Nature, Animals, Travel, Oil Painting - That sums me up pretty well.

Salutations! It was only a handful of days ago that my brother @kommienezuspadt told me about Steem and pressed me to set up an account. Now that I'm here, I see that I'm going to have a lot to learn.  I've never really wrote blogs before, mainly because I didn't think there would be much interest in what I have to say.  However, I must admit my life has become a lot more, well, interesting over the last decade or so.  I'll try to start with the basics...

My name is Adam and I love the natural world. I grew up in the woodlands of northeastern Pennsylvania, so much of my childhood was spent in the wilderness.  Fortunately, many memories of the streams, waterfalls, cliffs and critters from those days have survived my alternate-interest teen years into adulthood.  I know this because each time I'm on a trip or hike into the wild and there are few people around, I get a comfortable, familiar feeling of being home.  Maybe that's just me, or maybe that's a primitive feeling all humans get? I hope it's the latter.  

My love for nature really escalated around 7 years ago when I started dating my future fiancé, Kylene.  Travel was, and still is, her #1 passion.  She was around 23 years old at that time and had already been every continent but two.  I never met anyone like her who had such cool travel stories from her own experience.  She lived in Tanzania for 6 months, Thailand and Vietnam for another two or three. Montana before that.  She definitely gets 100% of the credit for introducing me to travel.  I just never thought about it before, really.  Out in the somewhat depressed country area where I grew up, it just wasn't something people did.  I'll be forever grateful to her for changing that.  There is so much to amazing stuff in this world and everyone should do their best to see it.  As a STEEM member, I'll be posting a lot of photos and stories from my travels.  I hope you enjoy them!

I've been lucky enough to have my love of nature and wildlife be included in my career.  In the mid 2000's I opened a reptile specialty pet store.  I'm an enthusiast for all types of animal, but I must admit I really like reptiles, amphibians, and insects the most.  I'm a bug guy. I've been fascinated by them for a good 15 years now, but I digress.  My pet shop, called "Project: Reptile" last for about 4 years or so, but really took a nose dive around late 2009 in the midst of the financial meltdown.  I also had a bit of a disagreement with the properties landlord too, which was the final nail in the coffin.  After closing the shop, I hit up one of my old customers who once told me he made habitats for zoos and such for a living.  He let me use him as a reference and before I knew it, I had a job being trained as his replacement as he was to retire in a year.  It was my dream job.  I was the exhibit designer and artist designing and fabricating exhibits for zoos and museums around the country.  I designed the waterfalls, I built the trees, I carved the cliff faces.  All my experience of animal husbandry paid dividends in my design.   My work can be seen at the National Geographic museum in DC, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, all the way out to the Museum of the Rockies in Montana.  Aside from building these things, I would also get sent out around the country to set up some of the companies rental exhibits on location; which was a huge bonus as it fed my new love of travel! The job was perfect, aside from one major flaw.... my douchebag boss.  Fast forward 6 years to this past June.  My boss had become ridiculously controlling, degrading, and flat out mean that we got into a verbal exchange at one of our client's venues, which resulted in him slapping me... twice.  I took him down and whooped him pretty good, and when he yelled "stop! stop!" I did and let him up... only to have him try blind siding me with an attack from a 2x4 from behind! I took him right down again, and then let him up AGAIN when he started yelling.  The real twist of this story is that I ended up getting fired for it.  Did I mention that my boss was the owner's son??? Anyway, that was tough.  I lost my dream job.  On the plus side of things though, I'm building my own traveling exhibit now!  I'll probably have a lot of blogs about that with photos and how-to's.  It's an arachnid exhibit, all about spiders!

Lastly, I'm a newcomer to the world of art and it's all thanks to Bob Ross.  Last October I found myself flipping through the channels on a Saturday morning and happened upon a "The Joy of Painting" mini marathon on PBS.  I always loved watching Bob paint in the early 90's when I was little and even then I remembered thinking "I want to try that!"  Well, I had that same thought some 20 years later now so I went out to Michael's and bought the CHEAPEST oil painting supplies I could find.  When I got home, I tried to paint some happy trees and mountains and to my surprise it came out pretty well! I've done close to 100 oil paintings now, I'd say.  I even sold a few!  Above is one of favorites when I titled "Scarlet Breeze".  I'll likely post my newest paintings on here from now on, if I like how they turned out.  

Well, if you made it this far: THANKS FOR READING!  Seriously, I mean that.  I hope you have found a shared interest that we might have and we can share thoughts and experiences in the future.  Take care of yourselves and each other!  - Adam