Get your arms up there!

I am on vacation! I am taking advantage of the three day weekend, and of my new I-don't-have-to-study-on-the-weekends lifestyle, to visit my good friends Ritchey and Andrew in their new home in Santa Cruz. It has been so amazing.

Yesterday we walked for hours on the beach, and I got a very intense sports bra sunburn that will be with me for months. We also paid a visit to the sea lions that live under the big warf that juts out from the beach. Sea lions are incredible creatures. They are like gigantic dogs, with their big old soft dog faces, and their dog voices barking, and their dog mannerisms. But their dog faces are attached to this weirdly long smooth water body with webbed flippers that seem kind of ridiculously close together in the back. They are the most graceful creatures in the water, but then they hurl their enormous hulking bodies out of the water and can barely move. You can't help rooting for them. Spread out along the wooden planks under the warf, it seems like they spend most of their time napping and sighing, and occaisonally wake up to yell at eachother or push eachother off the planks.

We spent a lot of time with this one smaller, younger sea lion who had been trying so hard to get up onto this low plank. He was clearly exhausted, and most of his attempts only resulted in him straining his neck desperately onto the wood and sinking back into the water. We decided it was because the other older seals didn't teach him how to jump out of the water properly. So we proceded to coach him, very encouragingly and enthusiastically. "You need to get your arms up there!" "That's not the way to do it, little guy!" "Try building up some momentum!" And then he did it. After so many tries. It was so triumphant.