Living well- with heat

At 2 am so AM two nights ago I realized that our furnace wasn't working. I had just finished getting Sam back to sleep and heard it cycling on and off every few seconds. This happened to us once when we first purchased our house, and a neighbor helped us replace the thermostat which fixed it right away. My first thought the other night was, therefore, where would I buy a thermostat at that time of night? It was 2 degrees outside and there was no way that I wanted to wake up Sofi and Sam to move them to a warmer place if it started to get cold. Being from our do-it-yourself family, I decided that the best approach would be to start Googling the problem to see if I could figure out a middle of the night work-around. Matt came upstairs in the middle of this process to start trying to figure out what to do and said, "can't we just call someone?" This had never even remotely crossed my mind. We did, and they were at our door within the hour to start the day long process of furnace rehab that followed (and it's a good thing that there were professionals involved, it was more than a thermostat). As I was awake for those hours in the middle of the night- the first in years without a child somehow harassing me- I started a long thought process about self sufficiency, a specialized economy, habitable climates, and where everyday life has to intersect with the big picture (not to mention the peak oil sorts of things that are always flying around). In the end, I've been too tired to sort it out very clearly; tonight as I hear the rumbling of our central heat doing what it should I sure am glad today that we have furnace repair specialists here.
On a side-note, I got a google ad from the Longmont Dairy- my longtime local milk delivery- the other day on this blog that made me really happy. (It was even right after we had completed our first completely successful local cheese project)