Well, I survived my first camping trip at the beach. Not that it was the most rugged thing I'd ever done. Our site was 6 meters from the sea-water's high-tide mark. We were hardly 3 kilometers from my home, within sight of a public carpark and the public restrooms, with blinding street lamps, public barbeque pits and trash cans within spitting distance.

I'm still wondering if I should mention the hundreds of inconsiderate idiot revelers we shared the beach with.

Oops. What a harsh way to refer to them. No, there's no kinder way to describe them that I can make myself type. Our neighbors on the beach were insensitive and irresponsible barbarians. Grown adults were treating the beach and public facilities like they expected magic to pick up the filthy and hazardous trash they left behind. Through the night, metal party sparklers were being flung into the nearby sea with wild abandon, in a monkey-see-monkey-do imitation of the retarded person who started it. Nevermind that the shallow swimming waters with the sandy floor were going to littered with these sharp metal rods, posing risk and injury to other beach-users later. The idiocy is beyond words.

I can be an angry bitch when I see natural environs being spoiled by people. Ignorance is not, CANNOT be an excuse. The consequences of what these litterers were doing were so clear and simple they had to be deliberate idiots to not think of it. We were on a swimming beach. Even if you're not an environmentalist, you have to see the inanity of hundreds of people flinging hundreds of burnt metal sparklers 5 to 20 feet away into the water. These people were not picking up after themselves either, not even the trash that they left on the land.

I'd come to enjoy the landscape and sea breeze. Instead I felt like I was being treated instead to watch some very ugly behavior for New Year's. The sparklers were not even half of it, though they were the most dangerous and stupid thing.

But I am thankful for the quiet bike ride I had earlier in the evening. I loved all the colors I saw low in the sky, above the torquoise and silver sea: peaches, purples, pinks and pale yellows and oranges bathing a fantastic glowing cloudscape... it was the stuff of epic-looking paintings. It was also, I suppose, a beautiful visual way to close the year. I don't think I really looked at a sunset in 2002, and the last one of the year was a stunning one. 2002 brought me countless good things, some of which I still have trouble believing are real.

It was a pretty good year.

Now I need to buy a Chinese Alamanac for 2003.