After writing my first post yesterday, I realized that I completely neglected to introduce myself or give any sort of insight or background into my life. My name, in case you didn't know it already, is Adam. I am an artist and I live in Wheeling, WV. I have a sweet apartment with my roommate and long time friend T. I have a beagle named Marley, whom I adopted from my sister when she moved to NYC. Marley pretty much rocks. She's incredibly smart and loves to play, a lot. Really her only pitfall is that she really likes to pee on bathmats.

I'm a potter and a sculptor. I like to restore furniture and build things. I like to reuse old things and recycle as many things as possible. I'm currently trying to jury into a few different artist co-ops and galleries. I was recently accepted into Artworks Around Town in Centre Market in Wheeling.

I am very proud of the city I live in. I really like Wheeling. It's a great town with a lot of history. However, I heartily disagree with many of the decisions made by the local government concerning the way that they try to attract business back into downtown. I won't go into much detail about that now because I have a LONG blog to write about that one later.

Anyways, I think that's about enough for now. I'm heading back to my studio.

Working in a Winter Wonderland

Ah, you have to love winter, it's coming back in a big way. Global warming just can't seem to keep winter down. This winter has been much worse than last year. Today it snowed probably two inches by 8 am. That made getting around pretty interesting. I realize that for people in a few areas of the country two inches isn't much, but when you put two inches of snow on top of two inches of ice, driving starts to get a little tricky. So naturally, we ventured out to get some rock salt to rid ourselves of some of this craziness and make it a little easier to get our vehicles out. Wouldn't you know it, the Lowe's right down the street was completely out of rock salt. And not just rock salt, they were out of heaters, rock salt, parts for heaters, and just about any other item you could think of that would help someone during the coldest part of the year. I was amazed. They said that they couldn't even order more in because they were "out of season."

The entire situation dumbfounded me. I mean, here we are in the coldest two months of our winter and rock salt and heaters are considered out of season. So, we went to the local hardware store, sure enough out front there was an entire pallet of ice melter. This brings me to my point, and what will probably be the point of most of my posts on this blog; in these tough economic times, we should all be counting on the "little guys" in our communities, local stores owned by local people. These stores are the ones that have been around for years. They're the ones who have those hard to find parts that have been sitting on the shelves for 20 years. They're the stores who charge just a little more than the big box retailers. And they're the store who sponsor the local little league team or give back to the community in some other way. These stores are the ones who need to be the backbone of our communities.

As you can probably tell, I'm a fan of buying local. I try to buy local whenever I can, and now that our economy is in the shape that it's in, I'm going to try to buy local and support local businesses as much as I can. Big box retailers will easily survive this recession. They may have to cut some jobs and perhaps close a few locations, but they will survive. It's those small businesses in our communities that need our help more than ever.

So in closing, I'll leave you with a photo from my studio this morning. It's on a pretty big hill so we get a bit more snow than I do downtown at my apartment.