About Me

I live in a small town (population 3000 and shrinking!)  in Queensland, Australia. I’ve been a teacher for around 9 years and recently decided to take a grown up gap-year. The plan is to take time out to travel and indulge my interests. Then it’s back to work, hopefully with a more balanced perspective. So far my hubby and I have mainly been road tripping (Far North Queensland and Tasmania) but have also made it across to New Zealand. I absolutely love second-hand and op shops so my cover image comes from a fantastically crowded shop we visited in New Zealand. It had the biggest collection of salt and pepper shakers I’ve seen! Not to mention the awesome vintage telephone wall!!

I first started learning guitar from friends in my early twenties. They taught me basic open chords and bar chords. Then I just learned whichever songs I could convince them to teach me. I had the very basics but not much more than that. Sadly YouTube did not exist then. : (   After the tragic demise of my first guitar (See R.I.P in My Guitars), I didn’t play for quite a while and even after I replaced that guitar I didn’t really play much.

I rediscovered a love of playing about six months ago. I was always interested in fingerstyle blues but had only attempted a few tunes before. This time around I’ve focused almost completely on finger picking and flatpicking styles, not much rhythm guitar. I became obsessed pretty quickly and gave myself some kind of RSI or tendon injury, most likely from doggedly trying to learn songs that were too far above my skill level. No one told me to be careful of tension! I’m pretty certain I have it under control now though. Touch wood!

One of the downsides of living in such a small place, or traveling around, is that it’s difficult to find the right guitar teacher. I think signing up to TAC has solved this problem beautifully! It helps that I love online teaching and learning. I’m grateful to live in an age where location is no longer a barrier to learning anything!