As I was waiting in the van with Willow and Alex in the darkened parking lot of the soccer field where Alex had just finished practicing, we saw a rather substantial shooting star streak horizontally across the sky above the northern horizon. It appeared almost greenish, and seemed to throw off sparks before it fizzled away to nothingness.

Despite all of this, I nearly forgot about it until I read the news story today about the astronaut who dropped some tools while spacewalking outside the space station. It occurred to me that what we'd witnessed last night might have been the spectacular demise of those fumbled tools.

This, in turn, reminded me of an incident that happened while Willow and I were driving from her pizza party to the barbeque at my friend's house. We were on the freeway, passing the soccer field, when all of a sudden there was a soccer ball bouncing across the lanes of traffic. Amazingly, it didn't hit any cars. Still more amazingly, somebody had to have kicked that ball damn hard to get it over the netting erected between field and freeway to prevent just this kind of accident.

People just have to learn to hold on to their stuff.