I was talk­ing to Pat the other day and the sub­ject of my siz­able debt came up. Debt used to trou­ble me. I did every­thing I could to stay debt-free, and was suc­cess­ful until this year. For some rea­son though, I stopped car­ing about money. “You must be really happy”, he said, “if some­thing that big doesn’t bother you anymore”.

It was true, but I never real­ized it until then. All the good things in life have eas­ily out­weighed the bad. There isn’t a sin­gle thing that I can point to and explain why, but it’s hap­pened — grad­u­ally, pro­gres­sively — over the course of the last year or so. I’ve become very com­fort­able with myself. I’m happy with who I am. The con­fi­dence I’ve gained, my luck in meet­ing Bronwen, the res­o­lu­tion of the sit­u­a­tion with my mom have all con­tributed I’m sure. The small things don’t bother me any­more, and almost every­thing is a small thing. I still lose sight of the big pic­ture every now and then and get in one of my moods, but they don’t last as long as they used to.

Now a new design.

I’ve had my own site since 1996, and look­ing back on all the dif­fer­ent ver­sions (around two dozen in all) I real­ize that they’ve all been dark — less than 30% grey. I used to be a dark per­son, and the designs were a reflec­tion of this.

This new design serves two pur­poses. Metaphorically, the light grey (93%) rep­re­sents my feel­ing of mirth. Technically, through var­i­ous tweak­ing, I can take advan­tage of dif­fer­ent design ele­ments, such as strong (these were links in the last iter­a­tion) and empha­sis. I also wanted to go back to the tra­di­tional under­lined links, with a slight hover flour­ish. Pixel icons have been updated for extra play­ful­ness. Also added is a colophon in the About section.

Not a com­plete lay­out change — really, it’s mostly colour — but prob­a­bly the most dras­tic change I’ve ever made to the site.

And it fits per­fectly with how I feel.