Yup, the blog redesign is finally here. I hope you like it.

I’ve done my best to make everything change over smoothly, but you know how that goes. I expect there will be glitches here and there, so if something doesn’t work for you, please let me know.

Here’s a tour of the new features:

Up at the top, you’ll see a blue bar with some text—for now, there’s a new About page, as well as a Home button. I plan to add more pages in the future. To the right of the text is a little search icon. Click on it, and plug in your search term if you want to look for something specific here on the blog.

On the sidebar to the right, you’ll see:

You’ll also find a new way to subscribe to posts via email, and when you do, you’ll also be on the mailing list for the brand new Happy Little Thoughts newsletter.  In addition, I have a little gift for anyone who joins my email list: “30 Days of Happy”—a free printable I made just for you listing a month’s worth of simple pleasures and everyday adventures. All you have to do is sign up for email updates. (I promise I will not sell or share your email with anyone else.)

After each post, you’ll see a row of icons linked to social media, as well as one that allows you to leave a comment. If something I’ve written inspires, touches, or motivates you, or even if you disagree with me completely, I want to hear from you. I’d also appreciate it if you’d share my posts with anyone you think might enjoy them—let’s spread the word about simple pleasures and everyday adventures!

Catching Happiness is a labor of love for me, and I hope it will be a place inspiration and happiness for you. So let’s go indulge in many more simple pleasures and everyday adventures together!

Yesterday I found myself near tears in the produce section of my local Publix supermarket. No, I don’t have a strange phobia related to cantaloupe and corn on the cob. Let me explain.

For the past 150 years (it seems) I’ve been working on a redesign of Catching Happiness. I’m trying to update its appearance, provide a way for readers to subscribe to posts, and come up with some new goodies for you. These things sound simple, and taken individually they might be, but taken all at once, by me, an impatient, tech-ignorant, semi-perfectionist, they haven’t been simple at all. Just when I think I’ve got one item sorted, some other thing pops up to derail me.

I’m in the messy middle. The messy middle is where you find yourself when the first flush of enthusiasm for a project has drained away, and you can’t quite see the finish line and draw energy from being almost done.

The messy middle is where it gets…messy. Messy with possibilities, both pursued and cast off, messy with decision-making. There is often confusion. Sometimes there is crying. Or cursing. The messy middle is where fear lives.

After taking the afternoon off in favor of grocery shopping and having two cracked teeth repaired at the dentist (if you can call having one’s teeth drilled “taking the afternoon off”), I decided that instead of weeping and tearing my hair out—and writing long, whiny emails to Laure Ferlita—I am going to grit those newly repaired teeth and figure out how to get through the messy middle so I can learn from it, and maybe even find some happiness in it.

Here are some things I came up with to help—maybe they can help you then next time you face the messy middle:

While I was writing this post, I did a quick Google search of the term “messy middle” because it felt so familiar. I found 72,500 references to the phrase, related to topics like spirituality, management, and creative projects. Apparently the messy middle is A Thing. It’s not just me who struggles during the period between “started” and “done.”

In the past I’ve been guilty of rushing through life to get to the “good parts,” only to find that what I rushed through was the good part. I have a feeling that I’m rushing through this blog redesign just to finish it, rather than taking the opportunity to learn something every step of the way. Laure kept urging me to have fun with the process, and until today, I couldn’t even imagine being able to do that.

So despite the fact that I’ve been talking about and working on blog redesign for 150 years, it’s going to take a bit longer, and I should just get used to it. As Brene Brown writes in Rising Strong, “The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”

I think it just did.

Are you in the messy middle of anything? How are you coping?