Well, if you've seen the front page you can see that I've got a new picture and there are several more in My pictures section on myspace and soon on my website which will be getting a bit of a sprucing up in the near future. Exactly what thats going to be I don't know but we will soon see! In the meantime have a look at the few pics I've put up and give me some feedback and also check out the good looking mama in there as well!

I got the pics because I've been loosing weight (2 and a half stone over the last year!) and I had the old set taken before then so it made sense to get a new lot done. Unfortunatly the last... I'd say two week... havent been the best all round in the whole "getting me into shape" side of things. Put bluntly, I've been pigging out! I may not be racing back up the hefty stakes back to where i was but its still very undiscaplined and WILL be rectified in the future! I got to get to a lower weight than Jamie!

The cause for this whole thing is, as I said, due to a lot of excess. I've been going out with my uncle and my cousins which means booze. Despite sticking to vodka / JD / anything alcoholic mixed with diet coke the odd beers been slipping in and if you've gone and got drunk then a late night kebab shop run normally follows. The whole thing leads ultimately to an empty wallet, a bigger waistline and farts that could be bottled and used as a nerve agent!

I also went out with the wonderful Wizzy to see 300. I'm not going to go into a big review cos thats not for here but if you like films with lots of violence, fantastic visuals and some truley epic fantasy images then i urge you to go and see it. I've been wondering round shouting Gerard Butlers line "This is SPAR-TA!!!" all weekend. Its now taken over from my "Arnold Swcharzenegger in pain" noise as the thing that I'm currently doing to death. Think the end of Total Recall.

Thats it for now. Tune in next week for news of how the last few rehersals of "The Anniversary" is going before we start on 28th of April till the 5th of May.
Hey! It's my blog and I'll pimp if I want to!

It's a small world!

You ever been in one of those situations where someone has called out your name and you and someone else stands up with the same name?

I have a MySpace (as you all should know!) and I got a couple of messages from... Myself!

Well, not really myself, but from another Steve Hester this one from the other side of the pond in the Good Ole' US of A! What makes it even more strange is that we're both in the same business except he makes his living behind the camera and I make mine in front of it!

So a big Hello to my name sake and to anyone else out there who also have the same name! Lets all be friends and rule the world!!!!

Disapointment

*sigh*

Another good idea has come a cropper. I've had an idea for a comedy show which I've been knocking round with for some time and I've been writing with my man Paul Binns. After Prank Patrol last December I gave the script to the first show and the series synopsis to the head Peter Baker who then passed it onto the BBC!

At first I was kind of shocked that he thought it would be good enough to send off! I mean, I thought it was good but... THE BBC!!! The biggest broadcasting company in the UK, certainly the most well known in the world and they're looking at my script!

Unfortunately, as the heading of this entry says, it's not gone to plan. Tonight I got an email via Peter giving me the news that an "established writer/performer" has already got a similar show commissioned and mine is out the window.

Gutted.

However, I'm not giving up hope! I'm refusing to let this one go! The Idea (which I'm not going to dive away on here) is too good to just let it go and the show that's just been commissioned sounds quite different! Perhaps not different enough for the same channel to have them both at the same time but definitely different enough to get mine made!

Time to get my plans into action! Mwahahahaha!

.....I love you!

I'm in the dog house.

Over the last couple of posts I've been referring to my girlfriend as "my girlfriend" and my girlfriend has taken the hump with me over it.

So I'm making this whole blog about her. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Louise!

I first met Wizzy (its her nickname) nearly two years ago on Saturday the 23rd of April which just so happens to be St. Georges day! We'd been set up on a blind date by a mutual friend of ours called Kathy so the only clues that I got to the woman I've called the love of my life was through text messages and one single phone call.

I've talked since with people who've been on blind dates. They've said they were nervous or a bit jittery because, lets be fair, you never know what the persons going to be like until you actually meet them in the flesh. Thing is... I didn't feel that. I felt like it was all going to be good right from the off and the only fluttering I felt in my belly lasted only a few seconds *just* before I actually met her.

The day was a glorified pub crawl without the alcoholism and tons of talking. I got to know her inside and out, what she liked and didn't like, all the while being sucked into her beautiful blue eyes. I was smitten with her from the beginning and we shared our first kiss in a little corner booth in The George pub in Stockport. The downside now is that the pub is all boarded up so we can't snuggle up in there again.

Two dates later I told her that I loved her and one thing about me is that if I say that I love or hate something then I mean it! I wouldn't trade her for anything in the world and apart from her time keeping which is lousy, there's not a single thing I'd change about her! She's everything that I've been looking for in a woman; I can play games like Gears of War with her for hours then we can snuggle on the couch just holding each other. She's tender and sweet yet has a wicked sense of humor and a much stronger stomach than I've got!

She's warm, caring, cute as hell! She is without a doubt the single most important person in the world to me and she's the only person that I've ever seriously thought about putting a ring on her finger.

She is d'babe and she's all mine!

Bitching

Ive just had a "discussion" with my girlfriends sister. Now I *could* go on a rant here and complain and moan and otherwise bitch about her. But I'm not. I am going to take the high ground on the whole subject and just say that she has my pity. I feel sorry for her.

In other news, Ive been messing round with Linux, Ubuntu to be exact. First I installed the wrong build so I had to uninstall which resulted in messing up windows so I had to repair it. Unfortunately the repair effectively ripped SP2 out of windows rendering IE7 and Media Player 11 as well as other apps useless BUT re-installing SP2 proved to be a minefield as something got messed up with Linux and most of the important components needed for the install vanished.

So with the right version of Ubuntu installed I gave up on windows for the time being only to be confronted by Linux's big failing: If you don't know your commands, your screwed!

Seriously! With windows you get an app or game and all it takes is a double click of a file normally marked "setup" or "Install" and before you know it the install shield takes over and soon enough your messing around with your new bit of software. With Linux there is no easy double clicking (most of the time). With Linux you need to open the terminal box, type in a code to get the software because there's no websites with an easy install file to grab, then when you get it you need another code to run it then another to update it, then another to run it, it just goes on and on!

With windows being screwed I had no real choice but to do a fresh install so barely a month after doing it before I was up to my arms in the windows file directories copying all my music, saved games and all those other little things, such as amusing pictures of innocent toddlers with amazingly offensive t-shirts which are soooo funny, that make my computer what it is. All that was moved (again) onto my back up partition while my c drive was re-formatted and windows put back on.

Then a long night of waiting for the updates to come through again and copying all the stuff back to where its supposed to be at which point I noticed that the dual boot software that kicked in just after Ubuntu was installed no longer works! Now I have a 13gig part of my hard drive that I can't get without re-installing Ubuntu which I'm really not sure is worth the hassle.

Yes it looks nice and yes it does seem faster and prettier than windows but until the REALLY make a version of Linux that an idiot like me can use without blowing up the house I don't think I'll be going back for more.

A manic monday

Well, to be frank, its not manic, not really but it has been rather more hectic than usual.

Firstly a couple of lucky people are going to be getting some nice trinkets from me via ebay... although i shouldn't have let those simpsons cards go so cheaply... But thats by the by now.

So, they got posted off, my girlfriend should be getting a nice (if rather late and yet again I'm sorry babes!) valentines suprise in the post soon and I've had an audition and the start of rehersals for my next play as well.

The time: 7pm. The place: MalMaison in Manchester. Just so happened to be at pretty much the same time that a speed read through of my play was due to start but never mind. I've never really thought much about former Catchphrase presenter Roy Walker in the last, oh, 27 years of my life but i had to today! I had to be obsessing about the guy, like a crazed stalker type bloke and doing his "catchphrase"s, all that "say what you see" stuff.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement on how it went. I *THINK* it went pretty good but I've felt that before. One good thing though, regardless, is that they were casting for an ad for the Star so I managed to sneak into that one too. Might as well while I can!

Unfortunatly this late start (it was a last minute audition type of thing) meant that i got to the readthrough at about 8:45 and missed most of my part in act one and I don't say much in act two but that all picks up again in act three. Lots of fun.

So as I'm writing this I'm watching National Treasure (a much better film than the DaVinci Code) and suffering from something or other thats making the room smell like a chemical weapons factory. Seriously, keep naked flames away from here!

Oh and Keep a look out, I'm going to start a video blog at some point (probably during rehersals) so stay tuned!

Size Wise

I've been trying to loose weight.

For anyone who knows me this isn't news for them that don't i have been. At one point i was about 2 pounds away from 19 stone which isn't good whichever way you look at it and certainly not for someone who's in a job where you need to look good so i wanted to do something about it!

So I took matters into my own hands and with no exercise (save for walking back and forth between the three game shops in Stockport to get 10p off the price of a three year old xbox game) I used a modified version of the Atkins diet. One where your breath doesn't stink and your not running the risk of chronic kidney failure, and the upshot is that I've dropped 4 stone!

Yay me!

Unfortunately its meant that I've had give my wardrobe a rethink and as anyone who knows me more than five minutes will know I'm more likely to spend my cash in one of the aforementioned game shops instead of in Top Man. As a consequence, I'm still stuck with styles that are a good few years out of date and now too big! So I've gone shopping.

Only, and this is the kicker, I'm still the wrong size! Yes I'm still hefty but I'm now able to get into a large and apart from George (at ASDA natch) i can't get into any other large that anywhere else sells without looking like a bag full of pudding. My problem is that I'm in the odd size part of the size scale and I'll explain what I mean.

For men off the rack tops (shirts or whatever) are measured by chest size (in inches) and collar size (for shirts really and also in inches) so that a size is calculated to be between, say, 42-44 across the chest. I'm 45 which means that the XL makes me look like I'm wearing a big top and the large gives me a cleavage that Jordan would kill for as my moobs are squeezed together. I need the middle ground, tighter round the waist but looser on the chest but they don't exist!

I saw some cracking tops in Matalan but they needed to be that ONE INCH larger to fit me perfectly but the next size up could also have filled with hot air and floated home so I gave up on the whole thing and went to Pizza Hut with my girlfriend to enjoy tasty carbohydrate and saturated fat.

I've come to the conclusion that if I want to look good I'm gonna have to get off my ass and exercise but even if I get down to the size of Russel Brand (Who, lets face it wants to be Captain Jack Sparrow) I know for a fact that whatever clothes I buy still wont look good and also that they will, 20 minutes after I put them on for the first time, also get a hole in them.

Still, at least I know that I'm better at Gears Of War.