It's About Time

Or, more precisely, it's about timepieces. These timepieces, to be exact:

I'm not sure when I started finding watches so interesting. (Which, come to think of it is kind of ironic.) I do know that there was a time in college when I wore 2 watches at a time (no pun intended), but I haven't done that for quite a while.

But, along the way, I started collecting watches. Not that I went out and bought them, but I just sort of started to have them show up in my life. And, no, I also did not shoplift them. One was handed down to me, a few were gifts, and I probably did buy a couple of them.

I'm not like the people who collect shoes and wear a different pair every day, though. In fact, there are long periods when I'll only wear one specific watch for weeks at a time without switching to another. Which is probably why -- as my collection gradually became smaller as one suffered a broken winding stem, one lost its crystal, the hand-wound got over-wound, the non-Fossil fossil watch simply stopped, and the Timex simply wouldn't run (but I don't want to send it back to Timex, because they'll probably just replace it, when I just simply want it fixed) -- I didn't immediately get them fixed.

But then Mickey's arms stopped moving. The Cat could no longer decide to Play, Eat or Nap. The London Underground wound down (that's really fun to say). The pocket watch went back into the pocket to stay.

Eventually, the Theory of Relativity stopped being relevant. The new Disneyland one stopped. And the Kodak-sponsored Olympian had its photo-finish. (In an a twist in the space-time continuum, the Relativity watch was actually last to go, even though it's not the farthest right in the picture.)

Suddenly, I was down to just one working watch. And, while I really like the tank-style and all, something needed to change.

I grew up working in my Dad's Drugstore, and I hate paying the folks in mall stores close to $10 per watch to change the batteries. So today I took the life of my thumb into my hands, grabbed a small pair of scissors and started popping the backs off my watches. (I am happy to report that I only drew one small dot of blood.) With my list of batter numbers in hand, I headed to Batteries Plus, where the guy behind the counter only did a couple of double-takes when I put 7 watch batteries on the counter.

Back at home, re-powering the watches went pretty smoothly. I may have dented the back casing of one of them which didn't watnt to close, but overall it wasn't bad. And as I flipped them over, I got to see them all running, again.

So now I have 8 working watches. Only 5 more to go. But I guess, for now, 8 will have to do.