I was feeling pretty smug on Thursday night as I watched the Tampa Bay Lightning beat up on my Pittsburgh Penguins.

For once, my little house in Penn Township would have power and others would deal with a potential outage in the multifaceted storm that raged outside.

Then, at about 9:30, blink! And my honey and I are in the dark.

Fast forward to Monday morning as I type this column, and I continue to wait for my furnace, stove, coffee maker and outlets to cooperate with my demands.

If I were in my 20s or even 30s, I may have thrown a royal fit in the face of such inconvenience. But if Father Time teaches a person one lesson, it’s to count your blessings.

The first in that count came as I got ready for bed in front of my ventless gas heater, which does not require electricity to create its blue and orange flames.

The second was on Friday morning as I made my way to work. My 98-year-old dad lives in a township that was pretty hard-hit by the widespread outages, and neither my brother nor I have houses set up to comfortably accommodate him. (Read: Our bathrooms are on the second floor.)

I called Dad’s neighbor on the way to work after my cold-water sponge bath, and was overjoyed to hear that neighborhood did not lose power.

After work, I was thankful for my unheated mud room off the kitchen, which served as a refrigerator during the outage.

Throughout the dark and cold weekend, I was thankful for my dear significant other, Bill, who hung with me the entire time and did everything he could to make the situation more tenable.

Overnight, I was thankful for my crazy dog, who kept me warm, at times a little overzealously. She’s the only family member who will be disappointed when the power returns, because she’ll once again be banned from the bedroom.

My brother and his lovely lady, who have a generator, were happy to welcome us into their Meridian home on Friday night so we could plug in our phones and portable charger. When their power returned on Saturday night, I took a shower in actual hot water, as I had the day before at my Dad’s.

On Sunday night, we had a cereal buffet at my brother’s, complete with toast. It was a meal we’ll not soon forget, and sustained us just fine.

I’m also thankful that the temperature remained at or above freezing — the threshhold which would have forced me to scramble for accommodations and hope my water pipes didn’t freeze and burst.

But of all those who worked to help us out or offered their homes during the weekend, I am most appreciative of the linemen and women who worked 16-hour shifts in the wet, chilly, muddy conditions to restore power.

Many comments on social media were astonishing, as customers disparaged the power companies and their hardworking employees who spent all of their time in bucket trucks or at the top of utility poles, in the cold and away from their families, rewiring like crazy to fix a massive problem as quickly as humanly possible.

I think people today expect instant results in every situation, and got their eyes opened during Winter Storm Avery that struggle is a part of life.

Every time I started to complain about no flushing toilet or means to heat a little water, I made myself look at a mental picture of the recent wildfires in Paradise and Malibu, California.

It’s important to know the difference between problems and inconveniences, people.

I was also thankful for the firefighters with chain saws, police, ambulance personnel, emergency services directors and others who rectified and responded to uncountable emergencies as our county struggled under the weight of the winter storm.

And just think, while some people were complaining and blaming the power companies in their dark homes, others were setting up warming centers throughout the county instead of whining about their own situations.

I guess it comes down to the words of the late Fred Rogers, which we heard so often after the tragic Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

Thanks for once again pulling together, Butler County friends and neighbors. It proves that while we have our issues like every other American community, when the chips are down, we’re there for each other.

Paula Grubbs is a veteran staff writer for The Butler Eagle.