Up close and personal with the bay

One of the nicest things about chaperoning on your child's field trip is that you get to learn cool new things.

Yesterday, I went with my daughter's class on a research vessel on the SF Bay, and the kids got to learn about the ecology and life of the bay. They used fancy-schmancy equipment to fish and touch and observe the creatures they caught, they touched and explored the benthos (the organisms that live in the bottom layer of a body of water), they observed plankton under a microscope (blew my mind), and measured the temperature and salinity of water of the bay.

Until now, the bay for me was just a patch of water near which we live. After yesterday, I see the bay as a living, pulsating, precious, delicate universe!