I would look under the oil filler cap to check if no outrageously strong deposits are present, checked if the front was not in major collision and wrote a check on the spot.
Short trips are not bad for your car’s battery and yes the negative effect of short trips is canceled out by a long trip. It might help to change the oil more frequently to reduce the damage from short trips if no long trip is done to boil out the moisture and whatever else collects in the oil in the absence of heat from a long trip.
This page had a pretty good explanation about the condensation damage that some of you mentioned.
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I had heater vents (we called them “registers”) in my home (Upstate New York…) when I was growing up. The house was built in the 1920s and the heat was a massive coal furnace in the basement. The coal heated a huge dome in the top of the unit and the dome was enclosed in a housing that went through the floor in the living room. In the living room was a grate about 3-foot square and the heat rose from the dome. That was the only source of heat in the house. The three bedrooms and bathroom upstairs each had a floor register to allow heat to rise up from the first floor. On the frame of the entry way from the living room into the dining room was a small crank that turned a chain that was connected to the flue on the furnace to control the opening and closing of the flue to the chimney. I remember as a small boy going to the Coal Supplier and ordering 4-ton for the winter… When the coal was delivered, the truck could not get around to the basement coal chute and the delivery men carried the coal in a basket on their backs to the chute and poured each basket in, all 4-ton of it… About 1960 or so, we got natural gas installed and the furnace was converted and the little flue crank was removed and a thermostat became a new “wall ornament” for everyone to finagle with, much to my mother’s chagrin…
My grandmother’s house had that same arrangement. I recall it was really comfortable standing next to that grate on a cold evening. The rest of the house, not so much, but if you wanted heat you knew where to go to get a good dose.