Fencing with style if not skill

Much to my joy, my fancy new fencing mask (seen below) arrived in Kingston on Wednesday. I ordered this stylin' FIE range mask from Leon Paul USA partly because I dug the free shipping. Hey! It's free! With the Canadian dollar being pretty strong, the mask, I figured, would be a fair bit cheaper than a similar quality mask purchased in Canada. As it turned out I saved only a bit, if anything at all, because I didn't figure in the duty charges and the $5 service charge levied by Customs (on top of taxes) but that is ok. What caused me much grief, however, was the fact that it took forever to get to me. When it was sent out from London I was told it would take two to four days. Excellent! I would have it in time for the RMC tournament. It didn't. It wasn't here for the Brock tournament the following week. It got to Toronto in two days but then it sat there. And sat there. And sat. All while I watched through the handy-dandy tracking service provided. If I couldn't actually see it just stalled in Toronto I probably wouldn't have been so irritated. I contacted the courier company and they said they would look into it. I contacted the Leon Paul guy, who was very nice and a quite apologetic (even though it wasn't his fault at all). I dunno if it got held up at customs or got lost in the shuffle or what the deal was but it took just shy of a month for me to get it in my hot little hands. But it is here and that is all that matters to me now. No longer will I have to use my first mask (seen on the top) which (a) has had a flaw in one section of the mesh which caused it to fail the safety test from day one, a point I was initially ignorant of until it was too late to do anything about it; (b) has started to rust in several places; and (c) has required duct tape from where the rubber bit around the front part of the mask is coming up and most recently from where a hit on the bib part took a chunk out of it. I doubt that the new mask will make me a better fencer, but it will protect me from getting a sword in my left eye and it will make me look better out there on the piste. And hey, fencing is, if nothing else, a style sport.
rgsc