Juice haul

Here is the basic set up for mass producing juice from free Saddlebrooke oranges.  I slice, Dave juices with the electric juicer, and when his container is full he pours the juice into the strainer.  Keeps out the wayward seeds.

Then I funnel juice into our recycled milk jugs.  Since we can't drink all this juice at once, we freeze some of the jugs.

We started out with four bags of oranges that looked like this.  We juiced three bags to get the 2 1/4 gallons or so of juice.  There are no photos of making contacts with neighbors who don't want their oranges, or the small amount of labor involved with picking hundreds of oranges.  The juicing is the fun part.  Finding the source for getting the fruit is more tricky.  But just driving around here you see so much fruit not being eaten, it's hard to see.

The good news is our baby orange tree that we planted last year has about 60 blossoms.  Hopefully upon our return next year we'll have some of our own oranges!

Best Coyote Yet!

Another splendid video of animals in our backyard.  This one was filmed around 5:30 in the evening which is why it's in color.  Plus it was a hot day.

Company

Our "homeless" housesitting friends visited us for the weekend.  The weather is still over 90 (nine days in a row now) but we got out and did some activities.

Spring wildflowers are the big deal and everyone is racing to hike and see the sights.  Sunday morning we got to Catalina State Park at 6:30 am to beat the heat.  The hike was about 6 miles and took four hours.

This is our friend Jeff, taking a photo of a brave hiker taking a cold dip.  This waterfall and pond was at the summit of the hike.  It would have been better if it was at the end of the four hour trek as we were really hot.

Onto Willcox

The town of Willcox, AZ is only about 20 or 30 minutes from our Wild West movie set attraction.  Willcox relies heavily on the old singing cowboy, Rex Allen, as a tourist attraction.  He died many years ago but they have a nice memorial, museum and street named after him.

Even his horse is buried a few feet from his statue.

Nice murals in the old historic part of town.

We also liked the rest stop off of i-10.  The rock formations are really interesting and similar to the Chiricahua National Park which is nearby.  These are some old mining cars as there was so much mining in Arizona a hundred years ago.  Most of these "ghost towns" were all here for miners back in the day.  Copper, silver and gold mines.

We crossed over into New Mexico and stayed the night in Lordsburg.  Honestly, this was the most unattractive, unappealing town I have seen.  There are a lot of run down towns in Oregon and Arizona due to logging or mining businesses that dried up.  But this one had nothing charming about it.  But our Comfort Inn was actually nice.  This is a deserted restaurant across the street from our motel.  No Mexican food was to be had at this joint.

Day One of Mini Road Trip

We decided to get out of town since it's 90 degrees.  However, going to the southeast corner of AZ is no cooler.  We started out by visiting a quirky little place called Gammon's Gulch, north of the town of Benson.

This is an old western town, created by Jay Gammon, starting in the 1970s.  Many movies and music videos have been filmed here.  Jay is playing the banjo for us in the above photo.  He also played the old hundred year old piano.  

His "tour" was peppered with jokes, gossip about the Hollywood people he has worked with, and political commentary.  We could have done without the rah rah Trump stuff.

Looking out at the main street.

Dave, in front of the prosperous law office.

Arts and Crafts Sale Day

Here is a photo of my "booth" set up before the customers came.  Kind of difficult to separate my stuff in this photo since you can see the vendors behind me.  The sale went for six hours and I sold about half my things for a total of a bit over $400.  So a lot better than last year.  Saw a lot of people I knew and it was pretty fun.

The most fun was that I filled a box and labeled it "Bargain Bin - Everything is $1".  These were pieces I've had laying around that I could care less about and pieces I wasn't proud of.  15 of the 16 items sold within the first ten minutes.  I will always do that in the future to "unload".

Before and After

We finally changed out the 20 year old plastic vertical blinds in half the house.  What a difference!

Before, laundry room.

After. laundry room.

Before, breakfast nook.

Now we can actually see the mountain.  We do have views!  Next up is the guest room, then next year we'll tackle the larger patio door windows.