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Ned Luce
Ned Luce
The weather is great, the mask requirement is lifted, the beach club is open and the vaccinated are exempt! The streets, paths and ferries are full of locals, tourists and relatives. Who would have thought that life would explode beyond normal levels so quickly?
The annual rite of introducing new officers to Rotary went very well, with Check Boggs providing home grown hamburgers and potluck from everyone else. As expected, Pat Cooper brought a store-bought cake to celebrate the past year under President Rick Smith and to welcome Pete Leenhouts as the new president.
My crowd expectations were roughly half the actual people who showed up.
My friends, it was great to see so many people in person. Of course, the meeting was just a preamble to the raising of 322 flags in east Jefferson County to celebrate Independence Day over the weekend.
BJ’s sisters were here last week and they got the royal treatment with dinner at the Valley Tavern alongside family friendly events. It was the bi-weekly get-together for poker widows and friends for their “book club,” which consists of readings from wine bottle labels.
I only lost $ 4 playing poker after an evening of bad cards and incompetent play, while BJ hasn’t lost anything since one of her sisters bought her dinner.
We rolled them around Port Ludlow and over to our son’s for a family dinner in Ballard. Then we left very early on Sunday to drive to the airport so that one of the nurses could catch a flight at 11:30 a.m. that left at around 2 p.m.
Anyway, BJ and I caught a surprisingly full ferry to Bainbridge Island and enjoyed a delicious lunch at Doc’s in Winslow on the way home. The drive back on the beautiful day also allowed glimpses of a Bentley, an Austin Healy, an unidentifiable unit from the 1930s and several Porsches. What do you dislike here?
In the fall of 2019, before the pandemic, we participated with the Drapers and Grosses in the annual auction for the benefit of Chimacum High School by buying a dinner prepared and served by GBF. Chef and owner Tyson Scott showed us around his gleaming commercial kitchen at the Port Ludlow Conference Center before serving us a fabulous filet mignon dinner. The man knows how to put together a nice meal. We were left with a piece of meat prepared for the sister who doesn’t like seafood!
We travel to Ballard and back regularly to visit our two children and their families. I particularly enjoyed the Kingston-Edmonds ferry ride in all weathers, even if the restrictions last year have limited my tourist style.
In all honesty, when we moved here from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, I decided that if anyone wanted to visit they had to take a ferry.
As everyone of you who takes the ferry knows, there are unwritten rules of conduct when using the ferry that are not practiced or understood by beginners.
I met one of these people when this bald guy with a fancy jaguar decided to inappropriately break one of these rules when he decided to use his horn while standing in line in Edmonds. I landed on the boat right behind him and watched him perform various functions in his car.
Turns out he recently bought the car and went through the function switches while reading the owner’s manual. A middle-aged man with an instruction manual?
One of the typical features of these cars is a small wing on the back of the car that usually straightens up when the car goes over 70 mph. It can also be operated manually with a switch in the car. “Mr. Jaguar” checked the operation of the “70 mph wing” when it did not close completely.
Since I am the kind hearted “Fuddy Duddy” that I am, I went to the open driver’s window of his car and informed him that the fender was not fully closed. He refused to admit that it hadn’t closed completely because he couldn’t see it with his rearview mirror. He concluded that my observation was wrong.
No reason to argue here. He hadn’t held the switch long enough and he didn’t care about my judgment.
The whole thing reminds me of the old adage “No good deed goes without punishment”. He eventually found out that the switch had to be held down for the entire operation of the grand piano.
Love a curmudgeon, stay cool and have a great week.
(Ned Luce is a retired IBM executive and Port Ludlow resident who has wings that automatically extend at any speed above 15 mph. Contact Ned at ned@ptleader.com.)
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