Leaving Brooklyn this afternoon, I saw billowing, towering stormclouds out to the west, slowly coming over and in. I took a couple pictures and went on my way, cursing this to be one of the rare days I went out without an umbrella and understanding that I was going home and if I got wet, no harm done. Even if they looked particularly ominous. Not even any texture to them: flat, hard gray, weighing so heavy the sky moved around them.

At the transfer point in Manhattan, I saw a lot of shaken umbrellas and one spot over the tracks - just one - where the water was coming through hard and steady. A singular two-foot rainfall.

When I got out at my stop and saw all the slick flooring just before the steps out, I was pretty well ready to speed back to spend as little time in the rain as I could, except then I saw two people walking down the steps, totally dry.

The time it took me to get to Manhattan was long enough for the storm to move on. I missed it entirely. Not the ecstatic greens and blues that come after a storm, the clarity of color that arrives; I didn't miss out on any of that. Just the storm that made it possible.

What timing.

The day's plans of meeting a friend of a friend and seeing a Broadway show were scuttled by the star of the show having to back out at the last minute due to a small injury. As the friend of a friend had come to the city to see Orville Peck more than he'd come to see Cabaret, we decided that he'd be better off refunding the tickets.

I knew the neighborhood a little bit, so I took us four blocks north and one block west to go from the city people visit to the city people live in, going from having a bite and some coffee at a tourist destination to doing the same at a local coffee and sandwich place. He ordered a gabagool sandwich and a pink iced chai latte, and I just had a pink latte. Afterwards, we went to a record store and he found a vinyl Ney Matogrosso album, which was a surprise because he's apparently hard to find in the US on pretty much any format, but especially vinyl.

Not long after, we went our separate ways, him to Brooklyn and the friends he was staying with and me to my apartment to finish folding laundry and cook some lunches for the coming week. I could fixate on the misfortune, or I could look at how we managed to made the best of things.

In trying to find a new pair of closed-toed sandals that use a buckle instead of Velcro, I'm learning that's basically a product no longer being made. I'm also learning shoe websites don't like people searching for things like closed-toed, or the clasp mechanism. Sometimes what I want is classified as a sandal, sometimes a shoe. And this isn't even getting into considering things like heel height, and heel narrowness.

It's especially demoralizing to find there's very little made in the way of women's shoes with buckles these days. Something nice to wear to work and meeting up with friends that helps me feel like I'm a grown-up and costs less than $400 doesn't seem like it should be giving me such a headache, but then, it's shoe shopping. Nothing's at all pleasant about that. These seem promising, and I may risk buying sight unseen to avoid going into a physical shoe store.

At some point in between sitting down to write and finishing the night's wordcount, something went nasty on the right side of my neck. Suddenly and without any seemingly inciting cause, too. Not even lifting more weight than I should've tried or falling and landing badly. The oddness of it doesn't help the pain, but at least it seems to point to an acute cause that should, ideally, clear up after a hot shower and some sleep.

Waking up to hail this morning was a surprise; getting out of the subway after the day's rains had all passed to leave the air in one of those hauntingly fragile summer afternoons was just as much a surprise, if a far more pleasant one.

Today's luxurious disappointments are in the fields of scheduling issues and data preservation.

The latter is because a hard drive stopped working. I got a couple error messages about moving and deleting files - "Error 0x8007045D: the request could not be performed because of an I/O device error" - which was soon followed by Error code 43, then "Cannot open drive for direct access". At this point, I'm pretty secure in saying it's not going to get fixed by trying the hard drive on another computer, or that I can fix it myself. As such, I'm going to leave it alone in the hopes it doesn't get worse and look into local data recovery centers to see which one can best help me.

In the former's case, it's because Escapade is scheduled opposite a few movie screenings at the MOMI I'd very much like to see. I can probably juggle them around, pick which movies versus which panels, and it's more than a little annoying to have to choose between two fun things to look forward to. As I said, luxurious disappointments.