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This is the girls' story. That's what doctors told Kendal and Tyler Conley as they worried and prayed and waited for their twin babies, fighting a rare medical condition, to be born. This is a …
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Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome, or TTTS, is a rare and serious medical condition that occurs in about 15 percent of identical twin pregnancies in which the fetuses share a placenta and the blood supply becomes connected through shared blood vessels.
One baby, called the recipient, receives too much blood supply and the other baby, called the donor, receives too little.
"We watch these babies very closely, every two weeks at least, starting at 16 weeks to the end of pregnancy," said Dr. Nicholas Behrendt, 37, a maternal fetal specialist and fetal surgeon at the Colorado Fetal Care Center at Children's Hospital Colorado.
"If the imbalance occurs, both babies can become very sick from the disease," he said. "If the disease progresses, then severe complications such as heart failure or death can occur."
Left untreated, one or both babies die in 80 to 100 percent of pregnancies, statistics show. The number of deaths from TTTS exceeds those from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). But when treated, and without complicating factors, the center expects 96.5 percent for survival of one or both fetuses and 83 percent for survival of both babies, according to a recent review of cases at Children's. But 90 percent of TTTS cases have at least one or more complications that can reduce survival rates.
Before ultrasounds, the condition was diagnosed only after the babies' deaths, Behrendt said. The laser surgery to separate the blood vessels has been used since the 1980s. But he said survival rates have drastically improved over the past decade because doctors are better at the technically challenging procedure that requires a team of doctors and support staff to perform.
"It's a satisfying feeling . . . to be able to take care of these patients," Behrendt said.
The Colorado Fetal Care Center, which opened in 2010, performs between 100 and 130 TTTS laser procedures a year involving families from throughout the country.
"I get a lot of satisfaction out of being able to educate the families about what is going on with their pregnancy," Behrendt said. "At the end of the day, it's great to feel that we give as many families a shot in a pretty dire situation."
— Ann Macari Healey
This is the girls' story.
That's what doctors told Kendal and Tyler Conley as they worried and prayed and waited for their twin babies, fighting a rare medical condition, to be born.
This is a story, too, about the marvels of medicine: That's what Kendal and Tyler will tell you saved their babies.
But more than anything, this is a story about family. And love. And faith that a happy ending would be written.
• • • • •
Meet the Conleys: Kendal is 33, an account manager for a wine and liquor distributor. Tyler, 38, in software sales, works from home. They live in Golden and have a 2-year-old son, Beckham, whom they call "little man."
Beckham now also has two little sisters, whose story began June 25, when Kendal's home pregnancy test unequivocally read "PREGNANT."
Eight weeks later, the ultrasound technician began laughing. "Do you have twins in the family?" she asked Kendal and Tyler.
"Nooo....," Kendal said. And then, "Oh, my gosh."
"Yes," the technician said, "there's two in there."
Kendal and Tyler were ecstatic. Beckham ran around the doctor's office in circles.
But a hint of concern shadowed the happiness when the ultrasound also showed the fetuses, who were identical twins each in their own amniotic sacs — bags of fluid in which the fetuses grow and develop —were sharing one placenta. That meant a higher risk for the rare and serious Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome, or TTTS, which in simple terms means babies share blood vessels that lead to one baby receiving extra blood flow and the other baby getting too little. Untreated, one or both of the babies die 80 to 100 percent of the time.
But with treatment, the outcome is drastically different: One or both of the fetuses survive in 96.5 percent of pregnancies; both survive in 83 percent of pregnancies, a recent review of cases at Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora shows. Most cases, however, have one or more complicating factors that can reduce survival rates.
At 12 weeks, the couple began consulting with specialists from Children's Colorado Fetal Care Center.
"We know that when they share a placenta . . . almost all the time you're going to see interconnecting vessels, but about 15 percent of the time, that will cause problems," said Dr. Nicholas Behrendt, one of the maternal fetal medicine specialists working with the Conleys. "We watch these babies very closely."
From then on, doctors ordered ultrasounds every three days to monitor any changes in the amount of fluid in the amniotic sacs and make sure kidneys, bladders and hearts were working properly. If TTTS were to kick in, the kidneys of the baby receiving too much blood flow would essentially work overtime, filling up the sac with the extra urine being excreted. The bladder would be larger; the heart would beat faster to help the kidneys work harder.
Anxiety began to consume Kendal. A pit of worry settled in her stomach. She didn't want to name the girls: "I was scared to get attached."
Tyler, unsure the babies would survive, didn't tell anyone, except for family and close friends, that Kendal was pregnant.
"Every time we went, we worried," Tyler said. "How are their bladders? Are there heartbeats? We were waiting for the bad, bad news."
Between 13 and 17 weeks, the ultrasounds showed some discrepancy in fluid between the babies, but it would self-correct, and the worry would ease.
At 21 weeks, however, Kendal's stomach became so swollen and taut she felt like a huge balloon. The ultrasound showed one baby floating in a pool of fluid. The other looked shrink-wrapped.
Doctors said the condition had progressed so fast the only option was laser surgery to separate the blood vessels.
The babies underwent a battery of tests to ensure their hearts and brains were healthy enough for the procedure. Behrendt and Dr. Henry Galan explained the condition, the plan, the risks, the options.
"Knowledge is power," Tyler said. "The more you know, the more you understand. We had so many questions."
A week later, a team of specialists including Behrendt and Galan performed a successful 2-minute, 34-second laser surgery that separated 11 blood vessels. They also drained 2 1/2 liters of fluid.
But to separate those vessels, it was necessary to rupture the membrane that divided the babies' amniotic sacs, which put the twins at high risk of entangling their umbilical cords.
As a precaution, Kendal went on bedrest at home. At 26 weeks, she moved to the maternal fetal center at Children's, where she continued on closely monitored bed rest. Ultrasounds three times a day checked the babies' heartbeats and made sure their cords remained untangled.
And despite being afraid to get attached, Kendal and Tyler got to know their babies well: Baby A, as she was called, was a spitfire, a wiggle worm who kicked and hiccupped and rolled around all the time. Baby B was mellow. Quiet. Peaceful.
* * * * *
On Christmas Eve, at about 30 weeks, Kendal's water broke. But the goal was to reach 31 weeks — nine weeks before the original March 6 due date — to give the babies more time to grow and a better chance of surviving and developing without complications.
On Jan. 2, fluid began to build up again, igniting concern that some vessels might still be attached. So two days later, on Jan. 4 at 11:25 a.m., doctors performed a C-section and delivered two little girls.
Kendal didn't see the babies before they were whisked away — each with her own eight-member team of neonatologists, neonatal nurse practitioners, nurses, respiratory therapists and pharmacist — to the room next door. But when she heard them both cry, she cried, too.
The babies were immediately put on ventilators to help them breathe — lungs don't fully develop until 36 weeks — for the first 24 hours.
Tyler drifted back and forth, between mom and babies, like a passenger following directions. He actually doesn't remember much.
When she finally met her babies, Kendal felt her anxiety ease.
Baby A, the one receiving the extra blood flow, became Kenna. She weighed 4 pounds. Baby B — Zoey — weighed 3 pounds, 10 ounces.
On March 2, just four days before their original due date, Kenna and Zoey left their side-by-side cribs in the neonatal intensive care unit and went home. Kenna weighed 8 pounds, Zoey 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Their parents brought with them oxygen equipment to help them breathe, a stethoscope to monitor heartrates, the meds and supplements needed to add calories to breast milk.
In the first 10 days home, the babies woke at night and slept during the day. Kendal and Tyler estimate their sleep totaled 15 to 20 hours during that same time. But the babies are growing and will soon not need the extra oxygen help.
Life, Kendal said, "is beautifully chaotic."
When she and Tyler look back on the journey, they say they have witnessed two miracles.
The first is the medicine — the doctors that educated and included them in the process and the procedures and care that gave their children life.
"Seeing how these babies started and seeing how good they are — 20 years ago these babies wouldn't have survived," Tyler said. "What's incredible is how medicine saved these girls."
The second is the girls themselves.
"They're little miracle babies," Kendal said simply. "We are overjoyed."
Love. Faith. Family.
And a happy ending.
Ann Macari Healey writes about people, places and issues of everyday life. An award-winning columnist, she can be reached at ahealey@coloradocommunitymedia or 303-566-4100.
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There's a principle in medical science that's most often cited as "the dose makes the poison." Let's talk about one example.
There's a drug that's a central nervous system stimulant, it's massively addictive both physically and mentally and, when ingested, can cause aggression, heart palpitations, nausea, vomiting, disassociative and delusional behavior, even death.
Wow, what a horrible substance! Surely we must band together to ban this drug for the good of mankind!
Except, that will be kind of hard, and I will fight you over it. Because the substance we're talking about is caffeine. And those effects only happen when ingesting massive doses. At least double what I ingest when work is buying me nitro cold brew. (Kidding. More like 1000x.)
Now, let's talk about another substance. This one is an effective treatment for such serious illnesses as bronchopulmonary dysplasia and apnea in premature babies, it protects against Parkinson's disease, and it can safely enhance athletic performance and improve mental alertness.
Is my narrative device too obvious here? Because we're still talking about caffeine. And the point is:
Something can be harmless, harmful or even beneficial, and what's good or bad is not the thing itself, but the dose.
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." — Paracelsus
(And for you non-science, literature nerds, Hamlet said something similar: "For there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Looking out for you guys, too. #litnerdsunite)
The notion of the dose making the poison is the principle behind toxicology, and recognition that it matters whether we're talking about a little bit or a lot of something. And it turns out that we can apply the exact same principle to money – and to all of life.
Money Isn't Good or Bad
Some of the happiest people I've ever known were those who were shortest on money. And some of the absolute worst, most miserable, least grounded ones were those with the most. We're all here because we're attempting to save more of our money than most people do, but I've learned this harsh truth time and time again:
Having more money doesn't make a person any happier. Just as often, it can do exactly the opposite.
I've also learned that having plenty of money doesn't make a person any kinder, smarter, more generous, more forgiving, more trusting or even possessing of better taste. And having little to no money doesn't mean a person isn't those things.
So money isn't itself good or bad. It's a tool, just like any chemical or pharmaceutical, and the dose matters.
Going All In, All at Once
This interesting thing happens when many people discover the idea of financial independence or early retirement: I call it the deep end effect.
We might first dip a toe in, then perhaps try out the shallows. But it's such a powerful idea, that most of us end up beelining straight for the deep end. Which means: no playing around where we can safely touch the bottom, focusing just on how fun the water is. Instead: total commitment, foregoing the safety of the shallow end in favor of the big rewards of braving the deep end.
And lots of things encourage us: the loudest voices cheering us on from the side, shouting, "You're good! You don't need the lifesaver!" even if we struggle to keep our heads above water. Our own overwhelming desire for the glory. Our own pride, not wanting to admit that maybe we should have stayed in the shallow end a bit longer.
This is a thinly veiled metaphor for the addictive feeling of seeing our numbers go up quickly, the pressure that many of our FI blogs put on people to save at an extremely and perhaps unachievably high rate, and the goal of achieving the "perfection" of a fully optimized budget with no fat left to trim.
The deep end effect is going straight from nothing to the big dose. And it's intoxicating, because we're not used to it. Good intoxicating at first, but if we don't moderate ourselves at some point, we quickly see the dark side of the dose.
Holding Back to Finish
If you have a headache, you don't automatically reach for 12 aspirins. You take two, and if those don't work, you maybe take two more. And for good reason: taking 12 aspirin is super bad for you. Well going straight to the deep end in your own finances could be bad for you, too.
The comments section of this blog, and my email inbox, are littered with people sharing their very personal stories of doing too much too quickly to save for early retirement, or of asking for tips in how they can possibly sustain their pace over the course of many years. And my answer is always the same: slow down.
My friend Maggie hates the marathon metaphor, but it's apt here: If you want to finish the marathon, you don't go out at a sprint. You go a lot more slowly than you could sustain for a short distance, and you pace yourself. You moderate. As everyone who has finished a marathon knows, a lot of the game is actually slowing yourself down so you never get going too fast. It's hard sometimes, because you know you could run faster at that moment, but holding back is the key to finishing.
"Holding back is the key to finishing."
It's the same with all the stuff that surrounds money – frugality, savings rates, spending on "wants." There's external pressure and the pressure we put on ourselves to keep getting closer to perfect, but perfect isn't sustainable.
The Dose Makes the Poison with Money Behaviors, Too
The personal finance community is as guilty as anyone of creating these idealized models of what life should look like, and creating our own enemy symbols.
Anyone who still pays for cable TV is an idiot, obviously, and really, if you even still have a TV at all, you're probably doing it wrong. If you bought something from Amazon on Prime Day, you're a mindless consumer robot. And if you haven't given away half your stuff already, then you might as well just light your money on fire. Don't even get me started on those lattes, which are a one-way ticket to financial hell.
A few weeks ago I wrote about those cooking boxes you can get delivered, and based on the responses, those are definitely next up on the list of "Public Enemy No. 1 for Money-Smart People." (My caution against them was that they could make us lazy and rob us of an opportunity to learn and grow – but also acknowledged that we all need some convenience, and if that's your convenience of choice, then great. Oh, and I'm opposed to the amount of garbage they generate – that's a legit problem.)
But any of those spending choices – just like literally anything you could choose to spend your money on – should never be seen as about the choice or behavior itself, but about the dose.
Someone who pays for convenience sometimes isn't lazy or stupid. You do not get more karma points for being a perfect specimen of frugality. St. Peter doesn't greet you more warmly when you reach the pearly gates just because you eschewed cable and cooking boxes and the latest iPhone.
The Problem with Purity
Much has been written about all the pressure that young people today feel because of social media. Instagram hashtags like #eatclean make those who occasionally indulge in a burger feel like gluttons, and we see this play out in the rise of orthorexia (obsession with healthy eating that becomes an eating disorder). The only way to eat "correctly" is to make sure everything that crosses your lips is Instagram-worthy.
Except, that's just false. Nutritional science is still incredibly nascent and inherently flawed because no one remembers everything they ate over the long term, so dietary behaviors can't be studied with anything like scientific accuracy. Movies like What the Health purport to tell us "the right way" to eat, but they cherry pick the data to tell a compelling (and ideologically driven) story.
So pressure to be perfect around eating, to do it "correctly," is based on a false idea of "correct," because we don't actually know what that is. We think that red meat and saturated fat are bad, but your risk of most diseases only goes up if you eat them often, not if you eat them at all. Eating them occasionally, in moderation, may not actually have any impact on your health whatsoever. So we collectively believe that the best thing we can do for ourselves is to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and to minimize the obvious junk, but we're still feeling around in the dark on the rest. See the recent redemption of cholesterol from Public Health Enemy to eh-probably-NBD.
Mr. ONL's doctor told him that the fact that he smoked in his younger days actually likely protected him and delayed the onset of his autoimmune disease. So we know cigarettes are bad as a habit, but apparently they might sometimes have the opposite effect.* The dose makes the poison. (*Please do not start smoking. The risk on that is too high to make any possible and theoretical upside worth it. Plus: So expensive!)
Focusing on the Dose, Not the Thing Itself
As much as any of us may try to tell the full, authentic story of our money lives here, there's bound to be some editing and curation that happens. I do my best to be transparent here (without sharing our numbers, of course), but I'm positive that the Ms. ONL version of me is a lot smarter, nicer and cooler than real life me. That is just the nature of human storytelling. But it matters because I know that my sharing our money story – while inspiring to some – is increasing the volume of the chorus shouting, "This is how it's done. Anything else is failure."
Related post: Reconciling Our Online Selves and Real Life
It makes me sad when I see a blogger or tweeter write something like, "My goal was to save X amount this month, but I only saved 90 percent of that, so I give myself an F." Like, what?! You saved a whole bunch of money, and you consider that a fail? This is crazy talk, people.
Focusing on the thing, not the dose, makes things black and white, when virtually nothing in life is actually either/or. Saving 100 percent of a goal is success, so anything less than that is failure. The latte factor is this big problem, so paying for a latte ever means being financially irresponsible and failing. Resorting to convenience products costs more than DIYing everything, which makes us less than. How about instead, we quit this toxic thinking?
A latte costs, what, four bucks? There is nothing wrong with spending four dollars unless you have less than that. There's even nothing wrong with buying that latte often if doing so isn't derailing your financial goals, and that's something you choose to spend your money on mindfully. I've been guilty of posting pics of lattes with the faux-confession of "Look how naughty I'm being." I will stop this, because it only reinforces this notion that a latte is a sin, when it's not. It's just a thing. The problem is buying them every day without thinking, regardless of whether they bring us real joy or happiness, and even then, they are only possibly a problem in relation to our context at that point in time.
For years, I was super careful to have only a half cup of coffee once each morning, because I'm a terrible sleeper and didn't want to do anything to make sleep even more challenging for me. And in those years, if I had a full cup as an exception one day, I really felt that caffeine. I'd be jittery and talk too fast, and feel like everyone could tell that I was jacked up. However, in these last few years of work, I've relaxed my coffee rules just to be able to get through the long travel and work days, and I now have at least a full strong cup of coffee each day, but some days have two or three, often of high octane nitro while traveling. And if I add another cup to the mix now? Nothing. I'd have to get five servings deep to feel the jitters or to start talking like the Micro Machines man.
The dose matters – and so does the context.
I could buy, with my own money, a latte every day right now, and it would not affect my savings rate in any meaningful way. Because in my current context, that's a drop in the bucket. That hasn't always been true for me — I had my years of just scraping by, of accruing debt to buy essentials, of paying off that debt — but that's where we are right now. For someone else, a latte every day or not could be the difference between getting ahead or falling behind. But the latte itself isn't the problem, it's the merely a symbol of larger money habits like mindless spending which, when viewed out of context, makes an easy target to hold up as This Thing That's Wrong With Us.
The Power of Radical Moderation
If it's not obvious, I think anyone who truly loves lattes should buy the damn latte, at least every once in a while. Whatever it is that you truly love should always be accounted for in your budget.
If you entirely give up something you truly love, you're doing this wrong.
This desire to optimize our spending and achieve high rates of saving makes total sense because all of this is so exciting and motivating, but for many of us, perfect isn't sustainable, if it's even achievable to begin with. So let's not even try to achieve it, because that way lies unhappiness. Rather let's embrace the radical part of radical moderation, and be dogged in insisting on not being perfect, on making room in our journey for whatever is most meaningful to us that might not be easy to represent on a spreadsheet or in numerical form.
Instead of focusing on some thing or set of things as either good or bad, let's focus on the dose, especially when it comes to:
Frugality and Spending — Instead of aiming for perfection and the banishment of all of the things raised up as symbols of Evil Waste, focus on what's easy to give up in your context vs. what's truly important to you. We gave up cable and most restaurant spending painlessly, but still spend a relative ton on travel for concerts, because we value that above most things. If we gave that up, our pace would only increase a tiny amount, but we'd feel that loss deeply. But, just because we love music, it doesn't mean we have to go to every concert we'd like to see. That would be too high a dose, and would absolutely slow us way down. Concerts and the travel surrounding them aren't themselves bad, and it's up to us to calibrate the dose to find the balance, in our context, between getting to keep doing the thing we love without spending too much on it. You could apply this example to anything that brings you disproportionate joy, whatever that might be.
Saving — We have seen in our own journey how addictive it can be to focus on saving as fast as we possibly can, pushing that rate ever higher, and on making ourselves miserable in the process. It's why last year was so hard — we saved too much, too fast, and we didn't take enough care of ourselves along the way by actually taking time to relax or using our vacation days. It's why we've actually slowed down our savings rate a tiny bit this year, because last year's dose was too high for us. We decided this is our last hurrah with big disposable income, and so we've done a few things that we can't easily do again, like take a ski trip to Japan this past winter and buy a few things that won't be in the budget once we quit working. We couldn't even tell you what our savings rate is this year, and we probably won't ever calculate it, because the rate itself isn't important. We don't grade ourselves on a pass/fail system any longer, either. What matters is that we aren't letting the journey to our big goal make us unhappy or unhealthy anymore.
What's Your Moderation Story?
Have you embraced radical moderation? If not, what's one thing you could loosen your belt on to increase your happiness or to make your journey more sustainable? If you have embraced it, what helped you get there? Anyone care to confess to having taken too extreme an approach — focusing on the thing, not the dose — and being forced to slow down? Want to stick up for spending money on something that you often see vilified in the media or on blogs? We'd love to hear from you in the comments!
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Andy and I set out to find some gifts we think most, drug
1. Refractometer
A refractometer allows you to read the specific gravity of a liquid without needing to take a large sample from your fermenter, as you would if you were using a hydrometer. This device requires just a drop of solution and a light source so you can read the gradations. In addition, the automatic temperature compensation (ATC) means that you do not have to do any computation to offset the temperature.
2. The Brew Hauler
The Brew Hauler is a carboy carrier that makes a glass or plastic carboy easy and safe to carry. The webbing is tough and strong and the buckle makes the carrier easy to load and unload. I do not (yet) have one of these but my friend Jason does. It is much easier to move carboys around with these, rather than using one hand to steady the neck and the other to cradle the bottom. That is an accident waiting to happen. This device can save you some time and energy and possibly help you avoid a trip to the hospital.
3. Carboy Cleaner
This bottle and carboy cleaner is ideal for getting that stuck-on schmutz knocked off the inside of the glass and get all the junk removed before you need the container again. I used to discard bottles that had not been rinsed well enough and had some remaining junk dried to the side. Of course, now I keg my brew, but the fact remains that without using some sort of device like this, quality cleaning is tough to ensure.
4. Carboy Sprayer
To go along with the cleaner above, you can hook up this sprayer to a faucet or spigot and spray water all up in your carboys and bottles to wash away all the schmutz you removed from the glass. Schmutz – I guess I like that word. This device will screw on most hose spigots and utility sink faucets but if you want to use it at the kitchen sink, chances are you will very likely need an adaptor.
5. Digital Scale
A digital scale like this one will help you measure out precise amounts of hops, and even help you when recipes call for a quarter pound of grain, for example, and your homebrew store only sells it by the pound. No more guessing. This is all part of the standardization of your brewing process. Rather than estimating, you will know for certain that your measurements are repeatable so you can replicate a process, or opt to change it.
6. Beer Glasses
These are advertised as "craft beer" glasses. Let's be honest – that does not really mean anything. They are cool beer glasses that you can feel good about serving your homebrew in. Personally, I have a set of non-descript pint glasses, similar to what you would find in most bars. However, once I break enough of them I will probably get a set like this. Truth be told, there are optimal shapes of glass for different kinds of beer, but mostly it is just an intermediary vessel that goes between the long-term storage (keg or bottle) and the main processing unit (my innards).
7. The Complete Beer Course
Educating yourself on the finer points of beer is always good for someone who is in the business or hobby of making beer. All of us, no matter how experienced, can find something to learn in this book, and this piece is good for beer lovers young and old. While it is not technically a homebrewing book, it is informative and can help beer lovers understand what the different ingredients are and how they affect the flavor of their favorite drink.
8. Periodic Table of Beer
This is a good guide for how to classify beers, so that if you want to make a porter, for example, you can see what is related to porters and get an idea for something else to try that you might also enjoy. It is not an official BJCP diagram but it is a general way to classify beer. Fun, clever, and useful. Exactly the type of thing I enjoy. I think you will as well.
Anytime you are trying to convert homebrew recipes to your available ingredients, check
you have to do a little figuring and guessing, even experimenting. This is because different ingredients have different properties and substituting one for another may not give you the exact end product you want. However, in the end it will be beer, so you will never stray too far off course if you follow the directions and get good approximations for your substitute ingredients.
One problem comes in converting grain recipes to extract. I do not like to do this is because my grain recipes list specific grains I want in the mash. If I try to use an extract, I do not know exactly what kinds of grains were used. Plus, my general philosophy is that the more an ingredient is processed, the more it loses nuance and character. The base malts do not differ significantly but you can get more variation with actual grains than you can with liquid extracts. The same goes for the difference between dry malt and liquid malt. The more you process something, the more nuance you lose. This is not a scientific statement, I know, but I believe it to be true.


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Our Babe's Chicken Dinner House in Cedar Hill opened on June 8, 2009.
The Cedar Hill location is a remodel of the Cedar Hill City Hall. It started out as the fire station in 1962 with 3 engine bays. In 1987 the fire station operations relocated and the building began its second life as City Hall.
The southwest corner of the building is a monument we built to honor the building's previous service. A series of radio towers that were on the building when we began construction once transmitted for police and fire operations for many years, and we kept them in their original glory as a monument.
There is a private room at the front of the dining room dedicated to our good friend and pillar of the community Steve Phillips. He joined the Lord in 2010.
Need catering from this location? Find out more
Check out the Cedar Hill Babe's feature on "The Offical Best Of"!


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women in advertising.
i'm gonna tell you a secret. i often look at the blogs of other women and think: i wish i could be more like them. i wish i could post more photos. i wish i could just present the happy image of myself. i wish i always looked good and put-together and vibrant.
and then, i remember that that's only part of their truth. the truth they wish to share. and i don't begrudge them that, not at all. it is everyone's right to put into their space that which they want to.
and thank goodness for that.
while it's often that truth that i wish to share, it's not the truth i know how to share. and probably, even if i was able, i'd get bored of it in no time.
i sometimes wish i didn't post stuff like this--stuff that seems more soapbox than anything else. but then, a part of me reals and goes, yeah soapbox but... still deserving of a platform--still needing to be heard. still important.
and because this is my space, and because i want to remember what i was thinking and feeling and being shaped by in my twenties, i am gonna post soapbox stuff. and write about goldfish filled purses. and not post pictures for months at a time because i'm feeling not terribly pretty. it's all a work in progress. nothing's perfect. no one's perfect. and no one blog, no one post, no one essay, or even collection of writings is the whole truth.
34 comments:
- kate said...
That's a great clip! I used to work with teenage girls and taught them life skills lessons (anger management, stress, etc) and one of big things we pushed for was body image. We showed them this clip and loads of girls were shocked that the models didn't really look like that in real life.
I think that is important to remember with blogging as well. Most bloggers are always putting their best face forward, and it's easy to trick the mind to think they're better than us.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Becky | Apples of Gold said...
Awesome post! Thank you for sharing! I enjoyed watching that video. I mean, most of us women know that the images on the covers of magazines, and in ads, etc.. are photoshopped and fake, but somehow we still feel inferior to those women. So this was definitely a great reminder for me!
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Unknown said...
thank you, thank you, thank you. for posting this. c:
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Allie said...
thank you for posting this....it's a wonderful reminder that we all have our flaws and it's perfectly fine to be flawed. i'm a new blogger and i have felt the pressure to put only my happy face out there in blog-land, but in the end i feel a bit fake. my life is a very happy one, but i also have some pretty crappy times as well. that's REAL life. again, thanks for this post.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Ashley said...
This is great. I've often contemplated removing all mirrors from my home whenever I have kids. They don't need to spend time looking in mirrors and analyzing their flaws...all they need is the affirmation from family and friends that they are beautiful and worthy and I think their self-esteem would be much healthier.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Jennifer M. said...
For the record, I love all of your posts, whether they're soapboxes or photos or whatever. You have an authentic way of blogging that also resonates with me, and I love that you continue to strive to be yourself.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Jessica said...
what an incredible video clip. thank you for posting.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- tu y yo said...
thank you for posting this video! i re-posted it over on my blog - i think this is such an important message to get out to people.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
you know what? i have often thought that one reason i enjoy your blog so much is that you don't spam us with tons of perfect photos. you write. and when you happen to have some pictures, you share them. i wish other bloggers would write more and not rely on photos to fill up posts.
thanks for blogging with integrity.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- stacey ann said...
for the past year i've ben looking into this area (women/advertising) and have found some wonderful resources.
here is one:
they are making a documentary and on this website they also have a blog, which posts some pretty shocking facts and articles.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- stacey ann said...
for the past year i've ben looking into this area (women/advertising) and have found some wonderful resources.
here is one:
they are making a documentary and on this website they also have a blog, which posts some pretty shocking facts and articles.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Sonja said...
i think your blog comes pretty close to perfect in my opinion actually...but I completely understand what you mean.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Unknown said...
Love this. Thank you, and bless Kate Winslet :)
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- lcb said...
I do it, too. A few weeks ago, I revamped my bookmarks toolbar so that it only featured sites and blogs that did NOT make me feel like I was doing it wrong. It being life.
Good on you for being so honest with yourself and your readers.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
I don't have a blog, but have wanted to create one for a while now. Part of the reason I don't have one is because I don't feel like I'm pretty enough, interesting enough, etc. in comparison to other bloggers. And fear in being adequate prevents me from doing what I want to do. It's something I'm working on. Regardless, when I read your blog I am not bombarded with a perfect image of a perfect life that I just must not be good enough to have myself. When I look through other blogs, sometimes (most times if I'm being honest) I am comparing and while I don't fault other people for having what they have, I do often come away feeling like I'm doing something wrong because I don't have a, b, or c at 24 years old.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that no, you may not post a hundred photos a week or about a perfect life, but you do post in a genuine way and that means more than any pretty picture does. I so admire your willingness to share the good and the bad on this blog. And I easily prefer it to the countless others that shy away from the gritty issues of life in favor of parading the pretty parts. You're an inspiration!
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
Fear of being inadequate would be the correct wording.
And by the way, you are also quite beautiful--inside and out!
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Laura C said...
My mom sent me a link to this clip a few weeks ago. Stunning. It's not new information; we all know that the women we see on magazine covers are digitally enhanced, but it's something we sometimes need to remind ourselves of.
Like any power, the power of advertising can be used for good or evil. As a woman with a passion for public health who just graduated with a degree in advertising, I see the way the world is going and hope to stand for something and use the power of advertising for good.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- JCP Eats, www.jcpeats.com said...
To be honest, your admittance of your imperfection makes you even closer to perfection in my eyes.
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Sierra @ Sierra's View said...
Don't ever stop writing your REAL self. Seriously.
Oh, Just Living the Dream
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Sara said...
The reason you have so many followers is because of your "soap-boxy" stuff. It's refreshing to read a blog that doesn't cover itself with make up, and tells the story of the blogger the way it really is. People relate to you more because they feel you have an understanding of them at a deeper level, not just understand what they like to look at.
Sara xx
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- Taylor said...
I loved this. Thanks so much for sharing!
I love it that I always seem to learn something when I come to your little space on the big world wide web.
Thanks for that!
- Saturday, April 28, 2012
- MR said...
- Sunday, April 29, 2012
- Courtney Hope said...
Wonderful video and a necessary reminder to me. I'm too prone to getting down on myself about these sorts of things. Thanks for sharing-
- Sunday, April 29, 2012
- K.J.D.L said...
I wrote much less gracefully about this very thing just a few days ago.
I love that your blog says what your heart thinks. Even when you are expressing something that is frustrating for you, you portray yourself so beautifully. That is way better than a pretty picture any day.
- Sunday, April 29, 2012
- Brittany said...
this was really interesting. thanks for sharing.
- Sunday, April 29, 2012
- Brook said...
I admire you in this regard, and have referred to your writing as I have wrestled with vulnerability in my own blog posts. I tend to express the most when I'm feeling good about life, but I'm learning to share the beauty that comes from the depths of darkness - or more so the rise from the depths. This is where the beauty reveals itself, but it cannot fully be revealed without the contrast of before.
- Sunday, April 29, 2012
- The Lewicutt's said...
Always happy blogs not only get boring to the writer, the reader too. Mine is generally happy... or at least urging myself to remember how to get myself back to calm in anxiety-filled moments... I want to remember those "at my wits end" moments... and remember how I coped too. And I want my daughter to read them... so she will know, no matter how well I hid it from her, I had my moments... so it's okay for her to have her moments too. <3 Be you. You're your best in your own skin. And clearly... we all think so too.
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Elisa @ Crazy, Amazing Life said...
You are absolutely right about that. And I can relate to what you say here - A LOT. I think we are always a work in progress - I don't think we are ever done growing, learning, shaping who we are and how we think. And thank goodness for that, too :-)
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- just sayin' said...
you're awesome!
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Rebecca said...
I feel that!
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Fran said...
I love Jean Kilbourne. I hope her trail continues to blaze. I am so glad you shared this.
Sometimes I never want to blog again. Because it becomes an affirmation fest - and I don't wish to only identify myself by the kind things people say about the only things I want to post.
Thank you for being honest - and transparent. Most of the time, I feel the persona I've created for myself on my blog is similar to Nanny from the Muppet Babies. Kind of enigmatic. Unintentionally - perhaps equal parts self-preservation and sometimes insecurity.
Did I just word vomit all over? Yes I did.
How wonderful for you to be a human! Celebrate that. Continue writing. It's a treasure many don't have.
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Jeneric Generation said...
Oh, Meg. You should know that sometimes I wonder if I should post more pictures, too. If that is what it "takes"...whatever that means. And you know what I tell myself?? "Meg doesn't post a bunch of pictures [even though, when you do, I always think you are so beautiful], she just rests in the strength of her writing." And that's what I want to do. Be strong and know your words are enough. They are not enough for everyone else :). Good writing is a gift! You are using it. And I like your "soap box stuff".
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Nicole said...
thank you for posting this- and it was so refreshing to read- especially when I've been feeling a bit like the blogging world is full of pretty popular girls in a clique and whose lives are perfect. I love your real honest words.
- Monday, April 30, 2012
- Krys72599 said...
Thanks for linking this video clip.
This is a subject I feel so passionately about, the fact that young girls today just don't stand a chance of ever learning that they are beautiful no matter how much they weigh, what color their hair is, whether they are popular or not...
I'm linking to this post on my blog...
- Tuesday, May 01, 2012


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Almeria airport gets new summer routes
It seems FITUR may be useful for something as Almeria Airport (code named LEI) has signed a series of new summer destinations at the trade fair. Mind you, it doesn't alter my theory that FITUR is just one big jolly for the boys one iota. Jet2 and TUI have been studying these destinations since last year, they just use the Madrid tourism fair as the press launch destination. Any hoo…. UK airline Jet2.com plans to Continue reading Almeria airport gets new summer routes


text:
Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
Degenerate globalist co-conspirator Elliot Abrams, has been consistently supporting the recent conflagration throughout the Arab world and is pushing for ever-expanding US meddling in the region. In his recent piece, featured in the Washington Post titled "Ridding Syria of a Despot," he fleshes out what is a fairly predictable plan of action already taking shape against the Bush-era "Axis of Evil" member.
Elliot Abrams is a member of the corporate-financier Council on Foreign Relations, a Project for a New American Century signatory, and former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush. He was convicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra conspiracy and promptly pardoned by George Bush Sr. He would later go on to be implicated for his involvement in the 2002 Venezuela coup attempt against Hugo Chavez. His history of betraying and disgracing his country, and getting away with it, is probably why he feels perfectly comfortable making broad, sweeping threats toward entire nations today.
Elliot Abrams recently issued a personal threat to Libya's Qadaffi and his intelligence chief, stating that they would both meet the "same fate as Saddam Hussein" if any American is attacked in the wake of increasing US threats and actions against Libya. He also had weighed in on Egypt in his piece "Less 'Engagement,' More Democracy" in the New York Times. In this piece he criticizes the current policy of engaging as equals with nations he deems as repressive regimes and calls for a revisit to George Bush's "freedom agenda." In other words – the export of "democracy" that has brought America the trillion dollar military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya at the cost of thousands of US soldiers' lives and the lives of millions of foreigners killed, maimed, or displaced.
It should be no surprise then that Abrams, who has never shouldered a rifle for his nation himself, is more than eager to move on to Syria with a myriad of aggressive attacks on its sovereignty prepared and ready in hand.
Abrams calls on the White House and Congress to condemn Syria, in particular the Assad government. He suggests that Syria be immediately brought before the UN Security Council, who just recently finished extra-legally ordaining the war with Libya. The Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court are also mentioned as possible avenues to pressure Assad and the Syrian government.
Regarding the newly US-reordered Tunisia and Egypt, Abrams suggests they convene the Arab League and expell Syria as a member, as he claims they just did to Libya. Abrams' suggestion echos fellow globalist policy wonk Kenneth Pollack's proposal in his Brookings Institutes report, "Bifurcating the Middle East." Bifurcate, meaning to "divide," indicates the classic gambit of divide and conquer is in play. Pollack, like Abrams, suggests that the "Arab street" after being "reformed" be rallied against states like Libya, Syria, and of course, Iran.
Abrams also suggests that Europe begin acting against Syria. Nicolas Sarkozy of France seems to have gotten the memo and is already making lofty threats toward Syria, including threats of military action, citing the ongoing atrocity in Libya as a stern warning for other Arab nations to consider. Sanctions are also being pushed by Abrams, but to what extent the Europeans are willing to carry them out remains to be seen.
Finally, Abrams suggests that the US pull its ambassador from Syria, reiterating his belief that it was a mistake in the first place to show this token sign of mutual respect for the sovereign nation. He concludes with a breathtakingly absurd display of patriotism and propaganda by stating, "Our principles alone should lead us to this position, but the memory of thousands of American soldiers killed in Iraq with the help of the Assad regime demands that we do all we can to help the Syrian people free themselves of that evil dictatorship." And help the US is, with the entire opposition being funded, defended, supported, and even partially based out of the United States and England.
Strange that Abrams has implicated Assad as complicit in killing US troops in Iraq, when Abrams himself and his "Neo-Con" cabal have hands-down done more to send US troops off to their needless deaths with their willful lying regarding WMD's, than any Arab with a Kalashnikov. Also interesting, considering his statement, is Abrams' support for the armed campaign in Libya, where the US is currently providing air support and arms for Al Qaeda linked rebels who themselves have sent fighters to Iraq to kill American troops, on record.
Of course, Abrams is writing for the impressionable readership of the Washington Post, so this blinding hypocrisy is most likely fodder strictly for the public's consumption. However, sweeping aside the propaganda, we see a very real strategy already beginning to play out in regards to Syria. Let us remember that this is already a plan in motion, and recognize the surprise displayed by our feckless "leadership" as the poorly-feigned act that it is.
Tony Cartalucci's articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at
Land Destroyer Report.
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Monitor Which Social Networks Your Visitors are Logged Into With Google Analytics
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
At Distilled's SearchLove conference in London back in October, Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. This has a few uses, such as customising which social buttons you show your user or just for recording how many of your users are logged in to Facebook and then using this to show your boss that you guys should really be interacting with your visitors there.
I wanted to take this idea and extend it to Twitter and Google+, and record whether users were logged in there too. It wouldn't provided me with any immediately actionable intelligence, but over time I'd love to see the trends of what percentage of a website's visitors were logged into the different social networks. As a side project, I was also interested to record what percentage of visitors were logged into a Google account and were therefore responsible for the dreaded (not provided) in my Analytics, and also what percentage of these users were registered for Google+.
However, whilst Facebook provides an API to allow this kind of intelligence gathering, there is no such API for Twitter and Google+, and a bit of research failed to turn up any techniques that worked across all the browsers. So I rolled up my sleeves and did some digging around, eventually finding a way to trick the login mechanism of these sites to reveal whether a visitor to my site was currently logged in. If you want to try it out visit my Social Network Login Status Detector Demo; it should return something like:
Setting up the tracking
If you're a code junkie and don't need any help then you can just go and pull the code from this template page. Otherwise, let me walk you through it. There are two main steps:
- Setup an empty Facebook app. This is free and only takes 60 seconds - it is required for the Facebook API code to work for your domain.
- Install the Javascript code.
Complicated, eh?!
Setup a Facebook App
I'm going to blast through this quickly; but if you want more details there are plenty of tutorials online. If you already have an App that is registered for the domain you wish to track then you just need the AppID and can skip to the next section. We need to create an empty Facebook App because the Facebook API will only allow code on a domain to make requests regarding an App that is linked to that domain.
- Login to Facebook.
- Go to the Facebook Developers page: https://developers.facebook.com/apps
- Press "Create New App" in the top right corner.
- For "App Display Name" enter anything you want; I used "TomTrack". Check the box to agree to the FB Policies and on to the next page.
- The next stage is pretty easy, just enter your domain in both the "App Domain" and "Website" sections:
- Hit "Save Changes" .
- Grab the App ID from the top of the page and save it ready for the next section.
Install Javascript Code
Firstly, make sure you have your Google Analytics on the page; the code below is for the asynchronous version of the code. Next you need to add this snippet of Javascript to the top of your page in the <head> section; this function will do the recording to analytics for us:
So far, so good. You'll notice that I used _setCustomVar, whereas Mat had originally used _trackEvent - I'm sure there are pros and cons to both, and the code on the template page provides both options.
Next we add the following code to the bottom of the page before the </body> tag, ensuring you replce the appID in the Facebook code with that AppID you created above.
You can copy and paste the code from the source code of this template page.
That's it - your tracking is all set!
Setting up Google Analytics
Once the code is installed you will be tracking right away, and can view the data in Audience > Demograhics > Customer Variables, assuming you are using the 'new' layout in Google Analytics. However, the power of this data becomes far greater when you setup Custom Segments so you can view how users logged into different Social Networks interact with the site compared to one another and compared to regular visitors.
Setup Custom Segments
Custom segments are really easy to setup, and can give a keen insight into your analytics when used well.
- Click "Advanced Segments" at the top of your analytics screen (once you're into the relevant profile), and hit "+ New Custom Segment" at the bottom right of the drop down.
- You'll be prompted to select a name for your segment and to select which facets to base it on. We'll be using the Custom Variable slots that the Javascript tracking code uses. Analytics allows 5 Custom Variable slots, and the code above uses 4 of these (1 = Google, 2 = Google+, 3 = Twitter, and 4=Facebook) [side note: I think you could cram all these into 1 slot possibly]. We'll make a segment for each; here is how I setup my Twitter segment:
- Hit "Save Segment" and you're done. Now repeat this for each of the other variables. Ensure you are selecting "Custom Variable (Value xx)" and not "Custom Variable (Key xx)".
- You're done and are ready to play with some data.
Viewing the data in analytics
Once you have the tracking installed and segments setup you need to wait a few hours before you will see the first data appearing in Google Analytics. Once you have data coming in, the first step is to select which segments from your shiny new advanced segments you'd like to use:
Select those you are interested in and "All Visits" if you also wish to compare against all the traffic, and hit Apply. You can now go into any of your regular report screens and see these 2 demographics against one another; here you can see Facebook visitors to one of my test sites starting to be tracked after I installed the tracking code on Feb 13th:
We can immediately see that about 40% of the traffic to this site are logged into Facebook whilst browsing the site and the trend of visitors generally correlate. By adding a couple more segments I can see at the top of the page this breakdown across the networks
It turns out that most staff of this website are on Twitter and Google+, hence the quite high number for Google+ (this is a non-tech website) and the correlation between the 2 figures.
There are loads and loads of metrics you can compare and find of interest and you can spend hours playing around and digging down into the data for your site yourselves. One interesting one for this site, which has an explicit Conversion Goal (yes - comparing conversions could be a lot of fun) of trying to retain users on the site for 10 minutes or more:
Looks like driving users over from the Facebook page could be an area to think more about! They reach this target 50% more of the time than the average user. Just another little example of the kind of things you could be thinking about - I'd love to hear more suggestions and discussion in the comments for what other facets could be useful to look at.
Wrap Up
Currently, whilst Facebook provides a 'proper' API to access this information, Twitter and Google don't, and you should be aware that they might 'fix' the way this process works anytime soon. In the meantime I think there is some really actionable analytics you can gather in the meantime, beyond measuring the details in analytics. You might want to change the details of which social buttons are shown, or maybe provide a popup window to prompt further interaction via a particular Social Network.
In the meantime, I'd love to here what sort of suggestions people have for actionable intelligence based on the analytics you can gather via these techniques. I look forward to hearing what people suggest in the comments. :)