Nice flowers. They're hydrangeas.

The temperature's getting hotter and the hydrangeas are in bloom. We planned for a visit to the Hydrangea Garden Yohena in Motobu, in the northern part of the island.

For some reason I dug out my Canon camera, a mirrorless I bought many years ago and just used occasionally because we have phones that take good photos now! Well I'm glad I brought it out. An honest-to-god full camera sensor with even just a kit lens is still leagues better than what my tiny phone camera lens can offer.

The garden was exactly that, a garden that your grandmother might tend to, just a bit bigger. It did remind me of how my grandmother's garden was when I was growing up, full of fruit trees and flowers she would tend to.

I don't think I've seen hydrangeas before moving to Japan. I did hear about it because of Gossip Girl, hence the title. And now I've come to learn that hydrangea season in Japan signals the start of rainy summer season, much like how sakura season signals the start of spring.

The majority of the blue hydrangea bushes were front and center as you climb up the hill after the reception desk (tickets were JPY500 each). A couple more colors (white, purple) were scattered throughout the garden amongst other flowers.

Getting home and working on the photos I took, I realized how much I was missing out on not bringing my camera to places we go to. I regret not bringing it to Osaka during our trip earlier this year. I could have taken more beautiful photos! But no sense dwelling on that. I'll make sure I bring it along on our next trip.

As I was editing these photos, I realized, hey, I take pretty good photos. You can disagree, I like them okay. Then I compared it into my foray into vlogging and how much I hated having to setup my phones every which way for multiple shots, it ate so much into my routine which I really like to stick to and not have unplanned variations. Things took twice as long when I needed to film them. I didn't like it.

I also disliked having to edit my vlogs twice, once for the long-form video for Youtube which I actually like doing, and again for the cut-up short-form videos that I must feed the algorithm gods of Tiktok and Instagram.

Then I thought, hey, whatever happened to blogs. I liked writing, god knows how many blogs I abandoned when I was a teenager, and I like taking photos.

I should start a new blog.

While researching which platforms are cool for blogging now, I found out that blogging is a whole new beast now because of SEO and rankings and affiliate marketing and whatever. Everyone's looking into blogging to monetize their niches.

But what about the journal-type blogs that talk about whatever they want. It's too small a community now it doesn't even have its own subreddit: personal blogging.

Will anyone read this aside from my husband (he's not even subscribed, he just knows about it) and my sister (who I told to subscribe under threat)? I'm not sure.

But for the most part, this is just for me. No algorithm to feed, no deadline to push out a product. I would just like to rediscover writing my thoughts down and at the same time having a place to post the photos I take. Let's be honest, Instagram cares fuck all about photos now.