Muggsy's Brain

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...

A couple of weeks ago I was cooling a batch of Nicaraguan Organic when I heard a loud CLUNK! come from my coffee roaster (the Probat L12 pictured above), I ran into the roasting room from my office to discover that the main drive wheel in the back of the machine, also known as the "idler wheel," had snapped off at its shaft where it connects to the machine's body. I knew what had happened before I looked because it had happened before back when we first moved into our current location about three years ago. A call to Probat down in Tennessee, an overnight package, $180 and a few hours of tricky labor and we were back up and running.  The machine was making a particular rhythmic throbbing sound just before the part snapped, and after the repair it is still making a similar sound. I am waiting -- half- expecting it to snap off again at any second. I am under a kind of stress that I've never been under in over 15 years of coffee roasting, and it's taking a physical...

This is from an ad from the early 1900s that Erin has framed and hanging in her kitchen: Nervousness comes from two causes.  One is half-fed nerves. The malt in beer is a food to them; the hops a tonic.  The slight percentage of alcohol is an aid to digestion, and that means more food. Another cause is the waste that clogs the nerve centers.  That waste results from drinking too little to properly flush the system. The habit of beer drinking gives the body the needed fluid. That is why beer is prescribed for nervousness.  That is why beer-drinking nations scarcely know what nervousness is. But drink pure beer -- Schlitz beer.  Bad beer may be worse than the lack of it. Half the cost of our brewing goes to making Schlitz pure.  Ask for the brewery bottling. The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous Powered by ScribeFire .

I think I might be setting myself up for a bad case of the winter blahs this year because it's already starting to set in. The weather lately has been cold, wet & rainy. It seems like 2 seconds after I get home in the afternoon the sun goes down. When it's like this it's hard to motivate myself to do anything: go for a walk, do the dishes, shave. I find myself thinking of the long winter ahead and I dread it -- for the first time in my life. I like winter, for the most part, it's got it's own beauty: frozen lakes, snow-covered hills, and once in a while hoar frost that makes everything look like a frosted cake. But it also has bitter cold, biting wind and tons and tons of darkness. Those are the parts I like the least. There is a beauty that can be found on winter nights, to be sure. The skies are never clearer, and if there are clouds they sometimes seem to glow. So I know I can find the beauty of winter, it's there all the time if you just look. I...

I just heard from Jewel.  Although everything is not 100% fine, there is no need for drilling or surgery.  She has a mild concussion and a little whiplash from when she passed out at work (must've hit the floor pretty hard), but there's no sign of an aneurysm or a tumor. She should be able to treat this whole thing with drugs (which she probably won't take for long, she's stubborn, remember?).  Between her daughter, her mother, her friend Tracey and me we'll make sure she takes them if we have to go there and poke them down her throat. What a relief!  Now I can look forward to having her outlive me.

My dearest friend, Jewel, the friend I've known the longest, the friend who knows me best inside and out, is going in for an MRI today.  She has suffered from migraines for as long as I've known her and she stubbornly doesn't allow them to slow her down much.  Yesterday she was at work and she passed out and hit the floor, she "coded" for 32 seconds.  Her co-workers did CPR and brought her around and drove her to the Emergency Room at the St. Cloud Hospital. Long ago she had a skull fracture, I can't remember how it happened, if I had to guess I would say it was from fighting with one of her brothers, but I could be wrong.  Regardless, it has left her with bone spurs on the inside of her skull and they are apparently poking her in the brain.  That's the most likely cause of the migraines.  One of them is located near the base of the skull where all the nerve endings travel through.  They need to do an MRI to see if that is indeed the case, or if it is pote...

Last Friday, after our gig at the Whitehorse, my left ear started to feel plugged. Saturday was annoying and Sunday was pretty bad. It stayed on all week, so I went to the doctor today. Turns out it's related to allergies. I spent every day hoping it would suddenly clear. I spent every night with visions of every urban legend I've ever heard about some insect or spider crawling into someone's ear only to become trapped and die (or in the really bad stories, hundreds of baby spiders come crawling out eventually!), or thinking about an infection that could potentially diminish or destroy my hearing. Losing my hearing is something I've thought about before. I've noticed in recent years that I can't make out higher-pitched sounds, like a woman's voice, in a crowded room. That makes it hard to talk to people. Lord knows I've spent enough time around cymbals and loud guitars to have some effect, add that to the fact that I am a 40+ year old male and it ...