About MeHI! I'm a private music teacher in Alaska, teaching in a very small town known as Petersburg, in the rainy southeastern part of Alaska known as the "Panhandle." My town is in the Tongass National Forest, a rainforest. And does it ever rain!
My family and I LIVE in an even smaller town (population 26, at last count) just across the water from the BIG town. Our home is a cabin, off-the-grid, and we provide our own electricity, heat, and water. To get to Petersburg to conduct our businesses (my husband is also self-employed), we don life-jackets and drive a small open skiff across the water to town. Sometimes it's a lot like camping out! However, we have the modern amenities...more than enough laptop and desktop computers to go around, internet hookup, etc. (Though my old Uncle Bud once said that the greatest luxury in the world was HOT RUNNING WATER... and I believe him, having endured frozen pipes more than once in the last few years.) Since getting my degree in Music Education years ago from Seattle Pacific University, I have taught private piano off and on. Mostly off, while our three daughters were small, but now pretty much year-round and with a full schedule, since moving back "home" to Petersburg in 1993. While I started out just teaching private piano, I gradually became comfortable teaching voice, and then beginning guitar, and most recently, violin (or fiddle, really). Perhaps there's a bit of a rebel in people who end up "pioneering." In addition to buying a cabin in an inconvenient, if beautiful, location so we could afford to live on a beach with the woods behind us, we have also homeschooled our girls, in spite of my Music degree which would have allowed me to teach in public school. Two of our daughters are through college, and the youngest, 16, is on her way there in a couple more years. Our home is filled with books, music, our favorite movies (The Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice, Braveheart, etc.), a wood cook stove, two cats, and a Labrador. Actually, the dog stays outside. This is a small cabin. My music studio is small, too; an old Norwegian-style house common in this Norwegian fishing town, just big enough for my piano and a few comfy chairs. On my home page I say that there is no music store within a hundred miles...true, though not as the crow flies, perhaps. North of Petersburg is Juneau, the capitol of Alaska, ringed with mountains, and like all towns in southeast Alaska, accessible only by boat or plane. South of us is another small town, Wrangell (smaller than Petersburg), and further south, the gateway of Alaska, Ketchikan, with more rain even than Petersburg.
But Petersburg is a beautiful place to live. Hard-working, and sometimes hard-living, this town has some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. When misfortunes occur in this small town, people pull together. Many of those people have been my students, and the parents of my students. I feel very blessed to live here, and share music with those I can. If you have found the music I share on this site useful, fun, and even beautiful, I wouldn't turn down a donation!
Thanks for stopping by!
Dana T.
|
