Ester picks up her medication then glances at the mirror. She notices a black tally-mark she drew with her eye-liner the morning before. She adds another to remind herself that she can't take her prescription that day. Instead, she can only take it every third day.

Since late January, Ester has been forced to follow this life-gambling routine because she can't afford health insurance, similar to many Tombstone residents.

"It's tough to get the kids to eat, period," said Stephanie Holzman, food service coordinator for the district. "Especially the younger kids."

Holzman has been with the district for 12 years and is continually challenged to devise plans and ideas to feed the children healthy meals.

Childhood obesity is a problem that has been sweeping the nation for almost two decades and it is an increasingly large problem in Arizona.

The state of Arizona, which has an obesity rate of about one-in-four, no longer requires any physical education in schools. However, Tombstone schools still provide it.

Joseph Thomas, the P.E. teacher at both Walter J. Meyer Elementary and Tombstone High, spends about 90 minutes each week with each grade at the elementary students – as opposed to high school students enrolled in the P.E. class who work out for 90 minutes each day, but only for one semester in their four years of high school.

The students aren't allowed to repeat the class.

When asked if he had insurance, 'Big' Billy Combs, an actor at Helldorado Town, joked, "Yeah - we don't use live bullets."

"It has been good to have all the rain and snow in this area, but that is going to cause different weeds and flowers to bloom that we haven't seen in a while and it is going to cause a lot of allergies," said Tombstone local Hermando Molina.

The new system, called the Communicator! NXT, will use the internet to alert Search and Rescue (SAR) members of an emergency call wherever they are by sending a message to their cell phone, PDA, email, pager, fax, work and home phones.

"The Communicator! NXT is a real improvement because no matter where I am, at home or on vacation, I will be able to send the emergency messages from my phone to all the electronic devices that the SAR members use for communication," said Sgt. David Noland, 52, who has been a part of the posse since 1987 when the pager system was still new.

Tombstone Family Health clinic celebrated its grand opening Dec. 3. Tombstone Epitaph’s Julie Stupp caught up with the clinic’s physician and a nurse practitioner to discuss why they enjoy working in Tombstone and what challenges they foresee.

Patients will no longer wait because Tombstone Family Health Clinic finally opened its doors to the public last Thursday but questions about the delayed opening remain.

Only a few fliers were handed out to local businesses around town about the clinic’s opening and hours. Tombstone Family Health will be open on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s from 8 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. It also will be open the second and fourth Friday of each month and will see patients by appointment then.

A few years back, in a pair of bright white steel airplane hangers just off of the Old Bisbee Highway southeast of Tombstone, a study emerged that changed the way scientists and water managers alike thought about water runoff and the effects of urbanization.

Roughly five years in the making, the 2004 Goodrich et al. study probed the regional aquifer to determine what impact ephemeral, or temporary, water channels had on replenishing the area’s groundwater.