Boy, do we love to moan and groan about the modern world.  Increasingly complex password requirements.  Ever changing food pyramids and nutritional flip flops – eggs are a healthy breakfast, but they spike your cholesterol, except they provide good protein…No cell service and home security systems gone haywire. 

But I’ll take the bad with the good any day because there are several modern conveniences I’m exceedingly grateful for.  (Yes, my fellow English majors, that should be “for which I’m grateful” – but does anyone else have trouble writing when it comes out sounding so…stuffy?)

Automatic Ice Makers.  I will admit right up front that this sounds, even to me, like the epitome of laziness.  The thought of filling trays of water and then dumping frozen cubes into a bucket, over and over, is a game changer, and I’m fully aware that’s just silliness.  But the magical machine that feeds water into the freezer, makes cubes, then fills the ice bucket for me?  Yep.  Love it.

Microwave Popcorn.  I don’t remember popping kernels on the stove.  My dad used to put them in a black box that he’d shake in the fireplace, and my mom used one of those big air poppers you plugged in – we put butter in the top so it was a mess to clean – so clearly I enjoy some popcorn.  However, being slightly averse to unnecessary effort, I’m a huge fan of tossing a bag into the microwave to pop.  Shoot, ours even has a button marked “popcorn.”  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Automatic Pencil Sharpeners.  Speaking as a teacher who’s worked in ancient older schools, ones with that classic metal pencil sharpener screwed to the wall, I cannot stress enough the miracle that is the automatic pencil sharpener.  The difference between preparing for Back To School by grinding thirty pencils into pointiness and whirring a couple of boxes through that magic sharpener is nothing short of finger saving.

My post as part of Colline’s Gratitude Project.