It's winter again and with it, the KTracy.com Headquarters are again in the crosshairs of the evil snow wizard. The snow wizard has never defeated me, and I will now share my tips and tricks for winning this battle and keeping your driveway clear this winter season!

Don't Salt Your Driveway!

Undoubtedly, your first thought is going to be "Why shovel my driveway when I can just salt it?" Stop right there!

Salt will absolutely damage your driveway, sidewalks, grass (you remember that stuff under the snow), and your very soul. Don't use it!

Salt is effective at preventing wet driveways from turning into ice after the snow starts falling. It's even mildly effective at stopping the buildup of snow if the temperatures aren't too cold. The problem is that the salt water mix the sleet, snow, and salt create is able to get into the nooks and crannies of your driveway, depositing salt inside. This weakens the bonds in the concrete and causes mild damage every year until your driveway looks like this:

Repairing this damage is STUPID expensive and the damage can start in as little as one year. Do you have a public sidewalk on your property? Don't think for a second that your local municipality is going to pay to fix it. There are no shortcuts here. You need to remove the snow.

Do You Even Need to Shovel?

After a peaceful sleep, you awake to find a half inch of snow on your driveway. But before you drink your morning Mormon narcotic (more commonly called 'coffee'), check out the weather forecast!

If you have a concrete driveway and the high temperature is going to be 37 degrees Fahrenheit or higher (2.8 degrees Celsius), you can trust the warmer temperatures to melt the snow for you.

If you have a blacktop driveway, you have one rare advantage over a concrete driveway. If the sun is going to be out and the temperature is just a bit below freezing or warmer, the blacktop of your driveway will absorb the sun's light and convert it to heat, causing the snow to melt! Once the blacktop is partially exposed, this process speeds up rapidly!

Now, there's one disadvantage to this strategy. If the process of melting the snow is not complete by the time temperatures drop (usually when the sun goes down), all that melted snow is going to turn into ice. In general, you should go out and shovel whatever is left of the snow about an hour or so before sunset so the moisture has a chance to evaporate. This will be the easiest shovel job you ever have! Even the compacted snow and ice from footprints and tires will have a thin layer of water between them and the driveway, so the shovel will plow right through everything with ease!

If You Must Shovel, Shovel Often!

The snow has begun to fall! The weather man has predicted 16 inches of snow; which drives up ratings for the nightly news and causes everyone to panic and buy excess milk, eggs, bottled water, and toilet paper. Realistically, there will only be about 6 inches of snow, but that's still a LOT of snow.

There are two ways to handle this. You might be tempted to wait until all of the snow falls, and go outside after the snow storm to remove all of the snow at once. This is a truly awful idea, and you'll know why immediately after you start. A shovel full of snow is HEAVY and each pass across the width of the driveway will take multiple scoops with the shovel. And worse, when you get to the end of the driveway, after an hour or more of painstaking work, you'll find snow two or three times as deep and ten times as dense and wet at the end of your driveway where the snow plow has deposited multiple layers of street snow up against the end of your driveway. You're doomed.

The best way to deal with snow storms is to plan to shovel snow multiple times throughout a snow storm. I try to shovel once there's about two inches of new snow on the driveway. If you're shorter, don't have the same amount of back pain holding your back, or have more upper body strength you may want to shovel less often (every 3 inches, for example). Alternatively, if 2 inches still seems like a lot of effort, you can go outside to shovel snow more frequently. Although you'll be interrupted from your indoor activities more often, you're going to spend less time and effort shoveling a little snow multiple times than a lot of snow once.

Avoid Driving Before Shoveling

The snow has come. The weather man who predicted 16 inches of snow and caused a riot outside the local grocery store was thankfully wrong and only two inches of snow fell. With a crisis averted, your wife and daughter have decided that so little snow fell, they're going to go shopping using their Fiat. If you haven't shoveled yet, STOP THEM IMMEDIATELY!

A vehicle driving over snow is going to compact it deep into the crevasses of your driveway and make it nearly impossible to remove with a shovel without picking and scratching at for an hour at a time! This compacted snow will quickly turn into ice that will not come off until the driveway heats up and melts the bottom layer of it, releasing the rest from its magnificent grip!

Throw on your jacket and, as quickly as you can, make a path for your wife's tires! You will be the envy of the you in the alternate dimension where you didn't shovel a path for your wife before she left!

This is Man's Work

Ladies, this is not work for you. That modern "feminism" is a has lied to you and any effort to make you think you should shovel snow is a misogynistic crime of the highest order. This is a man's work!

Don't have a man to shovel for you? Call a male neighbor or friend. If he's single and doesn't complain as you drink hot chocolate watching him shovel your driveway: Congratulations! You found a husband!

Don't have a male neighbor or friend? Call a snow removal service. When the snow guy arrives, you'll have to ask if he's single since he'll be wearing gloves and you won't be able to check for a ring. If he's single, congratulations! You just found a husband!

I realize this advice may seem outdated and perhaps offensive, but if you want to find a chivalrous, kind hearted man, ask him to do something difficult like shovel your driveway and see what happens! A woman who isn't afraid to be feminine and let's men do men's work is radically attractive to good men!

Do you have a husband who makes you shovel the driveway without a pre-existing medical condition preventing him from doing so? Speak to your priest, as this may be grounds for an annulment in the Catholic Church.

One Quick Thing About Snow Blowers

If the snow storm happens overnight and spending an all-nighter shoveling snow once every couple of hours before driving to work doesn't sound like your definition of a good time, you might want to consider a snow blower.

When it comes to snow blowers, you generally get what you pay for and bigger is always better. In general, the size of a man's snowblower is relative to the size of his manhood. To avoid embarrassment and to deal with heavy snows, you'll want to avoid the cheaper single stage snow blowers (including those cheap plug-in electric snow blowers) and instead save up a bit more to invest in a larger two stage snow blower with an electric starter. The single stage snow blower will be less useful than a shovel against a heavy snow fall and won't make a dent in the end of your driveway after the snow plow comes by and ploughs you in. If a woman asks you to come over to plough her, and you bring a dinky single stage snow blower that can't finish the job, she won't ask you to be her husband. Instead, the dude with the two stage snow blower will eat up the wettest snows imaginable and throw it half way across the county, satisfying the woman and proving himself to be a competent mate.

Bottom line: Go big or stay home.