Robin Tidwell's Blog

Kidney Cancer…Again

Let me tell you about kidney cancer and its aftermath. Twelve years ago, my husband had horrific back pain, out of nowhere, and instead of the kidney stones everyone was expecting, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Surgery followed a week later, a right nephrectomy. He spent four days in the hospital, came home, recovered, […]

DC

There have always been anti-government types, regardless of which government or which parties are in power. “Power” is probably the operative word here. But lately, for the last couple decades perhaps, their numbers have grown. I’m quite sure that social media has played a large part in this. People who couldn’t name more than a […]

Parler Experiment

Goofy. Sign-up involved a couple errors, captchas, and SMS codes. Took a few minutes and was pretty aggravating. So far, on my home page, the top bar looks exactly like the one on Facebook, except I can choose a color. Each post has options at the bottom that look exactly like those on Twitter, for […]

How NOT to Start Homesteading

Do NOT purchase only two acres. That’s 300 feet by 300 feet. You can do some things with that size acreage, but not much. Do NOT purchase land in an HOA or community. Your neighbor’s house could potentially be within yards of your own. Do NOT think you can move onto your land with no […]

Reality TV and Homesteading

Let’s talk about homesteading shows on TV and YouTube. Now, I rarely watch the latter, because I don’t have a lot of patience with boring or amateurish productions; reminds me of when I was a little girl just learning to jump rope and I kept telling the grown-ups to “wait,” while I continued my attempts. […]

Cuties

With all the hullaballoo about this movie, 90% of it from people who are condemning it without having seen it and who are simply repeating what someone else said (who likely didn’t see it, either) I decided to watch it. I’ll start with a summary: The movie is 90 minutes long; 30 minutes in, I […]

Greenhouse Watering

Basically, I took my shower in the greenhouse yesterday. See, I’ve had experience with those misting systems, we used to have one on our patio. Mostly it worked, but it was a pain to get all the nozzles pointing in the right direction. What I’m saying is that I THOUGHT it was a pain, working […]

What Else is in the Greenhouse?

Besides all my experiments, the herbs I generally keep on the kitchen porch will be transplanted into the center beds in the greenhouse: lemon balm, thyme, cumin, oregano, cilantro, parsley, sage, basil, chives. And one plant that I don’t know what it is—I’ve had it for a long time, it’s pretty and green, but I […]

Winding Up the Season

Normally, I could talk about baseball season, but we all know where that’s going. Has gone. Barely started. Whatever. Shut up, Laura! As I say every year, “Thank God that’s over with!” And again, not baseball, but gardening season. By September, I’m done. When my husband says, “I think I see a cucumber,” I do […]

Confederates

Here’s the thing about Confederate monuments, whether they’re statues, buildings, whatever: they were erected and named in order to try to heal the country after a brutal civil war. States and counties and cities put up the statues and named the buildings—try to put yourself in the shoes of the losing side. To half the […]