X-Country Skiing today

This is Janet just finishing off the emergency scraping of her skis. 
We skied across our local lake with Jan leading the way.  The snow looked perfectly okay on the surface, but it had invisibly soaked up water, probably from a crack in the ice.  Jan skied into it and the water froze onto the base of her skis. 
Normally, if you ski on, the ice quickly wears away but this time there was just too much ice, or it was just too cold, but the ice stuck there, taking away all the glide and weighing down each ski.
We were only out for a short trip, and it was the first real trip of the season, so we had none of the usual equipment, such as the scraper we needed.  But Jan was as creative as ever and fished out her keys, with an attached metal bottle opener.  It wsn't the world's best scraper but it much better than anything else we had with us so after about 15 minutes of scraping the base and sides clear of ice Jan was ready to put on the skis again. A last scrape of the slot for the front of the boot (pictured here) and we were off again.
Another grey day but having just read how Moscow only got 6 minutes of sun in December I won't complain.