Since so much of my music headspace has been devoted to listening to or thinking about music for the soon-to-be-launched Reselect music podcast, and so little to just writing up a simple music blog post, I figured I might as well post something . . . anything, to paraphrase Todd Rundgren. So here’s a very short story.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and we (my wife, my two teen sons, and I) were hiking on some trails new to us near Anti-Aircraft Peak in the Cougar Mountain wilderness area, using the guidance of a somewhat overwritten book of Washington State hikes. At one point it told us: “After the climb, the way eases along for a time. Pass an unexpected fence on the left.” So of course we were joking that we would never pass the fence now, because we were expecting it, and why wasn’t everything they talked about on the hike “unexpected,” because after all we’d never been there before, and tried to picture what type of fence was so special to deserve this mention. After joking about for it for quite a while, we finally came upon a chain-link fence that ran along a brief section of the trail and then continued off somewhere else. And completely seriously, not even realizing what he was saying until it was too late, my younger son said, “Oh, that wasn’t the kind of fence I was expecting….” It was then that we realized: the book had won.