Editor and publisher Sandra Olivetti Martin, vacationing with husband and Bay Weekly co-founder Bill Lambrecht, both of whom celebrate birthdays within a week of the year’s mid-point, asked for a week off from her usual letter. So I write you in her stead, aquake at the responsibility of filling this coveted space.     As a reader of the paper, you perhaps know me best for the weekly astronomy column, Sky Watch, that I pen. A fixture since Day 1, the idea was based on...

Books leave marks on our lives that may or may not be indelible, the word my grade school nuns taught us to describe the imprint of the sacrament of confirmation. That mark would last so long God would see it on our souls, no matter how little else was left by the time we met up with him.     I’ve swum through the words of thousands of books in total immersion; yet most of them disappear from my memory the way water evaporates from my body when I climb from the pool to lie...

The best times of summer are the hours we spend outdoors.     I bet you’re planning plenty such hours. Aiding and abetting your plans are Bay Weekly’s 8 Days a Week and 101 Ways to Have Fun: Your Indispensable Guide to Summer on the Chesapeake.     Both are packed with things to do on land and on water, where breezes tame the worst of Chesapeake Country’s heat and humidity, and when they fail, you can jump in.     On land this...

Memorial Day weekend puts us back in the water, where some of the best fun of summer is to be had.     In its liquid embrace, our nature changes. From land-locked pedestrians, we become swimmers and skimmers. We recover a bit of the fluidity we had in our beginnings, in utero and in evolution. It feels good — as long as we’re afloat. But liquidity can go all wrong in a instant.     As I saw last weekend, when husband Bill Lambrecht and I took an...