Laetare “Rejoice” Sunday. March 31st. Visiting the Pacific Northwest.

Written by Jack van Ommen on April 1st, 2019

Better Laet (pun..)  than never. Last day of the month and embarrassed to see the date of the previous blog.

February 28 was my twin brother’s 82nd birthday. My Cape Charles friends treated me to one of the best birthday parties I can remember. It was held at Thelma’s home with the help of friends. Here is a short you tube video clip of it.

with the b’day cake

“Fleetwood” Progress: It has been a cold winter, with an occasional Spring teaser, in Cape Charles.  Friends provided warm shelter from before Christmas until moving back aboard on March 1st. The boat is more like home now, with the formica and trim done, foam mattresses on the cabin settees, my new two burner gimballed stove, etc. Last Wednesday I ordered the second biggest expense of the renovation, the electronic navigation system, at Fisheries in Seattle . I stuck with the same Vesper XB-8000 Wi-Fi, I installed in 2016.  There is still much work to be done before my planned departure for the Atlantic crossing in June.

Northwest Visit: I flew Norfolk/Baltimore/Los Angeles to Seattle on March 19th and return to Norfolk on April 10th. When I missed the opportunity to spend the winter in the Caribbean, I figured that I had all sorts of extra time, until Spring, to afford to take time off to make a family/friends visit to home port. Not so sure now. But it is wonderful to be with family and revisit friends. The weather has been outstanding here. I left in 30 degree weather on the 19th and arrived here on a record breaking high of 78 degrees in Seattle. And it has been close to it since. Here are a few pictures I took of the Oregon/Washington Cascade range. I had a perfect seat on the starboard side of the plane and it is seldom that the landing pattern allows a view of the Seattle skyline from the West.

Mt. Hood east of Portland, Or.

 

Mt. St. Helens, lost its top on May 18, 1980.

Mt. Rainier

Seattle, Lk. Washington floating bridge in background

Looking west across Vashon Island at the Olympic range

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week I visited friends in Bellingham and British Columbia. This is a sunset from the Nesbit home on the Lummi Reservation looking towards Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands, and Mt. Baker on the way to the Canadian border.

Mt. Baker, from the Lummi Indian reservation near Canadian border.

sunset from Lummi Rez shore towards Vancouver Island

 

 

 

I will be cat/house sitting on Wollochet Bay from tomorrow through the 9th of April. My oldest daughter, Lisa, has moved into Federal Way from Fife/Tacoma. The house from where I posted many great views of Mt. Rainier is up for sale, but the move has brought blessings to our family and her friends. There will be a family gathering at Lisa’s on Saturday the 6th. My oldest granddaughter is flying in with Euan, her husband, from Edinburgh.

My Books: Amazon keeps squeezing the royalties. I have added the option on the web site of www.Soloman.nl to purchase the E-book for € 8,50 in PDF formaat from Boekenbestellen.nl where I get a much more reasonable return, go to:  Bestellen blauw

I expect to have further announcement on options with other publishers for North America as well for SoloMan and The Mastmakers’ Daughters and De Mastmakersdochters.

Reynaerdt the Fox: This is a fable from the Middle Ages about a sly fox. Little is known about the exploits of this crafty manipulative sly fox in North America. But much of the story is playing out right now in our daily lives and dysfunctional political system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox. I had often heard of the story but never had a chance to learn the many nuances of it. Until I was contacted by Jan de Putter, a Dutch scholar of early Dutch literature. He came across the references to this story in my book “The Mastmakers’ Daughters”. My cousin, Gerard Arendt, the younger son of Rennie de Vries-Arendt, the NAZI part of the Mastmakers’ Daughters, wrote his doctoral thesis on this medieval story. Jan de Putter published his view on the influence of the war period, that probably dominated Gerard’s thesis, this week in: https://www.neerlandistiek.nl/2019/03/reynaert-door-de-ogen-van-een-oorlogskind-een-portret-van-g-h-arendt/#more-33368 .

L.R. Gerard, Rennie, Georg on Mother’s Day 1941. Rennie wears her Swastika insignia. Georg in Jugendsturm uniform.

This is mostly meant for my Dutch followers. Putter points out, for one, the Anti Semitic interpretation used to brainwash Dutch children as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox 

You can read more about the parallel of Gerard and the Sly Fox in the book www.TheMastMakersDaughters.us and www.DeMastmakersDochters.nl

Rennie’s husband, August Arendt, left her and Georg before Gerard was born. She told her sons that their father had been killed in a KLM plane crash in Berlin. Georg told me that his younger brother was most likely conceived after his father left. At the end of the war Georg found out that his father was alive in Berlin. Georg shared with me a number of letters form his mother complaining of the mean treatment she received from Gerard. Georg discovered that the antiques his mother had inherited from her father were stolen out of a storage locker in Cologne by Gerard and taken to his mansion in Berlin. But Jan de Putter has now contributed at least something positive on the black sheep/ sly fox of the family.

 

Comments are closed.