Welcome to Keydetpiper's Blog

So here I am with my third blog post of the day... my third blog post in history actually. I'm still not convinced that anyone really cares about what I have to say, but I'm going to put it on the web anyhow. My first blog is about an unrelated project, and as a surprise to most everyone I know (including me), it has nothing to do with piping. This blog, however, will dedicated to the things I enjoy most, which are teaching, science, bagpipes, teaching science, and teaching bagpipes. There might be other topics in from time to time, but for the most part it will be dedicated to those topics. So without further ado, let's begin with an introduction to me, spread across several posts. Let's start with who I am, where I live, and what I do for a living.

Readers, meet me. I am (as of this writing) 27 years old, living in the small and somewhat remote town of Fryeburg, Maine. (I say somewhat remote because compared to many places in the country I'm in the middle of BFE, but there are places in Maine far more remote than here.) Fryeburg is about 50 miles northwest of Portland, right on the New Hampshire border. I have lived here for about a year and a half, and I moved up this direction to teach physics at Fryeburg Academy. It's a private boarding school that also serves as the local public high school. One of my job descriptions is dorm parent, and in addition to my regular salary I am provided housing in one of the dorms and food in the dining hall. In return I act as an authority figure (en loco parentis) for the 30 or so boys who live in the dorm. They come from all over the world (only 3 of them from the US), and I've learned to say "Hello" to all of them in their own languages (not to mention a few foreign swear words). This year I teach two courses, Honors Physics and AP Physics, which means I pretend to know a little about math and a little about science. It also means I have the best students in the school (and only the best students in the school), which makes teaching them a great job and a lot of fun. It's not all peaches and cream all the time, of course, but on the whole enjoy it and consider myself to be quite happy.

I have a lot of really good friends here in Fryeburg, and they are all associated with the academy in some fashion, and fall into such outlandish categories as "math teacher," "science teacher," "English teacher," "history teacher," "admissions," or "married to one of the above."

My apartment is certainly nothing that will ever grace the pages of any magazine, and not just for the simple reason that it's messy. It consists of two rooms on the second floor of the dorm, a separate bathroom, and nice large closet. The bedroom is directly above the dorm's boiler room, making the floor nice and toasty in the winter and uncomfortably warm in the summer. My "kitchen" is a refrigerator and apartment-sized electric range/oven in the corner of the main room, and a few cabinets and a counter top that I contributed. If you read the previous sentence carefully you will notice that it doesn't contain the word "sink," which appropriate because there is no sink in my kitchen. There is a kitchen sink in the bathroom, which is where I wash the dishes, wash the hands, brush the teeth, and shave. It turns out to not be such a big deal since I do most of my eating in the school dining hall, but it gives me something to complain about. I have colonized an empty dorm room across the hall that I'm able to use for storage. Considering the price it ain't bad, but if I had my druthers it's not quite what I would have picked out.

So that's all for now in this introductory post, and I will continue with other stuff about me, as well as anything that might be on my mind.