Sunday started off a beautiful 70 degrees and sunny. By the evening, the temperature dropped to below freezing and sleet hit. The next morning a nice and shiny covering of icy lay on the ground. Unfortunately, this scenario is not unusual in Oklahoma. Driving to work wasn’t too bad, just the neighborhood streets were really slick. The next day was a little worse as all of the driving on the streets melted the ice just enough to zambonie it. When Amy came home from work, she couldn’t get the car up the driveway, the tires just spun. So I came out to see what I could do.

I tried the male approach of driving faster but that didn’t work. My neighbor offered to help push my car, but he had no traction and all I did was push him back. We didn’t have any salt or sand or kitty litter so that wasn’t an option. It was time to look at my options.

I could leave the car parked in front of my house, but it might be difficult to pull out and another car might slide into it. My car was fine on the driveway because there was no ice under it. I could angle it into the garage and drive Amy’s car into the dry spot on the driveway, but that would mean she’d have to go outside with the kids to get them in the car and also scrape her windshield. I wanted to invent a flame thrower to just melt the ice, but that had hazards of its own. The last option I had was to break out the shovel and clear the ice off the driveway.

In my youth, I would have picked option 1 or 2, but I’m a man of action now and I wanted the best solution, so I grabbed the shovel. The ice was too hard for a regular snow shovel so I grabbed our garden shovel. I realized I just needed to make a path up the driveway, rather than clear the whole thing, so I picked a good part to start (where the tire tracks were, I’m brilliant I tell you) and I started.

Both my neighbor and wife came out to see if there was anything they could do, but there was no need. It would be hard work but the job would get done. And that was my attitude. It would be difficult work, but it would get done and it wouldn’t be impossible, quite a cry from my normal thought process of what is the path of least resistance. It took a while but I succeeded. I got in Amy’s car and drove it up into the garage no problem. My arms and legs were tired and I couldn’t grip things very strongly, but the car was in the garage.

Often there are many ways to approach a problem. Sometimes to get the best solution, you just need to do the most tedious and labor intensive method. There is no use in griping about it, the best thing is to grab the shovel and start digging. The job will get done, it just takes some time.