Muggsy's Brain

I took part in an amazing event this past week on Madeline Island in Wisconsin: my dear friends, Amanda and Stacy, got married. I've known Stacy for over 20 years, and Amanda over 10 years, and both of them are truly amazing women. The ceremony itself was mostly private (a group of us watched from a distance) at the request of the Happy Couple™, but the amount of love and acceptance expressed at the reception was an amazing thing to see. It's kind of odd to find a destination wedding that also features a pot luck supper, but that's what they did, and no one was turned away, even if they weren't a wedding guest. By the end of the night, most of the food was gone, and I saw a lot of Native Americans from the local reservation walk by me with filled plates. Feeding the poor, that's a pretty cool thing to do. Strangers offered their best wishes to the Happy Couple™, and no one judged them because of their gender -- not one person. That is the way it should be. It ...

Marty Sundvall (12/12/1965 - 5/13/2012) WARNING: Some of this post may be too graphic for some readers. My friend Marty was looking pretty bad back in February. His legs and feet got so swollen he couldn't even tie his shoes and his skin and eyes were taking on a sickly yellow hue. In his words: I had been feeling weird for a couple weeks. In that time my energy was zapped, I was very disoriented, my abdomen and feet started to swell and my eyes were an ugly shade of yellow. Being a stoic Minnesotan, he ignored it and continued life as usual, teaching classes at SCSU and the Minnesota School of Business, and having a few cocktails at the White Horse. But his Saturday and Sunday sojourns to the bar left him feeling sick and he was in bed by early Sunday evening. Monday morning he could barely walk. I got up in time to catch the bus to St Cloud State and opted to tough it out. Well, the bus stop is probably 500 feet from my office and I had to stop 4 times to be...