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How Not to Kill Yourself with Electricity

 I see (after having my nose rubbed in it) that I have been remiss in mentioning my longest-time (but not oldest) friend, without whom this cabin, and likely myself too, would long since have ceased to exist. His name is Charlie ______ (redacted, to protect the guilty), and he is an expert in anything having to do with electricity, from laptops to ICBMs (really!). He’s also an expert auto mechanic, welder, machinist, systems engineer, and gunsmith– my kind of people. I’ve known him since kindergarten, where we were smart-ass little nerds together. He eventually got big, but neither of us really ever grew up. Don’t get me wrong; Charlie definitely has his faults. He’s terrible at tolerating bad cooking, bad service, bad advice, incompetence, ingratitude, and general stupidity. He also doesn’t do too well at obeying speed limits, but is VERY good at avoiding accidents and tickets. After Aaron, our certified, but drunken electrician, left us with a house just waiting to kill us, Charl...
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Paving the driveway

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We had decided to pave the driveway before the accident since the winter before, when Don had snowblowed the driveway,  pebbles kept catching in the snowblower and breaking the shear pins.  We still pushed ahead with this plan once we were back in Mammoth as Don was even less able to snow blow this year that he had been last year.
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The Day We Lost Our Independence--July 5, 2021

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 We traveled to California to attend Heidi Burnham Davies' wedding to Larry Case on July 3.  Heidi is Barbara's niece. We had dinner with an old friend of Don's from school, Charley Turk, and his wife Carol Sue. We spent the night at a bed and breakfast and then went to Church with Eris Burnham (Barbara's sister) and had lunch with Mike and Eris and Julianne Denney (Barbara';s niece) and family who had come down from Montana.   Then we traveled back to Las Vegas where we stayed at another bed and breakfast.  We got up early because the air conditioner on the car was going out and we wanted to get to cooler climes before the day got really warm.  Uncharacteristically, Don said he wanted to drive.  Usually on long trips like this, Barbara drives first in the morning because she is more alert early in the day than Don.  Barbara navigated on her phone to get us from the bed and breakfast to I-15.  We had  just entered the freeway.  We w...
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