At The End Of A Long Lonely Day (Marty Robbins)
At the end of a long lonely day without you,
When the world seems to fall in my face,
I’m all right through the day, but the day fades away,
And the long lonely night takes its place.
Another day to wish that you were here,
I dread each lonely night that’s filled with fear,
Oh, I’ve cried and I’ve cried, these are tears that I can’t hide
At the end of a long lonely day.
At the end of the day, I go up to my room,
And I watch while the sun fades away;
And the loneliness there brings me grief and despair
At the end of a long lonely day.
Another day to sit alone and cry,
It makes no difference if I live or die.
With a world locked outside, I just lay there and cry
At the end of a long lonely day.
Just When You’d Given Up Hope….
If you’re a little too shy for Craigslist and a bit too agnostic for ChristianMingle, perhaps a little too country to exaggerate your merits, have we got the niche dating site for you! It’s called FarmersOnly.com and it’s for jest plain folks like you and me who are content to be kept down on the farm, never to see Paree. FarmersOnly is the brainchild of one Jerry Miller, a marketing executive who founded the site in 2005 after a divorced farm owner complained to him about a lack of like-minded people in her dating pool. Jerry says he now has over 200,000 subscribers and we believe him because it’s not easy down on the farm. The FarmersOnly motto is “City Folks Just Don’t Get It!” And they don’t.
The urban criteria for evaluating women, for instance, goes something like this: (1) Does she look like a supermodel? (2) Can she use polysyllabic words? (3) Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy? Whereas the farm questionnaire would like to know: (a) What are her hay-hefting abilities? (b) Does she maintain a proper PVC supply? (c) Is she tractor-savvy? (d) Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy? Different strokes for different folks was never so meaningful.
Now, I’m not saying everybody wouldn’t like a little cutiepie to share his bed with. But what if that cutiepie is an agricultural cypher whereas Mary-Clementine, homely as a mud tortoise, can mend fence like a hurricane? Who do you want in your posse when the sheep escape, have to be rounded up and penned back in? The ace fence-mender, that’s who. And sure it might be nice to have a girlfriend who can speak in complete sentences but what good does that do when you have to tow the pickup out of a swampy field? This requires a tractor with a chain and towing knowledge. Compromises have to be made.
Jerry Miller says the most challenging aspect of growing his user base is showing people how to use it. “The learning curve is a lot different for us,” he says. “I spend thousands of hours coaching people on how to use the site, send messages—even just teaching them how to upload their photos.” One customer—Lyle, from Kansas (where else?)—often calls, saying ’Jerry, I’m looking at my photo, I just can’t figure out how to get the dern thing ON there.’”
The site also had to wait for technology to catch up in rural towns. “When we launched, everybody had phone modems,” Miller said. “Connections were slow so we had to keep it simple.”
There are tons of success stories involving people who met on FarmersOnly eventually marrying and living happily ever after, which, in this case, means for the last couple of years, a great source of pride to its founder.
“Lots of these people are really, really lonely,” Miller said. “When you walk outside in New York, there are 10,000 people within three blocks. In some of these rural towns, there are three people within ten miles. It’s a whole different ballgame.”
If anything ever happens to Siobhan, I’m thinking this FarmersOnly might be the way to go for me. I’m looking for something between a cutiepie and Mary-Clementine, the mud tortoise. Perhaps well north of Mary-Clementine. I mean, if things get tough on the farm they still have such things as the rural handyman, right?
Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, It’s The Single Life For Me! (Captain Jack Sparrow)
Not everybody, of course, is unhappy with singlehood. Whether by preference or a simple twist of fate, many of the Blog Crew live alone and find it just peachy. Bill Mauk, our horse-broker pal in Kentucky, has tried marriage a couple times and it just didn’t take. “Those wives kept getting in the way of my job,” Bill says. “And they always wanted to go on vacations and stuff. Man can’t sell him a horse if he keeps goin’ on vacation.”
Leslie Logan, long married to Flying Pie legend Stuart Bentler, no cream puff to live with, figured twenty-plus years of that sort of thing was punishment enough and finally fled from Tampa to Atlanta and eventually to Portland, Oregon, where she resides today, a happy educator. Leslie relates that she almost slipped once and got talked into another marriage but regained her senses in the nick of time. “I love my life,” she says now. “At this stage of the game, I think I’m better off single.”
My sister, Alice Richards (the Republican), suddenly lost her husband a couple years back. She didn’t sit around and whine about it, embarking on an earlier-planned tour of Ireland and planning more excursions. In her spare time, she does her best to keep her grandchildren out of jail.
Everybody should live the single life for awhile. It toughens you up, makes you more self-reliant, causes less angst when some wayward inamorata decides to bail on you. You’ve lived alone before, you’ll do just fine. People who have never lived by themselves and are terrified at the prospect are too vulnerable, too prone to hop instantly from one relationship to another just to have a hand to hold. When I went off to college at Oklahoma State, I was stunned to find dormmates sad and lonely over their relocations from home, family and girlfriends. I was walking around feeling liberated and these guys were checking the bus schedules back to Anadarko. During one stage of my misbegotten college career, I lived in a little room in the back of a house owned by an elderly couple. I didn’t have a lot of money, so returning home for Christmas was not an option. I spent my time writing for long periods, my days eventually turning into the sleeping hours while I typed away through the nights. If it was lonely, it was acceptably lonely. And the writing improved. I have never been to a writing class so I can’t say for sure but I think the best way to learn to write better is to write more. Just like shooting foul shots or executing crossword puzzles. It was not the last time I lived by myself, nor did I regret any of these periods. When you live by yourself, every day is a new relationship opportunity. Exciting times.
Siobhan’s niece, Ashleigh Ellison, moved to Berlin a few years ago right out of college, discovered a nice, chilly apartment, bought a bicycle and pedaled off to her job at Nokia. That was brave. True, she had a German boyfriend a couple hundred miles away at school but she was on her own for the most part. Eventually, she learned a tiny bit of German, made friends and learned her way around a great city.
Kathleen Knight, Richard Allen’s ex, has been on her own for years. Awhile back, Kathy took up geocaching and is subject to show up anywhere around the globe hunting for the little goobers. Last I heard, she was talking about checking out a cache on some volcano in the Philippines, for God’s sake. Don’t these geocachers ever hide anything down at the Subway?
My old friend, Mike Garcia, never got married and rarely lived with anyone for long. For Mike, every day was an opportunity to troll the landscape for new talent. Mike would literally drive his car—the storied “Silver Phaeton”-- down the streets of Gainesville—or wherever he happened to be—hustling women. As far as I know, nobody ever called the cops and he was frequently successful in his quest. These Girls-of-the-Day were generally good for a couple of appearances before Mike got tired of them or vice-versa. You have to have a modicum of gall, looks and personality to pull off this sort of thing, of course, and Garcia had the requisite amount of each.
Bottom line is, life can be happily lived a lot of different ways. My old massage savant, Tiara Catey, used to tell me she could be happy almost anywhere in just about any situation and I believed her. The power of positive thinking. So whatever your situation, grab whatever bull you have by the horns and get on with it. It’s almost tomorrow. Here comes the Sun.
Return Of The Coon Wars
You city folks probably have some funny misconceptions about what living in the country is like. You think all we have to do out here is slop the hogs, prune the gladiolas and walk around in our bare feet. Want some dinner? Well, just go right out in the cucumber garden and pick some of the critters. Shoot a squirrel. Grab some low-hanging fruit off the kumquat tree.
Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not all as easy as you think. Take the raccoon problem, for instance. Yeah, I know, to you folks they’re just those adorable little fellows that keep showing up on cutesy You Tube videos, shaking hands with little Jimmie and stealing nuts from the Planter’s can on the veranda. Ain’t that a hoot? You don’t know the half of it. Raccoons are actually devilish little monsters who will fight your every effort to keep them at bay. It’s true. Consider for a moment the poor horse (substitute any other animal here) owner. If you are going to raise these animals, sooner or later you are going to run into the problem of feeding them. That would entail coming up with a place to keep the feed. You can’t just put animal feed in the closet with the Raisin Bran, it comes in BIG bags, like 50-pounders, which require lots of room to store. So you reserve some room in your barn or get a feed shed like ours and put your animal feed in there. This will work fine if your feed shed is built like Fort Knox and has no opportunity for critter entry. If there is, however, the slightest opening, it will be seized upon by these roving bands of pirates who will expand it by tooth and claw until they gain access.
For awhile, all we had to worry about were tiny mice, which were eventually dispatched—that’s a nice way of putting it—by our allies, the rat snakes. As the building deteriorated over time, however, the squirrels were next in. There’s nothing like opening your feed shed door in the morning to a cacophony of squirrels exploding off the walls and perhaps into you. This is nothing, however, compared to the raccoons. Now, you have to understand that these raccoons are not particularly afraid of anything. Oh, they will retreat in the face of a great hue and cry, but not far and not for long. As soon as you are gone, they’ll be back. They are wise to the fact that you cannot stay there forever because Justified is on the TV in a couple of hours. One mother raccoon got in the habit of bringing her three offspring by the barn in the north paddock every day around feeding time. She’d sit there until the horses were let out and then make her way, babies intact, into the stall to recover the leavings which the horses dropped out of their buckets onto the floor. As time went by, she got less patient and bolder, arriving about the time the horses were finishing or even before. As I went to let them out, she would sit up and glare at me as if I was not being punctual. If I advanced, she would grudgingly retreat but her expression was on the order of, “Oh right, bully the poor mother with three mouths to feed as she labors for the pitiful scraps left to her by overfed equines.”
Once the raccoons were able to get into the feed shed, drastic measures had to be taken. We started putting the bucketed feed for the next meal inside the bins in which the opened feed was lying. The raccoons raised us one by then nipping into the unopened bags on the floor. We upped the ante by placing an electric wire around the building. This worked for quite a long time, but then the edifice deteriorated further. The feed shed is basically a metal siding and roof hammered onto a wooden frame, base and floor. As the wood deteriorates, it is impossible to keep the metal nailed in, allowing the wily raccoons to pry it open. Basically, you need to replace the building or move the feed elsewhere. For us, there is no acceptable elsewhere so we currently buy enough just to fill the bins. This has outraged the coon crew, which thought they had it all figured out. Yesterday, several of them defecated on the bin lid as if to say, “Okay, Bohunk—put THIS in your pipe and smoke it!” It’s just an unending battle for Truth, Justice and The American Way and I’m not sure we are winning. So here’s our plan. We’re getting Rich the Carpenter out here to construct a shiny new Impregnable Feedroom, impervious to racoondom. It will have the strongest walls, the thickest floors, the biggest nails. They will put their wiliest raccoon leaders on the case but to no avail, the victory shall finally be ours! Right? Right, you guys?
That’s all, folks….
At the end of a long lonely day without you,
When the world seems to fall in my face,
I’m all right through the day, but the day fades away,
And the long lonely night takes its place.
Another day to wish that you were here,
I dread each lonely night that’s filled with fear,
Oh, I’ve cried and I’ve cried, these are tears that I can’t hide
At the end of a long lonely day.
At the end of the day, I go up to my room,
And I watch while the sun fades away;
And the loneliness there brings me grief and despair
At the end of a long lonely day.
Another day to sit alone and cry,
It makes no difference if I live or die.
With a world locked outside, I just lay there and cry
At the end of a long lonely day.
Just When You’d Given Up Hope….
If you’re a little too shy for Craigslist and a bit too agnostic for ChristianMingle, perhaps a little too country to exaggerate your merits, have we got the niche dating site for you! It’s called FarmersOnly.com and it’s for jest plain folks like you and me who are content to be kept down on the farm, never to see Paree. FarmersOnly is the brainchild of one Jerry Miller, a marketing executive who founded the site in 2005 after a divorced farm owner complained to him about a lack of like-minded people in her dating pool. Jerry says he now has over 200,000 subscribers and we believe him because it’s not easy down on the farm. The FarmersOnly motto is “City Folks Just Don’t Get It!” And they don’t.
The urban criteria for evaluating women, for instance, goes something like this: (1) Does she look like a supermodel? (2) Can she use polysyllabic words? (3) Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy? Whereas the farm questionnaire would like to know: (a) What are her hay-hefting abilities? (b) Does she maintain a proper PVC supply? (c) Is she tractor-savvy? (d) Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy? Different strokes for different folks was never so meaningful.
Now, I’m not saying everybody wouldn’t like a little cutiepie to share his bed with. But what if that cutiepie is an agricultural cypher whereas Mary-Clementine, homely as a mud tortoise, can mend fence like a hurricane? Who do you want in your posse when the sheep escape, have to be rounded up and penned back in? The ace fence-mender, that’s who. And sure it might be nice to have a girlfriend who can speak in complete sentences but what good does that do when you have to tow the pickup out of a swampy field? This requires a tractor with a chain and towing knowledge. Compromises have to be made.
Jerry Miller says the most challenging aspect of growing his user base is showing people how to use it. “The learning curve is a lot different for us,” he says. “I spend thousands of hours coaching people on how to use the site, send messages—even just teaching them how to upload their photos.” One customer—Lyle, from Kansas (where else?)—often calls, saying ’Jerry, I’m looking at my photo, I just can’t figure out how to get the dern thing ON there.’”
The site also had to wait for technology to catch up in rural towns. “When we launched, everybody had phone modems,” Miller said. “Connections were slow so we had to keep it simple.”
There are tons of success stories involving people who met on FarmersOnly eventually marrying and living happily ever after, which, in this case, means for the last couple of years, a great source of pride to its founder.
“Lots of these people are really, really lonely,” Miller said. “When you walk outside in New York, there are 10,000 people within three blocks. In some of these rural towns, there are three people within ten miles. It’s a whole different ballgame.”
If anything ever happens to Siobhan, I’m thinking this FarmersOnly might be the way to go for me. I’m looking for something between a cutiepie and Mary-Clementine, the mud tortoise. Perhaps well north of Mary-Clementine. I mean, if things get tough on the farm they still have such things as the rural handyman, right?
Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, It’s The Single Life For Me! (Captain Jack Sparrow)
Not everybody, of course, is unhappy with singlehood. Whether by preference or a simple twist of fate, many of the Blog Crew live alone and find it just peachy. Bill Mauk, our horse-broker pal in Kentucky, has tried marriage a couple times and it just didn’t take. “Those wives kept getting in the way of my job,” Bill says. “And they always wanted to go on vacations and stuff. Man can’t sell him a horse if he keeps goin’ on vacation.”
Leslie Logan, long married to Flying Pie legend Stuart Bentler, no cream puff to live with, figured twenty-plus years of that sort of thing was punishment enough and finally fled from Tampa to Atlanta and eventually to Portland, Oregon, where she resides today, a happy educator. Leslie relates that she almost slipped once and got talked into another marriage but regained her senses in the nick of time. “I love my life,” she says now. “At this stage of the game, I think I’m better off single.”
My sister, Alice Richards (the Republican), suddenly lost her husband a couple years back. She didn’t sit around and whine about it, embarking on an earlier-planned tour of Ireland and planning more excursions. In her spare time, she does her best to keep her grandchildren out of jail.
Everybody should live the single life for awhile. It toughens you up, makes you more self-reliant, causes less angst when some wayward inamorata decides to bail on you. You’ve lived alone before, you’ll do just fine. People who have never lived by themselves and are terrified at the prospect are too vulnerable, too prone to hop instantly from one relationship to another just to have a hand to hold. When I went off to college at Oklahoma State, I was stunned to find dormmates sad and lonely over their relocations from home, family and girlfriends. I was walking around feeling liberated and these guys were checking the bus schedules back to Anadarko. During one stage of my misbegotten college career, I lived in a little room in the back of a house owned by an elderly couple. I didn’t have a lot of money, so returning home for Christmas was not an option. I spent my time writing for long periods, my days eventually turning into the sleeping hours while I typed away through the nights. If it was lonely, it was acceptably lonely. And the writing improved. I have never been to a writing class so I can’t say for sure but I think the best way to learn to write better is to write more. Just like shooting foul shots or executing crossword puzzles. It was not the last time I lived by myself, nor did I regret any of these periods. When you live by yourself, every day is a new relationship opportunity. Exciting times.
Siobhan’s niece, Ashleigh Ellison, moved to Berlin a few years ago right out of college, discovered a nice, chilly apartment, bought a bicycle and pedaled off to her job at Nokia. That was brave. True, she had a German boyfriend a couple hundred miles away at school but she was on her own for the most part. Eventually, she learned a tiny bit of German, made friends and learned her way around a great city.
Kathleen Knight, Richard Allen’s ex, has been on her own for years. Awhile back, Kathy took up geocaching and is subject to show up anywhere around the globe hunting for the little goobers. Last I heard, she was talking about checking out a cache on some volcano in the Philippines, for God’s sake. Don’t these geocachers ever hide anything down at the Subway?
My old friend, Mike Garcia, never got married and rarely lived with anyone for long. For Mike, every day was an opportunity to troll the landscape for new talent. Mike would literally drive his car—the storied “Silver Phaeton”-- down the streets of Gainesville—or wherever he happened to be—hustling women. As far as I know, nobody ever called the cops and he was frequently successful in his quest. These Girls-of-the-Day were generally good for a couple of appearances before Mike got tired of them or vice-versa. You have to have a modicum of gall, looks and personality to pull off this sort of thing, of course, and Garcia had the requisite amount of each.
Bottom line is, life can be happily lived a lot of different ways. My old massage savant, Tiara Catey, used to tell me she could be happy almost anywhere in just about any situation and I believed her. The power of positive thinking. So whatever your situation, grab whatever bull you have by the horns and get on with it. It’s almost tomorrow. Here comes the Sun.
Return Of The Coon Wars
You city folks probably have some funny misconceptions about what living in the country is like. You think all we have to do out here is slop the hogs, prune the gladiolas and walk around in our bare feet. Want some dinner? Well, just go right out in the cucumber garden and pick some of the critters. Shoot a squirrel. Grab some low-hanging fruit off the kumquat tree.
Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not all as easy as you think. Take the raccoon problem, for instance. Yeah, I know, to you folks they’re just those adorable little fellows that keep showing up on cutesy You Tube videos, shaking hands with little Jimmie and stealing nuts from the Planter’s can on the veranda. Ain’t that a hoot? You don’t know the half of it. Raccoons are actually devilish little monsters who will fight your every effort to keep them at bay. It’s true. Consider for a moment the poor horse (substitute any other animal here) owner. If you are going to raise these animals, sooner or later you are going to run into the problem of feeding them. That would entail coming up with a place to keep the feed. You can’t just put animal feed in the closet with the Raisin Bran, it comes in BIG bags, like 50-pounders, which require lots of room to store. So you reserve some room in your barn or get a feed shed like ours and put your animal feed in there. This will work fine if your feed shed is built like Fort Knox and has no opportunity for critter entry. If there is, however, the slightest opening, it will be seized upon by these roving bands of pirates who will expand it by tooth and claw until they gain access.
For awhile, all we had to worry about were tiny mice, which were eventually dispatched—that’s a nice way of putting it—by our allies, the rat snakes. As the building deteriorated over time, however, the squirrels were next in. There’s nothing like opening your feed shed door in the morning to a cacophony of squirrels exploding off the walls and perhaps into you. This is nothing, however, compared to the raccoons. Now, you have to understand that these raccoons are not particularly afraid of anything. Oh, they will retreat in the face of a great hue and cry, but not far and not for long. As soon as you are gone, they’ll be back. They are wise to the fact that you cannot stay there forever because Justified is on the TV in a couple of hours. One mother raccoon got in the habit of bringing her three offspring by the barn in the north paddock every day around feeding time. She’d sit there until the horses were let out and then make her way, babies intact, into the stall to recover the leavings which the horses dropped out of their buckets onto the floor. As time went by, she got less patient and bolder, arriving about the time the horses were finishing or even before. As I went to let them out, she would sit up and glare at me as if I was not being punctual. If I advanced, she would grudgingly retreat but her expression was on the order of, “Oh right, bully the poor mother with three mouths to feed as she labors for the pitiful scraps left to her by overfed equines.”
Once the raccoons were able to get into the feed shed, drastic measures had to be taken. We started putting the bucketed feed for the next meal inside the bins in which the opened feed was lying. The raccoons raised us one by then nipping into the unopened bags on the floor. We upped the ante by placing an electric wire around the building. This worked for quite a long time, but then the edifice deteriorated further. The feed shed is basically a metal siding and roof hammered onto a wooden frame, base and floor. As the wood deteriorates, it is impossible to keep the metal nailed in, allowing the wily raccoons to pry it open. Basically, you need to replace the building or move the feed elsewhere. For us, there is no acceptable elsewhere so we currently buy enough just to fill the bins. This has outraged the coon crew, which thought they had it all figured out. Yesterday, several of them defecated on the bin lid as if to say, “Okay, Bohunk—put THIS in your pipe and smoke it!” It’s just an unending battle for Truth, Justice and The American Way and I’m not sure we are winning. So here’s our plan. We’re getting Rich the Carpenter out here to construct a shiny new Impregnable Feedroom, impervious to racoondom. It will have the strongest walls, the thickest floors, the biggest nails. They will put their wiliest raccoon leaders on the case but to no avail, the victory shall finally be ours! Right? Right, you guys?
That’s all, folks….
