Merry Christmas! Hope everyone had a great day - I definitely did, with plenty of food, drink, family/friend time, and holiday booty to make this one of the best Christmas' ever. Food highlights include hazelnut/raspberry linzer cookies my mom made, and my dad made "pancake sandwiches," which is a fried egg and bacon between two pancakes then covered in syrup. He got the recipe from an old New England diner recipes book he found in a used store.

I haven't been saying no to anything anyone has put in front of me since I graduated, which of course has led to my packing on an extra five pounds. And it's not in my head, because none of my pants feel right! It's terrible! I'll be joining the masses of people invading the gym in January with their New Year's resolutions to lose weight. Luckily the crowd thins out around February when people inevitably give up and the gym goes back to its normal crowd. What a drag though. Oh well. I've enjoyed every bite! My sister got this Eating Well: Healthy in a Hurry cookbook, which looked really good, so I think I'll pick up a copy for some new food ideas. I tend to eat the same things over and over, which gets pretty boring and doesn't motivate me to cook.

Now I'm back in Providence with G for New Years. The food fest continued last night at 3 Steeple Street, a beautiful little restaurant in an old iron foundry. The ceilings were low, with brick walls and wooden beams and candles flickering on the tables. We were seated in a small corner next to a window and a radiator. George put his hat on the radiator when we arrived. At one point after our entrees, G got up and went to the bathroom and I looked over and noticed his hat was completely underneath the radiator. It seemed odd, and when G got back we were trying to figure out how it got under there. The radiator was positioned in such a way that neither of us could have hit the hat with our arm or elbow, nor was the radiator shaking or producing enough of a breeze to move the hat. And the hat wasn't just on the floor in front of the radiator - it had slid underneath it.

When our waitress came back G asked her if the restaurant was haunted. She looked at us for a moment, then said yes, it was, and pulled up a chair and proceeded to tell us stories of ghost sightings by the owner and waitresses. She said the owner was closing up one night and saw an old man in a tweed jacket standing in the bar area, and he freaked out and started doing tequila shots! She told us that she refuses to be in the restaurant alone. Not sure if there is any connection between the man in the tweed jacket and the fact that G's hat was tweed, or if the hat under the radiator had any ghostly connection at all, but it's weird nonetheless. We will definitely be back for the awesome food and ghostly ambience!