Leave the ground.

Walking back from work is usually the best part of my workday. Not the knowledge of leaving work as such; more where I'm walking, and the pleasure I can take in the little trip to just be outside. To get underneath some sky. The path I take gets a good deal of open space between the trees and the buildings - there's not a great horizon line, even with the Hudson right there, but there's sky, and in Manhattan it's easy to miss that. Clouds, too. It was raining on and off today, and when I left it was drizzling very sightly, scattered large drops rather than thin mist, and I decided to walk it and get a bit wet instead of taking the bus.

There was one fantastic cloud formation over the Hudson while I was out, this hole in the clouds where the sun came on through. Most everything was a flat, low gray, uniform in texture, but to the west there was a gap, a jagged window that let the blue and light claw through before the clouds overtook the whole sky once again. And there was another, this tiny patch of cloud underneath the gray above all, ragged-edged and drifting low. There's got to be a name for that sort of cloud layering.

And also, the magnolias are splendid. I need to get out to the Botanical Garden again this weekend, because not many things make me as happy as a fully blooming grove of magnolias.