A Beach Kind of Day

Yesterday I had an unexpected visit to the beach.  A professor (an old old friend from my PI's old post-doc days) was invited to give a lecture at our school and with any visiting professor, lunch is always provided by the department and the graduate students are usually forced to attend and "eat" with them.  By forced I mean they are usually not people who's research we have anything in common with and why would you want to succumb to boring/intimidating conversations.  But this casual meeting was nice, she was particularly down to earth (for a Harvard graduate) and quite interesting to listen to.

Anyways, my PI wanted to do something special for her and to have her get a change to see the OC a bit.  So, rather than having a graduate student lunch in the dark, dingy conference room with pizza or sandwich's with shelf after shelf of dusty old 400 page theses from every graduate student from the age of the dinosaurs staring down at you, he had us take her out for lunch by the beach.  It was me, 2 other members of my lab and another student from another lab who volunteered to come out.  We had lunch at The Beachcomber at Crystal Cove.  The weather was in the high 70's (yes, it's winter remember this is SoCal we're talking about here) and it really was a perfect day (a bit warm for my taste though, haha).  This is when living by the ocean has its perks!

All in all (minus some flubbing of experiments) it was a nice day.

 Salmon...it was deelish!!!