We’re going to start with the shovel because it’s been dumping snow this year, and I know there are some folks out there who want a quicker way to clear the snow from their driveways and walks. And, boy, do I have something for them.

I think it’s safe to say that the Brown family clears more snow by hand than the average American family. We have a driveway and street that together are a little over a tenth of a mile long. Here’s a picture.

We clear that lovely stretch of road by hand with shovels. (Yes, we are crazy; more on that below.) Most of the time we have it cleared long before any city plow shows up. But we love our city plows because they can do the heavy work at the edges on the bottom two-thirds. And they do all the work on that bottom part when it gets really heavy and deep. We love our neighbors with tractors who’ve come to our rescue as well.

Still, we do most of the clearing.

We began our mad shoveling craze for one simple reason: we couldn’t get to our house when it snowed. And it was a pain in the neck to hike that tenth of a mile.

Part of the problem is that we live on a hill, and there are a couple of steep stretches. Another part of the problem was that we had not availed ourselves of this higher technology called snow tires. We thought all-weather tires would do just as fine.

Wrong. Big wrong. They don’t even come close.

With all-weathers, on a hill, you have to keep the road clear. As in to the blacktop. Because once you build up even a small layer of snow, you’ll get slick patches, and then the all-weathers do nothing but spin.

But we didn’t discover that until a few years into it. And by that time, we’d learned that shoveling such a long drive was not only good exercise, but it also was a great way to teach our four girls how to work hard and not fear projects that seemed daunting.

I know some of you are thinking, dude, why not purchase a snow blower, or a pickup or four-wheeler with a plow?

Because snow blowers at the time, much less four wheelers and pickups, were out of our budget. Because I’d much rather spend the money on a family trip somewhere fun. Because why spend the money when you can line up as a family and create your own Brown Family Snow Blade and give your kids stories to tell their kids about living in the Gulag?

Anyway, it’s what we do. Fast forward now to this year. Three of our daughters have grown up and gone off to college. Nellie, my youngest daughter, and I can usually still get it done. But this year’s record snows kicked our butts. Royally.

Now, we’ve tried all sorts of shovels. I can guarantee, if it was at a store for sale, we’ve tried it. We’ve used brooms. We’ve used all sorts of configurations of girl, woman, and dad power. After all that experimentation, we found a standard push shovel to be the best for general snow and a square garden shovel to be the ticket for ice. But this year our trusty tools weren’t cutting it.

So, after one long day on the driveway, I went on line looking for a better shovel. And after looking at quite several contraptions, I found The Snowcaster.

You can see it in action below. It’s basically a plow. One made for a human to push.

When I saw it, I thought this thing had to be better than pushing shovels. So I ordered it and assembled it. The curved blade of incredibly hard plastic rises 9 inches above the ground and is three feet long. Its nifty design allows you to simply flip it to change the direction of the blade.

After using it these last six weeks on multiple snows of everything from ten inches of powder to three inches of watery slush, I will simply say that it’s amazing. It’s so good, I ordered a second unit.

The Snowcaster does have a limit—you’re not going to plow three-feet of snow with it. You’re not going to plow a build-up of two feet. If you’ve got a lot of wet snow over a large area, you will break a sweat. And sometimes you’ll still need a shovel to toss snow at the edges. But for moving large quantities of snow out of the way on asphalt or concrete, it’s the best thing I’ve found to date.

If you are like me and don’t want to purchase a machine just yet, have snow to move, and want to dramatically reduce the time it takes to move it while providing some fun for the kids, I think you’ll love The Snowcaster. I ordered mine directly from the company here: https://thesnowcaster.com/. The model I chose was the 70SNC. I wouldn’t suggest the long model unless you rarely get snows above three inches. I say this because on some days with lots of snow the three-footer was about all I could push.

Okay, onto the movies. I have two excellent ones to recommend. Both of which are based on true-life events.

The first is Denial, a British-American historical drama, that tells the story of how Deborah Lipstadt, a holocaust scholar, was taken to court for libel in Britain by David Irving, a man who claims the Holocaust never happened. In America, you’re always innocent until proven guilty. However, in Britain, with libel, the burden of proof is upon the defendant. So how do you prove you weren’t slandering someone? The movie was thrilling and fascinating. And gave you something to think about afterwards. If you enjoyed Woman in Gold, you’ll enjoy this.

The next is Hidden Figures, an American biographical drama, that tells the story of female African-American mathematicians at NASA. These women were employed as computers—that was their official job title. Of course, this was before electrical computers and calculators, and what they did amazes me. The story is about the USA struggling to catch up to the Russians in the space race, and how four of these women helped while dealing with deep-seated prejudice against Blacks and females. It is full of humor, poignant moments, and surprises. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen these last few years. I don’t know what to compare it to. All I know is that you will laugh, be amazed, become outraged, and cheer.

Lt. General Michael T. Flynn. Flynn is a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Assistant Director of National Intelligence and is now our National Security Advisor. If you want to understand how he is likely to advise the president about our war against radical Islam, let me recommend his book The Field of Fight. In the book, Flynn describes his background as an intelligence officer and how critical good intelligence is in this fight. He then describes his take on who the radical Islamist enemy is and how he thinks we can win the war against them. He shares several surprising insights that only someone with his experience can and reveals as well how good and smart leaders can disagree about strategy. One of his main points is that we will never win the war by killing bodies—this is an ideological war, much like the war we fought against communism. For those wanting to get past news blurbs and hear the man speak for himself at length, I think you’ll find this book interesting.

And because, Dear Reader, you read all the way to the end, I will give you two more movie recommendations. Moana is a great, fun, family film. La La Land is an enjoyable musical romance that will probably break your heart. It did mine.

Edit: I wrote this like a month ago and thought I posted it. But there is was in my drafts. Somebody give me some Ginko extract.

The Avengers

The Avengers is Marvel’s latest installment of the films in the Avenger world—Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). 

Iron Man is, by far, the BEST of all of them.  I thought Captain America might be just as good, but the movie lost its way about half way through.  The others are okay, not anything to jump up and down on the couch about. So while I was looking forward to seeing The Avengers, I wasn’t expecting anything special. I’m happy to tell you that The Avengers is good. Not as good as Iron Man, but much better than all the others.  And certainly well-worth the price of admission.

The earth is in possession of an artifact of immense power called the Tesseract, which isn’t a made-up name. In geometry a tesseract is a cubic prism—some four-dimensional thing which boggles the mind. But in this movie and Captain America, the tesseract is a blue cube that can open portals to different parts of the universe or run Nazi war machines.  The problem is that there are other beings in the universe.  Some of these would like to be able to run their own Nazi machines and subjugate all species on every planet.  So they get Loki, Thor’s adopted brother, to lead an army to raze the earth and retrieve the artifact.   

Of course, earth’s forces aren’t strong enough to repel this alien force. That is, unless you call upon the Avengers—Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. As well as Avengers who haven’t had their own movies yet like Black Widow, Hawk, and Nick Fury.

It all sounds a bit much, and in the hands of a lesser writer it might have been. But Joss Whedon (Serenity, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) wrote the script and directed the movie. And he did a fantastic job. Instead of thinking we came for a barrage of special effects, he takes time to build the characters and relationships so we care about the action when it arrives. He does use the idiot chaos cinema technique for some of the action, but not nearly as much as was in Hunger Games. More importantly, he makes up for the error of his ways with a number of laugh-out-loud moments. Hilarious moments.  In fact, the humor is one of the main reasons why this movie was so good.

If you like super hero movies, you’ll love The Avengers. Maybe not as much as you like Iron Man or Spider Man 2 or the Nolan Batman series. But close enough to have a great night out.

The Paris Grill

The Paris (Idaho) Grill has opened another restaurant in what used to be the Bear Lake Motor Lodge Cafe.  The cafe was okay. Nothing to write home about.  So I didn’t know what to expect with the new grill.  However, I took two of my daughters out last night for dinner.

The Paris Grill has four menus. I don’t know why they keep them separate, but they do. One for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and another for their pizzas.  We opted for the “Burgers n Pastas n Salads” menu which I guess is the lunch menu, but was what we ordered our dinner off of.

Confused yet?

Luckily, the food’s good enough that the menu business doesn’t matter. The lunch menu features a number of regular sandwiches—BLT, chicken cordon bleu, French dip.  But it also offers some signature sandwiches like a kielbasa and pepper sandwich, something called the Hobo Deli (which is tasty sounding combo of sour dough bread with pepper cheese, roasted turkey, bacon, grilled tomatoes, and cilantro dressing), as well as the Monster Grill—roast beef topped with caramelized onions and peppers, mushrooms, and provolone cheese.  I opted for the Monster Grill. My girls skipped the salads and ordered a hamburger and the chicken cordon bleu with mashed potatoes.

The first words out of my daughters’ mouth when eating the mashed potatoes were “ooh” and “yum.”  That was followed by another “ooh” and “yum.”  The potatoes were good.  And they were made from scratch.  The sandwiches were tasty as well.  Good enough that I’m going to go back to the grill to try their dinner menu with my wife.  

We topped the dinner off by splitting one of the grill’s big, hot cinnamon rolls.  The prices for the lunch items were reasonable—around seven or eight bucks—and they were big enough that the girls took half their meal home.  

If you’re in Garden City, Utah and looking for something besides burgers and shakes, try the grill.  I think you’ll be quite satisfied when you walk out the door.