This is the official Barz blog announcement for little baby Asher:
Asher William Barz arrived Jan 19, 2009 at 6:26pm
He was 6 lb. 13 oz. and 19 inches at birth.
Liz and Asher are doing great and we love him dearly. Can’t wait for him to meet everyone.
Quick update with photos for everyone.
We are officially in the home stretch for the school year, now that spring break is over the countdown to the end begins. Personally, I cant wait.
Nothing extremely exciting going on at the homefront except a little bit of travel. Over last weekend we took a mini-vacation with our friends Kayla and Santi to California.
Liz and Kayla had been planning this as a suprise for us guys since just after Christmas, and if you know Liz, that is quite a feat for her to keep it under wraps for that long. I was kept in the dark about everything except the date until just days before we left.
The main purpose of the trip was to catch a soccer game in LA, the LA Galaxy against San Jose.
This was the home opener for the Galaxy and a real treat for me to see players like David Beckham and Landon Donovan in action. We ended up with great seats to catch the action.
Here is a wide view of the Home Depot Center in Carson, CA. Home of the Galaxy
Liz and Kayla enjoying the game
David Beckham taking a corner kick
A free kick later in the half
The final score, Beckham and Landon Donovan scored in the 1st half right in front of our seats it was pretty awesome.
The rest of the time there was for some R&R, and just exploring. We visited where LA all started as well as Chinatown and also spent time exploring old town Pasadena, where we stayed. 
All in all, a very nice time. We did this as a bit of an early anniversary get away and realized that it was our first non family visiting vacation since our honeymoon….
Note to self, do more travel with just the two of us..
So I realized today how badly I have neglected our little blog here. I suppose I could make some excuses about how crazy things got, what with the holidays and all that but I guess there really isnt much of an explaination, so heres the latest from the Barz clan in Arizona.
Christmas was a blast at home, even though it felt like we did nothing but run everywhere. We got to spend time with both families (Doby’s and Barz’s) see friends in a couple different parts of the state. We even got to see snow, which was a great improvement over last years 55 deg. and raining Christmas debacle. We did a day trip to go skiing with my family and Liz and I tried snowboarding for the first time (BIG mistake, especially since we had to spend the whole next day on a plane).
After returning, we spent the New Year relaxing/recouperating from our vacation and mentally preparing ourselves for school kids who had been away from the discipline of school for two weeks.
We celebrated Liz’s birthday 1/19 she turned the big 25!! We had a fun little get together with some friends after church for pizza and cake.
Exciting things have been happening at our church, we moved our Saturday night service that we attend from the main sanctuary to the youth building (the Bridge). The space has a real atmosphere that connects much better to the goals for the community than did the sanctuary but there is still a long way to go in terms of reshaping the culture of the service and the hearts of the people that attend.
With the move to a new building allowed for some great opportunities for me (eric) to lead part of our community. Along with one other worship leader, I am responsible for handling all of the worship for our community gatherings, that means that I am leading nearly every other week at the Bridge. This has been an awesome chance for me to grow and mature in my ability to lead others in worship and to take responsibility for the direction of the community for this season of change. Also, since the Bridge is a very new facility it has some very new (and very nice) sound equipment. This is great considering that our sound in the sanctuary has been a constant point of frustration for the worship team. The downside is that nobody really knows how to use any of the equipment, which is where I get tapped to lead the tech team for Saturday nights as well. Looking forward I see this being a great chance to teach and expand the knowledge of others in the community but for the time being it means that if I am not on stage leading, I am in the booth running sound and teaching.
God bless my lovely wife for her patience for this season of training volunteers for sound, as I have yet to actually sit and worship with her at a Saturday night service since the change in venue. (love you honey)
January also brought Liz’s dad, Paul, to visit us so that he could run the PF Chang’s Rock & Roll Marathon. Paul got to spend a few days hanging out with Liz and I and then ran the 1/2 marathon over the weekend. I think that he got the Arizona bug, being able to enjoy running outside in January, and the rumor is that he hasnt stopped talking about coming back since he landed back in Michigan.
One of the other major changes since our last update, is that we moved!! We decided to make a change in apartments so that we could be closer to our church community. As it was before, we were driving at least 90 miles a week to and from Joy which put a serious damper on our spirtits having to fight traffic to go to church. So at the beginning of February we packed up and moved to a new place that is MUCH closer to church and only 2-3 minutes more to work each day. So if you need our new address contact us and we will get it to you.
One last thing to update is some fun photography things. My first paying client (a co-worker) finished choosing her images and received her prints to rave reviews. She is expecting that some family will be looking for additional prints. Also, she returned from her destination wedding in Mexico with digital files from the resort photographer and has asked me to do some retouching and editing work on them to improve the quality. Also, Gareth Robinson, our worship pastor and friend of ours, just finished recording the bulk of his third album last month. On Monday, we went out got some great images for his CD packaging. Hopefully the record label likes them as much as I do. Part of the shoot was done in Sedona which is amazing nearly year round but we made a bit of a family day out of it and Liz came along as well as Gareth’s wife Lizzy and their three awesome kids. It was quite a fun adventure and I will post some images here soon.
If you follow this blog at all you will have noticed that I was a bit of a slacker in updating for the last couple of months so I am compensating with a bunch of posts right now.
So for my birthday, Liz arranged for a surprise photo session with some friends of ours Chris & Kelsi.. They were really good sports and attempted to follow my mismanagement and directions. The nice thing was that they were naturals and rocked it. Check out the photos below.
Click the photos to view larger sizes.
Well with just over 8 weeks gone in the school year, I figure it is about time to do an update. I had one of these started about 6 weeks ago but never got around to finishing it so if you are seeing this it means I actually followed through (yeah for me!!).
Since our last update, we have been doing a whole lot of the same and have settled in to a pretty good routine and toss in some spice here and there. Generally, we are diong the work, home, sleep, wake, work…. routine but the exciting bits are the best part.. I have been continuing to meet with a group of developing worship leaders at the church and attending practices on Thursday nights which has been such a blast getting to know such a talented group of people. Liz continues to meet her need for animal indulgence at the Arizona Humane Society at least 3x a month where she has moved up from dog walker to adoptions (quite a promotion). Together we continue to get to know our new church family and get to do fun stuff like cook out, have parties, and generally find any excuse to be with our new friends. Also, thanks to a new season in the life of our worship minstry I am getting the chance to lead worship for the Saturday night community and co-lead Sunday mornings along with our awesome worship leader/pastor Gareth (shameless flattery, but he may read this). This has been a neat experience and I feel privilaged to be a part of what is going on at Joy during this time.
The next few weeks should be pretty exciting. This Saturday, Liz’s aunt will be traveling from Michigan to stay with us for a few days. We will be hitting the Grand Canyon and Sedona as well as all of the local attractions while she is here. Also, while in Sedona we will be meeting up with Kevin & BethAnn Shoemaker, our pastor and his wife from Lansing. They are visiting for a conference in Flagstaff and will be meeting us on their drive up north from the Phoenix airport.
This coming weekend also kicks off Liz’s fall break so she will be out of school for 2 weeks. October 15 begins Eric’s lowly 1 week off but we already have another trip to Sedona planned with the Ozorios so it should be a great start to a relaxing week.
For those who want to know (you know who you are) Roxy is doing well, she is on a plan to get some of her summer weight off… Opposite process of Michigan winters.. the dog doesnt like walking in the heat so she put on some pounds over the summer instead of an inactive winter.
One of the highlights of any given week is my chance to go and play with the team that is leading worship each weekend. We have a rehearsal on Thursday nights that often times ends up being a band worship service : ) Anyone is welcome to come and join just for fun (and or practice) usually I attend to have some fellowship and to practice my guitar and singing but this week there were a ton of people there and so I decided to break out the camera and have some fun…
The lighting for practice is a bunch of fluorescent tubes about 30 ft over the stage so the light wasn’t great for taking pictures so I had to go with a more “artistic” interpretation of the images from practice… Here are a couple that survived my Photoshop manipulations… Enjoy!
For some of you who havent been in Liz’s classroom, but want to see what a first grader’s world looks like here it is…
This is a 360 degree view merged in to a 2 dimensional image… Pretty fun stuff..
Click on the image and then click “All Sizes” to get a larger view from flickr (Large is the best)…. Made with auto alignment in Photoshop CS3
So to resume where the rest of the vacation recap left off.. We spent a great week or so with my parents in Mt. Pleasant and got to hang out with my sisters and parents which always proves interesting.. One of the fun things we did was I made my sister and her friend do a fake portrait session with me.. Here is one of my faves from that. My little sister Leah. looking totally rockstar…
Also during our stay there we took a couple of trips.. First to Michigan State along with Leah, and Liz’s sister Jenny who will be following in the proud footsteps of their siblings (us) at the greatest university in the state.. We walked all over campus and showed them around and stopped at the ever famous MSU Dairy Store where they make their own ice cream from the dairy research done on campus.. Our second trip was with the whole Barz family and we went to Grand Haven/Grand Rapids.. 
We did one day at PJ Hofmaster park between Grand Haven and Petoskey (photo of the gals on the beach) and then the following morning we went to Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville and heard an awesome message in a new series called “God is Green.” To check out what its all about see Dr. Matthew Sleeth’s book called “Serve God, Save the Planet.”
Liz and I were fortunate enough to celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks twice once at a phenomenal show in Bay City with friend Noah and Sarah and the second time in Lansing with the Doby family. Here is Liz w/ her family checking out the sweet fireworks in Lansing.
After a couple more days with the Dobys we headed back to Lansing for the weekend to stay 
with our friends Vicki and Deej. They have been some of the closest people to us from our days at Michigan State and it is always a joy to hang out with them. One of my highlights from the weekend was getting to go fishing on Saturday and catch a bunch of bass particularly with Deej because he is such a knowledgeable fisherman and was the person who got me interested in bass fishing. Also, Roxy had some new friends to play with during the time with Vicki and Deej.. They 
have two black labs Cooper and Chief who by the end of three days were fast friends.
Our last leg of vacation took us to Kokomo, IN where we were attending the wedding of one of Liz’s college roommates Kim. They had a beautiful ceremony and a rockin‘ reception afterwards and we had a blast seeing all of Liz’s friends from college there after a year of everyone being spread across the globe.
One of the pictures from the wedding…
And now back to regular life… School starts again in less than 2 weeks…
So we have officially returned to the AZ, got in last night and are starting to get used to living out of our own home again..
Updates from the rest of our vacation will follow soon but wanted to make sure those waiting with rapt excitement knew we were back in town. Give us a call if anyone wants to hang out.
Some people know about my ever growing photography hobby (addiction) and so my lovely wife let me upgrade my camera to a semi-pro level DSLR (for the non gadget folks, thats pretty nice). So I have been documenting our life since about a week ago today when my new toy arried so here are some pictures from our time here so far.
Liz w/ Roxy doing a fake portrait session for me.
At the Ann Arbor Summer Festival for an outdoor movie.
And right by Liz’s parents house was the Michigan Challenge Hot Air Balloon Event which we went to a bunch of times to see cool things like this:
We capped off the week with Liz’s sister, Jenny’s graduation open house. Here is Jenny (far left) with some of her friends celebrating.
This week we are hanging out with my family and maybe making a few trips to visit friends as well.. Stay tuned. And as always check out more photos on Flickr using the link to the right.
