Bad Ice

I went to the evening public session to get some practice time in. When I got there I discovered the ice was in truly amazingly bad shape. First, one entire end of the rink was coned off. As I got out to skate, my buddy Veronica pointed out a big pond in the middle of the side by the hockey scorekeeper booth. We're talking about a half-inch of water, no joke. Then, in skating around a bit I almost fell when I hit a patch of "sticky" ice, which on closer examination had white paint coming up! As if this weren't bad enough, they had the regular lights off and just the disco lights on.

I went into the office to complain, and they said that one of the compressors had failed and they were keeping the lights off to keep the temperature down. They sent someone out to cone off the sticky patch I found. I skated for a few more minutes until I found a patch of ice that the kids seemed to skate on just fine, but when I hit it I almost fell again, it was sticky. It appeared that the ice was of the correct thickness so that 200-lb. Gordon's blades went through to the paint, but the 70 lb. kids didn't. That was pretty much the last straw. I decided that it was an accident just begging to happen (reason prevailed at last), so I went and took off my skates and went to the office and asked for my money back. They gave me a pass (they don't give cash refunds). What a waste of time.

Just before I left, I bumped into Luz, one of my former classmates from last fall. She has been off the ice for a while and just got back into skating. I warned her about the ice; she said she'd check it out. It was nice to see another adult; hopefully I'll see her next week.