with Casey and Miss Cherilyn, all stood in the back.

The Dreamliner was slow and sluggish and I had to anticipate everything and then wait for it to happen. And Mister Salvatore was busy pushing buttons and turning knobs for me, and I was pretty sure I didn't have what it took to be a Dreamliner pilot. Maybe if I practiced a lot more I could.

Sailing ships were a lot like that, too. You had to anticipate things before you did them, or else you'd be caught with the sails in the wrong place or find yourself in a narrow channel with noplace to go but the rocks. So after I'd practiced some and he'd let me work the controls when I was way up in the imaginary sky and had time to recover, I sort of got an idea of how it was going to respond to me, but even so the airplane shook its control stick at me a few times and the computer voice kept warning me about airspeed and terrain and glideslope on my landing approach.

I did get it on the runway and stopped before the end, but Ted said that I'd probably bent the landing gear and taken down a few of the approach lights as well. I didn't think that was my fault; they shouldn't have put lights in the way of the airplane.

Mister Salvatore was looking a bit tired, too—he'd put a lot of effort into all of his controls, and all I'd really had to do was steer the airplane side to side and up and down.

We had some more of the pizza for dinner, and Ted promised that he would make sure that I got training credit on the Dreamliner simulator. He said that he'd never thought he'd be teaching a pegasus how to fly a commercial jet, and that he was really proud of how well I'd done. And Casey took my picture with him, too.

Well, I thought that before we left I ought to fly for them, because I was sure they'd like to see it. So we went outside to the parking lot and I knew that I had to stay pretty low because we were right next to the airport. So I flew straight up and then looked at where the runways were and there was one that was kind of pointed in our direction but off to the side, so I got up a bit higher and did some wing rolls and loops and then dove down and skimmed along the ground before pulling back up and looping back around to make another pass of the parking lot. I also went around some of the light posts, trying to get my wingtip as close to them as I could without actually touching them.

They both thought that was pretty amazing, and I thought about saying how I'd gotten a college degree just for flying in a wind tunnel, but that felt too much like bragging, so I didn't.

Before we left, Casey gave me a book about Boeing, another book about the Dreamliner that she said had cutaway views and showed how everything worked, plus a little model of the airplane and two pictures—one of me sitting in the cockpit of the airplane and one of me and Ted out in the parking lot. It wasn't the one she'd had me pose for, but it was of me stretching out my wing and him crouching down to look at it.

She asked me if I'd mind signing a couple of pictures, too, and I didn't mind at all. So she offered me more copies of the picture of me sitting in the Dreamliner's pilot seat and I signed them with a black felt-tip pen.

The sun was just ducking over the horizon when we got to the train station and we unpacked the Equinox and Mister Salvatore left the keys in it so that it could get picked up and returned now that we didn't need it any more.

I thought that we were taking the very same train back—that it had gotten to its destination and turned around, but the locomotives had different numbers on them, so it must have been a different train even though it had the same name as the first one.

This time I had my own room and Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had theirs, too. He promised me that for the rest of our trip we'd be getting on and off trains at normal times, which was nice.

When the train had left the station, I had the conductor fold my bed down for me, and then I sat on the bed and wrote in my journal until my eyelids got heavy. It felt like it would be too much work to get up and turn the light off, so I just closed my eyes and went to sleep.

September 19 [Minors and cofactors]

September 19

I woke up at my usual time and looked out the window to see what the weather was like. It was nice and clear and I could hear birds chirping off in the distance. I wish that I still had a bird feeder.

There was a tree not too far from my window and I could hang a bird feeder in it. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to—since our room was right above the main entrance, people might not be happy if birds were dropping seed hulls and maybe also pooping on them. But maybe it would teach those people who liked to stand right by the door and smoke that they should go somewhere else.

I had a mouthful of hay for a morning snack and then got all my flight gear ready. When I filled up my camelback, all the red dye was gone from the sink but it smelled a little bit chemically. I'd never noticed that in our room, but Peggy didn't like to wear fingernail polish.

I didn't have all that much time to fly this morning, and I wanted to get a little bit of trotting in, too, so I used my radio to get permission from the grumpy man and then flew off towards the Nature Center.

I took a kind of indirect route, so that I could fly over the dirt mines and see if they were doing anything interesting in them, and the middle one had their big bucket tractor putting dirt on a conveyor so that it went into a new pile. It looked like it saved some trips for the tractor, since it didn't have to go as far to dump its dirt, but otherwise I couldn't see any purpose for it.

If they dug deep enough they might find monster bones. I'd heard that sometimes ponies dug up monster bones, but I'd never seen it for myself.

This time I remembered to keep towards the river side of the prairie as I came in for my landing, just so that I wouldn't scare off the deer. And they looked up when I circled around but I was far enough away that I didn't bother them. I wonder if they thought I was an eagle or something when I was in the air.

I looked at them too long and not long enough at the trees, and had to roll to avoid a branch that was suddenly right in front of me, and then I never quite got back to a good position—what the airplane simulator instructors called a proper configuration. So my landing was sloppy but nobody was there to see and laugh at it.

When I was along the river side of the trail, I trotted and then went at a walk past the deer, and I did that a couple of times before they were gone, and then I did a full gallop down the hill and cantered around and back up again, then after the second time my knee was starting to bother me a little and I didn't want to push it too far, so I slowed down to a walk and went around one more time, to cool off, then flew back towards college.

When I was flying over the cemetery, I decided that I'd take a little detour and see if Aric was home. My watch said that I had time, so I cut a little bit more west and I saw Winston in the driveway, so I flew around back and up to his window to see if he was in there.

He was asleep in bed and the window was opened about halfway so I got my forelegs under it and tried to pull it up to see if I could get in but I didn't get it too far open 'cause it kept sticking in the frame and with me flying I couldn't put that much strength into it. But the noise woke him up and it took him a minute before he saw me and then he slid out of bed and pulled the window open and asked me what I was doing.

I said that I'd stopped by to say good morning, then I stuck my head in through the window and kissed him, and then I said that I'd see him at Durak tonight and turned tail and headed back to college.

I landed on the boardwalk and went upstairs and got undressed in our room then went to take a shower, but I had to wait for Kat to finish 'cause I'd taken too long to get back, and then before I got my turn in the shower Peggy came into the bathroom too and sat down on the bench to wait for her turn.

I let her go before me, 'cause she had to get dressed after she was done anyway, and that took a little while. And then I took my turn and by the time I got back to our room she was all dressed, so we went down to the dining hall together, and she asked me how my knee was and I said it felt pretty good except when I did a lot of trotting.

Christine and Sean had stayed up too late, I think, 'cause both of them looked really exhausted, and I hoped it wasn't from studying but something more fun like staying up all night having sex.

I'd forgotten to bring my physics things with me, so I had to go back to our room to get them before I went to class. I'd been thinking about breakfast and how Peggy was already ready and not thinking about my classes.

Professor Brown told us the definition of calories, which was also how humans measured the energy of their food, which I thought was interesting. I guess it was because people were thermodynamic, too. And then he started talking about heat capacity, and how there were different formulas if the volume stayed the same or the pressure stayed the same. And then he told us about Joule and how he had discovered that water got hotter when it fell off a waterfall, because falling was work and work was energy.

So after we understood that, he started to explain that with gasses, you got the most work when you let the gas expand on its own in a way that was reversible, and he gave us the formula to calculate a piston holding down gas with a weight on top of it, and when the gas expended like it wanted to on its own, it would lift the weight until it reached equilibrium with the weight, and then he kept drawing the same experiment with smaller and smaller weights, and it was pretty obvious that it did more work the smaller the weights that you had.

And there was a lot of notes to take, because there were dozens and dozens of formulas that he showed us, and he drew out Joule's experiment that proved that when a gas expanded into a vacuum there was no heat change, but then he warned us that this was only true for ideal gasses and not real gasses, which would get colder, but Joule hadn't had a good enough thermometer to actually measure it.

Then before we left he reminded us that there was a lab tomorrow, which reminded me that I hadn't heard from Mister Salvatore about whether or not my lab coat was done yet, and I should have thought of that over the weekend, but I'd gotten distracted with other stuff. If I didn't have my lab coat I wasn't going to be allowed to do anything in the lab, and the professor would be mad at me and I'd get a bad grade. So as soon as I got back to my room I called him with my portable telephone and he didn't answer so I started getting more worried for a few minutes until he called back.

He said that he hadn't heard from her but he'd call her right away and see if it was going to be ready. And he said that he also had something else for me, but he wouldn't tell me what it was.

So I was kind of eager to see what it was, but just guessing wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I got out my homework and started working on it. The first few problems were pretty easy, 'cause they were just the basic formulas that we had gone over in class, but then they got a little bit trickier after that, and I didn't finish them all before it was time for lunch. So I packed my saddlebags for math and went to the dining hall.

Sean asked if I had the problems we'd worked on with me and I said that I had and then since we'd tried to show Christine and Peggy on a napkin but hadn't managed I got them out of my bag and put them on the table after Peggy wiped it off to make sure that the paper didn't get dirty. And I kinda gave a quick explanation of the different symbols. Peggy sort of understood 'cause she knows math and Christine doesn't know much math at all and hardly had any idea about it.

We could both tell she was getting kind of frustrated so I put the math away and talked about other stuff instead, but I was kind of thinking to myself that maybe if I'd tried a different way she might have understood it. Sometimes some of the new ponies on the weather team don't understand things until you've told them a couple of different ways and then all of a sudden you find the right one and they get it. There are also some ponies that are better hooves-on learners and they can never figure anything out from a book but if you show them they understand.

I think Sean was still feeling bad because when he went to get dessert for himself, he also brought her a piece of chocolate cake with some of the star-shaped ice cream on it and a little bit of chocolate sauce, too.

When we got to math class, we didn't want to interrupt Professor Pampena, so we agreed that we'd tell him after class, 'cause then I'd have time to explain it to him.

He reminded us about cross-products, and then said it was important to know that the cross product of a and b was not the same as b and a. And then he showed us how we could use vectors to find if something was in a plane because if it was all the vectors to that point would equal zero, and that was a lot of math to figure out but there was an easier way, where we'd find a normal vector and if it was perpendicular to one point and also our unknown point then they must be on the same plane.

Then he moved on to matrices, and showed us how to multiply them together, and how we'd know what size the answer matrix ought to be, and he reminded us again that if we had matrices A and B, AB was not the same as BA.

There was also an identity matrix which he told us about that made a number stay the same when it went through the matrix and that seemed kind of useless but I was sure that he'd explain why it existed, and then he showed how you'd use it when you were rotating something on the same plane.

And then at the end of class he told us how to find minors and cofactors, and then gave us a bunch of matrices for homework. It was all pretty straightforward so far but there were a lot of numbers to draw out.

Once he'd dismissed the class we both went up to his desk and Sean asked if he had a few minutes free, and he did. And we didn't even have to leave because there wasn't a class right after ours, so I got out our paper and put it on the desk, and he got really excited because he'd seen Equestrian math in books before but never in person, and he admitted that he'd kind of wanted to ask but he didn't want to make me do extra work that nobody else had to do.

And then I showed him how to use the weather wheel and he really liked that, too. He said that on Earth those were called circular slide rules and they had once been really popular back before calculators but now nobody really knew how to use them.

He said that he would bring an Earth slide rule to class next time even though he wasn't very good at working it.

And he said that if I wanted to convert one problem on each homework to Equestrian and solve it I could do that, and I would get full credit for it as long as I showed all my work. Well, I remembered that Sean thought he should get something too because it was partially his idea, so I asked if Sean could, too, and he asked if Sean knew Equestrian math, and he had to admit that he didn't really.

So when we left he was a bit grumpy that he hadn't gotten anything special, and I told him that I would be happy to teach him everything that he needed to know but we'd have to start with the basics, and he asked if that meant addition and subtraction and I said it would be best to start with the numbers first and then move on to addition and subtraction and he thought that was a whole lot of work he really didn't want to do. But if he couldn't draw them right, nopony was ever going to be able to figure out his math, not even me.

I went back to my room and finished up my thermodynamics homework first then got started on my math, and there was one problem I was having a little bit of trouble with and I thought that I could convert it to Equestrian and work it out and even if I couldn't solve it the professor would never know but that was cheating, so I finally put it aside and I was about to go to dinner when I remembered that I hadn't heard back from Mister Salvatore.

I checked my portable telephone and he had called, so I called him back and this time he answered right away and said that he had gotten in contact with her and we could meet her at six and make sure it fit and she promised that she'd make any other alterations needed then and there, so that meant that I would have to eat pretty quickly, and I said that I would meet him behind my dorm at three-quarters past five, 'cause that should give us enough time to get to her house. It wasn't all that far.

So I did have to rush through dinner, but that was okay because there wasn't anything all that good to eat anyway. Christine thought that maybe they'd given up early this year, and Sean said that maybe they were planning something special for tomorrow and that was why.

Well, I was hoping that they were planning something special, and Sean said that since tomorrow was Tuesday maybe it would be tacos and I hoped that it was. It was always fun when you got to build your own meal.

I got to the dorm only a few minutes early and there wasn't any point in going up to my room to wait so since there was only one way in to the parking lot I walked up it and I had gotten all the way to Academy Street before I saw Sienna coming up the hill, bouncing over the bricks. And Mister Salvatore stopped it out in the street and opened up the side door for me, and then we drove around to Monroe Street because that was the quickest way to turn around.

We got to her house right at six, and she let us in and said that she was very sorry that it hadn't been done sooner but she'd gotten busy with something else and it had also taken her longer than she thought it would because she didn't have any way to test-fit it. So I put it on and it fit pretty well, and it would keep me safe in the lab. And I was happy with how it had turned out, 'cause it was a lot more comfortable and I didn't have to roll up the sleeves at all.

So Mister Salvatore paid her and then we got back in the van and he said that he was kind of mad that it had taken her so long to make it, just because she'd said it would be done sooner than it was, but since I was happy with it he was happy, too, and Miss Cherilyn reminded him that he was going to give me something else, too. And he nodded and said that we'd have to wait until we'd stopped driving, but he was really happy that he'd gotten it and it was something that I needed to have, and I kept begging him for hints as we drove back to college but he wouldn't tell me.

Finally, when we were in the parking lot and stopped by the back door he got out and went around back and brought out a little cardboard box and inside was a pair of safety glasses that I could wear. He said that there was a company that custom-made them for ponies, so they should be reasonably comfortable.

They weren't the same as flight goggles, which I had to wear sometimes, and they felt kind of weird, but they were nice and secure and I think that Professor Brown would be happy that I had them, so I thanked him for getting them for me, and he said that he was happy to and asked if there was anything else I needed.

Well, I was curious if he'd found out anything more about getting the tornado team to Kalamazoo and he said that he hadn't yet but he was still negotiating, and he'd probably let me know one way or another by the end of the week. He said that tornado season was ending, and they might have a little free time after that, but they'd also been recruited to make a couple of stops on their way home and that had been settled several months ago, before they'd even come out, so he wasn't sure if he could make any changes now.

I thought that he was trying really hard and that was what mattered, so I hugged him and Miss Cherilyn too and then I went upstairs and set out my lab coat and goggles and also a sparkly scrunchie for lab tomorrow, then I went out to the boardwalk and flew to Fourth Coast.

I was a little bit late, so I had to sit out the first game, and I didn't get to sit next to Aric, either, because there were already people on both sides of him, and I thought that he could have told them that he was saving a seat for me. But then I started getting into the conversation and the next game, and pretty soon I was just having fun.

When we drove home, he let me steer down Dartmouth Street and to his house again, and he said that I was doing such a good job that maybe next week he'd let me shift, too. I think he kind of liked the idea of me driving, or maybe it was just to get me to sit on his lap—I could tell that he liked that, too.

So we went up to his bedroom and he said that it had been kind of mean to tease him by flashing him in the morning and I told him that I hadn't meant to even though that wasn't true.

And he said that he had already plotted out his revenge and I asked him what it was but he said that it wouldn't be any fun if he told me and he'd said too much already, but he would be ready the next time I woke him up in the morning.

I said as long as his revenge wasn't throwing a bucket of water on me, and he said that that would be a mean thing to do and he didn't have a bucket anyways, and so I jumped up on the bed and lifted my tail and he said that it wasn't fair doing that while he was still wearing his clothes, and I told him that he should have been getting undressed instead of planning his revenge.

October 6 [Astrometry]

October 6

I was gonna let Aric sleep in some, but when I looked out the window I saw that it was all foggy outside, and he was still sleeping, and I thought that maybe I could play in the fog some and then come back in, so I opened the window and flew out into the backyard and was making little cloudlets when I saw him at the window.

He was just standing there watching what I was doing, and so once I'd finished gathering a cloud I flew up to the window and he backed away so that I could get back in, and I told him that I was sorry I'd left him but he was sleeping and there was fog, and he said that he liked the fog and he liked driving in the fog.

I thought it might be too late for that, because it was starting to clear off, although maybe where there were more trees that were closer together than backyards there might still be some thick fog. And he thought the same thing, and asked how I felt about driving around and looking for some.

So he got dressed, and then we went down to Winston and he drove out to Ravine Road, and there were a couple of thick spots, then once we got past the dirt mines and the 131 Highway, there were a few spots that were pretty thick, and he had to slow down because you could hardly see anything.

It wasn't going to last; the sun would drive it away. In the thinner spots, I could see that the tops of the trees were already lighted by the sun, but it was fun while it lasted. And then he turned down a familiar dirt road, and we drove down to the little clearing that was out there.

I got out and flew around, gathering up some of the fog that was still caught in the shadows of the forest, and I made a cloud like I had on Monday, and he stood in the back of Winston, leaning on the cab roof, and watched me.

Then once it was done, I pushed it up a little bit, and I landed in the back and stood up next to him, and we watched as it slowly drifted away.

When we got back in Winston, he said that even though he didn't have the top on Winston we could still have some fun, and I thought so, too, so I unfastened his pants and then sat on his lap.

He put his arms around me to help hold me, and I couldn't help but nip at his wrists a couple of times, and I even drew blood once by mistake, although I didn't remember having done that until after, when we were getting cleaned up as best as we could. He still had a towel in Winston from when he'd come out weather-watching with me.

We were still kind of giggly and he hadn't fastened his pants yet and I was thinking about seeing if I could get him interested in a second time when he saw a couple of deer come out of the woods and look around. I guess they weren't scared of Winston, because they started grazing right at the edge of the woods, and so we both watched them until they finally walked back off into the woods.

Aric started up Winston, and backed it towards the road, and when he got on the road I asked if I could drive at least until the end of the dirt, and he said that I just wanted a chance to sit on his lap again. Then he told me to promise him not to crash, and I said that I would do my best. And he said that if we saw any other cars, he was going to take over and I had to get off his lap, and I thought that was fair.

But we didn't, and I got to drive all the way until the stop sign. And I didn't crash.

We went back home and took a shower together, and that turned into sex in the shower. It was a little awkward because the floor was slippery and it was narrow and he wasn't quite at the right height, and he had to stop to adjust the shower head once because I'd slid forward a bit and it was hitting him in the face.

Then we had a late breakfast, and I guess Angela and David had the same idea, because they came upstairs while we were still eating, and Angela saw what we had and said that just oatmeal and coffee wasn't a proper breakfast, so she got some eggs out of the electric icebox and cooked enough for all of us to share.

It was clouding up outside, and we'd planned to go get the hay a little bit later, but I knew that it would get ruined if it got wet, and Aric didn't want to put the top on the back of Winston because it was a lot of work, so he said that we could go right now.

So I said goodbye to Angela and David, and I had to give Aric directions to the Farmer's Market, which was something I was not very good at. I didn't know the names of all of the roads, and a lot of them had rules that you could only go one way, so we maybe didn't take the best route there.

But we got there, and the hay-woman showed us where her truck was and Aric parked Winston right next to it and put the haybale in the back.

He said that we might as well take it right to my dorm room, and he didn't need my directions to get back to the college. He stopped right by the back door, and I held it open for him as he struggled with the haybale.

On our way up to my room, we passed by a boy who I didn't know but had seen before, and he gave us a strange look. I guess there weren't any other people in the dorm who had a haybale.

Aric put the haybale in my closet for me, and I stood on my hind legs and wrapped my forehooves around him and he hugged me back, then leaned down and kissed me.

I said that he could come to lunch with me if he wanted to, but he said that he still had some homework that he needed to do plus he had to put some bandages on, and I told him that I was sorry. Sometimes I got kind of bitey when I was in estrus, plus it always seemed like the last one was the worst, maybe because you knew that after this you weren't gonna be able to get a foal until next spring.

So I kissed him one more time and then dropped to all four hooves, and he told me to be careful not to break Meghan, 'cause most women don't like to be bitten, and then he went back downstairs.

I packed up my astronomy books, and then I got my flight gear in my saddlebags, too, except for my camelback, because it was too big to fit in them. And I thought about putting it on, but I didn't really want to wear it to class, because it would be hard to sit in my chair if I was wearing it. And that meant I couldn't use my GoPro, either, but that was okay.

I nibbled a little corner of the haybale, just to get a taste for it, and then I went down the hall and out to the boardwalk, and then I flew up and over the railing and then mostly glided down to the dining hall. And I landed short of the sidewalk, because there were a bunch of people there going into the dining hall, and I didn't want to get in their way. People aren't as used to pegasuses landing as ponies are, so sometimes they're surprised.

I got a salad and they also had scrod again so I got some. It looked a little bit dry, and I wondered if maybe they'd had it last night and people hadn't eaten all of it. And when I got to our table, Meghan was already there, and so was Peggy.

Since they were sitting next to each other, I sat down across from them, and I asked if they wanted to go to the football game tomorrow night, and she asked me if it was a home game or an away game. I wasn't sure, and I said that I'd find out. So I got up and went into the other room and asked Cedric and I also had to apologize for not sitting with them 'cause I should have but I'd forgotten.

He said that they were in Olivet, and I didn't know where that was, so he told me it was halfway between Kalamazoo and Lansing, and then I think we both had the same idea at the same time, but he got to his portable telephone faster and sent a telegram to Aquamarine.

Then he said that he wouldn't get an answer for a little bit because she had class, but to ask him at dinner if I didn't hear word back sooner. I really didn't need to, though, because unless she had something else really important going on I thought that she'd want to come to the game, and she could always ask Mister Barrow and Miss Parker to take her.

So I went back to my table and told everyone, and we decided that we'd go, because it would be a fun way to spend a Friday night. And my scrod was cold, and it was too dry, too, but I ate it anyways.

It had started to sprinkle when we left the dining hall, and I told Anna that I should fly up and get a quick look at least and I'd meet her in class, and then I took off and climbed up until I was a hundred feet or so above all the trees. I could see it was darker off to the west, and I could also see some flashes of lightning a bit further off in the distance, and Mel was probably out there in it wishing that he had a pegasus in the sky to report the weather to him, but I couldn't because of class.

I told myself that he'd probably done a good job before I started helping him, and that he would probably do fine this time, too, but all throughout Astronomy class, I kept feeling guilty and getting distracted whenever there was nearby lightning or when the wind whipped the rain against the windows.

Professor Miller told us more about finding distant planets, and how you could figure out the size of planets from seeing a transit, and she showed us how it might work for someone looking for Earth, and it still made me cringe a little bit whenever she said that pi equaled three.

I think that wouldn't have bothered me if I wasn't taking math classes, because we did weather approximations all the time. The clouds weren't all gonna stay exactly where you thought or have the exact amount of moisture in them and the wind might be a little different than you planned, so it was never going to be exact.

She taught us about astrometry, which was where you used a telescope to see a star moving, and it was kind of like using Doppler shift, but it was using the moving center part of the star. And it worked best for big planets in big orbits, and she said that was how we knew that the closest neighboring star to Earth didn't have a big, Jupiter-sized planet.

And then she passed out homework, and she told us that instead of it all being made-up, it was real data from real stars, which she thought would be a lot of fun for us, because when we went out and looked through the telescope at the Nature Center, we'd be able to find these stars and see them for ourselves, which I thought was going to be really fun.

By the time we got out of class, the rain had passed, and the only evidence of it was a wet lawn and some leaves and small branches scattered around. Just the same, I flew up and looked to make sure it was all gone, and I could see off to the east the very tail end of the storm, and nothing at all off to the west.

Anna didn't want to sit outside because her butt would get wet on the grass, so she said she was going back to her dorm room, so I went back to my room to do my homework. It smelled nice in the room, and I opened the closet door just a little bit to let more of the smell out in the room, then took off my saddlebags and got out my homework.

I'd almost finished when Peggy came back. She said that the room smelled kind of like a stable, and I reminded her that she'd said it was okay. She said that she wasn't mad, it was just going to take some getting used to.

And she said that next time she had a boyfriend over, she could just open the closet if he didn't believe that she had a pony roommate. Then I asked her why she had never introduced me to her boyfriend, and she sighed and said it was complicated, but it didn't matter any more because they'd broken up. I asked why, and she said because he was going to go to overseas for at least a year or maybe more, and they weren't serious enough about their relationship to try and make it work. I thought that was kind of sad, but she said I didn't have to be; it had been fun while it lasted.

I gave her a hug anyways, and then went to finish my astronomy homework, before I finished reading Matthew.

Jesus said a lot more wise things, and when people would try to confuse Him, He would give them a wise answer and they would go away to think about what He had said. But some of them plotted against Him in secret, and one of His disciples named Judas betrayed Him, and so after Passover they caught Him and took Him to trial, and said that when He told them He was the Son of God, that he had committed blasphemy, even though it was true. God had said so. So they decided that they were going to kill Him, and they put Him on a cross, and the sky turned dark and when He died there was an earthquake and the saints came up out of their graves.

So they put Him in a tomb, and after a couple of days He got up and left, and he told his disciples to meet Him in Galilee, and when they got there, He told them to go baptize all the other nations and teach them the things that He had taught.

Since I was going to meet with Liz, I didn't have time for dinner, so I snacked on some of my new hay instead, which Peggy said was really funny, and she even took a picture of me. I didn't have a bowl or anything to put it on, so it was just as convenient to eat it right from the bale.

Pastor Liz asked me how far I'd gotten, so I told her, and she asked me what I thought about it so far. And I said that I liked how Jesus was going around healing people and helping them, and He seemed really nice, but I guess that there were bad people who didn't like Him. And then I asked why He couldn't have gotten off the cross, or why God hadn't sent somebody to help Him. I think that if anyone tried to hurt one of the princesses, the others would come to help.

She said that His sacrifice was important, because it paved the way for Christians to be saved, but I guess even after she explained it all to me, I really didn't quite understand how. It wasn't quite like directly sacrificing himself to save someone else, which I think was where I was confused.

Maybe it was just confusing to me because after He'd been put in His tomb, He'd gotten up a couple of days later and left it, and then told His disciples what to do.

And she said that it was kind of a hard idea to get your head around, especially the first time you came across it, and that Mark, Luke, and John all told the story in slightly different ways and that might help me make more sense of it. And she reminded me that whenever I had a hard time figuring something out, I could always call her or visit her office if it was during her office hours, and she said that she'd be happy to see me any other day if I needed more help.

So I hugged her and thanked her and then went to fighting practice. And after we'd gotten done warming up, we practiced against just one person for a while, and so I got to fight with Stellan and Kennith and Seth. And then she said that we needed to relax for a little bit while she set up the next challenge, which was a bridge crossing, and she said that she'd decided it was too dangerous for me to participate in it since I didn't have any armor.

I said that she'd let me do it last week, and she said that the more she thought about it, the more she thought it had been a bad idea, and we were lucky that I hadn't gotten badly hurt. I guess she was right, but I still would have rather been fighting than watching.

After I got over my grumpiness, though, it was a lot of fun to see. The mock bridge was too narrow for anyone to stand side-by-side, and since nobody had bows, they had to figure out a way to get across. Rushing across didn't seem to work, because the people on the other side could all attack the person on the bridge, and meeting in the middle and fighting one at a time was a kind of silly way to do it, too, because you lost a lot of fighters that way. The only thing that had worked really well was when Seth charged across with Kennith right behind him. Seth had been killed pretty quick, but Kennith had been able to kill two of the people that were fighting Seth and then Stellan came across, too, and they forced their way through.

I could have asked Mister Salvatore to see if he could get me armor, but that would probably take a really long time and there wasn't much of the year left, so I'd just have to watch for the big battles, but I could still practice with one other person.

And since Karla felt bad that I hadn't been able to do the bridge fight, she let me fight her after they were done with that and getting out of their armor, and I did feel satisfied the first time I killed her.

I couldn't decide if Aric would be mad if I spend the night with Meghan, especially since I was going to the football game with her tomorrow, so I decided that I'd spend the night in my room.

I thought that we ought to have another meeting together and maybe think of something fun that we could all do together. Maybe Aric could come horseback riding with us—we could all ride in Winston, and that way we wouldn't have to get an Uber-car. Or we could go walking on the trails together, or all see a movie. We could go to the beach if the weather was nice; that would be fun. We had a whole weekend, and I bet we could all find something fun to do together.

October 17 [The world is governed by partial differential equations]

October 17

When I woke up, I was hot again, and I couldn't move too much 'cause both Meghan and Aric were cuddling me, and I had to use my wings to push the covers down a little bit, and then I felt bad 'cause maybe now they'd get cold, so I stretched my wings out over both of them to help keep them warm, which also woke up Meghan but I hadn't meant to.

She kissed my cheek, then whispered in my ear that her sleeping pants had come off a little bit because they were too big for her and did I think that she had enough room to pull them back up without pushing Aric off the bed. He was pretty close to the edge, and so I didn't think that she did, so I told her and she said she was going to try anyway, so she held on to his shoulder with one hand and I scooted over to give her as much room as I could without pushing him off the bed, and then she said that she'd probably wind up waking him up if she moved around too much.

I told her he was probably going to wake up pretty soon anyways, and she sighed and said it was her fault for not wearing panties to bed, but she wiggled around and must have gotten her pants pulled up, because she told me I could move back towards her. And when I did, she grabbed his butt and pulled him a little bit more on the bed, just to make sure he didn't fall out.

That woke him up, though, and he was a little bit confused at first, and so I just turned my head and kissed him and said that it was time to get up, and he tossed off the covers and got up, and then I followed him out of bed.

He yawned and stretched out and then he realized that Meghan was looking at him and that he was hard like he usually was in the morning, and he turned around really quick, and her face got kind of red, too, and then she darted out of the room and went down the hall to the bathroom, and I kind of wondered if maybe she'd never seen a real dick before. Maybe that was why she'd been kind of shy around him.

And Aric said that he was really embarrassed, so I nuzzled him through his underwear and he said that wasn't really helping things but I shouldn't stop, either. But I did, 'cause I didn't want Meghan to come back in and see that if she didn't want to, and he sat back down on the bed and covered himself with a pillow.

When she came back in, though, she didn't seem upset, and I wasn't sure if I should leave the two of them alone but I had to pee, so I went off to the bathroom.

Meghan was still wearing her sleeping clothes when I went back to the bedroom, but as soon as Aric left she started changing, and he knocked on the door before he came back in and she said it was okay even though she wasn't all the way dressed yet.

We all went downstairs and Aric offered to make us coffee if we wanted, but she said that he didn't need to bother. And then he said he could give us a ride to campus, and she said that would be nice, so we all got in Winston and he drove us back to Trowbridge, and before she got out, she thanked him and then leaned over and kissed him.

Me and Meghan walked upstairs together, and she said that she really liked that he was a gentleman and it was cute how embarrassed he was that she'd seen his erection and then she crouched down to kiss me and asked if I was going to go flying, and when I said I was, she said that she'd see me at breakfast.

So I went to my room and got on my flight gear and got permission to fly from Dori, and then I took off for the Nature Center, and when I got close I thought I'd do something different, 'cause it just felt like a good day to change things a little bit. So I flew over the pasture like I usually did, but I didn't land. I went over the field of pasture grass and down the hill to where the paths intersected, and I followed them back to where a different path that I hadn't been on branched off.

I took that back and it went under Westnedge in a little tunnel, which was kind of scary but not too bad because I could see all the way through it, and it was big enough I could fly through. And when I came out on the other side, I kept following along with the trails until I found a pond that had a stream running out of it, through a marshy area.

People weren't allowed off the path, but I could fly over the stream if I wanted to, so I did, and I could see some fish down in there and I probably wasn't supposed to catch them. If I wasn't supposed to eat the plants, I was sure I wasn't allowed to catch the fish, either.

So I flew back over to the actual path and followed it back to the other end of the loop, and now that I knew where it went, I trotted around it, and it was only when I'd started my second circuit that I remembered that maybe I should have woken up Peggy so that we could trot together. And I felt like I was being a bad roommate, and I hoped that she wasn't mad at me.

I tried to get those thoughts out of my mind by changing to a canter and focusing on my hooffalls, and it sort of worked.

When I got back around the second time, I took off and curved out over Westnedge Avenue, and then followed that back towards town, and I went over Meghan's old house on my way.

Instead of coming in high, I dropped down as soon as I crossed over Academy Street, and went between Dewing and Mandelle, then went around a couple of trees and landed in front of the dorm and went in like any of the other students would.

I flew up the stairs, and when I got back to my room I took off my flight gear and went into the bathroom and got in the shower.

After I was done, I lost a couple more feathers when I was preening, and I looked really close to make sure that the pinfeathers were coming in like they should. And then I got together my books for thermodynamics and waited for Peggy.

Meghan had already gotten there when we arrived, 'cause she hadn't gone flying around or anything, and she was mostly done with her food. Christine was playing with her fruit loops, trying to build a pile out of them on top of the milk, but they kept sliding back down into the bowl before she could make it very high.

Anna was making a little collection of paper animals out of her napkins, and when she made a water bird, she put it in Reese's cereal, where it floated for a little bit and then it dissolved and sank.

Sean said she should make a mountain goat for Christine's fruit loop mountain, and I said that the mountain goat had better be able to swim, which they thought was really funny.

I got to thermodynamics a little bit early, and when everyone was waiting in the hallway, I asked Lisa if that had been her roommate Jennifer who was cheering the football team on and she said that it was, and I said that I kind of wanted to do that. So she said that I'd have to ask her, because it was a lot harder than it looked, and she said that they did some routines that put the football players to shame, and I wasn't sure if that was true, so I thought I'd ask Cedric what he thought.

Professor Brown started out class by telling us more about Gibbs Free Energy and how important it was, and how it was the fundamental equation you wanted to get. And he said that it had a special name called mu, and it had its own letter, and it described chemical potential.

He told us how that kind of applied to putting fish in the wrong kind of water, because if you put a fresh water fish in saltwater, it would hurt the fish and I kind of wondered why that didn't happen to ponies. I could swim in saltwater and freshwater, although I couldn't drink salt water and fish were always drinking so maybe that was why.

And then he showed us how it was true, and how to make an equation where mu came out, because then we would know that we could use it in the equation, and that was kinda the same thing that we were doing in math, so as soon as he wrote the first equation on the markerboard, I started working on solving it in my notes, trying to get done before he did.

I didn't, which was too bad. I would have been really proud of myself if I had.

He stopped the lecture a little bit early so that he could give us back our tests, and I'd gotten a 91% which I thought was pretty good. And while he was still giving people their tests back, I looked over mine to see what I'd gotten wrong, so that I'd know what I needed to study more.

Me and Lisa sat in the lounge after class and we both looked over what she'd written for our experiment. Everything looked good, so she put it back in her folder so that she could turn it in tomorrow, and we walked together all the way back to DeWaters, and then I flew up and landed on the boardwalk and went up to my room so that I could do my homework.

I worked on my math problems until it was time for lunch, and then I packed my math things into my saddlebags and went off to eat. And it was kind of lonely at the table, 'cause Anna and Reese never arrived, and nobody knew where they were. Christine said that they were probably having a nooner, and I didn't know what that was. Peggy said that I could just assume whenever someone said something that I didn't know at this point it probably had to do with sex.

If they had roommates, it was probably a good time for it, because maybe their roommates were at lunch, so they'd have some privacy. And I kind of looked over at Meghan and she was looking at me and Peggy started writing something on a napkin, and then she gave it to Meghan. Christine started laughing and Meghan looked a little bit embarrassed, and Sean asked what was going on, and Christine said it was a girl thing that he didn't need to know.

I thought that he already did, but I kept my mouth shut just in case he didn't, and Peggy changed the subject and said that she'd heard that I was going to be on television, so I told Christine and Sean about it and Sean got out his portable telephone and started looking to see if the movie was on there but he couldn't find it.

Me and Sean went to class together, and Professor Pampena told us that the world was governed by partial differential equations, and I thought how I was learning all sorts of important things today. And he gave us some examples and my ears perked up at the diffusion equation, 'cause that could apply to clouds. They always wanted to do something that you maybe didn't want them to do and there were a lot of complicated tables and calculations to figure out how to have not too few but not too many either.

But he never wound up telling us all those equations, which was disappointing. He said that maybe he'd tell us later, and then he gave us back our tests and I only got an 85% on mine, which was not as good as I thought I should have done. And he said that a lot of people needed a review, so he spent the rest of the class reviewing what we'd already known, and I paid really close attention because I'd noticed that I'd made a really dumb mistake on one question and not noticed it even when I looked back at my work, and I'd also messed up the chain rule once.

When class was over, I circled where I'd written down that there was a diffusion equation, so that I would remember to ask him later if he didn't tell me what it was. And then me and Sean went to his room and did our homework together, and we listened to more Lisa Gerrard. She had been in a band called Dead Can Dance, and Sean said that sometimes she wasn't actually singing lyrics, but just making up sounds and that there was no language to some of her songs.

But I thought that there was, and I said that music was its own language, and maybe he just wasn't understanding it right. Maybe it didn't mean anything like a book or a math equation did, but it meant something in the heart and that was what mattered.

When we got done with our homework, we compared our answers and went and re-did our work on each one where we'd come up with a different result, and I'd gotten a couple of them wrong. I think I was paying a little bit too much attention to the music.

Then the two of us worked together on a problem in Equestrian, and then after that was done, Sean showed me a Numberphile video, which was about a mathematical series where you added and subtracted one, and how it actually added up to a half.

I wanted to watch another one but he said that I should know my limits, and I stuck my tongue out at him because that was a bad pun.

So when I went back to my room, I sat on my bed and got out my Bible and started reading Acts. It must have been written by Luke, 'cause it was also addressed to Theophilus. And it started out saying how they'd gotten a new disciple to replace Judas, who had bought a field but then died when his intestines fell out.

And the disciples went around telling people wisdom and healing them and the Pharisees got mad at them, and flogged them but then let them go because they thought that if they were really teaching God's word, then man would not be able to stop them anyways.

But they did stop Simon, and then Philip baptised a eunuch and nobody stopped him. And a sorcerer tried to get the power of healing, but since he was doing it for money and not for God, Peter wouldn't tell him.

Peggy asked if I was going to go to dinner, so I didn't finish, but put my Bible away and went to dinner with her.

Everybody was there, and the food was mostly pretty good, because they had some leftovers from the weekend which they hadn't tried to change into anything else. I got a bunch of proper fish, and instead of their watery lettuce they had spinach so I made a good salad, too.

We were talking about classes and Peggy mentioned that there was a special vacation day coming up on Friday which was kind of a surprise to Anna and Reese because there wasn't a holiday. And I was surprised, too, because that meant that we got three days off in a row, and I was looking forward to that. We'd have to think of something fun to do.

Sean came in a little bit late and he had a whole pie on his tray, and he said it was a pumpkin pie and he loved pumpkin pies and he had grabbed it before anyone else got a chance at it which I thought was kind of mean. And Christine said that Pumpkin Spice Season was upon us, and I didn't know what that was, so she told me how a coffee store called Starbucks had a pumpkin spice latte that everyone liked and since then everyone had been making all sorts of other things pumpkin spice flavored even when it was a bad idea, and she said that there were even pumpkin spice flavored condoms. Sean said that wasn't true, that it had been debunked, and Christine said it should be true.

Sean said that maybe he'd go to the store and get a bottle of pumpkin spice and they could experiment. And Reese said that was way too much information and all of a sudden he didn't want a piece of pumpkin pie anymore, so Anna took it away from him and started eating it instead.

I couldn't decide if that was something I'd like or not. It just seemed strange to try and make your partner taste like food and not like himself. And if you didn't like his taste, why would you want to give him a blowjob anyways? I guess maybe if you really liked him except for that, and you knew that he really wanted one, maybe that would be why, but it would be kind of insulting to tell him that he tasted bad, even if it was true.

Me and Peggy went back to our room after dinner, and I asked her if she'd ever tried a flavored condom, and she said that the taste didn't last for all that long, and she thought it was more of a gimmick than anything else. She said that they did come in lots of different flavors, though. And she said if I was really curious about it, maybe I should buy some and put them on my toy and try that for practice, which was a really smart idea, and then she said that if I did she didn't want to see it.

I packed up all my flight gear and I probably should have washed it but I didn't have time tonight, so I just stuffed it all in my saddlebags.

Then I went out to the boardwalk and flew over to Fourth Coast, and when I looked on their menu board I saw that they had a pumpkin spice latte on their board, too, and I thought about getting it just to try it, but I didn't want to change what I normally got.

I didn't do as well as I usually did, and I lost the first game, and then I almost lost the second, too. I kind of got lucky, because I'd miscounted the cards somehow, and it came down to Alex having three cards and me having two cards, and I thought that all of them were kings but not trumps, and I didn't have any trump cards left either so I played a club and hoped for the best and he beat it with a five of spades, which was trump. And he could only play one, because I only had one card left, which was an ace, and he played a king of hearts, which I could beat with my ace of hearts, and he lost.

While Kennith was shuffling the cards for the last game, Aric told everyone about how I'd gone up into the storm on Sunday and he said that it had even been on television this morning and he was disappointed that the news anchor hadn't asked him any questions.

Even though both me and Aric were out of cards, we stayed until the end of the third game, and like he always did, he offered people a ride back to campus, but nobody took his offer, so we went back together, and he let me drive the last little part.

It was getting foggy and he asked if I wanted to go out driving in the fog and I kind of did, but I had lab in the morning, so I didn't think that I should stay up late. And he was kind of disappointed, but he understood.

He told me that next week was tech week for the play, and so starting next Monday, he might not be home until really late. And he said that I was welcome to come to the house and wait for him, but I didn't have to if I didn't want to.

I helped him get undressed and then I said that I'd ought to finish what I'd started this morning, and I wouldn't even let him get into bed until he was done, and then he said it was his turn, so I rolled on my back and let him kiss his way down my belly, and I got completely lost in pleasure.

November 6 [Finishing the Bible]

November 6

Peggy was back when I woke up, and I was really quiet so I didn't wake her up, since it was a Sunday. I took all my flight gear into the bathroom and filled up my camelback and got dressed, then I went down to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors.

It was someone that I didn't know who was directing airplanes this morning, but he gave me permission to fly, so I took off and went west.

Main Street was kind of empty this morning, which was odd. I didn't see very many cars on it until I got close to Drake Road, which is where there are always lots of cars. And I started to climb when I was over Maple Hill Mall, and I was at about eight hundred feet when I went over the 131 Highway.

I turned north, so that I could follow along the Kal-Haven trail, and pretty soon I went over the parking lot at the entrance, which was empty, and then I started to follow the trail along. I was gonna go to Gobles, and then turn around and come back, 'cause that was about thirty miles.

Most of the fields were empty now, but there was still some corn up which didn't make a lot of sense to me. I was pretty sure that it would go bad if you left it on the plant in the field, so I couldn't figure out why the farmers hadn't harvested it yet.

And they'd left out some of the big rolls of hay, too—I saw a few of those sitting in fields, too. Maybe they'd gotten them in late and were waiting for them to dry the rest of the way, but the hay in the center was never gonna dry, and they should have done that when it was in windrows.

There was an electrical wire path that cut across the trail before I got to Kendall, and I thought about following it to see where it went, but then decided that maybe I'd do that some other time and for now just stick with my plan of flying above the trail because then I knew how far I was going and when I would be back.

I kept looking back, 'cause it was getting near sunrise time, and since the sky was so clear, I didn't want to miss it if I could help it. I should have thought of that when I was making my plans and flown east instead of west, 'cause then there wouldn't be any chance to miss it.

I was about halfway between Kendall and Gobles when I thought that the sun had to be getting pretty close, so I started to circle, just gliding around in a big, slow spiral like hawks did when they were looking for prey. And I guess I kind of was, except that I couldn't catch the sun.

When it started to poke above the horizon, I just kinda hovered in place until it was all the way above the trees, and then I dropped down and landed so that I could watch it again because it had been so pretty the first time.

I wasn't on the path; I'd landed at the edge of a harvested blueberry field, and even though it was a really big field, the trees on the other side blocked my view a little bit so I didn't see the sun until it came up above them, and it wasn't as good as the first sunrise had been. But it was still really fun to be able to see it twice.

I took flight again and I hadn't gotten all that high before I was over Gobles and turned around to go back to Kalamazoo. And I had to kind of keep my eyes downwards, 'cause otherwise I was looking straight into the sun.

As soon as the trail made its big turn south, I started to lose altitude, and I started to angle towards the 131 Highway as I descended, until I was under a thousand feet, and then I turned towards downtown. I called the airplane directors on the radio, and instead of the man I'd talked to earlier, Dori was there and so I told her where I was and she said that I was flying earlier than usual, which I thought was odd 'cause it was about the same time that I usually flew. I thought maybe she was just confused 'cause I was headed back into town and I hadn't talked to her on the way out of town.

Usually when I landed on the boardwalk, there were a few students around on campus, but this time I didn't see any, which was odd, especially with the roads being kind of deserted, and I stood on the balcony for a few minutes looking over campus. There were lights on in some of the windows, but I didn't go inside until I saw a boy walk out of Hoben and to Academy Street.

And when I was back inside, I heard some noises of people waking up for the day. Yesterday had been Guy Fawkes Day, so maybe everyone had been celebrating that and had woke up late.

Nobody was in the bathroom when I went in, and the floor of the shower was dry so I guess I was taking the first shower of the day. And I didn't hear the door open at all while I was in there, so I took my time.

When I was back in my dorm room, I had to be really quiet because Peggy was still sleeping, and I didn't know how late she'd gotten in last night. I didn't want to wake her up by mistake.

I didn't think that she'd want me to wake her up for breakfast, so I went out of the room and back down to the boardwalk and glided down to the stairs in front of Hicks Center, and when I went inside, the dining hall was closed even though it was supposed to be open, which was really annoying since I was hungry, and I could smell the food inside.

I sat down outside the dining hall in frustration. It was like the whole town had decided to sleep late today, everyone except me, and that wasn't fair at all.

Sitting around and being frustrated wasn't doing me any good, so I went back outside and kicked some acorns across the grass, then took off and I thought about flying to a restaurant and getting breakfast there but probably they would be closed, too, and I'd have wasted a bunch of energy for nothing. Besides, it was the principle of the thing—the dining hall owed me breakfast, and I wanted it. So I flew around the building a couple of times and looked through the windows but I couldn't see much, 'cause they hadn't even turned on the lights yet.

It took them almost an hour before they finally opened up, and I'd resorted to nibbling on some of the grass on the quad even though it wasn't very good. And I was the first one in, and I was in a pretty grumpy mood by the time that I got my food and sat down at the table, and there wasn't any of my friends there so I didn't even have anybody to complain to.

I'd finished with my food and I felt a little bit better when Meghan finally came in and sat down next to me and I started complaining which wasn't very nice of me at all, and then she started to laugh until she saw that I had my ears down, and she hugged me and told me that Daylight Saving Time had ended last night, and the clocks moved back an hour, so it was an hour earlier than I thought. And that was why there hadn't been too many cars on the road and Dori hadn't been directing airplanes and I felt kind of dumb but I was still mad that nobody had told me. And she said she was sorry and she thought that I'd already known.

It was going to be confusing while I got used to it.

So I sat at the table while Meghan ate, and I guess I was glad that I hadn't woken up Peggy, 'cause she'd probably expected to sleep in another hour and she would have been really mad if I'd woken her for when I thought breakfast time was.

Nobody else showed up while we were eating, so me and Meghan walked back to the dorm together, and she said that she was still working on her project and she didn't know if she'd be done by the evening, but she hoped so. And then she said that she hoped that Aric had gotten done with his project, and I did, too.

I got my Bible and went outside, 'cause it was a really nice day. And at first I sat in a tree, but it was kind of hard to read there and after a while the branches began to dig at my belly so I flew down and landed on the quad.

There were a bunch more letters from Paul, to other churches and also to Timothy, and he mostly told them good, encouraging things, and gave them advice on how they should conduct themselves and what they shouldn't do.

Hebrews was kind of long, and it said a lot about what Jesus had done for people, and after I'd read it, it made a lot more sense about why God hadn't saved Him from the cross, and how He had changed the covenant by His sacrifice.

And then there was a letter from James, who was one of the disciples. It didn't say which James, and there had been two of them. And he gave some advice to the twelve tribes, and then Peter also had two letters. The first was to the exiles, and I guess the second one was, too, although he didn't say specifically. And he had lots of advice, as well, about how to live good lives and do what God wanted.

There were three letters from John, and the last one was to Gaius. And John said what everyone else had said, that God wanted people to love each other as brother and sister, and to do good deeds for each other. And Jude only had one short letter, and then it was Revelation, which was the last book of the Bible.

It was written by John, and God had showed him a vision like he had showed the Old Testament prophets, and there were a lot of letters he was supposed to write in the beginning, telling them that they had been bad, and then he started to describe the things God had showed him. It was a strange vision and I had trouble making sense of all of it. There were horses who rode out and there were monsters and plagues and a war in heaven and angels blowing trumpets and it was all very confusing. An angel took the dragon and threw him in Tartarus (which John called the Abyss) for a thousand years, and then John saw how God was going to create a new Earth and a new heaven and a new Jerusalem, and He was also going to open Eden again. Then at the very end there was a benediction, and that was the end of the Bible.

I went back to my room and set the Bible on my desk. It was really strange to be done reading it, 'cause it had kind of seemed like I'd never finish. But I guess no matter how big a book is, if you slowly work your way through it you'll get to the end eventually.

I was still kind of confused by the clocks and so I finally asked Peggy, 'cause my portable telephone said it was one time and my body said it was another and I wasn't sure which was right. How did my portable telephone know that it was a different time than it had been? And she looked at hers and said that it was almost time for lunch, and that she should get dressed, then she decided that since it was a nice day outside she'd change out of her sleeping clothes after lunch.

She wasn't the only one who thought so, because Christine was also still wearing her sleeping clothes. I guess when people got the opportunity to sleep in one hour late they slept four or five hours longer.

Peggy and Christine decided that they needed to go shopping to get props for the play, and Sean went and got a bunch of toast and wrapped it up in a napkin and Christine put it in her purse because that was one thing that they needed. And when they were done eating, Christine and Peggy left so that they would have time to get what they needed, but Sean stayed and he and Meghan helped teach me the Time Warp so that I could dance it with everyone else.

Meghan said that she wasn't going to be able to go to the play, 'cause of her homework, but told me to have fun, and she said that if she was lucky she'd be done with her work early enough that we could play tonight.

So I walked back to the dorm with her, and since I didn't have anything else to do before the play started, I went to her room and sat on her bed while she worked at her desk and sometimes petted my mane or scratched my ears.

When it was time to go to the play, I nuzzled her and then kissed her and asked her if she was sure she wanted to miss it, and she said she'd rather work now and spend time with me later, so I kissed her again and then went off to see the audience participation version.

I had to wait around a little bit for Peggy and Christine, and they must have spent more time shopping than they'd planned to, 'cause instead of walking, Peggy drove Cobalt to the theatre and they had a couple of plastic sacks full of things.

We got our tickets and sat down in our seats and right before the play started, the director came out to announce it and to remind us that we were expected to participate.

And it was really neat to do it that way. Since I'd seen it last night, I kind of had an idea what was going to happen, so I didn't have to pay as much attention to the actors as I would have if I'd been seeing it for the first time.

There was a lot of times when the audience said things and I didn't always know what to say, but when it was something that got repeated I figured it out. And Peggy and Christine told me when I had to hold up the toast and throw rice and toilet paper, and we all got to get up and dance the Time Warp together, which was a lot of fun, especially since I knew the steps to it.

It was really strange when the play got over that it was light outside. It was confusing to be in a theatre during the day, 'cause you got used to the dark and then were expecting it to be dark everywhere. And we congratulated all the actors again, and rather than wait for Aric, I went through the door that went upstairs and nobody stopped me. Aric was by the light board, cleaning up, and so I hugged him and told him that I'd liked the audience participation even better than the audience just watching version.

He had a lot of stuff to do, because after the last performance they had to take down the set and all the lights, but we had a few minutes together because he couldn't start working until everybody was out of the theatre, since he might accidentally drop a light on someone.

I asked him if that had ever happened, and he said he hadn't dropped a light, but he'd dropped gobos and gel frames and wrenches before. And he said that he nearly got someone with a length of pipe when they were taking down the set for Six Characters in Search of an Author, because they were supposed to all be off stage, but someone hadn't been paying attention while he was taking apart their temporary lighting grid.

When the actors started to come back on stage, dressed in work clothes, he kissed me and said that it was time for him to work, and I asked if he'd gotten done with his project, and he said that he was almost done with it and if he finished her pretty quickly he'd have it done by the end of the night, and that me and Meghan could come over if we wanted to. He said if he wasn't done, maybe the thought of two sexy girls in his bed would motivate him to finish up.

I went back to my room and Peggy was gathering up her laundry so I thought that I should do mine, too, so I stripped everything off the bed and emptied the pockets out on my flight vest and then took it downstairs. We had to wait for a washing machine that was almost done, and then she put all the wet clothes on the table and I said that she could put her things in first and I'd wait until the other machine had finished to do mine.

So she went upstairs and came back down with her homework which she hadn't done yet, and we both sat on the washing machines because there weren't any chairs, and she read her art book while the washing machines were cleaning our laundry.

When you really focused on them, the washing part was a pretty relaxing noise, and the machine moved gently under you. But then it got more chaotic during the spin cycle, when it was trying to fling all the water off the clothes.

We put our clothes in the dryer before going to dinner, and Peggy said that probably some impatient jerk would take them out before they were finished and we'd get back to the laundry room and they'd all be piled on the table and still wet, and it turned out that she was right. We should have stayed in the laundry room and guarded them.

She wanted to take the clothes out of the dryer and put ours in but I thought that was mean, so we waited until they were dry and then took them out and Peggy folded them up but instead of putting them in a neat little pile, she put them all through the laundry room so that whoever had left them there would have to get them one at a time. She said that maybe he'd learn something from that.

And when he finally did come in, he saw his shirt sitting by itself on the middle of the table and another that was on top of the dryer right between us, and Peggy just crossed her arms and glared at him as he went through the laundry room finding all of his clothes, and his face was really red by the time he'd gotten everything and left, and I didn't think he'd be mean like that again.

She helped me fold up my sheets and blanket, even though I was just going to put them on my bed when I got back up to my room, so they didn't need to be folded. And I put them across my back and let her put her blankets on my back, too, and she said that I looked like the world's cutest pack mule, which was kind of insulting but she didn't mean anything bad by it.

After we'd made our beds and she'd put her things away, I said that I was going to go to Meghan's and then to Aric's, and she told me to have fun. And I packed up my flight gear and this time remembered to bring the Kama Sutra, too.

When I got to Meghan's room, I told her that I had it, so she decided that she'd be daring, too, and changed into her sock-skirt without any underwear, and her tall boots, and I said that she should try not to distract Aric too much if he hadn't finished his homework.

So the two of us walked to his house together, and when we got there he was upstairs in his room, sitting at his desk and working on his computer, and he still had his theatre clothes on, so I guess he'd just come right home and started to work.

Meghan asked him how much longer he thought he was going to be, and he said that he was getting close, so the two of us sat on his bed and we went through my saddlebags and got out my book and looked through it for inspiration. The drawings were kind of crude and there were some positions that looked really athletic and others that just looked like they'd be uncomfortable and not fun at all. And there weren't any that included a pony, which was disappointing, but some of them were things that I could do; my legs might just be in a different position.

We tried to be quiet and not distract him, and so we were mostly pointing and making gestures at each other, and I guess he started to wonder what we were up to, 'cause he turned around and looked at us to make sure that we were still there, and then he looked back at his work and a moment later he turned around again and I guess he saw what we were reading or else he saw up Meghan's skirt, or maybe both.

And I guess that motivated him to finish, because it was only a couple more minutes before he said that he was done, and Meghan leaned over and whispered in my ear that she bet he wasn't really and he was just saying that because he wanted sex.

I thought that was probably true, but I wanted sex, too, and I was getting impatient.

Besides, if he wasn't done yet it was his own fault for not starting sooner.

So Aric sat down on the bed between us and we started going through the book again until we'd found a position that we all thought looked like it would be fun to try, and then I undressed Aric, and I was gonna undress Meghan, too, but Aric said that she should leave her dress and boots on a little bit longer and she said that she didn't know he had a clothing fetish, and he said that anyone would with that dress, and I had to agree with him.

November 22 [Goodbyes]

November 22

It didn't feel like I'd slept at all when I woke up, although I was pretty well-rested. I nuzzled Meghan's chest, and I guess she was awake, too, 'cause she petted my mane and scratched behind my ears, and then she reached over me and petted Aric's head, too, until he opened his eyes.

Even though we didn't, we pretended that we had all the time in the world, and we were all slow and patient and concentrated on making each other happy, and I was glad that we'd started our day off right.

We did kind of have to rush our shower a little bit, but there was still enough time to get ready and for me and Meghan to help groom each other.

Aric gave us a ride back to campus in Winston, then he had to hurry back home because he said that he had a project that he was supposed to turn in by noon and it wasn't quite done yet. And I told him that he should have been working on it instead of watching the movie, and he said that his hand had cramped up and he was seeing double because you could only draw so many lines on a lighting plot before you had to take a break, and he said that he already had the rough draft done and now all that he had to do was ink it in, and he knew that he needed a steady hand for that.

We all kissed and I promised that I'd say goodbye to him before me and Peggy left for Colorado Springs, and then me and Meghan went to breakfast together.

Meghan just had a plain bagel, which Christine said was like a giant, unflavored fruit loop, and I told her that I knew what bagels were and they were nothing like fruit loops except that they were circular with a hole in the middle, and she might as well claim that a bagel was a plain donut, even though they weren't that much alike, either.

Christine told me that she was trying to see the entire world in relation to fruit loops today, and Sean said that it was better than the time she'd assumed that anything that was taller than it was wide was a penis. Then she told him that it was true, everything was a phallus if you looked at it right. And he shook his head and sipped his coffee.

Anna got an orange and peeled it so it looked like there was a penis in the skin, and she said that that was our new god now, and set it in the center of the table. And Reese took a couple of seeds from the one that he had been eating and put them in front of it, and Peggy just shook her head and said sometimes she wondered if she'd ever actually left middle school.

Christine said that you were only as old as you felt you were, pulled her arms into her sleeves, said she was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and shoved her face into her cereal and started eating it that way, even though it was really messy and she got milk in her hair and a fruit loop stuck to her forehead.

We all left together, 'cause almost everyone else had a final to go to, and Christine still had a little bit of milk in her hair, which Sean finally wiped off for her when we got outside. And then we split up to go to our exams, and I went to see Pastor Liz.

When I came in without my glaive, she chuckled and said that she'd always thought it was funny how I was bringing a polearm when I talked with her.

She said that there were a lot of people in the world who just picked the verses in the Bible that most matched their views, and that they didn't really understand what it really meant. And she said that some of them used that for bad reasons, because they thought that it allowed them to do bad things. Other people who didn't like Christians found verses that made them sound bad and took them out of context, not wanting to understand the deeper meanings.

Then she told me that there were other religions as well, and people did the same for them, even though it wasn't what Christians were supposed to do. She reminded me that Jesus had taught a message of peace, and that his sacrifice meant that God had forgiven everyone, which was why Christians didn't have to follow the laws in the Old Testament any more, but the new laws that Jesus had set forth, and too many people didn't understand that.

She told me that I should always remember what Paul had said to the Corinthians: 'And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love,' because she thought that that was the most significant duty of a Christian.

And then she hugged me and told me that I was a good pony, and she'd heard how seriously I took my duty to stormwatch, and to study for my classes, and said that she'd miss me when I went back to Equestria, because I was the kind of pony who changed lives for the better, and that was so nice it made me cry a little bit, and I just kept thinking about what she'd said when I was back in my room.

I started to pack up my things even though I didn't want to, because it was a sign that there was hardly any time left at all, and I didn't want to go, and I had to stop, because I couldn't do it alone, so I went outside and sat on the boardwalk and looked over the quad until I saw Peggy walking up towards the dorm, and she saw me and waved, and I waved back at her then went inside and waited for her to come up to the room.

She was all done with her finals, and I gave her a big hug, and then the two of us spent a little bit of time packing together, until she ran out of boxes. That didn't take all that long, 'cause she only had had five, which wasn't enough, so we had to go to one of the metal dumpsters that was for cardboard and find some boxes in there. They were usually pretty full, except now I guess a lot of students had thought of taking boxes out of them, 'cause there weren't too many left. So I set the things that didn't have boxes on my desk for the time being.

Peggy set out clothes for tomorrow and Thursday and said that I was lucky that I didn't have to worry about wearing clothes at all, 'cause I could travel with everything I needed in my saddlebags and she had to carry around a big suitcase. But it wasn't all that big—she used her big one for dirty clothes that she was going to wash at home, and put everything that she'd need for the road in her duffel bag.

And then it was lunchtime, so I got my astronomy books and my poetry book and went to the dining hall and sat down with Cedric and Trevor and Leon.

At first, no one talked much, 'cause we were all thinking how this was the last time we'd eat lunch together, and then it was just too much for me and I started crying again, and Cedric got up and hugged me and he was so big and strong and gentle, and I told him that I was sorry that I was being sad, but I was going to miss them so much, and he said that he was going to miss me, too. But he promised that he'd write me letters when I was back in Equestria, and then he said that the three of them had gotten together and gotten me a gift, and it was all the Harry Potter books, and they'd also gotten me a guide to Quidditch. Leon and Cedric said that I had to promise to use them to teach ponies to play, and I told him that I would.

I hadn't gotten them anything, and I felt bad about that, but Leon shook his head and said that I'd given them poetry. And Cedric said that I was braver than anyone else he knew, and that when we'd first met he thought that I was going to turn tail and run off, but I'd gone and hugged him anyways and he said that it was easy to be brave when you were big but really hard when you were small.

And pretty soon we were laughing and joking around, and I felt a lot better.

Trevor said that he had a poem that he thought was appropriate for today, and it was called My Human Family by Maya Angelou, so he read it for us, and then he gave it to me to keep.

Even though I should have returned it on my way to astronomy, I kept the poetry book in my saddlebags and went to astronomy. Anna was already there, and I smiled when I saw that she'd brought extra pens, too.

Professor Miller came in a couple of minutes late, and she said that the Xerox machine had run out of paper and they'd had to go on an epic quest to find some more, but all that they could find was canary yellow, so some of us were going to get yellow test booklets. And she said that to make up for her being late, we'd have an extra fifteen minutes on the test if we needed it.

And then she asked if there was anyone in the class who didn't want a yellow test, and a couple of people raised their hands, so she gave them normal-colored ones. I thought about raising my hoof, but I decided that I'd just take my chances, and I did end up getting a normal-colored test, which was a relief. I thought that it might hurt my eyes if I stared at a yellow one for too long.

Me and Anna had probably over-studied, 'cause there weren't any pictures that we had to identify, but it was always better to be too prepared than not prepared enough.

A lot of people finished before I did, and there weren't too many students left in the class by the time I was done. Anna had already finished up her test and left, and I had to remind myself not to hurry, 'cause I thought that she might be waiting for me.

There was still a half-hour left for the exam when I was done reviewing it and carried it down and gave it to Professor Miller, and I thanked her for the class, and she said that I'd been a good student and reached down like she was going to pet my mane, but then she stopped, which kind of confused me.

Anna hadn't waited for me, and I hoped that she hadn't waited for a while and then gotten bored when I didn't come out. Probably she had wanted to go see Reese before they went home for the break.

So I went back to my dorm room, and Peggy had gone and gotten some more boxes which were really clever. They were called file boxes, and you could fold them all up from a flat sheet of cardboard, and you didn't need any tape to hold them together.

I only needed one more for the rest of my things that I needed to pack up, so I mostly helped Peggy with her things. I trusted Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn to take care of the rest for me, and it was too bad that he wasn't going to help Peggy, too.

She had everything ready by dinnertime, and she carried most of it down into Cobalt and packed it in. Tomorrow morning, we were going to put all my things on my bed so that Mister Salvatore would know what to take—she had the same room next quarter, and so she didn't have to empty it out completely.

Peggy said that she didn't know who she was getting for a roommate next quarter, or if she was getting anyone at all. She couldn't have another pony roommate, since she was graduating in the spring.

She said that whatever happened, it was going to be a lot different without me. And I said that I didn't really want to think about it right now, 'cause we were still going to have a nice vacation together. And Peggy told me that it had been snowing in the mountains in Colorado, too, and all the good resorts were open, so we were going to get to spend lots of time in the big outdoors, which I was really looking forward to.

We went to dinner together, and already the dining hall was a little bit emptier than it had been before. Everyone was still at the dinner table, though, and Anna and Reese both looked a little bit stunned that the year was over. There would be breakfast tomorrow, and then the dining hall was closed, and everyone had to leave, which is why so many people already had. And I was hoping that nobody that I'd wanted to say goodbye to had left yet.

Although it was the last supper, the food was actually good. They had cod fillets, which were really tasty, and they had spinach with the salad again, and they had a lot of pies for dessert. Christine thought that was probably because they were getting rid of the last ones that they had left, which was probably true. And they weren't as good as the ones that they'd had for Thanksgiving, but they were still pretty good.

We stayed late at our table, and then said our goodbyes and pretty soon I was crying again, and I wasn't the only one. Sean said it was kind of like a funeral, and I think he was trying to lighten up the mood a little bit but his eyes were wet, too. And before we left, I made sure to hug and nuzzle everyone, and then after I'd put my tray away, I took one last look at the table, which looked sad and empty without us there.

Me and Peggy went back to our room and she left the door open, so that people could come by and say goodbye if they were leaving, and pretty soon Rebekka and Kat and Ruth were all in our room, and I sat on the bed between Ruth and Rebekka and we thought about playing one more game of euchre but we didn't—we just sat and talked, and I was getting teary again because it was so hard to say goodbye to all my friends, and I didn't want to go, I wanted things to stay like they were even though I knew that they couldn't.

And I was a little bit jealous of the other ponies who weren't done with their classes yet, because after Thanksgiving, they'd get to go back to school and spend some more time with all of their friends.

Too soon, we hugged and they went back to their rooms, and it got more and more quiet in the dorm, and we laid down in our beds, but I couldn't sleep, so I finally got back up and turned on my bendy light and wrote in my journal and that helped.

Author's Note

Human Family

December 10 [Room Service]

December 10

When I woke up I snuggled with Aric and Meghan for a while and dozed back off but then I woke up again and it was light out and they were both still sleeping, so I got up and went to the window and watched outside for a little bit and I must have been really focused on the outside, 'cause I didn't hear Aric waking up, and only noticed him when he came over and stood next to me so that he could look out the window, too.

I kind of wondered if anyone down below could see us clearly and he said that he didn't think so because the windows were tinted and the lights were off in our room, so probably all they'd see was a reflection of the sky and maybe they wouldn't even see that because of the snow that was still coming down. So then I thought that maybe it hadn't counted when they'd flashed the train and he said it was different at night, 'cause the lights on in the room would make the window easier to see through, and I didn't really understand how that would work, but I believed him.

Aric was disappointed that our room didn't have a coffee maker, and then Meghan said that we ought to just order room service. Aric told her that that was expensive, and she said it didn't matter because we weren't paying for it and then I started to wonder who was. Aric thought about it and decided that probably it was covered by my expense account or something like that and since it was near the end of the year anyways there was probably extra money in there that I hadn't used.

Then Meghan said that he was probably right; the program had the host nation sponsoring the students and paying all their expenses, which I knew too, because I hadn't been allowed to bring any money with me.

And she said that right now there were probably people in Equestria staying at fancy Manehattan hotels and ordering room service so it was okay if we did too.

So I got out of bed and brought the menu back and sat between Meghan and Aric so we could look at it, and it was what I'd come to know as standard human breakfast food.

We decided that we could share some, 'cause the eggs I wanted also came with sausages that I didn't want, but Aric said that he'd eat them for me. And there was also a blueberry muffin that sounded really good that Meghan and I wanted to share, and we decided we'd get extra coffee so we could have seconds.

Aric got up and used the telephone to order the food and then he got back in bed and said that it would be about a half hour before the food was ready and he wasn't sure what we should do until then, and I told him to get back in bed 'cause I had an idea what we could do.

It made it a little bit more exciting not knowing when the waiter was going to bring our food, 'cause at any moment there might be a knock at the door, and we weren't ready when there was. Meghan yanked the covers over herself and told me that I should go to the door and get our food because I was used to being naked anyway and they'd just pretend that they weren't there, and I said that I wasn't sure that I could carry it all myself and the waiter was gonna know, 'cause the two of them made a pretty big lump in the bed, and anyway did we really care if he did.

Aric said that he'd do it, so he got out of bed and put on his pants and he opened the door real quick and got the tray and then brought it in and set it down on he desk and then started lifting the lids off the food to see what we'd gotten and both me and Meghan thought he shouldn't be getting distracted with breakfast, so we got out of bed and she reached around his waist and took his pants back off and then the two of us herded him back to the bed so that we could finish.

And then we relaxed in bed together a little bit until Aric got up and started bringing our food over. There was a little table next to the bed where we could put our cups of coffee so they wouldn't spill and it was kind of hard to eat food in bed without making a mess, but it was also fun.

The shower that they had was a little bit bigger and had a sliding glass door like my balcony, and it even had a really fancy showerhead that let you change how the water came out of it which was nice but the little bottles of shampoo that they had provided weren't enough. Meghan and Aric each needed one and I could have used about ten of them and he said that we should call them and order some more, but I thought it was okay if I didn't get all the way clean, 'cause I hadn't gotten too dirty yesterday, and I didn't want to bother the hotel people again. It was my own fault for not thinking of it earlier; we could have had it brought up with breakfast.

After they'd washed off we stayed in the shower and let the bathroom fill up with steam and then I went down to the far end of the shower and started trying to condense some of the steam into a little cloud. There wasn't really enough room in the shower for me to get a decent cloud together but I managed to pack enough steam together to get one that was a little bit bigger than a football, and then I started to see how much I could put in it before it became completely unstable. The hot water gave it a lot of energy and all the air currents in the bathroom kept bouncing it around until it got heavy enough that it kept wanting to fall and I sort of had to work to keep it aloft.

Since I'd made it myself at ground level, I knew that it would have the same charge as everything else in the room did so Aric and Meghan could safely touch it, so I let them pick it up and hold it and play with it. It didn't respond too well to humans and I had to keep a hoof on it, 'cause otherwise it would have just disintegrated in their hands.

Meghan said that it felt kind of tingly and I thought that maybe she was feeling my magic in the cloud 'cause I was actually having to work pretty hard to keep it together. Aric thought it felt more like a vibration like a machine or something and he said that it was really weird, and he wanted to know if clouds in Equestria felt like that all the time.

I said that it felt normal to me, except that it was taking a lot more magic than it ought to to keep the cloud intact, especially when he started to squeeze it, and then I had to take it back away from him and let it recover a little bit before it was happy again, and then I let them play with it some more until I started to feel a little bit tired from maintaining it, and then I told them that I was going to let it go and I didn't know what it was going to do when I did.

It had lightened up enough that it could float again, and it drifted on a little air current around the shower and both of them kind of moved around to stay out of its way, and then it got stuck on the glass wall of the shower and that was the end of it, 'cause it picked up too much condensation and just dissolved which was a kind of sad fate for it, but it had never been enough of a cloud to really amount to anything, and I couldn't have opened the window of the hotel to let it out.

We got out of the shower and dried off and then sat back on the bed to figure out what we were going to do for the rest of the day. Aric said that unless I wanted to stay up super-late tonight we would have to do our Lord of the Rings marathon tomorrow, which was okay by me. I said that I'd like to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity today and we could go Pokemon hunting with them or play in their backyard, 'cause it was still snowing, and we had to go back to the apartment to find out how the alarm worked, too.

Then Meghan got up and went over to the window and looked down on the streets below and said it was really pretty watching the snow fall and the people go by below us and she thought that it was kind of like being in a cloud.

It was almost lunchtime when we got dressed and we didn't have anything to take home with us, 'cause we hadn't packed anything, and we went downstairs and I gave the clerk the plastic key back and then we went across the tube-bridge to the parking lot building and we had to go all the way to the top because Aric had parked Winston on the upper floor. Meghan thought that was kind of silly because there had been lots of other parking spaces on the floors below, but Aric said that Winston didn't like being inside because the only time it was in a garage was when it was being fixed and he thought that if he'd parked it on a lower level it would have broken just so he could fix it.

She didn't think that was true, and I wasn't convinced either, but it was nice to be on the top floor and have the open sky above me after being inside. I could have just flown out and then landed up there and I had thought about it but then I would have been leaving Aric and Meghan behind, so I'd walked up with them.

There was nobody else up there, 'cause everyone else had parked their cars on the lower floors, and you could see where the snowplow had had to go around Winston—even though there was more snow on the ground covering up the pavement, Winston was on a little snow-island all by itself, which was surrounded by a ridge of slushy snow.

Aric brushed Winston off and scraped off the windows and then we all got in and he decided he wanted to see if he could get all the way down to the bottom without starting it, which was going to be hard because it was facing the wrong way.

He tried to turn it around once it had rolled a little bit but he didn't get far enough around and when he saw that he was going to hit the wall, he had to stop and then start it long enough to get Winston pointed downhill again. And then he turned it back off and coasted down all the floors until we got right to the last one and he let the clutch out so that Winston would start itself, and I thought that was pretty clever.

We didn't have to pay for parking, 'cause we'd stayed at the hotel and had a little paper card that the clerk had given me, so Aric gave that to the attendant in the booth and then we drove back to my apartment, and Mister Salvatore was still there. He did look a little bit tired, but he smiled when he saw me and he showed me how the alarms worked. They were pretty simple to use; they were just little boxes that went by the doors and had keys that went in them that you could turn. There was a green light when it was okay to open the door and a red light when it wasn't.

He said that it was probably unnecessary and he thought that maybe he'd overreacted some but since he hadn't known what was going on he'd thought it was best to be safe. And Aric asked him what else they knew, and he said that so far they still hadn't found the suspects but now the police were sure that it was a robbery gone wrong, and they'd also figured that the bad guys had left Kalamazoo and they probably weren't going to come back.

Then he said that he'd worked up a schedule for my vacation to Florida, and that we could go to Chicago on the train on Tuesday and then we'd take a train to Florida and we'd visit the beaches and a spaceport. He said that Gusty was going to fly down later, because she got out of school really late, and so it wouldn't be until Saturday that we got to see her.

And he said that I'd be back in Kalamazoo before Christmas, and then he crouched down and gave me a hug.

I saw that they'd thought to refill my bird feeder, which was nice of them, and thinking about the birds having their meal made me think that I was hungry, too, and so Meghan got out the leftover quiche and warmed that up so that we could have it for lunch.

After we'd eaten, Aric and Meghan wanted to go back to Aric's house to get new clothes and I wanted to fly some, so we agreed that we'd meet at his house in two hours, which would give me enough time to fly around the city a little bit, so I put on my flight gear and I was going to go out the balcony but then I remembered that I couldn't turn on the alarm if I went out that way, and if Mister Salvatore came back and saw that it was off he'd be mad at me.

Aric said that he could turn it on for me, so I went out on the balcony and kissed him and Meghan and then I called the airplane directors and told them that I was just going to patrol above town and I'd stay out of the way of airplanes, and the grumpy man said that there weren't going to be any for a little while but I should be careful because of the low visibility and I promised that I would. Then I kissed Aric and Meghan one more time and took off.

I thought that if I stayed under 500 feet, nobody could get mad at me, so I went along Stadium Drive until I got to downtown and I had to circle the Radisson and find the room we'd had, even though we weren't in it any more, so I flew by outside and then I followed the railroad tracks until I got to the river and I turned and went east along it for a little ways, until I got to the dam, and then I went south, and once I crossed the 94 Highway, it was almost all farms and fields and woodlots, although I did fly over one neighborhood of moveable houses that wasn't too far from the highway.

I knew that the airport was off to my right, but I couldn't see it because of the snow. When my watch told me that it was almost due west, I dropped down a little bit because there was a runway that pointed kind of in my direction and I wanted to be sure that if there were any airplanes coming along I'd be clear of their wake. But I didn't see any or hear any and probably I was far enough out that they'd still be pretty high above me.

When I got to Long Lake, I descended until I was right above the water and skimmed across the top of it, and then I had to climb on the other side so that I'd clear the trees and wires, and then I dropped down over Austin Lake.

There was a bit of a clearing in the trees at the end of it and so I didn't have to climb as high, and I zipped right over a road and then descended to the next lake—there was a whole chain of them—and turned northwest, 'cause I knew that I was getting close to Portage Park which ran alongside the railroad tracks, and I was going to follow that back to town.

I'd just gotten to the celery flats when I heard dogs, and then I saw a team of them pulling a sled behind them come out from the trees and so I had to turn around and get a better look at that. They were all hitched up like a team of horses might be, and on the back of their sled was a person holding the reins, and so I slowed down and watched them go by, and I wasn't going to land and distract them but my curiosity got the better of me and I did.

And their drover stopped the sled and the dogs got a little bit out of order trying to sniff at me, and I found out that she raced dogsled and she was training up for the Iditarod which was in Alaska and was the most important dogsled race in the whole world. So I asked her if she thought she'd win, and she said that she didn't think she had a chance but it was still going to be amazing even if she came in last.

So I wished her luck and she got her dogs moving again and I watched until they went around a little curve and I couldn't see them anymore.

When I got back to Aric's house and told him what I'd seen he didn't believe me at first, but Meghan said that she'd seen her around before in the summertime on a sled with wheels, and that it was Libby who also worked overnight at Kalamazoo College as a security guard. And it was funny because I thought that she was familiar but since she had been all bundled up in winter clothes I hadn't been sure, and I couldn't really get her scent all that clearly over the dogs'.

We walked over to Jeff's house together and it didn't take too long for the kids to come out to play with us. Trinity and Lindy both gave me hugs and Caleb bumped my hoof, and we decided that we were going to have a snowball fight and after a little while it turned into everyone against Jeff and Aric, which wasn't as unfair as it seemed, 'cause they were both pretty clever at hiding and then jumping out and throwing a barrage of snowballs at us and that went pretty well for them for a while, but then I decided I'd fly up into the tree that they were hiding under and start knocking snow down onto them which they didn't think was very fair, and then after that we stopped throwing snowballs and decided that we were going to go to Echo Valley, which was a sledding hill.

That was on the other side of town, near Galesburg. And Jeff offered to take us all in his van, which was a really nice van called an Odyssey. It was a little bit crowded with sleds and the seven of us, but I didn't mind and Trinity and Lindsay liked sitting on either side of me, 'cause they could pet me and play with my mane. Trinity decided to braid a little bit of it, but she didn't have any elastic bands to put in it, so it was kind of a loose braid that was gonna fall out later.

Echo Valley was kind of like a ski hill, but a lot smaller, and there were lots of people there playing on the hill—some of them were riding round tubes but most people were on some kind of a sled. Jeff didn't have enough for everyone to have their own, so Aric and Meghan made a few trips down but then mostly just watched everyone else having fun.

I tried going down once standing on my hooves and I made it halfway down before the sled hit a bump and knocked me out and so I had to fly down and grab it, then I towed it back up the hill and after that I rode down with Lindy or Trinity instead of going by myself. And I also got to fly around and bring their sleds back to them, and I carried Trinity up the stairs a couple of times, too, and we stayed at the park until it got dark out and the kids were tired out, and then we rode back home and Trinity fell asleep and Lindy had to wake her up when we got back to Jeff's house.

We walked back to Aric's house and then had a late dinner there, and then drove over to Tiffany's so that we could get some drinks for tomorrow and then we went back to my apartment for the night. It was still snowing and the wind had drifted it up almost a foot on one corner of the balcony, and I thought it was neat to be looking into a little snowdrift like that.

Meghan and Aric pulled the futon mattress back out into the living room so that we could share it, and we turned out the lights except for the Christmas tree and all piled onto it and snuggled up under the blankets and watched the snow falling outside.

December 11 [Lord of the Rings]

December 11

The snow was still coming down when I woke up—if there hadn't been all the lights in the parking lot I wouldn't have seen it, 'cause the light from the Christmas Tree would have blocked it out, but I could see orangish flakes out the front window of the apartment and then when I got out of bed and went over to the balcony window and pushed my muzzle up against the glass I could see the snow, until my breath fogged up the glass.

I wasn't sure how deep it was or would get—it was drifted high enough against my window to be at my barrel, but it looked like it wasn't really as deep as it was on the balcony and I decided that I wanted to check, so I turned off the alarm and tried to get the door open. It was really stiff and didn't want to move at all and I had trouble getting any leverage on it at all. I wish that it had a rope around the handle so that I could pull on that, 'cause that would make it a whole lot easier to open.

B & G Outlet in Schoolcraft had lots of rope and it probably wasn't worth taking a trip all the way down there for a couple of feet of it, but since Aric shopped there a lot he probably had some that I could borrow.

I got the door open a crack but it wasn't enough to get a hoof in there and really force it, and I was still struggling with it when the cold air woke Aric and Meghan up. Neither of them got up to help me right away, though; they just huddled together and Meghan pulled the blankets over them, while I looked around the apartment to see if there was anything I could use to pry the door some more.

Finally Aric rolled on his back and saw what I was doing and he told me that I was crazy, and I said that I wanted to go out and see, so he got up and pulled the door open far enough for me to get out on the balcony and then closed it again to keep the cold air and snow out of the apartment.

I determined that it was mostly drifts on my balcony, and then I decided I was gonna fly over top of the building to see how much had fallen overnight—I'd be able to tell how much new snow was on Winston—and then come back inside and we could have sex and then take a shower and make breakfast and start watching the movies.

So I went over the roof and I didn't land on the other side, 'cause I knew Winston pretty well, and I could see that there were a couple of inches of snow piled on top of it. And then I stayed up there a little bit longer, because there was a truck that was just like Winston except that it had a big snow-blade on the front and a blinking orange light and it was shoving the snow out of the way and up against the snow mountains. They were too tall for that truck to have made them all, so I thought that probably a bucket tractor like the ones that worked in dirt mines came along and picked up the truck's little snowpiles and put them on the big pile, or else they had some kind of conveyor that they brought in.

I flew back to my side of the roof and Aric had turned on my P so I knew right where to land, and he'd laid back down so I had to tap on the glass to get his attention, and then he sat up and looked at me and said something to Meghan and she shook her head. I couldn't hear what they'd said, but whatever it was she sat up and watched out the window too as he came over and then he stuck his butt up against the glass and bent over, and after he was sure I'd gotten a good look, he straightened up and pulled open the door for me.

He said that that was called a pressed ham, and Meghan said that it was kind of insulting, but I thought it was sort of funny, especially since he was trying to rub the cold off his butt. And then I stuck my muzzle between his legs and made him jump, 'cause my snout was really cold even though I hadn't been outside for all that long.

Aric said that I was being mean, and I said that he'd had fun with the ice cubes and he said it wasn't the same thing.

Meghan said that I couldn't get back in bed until I'd brushed all the snow off my back, so I went into the bathroom and shook off and then she came in and helped get what I hadn't, and the two of us went back to bed and Aric had recovered from me frosting his balls, but he wouldn't let me put my head down there until he'd felt and made sure that my muzzle had warmed up.

After, the three of us took a shower together and then me and Meghan went into the kitchen to make breakfast, and Aric was kinda mad that Meghan said that we shouldn't start watching the movie until we were done eating, but then he decided that he'd wash the dishes to speed things along, and so that gave me and Meghan a little time to relax when we were done eating.

We left the mattress on the floor so that we could lie on it, and then Meghan decided that we should pull the futon frame close so that they'd have something to lean up against if they wanted to, 'cause she wasn't sure that she wanted to watch all the movies lying down.

Then Aric put the first movie record in and he had to adjust the volume a little bit so it was loud enough that we wouldn't miss anything but not loud enough to hurt my ears or wake up people downstairs.

He said that he should have brought the sound system that they had at his house with him but it was a lot of work to unhook and it was David's anyways.

While he was doing that, Meghan got up and put on a sweatshirt, 'cause she wanted to start out sitting and didn't want her breasts to get cold, and I couldn't cover both of them by leaning my head against her.

The movie started out with a war, and I learned about the rings, and then how one of them had gone to the Shire which looked like a really nice place to live. And Gandalf found out that Bilbo's ring was bad, and said that Frodo should destroy it, which I thought was pretty sensible, but when Gandalf went to get Saruman's help, he got imprisoned instead, because Saruman was really bad.

I thought it was pretty neat that the pub in Bree was called The Prancing Pony, and thought that after the first movie was over I was gonna stretch my legs by prancing around the living room. And they met Strider there, who was actually called Aragorn and was a good person who wanted to help them and later on he helped them fight off Ringwraiths.

Gandalf got free by talking to a moth and being carried away by a giant eagle, and then they all met in Rivendell and made a fellowship of traveling partners. And they tried to get over the mountains but it was too snowy, and Aric said that maybe he could open the balcony door to get some more atmosphere in the apartment. I wouldn't have minded if he had, but Meghan was against the idea.

So they decided to go through the mountain instead which I thought was a really dumb idea, and I was right. They had to fight a troll and then a Balrog, and Gandalf fell and the rest of them barely escaped.

And they got to Lothlórien, then set off down a river and Gimli got three hairs from Galadriel as a gift, but Boromir started to get corrupted by the ring and Frodo thought he might try to take it and wanted to go on his own, and then everyone who was left got attacked by Uruk-hai, and Merry and Pippin got captured and Boromir was killed, but I was proud of him 'cause he died trying to defend the hobbits.

I had a lot of questions about the movie and Aric wouldn't answer the ones that got answered in the next movies, but he did tell me that the whole story was made-up and none of it had ever really happened, and that there weren't any of the monsters that had appeared in the movie, either, which was kind of reassuring. And then he told me a little bit about how they'd made it and said that the movies had all sorts of special features about how they'd made it which were all really interesting but he didn't want to show them just yet because they kind of took some of the magic out of it.

When I watched too many movies, my eyes started to hurt a little bit, and Meghan said that the best way to complete our marathon was to take breaks between the movies, and Aric thought so, too, so he got out from under the covers and started to walk around and Meghan grabbed onto the futon frame and twisted around to make her back crack, then she got up too and said that maybe we should have lunch.

Well, I was kinda hungry and I was also stiff from sitting, so I said that I could fly around a little bit unless they wanted to get dressed and go outside and play, and Aric said that he had hoped to stay naked all day long because he didn't get to do that very much, and that next year he was going to spend a whole weekend at Sunny Haven, and he said that she should come with him, and Meghan said that she might, which made Aric really happy. It was kind of sad for me, though, 'cause I would have liked to go, too.

Then Meghan asked if I knew if any people who were students in Equestria had given up on clothes while they were there and I said that I didn't know for sure. I didn't think that anypony would mind. And I thought about how Gusty had decided that she should wear clothes, so I thought that surely there were some exchange students in Equestria who decided that they didn't have to wear any.

Aric made sandwiches for lunch and I stuffed a lot of hay in mine, then after I'd eaten it I had him open the balcony door for me so I could take a quick flight around, and I asked them if I should get some donuts 'cause Sweetwater's wasn't very far. And Meghan said that that might make a good snack for the next movie and balance out the popcorn, so she helped me put on my saddlebags and I thought about putting on my flight gear, too, but decided I'd stay really low instead.

So I flew out and it was still snowing, and it had gotten heavier. There were at least four inches on Winston now, and the parking lots were covered in snow again, so I guess the snow-pushing truck was somewhere else.

I flew over to the railroad tracks and went under the 131 Highway bridge, and then followed the tracks until they got to 9th Avenue and turned around, and I went back past my apartments to Sweetwater's and got three cinnamon rolls. They were a little confused that I'd gone to the car window, 'cause I guess if you were on hoof you were supposed to go inside, but they did give me the donuts through the little window and the woman there was nice enough to lean out and put them in my saddlebags for me, and then I flew back to my balcony and I had to knock on the window until I saw Aric, and then when he started walking over I turned around and lifted my tail and then pressed my rump right against the glass.

Nobody wanted to eat the donuts right away, so Meghan put them on the kitchen counter for later and then she went into the bathroom with me to brush off all the new snow I'd gotten on me, and she took off her sweatshirt and put it on me so I wouldn't be as cold (I wasn't, but it was really nice of her to do), and we all sat back down together and Aric started the second movie.

At first it was really suspenseful, 'cause we didn't know if Merry and Pippin were still alive and thought that Gandalf was Saruman and I thought that Gollum was going to betray Frodo and Samwise. But he didn't right away—he could have in the Dead Marshes and didn't. And the other hobbits met Ents which were big trees that could talk and walk around, and they wanted to help the hobbits but kind of went about it stupidly and slowly, and Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gimli saved Theoden King and banished Wormtongue which was smart of them. And then they went to Helm's Deep which wasn't so smart, and Aragorn fell but his horse was smart and took him to Helm's Deep, too.

I was curious about Shadowfax, too, and I kept waiting for him to rally all the other horses to him or for one of the Rohirrim to notice that he was lord of all horses but they never did, or else they never said anything about it, and none of the other horses ever knelt down to him, which was kind of odd, but maybe human horses showed respect differently.

And I thought it was going to be all over for them because they were trapped in Helm's Deep with no way out, and then Aragorn told Theoden to ride out and when Gimli blew the Horn of Helm Hammerhand it made my coat stand on end, and then Gandalf and the Riders of Rohirrim arrived and overrode the Uruk-Hai, and the Ents finished off everyone who had survived.

So I told Aric that that was proof that Equines were better than humans and Meghan said she'd known that for years. And he said that it was a historical fact that it was very hard to stop a charge of heavy horses and told me about the time he'd been on the field with actual jousters and they'd been riding horses as big as the draft horses I'd seen at the Pavilion and they were at a full gallop.

He said that he'd felt the ground shake under his feet and he was a hundred feet away from them and that was when he realized how terrifying it must have been to have cavalry coming towards you. And I said that before the tribes were unified, pegasuses had learned that fighting earth ponies on the ground was dumb, 'cause when they charged you couldn't stop them at all, and when they overran your position you probably wouldn't even have time to get into the air. And I said that I thought that if things had gone a little bit differently and the earth ponies and the unicorns had banded together then there might not be pegasuses any more. Which was something that wasn't pleasant to think about but it was probably true.

Meghan hugged me and said that she was glad things had turned out the way that they had.

It was almost dinner time—it was strange how fast the day had passed while we were watching the movies, and there was still one more to go, which was also the longest one, Aric said.

I wanted to stretch out and Meghan did, too, so she put on pants and her sweatshirt again (I'd taken it off after I'd warmed up) and the two of us went outside and played around in the snow for a little bit. Aric stayed in the apartment 'cause he said that he was going to take care of dinner.

Me and Meghan both thought that meant that he was going to order pizzas, and she wondered if he was going to put on clothes before they got delivered or just surprise the pizza person.

I thought he might not and just lean around the door, and then she decided that if we saw a pizza delivery driver we should get the pizzas and then we could hide them from him somehow. I thought that was kind of mean, but it would be funny and it would confuse him.

Well, we were right that he had, 'cause after we'd been outside playing for a little over a half hour, a Dodge Caliber with a Domino's sign on its roof arrived and a girl got out and it was someone that we both sort of knew from Kalamazoo College called Jessie.

Aric had already paid for the pizzas so we just took them and Meghan said that I should distract him and then she'd figure out how to sneak them in the apartment before they got too cold.

I thought that I could fly them up to the balcony, but they'd get cold pretty quick sitting out in the snow.

She said that he was probably looking at the app on his portable telephone that told him where the pizzas were and he was gonna be really confused when it said that they had been delivered and there were no pizzas.

So I went back upstairs and let myself into the apartment and I hadn't thought about how I might distract Aric, but it turned out he was in the bathroom and so I just let Meghan in and she put the pizzas in the oven and and I opened a can of anchovies, 'cause their smell would hide the smell of the pizza.

And it did; when he came out he was looking at his portable telephone in confusion, and me and Meghan both pretended that we didn't know and asked him where dinner was and what it was and he told us that it was supposed to be here and someone else had probably stolen it.

Then we started laughing, but we wouldn't tell him where it was and made him try and find it and it took him longer than it should have to figure out that it was in the oven.

I put the anchovies on the pizza that I was eating, 'cause I didn't want to waste them, and we all stayed in the kitchen and ate until we were full, and then went back to the living room to watch the last movie.

All the human movies I've seen so far have happy endings (I wasn't sure about Bad Santa, but Aric thought it was a happy ending), so I was kind of expecting it but then as the movie went on I was less sure, 'cause Theoden died and Denethor set himself on fire and threw himself off Minas Tirith, and I thought that Frodo had died, too, along with Eowyn and Merry and Boromir. And I was crying when the Riders went out of Minas Tirith to Osgiliath, cause it was obvious that they would die and everybody knew it but nobody stopped them. And the Mouth of Sauron was the scariest person in the whole movie, I thought, because he was so evil and I wasn't sad when he got beheaded, 'cause he'd gotten what he deserved.

I did feel bad for Gollum. He hadn't asked for the ring; it had come to him and deep down Frodo knew that he could have been Gollum, and maybe if Sam hadn't been such a good friend he would have, but he was really smart and wise and strong.

Sometimes good friends are all that keep you safe from monsters, or becoming a monster. So I nuzzled Aric and Meghan and then kissed both of them and put my wings over them to protect them.

And I thought about how sometimes even if you don't want to you have to do things to protect your herd and your tribe and sometimes it doesn't work out like you'd hoped it would. We didn't have big battles like in the movie any more but every storm we fought for the sky and sometimes ponies didn't come back.

It was almost midnight by the time that the last movie had finished and I was a little stiff and sore from sitting so long, so I wanted to fly one more time before I went to bed. So Aric got up and he pulled the door open for me and I went outside and stood on the balcony for a little bit, just looking up at the snow. It had lightened up a little bit but it was still coming down and I couldn't help but wonder if it was ever going to stop. You could see a little slump in the drift where I'd gone through before but all my hoofprints were covered up and if the snow got much deeper, the birds weren't gonna have to fly to the bird feeder; they could just walk there on top of the drifts.

There hadn't been as much last winter, but since humans couldn't control the weather I guess they got however much wanted to come down whether they liked it or not. I couldn't help but wonder if it had ever gotten so deep that people had to go out the second floor, or their cars got stuck in it and it was too deep for even the plows to push it aside.

It wasn't that deep yet. When I flew over the building, I saw a couple of parking lots down a big yellow snow-tractor was pushing snow up the piles, and doing its best to move the snow away so that the cars could still go. And even though I wasn't wearing my flight gear, I went up to the bottom of the clouds and felt that there was still more snow in them, but not so much any more.

Hopefully, Amtraks could push snow out of their way, or else I wasn't gonna be able to go to Florida.

I didn't go too far this time, 'cause it was late and I was kind of tired even though I felt like I hadn't done anything all day. After I came down from the clouds, I made a big circle over the lake behind my apartment which was still open in the center, although I didn't think it would be for much longer. I could see that the ice had moved halfway to the middle over the last day, and while it was probably a lot thinner than it looked, it wasn't going to be all that much longer before it iced over and then if I wanted to get a fish out of it, I'd have to make a hole in it and hope that one got curious and came up to where I could get him.

Probably the river was still open, 'cause with the current flowing it wouldn't ice over as easily. And thinking about that made me glad that people had so much food, so you never had to worry during the wintertime if there was gonna be enough to eat.

Even though I wasn't supposed to, I landed on the roof and once I was sure I wasn't going to slide off I rolled on my back and made a pegasus angel in the snow, and then I got back on my hooves and moved off to the side a little bit and shook as much of it off as I could before I landed back on my balcony.

Aric opened the door and let me in, and even he had trouble with it. He said that it was getting ice in its track, from the drifted snow getting compacted down and the heat from inside melting it and there wasn't really too much that we could do about that but he said that maybe tomorrow we could go get the snowbrush out of Winston and sweep some of it out.

Even after Meghan brushed me off, I was too cold to snuggle with at first, and neither of them wanted to touch me until I'd warmed up some, and then Aric complained that I'd made the blankets wet, 'cause she hadn't gotten all the snow out of my coat or my feathers. Meghan said that that was the one disadvantage to being fur-covered and said that if he went out and rolled in the snow he'd have a hard time getting it all off, too.

And I thought he was gonna do it, but he decided not to, because he was pretty comfortable and even though he was complaining about the wet spots in the blanket he didn't mind that I had my wing over his stomach.

December 18 [Hollywood Studios]

December 18

I wasn't the first one awake in the morning. Gusty was already up, and she'd already taken a shower and brushed her coat and was brushing her mane when I got out of bed. She had a towel draped over her since she wasn't wearing any clothes yet. And Miss Russi had gotten up, too, but Miss Parker was still asleep in the bed they'd shared.

She said that she was going to order us some coffee and then take a shower unless I wanted to go first and I thought I'd wait until after she had, 'cause since she'd got up first it ought to be her turn.

As soon as Gusty was groomed she opened up one of her bags and got out her clothes and she retreated back into the little room by the bathroom to put her clothes on and she asked me to guard the entrance for her. And while she was getting dressed I asked her if she was going to keep on wearing clothes when she was back in Equestria and she said that she thought she would, at least at first, because it was going to be really strange to go around naked.

And that seemed really weird to me. I was going to be happy to not have to wear my flight gear, wasn't I? Or would I feel like I needed it when I went flying? I hadn't even planned to take most of it back with me, but now I was thinking that maybe I should.

Our coffee arrived before Miss Russi got out of the shower, and Gusty brought it in and set it on the little tables for us and then took a cup and sat in the armchair that was by the window and looked out over the park.

Aquamarine and Miss Parker got up at about the same time and we let Miss Parker take the next shower while we woke up Cayenne. She hadn't gone to bed any later than the rest of us and she hadn't had anything to drink either unless she'd woke up in the middle of the night and gotten a bottle out of her bag, which I suppose was possible, but she was still sleeping like a log until Gusty levitated a cup of coffee in front of her muzzle and that persuaded her to open her eyes. And for a moment there were two fields around the cup and then Cayenne took it and sort of sat up in bed and took a sip of the coffee.

We got breakfast at Chef Mickey's, which was a buffet so we got to pick whatever we wanted to eat. And we had to keep reminding Gusty to eat, 'cause Mickey was walking around to the different tables and greeting people and she kept watching him instead of paying attention to her food and we had to tell her a couple of times that he was going to come over and see us and so she'd eat a bite or two and then look around to see where he was now, and a couple of times she didn't even get the food to her mouth before she got distracted 'cause she'd seen him move out of the corner of her eye and so she just left her fork hanging in the air with a little bit of food on it. And Cayenne decided to teach her a lesson and got some jalapenos from the buffet and when Gusty was distracted put them on her fork, and she didn't notice that they were there until she was chewing her food, and then she had to drink a whole glass of water but after that she paid a little bit better attention to eating.

Mickey did come over and greet us and he was really happy to see ponies in his restaurant. Gusty hugged him and then she used her portable telephone to take a selfie with him and then we all posed with him for another selfie and gave him hoof-bumps, and she got out a little autograph book she had and asked him to sign it.

I wasn't fooled by him; he wasn't a real mouse but a person wearing a costume. And Gusty must have known that, too, but she was still really excited that she'd seen Mickey.

When we were done eating, we got in the Suburban and Jeep so that we could go to the Hollywood Studios, and on our way Mister Salvatore told us that they were going to try launching the rocket again today and if we wanted to go look we could see it.

Well, I knew that Gusty wasn't going to want to, but I did. And Aquamarine asked if it was okay if she stayed at the park and he said that that was fine. That was why most of the helpers were here, in case we all wanted to do something different.

I said that I wasn't gonna be mad if she preferred the park—yesterday had been lots of fun and I was sure that there were going to be all kinds of fun things to do here and I kind of didn't want to miss any of it, but then I didn't think I'd ever have a chance to see a rocket getting launched if I didn't take this opportunity. So Aquamarine nuzzled me and said that she'd stay at the park with everyone else.

It was overcast and I'd thought that maybe the weather had been bad before and that was why they didn't launch but it looked worse today than it did then. And I guess that once the rocket got above the clouds it didn't matter what the weather was like, and it was going to go outside the atmosphere anyways where there wouldn't be any weather at all.

We parked in about the middle of the parking lot, 'cause the front part had filled up already. And then we walked in and had to use our magic bands to get into the park and there was an attendant there who was looking at a big portable telephone as we went in and he made sure that our bands matched our cutie marks. He was a little upset that he couldn’t see Gusty's 'cause of her skirt, but Mister Wayne said that she was legit and showed the man his wallet and so he nodded and let us continue on.

The first thing that we went to was the Jedi training, which was from Star Wars and that was really exciting. We had to wait in line before we could go in and there were a couple of Stormtroopers who were patrolling the line and asking people questions and they made some people get out of line and talked to them before they could go back in line. And when they got to us one of them crouched down and asked Cayenne if she'd seen any droids and she said that she hadn't and I told her that she should have said that we weren't the droids that they were looking for. I guess she hadn't seen Star Wars, so she didn't know that.

I wonder if Christine has been here? It's not too far from New Orleans. I bet she has, 'cause it seemed like the kind of place she'd like to visit.

When we were inside we got trained in how to use lightsabers and they even had ones that were hoof-friendly for us to use. Gusty and Cayenne got to choose which kind they wanted, since they could also hold the human ones in their auras.

If they had a longer handle like a glaive I thought I could use a normal one but the handle was too short. And we could touch the light part because they were fake, but if they had been real light sabers we wouldn't have been able to.

It was a good thing that we'd gotten to train some, 'cause Darth Vader came in and we chased him off before he could do anything bad.

Then we got to go to the great movie ride, and there were a bunch of costumes on display in the waiting area and a rope maze that we had to go through to get to it. We could all fit under the ropes but that was cheating. And they had some movies playing on a big screen so we could watch them while we were walking along.

We had to wait in a short line and then we got into a little car that was going to take us on the ride, and we had a tour guide who was named Rima. She got to stand up but we all had to sit down.

She was really enthusiastic, and she told us what the movies were about as we went through their scenes, which had people acting them out. Gusty said that they were actually robots, but they looked real to me.

We had to wait for a red light and then a bad man in a suit told Rima to get out of our wagon and she wasn't supposed to but she did and then he stole ours and said that he was going to hurt us if we weren't good but he was really a new tour guide and he took us to see John Wayne, who was riding a fake horse.

And we got in the middle of another gunfight, and then went into a spaceship with Sigourney Weaver, and there were lots of alarms going off and we got chased by an alien into a temple full of snakes that looked like something out of a Daring Do novel. And our ride thief got out of the car and tried to steal the temple's jewel and Rima outsmarted him and got our car back.

We went into a little jungle and Tarzan went swinging by, then we saw an airplane and Humphrey Bogart and then it was dark for a little bit and we got to see Mickey Mouse who was making water come up, and that was from the movie Fantasia.

Then we went to Oz and there were lots of funny people called Munchkins singing about him, and a witch came out and said that Rima had killed her sister, but she really hadn't, and the witch let us go on and see Dorothy and her friends, and then our little wagon came back to the entrance, and Rima thanked us for going on the tour with her.

Then we went to see Muppet Vision. I didn't know what Muppets were but there were pictures of them all around and it, and Gusty said it was made up to look like an old-fashioned production studio, which was where they made movies.

We went into a room that was full of props and there were televisions all over showing different things which were part of the production, and a big box that belonged to Sam the Eagle, and we got to look around there until it was time to go into the theatre and see the actual show.

We had to wear special glasses that let us see in 3D (which I thought was odd because I saw in 3D all the time but maybe humans didn't). And they had special ones for us ponies to wear that fit comfortably unlike the earmuffs we'd had to wear on the airboat.

Kermit the Frog showed us around their 3D studio in the movie, and it was strange because sometimes things seemed to pop out of the screen and made us jerk back, and Fonzie got in a fight with two grumpy muppets who were up in the balcony. And he threw some water at them and I got splashed with a little bit of it, which I wasn't expecting.

The show was a little bit confusing because it didn't seem like they really knew what they were doing but I think that must have been intentional. It was pretty chaotic though and I thought that maybe the Muppets shouldn't make movies, especially after someone blew up the screen with a cannon and there were actual muppets who had gotten out of it walking around in the theatre.

We had to give our glasses back so that the next ponies could use them, and everyone went off to the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular except for me and Mister Salvatore, 'cause we were going to see a rocket launch instead.

The weather had cleared up a lot and there were only scattered clouds, so we'd be able to see the rocket on its journey into space. And I bet the rocket pilots had been hoping for that.

I helped him fold the top down on the Jeep and then I got to ride in the front and we left the park and drove back to the coast. We stopped on the way to get some food to eat, and he let me stop at Taco Bell 'cause the Jeep didn't have a top so it was okay if the burritos gave me gas.

We went all the way back to the Kennedy Space Center, and then got to take the bus to a place where we could watch the launch. It was still pretty far away and so I couldn't see too much, but Mister Salvatore had gotten two pairs of binoculars that we could watch through.

I could see some big towers with white tops and behind that was the rocket, and it just sat there not doing anything. There was someone who had a radio that could listen to their communications, though, and everyone got quiet and focused on the rocket when they started the countdown to launch. And then a whole bunch of smoke came up around it and the ground started shaking and I thought something had gone wrong, but then the rocket started climbing and it took off into the sky a lot faster than I thought it would be able to. And it curved off which seemed silly to me—they'd get to space faster if they went straight—but I was sure that they knew what they were doing.

We watched it until its trail disappeared on the horizon, and then when we got back to the Space Center, they told us that it had successfully gotten into orbit and was unloading its satellite, and they had movies that they showed us which were taken from a lot closer to it. There was even a camera on the rocket that looked back, and so we could the whole liftoff from that view, and even when it dropped its boosters behind it and then the first stage, and that was really neat to see.

You could see a lot more in the movie, but it wasn't the same as seeing it with my own eyes and I was really glad that I'd decided to come.

Mister Salvatore had left the top on the Jeep folded down because it was nice, so we just got right back in and went back to Orlando, and I kept looking back 'cause you could still see the rocket trail up in the air. I was kind of curious what it was like, if it was a cloud or if it was something else, but I was sure that I wouldn’t be allowed to fly out there and play with it so I didn't ask.

When we got back to Hollywood Studios, we had to park in the very back 'cause the parking lots were full. Mister Salvatore said that we could drive around some and maybe find a closer spot but I thought that it would be just as fast to walk back to the entrance from here. And I helped him put the top back up before we went into the park, just in case it rained. Mister Salvatore said that back in the old days, Jeeps had insides that could get wet, like a boat, so you never had to put the top up if you didn't want to. And he said that the first Jeeps didn't even have tops at all. They were designed for soldiers, who just rode around in the open.

He used his portable telephone to call Miss Cherilyn and find out where everyone was, and we met up at the Voyage of the Little Mermaid, which they had skipped so that I could see it with them, 'cause it was about the ocean and they thought I'd like it. So we went inside and got seats and it started out with a ship coming and mermaids swimming around, and then a weird red crab started singing, and he had some other fish-friends who sang with him.

And then a real mermaid came out (sort of real, 'cause I figured out that her fish-tail was fake) and she didn’t know what you were supposed to use utensils for, and she sang about wanting to be where people were. And there were some bad morays who told a big octopus-woman what she wanted and she offered the mermaid legs in exchange for her voice.

None of us thought that we'd want to give up anything to become another kind of pony, 'cause we were all happy with what we were. Sometimes I wished that I could use casting magic, and Aquamarine said that there were times when she wished she could fly off into the sky but not enough to sacrifice part of her.

In the end, though, her father turned her into a human 'cause that was what she really wanted, and she went off with her man.

I wasn't sure what I thought about it. Maybe next time I saw a seapony I'd ask her if she'd rather have four hooves so she could walk on land. I bet that they liked it in the ocean, though.

Gusty told me that while I was gone they'd seen the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular and she'd gotten picked to be on stage which was really fun, and it was just like being in a Daring Do book but it was real. And Cayenne had taken a movie of it which she said that we could watch tonight once we were back at the hotel, 'cause there was still a lot of stuff to see here. And they'd gone on a roller coaster ride with Aerosmith, which was a band, and had lunch at a restaurant called Hollywood and Vine.

Cayenne said that we should go to the Tower of Terror and I wasn't so sure, 'cause the building didn't look very safe, but it had been made that way on purpose, so it was okay. And there was a fancy bellhop that let us in and then then we saw a little movie where a man told us that we were going into the Twilight Zone, and it told us about how the hotel got hit by lightning and we had to experience it ourselves, so we walked through a bunch of rooms that were kind of creepy and rundown and looked like they'd been abandoned.

Then when it was our turn, we crowded on the freight elevator—which I didn't like too much—and we had to wear special harnesses that attached to the seat belts and I didn't like that too much either, 'cause they pinned my wings down. Our attendants helped us get settled and then the doors closed and we started going up the shaft.

It was a little bit nicer than a normal elevator, 'cause you could see the walls moving as it went up, and then we saw a hallway and there were people in it who got hit by lightning and then disappeared and the lights went out and then when they came back on we went around a dark room that was filled with sparks of electricity and stars and then we were in the dark for a bit and then the elevator went up and it plunged back down again and lots of people were shrieking and I was, too, 'cause I couldn't get my wings out and fly to safety.

I was a little shaky when I got off of it and I think I might have pulled a wing muscle trying to fly. So after we got out of our harnesses I stretched out my wings and my left wing was a little bit stiff but still worked.

On our way to the next ride which was called Star Tours, we met some ponies who were just visiting Earth. They were crystal ponies, named Golden Wheat and Arctic Lily, and they'd both decided to spend a week here. She said that they were part of a tour group that took them from the portal to Walt Disney World, but when they were here they could go around and do whatever they wanted to.

Golden Wheat said that everypony had kind of stuck together the first couple of days but after they'd gotten used to all the people they'd decided to split up some and do what they thought was the most fun. And we all agreed that it was good to stick together but sometimes it was also fun to be on your own.

They hadn't been on the Star Tour yet, so we invited them to join us.

On our way in, we saw C-3P0 looking over the crowd as they came in, and there was a little robot who was trying to get someone to claim some underwear. And there were lots of signs on the wall telling us about the spaceship that we were about to get into and there was a line so we had plenty of time to look at it.

When we got to the front, we had to take on 3D glasses again, and then we all got into the spaceship together, and we got instructions from a robot who told us how to put on the seat belts and these had special fittings for ponies and separate instructions. And we found out that C-3P0 was our pilot even though he didn't know how to fly and Darth Vader tried to get us but we made it out of the launch bay before he could and then went into hyperspace and wound up on the Wookie planet and hit a Wookie but he was okay.

Yoda told us that we'd joined the Rebel alliance and there was a lot of cheering at that. And then we had to fight our way through an asteroid belt and flew through a space station and got chased by a bounty hunter and landed on a rebel ship and everyone said that we were heroes even though we hadn't really done anything.

We were all pretty hungry 'cause it was dinnertime, so we went to the Backlot Express and had sandwiches. Gusty wanted the peanut butter sandwich even though it was on the kid's menu, and they let her have it. And me and Cayenne each got a Sea Dog Sunfish Ale with our Caprese sandwiches. And we didn't have to use our money cards, 'cause our magic bracelets let us get food.

All of us went together to the Toy Story Midway Mania, and everything there was really big so it made us feel small. Gusty said that was because toys were small, so everything else looked big to them. And there was a talking potato who talked to us as we waited in line, and then we got in little cars that sat two abreast on both sides and we had little cannons that we were supposed to shoot at targets as we moved around and we got points for the more that we hit, and our ride attendant gave us little hooks that we could put on a forehoof so that we could use it, and that was really fun. I was riding with Arctic Lily and she'd trained a lot in archery, so she had really good hoof and eye coordination and after she figured out how to work the cannon she was very accurate. I wasn't so good at it, 'cause it wasn't something I'd practiced very much. I was a lot better at dropping things where I wanted to but that didn't help much on the ride.

We got our scores when we came back out and we'd done the best out of all the pony teams. Cayenne and Gusty had been second-best, 'cause they'd both used their magic to aim, but I guess Gusty wasn't very accurate—she was worse than even me.

Then we wanted to go see Beauty and the Beast, and Arctic Lily and Golden Wheat had already seen it, and they said that they were going to ride the movie ride so we all nuzzled and said that we hoped we'd meet up again.

It was a musical which was really nice and we saw how a Prince had been cursed 'cause he was selfish and thought too much of himself, and I heard Cayenne mutter that that sounded like Prince Blueblood. And then later Belle found herself in his castle, where a lot of the furniture was alive because of the curse, and Gaston who wanted Belle for himself told the villagers to kill the Beast. And when he was mortally wounded, Belle confessed her love for him and then he turned back into a Prince and then when the show was over, Belle and the Prince came out in the audience and gave a rose to a couple in the middle of the theatre. I thought that that was a much better play than The Little Mermaid, and Gusty must have, too, 'cause she had tears on her cheeks at the end of it even though she also had a really big smile on her face

We'd wanted to see Fantasmic, but it was canceled because of rain, even though it wasn't raining yet. I could feel it in the air, though, and I thought it was gonna get here pretty soon. I was looking forward to it, 'cause it had been a hot day, and I was getting kind of tired out even though it was still pretty early, 'cause the day had been really intense. So we split up, 'cause Gusty wanted to see a little museum about Walt Disney that she said had historical things, and I just wanted to spend some time outside where I could find a little bit of quiet. There wasn't really anyplace for that here, though, so I did the next best thing and there was a little pond and I sat beside that. Miss Cherilyn came with me and she sat with me until it started raining and then she went back to the tables that were by Min and Bill's Dockside Diner.

And the rain cleared everybody out, 'cause at first it came down gentle and then it started downpouring and so people ran off to buildings and stores and that was nice, 'cause for a little bit it was just me by the little pond with the rain and all the water on the sidewalks reflected the Christmas lights that were all over everything and it was very pretty and relaxing, and I held out my wings and let the rain spray off them and cool me down. And when it finally passed I felt reinvigorated, and I shook off most of the water and tucked my wings back in and then went over and sat with Miss Cherilyn. The seat had some water on it, 'cause the umbrella hadn't protected it, but I was wet enough that it didn't matter.

We met back up and went to see Olaf, who was a dancing snowman, and then we went to the Frozen Sing-Along and that was a lot of fun. There were words up where you could see them but most of the people there seemed to know them already, even the ones who weren't very good singers. Mister Wayne said that he'd spotted our crystal pony friends up in the front, but there were too many people for us to get to them.

And when that was over, we went back out to the parking lot and went to the Suburban first and all our helpers but Mister Salvatore got in and us ponies had decided that we'd all ride back in the Jeep. We told Gusty she could sit in the front and the three of us would crowd into the back and he liked that idea.

Cayenne was a little mad that it was parked so far away, but we couldn't help that. And so our helpers had gotten back and changed into their sleeping clothes before we got there, and they were already relaxing in bed. Gusty had to find her sleeping clothes and then she went into the bathroom to get dressed and Cayenne had already fallen asleep by the time she joined us in bed. It had been a really good day.

Author's Note

And once again, the chapter is up for an hour before I remember to thank ClosetBrony for his invaluable help!

December 27 [Preparations]

34 Midwinter December 27
(I guess I ought to get used to writing human-style dates.)

Ugh, we had another long day of presentations about the foreign exchange program today. Me and the other three girls who got selected to go. ~~If I'd have known it would be so~~ boring ~~to get ready I never would have signed up.~~ Nah, scratch that. I've got a mind-set of already being there. I can see it in my head, and it just feels more and more real with each new picture we see, or the short films they sometimes let us watch.

But it's only a couple more days!!!!!!

After the lecture, Miss Chestnut took me aside and told me how lucky I was, that there weren't very many pegasuses in the program, because of the reciprocity. I nodded, even though I wasn't sure what that meant—I had to look it up. I guess it's 'cause humans can't live in cloudhouses, even though they build tall skyscratchers (I think that's what they call them).

I never thought that living in a groundhome would work out to my favor.

Mom and my sister are planning a going-away party for tomorrow night. They think it's a surprise, but I found out about it when Juniper Berry asked me about it in history class. I didn't tell them that I know, 'cause that wouldn't be nice. I know they're stressed out about this, too. Mom had to go to a bunch of meetings after work, plus Juniper Berry said that when I'm away at lectures, they have some as well, about how to act with humans. She says that those are interesting and I think so too.

Sometimes I think they're making too much of it. We all want to be friends, right? That's the whole reason we have this student exchange program, to learn about each other's culture and language and stuff. Practically every presentation talks about that. So how do we learn if we're always walking on thorns around each other?

Author's Note

Click here for the blog post!

December 30 [One more day!]

December 30

Only one more day! I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep a wink tonight.

December 31 [Last Day in Equestria]

December 31

I think the train left the station late 'cause everypony was hugging and saying their goodbyes on the platform. It was kind of weird watching out the window as the train pulled out of the station, knowing that I wouldn't be back for a year. We can keep in touch, though; we're allowed to write back and forth.

I hope I remembered to pack everything I need. I don't know if I can get pony things on Earth, and it takes forever to mail things back and forth.

I met a couple of the other exchange girls on the train. It was true, what Chestnut had said—there weren't any other pegasuses.

One of the other girls said that we were going to be put up at a hotel for the night, 'cause we'd get into the city too late. Another girl said that there would be rooms at the exchange building. It turned out the first girl was right; we got to share rooms at the hotel. My roommate is named Aquamarine; she's an Earth Pony from Ponyville, which is a small farming town near Canterlot.

She's pretty nice. We're going to nearby schools, so maybe we'll get a chance to visit each other. Humans also have telephones which are like telegraphs but you can talk on them. I can't wait to try a real one out.

January 2 [My Dorm Room]

January 2

I woke up earlier than I thought I would, 'cause I was so excited to meet my human roommate. It was still dark outside, even though the clock in the room said it was seven-ten.

I turned on the lights in the room—there's a switch on the wall about muzzle-high—and read her letter again. I know I can't get the perfect first impression of her from a letter, but I can't help but picture her from her tone of pen.

I have to remind myself to keep an open mind. Like, I saw Iron Hock wrestle a bunch of times, and when I actually met her, she was totally different than I'd imagined she'd be.

I decided I'd take a shower first. I normally don't like taking showers first thing in the morning, but I feel grubby from all the traveling I did yesterday. The seats in the van made me sweat where I was touching them. I don't understand how humans can put up with wearing clothes all the time. Maybe they don't sweat.

We were warned that showers were really slippery, especially with shoes. We got a pamphlet about what kinds of shoe were appropriate, but I don't have to worry about that: I've never worn shoes.

It didn't take me too long to figure out which knob did what. The showerhead was too high, so I had to fly up and adjust it. I feel bad for the Earth Ponies; hopefully their roommates will help them.

We had to bring extra brushes and stuff 'cause we have to bathe alone here. That's going to be weird, but I can get used to it. Sometimes it's nice to be alone in a shower with just your own thoughts in your head.

I've got my own desk. The chair isn't all that comfortable, and it's got an angled base so it tips back if I lean too far back. There's a funny little lamp with a bendy neck which I can use, maybe if I want to write at the desk when my roommate is sleeping and wants the lights in the room out.

The Earth-paper is very nice. There is a glossy black machine on my roommate's desk that makes it, I think. It has an opening on the top with a little roller, and then there is a little box on the bottom that has fresh sheets of paper.

Outside, it's beginning to be a beautiful day. There aren't any clouds in the sky at all, and I'd like to go flying, but I've got lots of stuff to unpack and put away, and I don't want to be gone when my roommate comes. She's probably as eager to meet me as I am to meet her.

Snowstorm!

January 21

The first thing I did when I got up was press my muzzle against our window so that I could look at the fresh blanket of snow.

Sadly, there was no fresh blanket of snow. The ground was as barren and snow-free as it had been yesterday. That was really disappointing; our climate professor had promised that there would be, and there wasn't. So the human weatherpeople had gotten it wrong.

I started my morning trotting routine with a little less enthusiasm than before. I'd so been looking forward to new snow, and there wasn't any. Dumb unpredictable human weather.

Still, it wanted to snow. The clouds overhead were gravid with it, and I guess it's not the humans' fault that they can't make it fall when they want it to. We'd have been reprimanded for not starting a snowfall on bare ground before sunup, so even if there wasn't a fresh blanket on the ground you could see it coming down.

It's hard to see your duties going unfilled, and I wasn't even halfway done with my route before I felt the need to get up there. There wasn't much that only one pegasus could do to get a storm of this magnitude going, and maybe here on Earth, I couldn't do anything at all, but I could look. I knew that the clouds would be low enough for me to fly up to them, although I wasn't supposed to fly around inside them, because an airplane might also be in there.

I almost galloped back to the dorm room and hastily put on my flying outfit. I used the radio to ask the airplane for clearance while I was still on my way back out of the dorm, and they grudgingly gave it to me. The man who I was talking on the radio doesn't seem all that friendly. Maybe he's not a morning person either.

There are a few early-risers on campus, and I saw two of them pointing up at me as I angled into the sky.

As eager as I was, I took the proper precautions around the cloud. I didn't fly right in; I looked all around me to make certain that there weren't any airplanes sneaking up, and I listened for any airplane noises. The one I'd flown in before had been really loud, and the one I'd seen at the airport when I got my pilot's license wasn't as loud but it was buzzy like a bee, so I was sure I would hear them if they were close.

Then I zipped up a few dozen more feet, and I was in it.

There's no way to properly describe the joy of being in a cloud, of being a small part of the weather. It's surely the same feeling an earth pony gets feeling the good soil under her hooves, or a unicorn feels channeling a spell through her horn. It's a feeling of joy and wonder and power all wrapped up in one. It's the feeling of the air currents caressing your coat and the delicate dewdrops collecting on your feathers, of the strange shifting of sound in the moisture-laden air.

I was one with the cloud. I knew the cloud, and it knew me. Already the snow was forming in it, just as the weatherpeople had promised.

I dove back out of the cloud, and once I was in clear air I let myself drift down as if I were a snowflake.

By the time I was out of the shower and on my way to poetry class, the snow had begun. The old snowpiles, dirty and melted, had a thin fresh layer on them, but everywhere else, the sparse snow was melting as soon as it touched the ground.

That would change quickly, I knew.

I was a bit distracted during poetry class; I kept turning my head to see the snow falling by the window. It was getting progressively thicker and heavier. I imagined so much of it falling that it would cover the window, but that was impossible; poetry class was on the second floor.

Professor Hillberry was prepared for the weather. He read aloud The Snow, which I liked very much—Emily Dickinson understood watching a snowfall. I imagine that she sat at her desk, which was probably very much like mine, and watched the snowfall through her window, blanketing the slumbering land.

I don't think she would like playing in it, though. Not as much as pegasuses did. But maybe she would. Maybe she'd want to soar in the clouds and feel the fresh flakes as they were born inside the cloud.

By the time class was out, it was already fetlock deep. People put on hats or put up the hoods on their jackets and leaned into the snow, but not me. I soared gleefully into the air and darted around in the snowflakes, then skimmed back down to earth, trailing my hooves through the fresh powder.

Then I landed on the flat half of the front lawn and rolled in the snow, letting it dust my coat. Once I was well-covered, I stood back up and shook some of it out of my mane, flicked a little bit from my tail, and nodded politely to the student who was pointing his portable telephone in my direction. He was probably so amazed at seeing somepony actually play in the snow that he forgot how to use it. He was pushing at the screen when I turned away to go to the dining hall.

I shook myself the rest of the way off before I went in. It's not polite to be dripping all over when you're inside.

I kind of rushed through lunch, because I wanted to get back outside again. Rather than spend a lot of time choosing what to eat, I just had a salad and some dark bread.

As the afternoon went by, the snow got deeper, and my classmates began playing in the snow. Some of them rode sleds and saucers down the hill, to the detriment of people attempting to cross between Olds-Upton and the dining hall, while others packed up handfuls of snow and threw them at each other.

I tried my luck with a sled, which was a lot of fun. I was told that I was supposed to sit down on it, but it was easier to be on all four hooves and use my wings for balance—plus, that made it easier to soar free when the sled went off-course.

Peggy joined us, along with Sean and Christine and Aric and Brianna and Keith and a few other people I don't know all that well (like James and Elisabeth). They all came and went as the day went on, because they had to go to classes, but I didn't because I don't have any classes in the afternoon.

After dinner (with lots of hot chocolate), we went back outside and played some more. The snow was still coming down, although not as heavy as it had been before. I sledded some more, and then Peggy made a snowman while I made a snowpony.

We were super-soggy by the time we got back to the dorm. Her boots were too short, so when she went through deep snow, it fell over her boottops. I was soaked to my skin, but it had been totally worth it.

She started getting out of her wet clothes as soon as she went into the room. I, of course, didn't have to do that at all, and I'd shaken most of the loose snow off myself while I was still outside, and she thought that was sort of unfair because she had wet socks and cold feet.

I took the first shower, since she was still taking off her clothes (although I offered to wait). Then I read a chapter of The Last Unicorn while she had her turn in the shower. It would have been nice to share but we were told that humans don't like that, so I hadn't asked her. Maybe I would one day, and maybe they just didn't share because they'd never thought of it.

Before I went to bed, I took one last look outside. The snow was still coming down.

January 26 [Humanity i love you]

January 26

I got up later than I meant to, because I was up too late playing Durak. I had to kind of rush my morning routine, and I didn't get to trot as far as I wanted to and I didn't get to fly at all. I can't quite put a hoof on when it happened, but it feels like my schedule is shifting to match the human's schedule, which is go to bed late and get up late.

Maybe human universities are better suited to thestrals.

It doesn't help that I sometimes have to wait to use the shower in the morning. It would be so much more practical to be able to share. Especially since some girls (and I'm not naming names) feel the need to groom themselves in there before coming out, which takes even more time.

Speaking of grooming, I probably ought to have a manecut soon, and maybe get my tail trimmed a little bit too. It's a touch long for all the walking I'm doing lately. I wonder where you go to get that done here? I don't remember seeing any spas. There certainly weren't any on campus, 'cause I'd been just about everywhere.

I have made the most important discovery in the dining hall. There is an electric waffle iron! It's kind of out of the way, which is why I didn't see it before. I thought that all the food was mostly prepared, besides stuff like toast, which you have to make yourself in an electric machine that takes the bread on a little conveyor and it goes into the machine and comes out toasted.

I asked Christine if the waffle iron was out all the time, and she said it usually was, but it was away from all the other food, and not so easy to find unless you were looking for it.

Then I asked her if it had been there since the beginning of the year, and she said it hadn't. She thought it was probably broken; she said that sometimes people put stupid things in it and it breaks. She also said that the same thing happens to the microwaves in dorms like mine.

Since I didn't know how one works, she told me she'd show me the next time I came by her dorm room. I asked her why she needed it, when there was the dining hall and you could use the telephone to get pizza as well, and she said that it was really convenient for all sorts of things like popcorn and hot chocolate.

She asked me if I was thinking of doing any extracurricular activities, and I told her I hadn't really decided yet. We knew it was an option, but a lot of times it got really complicated, and most ponies didn't bother. There was enough stress with trying to fit in and learn about new stuff. She said that was probably true, but I might meet a new friend, and maybe I'd discover something else that I liked to do. She also said that with a lot of stuff, there wasn't a really big commitment; I could do it if I wanted to, and then quit if I didn't like it.

I told her I had considered the track and field team: I'm a decent runner, but not as good as an Earth pony. I'd probably do all right in sprints and hurdles, even if I wasn't allowed to actually fly.

She said she wasn't really thinking of organized sports, although that was a good idea as well, then she asked me how I felt about role playing.

Well, I'd tried that a couple of times, but it was always a bit weird. Some stallions have really odd tastes, and it was hard to get in the mood when he kept calling me 'Momma.'

She said that she was into LARPing; from her description it sounded like a lot of fun, so I told her that I'd be willing to give it a try next time she was going to do it.

Then in poetry class, we moved on to a new poet, who was called e e cummings.

I was baffled by the first poem. When I looked at it, it was like he didn't really know how words are formed, or sentences are made.

I think if I had just read the poems in my book by myself, I would have passed them by after the first or maybe the second if I was feeling generous. In the bathroom, there is a message on the stall that says “I know the brownie batter blizzard secret,” and that made more sense to me than the first of his poems that I read before class started.

But then Professor Hillberry read it, and that made all the difference.

We have never imagined poems like this.

This was like a

This was like when you've got the sky all properly covered and suddenly a fallstreak opens up. I realized that there was more to words than just the rules, that you could make every single letter and punctuation mark be important on its own. I'd been confused (and a little annoyed as well) and I suddenly understood that he was doing more with less.

The professor had a student read another poem, and then he asked us what we thought about it. I raised my hoof, and he called on me right away.

I told him that I thought that poems weren't like novels; that a poem doesn't try to paint an exact picture, but rather lets you feel in yourself what the poet felt when ~~she~~he was looking at something or feeling something, and that it was okay for a poem to change its meaning depending on the circumstance. I told him I thought he'd been trying to show us that poems were sometimes held back by rhythm or meter, but that they didn't have to be; they could be whatever they wanted to be.

He said that I was right, and then he told me that I ought to look through e e cummings poems and see if there was one that particularly spoke to me, and read it for class on Thursday.

Then he gave a lecture on how all sorts of art styles were changing when e e cummings was alive, and how the people of the time rejected a lot of the old styles in favor of new and different styles.

Sometimes change is good. It's too easy to get caught up in a rut and keep doing things the way you've always been doing them, because it's easy.

But sometimes it's better to move beyond what you know and do something else. If I stuck with what was easy, I'd still be back in Equestria. Maybe I'd be reading stories in newspapers about how strange humans are and I'd be shaking my head and pushing clouds and not thinking too much about it. I think a lot of ponies would be.

It's not all good, though. Sometimes the old way was better and the new way is dumb. So it's not practical to just gallop off after every new thing.

That got me to wondering if I had made the right choice. I was far away from all my old friends, and I'd just recently discovered that not only were there dangers like cars that would run you over or airplanes that might sneak up on you in the clouds, or even like Miss Cherilyn said boys who would put roofies in your drink, but there were also angry men who might be upset at you just for being yourself, and it was easier to just go back to the familiar herd and not risk those dangers.

From that perspective, I'd made a stupid choice. I ought to have stayed in Equestria.

But then I thought about all the new stuff I'd learned, and we weren't even five weeks into the school year. I thought of the places I'd been so far, and the things I'd seen, and the people I'd met, and I realized I wouldn't want to trade it for anything. So what if some asshole in a suit spit at me and Peggy? He didn't matter. He was gone, and good riddance. He'd probably sulked back to his home; maybe he thought he was a big stallion, but he wasn't at all because I was still here, and he couldn't change that.

I spent the whole rest of the afternoon reading e e cummings, and after dinner as well.

Humanity i love you.

Author's Note

Fallstreak

Humanity i love you

February 14 [Valentine's Day]

February 14

It was nice to wake up in a room full of my friends. Aric was stretched out on my right side, being a comfortable wall, while Sara was on my left. I'd somehow slid off the pillow Aric and I were sharing and wound up in the cleft between the two, which wasn't doing my neck any favors, but that was all right. Aric's hand was on my shoulder, while Sara's arm was wrapped around my barrel. There was no way I could move without waking both of them up, and that thought comforted me.

I would have guessed the night before that I'd be the first to wake up, but that clearly wasn't the case. I could hear the shower running, which told me that someone else was an early riser. From my position on the bed, I couldn't tell who it was, and I didn't feel like straining my neck any more than it already was to find out, so I just closed my eyes again and pressed my muzzle against Aric's chest.

I didn't really fall back asleep again, but I sort of drifted in and out. I heard the bathroom door open and felt the cloud of hot air and steam drift out and mingle with the stale sleep-air of the hotel room, and then I heard the low voices of Kathleen and John-Jacob as they came out of the bathroom together and wove around our sleeping friends to find their open spot.

That was enough to start waking everyone else in the room. Aric yawned and looked down at me with sleepy eyes, and Sara shifted against me in a final rebellion against waking, but it was too late. Pretty soon the room was full of the sounds of people yawning and stretching.

One of the things that's annoying about a group in a room like this is that there's only one bathroom, and aside from Kathleen and John-Jacob, no one was inclined to share. At least our bathroom in the dorm has several toilets, although only the one shower. So there was a bit of discussion over who was going to bathe and use the toilet and when, but that all got settled pretty quickly at least.

All of us girls had to have help getting dressed, which I thought was a bit unfair, but Aric mentioned that he couldn't put on all of his armor by himself, either. Human hands make short work of most clothing, even with the little tiny fasteners that humans like to put on their clothes.

Kathleen said, as John-Jacob was lacing up her bodice, that back in the Middle Ages, most women that wore clothes like this would have servants to help them get dressed. She chuckled and said that we'd probably never had that problem, and I told her that in fact almost all the clothes I'd ever worn had required another pony to help me get dressed.

She was curious about what kind of clothes we wore, and why, so I told her about the special flight suits we sometimes wore, and of course the barding that the Guard wore, and on top of that there were formal dresses for balls and galas and so on and I had the one that I'd brought.

So John-Jacob asked if I was planning to go to any of the school dances, and I told him that I hadn't known that there were any. He said that there were, but he didn't know when, on account of having graduated the year before. It was something to look forward to!

Once everyone was dressed, we went down to a common room in the hotel where they had breakfast. It wasn't much—Sara said it was called a Continental Breakfast, which consisted of bagels, sorry-looking half-squished muffins in a plastic wrapper, and packets of oatmeal. There was also a big urn of overbrewed coffee and little cheesecloth sacks of tea.

It was the worst breakfast I've ever had, and if it had been later in the year I would have just gone outside to graze. But, I suppose it was better than nothing.

When we were done eating, we piled back into our cars, and drove back to the fairgrounds.

Aric said that today there wasn't any heavy weapons fighting so that we could do whatever we wanted to. He said that there was going to be a fencing tournament, and that Sara was one of the fighters, and I thought that would be fun to see.

It wasn't starting right away, so we wandered around for a little bit. Just like yesterday, a lot of people came over to talk to me and there was one little girl who said she really wanted to ride the horsey. Her mom kept telling her no and was holding her back by the collar of her dress, and I finally said that she could if she wanted to. She was pretty small so I didn't think that she weighed all that much.

I had to give my glaive to Aric—there wasn't any point in risking her getting injured on it—and the mother asked if I was sure it was okay, and I said that it was, so she picked up her daughter and gently set her on my back, being careful of my wings and my costume.

The girl immediately grabbed onto my mane and told me to 'geddyup.' Then she kicked me in the barrel! I had to restrain myself from just bucking her off—I'd actually dropped my rump before I realized what I was doing.

She kicked me again and leaned forward, and I guessed that meant she wanted to go forward, so I gritted my teeth and started walking. I was totally off-balance; she wasn't all that heavy, but there was a giant weight on my back that was randomly moving and I kept feeling like I was going to fall over.

Her mother hovered next to me, arms ready to grab the child, while Aric just started laughing so hard that he almost fell over. He had to bend down and rest his arms on his knees.

Well, we got things worked out after I'd gone a little way down the hallway, and the girl on my back was getting pretty enthusiastic about how she was riding a pony. I kinda got more into it, even though she kept squeezing her legs against my side, as if that would motivate me.

Naturally, all the noise attracted a bit of a crowd, and I was a bit embarrassed, but everyone else seemed to be having a good time, so I just went with it. Aric had gotten over his fit of laughter and took out his phone and started taking a movie of me, which motivated me to look really good, so I started to really lift up my hooves like the fancy unicorns in Canterlot do, and high-stepped back down the hallway, with the girl on my back shouting gleefully the whole time.

When we got back where we'd started her mom took her off my back and gave me a big hug and then she asked Aric if he could send her the movie.

After they exchanged their computer mail addresses, we went back to the hall where all the fencers had been setting up. Keith asked where we'd been, and I said that I'd been giving a little girl a ponyback ride.

Nobody believed that until Aric showed them the movie, and they thought that it was hilarious. Donald said that Aric ought to put the movie on YouTube if I didn't mind, and I said that would be okay.

The fencing was totally different from the heavy weapons fighting. There were just two opponents at a time, and their movement was a lot more restricted. They wore thick mesh helmets and had their bodies covered in a fabric armor, so it was a little hard to tell who was who. Luckily, I could see Sara's hair sticking out below her helmet—and it turned out she was the shortest one to compete as well.

The fights were more like a ballet, I thought. Sometimes the two opponents would taunt each other—one man wore a sock-puppet on one hand and used it to taunt his opponent (that wasn't a very good strategy; he lost). Sara used her short height to her advantage: she had a little shield which Keith said was called a buckler, and she ducked under her opponent's blade, blocking it with her buckler, and then went straight in for his chest.

She advanced through four rounds before she was finally beaten by a man who faked an attack, and when she went to block it, he came around even lower than she had crouched, and she pretty much ran into his sword.

She was in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, though. Aric told me that he'd taken some fencing classes with her, and that she was pretty hard to beat (he never had) but that she used her favorite opening move a little too much and probably the man who had beaten her had expected it. And he also said that she was the only person who had ever broken a sword on him.

Everyone found a spot in the main hall—where the market had been—to sit down for lunch, and we passed around more of the bread and cheese and what was left of the summer sausage. Keith got out his cards and we played a round of Durak while we were eating, and that was a lot of fun. I could kind of forget that we were in a boring modern building and imagine that this was how people had acted a few hundred years ago.

Kathleen said that there was a workshop on making clothes that she wanted to attend, and I thought that would be interesting. I didn't think I was going to make my own clothes, but I was curious about how it was done, so I told her that I'd come along, and John-Jacob said he would as well. Aric wasn't interested at all, but he told me that I could go if I wanted to, and he'd just find something else to do.

That kind of bugged me, but I chalked it up to drowsiness (nobody got a lot of sleep last night) and went off to the class.

The lady in the front of class really covered what I thought were probably the very basics at first—but a lot of classes do that. She explained where to get patterns and where to find appropriate fabrics, and then moved on to more advanced stuff, like how to modify patterns and what sorts of historical books would have pictures of period clothes in them. She said that we were lucky to live in Kalamazoo since Western Michigan University had a very good Medieval Studies department, with lots of books and experts.

When that was over, we went back into the main hall. Aric had found a spot at a table and was playing a game he called The Viking Game with Malcolm. Aric said that one side was supposed to protect their king and let him escape, while the other side was supposed to capture him. I watched the game until it was over—Aric won (he said that he usually did). I wanted to play, but it was Donald's turn first and even though he said that I could go, it would be rude to cut in line.

I watched intently, so that I might get an idea what the strategy was. The king's side had only half as many pieces, so it seemed at first like that might be a big disadvantage, but it wasn't really. Once Aric got some of Donald's pieces captured, he moved the king out of the center of the board and rather quickly made his escape to a corner square.

Then it was my turn, and I hoped I could put on a better showing. Aric explained all the rules to me, and we began.

I knew that once he got the king free, the game would be over, so I concentrated on pinning him towards the center of the board. Donald had tried to protect the corners, but that hadn't worked out very well for him.

I didn't win, but I did better than either of the other two had. I got Aric down to only four pieces plus his king when he finally made his run for the corner, and if I'd managed to have had one more piece on the left corner, I think I would have beaten him, but he caught me out when he ran to one corner and then switched directions when I responded.

Then we changed sides, and I won easily. I got my king out before Aric even had time to set up a good defense, letting him capture a couple of my soldiers to open up a path for me. He didn't see it coming, and by the time I was halfway down the board, there was no way he could win. I had open lanes to all four corners.

Kathleen said that we were all going to go to Denny's for dinner because it was a tradition. Aric said that Denny's was a great restaurant because it was open all the time, and because you could get breakfast whenever you wanted to.

We were quite a spectacle when we came in. The hostess didn't know what to make of us: nine people and one pony all dressed up in medieval clothes. When she saw me, she went back to talk to someone else before seating us and finally a man in a suit with a gold badge came over and looked at me than looked at Aric and then back at me.

He said that animals weren't allowed in the restaurant. I don't know what came over me, but I stomped my hoof on the ground and flared out my wings and told him that I wasn't an animal, I was Silver Glow, of the second ile of Commander Hurricane's hipparchy. It had impressed the girl at Val Day, so maybe it would impress him, too.

He got a really funny look on his face then. He looked around at all of us and kind of slumped down and then said that he supposed it would be okay if I ate at the restaurant, as long as I was housebroken.

I didn't know if I was, but Aric said that I was, and that was good enough for him. He took a pile of menus and led us off to some tables in the back, well out of the way of the other customers.

All through dinner, he kept an eye on us. I think he thought we were some kind of troublemakers. Our waitress liked us, though; she kept saying how cute I was and she wanted to know if I was the same pony she'd seen in a YouTube video playing in the snow. I said that I was, and she said that I was simply the most adorable thing she'd ever seen and asked if I would give her my autograph.

I couldn't say no, so I signed her little notebook for her and she gave me a big bosomy hug, and all in all it was a great dinner.

I really would have liked to spend the night with Aric, but I had some homework I still had to do, so I had him drop me off at my dorm. I gave him a kiss on the cheek and he kissed my forehead and told me that it had been a fun weekend, and I agreed. He asked if I'd be playing Durach tomorrow, and I said that I would, and if he didn't mind I could stay over after; he said that would be nice. Then he drove off and I went back up to my dorm room.

It was only when I was halfway up the stairs that I realized I might have some trouble getting undressed by myself.

Luckily, Peggy was back, and once she was done telling me how awesome my costume looked, she helped me take it off. We caught up on how our weekends had been—I told her about the girl I had given a ride and the waitress at Denny's and the weaponsmith who had sold me the glaive, and she told me about the fancy restaurant her boyfriend had taken her to and how they'd spent almost the whole rest of the weekend in the hotel room, and that it had been fun and really sexy to have the curtains open and look over downtown Kalamazoo and nobody outside could see them or guess what they were up to.

I said that I hadn't gotten that lucky over the weekend, and Peggy hugged me and said that was okay, it would probably take Aric some time to get used to the idea, and maybe we ought to talk and figure out what each of us wanted out of the relationship. That was pretty good advice.

Then I sat down and finished all my homework and wrote in my journal. It was pretty late by the time I was finished, and I knew I was going to be tired in the morning.

February 27 [snowboarding]

February 27

For as much as she likes to sleep in during the week, when there's something fun planned Peggy can get up early. She was getting dressed when I woke up, and I'm usually up well before she is.

I got out of bed as she was pulling on her UCCS sweatshirt, and she told me that she'd already started Cobalt so it could warm up and melt the snow off.

It didn't take me nearly as long to get ready as it took Peggy, plus she added a bunch more clothes to take with her to put on when she got there. I got out my scarf and hat—which I haven't worn yet this year—in case it was really cold up there.

She said that we could get breakfast on the way if I didn't mind fast food. I didn't mind; I was eager to get going.

We made one stop at a restaurant called Tim Horton's. I had a blueberry muffin and a B.E.L.T. without the bacon, so I guess that makes it an E.L.T. And they had really good coffee: I'm not normally a coffee drinker, but Peggy insisted that I try some. It was rich and buttery, and went very well with my food.

The ski resort wasn't as far as I thought it was, and we got there just as the sun was coming up. I'd expected a big mountain, but it wasn't much more than a tall hill. Peggy said that that's all there was in Michigan, unfortunately. This one was called Bittersweet and Peggy said that it was one of the best that was close to campus. She told me that if we had fun here, we could go to one that was better but further away next weekend.

She got the rest of the way dressed behind Cobalt, and took our snowboards out of the car. Hers had little binders that her boots hooked into; since I didn't have any of the special boots, I was going to ride it barehoof. Peggy thought that would work; she said it would be just like surfing, and then said that if it did work we could call it snowsurfboarding.

The man at the ticket window was really confused about why I wanted a ticket, and I said that I was going snowboarding with Peggy. She'd modified one of her boards so that I could use it, and I was really looking forward to trying it out.

He was dubious, but finally accepted Peggy's money and gave us each a waiver to sign that (Peggy said) meant if we got hurt, it was our fault not theirs.

She thought that we ought to start off with something simple to make sure that I could ride the board. There were several lifts that carried people up to the top of the hill, which seemed easy enough for people to use but a bit more complicated for me. We decided that she could ride the lift up with our snowboards and I would just fly alongside.

That got a lot of attention, more than I would have liked. I guess nobody here had ever seen a pegasus flying next to a chair lift.

When we got to the top, Peggy walked out of the way and to the start of the route, strapped on her snowboard and set mine down next to her—not so close that we would crash into each other.

She gave me a quick run-through of how the snowboard worked, and reminded me that if things were going out of control I could just fly to safety and we'd get the board back later. She also told me that she'd probably wind up doing things that I couldn't, because the board was fastened to her feet, but mine wouldn't be attached to my hooves.

I was super-excited to try it, so I got going like Peggy told me to and pretty soon I was rushing down the hill, tilting side to side experimentally to steer the board. Broad turns were okay, but when I tried to turn farther, I felt myself slipping off the board and had to hold out my wings to help me follow the same line the board wanted to take.

I made it partway down before the snowboard's bow got caught in snow and skidded me off its front. Luckily, my wings were out, so there was no harm done: I just skimmed above the snowpack for a few meters before I thought to stop.

Peggy came up right next to me to make sure I was okay, and I retrieved my stuck board and finished my trip down the hill, only falling off four more times.

We made a dozen or so more trips down that hill until I'd figured out more or less how the snowboard ought to work with me on it. The trickiest challenge was keeping it underhoof: whenever I did anything too abrupt, the snowboard would want to go one way even if I wanted to go a different way.

When we were both sure I had a good idea of the basics and how to avoid a bad crash, Peggy asked me if I wanted to move on to something a little more challenging. I knew that I was holding her back, so I said that I did. I thought I was ready to handle any trail.

This time, Peggy took a different chair lift, and since I'd figured out how to steer the board, we took a curvier trail down. I only lost the board once on a turn.

I could tell that Peggy was having a lot of fun and so was I. It was nice to be outside instead of cooped up inside the buildings on campus.

We stayed on that hill until it was lunchtime. Their main building which is called a lodge had a restaurant inside of it, which was about the same as the Quad Stop had been. There wasn't a whole lot that Peggy said I could or should eat, so I had a basket of fries and a fish sandwich which I didn't finish because it was disgusting. Whatever kind of fish that was ought to be ashamed.

We also had hot chocolate, and that was really good. At least they know how to make proper hot chocolate.

Throughout the afternoon we moved on to more challenging trails. I'd gotten good enough that I almost always made it to the bottom without falling off my snowboard. Peggy started to leave me on my own a little bit, letting me get a head start down the trail and then catching up about midway down.

It was getting crowded and I had to be more careful not to run into anybody. Peggy and I had started to get a bit of a following; other skiers and snowboarders were clustering around us on the trail. There were a couple of men who were showing off in front of Peggy, trying to get her attention, like when a stallion puffs himself up and does acrobatics so that you'll notice him. Some of them were doing it to me, too, cutting really close and once one of them made me almost crash.

I'd started to get a bit tired from all the balancing I was doing, and had been riding the chair up with Peggy (it actually wasn't that difficult if I flew into it) and she thought that we could mess with them a little bit. She said that there was a little hummock about halfway down and I could bury the nose of my snowboard in it and then fly off the rest of the way down the hill. She said she'd stay behind and pick up the board.

That sounded like it would be fun, so I did it like she said. A bunch of the men were still trailing behind me (they liked to pass me just beyond that little hump) and when I was almost there, I shifted my weight forward to drop the bow of the board and spread my wings.

It worked just like Peggy had hoped. The board dug itself into the snow and I gave one pump as I felt my hooves skid, then I was soaring above the trail. I heard a couple of them gasping in surprise.

I was feeling a bit showoff-y, and I dropped down and followed the path as if I were still on the snowboard, but of course I didn't have to worry about keeping it underhoof. The open air is nice because you can fly wherever you want to, but sometimes it's really fun to follow a path down a mountainside and dodge around trees and rocks and stuff. Obstacle courses in the sky aren't quite as thrilling because there's no penalty for getting it wrong.

One of them did manage to keep up with me and I considered pulling up sharply but that wouldn't have been sporting. We raced together to the bottom of the hill, and when we broke into the flat area at the end I tilted my body back and braked, while he spun his board sideways and dug it into the snow.

He lifted his goggles up so he could see me better and I flew right up to him, and we just stayed there studying each other for a moment, then he held out his fist and told me that I had good moves.

I bumped him lightly with my hoof and said that he did as well.

Peggy arrived and made a little half-circle around him, all while holding on to my snowboard. She kinda studied him and looked down at the tags hanging from his jacket, then tilted her head towards the chairlift.

While we were riding back up she said that if I didn't mind, she was going to try a few quick runs down the hill. I could follow if I wanted to, or I could hang out at the top and watch.

I asked her if I could follow along in the air, and she said that would be okay, but wasn't sure where I could leave the snowboard because if I left it on the hill, someone would steal it.

I had the perfect solution to that; I stashed it up in a tree, making sure that it was firmly wedged in the branches. Nobody could get to it up there, I was sure.

Peggy said that I was like a leopard dragging home my kill. I stuck my tongue out at her.

I had been right that I was holding her back. She zipped down the hill in no time at all, effortlessly darting across the trail and around slower people. She was as graceful as any pegasus in flight, leaning and twisting her body and using the snowboard like it was part of her own body. She was easily one of the best snowboarders I'd seen all day.

Her little troop of followers tried to emulate her, but most of them weren't good enough. The guy I'd met at the bottom of the hill kept up, and a couple of others did, but most of them were left far behind.

We met up down at the bottom and she rode the lift up to try again. I noticed that she was waiting until the little group that had been following us was at the top and in position before she headed down the hill. That worked out well for me; it gave me time to get up in the air so I could follow her course.

After a half-dozen runs, she said that we ought to have some dinner, and then she was going to play on the black diamond trail for a little bit. I got my snowboard back out of the tree and we both went down the trail together.

We got our food (I just had fries) and sat down at a table, and I noticed a couple of the boys who had been showing off around us sat at the next table. They stayed there, just watching us and talking quietly among themselves. I thought one of them was going to come over, but he was just getting a new drink and our table was between him and the pop machine.

It was getting dark when we went back outside, but just like the roads in town, the trails were lighted and it was easy to see.

Peggy and I took different trails for a while: the black diamond trail that she wanted to go down was probably too advanced for me. I thought I could probably do it, but I didn't want to hold her up rescuing me or my snowboard, so I stuck with the easier course that I knew and let her have her fun on the complicated one. Each time we'd meet up at the bottom and go take the chairlift back up again.

We stayed until the resort closed for the night. I was exhausted, and I think Peggy was, too. She stripped off her over-pants and coat and put them and the snowboards back in the trunk, and we drove home.

Back in the dorm, we each had a beer to celebrate a good Saturday, and I said that if we stayed up much later we'd be toasting a good Sunday.

Neither of us had the energy to shower. Peggy said that she was going to do laundry tomorrow anyway, and changed into her sleeping clothes. I thought that was a pretty good excuse, and so I said I would do my laundry tomorrow as well.

March 11 [last day of winter quarter]

March 11

Meghan was still snuggling me like I used to snuggle Albie. It was the best way to wake up, all wrapped up and safe in her arms.

I really wished that I didn't have to get up for class. But I did, so eventually I started flicking her leg with my tail until she woke up.

I gave her a kiss on the cheek before I left, and then darted over to my dorm room long enough to grab my flight outfit.

The nice lady was controlling airplanes today, and I asked her if I could stop by and meet her sometime. It would be nice to put a face to the voice.

She said that she might be able to work something out, and then gave me flight clearance, but warned me that there was a medical helicopter inbound for Bronson hospital and so I shouldn't fly north at all.

I told her I would look out for it and made extra sure that my strobe light was blinking brightly. I was curious about it; I hadn't seen any helicopters flying around before.

It was a good thing she warned me. I heard it coming, but I hadn't expected it to be so low. All the airplanes have to fly higher than I do, but the helicopter apparently doesn't.

I stopped my own flight and watched as it passed me by, heading towards the hospital. It dropped its nose down and descended like a normal airplane would, but then it stopped and went straight down until it was on the helipad.

Helipads are marked with a big letter H in a circle, and if I ever fly into an airport, that's where I'm supposed to land, too. I'm not supposed to land on a normal runway at all, except for when I’m training or if the airplane director specifically tells me to.

Climate science class was all review today. Everyone handed in their extra credit assignments, and the professor told me that I could grade them now if I wanted to, or take them back to my room and grade them there—as long as they were graded before the final exam, that was all he cared about.

Since I still had to do some more studying for the exam, I said I'd do it later, and sat down with Crystal Dawn and Luke.

It wasn't as fun as studying while cuddling and fondling, but I think we got through the material a bit faster.

When class was finally over, I took all the assignments back to my dorm room and set them on my desk where they'd be safe. I was really looking forward to what people had come up with; it was possible that they might have some solutions we'd never thought of. Airplanes making contrail-clouds was something we couldn't do, and maybe there were other things too.

Philosophy class started off with a bit of an argument, and the professor had to calm students down right away and remind them that we were only talking about philosophy, not how that philosophy had been applied historically.

She spent most of the class discussing Marx's economic philosophy. In its simplest form, it meant that a worker ought to be paid enough to feed, clothe, and house him for his day's labor. Then he went on to explain that to make any additional profit after that for the capitalist (who is the person who hires the worker, I think) is greedy, and is robbing the worker of the benefits of his work.

The problem I saw was that the needs of one are different than the needs of another. Some pegasi are perfectly happy floating around on a cloud wherever the wind blows them, eating wild plants and maybe earning a few bits here and there for treats. Other pegasi buy houses on the ground, or spend bits on dresses or at the bakery.

Plus some ponies have foals to care for, and others don't.

It seemed like Marx was saying that either everypony ought to be paid the same for the same amount of work, in which case a mare living simply and eating what nature provided was a greedy capitalist for having bits left over, or a mare with several foals would have to starve.

Or would they be paid according to need? So the single pony would make less than the pony with a family?

I thought that was a system which would cause nothing but resentment, and I started to get an idea that maybe Marx wasn't as clever as he thought he was. I guess that's why people were not enthusiastic about what he said.

But, I could also see the positive side of his argument. Yesterday, I'd learned from Trevor's friends about how their ancestors were enslaved, and that was to take their labor and make it into a profit for the white people while the black people got basically nothing, and that wasn't right, either.

It was really complicated to think about, and the professor's lecture was constantly interrupted by people raising their hands and asking questions about stuff.

I got the impression that economic theory is really, really complicated, and I'm glad that I don't have to think about it. I clear the weather and break up storms, and that's all I have to know. Someday I'll be in charge of weather over a whole sector, and then I'll have a lot more responsibility, and I'll be paid more because I have to do a lot more work even if it doesn't seem like it.

When she finished the lecture, there was almost a sigh of relief from the class, and from her too.

Lunch was leftovers, which meant that there was going to be a special dinner.

In Equestrian class, the professor put on a movie which was called Life in an Equestrian Town. It was weird for me to watch; the narrator (who was a pony) was trying to explain stuff to a human audience, but it was obvious that she hadn't spent any time with humans. So there were some places where she explained things as if a human would have no idea what it was, and other times when she glossed over things I'd learned from experience completely baffled humans.

I had already noticed that I tended to slow down my speech when I was speaking Equestrian to the class, but the narrator of the movie hadn't thought to do that, so my classmates were struggling to keep up with her.

Then when the movie was over, the professor reminded the class that there would be two parts to the final—a written part and a spoken part. I was going to help her with the spoken part.

It felt really weird leaving class, because that was my last class of the quarter, and I would never have those classes again. I had one final in each to prove what I'd learned, but that wouldn't be the same as a regular class.

It was hard to believe ten weeks had gone by that quickly.

Dinner was special. All the lights were dimmed (which Christine said made it look fancier) and there were table cloths and candles in little jars on every table. There were even cloth napkins for us, instead of the normal little fake-woven baskets full of paper ones.

And that was just the appearance of the place. They also had a lot of special meats, and a man in an all-white outfit with a poofy hat that looked kind of like a cauliflower to cut them for you. It felt rude to ignore him, so I had him cut me a very small piece of ham and also a very small piece of roast beef.

When I put my tray on the table, everyone looked at the meat on it and then looked at me and there was this huge feeling of anticipation.

I ate the ham first. I thought I'd probably like it more. It was salty and a bit chewy and at the time I didn't really think about where it came from so it was pretty good.

Then I ate the roast beef and it was a bit drier and had a somewhat caramel taste to it.

After that a lot of the tension was released, and Sean said that I was a real human now because I'd eaten meat (apparently fish isn't meat) and I told him that he'd only be a real pony when he took his clothes off and so he reached down and grabbed at the base of his shirt and Christine swatted his hand and told him that nobody wanted to see him naked.

Then he told her that wasn't what she'd said last night, and her face got red and she said that she meant at dinner.

Joe said 'that's what she said,' and everyone laughed but I didn't get why that was funny.

After dinner, I looked over the climate science assignment and discovered that the professor had also done one and turned it in.

I hadn't decided how to grade them yet. I didn't know anything about being a teacher or a professor, and I didn't want to give anyone bad marks because they weren't clear on how things worked. It was probably my fault anyway for not explaining it well enough. Sometimes I took for granted the stuff I'd learned as a filly that was maybe not so obvious to a human.

So I just wrote in my notebook what each student (and the professor) had got right and what they'd got wrong, and I decided I'd sleep on how to grade them.

Maybe I'd come up with something tomorrow on the field trip.

March 28 [First Day of Spring Semester]

March 28

Waking up to the first day of a new semester felt odd. On one hoof, I was going back to how things had been before vacation, with classes and eating in the dining hall and everything, but my classes were different, and so were everybody else's.

I hadn't thought about everybody else at first. I got on my gear and took off for a morning flight. The grumpy man was on the radio again, but even he was a bit more cheerful than usual. Maybe it was the nice weather, or maybe he missed me.

I got in a good flight around downtown. It's kind of fun to follow the streets and pretend that I'm a car: I have to remind myself not to cut corners, 'cause I'm above the buildings and could do that, but that would be cheating.

Sometimes if the traffic lights aren't in the car's favor, I can stay ahead of it. Other times it gets all green lights and I can't keep up.

It would be funner to fly lower, but there are all sorts of dangerous wires that cross the road. Some of them look thick enough to land on—birds do, and squirrels sometimes run along them, their little bushy tails flipping from side to side for balance—but I was told that it was way too dangerous for me. All of us pegasuses were shown a movie made by Golden State Power and Light showing two wires stuck into the end of a tube of meat humans call hot dogs and then turned on, which made the hot dog explode. They said that the same thing would happen to us if we touched any of the wires or landed on the poles.

Obviously squirrels and birds don't watch those movies.

I'd worked up a pretty good lather by the time I'd had two 'races' through town. I lost both because the traffic lights were against me.

Then when I got back to my room, Peggy was gone, and when I went into the bathroom somebody was already in the shower. I wasn't later than normal—and then I remembered that it was a new semester, and probably everyone else also had a new schedule.

I thought it was Peggy, but I wasn't certain. There were so many different smells in the bathroom it was hard to be really sure, so even though I thought about flying up and sticking my head over the top of the shower cubicle to see, I didn't. I just knocked on the door.

It wasn't Peggy, it was Ruth. I said that I needed to take a shower 'cause I was all lathered up from my exercise and she said 'you snooze you lose,' and I said that I hadn't been snoozing, I'd been flying. She laughed and said that she'd be done soon and I should just be patient. So I sat on the little bench on the wall and was patient until she was done and then I really had to hurry and didn't get much more done than rinsing the sweat out of my coat before I had to dash off to breakfast. I wish humans weren't so weird about sharing showers.

I got to my first class a little bit early—I thought it might take me longer than it did to find the room. It was in the Olds-Upton building, which is the same building that my climate science class had been in, but this room was on a different floor than that one had been.

It was pretty much the same inside. I picked a seat where I was close to the front and could also see the door so that I could watch people as they came in and see if there was anyone who I was friends with in the class. I hoped there would be. I hadn't thought about how all the students in the class were going to change, too, which meant that I might have to make some new friends.

I got lucky in this class, though: both Keith and Sean were taking it, and they both sat next to me. Keith leaned over and asked me what a nice pony like me was doing in a class like this, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

The professor came in before the whole class had gotten seated and just stood up front waiting until five minutes after class should have started, when one last student came in through the door. He said that there was always one.

He started by taking attendance, and then he said that since he now knew all our names it was time that we learn his, which was Gurkiran Banerjee, and if we had trouble pronouncing it we could just call him 'sir' or 'doctor', or if we were trying to get in his good graces, 'doctor sir.'

That got a good laugh around the classroom, and he began his introduction to the class. It was kind of hard to understand him because he had an unfamiliar accent, and his voice had a sort of lilt to it, almost like listening to a zebra, but he didn't rhyme.

After a bit, though, I got used to it and I could make sense of him. I'd noticed that some of my friends had slightly different accents, and it was a lot more pronounced with Trevor and his friends (especially Leon, but he did it on purpose because it helped his street cred).

We didn't get a whole lot of actual classwork done, because he just covered some of the most basic basic things, and how we were going to be graded at the end of the semester, and then he gave us a quiz that didn't count for any points at all just to see what we knew.

It was all pretty simple multiple-choice questions, except for the last one which asked who the most handsome man in the class was and I could choose between the professor or the closest man to my right or left, or none of the above and I chose none of the above, but when we went over the answers he said that anyone who answered anything other than 'the professor' failed the class automatically, and my ears fell but then he said that he was only kidding.

When class was over, he stood by the door and shook everyone's hand and thanked them for coming, which I thought was a little odd. And he asked me to stay behind for a minute. So I sat back down and waited for everyone else to leave and then he turned and sat down next to me and asked me if I was sure that I was ready for this class. He said that he wasn't going to give me any slack just because I was a pony, and that made me kind of mad. I told him that I had expected it to be hard, but I thought I was smart enough to figure it out and I didn't think he ought to be telling me what I should or should not do.

That kind of backed him down, and he said that he didn't mean to be offensive or condescending, but that since I was from a completely different culture with a different understanding who spoke a different native language, that there might be some special challenges for me that the other students didn't face. And he told me that he had been born and raised in a city in India called Muzaffarpur, and his family had moved to America when he was in high school and it had taken him years to figure things out and he was still occasionally confused by America.

I felt bad, 'cause I'd thought that he was picking on me for being a pony, when really he was looking after my best interests although maybe not in the best way. I told him that I was sure I'd figure it out, and he said that if I needed any help understanding things, he'd be glad to help me.

I had lunch after that, and then went to my next class which was in Dewing. I got there early, but it didn't do me any good because there was another class in there already. I got a look at the early arrivers in the hall and there wasn't anybody that I knew very well, although a couple of people were familiar, like Melissa who had been in my poetry class, but there wasn't anybody who I knew really well.

We had to stand out of the way while the other class left, and when I could get in I picked a seat that was a little farther back than I would have liked but gave me a good view of anybody else coming in, but nobody I knew wound up coming in after all. It was funny; I'd sort of gotten the idea that the campus was small enough that I ought to know everybody by now and besides Melissa there were a few other people who looked familiar, but who I didn't know at all.

The professor was called Amy Cunningham, but she said that we could just call her Amy if we wanted to. Instead of taking attendance like Doctor Sir Banerjee had, she went around the class and asked each of us our names and where we were from. I just said Equestria, 'cause the cloud outpost where I'd been living didn't really have a name that I could easily translate into English. Some of the earth ponies who lived below jokingly called us 'North Chonamare,' because they said that on all their maps the north was always up, and when they looked up, there we were, clearly north of them. And one of my friends called it skyseaponytown, which sounds a lot better in Equestrian.

I'd never really noticed before how humans always wanted to have a strong sense of where they were from. They'd name the town where they'd lived, and if it wasn't an important town, they'd name one that was near it, so that someone who was familiar with geography would know exactly where they were from. And a lot of my friends from Michigan just pointed to their hand, because Michigan is shaped like a hand. (I wonder if there are any states shaped like a hoof?)

A girl called Madison was from a town called Climax which was near Kalamazoo, and that made a couple of people snicker. She just rolled her eyes.

After we'd all gotten done with our introductions, Professor Cunningham explained how the class would be graded and handed out a schedule that included what reading we ought to be doing throughout the quarter. Then she explained how cultural anthropology was the study of different human cultures.

I noticed on the schedule that she had assigned us some reading already, so we'd be starting the next class at a gallop.

At dinner, everybody talked about what they'd done over Spring Break and how they liked their classes so far. Christine had visited New Orleans which is a city in Louisiana that used to be underwater, and Joe had gone to Japan, and Sean had spent the entire week at home playing games and setting up a new website on the internet.

I thought about reading through some anthropology, but decided that I would have time to do that tomorrow, and I had promised Liz that I would read more of the Bible, so I went back to reading Joshua. I couldn't understand why they thought it was important to circumcise themselves, and I had to ask Peggy what exactly they were cutting off because my computer told me but I wasn't sure what a foreskin was. She showed me how to get pictures on the internet, and I looked at a bunch and told her that Aric was circumcised she said that she really didn't need to know that. So I didn't ask her if her boyfriend was or not.

It said that they marched around Jericho and took the city, and they kept their word and saved Rahab and her kin. Then they burned the city and all within it, and I was a little confused with how that was written because it almost sounded like that meant the people from Jericho, too.

They didn't capture Ai because they didn't follow God's instructions again. And that didn't go well for some of them, because Joshua found out that they had taken things that they should not have and killed them.

And then they took the city of Ai and killed everyone in it and destroyed the city. That felt to me like a bad thing to do, but if God had said it was okay? It was hard to wrap my head around. Surely there were people in the city who weren't bad, and who would be just as happy living with Joshua as their leader rather than their old king. And probably the people in Jericho would have, too.

I thought I ought to ask Liz about that. She would probably know the answer.

I had just finished the part where Joshua had gathered all the Israelites together and read all the rules that Moses had gotten from God when Aric knocked on our door and asked if I wanted to go play Durak, and of course I did so I hugged him and kissed him and we went together in Winston to the coffee shop.

Everyone there had stories about their Spring Breaks, too. Aric had picked up a crazy hitchhiker who told them stories about being a radio operator in Vietnam and then they had spent one night camping out in a cemetery near Muskegon. James and Elizabeth went to Miami Beach together, and said it was very nice. Seth said that he went to Cancun, which is in Mexico, and he said that it was fun to be the only sober one because girls lost all their inhibitions when they were drunk. Elizabeth said that wasn't true, and James started to say something and then her face got red and she gave him a death glare and he shut right up.

We played a couple of hands and I lost once because I forgot that Seth still had an ace of trump, and then Aric drove me to his house and we made up for a week apart.

April 11 [Monday]

April 11

It was another gloomy day. Springtime in Kalamazoo didn't have too much going for it so far.

I got in a bit longer flight than usual, 'cause I got up a little bit earlier. I started off by just making big circles, stretching out my wings and relaxing my mind. It's easy to get in a kind of trance when flying, and you have to be careful that that doesn't happen. Most often it happens over the ocean, 'cause there isn't a whole lot to focus on. But it can be good, too, as long as you only let your mind drift a little bit and keep aware of what's around you.

Once I had cleared everything out of my mind but me and the sky, I started to do little hops up and down, then higher and higher. At the peak of every arc, I'd add a couple of flaps, then dive down and glide back up, until I was swinging through a couple of hundred feet of altitude at a time. Some of the ponies on my weather team thought that was one of the best ways to exercise, because you worked your wings then relaxed them. I wasn't so sure myself; you don't trot and glide to work your legs.

Even if it wasn't the best exercise routine, it was fun, and the repetitiveness of it helped keep my mind clear. I had to focus to keep at the same altitude at the bottom of my dives, and then to add just the right bit of speed at the very top.

When I decided I'd done enough, I did a backflip at the very peak instead of flapping and let myself fall backwards for a moment before twisting to hooves-down flight.

I hadn't buzzed the quad in a while, so I did that on my way back in. I came down steep over the roof of Hoben and leveled out just on the other side of the brick road, then shot across the quad and up the hill to Trowbridge, scaring a couple of students who ought to have been paying more attention at what was around them and a little less to their telephones. Then I banked hard around a tree and gained some altitude to bleed off speed. There were ways to do it at ground level, but it was tricky and you could strain a wing or crash if you didn't do it right.

My morning preening left me with three fewer feathers, and I could see where another one had fallen out in flight. Who knew where that had gone. Maybe somebody was going to find it on the ground and wonder what kind of bird had lost it.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started by reminding us that in a dynamical system we ought to find the equilibrium points first, because that was where we had a good understanding of how the system worked. Then he put a problem on the markerboard, and had us help him calculate the Jacobian matrix and the eigenvalues, and explained how when r changed, the system went out of stability. Then he explained again how to calculate eigenvectors and eigenvalues on a flat surface, and how on a cubic place you had to calculate the eigenplane, too.

Sometimes there would be a system that when it went out of equilibrium it could go in two different directions, and sort of be in its own compartment (as he said), and those were called basins of attraction, and the stable points in them were called attractors. It got a little more complex because limit cycles counted as attractors, too, which wasn't the case in linear equations.

Besides having trouble with the math letters, writing neat matrixes was tricky, too. I wasn't the only one having trouble, though; a lot of the students seemed to be having difficulty comprehending a three-dimensional space, but of course that type of thought came natural to a pegasus. Although it's always difficult when you're looking at a representation of three dimensions of a flat surface.

I told everyone at lunch about my weekend with Aquamarine, but it was hard to get across how seeing the horses had made me feel. They were interested in the astronaut ice cream, though. Everyone at the table had had it when they were children. Sean said that it was never popular with astronauts, and that now they had real ice cream on the International Space Station. Although he admitted that that was a special treat for the astronauts; they didn't have ice cream all the time.

I didn’t know all that much about the space station so he told me about it and got some pictures of it on his telephone. He said that I could see it streaking across the sky from the ground, if I knew where to look, and said that his telephone kept track of when it was going to go by. He said that he could let me know when it was going to be close enough to see on a clear night, and that we could go out and look at it as it went by. I thought I could wave; maybe they'd see me. Then I realized I was being silly; I couldn't see people on the ground from the airplane for very long, and the space station was higher up than airplanes could go.

In anthropology, Professor Amy started off by talking about what we'd read about the Kayan women who put rings around their necks to make their necks look longer, and then she asked how many ways we could think of that people in America changed their bodies for religious or beauty purposes. She said that it had to be a permanent change, so things like dying hair or painting fingernails didn't count. Then there was a little debate about whether piercings counted, because they could grow back out. She said that they did count.

So the class together came up with a pretty long list of things that people in America did, and I said that I'd heard some zebra shamans wore neck rings, too, but I didn't think that they were trying to stretch their necks. And some ponies wore earrings, too, but not too many. There had been pegasus clans that notched their ears, but nopony did that any more—it had fallen out of fashion when my granddam was a filly. She said that back then you could tell where a pony had come from by the notches in her ears. It sounded painful to me: I'd had an ear bitten in a fight and it bled a lot and really hurt for days and days.

Then after that we talked about some ways that other cultures had changed their bodies in pursuit of beauty, and all of it was new to me. Some of it seemed simply horrible, like various ways that people had found to bind their bodies and make them grow in different, bad ways. I guess for humans sometimes not being able to move was a desirable trait, but I didn't see why. Not being able to move means that you might get eaten by a monster. Nopony would do that.

I spent some time in my room working on my poem, which wasn’t working out. I decided that I was overthinking it, and just needed to clear my head and let the words flow naturally, but that was hard to do when I was looking at a piece of paper that was all marked up from bad tries, so I filled the rest of the time by reading the next chapter of my anthropology book and then some of Samuel, which was the next book in the Bible.

I ate dinner in the dark room, and we spent an extra long time there before everyone went off to play Durach, and I went with them. On our way there, Aric came along in Winston, and he stopped on the road and asked if anybody wanted a ride, so we all got into the back of the truck and that was kind of fun. It was a little cramped and dark, because he still had the top on, but at the same time it was cozy, and there was a window that he opened between the truck and the top so that he could talk to us.

When we got there Keith pushed open the back window and lowered the tailboard, and then we all climbed out and went inside to play cards.

We rode back to campus in the same way, and after everyone had been dropped off, I got out of the back too and into the cab. I thought about asking him to stop by the dorm so that I could get my flight gear, but I didn't. I had gotten cozy against his side when we had pulled out of the parking lot and I didn't want to get out of the truck until it was time to go up to his bedroom.

April 24 [Light Shop]

April 24

It was chilly and the sun wasn't up when I woke up. I'd gotten used to the fact that everywhere I'd been sleeping was heated, so I wasn't used to it anymore.

The only solution was to stick my head under the covers and snuggle up as tightly against Aric as I could. He'd told me that when he went on the road trip he and David and Angela all had to cuddle up in the back of the truck to keep warm, and now I knew why. And I bet it was at least a decigrade warmer than it had been over Spring Break.

He woke up as soon as I moved and hugged me against him and then said that he hadn't expected it to get this cold overnight. He said he could turn on Winston and we could sit in the cab and warm up, but I thought that would be wimping out and I said that if he was okay with the chill I was okay with it too.

We both dozed but didn't really get much more sleep at all. When the dawn was finally breaking over the trees I nuzzled his cheek and then tugged at his pants with my hind leg (he was still wearing his clothes because of the cold) and he got the idea and it wasn't too long before the blankets all managed to get pushed off but we didn't mind.

There was a trick to getting out of the back of Winston easily which I couldn't manage. Aric had to push the glass back window up and then reach over the edge to get the handle, which was recessed too far for a hoof to pull. When he finally got it, the tailboard crashed down and he slid out and went off to water a tree. He’d told me that the French word latrine came from 'le tree,' because that's what you peed on when you were in the woods.

I found my own tree on the other side of the clearing where I could still see him but not too close because some stallions were weird about that and I thought maybe boys were too.

It would have been fun to spend the rest of the day in the clearing, but we didn't have any food at all, so we got in the truck and drove back to Kalamazoo and went to Nina's because that was his favorite place to have breakfast and I liked it too.

I asked him what he wanted to do for the rest of the day and he said that he ought to be finishing the diorama for his set design class but he could always do that later. And he said that he did have to fix some theater lights because there was an upcoming play in the black box theatre that he was doing lights for and he really wanted to use the Berkeys because they had irises in them but all of them put out shit for light and no one could ever get them to focus and he wasn't sure why.

So we wound up going to the light shop together so he could work on them. There were a couple of tall stools (which wasn't comfortable for a pony at all) and a cabinet full of the special bulbs that the lighting instruments took and cables all over the walls and big flat drawers full of colored plastic which he said were gels and used to make the light a different color.

There was enough room on the workbench for me to sit there and watch as he took one of the Berkeys apart and started inspecting it. They didn't have a lot inside them; there was a tube which had the lenses and then a slot where the iris was and another slot where you could put a thing called a gobo which made a pattern in the light, and there were also shutters that blocked off some of the light. He explained what all that was as he took it apart.

When he didn't find anything in the main body he got out a screwdriver and started taking the lens train apart to see if that was where the problem was. When he got it open he studied them and pointed to little marked slots where they could go—he said that one of the cleverest things about the Berkeys was that you could move where the lenses were to change the angle of light coming out of them, so it really took the place of several different lighting instruments and then he showed me by pulling one of them out of the forty slot and putting it in the fifty slot and sort of drew with his finger how the light would come into the first lens and then be bent into the second and midway through he stopped and just started laughing and picked up the frontmost lens and turned it around.

He said no wonder they couldn’t be focused; the front lens was in backwards and he bet that they were all that way. So he reassembled the one he'd been working on and then lifted up another one and looked through the end at the front lens and it was wrong too.

Aric said that now that he knew what the problem was it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to fix the rest of them and that he might as well give me a tour of the rest of the theatre while we were here.

He said that the smartest thing about the light shop was that it was above the scene shop and it connected both theatres. There was a door on either wall near where we'd come in that led into the catwalks. He said that we might as well go into Balch first, and he led me onto the catwalk that ran above backstage and then over what he called the house—where the people sat. There were lots of other lights hung from the railings and he named them all as we went by—there were Kliegels and Parcans and Fresnels and Shakespeares and after a while I couldn't keep track of them any more.

One end of the catwalk was right over the top of the stage and there was a bare light bulb hanging from it which was so bright it hurt my eyes and Aric said that was the ghost light and they had found it when they were cleaning out the lamp cabinet and that it was a two thousand watt lamp.

Then we went all the way into the back where there was a door which went down to the lighting booth where I'd been before. I'd already seen that, so I said that I wanted to see the other theatre, which was called Dalton. When we got over there the catwalks were much nicer because they were more open and didn't have beams across them.

He said that from a lighting perspective, it wasn't as good because the catwalks were in the wrong place so they had to improvise a lot. It was all right for a concert, he told me, but there was a dance troupe that performed in there and it was really tricky to get the lights where he wanted them for their show. He told me that at the last show, he'd used every one of the patch cables I'd seen hanging in the light shop.

Then he showed me to the light booth, which was a bit wider than the other one, and he said that was nice but the lighting board was a lot older. He said it was more fun to use, though because it wasn't as automated so you had to do a lot of effects by hand.

When we were going back to the light shop, he pointed to a border in the stage and he said that the whole front of the stage could be lowered all the way into the basement and at first I didn't think that was possible but then remembered how the whole restaurant at the Space Needle had rotated so I guess if that could be built then a giant stage elevator was possible. I wanted to see it work, but he said that it took a key he didn't have. He told me that he could show me one other secret, though, and when we were in the light shop he pointed up to a hatch in the ceiling which he said went to the attic and he said that from there you could get onto the roof.

I stuck out my tongue and told him that I could get on the roof whenever I wanted to.

He said that this was more fun than just flying up there and climbed the ladder to the hatch and undid the lock and then opened it up. I flew up behind him but he had to grab my forelegs and pull me through because the opening wasn't wide enough for me to fit.

There were a few bare light bulbs hanging around that gave enough light to see, and there was a catwalk that led off to the north, I thought—it went off in the direction of the Balch theatre.

He led me along it until we got to another short ladder and there was a hatch above that and he said that we couldn’t go through because it was daytime and students weren't supposed to know it was there but he pushed it up just a little and I could see daylight through it.

He said that some night we ought to come out here and look at Kalamazoo because it was the second-best place he'd found to get a look at the city at night: the first-best was the top of the parking garage next to the hotel. He supposed that the hotel was probably a good place, too, but he had never gotten a room there.

Once we were back in the light shop, he said that I could stay and watch him work if I wanted to but if I had other stuff I wanted to do that was okay, too.

I knew that I probably would get bored watching him work all afternoon and I really wanted to fly because even though the day had started out chilly it was just getting nicer and nicer.

When I got back to our dorm room to get my flight gear Peggy was there like she'd said she would be, but instead of doing her homework she was watching a movie on her computer. She said that I looked happy and hadn't called or showed up late at night so things must have gone well, and I said that they had and she reminded me that I still had to tell Meghan and I said that I knew but I didn't have to do it right away and I was going to go flying before dinner.

I didn't challenge myself; I just took a nice, lazy flight over the city. There were a few decent thermals that gave me a boost, which was nice. I could circle in them and get some altitude with almost no effort on my part, and then mostly glide along until I came to the next one.

I did sort of lose track of time, though, and didn't get back until kinda late. I hadn't missed dinner, but all of my friends were already gone, and I had to eat by myself and most of the food had already been taken. But there was still a good selection of salad, and some cookies left, too.

Even though I didn't like taking showers at night, I decided that I ought to at least rinse myself off, since I'd been running and flying and there was probably a lot of sweat dried in my coat. And then I meant to just stretch out on bed until I'd dried off but I hadn't really gotten enough sleep last night because I dozed off and didn't wake up until a couple of hours later. Peggy and Sean and Christine were playing euchre and when they saw I was awake they decided to partner me with Peggy and we played a couple of games before it was bedtime for everyone.

Bucket List

~~Things I want to do~~ Bucket List

Be a stormwatcher

Visit museums in Chicago

Go Kart racing

Go skydiving

Spend time with horses, maybe learn to drive them or ride them.

Visit the nice airplane director lady

Maybe visit the grumpy airplane director too because he might be happy if he has a hug.

See the weather lady

Go to Taco Bell all by myself

Fly across Lake Michigan to Chicago

Visit an airplane factory

Go to a nudist camp

Write a poem about horses

Visit Peggy in Colorado (to do in the summer)

Finish reading the Bible

Make dreamcatchers for all my friends

Take a road trip with Aric

Fly an airplane

Watch Cedric and Leon play football

Fight in a SCA battle

And anything else I can think of

May 27 [Firefly]

May 27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn't sure what to make of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 1 [A Cloud in a Tree]

June 1

I couldn't decide if I should wake up Aric or let him sleep. He'd probably get back to sleep after I left, but maybe he wouldn't, and then he might be mad that I got him up so early. On another hoof, he might also be mad if he woke up in a ponyless bed.

I didn't know what kind of schedule he had on Wednesdays, so I finally chose to leave a note on his desk for him, and then I went out the front door, because he couldn't close the window behind me if he was asleep and the way it was inset I didn't think that I could close it myself from outside.

While I waited to get permission to fly, I shook some more sunflower seeds out of the birdfeeder—it was getting kind of low, so hopefully he'd put more food in it soon, or else the birds would be disappointed.

There were scattered clouds up in the sky, and they were low enough I could reach them. They were clearing out, evaporating, so I knew that nobody would miss one. I spent my whole flight time fighting with it, getting it to bend to my will, and then I grabbed it and flew it back to campus. I sort of had a idea of seeing how long I could keep it together . . . I guess without knowing where I'd be living, I was acting out a nesting instinct.

In Equestria, there were almost always a few loose clouds in the sky, because the weather teams always had extras, and it was a nice thing to let them go so that any wandering pegasus who needed a place to land for a bit had something. But on Earth, there were days when there weren't any clouds at all.

I left it by my window, but when I got up to my room it had already drifted off, and when I looked for it it was stuck on a tree.

I was just thinking that I couldn't leave it there when Peggy came back from her shower and asked what I was looking at, and so I told her that my cloud was floating away, and asked her if she had any rope. Maybe I could tie it above the trees.

She asked if that was some sort of pegasus saying, and I told her that I had an actual cloud which I'd put outside the room but that it was stuck in a tree right now and she put her face right up against the window and then looked at me and said that there was a cloud stuck in the tree, and that she would be right back.

I was still looking outside, trying to see if there was somewhere I could tie it that nobody would mess with it (because I wasn't sure what happened to humans that touched clouds, but I knew that sometimes we got hit with lightning if the cloud was charged) and I saw Peggy down on the front sidewalk in her bathrobe, taking pictures with her telephone.

Well, I knew that I should have thought my plan through better, so I went downstairs too and flew up into the tree and pulled the cloud back out, then I lifted it high enough that it wouldn't get stuck on any more trees, and set it on its way.

I thought about it more while I was in the shower, but there wasn't anywhere that I could really put a cloud that it wouldn't get away while I was in class. Sometimes I come up with pretty clever ideas in the shower, but not this time.

There were no waffles again, but there was the little table with omelets, and so I got one and then when I got to the table and sat down Peggy started telling everyone how I'd gotten the cloud stuck and showed them pictures and I said that if I'd had the right kind of rope I could have tied it to the top of a tree and it probably would have stayed there. Sean said that we ought to find the right kind of rope, because the idea of a cloud tied to a tree was too good to pass up.

I told him that I didn't know what kind of rope was best (it wasn't very often that anyone tried to tie a cloud to something) but I did know that if you were going to the ground you had to use a rope with some copper in it. Sean said that he didn't think that anyone made a rope like that, then Peggy said that she bet some of the makers could and maybe that would be a fun project which could distract people from finals.

I thought that to make it last, there would have to be a bunch of experimentation to find the right kind of rope and what you could tie it to and what the weather was like and if trees and buildings behaved differently when they had a cloud attached, and I didn't think that it would be likely to last for too long, but they were all so enthusiastic about the project that by the end of breakfast I'd promised that if they got a rope, I'd get a cloud and we'd tie it to a tree and see what happened.

Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee told us that a matrix times a circle equals an ellipse, and then he explained the theorem that proved it. Then he started drawing out matrixes and having us solve the eigenvalues and the vectors so we could see it for ourselves, then he tricked us by making a matrix where the ellipse expanded on its first iteration,but then shrank because the value was less than one.

There was a bit of argument about that, which was silly; obviously Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee knew what would happen in his example. And he told us that we should numerically do iterations and see how it changes because that would be a good exercise for us.

He finished by explaining how to characterize a chaotic orbit, and explained how we could do that using its fractal dimensions, which let us take a pretty irregular graph and break it into parts, and when he gave us the equation he showed us one way to do it, and then said that it was more efficient sometimes to write it as a logarithm.

It got a lot more complicated when it was three dimensional (he'd been using a two-dimensional chaotic orbit as an example). He gave us a formula which could help calculate that fairly simply, and at the end of it it made a graph which indicated how chaotic it was.

I thought it was kind of funny at the end of all of it, you could show how chaotic something was with a straight line.

Lunch wasn't very good today—it was leftovers from last night, mostly. I hoped that meant that we were going to have a special dinner again.

Professor Amy got us together in our groups, and she handed each group a packet of papers which were previous observations from an anthropologist and were based on observations of the Waziri Tribe.

Our first assignment was to go through what had been observed before and draw what conclusions we could from the materials, find any biases the early observers might have had, and then plan out how we intended to meet with them.

It was a lot of fun. Rachel said that she was pretty sure that the Waziris weren't real—she said it sounded like something from a comic book—and I thought about the weather for New Atlantis that we were supposed to figure out weather for.

For once, my inexperience in a subject helped our group. Hunter, who had been in the last group, too, said that the Waziri had the same attitude towards cattle as the Xhosa. Rachel asked him how he knew that, and he said that he had studied them in a high school class, and then I said what if the imaginary person who had made the observations had also studied the Xhosa and was only seeing what he wanted to see. And Rachel said she thought that was possible, so maybe we ought to verify by observation and by asking questions about what they thought.

At the end of class, we turned in our group notes—that was all that Amy wanted—and I stayed late to show her my essay, and get her final approval before I finished it.

She said it was pretty good and that she was happy that I had taken her suggestions to heart. And she said that she'd noticed that I was getting better at English writing than I had been at the very beginning of class, and asked if I'd been practicing. So I told her that I was keeping a journal and had already filled up one notebook and almost another.

I probably should have worked on my essay more after class so that I could be done with it and not have to worry about it while I was studying for my math final, but when we were in class it had started to rain and there hadn't been any rain during the day in so long that I decided to go fly around in it and play in puddles instead. That might not have been the wisest way to spend an afternoon, but it was a fun way.

I took a really quick shower to rinse the mud off my legs, and then checked my computer mailbox. I'd gotten a letter from Mister Salvatore saying that they had found me a few possible apartments and that we could look at them tomorrow after class if I wanted to but he needed to know soon, and I saw by the date that he had sent it yesterday and I hadn't checked because I was a bad pony.

While I was writing a letter back, my telephone rang and it was Miss Cherilyn, and she wanted to know if I'd gotten the computer letter and I said I had, and they said that they would meet me tomorrow after Conrad's class.

Even though we had already made arrangements, I finished up the letter anyway, since it would be rude to ignore it, and I also sent another to Liz, saying that I might miss our talk because I was going to be looking at apartments so I would have somewhere to live that wouldn't drift away in the wind. Then I went to the dining hall.

They had the worst dinner I've had yet—everyone at the table was complaining about it, and I'd noticed that the lettuce wasn't very fresh. Sean thought that either they were saving up for the most epic dinner ever tomorrow, and Christine said that they'd probably run out of food for us and were just looking in the back of the coolers to get what was left.

Joe said that he didn't care; his mind was already on the summer and on moving to Japan, and he hadn't noticed the food in the last week.

I said that we ought to have a get-together before everyone leaves, and Christine said that was a good idea, and as long as her roommates didn't object too loudly we could do it in her suite on Saturday night.

It was going to be sad when everyone was gone.

After dinner, I finished up my essay, and gave it to Peggy to read to make sure that I hadn't made any dumb mistakes. English has a lot of words which sound alike but mean something different, and sometimes it's hard to know which one to use. And my computer isn't always smart enough to know, either.

In exchange, I looked over her math homework for her, which I thought was a pretty fair trade, and she did too.

She was getting pretty good and I told her if she kept studying over the summer she might be ready for nonlinear dynamics in the fall. She said that her idea of summer vacation didn't involve math at all.

That was kind of strange to me—why take a class if you're not going to use the knowledge as much as you can, and practice at it until you get better? But I suppose maybe that was a human thing.

I gave her a nuzzle before I went to Aric's house. I didn't like the thought of her leaving and going back home—she'd always been there for me when I needed her. I was going to have to do a lot of adjusting over the summer.

Aric was on the couch with David and Angela, and they were watching a movie called Black Dog. David said it was a movie about driving big trucks, but the more I watched, the more I thought it was about how not to drive them, because they were crashing and exploding a lot. But then things kind of calmed down until the very end, when two trucks raced each other, crashing into almost everything that was in the way, and one of them got hit by a train and exploded.

I wanted to know if that really happened, because I'd seen a couple of cars that had crashed into each other once, and it didn't look like either of them had exploded, and David said that that only happened with big trucks. He said cars were too small to explode, but trucks weren't.

When we were up in the bedroom, I asked Aric if he ever worried when he was driving on the road that a truck might explode, and he told me that David had just been making a joke; all the big explosions were because a lot of people liked seeing them in movies but that that normally didn't happen. He said that even fires after accidents were really rare.

He could have said that downstairs. I probably looked like a fool listening to everything that David claimed.

Then he sat down on the bed and asked me why I'd left without waking him up, and I said that I'd had sex with him but he must have been too tired to remember. He didn't believe me at all, so I told him to get undressed and I'd show him what I'd done.

Afterwards, he asked me how he'd slept through all that, and I shrugged and said that he must be a very sound sleeper.

June 17 [Fort Wilkins to High Cliffs State Park]

June 17

It was super-chilly, and Aric was just huddled up against me for warmth. When we shifted around, he pressed his face up against me and his nose felt like a little icicle. At least the wind wasn't too bad.

Hopefully, it would be warmer tonight and tomorrow morning. We were going to go back south—we couldn't go any further north, after all.

I asked him if he was too cold, and he said that I was warm and furry and was doing an excellent job of keeping him warm. Then he said that he might as well get up, even though it was just barely light. He said that we had a long day of driving ahead of us, because tomorrow we had to get to the dock in Manitowoc before the Badger sailed, or else we were going to have to take the long way back home, through Chicago and around the bottom of the lake.

Well, I wouldn't have minded stopping in Chicago, 'cause maybe Cayenne would be there, but I guess we weren't going to have time for that.

We made the usual breakfast and put out the fire. Aric asked me if I wanted to see the very end of the peninsula and a special forest, or see historic Fort Wilkins.

I asked him what it was like, and he said that he imagined that it was kind of like the lighthouse keeper's house, but maybe there would be more military stuff there, since it had been a fort.

I was sure it wasn't open yet—the sun wasn't even above the trees yet—and I could tell he was kind of eager to get on the road. So I said that the end of the peninsula and the trees would be nice to see.

It took a while to get there, and it was kind of rugged and windblown. I could see an island off in the distance which was Manitou Island, he said, and he said that beyond that, if a storm came from the west or northwest, the next chance at a safe shelter was probably Whitefish Bay, unless you could run nearly due south and make Marquette or one of the bays along there.

He said it would have been nice to have been able to camp here, because seeing the sun come up over Lake Superior would have been pretty amazing.

We went around the southern side of the peninsula, and drove near the lake for a while until he turned inland, and we got to Estivant Pines, which he said had been saved from loggers in the seventies.

There were trails leading through the pines, and he said that there wouldn't be any airplanes here, so I could fly below the treetops to my heart's content. So I kissed him and then took off, working my way up to the very tops of the trees, and even though I didn't mean to, I lost him on the ground, and when I went to fly back down, I had no idea where I was—I went through the trees but there was nothing but undisturbed forest below me.

I flew around for ten or fifteen minutes, looking for him and then looking for anybody, but it was no good. There was no one to be seen, I couldn't hear any voices, and there was nothing in my nose but the scents of pine and dirt.

I landed on a nice thick tree branch and tried to think about which way I'd flown, how I'd turned around the trees and then where I'd gone when I was looking for him, and I thought that maybe if I went back up I'd see a familiar landmark, but I didn't—the trees pretty much all looked the same.

I couldn't even call anyone on my radio, because it was back in Winston. I was all alone in the sky.

The thought of Winston triggered a memory, and off in the distance I saw a lake that I remembered we'd gone by just before coming to the park, and I didn't know if it was the same lake because things looked different in the air than they did on the ground, but it was the only clue I had, so I flew over to it and sure enough a road went by, and so I turned with the sun at my tail and flew down along the road, following it all the way back to the park entrance and then to the parking lot and Winston.

Aric wasn't there.

He was probably still in the woods, waiting for me. Maybe he was sitting on the ground, resting, or maybe he was walking up and down the trail more and more worried because he couldn't find me. Which meant that I had to go find him, but it would be dumb to just go flying or trotting down the trail because if there were forks in it I might miss him, and then we could spend all day not finding each other.

Most people locked their cars, but Aric didn't, so I opened up the door and got out my journal and wrote a note for him, telling him that I had been back and was going on the trail to look for him and if he came back to stay put, 'cause I'd check back on him. Then I put the note on his side where he couldn't miss it and went back into the woods.

Then I turned back around and got my vest, radio, and blinking light and put them on, because even though it looked really silly, it would make me a lot easier to see.

I trotted along the trail, stopping every now and then to sniff around for his scent. Dogs are really good at sniffing things out, and we are too in the air, but in a forest it was hopeless. There were too many other scents for me to get more than a hint, and unless he'd started peeing on trees I wasn't going to be able to track him like that.

So I went to the air, and there were a couple of places where I got a bit of a whiff and knew he was still upwind of me, but if I flew directly into the wind, I'd have to go off the trail, and then there was a pretty good chance I'd get lost again and have to repeat the whole process.

It felt like an hour or more before I saw him, standing in a tiny little clearing and looking up into the trees, and I was so happy to see him that I broke into a gallop, and he heard me and snapped his head around in my direction and I could see the look of relief on his face.

When we were walking back he said that he'd kept walking, thinking that I'd follow the trail from above, and then after he'd gone a little ways he realized that I probably couldn't see it, so then he'd turned around and gone back to where I'd been, thinking that maybe I'd landed back there but I hadn't, and then he thought that maybe there was a place where I could see the trail from the air. I told him that I'd been completely lost until I found a lake and the road and Winston.

We both agreed not to split up like that again, because it was stupid. And he said that maybe next time we went out into the woods, we'd have little radios that could talk to each other, just in case. Because while pocket telephones were pretty convenient and everyone in Kalamazoo had one and could use it anywhere, they didn't work up here, except sometimes when we were near cities.

When we were back at Winston, I put away my flight gear and we started heading south.

We were out of food in the icebox, so we stopped in Bruce Crossing, at a restaurant called Char's Cafe, and Aric said that I should at least try some of a pasty, because that was the traditional UP food. I wasn't sure that I wanted a whole one, because they all had some kind of meat in them, so I had some whitefish and just a little bite of his pasty.

After we'd left there, we drove along railroad tracks and saw a train with blue locomotives and dusty reddish cars that were all the same, which Aric said were train cars that carried iron ore to port.

And we went past some hills that Aric said were the Porcupine Mountains. I told him that out west the mountains were a lot taller, and he said that Michigan wasn’t known for its mountains. I could see why.

I thought that we were going to be inland for the rest of the trip, until we got to the shore of Lake Michigan, anyway, but we started going due west for a while, and then right after a park which was called Little Girls Point we were up mostly against the coast again.

He stopped in a park that he said was right on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin, and we walked all the way to the water and sat on the beach and ate, and there was a little spit of land that ran out along a river, and Aric said that if we went to the end of that, we'd be as far west as it was possible to go in Michigan.

So we walked down there and scratched our names out in the sand, and he took a picture of it and me standing in fetlock-deep water just off the end. I suppose I could have gone out further, maybe up to my belly, but the lake was pretty cold.

He said that it was good that we were going to be in Wisconsin, because we were out of cheese and almost out of beer, and those were the two things that Wisconsin had in abundance. He told me that they also had cheese curds which was a traditional Wisconsin food and when they were made right they would squeak when you bit them.

I didn't believe him, but the first store we saw along the side of the road had a sign out front that said cold beer and cheese curds, along with fishing gear.

He pulled into their parking lot and said that the best place to get food out in the country was a bait shop. And I sat in Winston while he went inside, and he came back out a minute later with a little white box like the one that the fudge had been in (and I kind of wished we'd been going back through Mackinaw City, because it had been delicious) and he was right; it did squeak when you bit it.

It was a little weird to be eating it as we were driving, but Aric said that we were running kind of late, and had to make up some time.

I said that it was my fault for getting lost, and he said that it wasn't at all; it was just further than he thought. But we were both kind of quiet for a while.

The scenery was almost the same as it had been in the Upper Peninsula. I knew what it was like when we got further south, 'cause of the train trip, and I finally asked him if we'd be going near Milwaukee. He said that we'd be north of it, but we might go through Green Bay, if he felt like taking a shortcut.

Then he said that it might not save any time, because at best we'd get there just after rush hour, and sometimes it was faster to just avoid cities.

There were lots and lots of little lakes around us, and Aric said that this was the boundary waters and once when he was a Boy Scout, they'd spent some time canoeing on the lakes, and it was one of the most fun trips he'd had. Then he talked about other trips that he'd taken, and a lot of them sounded like they weren't all that much fun, like when their tents had blown away on an island in Lake Erie, or when he had been on a winter camping trip and his boots had frozen and he had to walk in his socks to the fire so that he could thaw them out.

He said that it had been fun, though, even if it was sometimes miserable when he was on the trip. And I think he was right about that, 'cause some of the storms that we worked it was easy to forget how our wings were aching and our eyes hurt from squinting them shut against the sleet, or being so soaked by rain that you thought you'd never be dry again . . . those were the days that we talked about and remembered, not the easy days where we just pushed puffy clouds around on schedule.

And the sailors never said much about uneventful crossings, either. I think sometimes they even made stuff up if nothing interesting had happened.

We got to Stevens Point around dinner time, and my stomach started growling at the familiar signs of restaurants, but Aric said that we weren't going to eat at an Applebees, or Taco Bell, or any other fast food restaurant. We'd just drive a little further until we found a town with a fun-looking mom and pop restaurant, and I said that was smart, but that didn't make me any less hungry.

So we got off the 10 Highway in Amherst, and he found a restaurant called The Rivers Bar and Supper Club, and it really didn't look like much, but Aric said that the restaurants that looked the worst on the outside were often the best on the inside, and he said it was a good sign that they had a parking lot full of cars and an ever better sign that none of them were as beat-up as Winston.

I told him that we'd passed a bait store not too far back that was full of trucks just like Winston, and there had even been one with mottled green and brown paint, and he said that bait shops were for on-the-road snacks, not dinners.

We picked the right day to visit, because they had all their fish on sale. Aric said that was because Catholics couldn't eat meat on Fridays. I was too hungry to care why; and I got their combo plate which had lots of different kinds of fish and shrimp, too, and I couldn't even eat it all. Aric didn't want any more than a couple of nibbles—he said that he didn't like fish and never had.

The waitress—who had been watching me but not in a bad way—put my leftover food in a little box so we could take it with us, and we got back on the road.

I fell asleep.

I guess it was too much food and the kind of soothing noise that the tires made on the road, but I just put my head down and the next thing I knew Aric was gently shaking my shoulder and said that we had arrived at our campsite for the night.

I asked him where we were, and he said that it was the High Cliff State Park, on the shores of Lake Winnebago. And he said that was a very special lake, because it was where Winnebagos—which were a kind of Arvey—came from. He said that every spring, they would get together on the shores of the lake, and then lay their eggs, and in the summertime, they would hatch. And he pointed to a little Arvey that had a big W on it and said that was a juvenile, and that the bigger one a few sites over was probably its mother.

I was a little too sleepy to realize right away that he was making that up, and I asked him if we could go and see their breeding grounds, which I kind of was picturing as a big parking lot. Then I remembered that they were just machines like Cobalt and Winston, but bigger.

He said that we could go down to the lake if we wanted to, and I thought it would be a nice way to end the day, so we took a trail that looked over the lake, and it was plenty big, but not so big that you couldn't see the other side.

It had been really nice to be all the way up in the UP and where it was very remote, but there was another kind of beauty in all the lights across the lake, almost like stars that had fallen to the ground.

We walked back in the dark, until we found our campsite. The whole park was nearly full, and Aric said that he had been lucky to get a space, because it was the weekend now and this park wasn't very far from Milwaukee or Green Bay.

When we were in the back of Winston, I asked him if that meant that we couldn't have sex, and he said that it was dark outside, so no one would notice if the truck was rocking a little bit.

July 11 [Airborne Idiot]

July 11

Aquamarine said that she had to check on her plants, and she said that there was a bus that took her there. She told me that I could come along or I could fly around for a little while if I wanted to. She said she'd be back in time to make breakfast and then we'd all go to the train station together.

She was sincere—and I knew that she wouldn't be mad if I wanted to fly. So I put on my flight gear and she propped open the balcony door for me, and when I was getting on my flight gear she looked on a map at where Lansing's airport was and it was way north of the city so as long as I didn't fly up too high I wouldn't be in their way.

I still used the radio to announce my intentions 'cause that was important, and another pilot asked me to repeat. I could hear a buzzy noise in the background which I thought was probably his airplane engine so maybe he hadn't heard me.

So I told him again that I was Pegasus 1 and that I would be flying from the corner of Hagadorn and Mount Hope Roads and performing maneuvers between there and the Pavilion (which was where the draft horse show had been) at up to five thousand feet.

Then he asked what kind of aircraft I had and I told him that the FAA called me an ornithopter, and he said that this radio was for professionals and I should give it back to my daddy.

Well, even though I wasn't supposed to, I told him what he could do with his radio and I hope that nobody who heard knows Equestrian. Then I said that I bet I'd been flying longer than he had, so he got kind of snarky and said that he had over four thousand hours in the air, and I told him I'd gotten more than that before I was out of diapers.

After that I just stopped listening to him, 'cause this argument wasn't going to go anywhere, but when I flew I kept a good watch for airplanes. He seemed like the kind of guy who would fly over just to see if I really was in the air.

I was glad I did, too, 'cause I'd just circled around the horse pasture when I heard an airplane engine from behind me and so I looked up and there he was, coming up from the south. Well, I think it was the same man but there wasn't really any way to know.

I found a sturdy-looking dead tree that was standing near the horse pastures and landed in it, just to watch him and see what he was up to.

He flew past me, and over the university, then he turned around and went lower and started to make a big circle, which was kind of stupid and dangerous, since I'd said that was where I was flying, and I hadn't heard him tell anyone on the radio what he was doing. So when he went by I read the numbers off the back of the airplane and thought maybe I'd tell Mister Salvatore when I got back to Kalamazoo.

After a couple more circles, he went back up to altitude and flew off and I don't think he saw me at all, even though I didn't try to cover my blinking light.

I flew back to Aquamarine's apartment and landed on the balcony then pulled open the door and got out of my gear in the living room. I packed it all in my saddlebags so that I wouldn't forget anything, and then went back into the living room and waited for Aquamarine to come back.

She had a little smear of fresh dirt on her muzzle from her plants, and I wiped it off for her. She asked if I wanted to help with breakfast, and I did, but I warned her that I still didn't know how to cook that much. She said that was okay, and most of my helping her was me getting food when she asked for it.

She had a low table on wheels that she could use to prepare stuff on, and a step-stool for standing at the stove, and both of those things looked like they'd be useful if I wanted to do more cooking, although standing on the counter worked too.

Jenny got up when breakfast was almost done, and Aquamarine put our pancakes and scrambled eggs on plates for us and then got us each a glass of juice.

When we were done eating, Jenny drove to the train station, and we waited inside until the train came, then they came out on the platform with me and I hugged Jenny and nuzzled Aquamarine and got on the train.

I got a seat that had a table, and after I'd waved goodbye one more time as the train left the station, I got out my journal and finished up my entries for the weekend, 'cause I hadn't had enough time to do it all. And I also wrote down the numbers I'd seen on the airplane in a corner, so I wouldn’t forget them.

I probably wouldn't have been able to get all caught up, but the train had to wait for a while outside of Augusta. The conductor announced that we'd be moving soon, but soon was almost an hour, and I was glad that I hadn't made any plans for when I was back in Kalamazoo. I could tell that some other people had, though, 'cause I could hear them grumbling.

We never really got going fast again, either. I could have gotten out and flown back quicker.

After I'd unpacked my saddlebags, I filled up my birdfeeder then flew over to Aric's and filled up his, too.

I thought about the airplane this morning and I still hadn't decided if I should tell Mister Salvatore. I hadn't been nice on the radio like I was supposed to be and even though he'd started it, that didn't make me right.

If it had just been that, I think I would have let it go. But the way he'd flown low right through the middle of where I'd told him I'd be, that was against the rules. I had to respect other airplanes, but they had to respect me, too.

So I turned on my computer and wrote a computer letter to Mister Salvatore, and I admitted that I'd been rude, too, and then I read back over it and couldn't decide if I liked what I'd written or not, so I left it on the screen and paced around the apartment a little bit. Then I ate the rest of my alfalfa, tried to remember how to order more of it, and then once I'd figured that out (and ordered a box of timothy as well) I read through the letter again and sent it to him.

It hadn't bothered me that the train was late, 'cause I didn't have any plans, but now I was pacing around my apartment like it was a cage . . . 'cause I didn't have any plans.

So I put on my flight vest and filled up my camelback and flew out of the apartment and I went north 'cause that was as good a direction as any.

I hadn't felt like using my radio, so I stayed low and just listened to hear if there was anything flying around that I should know about.

When I got over the dirt mines, I circled around them, watching the machines work, and that was kind of fun. There were yellow machines with a big scoop on the front that dug into the walls, and they put them onto a conveyor which dumped them into two separate piles, and then another scoop-tractor took the dirt out of one of the piles and put it into another conveyor, which carried it up and into the back of a big open truck trailer. And then when it was full, it would drive off and another one would take its place.

They filled about a dozen trucks that way before there weren't any more to put dirt into, and then the scoop-tractors stopped sorting the dirt, and I saw their drivers get out of them and go back to a little white building.

I had a drink of water and then flew off to the west, 'cause that was the way the trucks had gone. And I followed them all the way up to the 131 Highway, which wasn't hard because it took them a long time to accelerate.

I realized when I got back to my apartment that my portable telephone was completely dead. I hadn't charged it at all over the weekend.

Mister Salvatore had probably gotten my message, and then he'd tried to call me, and I hadn't answered, and he was going to be mad when he found out.

I kept expecting him to show up all afternoon, but he never did, and when I turned my telephone back on, there were no messages from him.

But there was one from Aric—he'd called last night, when I was at Aquamarine's apartment and I wondered if the telephone had been dead then or if I just hadn't heard it ringing from inside my saddlebags.

So I sat on the papasan and called him back and there was a lot of noise in the background until he went up to his room. He said that Autumn and Felicity were downstairs, doing some kind of fitness thing that involved a lot of jumping around. He said he thought it was called zoomba or something like that.

I told him about my weekend and all the tall ships we'd seen, and he told me about how he'd spent all his weekend doing tech so that they'd be ready for the show and that he'd gotten a promotion to light board operator that he hadn't really wanted but that was how theatre went sometimes and he said it wouldn't be fun if you didn't have to scramble at the last minute.

He said that they had another rehearsal tonight, but it wasn't for a few hours yet and he was just going to get some dinner at a fast-food restaurant and eat it up in the light booth.

I thought it would be fun to go and see his play, although I wasn't sure how I would get there. That was a pretty long way for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn to drive, but I bet a train would go there. I'd just have to figure out which one.

We had to stop talking after an hour, because I hadn't let my telephone charge enough and it was beeping at me. So I said that I missed him and I'd send him a computer letter soon and he said that he missed me, too, and I hung up right when the battery picture turned red.

I read another couple dozen Psalms, and then I heard someone knocking on my door so I flew down to see who it was and it was Trinity who was knocking, and Caleb and Lindy were standing behind her.

Trinity said that they were going out to hunt Pokemon and wanted to know if I'd join them.

I didn't know what Pokemon were or how you hunted them so they all explained that they were imaginary creatures that you could see with your portable telephones and Celeb showed me the ones he'd caught. He said that you walked around until you found one and then you threw a Pokeball at it and if you were good, you'd catch it and then you could train it and fight with it.

I said that I'd never played and I didn't want to scare off any of the Pokemon, and they said that I wouldn't, and it did sound like fun to walk around the neighborhood, so I said that I would.

They kept checking their portable telephones, and after a little while they found one near a small park by Academy Street, and Trinity caught it. She said it was a Eevee, and showed me a picture of it on her telephone. It was a cute little brown thing with really big ears and a white ruff.

Caleb said that when students came back to Western, there'd probably be a lot of Pokemon over there and maybe at Kalamazoo College, too, and sure enough, they found one right by the library. This one was a Weedle, which was some kind of leggy worm with a hat, and Caleb caught it.

We went down to Main Street, and then back up Grand Avenue, and there was another one there, which Caleb also caught. Lindy said that wasn't fair, so they decided they'd let her catch the next one no matter what it was, and we went around the neighborhood a bit more until we found another. Caleb saw it first, but he pointed to where it was and let Lindy catch it like he'd said he would.

I stayed with them until they went inside for dinner, and then I went back to my apartment. I was really happy when I landed on the balcony to see Meghan inside, sitting on my papasan with her folding computer in her lap.

When I came in, she closed her computer and held it off to the side so that I could jump up in her lap and kiss her.

She told me about her weekend and I told her about mine and I think I had more fun than she did, although she said that she got to stay in a big hotel near downtown, and that had been kind of fun. She thought I would have liked it there, especially since the room had a jacuzzi tub in it.

I asked her what her plans for dinner were and she said that she'd already eaten dinner, so I just got some fresh vegetables (which weren't looking so fresh anymore) and snacked on them. And she said that maybe tonight would be a good night to make up for missing the hot tub last week and I thought so, too, so she called for an Uber-car while I was finishing up my meal.

We sat in the hot tub together until it was all the way dark outside. She said she really wanted to enjoy it because on Monday, her uncle was coming back home and then we wouldn't be able to use it and so I wanted to know if we weren't supposed to be at all. Meghan said it was okay—he'd told her it was—but that she'd have to wear a swimsuit if he was home and it wasn't as much fun like that.

Since it was such a warm night out, I said instead of drying off we should just sit on the bench for a little while and air-dry. Meghan was a little reluctant, but I finally convinced her to try it, and she said she would as long as I stayed close to her.

She put down a towel to sit on and then covered her lap with another, which she said was so I could rest my head there.

It didn't work out like I'd hoped, though, and after a few minutes she said she was getting cold and she got up and put on a robe then started drying me off, and then we sat back down and looked up at the moon and the stars that we could see over the lights of Kalamazoo, and I pointed out a couple of airplanes flying overhead.

It was close to midnight by the time an Uber-Car got us back home, and as soon as we were inside, Meghan got undressed while I folded down the futon, and I snuggled up with my head on her breast and she put her hand on my cheek and said that at least we'd get to sleep in a little bit because she thought that soaking in the hot tub counted as bathing, and I thought so, too.

July 26 [Flying to Grand Rapids]

July 26

When I woke up, I snuggled against Meghan until her alarm went off. She reached over and turned it off, then kissed my nose and asked me if I was ready to get up yet.

I said that I wasn't, and she said she wasn't either. She scratched my ear and I nuzzled her chin, then I asked her if my ears moved when I was asleep.

She wanted to know why I was asking, and I said 'cause I didn't know.

Meghan said that she wasn't sure, but she thought they did. She said sometimes when I was sleeping on my side, I'd walk in my sleep, which was really cute. I wasn't sure if I believed her—I thought that was something that I would remember doing, but she swore it was true, and she said usually I'd get the blanket tangled in my hooves and push it off the end of the bed and that was what woke her up.

And she said that when I was lying on my stomach and she got up to pee in the middle of the night, I'd pop my wings out which she thought was for balance.

So we agreed that if I was moving my legs in my sleep and I was moving my wings, than my ears must be moving. Meghan said that she'd watch next time I was asleep and she was awake, and let me know for sure.

When the alarm went off a second time, we got up and I went to the bathroom while she put on her robe, then I went to the kitchen to set out breakfast for us.

I brushed her hair when she was done with her shower and after she got dressed we went downstairs for breakfast and she asked me what I was going to do with my day. I said that I was going to fly all morning, because I wanted to fly to Chicago before I left to go out west, and then I was going to see if I could get a camera like the one Gates had loaned me so that I could take pictures of me in flight.

Plus I had to check the bird feeders and read more of the Bible.

Meghan laughed and said that it sounded like I had a busy day planned.

We washed the dishes together, and she went upstairs and got my saddlebags and strapped them on, so that I wouldn't have to do it myself, and then we went out and waited for her friend to show up.

Once she'd left for work, I went home and took off my saddlebags and then I refilled my birdfeeder, 'cause it was nearly empty. That meant that Aric's probably needed attention, too, but rather than fly off right away and fill it, I filled up my camelback and got dressed for flying, so I wouldn't have to come back and do that.

I probably should have called Mister Salvatore and asked if he wanted to drive me to get a GoPro, but I didn't know what time I was going to be back, so I decided that I'd do that later.

Aric's bird feeder was almost empty, too. I went into the garage and got the bag which was pretty empty. I guess the mouse had eaten more than I'd thought he would. They were really tiny; I didn't see how one mouse could have eaten that much. Maybe there was more than one and they took turns at it.

Well, however many there were, they were going to be disappointed, because I emptied the bag in the feeder, so that the birds could enjoy it.

I went back and sat on the garage roof while I called the airplane directors to get clearance. I'd decided that I was going to fly north, all the way to Grand Rapids. I could just follow the 131 Highway up there.

Dori reminded me that Grand Rapids had an airport, too, and I would have to make sure that I had clearance from them before I got too close. So I said that I would, and she told me to be safe and to call in when I was back in Kalamazoo.

I flew almost due north from Aric's house, and when I crossed over the dirt mines, I started angling to the west. I could see the 131 Highway off to my left, and I crossed it just past where there were a bunch of little lakes and it made a jog to the east.

When I had crossed over, it was okay to climb, so I went up to about five thousand feet and used my radio to make sure that other airplanes knew where I was.

It was about a perfect day for flying. The sky was clear and there wasn't much wind at all. I wasn't the only one who thought so, either; I saw a balloon off in the distance, and also saw a few little airplanes going by, and some big ones up high that were making clouds behind them.

A lot of the land under me was farmland, and that got kinda boring sometimes, so it was fun to watch a noteworthy car or truck go by under me and then see how long I could keep my eye on it before it disappeared off in the distance. There was a bright yellow semi-truck that I could see for almost ten minutes before it was gone—semi-trucks were easier to keep an eye on, 'cause they were bigger and didn't go as fast as the cars.

It would have been really useful to have a map that I could put on my foreleg, so that I'd know where I was. I'd kinda memorized my route (and since I was following the 131 Highway, it was hard to get lost), but after I'd been flying a while, I started to wonder just how close to Grand Rapids I was getting. I had an idea where the airport was—it was east of the 131 Highway, off the 6 Highway.

There weren't any big towns, so when I saw Grand Rapids, I figured that I'd know, and then I'd tell the airplane directors in Grand Rapids where I was.

I saw the big lake where I'd first tried out my radio with Mel; that was on my right, a few miles away from the highway. And I thought I saw the building where we'd eaten, the one that had the small dirt pit next to it. I hadn't seen it from the air, so I wasn't sure if it was the same place. There was a big metal pavilion next to it now, and lots of machines around the metal pavilion.

By the time I got past the next curve in the 131 Highway, I could see Grand Rapids off in the distance, so I called their airport and told them where I was, so that they'd know.

They thanked me for advising them, and they said that I would have to descend below 2000 feet when I got to Moline. I wasn't exactly sure where that was, and they said that I would see the 131 Highway make jog to the west, and Moline was near the end of that jog, on the east side of the highway, and on the west side there was another town called Dorr.

Well, I was pretty much over that right now, and I was way too high, so I told them that I was going to circle back and descend, and they said that I could, so I made a big descending loop and when I came out of it I'd picked up some speed and was at 1500 feet, which was plenty safe enough.

I told them that I was now under 2000 feet and continuing north, and I said that I was going to turn around when I got to the 6 Highway, and they said that was okay.

It wasn't much further before there was city under me, and it stretched out in front of me as far as I could see, and I followed the 131 Highway all the way to a big intersection with roads and bridges going off every which way. I could see on the big green signs below me that this was the 6 Highway, which was where I was going to turn around, and I decided just for fun I was going to take the path that a car would if it wanted to turn around in the intersection.

I think I went the wrong way around one of the loopy ramps, but since I wasn't on the ground it didn't really matter, and I did end up going back south.

I called the airplane directors again and said that I was now headed south, and following the 131 Highway, and they asked me if I could give them an estimated airspeed.

Well, I wasn't sure, but I didn't think I was going faster than 20 miles per hour. I could have sped up, but then I might get tired before I got back to Kalamazoo. Everypony knows that you don't fly as fast as you can when you're going long distances.

When I got back to Moline, I got permission to climb again, and I took a couple of miles to get back up to 5000 feet.

I was really happy when I finally saw Kalamazoo off in the distance, and I could start gliding for longer stretches, 'cause I didn't have to worry about keeping altitude as much any more. I called Dori and told her that I was back, and said that I'd just passed D Ave and was descending, and asked if I could cut the corner from there to Kalamazoo College (I couldn't quite see the bell tower yet, but I could see the dirt mines, and I knew the area well enough to know where the bell tower was). She said I could.

I still had to fly some; I wasn't good enough at really stretching a glide to get all the way there, especially with the wind blowing out of the southwest.

By the time I changed my course enough to land at my apartment, I was exhausted. My wings muscles were sore, my coat was soaked, and my blinking light had quit completely, but I still felt pretty good, 'cause I'd just finished a seventy mile flight without stopping. That was almost enough to get to Chicago. A little bit more practice, and I'd be able to do it.

I stripped off all my flight gear and put my blinking light on my desk so I'd remember to put new batteries in it. I instantly felt cooler when I took off my vest—I don't understand why humans want to exercise with clothes on. If sweat doesn't evaporate, it doesn't cool you off, and it can't evaporate like it should when it's held in with clothing.

I stayed in the shower until the water turned cold, and then I turned it off and shook myself off and rather than dry myself, I took my towel and put it on the balcony and took a little nap under the tree.

Apparently, the birds decided that when I was sleeping, it was okay to get food, and that it was okay to peck fallen seeds out of my mane, 'cause I woke up with a robin digging through my mane and then he had the nerve to chirp at me when I jerked my head up and scared him off.

I told him that I wasn't the bird feeder, and he should get his seeds from somewhere else.

I was mostly dry, and my wings had stiffened up a little bit when I slept, so I shook them out and went back inside. I was starving, 'cause I'd flown through lunch, so I had a big plate of clover hay, and then I called Mister Salvatore.

He said that he'd take me shopping and that we could go today or tomorrow, whichever I preferred.

Well, I thought that today was a good day, so he said that he'd come by after dinner, and I said that I was worried that the stores might close, and he said that they were open late, so we'd have plenty of time.

So I sat on my futon and preened out my wings, and once I'd done that I got my Bible and went back out on the balcony to read it.

Isaiah started off by saying that God was mad because His people had forsaken him, and He was going to take things away from all the people who were bad and lead them to ruin. But for those who were good, he was going to make them holy and protect them with smoke and fire above Jerusalem.

And then God came and told Isaiah to be his messenger, and Isaiah said that he was unclean, so an angel touched a hot coal to his mouth and cleansed him with it, and then God told Isaiah to tell His message until everything in the land was forsaken.

Isaiah had sex with a prophetess and she gave birth to a son named Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, and then God told him that a flood was coming, and I was curious what was going to happen next but I saw Sienna turning into the driveway, so I put away my Bible and brought my towel inside and went downstairs.

I asked Mister Salvatore to stop at Taco Bell, 'cause I hadn't eaten dinner yet, and he said that we could go after we'd done our shopping, to minimize the chances of being stuck in a van with a farting pony.

We went to a store called Best Buy first, and it was filled with all sorts of amazing human gadgets. I kept getting distracted by the movies on the big flat televisions, and there was one that you could stand in front of and wear special glasses and see the picture in three dimensions. I'd never seen anything like that before, so Miss Cherilyn held the glasses in front of my eyes (they weren't really made for ponies) and all of a sudden everything seemed to pop out of the television until it was right in front of me, and I stepped backwards in surprise and then the picture on the television was all blurry.

That was pretty amazing magic, I thought.

Mister Salvatore said that I might really like the Oculus Rift, and Miss Cherilyn said that she didn't think that was a good idea at all, and he said it probably wasn't, but it might be funny to see, and asked her if she remembered what happened when one of the field agents brought his in, and she said that she did remember because that was the day that the break room table got broken when Agent Marshall had tripped over it.

Mister Salvatore said that had been a great day.

Then they took me over to the camera department, and we found a GoPro camera and a set of straps that were called a chest mount. Mister Salvatore persuaded the salesman to take it out of the box so I could try it on, and Miss Cherilyn helped me put it on and adjust it.

Well, I was glad we did, 'cause it would only fit with the camera under my belly, and the straps were pretty awkward, too. It wasn't something I was going to be able to put on and take off by myself.

The salesman suggested a wrist mount, which would go around my foreleg, but with the radios and altimeter I'd normally be wearing, I didn't see how there would be room for it at all. I guess I could put it on a hind leg, but then all you'd see most of the time was my forelegs, and that wouldn't be too interesting.

We tried a head mount next and that worked okay, I could pull it on by myself; the only thing I was worried about was it flying off and the salesman said that it wouldn't.

I wasn't sure that I believed him. I thought it would be okay for normal flying, but I don't think that the salesman has ever flown in a thunderstorm.

So I decided that I would see if the makers could build me a chest harness that would put the camera right at my brisket, that I could put on and take off by myself.

There was a Taco Bell that was between us and Meijer, so Mister Salvatore stopped there and told me that he'd better not regret it, and I said that he wouldn't.

Then we went around Meijer and I got two big bags of birdseed and also some more shampoo and soap, which I could have gotten on my own but since we were already here, it would save me a trip.

Mister Salvatore carried the birdseed up to my apartment, and Miss Cherilyn carried the other bags, and he asked me why there were haybales in the bedroom, and I said that I'd gotten a great deal on them at the farmer's market.

He made me promise not to buy more until I was almost out, and I said I wouldn't. I thought that those would probably last me through the end of August, and then I'd just get one more, and for school I could buy the smaller boxes (even though they were more expensive) because I didn't think that Peggy would want haybales in the dorm room.

And then he said that we'd be leaving the Friday after next for Stratford, and we'd pick up Aquamarine in Lansing. He said that we were going to drive the whole way, 'cause the train didn't go there.

I asked if Cayenne was coming, too, and he said that she was flying in to Detroit, and that Mister Barrow and Miss Parker would be picking her up, and we'd meet her in Stratford.

I thanked them for going shopping with me, and he said that he was glad that it had been pretty uneventful.

After I put the shampoo and soap in the bathroom, I sat in the papasan and read the instructions for my GoPro, changed the batteries in my blinking light, and then I went to bed a little bit early, 'cause I was pretty tired from the long flight today.

Author's Note

Special thanks to Georg and CatCube for answering my questions about controlled airspace.

August 1 [Flight to Indiana]

August 1

Monday morning wasn't as relaxing as Sunday morning had been. Meghan's alarm woke us both up, and we could only snuggle until it went off the second time, and then she had to get up so that she would have enough time to take a shower and get ready for work.

But we had our morning routine pretty well established, and so I got breakfast set out and then brushed her hair and didn't help her dress because that would have slowed her down (I helped a little by getting out underwear that I liked). And after breakfast we'd been working together so well that we had a little time to snuggle before her friend came, but I had to be careful not to mess up her hair or her clothes.

I flew low back to my apartment and then got all my gear together. If things went well, this was going to be the longest flight I'd ever accomplished on Earth. I was pretty sure I could do it, as long as I didn't do anything dumb.

I got all my gear ready, and I thought about taking some food along, although it would be really difficult to get to it in flight. That was something I would have to think about when the time came to fly to Chicago; I couldn't count on there being a cloud where I could land and have a snack, and I really didn't want to land on a boat if I could help it.

So then I thought that the smartest idea would be to take some food in case I needed it, but to hopefully not eat any of it, and if I could do that, I knew that I could make Chicago.

I had to take my airplane radio, but I left the other behind, and I thought about leaving the GoPro, too, but it really didn't weigh all that much and it wasn't really in the way when I flew.

I called the airplane directors and said what I was going to do, and they gave me permission to fly. Dori said that it would be okay to fly southwest to the 131 Highway, climbing over town, as long as I looked out for other airplanes and could get there in less than a half hour. I said that I would—if I got over the 131 Highway where it crossed the 94 Highway, I could do that in less than a half hour, even climbing all the way, without pushing myself too much for so early in the trip.

She said that would put me in their control zone for my climbout, and she could keep other airplanes away from me.

I thanked her and she wished me good luck on my flight, and then I took off from the balcony, went under the tree and the power wires, then started climbing. I couldn't see the highway yet but I was familiar enough with this part of Kalamazoo that I knew where it was even when I couldn't see it.

I did a real slow, gentle climb, to save energy, and when I got over Western Michigan University, I changed my course a little bit to take advantage of the weak thermal over their parking lots. It was too early to get much of anything off it, because the sun hadn't really had a chance to warm it up, but I'd take whatever free energy I could get.

By the time I'd gotten to the little curve of lakes and woods near the intersection, I was at four thousand feet, and I called Dori and told her where I was and how high I was flying, and then I crossed over the highways and kept climbing. I only had to change course a little bit to stay alongside the 131 Highway, because it turned right near that intersection.

I topped out at about five thousand feet, because I didn't think it was worth it to gain much more altitude. The winds were a little bit from the west but not too much—if they'd been stronger, I would have tried to fly over or under them to get more favorable conditions.

I let Dori know when I'd passed by the pair of lakes off to the east of the 131 Highway, because that was about where the airport's air control area ended. And then I kept going.

I knew Schoolcraft kinda well, since I'd flown over it before, but after that the land got a little bit unfamiliar. It was lots more fields, mostly, with rows of trees along the boundaries of them, and sometimes also patches of forest that stretched across a lot of fields.

There was a set of railroad tracks that ran kind of parallel to the highway, and another set that crossed them on the south side of Schoolcraft, and it was kind of nice to be following them along with the highway. I was pretty sure that this was the same tracks that ran alongside the river trail where me and Meghan had been walking yesterday, and as I flew my mind kind of wandered and I thought that maybe if she should have followed the tracks instead of the trail. Trails didn't always go anywhere interesting, but railroad tracks usually did, because it was a lot more work to build them.

The highway made a couple of jogs, but the railroad tracks stayed straight until I could see Three Rivers ahead of me, and then they curved off and I lost them in town, because they were going southeast and I was going southwest.

South of town the highway turned again, to avoid a big boggy area around some curves in a river, and then it turned again to go around the next town, which was called Constantine.

I followed it around the edge of town, even though I could have taken a shortcut. I didn't want to, because when I was flying over Lake Michigan, there weren't going to be any shortcuts.

I paid attention to the curves of the road and what buildings on the ground were easy to see from the air. And I also looked behind me every now and then to get a sense of what things would look like when I went the other way, because sometimes what seemed like an obvious landmark when you were flying one way wasn't so obvious when you were going back the other way.

I passed by another town that was on my east which I knew was called White Pigeon, and that was right near the border of Indiana, and the 80 90 Highway wasn't too far beyond that. I could see a big road that I thought was probably it ahead of me, but I couldn't be sure until I got closer.

The tracks crossed the highway south of White Pigeon and raced off to the southwest, and I didn't think I'd be seeing them again once I'd crossed over them. They were going through fields and not around a river or anything, which meant that their next destination wasn't along the 131 Highway.

And then the 131 Highway made another big curve to the west, and before it straightened all the way back out again, it crossed the 80 90 Highway, so I made a big turn and then started going north again.

I had assumed that the border between Michigan and Indiana would have been pretty obvious, but I couldn't see anything that looked like it was a border. The boundaries of fields weren't in a constant straight line except for where a road ran alongside a couple of fields, but none of the roads went far enough to be roads at the border. But I was sure I'd crossed it; there hadn't been any other big highways on the map. And it felt like I'd flown far enough to be there.

I circled again while I tried to decide if it was worth dropping down far enough to clearly read the signs on the highway, but I decided not to. I was sure that this was it; I could account for all the towns I should have passed on my way.

So when my circle pointed me back north, I flew off along the 131 Highway again.

The highway was such an easy path to follow, I think I could have not bothered looking at landmarks on my way down.

Like I had when I flew to Grand Rapids, I followed some cars with my eyes for as long as I could. There was a big boxy ambulance with its lights flashing that passed under me just after I got to Constantine, and I could see it all the way until it got off the highway in Three Rivers.

And after that, a train came along the tracks from behind me, and it wasn't going all that fast. A little bit faster than me, and it was long enough that I could barely see the front of it, but then it slowed down and stopped, and before I'd gotten back to the front of it, I saw another train crossing in front of it, through Schoolcraft.

I wonder how trains decide who gets to go first? They have signal lights like for cars, but I don't think that train signals go through a cycle like car signals do.

I could see Kalamazoo ahead of me, and I was glad for that, because I was starting to get a little bit tired. I still had a ways to go, too.

Once I was past Schoolcraft, I called Dori and told here where I was and how high I was flying, and she said that I could keep on my course, and that I should give her a call again when I got over the 131 and 94 Highway crossing, and she'd see if she could give me a vector straight in.

And she asked how I was feeling, and I said that I was tired, but I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having flown all that distance.

I was out of water in my camelback, and I was starting to get thirsty, and it was kind of tempting to try and rush for home, but I'd just wind up exhausting myself quicker if I did.

When I got over the crossing, I called her again and she said I could make a descending straight-in approach to my apartment, and that was good news because that meant I could glide some of the remaining distance. Of course the wind had shifted a little bit and now it was almost in my face, robbing me of speed.

There was a trick to use headwinds to your advantage, and I knew some of the mares on my team had known how to do it, but I'd never figured out how to do it right, and now wasn't the time to try and learn a new trick, so I just kept flying, over the little winding neighborhoods and then over Western Michigan's campus, angling towards the bright green tennis courts at the edge, which almost line me up with my apartment.

My landing back on my balcony wasn't especially graceful, but that was okay. I called Dori one last time and told her that I'd landed, and then I went inside and stripped off my gear and went right to the shower. I was covered in lather and my wings didn't want to pull all the way in, and my throat was completely dry so I stepped right into the bathtub and held my head up and caught the water in my mouth and drank a little bit, then let the water run over me. I think that I was steaming a little bit, I was so hot, and I knew I'd be sore tomorrow. Even so, I was really happy because I'd gone about a hundred miles, and I hadn't stopped once, which meant that I could make it to Chicago.

I was going to have to call Mister Salvatore and tell him.

I thought about when I wanted to go while I was rinsing off. Not before I went to Stratford, that was for sure. I could take it easy tomorrow, do some light wing exercise and legwork, and then another long flight on Wednesday to make sure I was ready, then I'd have a long weekend to relax, and I could fly over the lake on Monday or Tuesday, depending on when we got back and what the weather was like.

When I got out of the shower, I put my towel over my back and went into the unused bedroom to snack on some hay, then I laid on my back on the futon and stretched out my wings. It took a bit of shifting around to find a comfortable position, and no matter what I did, they'd get sore if I left them in one position too long, so I kept having to adjust myself a little bit.

I got up after about an hour and had another snack and drink of water, then I tried to decide if it was worth it to go to the store to get more food for dinner, or just eat what I had and buy some fresh food at the farmer's market tomorrow.

The second idea was more appealing to me, so I opened the balcony door to let more breeze in and set the papasan right next to it and got a book of Kipling's poems and read through it, letting my imagination wander.

I wonder what he would have thought about flying along over a highway? I think he would have liked it.

By the time I'd finished the poems in the book, I was hungry for dinner, so I went and made a plate of vegetables and put more hay on them and ate that in the papasan chair, then I sent a telephone telegram to Meghan letting her know that I'd had a really good flight today and asking if she'd made us a spa appointment, and she said that she had, and that it was this Wednesday.

That was good, 'cause I'd be well-groomed for our visit to Gusty.

I made sure that it was late enough that I could do a long flight and then I thought that I ought to tell Mister Salvatore that I was ready to fly to Chicago next week, but I decided that I could just as easily tell him tomorrow, and I was getting kind of sleepy, so I closed the balcony door because I didn't want to wake up with a bird nesting in my mane, and curled up on my futon.

August 6 [Tom Patterson Theatre]

August 6

Gusty was awake before either me or Aquamarine. She was either nervous about her play or eager or maybe both.

The three of us got out of bed and tried not to disturb Cayenne, who was flopped on her side next to Aquamarine. Her folding computer was still on the other bed, and so was the bottle of Jacapple, but there wasn't as much in it as when we'd gone to bed.

I was worried that she might sleep through Gusty's performance, and I couldn't imagine how sad that would make Gusty, and I kind of looked over at Aquamarine and I think she was thinking the same thing and we'd drag Cayenne to the theatre if we had to.

Gusty said that she had to go to her room and take a shower and groom and put on clothes and I said that the showers were big enough for all of us and it would relax her if we groomed her and she wasn't really sure that she wanted to and Aquamarine nuzzled her shoulder and nibbled on her mane a little bit and she untensed a little bit. She said that we could, but we'd have to go to her room 'cause her shampoo and brushes and clean clothes were all there.

When we opened the door there was a basket of coffee and muffins outside, and a little card that said good morning. Aquamarine took it inside so that nobody would trip over it and so when Cayenne woke up she'd have coffee, and then we went down the hall to Gusty's room.

I really liked the bathrooms that they had. There was a nice big bathtub that could have fit us all, and the shower was separate and had two showerheads.

Gusty was kinda embarrassed to get undressed in front of us, which made me kind of sad. It was like she'd lost some of what being a pony was, although I think I remember that she was from Canterlot and a lot of ponies there wear clothes all the time, I've heard. But it still didn't feel right to me.

Once me and Aquamarine started washing her, though, she started to relax a little bit, and then she started saying bits of her dialogue which was a little bit odd but maybe that's a thing that actors do. At first I thought she was talking to us, but she was looking off in the distance.

Neither of us got too clean, 'cause we were spending all our time working just on Gusty but that was okay.

When we turned off the water she shook herself off and then started drying herself with a hot-air blower. I'd tried using one once and didn't like it—it made my coat feel funny and my mane feel crunchy.

We got out her brushes and started brushing her coat, and once that was done Aquamarine sat down and combed her tail while I did her mane, and I kept having to stop while she looked in the mirror and put on makeup. I thought it was kind of heavy, but she said that was important for the theatre to really bring out her facial expressions, because they were hard to see from far away and so you wanted to overdo it.

Then she got dressed in underwear and loose pants and a loose shirt with buttons so she wouldn't mess up her mane when she took it off to put her costume on, and she nuzzled both of us and thanked us for getting her ready.

Just as we were getting ready to leave and get ready ourselves, there was a knock on the door and then it clicked open and Nicky came in. Her clothes were all wrinkled and she looked really tired but her face lit up as soon as she saw Gusty and the two of them hugged each other so tightly I thought that they might break some ribs or something.

We knew that they'd want time to themselves, so we wished Gusty luck again and each hugged Nicky and then we went back to our room.

Cayenne was still in bed when we got back to our room, so Aquamarine stood by the side of the bed and I pushed her off onto Aquamarine's back, and she carried Cayenne into the shower. I turned on the cold faucet, and Aquamarine walked under it and refused to move until Cayenne started yelling at her and I started swearing back, and it turned out I knew a lot more creative curses than she did.

Cayenne marched out of the shower, still dripping water, and picked up a cup of coffee in her field and drank it in a few gulps, then she opened up her bag and got out some aspirin, then she came back in the bathroom for a proper shower.

So the three of us got showered and groomed together, and Cayenne wanted to go down and see what was for breakfast. She got just eggs and Aquamarine and I shared a bowl of steel-cut oats.

Our helpers came down while we were eating and took the table next to us, and even though we had our own conversation and they had theirs it was nice to be next to them. Miss Parker asked if Nicky had arrived yet and I said that she had, and she was with Gusty. None of us knew when Gusty had to go get ready, but I knew that Aric had to be in place an hour before the show opened, and I thought that was probably the same for the actors, too. So I didn't think that we'd see her before the show.

We had plenty of time, though, so we took our time eating and then we all enjoyed a cup of coffee, and when we were finished we still had time to walk around a little bit before we went to the theatre.

It was about a kilometer from the hotel, and so after we went back to our room long enough for some last-minute grooming and turns in the bathroom, we met up in the hotel lobby and walked to the theatre.

It was a kind of strange looking building—it looked like a barn that had been added onto, but I'd seen a barn-theatre near Augusta, so I guess that was one way that humans built them.

The theatre wasn't as nice inside as the other ones I'd been in, either. It looked kinda unfinished. And the stage was strange; it was an island instead of being a normal stage, which I guess meant that you could see everyone from every side.

We'd gotten seats that were close to the front, and we decided that we'd sit with my helpers next to me and Aquamarine's helpers next to her and Cayenne in the middle.

I saw some people who were sitting across from us pointing in our direction, and there was also a pair of earth ponies in the crowd, but they didn't have as good seats as we did. Aquamarine waved at them, and they waved back at us.

And over to our left, I saw a man who looked really familiar, but I couldn't figure out where I'd seen him before. I think a lot of people knew him, 'cause a few people were waving at him and pointing to him and the grey-haired man sitting next to him.

I still hadn't figured it out by the time the lights dimmed down, and I turned my attention towards the theatre.

When the play started, the kind of shabby look to the building didn't matter at all, because all my attention was on the stage. It was a little different than when I'd seen it in Wisconsin: they'd changed their blocking (that's what it's called when actors move around) so that they could face every part of the audience, and I wondered how much work must have gone into that. I'd have to ask Gusty if it was harder to remember lines or harder to remember where you were supposed to go and when you were supposed to go there.

Gusty got a short round of applause when she first came out on stage, and I think it disoriented her a little bit, because she'd started to say her line and then she had to wait until the applause stopped. As soon as she started her first long speech, though, she was back in perfect form, and the whole crowd fell silent.

She was right in front of us when she put the flower on Lysander's eyes, and that was a little bit strange because at one moment she was looking at us but seeing something beyond us.

It was over too soon, and when she'd said her final line the theatre exploded in applause, and when the cast came out for their bow, everyone got on their feet and kept applauding loudly enough that I thought maybe the ceiling would come down. If there were people walking by outside that didn't know this was a theatre, they were probably really confused at all the noise.

All the actors went out the front, so that they could greet the audience in the lobby. And I guess being first out of the theatre would be one advantage to sitting in the very back, although you wouldn't have as good a view as we did.

But it gave us a chance to talk about the play, and I was especially happy that Mister Barrow and Miss Parker had gotten to see it. They both thought it was really really good, and even Mister Salvatore said that when he was in school, Shakespeare put him to sleep, but this had kept him on his toes for the whole thing.

Even though it was rude to eavesdrop, I couldn't help but overhear everyone else talking about how wonderful it was, and I thought so too.

When we finally got out of the theatre I made a point of greeting all the actors, because it would be really rude to just ignore them and run off to see Gusty, like a lot of people were. I couldn't actually even see her, but there was a big cluster of people around her.

We waited until the crowd had thinned out a little bit before we made our way over. The other two ponies we'd seen found us, and so we all introduced ourselves. They were Sterling Silver and Viola, both from Manehattan, and they said that they loved the theatre and had planned their vacation around seeing as many different performances as they could.

They said that Canada hadn't been their first choice, but there was a really long waiting list for New York and California, and they did a bit more research and found out that there were lots of good theatres and theatre festivals in Canada, so they were trying to visit as many as they could. They'd been in Montreal and Toronto and on Monday they were getting on the train and heading west.

Then Viola said that she didn't mean to be rude, but they wanted to greet Gusty before they left, and they had another performance to see at the Avon theatre, but they would love to treat us to breakfast at their hotel tomorrow if we could, and Sterling Silver told us their telephone number so that we could call them in the morning.

Well, we didn't really get much of a chance to talk to Gusty in the theatre, 'cause I could tell that she was getting kind of tired from all the well-wishers, and besides we had a lunch reservation soon, so we just nuzzled her and told her she'd done a great job and we were looking forward to lunch.

We took our time walking to the restaurant. Mister Salvatore had reserved a whole room, and he said that he didn't know how many people were going to be there, because Gusty was allowed to invite anyone she wanted to. Cayenne said that was kind of unfair, and I smacked her with a wing. I don't think she was being serious, but it did sound mean.

The restaurant was called The Prune, which was a really strange name, and it was kind of a strange building, too—it looked like a house, but it said 'restaurant' in big letters down the front.

So we went into the room that we'd had reserved for us at at first it was a little awkward because a woman with dark hair took one look at Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, who went in first, and said that it was the feds. Then I said that they were my helpers, and they'd driven us here, and she kind of blushed and said she was sorry.

Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow looked at each other and took out their wallets and showed them to her, and Miss Cherilyn told them to be nice to Ruby.

The bald man and his grey-haired friend were there, too. And there was also another beautiful woman with ebony skin and dark hair, and an older woman with big glasses.

Miss Parker and Miss Cherilyn were most impressed with the two young ladies, and Mister Barrow went right over and introduced himself to the two men, and I thought that maybe the older woman would feel left out, so the three of us went over to her.

She was a famous theatre director called Zelda, whose husband had started a famous theatre in Washington, D.C., and she was a very well-known play director. She was really nice, and she said that Gusty had done a marvelous job and it was the first time she'd seen a pony acting in a serious role.

Well, the ebony lady—whose name was Uzo—overheard that and said that Gusty had done a very good job on Orange is the New Black, and Zelda said that she didn't doubt it, because it was obvious that Gusty put all of herself into every character.

We'd finally all gotten comfortable with each other when Gusty and Nicky arrived, and Nicky took one look around at everyone who was in the room and for a second I thought she was going to turn and bolt but she went around and shook everyone's hand and then she sat down next to Gusty and took her hoof and Mister Salvatore frowned a little bit but the grey-haired man got a big smile on his face.

I'd kind of guessed that the two women were from Orange is the New Black, and I found out that the two men were really well-known Shakespearean actors, and that they had both been knighted because they were so good. And it was kind of a strange dinner, 'cause there were times I felt like we were really left out of the conversation, and maybe it would have been better if we hadn't been there. I don't think that was on purpose, but it would have been the same thing if I'd invited Gusty to a cloud convention—she wouldn't have known anything about it at all, and it would have been really hard for her to participate.

And I knew a few things about human theatre, because of Aric. Cayenne and Aquamarine must have really felt a bit left out.

But after some drinks, and a lot of praise for Gusty (which she deserved), people started talking about other stuff, and pretty soon there were a lot of conversations going on.

We spent most of the afternoon there, which was the longest lunch I've ever had in my life. I think Cayenne was the only one who was used to it, 'cause she'd been to some formal dinners in Canterlot.

Everyone had gotten tickets to see H.M.S. Pinafore, which was a musical play about sailors and love and I really liked it, because it kind of reminded me of home.

A bunch of Gusty's fellow actors had also watched it, and so we split up after the play was over. Cayenne said that she was going to try and crash an after party, and me and Aquamarine decided that we'd walk around town a little bit and then go back to our hotel room. Miss Cherilyn had made friends with Uzo and Ruby, and they went off to a bar together, and Miss Parker was talking to Zelda. I wasn't sure where Mister Salvatore and Mister Barrow had gone.

So we walked along the river and got caught up on what we'd done over the summer. I told Aquamarine more about flying in storms and how I was going to fly over Lake Michigan to Chicago next week, and she told me that her experiments were going really well, and said that she'd spent some more time with the horses, too, and the last time she'd been shod the farrier had done a really bad job of it and next time she was going to be smart and have a proper farrier work on her hooves.

When we got back to the hotel, both of us were ready to relax, so we got a bottle of white wine sent to our room and sat in the giant bathtub sipping our wine, and we made a bet on whether or not Cayenne would come back before we went to bed. I didn't think she would, but I was pretty confident that she'd be in bed by the morning, and we both agreed that next time we saw her, she'd smell like sex.

Author's Note

Fanart!

By Shachza