Expense Report #12

What a brutal day. Best to stay indoors with AC if you can. Supposedly we're going to have some more comfortable weather coming along after tomorrow, at least for a couple of days. I know there are plenty of people who will be angry with me for saying this, but I've already kind of had it with summer. The heat and humidity arrived early this year, plus I think it's just part of getting older; I'm much less able to tolerate discomfort than I did when I was younger.

Anyway, I bought another watch this past week. It's a vintage Seiko automatic from the late 1960s, when the brand was little known in this country. (I don't even know if their watches were sold in the US back then; many of the ones for sale on eBay are from either Singapore or the Philippines, which would suggest they were primarily sold in Asia.) They made many excellent watches during this period that are not especially difficult to find now, and also are not prohibitively expensive, which is great if you're starting a collection or looking to add a specific watch to one.

I've been looking for one of this model for well over a year, since I saw one for sale on a vintage watch site for $200 and knew I could find one for less. In fact I ended up paying $65 for a watch that is in fine cosmetic and mechanical condition, has been cleaned and serviced, and has a new crystal, so it was an excellent deal, and it came from a US seller. Better yet, I'm paying for it with saved change that I rolled over the weekend and will be depositing into my account this week. I'll have more to say about this particular watch when the next Watch Wednesday rolls around.

I also bought a couple of watch straps from The Watch Prince in Oregon, and that would have been it for the week, except for one other thing. A long, long time ago, I sent a watch to be serviced. One of my coworkers had mentioned a repair place in her town, and offered to bring the watch in on my behalf. I seriously think it was about two years ago. It was a watch that I had damaged several years ago through my own carelessness (I stupidly banged on a stubborn paper towel dispenser with my left hand, and caused something inside the watch case to come loose), but after the repair person had a look, he found some other issues. He offered to fix everything for $175, which was very fair considering Alpha Omega had quoted me $500 to $600 a few years before, and they weren't even going to do the work in-house (which is why I was looking for another repair place to begin with).

And sure enough, the call came this past week that the watch was finally ready. I suppose I could have waited a bit to pick it up, but I really wanted it back. Given the amount of time involved and the updates I had received from the repair person along the way, I expected the final bill to be higher, but he charged me exactly what he had quoted me originally. So I guess I'll be featuring this watch in the future as well.

And, okay, no more watches for a while, I guess.