Getting Down And Dirty & Steve Ballmer’s $2B Bid

A good portion of our time this week has been spent moving dirt. This included transporting, unloading and then spreading dirt. Actually, it was pretty good topsoil that Paulette wanted for her Rose Gardens and a few other areas in our yard. The first part of this job was a snap as all I had to do was hook-up our trailer and drive a few miles to the dirt yard. There, the operator loaded one big scoop of their very best topsoil into the trailer, I paid him $30, and I was headed back home.

One big scoop of #1 topsoil loaded into my trailer for $30

It had been a while since I had to load topsoil into a wheelbarrow so I’d forgotten how heavy dirt is. It took 8 wheelbarrow loads to move the topsoil from the trailer over to the rose garden. I was getting “dirt tired” by then but I still had one more load to get.

Dirt is heavy. Very heavy!

It was back to the dirt yard and after shoveling another 8 wheelbarrow loads of topsoil into my wheelbarrow and moving it to where it was needed that was enough for me.

The Rose Garden was chopped off by 40% – we’ll plant grass instead

Part of the reason for needing all this topsoil was because Paulette decided to reduce the size of her main Rose Garden by about 40% and replace it with grass. Less work for her and more grass to cut for me! In fairness, roses do take an awful lot of time, care and attention in comparison to just mowing the lawn. The work went pretty fast and I had all 16 wheelbarrow’s full of topsoil moved to their designated locations for filling and spreading. Next up – plant some grass seed!

Picking up this heavy sod was a real killer job – all done now though!

Little did I know that while I was playing in the dirt, Paulette was busy working very hard to keep me using our old wheelbarrow. For reasons known only to her, she decided to edge the sidewalk in our backyard as well as the driveway and even the roadway in our front yard. This amounted to about 10 more loads of extremely heavy sod that I had to first load into the wheelbarrow and then cart off to our big compost area. This was probably a harder job than just moving the topsoil.

If numerous media reports are true then Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO, has won the bidding war for the NBA’s LA Clippers. The bid – $2 billion!

Wowza! That’s a lot of dough for a hobby! The disgraced, racist owner of the Clipper’s, Donald Sterling, bought the NBA franchise in 1981 for just $12.5 million. His wife owns 50% of the team so they’ll get about $1 billion each.

Steve Ballmer won’t be the first former Microsoft exec to buy a professional sports franchise. That honor belongs to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who owns both the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks as well as the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers.

Part of the deal requires that Ballmer not move the Clippers from Los Angeles to his hometown of Seattle. Seattle is still bitter over losing their NBA Supersonics. But, as Ballmer said for $2 billion a large TV market is needed and that’s Los Angeles. It’s not like he’s going to lose any sleep about this expenditure as he’s reported to be worth around $20 billion. Besides, the second highest bid from a consortium of businessmen was a reported $1.6 billion so he can always sell it if he wants.

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