Some poker, some food, and more visitors | Life in Ludlow

Posted

The weather is great, the mask mandate has been lifted, the Beach Club is open and the vaccinated have been liberated!  The roads, trails and ferries are full of locals, tourists and relatives. Who knew life would explode past normal this quickly?

The annual rite of the induction of new officers in Rotary went extremely well with Check Boggs providing homegrown hamburgers and potluck from everybody else. As expected, Pat Cooper brought a store-bought cake to celebrate the past year under president Rick Smith and welcome Pete Leenhouts back as the new president. 

My expectations of the crowd size were roughly half of actual folks showing up. 

My friends, it was great to see so many folks in person. Of course, the meeting was but a preamble to putting up 322 flags in eastern Jefferson County to celebrate Independence Day over the weekend. 

BJ’s sisters were here last week and they got the royal treatment with dinner out at the Valley Tavern among more family-friendly events. It was the bi-weekly gathering of the poker widows and friends for their “book club” which consists of wine bottle label readings. 

I only lost $4 at the poker game after an evening of bad cards and incompetent play while BJ lost nothing since once of her sisters bought her dinner. 

We taxied them all around Port Ludlow and over to our son’s place for a family dinner in Ballard. Then it was up very early Sunday for a ride to the airport so that one of the sisters could catch an 11:30 flight which ended up leaving around 2 p.m.

No matter, BJ and I took a surprisingly full ferry to Bainbridge Island and enjoyed a delightful lunch at Doc’s in Winslow on the way home. The trip back on the beautiful day also provided glances at a Bentley, an Austin Healy, an unidentifiable unit from the 1930s and several Porsches. What’s not to like here?

In the pre-pandemic fall of 2019 we joined with the Drapers and Grosses at the annual auction benefitting Chimacum High School by purchasing a dinner prepared and served by GBF. Chef and owner Tyson Scott gave us a tour of his shiny commercial kitchen in the Port Ludlow Conference Center prior to serving us a fabulous Filet Mignon dinner. The man knows how to put together a nice meal. There was one piece of meat left over for us which was prepared for the sister who did not enjoy seafood!  

We travel to Ballard and back regularly as we visit our two children and their families. I have particularly enjoyed the Kingston-Edmonds ferry ride in any kind of weather even though the restrictions during past year have cramped my tourist-like style. 

Frankly, I decided when we moved here from Lee’s Summit, Missouri that if anybody wanted to visit they needed to ride a ferry. 

As any of you know who ride the ferry know there are unwritten rules of conduct when using the ferry which are not practiced or understood by rookies. 

I encountered one of those folks when this dude with a bald head and a fancy Jaguar decided to inappropriately violate one of those rules when he decided to use his horn whilst in line in Edmonds. I ended up right behind him on the boat and watched him practice using various features of his car. 

It turns out he recently purchased the car and was going through the feature switches as he consulted the owner’s manual. A middle-aged guy with an owner’s manual? 

One of the features typical of these cars is a small wing on the back of the car that will usually rise up when the car exceeds 70 miles per hour. It can also be operated manually with a switch inside the car. “Mr. Jaguar” was checking out the operation of the “70 mph wing” when it did not fully close. 

Being the kind-hearted “fuddy duddy” that I am, I went to his car’s open driver’s window and informed him that the wing had not fully closed. He refused to concede that it had not closed completely since he could not see it with his rear-view mirror. He concluded my observation was wrong. 

No reason to argue here. He had not held the switch long enough and my assessment mattered not to him. 

The whole thing reminds me of the old saying that “No good deed goes without punishment.” He ultimately did figure out that the switch needed to be held down throughout operation of the wing.  

Love a curmudgeon, keep 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 speeds greater than 15 mph. Reach Ned at ned@ptleader.com.)