There is no title, I ate it

Boring day but that's alright. Good food today; I treated myself to a burger with jalapeños and hot sauce and there were home-made whoopie pies to celebrate a co-workers birthday.

Bandoline: "A gummy preparation for fixing hair." Can also be used as a verb. From OED.

I've never heard this used. I wonder if it's obsolete. Dictionary.com says it's "a mucilaginous preparation made from quince seeds and used for smoothing, glossing ,and waving the hair."

Other web hits seem to imply it's some sort of musical instrument but I wonder if people aren't just confusing it with something else.

Not much to say today. I finished When the Bough Breaks. I always forget how irritating Kellerman's books are. There's something aggressively bland about his main character. Alex is a psychologist and he's capable of drawing people out with his mad shrink skills but he kind of comes off as rather patronizing. I can't imagine his techniques working on real people unless they wanted to talk to begin with. I know the author is a psychologist but I can't help but feel he makes it a little easier for his character to allow him to show off and advance the plot. And then the rather bland character goes all Jack Bauer on the bad guy but fails when it comes to the actual rescue. In the end the police save the day, which is fine but for all his posturing it would have been nice if Alex had managed it alone. Also, dude, if you're in a car chase, dodging a guy on a motorcycle with a gun, put the brakes on sooner. He'll go right over your trunk and viola, problem solved. Well, the books aren't bad when gotten out of the library.

I watched the movie Pulse. A Japanese horror movie from the days of dial-up internet where a website shows...ghosts? There are red taped doors that lead to the Forbidden Room and there's not enough space for people and spirits and people merge with walls, leaving creepy shadows. Apocalypse! And it all ends on a boat. I think I missed something crucial to understanding the whole thing. Ah well.

I'm reading Le Clezio's Onitsha. Takes place in Africa in 1948. A boy named Fintan travels to Niger with his mother to meet up with her husband. I haven't quite figured out if he's Fintan's biological father or not. They've just arrived which is good because I was getting tired of them being on the boat. It's okay so far but the descriptions aren't very evocative. Everything seems a little flat. I don't know if it's the translation or what but maybe things will be more interesting when they get to their destination.

By the by, that's my sister up there reading to my cousin's daughter.