Peter, I believe, (I've heard a few autobiographies in the last couple months, so forgive me if I state any untruths, Peter) hails from Canada by way of Lacrosse, WI, as well as England, both of which he taught in for several years before coming here. This is his first year here like me and he's here with his wife Madeleine who teaches in the First Program (elementary school). Peter is a middle school history teacher and a bagpiper, being of mixed Scottish-English ancestry.
Today Peter and I hosted our first Extra-Curricular session at the end of the school day for 16 students (11 from middle school, 5 from high school) who had signed up for our combined chess/strategy game club. It's a combined club because there weren't enough students signed up for both so they put us together as one. We'll meet twice a week from 2:45 to 4:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays (my byzantine schedule to be revealed in a future post).
During our EC (extra-curricular) we had a little downtime and I mentioned to Peter that I'd heard him practicing his bagpipes over the weekend (Saturday evening, to be exact, around 5:30 p.m. as I was heading out on my latest exploratory mission - also to be revealed, if ever as I'm getting quite behind - in a future post). He acknowledged that he was practicing at that time and I pointed out that it sounded like he was playing beneath the under-construction freeway in front of the school and he acknowledged that yes, that was the case. So we briefly talked about how he got in there since there's high walls on either side and he said he'd stepped over a low point in the fence a ways down where the walls had ended. I was intrigued since I'd so far not dared to cross that fence (especially when there were work crews right there paving the adjacent frontage road - although I've done my own bushwacking further along and more out of sight - but Peter said they don't care, and indeed he seemed to be correct because as I was walking by on the sidewalk I could hear him clearly and loudly from under the highway and I wasn't the only one looking around and wondering where that noise was coming from!)
Anyway, we talked about that for a bit in my classroom and the subject drifted to the Netflix series "Outlander" which I must have mentioned to him earlier when I first made the connection between him and the pipes because he said he'd been watching it and he said it was pretty accurate, unlike, for example, Braveheart - he is a history teacher after all, and Scottish-English history is his specialty perhaps because it's personal for him - and he proceeded to fill me in on all the subtleties I'd missed concerning the Jacobites et al. from the series.
So that was this afternoon at work, and after work and after dinner (again, more to blog about in the future) I decided to head off on a loop walk around the adjacent golf course for the first time since my maiden voyage shortly after I'd first arrived, which would conveniently take me past what was marked as a 7-11 store on Google maps where I suspected I could replenish my beer supply (another story still) and as I exited the front gate of the school and turned left (south) parallel to the afore-mentioned under-construction highway I again heard the plaintive sound of the pipes. This time, however, instead of finding (or not finding, actually, merely hearing) Peter hidden under the highway I found him in the open alongside the canal where I turned left on the pedestrian/bike path taking me to the phantom 7-11 store.
Here is some documentation of our meeting and brief exchange before he marched off back toward campus and I continued on my quest. P.S. It was much cooler this evening and quite lovely out.
