The Joy Of A New Snow Shovel

We got hit with yet another snow storm Tuesday night. Yesterday I shoveled out part of the driveway, and this afternoon I went to buy a new snow shovel. Then I finished shoveling the driveway, and the new snow shovel made all the difference.

The shovel cost about $20 at a nearby CVS, and after only one use it’s worth every penny. It’s called a Back-Saver Lite-Wate, and other than its annoying use of words that aren’t the King’s English its got everything you’d want in a shovel. The handle is aluminum and is bent in the middle to assist in ergonomically hoisting heavy snow. There’s a grip at the end that also helps with the over-the-shoulder snow toss. The shovel blade is some kind of sturdy space age plastic.

The shovel has three clear advantages over my prior shovel, which had a straight wooden handle and a metal blade. First, the plastic blade avoids the infuriating times when snow sticks to the frozen metal shovel blade as you try to turn and toss and almost causes you to blow out a disk. Second, it weighs about 1/100th of my old shovel. Third, it doesn’t have an irreparable bend in the blade that made it impossible to do any kind of decent scraping.

I freely admit I’m a cheapskate — which is why I was using a bent, ancient, ridiculously heavy snow shovel in the first place — but buying a new, light snow shovel is money well spent during this Little Ice Age winter we’re experiencing.