Candy coated

Hope everyone had a good Easter weekend, I know I did. We started Friday night with dinner at a new place for us, the Oak City Grille on Sixth Avenue in downtown Royal Oak. Excellent food, I recommend it highly. We were then invited to visit Heate later in the evening for a backyard fire at their house, which, as usual, was divine.

Part of the plan Friday night was to start and finish a mass Easter basket production on which we’d embarked. The plan was to make 50 Easter baskets for the ladies at the St. Mary’s Residence in Detroit, a home for mentally disabled adult women. It’s an interesting and very humbling place, actually. These six nuns, none of them seemingly under the age of 70, run the entire facility, which provides the day-to-day care for approximately 39 adult women with ailments ranging from retardation to schizophrenia to a general state of “slowness.” These nuns do all of this on a volunteer basis, with no state funding, relying entirely on the charity of others for everything from preparing daily meals to maintenance around the building and everything in between. Many of the residents have no family, or at least no family members with any time or interest to come visit them. One of the nuns told us that a good amount of them are simply written-off or disowned by family members because of their illness. Kerry took me there a few months ago. We dropped off a TV set and DVD player for a couple of their little TV-viewing rooms. The place looks like a four-story dormitory building. They have laundry, a small cafeteria, an industrial-type kitchen and, of course, a church service room in there. Most of the women receive Social Security, which pays for their room and board and their medications. Some residents take as many as 9 pills a day, so after their SS loot pays for the necessities, they have, like, $8 left for themselves for the month. Now granted, most of the women stay inside and it’s not like they need a lot of spending cash, but money is money and irrespective of your mental state, it’s still good to have. The sisters invited Kerry and I for lunch for dropping off the TV equipment and in the middle of my Hungarian goulash, I had the idea to do something for them for Easter.

Hence, the basket project was born. I went to Michael’s and bought small, plastic baskets, roughly 50 of them. I didn’t want to do anything too garish, plus I thought expenses could add up quickly here. So I got the baskets, Kerry bought some candy, we scored some hollow plastic eggs that we filled with jelly beans, bought some more candy (if I’m not mistaken, each basket had one of the following: a mini pack of Starburst, an egg filled with jelly beans, a couple of Dove mini-chocolate eggs and some mini-Cadburys. I think that’s everything). This is what the production line looked like in the end.

There were actually more baskets in the living room. We packaged them up and dropped them off at St. Mary’s on Saturday morning. We then hit Eastern Market. We went mainly for flowers.

I would later go into Rocky Peanut Co. for some bulk chocolate treats. We like their sugar-free selections, but they do have quite an amazing array of goodies there.

Kerry’s folks and Ri-Ri came over for Easter dinner Sunday, one that Kerry absolutely blew out in the kitchen. It was an amazing meal and a really long day, but totally worth it.