EDIT: In less than 24 hours, I moved my blog again… It’s now at:

http://www.intlwota.com/fieldsofmaizeandberryz

Welcome to my new home. I found that the ground in which my crops were growing was not fertile enough, so I had to uproot and re-plant in a more nurturing environment… LOL XD

Seriously though, I had been thinking about moving over to wordpress for a little while now. I’ve noticed that all the wordpress blogs that I read have cooler features available that blogger. However, my thought to move over wavered a little when a bunch of WP H!P/J-pop blogs suddenly disappeared. Luckily, that mystery seems to have been solved after some crafty detective work by Kawaiirrhea so I now feel quite comfortable in moving my blog over here.

To welcome myself to my new home in this little corner of the internet, I thought I’d do a very late “about me” bit and my reason(s) for keeping this blog – since I didn’t do that the first time around.

I first discovered Morning Musume (and thus Hello! Project) around September of 2001. My first two Morning Musume songs were ‘The Peace!’ and ‘Renai Revolution 21′. I don’t think I could have joined the Hello! Project bandwagon at a better time. I quickly became hooked on the infectious happy bubble that surrounded everything Morning related. I found Hello! Project to be a very welcome reprive from the over-sexed mainstream music being released by the top female artists in North America – for this was around the time when Britney Spears dropped her cute innocent school girl act, and got all sensual (to put it mildly) and of course the other female acts had to do the same or lose popularity (Christina Aguilera followed Britney’s track, as did Jessica Simpson eventually – while Mandy Moore [who I absolutely adore] never sold herself out and made the move to movies while still giving herself the chance to record and stay true to herself).

Anyway, I followed H!P almost religiously until late 2005 (I’ve just noticed this, but it looks like it randomly coincides with Koharu’s joining of Morning… however, I will stress that it’s just coincidence. Even with my being unimpressed with Koha, she did not ruin Morning Musume for me). I can’t really explain why I stopped following Hello! Project at this point. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was in the midst of my final year of my undergraduate studies for biochemistry and I got swamped with the ridiculous amount of labs and research projects that all 4th year biochem students face. I actually think that may be the reason… Hm.. this post is bringing up some interesting things I’d never noticed before. XD

Anyway, at this point I got back into English music as I started to watch Veronica Mars, and that introduced me to song quality rock music which kept me occupied for some time. It was only late last year, maybe a month or 2 before I started blogging, that I got back into Hello! Project.

My brother got me to listen to Berryz Koubou’s ‘Munasawagi Scarlet’. He was gushing about Risako in that song, but I was drawn to Miyabi. Soon after that, I watched the Winter 2007 Wonderful Hearts Otome Gokoro concert and fell in love with Miyabi (while noting – “Hey! She’s the Aa! girl, isn’t she?”) after watching her sing ‘Hare Ame Nochi Suki’ which happens to be my favourite Morning Musume song (as outlined in my Morning Musume singles ranking). After that, I started getting into Berryz Koubou, who I hadn’t taken too seriously before (even though I did enjoy their early releases, particularly ‘Piriri to Yukou’, ‘Nanchuu Koi no Yatteru YOU KNOW’ and ‘Special Generation’) and soon after I started this blog. The rest is history… Or rather the rest is to come. ^_^

So why do I blog? Well, the main reason is I like to get my thoughts out there, but to write a journal to myself about my current thoughts on H!P seems kinda weird to me. So I started this blog in the hopes that people would be interested in my take on H!P going-ons, but if not, I could always imagine that people were reading since this is published on the web. It’s also nice to be able to go back and see what I was thinking a few months ago (ex. my Berryz ranking has already shifted dramatically since I started this blog, and may shift further depending on what Momoko and Risako do in the upcoming months [particularly at the Berryz vs. C-ute concert]).

I love reading other blogs because even if I don’t agree with the opinions being stated, it gives me something to think about. And of course, things that weren’t evident before can be brought to light or things I didn’t even realize were in existence are brought to my attention (ie. the H!P scarves that I first saw on Paul’s Hello!Blog and subsequently got when my friend went to Japan this past Christmas season).

Blogging is a wonderful way to share ideas and with a resource like International Wota available, it makes it even easier. I love the H!P blogging community because it’s so interactive and fun. There’s always something going on – you can never say that it’s boring. ^_^

Now back to the move. Other than the new layout and url, not too many changes will be made here. I’m still fiddling around with wordpress, though, so we’ll see what that brings. I apologize for the crazy long url, but I couldn’t think of a good way to shorten my ridiculously long blog title.