November 21, 2025 • 22 mins
The lengths parents will go for their children is immeasurable. It's even more impactful when it puts them completely out of their element. Oh this episode, Brent's sharing a listener story about a deer hunter's mother that's sure to put a smile on your face. Then, he's finally talking about his new office and promising a tour of its contents in future episodes. It's not hard to believe there's some really cool items in there. Get cozy! It's time for MeatEater's This Country Life podcast.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just in general
country living. I want you to stay a while as
I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life
is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio
on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor
(00:26):
podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab
a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stores
to share, a first buck in Pennsylvania and my new office.
I talk a lot about dads on this show. Being
(00:49):
a dad is the best job I've ever had. But
there's some mamas out there that are equally towing the mark.
And if you've got a good one, there ain't nothing better.
Also got a new office, studio, secret hideout that I
want to tell you all about too. But first I'm
gonna tell you this story. Today's efforts come from way
(01:16):
over Yonder in Pennsylvania. This Country Life listener, who we're
gonna call Chris. Chris has a job where it's best
to keep his name out of public domain. Trust me,
he is one of the good guys and Hell's from
the Keystone State and says he wants to share a
story about how he has the best non hunting mother
(01:39):
a son could have. Well, that's a lofty claim, Chris.
Let's take a listen and decide for ourselves. So in
Chris's words, if that is in fact his real name
and my voice, here we go. As I sit here
(02:00):
during the white Tail rud in twenty twenty five, I
think back to my first archery buck that I killed
in the fall of two thousand and six in Pennsylvania.
It was November the seventh of that year and I
was still in high school. We had a half day
of school that day and I begged my parents to
let me skip it to go bow hunt on property
(02:23):
when we had started hunting a year before. My parents
were hesitant to let me go since I wasn't familiar
with the new property like I should have been, and
hadn't hunted without my father being there with me. He
had to work that morning. My mother was to stay
at home. Mom, who is not a hunter and she
(02:44):
supports us hunting, but she isn't wanted to get in
camouflage and go sit in the woods for hours like
my father and me. I didn't think they would let
me go, but To my surprise, my parents agreed to
let me skip school to go, and it was thanks
to my supportive mother. She agreed to sit in the
truck all morning with blankets to keep her warm while
(03:07):
I sat in my stand hoping for any sort of
deer movement. My father would let me take his pickup
truck and he'd take my car to work that day.
I would have to check in with Mama periodically to
let her know that I was okay my cell phone.
The morning came and my poor mother woke up extra
early and got all the stuff to keep comfortable to
(03:29):
sit in the truck before the crack of dawn until midday.
I remember being excited because the weather seemed great. It
was cold, it was overcast, and the rut was in
full swim. I drove us to the parking area off
the Stone Road where we hunted. I got myself ready
and made sure that Mama was setting before I bade
(03:50):
my way across the creek and up the hillside where
she wouldn't be able to see me anymore. And when
I got to my stand, I called my mother let
her know I made it in and had my safety
harness attached to the tree now it was the waiting
game in anticipation for shooting light. It was the perfect cold,
(04:12):
overcast morning with a little rain spitting off and on.
Movement was slow to start, but around seven that morning,
a group of dough came in right behind me. They
were moving quick. Now I wasn't against taking a dough
during the rut. At this point of my hunting career,
I'd only killed one with my bowl before this season.
I drew back and I waited for the shot that
(04:35):
they never gave me. I was frustrated as a young hunter.
This property had not been very productive at this point,
and the landowner logged a bunch of the property, which
had made hunting kind of tough that year. I thought
I had missed my opportunity. I settled back, hoping things
would be different. I wouldn't have to wait long. About
(04:58):
twenty to thirty minutes later, I caught movement behind me,
and to my right, I saw an eight point buck
following that same trail as the group of dough used
that morning. Felt like he had just appeared out of
thin air. He had his nose to the ground trying
to find those dough I had just saw earlier that morning.
I turned around and had to position myself off to
(05:20):
the right hand side of the tree in order to shoot.
I remember being at full draw the wind coming around
my glasses that I wore at the time. It was
making my eyes start to water. I had to keep
blinking to try to clear my water and eyes so
I could see my pen. The whole time, the biggest
tear I ever had a chance was walking twenty yards
(05:42):
behind me. To my fortune, the buck stopped to make
a scrape and look at low hanging branch on a
beech tree. I got my eye to hold itself together.
As the bucks started to walk again, fighting the urge
to rush the shot, I remembered my father's teachings of
being paid. He said to wait for him to step
(06:03):
the closest front leg forward and placed that pin in
the pocket behind that front shoulder. That buck took one
more step at twenty yards broadside and extended that front
right leg as my twenty yard green pen rested in
the pocket behind the front shoulder. After probably punching my
(06:24):
release like I was Mike Tyson, I watched my green
and orange fletching bury behind the front shoulder of that buck.
He twisted and he bolted back in the direction from
where he came. I started shaking worse than an aspen
leaf during a windy day. I told my mother what
had happened and I would be back to the truck
shortly before trying to track this deer. I got out
(06:48):
of the standing. I walked to where I shot, and
I found blood and a lot of it. My excitement
took over at this point. I just took off running
for the truck. I called my father at work while
I was spread down the hill, and he wasn't able
to answer, so I left a voicemail that was an
instant classic. He still has it on recording. You can't
(07:09):
make out anything I was saying, but you can just
hear me trying to breathe while running, and the only
discernible thing being I shot the big one. I let
him have it. I got back to the truck and
I gave my mother a step by step of the
events that morning. As I jumped up and down like
I was doing jumping Jackson the road. As much as
(07:30):
I wanted to look, I told mother I had to
wait thirty minutes. She offered to walk with me. My
father called me in the meantime, he had played my
voicemail for his boss, who told him to go home
and help me. He was a good distance away and
told me to go ahead and track without him, but
if I lost the blood, I should just wait for him.
(07:51):
At that last spot. My poor mother, who was set
up for taking a nap and the truck was now
walking across the creek getting up the hill with me.
She found herself up on the ridge where I had
my standing listening to me talk a mile a minute
about what had happened. I started tracking and had good blood.
(08:12):
We got to where I lost sight of the buck,
and I found my arrow. It was absolutely saturated. I
was able to follow the trail to where the ridge
line makes a drop down to the creek. And as
we started down this hill my mother, probably wondering what
she had gotten herself into, I saw a set of
antlers sticking out of a thicket just ahead of us.
(08:37):
My mama probably got one of the biggest hugs ever.
I was so proud of that deer. I remember making
sure those tying tips stuck up in the back of
the truck so anyone behind me on the ride home
would see that I had a buck. Back there. My
friend started getting out of school after half a day,
and I was calling them to come to my house
(08:58):
and see the deer I got that morning. My agricultural
teacher had a bullety board that the students could post
their deer kills for that year. My buck ended up
being the best one taker. I've killed more bucks, and
some nicer ones than that one on that November morning
nineteen years ago. In each with their own story, that
(09:22):
first archery buck, skipping school and having my loving and
patient mothers sitting there in a truck so her son
could do something he loved will always be a hard
one to top. That A point hangs on the wall
in my house today, and each time I go in
that room where it hangs, I think about that special
morning and that special moment with my mother, And according
(09:46):
to Chris, that's just how that happened in Pennsylvania. Chris
is one of around six hundred and fifty thousand deer
hunters with a one in a million months. Thanks for sharing,
brother and stay Frosty. Last April, I was in Bozeman
(10:14):
at the Meat Eater office to record and film a
lot of different content in one week play and I
did Giannis's Mead Eat a Roast, showing once as contestants
and once as judges. Then I did a couple of
rounds of trivia and the Meat Eater Radio live show,
and an experimental production where Jannis and I tried to
knock a scope off zero by abusing it with an
(10:37):
extreme prejudice. You may have seen that one on the
mediater YouTube channel. There's never enough time to see all
my friends at work there traveling, lodging it and cheap
and if they've gone to the expense of getting me
up there, my time is understandably scheduled pretty tight, working
on projects and making the best use of my time
(10:57):
while I'm there. And it was during the right for
one of those shoots that my friend and colleague Matt
Miller asked me if I would ever have used for
storage shit. I thought it rather odd that he'd asked
me that specific question. The look I gave him before
I actually resembled the look I had a few years ago.
(11:17):
That was when Bailey's second grade teacher was explained to
me how the new way of adding and subtracting was
better than the old way, the old way being what
we'd used to settle the frontier kick Germany's butt on
the world stage. Twice. They used the metric system with
why and go to the Moon and back a half
(11:37):
a dozen times. Yes, Matthew, I absolutely would have use
for one. The reason I thought it was a little
lot that he'd asked me about that is because my
wife Alexis and I had been on a three or
four month search for just such an item, and we
talked about it at length. The night before I left
(11:58):
from Montana, she said, we're running out of room in
the garage, and your upstairs room is packed with all
your stuff. That all my stuff, she was referring to,
is all the clothing gear that comes with doing this job.
I please don't misunderstand either one of us. I'm not
complaining in the least, and neither is she. I go
(12:21):
to sleep and wake up counting my blessings daily to
have this job that I have, but in doing so
I represent First Light and all the other companies we
own and all our partnerships. It doesn't take long, especially
with clothing and equipment, to amass a bunch of stuff,
as Alexis refers to it. We'd also talked about moving
(12:43):
my studio into a separate space out of the house,
and we could combine that with a storage shed. It
would be the best of both worlds. Until recently, I
recorded every episode except for the remote ones, in our son,
Hunter's old room upstairs, bigger than Bailey's room and has
a walk in closet, and she deserves it for her
(13:05):
room more than me using it to record twenty minutes
of Shenanigans every week. I know there's some of you saying, hey, dummy,
just for our prooms. Well, believe it or not, we'd
already thought of that. Decided to move the computers and
recording equipment just once when we found the perfect building
that we wanted to buy and finish out ourselves. Plus
(13:25):
there wasn't any room to move that stuff into Bailey's room,
so we started looking. They're easy to find. It seems
like there's a lot full of them on just about
every corner or big building supply store that you come to.
All of them in various stages of completion, but none
really compatible with what we were looking for. I didn't
(13:48):
have a need for a door big enough to drive
lawnmore through. Some of the worksmanship on a few brands
was less than what I could do, and I ain't
no carpenter, and I'm sure we could have gotten them
up to speed, but it would it take us hiring
a contractor or doing a lot of the work ourselves,
and with my travel schedule, I don't have time to
do that, not to commit to a project like that,
(14:10):
So we were kind of stuck in limbo. We found
some decent buildings here and there, but we'd have to
insulate it, do this, and do that, and it was
gonna wind up being a bigger project that we could
take on. Then I went to Montana and Matt Miller
asked me that question. Why do you ask me that, Matthew?
(14:32):
He just smiled and said, no reason. I told him
the story. I just told y'all all about how Alexis
and I had been looking for months now and had
discussed it just the night before. And he looked at
me dead in the eyes and said, don't buy one
on tour with my emotions. Matthew, you have no idea
(14:52):
how important this is to my family. I'm not kidding.
We've been actively searching for a building. Well. Old Matt
works in the content Partnership division here at Meat Eater
was out telling me anything that would violate the non
disclosure agreement that all those folks work under. During the negotiations.
Part of those deals, Matt said, there was a storage
(15:14):
building company that really liked meat Eater, and it acquired
as to how they could work with us and specifically
me in my show. I was absolutely floored. Lexis and
I have been praying about this, and now it looked
like our court was dadhing from getting a bite from
a fish that looked a whole lot like a storage building.
(15:37):
Well as in cases like this, Meetings between Matt and
his boss, Art Brady, and the storage building folks eventually
included a meeting where yours truly was invited to attend.
My brother. Anytime I'm telling him about someone he hasn't
met that he's about to, he will ask me, are
they one of us? Now? This question has nothing to
(16:00):
do with politics, race, religion, gender, or where they're from,
and all to do with an observationally perceived attitude for
having fun regardless of what we're doing, treating others like
we'd want to be treated, and standing behind what we say. Well,
from the moment I met all the folks at store More,
it was plain as day that they were definitely one
(16:24):
of us. Now, before anyone gets their drawers in a
wide thinking here Brent goes doing a commercial for one
of his sponsors, let me stop you right there. As
I have said before, I have one hundred percent control
on whatever is said or isn't said on this platform,
and what I'm telling y'all now would have helped me tremendously.
(16:46):
When Alexis and I started our journey down the road
looking for a quality storage building, I didn't know the
first person who'd bought one from any company. This is
our experience and if it helps someone get pointed in
the right direction, whether they buy one from these folks
or not, and I have done my job. Here's some
(17:07):
background on Store Moore. First, i'd never heard of them
before Matt and Art brief me on their company. I
had no reason to be familiar with them up till now.
I didn't need a building. The last three months have
had me necked deep in research on the ground and online,
and let me tell you, there is a noticeable difference
(17:28):
in what I've found. These folks are headquartered in Kentucky
and it was there that Darren Warren opened Portable buildings
in twenty seventeen with his cousin in corner, Chris Burnett. Now,
in eight years, the company has grown to service twenty
six states and nearly two dozen different partners, manufacturing their
(17:48):
buildings to very define specification. You can do all your
shopping online or pull up to four hundred different places
where you could look at someone eyeball to eyeball and
figure out what you're looking for. To say they've built
a successful company, be it understatement to say they're a
business that's all about themselves will be an absolute life.
(18:13):
Darren Warren was diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma at the
age of sixteen. It took one hundred and twenty chemotherapy
treatments over multiple years before he and the good folks
at Saint Jude kicked cancer out of his life. Since then, Darren,
in every business venture he's been involved with and encouraging
(18:35):
all his business partners, have made a goal to share
their blessings with Saint Jude Hospitality. From the onset to
the end of this year, store More is own target
to raise and donate nearly one million dollars the Saint year.
That's not only being grateful and remembering where you came from.
(18:57):
That's supporting the people who helped you to continue to
help others. Those are the kinds of people I'm dealing
with and still getting to know. A humble bunch of
folks who take their business seriously and their philanthropy even
more so. During the first series of meetings that included
(19:17):
me began in June of this year, Art and Matt
introduced me to Graham Hall and Kevin Shavaria, and Caitlyn
Colinberg and John Stevens. I'd get to know others along
the way, but it was during this process that my
storage shed morphed into a new studio and secret hideout
for me and Old Whalen. It was the easiest and
(19:39):
most difficult thing I'd ever done. Easiest by having a
three D model on their website where I could I
could design my own layout from the interier, and difficult
by having so many color combinations to pick from. I
enlisted my daughter Bailey's help, and after trying just about
every combination, imagine the more we settled on. While I'm
sitting in right now, I would absolutely live in this thing.
(20:05):
My descriptions won't do it justice, but I'm going to
share pictures of it on my social media and I
love y'all check it out there. I wouldn't have had
a place to set it up had my good friend
John Howard not leveled and prepped the space that we
picked out in the backyard. He and his team went
above and beyond anything I could have dreamed of, so
(20:28):
much so that when Storeboard delivered the building, they were
blown away about how good it was in the day arrived,
in delivery was at hand. There's a video of it
being driven into my backyard. How smooth a professional that
was done. Is something to see. I'll be sure it's posted,
so if you're interested, you can watch it. Now. That
(20:50):
brings us to what I really wanted to talk about,
and that's the stuff inside the structure, the mementos new
and old that adorned the wall, and the shelves that's
surround me, and I'm gonna tell you all about them
in the next episode of This Country Life. That's terrible
and I should be ashamed of myself, but I ain't.
(21:12):
I get mouthed and I run out of time, and
there's some items laying around and hanging in here that
I want to tell you about, and I'm going to
next week. The big Black Friday sale is opponus, and
I know there's some folks waiting for it. Well, here
it is First Light, Phelps, FHL, Dave Smith Decoys in
(21:32):
the Mediator store. They've all got it going over right now.
If he's shopping, it's time to get busy til next week.
This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just in general
country living. I want you to stay a while as
I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life
is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio
on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor
(00:26):
podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab
a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stores
to share, a first buck in Pennsylvania and my new office.
I talk a lot about dads on this show. Being
(00:49):
a dad is the best job I've ever had. But
there's some mamas out there that are equally towing the mark.
And if you've got a good one, there ain't nothing better.
Also got a new office, studio, secret hideout that I
want to tell you all about too. But first I'm
gonna tell you this story. Today's efforts come from way
(01:16):
over Yonder in Pennsylvania. This Country Life listener, who we're
gonna call Chris. Chris has a job where it's best
to keep his name out of public domain. Trust me,
he is one of the good guys and Hell's from
the Keystone State and says he wants to share a
story about how he has the best non hunting mother
(01:39):
a son could have. Well, that's a lofty claim, Chris.
Let's take a listen and decide for ourselves. So in
Chris's words, if that is in fact his real name
and my voice, here we go. As I sit here
(02:00):
during the white Tail rud in twenty twenty five, I
think back to my first archery buck that I killed
in the fall of two thousand and six in Pennsylvania.
It was November the seventh of that year and I
was still in high school. We had a half day
of school that day and I begged my parents to
let me skip it to go bow hunt on property
(02:23):
when we had started hunting a year before. My parents
were hesitant to let me go since I wasn't familiar
with the new property like I should have been, and
hadn't hunted without my father being there with me. He
had to work that morning. My mother was to stay
at home. Mom, who is not a hunter and she
(02:44):
supports us hunting, but she isn't wanted to get in
camouflage and go sit in the woods for hours like
my father and me. I didn't think they would let
me go, but To my surprise, my parents agreed to
let me skip school to go, and it was thanks
to my supportive mother. She agreed to sit in the
truck all morning with blankets to keep her warm while
(03:07):
I sat in my stand hoping for any sort of
deer movement. My father would let me take his pickup
truck and he'd take my car to work that day.
I would have to check in with Mama periodically to
let her know that I was okay my cell phone.
The morning came and my poor mother woke up extra
early and got all the stuff to keep comfortable to
(03:29):
sit in the truck before the crack of dawn until midday.
I remember being excited because the weather seemed great. It
was cold, it was overcast, and the rut was in
full swim. I drove us to the parking area off
the Stone Road where we hunted. I got myself ready
and made sure that Mama was setting before I bade
(03:50):
my way across the creek and up the hillside where
she wouldn't be able to see me anymore. And when
I got to my stand, I called my mother let
her know I made it in and had my safety
harness attached to the tree now it was the waiting
game in anticipation for shooting light. It was the perfect cold,
(04:12):
overcast morning with a little rain spitting off and on.
Movement was slow to start, but around seven that morning,
a group of dough came in right behind me. They
were moving quick. Now I wasn't against taking a dough
during the rut. At this point of my hunting career,
I'd only killed one with my bowl before this season.
I drew back and I waited for the shot that
(04:35):
they never gave me. I was frustrated as a young hunter.
This property had not been very productive at this point,
and the landowner logged a bunch of the property, which
had made hunting kind of tough that year. I thought
I had missed my opportunity. I settled back, hoping things
would be different. I wouldn't have to wait long. About
(04:58):
twenty to thirty minutes later, I caught movement behind me,
and to my right, I saw an eight point buck
following that same trail as the group of dough used
that morning. Felt like he had just appeared out of
thin air. He had his nose to the ground trying
to find those dough I had just saw earlier that morning.
I turned around and had to position myself off to
(05:20):
the right hand side of the tree in order to shoot.
I remember being at full draw the wind coming around
my glasses that I wore at the time. It was
making my eyes start to water. I had to keep
blinking to try to clear my water and eyes so
I could see my pen. The whole time, the biggest
tear I ever had a chance was walking twenty yards
(05:42):
behind me. To my fortune, the buck stopped to make
a scrape and look at low hanging branch on a
beech tree. I got my eye to hold itself together.
As the bucks started to walk again, fighting the urge
to rush the shot, I remembered my father's teachings of
being paid. He said to wait for him to step
(06:03):
the closest front leg forward and placed that pin in
the pocket behind that front shoulder. That buck took one
more step at twenty yards broadside and extended that front
right leg as my twenty yard green pen rested in
the pocket behind the front shoulder. After probably punching my
(06:24):
release like I was Mike Tyson, I watched my green
and orange fletching bury behind the front shoulder of that buck.
He twisted and he bolted back in the direction from
where he came. I started shaking worse than an aspen
leaf during a windy day. I told my mother what
had happened and I would be back to the truck
shortly before trying to track this deer. I got out
(06:48):
of the standing. I walked to where I shot, and
I found blood and a lot of it. My excitement
took over at this point. I just took off running
for the truck. I called my father at work while
I was spread down the hill, and he wasn't able
to answer, so I left a voicemail that was an
instant classic. He still has it on recording. You can't
(07:09):
make out anything I was saying, but you can just
hear me trying to breathe while running, and the only
discernible thing being I shot the big one. I let
him have it. I got back to the truck and
I gave my mother a step by step of the
events that morning. As I jumped up and down like
I was doing jumping Jackson the road. As much as
(07:30):
I wanted to look, I told mother I had to
wait thirty minutes. She offered to walk with me. My
father called me in the meantime, he had played my
voicemail for his boss, who told him to go home
and help me. He was a good distance away and
told me to go ahead and track without him, but
if I lost the blood, I should just wait for him.
(07:51):
At that last spot. My poor mother, who was set
up for taking a nap and the truck was now
walking across the creek getting up the hill with me.
She found herself up on the ridge where I had
my standing listening to me talk a mile a minute
about what had happened. I started tracking and had good blood.
(08:12):
We got to where I lost sight of the buck,
and I found my arrow. It was absolutely saturated. I
was able to follow the trail to where the ridge
line makes a drop down to the creek. And as
we started down this hill my mother, probably wondering what
she had gotten herself into, I saw a set of
antlers sticking out of a thicket just ahead of us.
(08:37):
My mama probably got one of the biggest hugs ever.
I was so proud of that deer. I remember making
sure those tying tips stuck up in the back of
the truck so anyone behind me on the ride home
would see that I had a buck. Back there. My
friend started getting out of school after half a day,
and I was calling them to come to my house
(08:58):
and see the deer I got that morning. My agricultural
teacher had a bullety board that the students could post
their deer kills for that year. My buck ended up
being the best one taker. I've killed more bucks, and
some nicer ones than that one on that November morning
nineteen years ago. In each with their own story, that
(09:22):
first archery buck, skipping school and having my loving and
patient mothers sitting there in a truck so her son
could do something he loved will always be a hard
one to top. That A point hangs on the wall
in my house today, and each time I go in
that room where it hangs, I think about that special
morning and that special moment with my mother, And according
(09:46):
to Chris, that's just how that happened in Pennsylvania. Chris
is one of around six hundred and fifty thousand deer
hunters with a one in a million months. Thanks for sharing,
brother and stay Frosty. Last April, I was in Bozeman
(10:14):
at the Meat Eater office to record and film a
lot of different content in one week play and I
did Giannis's Mead Eat a Roast, showing once as contestants
and once as judges. Then I did a couple of
rounds of trivia and the Meat Eater Radio live show,
and an experimental production where Jannis and I tried to
knock a scope off zero by abusing it with an
(10:37):
extreme prejudice. You may have seen that one on the
mediater YouTube channel. There's never enough time to see all
my friends at work there traveling, lodging it and cheap
and if they've gone to the expense of getting me
up there, my time is understandably scheduled pretty tight, working
on projects and making the best use of my time
(10:57):
while I'm there. And it was during the right for
one of those shoots that my friend and colleague Matt
Miller asked me if I would ever have used for
storage shit. I thought it rather odd that he'd asked
me that specific question. The look I gave him before
I actually resembled the look I had a few years ago.
(11:17):
That was when Bailey's second grade teacher was explained to
me how the new way of adding and subtracting was
better than the old way, the old way being what
we'd used to settle the frontier kick Germany's butt on
the world stage. Twice. They used the metric system with
why and go to the Moon and back a half
(11:37):
a dozen times. Yes, Matthew, I absolutely would have use
for one. The reason I thought it was a little
lot that he'd asked me about that is because my
wife Alexis and I had been on a three or
four month search for just such an item, and we
talked about it at length. The night before I left
(11:58):
from Montana, she said, we're running out of room in
the garage, and your upstairs room is packed with all
your stuff. That all my stuff, she was referring to,
is all the clothing gear that comes with doing this job.
I please don't misunderstand either one of us. I'm not
complaining in the least, and neither is she. I go
(12:21):
to sleep and wake up counting my blessings daily to
have this job that I have, but in doing so
I represent First Light and all the other companies we
own and all our partnerships. It doesn't take long, especially
with clothing and equipment, to amass a bunch of stuff,
as Alexis refers to it. We'd also talked about moving
(12:43):
my studio into a separate space out of the house,
and we could combine that with a storage shed. It
would be the best of both worlds. Until recently, I
recorded every episode except for the remote ones, in our son,
Hunter's old room upstairs, bigger than Bailey's room and has
a walk in closet, and she deserves it for her
(13:05):
room more than me using it to record twenty minutes
of Shenanigans every week. I know there's some of you saying, hey, dummy,
just for our prooms. Well, believe it or not, we'd
already thought of that. Decided to move the computers and
recording equipment just once when we found the perfect building
that we wanted to buy and finish out ourselves. Plus
(13:25):
there wasn't any room to move that stuff into Bailey's room,
so we started looking. They're easy to find. It seems
like there's a lot full of them on just about
every corner or big building supply store that you come to.
All of them in various stages of completion, but none
really compatible with what we were looking for. I didn't
(13:48):
have a need for a door big enough to drive
lawnmore through. Some of the worksmanship on a few brands
was less than what I could do, and I ain't
no carpenter, and I'm sure we could have gotten them
up to speed, but it would it take us hiring
a contractor or doing a lot of the work ourselves,
and with my travel schedule, I don't have time to
do that, not to commit to a project like that,
(14:10):
So we were kind of stuck in limbo. We found
some decent buildings here and there, but we'd have to
insulate it, do this, and do that, and it was
gonna wind up being a bigger project that we could
take on. Then I went to Montana and Matt Miller
asked me that question. Why do you ask me that, Matthew?
(14:32):
He just smiled and said, no reason. I told him
the story. I just told y'all all about how Alexis
and I had been looking for months now and had
discussed it just the night before. And he looked at
me dead in the eyes and said, don't buy one
on tour with my emotions. Matthew, you have no idea
(14:52):
how important this is to my family. I'm not kidding.
We've been actively searching for a building. Well. Old Matt
works in the content Partnership division here at Meat Eater
was out telling me anything that would violate the non
disclosure agreement that all those folks work under. During the negotiations.
Part of those deals, Matt said, there was a storage
(15:14):
building company that really liked meat Eater, and it acquired
as to how they could work with us and specifically
me in my show. I was absolutely floored. Lexis and
I have been praying about this, and now it looked
like our court was dadhing from getting a bite from
a fish that looked a whole lot like a storage building.
(15:37):
Well as in cases like this, Meetings between Matt and
his boss, Art Brady, and the storage building folks eventually
included a meeting where yours truly was invited to attend.
My brother. Anytime I'm telling him about someone he hasn't
met that he's about to, he will ask me, are
they one of us? Now? This question has nothing to
(16:00):
do with politics, race, religion, gender, or where they're from,
and all to do with an observationally perceived attitude for
having fun regardless of what we're doing, treating others like
we'd want to be treated, and standing behind what we say. Well,
from the moment I met all the folks at store More,
it was plain as day that they were definitely one
(16:24):
of us. Now, before anyone gets their drawers in a
wide thinking here Brent goes doing a commercial for one
of his sponsors, let me stop you right there. As
I have said before, I have one hundred percent control
on whatever is said or isn't said on this platform,
and what I'm telling y'all now would have helped me tremendously.
(16:46):
When Alexis and I started our journey down the road
looking for a quality storage building, I didn't know the
first person who'd bought one from any company. This is
our experience and if it helps someone get pointed in
the right direction, whether they buy one from these folks
or not, and I have done my job. Here's some
(17:07):
background on Store Moore. First, i'd never heard of them
before Matt and Art brief me on their company. I
had no reason to be familiar with them up till now.
I didn't need a building. The last three months have
had me necked deep in research on the ground and online,
and let me tell you, there is a noticeable difference
(17:28):
in what I've found. These folks are headquartered in Kentucky
and it was there that Darren Warren opened Portable buildings
in twenty seventeen with his cousin in corner, Chris Burnett. Now,
in eight years, the company has grown to service twenty
six states and nearly two dozen different partners, manufacturing their
(17:48):
buildings to very define specification. You can do all your
shopping online or pull up to four hundred different places
where you could look at someone eyeball to eyeball and
figure out what you're looking for. To say they've built
a successful company, be it understatement to say they're a
business that's all about themselves will be an absolute life.
(18:13):
Darren Warren was diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma at the
age of sixteen. It took one hundred and twenty chemotherapy
treatments over multiple years before he and the good folks
at Saint Jude kicked cancer out of his life. Since then, Darren,
in every business venture he's been involved with and encouraging
(18:35):
all his business partners, have made a goal to share
their blessings with Saint Jude Hospitality. From the onset to
the end of this year, store More is own target
to raise and donate nearly one million dollars the Saint year.
That's not only being grateful and remembering where you came from.
(18:57):
That's supporting the people who helped you to continue to
help others. Those are the kinds of people I'm dealing
with and still getting to know. A humble bunch of
folks who take their business seriously and their philanthropy even
more so. During the first series of meetings that included
(19:17):
me began in June of this year, Art and Matt
introduced me to Graham Hall and Kevin Shavaria, and Caitlyn
Colinberg and John Stevens. I'd get to know others along
the way, but it was during this process that my
storage shed morphed into a new studio and secret hideout
for me and Old Whalen. It was the easiest and
(19:39):
most difficult thing I'd ever done. Easiest by having a
three D model on their website where I could I
could design my own layout from the interier, and difficult
by having so many color combinations to pick from. I
enlisted my daughter Bailey's help, and after trying just about
every combination, imagine the more we settled on. While I'm
sitting in right now, I would absolutely live in this thing.
(20:05):
My descriptions won't do it justice, but I'm going to
share pictures of it on my social media and I
love y'all check it out there. I wouldn't have had
a place to set it up had my good friend
John Howard not leveled and prepped the space that we
picked out in the backyard. He and his team went
above and beyond anything I could have dreamed of, so
(20:28):
much so that when Storeboard delivered the building, they were
blown away about how good it was in the day arrived,
in delivery was at hand. There's a video of it
being driven into my backyard. How smooth a professional that
was done. Is something to see. I'll be sure it's posted,
so if you're interested, you can watch it. Now. That
(20:50):
brings us to what I really wanted to talk about,
and that's the stuff inside the structure, the mementos new
and old that adorned the wall, and the shelves that's
surround me, and I'm gonna tell you all about them
in the next episode of This Country Life. That's terrible
and I should be ashamed of myself, but I ain't.
(21:12):
I get mouthed and I run out of time, and
there's some items laying around and hanging in here that
I want to tell you about, and I'm going to
next week. The big Black Friday sale is opponus, and
I know there's some folks waiting for it. Well, here
it is First Light, Phelps, FHL, Dave Smith Decoys in
(21:32):
the Mediator store. They've all got it going over right now.
If he's shopping, it's time to get busy til next week.
This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful
Host
Clay Newcomb
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