On Launching the First Cuckoo Gopher Entry of Spring Happy April to you: colour of spring, colour of autumn, colour of year-round brown grass and moss for the inbetweeners, Spring is my favourite season: I like to see the leaves budding and opening on the trees, smell the muscari and hyacinths, see more daylight. Spring to me is bright resurrection. I am not resurrecting myself, nor my husband, but I would like to expand my interests or commit to and execute a realistic plan to be a competent, poised, more attractive, well-adjusted person with good habits. April to me means promise, colour, rebirth, and birthday cake. I'll commemorate my first birthday as a widow. Thanks to a cultivated support system mostly online, and friends and family and a chaplain who counselled me the first four months, I've managed nicely. I would like to manage beautifully for the next twelve months, after a year of hermitage. I'd like to do things I said or wrote to myself I would do: books to be read, letters to write, the waist-to-height ratio to reshape into a bodacious indication of a seasoned body in good condition. I'd like to know what it's like to plan meals for the week and eat them without food rotting, to discard or re-home that which is needless and not beautiful. I'd like my Charlie Chaplin signature belt buckle to reach more than one notch when I wear it. I'd like to find my external hard drive and back up my data so I can update my OS to what's currently supported, and wiggle into the smolnet and into "adulting for two." Maybe you have similar inklings. Maybe glimmers of optimism and ambition flash in your brain. Maybe you share my pattern of distraction, of sprints but no mile or kilometre runs. Maybe, like me, you've "should" yourself so much it smells. I don't have a 24/7 support-buddy anymore. I could use one. I want to have a partner-buddy for some gentle but dedicated (up to a year) personal improvement and reinvention. Aside from my tendency to distraction, another difficulty is my good friends are the ones I trust to be supportive and gentle, but I hate for them to think I see room for improvement in them. If enough of this resonates within you, consider the possibility your intuition is prompting you to accept a virtual online support-buddy for mutual accountability. Your projects needn't be similar to mine. This is an opportunity to embrace change, employ radiant thinking and affirmative attitudes while committing to and pursuing gentle, realistic transformation. I'm still at the 'clarifying vision' stage. My own personal development will begin with three short-term (3 months) realistic, manageable, achievable goals: - keeping connections with people I care about - waist-to-height ratio of 0.45 (healthy) - home management/organization This is new and incipient. I may append a Q&A if I get any nibbles of interest. Otherwise, I'll start 1 April at 18h00 UTC solo. But I am finding that 2021 so far abounds with people eager for one-month challenges, maybe slightly longer challenges will attract sufficient number of people. Mastodon: at cosullivan at mastodon dot sdf dot org email: christyotwisty at sdf dot org gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~christina Fellow Sundogs: christina(@circumlunar.space)