SimplyLife

It's pure liquid gold--sticky,sweet, and  tastes really good on the muffin I'm eating. Of course I'm talking about honey. As a longtime honey lover, buckwheat honey has always been a favorite, but now that distance precludes that treat, mesquite blossom has become the flavor of choice. The vendors at the weekly farmers' market have the best choice here with a variety of flavors. The Killer Bee Guy from Bisbee has a good selection of honey mustards too, that range from chipotle to roasted garlic.  Bees in Arizona are all pretty much Africanized which means they're killer bees. However, the bees in our yard are desert honey bees and not killers. At least we don't think so. You should however respect these industrious insects and not irritate them. The results could be painful and sometimes downright dangerous. Bees are highly organized and the division of labor within a hive is clear. The queen is in charge. The drones keep the queen happy so she can keep the n...

The wild West is alive and well where we live. Tombstone is an easy drive for an afternoon of strolling the boardwalks, getting some BBQ, and chatting with cowboys, gunslingers, and "soiled doves." Every self-respecting American knows about the gunfight at the OK Corral. We've romanticized it in film for decades. Personally I enjoy the 1993 version with Val Kilmer and Kurt Russell. There are quite few tales of violence and western justice in our area that are not as well known as the OK Corral incident. Bisbee, which snatched the designation of county seat in Cochise County after the Tombstone silver ran out has some tales of its own. Since winter is upon us and a story is always good by the fire, sit a spell while I tell you the about the Bisbee Massacre. On a cold December night in 1883, five outlaws rode into Bisbee and commenced robbing the largest mercantile in town with the goal of snagging the Copper Queen Mine's payroll of $7,000. The Phelps Dodge...

Hidden treasures---maps---encrypted clues to decode.  Remember those childhood games of buried treasure, secret codes, great games of pretend when we were pirates and spies? I got that flashback  when we mobilized for our first geocaching hunt. With a handheld GPS, a list of decoded clues, and coordinates from a geocaching website, we headed out to see if we could actually find these caches of trinkets. What fun to find out that trails we'd hiked previously were full of these caches! After a false start on the first search, the hiking trip up an abandoned railroad bed and into a nearby canyon yielded four finds. Each was different. One was a metal box full of odds and ends--a nickel, key chain, etc. The next merely a geocache pin which we walked around for a few minutes before identifying it. It looked like a bottle cap at first glance. Then a Navy ammo tin tucked under a huge boulder and some smaller rocks. I signed the log book and continued up the...

I've begun another decluttering tour this week. After the holidays it seems like paper, assorted magazines, and just plain junk have taken over counters, tables, nooks, crannies, etc. There are all those little instruction pamplets for new coffee makers, toys, GPS devices. Then there are magazines that have been saved throughout the year for one or two recipes and sometimes a decorating idea. The Christmas cards and letters...they're too pretty to throw out...right? The closets are bursting at the seams, the garage is a mess. It's an overwhelming task if you take it on all at once, so I've developed a system over the years to take a few minutes a day and eliminate one area of clutter at a time. Since clutter equals chaos and order equals tranquility for me, it's a task necessary for mental health, along with a sense of order. You know--a place for everything and everything in its place. Sometimes the place is the garbage. First, why do it? It's only going to g...