in total, it was mightily intense and ultimately destructive. Lighting was striking all over the place and continually. The storm gods were angry. The night sky lit up more or less perpetually. And the wind toppled trees and made my (not-so-sealed) house rather breezy. But, one of the damned lightning bolts struck somewhere immensely close to my house in a booming explosion and blew out two lightbulbs (literally, as the shards of glass on my floor could attest) , made my cell phone charger start to smoke, and, worst of all, fried my laptop. In my defense, it was plugged into my surge protector. But it didnt matter. So, about six months after recooperating my laptop from a virus which shut it down for nearly four months, Im again sin portatil 
(without laptop). Life goes on without a computer, just much less efficiently. Luckily, it was under insurance (Im glad I went for the PC-endorsed property insurance after all) and I had all of my most important documents backed up on my harddrive back home and on my USB here. So the lesson to be learned is either 1) invest in a super heavy duty surge protector (in retrospect, mine was only about $20 from Target) or 2) unplug everything during any storm where there may be lighting.PS- this is not the real picture of what happened to my laptop, rather an exaggeration
