Christmas Lily

Lily's new favorite activity is to climb the Christmas tree. She is too funny. She's small enough that her climbing hasn't toppled the tree--yet. She and Little Spike are about the same size, so they're deciding that they kind of like chasing each other around the house. The dogs like eating the kitty food, and she likes eating the dog food :-)

This afternoon Greg and I went on a Christmas outing with his co-worker Alice and her husband Don. They took us to the little tiny town of Salisbury just outside of Petersburg. We had some delicious pie and hot chocolate at this quaint little cafe that seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere. In the cafe, we saw an advertisement for a new store in Salisbury, so we went to check it out. It was so funny! The store is in a transformed car garage, and they were selling all of these fancy vases, jewelry, and leather jackets that the store owners got in Mexico. I couldn't help but wonder: who in Salisbury would spend $2,000 for a vase?

Then we went to a place called "The Farm." :-) It was a fun little boutique-type store in a big red barn out in the country. They had a lot of Christmas things for sale. Then we went to the cemetery in Petersburg where Anne Rutledge and Edgar Lee Masters are buried. (Anne Rutledge was Abraham Lincoln's first girlfriend, and Edgar Lee Masters was a famous poet who is perhaps most well-known for his Spoon River Anthology.) After the cemetery, we drove around some neighborhoods in Petersburg. Alice and Don took us to this funny little community known as Old Salem, or Chautauqua, which is an "eclectic river community" along the Sangamon River. Eclectic indeed! We kind of felt like we were in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a very fun adventure.