i left the house in the afternoon in search of halloween candy. i went to the somerville rite aid but they were already removing all their halloween items, replacing it with what i'd assume will be their christmas display. the pickings were slim, i decided to go elsewhere, but left with some dove curly hair shampoo and condition (more on that later).

next i went to market basket for some groceries. MB recently finally got a website (2017!), and now their weekly flyer is available online making shopping a little easier. up until now the only way to see the flyers online was through a 3rd party site that manually scanned the flyers every week. i got some ingredients for making spaghetti and some for making italian subs, my lunch and dinner for the coming week.

i returned home to drop off my groceries before planning to head out again to look for candy at the mass ave rite aid before going to the cafe. i bumped into renee who was sweeping her sidewalk, raking the leaves into the streets. we chatted briefly before i told her i had to go (2:30pm). i called my father and he said my sister already got some halloween candy, even though she asked me this morning to get some. that meant the candy hunt wasn't necessary anymore.

so i ended up spending some time raking the leaves and cleaning the backyard, including trimming the ivy and picking up all the small branches that broke off due to the storm. afterwards i went to star market because i had a craving for salty snacks. i should've realized this was the place to be for halloween as they were having a sale on candy, 4 for $10. i ended up waiting in the line with the large cashier who's super slow, and it took him nearly 10 minutes to ring up just one person.

i met bruce around 6pm to go see the halloween festivities happening on sacramento and traymore street. we met jack outside the now defunct oxford spa. maybe it's because we came so early, but there seemed to be even more people than in years past, to the point where sacramento street was just a sea of people.

they had a theme this year (do they have a theme every year?), something to do with books and reading, though i'm not sure what's so scary about literacy. representatives from the cambridge public library had even set up a table.

elsewhere on traymore it felt more like wake, with barely any children, and just a few houses putting on halloween displays. i fear eventually traymore will stop having elaborate halloween haunted houses altogether. around the corner though on harris was an edgar allan poe display, with spooky human-sized raven, poe lookalike, and dead woman sleeping in a coffin.

i had a bag of twix from my personal stash to share with trick-or-treaters. enough children rang my doorbell this year that i ended up giving away all my candy. darth vader, soldier, mal, rainbow unicorn, and spiderman were amongst the children who visited.

i whipped up a quick batch of meat sauce for spaghetti, sauteed chopped onion and garlic, a pound of ground beef (80% lean), followed by a whole jar of classico tomato sauce. meat sauce spaghetti is so easy to make, i'm surprised i don't eat it more often. afterwards i felt very filled. li came home around 8:30pm. i let him try some of my spaghetti, i believe he's never had italian noodles before, and seemed to like it.

around 9:30pm a tree pruning crew was working on my neighbor's broken tree, cutting it down and leaving it in pieces on the driveway. i'm not sure why they did it so late at night when it's harder to see, but maybe they were busy all day and only managed to get here now. plus it seemed like an unnecessary risk with trick-or-treaters around, but by that time of the night all of them had already gone home.

i got a chance to use my new dove shampoo and conditioner. the one i'd gotten recently - dove daily moisture - i don't like because it leaves my hair looking flat with no body. i've had luck with shampoo for curly hair (my hair is slightly wavy) but all the brands i used to use are no longer available. so i was desperately in search of something new and saw a few days ago that dove also makes a shampoo for curly hair. before i even tried it i was a little suspicious. first, the color designation was a brown maroon color, and usually shampoo packaging like to use brighter colors that convey cleanliness. then i read the label more carefully and noticed it said it was for "curly, coarse hair." what kind of hair is coarse? then it hit me: black people hair. did i accidentally buy hair care product meant for black people? when i finally tried the shampoo tonight, there were a few more hints of the target audience. typically shampoo liquid is white, but this one came out in a light brown color. and it smelled different, like incense or sandalwood, what some black hair care product smells like. the conditioner was similarly colored and scented. finally, going to the dove hair care website, they don't have this exact shampoo/conditioner (did i not only buy black hair product, but discontinued black hair product?), but something similar - dove advanced hair series quench absolute for curly, coarse hair - features a black hair model. i won't know until tomorrow if this new shampoo/conditioner is good or not.