Founding father

Seattle's supposed to be beautiful in the summer, but I think I arrived before summer really began. During most of my stay the sky has looked like this:

 That picture comes from my weekend ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, which was entertaining and beautiful and so rainy and wet that I didn't take any other pictures. (But check out that giant Ferris wheel - it's the newest addition to the Seattle skyline!)

We've had some beautiful days, though. On the Fourth of July, some of the scholars got together (after working all day in a windowless office) and had a picnic. We walked across the Fremont Bridge.

 We went to visit the Fremont Troll, who lives under a different bridge.

 And then we had a picnic at Gas Works Park, so named because the remains of  a coal gasification plant are still in the park. We picniced with thousands of other people, plus a disturbing, disembodied Statue of Liberty head.

Someone had recently told us that Boston has a great Fourth of July tradition, where they read aloud the Declaration of Independence from the exact location where it has been read aloud since the first July 4th, in 1776. My two colleagues and I wanted to do something similar. Because we are all physics education researchers, we carefully considered which book could be considered a founding documents in our field. Thus, while enjoying the view, we read aloud from Arnold Arons' "Teaching Introductory Physics". Our reading only included the first two pages of this 700 page tome, but I think we captured the spirit of the thing.

Luckily, Seattle is full of people doing far stranger things, and no one directed a second glance our way.