🚜 The EV of Spreading Mulch

In this week's P.O. Box:

I've been in mulch hell for the past week. And if you are wondering what in the world "mulch hell" means, boy is this the newsletter for you.

In fact, there's a very good chance that I'm out in my backyard schlepping around mulch while you read this very post, all because I did an EV calculation that may or may not have held up.

I'll let you be the judge on this episode of Mulch Chasing...

My mulching career began last summer when Lauren and I did the bare minimum to spruce up our condo before selling it. We had a very small yard and bought the off-brand bagged cereal equivalent of bark mulch. Here I am at Home Depot larping as an adult who doesn't yap about fantasy football for a living:

This is our first spring at our new house and there's a lot of landscaping work that we need to get done so our neighbors and summer guests don't judge us too much as the deadbeat homeowners we otherwise are.

One of those necessary tasks is putting down a fresh layer of natural pine bark mulch (yes, it has to be natural I'm told).

I'm generally perfectly content to pay someone to do work like this for me, but I immediately balked when multiple companies quoted me anywhere from $1800-$2200 to deliver and spread the mulch for our yard.

There was just no way in hell I was paying someone 50+ Best Ball Mania 4 entries to do something I knew I could do just as well on my own.

This was my itemized calculation:

• $500 for mulch (& delivery)

• 6-8 hours of work schlepping & spreading

• Assuming I went with the lowest quote, I would be paying a company roughly $185/hour ($1300/7) to do this job for me.

The general framework I use when it comes to these things—and it's often led to many disagreements with Lauren (I once got mad because she drove an extra 30 minutes across town to save roughly $5 on cheaper groceries)—is that if someone can do something way better than me and it saves me time, I'm happy to pony up.

Like sure, I could theoretically watch 12 hours of YouTube videos to figure out how to troubleshoot my sprinkler system and fix broken heads, but is that really the best use of my time? Especially when the chances of me exhausting many hours of research and still fucking it up are very high? But lugging mulch around the yard? You don't need special skills for that and I have no problem getting my hands in the dirt, unlike some other fantasy analysts out there.

Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely don't have the time to do this right now. I'm burning the candle on both ends and have actually only recently become much better at outsourcing things that I used to stubbornly do myself.

I got LouDog crushing short-form video edits for me. My guy Chris is now doing all of my thumbnails. It's the perfect set-up. These guys are both better than me at editing/graphic design, while also freeing me up to do things I'm more equipped to do, like figuring out where Nuk is going to play next year.

But I did the math on this godforsaken mulch and I just couldn't stomach writing that absurd check.

In addition to paying myself $185/hourly rate for the labor, I also factored in that I would be replacing my typical 45 minutes or so of daily exercise with shoveling and deadlifting mulch (I faded the chalky wheelbarrow set up for a more contrarian and efficient trash can/dolly system that my neighbor recommended I dupe him on).

Exercise and saving money?! Surely this tips the EV scales in favor of DIY Pete, right???

Ultimately, Lauren and I settled on a compromise. We opted to do the mulch ourselves, but only in the front yard, "mullet style" (aka business in the front, party in the back).

So I ordered the mulch, it was delivered, I disbursed it across the yard, and we lived happily ever after.

Ya right.

My estimations were fairly accurate up until this point. It took me roughly 3.5 hours to finish the front yard. But then something that should not have been unexpected happened...the peanut gallery chimed in:

It looks great, are you sure you don't want to just do the back?

My mother-in-law impressed upon me how I really should tackle the backyard too, not even for aesthetics, but to keep the weeds at bay. Guess she didn't get the mullet memo.

And then I caved. Total capitulation. Fuck it, I said. Let me call this nursery back up, ask for another delivery, and we'll bang out another 3.5 hours of honest work. Besides, I have podcasts to listen to and a budding farmer's tan to enhance.

This is where the story gets absurd...

The nursery asks you to clearly mark where you want them to dump the mulch. It worked well for the first batch, but these jamokes exhibited Anthony Richardson-level accuracy on the second go around and dumped the heap of mulch directly in front of my garage, blocking my car:

I called them to complain and they offered to send someone over to move the pile. I figured they'd come with a plough or whatever, but no...a single dude showed up with the world's smallest shovel. I swear it looked like something they'd include in a sandcastle beach set for kids.

I told him to forget it. I never leave my house anyway and would shovel myself out.

I had made my EV calc, and now I needed to lie in it.

If you would have told me a couple months ago that I'd be writing about goddamn natural pine bark in my newsletter, well, that would explain its lack of popularity.

But I needed to get this off my chest; a cathartic exercise to help cope with my naive EV calculation.

Last year I pretended to become an engagement farmer as a content play...

This year I became an actual farmer.

Let the record show, however, that The Mulch King is abdicating the throne in 2024...

☕ What do I need to do to get an early pick in Superflex? I must have angered the best ball gods, it's the only explanation.

🔮 Predicting the NFL Draft with Bill Barnwell. Bill joined us on Ship Chasing and shared a bunch of his wild trade ideas for draft night.

💊 I try to quit Kyle Pitts...but then Bill Barnwell pulls me right back in.

💡 Best Ball Tips. Sneaky correlations to consider, including QB/RB and some data on fast drafts vs. slow drafts.

🥊 Spags vs. Pete. Our final battle in the Superflex streets. Go vote for my team in the comments.

⁉️ Top 10 fantasy question marks. Debated questionable ADPs with Ian Hartitz, including Breece Hall, Chris Olave, and Deshaun Watson.

🐸 A new meme coin. Crypto is pumping, Draymond is stomping, and The Club is recapping NFT NYC and the NBA Playoffs.

🕵️‍♂️ The mystery young gun battling the DFS pros. A shadowy DFS pro joined us on LOLz and we pressed him on his process.

Splash Play draft vs. the viewers at noon:

Tonight at 9pm ET the Best Ball After Dark streams roll on. My 'ol pal, Fantasy Mensa brother, fellow Zero RB zealot, and my frisbee WR1, Denny Carter, joins the show for drinks and drafts. Become a YouTube member here for access.

Finally got the private #☕bestball-breakfast channel set up in the Deposit Kingdom Discord. You can unlock it by becoming a "Best Ball Value Hound" via YouTube membership and then syncing your YouTube account with your Discord account (there are instructions in the #👑kingdom-faq channel of the server.

This membership will get you access to all of the Best Ball After Dark shows and priority access for live stream drafts. With no tournaments dropping before Best Ball Mania, I'll be doing a private draft on Monday's stream and dropping the link in there.

This dumb app Toasteed, which purportedly shows you who checks out your Twitter profile, took over my timeline this week.

This wouldn't be an issue, except I appeared on a disconcerting amount of people's Top 10:

If anything, I have grounds for a lawsuit after watching my reputation get sullied with defamatory nicknames such as "Peepin Pete" and "Profile Petey."

No matter what these liars on Twitter say, I have never visited your profile.

Need more newslettering? Fantasy Life newsletter drops every weekday: