The Gold Rush of '46

Behold, a tally (to be added to throughout the year, she claims in a flash of brief ambition) of new experiences since turning 46:

• Saw Joan Baez in concert. She was strangely business-like with her first three songs, but eventually some patter emerged. Her voice, while not quite as strong and smooth as 50 years ago (and whose is?), is still gorgeous. I was pleased to hear "Silver Dagger" and "Dona, Dona, Dona", and of course "Diamonds and Rust", but the whole audience audibly groaned when the house lights came on, the calls for "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" ignored.
  
  (I don't think we were the only ones on the car ride home thinking she could've easily traded the Lennon and Simon/Garfunkel covers for one of her biggest hits, but I suspect 21st-century politics at play.... a shame, as I don't believe the song glorifies the Confederacy at all, only creates sympathy for a person who suffered from being caught up in other people's wars, as so many pawns are.)
  
  
• Planted some white lavender. I never even heard of white lavender. I suppose it pairs nicely with my white sapphire necklace. There's probably some message in all of this about loving things as they are and not as we expect them to be.
  
  
• Tried a chocolate bar flavoured with grapefruit and fennel. Interesting. I don't know if I'll seek it out again, but as I chew on a bit of the fennel while I type, it's all pleasantly unusual. Maybe next year I'll go for TemperTemper's "vegemite and caramel" bar. (Never.)
  
  
• Used a steroid inhaler. Forty-six came in like a lion with two days off work at the end of the term and a diagnosis of bronchitis. Ten days later, as the school holidays wound down, I still wasn't better. I switched doctors and meds and am finally hardly wheezing and barely coughing up gross stuff (which I then swallow because spitting/seeing it is a touch less disgusting to me)... and now I have four days to do all of the marking, planning, application crafting (since mine was a one-year position), and portfolio assembling (turns out "fill out a form to upgrade your teacher registration at the end of the provisional year" does not just mean, oh, filling out a form) that I planned to do over the past two weeks (plus the last week of term when everything was meant to be easy-peasy, but I was either staggering and hacking or in bed). I need more chocolate.