There is no way that any person south of Nebraska would debate the fact that it is indeed summertime. Pools are hot commodities, popsicles appear as though with legs in the freezer, and parents find themselves regularly reminding children not to cool the whole neighborhood.

It is summer. It is hot. And a lot of people are trying their very best to hightail it out of my fabulous little Southern state until the tar on the roadways has a chance to cool and re-harden. I say “a lot of people”, but not all people. There are some brave souls who just can’t stay away from the siren’s song that is Texas.

I consider it a great fortune that one such soul is my darling Lauren. Lauren and I met in the comment section of another blog some three or more years ago. It is an absolute hoot working with her on BloggedIn and I am over the moon that she and her lovely family are finally making the arduous move to the blazing South.

Her move and all the work it brings has meant that she loosened her grip on the reigns here and turned it over to little ol’ me for a bit. I was flattered at first, but then I remembered that we have a BloggedIn Bounty winner to announce today.

Giving away Target mad money is fun, but before I could announce the winner, I had to do all the math involved with finding the winner. Do you guys remember the many, many ways crazy Lauren made available to enter our $100 Target gift card give away? A lot of ways to enter.

After making all the graphs, the pie charts, the spreadsheets and the copious amounts of coffee it took to stay awake to figure out the whole thing, we have a winner. If only there was some way to blog a drum roll.

Laura Chilton! You are our big winner! Please send us an e-mail with your mailing address and your card will be sent to you post haste.

Wasn’t that fun? So fun. Let’s do that again real soon. Only with less math, okay Lauren?

June is shaping up to be a really exciting month on BloggedIn. I am pleased with the blogger interviews that we have lined up. Some you may be familiar with already, but some of these folks are hidden treasures that I am just tickled pink to introduce to you. I also have a super secret interview planned. More on that later.

Have you been keeping up with Tim and his fabulous posts on family? We are very happy to have his wisdom on board here and I hope that you are enjoying his work. I know that I tried Kristen’s recipe for chicken marsala, have you all tried any of her stuff? We are very excited to see what she’s got cooking this month.

I’m happy with the response that our new Awareness column has received and I look forward to a lot more lively comment discussions in June. Lady Why and I will continue to write that column, but don’t be surprised to see a few new faces coming soon.

If you haven’t checked out our author’s page, you really should. Dear, brave Lauren is actually going to be live blogging her move to Texas on Twitter. I wonder if she’s just doing that so I don’t call her every ten minutes and ask, “Are you here yet?”.

When you consider what we have come up with over the course of a three year friendship with only the computer and telephone to communicate, can you imagine how awesome this place is going to look when Lauren gets down here and we get a chance to really conference? Stay tuned. Looks like June is going to be a scorcher.

Categories: Features
Tags: contest, family, friendship, June