The Ice Palace seemed like a true outdoor rink today.

An outdoor rink near the end of the skating season, that is.

Even though Riverfront Park's open-air ice surface is artificially chilled, the warm wind makes it all but impossible to keep it from turning into a bit of a pond.

You could still skate though. And a couple dozen of us did just that.

The guy who drives the ice resurfacing machine told me he had sucked up a phenomenal amount of water before the public skating session. But he admitted he was fighting a losing battle.

One hoodie-clad boy who looked to be about 13 fell in the middle of a wet patch and soaked up what seemed like gallons of frigid water. When he got up, he looked like he wanted his mother to magically appear and provide him with dry clothes.

If all the other kids had done that it might have mopped up a fair amount of the standing water. But I suppose I would have gotten dirty looks if I had suggested that.

The ice was a little soft at the Riverfront Park rink this morning.

It was perfectly fine for skating. They do a good job at the Ice Palace. Someone who hasn't skated much wouldn't even notice. And with the weather we're having, it certainly was to be expected.

There are two schools of thought about whether soft ice makes skating easier, if not as efficient physics-wise. But I suspect it didn't seem soft to the kids who fell. And fall, several of them did.

It's a wonder anyone ever learns to ice skate, the joys of going down hard on an unyielding surface being limited as they are.

For young children, though, the falling distance isn't all that great. So most of them keep getting back up. (A few crawl off and never look back.)

I wanted to tell this one little boy (a repeat faller) that he really had guts. But it was apparent that he was concentrating and I didn't want to distract him.

Saw some skaters on the Canon Hill pond this afternoon.

Looked like fun. But it reminded me of my late father's warnings about natural ice.

In a nutshell, here was his message:

Skate too early in the season and you will fall through the ice and die.

Skate too late in the season and you will fall through the ice and die.

He believed bad decisions had consequences.

Dana Freeborn mentioned 1961's “Snow White and the Three Stooges,” 1970's “Love Story,” 1983's “Curtains,” 1996's “Happy Gilmore,” and 2005's “King Kong.”

And Kristi Kurle wrote, “I think girls will say 'Ice Castles' and guys will say 'Miracle on Ice,' but my favorite is 'The Cutting Edge.'”