I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

Werner Herzog

For Christmas… I ask my friends and family for Amazon gift cards – at my age, the stuff I want (my lifelong quota of tchotchke and cute gifts is long overfilled)tends to the expensive side – far greater than the generosity of one person towards me. This way, I can accumulate them and add my February birthday haul to reach my consumerist goal. For example, I saved up and bought a decent camera a few years ago.

One unanticipated benefit of this – if you call a few minutes of amusement a benefit – is the time I spend looking through Amazon, deciding what to get. It’s kinda fun.

This year, I settled on a decent pair of binoculars. I have always had a soft spot for these. When I was a small child, my father brought back a pair of Soviet Military binoculars from Korea (how did he get them? I have no idea. The case had bullets holes in it). I loved those things… They lasted for decades but are now lost… Something had gone wrong, maybe a prism had come loose, and how do you fix something like that? No Russian optics repair shop down on the corner.

They were big and had the traditional porro prism arrangement. Yes,I did research on the various ways binoculars can be designed. Because of that, I was at first leaning toward a porro prism binocular – like this one. But nowadays the preferred arangement of glass seems to be the more compact roof prism. So after some (a lot, really) of research, adding and removing from my wish list – I arrived at the
Vortex Crossfire. These are entry level, but quality scopes from a popular brand. Plus, they seem to come with a nice case.

They are now winding their way to Richardson from some unknown binocular warehouse somewhere. I’m surprisingly excited.

So, if you had, let’s say, somewhere between one and two hundred bucks in Amazon gift cards (not a lot of money, but enough for something) what would you buy. Fun to think about… but not to obsess over.