As luck would have it, tiny whirling balls form from the stuff of which the universe is made.

And the most common whirling ball is the simplest.

And one of the most common of the confederations of whirling balls in the Universe, water, consists of two of the simplest whirling balls and one sixteen times heavier.

Luckily, that confederation is unusually sticky across a wide range of temperature.

And when it is ice, it floats; it does not sink.

It's a stroke of luck that there's a planet here in a place near enough to the sun to melt most of the ice.

And far enough away to keep water from boiling away.

Fortunately the planet is big enough to hold a thick layer of air.

But not so big as to pull lots of big rocks down from the sky and snap the branches of the trees where my ancestors evolved their hands.

Lucky for me there's a vast planet out there a long way away sucking up most of the dangerous loose rocks in the solar system and not interfering much with the orbit of my planet.

Lucky too that there's a moon keeping our planet from wobbling too much as it rotates.

It's a fortunate thing that there's enough nuclear fuel in the Earth's core to keep mountain building happening. Because of this, there are still spots of dry land even after billions of years of rains, rivers, waves and winds.

The fates were smiling on the baton-passes of my evolution and my genes managed to survive from the beginning of life all the way up to and and including today and hopefully will continue surviving tomorrow.

What were the chances that I'd be born to odd but educated parents in the United States of America?

It's a stroke of luck that my parents raised me in a rural area, away from drugs and social circles, where I had to learn to entertain myself.

I'm fortunate to arrive at mature adulthood in the age of the Internet goldrush.

I'm pleased that I was into electronics as a kid and that I started keeping computerized versions of my documents back in 1989.

It's a good thing that I documented the Big Fun experience at the beginning of the Web and then put it online, learning the skills I would need to get the job from which I was just fired.

It's fortunate that I once saved my lunch money and spare change and bought a VIC-20 and learned to program in BASIC. This was all I needed to know in order to pick up ASP, then SQL.

Who could have guessed that when I went to that Ann Arbor community radio station benefit I'd be meeting up with my future long-term partner and getting a ticket to the internet goldrush as well?

It's a stroke of luck I got that internet startup job in Mission Valley and worked my ass off and learned how to build complex websites front end to back end.

I'm lucky to have survived all the firings that happened long enough to fully vest in thousands of shares of stock.

It's lucky I was fired. Now I'm free to take what I have and be more selective about where to apply it.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?000220