So, this past weekend--we went with our friends-from-out-of-town to Tombstone and Bisbee, a nice Sunday-drive fromTucson...
Bisbee is a historic mining town and county-seat--about a mile high in the Mule mountains of Cochise County, a couple of hours SE of Tucson...its mining heydays are gone, but what's left is great architecture that hosts an incongruous mix of hard-drinking Harley-riders, hippie gallery-owners, county bureaucrats, pierced baristas, retirees who've opened up antique shops, tourists from Ohio and Germany, and urbanites away for a b&b weekend...
...the old stone and brick buildings (optimistically grand Italianate) in the narrow valley, with wooden houses and postage-stamp-gardens going up and down red hills covered with oak and pine...Bisbee almost has an old-world feel...(And the chipotle honey mustard from the Killer-Bee-Honey-hole-in-the-wall is killer-good...)
...speaking of bees...some artsy-graffiti down in the Brewery Gulch area of town:
(fun with stencils...)...some real-life bugs too, battling for one of the spring blooms:
(Does anyone know what kind of bug this large guy is?)This street-corner gives you a good feel for the up-and-down-ness of Bisbee. Much of the residential-part of the city is only accessible by pedestrian-stairs...
...back to some of the artsy-graffiti, in an empty lot between a gallery showing avian photos and an off-the-leash dog park:
...one of the doors in town; bottle-capped folk art:
=========================================...on the way down, we stopped in Tombstone for lunch, and for our out-of-state-friends to watch a re-enactment of The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Right after we parked, we noticed this bumpersticker:
...nothing like a bit of in-your-face xenophobia to make you feel welcome as a tourist, eh?
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Spring continues, with breezy days...
The last of the winter fruit are dropping off the taller branches of lemon tree in our yard. This one had been deformed--it grew in the crook of a branch and took a permanent bend:
...more desert globemallow blooming, including this purple variety:
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...and, in the midst of all the school-budget-uncertainties,
I've learned a new acronym: RIF--Reduction In Force...
...as in--you get a pink slip; you've been RIFed.
(English is a flexible language, eh? Any noun or acronym can magically become a verb.
RIF's been verbed.)
I've not yet been verbally notifiedin that way, but who knows...
(photo courtesy of this article in the Tucson paper: 
...gotta love the festive sense of color, even in the midst of death, eh?
...orange blossoms, just opening...too bad no one has come up with a way to transmit smells on-line; the fragrance is heady, and our trees are full of bees...
This area was settled by the Hohokam for probably a thousand years before being abandoned in the 1400's...intensive agriculture, sophisticated pottery, trade routes stretching all the way to Central America, miles and miles of canals...(cautionary tale?)
...in front of the visitor's center, some desert cassia (senna) was blooming...
...façade of a Sonoran-style house built in 1880 in 
Florence is also the county-seat of Pinal county and its Victorian-style courthouse dates to the 1890's...
This year is not turning out to be as spectacular as last spring for wildflowers in Arizona, but still, there are some Mexican goldpoppies here and there...
...and this is a view of Queen creek, which runs through the middle of the 
...some poppies...
...and this Japanese quince was blooming...
...and this Mexican crested blue cactus...(remind you of anything?)