Goalkeeping might be an expensive career

Among the gifts under the Christmas tree for Ottawacker Jr. this past December 24 was a pair of Storelli goalkeeping gloves.

They are quite expensive ($80) and were purchased because (a) I knew he would love them; (b) they look like the gloves Allison Becker wears; (c) I figured that $80 for gloves that last 2 seasons would be better than buying eight pairs of cheap gloves that seem to develop a hole in them the moment they go over a finger.

Down into the basement we went; out came the mats, and Ottawacker Jr. dived hither and thither, pushing away the ball and getting a work out as well as he could. 

The next day, as I went down to do the laundry, I noticed a bit of black on the floor. My first thought was that it was a dead spider - or maybe a stray rabbit had got into the basement and taken a dump just for fun. It turned out to be neither. It was a piece of foam from Ottawacker Jr's goalie glove. I looked around and also found other pieces... I mean, WTF? What the actual F?

So I have obviously written a strongly worded reprimand to the store from which these were bought and shall be conducting various social media hate campaigns should I not receive satisfaction. I mean, really.

On the plus side, as I was taking my morning constitutional, I noticed it was garbage pick up day. At the top of our road, somebody had left around 15 big boxes, with a note: "Hardback books: Not recyclable according to City of Ottawa website: please take with garbage."

I hovered around for a minute thinking, and then decided that this was an opportunity too good to turn up. So I opened a box and saw around 50 novels. That was it - off I went, picked up the car, and loaded them all in. 

Mostly it was either crap (and can be recycled, so will be when it is our paper recycling next week); some of it was good - a whole series of C.S. Forester novels which I have been thinking of reading for a while; some of it was very good: 1912 first edition of Paine's biography of Mark Twain, for example. 

Why do people throw this stuff out? 

___________

Update: I love Storelli. They are the greatest. Buy Storelli now.
They called and let me know they would replace and upgrade the gloves immediately. So, kudos to them.
Interesting to see what sort of upgrade it would be; maybe they'll throw in a goalkeeper too.