Ned Luce

Yep, I am out of it.

In the ESPN Men’s Tournament Challenge, I rank 8,015,062.

What a year for the NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament. If you follow this tournament and wasted any time selecting the winners of the games via one of the “March Madness Brackets,” I suspect you may be in the same losing position. At this writing Final Four teams are San Diego State, UConn, Miami, and Florida Atlantic (who?), none of which occupy any of the selections I made.

BJ and I are both in a group of brackets composing the 10 members of our family who all have selected teams to be champion who are no longer even in the tournament. In addition, none of the eight top-seeded teams are one of the final four teams. It was “madness” this year.

On a rainy night last week, we headed to Port Townsend for dinner to celebrate our “double-nickels” wedding anniversary. Even after 55 years I remind BJ she is good enough to easily upgrade but she sticks around claiming to love a curmudgeon.

We have not been to the Fountain Café for too long so that was our destination. Wendy greeted us when we walked in, claiming to remember us from when she was a waitress at the Inn at Port Ludlow several years ago. The food, the wine, and Wendy’s help made for an evening so exceptional that the heavy rain made little difference. BJ is not a fan of lamb so I tend to order it when at a restaurant, which I did that night and enjoyed it. BJ helped me survive the rainy walk to the car with some extra Kleenex she gave me to dry my head. I may not have lost all my marbles yet, but BJ senses there might be a small hole in the bag somewhere.

“Good Lovelies,” a “roots-pop combo” of three young women provided an entertaining evening of music last Saturday at the Bay Club. (What is “roots-pop”?) The group has been together for 16 years producing several albums and winning awards along the way.

These Port Ludlow Performing Arts concerts also provide an opportunity to see and greet many of the locals. Mark and Maureen Makarowski, Marv and Caroline Voss, Terry and Shelley O’Brien, Tom Satterly and his wife Patty Patterson, Steve and Fran Gross, and more were part of the more than 200 folks enjoying music, wine, and conversation.

Our plan the next day was to head to Port Angeles to pick up our quarterly ration of Camaraderie Cellars wine. The plan was thwarted by the basketball games. As a result, PLPA friends Jeff and Peggy Welker and Gregg and Shelley Patton kindly agreed to bring it back to Port Ludlow for us. A warm thanks for kind people!

We went to Seattle last week to watch grandson number two play soccer for Ballard High. Man, it was cold and windy! If the weather is going to act like that in late March why not put in some snow? I remember playing high school football in northern Ohio and it was more interesting and fun when the snow started!

No matter, the soccer game was in Woodland Park and we noted the strong performance by the daffodils and forsythia in Seattle. Our neighbors, the Harringtons, are clearly forecasting spring soon as they planted some bushes in their front yard. Hooray.

Love a curmudgeon and have a great week.

(Ned Luce is a retired IBM executive and Port Ludlow resident. Contact him at ned@ptleader.com or in his garage, where he will be sitting on a lawn chair in the spot where his Porsche was once parked.)