You know what surprises me about crochet? The way it works muscles I forgot I had.

It’s improved my grip strength enormously (I think it’s better than when I was heavy lifting—I needed help from straps—and I wasn’t good at rock climbing) and that’s the obvious benefit. I’ve never seen my hands like this. The muscles coming up around my thumbs are so cool!

But also, crochet works my deltoids a ton. Probably more than any of the standard compound lifts, too. I had to add accessory lifts to get this feeling in my deltoids as a bodybuilder.

Deltoids are kind of like the muscle caps on the top of your arms, partially controlling the rotation of that complex shoulder joint. Sawing my arms through tight stitches with stiff fabric is *difficult,* and I will do it for *hours* when I’m working on something bulky (a purse, a blanket).

Even though nothing I’m handling is heavy, I’m watching my arm muscles go crazy and laughing in disbelief like “what??”

But it also works my chest muscles! I’ve had zero chest development since I quit bodybuilding in early 2020. For me, nothing works like a good chest press, and I just don’t have the stuff around to do that as easily as weighted squats. (Pick something up, squat. You’re done.) So there is only one place that I can be getting aching pectorals from.

Again, it’s a different kind of development than bodybuilding. It’s less mass, less swelling. I feel like I’m developing *cables* under the skin.

I am crocheting with a hook, creating fabrics in my hands, and somehow this is also making my body crochet muscle in this whole new fascinating functional way. I have never had a functional hobby in my life. It’s weird learning my body is meant to DO THINGS.

Most of my core maintenance is actually using a standing desk and picking things up, which also helps my legs a bit. I’m often hauling 40lbs bags of cat litter around, which is nearly the weight of an unweighted Olympic barbell. I pick up and move a lot of plants and heavy water containers.

Like I’m the chubbiest I’ve ever been, the most body fat no doubt, biggest dress size, but I’m kind of turning into lowkey homesteader farmb0tch strongk? Just DOING THINGS instead of sitting at a computer writing all day? WILD.

Behold my MIGHTY LEMON TREE! In summer ‘22, I was gifted a gigundo lemon that I didn’t remember to eat. When I cut it open, I found a seed already germinating. Zut alors! I took that seed and a couple others and put them into tiny cups. I don’t know which survived, but only one survived, and I moved it into a cup in mossy organic substrate. It *exploded* this summer.

I’ve been trying to prune it in a tree shape (obv the lower leaves need trimming) so it looks like a proper little tree in my kitchen windowsill. Did you know lemon trees wanna stab you? They bite! It’s made me bleed several times from those majestic, citrusy thorns. I think I’m going to turn into citrus at this point, like the werewolf curse, but lemons.

There is some common street moss in there (like pulled off the side of the road, that’s not actually what it’s called) and a couple little succulent florets so it also looks like a forest in the cup. The grass grows out of the sphagnum moss. I keep trying to pull it out but that shit is ROOTED so now I just mow it with kitchen scissors.

Yesterday I moved my tree from the McDonald’s cup to a bigger maverick gas station cup. The roots had wrapped all around the bottom of the cup and much of the inside, too. It didn’t stay damp long. Do you know where the soil goes when you’ve had a plant for a while? THE PLANT EATS IT AND TURNS IT INTO MORE PLANT. All these big bushy leaves are like 90% substrate probably. Anyway, they’ve got more substrate now.

I get to visit with this bad boy in my kitchen every day and it makes me happy, even if I do get bitten a lot.

Ahhhh I miss having little kids. Tonight I sat outside while kids were playing with my youngest, and a couple of the wee ones came over to check me out. One was so tiny I could cry, with his tiny bicycle. Smaller than our pumpkin.

Apparently the kids think our house is scary. I think we have a bit of a mystique for a couple reasons… My eldest used to play with kids on the street but no longer does (just not interested anymore, kinda grew out of it) so they’ve ascended to myth. youngest seldom goes outside to play. i keep some halloween stuff up year round. big barky dog. black cats in every window. etcetera.

the kids don’t even know about most of the creepy shit in my house, but they definitely caught our vibe. i love it. i can’t help being sweet with kids tho, i probs ruined my dreams of being the scary neighborhood witch.

they were sooooo cute, on their bicycles, just climbing over my porch like it belongs to them. no boundaries!!! boogery and wearing very small shoes. then they ran home and weren’t my problem anymore, which is kind of even better than having little kids of my own honestly

i also always think it’s so funny how neighborhood kids swarm me every time i go outside. i am not sure if it’s Just a Me Thing or if they do this to all grownups but it’s like, they want to hold entire conversations with me, directly. about random kid things like roblox.

i’m like, this is adorable, but also you’re all frolicking out here to play with each other. go forth. frolic with humans similar in mass and cognitive development to you. (but of course i cannot stop them when they are giving me all their best prison escape tycoon tips)

I think if I ever interviewed for a job again, and they asked me, “What’s your greatest weakness?” It would be, “I get so excited about a particular project that it fills me up and pushes everything out, until suddenly I get excited about another project, and in order to finish the first project I will someday have to collapse sobbing over my work to figure out wtf I was doing, relearn everything, and wrap it up.”

Just saying, I left the worldbuilding guide to my epic fantasy book unfinished – and I haven’t finished editing the second half of the book, either. I decided to set them aside because I wanted to grow a little before revisiting. But also I got *really* excited about crochet. And then interactive novels.

I have to fully reread the worldbuilding guide (and realistically the book itself) to finish it off at some point, so I’m going to have to study myself to figure it out, lol. I was just poking around in there again going, “Wow, this is incredible, and incredibly esoteric, I sure Made Some Decisions that I no longer recall.”

Also I spent a couple days away from my interactive novel because I’ve been going hog over crochet again, PLUS I had to repot/replant a bunch of plants for the shift from summer to winter conditions. Now I’ve come back to code chapter 7, and I’m like, holy crap, what was I doing? Where do I put the autosaves? How do I determine the location of journal entries? Whaaaat monstrous abomination of a logic chain have I crammed into the end of every chapter in order to track character development for a dynamic narrative?

I spent my twenties furiously writing fiction, and it got hard in the end because it felt too repetitive – like I wasn’t learning anything anymore – like there were no more surprises. Trying to Just Write a Book got to be excruciating because it was understimulating and too easy, as weird as that sounds. I made Mood Management my problem in that case (working even though routine murders me). Now I’ve thrown routine out the window so I can focus on having fun, but oh boy if it doesn’t spawn about a thousand different problems.