Home is where I park it

A very quick check in and update on the diet. What a pain, the scales were broken in Boots when I went there so no weigh in this month, I'm not feeling massively slimmer but hopefully I've shed a pound or two! As I expected I didn't do quite so well when not at work with fast and feast days although I don't think I ever went over 2000 calories in a day so at least I shouldn't have put weight on. I have been back working again for 2 weeks and have done well and stuck to the diet. I had one day where I was really really hungry with stomach cramps but I think I over ate the day before. There is defiantly a connection with eating more one day and feeling hungrier than usual the next. I'm no expert but I think maybe it's because you're stomach stretches when you over eat and so then there is more space to fill!! So I have really tried to keep portions to a reasonable size even on feast days. I also hardly eat much after lunch now. I eat breakfast every ...

Very Bright Blessing to all for the Spring Equinox (or Ostara) today. A time where we have equal light and dark and move forwards to lighter days in the coming weeks. Over the darker winter months I have been busy painting and making crafty things but soon it will be time to go out and socialise again and have fun!! To happy days ahead, the spring & summer and love & laughter!! Looking forward to being in a field with friends old and new over the next few months :) Talking of being in a field, do you want a nice cheap grass roots festival this year? New for 2017 FEREL FEST set in a beautiful part of Wiltshire. Check out the awesome line up! Book your ticket now before it sells out!!! FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE You may remember I posted about a painting a friend had done of one of my photographs recently, it reminded me that she did one near the end of last year that I forgot to post about. I think at the time I was busy with stuff and kind of forgot all about it until...

Hello there readers :) Just a short blog post to remind you all of the various items I have for sale and where you can get them from. I have had a huge amount of interest in a photograph I took at the Winter Solstice on the Drove road at Stonehenge and you can buy it as a A4 print or as a greetings card in two different sizes on white or black card. There are two designs, the original and one with 'Home is Where we Part it' printed on the top. There are two different shades, one slightly darker than the other... I have tried to keep prices low but have got through a lot of ink in the printer so this is the lowest I can offer. With Ebay fees and PayPal fees I don't make much back in the end. You can help me with this by buying directly from me by emailing me at THIS ADDRESS or contacting me through MY WEBSITE or the FACEBOOK page for Samsimillia. You can also buy through MY WEBSITE where the prices are slightly lower than Ebay (cards & prints are a little mo...

On the Winter Solstice we went to Stonehenge and parked at the drove, one afternoon we went for a walk over to some beech trees and mounds across a field from the stones. By the time we came back the sun was starting to go down and casting a lovely orange glow on everything and casting beautiful long shadows. People had their burners going in their vans and trucks and there was a hazy look to the drove road as we stepped out of the field back onto the path. I took this photograph below which I think was the best photo I took last year. The colours and light are just perfect and it conjurers up a feeling of what travelling life is about. I have had many many positive comments about this photograph and have recently been making some cards and prints to give to friends and sell at festivals. It means so much when people love your work and what more of an honour could I hope for than someone turning it into a painting. Drea Blackbird is an amazing artist and immortalized my photog...

Just a quickie to let you see what I have been working on today. My first attempt at making some key hooks (or hooks for anything!) I have many more ideas in the pipeline but these are the first ones I've ever made :) The top one is made with a piece of driftwood I found on the beach in Spain and the bottom two are pieces of beech I found in Gloucestershire, UK. I also made some more Sea Glass pendants, I've run out of wire for now but I am pleased how they came out and how I am improving in the art :) And lastly just to fill this post with something else beautiful here's a picture I took recently in the Forest of Dean :) Thanks for looking :) xxx

I have finally got round to making some more Sea Glass pendants in the last couple of days. When I found the first lot of Sea Glass in Spain a few years ago I varnished it all so as it looked more like normal glass. I made pendants out of the larger pieces and still have lots of tiny pieces to one day make something with! This time I have not varnished them and have kept their frosted look. I have just watched some tutorials on wire work so am going to try out some other stuff now with the wire. Watch this space! Thanks for looking :) xxx "Sea glass" is physically and chemically weathered glass found on beaches along bodies of salt water. These weathering processes produce natural frosted glass. "Genuine sea glass" can be collected as a hobby and can be used to make jewellery. Sea glass takes 20 to 30 years, and sometimes as much as 50 years, to acquire its characteristic texture and shape. Sea glass begins as normal shards of broken glass that are t...

Hello lovely readers :) Today I'd like to make you aware that for a limited time (just over 3 weeks) you can buy my paintings at a discount price. As my work is becoming more popular and I am in desperate need of more paints, brushes and canvases I have decided that the time is right to put the prices up on my paintings. I have had some sales recently from as far away as Italy and I feel it is only right that the price of my work should at least reflect the time I have put into the painting. So this is the last time my paintings on Ebay will be at this low price! Fire Goddess Painting £9.99 + P&P will be £25 next month. See HERE for Ebay listing. Air Goddess Painting £9.99 + P&P will be £25 next month. See HERE for Ebay listing. Earth Goddess Painting £9.99 + P&P will be £25 next month. See HERE for Ebay listing. Gypsy Wagon Painting £19.99 + P&P will be £50 next month. See HERE for Ebay listing.  If you like my art but don't want t...

So here I am on day 7 of the Feast and Fast diet and it's going quite well. For those of you who read regularly you will know what this is all about and for new readers you can use the labels on the left hand side of this blog to find my original post about the Fast and Feast diet. Briefly the concept is that you alternate 'Fast' days of eating only one meal of 500 calories with 'Feast' days of eating a normal 3 meals a day without worrying too much about the calories but without going overboard! Rather than being too strict and religiously counting calories on my fast days I have had a large banana for breakfast (120 calories), a 400-500 calorie lunch and a small apple (80 calories) later in the day. So on a 'Fast' day I am actually taking in up to 700 calories. I started this way as I was a bit afraid that if I literally had one meal a day I would be so hungry I would give up. This was has been far better for me personally and am happy with this calori...

Back when the internet was a very new thing to most of us, before social media and everyone being online pretty much 24/7 I was looking to buy an album by AOS3 as a friend had said I would love them. I found a record label called Words of Warning that had a small online store and as well as buying the AOS3 album, (God's Secret Agent), I also bought another couple of albums. One of them was a compilation album called Biting Back that was brought out to support the Hunt Saboteurs.  On that album I discovered a few new bands that I came to love but my favourite of those new finds was Scum of Toytown. Maybe it was just because I loved the song of theirs on the album, (Sink or Swim) but years later I got round to finding the only album they ever brought out, Strike and loved every song. Funnily enough though as the Sink or Swim version was different on their album to the Hunt Sabs one I was quite disappointed with it! Since the mid noughties a lot of the anarcho-punk bands from the ...

Just a quick update on the whole healthy lifestyle journey I am taking. I have been reading more about the Fast and Feast diet that I mentioned in my last post about health and have also been counting calories every day for the first time ever. Turns out that actually in my normal diet I don't actually consume that many calories and so on 'good' days I eat within the 2000 a day recommended calorie count for females. So I will go as planned with the fast and feast diet as I need to loose some weight. I am not going to be as strict as some plans say to be and I am not only going to eat once on the fast day. I will have a piece of fruit for breakfast, a 500 calorie meal for lunch and another piece of fruit and some raw vegetables at dinner time. This will still mean my calorie intake on a fast day is less than a 1000. On a feast day I will not feast I will just eat normally with an allowance for a couple of biscuits or small slice of cake. This should mean I take in 2000 cal...

My dogs are raising money! Please help them by donating £2.  Walking the Dog Day is 22 Feb 2017 in aid of Guide Dogs for the Blind.   Cheers all who donate :) xxx AGUA & BUSTA'S JUST GIVING PAGE

Good evening blog readers and I hope you have all enjoyed the Yule time and I wish you all a very Happy and Healthy 2017 :) So despite aiming for a detox starting January 1st yet again I seem to be telling you that I haven't succeeded. I am back here at work and there are still biscuits, cake and chocolate lying around to try and tempt me! I have done moderately ok since new year though. I have stuck to about 2000 calories a day so hopefully I wont be gaining weight just not loosing it! And I have dramatically cut back on the chocolate, biscuits and cake! I have set my self the goal of exercising 5 days out of every 7, power walking or aerobics depending on the weather and circumstances. It's a bit early to say how well (or not) I'm doing on this one but I am determined to stick with it this time. I even decided not to go shopping in my break today and instead did a mile and a half power walk! What I have been researching these last few days is different types of fast...

There is now a sale on most of my crafts on Ebay. All cards from 99p and all jewellery from £1.99 please take a look HERE . To be in with a chance of winning a whole load of Samsimillia goodies go to the Samsimillia Facebook page and 'like' and 'share' the *** IT'S COMPETITION TIME *** post from 30th December. Good luck! Thanks for looking :) xxx

Write up and photos now up on my website from the Winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge. Check it out HERE . Thanks for looking :) xxx  

Here is a little slide show movie I made with all the photographs I have of travellers past and present. Hope you enjoy :)

Here's a video I made a little while ago, only just got round to uploading it to YouTube. The quality is not always great but it's just a bit of fun! Brilliant soundtrack from The Defekters :) Thanks for looking :) xxx

Sometimes I despair at Social media as I'm not sure we are using it to our best advantage. I think some people 'sharing' and 'liking' really informative political posts feel they are doing their bit to spread a message but don't do anything else. While sharing information is essential we must remember that nothing beats getting together and actually trying to make positive things happen. Social media can be a great tool for networking, joining together like minded people and raising awareness of issues locally, nationally and globally. Often though we may be preaching to the converted if our friends mainly have the same views as us! That's why I wanted to dedicate a post to a group set up in Stevenage called Creative Change. Creative Change is a creative initiative raising awareness on a range of issues important to sustaining communities and rebuilding our tribes.While they use Social media as a platform to spread the word they are also out on the str...

Well blog readers I have not done so well this last couple of weeks. I have not weighed myself yet but I know if I have lost anything it is negligible! The last time I was at work I did really well with the exercise and moderately well with eating. I then went home for 2 weeks where I walked for half an hour every day except 2 days but not so good with the eating then as my partner is mad about biscuits and I always find them hard to resist when we are watching a movie in the evenings! I have now been back at work for 11 days and haven’t done much exercise, I did a couple of hill walks and an aerobics session but 3 out of 11 days is not so good. Some of it was circumstances, I just had to do other things in my break times, some was just lack of motivation. Some other days I did walk a little but not really enough to count as an exercise session! It has seemed so cold and yet two years ago when I was power walking most days I started in the January so it must have been c...

Last week an amazing thing happened, we moved into our new home on wheels! We bought a 7.5 ton lorry back in April and have spent until now converting it into a home. It has been very hard work, very stressful and very expensive! After building two previous homes in vans we were pretty sure what we wanted out of our new home. We wanted something fairly new so as it would have good fuel consumption and wouldn’t be a rust bucket! Although we have the disadvantage of it having a massive computerised system which could prove to be a nightmare the bottom line is that all vehicles are going that way and so unless you want to have an old motor you just have to suck it up! We know next to nothing about mechanics anyway so if something goes wrong it is going to the garage. Parts are also quite expensive but as this is going to be our forever home maybe they won’t be so bad in 10 years time! It’s just a personal choice really of weighing up an older vehicle with likely higher mileage and possib...

So I have started my second attempt at getting fitter and loosing a bit of weight. It is now a week since my start day on 4th October and I have exercised 6 out of 7 days which I'm really pleased about. I kept to my plan and have done 4 power walks, the last two being 2 miles in 30 minutes, 1 20 minute aerobic session and today as I had shopping to do I just walked as quickly as possible around the shops and a couple of times up and down the car park. It was only a mile but at least it was something! On the exercise front I am really pleased and know that as long as I stick to it I will be walking for an hour most days getting in 4 around miles. On the food front it has not been so easy, temptation has been in my way and I have had a few biscuits and cake :) And still I just can't seem to reduce my portion size. I need to put more effort into this. Today I weighed myself for the first time since July (then I was 11st 5lb or 73kg) today I am 11st 8lb or 73.8kg. I need to loo...