Oh, I do love skating. We had this special snow shovel that worked sort of like a push broom that we would use to clear the ice in front of the house for skating. Dad messed about with a floor polisher to make it an ice smoother for those winters when the lake froze on a windy day (bumpy ice makes for bad skating). We would string Christmas lights round a big cleared square of ice and run a loudspeaker down from the house. Then Dad would build a big bonfire on the ice and we would  roast hot dogs and marshmallows and skate and ice dance for the 3-4 hours it would take for the bonfire to melt through the ice and fall into the lake.  I spent hundreds of hours on the ice and in all that time never once did I wear a pair of ice skates as improbably sexy hot as these new skates from Bax Coen.  Of course, no jacket of mine was a fancy and outright impractical as this jacket from Bare Rose either – it was too cold for such silliness. Thanks be that Second Life winters are more forgiving.

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