My Published Articles for ViewsHound: 30. Places in the US that Macrine and I had Visited-Seattle, Washington

Thursday, February 11, 2016

30. Places in the US that Macrine and I had Visited-Seattle, Washington

The Space Needle
I attended another American Chemical Society (ACS) Meeting in the early 1990's. The main guest speaker was Bill Gates of Microsoft. His topic was of course the Future of Computers. It was a standing room only session and this meeting was one of the most informative meeting that ACS has sponsored for it members. I stayed in a
Victorian downtown hotel (Mayflower Park Hotel) adjacent to a shopping mall(West Lake Center) and of course StarBucks. I eat lunch at the revolving restaurant at the Space Needle and viewed the salmon runs ( Ballard and Chittenden Locks) facilities, went to the fish market(Pike Place) and did a little souvenir shopping in the adjacent mall to my hotel.

Salmon Jumping Upstream to Spawn and Die

Do you know that Seattle is the headquarters of StarBucks and Bill Gates(the riches man in the world) resides in a multi-million mansion in the Seattle suburb of Medina?

Here's a description of Gates residence in Medina, Washington. The world's richest man and family lives in the exclusive suburb of Medina, Washington, in a huge earth-sheltered residence in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington. The residence encompasses more than 66,000 square feet which is equal to 1.5 acres.The major rooms include 7 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms, six kitchens, and six fireplaces. The address of the mansion is 1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039.

The Residence is a very modern, 21st century residence in the "Pacific lodge" style, with advanced electronic systems everywhere & great interior design. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion, It has a large private library with a domed reading room. While it does have a classic flavour, It has many unique qualities. Among the many genius marvels that are integrated into the home for the latest in modern conveniences are revolving works of art.

The floors are pressure sensitive, at any given time family member or security can know who is in the residence by the weight of their footsteps. Lights would automatically come on when you came in. Speakers would be hidden beneath the wallpaper to allow music to follow you from room to room. Portable touch pads would control everything from the TV sets to the temperature and the lights, which would brighten or dim to fit the occasion or to match the outdoor light.

Visitors to the residence are surveyed and given a microchip upon entrance. This small chip sends signals throughout the home, and a given room's temperature and other conditions will change according to preset user preferences. In 2009, property taxes on the home were reported to be US $1.063 million on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.

Bill Gates Home of the Future
Inside this luxury home plan you will find Swimming pool size 17 × 60 foot (5.1 × 18.2 metre). The 17-by-60-foot swimming pool has an underwater music system and a floor painted in a fossil motif. Swimmers can dive under a glass wall and emerge outdoors by a terrace. Locker room off the pool has four showers and two baths.

Towering Douglas fir beams support the stainless-steel roof and are surrounded by walls of glass, concrete, and stone. While much of the residence is buried into the hillside, windows on the lakefront side provide views of Seattle to the west. There are 84 steps down from the entrance to the ground floor. The vertigo-inclined can take an elevator.

The Theater with apx 20 seat, Size: 1,500 ft. The 20-seat art deco theater is outfitted with plush chairs, couches, and a popcorn machine. The Screen is HDTV capable. The Library, Size: 2,100 sq. ft. The ornate, paneled library has a domed reading room with oculus (light well), fireplace, and two secret pivoting bookcases, one containing a bar. It's the fitting home for Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century notebook, the Codex Leicester, which Gates bought for $30.8 million.

Aerial View of Bill Gates Residence in Medina, WA
The Formal dining room, Size: 1,000 sq. ft. Up to 24 guests can dine by the fireplace while enjoying the sweeping view from the third level. Nearby commercial-grade kitchen is 39 feet by 23 feet. The Reception hall capacity more than 150 people at a time,Size: 2,300 sq. ft.

Partly below ground, the reception hall can seat 150 people for a sit-down dinner or hold 200 for a cocktail party. A 6-foot-wide fireplace, faced in limestone, commands one wall. Another wall is dominated by a 22-foot-wide video display made up of 24 rear-projection television monitors, each with a 40-inch screen. A second commercial-grade kitchen serves the reception hall.

The Exercise room, Size: 2,500 sq. ft.It includes sauna, steam room, separate men's and women's lockers, and a trampoline room with a 20-foot ceiling.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the median American residence size is slightly more than 2,000 square feet. Microsoft founder residence is more than 30 times that size. Inside the Garage, you'll find a 1999 Porsche 911 Convertible and 1988 Porsche 959 Coupe. Steven Ballmer drives a 1998 Lincoln Continental. In fact, due to the 959’s questionable emissions and unknown crash ratings, it took a federal law signed by President Clinton to legally drive his 959 on American roads.

Its every One's Curiosity to know how world's richest man lives, Having net worth over 57 Billion Dollars.

I would not mind residing in a residence similar to Bill Gates. Just wait, If I win the Lotto, I will built one better than the Gates residence in Boac, Marinduque, Philippines.

Here are two videos on some tourists attraction in the Seattle area.

Note: This is No.30, last of the series of articles on places that Macrine and I had visited in the US since 1960. I hope you enjoy this travel series. Part 2 will be places that we have visited outside the US.

No comments:

Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

30. Places in the US that Macrine and I had Visited-Seattle, Washington

No comments:

Post a Comment

Linkwithin