I’ve been fighting a sore throat and chest congestion since about the week after Seabeck (mid-October). My wife the nurse tells me to “keep drinking lots”, so I’ve been drinking tea almost nonstop for the past three weeks. Feels good on the throat and also means I’m popping fewer citrus-flavoured Halls drops. (Did you know the package recommends no more than two per day? Ha!) Anyway, I polished off one of my favorite specialty teas (”Madagascar” blend from Cornelia Bean) and have been steadily working my way through the Blueberry, English Breakfast, and Ceylon Breakfast tins of loose tea on the shelf; I’m starting to wonder about the phrase “for all the tea in China.” Unfortunately, I seemed if anything to be getting worse… I only had to add the Halls drops in the past week or so. The whole time of brewing all this tea, I kept lamenting the fact that we’d run out of chrysanthemum tea.