Not really sure how to post something like this on the blog. 

We lost Ahna’s cousin, Tim Abernethy, in the Line Of Duty this morning (Sunday). Tim was a police officer with the Houston Police Department, and was on a traffic stop when the subject got out of the car and ran. When Tim followed in pursuit, the suspect hid behind a bin, and shot Tim several times.

We really can’t express the shock and loss that we are feeling right now, let alone Tim’s family. He has left behind a wife and two beautiful kids, amongst the rest of the family. 

I’m not really sure what the blog postings will look like for the next several days, but we are trying to go to Houston for the services. Needless to say, the postings might be a bit scattered for the next week or so. 

Please hold Tim’s family in your prayers this week. And please, please, please let your local police officers know how much you appreciate their service, dedication, and commitment to a better community. 

Here is a link to a news story about the incident.

A nice story about Tim.

The picture was taken last June at a family reunion in the Seattle area (nothing on this site is for reproduction by anyone else, period).

Ahna, Ezra, and I went up to Breckenridge over the weekend to spend some time up in the mountains…the excuse was that I had a meeting up there (more on that later). My folks and Rena were already up there for a conference that my Dad was speaking/attending at, so we met up with them for breakfast on Saturday and enjoyed a nice walk around downtown Breckenridge afterwards. It was cold up there: like 0-5 degrees with lots of snow, so Ezra packed into his snowsuit that Grandparents Bersagel got for him.

The meeting that I attended was my first with a new team that I am on called the Colorado L.A.S.T. (Local Assistance State Team), which is a state-level resource for the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. We will respond to any and all Line Of Duty Deaths of firefighters within the entire state of Colorado. The team is comprised of about 10 people, and took an application and interview process tojoin. It’s something that is extremely important to me, and I am honored to be selected to be on the team. My specialty will be Logistics: helping the family and local jurisdictions in coordinating the services, and everything that goes into those services (bagpipes, honor guard, etc). I pray that my service to this team never goes beyond simply attending the meetings, but if I am ever called out, I will do it with the greatest sense of pride. 

The picture is during the sunset from the hotel….

I love Saturdays. Especially when they involve waking up to snow, hanging out with Ezra in the morning, spending the afternoon with Ahna (alone), good college football on TV (go Gators), and finally a fairly productive and relaxed evening. Basically what I am saying, is that I like 3-4 Saturdays per year….at least to the degree that I enjoyed yesterday. 

The morning hours were fairly self explanatory based on the previous paragraph….so skip to the afternoon. Mom, Dad, and Rena hung out with Ezra while Ahna and I enjoyed a wonderful lunch, chilling at the house, and some errands. I can’t say the next statement without the qualifier that we wouldn’t change anything for the world, but we really enjoy each other’s company…and miss the intentional time together. 

There we were: 7am, heading out the door to go shopping on Black Friday, stopping at Starbucks, wearing our North Face jacket, going to Babies-R-Us. Wow. What the heck happened to us? We had become representative of the people that we protested sometime in our previous lives. 

But there was an explanation for all of it. First of all, we have always tried to avoid the Black Friday consumption-based world – mostly as a protest of all of the things that we are told that we need. But perhaps there is some merit in it all: like sales on things that you actually need (car seats) in a tough economic time. Perhaps we can take advantage of the early store openings – especially since Ezra woke up at 5 on his own. The Starbucks? Well, simply Ahna’s favorite chai. The North Face? I dunno, I’ve had it for almost 10 years now. Babies-R-Us? I suppose that’s obvious. It’s interesting where life takes you….places that you could never have imagined years ago. 

ed note: so after I wrote the posting, I found this story which seems to trump any of the good that can come from the shopping events of today: a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death in Long Island attempting to hold back the crowds during the opening of the store. It makes me want to say lots of bad things about consumerism.

If there is one lesson that is continuously beaten into us it’s this: the growth curve is dramatic, and so is it’s influence on the pocketbook. Call it ignorance or nievety, but I had no idea that things would change this fast – not even his cloths…and while I got over the clothes by the end of his first month, the larger things are starting to rear their heads. 

Take the car seat situation. He has outgrown his infant carrier seat….due to height. There is still plenty of room to maneuver in the weight limitations, but he is too tall for the straps (they are curling over his shoulders). Turns out that the big secret in the car seat/stroller world is that the kids rarely ever make the weight limitations before they outgrow the height limitations (for the 50+ percentiles). Even as we researched the seats that we purchased today, there were some that were advertising weight limits that would put the average child at 10 years old….and well past the need for a combination seat. I suppose that it only reinforces the need to do a little reading of your own before hitting the stores. 

We enjoyed the relative emptiness of the store in the early morning hours, and the chance to look, feel, test, and ask lost of questions without the pressure of 15 other people waiting to do the same. We used the Baby Bargins book as our guide, and settled on a new convertible seat and a new stroller for Ezra. It’s sort of daunting to think of all of the changes that will happen with these new items (no more in and out with the infant seat, more trips to load the car, what happens when he is sleeping?, no more clipping the seat in the stroller, etc, etc, etc.). Who would have thought that it would be somewhat scary? 

The convertible seat that we ended up purchasing was the Even-Flo Triumph Advance. It’s gotten great crash ratings, good product design reviews, and generally fits within the budget. The bonus to us is that the weight limitations for rear and forward facing are more than comparable others, and since Ezra is in the 75th percentile, we think it will work nicely. We had to get one per car since both of us are primary care providers during the day, and we can’t switch cars (that whole manual transmission thing). 

Since we can’t take it out of the car and clip it into a stroller base, we got a stroller as well. We went back and forth on this one for a while, but purchased the Combi Cosmo stroller for it’s size, weight, and portability (it’s actually designed for air travel constrictions: slightly narrower base, compacts like an umbrella stroller, and it is designed to be compliant with overhead storage requirements). We figured that those were good reasons for travel, but also for taking it around generally: lighter, smaller, and portability can’t be all bad. 

If anyone has any idea on what is next on the replacement schedule, please let us know. It seems like we should have been able to anticipate this change sooner, but we didn’t…the learning curve for us appears slower than Ezra’s growth curve. Hmm, perhaps we should start saving for his first car. Oh boy.

As you guessed it, there has been lots going on for the last couple of days. 

Wednesday began with my Aunt arriving into town fro Israel, and Ezra and i going up to the airport to pick her up. She ended up catching a flight that put her here 5 hours before she was scheduled, which wasn’t that big of a deal…but it was a contributing factor to Ezra not eating his mid-morning snack for the second consecutive day. The weird thing is that he wasn’t hungry (or at least acting that way) on either occasion. Don’t know if this is a new trend, or we were just too busy…so stay tuned.

Wednesday night brought our return to family dinner for the first time in a couple of weeks. We had suspended our attendance in an effort to establish a bedtime routine for Ezra, but Wednesday of this week was our turn to host and cook. It was great to see everyone again, and we were thrilled that Mary was back and everyone could be together for the first time in seemingly 50 years. 

My tour started back at work on Friday, along with class and studying. Saturday however, brought the annual Chili Supper and Starlighting Event to Castle Rock. For those that don’t know, accompanying the Starlighting, the fire department (and now the union) has hosted a chili supper for something like 68 years. For the past couple of years, I have been part of the cooking crew….we start at 730 in the morning, and finish the cooking around lunchtime….and the clean up around 6pm. 

For the past two years we have made 105 gallons of chili. If it sounds like a lot, it is….it’s almost three bathtubs completely full to the top of chili. We end up serving around 3000 people (in the last picture, you can see the line for chili stretching outside of the station) over the course of a couple of hours. Since I cooked, I was able to enjoy the evening with Ahna, Ezra, Mom, Dad, and Rena. We hung out for the Starlighting and the fireworks that followed, then proceeded to head home through lots of traffic. There have been estimates of 6-10,000 people downtown. 

To wrap up the weekend: the Broncos stink. 

A few weeks ago, after looking at the schedule for days that Ezra would be in daycare this month (and realizing that it would only be one or two) we decided to include another day in the schedule to allow for him to become more familiar with Peggy and gang. 

Of course, the little man with skis sitting on my shoulder had absolutely no objection to this course of action and we made arrangements. The day was yesterday, and while Ezra spent the day with Peggy, I spent the day with Arapahoe Basin. 

A good friend and his new wife happened to be in town as they drove across the country to their new home, and they came along. They got married in a foreign country Alabama, and are on their way to San Diego where JJ will be stationed – he is a helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps. It was a lot of fun to spend some time with them, as well as to enjoy a beautiful day skiing and drinking beer in the mountains. 

Quick funny story: we arrived into Idaho Springs on the way up to A-Basin to get fuel (for the car and for us), at which point I realized that I didn’t have my wallet. See, earlier in the morning, I overslept my alarm by 45 minutes at work and was scrambling to get out of there to make the meet time. I thought that I had miraculously pulled it off, until we got to the gas station when I came to the conclusion that I left my wallet at work. We got the gas taken care of, I worked a free beer at the bar through the mug club, and scrounged enough change for a soda and fries for lunch. Argh. Wallets and I haven’t gotten along recently….and it’s been mostly a one-way street sort of relationship. 

Oh, I forgot to mention that on Sunday Tori, Mary, and Alex came down and spent some time with Ahna and Ezra. Mary has been back east since the end of the summer, so it had been a while since she had seen the little boy. Everyone had fun, but there are no pictures to prove that it even happened….so I am going on Ahna’s word.