Grizabella's Tippy Tea House Newsletter

I've been turning over and over in my mind what I could say to write a review of Poppy Palin's new deck, the Everyday Enchantment. I'm so impressed with this deck that I can't begin to put it into words. I just escapes me. I'm going to try here, though. First of all, the deck is presented in a lovely box with a strong magnetic closure. It's a bright, sunshine-y yellow with an image from the Sun card on the box. Inside there's the lovely handbook and the gorgeous deck. When I was watching the scans of each card as the deck developed, I was skeptical. I thought this deck would be too simplistic and not versatile enough to really stand the test of time. I was so wrong! The book is a work of art itself. It's printed on paper that's a joy to touch. Very nice, smooth pages and the binding is very sturdy and well-made. No danger of this book falling apart with use. The backs of the cards are absolutely gorgeous. I love keeping the deck on my desk

This Christmas is very different for me from other Christmases. I've been spending a lot of time alone and thinking as I worked on crocheting afghans for my great-grandchildren and listening to Christmas music. I don't have cable TV and I've gotten tired of watching movies so I just decided to listen to music and think. What do I think? Well, I think about many, many things. I remember Christmases past when I hear this song or that song. Lots of the memories involve drinking, which I haven't done now for almost 34 years. I have regrets about that because I spent time away from my kids instead of home with them, so some of the memories aren't so good. Other Christmases are happy memories from when my late husband was with us. He loved Christmas and he was quite the romantic at that time of year, too. He always showered all of us with gifts at Christmas.  I'm actually choosing to stay home and not go out. I've been invited places but staying home is much

I just got out of the hospital a couple days ago. Quite an experience. I appreciate their care but I hope I stay in better shape for another 20 years. My first really severe crash with my inflammatory diseases happened almost exactly 20 years ago. Needless to say, I was younger then and hadn't even entered my 50's yet. Now I'm 73 and just as time marches on, so does my condition. Temporal arteritis is one name for this disease. I won't belabor the disease thing here because I'm just glad to be out of the hospital and want to get back to what I was doing that I enjoyed so much before the big ER and hospitalization trip. I've written some humorous stuff in these blog posts, but this is not going to be so humorous. I'm good at laughing at myself, but I can be down to earth and not silly as well. What I've been doing before the hospital was taking some granny squares my late ex-mother-in-law crocheted before she passed away but never made anything out of

After all the excitement of water sports here in My Tippy Tea House, I was glad to be able to settle down, go to bed, read a book and just call it a night and go to sleep for once. There was a difficulty with the reading bit, though. See, it all began about a week ago. I was going to clean the bird cage and get him all cozy and settled, even though he's an ungrateful bird who treat me as if I'm just the hired help. I don't know what did it but the cage tipped over and the bird got out. So I went chasing him till I could catch him, get him back tnto the cage and safe. Well, somehow in the fray, I lost one of the lenses out of my glasses. I've had the same glasses for 14 years and when they were only 3 weeks old, the lenses started falling out and I've been just putting them back together with bread ties or crafting wire ever since. Now, normally when a lens pops out, it plops into my lap---or my soup---or wherever. This time, though, since I was intent on getting t

No, this is not an S&M thread. I don't even know how to spell seques anymore so this isn't R rated. A few nights ago, after the weather channel predicted "partly cloudy" for a couple of days, I went and crawled into my cozy bed. Gypsy (my pooch) settled down next to me. It had been more than partly cloudy. It was cloudy as hell and pouring rain for a few days. Lucky thing that my sons went up top on the RV and put awnings over the slides-outs before the rain hit. They wanted to make sure the slides wouldn't leak if it did rain----which it started doing the next day, sure enough. All's well that ends well, right? Well, this rain didn't end for three days. It poured buckets around the clock. Then my son's wife came down sick with some kind of terrible bug and my neighbor did too, too. That didn't worry me. I'm resourceful, intelligent, and independent. I believe in "working well without supervision" so aside from hoping I didn

My oldest son lives in this same secluded mobile home park. He's manager and my grandson owns the park. The grandson and son installed me in a wonderful RV and it's just so cozy and beautiful.  But yesterday my son was very sick and to save calling and waking him up to ask silly questions, I just used my life experience and knowledge to act on my own. It was getting down into the 20's at night, so I remembered that if you don't want the water to freeze up, you turn on the faucets to run a thin stream in the sinks. So I did that! Chalk one up for the old lady, right? Bring in the brass monkeys and wear your willy warmers, guys, because it's COLD outside! I took a shower and then came to the living area to crochet a combination spreadcloth/Tarot deck case for my new Everyday Enchantment deck. I had to go to the upper part to get the yarn and as I went by the shower, I stepped in wet.. I thought I'd dripped when I got out of the shower so I went on and got the