I don’t ever remember getting off from school on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but this year both girls are off tomorrow. Yuriko has to work, and I have things to do too. But it seems like a good day to knock off posting. Back on November 30 or so.

The ground is frozen and ice has already almost slipped me up. Last winter started like this, and about at the same time, and we all know how that turned out. Harsh enough to contribute to a temporary contraction of the US economy. But at least we didn’t have a Year Without a Summer to follow it up.

The eruption of Mt. Tambora’s credited with making 1816 so cold, or at least contributing mightily to the condition. Which reminds me of a book I saw in my elementary school library that had a graphic illustration of volcanic eruptions. The larger the drawing of the volcano and its plume of gas, the bigger the eruption.

Various famous eruptions were charted, including Vesuvius (Pompeii fascinated me in the fifth or sixth grade) and Krakatoa, which I heard of because of bad TV. Tambora was bigger than all of those, but Mt. Toba was the enormous monster of the page. Something like this illustration.

Nobody had ever heard Tambora or Toba, and information about them was hard to come by, at least in a pre-Internet elementary school library. That only added to the allure of the events: that much bigger than Krakatoa? Wow.