Ooooo more changes

well thought i would add a little addendum into my blog. Its Saturday and im in nottingham at the moment waiting for another little tripsy out. Tonight we are all off into Nottingham to eat copious amounts of carvery followed by the cinema, going to see the Wicker Man, which should be interesting, I've never actually seen the Wicker Man, even though its one of those 'must see' films, so as a film student I probably should have rented it by now, but anyway. Also today I have had my hair straightened, this time chemically....by my sister...worked pretty well too, ill get some pics soon hopefully!

Im organising a big theatre trip to london for all my friends too, at the moment we are looking at a probably Mary Poppins by the votes I have had so far, if you want to see something else you have to make your voice heard! If your interested go here join the facebook group and email me so i know you wanna come, along with which show in the west end you wanna see.
On the West End front, the show I am off to see at the end of the month, Wicked, has started previewing, it looks amazing and bar a few technical hitches is apparently going on well. YOu can read Martin Ball, a cast members blog here and find out more about the show, or visit its website www.wickedthemusical.co.uk. Before christmas i am now expecting to see 3 london musicals, wicked this month, the group trip next month, and Spamalot, the monty python musical, in November with dad and ella.

Anyway enough ramblings, this was only meant to be a quick post so I will leave you all, next week I goto PLASA in london (A big theatre trade show) on monday, get dvds finished on tuesday and wednesday with a meeting with the bank manager on wednesday also, and then thursday and friday I am in the new studio in training on the lighting rig, so ill speak to you all soon!

The big cull... face fungus and masculinity!

Well another week is coming to a close and I feel its time for me to do a slight update. This week has been taken up preparing our second DVD release, the Squab Pie Charity Dance show, while finishing off and prepping for delivery the first release, the LES november '05 show project. The latter is now complete and just awaiting the wrap around for the cover, but the suppliers we use for the special paper are out of stock so we are awaiting stock on that. Squab Pie is just about ready but after a few quality concerns we are just re-rendering sections of the show to ensure the best quality. On the business development front we are going well, have a meeting with NatWest Bank on wednesday hopefully we will have our bank account shortly after, and we are all registering for tax shortly aswell. I am also registering with the Information Commisioner as a Data Controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act, and accompanied by the company documentation arriving this week I have now gained the following titles, Data Controller, Business Support Manager, Partner and Chairperson, quite an impressive list!

In other aspect havent been up to too much this week, Sam got back from thailand on wednesday, with sophie, his gf, in tow so its been a full house again, been shopping to tescos for foodstuffs, the usual stuff.

Yesterday I underwent a transformation, the beard has gone from my face and hopefully will stay that way for a while, but of course that all depends on whether I can actually be bothered to shave on an at least every other day basis so watch this space and see how the lack of facial hair pans out.

In other news also yesterday Andy underwent a transformation also, except his was a bit different, you see Sophie decided she wanted to make up andy, and so he very quickly became Andrea, looked very nice too...piccies here:















So there he is, the gorgeous andrew, he liked his new look so much he even went to Tesco in it, which was rather funny, no strange looks though, which was weird.

Anywho, this weekend is another veriatble feast of fun, with pub friday and saturday night, cinema on saturday and ice skating on sunday, all joins together for a fun packed weekend. Then next week on monday im off to a big industry show in london called PLASA with Rob N, got my ticket and everything. Stay tuned ill update you all soon!

Sherwood Forest becons.....AGAIN!

So last time i blogged it was ain a small window where NTL was working, well a bit better news, NTL is working better now, although an engineer is still coming over tomorrow as they did say there is a fault on the line so hopefully it will be even better soon! Shower still isnt sorted, but hopefully landlord will come on monday and sort it for us, i do hope so cos i want a decent shower!

So, the weekend, well went back to loughborough, after picking up andys ladyfriend from that station and dropping them off at the house for a weekend on their own, on friday evening for an evening in the pubs with mates, so we had rob newbould, jess, ashley, kat, Biddy, matt and beka eaton and of course, ed, and ed brough friends too, in the guise of Jo, the girl from Leeds who went to arizona with him, and also Emily and Becky, 2 sisters who were friends of Jo's, who all work at Calke abbey near derby, all good fun and drunken humour and good times were had, well until the end of the night when Emily and Becky went back to their car to find their alloys had been stolen, so being the gentlemen that we are, Ed and I, with Jo in tow, called the Police for them and waited and made sure they were ok before we all retired to homes for the night.

On Saturday i was rudely awakened by Staffordshire Police, who were looking after the alloy wheel case, they had tried emily and beckys home with no answe so were calling the phone which reported the crime.....mine, promplty went back to sleep for a bit after that! Finally arose late morning and just bummed around for a bit, then about 4ish went over to eds for the hell of it....and ended up fitting a new built in fridge for the family with ed and trevor (eds dad) and was then handsomely rewarded with a very nice chinese meal. By this time rob had joined us and we all decided to go to my house and play dance mat and jam on piano, computer, guitar, saxophone and singing, then ashley joined in and played dancemat with us and added human beatbox to the jamming session. Unfortunatley XBOX dance mat is alot harder than PS2 and my sister won against us all! So we now owe her a bottle of Malibu! We then all went to the park (this is 1am by now) and made up obstacle courses, which was fun....i won! YAY! Then it was retire to bed time again and suddenly it was sunday!

Sunday came and it was a 9.30 wake up call (mean to be 9 but what ya gonna do!) and we were at eds for 10, quickly joined by will gardner ready for a day of bicycling in sherwood forest, but first ed had to pack his car as he was going up to leeds for a job interview after and wanted to move stuff up there too. So Rob and Will and I played poker for a bit, joined by Kat who was picking up Biddys coat, Kat won....by a long way, but i need to learn more poker i think!
Then it was off to Asda for food then Sherwood forest, we ate out food, then nearly went to go ape instead of bikes, but in the end bikes won, we hired and went riding, after getting bored we turned off the beaten track into the forest and had an ace time just cycling round the forest! The went to the playground for more frollocking before time came to say goodbye to ed so he could goto leeds, i took rob and will over to their cars in costock then it was time for back to Stafford, since i have been back here its been not much so until next time...........

While its on....

Well NTL seems to be working just about ok at the moment, so time for an update. Had a pretty busy week this week with work and much other stuff, so here goes! Tuesday was our return to work after the bank holiday and it was visit from the landlord day, our shower is a little bit knackered at the moment and so he came round to have a looksy at it. It is broke so he is coming tomorrow to give us a new one, on top of that we found out on tuesday that SiMILE Media Solutions is now an official company, registered with companies house, so from 25th August 2006 we have been known and will now be trading as SiMILE Media Solutions LLP, go us! The work is coming slowly through at the moment, hopefully will be doing some work in nottingham in november, and the corporate stuff is coming along too.
Tuesday night it was off home for the evening so met up with ed and went to see Miami Vice, was a pretty good film, story was a bit long but the photography on it was really really good :-)

Wednesday comes along and i had to be in Ruddington at 8am for some test at Pharmaceutical profiles, was due to do a medical trial with them, but unfortunately i wasnt suitable for that one, whe trial was for an anti blood clot drug and cos i have had nose bleeds in the past i couldnt be used so away from them back to the grindstone, I am working on the dance show DVD at the moment and am just deciding whether to put it to DVD using Sony DVD Architect or Adobe Encore, at the moment Encore is winning but that does mean I have to learn it first so classroom in a book is coming out and i am working my butt off on that. Also on Wednesday on the way back from nottingham to stafford has a little incident with my car, coming out of uttoxeter, tried to avoid a piece of roadkill just as my phone went off, which startled me and i mounted the curb, no harm done to the car or the curb and noone else involved, but bang, the tyre blew, so that was £75 at Kwik fit for a new tyre....bit on the expensive side there, should have just gone to big city tyres in nottingham, but oh well.

So it comes to today, been doing more Encore learning today and had a trip into the office, to check post and try and get our web login details, we have 100mb of space on the uni web server for our website, but i dont know the password, and neither it seems, do IT so they are sorting it out for us,hopefully, so watch this space for news of the all new simile-media.co.uk

Finally, if you are reading this from blogspot, then you will notice this blog is now officially ad supported, these ads are targetted to the blogs content, and i also have links to firefox and google adsense, and a search box. So if you ever want to download firefox, or sign up for google adwords, or do a websearch, doing it from http://bmacrow.blogspot.com will hopefully earn your best buddy ben a little bit of money.

This weekend im back in nottingham again, going cycling on sundau in sherwood forest, all are invited, and just general fun stuff with ed and the gang so looking forward to all of that.

Until next time!!!!

Service Suspended

Due to an NTl fault on our line our house's internet is currently out of action, so no blog, no facebook, no msn, no nothing.

Service will resume as soon as possible (when NTl get their arse's into gear!)

I'm available on my mobile if you need me tho!

That is all

Its a Bank Holiday!

Wow! Its Bank Holiday Monday and I cant see any rain and i CAN see the sun!, what are the chanced of that....especially being so close to "Oh so sunny" Stoke on Trent, so will i be taking advantage of this sunnyness? Will i crap, im lazy, totally lazy so I have the day slobbing round the house, Andy has gone to see his ladyfriend in Manchester so right now is probably finding out that although it is now PHENOMINABLY big and new, the Arndale centre still wreaks of nothingness and cheap crappy 60s buildingness (referring mainly to the huge tower of flats over it, much like Viccie centre in nottingham.

I was going to goto Derby on the train to kill time, but my dad rang this morning to say that ella and him were driving up to see me, which is nice :-) and they are taking me out for a meal later, which is nice also. Of course i do have pennance to serve through this nicety of a visit and a meal, my mothers old Sony Viao is being delivered and I have offered to open it up and try and fix the problem where the graphics card just decides anytime between 7 and 27 minutes is enough for the screen and so very nicely stops it working. So in a bit i am going to try and pretend i am a sony laptop engineer and get the service manual for my mothers lappytop.

Got told last week upon asking that i can have money instead of my usual theatre tickets for christmas, which is good cos I can put that towards my "visit rachel in L.A." fund, im trying to get over there for a week or 2 in easter time-ish, i recon ill need about a grand for it tho, for flights and car hire with a couple of hundred quid for food and entertainment, specially as rach said she would put me up so i would just feel bad frankly if i didnt repay the favour with a treat or two! Ill prob see if she wants to goto magic mountain, cos thats always fun, and i am planning on before i leave ringing the applause store, who now have a US section and trying to get a ticket or two to some show recordings, if I could get into a session of Whose Line is it Anyway? well that would just be fan-bloody-tastic!

Yesterday was spent actually doing so much of nothing that it still felt like morning as the sun set, so my body clock was fairly crapped up but its all good cos i have now slept so much in the past few days that hopefully i will have a nice productive working week, minus wednesday morning when im at Pharmaceutical Profiles having tests done to work out whether i can then test a new medicine, which will be nice, especially the £1600 they pay me for it so that will go into 3 funds......bens fund for L.A., bens fund for making his computer work a bit nicer, and bens fund for living!

Right i think its about time to leave now, tidy the old bedroom before father and sister appear on my doorstep wanting to see the new room i have for this year so for now i say see you soon!

me

P.S. It was never going to last long....bank holiday in stafford, close to stoke on trent....yes....its raining

Go Ape! in Sherwood Forest

Wow! What a day, bit insane but oh well! Started off by getting up and doing the usual morning stuff before heading off to loughborough to pick up Rob and Karen, Rob was on time, Karen was not, as usual so off to her house to pick her up then to my house where we were meeting a few other people. So we get half way to my house and my brother calls me....it seems that Kat and Biddie, Kats sister and Kats Sisters friend have beaten me to my own house...so i havent warned my mum n dad that they were turning up...OOOPS my bad but its all good and we get home to find everyone chatting merrily. Then the final two turn up, Ed and his Arizona friend and we all have a chat before leaving for the days activities. So to sum up we have a group of 10 in 2 cars, there is me, Andy Beksa(housemate), Ed Lax and Steph (Eds friend from Arizona), Rob Newbould and Karen, Kat and Biddie and Sarah (Kats lil sister) and Katy (Kats lil sisters friend) making a happy bunch of 10 happy campers who all pile off to ASDA to buy food. We buy lots of food, lots and lots in fact, £20 of picnic stuff and then off to Sherwood Forest!

We got to the forest and straight away devoured our picnic food (after everyone realise that it was now about 3pm and hardly anyone had actually eaten anything so far) lots of brie, cheddar, ham, branston, bread, sausage rolls, mcvities caramel digestives, cookies and more. The brie was a bit off and the apple juice opening didnt go too well, Katy decided the lid wasnt and so the whole carton pouring mechanism should be removed not just the lid. Pictures of our lovely picnic....













Then we decided to join the 5 year olds on the adventure playground, and adventure we had, there was a pole, some monkey bars and a weird thing with two wooden beams that made you look geriatric when you walked over it. Oh and a big wooden deer that was quite a challenge to mount, but we did and 6 of us got on it at the same time, much to the amusement of a family and their small kids, who didnt seem to mind the occasional swear word or rude gesture as the mountain of bodies on the deer increased.

Next it was time for the days main activity, Go Ape! an aerial assault course in sherwood forest which is possibly the most fun you can have in a climbing harness, it basically consists of like 7 big challenges where you climb a rope ladder, traverse cables and cargo nets then re-enter the ground on a zip line with a thud and a brown patch on your trousers, I think we pissed off the safety people a little bit but thats just ed for you, much fun was had, especially when my glasses feel into the foliage below from 30 foot in the air!

Following our wonderful time at Go Ape we all decided hunger had set in again and so food was in order so off to nottingham to the corner house where pizza hut fed us, not before we waited in PArliament Street Car PArk for 10 minutes, so we could get the cheap clubber parking of course.....more pictures:
, ed andy rob and i were all very hungry so ordered this meal deal where for £5.50 each we got 4 starters, a large pizza, a medium pizza and 4 desserts. Well our starters got stuck in the lift?!?!?!?! (yes thats what they said) so they gave us 2 portions of each, they ran out of large pizza bases so gave us 3 mediums instead of a large and a medium and so we were pretty damned stuffed by the end.

Finally it was time to leave for home, tho home for me meant stafford, via newton linford to drop off rob and then leicester to drop of sarah and katy. The bit og blogging and now im off to bed. So all in all a good day....know 3 new people so hello Katy, Sarah and Steph who are all tres cool and hope i see again soon (well wont with steph she off to dublin as i type virtually then off to hungary next weekend) for drinking and merriment.

Next week the activity is go karting, yes ben is behind a RACING wheel WOOOOO!!!!!

C ya all soon!

(oh yes....only one problem with go ape for you men our there......warning that sat on myself within the harness alot!)