Pandemic Watch Purchases

I’ve been doing an inventory of all the things I’ve bought since the city went into lockdown on March 14. I had assumed that quarantine had made me cut my consumption down considerably but as I go through the process of counting my acquisitions I realized that I am still amassing a large amount of things. Let’s start with watches, shall we? Granted, three of the four pictured above were acquired in a trade, so maybe I’m not spending as much, but still. The Tian Harlan watch was an eBay win that has its own curious story. That’s four new (but very cool) timepieces.

As part of my inventory, I am also drawing all of my panedemic purchases. It’s kind of like writing lines on a chalkboard because it makes you think a little harder about what you’ve done. Notes on these three timepieces, the Longines cocktail watch was part of the same trade mentioned above, the Timex Snoopy Marlin is a brand spanking online buy and the dainty Universal Geneve was technically purchased in the Before Times as a birthday present to myself, but it arrived with a broken lug and I wasn’t able to have it repair until the city moved into phase 2 (which we have just returned to).

Speaking of going back into lockdown, I did a few thrift shop runs before everything closes down again. I got these two working windups on my jaunts. On the left is a 1960s Gruen Geneve Precision. It is very handsome. On the right is a 1987 assembled in the Philippines Timex. I think this was pretty much the last hurrah of mechanical watchmaking for Timex until the company’s reintroduction of automatic mechanisms like the Snoopy pictured above. I got my start in vintage collecting with Timexes. And goodness knows I loves me some Peanuts.

Unfortunately, 2020 and the Pandemic are far from over. In fact, I won an eBay auction for a freaky Seiko that has not arrived yet.