RIP Dairy Queen...1984-2013

RIP Dairy Queen.  It’s ‘official’.  Today was the first day I could reintroduce potential allergy foods back into my system and the first thing I tried was dairy.  I didn’t even get halfway through the cheese stick before I felt gross.  I ate the whole damn thing anyway.  You never know when you’re eating that last piece of Pizza Ranch pizza, or that last bite of Blizzard that it will be your last.  And when it’s gone, it’s really gone.

It won’t be OFFICIAL official until I get the prick test at the doctors, which hopefully will be either August 28 (my appointment) or shortly thereafter.  The prick test sounds more like a potential boyfriend test than an allergy test, but who am I to question science. 

I’m not too worried about eating around a non-dairy diet, and I’ve already put in a request for an ice cream maker for my birthday so I can make my own with coconut milk.  Ah, ice cream…  I owe my love affair with ice cream to my Grandpa Coles.  He was obsessed with ice cream and they always had gallon buckets of it in their basement freezer…a highlight of every visit was a trip down the basement stairs with a bowl and the ice cream scoop.  And if unaccompanied by a parent, we went CRAZY. Scoop upon scoop of chocolate chip.  That was his favorite ice cream flavor and there was ALWAYS chocolate chip ice cream in the basement.  I don’t remember ice cream in our house growing up, but it was definitely a treat and part of the fun of visiting Grandma and Grandpa.  And when they came to visit, ice cream was always part of the meal-usually it meant a trip to the Marble Slab, this awesome ice cream shop that makes Cold Stone Creamery seem like slop that was on Welch Avenue in the 80s. 

He passed away in 1994, right before I started seventh grade, nineteen years now…which seems ridiculous.    I buy chocolate chip ice cream (or cc mint, which is even MORE delicious) every once in a while in his honor but it’s never the same when it’s not scooped up in a wooden bowl straight out of 1967 and eaten in the family room watching old Popeye the Sailor movies on VHS with my cousins.  My grandparents always hosted each grand kid (there were twelve of us when he died-three more came later) for a week every  summer and Grandpa was notorious for ‘afternoon trips’ to DQ so he could sneak extra ice cream ‘for us’ [for him…but I never questioned the man!]

You could fit a lot of ice cream in these bad boys...

So, one potential food allergy down, 22 to go!  Tomorrow I’m having coffee for the first time in twelve days and I’m almost giddy with anticipation.