Bryce Moore's Blog, page 16

Moving Offices. Again.

Anyone coming into one of my workspaces would hardly be overwhelmed by the neatness. That’s a nice way of saying they tend to be on the cluttered side. If I don’t use a spot regularly, then the likelihood of it being organized is actually fairly high, but in a space I’m constantly doing stuff in?

War zone.

So you’d think moving offices wouldn’t be that big of a deal. I’d go from one cluttered mess to another cluttered mess. However, my workspaces are a cluttered mess where I know where everything is. This is, of course, a key difference. They’re a mess because I get something and need to put it somewhere, and so I stick it wherever is convenient, telling myself that I’ll find a place for it eventually. (“Eventually” usually actually comes around, though that can be months and months later, depending on how permanent that something turned out to be.)

For me, moving spaces ends up having two big drawbacks. First of all, there’s an awful lot to move. I accumulate a lot over time, squirreling it away here and there in a way that undersells just how much stuff I have, even to people glancing at my cluttered office. But beyond the pain of moving, it ends up feeling fairly disorienting, as I no longer know where anything is.

I imagine this is the same for everyone, but I also tend to think it’s too easy to always assume what life is like for me is the same as what life is like for everyone else. I mean, surely there are people whose workspaces are self-contained, neat, and easy to move. (Actually, I know that for a fact, as someone else moved offices at the same time I did. It took him all of about one load, and that was including moving furniture.)

I really ought to declutter all of this stuff, and I feel bad that I haven’t, but at the same time, it takes time and attention to go through it all, and I always feel like there’s something else I could be doing with both my time and my attention, so it just ends up hanging around.

In any case, I’m moved now and slowly trying to find places for everything. If you’re on campus, my office is now on the main floor, back behind the main library desk. So, harder for people to just waltz in and talk to me, but much (much) easier to find. Then again, it’s also much noisier than where I was before, tucked away into a corner of the second floor. The good news is there’s pretty decent insulation in the walls, so closing the door makes a significant difference.

Give me a few weeks, and it’ll all feel like I’ve always been here. Right?

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Sugar Overload

In a development that may, or may not, have something to do with the homemade sno balls I made a week or so ago, I came to the hard decision on Sunday that I am, in fact, eating too much sugar again. I’m not sure what really gave it away. It might have been the sno balls, sure. Or it might have been the nightly ice cream (with chocolate syrup, because who wants just ice cream?). Or was it the binging on Easter candy? Or maybe it was the powdered sugar residue always around my mouth.

Whatever it was, I had to face the stark truth: for a guy who once made a whole big deal about giving up sugar, I was most definitely back off the wagon, traipsing through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, through the sea of swirly-twirly gum drops.

Honestly, this is something I’d known for quite some time, and now and then, I’d consider doing something about it. I even made a few resolutions. “I’m going to cut back on sugar. Right after these four orange rolls.” “This brownie is the last one I’m going to eat. This hour.” And the more I thought about maybe possibly considering the idea that it might be a good idea to just stop eating sugar altogether again, the more excuses I found to postpone that decision. A birthday was coming up. What was I going to do? Skip cake?!?

Well, I’d had a stomach ache for a fair bit of last week, and for some reason, more sugar wasn’t fixing it. So when I woke up Sunday morning feeling crummy still, I decided enough was enough. I was going to go cold turkey off sugar again. I had a really hard time committing to anything long term, though. In my head, I decided I’d go for one week. Surely I could manage a single week, right? (Though it’s a sign of just how hooked I am that even that decision seemed very, very difficult.)

It’s Thursday now, and I’ve gone four whole days without eating anything with added sugar. (What does that mean? It means no candy. No jam. No cookies. Nothing where the sole purpose of the food is sugar. I haven’t given up all foods made with sugar or things that just turn to sugar in my stomach, like pasta or white flour.) And I’ll be honest: those first two days were especially difficult. My stomach hurt even more (though I’m not sure if that had to do with the sugar or not). I was grumpy. I had to continually resist the urge to go find a little something something in the cupboard. (Surely just a handful of chocolate chips would be okay, right? Wrong.)

It was no fun.

However, I’m coming through that stage, and I’m beginning to think that I can last more than a week, after all. Maybe I’ll extend it for another week. Or two. Or more. A lot will depend on how I’m feeling. I definitely would like to be eating less sugar, though I wish I had the willpower to just do it without needing to cut it out completely. I wonder if I could do a weight-watchers-style approach, where I get a certain number of sugar tickets each week, and once I’m through those tickets, I can’t eat any more sugar.

Not sure yet. I’m playing it by ear. One candy bar at a time, you could say.

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Orangey the Cat

Lest you mistakenly believe that my cat personality days are over, I’m here today with a new video to show you that’s not the case. I’ve just been busy doing other things, which derailed my efforts to get this video done. Ideally, we’d like to be doing about a video a week, all cat and personality related. I’d like to get an intro made, but I’m not that far along yet.

Baby steps.

Posting videos is a lot harder for me than blogs, mainly because I have a hard time just deciding something is good enough. I’ve been blogging for so long, that I just kind of rattle off a post and then hit publish. Not much editing, because there’s always another post. I’m not there with videos, and I don’t know the ins and outs of editing them as well, so it’s more involved.

So there are still a couple small bits in here that I’m not happy with, but I have to realize this isn’t my full-time job, and good enough is good enough.

Today’s video is all about Orangey, the award-winning acting cat who was also known as “the world’s meanest cat.” I look at that contrast, what might have caused it, and view it from a personality perspective. Sound riveting? You bet! Here it is.

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Snowballing Sno Balls

Before I left for my conference, Daniela and I decided to try a little experiment: homemade Sno Balls. I have long loved the marshmallow, coconut, and chocolate cake (with cream filling!) treat, but I’ve also recognized almost no one else does. Also, I understand that much processed sugar is supposed to be bad, or something like that. So I haven’t eaten Sno Balls as frequently as I’d like.

But homemade Sno Balls had to be better, by definition. And so even though we’d never made marshmallow before, we decided we’d be able to tackle the task without too much trouble. We used this recipe. It seemed straightforward.

It wasn’t.

For one thing, we had no molds for the sno balls, so we decided to use cupcakes, instead. But since we didn’t want to have ginormous sno balls, we went for mini cupcakes. Except the recipe had enough batter for way more than just a single pan of mini cupcakes. So we made bigger ones, as well. Into the oven they went!

The creme filling required whipping cream, so we went with a doughnut creme filling instead, turning to this recipe. (Except that makes enough for 100 doughnuts, and . . . that was a lot of sno balls, even for me. So we just did a quarter of it.)

While all of that was going, we turned to the marshmallow. Being completely new to the task, we stuck to the recipe 100%. It asked for 6.75 Cups of sugar, so in the sugar went. We had to use gelatin powder that bloomed first, and all sorts of other things I hadn’t done.

The gelatin powder turned into this squishy brick that was then supposed to dissolve in the sugar water mixture. That took an awfully long time. Also, it seemed like a ton of sugar water for how much marshmallow we’d actually want. But hey! Maybe it would boil down?

It did not boil down, despite having to boil the stuff for 15 minutes. Seriously, it felt like we’d become indentured servants at some point during that process. Stir stir stir stir stir stir, and then stir some more. We had a half sauce pan full of goopy sugar water that just looked cloudy and runny. Not like marshmallows at all. But you’re then supposed to whip it in a mixer until it turns fluffy and white. I was more than a little skeptical.

The good news? It most definitely turned fluffy and white! The bad news? I had to stop whipping early, because it was going to go over my Kitchenaid bowl. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. We had sooooooo much marshmallow. Even after we made the sno balls, we had enough marshmallow to fill a 9 x 13 pan to the top.

We put coconut oil on all the pans, and as we were scooping marshmallow into each cupcake tin, I was convinced I’d be cleaning pans for the next decade. But we’d committed this far, so why not all the way. For each sno ball, we put the coconut oil and then a bunch of shredded (unsweetened) coconut. Then we filled them halfway with marshmallow.

The mini cupcakes . . . didn’t work at all. They got stuck to the pan, and came out more like mini . . . piles of chocolate cake. So we smushed them together, but they didn’t want to fill up with creme. So we improvised again, putting cream on top of the cake piles and then just smushing it all into the cupcake molds, one by one.

And then . . . we were supposed to wait for everything to cool. That’s easy enough, but I was dreading the unmolding process. that marshmallow! So sticky!

Except when it came time to take them out, the marshmallow released from the side of the pans like magic. Yay for coconut oil! We cut up the spare marshmallow into smaller slices, dusting them each with powdered sugar, and thus realized that homemade Peeps are a wonderful side effect of homemade sno balls. (Seriously. Delicious, though next time I’d use granulated sugar for a more Peepy experience.

In the end, it took hours and hours of work. Thankfully, they were, indeed, delicious. And now that I’ve made them once, I know what I’d do in the future: Bake my favorite chocolate cake. Make a batch of frosting. Make a reasonable amount of marshmallow. Take small slices of cake, add some frosting, and put in the marshmallow-and-coconut-lined cupcake pans.

And that’s it. No need for special recipes. I think they’d be much less difficult to make, and end up tasting even better. In case you’re looking for a tasty treat in the near future . . .

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Movie Review: Wish

I had heard next to nothing about Wish before I watched it. I knew it was the latest Disney animated movie, and I saw it was now streaming on Disney+. I was looking for something to watch with the family, and it seemed like an obvious choice, so I pressed play.

I struggle to find things that I actually liked about the movie, as it failed for me on so many different levels. But as I thought through everything, I did manage to come up with two things. First, my 11 year old daughter had a good time watching it. (Denisa, Daniela, and I all agreed with how awful it was, on the other hand.) Second, the main character would have been a good main character in a different movie. If she were surrounded by real characters, a better villain, and an actual storyline, then I don’t really think she’d need to be changed at all. Maybe.

So there. I’ve now officially said something kind of nice about the movie. (So far, the only people I’ve heard defending the movie have said it was “tolerable,” “didn’t think it was awful,” and “there are other movies I’ve hated way more.” But 2,400 people on IMDB gave it a 10/10, so it’s a good reminder that there’s something for everyone, I guess. However, I hated the movie, and I shall now tell you why:

The whole premise is just bizarre. There’s a wizard who takes away each person’s biggest heartfelt wish and makes them forget it, so he can store it in a wish vault for safe keeping, and randomly grant wishes here and there over the years with magic? And people hear about this and think it’s such a good idea that they all flock to his city for him to work his wish-sucking magic on them? We are told that everyone thinks this is a great idea. We are shown characters gushing about how great it is. But the whole concept sounds awful right from the get go, and it’s absolutely no shock that the wizard turns out to be an awful person. I mean, even the guy’s wife takes all of 24 hours to go from adoring him to deciding to hang him on the wall like a Christmas tree ornament.Speaking of that villain, he was terrible too. He goes from misguided to absolutely evil in about a couple of seconds, and he never turns back. And why does he turn evil? Because a random teen dared to question him once. That’s it. He goes full on Maleficent over that, and we’re just supposed to kind of accept it. Whatever.I didn’t realize until after the film was over that the basic conceit of the movie was “let’s make a movie that references all the other Disney movies!” The credits were rolling, and they were showing drawings of Snow White or Dumbo or Ariel, and I was confused. Yes, there had been some ham-fisted references in the movie, but I thought they’d just been poor attempts at winks at the audience. But then as I thought it over, the Hidden Mickeyfication of the film was obvious and disappointing. If you’re going to do something like that with a movie, at least make it a fun movie. Taking all the Disney movies, sticking them in a blender, and hitting puree isn’t the way to come up with a good movie. It’s just a way of highlighting how formulaic many movies can be.The side characters are hot garbage. The main character has a group of seven friends, which as soon as I write that, I’m sure most of you have already seen where it’s heading, but while I was watching the movie, I never paused to actually count the friends. I just knew they were all only characters in the loosest definition of the term. They were reduced to one basic beat per character. The one who was always hiding. The one who was angry and distrusting of everyone and everything. The one who always fell asleep. The one who was just plain goofy. The one who sneezed all the . . . Oh. Yup. It’s all seven of the dwarves. Groan. It felt like the creators spent more time trying to make sure all seven ticked as many diversity boxes as possible than actually trying to make them characters. (Short? Check. Tall? Check. Thin? Check. Fat? Check. Asian? Check. Black? Check. Disability? Check. Girl? Check. Boy? Check. Someone needed to tell them they don’t win some sort of BINGO award for doing it all at once.)I didn’t care for the music at all. To the point that I got out my phone and checked to see who they’d hired to do the songs. Julia Michaels, in case you were wondering. Famous for . . . writing two Billboard top 100 songs: Bieber’s “Sorry” and Selena Gomez’s “Lose You to Love Me.” Not exactly who I would have picked to do the songs for the Disney movie to reference all Disney movies. The tunes are forgettable. The rhyme scheme was forced. The rhythms and syncopations were all just meh. I love Disney music. This wasn’t Disney music.The animation was an amalgam of styles, all executed poorly. It was like this mish-mash of hand-drawn and CGI that looked just plain . . . ugly. It’s what threw me out of the film right from the beginning. It just looked cheap. And now that I know this was supposed to be the meta Disney movie, it’s even more disappointing that they didn’t just go with a hand drawn film. Guess what? When you try to be every single style, you end up being nothing. Ick.

I’ve wasted enough time on this movie as it is. I should have turned it off instead of finishing it, but MC has been sick, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, so I didn’t want to make her feel bad. But do yourself a favor and avoid this if at all possible. Sure, maybe you’ll think it’s not terrible, or that there are movies you’ve hated more, but even a fairy godmother couldn’t make the odds of you liking it anything better than slim to none. 2/10, and it can thank MC I didn’t put that any lower.

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Television Review: Masters of the Air

I’m a big fan of the earlier World War II series, Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Both of them brought home just how much of a struggle the war was in Europe and in the Pacific. Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg after they worked on Saving Private Ryan together, the series are both very well done. Acting, casting, plot, production values–you name it. (My personal preference from a story perspective is Band of Brothers, as it’s more of a contained narrative. The Pacific is more sprawling, though it’s also far more horrific. I knew next to nothing about the war over there, while I had a fair idea of the general arc of the battles in Europe.)

In any case, I was excited to hear Hanks and Spielberg had produced a third entry in their WWII “series”: Masters of the Air. The complete show is on Apple TV+ now, and Denisa and I finished it last night. It’s a fine addition to the other two shows, though I think I’d put it in third place if I were to rank them. I felt like the first half of the series was stronger, simply because it was (again) more of a contained story with characters you grew to know and understand. It was also startling and disturbing to see just what those men faced up in the skies.

Then again, it’s not as if you could make an entire series consisting of one gruesome air battle after the other. (Well, I guess you could, but I think it would tend to get pretty repetitive.) So it’s only natural that they extended the scope of the story to look at other areas, like the Tuskegee Airmen and POW camps. The same characters weave in and out of the stories, so there’s still a connection, but it wasn’t as horrific as the Pacific or as powerful of a single story as Band of Brothers.

I still gave it an 8/10. It’s based on real stories of real pilots and real battles. It does a great job expanding the scope of the earlier shows while not feeling like it’s walking over the same territory (with the exception of the “Coming across a concentration camp horror” scene, though honestly, with so many people seeming to want to completely forget that or question it, I’m all for reminding people as often as necessary.)

I’d suggest watching all of the shows if you haven’t seen them, and I’m considering giving the first two another viewing in the near future.

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Off to San Antonio for TLA

I’m heading out to San Antonio on Monday to go to the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. This will actually be my second time attending TLA. I first went in 2022 when I was promoting Don’t Go to Sleep. This time around it’s going to be A Family of Killers.

While I’m not looking forward to the travel (as you might imagine), I definitely am looking forward to the conference. The last time I went was still heavily influenced by the pandemic. (I actually caught COVID for the first time at that conference, which wasn’t exactly the souvenir I wanted to take home most from Fort Worth.) It’ll be nice to be there at a time when things are more established.

It’ll be my third trip to San Antonio. I went the first time back when I was getting my Masters at BYU, for the Pop Culture Association conference. In 2019 I headed down to visit my sister and her family. And now I’ll be back again. Not sure I’ll see the Alamo for yet another time, though who knows? Maybe this time I’d find the basement . . .

In any case, I’m not sure what my blogging schedule will look like next week. Should be a bit touch and go as I’m all over the place. But if you’re in the Texas area, let me know. Time will be tight, but maybe I can wave hello. I’ll be the one trying to see through a mop of hair. Should be easy to spot.

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Happiness and Religion

Over the weekend, I had a chance to watch General Conference again, the twice-a-year series of talks by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s about 10 hours of talks in all, and we always make a weekend out of it with the fam. (Sessions go from 12-2pm, 4-6pm, and 8-10pm on Saturday, then 12-2pm and 4-6pm on Sunday.) You would think persuading your kids that they want to listen to 10 hours of church talks would be a difficult task. You would underestimate the persuasive powers of Oreos and Goldfish.

It’s not all just about bribing the kids, though. For that weekend, we just get to hang out in our pajamas and work on crafts or rest (and yes, maybe catch a nap now and then), all while hearing messages centered around how to be better people. Yes, every now and then there’s a talk that rubs more than a few people the wrong way, but having listened to almost all of the talks in the last twenty years or so, I can comfortably say almost all of them boil down to a few basic principles: be kind to each other. Be good people. Principles that you would be hard pressed to have anyone balk at, except perhaps to say they don’t need religion to tell them to do those things.

(Note: just because people wouldn’t balk at the topics doesn’t mean they’d actually follow the advice in the talks. There’s a far cry from hearing something and thinking it’s a generally good idea to then actually doing that thing in real life, whether it’s feeding the hungry, caring for the downtrodden, or just treating your family kindly on a consistent basis. Then again, any truly faithful person will have some hypocrisy involved somewhere in that faith, simply because we’re all imperfect, even if we’d like to be better.)

Anyway, this is just a preamble to explain the talk I want to discuss briefly today. Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf has been one of my favorite speakers for years. He focuses on the aspects of religion that generally hit closest to home for me, and his speech this year was very on point. He was a pilot for Lufthansa for years and years before he became an Apostle. (Once that happens, people give up their day jobs to devote their full time to their church positions.) He’s well-known for tying almost anything into aviation in some way, and this talk kept to that pattern, using the Wright Brothers as a launching point to discuss how devoting yourself to God and Christ can bring you greater joy.

The whole talk is lovely, coming full circle in the end in a way that really tied it together wonderfully. I encourage you to read or watch it, regardless of your religious persuasion, though it’s definitely fully rooted in Christianity. But here’s one snippet that stood out to me:

Jesus taught, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”23

Can it be that in our search for joy, the best way to find it is to bring joy to others?

Brothers and sisters, you know and I know this is true! Joy is like a barrel of flour or a jar of oil that will never run out.24 True joy multiplies when it is shared.

It doesn’t require something grand or complicated.

We can do simple things.

Like praying for someone with all our heart.

Giving a sincere compliment.

Helping someone feel welcome, respected, valued, and loved.

Sharing a favorite scripture and what it means to us.

Or even just by listening.

“When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God,”25 and God will repay your kindness generously.26 The joy you give to others will return to you in “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over.”

I know that religion can be a very (very) sore spot for many, especially when it comes to some of the hot button topics in the world today. Generally, religion is far slower to make changes than many would wish, and we could definitely have a very long conversation about that. But I think our society is generally becoming too focused on finding the things where we disagree instead of looking for areas of commonality. Two different flavors of Christianity might agree on 80 or 90 percent of their teachings, and yet all anyone will look at is that remaining 10 to 20 percent. A Republican and a Democrat might have very similar goals or world views, but are unable to work on anything together, simply because they can’t get over who the other person voted for.

The more we focus on these differences, the more we will struggle to actually get anything done. To effect any positive change in the world. Instead, we become mired in labels and prejudice. It’s ironic that both sides of the political spectrum fall prey to this trap. There’s a laundry list of acceptable and unacceptable labels on both sides of the aisle. One person will loudly object if someone uses the wrong pronouns, and another will be very insulted if they’re casually labeled a “Nazi.” We scurry around deriding some labels and enshrining others, debating what matters and what doesn’t, arguing that labels are irrelevant in some cases but of supreme importance in others, unable or unwilling to see how alike we all are.

The war in Gaza is another example, with some people decrying the actions of Hamas and others pointing the finger squarely at Israel, ignoring whatever pieces of evidence or history might disagree with whatever viewpoint they’ve chosen to espouse. And while that name calling and objecting goes on, people continue to die on both sides.

I think that’s why Elder Uchtdorf’s talk about bringing joy to others resonates with me so much. It’s not about inflicting your opinion on someone else. It’s about finding the things that will bring someone else joy, and then doing those things. Yes, I guess there’s more than a little kumbaya about the sentiment, and it would be easy to dismiss it as naive and trite. But if we were more focused on spreading kindness and compassion, many of the differences that seem so devastating might no longer seem quite as defining. Perhaps we’d begin to be able to see things from a different viewpoint, and if not agree with others, at least understand them and respect them.

When we simply disregard someone else for any reason, we only make things worse.

Anyway. That’s all I’ve got time for today. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you have a happy Wednesday.

Moon Shadow

Ever since the last significant eclipse we had here in Maine back in 2017, I’d been looking forward* to the total eclipse that was coming 4/8/24. The asterisk there is due to the fact that I was pretty pessimistic that we’d actually be able to see the eclipse. Maine is typically quite cloudy this time of year, and so I was more than a little skeptical that the big day would arrive and all I’d be able to see was things getting a bit darker for a few minutes. (Heading into the date, most estimates I’d read said we had a 15% chance of sunshine on the day in question.)

However, the closer we actually came to the eclipse, the more it looked like the weather would work with us for once, so I moved from just toying with the idea of trying to go see the totality to actually making plans to do it. Everything I’d read and heard about the experience of a total eclipse said that it was basically totality or bust. Even 99.5% totality just wasn’t supposed to be close to 100%.

Thankfully, I lived all of about a half hour away from totality. I didn’t really fancy just going up and back for a glimpse, however, and some friends have a camp that was deeper into the zone of totality. From there, we’d have a bit more than 2.5 minutes of total eclipse. I’d already bought glasses well ahead of the day, just on the off chance that it would come together, and we finalized our plans on Saturday. In the end, we drove up on Sunday afternoon, spent the night at the camp, and then had a nice relaxing morning as we waited for the eclipse to arrive.

It completely lived up to the hype, and I was very happy to have spent the time to go check out the totality.

Not that my experience is much different from everything else you’ve read about, but there’s a big distance between reading about it and living through it. At first, I was just impressed by how well astronomers can predict it. (I know I shouldn’t have been, because they can calculate all sorts of things when everything’s in constant, known motion along steady paths, but still.) 2:18pm came, and right on time, someone started nibbling the sun.

Bit by bit, the sun disappeared more and more. We got to see the crescent-shaped shadows, and we watched while the crystal clear, sunny sky became . . . muted. The sun was still there. If I hadn’t had the eclipse glasses, I wouldn’t have been able to see a difference, really. It’s just that everything looked like I’d put on sunglasses. The wind changed. And then I watched as the sun dwindled to a little tiny sliver that kept shrinking. It was darker, but still not stunning.

And then the sliver went away completely, and it was just plain eerie. You could look up at the sky and see this hole where the sun was supposed to be. We saw Venus and Jupiter, but I couldn’t make out Mars and Saturn, which were also supposed to be right in alignment at the same time. Those 2.5 minutes were unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before, which is one of the reasons why it’s so special. You might wish you could repeat the experience whenever you’d like, but you only get one shot at it, and it’s got a very defined beginning, middle, and end.

All in all, it was incredible. We stayed out until it was mostly over, though the time after the totality had passed wasn’t nearly as enthralling as the time leading up to it. Our drive home took about twice as long as it should have, due to the heavy (heavy) traffic on the way back. Even having given it a couple of hours before we left, we still were in bumper-to-bumper traffic for a good hour and change. The back roads of Maine just aren’t built for that many people. I heard that on the way up north yesterday morning, traffic was moving through town at the rate of twelve cars a minute. That’s pretty pokey.

Would I do it again? You bet! Would I plan a trip around a totality? Not sure. A lot of the country was covered in clouds, and I’d hate to go up and just see a cloudy sky. Whether I see one again or not, I’m really happy to have had the one I did get to experience. Truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Bryce’s Handy Guide to Snow Removal Procrastination

Having lived in Maine for the past decade and a half or so, I realize I have a lot more experience working with snow than most of the rest of you. (I’m looking at you, Arizona. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about Georgia or Texas, either.) Having just faced another round of removing more than a foot of snow this morning (yes, in April. Snow happens.), I thought it might be useful to the rest of you for me to fill you in on my personal approach to handling a lot of snow. As with many of my approaches to life’s challenges, it basically boils down to doing as little work as possible while still getting everything done that needs doing.

In the case of snow, this shouldn’t be all that complex. Snow falls from the sky. It starts. It stops. While there is a strong sentiment among some that you should do multiple passes of snow removal (shoveling, plowing, blowing, etc.), I stick with the most basic.

Once the snow stops, get rid of it.

Of course, this assumes that you’re not shoveling too much. As I recall, shoveling lots of snow at the same time is against the Geneva Convention, but maybe I got that mixed up at some point. If it’s not against it, it should be. Regardless, if you think you’re successfully going to shovel 20+ inches of snow from your driveway all at once, I know 20+ inches of snow that’s got a different idea. Also, your back will likely agree with it. So in that case, you’re going to be stuck doing it in manageable chunks.

(That was me my first year here in Maine. No snowblower. It was terrible.)

So to avoid that, get a snowblower if at all possible. If you’ve got one, remember that the rules that applied to shoveling don’t apply to blowing. For snowblowing, it all comes down to one simple maxim: as long as the snow isn’t deeper than the height of the front of your snowblower (the part the snow goes in), then just wait until the snow is done. With this in mind, make sure that front end is as tall as possible. In the storm a week or so ago, we ended up getting around 20 inches. Luckily, that was exactly as tall as my snow blower’s capacity for a single run, so I was just fine.

(What happens if you get more snow than that? You’ve got to make multiple passes with the snowblower. This is decidedly less than fun. However, tell me how this is any different than doing multiple snowblowing sessions. You’re still making . . . multiple passes with the snowblower.)

And that’s it. Just wait. Do it once. Of course, this also hinges on an important prerequisite to the approach: having a job that gives you snow days. And I guess I should have recognized I was writing from a place of privilege before I penned this little guide. Sorry about that . . .

Even then, the same basic principle applies. Getting rid of snow is one of the worst parts of snow. Do as little of it as absolutely necessary. I guarantee one thing with 100% certainty.

Sooner or later, it will just melt.