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Summertime is officially here. Hot weather, weeds grow tall overnight, neighbors report seeing snakes, occasional cook-outs and vacations, more reports of sickness of family members and friends as we all grow older. The world just keeps on going round and round and round. Wind and rain, beautiful crops, fresh veggies. It is a most wonderful time of the year. Youngsters busy playing sports, going to or preparing to attend vacation bible school.

Beats the heck out of barnin’ tobacco.

Love surprises and had a good one recently. One of my longtime friends brought fresh tomatoes to an early Sunday morning meeting to share with me and a couple of other attendees. Maybe the most beautiful, delicious tomatoes ever, and growing up on the farm, I have grown many, picked many, and shared many, but these were the best. Nice surprise. That is what good friends do.

Remember MacKenzie Gore, the former Whiteville Wolfpacker drafted last year by the San Diego Padres? He has struggled with blisters on his pitching hand the first half of this season, but better now. His last outing last Thursday lasted 4 innings, gave up 2 hits, 2 unearned runs, 2 base on balls and recorded 5 strikeouts. He plays for the Fort Wayne Tincaps. Hopefully the blisters do not return and he continues to improve.

At the half way point of the year, time to look back at BladenOnline. Our page views and visits were down slightly for June, 2018, when compared to a year ago. However, BladenOnline still surpassed 500,000 page views and made it nine consecutive months with at least half a million page views.

BladenOnline had 3,515,331 page views for the first 6 months of 2018, a 12 percent increase over the first six months of 2017. Visits were up 7 percent and users were up 10 percent over the same time period.

At the current pace, BOL would surpass 7 million pages views for 2018 and would have almost 1.4 million visits.