Grand Canyon

I really cannot figure out how to to space my pictures and my words so I can tell about a picture before I move on with my words so that is why my pictures and my words are separate today! Any tips would be appreciated. Anyways.... Over the Columbus Day weekend our family got to go visit some dear friends of ours The Garcia's in Nevada. We had the best time with them! Friday we all piled in the van and drove about 3 hours to the Grand Canyon. It was the whole entire Marin family's first time ever so we got lots of pictures. One of my highlights was on our way seeing some of the beautiful trees changing colors. I love love love Fall and seeing the trees change is such a treat for me. That really made my afternoon. I just put a couple pics of the Grand Canyon as I am sure you do not really want to see ALL of them. One of the pictures is a "window" cut out of the rock, It is called Angels's landing, we actually got to walk on top of it. A little scary for me as I do not care for heights, but it was a great view. My next post will be about Zion National Park which we did the next day but enjoy for now...

Grand Canyon pictures

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce!

I know finally... I was able to get the pictures of Rose, Leah and I making our own homemade spaghetti sauce. It was a lot of fun and I love when I get to do cool things like this with my sisters! So you take about 20lbs of tomatoes and drop them in boiling water for about 5 mins. Then you quickly throw them into some ice water where you take them out one by one and peel the skin off. Next step is you mash them in the colander and get all the juice out. When its pretty mushy you stick it in your nice big pot with :

2 cups chopped fresh onions (then sauté or microwave them until they are soft)	3 Tablespoons of oregano
3 clove of garlic, minced	2 bay leaves
2 Tablespoons diced, fresh OR dried basil	1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped celery (optional, may be too strong for some folk's tastes)	2 Tablespoons chopped red sweet peppers
I then let it cook most of the day, it was still kind of chunky but if you want it smoother just stick in the blender. We froze it in freezer ziplock bags and that worked pretty good. Italian sausage added to it the day I made spaghetti was so good!	1/4 cup lemon juice (helps to acidify it, not necessary if you have a pressure canner)

Coming Soon.......

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce. Yum!

Beach Days....

Beautiful Day, Cute girls, Sparkling water, what more could you ask for.... Pictures are of Olivia and Brianna my niece from Az.

Navy Seals/Surf Passage

Ok I know Navy seals are not "Marin news" but we were at Coronado the other day and the Navy seal recruits were there. These are the guys that want to be Navy Seals but have to go through the grueling training to see if they can hack it. It was the coolest thing I have seen!

Wow is all I can say, I'm amazed at the endurance they have, I guess thats why they are the best. So just to try and explain some of these pictures and what they were doing: They had this nasty stinky inlet ( it seriously smelled like a sewer) that they would have to lay down and do their leg lifts/pushups/situps in. They had groups of maybe 8 in these rafts that they would have to take over the rocks , into the water, back over the rocks and then various excise's/drills over and over again without a break. You could see the fatigue on these guys faces, sometimes they would stumble and barely recover. We met a wife of one of these guys and she was telling us they do this like nonstop for at least 3 hours at a time, when we got there they had been drilling for an hour and a half. This was their second week and "Amber"(the wife) told us they started out with 200 guys and they were down to 100 and this particular exercise was called surf passage. It was funny because two of the D.I.'s stopped her and asked who her husband was and she wouldn't tell them! They found out and kind of harassed her husband a little. They had the platoon waving at her and shouting her name during the drills, it was pretty comical, but a great way to show their sense of humor too. She was pretty embarrassed but it was neat to see!

Volleyball

Yay for Adrienna! Her team won 3 out 3 games for Volleyball. Picture soon to follow!