Gratitude for modern day advances

See? There he is! Beeping and scraping...he's been at it for about 5 minutes...which tells me that if I'd gone out to do it, it'd've taken me a couple of hours! Of course, I would have just done the stretch right from our garage to our street, not the circle part, so that probably would've been an hour. In any event, I am grateful! Not just for a mechanized snowplow, operated by a 3rd party ... but also, for electricity. Ours went out at 5:30 am. I woke up to complete and total silence. Most striking was the lack of the humidifier's noise, but there were also no background hums or purrs of the furnace, refrigerator, or any of our modern conveniences. We got up, used a flash light and candle to dig out the number for ComEd from the Yellow Pages (first time we've used it in years!), and reported the outage. Their representative apologized for the outage, said they were already aware of it, that it affected 500 people, and a truck was currently en route to fix the problem. We went back to bed & I laid there, planning on how to conserve heat, to open the garage door with no power, to use the stove to cook meals, to refrain from opening the fridge. About an hour and fifteen minutes later, I heard the furnace kick back on, so I turned back on the humidifier, and turned over to go back to sleep, content that our modern day advances were back, but equally happy that I'd devised plans to do without them for a couple of days if necessary.