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"Get your..."

I started college at Virginia Tech, and after the first semester of General Engineering courses, I was talked into declaring a Mining Engineering major by a friend of mine on the cycling team.  Through that department, I received an offer to work in a coal mine for Consol Energy in Buchanan County, Virginia.  The pay was better than what I could have gotten for a summer job back at home, and it was a good way to learn first hand about my new major, so I went for it. Buchanan County is in eastern Virginia, and has borders with both Kentucky and West Virginia.  Right in the middle of the Blue Ridge mountains, it is a very beautiful area, but it is a relatively isolated place.  Once you get to know people in that part of the country, they are some of the kindest people you'll meet, but they are very guarded, and it takes a while to get to know them. After I got my stuff moved in, I was kind of depressed.  I was in a part of the country I hadn't been in before.  I was rooming with
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Looking back, then looking ahead

 The year that was In January, things started off on a really down note.  Charlie's health had started declining in the last couple months of 2019, and in January, the day before Amanda flew to Singapore, we made the difficult, but correct decision, to put the sweet boy down.  After Amanda came home, she had some sniffles and lost her voice (Covid?) that went around the house, but we didn't think a whole lot of it. Sometime in March, we got the order to work from home.  The project I was on got deferred (it would get deferred a couple more times after I got pulled from it).  More and more projects got deferred, and we heard nothing from upper management.   That was, until October, when we got word that there would be 1,900 layoffs in the US, 425 from the company I worked for.  That set of a month and a half of a very panicked atmosphere.  Then, December 2nd, Amanda learned that she was getting laid off, and December 3rd, I learned that my employment fate would be the same as he
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