Soooooo….how did you all survive being snowed in? No electricity, phone, or heat — sounds like a good idea to hit the liquor cabinet, I say. There's nothing like huddling around the fireplace with all your family members because mom and dad are the only ones smart enough to have one. Me and my siblings and all of our offspring just pack up and head there for survival purposes and hope we survive each other — not the storm. Screaming children, no TV, trying not to take a leg off chopping the wood, and filling the bathtub with snow to later dump into the toilet is a sure-fire way to bond, isn't it?

Actually the first day isn't so bad because we sit around the fire like a Norman Rockwell picture, roasting marshmallows and singing a few rounds of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and reminisce about the past over good wine. By the end of the weekend we're hittin' the Jack Daniels, don't ever want to row a boat ever, and throwing scrabble pieces at one another complaining about whose turn it is to get more wood.

Back in the 1970s, our electricity constantly went out constantly because we lived on a dirt road in an unpopulated rural area that even the cable company wouldn't venture into. Now there's developments all over the place where there was once farms so the people complain more than the cows did if they don't have their internet. So in my youth we were very comfortable not having electric and to pass the time we would get snow from outside and pack it into the hand-cranked ice cream maker and have at it. We always made just plain vanilla until one night someone said let's try making chocolate and so we gave it a go. It was awful. If a child won't eat ice cream you know it's not good. We all simultaneously made faces and all my uncle did in response was to take a spoonful of the stuff and whip it at my brother's face. Hence began the biggest ice cream Armageddon that ever occurred in our household, as adults and children alike threw handfuls of the slop everywhere hitting walls, furniture, the pool table, and the dog….although the dog didn't seem to mind so much. We slipped all over the hard wood floors and got sopping wet with the melted mess laughing till it hurt. Since we were all in the dark we didn't realize the full repercussions of our actions till the next morning when we woke up with dried sticky hair that looked like straw…then the kicker of not being able to wash it out due to the lack of water. Luckily it would sleet and we would take the shampoo outside and stand on the front lawn washing our hair out. The neighbors would stare out their windows and shake their heads at the kooks next door and you could see them mouthing the words, "There's somethin' wrong with those folks."

So, once again, here in 2010, we somehow got through the weekend without the comforts of modern day, although it was tough because we were rusty from the 1970s. One sibling went a little stir crazy and needed to have a pizza. So my mother used the last bar on the cell to call the pizza place and beg him to crank up the generator and open the place for two pizzas and he did. So there we were in a snowstorm passing car accidents all the way there on a crazed mission to get pizza. The whole time my mother screamed at the people standing around their wrecked cars, "It's a state of emergency; you're not allowed to be on the road." Never mind that we were risking our lives for a lousy pizza craving. "What's wrong with these people?! It's a state of emergency, for cryin' out loud!" she endlessly yelled, not quite getting it.

My children couldn't seem to understand why we couldn't just flip a switch and have the lights come on since they are young enough never to have experienced an outage like that. My father wanted to pull out the air mattress and put it in front of the fire to sleep until he realized you needed to plug in the air compressor to blow it up. It never occurred to anyone to actually use lung power to do so. Our society has become so dependent on electricity that my cousin actually stated that we should use the fan to blow the heat from the fire place down the hall to the bedrooms not thinking we needed to plug the fan in to make it work. Getting the candles lit, we struggled to find matches since nobody had a lighter and my kids actually asked what matches were. I made a mental note to enroll them in boy/girl scouts and plan a camping trip next summer. God forbid if the end of the world started to occur and we all had to run for the bomb shelters — my younger relatives would be in there looking for a place to play video games instead of building a Geiger counter. Flint? What's that and why do we need it? If it came down to survival of the fittest I'm pretty sure we ain't so fit. A world without texting would send some of my brood into shock and their thumbs would twitch uncontrollably in phantom text mode like a lost appendage.

Thank goodness the electricity came on just before we killed each other. Now, where's my fresh brewed coffee, my cell phone, my laptop, my hair dryer, my washing machine, my microwave…