I love them. In college in upstate New York, a friend and I would sit on our porch with a couple of drinks and just watch and listen to the storms. They were one of the best parts of the summer.
Reno gets about 7 inches of rain and 2 bolts of lightning a year.
(Live in South Jersey, USA)
When we bought our first house, as well as our current house, I made sure the back had a Western exposure, so that I could look out my kitchen windows or family rooms windows to watch storms roll in.
Nothin’ beats a good storm over the ocean. You can see for miles.
I absolutely adored them and was eagerly anticipating some. . .
Until last Wednesday one knocked out our cable. We got the TV cable back in a few hours, but we didn’t get the net back till Monday. I was starving. 
I love the thunder storms. I think they are great to watch.
We get a lot of tornados, and I like to watch them, too. Just as long as they stay out in the open, they are quite lovely.
I love to just sit and watch thunderstorms, especially from a distance. You don’t seem to see as much of the fancy stuff when you’re actually enveloped in them.
I used to love walking the dog or sitting on the roof back in Beaumont, TX watching the thunderstorms come in. The clouds there were always incredibly bumpy and textured, so one could really see the cloud to cloud lightning perfectly.
I remember the night of my friend Chris’s graduation this past May. I was waiting for the rest of the gang outside of the movie theater, and off in the next county was a HUGE lightning storm. I must have stood outside that theater watching the most impressive natural lighshow I’ve every seen! Every second, it seemed ten bolts would flash threw the sky. Absolutely breathtaking.
Yeah, when you can see the entire cumulonimbus cloud off in the distance that’s always very cool. You really see just how powerful lightning is.
Love thunderstorms, hate the hail which usually comes with them.
i like watching them from a secure, protected location. our house was hit twice, i saw one hit, wasn’t around for the other. i know someone who was killed by lightning.
like the storms, hate the lightning part.
Love them when I’m safe at home.
Not so fond of them when I’m trying to drive in one after midnight- like last night for example. I couldn’t see the road for all the sheets of rain and there was so much lightning it was like passing through Mother Nature’s Disco.
I think I actually saw a traffic light explode.
There’s nothing like a Texas thunderstorm - I love to watch them roll in. And, I also love the hail, since my hubby is making excellent money estimating the hail damage on the roofs in our area! On the other hand, he’s a firefighter by trade and has to deal with all the chaos on the roads when thunderstorms are in the area.
I watched an awesome one come in last week - our roof was being replaced from the last hailstorm. I yelled at the roofers, pointing towards the lightning - and they never got down from the roof. Amazing bravery/foolhardiness.
I’m in heaven if I’m sitting on the front porch with a glass of wine, watching a big storm coming in - the wind that precedes a thunderstorm is just incredible.
I love the storms, but these days have a dog who is severely storm-phobic so end up spending the whole time trying to keep him from hurting himself crawling into somewhere he shouldn’t go. He’s worst when storms are approaching. Once the storm actually starts, though, he settles down and then I can enjoy the rain blasting the house and the thunder and lightning.
When I was a teenager, we had a house with a big screen porch. My girlfriends and I used to go out with our sleeping bags and sleep out there and enjoy the storms from our nice dry spot.
One storm I didn’t enjoy was a severe thunderstorm over the southern cape of New Jersey as I tried to get my 18’ open boat back to dock, after friends and I were out relaxing on a small isle.
When you can feel the electricity and hear the zap of the strike, you know that while the odds might be something like 90 million to one of getting struck, you start to think that heck, I’m sure the odds get worse if you are actually under the heart of the storm.
Humbling to see grown men cry and hide under towels.
I’m a big fan of thunderstorms as well.
Pity, too, because where I live now, they are very, very rare events. I gre up in New England, not far from where Phlosphr lives and I gre up with thunderstorms and a normal part of summer life.
My parents have a little place on the eastern shore of a pond in Maine. As the storms roll in across the water, you get to watch all their phases. You go from sunny to dark, breezy to dead flat calm. The light rain starts as you hear the thunder get a little louder. The first couple of lightning flashes happen as the rain picks up a bit. By the time the downpour has arrived, you’re sitting all cozy on the front porch feeling the wind really kick up and smelling the heavy ozone in the air. The best ones are when the hail starts and the lightning cracks the air right nearby.
Yup, I like weather too.
I love them too but can’t see very much when one hits. Our house is surrounded by trees. They’re better at college where I’m on the east side of a lake and can see them coming. Too bad the school year isn’t exactly peak thunderstorm season.
When approaching, they give me a sense of urgency, somehow. Like I should be running around battening down the hatches and putting the animals in the barn or something, even though we’ve never had barn animals. Maybe it’s instinct.
I hate driving in them. But I love them at home. Especially in the summer, when they cool things off some and I can throw open a window and turn off the AC and just listen to the rain, usually with some light music in the background.
I’d be one of those guys buying a Sounds of Nature Thunderstorm type CD, if I could bring myself to do it.
We had a real doozy just tonight.
I was out on the deck smoking a pork loin (my favorite birthday present is any delicious hunk of meat that I get to grill) and I watched the sky get progressively blacker. By the time the clouds were churning and that ominous grey-green color, I was silently urging the meat to please cook faster. The rumbling started and I managed to get dinner inside just as the first visible bolt zapped down about 3-4 miles distant.
While waiting for our other guests to finish arriving, I stood at the back door and watched nature’s gloriously impressive fireworks. The strikes were really coming fast & furious for a couple of hours. Most kept their distance, though we did have some real window-rattlers.
Later, as our guests were leaving after dark, I stayed out on the porch & watched the storm fade off to the southeast. I saw some amazing cloud-to-cloud streaks, some seeming to criss-cross the whole sky. I felt fairly safe, since there was at least a good 30-count distance by then.
One other happy note - my 21-month old daughter seemed completely un-fazed by the loud noises. (Can’t say the same for my mother-in-law, who practically curled up in a ball on the floor.)
I love them…they’re one of my favorite things about the summer. Everything about them…the way the sky darkens and the air gets cooler and filled with that electricity that lets you know a storm is coming before it starts. The way everything creeps back to normal afterward. Thunder and lightening, the sound of the rain on the roof in a really torrental downpour. Flooding. Tornado warnings. And power outages are the best, especially at night, and when they last a long time. Love to go to sleep to them, read, draw, or just watch.
Oh, and of course I also enjoy watching the each of local TV station’s resepctive weather guy of the week trying to out-do the other network in their up-to-the-minute-storm-tracker-coverage, highlighted storm cell maps, special weather bulletins breaking into the regular scheduled programings and the like. In short, thunderstorms are the best.
Oh yes…I am a HUGE fan of thunderstorms!! My husband and I invariably go out on the porch with the first rumble. We bring the dogs, some iced tea, and make a party of it! We get some real doozys where we live. For some reason our dogs get a real charge out of it…Fun!
I feel so connected to nature or something…(primordial?) after a good storm. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that this unbridled, passionate beast can, if it chooses…zap you into burnt toast in an instant. So neat!
You know one of the best parts of living in Atlanta, for me? We get some wild lightning shows. In New Orleans, I’d usually just see flashes and the occasional bolt. Here, we get those cool cloud-jumping, sparks flying every which way, lightning shows of doom, with the ground rumbling thunder right after. Man, it’s beautiful.
Thunderstorms are high on the list of my very favorite things. Got some good ones growing up in Texas, but here in Korea they aren’t common.
I just returned from two weeks in Thailand, though, and there were some nice ones. The last one was while I was returning to the mainland after some time on an island, a 3-hour boat ride. A thunderstorm on the open water–now that’s livin’. As long as the boat is up to it.