Today I’ll prepare and dry rub a rack of babybacks for tomorrow, Labor Day, a day demanding the sacrifice of grilled and smoked meats, home-made barbecue sauce, potato salad, corn on the cob, and possibly a nice Costco apple pie. But first the walking of the dogs, followed by weekly bird bath maintenance.
To wit:
Maybe it’s the time of the year, but the amount of algae that grew in our birdbath over the past several days was crazy. I scrubbed so hard I hurt both elbows, and two minutes after refilling it a pigeon sat on the rim and shat in it.
Speaking of labor, daughter Polly never did hear back from her new employer (which turns out not to be Amazon but a subcontractor called PillPack, which sounds a lot like cold-calling sales work to me but never mind), and the work-from-home computer setup they sent her sits idle in a corner of our living room. The level of frustration, mine at any rate, is approaching eleven. When I snap, it’s gonna be a doozy. But you don’t want to hear about that.
I posted a photo of my watch collection and a friend noticed they aren’t all keeping time. He mentioned it in a comment, then said he’d stand by for my usual verbose explanation. Which isn’t verbose at all. The ones that run on batteries show the correct time; the ones that have to be wound have run down and stopped.
I visit a subreddit, r/watches, where fellow enthusiasts post photos of their wristwatches, and can report the existence of collectors who actually wind and set each watch in their collection, sometimes two or three dozen at once, to the same time, just to get a perfect photo. That’s a level of OCD I can only salute from afar. Bravo, gentlemen. I won’t be joining you on that lofty plateau.
I wear my watches in rotation, a different one every day. Obviously the battery-powered quartz watches are the easiest. They keep perfect time and never stop, so all I have to do is buckle the strap. The mechanical watches, though, need to be wound and set, a ritual that’s part of the fun of wearing them. The days I put on wind-up watches are just a little more special than the days I don quartz, and you can bet I’ll be wearing one of the “real” ones as I man the smoker on Labor Day.
Gotta say, even with everything going down the tubes at Twitter (X being halfway to a swastika, eh, Elon?), I don’t see a lot of porny TikTokish crap there. I see tons of it on Bluesky and Threads. To be fair (checking the box for obligatory Letterkenny references), I have yet to curate my timeline … whom I follow and whom I don’t … on those two platforms. Mostly because I don’t care. Too much work for not enough return.
Stay fresh, cheese bags!
Do you have any self winding watches? I know one friend who has a special case for his that rotates them so they never run down.