Lubricate your car engine with oil

I used to when I was working find the time to change the oil on my car on a regular basis. It was a pain as a how-to article by Car and Driver says you need your own car jack, the right kind of oil for your car, and a safe space to be able to get under your car and work. Since I retired I don't. There are so many Lube and Oil places where you can go without an appointment, drive in and 15 to 20 minutes later drive out with your oil checked. In fact, many of these companies do safety checks as well and they do them for free. Do it yourself and you have a two or three-hour job and you do not have a safety check done.

There’s also the worry that you might do something wrong, such as not tightening the plug which could hurt your vehicle, costing you more in the long run.

The McNally Institute reports that 74% of men have changed the oil in their car themselves as opposed to 30% of women, although both genders reported regularly checking their levels.

Oil helps keep your engine from overheating, and experts at AAA recommend that, depending on what type of oil you use (synthetic or real) and the kind of car you drive, you change your oil every 5,000 to 7,500 miles.

While it is undoubtedly useful to know how to check when your oil is getting low and perform proper maintenance so your car never runs dry, I think it's worth getting a professional to do it in order to free up some time and anxiety.

Reading a compass

A compass is an incredibly useful, pocket-sized tool. It requires no batteries and can be used either with a map or on its own. However, these days it is typically only found in the kit bags of outdoors enthusiasts.

Knowing how to use a compass is ideal for those times when you’re taking a trip and your phone runs out of battery, or when you’re travelling in an area you don’t know well.

One important thing to know is that compasses are magnetic, which means their arrow always points to magnetic north — this is different from true north. Once you know how to follow its guidance, a compass can provide consistent information regarding the land you’re on and the direction you’re going.

Your phone does have a compass as one of its features, but you’ll still need to know how to read it. Like reading a map, this list item falls into the “good to have in your back pocket for emergencies” category.

Finding dates in person

I found this surprising and you might not have realized it if you’re already partnered, but a large portion of heterosexual couples have found their person on an app, according to a 2019 study from Stanford.

According to sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, 39% of heterosexual couples found their significant other online, growing from 22% in 2009.

Beyond the fact that it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry with an effective marketing reach, the initial stigma of meeting someone online has worn off, and people are trusting the technology behind the sites a lot more, says the study.

Another study, this one conducted by Pew Research Group, broke down the difference between different age groups, with 48% of people aged 18-29 saying that they had used a dating app to find someone, with the percentage decreasing the older the demographic.

The study also noted that LGBTQ+ people had higher instances of using apps than people who identified as straight, who are roughly half as likely to use an app.

Consider dating another area of life that technology is streamlining, but there is still hope for those that want to connect in person. Technology is a good starting point for some and for others, it is easier to connect with someone through personal contact. Whatever works best for the individual because if we are alone, we want to connect with that someone special.

Balancing a chequebook

Since a lot of purchases and bill payments happen online these days, the frequency of someone writing a check to cover — well, anything — has sharply decreased, especially in the last decade. I use my Debit card for almost all of my purchases and I cannot remember the last time I wrote a check. Balancing a chequebook was one of the skills I used to teach in my Recordkeeping classes and it was one that I believed was an important lifelong skill. However, technology has changed that need.

The art of balancing a chequebook — that is, going through your own notes of what you paid out to compare it to your monthly bank statement — is also a thing of the past.

While you may not have a physical chequebook anymore, the logic of financial literacy behind this process is sound. The logic is that you know where you spend your money, and you know how much you have in the bank. Without understanding this simple concept, as a person on a fixed income, you may be one of the many that just shut your eyes and whisper a small prayer that your debit card would have enough funds to cover your purchase. Maybe taking some time to look at your statements regularly and understanding what they mean isn’t such a bad idea.

It can help you spend your money more wisely, and it can help you notice any signs of fraud.

Unless you meant to buy thousands of dollars in gift cards. In that case, you do you.

Do you have a land line?

I wonder how many of you still have a land line. I do and I use it a lot. I also have a smart phone, which I use as a phone, a map, a search engine and a social media viewer and I use it for group messages with family. I find it hard to use all of the capabilities of my smart phone, because my fingers do not work well, and I am not used to using my thumbs or whatever the younger generation use to work their phones. I and my friends still rememb3er waiting to use the land line when others were on the party line. Young people may never understand the torture of waiting your turn to use the one household phone — which had a tangled up spiral cord that stretched halfway into the next room, if your call required any privacy.

According to data by the U.S. Census, 84% of households had at least one smartphone in 2018, and as of 2020, over 80% of adults ages 25-34 had opted to go entirely wireless, says the National Center for Health Statistics.

Heading out alongside landlines and rotary phones — remember those? — are the days when you needed to remember all your buddies’ phone numbers.

Now that most of us have cell phones that we use for notes, phone numbers and calendars, the phenomenon of “digital amnesia” has grown. Research by multinational cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has shown that with a rising reliance on technology, people don’t try to remember these things because they know they have it in the cloud somewhere.

I suspect that land lines may go the way of other extinct technology, but the telephone companies may figure out new ways for us to use the land line as the boomers are still a huge market force. It won’t be long now before the only land line phone you’ll find will be in a museum but it will be a few years before all of us who use the land line give it up. We will not go quietly into the night on this issue.

Skills we could keep or drop 1

 An article in MoneyWise discussed the skills we are losing and listed some of them the writer thought important that we keep. Over the next few posts, I will highlight some of the skills identified in the article and give my view on whether we should keep or lose the skill. I am interested in what do you think, so let me know in the comments.?

Back in the early days of the digital age, we talked about Digital natives, which were people who were born into a world where technology was already an integral part of daily life, and digital tourists or visitors, which were people who were only introduced to tech in their later years. For the record, I am a Digital tourist.

As computerization continues formerly essential skills like switchboard operation or being a human calculator have perished.

With any change comes loss, and more than a few life skills society used to take for granted are falling by the wayside. From ironing your clothes to the way we communicate, here are some skills that we should keep and some that can just go the way of the dinosaur.

1. Reading a map

In my youth, I once went on a Gymkhana. For those who don’t know, a gymkhana is a type of motorsport, known as Motorkhana in Australia and New Zealand and Autotesting in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Similar to autocross, the goal of gymkhana is to achieve the fastest time possible; memorizing the course is a significant part of achieving a fast time. But if you don’t memorize the course, you have a navigator who used a map to keep you on track. I was the navigator, and we became hopelessly lost and ended up not last but near the end.

Map reading was never my strong suit, but I think for those times when one is travelling, and Google Maps is not available this is a skill to keep.

In a survey commissioned by British mapping company Ordnance Survey, researchers found that only 20% of millennials wished they were better at reading maps. They probably should be though, because 60% of millennial respondents say they are reliant on digital maps when going somewhere new and a quarter are very reliant even in their day-to-day lives.

Google Maps and Waze are essential tools of 21st-century navigation, but there are countless stories of times GPS has failed travellers, causing them to be stranded in desolate locations. 

The first time I used Google Maps for directions in my car, we ended up on a mountain path that was a nightmare, and it took us about 4 hours out of our way, our problem was that the owner of the phone we were using had programmed the map wrong, but we believed in the technology when we should have read the map. There’s also the question of what happens if your phone runs out of battery, or you can’t access online maps. So I vote that we keep the skill of map reading and teach it to the yonger generation, just in case of emergency.