Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford Ellen Ashford · July 9, 2026
I once logged a moonphase purchase in my collecting journal as “practical” — a word I had to cross out three months later when I actually tried using the thing to track anything. That entry was for a $310 dress watch I bought at an antique mall outside Salem, convinced its little crescent disc would … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 8, 2026
Don’t trust a journal entry until you’ve flipped the page. That shadowy double of yesterday’s handwriting rising up through today’s paper is the single most common complaint I field from other people who write daily with a dip or cartridge pen — and it fooled me for years before I finally sorted out what was … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 8, 2026
Sitting in my pen cup at this very moment is a Pelikan M200 with a faint ghost of iron gall staining near the feed — a scar left by a clog that took three full weeks of soaking to undo. That pen is also the reason strangers write to me more often about clogs than … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 7, 2026
Four time zones deep into a single work trip, doing arithmetic on hotel lobby carpet, and the watch on my wrist could tell me exactly one thing: the time in the city I’d left three days earlier. I miscalculated call times twice that week and showed up mentally twelve hours removed from everyone I was … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 6, 2026
The nib sits bent sideways in my palm right now — tines splayed apart where a notebook spiral caught them and yanked hard, a $120 lesson in what happens when a Pilot Custom 74 rides loose in a jacket pocket like spare change. That’s roughly how careless my carry used to be: pens tangled in … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 6, 2026
Scroll through enough watch forums and you’ll bump into two flatly contradictory pieces of advice about chronograph pushers. One camp tells beginners to just mash the buttons and let muscle memory sort it out. The other insists you should never touch a pusher on an unfamiliar caliber without first reading the manual cover to cover. … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 5, 2026
Forty-seven dollars. That’s the entire sum that changed hands at a Cincinnati flea market for the first watch I ever bought with actual intention — a battered Seiko 5, crystal full of hairline scratches, bracelet so tight it yanked arm hair with every twist of the wrist. I strapped it on and didn’t take it … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 5, 2026
Should you buy the automatic or train yourself to wind the other kind daily? After a decade of watch meets and forum threads, my honest answer is that most people arguing this are arguing the wrong question. They treat it like a contest with a single winner, when what actually decides it is how often … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 4, 2026
Two years into this hobby, I made a rule for myself: nothing under $80, because anything cheaper had to be junk. I held to that rule right up until a friend handed me a $28 pen she’d bought on a whim, and it outperformed three of my “serious” pens on the spot. That rule cost … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 4, 2026
Fountain Pen Buying Guide Under $50: Nib Sizing, Fill Systems, and 8 Pens Worth Buying Ten years ago, I dismissed fountain pens as nostalgic affectations. Then I spent $35 on a pen that changed everything. The smoothness of the nib, the intentionality of every stroke—it wasn’t a gimmick. It was better than ballpoints in ways … Read more