Summer

Aerosmith is going on tour again this summer. The Global Warming tour, which was announced Monday, is the band's first North American trek in two years. Jiffy Lube Live is getting the show July 3. Cheap Trick is opening.  Unlike their contemporaries Van Halen, the band doesn't have a new album to plug. In fact, they haven't released new studio material in eight years, since "Honkin on Bobo. " While they've stayed on the road, they've mainly played South America and Europe in the course of the last two years.

A friend gave me some honest advice: Summer starts to go by more quickly after the Fourth of July celebration. I've learned this to be true, and now I've got to get moving on a lot of stuff I plan to accomplish before Labor Day — or maybe Oct. 1. Or perhaps Thanksgiving. My plans are fluid, and if I don't achieve them all, at least I've set down a list. I've never been to Chincoteague, Va., or Assateague Island, despite spending weeks each summer in nearby Delaware. I've never been south of Salisbury, and I want to make it to Princess Anne and Pocomoke City, as well as the Eastern Shore towns of Virginia.

Birdwatchers, hikers, photographers and angles will have more hours to enjoy the Patuxent Research Refuge facilities in Laurel as the refuge extends its hours for public visitation this summer. Beginning Friday, June 10 and continuing through Aug. 13, the North Tract entrance to the refuge on Route 198, in Anne Arundel County, will remain open until 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday evenings. Then entrance opens at 8 a.m. daily. The walking trails of the National Wildlife Visitor Center, off Powder Mill Road between Route 197 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, will remain open until 7 p.m. on Tuesdays for "Twilight Tuesdays," June 14 through Aug. 16. The visitor center grounds open at dawn so that birdwatchers, wildlife photographers and others can enjoy the trails.

Parking in downtown Ocean City could cost an additional 50 cents per hour this summer under a proposal being introduced at Monday's town council meeting. The ordinance would increase parking rates for all spaces that are served by pay stations, including street parking and municipal lots, from $1 to $1.50 per hour. From April 1 to May 24, the higher fees would be in effect on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. (Also on Thursday before events like Springfest and Cruizin OC.) From May 25 to Sept.

A new restaurant named Delmarva's Southern Cafe will open this spring in Canton's Harbor Enterprise Center, also known as the Broom Factory. Delmarva's is scheduled to open sometime this summer, according to David Levitt, a partner in the new business. Levitt, a food-indusry veteran, is also a partner in a Leesburg, Va. restaurant named Tenderjacks. Delmarva's will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, Levitt said, and will operate as a fast-casual restaurant, the kind where you order at a counter but the food is brought to your table.

The mark of a successful summer is its similarity to other pleasant, uneventful summers. You visited the same places, saw the same family and friends, enjoyed the same summer foods one more time. The slow days helped you catch up on some rest. And Labor Day marks the beginning of an imaginary new year, even if school is long past. I'll remember this summer as the one when the vacation got trimmed by one day. My friend, Steven Bailey, my father, Joe Kelly, and I spent Aug. 26 on the highway, turned out of our beach vacation quarters by the order to evacuate in advance of Hurricane Irene.

I wrote today about a 5-year-old Harford County girl who lost her feet after her father accidently backed into her with a lawn mower. It is an accident that could have been prevented, but one that is not all that  uncommon in the summer months. Parents are out doing yard work while kids play nearby creating a bad mix. Lawn mower injuries are the leading cause of amputations in adolescents, according to the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Most injuries occur because the mower doesn't realize the child is behind them and backs over them.

The summer of '92 was certainly a cool one. Just how cool was it? (We would ask The Great Karnak, but he retired at the start of the summer.)It was the third coolest summer, and the coolest August, in the 42 years such records have been kept at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The average temperature at BWI last month was 72.3 degrees, six-tenths of a degree less than the previous record set in 1963. (Baltimore recorded temperatures for this summer slightly above average, because the city retains more heat than the countryside around the airport.

It's summer. Empires are breaking up everywhere, but in New Orleans the dogs lie still on the road until cars just about run 'em over.The alligators sprawl quiet on the bottom of the bayou with sleeping turtles on their backs. The magnolias are dozing and the girl at the Seven Eleven moves in a dream and holds your quart of milk for what seems like a day.It's a fine time for Rep. Arthur Morrell, a Louisiana House Democrat, to propose that New Orleans secede from Louisiana and the nation. That would make legal what is already a fact of life.

REPORTERS AND editors have traditionally used reader inattention as an excuse to take long vacations during July and August.We have promulgated the fiction that in the summer months, people are available to read only paperback books that can be left out on an Adirondack chair in the rain: books about carnivorous sea creatures, books about serial killings with Satanic overtones, books about the glamorous and cutthroat world of big cosmetics with sentences that...