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.
As difficult as it is to believe (particularly when temps are just dipping in to the 70′s) the holiday season is upon us.. As my wife will tell you, I have a bit of a love:hate relationship with this time of year. I enjoy what the traditional meanings of this season stand for, but often lament the way that they are celebrated in culture today. I enjoy Christmas music as a general rule, but loathe it before December 10. I enjoy that people are often motivated to be charitable, but wish that it didn’t take a special season for that to happen. There are many more but I don’t want to Grinch out any one’s holiday zeal.. Just a number of thoughts that struck me today that I thought I would share..
On a more practical update note.. Some excitement of our own lately, I traveled home to Michigan for 5 days to do some hunting w/ my dad and will have venison by Christmas at the latest 
Liz had a visit during the same time from my mom, who spoiled Liz rotten and enjoyed a girls day at the spa. We spent turkey day with friends Angela & Kyle who prepared a masterful feast, it was great to hang out with them and their family and friends, thanks for opening your home to us. Liz was a mad woman and went shopping at 6:15 Friday morning “just for fun” particularly as we have completed most of our Christmas shopping already. I will never understand the “fun” in that experience. And the countdown is on for the return to Michigan for Christmas, the report is that snow is falling regularly and we cant wait, only 22 days.
As always, check out the latest in photos at our family flickr page
www.flickr.com/photos/barzfam
or Eric’s portfolio page
www.flickr.com/photos/ericbarzphotography
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!
Some of you may know that I have been pursuing photography for a while and I have come to the point where I feel more equipped to offer some services to paying customers!! But the downside is that I dont have what I would consider a suitable body of work to represent what I am capable of doing. So here is the pitch:
If you have a desire for some portrait work to be done for your family or just the kids please contact me.. I am looking to do a few freebies in exchange for releases of the images for a portrolio. So let me know…
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 our long awaited new computer has arrived and is functioning awesomely.. This also means that I have been going crazy working with images from vacation. One that I was blown away by today is from the wedding we went to on our way home.. Here is the beautiful bride Kim looking radiant.
Hope you like it.. look for more to come.
