This is the time of year that I extend my annual welcome to all of you visitors who are in our area for the week.

As for you local residents who haven’t deserted town to flee the crowds, thanks for hanging around and mingling with out-of-towners who ask for directions, the name of a good grocery store and what will happen if they get on Washington Road and just drive. (The answer: If you’re headed east, you’ll run into Augusta; if you’re going west, you might actually reach Washington state; I’m not sure, because I’ve never had that much gasoline in my car.)

I also inform people that this is a pleasant place to be, whether the house you are in is yours or rented for the week. I always remind strangers that our the water is potable, the weather pleasant, and the trees and spring flowers are as easy on the eyes as the pollen is murderous on the nose.

No doubt you’ve heard of the tornadoes and floods that dashed across the Midwest and South recently. Well, all the way to Georgia, where they petered out and gave us only some rain. Most storms in our area are like that. They come barreling in – dark and flashing and gusty and wet – but just before Augusta they weaken or detour into South Carolina.

I don’t get out much any time of the year, but especially during Masters Week. That’s because work is steady and my wife treats me as though I’m on vacation all week because I work different hours and am home many of the same hours the vacuum cleaner is operational.

She and I have altogether different ideas about vacation.

That means you won’t see me out on the town, but that’s no big deal. My idea of a good time is not getting killed in traffic, and this year I’ve noticed a disturbing trend to get me. People around here are backing into parking spaces instead of pulling straight in.

Maybe the growing availability of rear-view cameras on cars is fueling this madness, but that doesn’t explain the many times I have nearly had my car door taken off as they pull a kamikaze back-in maneuver in a parking lot. Often it’s huge pickups that squeeze in backward, endangering cars on both sides.

I even accosted an elderly man who was trying to back his truck into a space at a restaurant next to my car.

“Why back in?” I asked after the third time he had pulled forward and backed into a slightly different part of his space.

“It saves me time when I pull out,” he said.

I didn’t point out the obvious.

Despite that, one and all.

PARTY TIME: Happy birthday today, Mike, my next-to-baby brother. Happy birthday, too, to my son, Tommy, whom I never get to see enough of. Barbie just had a birthday, as did her son – our grandson – Colten; one more day and it’s her daughter, Madison’s, big day.

Do birthdays occur in clumps in your family, too?

Reach Glynn Moore at glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.