Seriously. It’s something people don’t talk much about, but as I learned last night, where you put your balls can be a very important and potentially devastating thing.

See, when we were coming back from the Grand Canyon, we decided to head east and check out the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park. This is really two parks in one, with the Painted Desert being in the northern part, above I-40 and the Petrified forest roughly 25 miles south, below I-40, but all connected by a large tract of land that apparently nobody else cared about when Congress decided to create this combined National Park thing.

But, as we headed east from Flagstaff, I noticed on my trusty Rand-McNally atlas that Meteor Crater is just a few miles south of I-40, so we figured, what the heck, we’d go visit the most recognizable meteor impact crater on earth.

So we did. (I may have already posted on how this and other detours led to an arrival back home on Friday morning at 3:00 am…)

So, of course they have a gift shop at Meteor Crater, just as they have gift shops at any place there is a reasonable chance that three cars might stop on any given day. Especially out in the middle of a nameless, featureless desert. Gift shops are the surest sign that civilization is present.

Somehow the gift shop at Meteor Crater included all sorts of rocks, crystals, pottery and other things that you might not think of as being related to meteors, craters or astronomical collisions. Such as the two South American arrowheads I purchased (exquisite work, by the way, much better than most of the “native American” arrowheads I’ve seen for sale in the other ubiquitous gift shops that litter the west, and cheaper too, at $2.00 per arrowhead).

But they also had these magnetic balls for sale, balls made of powerful ceramic magnets. We bought six of them for the Cosmic son. They are really cool. He played with them nonstop for most of the rest of the trip.

But, as the title of this post warns, you must be careful where you put your balls. He put his powerful magnetic balls on his laptop computer.

It destroyed his hard drive nearly instantly.

So, we are now reinstalling everything on his computer onto a shiny new hard drive while I am trying to see if I can salvage his old one. So far, no dice. It “formatted” but every test I’ve run on it so far fails.

So, be careful where you put your balls. This is very sound advice. Trust me.