Thank you.

Yellow pine does have something of a dramatic grain; the springwood is a pale cream but the summerwood is reddish brown. The varnish I used actually toned it down, believe it or not.

The drawer front is made form the same plain sawn 1x6 as the top, hence the cathedral grain. The face frame is made from what was left of a really unfortunate 2x8 I bought to make legs out of for another table, it was full of defects and cracks, but happened to be rift sawn so it presented that very straight grain.

The only thing I know about that plywood is it isn’t clad in pine, it’s what’s left over from a pantry cabinet. But I think it finished up nicely. The grain doesn’t match but at least on the A (outer) side I think it came out about the same tone.

(I think this is a reference to the recent “a grad student was grabbed off the street in my town last month” entry into the series and the “ooh XKCD gone political” response to same)

opposite idea from mixing powdered milknin fresh milk for “more milk per milk.”

If you’re new to Linux, I suggest at the very least starting to learn now. If you have a spare device you can install it on, an old laptop or something, dual boot on your existing machine or use Virtualbox…Start learning now, while you still consider Windows an option.

My own journey to the Linux platform included several instances of the following scenario:

I need to get something done. It’s simple, in Windows 7 I know how to do it in seconds. It’s so simple that I don’t know the words for it, just the thing to click to do it. But it doesn’t work that way in Linux, even the vocabulary is different, and you need this done right now because you’re working on something and you don’t have time to stop and learn this right now.

Boot into Windows, get your job done and turned in. Then look up how to do it in Linux later. Eventually you stop hitting that wall.

You’ve decided you have seven months. I’d get to it.

While the nation was functioning, meat and dairy would have been regulated by the USDA, not the FDA.

Male puberty happens a bit later than female puberty; at almost 14 he’s either in the thick of it or just about done.

I don’t think male puberty is quite as “what the Lovecraftian fuck is happening to me right now” as female puberty. His voice either has or will drop, this isn’t physically painful but it’s not fun how people react to it sometimes.

He is going to GROW. When I was 15 I outgrew a pair of shoes overnight. Came home from school one day, took my shoes off, went to bed. Woke up the next morning, those same shoes didn’t fit. In the next couple years he’s probably going to have some joint or bone aches just from growing so much. My parents fed me Tylenol which did basically nothing, I’m not convinced Tylenol works. It’ll slow down by the time he’s out of high school but where girls are pretty much at adult size at 18 boys will keep growing a bit into their early 20s.

He’s gonna get stronger. Sometimes it’s going to sneak up on him; prepare for the occasional moments of didn’t know his own strength style clumsiness.

Physical activity is a good idea; sports, marching band, shop class, if you can get him up and moving during the day and not packed into a classroom it’ll be good for his brain. Boys don’t really do well sitting in a classroom all day.

For the above three reasons he is going to have a VORACIOUS appetite. I ate 5,000 calories a day and struggled to gain weight in high school. Let the kid eat. A hungry teen is an angry teen. Somewhere around 19 or 20, either in college or in the get a job part of life, that growth spurt is tapering off and there’s less physical activity inherent in life, so the need for calories is going to decrease but his ordering habits won’t. 19 years old is about time to start ordering medium combo meals.

You can expect a certain amount of teenage moodiness; his brain is rewiring itself. He’ll have feelings. Society isn’t okay with this. He’ll learn how to express nothing but anger or amusement. This is ultimately for the best; once he’s an adult he will be expected to do two things: Work and die. Having feelings is accomplishing neither of those so he is expected to…never do that. Some people will ask him for displays of emotions; he will quickly learn that they are not interested in his actual feelings because those would require, like, dealing with or whatever. They want to see an impromptu rom-com performance.

Unexplained genital pain is never normal in males; “it hurts, and it has hurt for awhile now” is reason to see a doctor.