Michigan Vacation pt. 1

Rather than reposting I’m going to redirect you to the Eric Barz Photography Blog to see pictures and a brief recap of our vacation to Michigan.

Announcement – Baby Asher

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.

Poor Neglected Blog :(

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.

Happy Holiday Season & a quck update

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

Liz’s Classroom

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

Michigan Recap

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…

Michigan Update

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 also got to go to the Detroit Zoo and see tons of cool exhibits but the most well known and unique is the polar bear exhibit and we got to see him up close.

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.