Hanging With Leah, Our Twenty-Two Year Old Niece

7:20

7:24

7:25

It's 7:10 and there's enough light to make out the lake, the dark shadows of a couple of fishing huts in the middle of the lake, and a light pink just above the tree line.  It's very cold once again, 9º though it should warm up into the 20's later in the day.

Yesterday was framed by our drive to Buffalo, to pick up my niece Leah at the airport.  The day started, as it usually does for me, with yoga at 9:30, five of us, on a overcast morning.  I am getting to the point where if I don't go to yoga, I feel lost, like what am I supposed to do without it. When I got home, Evie was finishing up getting the house ready and had put together dinner, chicken enchiladas and a black bean soup, so when we got back from the airport, dinner would only need to be heated.

We left for Buffalo at 12:15, despite the fact Leah's plane did not arrive until 4:00. I had made an appointment at the Apple Store at the Walden Mall, about ten minutes from the airport.  So, I had my Mac checked, no problems with hardware, some with the software, so the genius suggested wiping my hard drive clean and starting over, something I was not keen to do unless my computer really starts acting up.  He did say it was in good shape, which gives me confidence to wait until the new Mac Air arrives, hopefully sometime in the next six months.  We also did some browsing in the various mall shops, all with great sales, though the prices of almost anything seemed ridiculously high to the both of us.  We have not shopped much in the past five years so we have lost track of the cost of clothes especially.  The only store we really shopped at was The Body Shop, where Evie was able to get some things she really liked.

Leah Arrives At Buffalo International Airport

We arrived at the crowded airport parking lot at 3:30, and Leah's plane was early, arriving at 3:55 which was great.  She was excited to see us, to get to snow country.  We did not get home until 6: 15, driving the 90 miles in the diminishing afternoon light, so when we got here, we could just make out the shapes of the fishing huts on the lake.

We relaxed when we got home, with a glass of wine (Leah's now legal) and had fun catching up on Leah's life since we last saw her a couple of years ago.  She looks great, happy with her graduation from college in psychology, and is in serious training for a bicycle race in May, hoping to break a record for this race through the mountains of California: her goal, less than four hours and fifty minutes.  I cannot even imagine the amount of toughness and training it will take to even finish the race.  She's obviously obsessed in a good way with her life, her training.

A Great Dinner With Leah's Aunt Evie

 Dinner tasted good to all of us, enchiladas and soup.  We then quickly did up the dishes, made Leah a fresh latte, as she's become a coffee lover, then adjourned to our TV room and watched a cute movie from about ten years ago called Waitress.  Evie and I had seen it before and liked it, thought Leah would as well.  It was a good choice, preferable to the State of the Union speech.  We all went up to bed after the movie, tired from our day of travels, us to the airport, Leah from Chicago to the lake.

We hope to cross country ski part of the Westside Overland Trail this morning, when I return from an early yoga class at 8:30.