November 7

I woke up at the usual time, because while my portable telephone might have known that it was supposed to change times, my body didn't, and it was very confusing.

I guess humans adapt to it much easier than ponies, because Aric and Meghan were still both fast asleep, and so I snuggled back down with them but I couldn't go to sleep, so I just listened to them breathing and the birds outside—who probably also didn't know anything about Daylight Saving Time—chirping as they had their breakfast.

And I was kind of starting to doze off again when Meghan woke up enough to start scratching my back, and I pushed my head against her and gave off a happy sigh.

She leaned up on one elbow and looked over at Aric and asked if we should wake him up, and I thought that would be kind of rude, so we let him sleep until Meghan's alarm started going off, and even that didn't wake him up. She was kind of quick to turn it off, so maybe that was why.

I thought that her alarm had gone off at the wrong time and I had to look at it and make sure that it was correct, 'cause it didn't feel right to me. She said that in a few days things would go to normal and I hoped that was true. I didn't think I'd been this confused when Daylight Saving Time had started, but maybe that was because I had to get up earlier, and so it hadn't seemed so strange.

Us moving around in bed was what finally woke him up, and he was pretty out of it, and I thought that maybe he was having trouble with the time change, too, but Meghan said it was probably because he'd stayed up all Saturday night working on his paper, and it turned out that was why.

Even though it was his own fault for not getting it done sooner—I wouldn't have been mad if he'd done it on Saturday instead of going to Fort Custer with me—I felt kinda bad for him.

So after we'd kissed him goodbye, Meghan got dressed, and the two of us walked back to school, and I went right up to my room and woke up Peggy so that she could have a morning trot with me. She was a little bit more cheerful because of the time change, and she got dressed while I was in the bathroom filling up my camelback.

We went around Academy Street to Grove and even though we'd left kinda late because I'd been at Aric's, we got close enough to wave to Caleb and Lindy and Trinity before they got on their bus.

And then we went around the rest of the neighborhood the usual way, and it was really strange for it to be so light out when we'd finished our morning exercise. And I kept thinking that I was missing my class, even though I wasn't.

After Kat got out of the shower, I took a really quick shower and then let Peggy take hers, and I went back to the room and groomed myself and preened my wings. The summer brush I used was starting to tangle in my coat now, 'cause I was starting to grow in a winter coat, so it was about time to put it away and get out my winter brush. Pretty soon I was gonna be fluffy instead of sleek, and I hoped that the weather got cold pretty soon, 'cause if it stayed warm like it had been, I was gonna be too hot.

Peggy got dressed and I packed up my things for thermodynamics, and I hoped that Lisa was at the class, or else I was going to have to go to her room and get the lab notes and figure out how to put them in the computer myself, 'cause she might have had an excuse for not getting them done but I didn't.

I guess the extra hour in the morning had given the kitchen more time to get ready, because there were omelets and waffles and lots of other good food, and so I got both an omelet and then I shared a waffle with Peggy, 'cause neither of us wanted a whole one. And everyone was a little bit cheerier and more awake at the breakfast table, and when I got there Christine and Sean were telling Meghan how much fun we'd had at the second Rocky Horror.

Sean got up and went off looking for more food, and when he came back he had a whole plate full of chocolate eclairs, and he said that they'd just put them out and he'd gotten enough for everyone, and he passed them around. I didn't want one, 'cause I was full, so he had one extra, and he gave that to Christine, and she kissed him even though she had chocolate frosting all over her lips.

Everyone got done eating a little bit early, so we didn't have to rush off, and we just sat and talked for a little bit, and then I got up so that I could get to class on time and I nuzzled Meghan before I took my tray back to the conveyor.

I flew across the quad, and landed in front of Dow and I got there early enough that the last class hadn't left yet, and Lisa was there although she still looked kind of sick and maybe should have stayed in bed.

Professor Brown taught us more about mixes and the Lever rule, because it was so important how it worked because most things were solutions of one kind or another, and after he'd reviewed what we'd learned before he started to talk about alchemical potential, and he gave us equations for all the different parts of the pressure diagram, and some of them got so long that they were crowded on the markerboard and so I was careful not to scrunch them up in my notes.

He also told us that the achemical potential of a mixture was always lower than the alchemical potential of a pure liquid, and then we moved on to non-ideal liquids, and he gave us a formula for that, and then how there might be positive or negative deviations from it, if the two liquids really liked each other or didn't get along at all.

He drew out a phase diagram for acetone and carbon disulphide, and I didn't know what either of those were. Carbon was on the periodic table, but acetone and disulphide wasn't, and he said that when you mixed them together they tried to become a gas. But if you took away the carbon disulphide and replaced it with chloroform (which also wasn't on the table) than they liked each other and would stay a liquid that was lower than it should have been on the ideal phase diagram.

After class was over, me and Lisa went to the lounge and she got out our lab work and we both looked over it for mistakes, and we didn't find any, which was good. She said that she was going to go back to her room and get some more sleep, and I went back to my room.

I sat at my desk and did my homework, then when I was done I picked up the Bible without really thinking about it and then I remembered that I had finished it. And I ought to have started the World War One book—I was going to start over, 'cause I couldn't remember what I'd read—but the window was open and it was a really nice day again and people were playing out on the quad, and I thought it would be more fun to join them. I could start on the book in the afternoon.

So I went out and galloped down the quad, then when I got to the bottom I flew up almost against the wall of Hoben and then flew to the top and landed and did it again, and that was a lot of fun. And then I laid on the hill and rolled on my back in the grass, which cooled me down a little bit, and when I got back up again, I had lots of grass clippings stuck in my coat, 'cause they'd trimmed the lawn while I'd been in class, and so I shook them off and that made me think of a tree shedding its leaves.

And there were trees that hadn't shed their leaves yet, maybe because it was still pretty warm, but they were mostly turned, so I started to gallop around one and I didn't think that I was accomplishing anything at first, but then I started to feel the pull from the tree, and pretty soon I had leaves raining down around me.

I was only one pony, and I wasn't very good with trees at all, so by the time I'd started to get dizzy, the tree still had a lot of leaves on it, but there was a pretty respectable pile of leaves around it, too. And there were also a few people who'd watched me, and also got to watch me stagger around a little bit while my body tried to figure out straight again.

I had to go back to my room to get my things for math, and when I got there Peggy asked me what I'd been doing on the quad, because someone had texted her and said that I was running in circles, and I said that I'd explain at lunch, because I thought maybe other people would want to know, too.

So after we'd gotten our food, I explained how we ran to help the leaves come off the trees so that they would be ready for winter, and Sean said that on Earth the leaves just fell off on their own and nobody needed to help them. And I thought that maybe they would in Equestria, too, but it was also a sign to everyone that winter was coming, and it was time to get ready to hibernate or to fly south if they were birds, plus it was just a fun thing that everypony could do, even pegasuses and unicorns.

Christine said that in America the sign of fall was pumpkin spice, and when animals smelled it in the air that was how they knew it was time to leave. Anna asked her what the animals had done before Starbucks, and she said that there was no civilization before Starbucks, just people living in caves trying to invent pumpkin spice lattes.

So I wanted to go to Starbucks and try one since they were apparently so good.

When we were done eating, me and Sean went to math class together, and I was still feeling pretty frisky, so instead of walking I cantered across the quad, and he just kept walking, so I cantered all the way back to the dining hall and then back, and I might have been able to do it a third time but instead I just stayed by the door until Sean arrived.

Professor Pampena taught us about flux, which was another line integral. And it was kind of similar to work, but not the same. And it was really useful because it could be used to figure out how fluids moved.

He showed us how to calculate it on a circle first, and it was kind of easy because a lot of things got to cancel out, and then he showed us on another vector field how it was just zero, and then when he was sure we understood that, he said that instead of solving it geometrically it was easier to use coordinates when things got complicated, and showed us how to do it that way. And at first it seemed like it was going to be more difficult, but then he reminded us how to rotate vectors, and then it was a lot easier.

He wrote an equation for it on the markerboard and told us that we had to remember it, so I underlined it in my notes, and then told us that there was a Green's theorem for flux, too, and put that on the markerboard, too.

We went to Sean's room to do our math homework together, and he had the window open and there was a little bit of a breeze blowing through it and it got better when he cracked his door open some to give the wind a place to go. And I stretched out my wings and let it ruffle my feathers a little bit before I started to focus on my math homework. At least this time I'd be doing it without my insides trying to get out.

He finished up while I was still double-checking all my answers, and he asked if I minded if he changed the music to another beautiful song, and I said that he could. And the woman who was singing had a really beautiful voice, and I kind of lost track of checking my work, 'cause I was focused on what she was singing. And I didn't know any of the words, and he said that they were Bulgarian, and that the song was called Zaidi Zaidi. And he didn't know what the words meant, but I didn't think it mattered too much.

I wish that I could sing like that.

The two of us went over our problems together, and then we wrote out one of them in Equestrian, and I was glad I'd thought to write down what symbols I'd been using for the math letters, because I'd forgotten one of them, and I didn't want to confuse Professor Pampena by changing math letters from one problem to the next.

And he played the song for me one more time before we watched a Numberphile movie. It was about a math problem that had been on a math Olympics test, and it had been so difficult that the mathematicians who had picked the questions for the test couldn't solve it, and I thought that that was kind of unfair, but they'd thought that maybe some of the contestants could figure it out. And it was actually two movies, because the first one explained the question and then the second one gave the answer.

At the very end, he also revealed that one of the other people who had solved it correctly and gotten all seven points was Zvezdelina Stankova, who had been in one of the other movies I'd seen. So she was really really smart. And she was Bulgarian and so was the song that I liked that Sean had just played for me which was also an interesting coincidence.

I went back to my room and got out my World War One book and started reading it, just to familiarize myself again with how it had started, and then it said how all the different European nations declared war with each other just because Archduke Ferdinand got assassinated and Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for it.

And the Germans went through Belgium and started massacring people on their way to France, and then Germany pushed through and into France and hundreds of thousands of people got killed.

And in the sea, the British sank German ships and blockaded them to force surrender, and that only worked until the Germans started sinking their ships with submarines.

The Russians attacked in Prussia and the Germans defeated them, but Austria-Hungary didn't do so well, until the Germans helped them, and they fought all winter and nobody won.

Turkey decided to fight Russia, too, and their warships bombed ports. And in Africa, all the European nations started to fight against enemy colonies there, too.

Japan declared war on Germany, and Australia defeated a German colony that was nearby, and they started to fight around South America, too.

And the book kept telling me how many people died in each battle and the numbers were impossible to imagine. It seemed like everybody was fighting everybody else and nobody was getting anything from it. I guess it was important for friends to stand by each other, but I thought that everyone should have already figured out that the fighting wasn't working and nobody was winning and maybe they should just stop.

I wasn't enjoying the book very much, so I was pretty happy when I got to put it down and go to dinner. And I ate a pretty light dinner, even though I was hungry, 'cause I had to practice cheerleading tonight and I didn't want to do it with a full stomach.

Which was too bad, because they had a pretty good dinner, and I had a couple of fish fillets, and also some salad, and then I told Reese and Anna that I wasn't going to be able to come to Durak tonight because of cheerleading practice, and I thought that I should probably tell Aric, too, so he didn't worry.

I got there a little bit early, and so I had to wait around the entrance, and Sandra wound up arriving a little bit late, so everyone was already there and even though she hadn't been there to coach them, they started to do their stretches. I'd worked with weatherponies who weren't that motivated.

While they were doing their normal routines, Sandra took me into another room so that I could get measured for the uniform, and she had a woman named Elaine take the measurements, because she had been the same one who made the costumes for the play. And she kind of fussed about a bit and had me hold out my wings and flap them and flex them, and then move around my tail. My legs weren't too much of a problem, because the vest didn't have sleeves and the skirt at the back let my hind legs move freely.

And I thought it would be like with my lab coat where I would get it back in a couple of days to see how it fit, but she'd brought a whole sewing kit with her in a toolbox, and she got to work right away.

So I got interrupted a couple of times while I was practicing, just so that I could try it on and try to move in it and then she'd make a couple of marks and take my clothes back off and I could practice some more, and then I had to be fitted again.

But it was worth it, because by the end of practice she'd made me a cheerleading uniform that fit me, although I had to be careful because some of the seams were still held together with pins that would poke me if I moved too much. And she'd even made underwear with a tail-hole which I didn't like very much but Sandra had decided that I would have to wear it, even though I didn't really want to.

While the girls went off to the locker room to change, I went back into the other room and Elaine helped me take off my uniform, and then she also measured around my fore fetlocks so that she could make straps for pom-poms for me.

She said that she should have it all ready for tomorrow, and I could practice with it on, since it would be my first time wearing it.

I was happy to have it off, 'cause it was hot wearing clothes. I didn't know how Gusty managed. She was probably gonna have to clip her coat really short, especially if the weather stayed like this.

I walked back up the quad to my dorm, and I was glad that the temperature had dropped. I guess that was one nice thing about it being later sooner—the temperature got a little bit cooler. And I was getting kind of tired, 'cause my body still hadn't figured out the new time, and thought that it was bedtime.

I probably should have taken a shower to rinse out my coat, but I didn't really feel like it, and I'd be taking one in the morning anyway. And so I went and started to pack up my flight gear so that I could go to Aric's, and then I went to get Meghan, and the two of us walked over to his house together, and I told her about my cheerleading outfit.

We were a little early and he hadn't got back from Durak yet, and I was kind of tired, so I just got in bed and I scooted over up against the wall, and I was mostly asleep by the time that Meghan was undressed and in bed with me. And she was kind of worried that maybe I was getting sick, but I told her that it was just the time change messing with me, because my body was telling me that it was time to sleep.

I felt kind of bad disappointing her, but she rubbed my ears and told me that it was okay, it was better to let my body get accustomed to the new time, and then she put her arm around my belly and snuggled up to my back.

This is the best summary of World War One I have ever read:

"No war in the history of the world has equalled this conflict in mere stupendousness. In number of nations actually engaged; in its reckless abandon of human lives, destruction of wealth and the treasured creations of the ages; in titanic battles and sieges; fury of martial combat; prostitution of every known achievement of science to death-dealing devices and instrumentalities; in its subversion of the civilizing processes of morals and mind to justify the extremities and perversions of racial and human passions; in the overturning of law and order; and in the undermining of human confidence in the higher institutions of society, it stands naked and alone in its saturnalia of destruction."

—The Circle of Knowledge (c) 1921

Poor bastard who wrote that didn't know that in two decades there'd be another.