I had the opportunity to come back to Metro Detroit from Connecticut for a week last week to attend a friend's wedding and give a presentation at a meeting in Lansing. In between, I spent a few days at my old job in the city....and as a consequence if any of you ride the Diamond Jack tourboat out of Wyandotte this year you'll notice she has a completely new coat of paint! Anyhow, since I was working and playing near Detroit for several days I decided I could set a goal of not only supporting the city and its businesses in some way every day, but also trying to do a "good turn" to help the city that I love in some very small ways. Here's what I came up with:

Friday, May 6- A bunch of construction barrels for the Michigan Ave. repave project closing down lanes on Cass next to the AT&T building were either knocked over by the wind or by somebody who was not in the mood to merge left. I rescued several of them [[including a couple blowing around in the street) and put them back in the nice diagonal to push traffic over to one lane.

Monday, May 10- On my way to the Inside Detroit Welcome Center I cleaned up some trash in one of the planters along Woodward. Yes, I know the downtown Clean Detroit crews do a stellar job, but this stuff was here, and it was windy. I also happened to pick up a #53 Woodward Ave. DDOT route schedule just to have one, then ran into some guy who wanted to know what bus would go up to Midtown. Perfect. I didn't really need one more thing to bring back anyhow.

Tuesday, 11- As I was driving back from downtown I noticed that the plug ends were hanging off a Detroit Standard fire hydrant on W. Lafayette on the south side of Corktown. I pulled over and screwed them back on. Why/how/who does this? I've seen the plugs hanging off the hydrants in other places around the city before, too.

Thursday, May 13- Today was the biggest of my little projects, a friend and I decided to tackle a traffic control relay box on a busy street corner in SW Detroit. It was covered by graffiti and had a lot of stuff stuck on it [[ironically....some with painters tape). We cleaned it up and then gave it a fresh coat of gray all over. We also patronized a local corner blue USPS mailbox by mailing a few things. Then we took a couple spins around downtown on the People Mover, just checking out the city in the early evening light. And I called DDOT to inform them of a bus stop sign on Fort that had been felled.

Each of these days I was in the city, I also bought a copy of the Detroit News from a different paperbox in the downtown area, among them the box in front of Subway on W. Adams across from GCP, the box in front of the old Trolley Square apartments on Washington Blvd., the box on the Lafayette side of the Detroit News building, and the box on Randolph Street just south of Harmonie Park. Trying to support our local print media!

I also grabbed lunch and/or dinner at a couple local Detroit dining establishments, among them Gonella's down on Oakwood and Mudgie's Corktown location.

I write all this not to show off "look at me, I came home and look what I did to help out," but to show that everyone, even if you're just in the city for a short period of time, can do something small to make a difference in and support businesses in the city we love. Next time I'm back in the area I hope to be able to do something similar. Hopefully some of you will consider doing some of the same types of things to make the city a better place. Sometimes, its all about the details!