Ooops! I Need Some Tissue for My Blade Issue!

What with 3 bouts of shingles since August and two knee injections since March, I haven't skated much this year. Are you surprised that I kind of forgot to stay on top of my sharpenings?

I was on ice Friday, barely able to get an edge. I was skittering all over the place.  It wasn't helped by the fact the ice was too cold for figure skating.  Ice as rock hard as diamond. I had to really work hard to maintain control.

When I got off ice I checked my blades.

Yes, they were d.u.l.l. And it's 3 weeks until my skate tech comes back.

I feel like doing this to myself:

I know what you're all thinking:

Yeah, I think that too!

Skating on Sharp Blades

So I went to the rink to skate on public and break in my new sharpening on my dance boots. This was my experience:

It felt like tentacles were reaching up from the ice and grabbing my blades, pulling me down, down, down, into a living hell.

Fortunately, I have pictures:

Evil Picture

Rising from the Cthulu mythos, come the cursed slime tentacles of the Evil One. Arms of of the Great Gods , they slide between the grains of sand until they merge into ice, creeping into the breath of the good earth, reaching into steel of the mystic edge blades of the ice dancer.*

* Yeah, I wasted some brain cells in the 60's reading Lovecraft.

Banal Picture

"Crap, I'm stuck"

Fortunately, after an hour of tooling around, the blades are manageable. Stops are still a bittch though.