Even more dolphin fun!

 I love this dolphin!!!!

Last week at the aquarium!

My last week at the aquarium was bittersweet...I was obviously happy to be moving back to CA and starting my life with Yoav, but I was sad to be leaving all my friends and my dolphins.  I had a pretty awesome last week though!  Lots of fun and lots of dolphin snuggles!!!

Underwater with Lily!

 Hurdles!

Painting!!!

All these pictures are with Lily, one of my favorite dolphins!  She is so sweet and gentle with a great personality!  And she is an exceptionally beautiful animal...I always said she looks like a movie star dolphin!

Major Life Changes!

So I haven't updated this blog in months, and some pretty big things have been happening in my life!  On July 21st Yoav and I got married!  We had a magical beautiful wedding in La Jolla, CA! Here are just a few photos from the big day!

After the wedding we headed off to Kauai for our honeymoon!  It was a week of fun- ATVing, biking, snorkeling, scuba diving, boating and soaking up the sun!

After the honeymoon I went to back to Atlanta to keep working at the Aquarium for one more month!  Then I packed up my apt, gave away all my furniture, sold my car and moved to San Francisco! Yoav had been apartment hunting throughout the month of August and he finally found us an awesome apartment!  It is in an area called Nob Hill and it even has a distant view of the Golden Gate Bridge!

For now I am just taking advantage of my unemployment and getting some projects around the apartment taken care of, like changing my name and wedding thank yous and whatnot.  I am also taking advantage of the super beautiful weather we have been having and trying to explore San Francisco before it gets too cold! Hopefully I will be able to find a new job in a similar field!  I need some animal interaction! :)

Just Great Part 2

June is officially turning out to be the worst month of my life.  On top of breaking my nose and having surgery I have also been in a car accident.  Yesterday after work I rear ended someone on the freeway causing them to bump the car in front of them.  So great, I caused a 3 car collision. FML.  Luckily no one was seriously injured but my car has a fair amount of damage.  I'm getting some estimates today to see if it is even worth the money to fix the Funmobile or if she's just gonna get scrapped.  We shall see. 

 My poor car. :(

I guess all the bad luck is happening to me this month so that all the good stuff can happen in July.  Exactly one month 'til my wedding!

Just Great

So two weeks ago I got just what every bride wants before her wedding...a broken nose!!!  Part of our show is a fight scene between "Good trainers" and "Evil sea creatures." During the show I was an evil sea creature and the girl who was playing the good trainer accidentally punched me in the face! 

After seeing an ENT, he told me I would need surgery to fix a broken septum!  Yesterday morning I had surgery to fix it.  Luckily it was soon enough after breaking my nose that all he had to really do was pop the septum back into place and didn't have to rebreak my nose!  I don't even have a split, just a little bit of tape and gauze.

According to the doctor I should be all healed up by my wedding and as good as new!  I just really have the best luck. haha :)

The Best Coworkers in the World

So I just spend the past like hour and a half reading all my old blog posts (i know, my life is soooo thrilling hahaah) and I realized how lucky I really am.  I'm sure I've said this before, but sometimes I just start getting in a rut with life and I start to forget that I am incredibly fortunate to be living out a dream that so many people have but never get the opportunity to go after.  As I was reading my old posts, all of them are filled with so much excitement and happiness for getting to do something so basic (to me now, that is) such as fish prep, scrubbing a dolphin pool and even just feeding a dolphin.  This was one of my favorite quotes I found from a post I wrote when I had just started my Disney internship: "Its kind of gross because you have to sort through frozen fish that sometimes are broken in half with guts spilling out, and it made my shirt smell terrible like fish, but at the same time its really awesome because I am making food for dolphins!!!! :)"  I need to be better at remembering that enthusiasm.  Don't get me wrong, I love going to work every day because I get to be with the best co-workers in the world (both the people and the animals) and nothing brightens up a day better than dolphin kisses, but sometimes I forget how special that stuff really is!!!

 

 

Like seriously, who actually works in a dolphin show?  Sometimes when I am doing the show I just think, is this real life?!  I know how lucky I am to have such an amazing job and sometimes I just forget to be grateful for it.  So I just wanted to say to the universe, THANK YOU! For all the opportunities I've had over the past 3 years and for all the crazy adventures I have coming up in 2013! (I'm going to be a wife!?)

Love and dolphin kisses everyone!!!!!! :D

Today...

...I did my first full ballad!!! Woohoo! Yoav was visiting and he got to see me do the show! He's seen it several times before, but today was the first time he saw me doing water work! And they let me do the full ballad!!!

Happy Birthday Nellie!

Yesterday was the 60th Birthday of Nellie, the oldest dolphin in human care!!!  Nellie lives at Marineland Dolphin Adventure, a sister facility of the Georgia Aquarium!  She was born at Marineland on February 27, 1953!  She's even older than my parents! It's pretty amazing and a testament to the care that she has received throughout her life that she has out lived the average life expectancy for dolphins by over 30 years! 

 

 

These pictures came from the Marineland facebook page and celebrate some of Nellie's birthdays over the years!

Dolphin Debut!!!

Yesterday I made my waterwork debut in the show!!!  I was so nervous before the show, but luckily everything went well!  The female trainers start out learning a segment called the Ballad, which is a slower segment that celebrates the relationship between dolphins and humans, or as the song says, "somehow it was planned, animal and man." :)  

The segment of the show starts off with the Star Spinner and the dolphin having a moment. haha

After a few mimics, the trainers and the dolphins peek over the glass and wave to the audience!  Look at what a star Pukanala is!!! Love her!

The first half of the ballad ends with a peel back pec push!  So far I have only done the first half, but I am looking forward to doing the second half and whole ballads soon! :)

Sorry all these pictures are so blurry!!! I just did the old fashioned "screen capture, crop in paint" method to make these pictures out of a video, so they aren't the best quality.

Sometimes my life seems perfectly normal, but then some days it just seems so surreal!