Hi all:

Alice wanted me to do a post here even though she is feeling fine now but is dreading tomorrow’s chemo session.  I will keep reminding her that it is the last session and she has to put up with possible side effects only for the next two weeks.  More importantly she wanted me to do the post because I got into trouble with daughter #1 and S-I-L, and daughter #2 helped out with telling her sister some of the bad aspects of what I did.  Alice was getting a kick out of this and this really shows how well she is feeling now.

Daughter #1 called Sunday AM and asked if Alice and I would like to go sailing with them on the Great Salt Lake.  I looked over at Alice reading the newspaper and she looked like she needed an outing really bad and I said YES for both of us.  So, there we were out on the lake four adults and the two grandchildren who took turns being bored and eating junk food and gross candies most of the time.  By the time we got back to the dock, the grandson was in trouble with his mom and she decided to make him stay on the boat with his daddy and ride home with him.  She was going to stop by the grocery store on the way home and so the little one wanted to go home with us.

She is always scheming about getting grandpa to give her candy or other bad stuff to eat. As we were driving out of the Marina, she says “Grandpa, will you buy me  a root beer float?”  As I like them too, I thought we could stop somewhere on the way home to get it.  Then she says “No Grandpa, you get it from the vending machine at the Marina”. When I asked her if she was sure, she swore that it was true.  I decided, like a dummy, I had to see this.  So we did a U turn and went to office at the Marina to check out the vending machines.  Well, there was no Root Beer Float in the two machines there.  By this time she was determined to get something from the machine.  She tried Gatorade which was sold out, so settled for a 20 Oz bottle of MountainDew.

As we were on our way home, she says that the drink she got had caffeine.   I did not think so as I had specifically avoided buying her a Pepsi she wanted first.  So I asked her to hand the bottle to grandma too check it out.  Alice goes through the list of ingredients and is appalled at the list of additives but does not find any caffeine in the list.  So we get home feeling happy.  At home she watches a movie while drinking all of the 20 Oz of Mountainedew.  Later I walked her home and she insisted on walking barefoot on the street. (She is definitely one quarter Indian).  I did not think there was anything peculiar about the way she was behaving.  She was even making some remarks about Shannon Bharke (Vancouver Olympic medalist for Mogul skiing) when we passed by her house on the way.

That night, I got a call from her mommy THANKING me for loading her little daughter up caffeine and how she was bouncing off the walls, running up and down neighbor’s driveway and talking gibberish throughout dinner.  She had gotten a call from daughter#2 who had educated her on the amount of caffeine in Mountaindew.  Apparently when she was in college, most of the kids who did not drink coffee, kept themselves awake in class by drinking Mountaindew.  Then I got an e-mail with a link showing the amount of caffeine in soft drinks and I thought that I almost killed the kid buying her the bottle of Mountaindew.  Alice listening to all these happenings was having a good laugh at my expense but we were both worried for the health of the “little bit”.  Our daughter threatened to call me in the middle of the night to come take care of the caffeinated granddaughter and needless to say they were not happy with my continued pushover behavior when it came to the grandkids.

Luckily, the kid was okay the next day, but complained of a killer headache and told her mom that she liked the drink but did not like the headache.

Here are some pictures from the sailing trip.