April 1

It was nice to wake up next to Meghan again, even if I couldn't linger in bed with her. I didn't want to wake her up so I just eased my way out of her embrace and kissed her on the forehead and then let myself out of her room.

I had to be quiet going into our room, too, 'cause Peggy would be asleep. But I got in and out without waking her up at all, and once I was outside, I took to the air.

It was a bit cooler today and there was the smell of snow in the air, but that didn't seem right. Spring had been a couple of weeks ago, so maybe it was something else that was confusing me. There was a building in town that made the sky smell like mint, and another that made it smell spicy, so probably there were other buildings that made different smells in the sky and one of them was mixing me up.

I'd gotten a good bit of exercise yesterday, so I didn't feel like I needed quite as much today. Rather than speed around, I went up to the base of the clouds and boxed one around the sky for a little bit. I thought about bringing it down with me, but then decided it would be happier up in the sky, so I pushed it back with its friends and dove back down to the school.

Every day there were more birds on campus, and that made me happy. It wasn't the influx that Equestria had, since the birds had to decide when to come back all on their own, but I was kinda used to that because there were some seabirds that went on their own schedules without a pegasus to help them.

When I was at tree canopy level, I scouted out all the new birds and got chased by a cardinal who probably thought I was going to try and steal his territory. I taunted him for a little bit then flew off so he'd feel good about himself.

Since I had a short flight when I got back to our room Peggy wasn't there. I guessed that she was in the shower, so I went into the bathroom to see. Sure enough, she was in there, and Kat was waiting on the bench for her turn.

What would happen if everybody had classes first thing in the morning? That was something that the bathroom designers hadn't thought of.

After Peggy was done, Kat took her turn and was pretty quick, and I didn't spend too much time, either, so when I got back to our room Peggy was still there, getting dressed.

She told me that today was April Fool's Day, which is a day when people played funny tricks on each other, which I thought was an interesting human ritual. I asked her why today, and she said she didn't know, but she thought she'd heard once that the French started it.

Then when she was at her desk gathering stuff up for her class, she said that there was a cowlick in my tail and that she could get it for me, so I turned around to let her and felt a kind of tug at my tail and then she said that it was good now and she had to go to class but she'd see me later.

I heard a couple of people giggling as I walked across campus, but it wasn't until I sat down with my breakfast that I realized that Peggy had played a trick on me: she had used one of her hair-clips to put a sign on my tail that said 'pull me.'

Sean said that was really juvenile, but Christine thought it was kind of funny and cute, and over breakfast we talked about some of the other pranks that people played all the time like putting sugar in the salt shaker or the other way around, and Sean showed me how to tear off a piece of napkin and then fill the very topmost part of a salt shaker with pepper.

Christine asked what kind of pranks ponies played, and I said that hitting ponies with rainclouds or lightning was really funny, and she said that I shouldn't do anything with lightning because it could kill a person here on Earth.

She wanted to know if I was going to do anything to get back at Peggy, and I told her that I hadn't really thought of anything, but she said I had to, just because Peggy had started it.

I said that I could hide all her underwear, but Christine told me that was kind of mean, and she wouldn't find out until tomorrow anyway. I couldn't really think of anything else right away that would be funny and not mean, so I finished my breakfast and took my sign and put it in my bag so that I would keep her hair-clip safe.

Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee started off class by reminding us that we used linear models because they were easy, but complex systems were almost never actually linear, and he gave some examples of manufacturing and chemistry, where when you combine two elements what you get sometimes is nothing like what you started with.

The weather is like that. There were lots and lots of different things interacting together in the sky and on the ground to make it happen, and the supervisors had to have an understanding of how it all worked together in order to make the things you wanted happen. And sometimes despite your best plans it doesn't work out because there was something that you overlooked and then it usually turns into a lot more work from everypony. But a lot of the ponies on the ground didn't know that and just got mad when there wasn't the weather that was promised when it was promised.

Then he got into describing the equations, and I really had to pay attention because there was a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary like lambda and sinusoidal and Jacobian linearization. I was glad that I didn't have to dip my pen in an inkwell, 'cause it carried all its ink inside in a little tube.

It's always weird to learn new symbols to draw, too. Everyone else in the class could do it better than me, I bet. English and math weren't made with mouthwriting in mind, and for a minute I felt a bit jealous that Cayenne was probably learning the same symbols but could copy them a lot easier with horn-writing.

When class ended it was almost a surprise. We had a bit of homework for the weekend, but it looked like it would be pretty easy so long as I could remember all the symbols.

In the dining hall for lunch they had replaced the tags that went with all the food with silly tags, which I guess was their idea of a joke but it wasn't all that funny since anyone could see that the food wasn't actually what the tag said it was. The only one that made me laugh was the card by the bananas that called them 'yellow curved fruit.'

I still couldn't think of a joke to play on Peggy, but I kind of had that idea that I could do something with a cloud, maybe. I just wasn't sure what. I didn't want to bring one into the room,'cause that would get everything wet and she wouldn't like that. I wouldn't like that.

If' I'd known earlier, I could have brought a small cloud down and given her an sleetshower in the bathroom. That would have been funny.

We spent all class discussing how Margaret Mead had gotten things wrong in her book. At first I thought it was kind of silly that she would have us read a book that had a lot of mistakes in it, but it turned out that the truth was a lot more complicated than that.

After discussing that for much of the class, Amy said that it was important for us to remember when we read material that our biases might influence us in what we read, and that it was especially important if we were ever engaged in anthropological study that we be aware of our biases and how they might mislead us. Then she gave us a small pamphlet about an imaginary primitive village of humans and it had some drawings and descriptions of some of the people who lived in the village and what the land around it was like, and she told us that our assignment was to write an essay describing one thing we'd like to learn about these villagers, and how we would go about learning it, and what methods we might use to make sure that we weren't jumping to conclusions.

That sounded like it would be fun. My first thought was to see what they ate, 'cause there weren't any fields on the map, and I knew a little bit about farming and a little bit about foraging, so I had some ideas how I might figure out their diet.

So I worked on that a little bit before dinner and then I started reading Judges and I think that Liz was right when she said that the men who wrote the Bible weren't perfect. Even after all God had done for them, they kept breaking His rules and getting punished for it, and finally they would cry out for mercy and He would send someone to help them, but then when that person was gone they'd go back to their old ways, again and again. Probably if He hadn't promised that He wasn't going to drown them all in a flood anymore, He would have done that and started over.

Even so, it was really sad how they couldn't learn to live together and get along together. Nobody seemed to figure out that if they all kept fighting that none of them would ever prosper.

It was too much for me to think about, so I did equations until it was time for dinner. I had to look at my notes a lot, just to make sure I got all the symbols right. It would have been easiest to solve them using our symbols, but that would come back to bite me in the tail if I got in the habit of doing it that way.

I still hadn't thought of anything funny to do to Peggy, but when she got up to get dessert, I got an idea and I went and filled a glass mostly with grape juice and then put a little bit of Sprite in it for the bubbles, and I put that in the place of her drink. The cups were dirty and smudgy because of how many times they'd been washed, so it wasn't very obvious that it was kind of a purple color, and Peggy didn't notice at all when she sat down with a couple of cookies on a plate.

It worked just like I'd hoped; she didn't really pay any attention to the glass and picked it up to take a drink and then made a face and spit it right back into the cup.

I left right after dinner to go over to Aric's. He was down on the couch watching a movie and he said that it was almost over, so I sat down next to him and watched it with him. He said that I was kind of distracting, and I didn't really get what was going on since I hadn't seen most of it, so he stopped the movie and told me it was called The Merchant of Venice and it was an assignment for class so he had to watch it even if he really didn't like Shakespeare all that much.

Well, I thought he could watch it later, but he said that it was due back at midnight tonight, so he had to finish watching it now, and so I kind of sulked on the couch until it was over. I think I would have liked it if I'd seen the whole thing. The language had a nice flow to it, and the setting was really pretty, too. It was a city called Venice, and there were lots of canals instead of roads.

When we rode to the movie library so that he could return it, he apologized for being a little short with me, he'd planned to be done watching it before I came over but he'd spent more time than he'd planned working on his set design homework, and had had to run out to an art supply store and get more foam board for it. And I was happy because it was fun riding in the truck with him, even if it wasn't as nice as any of the other cars I'd been in.

He ran in really quick to return the movie and then we drove back to the house and I leaned up against his shoulder and just enjoyed being close to him and this time he didn't swat my hoof away because he could still drive when he was distracted.

Then when he shut off the truck in the driveway I just climbed up on his lap and it was a little bit difficult but a whole lot of fun.

Next Chapter: April 2 [Lazy Saturday] Estimated time remaining: 55 Hours, 50 Minutes