Defining Shoveling Techniques

There's only one way to really shovel. You start as soon as you can bear it, as soon as the snow has started to settle. Shovel shovel shovel, getting as close to the cement as you can. Make a path from your front door to the sidewalk, and down as far as our building/house is. Then turn the shovel over and scrape the remaining slush until you get to bare pavement. You don't want to leave a smooth layer of hardpacked slush. Even if the snow hasn't stopped, you want to start early. It'll feel totally pointless, even impotent, because your work will get erased. The point is you want to clearly define the basic path, the borders of the fundamental channel that you'll be tying to get back to in the coming weeks, as more snow comes and your path gets covered again and again. It's always easier to get back to an almost perfect path than to dig through a general swath of slush and snow and define a path. You'll want a curved push shovel, preferably not too heavy, with a straight handle, and hopefully a straight bladed shovel for doing steps. Either way, you'll also want to have a stiff bristled, outdoor (or indoor/outdoor) broom. You can use the push shovel for the patio and sidewalk, and the brush for the stairs. If you're really ambitious, after you scrape the path, use the broom to really grind the snow and slush away. You'll feel really ridiculous at first, but in the next few days, if you start dealing with freezing rain, or even if it gets warm all of a sudden, the path where you got to the pavement will melt quickly, and the rest of if will gradually pack down harder and harder as you and other people walk on it. One year I scraped a tiny one foot's breadth path down my chronically heavy sidewalk, an the next day I found myself walking on a sidewalk covered with hard packed snow and a rivulet of solid ice running down the middle! Why, oh why did I work so hard? well, the next day the ice in the middle melted away completely and the rest of it stayed the same.