August and Everything After

This is from an email I sent out earlier this month, in order to jump start my blogging once again:

You may have heard, either from myself or one of the news outlets, that we had a day last month with a temperature of 102! It's true! Well, last night, we experienced almost the inverse of that...
We had tickets for Joan Baez, who was playing at the zoo, less than two miles away. The zoo concerts are pretty mellow affairs, 6 p.m. start time, a mostly older crowd, some small children, nothing too obnoxious. We made a picnic lunch to take, packed a blanket and some low seating. As we were packing up, Mark noticed it had started to raining. We found some rain gear, put on hats, grabbed a large umbrella. The zoo doesn't cancel on account of rain.
Naturally, all the parking near the zoo was full up, so we found street parking about a quarter mile from the entrance. It was now raining steadily, not that lovely mizzle (mist-drizzle) that we normally experience in summer, but a regular October rain. We huffed up a hill and found the ticketholders line right outside the gate. At least that's where it started...
The rain got heavier, a late November rain, and as we marched to the end of the line, some six blocks, I marveled that the show was sold out. Not such an odd thing in and of itself, until you see the hundreds of people in slickers, armed with tarps and plastic. Only one woman was offering her tickets for sale on account of the weather. The rest of us were just going to tough it out, which is how we do it in Seattle. If we let the rain dictate our actions, we'd almost never get to go outside. LOL
On the zoo grounds, there was little in the way of protection from the elements, and those few spaces were well populated, so Mark and I resigned ourselves to sitting on the middle of the field, in the grass. "It's gonna let up any minute now", I kept repeating. We made an agreement that we would leave if we got too squishy. Even with the rain, people packed in around us.
Once you resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be wet, there's nothing else for it but to enjoy yourself. We brought wine in a water flask, ate our sandwiches and laughed. Joan seemed quite surprised that the crowd was so large...she called us her "rain people" and admitted that this would never have come about in CA.
And then, about midway through the second song....yup, the rain slowed. By the third song, it had stopped entirely. We took down our umbrella and so did everyone else, and you could finally see the stage. Woo-hoo! Joan played "Diamonds and Rust", telling us we deserved it for sitting out in the rain. She has a great sense of humor...singing the last of "Don't Think Twice" in an exaggerated Bob Dylan accent. Hilarious!

Once we got home, we put all our clothes in the dryer and Mark made hot chocolate. What a great evening.