A Melvindale mother who had sex with her son’s underage friend was sentenced Thursday to 5-15 years in prison for the illicit affair.

Michelle Perruzzi, 34, had hoped to avoid a prison term altogether for the two convictions for third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Police said Perruzzi repeatedly had sex with the 14-year-old boy in her home while her two children were in the house. The boy is a student at Melvindale High School. He told police Perruzzi molested him at least four times over a four-month period that ended in December 2005 while he stayed overnight with her son.

The national mortgage industry credit squeeze could be a “blessing in disguise” for Livonia-based Quicken Loans and Rock Financial, founder and chairman Dan Gilbert said in an interview today.

Quicken has moved in recent weeks to cut costs, slow hiring and shift all its retail lending to “plain vanilla” very-low-risk loans, Gilbert said. But it has not laid off any workers and still expects to grow mortgage lending volume this year by about 10% to more than $20 billion.

Quicken and Rock have never made subprime loans to home buyers with poor credit histories.

DTE Energy Co. announced today that it signed a long-term purchase agreement with Heritage Sustainable Energy LLC, allowing for the construction of a 6,500-acre wind farm in northern Michigan’s Richland Twp.

The 10-year agreement is part of the Detroit-based utility’s GreenCurrents program, which allows electric customers to pay a premium for the assurance that their power will come from renewable sources.

The agreement allows Heritage to begin construction of Stoney Corners Wind Farm, which will generate power from two, 2.5 megawatt wind turbines. The facility is expected to be in operation next spring and could expand its capacity to 100 megawatts.

The new FedEx Corp. hybrid electric trucks are sweet rides.

Ask Dan Saville, who got the assignment to drive to Ann Arbor to pick up FedEx’s only hybrid electric truck in use in Michigan.

“It’s very nice,” said Saville, adding the 158-mile trip barely used a quarter tank of gas.

A growing pharmaceutical services firm is opening a new office in Ann Arbor in mid-September, planning to hire at least 30 laid-off Pfizer workers as it seeks clients who launch start-ups.

United BioSource Corp. will occupy the first floor of an office building in Plymouth Park on the city’s northeast side.

The 10,921-square-foot office will be the firm’s first in Michigan.

Scientific instrument manufacturer Waters Corp. is doubling the size of its Ann Arbor demonstration laboratory.

The company signed a lease for a 3,000-square-foot facility at 2805 S. Industrial in Ann Arbor. Waters will move from a 1,500-square-foot site less than half a mile away at 2455 S. Industrial.

“Some people told us that America is dangerous because of what they see in films,” Andreas Maurer said. “But I felt safe in Detroit.”

First stop was a restaurant called Lafayette Coney Island. It is a unique place that’s main dish is hot dogs and the waiter, with a thick Greek accent, memorizes everyone’s order and shouts it to the cook on the other side of the room. The kids tried a Coney dog for the first time and gave it mixed reviews.

Next was a trip to the Hard Rock Café, and from there the group walked down Woodward Avenue toward Hart Plaza. They got wet at the fountain and walked on the Riverwalk to gaze across the Detroit River at Canada. From there they headed to the GM Building and took a ride on the People Mover.

About a million people will line Woodward on Saturday to watch what can only be described as auto machismo in overdrive: 40,000 vehicles strutting their stuff along a 16-mile stretch of Woodward from Pontiac to Ferndale. The noise alone, most of it proffered by the deep growls of the powerful V-8, just shouts Detroit.

And that’s just why expanding the Dream Cruise, to build on its prominence, makes a lot of sense. Why shouldn’t this event stretch from Pontiac to the newly energized riverfront in Detroit? The foot of Woodward, at Jefferson, already offers the perfect turnaround.

Saturday will be the first time Preservation Wayne, an advocate for historical preservation efforts in Detroit, will include the Oriental Theatre, (a.k.a. RKO Downtown) in its annual tour of former movie palaces.

Though the auditorium of the 1927 theater was demolished in the early 1950s, parts of the lobby remain in an adjoining building near West Adams and Grand Circus Park. “Because real estate was so precious at the time, theaters had to get creative with their entrances,” says Francis Grunow, executive director of Preservation Wayne. “You can still see some of the details: columns, plaster molding and ornamental glass.”

Last year, nearly 150 people attended the four-hour walking tour of the city’s entertainment district. Tickets are $40, including a boxed lunch at the Detroit Opera House, formerly the Capitol, one of eight tour stops.

Perhaps the shortest, most original menu you’ll find in metro Detroit now is in Eastern Market, at a tiny new health and education center called Detroit Evolution Laboratory.

Serving only vegetarian, vegan and raw foods, the center’s menu features three lunch items weekly, made daily in limited quantities using organic or local ingredients.

This summer, chef Angela Kasmala is preparing all raw foods. This week, it’s stuffed heirloom tomatoes over sprouted quinoa salad ($10); a design-your-own salad with sugar-free, wheat-free Lioness dressing ($7); and veggie samosas ($9), using young coconut wrappers.

As downtowns across Metro Detroit continue to revitalize, small businesses like TeamLogicIT should be credited with making these turnarounds possible.

The new downtown Dearborn firm spent $13,000 to do some cosmetic renovations to its one-story storefront at 4929 Schaefer. Not a huge sum and not a project that will inspire countless conversations, like the proposed renovation of the old Montgomery Ward building down the street. But making one more small building better helps make downtown better and can inspire its neighbors to invest more.

Not all of Ann Arbor’s loft developments are going up in the downtown area. Construction is moving forward at the Plymouth Green Crossings development on the city’s northeast side.

The mixed-use development’s first model is expected to open in November and its first phase is set for completion as soon as January. The project features three, three-story buildings on a 10-acre site at Plymouth and Green roads between U.S. 23 and the old Pfizer site.

Thirty-five lofts will be built on the second and third floors of each building over 24,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. There will also be two other free-standing buildings on the site. One will house a Fifth Third Bank branch while the other is designated for a 6,000-sqaure-foot restaurant with a roof deck. Among the tenants signed for the retails space are Sweetwater´s Café and Olga´s Kitchen.

Ann Arbor-based Terumo Medical Devices makes equipment used in heart surgeries to replace heart and lung function when those organs have to be stopped during a surgery. They also make products that are used in bypasses and artificial vascular grafts.

Terumo’s Ann Arbor operations include corporate headquarters, research and development and a manufacturing facility. Since 2006, the Ann Arbor location has grown from from 333 to 410 while still hiring. “We have been growing every year,” says Schmid. The company also has three other manufacturing facilities in the country, with a total of 900 employees.