Over the next few days, you'll notice some changes on the site. We are finally finishing the process of some design tweaks, and a pretty major reorganization of our static content on the site.

We hope everyone will be as excited about what we have come up with as we are!

We are 15 years old today. FIFTEEN! (In internet years, that's like being 500.)

We debuted online on December 15th, 1998 and here we are, still rolling, and wanting to keep on rolling some more, in 2013.

"AND OMFG I WAS OVULATING, TOO!!!!!!!" This sentence is becoming familiar to us.

More young people seem to be developing some new knowledge about fertility cycles. I think that's great. Well, kind of great. Thing is, lots of the information you're getting, or think you have, is often dodgy, only half the picture, or just flat-out wrong.

One of the most common condom whoopsies we hear about from our users involves themselves or a partner going to put a condom on, then discovering they've put it on the wrong way.

Often, after doing that, they'll also report following that up with a second common oops, which is just flipping that same condom over and then putting it on the right way.

Today is my birthday.

If you've been a reader here for more than a year or two, you might have noticed that some years, I ask for something for my birthday here, and not usually something that's a thing, like a pony, a fire hoop, a scooter with a sidecar for my little dog, or a life-sized Fozzie Bear I could tell bad jokes to while going wokka-wokka (though I'd oh-so-gladly accept all of those things, for the record).

Eleven years have gone by since I first came to Scarleteen as a very frightened, very lost sixteen year-old who had nowhere else to go and was ready to give up altogether.

I don't remember now what I wrote or what I asked for. But I will never forget seeing a response from Heather which read "I believe you, and I care."

As you may know, we started our major fundraising drive for the year this month.  Our goal, for the year, is to raise just over $40,000 from new donors in order to best sustain, support and grow our organization.

Since we began the drive on the 13th, you've helped us raise just over $5,000. If the donors who chose to give monthly all keep that up for the year, that will get us to $8,500 of the total funds we need. Hooray!

We sometimes deal with a tough situation in direct service: a user comes in, and reports having contracted an STI; a user who also isn't a first-time user of our site or services, and who, in a previous conversation with us about pregnancy risks, blew off also talking about STIs and safer sex and turned down help we offered to them to reduce their STI risks, not just pregnancy risks.

This is one of those things where there's no joy or pride in being right: it stinks to be right about someone getting any kind of illness and being unhappy.

When one person walks up to another person on the street and just starts punching them in the face, we don't call it boxing. We don't call it "unwanted boxing." We call it assault.

It occurs to me that the "we both forgot to use condoms" thing that comes up often enough is a bit like suggesting that a person forgot to wear pants.

For a whole day.

And didn't notice.

At all.