At the dinner table

I had to stop Rosario in mid conversation and ask "Why is Catalina dressed like Miami Vice?"

Say 'Yes Dad'

'No Dad'

No fear

I was about to write a terribly boring entry about how happy I was with the new bath panels I'd put up in our bathroom then I saw the other pic of Juanita I'd taken yesterday at the park. She had climbed up onto the highest ropes to get to the other side of the toddlers' assualt course and all the other mothers watched in astonishment at how high that little blond girl could reach without fear. Yes, I thought, that's my girl.

Drills in my mouth

I had to see the dentist today because the right side of my face has swelled up the size of a balloon. If you cover the left side of my face I look like Don Corleone's long lost nephew. I'm going to have my bottom right wisdom tooth taken out, the first one to leave. But not until the swelling has stopped. So the dentist put me on antibiotics and sent me to the hygenist.

I'm sat there lying down on the blue padded reclining chair, she shines a light in my "north and south" and gets out her metal tools. After she scraped away at my gums she got out a tiny drill and started using it on my upper teeth. She stopped at one tooth and drilled so much the pitch of the whirling needle went up and up, and the pain got worse and worse with this woman's gloved hands grabbing my jaw to fix it in place, then I suddenly just started laughing! I couldn't believe the ridiculous position I was in, at the mercy of this woman I'd never met before.

Tracking

I enjoyed this shoot. It was about a scientist creating a new type of gel for women to use as a preventative to catching HIV through sexual intercourse. The gel has been in development for years but it's soon to come on the market. Here we filmed the presenter

asking the scientist about how it was made in the laboratory, whilst I slowly tracked across the science lab's bottles and potions that passed slowly through foreground. I love the way you can tell the two people are lit.

Dame

Two coffees and a medialuna and make it snappy

I did this

If the theory of parallel universes existed and I looked through a magic window at each one to see how my life turned differently, I think I'd find myself in Italy, Spain or maybe even still stuck in Watford. In Watford I'd be a manager at Sainsbury's, monolingual and quite probably disillusioned. In Italy I might be married living in Milan teaching English, still. In Spain I'd be a school director in Madrid and know every bar in my suburb. That's my honest instinct. So I think I can say with confidence that I have chosen the right universe to live in, and I can see living proof in the black and white above.

meme de mi apellido

Better late than never as started by Matias I looked up my surname in Google. It's like a following of other ideas created by other bloggers that write about something then pass on the same subject to their blogger pals. He wrote about finding his namesake on Google, and passed the 'meme' on to Rosario who passed it onto me. The surname Sanchez is as common as Smith or Jones in the UK if not more so. Finding a famous Sanchez is probably too easy, like Marta Sanchez, Roger Sanchez also known as DJ Sanchez, Roselyn Sanchez and I could go on. So I put my first name in aswell and found Ricardo Sanchez, or rather Lieutenant General Ricardo Sánchez.

LtG Ricardo Sanchez was a US Army General who commanded the coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. I did actually know of him as I remember seeing him on the news quite often at the time. What I didn't know was that his retirement was tainted by the tortures that occured during the end of his term. According to an official memo signed by himself, he personally authorized the use of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Convention. In other words, he condoned the use of torture in interrogation. He retired soon after. In conclusion, not such a pleasant comparison to my own name!

Now what I couldn't find anything on was my full name. Ricardo Sanchez Blake-Lobb. There was only one Elvira Sanchez Blake who is a writer on Latin literature based in the USA but that was without the Lobb, so it doesn't count! So what I'm supposed to do now is pass it on to other bloggers, but this chain is an old one so I'll just remind those that Rosario intended to pass it on to, which was el Oso and Uch.