On Saturday we had a pretty huge (freak) snow storm here on the East coast. In October no less! It was one of those times when all the elements aligned perfectly to totally and completely ruin the weekend. (Why don’t nor’easters ever show up on Monday mornings?) Seriously – it wouldn’t even have been able to snow if it weren’t for a phenomenon called “dynamic cooling,” wherein heavy rain drags down colder air from the upper atmosphere, which allows said precipitation to freeze and fall as snow. Heavy, tree-brach-and-power-line-demolishing snow.

The power went out at around 4PM as I was fleeing the office in an effort not to get stuck there all weekend. As I arrived home, the temperature continued to fall rapidly. Layering sweaters and ridiculously huge piles of blankets can only take you so far. We went out to get something to eat and watch the football games (it was Sunday, after all). While we were out, I tried signing on to LogMeIn from my iPhone to check and see if the network had come back up. JCP&L had predicted that we would get our power back sometime in the next five days. I was getting anxious and searching for a hotel, when I had finally come up with a way to get notified the moment our power came back on.

Enter Find My iPhone. If you don’t have it already, get it. It’s a free app created by Apple. The functionality is built into iCloud, and the idea is this: “if you misplace your iPhone, [or] iPad[…] the Find My iPhone app will let you use another iOS device to find it and protect your data. Simply install this free app on another iOS device, open it, and sign in with your Apple ID. Find My iPhone will help you locate your missing device on a map. You can then choose to display a message or play a sound, remotely lock your device, or erase your data on it.” The most important thing left out of the write-up on Apple’s site is that in the event iCloud can not locate a device, you have the option to receive an email once the device has been located. And this is the feature that saved me from a third world apartment country.

I tried to locate my iPad, which was at home in the apartment in standby mode, presumably at the low-end of it’s recommended ambient operating temperature. Fortunately this would most likely improve upon the iPad 2′s already awesome stand-by battery life. Knowing full well the iPad would not be found without a working wireless network at home, I chose to have Apple email me once the iPad was located. Not three hours later, I received an email from Apple telling us that we could finally return home to power, heat, light, and civilization.

If this is any indication of how the rest of this winter will go: enjoy the white Halloween while you can.