I do it because I’m too cheap to buy a car GPS (or a smartphone data plan for that matter.) I also don’t want to be one of those distracted drivers who is checking their GPS rather than looking at the road, and while I admit I do look at maps occasionally while driving, their cumbersomeness means I do it far less often and only when there’s no one else on the road.
I take minutes for a monthly meeting by hand, and then type them up later. I’m a decent typist I just feel like I can be more loose using pen and paper.
There was an old guy who did the minutes for a short while. He brought in his ancient laptop and plugged it in, then took horrible notes because he was a horrible typist.
I have a 1/3 acre yard. All the neighbors give me crap because they have riding mowers, while I use a push mower. I do it for the exercise.
This - but my neighbors don’t even have riding mowers, they pay for a lawn-mowing service.
Mower has an engine to spin the blade, but the wheels are undriven. Good exercise.
Electric guitars are known for being easy to play, with lighter gauge strings and a faster, low-to-the-neck action.
I play mine with a string gauge just below what Stevie Ray Vaughn used, i.e., bridge cables (I play with .12’s, he legendarily used .13’s), which I keep a bit higher off the neck so my fingertips can grab the strings for bends, and so I can whomp on the strings in general.
It sounds better and is more fun, even if my fingers feel it!
I knit my own socks. I love how they fit and I love being able to have wild colors and patterns. And I love to knit. Win win win.
I like driving mainframes via native command lines. We have web-based tools that help simplify most regular tasks and they have “guardrails” to help prevent disasters, but they have a funny way of misbehaving now and then, and causing minor disasters.
Knowing that goofing a native command could bring down a production system keeps you on your toes!
There’s no finer experience than typing: rm junk *
when you meant: rm junk.*
Then you get to ask the sysadmin to dredge up the latest back-up tapes (from the off-site storage vault across town) to restore everything. Better still if you are the sysadmin yourself. Even better still if you happened to include the -r option and you were working in the root directory. (ETA: As super-user, of course.)
Been known to happen.
I hate using the microwave for anything other than boiling a cup of water or popcorn. Even if I’m eating something supposedly microwavable I’ll still use the stove.
Iron Mountain sends us a christmas card every year 
I split wood for my fireplace using an ax and a wedge. It is both satisfying and good exercise.
I pay my bills by check, and then mail them in. The only bills I pay electronically are the onesthat don’t allow it any other way.
I also do my own taxes, on paper.
I spell out entire words when texting. I h8 txt spk!
I do, too, but for me it’s because spelling the words out is the easy way. I’ve actually tried typing in txtspk on occasion, and I can’t wrap my brain around it.
Same here, mostly (I get extra points for paying the cellphone bill by card, so I do it that way).
Manual transmission. (Can we say “tranny” in this context?)
Baking. I like to bake and prefer to make cakes, cornbread, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, cookies and brownies from scratch.
I don’t even use dish soap. I rinse my dishes under hot running water until they feel clean, using a nylon net pad if necessary. Dry them in the drainer. My dishes haven’t been washed with soap in years. My apartment is furnished with a dishwasher, I store plastic bags and tubs in there.
To me, it’s doing thins the easy way.
I also walk a kilometer each way to the supermarket, and buy only what I can carry, and go as often as I need to. It’s nice to not have to carry home dish soap.
Lazy sod. My dad mows his lawn with a pair of scissors.
I roast my own coffee beans.
I shave like grand-dad, with a double edge razor and shaving cream applied with a brush.
I make chicken stock from scratch…sometimes, anyway.
this, especially for pancakes and waffles.
Well, pancakes from a box mix are usually acceptable, but I usually make my own dry-ingredients mix.
Waffles made from a box mix are just <vile> pancakes that somebody sat on and it always amazes me that people act like it’s so much work to make them from scratch.
does the 1/3 acre include the area occupied by your house, or is that 1/3 acre in addition to the area occupied by you house? Either way, if your neighbor’s lots are comparable in size, what a bunch of lazy sluffs for having a riding mower for such a small lot. I have just under a 1/4 acre and I sensibly pay the Fosterling and occasionally the eldest Guestling to push a mower around it. I do the edge-trimming though, otherwise it comes out looking too much like a haircut from the barber college
I push my lawn mower. I had a reel mower until last year, when my son won a competitive apprenticeship with the local Briggs and Stratton plant. .We bought a cheap power mower then, but that wasn’t too long after we moved from a quarter acre rental to the current 1.25 acre lawn.
I make bread from scratch most of the year. Summer in South Georgia? I’ll buy it.
But my basic “do it the hard way” is still yard work. I’m a terrible gardener. But I enjoy it. So I spend hours babying plants, because that’s how I gauge my success versus Mother Nature.