Sealion Kisses!

Well Emily wins the prize for both most nerdily awesome, and most belated birthday present I think I have yet received :) One of her old friends is now a trainer at the New York Aquarium and she brought me along for a behind-the-scenes tour which included kisses from TWO sea lions and TWO seals. Now if you wanted to know, and you should, sea lions do not actually kiss in the wild, what they DO do is a "breath exchange" which is a sort of hello, probably similar to dogs sniffing each others rear-ends. Thus when the KISS they are actually gently BLOWING AIR INTO OUR EARS AND HAIR. It was quite ticklish and fishy...and there is an AWESOME picture of Emily looking concerned while one is blowing in her ear on facebook if you have access to that. Anyway, I can't seem to post my pictures on facebook for some reason, so here are a few highlight pictures (for more see facebook):

In other news, my parents came down and my dad got to release a hawk as a Christmas present I had promised him. It was really cool because the one we ended up releasing was one that had come here a few weeks ago, so I got to finally see an animal come in, be treated, and be released (by my dad no less) which was nice. Also the release went well; the hawk didn't claw my dads eyes out or crash into a tree, which was nice. Also, also, I visited Mary Saturday night and after we had dinner with Emily at Bubba Gump's in Time's Square, I went back to NYU with her and became addicted to Firefly....Thanks, Mary : p

Here is a video of my dad releasing the hawk