struck speechless

We had a great trip, which I got online intending to write all about, but I’ve been struck absolutely speechless – I just found out the most astonishing thing, like, EVER –

Tom Waits is touring. And he’s coming to Asheville.

Asheville.…ASHEVILLE!!!! I’m still trying to process this.

I saw the list of tour dates, and the first city was Atlanta, which alone was enough to make me shriek with delight – I’d drive to Atlanta in a heartbeat to see Tom Waits. It’s four or so hours from here if you do the interstate thing (seven if you’re with my husband and mother-in-law and do the two-lane-back-road-stuck-behind-tractors thing) but Tom Waits never comes to this side of the country as far as I know. He hardly tours at all. So, yeah, Atlanta was enough to make my heart stop  – then I saw the second city…and seriously nearly collapsed into the floor.

ASHEVILLE. August 1. Tickets aren’t on sale yet – apparently its just been announced – but I’m there. If I’m not imagining this, which frankly isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

Asheville???? It REALLY doesn’t get any weirder than that!!! Well, other than the fact that Radiohead was at some festival in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, that I didn’t find out about until too late to go. Bonaroo, which apparently is this huge big deal of a music festival and I’d never even heard of it. But that’s not NEARLY as shocking as Tom Waits being in Asheville.  

He’s going to be in Nashville and Memphis and Louisville, Kentucky as well (and I didn’t misread "Nashville" as "Asheville", either). In the little blurb he explained his kind of odd choice of concert venues by saying, "We need to go to Tennessee to pick up some fireworks, and someone owes me money in Kentucky."

Well, after that I can’t even remember what I was going to say about our trip. Which was lots of fun, once we finally settled  on where we were actually going. We ended up in Lexington VA, which is very pretty and very historic. We used to go there pretty often, but hadn’t been in three years. Last time we went, we found to my horror that my favorite weird old house ever- The Witch House –  had been TORN UP… or at least had the bottom part of it removed so the foundation could be fixed. And they’d plowed the front yard up and cut down all the trees around it. The old man who lived there probably forever had died. But I’m happy to report that the bottom of the house has been put back and although it’s still all sparse and bare, it’s still there. And it’s for sale. So of course we were all excited – "WE’LL buy it!! We’ll buy the Witch House and fix it all UP and LIVE IN IT!!! How cool will THAT be????" Until we discovered they’re asking TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for it.   And just making it habitable would probably cost another hundred thousand. So, well, maybe we won’t be buying it.

Oh, here you go – I of course took a zillion photos but of course can’t upload them from home because of my Miserable Dial Up so will have to do that at work tomorrow – but that’s the house. The house I’ve been completely and inexplicably obsessed with since the first time I saw it, years and years ago. I see this listing says 297,500. And we’re not at all sure where the four bedrooms are – it looks like it’s one room wide. I have no idea why I love this house so much – it did look much more mysterious and neat years ago when it was surrounded by trees and bushes and that weird old man lived there, but I still love it. Obviously I’ve lived there myself in some past life. Our Lexington trips used to revolve around walking past it and gazing lovingly at it.

Oh, here it is with a picture of  it in its original incarnation – and with the foundation exposed. I’ve also got zillions of photos of it from past trips, and have posted them before – but of course had them all on Picturetrail and my account expired.

AND it has EIGHT GHOSTS. According to the Lexington Ghost Tour Brochure. I’m sure some of them are me and Baker B.  We HAD to hear about the ghosts, so Sunday night we made sure we were in the bar across the street, where there’s a VERY convenient window seat that looks right out at the Witch House. Baker B had a cunning plan, so parked our car right in front of the house, and when we saw the Ghost Tour arrive he went dashing out of the bar, dashed to the car, hopped in, rolled down the passenger window, and listened in on that part of the tour. They only mentioned four ghosts, though. It wasn’t a very good tour.

Okay, I have got to go to bed now – tomorrow I’ll have pictures. AND tomorrow my new boss starts – Dr. Airhead’s interim replacement. Who I may not have even mentioned. Everyone in our building has warned us about how AWFUL and HORRIBLE she is, but she seems fine when we’ve had meetings. I don’t think things could possibly get worse, although that could of course be a prime example of Famous Last Words.  
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