Feliz Navidad 2007

Christmas greetings everyone! We hope all of you are having/will have a most excellent time celebrating Jesus' birthday wherever you are. We are just staying at home in Kentucky this Christmas, keeping it totally low-key...we miss you guys!

Don't you love our neighbors Christmas lights?? We decided to not even attempt to compete with their efforts...but Russell did make sure we had our own Christmas tree inside :)

He brought me a 'Bah Humbug' Scrouge hat because I couldn't be bothered making a fuss over decorating for the holidays! To be quite honest, I'm actually getting into the whole Christmas light thing and it's such a novelty to be in this freezing weather right now.

Otherwise, we're all good....enjoying some time off work and looking forward to my sissy, Katie coming to visit in a couple of weeks :)

God bless

Love Russell & Sarah

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! We are missing ya'll so much right now during this festive season with all this time off work and no family to hang out with...but we are making the most of what we have and had a great time serving the really poor in our community (and there are ALOT of them!) by cooking them a yummy thanksgiving meal and delivering it to them with the other volunteers from our church- I really have found these americans to be so generous and helpful!!

So in order to make room for the inevitable food excesses, Russell and I also ran in the local YMCA's 6 mile turkey trot before we shared a meal with some new friends from Mississippi, who are also pastors up here and couldn't be with their families either.

We are just relaxing and enjoying some chill time- although i'm really upset today because i just got mum's email that they had our gorgeous, lovely Scamper put down this week :( mum and dad are really upset too- scampy was the best dog ever! He was so loyal, fun and completely crazy with several screws loose!!- ever since we rescued him from the bush, he has blessed us with such a devoted faithfulness that has helped each one of us in so many different ways.... so please join us right now and give thanks for all the wonderful pets that have blessed your lives in honor of our little scampy scamp scamp stiles :)

so that's about us for now, love you so much and God bless your holiday season!
love sarah and russell


ps.. I , Russell, have redesigned our bathroom to help meet Sarah's needs. Let me know what you think.

Thank goodness dumb halloween is over!!

Happy Halloween to all those who even knew it was happening. These are some of the picky's from the Fall Festival we ran for the kiddies at our church in the weekend...what a bunch of cutie wuties huh?

So we spent the actual hallow's eve at our friends house because we wanted to escape the inevitable onslaught of the masses of scabbing little kids in our neighborhood (which is packed with young families). It actually was pretty fun and we even did a bit of trick 0 treating ourselves ;) So, I suppose the lesson from it all, is the good old saying of,

'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!'

So there you have it folks, our first halloween in the states together...hoorah!

love ya'll
God bless
russell and sarah
p.s.- this is our favorite costume of the night.

Who's gettin' ready for Halloween??

Hey guys, spot the boring house in our neighborhood! Just look at what our next door neighbors put up in their yard back in early September (!)....they were like, "so, are you gonna decorate?"....ah, that would be a no.

We have, however, given-in to wearing costumes to the Fall Festival our church is running...of course Sarah took this as another excellent opportunity to celebrate the mighty 80's! We hope you are all doing well, we are fine- just enjoying Fall break from School and finally enjoying some cooler weather (although, it's still about 24 degree celcius!).

Happy holidays ya'll and we'll post some of the picky's from our party soon :)

Love you

Russell & Sarah

We made it!! The big 1st year wedding anniversary celebrations, Sept 30th 2007

Hey guys, here's a little quiz for ya'll...which activity did Russell pick for our anniversary and which one did Sarah pick?? After one year of marriage the Bone team has learned a lot about that lovey-dovey word: compromise ;) So, on Friday afternoon we drove up to Cincinnati, Ohio to watch the Chicago Cubs maul the Cincinnati Reds in a really exciting game. We were unfortunately sitting with all these Chicago fans and you bet Russell low-key took his Cincinnati cap off half way through!!

After a luxurious night in Mr Hilton's abode we left the world of comfort behind, for some good old kiwi camping! Trust Russell to choose the state park that he did...hahahahaha!!! We had a great time pitching up our $20 Wal-mart tent and playing with fire even so it really was still quite warm outside. Sarah bet Russell at mini-golf (AGAIN!!) and then Russell got the camp manager to heat up his microwave dinner..(!!)...how embarrassing...I'm trying to toughen him up folks, I really am...but these Americans do love their creature comforts!!

The Big Bone Lick state park is actually really beautiful despite it's horrendously awful name....(I mean honestly, who chooses a name like that??!!) and we had a very relaxing walk around it's pretty lake before retiring to our cosy little cavern....

well, cosy yes...but flippen' freezin' by 8am the next morning too! So, we're like, "you wanna go?" and we're like "yeah, let's get outta here!"....we didn't even bother to get changed, we just threw everything in the car and drove home to take a nap!! Happy Anniversary dear! So, all in all we had just another great Bone adventure...hope this made you laugh, we really are quite a pair over here!!

love you guys,
Russell & Sarah (1 year down....)

sarah's gotta' gun

Hey ya'll, we are furthering our education of true Kentucky by Sarah learning to shoot her first gun. After missing several clay pigeons, she actually managed to hit two of them while Russell started nailing them after getting warmed up.

Thanks must be given to our awesome gun instructors Jason and Wendy, who along with their great kids treated us to such a fantastic time! Make sure you check out in the video how far the gun pushes Sarah back!!

oh and just so you know, no animals were harmed in the filming of this historic moment.

We love you guys, please keep in touch :)

Russell and Sarah

We are SO Blessed!!

Please Welcome Jimmy Bone!

Hey everyone, just wanted to share our joy of the last week or so...our good friend Sarah visited us from London, England....we got GIVEN a car (AND we got to travel down to Nashville, Tennessee on Labor Day. We had a great time showing British Sarah all the wonders of our area (the Jim Beam factory, Berheim Forest, Louisville's downtown, the mall, WAL-Mart [of course!!], Sarah's school, our church, the YMCA, some of our cool new mates and of course Nashville- only 2 hours away!!).

So we hope you get the suttle hints...and start planning your own very special visit to Shepherdsville, Kentucky!! We now have a reliable car that is allowed on the interstate (thanks to a VERY GENEROUS lady at our church who seriously "just wanted to bless us"....she certainly achieved that!!) and we just love to chill with our pep's whenever we can get a chance ;)

Otherwise, it's apparently Fall (Autumn)...but we're still in the 90's (30's degree centigrade), so yeah not really feeling like ever putting a sweater on over here. Hope ya'll are well and loving spring down under- should be a cracker huh?! Sarah sure does miss her lambies right now!

Peace, love and happiness all round guys,

Bless ya

Russell and Sarah

Summer fun at the Lake!

Hey everyone, how are you all?

We've just got back from a great trip to a huge lake just

south of us here in Kentucky.

We stayed with some of our friends from our church in their amazing RV...house on wheels...complete with flushing toilet, shower, full kitchen and enough beds for 8 people! We had a blast swimming...tubing and just lolling around in the lake. It's still a million degrees here and it was just so nice to be in water, even if it feels like bath water compared to NZ's crisp, refreshing waters ;)

oh and check out some of the local wildlife...cutie, cutie, cutie!! (the bug not our friends, but you can check them out to if you want. Sarah thinks that the bug is so cute that it deserves its own spot on our blog. I tried to tell her that it is only a bug.)

Otherwise we are all good...I (Sarah) just started as the long-term PE substitute teacher at a local elementary school...which I absolutely LOVE!!! Why did I ever teach those rude little high school kids??!! (Just joking...I love you all really!!). But seriously, it's SO nice to not be sworn at and to have all these little children doing exactly what you want them to do :)


We are loving our free YMCA membership and have finally got into a consistent routine for burning all our fast food fat off...I hate to say it, but I've never eaten as many french fries as I have in the last nine months here!! Our house is all good and we thoroughally enjoyed having our first guest (Celeste) come stay last month before she travelled down to Mexico.


So, that's pretty much us for now...love you all so much and always appreciate hearing from you!

God bless,


Russell & Sarah