I like my new watch!

I haven't had a watch for the longest time. Who needs one, when your cell phone, computer, microwave, car, and just about everything else already keeps time for you? However, I've been keeping an eye out for something really special... something that shows the moon cycles, or has a horizon with sun and moon keeping time above it, or something like that. I can't honestly say why I would want my watch to tell me what the moon and sun are doing, but I do. I really do.

While I was at Target I found this fisherman's watch. It's something really special.

It's impossible to make out in the picture, but see that circle, above the hours' column? That shows the phases of the moon, with four different parentheses-shapes (nested pairs) marking eighth-phases. Right now, all four bars are solid (dark), showing a new moon. All four blank (white) would be a full moon. I can hit one of the shoulder buttons and it will tell me what day of the lunar cycle it is (the first). Hurrah!

But that's not all. See the wave-shaped section to the right of it? That's supposed to be a tide marker - you feed in your longitude and the delay between the azimuth of the moon and high tide, and voila! But I have no use for a tide marker, and by putting my delay to 0:00, it tells me when the moon is directly overhead or on the other side of the earth! How you like my little watch now?!

But that's not all. If I hit another shoulder button, it will tell me what angle off true North the sun is. That's supposed to be to find true North, but since I usually have a pretty good idea of where North is, it can tell me where the sun is instead (usually, that's pretty obvious, eh? But not when it's overcast). I hit the button accidentally somewhat frequently, so maybe if I look at it enough, I'll start to build a mental databank of what direction the sun is at different times of day. That would be a useful skill!

I like my new watch!