Most of you reading this own a “living machine” … and if you do, you should really count your blessings.

As I peck away at this column, the temperature outside is a balmy 21 degrees below zero.

But the temperature we’ve set inside our “living machine” is a snuggly 72 degrees, and, just to make things a little cozier, the flames in the fireplace are dancing to keep the coziness at just the right level.

When it gets a little too warm, we just turn the temperature down a bit, or, when the summer-swelters bring on a rather nasty heat wave, we just flick the thermostat to ‘cool’ and crank up the air conditioner.

Such a tough life.

I’m retired now, but I worked rather diligently for about 44 years to be able to kick back in this little “living machine” we call home, but believe me, when I pick up the remote control and flick off the TV in our bedroom, snuggle down in the warmth of our bed, I can’t help but feel I’m one of the very lucky ones.

How things have changed over the years.

I can still recall the coal truck chugging into Mom and Dad’s Grove Street home to pour dirty old chunks of the stuff into the basement. Mom hated this with a passion because the coal dust used to permeate the whole basement … and she was a stickler for tidiness.

You didn’t wipe your feet when you came into the house, you darned well shampooed the soles of your shoes and then you took them off outside and gently placed them in a box in the side hallway – not the front!

I can also remember Dad going downstairs to put a few shovelsful into the furnace to warm things up before turning in at night. She didn’t like that much either because that raised the dust.

Mom sometimes took a hot toddy to help her sleep on a cold winter night. She didn’t drink though … heaven forbid! I still laugh now, when I recall, as a child, watching while she made one of her ‘toddies’.

She’d put on the kettle, bring it to a boil, and then, get down a bottle of my Dad’s rye whisky. Into a glass went (and I kid you not) at least four ounces – glug, glug, glug, glug – of Canadian Club; she’d top this off with a splash of the boiling water and a generous spoonful of honey.

Then wham - right down to her tummy quick as a wink! Every once in a while she’d talk in her sleep, but she slept like a log!

Sorry about the diversion to that old memory of my Mom’s ‘hot toddies’, but I had to pass the story along. What a teetotaler!

When you stop and really think about it, our “living machines” are so marvelous today.

We have boxes in these “machines” with glowing tops to let us cook our meals … we have other boxes to keep our milk cold and our meats fresh.

We’ve got different boxes to let us peer into what’s going on all over the world without leaving the comfort of our easy chairs; we’ve even hung little silver screened televisions in the corner of our bedrooms so we can watch the boob tube in bed before lights out.

We’ve got little switches on the wall to bring the equivalent of cheery sunshine into the midnight-blackness of any room.

And some of us … and this I love … have switches in the bathroom to transform a boring old tub into a swirling sensation of jet streams that make a professional masseuse’s hands almost obsolete (well, maybe that’s going a bit too far).

And talk about bathrooms. I can still remember trips to my Uncle Harold’s and Aunt Irene’s farm.

The bathroom there was a little moon-in-the-door shed out back, located above a deeply dug trench; you opened the leather-hinged door and there was a two-foot wide plank complete with a backside fitting hole. (The hole was actually carved around the edges to take the sharpness off!)

Charmin Ultra Soft was 20 years down the road and all you had to finish up with was a couple of pages you’d tear from the Saturday Evening Post, and with the glossy finish of the paper and wintry temperatures, it was NOT, believe me, a pleasant experience.