The last couple days have been busy in a completely different way. We’ve spent a lot of time getting to help Susan around the house, mostly preparing meals and helping finish painting projects that are more suited to three people rather than one. It’s been nice getting to help her in exchange for the opportunity we’ve received of living here for this stretch. Another highlight has been work on a new project to help people recovering from the hurricane. Instead of construction work, Evan and I have found ourselves doing culinary work.

After meeting some of Susan’s friends and realizing how little people are eating while repairing their houses, we knew we could do something about that. On Monday, after several errands, including Evan’s first trip to a laundromat, and a fascinating symphony focused meeting with the Rotary Club of Ft Myers South we started on this project. For the first batch of food, we focused specifically on lunches and snacks designed to be taken to job sites with people.

In the midst of everything going on, it was a little different celebrating Halloween this year but still Evan indulged me for one of my favorite holidays. We craved faces into and ate pumpkin cookies, made 5 minute costumes (a frog and a witch, with clothes we had and some paper), and ended the night with a Halloween movie.

On Tuesday evening we were able to deliver our first batch of food to the people who had inspired the project as well as a few others who could also make use of the products.

Today, we spent five hours in the kitchen making job site lunches, sweet treats, and even prepping dinners that would be ready when people return to rental homes at the end of the night. The fridge is filled with soup, mac and cheese, bread pudding, hand pies, and more waiting to be delivered.

Now it’s off to bed early to begin construction work again tomorrow…