"Do they know your feelings about this?"
"I think so. I've tried to be obvious about it."
"But you haven't actually talked with them about it," she said.
"No, I guess I haven't. Sometimes it's hard…"
"Would you object if I talked to them?"
"Object? I'd be forever grateful!"
"Then I will see what I can do."
She tried, but nothing came of it.
The next day we were back in Three Walls, and the day after was a normal working day. The country folk knocked off work for two weeks around Christmas, but the people at Three Walls had mostly been recruited from a city. City folk worked whenever work was available, and there was plenty for us to do.
Winter is the best time of the year for logging, the wood is drier and the logs are easier to move around on the snow. Also, the tops of the fir trees were about the only fodder the outdoor animals were going to get. Besides the six dozen bucks left over from the fall's hunt, we had a thousand sheep in the valley. All of them ewes.
I got a lot of ribbing about that, the gist of which was that I didn't know that rams were needed to make little sheep, but I didn't care. I happened to remember that sheep have a five-month gestation period. Any ewe you buy in December is pregnant if she's going to be. And sheep are sexually mature in six months. Next year we'd have plenty of rams. I think.
Well, I had one ram in another, much smaller herd. If he fell over dead from exhaustion next breeding season, I'd have to buy some more in a hurry.
We kept the sawmill going all winter, with sixty women walking back and forth on that huge teeter-totter. The main wooden buildings were up, but we needed lumber for furnishings.. shipping containers, barrels, and so on.
Some construction went on as well. The coke ovens were drylaid sandstone, so there wasn't any worry about mortar freezing. But putting in foundations was difficult.
The big problem was the lack of decent artificial light. By Christmas, we were down to about six hours of daylight. Most Americans don't realize just how far north Europe is. Southern Poland is farther north than Lake Superior, and our seacoast is farther north than the shores of Hudson Bay. A high latitude means a large yearly variation in the length of the day.
Mining went on continuously, of course: it was always dark down there. It was also fairly warm in the mine, and coal mining came to be the job everybody was trying to get. I hoped that Count Lambert wouldn't hear about it.
But even when the weather was good, which wasn't all that often, we were lucky to spend seven hours a day working.
Well, if you can't spend, invest!
I set up a school for the adults. A school for the children was already being taught by two of Lady Richeza's women, so once the children's school was out, the adults took over. Most of my people couldn't read, write, or do simple arithmetic.
By spring they could. That's not quite the accomplishment that it sounds, because Polish is an easier language to learn than English. Polish is absolutely phonetic in its spelling, rather than nearly random as English is. Every letter has a distinct sound, and there are no silent letters. You spell it exactly as you speak it. Learning to spell in English gave me nightmares.
Many Americans who write use spellchecking programs in their personal computers, since the English-speaking peoples can rarely spell their own language. When I got back to Poland after my college days, none of my Polish friends would believe me when I told them this. They thought that I was telling an ethnic joke!
But we had enough people around who could teach arithmetic and reading. Aside from monitoring things, teaching a course in first aid, and tutoring Piotr in math,
I had a fair amount of time to myself, which was wonderful.
I could close the door of my new office, sit down on my new armchair, put my feet up on my nice new desk and do some serious thinking. Mostly about standards. The weights and measures of the Middle Ages were a vast agglomeration of random events. Length was measured in feet, yards, cubits, spans, hands, fingers, miles, and days. Not only was there no agreed-on relationship between those units, but the size of the unit varied from place to place. A Cieszyn yard was not equal to a Cracow yard which was not equal to a Wroclaw yard.
It even varied from commodity to commodity. Fine velvets, for example, were sold by the Troy yard, which was shorter than all of the above. And these weren't minor differences of a few percent. The Wroclaw yard was half again longer than the Cracow yard.
Weights were in even worse shape. Cheese, wheat, and oats were all sold by the quarter, for example. A quarter of what, you ask? Why a quarter of cheese, wheat, or oats! There was no "whole" or "half." But a quarter of wheat was more than five times larger than a quarter of cheese, which was maybe a hundred kilos. And a quarter of oats was bigger than both of the others put together. And of course a quarter in one city was not equal to a quarter anyplace else.
Well, a pint of milk weighed a pound, but milk is the stupidest standard possible. The specific gravity of milk varies by at least five percent, with the richest milk being the lightest. It spoils quickly, so there is no possibility of having a standard jar of milk somewhere. Yet this didn't seem to bother anybody but me. Of course, if a merchant sold short weight, he might get hung, but you never got any complaints out of him after that.
The Church had been working on calendar reform for a century, and things in Poland were not really absurd. At least we all agreed on which day was Sunday and what year it was. From what a merchant friend, Boris Novacek, tells me, in Italy it is possible to leave Venice in 1232, get to Florence in 1233, then go to Milan in 123 1.
Some people started the new year on Christmas, some a week later, and some on March first. For them, December really was the tenth month.
Well, we had a standard yard. Given my own choice, I would have preferred to use a meter, but my liege lord had specifically ordered me to use his yard, the distance from his fingertip to his turned-away nose. This was shorter than a meter and slightly longer than the American yard.
And we had a base-twelve numbering system. This was something that was sort of done to me at first, but I soon saw the advantages of the duodecimal system. Since twelve has more factors than ten, you run into infinitely repeating decimals less often. It often takes fewer digits to express large numbers and math just becomes easier to do.
Since last winter, I had been carefully copying down every constant I could remember, and already I had several pages of them. The distance from the Earth to the Moon and to the Sun. The specific gravity of aluminum and how many centimeters to the American yard and all sorts of things. An engineer needs thousands of numbers, and much of what I did not remember, I could interpolate.
Playing with numbers and all the constants, I was delighted to discover that a thousand (that is to say, 1728 in base ten) of our yards was almost exactly equal to an American mile! The American mile is almost equal to the old Roman mile, which was still somewhat in use.
So, a dozen yards was a dozyard. Twelve dozyards was a twelmile and twelve of these was a mile.
Going down, one twelfth of a yard was a twelyard. Divide that by twelve and you had a dozmil, and a mil was about half a millimeter.
Another nice accident that happened was that a cubic yard of cold water weighed slightly under an American ton, and a thousandth of that, or one cubic twelyard, weighed just over an American pound. This gave us a standard of weight and volume. We had a ton, a pound, and a pint, which was the volume of a pound of cold water.
In a few days, I came up with a complete set of weights and measures, all based either on our yard, or in the case of my electrical standards, on Avogadro's number. Our amp was actually related to the number of electrons flowing.