So we had a bit of a busy week last week. We have made a decision that we want to try to be more social here in Petaluma, and we did that well last week. First, on Wednesday we went out to hear the seminar at the Bodega Marine Lab, and the speaker was actually Jen, my roommate from when I was in the phycology (seaweed) class at Friday Harbor Marine Labs in 2003. We have run into her from time to time since then, mostly at conferences, and I see her on Ravelry, but it was nice to talk to her again. After her talk we all had a potluck dinner together.

On Thursday Megan came over to help me eat the crabs that I had bought for us when we went out to Bodega Bay the day before. We had a delicious crab dinner with garlic bread, watched the final episode of Glee, and did some knitting. That's always fun, of course.

On Friday I did a couple of things. First, I went at lunchtime with Megan back out to Bodega Marine Lab to hear Jackie give a talk about the history of intertidal research at Bodega Head. This is widely defined to include the naturalists and European and Russian explorers that were around 200-300 years ago, and she also gave some information about the local native tribes that were in this area. One of the personal specific important tidbits about Bodega Head for me is that it's the type locality of Postelsia. Type locality means that a specimen from that place was first used to describe the species. THAT means that someone (Ruprecht, in this case) got a Postelsia from Bodega Head, and was the first person to name it, and write about what it looked like and where he found it and so on. This sort of thing is something that phycologists (people who study seaweeds) think is really cool. Anyhow, Jackie's talk was really interesting and fun to hear.

In the evening, Spencer and I went on a double date with Jackie and Eric. We met them for dinner at a mexican restaurant in Sebastopol, which they treated us to as congrats for us finishing our degrees, and then we all went to see a movie. We saw "Invictus", which was good! It was fun to go do that sort of thing.

Yesterday we just hung around and then we did a little decorating for Christmas. I decided that I wanted to see some of our ornaments but didn't want to get a tree, so I hung them from a ribbon in that big doorway between the living room and the dining room. It looks pretty good! I posted a few photos of that in my gallery a little while ago, if you'd like to see. Today we plan to do a little shopping and have a stroll around downtown. I hope you all had a nice weekend too...