Vintage 1959 Seiko Cronos

Here is another vintage watch from Seiko. Seiko produced a lot of watch models including the Liner, Crown, Laurel, Sportsmatic, Weekdater, Champion, Actus (which is actually a Seiko 5), etc. Of course, the more popular lines like Seiko 5, Lord Marvel, Lord Matic (LM), Bell-Matic, King Seiko (KS), and Grand Seiko (GS) along with AGS and Kinetic remain very much in circulation. This one's a Cronos from 1959.

Simple dial with baton hands and distinctive hour markers that seem to be carved into the face

Side view showing the crown

The other side view

Case back bearing the Cronos name

Close-up of the dial. Instead of raised or numbered hour markers, this watch features etches on the dial.

Signed Seikosha hand wound movement - I have not checked exactly what movement caliber this is but I assume that it runs at 18,000 beats per hour, which is the most common for the period when the watch came out.

Inside of the case back bears the serial number and the Suwa logo. Based on the serial number, this watch was manufactured in June 1959.

Wrist shot of the watch

 

I have not had the chance to time how long the watch will run when fully wound. It has a decent power reserve though based on the fact that it runs overnight after I retire it for the day and keeps time. I will update this post once I get a fair measurement of its power reserve. 

 

[I sold this watch last week. It is another watch that didn't get worn considering others in my collection that I favored using. 9/26/2023]

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Guilty pleasures: Spanish style sardines

I was taking stock of our food reserves for the quarantine period. Most of these are bottled or canned goods. Our usual stock (for typical rainy days or emergencies) doubled for the enhanced quarantine period as we wanted to assure our household that we had food to eat just in case markets and supermarkets were closed or had restricted operations. It turned out that these were all open albeit only during the day because of the curfew so we ended up with a significant food cache.

Among the food we have on stock are several bottles of sardines I bought from my last travel to Zamboanga last January 2020. I am usually on the lookout for high quality sardines and Zamboanga definitely has these with fishing as one of the major industries of this city surrounded by the Sulu Sea to the west and the Moro Gulf to the east. The last time I had sardines this good outside of the locally-made bottled sardines in the supermarkets was when my friends gave me top quality sardines from Dipolog, where many if not most of the top quality sardines are canned or bottled. I bought my supply of sardines at the famous Alavar Seafood Restaurant, which had their brand products for sale. These had to be checked in for our flight back to Manila as airlines don't allow them to be hand-carried.

Spanish style sardines from Zamboanga City

I eat what I believe is a healthy serving of sardines, which is once in a while and not often. I used to have my own stash while I was living in Japan in the 1990s. Those were the Victorias spanish sardines that I love. My parents even found a way of sending me cans of sardines through engineers my father sent to Japan for training. In gratitude, I would show them around Tokyo and Yokohama and treat them to nice meals (welcome breaks from the usual meals they had at the training center canteens). More on sardines in future posts!

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Garden photos: Golden Tortoise Beetle

It seemed to me that I was running out of things to write about. It turns out there's a lot more to write about and with pictures to share. Here is one of my subjects for my recent interest in nature. The amateur photography employs my iPhone 8. This interest was encouraged by an app developed by National Geographic in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences. We begin the month of May with what I think are among my better photos of a subject: the Golden Tortoise Beetle, which has the Americas as its origin.

You can download Seek from the app store. It is easy to use and child-friendly so you can have your little one explore and learn about plants, insects and animals. It's not perfect so don't expect that it can identify all those specimens immediately and accurately (e.g., domestic dog for any of your dogs even your pure breeds).

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