BJ went out to Indiana for a week and I was looking forward to listening to Paul Anka sing “Lonely Boy” for the entirety of her absence. Well, I was lonely but I did survive.

I made it known to several friends I was available for dinner while BJ was gone and some folks took the bait! Ramsey and Anne Smith invited me over for a nice dinner on their deck. They were followed by Vic and Sharon Draper with a dinner of great ribs on Monday. Our daughter in Seattle invited me to spend a night with her and her family. Well, I kinda asked and she took pity on me. BJ wonders why I get invited out when she is out of town but when I am similarly gone she doesn’t get the same invitations. I then remind her that I have no shame.

The overnight in Seattle included meeting up with some old friends from Kansas City. They wanted to get together with me at a sports bar in Seattle at 10 Sunday morning to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play the Jacksonville Jaguars. (Final was 40-26 in favor of the Chiefs.) It was a great opportunity to dig out an old Chiefs hat and hang with like-minded fans.

Regular readers know that I am involved in the local East Jefferson Rotary Club. Ten days ago I was one of 25 volunteers who erected and took down the almost 300 American Flags on display over Labor Day weekend. You should have also heard that the club is in the final days of the annual Pot o’ Gold raffle. (Call your favorite Rotarian, or me, to buy the winning ticket.) The Rotary Foreign Exchange Student program could be one of the most key elements in working for peace in the world. I ferried three of the foreign students to the annual orientation at the Seabeck Conference Center last Saturday. They are in school in Chimacum, Port Townsend and Port Angeles. An experience like that does give you optimism about the future.

Last Friday I went through downtown Port Townsend and there were NO parking spaces as mobs of people wandered around as they made their way the Wooden Boat Festival. It may have been the most crowded day for the for the three-day event given the erosion of the weather on Saturday and Sunday but it sure looked like it was going to be successful. Pete Leenhouts displays his boat and I asked Jennifer, the Rotary Foreign Exchange Student at Chimacum if Pete showed her around the festival. She confirmed that he had and that she had seen many “big boats.”

BJ returns this evening so I will have to change my song to “My Baby’s Back” by Freddy Fender and also do the dishes. I suspect you will be happy to have her back too because she edits this column every week and provides a higher level of quality than you see here. But as you can tell, I fought off the loneliness with plenty of tasks, visits and Rotary activities. Now college football is back and you will start hearing more about that.

Words of advice are from Judy Garland this week. “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”

Love a curmudgeon and have a great week.

(Ned Luce is a retired IBM executive, a hard-working printer and stroller of Olympic Peninsula events.)