Shortly after we arrived in San Diego, I took my favorite watch to Ben Bridge Jewelers in Fashion Valley to have have it serviced. The watchmaker there, Israel Coughlin, had serviced Donna’s watch a couple of years ago.  I have an affinity for mechanical self-winding watches. Their intricate design and precise workmanship fascinates me. They have their drawbacks though. A mechanical watch will never be as accurate as a quartz movement. It also needs to be disassembled, cleaned and lubricated periodically. On the plus side, it doesn’t need a battery.

The heart of a mechanical watch is the balance wheel. Different designs oscillate at different frequencies, ranging from 2.5 hertz to 5 hertz. The balance wheel swings back and forth – for example it rotates clockwise to a certain point, then stops and rotates back counter-clockwise. The full back and forth motion is called an oscillation. The movement in one direction (half an oscillation) is called a vibration.

Bear with me here. A watch with a balance wheel frequency of 2.5 hertz ticks five times per second or 18,000 vibrations per hour (vph). The most common frequency is 4 hertz – 28,800 vph. Some watches are 5 hertz which tick 10 times per second or 36,000 vph. The reason I’m going through all of this is to illustrate how even a slight discrepancy in the oscillation of the balance wheel can add up quickly. A fine mechanical watch may have an error of a couple of minutes per month. When you realize that over 690,000 timing events (ticks) of the watch occur every 24 hours, it’s an amazing feat to keep the total timing error down to a couple of minutes per month.

Israel didn’t service my watch due to the heavy workload he had scheduled. Instead he sent it to the Rolex Factory Service Center. They disassembled the watch completely, put the components through an ultrasonic cleaning process and inspected all of the parts. They polished the case and bracelet, reassembled it with special lubricants and calibrated the balance wheel.

Israel called me Tuesday evening and told me my watch was ready for pick-up. They’d had it for five weeks. So on Wednesday, Donna and I drove to Fashion Valley Mall and picked up the watch. It looks like brand new! The only part they replaced was the bezel – it had a couple of fine scratches and was starting to fade a bit. The polishing of the case and bracelet looks fantastic. I’m glad to have my Rolex GMT Master II back again!

I had another phone call Tuesday evening. I had reserved a rental car from Enterprise in Pacific Beach a little over a mile away from here. They told me they expected to be extremely busy Wednesday morning – San Diego is one of the nation’s most popular Thanksgiving destinations – and advised me to come early. They were closing at noon on Wednesday and I originally set my pick-up time as 11:30am.

Donna dropped me off at 10am and took the Spyder to pick up some last-minute items at Trader Joe’s. She commented on how empty the Enterprise lot looked. When I went into the office, the manager pulled up my reservation and then said there would be a short wait as they didn’t have any cars but were expecting some soon.

After about 20 minutes of waiting, she asked if I would be willing to take a ride with one of their employees to another location to get the car. They had a car at the Little Italy location just south of the airport. By the time we went there and I got a car and drove back to Mission Bay, I’d been out for over an hour! So much for the advice to come early. I think I would have been better off coming at the original time – maybe they would have had cars by then.

Thursday morning I spatchcocked our Thanksgiving turkey. Spatchcocking is a method of cooking whole fowl by removing the backbone and flattening the breast. This puts the breast, thighs and legs along the same plane and about the same thickness. It cooks more evenly and also takes less time to roast.

I spiced the turkey and put it on the Traeger smoker/grill. I set it to the smoke setting which is a cool temperature for 30 minutes.

Then I turned it up to 325 degrees. It took about 15 minutes to reach the cooking temperature and I thought it would take about two hours from there. An hour and a half later, I checked the temperature of the breast with a quick read thermometer and was surprised to find it was 160 degrees.

I took the turkey off of the grill and wrapped it in foil. Then I wrapped the foil package in a towel and put it all in a foil bag designed to keep hot foods hot. The plan was to drive up to Menifee for Thanksgiving dinner with my step-dad Ken and his neighbors Ray and Helen. I was so absorbed in the task, I didn’t stop to take a photo of the turkey – it looked marvelous.

Meanwhile, Sini had brought her golden-doodle dog, Ziggy, over to our place. Our plan was to be dog sitters while Sini went with her sons to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends in Pasadena. We would have Ziggy Thursday and Friday until she returned. Ziggy and Ozark the cat get along fine.

I expected to take about 90 minutes to get to Menifee. I didn’t count on stop-and-go traffic on I-15 from south of Escondido all the way to Temecula. This 30-mile stretch took over an hour to cover. It took more than two hours to get to Menifee.

When I unwrapped the turkey, I was disappointed to see the skin, which looked nice and crispy when it came off the grill, had become somewhat rubbery – no doubt from being held in foil for so long. The meat was still plenty warm and I carved the turkey.

Donna heated up side dishes in Ken’s kitchen and we all ate together. Ziggy stayed in Ken’s backyard and Donna took her for a couple walks. We had a good time and headed back home around 4:30pm. The ride home was quick – traffic was moving at 75 miles per hour all the way and we made it back in just over an hour.

This morning I have to return the rental car. The weather forecast looks good today – sunny with clear skies and a high in the mid-70s. This weekend’s weather is not so fine looking. The forecast calls for a cold front bringing rain and highs in the 60s.