Gingerbread vacation.

Tonight is all about winter food. I am making cabbage and potato soup with blue cheese and toasts for dinner, and I am attempting the highest-maintenance gingerbread recipe ever. This, plus football, is what Sundays are all about. Though I should have read through the gingerbread recipe before starting so that I would have known about all the refrigeration and freezing phases that need to be traversed before actual baking starts. Whatever, it's gonna be tasty.

Less than two weeks until we head off for Hong Kong and Australia! I am getting all fired up and starting to think about packing. We're going to try to fit everything for the entire trip into one carry-on each. It's all about embracing the rewash and rewear. I cannot wait to hit the sunshine -- and the warmth. Whoo hoo! Summer in January! It's sort of weird to think about the fact that I am making gingerbread today, but on Christmas itself we're going to be having dim sum. Living out the age-old stereotype of Chinese food on Christmas. But in Hong Kong.

We're trying to lay out our upcoming travel plans for the next year, which seems to be something we do every time we travel. You get a little, you want a lot. Next year I'd like to take a longer trip to Europe, as well as some long weekends in Boston and San Francisco. And we're going to head to New Jersey at some point to see family. And I want to do a week of a trail running vacation. And once again I don't have enough vacation time to stuff all this travel into. Oh well, life is full of difficult choices.