New Watch Alert Part 1

I’m an impulsive watch buyer. Sometimes I’ll pick something up just because it piques my curiosity. Last week I went on a bit of a fun watch bender though. I went to a watch swap event and traded some merch for this super cool 1990s Seiko Avenue chronograph. I’m still trying to research this line but this is what I know so far: it was introduced as an accessibly priced collection marketed toward the youth. This is reflected in its post modern aesthetic. Its functions are written on the dial. One of the complications listed says “direction” and there is a compass subdial but I can’t figure out how to use it.

I also got this crazy EuTour Minimalist watch. It looks very much like the Bradley eOns braille watch although it doesn’t technically function as one. It uses magnets to move tiny ball bearings around two tracks to indicate hours and minutes. There is no crystal. One day I would like a proper eOne. Sometimes you just gotta take a chance.

Not technically a swap, but I stopped into a discount store on my way to the meet up and bought two New Old Stock Phillipe Stark by Fossil watches. Both timepieces date from 2008. I’m always intrigued by architect designed objects — even my cane was created by Michael Graves, so I snapped them up. The store installed a fresh battery in this grey one and it started up straight away.

The second Stark is a digital LCD watch. The shop that I bought it from didn’t have the right sized battery for it so I took it to a watch repair place near my dentist (side note: always take of your teeth because fillings are very expensive). He put in a fresh power source but the watch only flickered a bit. He said that sometimes it took a while for old LCDs to come back to life but there was no guarantee that it would ever work again. I decided to pay for the battery anyway as an experiment. It’s been almost a week and the display comes and goes. I keep checking in on it like hen waiting for an egg to hatch.

This is what the time should look like. Very futuristic.