Storms - love them or hate them?
I love to hate them.
When I'm at home, not planning to go anywhere, the power doesn't go out, and I'm in bed with my kitty in a ball next to me purring, there's something satisfying about a good, hard, torrential downpour.
Riding on Amtrak with your own private roomette, looking out the window and watching a torrential downpour -- knowing that it's completely and utterly irrelevant to the train's ability to safely roar down the tracks at 80+ mph without having to slow down, it's downright cool.
In any other context, they suck.
I've lost weeks of productive time at work and in my own personal programming projects being obsessed with approaching hurricanes, shopping for an inverter-type generator I never ended up buying, shopping for hurricane supplies, and hemorrhaging vast amounts of cash buying enough supplies to last through Armageddon.
I get dangerously overwhelmed driving in the same torrential downpours I enjoy from trains and in bed with my kitty.
I almost miss the days before I got my first Android phone, and went through Florida afternoon thunderstorms happily oblivious to the doppler tornadoes swirling overhead everywhere, now dutifully reported in realtime by at least a half dozen apps available from Android Market. Now, I get bent out of shape every time it happens... which is a lot (Florida actually has more tornadoes per square mile in any given year than any other part of the country... and roughly half of them occur in Dade & Broward counties). Intellectually, I know that most Florida tornadoes are basically 30 seconds of Hurricane Wilma, and the main evidence that a tornado hit your neighborhood is going outside the morning after a really bad storm and finding your neighbor's lawn furniture hanging from the tree in your front yard. It doesn't matter. I was born in Ohio, and my elementary school teachers did a great job of making me neurotic about them.
And I really, really hate getting wet.
I don't think I'd ever want to live in Florida or anywhere along the southeast coast. In Michigan we get severe thunderstorms in summer and ice storms in winter that might knock out the power for a day or two. I can't imagine having to deal with a hurricane though. I'd hate being forced to evacuate my house and then not know if all my stuff will be ruined when I get back.
We do get tornadoes in Michigan but they are mostly isolated and small. One will take the roof off a barn or destroy a grain silo somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and you'll hear about it on the news. Straight line windstorms tend to produce more widespread damage and they can pack winds 70-100 mph. West Michigan is probably overdue for a major tornado though. There hasn't been a really bad one since 1980.
i like rain , im scared of thunder and lightning
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moderate low functining autistic (i was diagnosed with autism, not aspeger syndrome).
my picture is my ear defenders that i wear all the time. pictured is silencio earmuff, l1 howard leight, i also own 12 howard leight (not pictured) .
I'm still a bit scared of thunderstorms. I think it's because when I was little a lightning bolt hit a house a few doors down from us and knocked the chimney off and our TV went out. After that whenever my mum told me that storms couldn't hurt me I knew she was lying. I'm ok with them if they're far off in the distance but if they get really close I get anxious and I don't like the very loud thunderclaps. I am usually quite relieved after a storm in the summertime though because it relieves the build-up of heat and humidity which always gives me a headache.
I love storms of all kinds! I love the snow, it always seems to lift the winter gloom and lying in bed listening to rain batter against the window is always cool! Although I would happily substitute any storms for hot sunshine, I hate the cold! Sometimes I think I'm solar powered!
kx250rider
Supporting Member
Joined: 15 May 2010
Age: 56
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,140
Location: Dallas, TX & Somis, CA
> But if I lived in a country that has proper storms I would probably hate them.
Well, you can't *quite* relax. I might have misread the statistic, but AFAIK, Britain is kind of like Florida when it comes to tornadoes... it's not the first place that comes to mind when people hear about them, but apparently it has more per square mile than any country in Europe, and in fact has more per square mile than any state in the US besides Florida. It's just that (like Florida), most British tornadoes are short-lived EF0 or EF1 (with an occasional EF2, and an exceptionally rare EF3 once or twice per century), and strike at night (when they're unlikely to be seen, photographed, or caught on video).
I might be wrong, but I think I read somewhere that Britain gets lots of tornadoes for the same reason Florida does -- cold continental air colliding with warmer air above the Gulf Stream offshore (in contrast to the supercell-type storm systems that spawn monster tornadoes in the midwestern US).
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