Just after Christmas, back home in Ireland the weather turned really cold and frosty. Roger had always wanted to go ice skating, but to get an ice rink we had to use our imagination. Then the ingenious McBear came up with a brilliant solution: We asked our owners to leave an oven tray out in the garden and fill it with water. Roger couldn't wait until the next day...

While Roger started practicing pirouettes, the rest of us watched and admired Roger's elegant style.

Dublin, January 2010

As the snow kept pouring down for the next week in a most unusual way for Irish standards, McBear, Roger and Tom had another look out the window.
"It's now or never!" Roger said. "The snow has started to thaw, so now is the time if we want to build a snow man in our own garden!"
"Why build a snow man?" Tom argued "We want to build a SNOW BEAR!"
"Oh... yes, of course!" Roger agreed. "We'll build a snow bear! Let's initiate Operation SNOW BEAR!"

McBear and Roger managed to mobilize half an army of bears for Operation Snow Bear. We needed to shovel quite a lot of snow to build a huge snow bear. Now, the problem was that we only had 3 small shovels from our mountaineering equipment when we went to Jasper in 2009. We also had a small shovel that size-wise would fit Irving. It was a shovel used for Creme de la Mer face creme.
"It's a kind of shovel that female humans use to shovel creme onto their face," McBear explained.
"NO, McBear!" Olivia corrected him. "Women do not SHOVEL creme - they PAT it carefully!"
Since we were short of bear sized shovels, McBear went inside and borrowed spoons and teaspoons from our owners.

Dublin, January 2010

We shoveled two lots of snow to make sure we had enough. Then we built a huge snow bear. Now, we didn't have any bear sized carrots for the snow bear's nose, but Dr. Bath proposed that we'd use the tip from a red biro. We didn't have a tall black hat either, but decided to use one of our gondolier hats from Venice. You wouldn't normally see many snow bears in Venice, so the hat in a way was a bit misleading.
For the snow bear's sweeping brush, McBear cut a tooth brush in two halves and mounted the brush part on a metal bar.
"What's the green thingie at his ear?" Kevin wanted to know. "It looks like a human sized piece of rubber eraser.
"C'mon!!!" McBear was teasing. "Have you no imagination? It's his MOBILE PHONE! In these hi-tech times we have to update snow men and snow bears too."