Making Friends With The Neighbours

Clouds. Oh how I love them. (Image from Nathan Oldfield's blog) Every evening, I watch the sky as the sun sets. Every evening. I love the colours, the shapes, the light, the end of day. And every evening, without fail, I wish I was watching it from the water, from the sea. For now, that wish is rarely granted, but I happily make do enjoying it during long walks, or from our veranda. From where I live, I can watch the sun set behind green hills that dominate the city skyline. We're pretty lucky here in Brisbane. Yesterday, I surfed into the dusk with some friends. The waves were small (and that's being generous), but the sunset was something to behold. The clouds were more sparse than Nathan's castles in the air, but smoke from a (bush? cane?) fire in the hills turned the sun a bright, neon red as it sank. As we surfed the warm, tiny waves, we watched the colours glow and shift and change and fade towards night. It was perfect. 

So, here is the text of an email a friend just sent me: Subject: Surfing Magazine - All class Latest issue has an article titled 'Waves are Women' with the subtitle 'Please no red tides'. Fucken astounding... Yes. Yes it fucken is. I'm not sure what the rest of the article says, but the delightful word-smithery of 'Please no red tides' (see what they did there!! Coz, like, chicks get periods. LOLZ!) is so offensive and sexist that I can't actually cope. Please no red tides? Are you serious Surfing Magazine ? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Did you realise that it is 2012? Have you come across many women who laugh at your crap jokes about periods in the past? Did you think for more than a millisecond about publishing that line? Maybe this is usual fare from this publication? Maybe it's an anomaly? But I can only imagine that the rest of the article is as shitty as this subheading and heads in one of a limited number of projected directions: 1) waves are f...