Timing

Yesterday, I decided to go with beef & barley soup for this week's dinners. I've made it a couple of times, and like it, and I had most of the ingredients already in the pantry or fridge.

Today, I failed to check just how long it had to sit in the slow cooker. I didn't get it started until 10:30, 11 AM. It is now almost 7:30 PM, and it won't be ready for another hour, hour and a half.

To top things off, I'm low on staples and can't muster up much in the way of munchables. I'm out of soda, and have just enough milk for tomorrow morning's coffee.

Fall Semester is fast approaching - two weeks from tomorrow - and I'll have to get my body back in synch with the rest of the world.

Le sigh.

Connections

In the section of Lyell that I'm currently reading, he goes into much detail concerning the effects of volcanic eruptions, starting with Vesuvius and Etna, proceeding to Iceland and Chile, and ending with the great Tambora eruption in 1815. (He's restricted, somewhat, by the need to have details recorded by observers of a scientific bent.) He does not, however, mention the meteorological consequences of that last - the legendary Year Without a Summer, when harvests all across the Northern Hemisphere failed because of the reduction in sunlight induced by the debris of the eruption. I can see two possible explanations.

1) He wasn't interested in the meteorology; his concern was establishing that known geological phenomena, given enough time, could account for all the changes in the geological record, without recourse to global catastrophes.

2) He didn't make the connection between the two. After all, it's not obvious that a volcanic eruption in the East Indies could cause crop failures in Europe.

The question that occurs to me, then, is this: when did someone make the connection? I have a vague memory that modern meteorology, with its fronts and jet streams and whatnot, didn't arise until the early twentieth century, but would that knowledge have been necessary? (There was a book I read forty-some years ago, a treasury of snippets of scientific history; it included some stuff about the life of Louis Agassiz, about the emergence of the Paricutin volcano, and, if I remember correctly, about the introduction of the idea of fronts. I don't remember the title or the editor; the book vanished from my hands long ago. I wish I still had it, for nostalgia's sake if no other.)