[Lonesome in Massachussets]

You must spent more than an average amount of time outdoors at night, or else you’re just lucky or exceptionally observant.

They are uncommon but not particularly rare. About one trillion meteors large enough to cause ionization trails enter the earth’s atmosphere every day. They are modeled as being exponentially distributed, with the relative number of objects being inversely proportional to a constant raised to size. (Select your units carefully). In other words there are about a million times as many 1 gram meteors as 10 gram and trillion times as many 1 gram as 100 gram objects, for instance. (I don’t have the proportions in front of me.)

The ones that scare me are the 10,000,000+ gram objects.

[Roccus]

I do pay attention to the sky. The two that ended in flares were orange/red and were falling toward the horizon. The one that passed overhead was quite an experience. When it first cleared the distant roofline, I thought it was a color ball from a roman candle going up. As I waited for it to arc back down, it's (perceived) speed increased and it raced by to disappear behind a nearby building. It was white/green and shaped like an elongated, horizontal tear drop. Funny, even though this was almost thirty years ago, I can picture it very clearly in my mind.