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Sarah and I are about to place another order for bison. We’re buying a 1/4 of a bison for ourselves from a Wisconsin bison rancher, and are willing to try and organize people to purchase another 1/4 or so collectively. The going price is $3.00/lb and a share of a 1/4 consists of roughly thirty pounds of meat. The shares should be roughly 3-2 ground/ribs/roasts/stew meant/soupbones to steaks.

There are five shares of the size we’re selling in a 1/4 bison. Before we’ll sell shares six-nine, share ten also has to be sold. That means we’re only selling shares in a 1/4 if we can sell the whole quarter. We’re not interested in more bison for ourselves since we’re already buying a whole 1/4 just for us.

Caveats: The bison are raised near Princeton, WI and are processed by a small butcher near Oshkosh. The meat is shrink-wrapped in plastic and it holds up very well to long-term freezing. All of the meat is frozen when it is picked up from the processor. When the meat will be available is unknown since the rancher does not (yet) have a butcher date. Based on past experience with this rancher and processor, I expect 01 June 2006 will be earliest the meat will be available. Because these are obvious natural products, and no one really knows how much meat is on an animal until it has been processed, all the weights are estimates.

If you’re interested in buying a share, contact either myself or Sarah for more details.

After my extremely unfortunate experiences last week, I’m finally back on my feet.The Great Turkey Debacle didn’t really end until yesterday around noon. That was when I left my doctor’s office for the follow-up appointment to my ER visit late Saturday night.

On Friday, I had a reasonable day. I couldn’t eat much for breakfast, but managed to get down something like a normal lunch and a small dinner. Saturday, by comparison, was a disaster. I ate a small breakfast, got ill, suffered a headache, and took a nap. Then, I managed to eat a small lunch and a very small dinner. I basically choked down those last couple of meals but wasn’t happy with how I felt afterwards. Regardles, I felt like I had to eat something, so I did. Most of the day on Saturday I was nauseus and lethargic. 99 days out of a hundred I don’t take any sort of nap, but on Saturday I took several naps, some an hour long or longer. I finally went to bed around 23:00.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I felt my heart transition from the normal two-beat (“Dub, dub…Dub, dub…Dub, dub”) rhythm to a three-beat rhythm (“Dub, dub, Dub……Dub, dub, Dub”) and as the beat changed, I felt a catch inside my throat. This was definitely not normal, and as I worried about it, the beat sped-up and normalized. I talked myself into believing that I had imagined the whole affair or somesuch, and was drifting off to sleep when the change in rhythm happened again. Now, I got really nervous. I told Sarah what was going on. She helped me give in to my better senses to seek some sort of professional medical opinion. At that hour, it meant a trip to the ER.

Once at the ER, I was placed on a bed, an IV was inserted in my arm, an EKG was taken, blood was drawn, and a heart monitor went on one of my fingers. As I was waiting there for the doctor to come in, I decided that if something was going to go wrong with my ticker, that I probably couldn’t be in a much better situation. There I was, with an IV already in my arm and a heart monitor on my hand, lying in the Emergency Room of a highly respected hospital. The old Boy Scout motto of Be Prepared seems to have stuck.

Eventually, the doctor came in and said that the EKG showed nothing wrong, but that we needed to wait for the blood work to come back before he’d be happy releasing me. After a seemingly interminible wait, the news came back that my electrolytes were out of kilter and that this was most likely the reason for my change in heartbeat (a.k.a atrial fibrillation). He had the nurses provide me with what I now call The Magic Orange Juice.

If you are ever in the hospital, ask for The Magic Orange Juice. It is definitely not a sippin’ drink; it’s a chuggin’ drink as the flavor is reasonably awful. However, it’s probably the closest legal experience to a drug like cocaine or speed. Ten or fifteen minutes after finishing the glass, it’s like all my senses came online together. It was like looking through a dirty window for months on end. Then, one Saturday you clean the window, and find yourself wondering how you ever managed to see anything through the formerly filthy pane. That’s what The Magic Orange Juice is like. It’s like cleaning the windows in front of all your senses.

What’s in The Magic Orange Juice? I don’t know exactly what they put in it, but it provides a huge dose of potassium. My blood work indicated that I was hypokalemic (i.e., I had too little potassium in my blood). Potassium is major regulator of heart rhythms and when I ran low, my heart developed its own little rhythm. So, the folks at the ER gave me a huge shot of potassium in an otherwise potassium rich food that is quickly and easily absorbed.

After I was discharged, I looked at the information sheet they gave me about hypokalemia. As it turns out, cocoa is a good source of potassium. Earlier in the evening, I had asked Sarah to pick me up a bit of chocolate while she was out running some errands as I had a jonesing for it. This was a highly unusual request from me. Not so much because I don’t like chocolate, but because I usually prefer hard, swett candies. Apparently, my body knew it needed potassium, knew where to get some quickly and in a form my GI tract would accept, and produced the necessary craving. The mind fell right in line, and the mouth spoke the request. It’s amazing how the whole system works.

Anyway, Sunday I was home trying to eat as many bananas as I could, even though I could hardly eat anything else.

Finally on Monday, I was allowed to start eating almost like normal again. Even today, I’m not back to where I was before the Damn Cutlet, but I’m definitely getting better. The smell of any meat no longer causes my stomach to wrench as it did earlier. However, all poultry products are strictly off-limits for now. Someone at work today had something that only smelled like fried chicken and it absolutely caused my stomach to lurch and then lurch again.

Since this incident, I’ve given very serious thought to radically changing what I eat. I’m not ready to become a strict vegetarian, but it is not out of the question to cull several of the meat food groupings from my diet. At the moment, it appears that all fowl and I are no longer on speaking terms. Sarah and I almost never eat beef any more because we substitute bison instead, so it’s easy to cut beef out of my diet. Interestingly, pork will be the sticking point, not because I like chops and roasts, but because I like port sausages like bratwurst and pepperoni.

The whole time I was ill, Sarah felt guilty because she was the person who cooked and served me the Damn Cutlet. It probably didn’t help that I kept accusing her trying to poison me to get sole custody of the dog. While I was either sleeping or moaning about the state of my stomach, she worked in the yard this weekend. We bought five bags of cocoa shell mulch from a PTO at a school near our house and Sarah spread several of them around her herb garden. She also finished weeding the flower gardens at the back of the house. The lettuce seeds she planted in pots two weeks ago are starting to come out of the dirt, as are the basil seeds.

For some reason probably closely associated with the tides or some other force, Sarah and I were in no-nonsense moods today. She disposed of several long-term problems by telling the source of the problem to take a very long walk in any direction they chose as long as it took them farther away from her. When I spoke to my friend Josh today and he asked how I was today, I responded, “Do you ever have a day where you wish you could solve your problems via mortal combat?”

For dinner last night we had stuffed turkey cutlets on the grill. At the time, they seemed like nothing special.Once I went to bed, however, the turkey cutlets struck with a vengence. I was up all night either preparing to vomit, vomiting, or recovering from vomiting. When I was in bed I couldn’t sleep because my guts were roiling and I was shivering uncontrollably. It was not fun.

Sarah was lucky enough to be generally unaffected.

Today, I stayed home from work because I still had fairly strong nausea and a wicked headache. Of course, I couldn’t eat much beyond a few crackers and some liquids which meant that I had the energy and activity level of a comatose sloth.

No more turkey cutlets. Ever.

After buying a copy of the book quite cheaply, I was delighted to so thoroughly enjoy Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.The subject of the book is the famous 1972 chess match between Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassy in Iceland. Unlike many other books that cover the chess games themseles, this book covers the personalities of the men playing the games and the circumstances that surrounded the match.

Mention Bobby Fisher to nearly anyone familiar with his name and they will most likely a strong and immediate reaction. One of my co-workers described him as a “world-class flake.” Unfortunately, such a reaction is probably unfair to Fisher. He is undeniably difficult to interface with as a person. His sense of morals is clearly underdeveloped and when they were handing out social graces, Fisher wasn’t just at the back of the line, he was in another line altogether. What Fisher did, probably better than anyone else at the time, was play chess. All of this leads nearly inexorably to the conclusion that Fisher is most likely a savant. He plays chess like a brilliant grandmaster, but runs the rest of his life like an 8 year-old kid.

Spassky is something of an unknown to many people. While he was a product of the Soviet system, he was a Russian at heart. It is important to understand the difference between a Russian and a Soviet because they are not the same thing. Russians are born in Russia and they may or may not be believers in the Soviet way of life. Soviets, on the other hand, could be born in any former USSR state as long as they advocated the advancement of the Soviet agenda. The Soviets pushed the idea of chess as a measure of their society’s superiority over other societys and economic systems. As such, there were extensive programs setup to identify and develop latent chess talent all across the Soviet Union. This system helped to create a long line of Soviet grandmasters that held the world title for many, many years. Spassky, being a Russian, was not interested in imbuing the game of chess with the Soviet agenda. He loved the game for what it was.

Edmonds and Eidinow repeatedly cover just how the governments of the two superpowers viewed the match within their inner circles. While much of the world looked at the game as a lone American rising up to challenge the Soviet dominence, ample evidence is presented to support the idea that the two governments did not much care about the match in the larger geopolitical sense. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, many previously hidden records were opened to the authors. They mined these records to reveal many interesting behind the scenes facts about the participants in the game and their respective governments. Actions taken by the KGB during the match are discussed, as are accusations by Spassky’s team there were psychotropic drugs or mind control devices hidden in Fisher’s chair.

Bobby Fisher Goes To War is an excellent and compelling book about the great chess match in Iceland. The authors’ extensive research and interviews with many of the principals of the time, along with their accessible and well-constructed prose, really bring the work to life.

There is no hole deep enough or dark enough for this creep.

This morning I received some spam advertising “Viagra Professional.”

My first thought was who, exactly, would need professional-grade Viagra?

The weekend before last, Sarah and I traveled to Boston to visit family and friends; see how some of our old stomping grounds had changed; and take in a draw or two at the World Men’s Curling Championships. We took some photos of our trip for those who are interested.