Speaking as an insurance professional, who keeps up on the subject of auto safety, new cars are safer than cars from 20 years ago, despite all that.
As to the impact of all that distraction, there has been an increase in frequency of insurable auto incidents, but it’s not clear how much of that is from bad modern auto interfaces. Most of it is probably due to people being distracted by phones. Anecdotally, I’ve driven three newish cars since these trends began. One was hideously distracting, and it took me a month before i felt safe driving it. One has a traditional interface despite having modern safety features, and is great. (We still drive this car.) The other is annoying, but the mission-critical features are mostly mechanical (i mean, they are electronic underneath, but what you interact with is mechanical.) The only exception is the defroster, which might be mission-critical and requires me to take my eyes off the road. I never need to change the temperature or turn on the radio so urgently that i can’t find a placid place to do it, like a red light.
I, too, have a trash can in the kitchen and a garbage can in the garage, into which i empty the trash can.
I usually just say, “I’m putting this in the trash”, or “I’m throwing this away”, regardless of whether I’m placing it in the trash can, the garbage can (used kitty litter goes directly to the garage), the recycling (the receptacle is just a paper bag, we don’t name it beyond “recycling”) or the little compost bucket under the kitchen sink.
My baby gurl is welcome in the bed & usually starts the night there. When she was younger she’d spend the whole night there but now she gets down & spends the rest of the night in her own bed. There is nothing cuter than to wake up to a ball of fur at your feet & when you call her she’d look up & then army crawl up between (her legs worked fine, she’d just only use her front paws to dig in & pull her body up to us) us for cuddles & skritches.
If one certain INCREDIBLELY SHITTY band or one annoying grating commercial comes on the station must be changed IMMEDIATELY, & somewhat violently to get rid of them. They. Must. DIE!!!
There’s a button on the steering wheel that I’ve programmed to turn the radio on and off. Because the car has a shitty interface, it doesn’t always work to turn the radio on. But if the radio is on, it always works to turn it off. There’s another little toggle on the steering wheel that will change the channel when the radio is on.
I don’t ever need to do either of those urgently, but it is possible to do them with muscle memory, and without looking away from the road.
I will take an afternoon nap with our cat, with him above the blanket but under the bedspread. But he does not join the Mrs. and me for sleep at night, he’s got his own spot on the other side of the house so he doesn’t wake us with his demands.
There is trash. There are compost, recyclables, firestarter, and landfill items. I’d be most likely to use the word trash for landfill items, though sometimes I just call them landfill.
The kitchen has a landfill can, a compost can, a recycling bin, and a bag for clean newspaper. A number of rooms have wastebaskets; some rooms have two, to divide recyclables from firestarter. The upstairs bathroom also has a lidded can for smelly bathroom stuff. I don’t usually hang a name on it.
Oh yes, and the landfill trash goes into a dumpster outside.
I occasionally miss the 1950’s, when we threw stuff “away” and didn’t think about it. But not thinking about it was a bad idea.
-– I share my bed with cats, not with another human. We all have our usual spots, though we all move around some. I usually sleep more or less on the side next to the nightstand.
I still throw stuff “away”, and don’t think about it much. But i throw different stuff into different bins. I don’t light my fireplace often, so I’ve stopped saving “fire starter” items for it. (Although there’s a large container next to it holding old wooden fruit crates and such, for that purpose.) I throw most food waste into the compost bin. I put metal and glass and clean paper and plastics 1&2 in the recyclables paper bag. Things that night be reused, plus worn out clothing, batteries, and some other items get put aside for my infrequent dump runs. When i have enough items that need to go to the town dump, i usually take my recyclables, too, and sort them. (Different types of metal, different types of clean paper, different types of plastic – actually sorting the stuff greatly increases what the town can get for them.)
But despite all that, i spend almost no time thinking about the stuff I’m throwing away.
So much this. Not to mention the other mention upthread, that getting parts to repair a 20 year old car is going to be a total pain. For that matter, given the price of new cars, even economy options you’re taking a huge risk.
Using, say, a baseline of a 2026 Honda Civic Sedan LX (MSRP of nearly $25,000), you’re spending a lot of money. Taking a quick glance at a 2006 Lexus LX 470 ~$14,000 – $15,300 is the range right now, so we’ll say it’s got 10 grand in custom audio, paint, etc to push it up to $25k to not fight the hypothetical.
If you get in an accident with the Honda (speaking as a former claims adjuster and P&C sales person), you’re likely to get a full repair, if it’s not a total loss. If you get a carrier to put COMP and COLL on the Lexus (some won’t at that age) you’re ALSO going to have to pay for the extra 10 grand in custom features, or more likely insure it as an Agreed Value vehicle (which is expensive). And any loss, given the lack of parts, qualified repair experts, etc. is going to be a total. And if it’s only insured at ACV, well, value and quality is subjective after all.
I agree that the point about depreciation is real concern, 2-3 years down the road, the Lexus is going to have lost a far lower % of it’s remaining value than the Honda, but especially if you’re financing, the insurance is going to kill you and leave you potentially under insured.
I don’t have pets. But when I visited my lesbian friends in Massachusetts, one of the cats came and purred and slept on my chest every night and I loved it. Another time the same kitty came over to stay with me for a weekend while her mommy traveled.
When lesbian friends in San Francisco hired me to dogsit for 3 weeks, I had to sleep in their bed while they were away, and their 3 poodles always went to bed with them. So it was part of my job to keep them company at night. They were well-trained, good doggies, and I enjoyed their company. I answered the poll on the basis of these nights spent with other women’s pets.
Years ago, I decided that the only way to speak of air conditioning is “Make it colder” or “Make it less cold.” Little directional metaphors like up and down are a nice linguistic frill when metaphorical, but not when they get in the way of understanding. That’s when you have to state what you want as plainly as possible: just “Make it colder.”
Ah. Usually when i speak of the AC in my home it’s words like, “I’m freaking hot, I’m going to crank up the AC.” I think my meaning is generally clear, and if it isn’t, it’s not a huge problem.
I decided to interpret “same side preferences” in a general, not a specific sense. My preference is not right or left, but “farther from the door”. And my husband accommodates that preference.
We rarely share a room with two queens. With two doubles or two twins (which both come up regularly, with our travel habits) we take separate beds. We usually share a queen with plenty of space for sleeping.
The last couple of times we’ve shared a room with two queens, we’ve also shared it with another person, and he got the other bed, of course.
I think we’d likely each take a bed with two queens, but we might use the second queen to dump all our stuff. I’m not sure.
