Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford · July 29, 2026
What Happens Before the Caseback Ever Comes Off Almost every new collector assumes a watch’s ticking is just ambient noise — something you eventually stop hearing altogether. That assumption is backwards. The very first thing I do with any watch I don’t already know is bring it to my ear and shut my eyes. It’s … Read more
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 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
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 3, 2026
Spec sheets will hand you beats-per-hour figures, accuracy tolerances down to the decimal, and battery-life estimates measured in years — but none of that paperwork tells you what it’s actually like to live with the thing strapped to your wrist. I got a real education in that gap at a cramped repair bench in Kyoto, … Read more