When stepping away, and looking from the outside, the recent, severe ice storm has a good side to all the bad that has been endured.

For instance, the way that all of the surrounding communities have pulled together throughout the situation has been astounding. Everyone has been working together and helping one another for the better of the entire community. Most have set aside selfish ways and differences to aid the people in need and be thankful for what they have.

I have talked to several people about how the ice storm has affected and effected them personally. These people always give the details of their own situation, but end with saying they are thankful for what they have and that they were lucky because some others have it worse. In this type of situation, that is a good outlook to have, because it defines who we are as a community, and as a county.

Another benefit of the ice storm is that it has brought many families and neighbors closer together. The lack of something electronic to do has made us be creative and go back to older time, passing activities that build strong family bonds and values. My family, for instance, spent a large amount of the first week working on a puzzle. We have owned the puzzle for about five years and never even opened the box, until the power outage. Everyone in the house took part in working on the puzzle at some point during that first week, and once it was completed, we looked for another puzzle to begin.

The last thing that I have noticed during the power outage is how strongly we as a society depend on electricity. This outage shut down everything that we have going, and it makes you wonder how people survived before electricity was available in every home and business. Speaking of businesses, the majority of the areas businesses did not open until they had secured a generator to run equipment. What happened to the days when the electricity went off and businesses went on by using good old paper and pen. This method may be more work and more cumbersome, but it gets the job done, and in a crisis situation when people need things, it seems they would attempt to open and work under these circumstances.

Now granted I am not talking about every business out there, because there are several that need electricity to provide their services, but the stores and businesses that provide essentials could have easily worked with paper and pen and updated information once power returned.

This just shows how dependent our community is on electricity and I could not imagine what things would have been like without generators.

All-in-all, lots of good information came from the ice storm, and parts of the event were not all bad in my eyes.