Old one apparently gone to the dogs.

About two weeks ago, I realized that I couldn’t find my everyday watch.

I had four watches:

• A Swatch that I bought years ago when I didn’t mind plastic watchbands. I don’t wear it anymore.
• A Minnie Mouse watch that I bought in Disney World a few years back. I like it a lot, but with my failing vision, I can’t read it.
• A Bulova dress watch with a tiny rectangle face, four lines instead of 12 numbers, a tiny diamond at the 12 position, and a gold-tone band. This is my dress watch and I only wear it if I dress up and need to know the time. Which is so seldom, I pretty much never wear it.
• An Eddie Bauer watch. (No snide comments, please!) I got it on sale for $40 at an Eddie Bauer store. It was waterproof to 10 meters and came with three denim watch bands. Which was a good thing because it became my everyday watch and I wore out all the bands.

It was the Eddie Bauer watch that I’d lost. I wasn’t terribly upset. Although it was my everyday watch, I didn’t have much of an attachment to it. It’s not like it was a collector’s item or a keepsake. It was a cheap, functional watch.

How I Figured I’d Lost It

I figured I’d taken it off one day and left it on the kitchen table or on my desk. If you saw my kitchen table or desk, you’d recognize the black hole-like tendencies. I’m the queen of clutter and there’s a lot of junk just sitting around, waiting to be dealt with.

But when I cleared off the kitchen table and my desk, the watch wasn’t there.

So then I figured I’d left it on my night table and that it had fallen into the little waste paperbasket beside it and had been taken out with the trash. That’s how I probably lost my Pulsar dress watch years ago (although I do suspect my cleaning lady back then; she may have cashed in on my carelessness).

In any case, the watch was apparently gone for good. Minnie Mouse wasn’t going to cut it unless I added a magnifying lens over the watch crystal.

It was time for a new watch.

Zulu Time

I’m a pilot and thought it might be nice to have a watch that also told Zulu Time. Zulu Time is the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and it doesn’t adjust for daylight savings time. In Arizona, it’s always 7 hours after current time (because we don’t have daylight savings time either). So if it’s 9 AM in Arizona, it’s 4 PM GMT or 1600 hours Zulu.

And yes, I can do the math in my head. But I figured, why not get a watch that just tells me Zulu time.

I did some research. Women’s watches, in general, are pretty useless. Faces too small, often too ornate. So I concentrated on men’s watches. But I have a pretty small wrist and they’d likely look ridiculous on me.

Long story short, I found the Torgeon T15 ladies watch. It has a big face, but not as big as the men’s version. It has numbers and hands that are big enough to see and read. It also has the date and a nice precision second hand. But what makes it a pilot’s watch is the red Zulu Time hand. It travels at half-speed around the dial, pointing to an inner scale of numbers from 1 to 24. When set properly, it points to the hour of zulu time.

Notice I said “when set properly”? That’s because I couldn’t set it. I tried five times. For a while the damn hand decided it was going to hide behind the hour hand and ride it around the dial.

But Mike, my husband, collects watches and knows a lot about them. The other day, he set it for me. So now I’m good until July 1, when I need to change the date. I’ll probably just keep it a day off until I see him again.

Postscript on that Eddie Bauer Watch

About two days after I got the new watch, I dipped into the big dog cookie box in the cabinet to pull out a bedtime treat for Jack the Dog. Mike buys certain things at Costco, so they come in really big boxes. The dog cookies are in a big box.

I stuck my hand in and felt something that definitely wasn’t a dog cookie. Could it be? I pulled my hand out, grasping my old Eddie Bauer watch. The band had broken.

Now you might think that this is odd. After all, there’s really only one way that watch could have gotten into the box: I’d reached in for a cookie weeks before and had pulled out a cookie while leaving the watch, which had been on my wrist, behind. How, you might ask, could I possibly not notice my watch falling off?

I wish I had an answer for you.

Maybe my subconscious mind had just decided it was time for a new watch.