In Seattle, Not Sleepless

Written by Dr Jennifer Marohasy on May 27, 2024. Posted in Current News

Monday two weeks ago I was swimming with a rare, giant stingray at the Yongala wreck at the Great Barrier Reef.  The Yongala regularly features as one of the 10 best dive sites in the world and is acknowledged as a biodiversity hotspot

It is just to the north of the Burdekin River’s mouth that drains a catchment replete with sugarcane and cattle.   That dive was a dream come true.

You can read about my encounter with the giant sting ray – and see just how stout its tail with barbs was, and how it swung this tail across the top of my head, not in anger, but trying to get a better look at me – at my blog.

It is all in that blog post that has been much shared at Facebook.  I am very happy with my Facebook statistics at the moment, with a reach of over 100,000 this last 28 days.

I don’t have an Instagram account, and am wondering if there is someone out there already successful on Instagram who wants to help me get started.

I have switched gears several times over the last month, most recently with my visit to Seattle – I’m staying with my daughter who is part of the PhD program at the University of Washington.

Instead of swimming with giant stingrays I’ve been photographing squirrels and rabbits as I jog around Green Lake, not far from Downtown Seattle.

I’ve contemplated wadding in with the ducks and going for a swim – but so far have just applauded the one woman I’ve seen cutting a lonely figure as she swims the perimeter of the lake with surface water temperatures at just 15 degrees Celsius.

I’ve written something about this at my blog, while wondering if more people swam in Green Lake back in the 1920s and 1930s when the bathhouse was built (CLICK HERE).   The Green Lake bathhouse is now a theatre.

Downtown Seattle, just to the south is, of course, home to the headquarters of The Gates Foundation – built just across from Seattle’s iconic Space Needle.  The Foundation is said to embody two of Seattle’s most important ideals – environmental stewardship and healthy communities.

About 100 metres down the road from The Gate’s Foundation’s headquarters is a tent community of homeless people, that makes for some contrast.

As of December 2023, The Foundation had an endowment to progress the ideals of environmental stewardship and healthy communities of more than $75.2 billion.  That is an extraordinary amount of money, and with it comes a network of extraordinary influence worldwide – if not just down the road.

Various conspiracy theorists consider Seattle, particularly this community that works at the Gates Foundation, and also within Amazon, Google, Microsoft and University of Washington, (their offices are jumbled together across many city-blocks …) to be the source of so much influence across the world.

The conspiracy theorists consider these people to be the ones that set government policy on everything from covid vaccines to what cars we should drive, and what books we should read even where I come from in northern Australia.

I can see how easy it might be, with so many really clever people so seamlessly networking and with access to so much money and creating tools that give not only power, but also generate extraordinary income including through ongoing licensing. And they really do care.

Interestingly the headquarters for the largest coffeehouse chain that is Starbucks is also in Seattle – literally fuelling it all.

I used to regularly visited places like Toowoomba and Melbourne, where people make it clear they think they live somewhere special – but I get the impression that Seattle really is.

I’ve much more to tell, including how Bill Gates still buys his burgers at Dick’s (the fast-food restaurants located in the Seattle metropolitan area), but that will have to wait until another time.

See more here jennifermarohasy.com

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