Issue #67: Everything I'm Packing for My 4-Week Vacation

Where I'm headed, carry-on only! ✈️

Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

🎧 “Everything Is Fine” Podcast: Although I’m a decade shy of the target audience for this podcast, all about life over 40, I quickly fell in love with it. It’s hosted by Kim France (of Lucky magazine, RIP) and author Jennifer Romolini, who are both hilarious and insightful as they chat about clothes that fit as poorly as ex-boyfriends, “concert friends,” and the latest in pop culture. They even had a recent interview with Lynn Steger Strong, who wrote the book Flight, which I recommended here! It feels very much in the same vein as “Girls Gotta Eat”—listening to it feels like hanging out with friends.

🍪 Sweet Laurel Gingerbread Blondies: I splurged and bought a Great Jones ceramic baking dish over Black Friday, and was looking for the perfect recipe to make in it when I came across these spiced blondies. I don’t love overly sweet desserts, which is why I gravitate toward Sweet Laurel, which doesn’t use any refined sugars, and uses primarily almond and coconut flours (I love AP flour too, but not so much in cake-adjacent baked goods). They were incredibly easy to make, though I skipped the Coconut Buttercream Drizzle, and a hit at my holiday-themed bookclub last week. The next morning, I had a square with a gingerbread latte (I already had the spices on hand, so it just made sense) which is reason enough to bake them!

🎥 ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’ on Netflix: In this adaptation of the 1930 erotic novel by D.H. Lawrence, Constance has realized that her marriage to Clifford is not the partnership she imagined it would be—he no longer makes her feel safe, but instead trapped. Still, she dutifully cares for him when he returns from WWI paralyzed from the waist down, until she falls for the brooding, dark, novel-reading gamekeeper in a deeply romantic love story. I loved this movie, and the way it’s filmed, from the very first scene!

Liked, but didn’t love… “Welcome to Chippendales” is fun, but eh. Sort of exactly what you would expect!

The plan, for years, was to spend this month in Japan. When Jonah and I got married mid-pandemic, we reallocated our wedding fund to a honeymoon, and began plotting a month-long vacation to a country we’ve both long wanted to visit. On the day we decided to cancel the vacation in light of our separation (a painful decision for both of us), I woke up in the middle of the night and immediately booked a very different trip.