Twisty Ginger

Last night after work Dave and I went to a concert at Royal Albert Hall by Anna Lapwood, a 29-year-old organist who is apparently helping to make the organ hip for a new generation. I'd never heard of her until someone at work offered a group of us tickets, and Dave and I both got one. It was a fantastic concert, with orchestral and choral accompaniment and music by Max Richter and Camille Saint-Saëns, among others.

The organ is really an insane instrument. In the picture above, taken during the curtain call at the end of the show, Lapwood is standing in the yellow square above the stage. That's where the organist sits, with the organ itself rising above her, as big as a house. I can't imagine what it must be like to sit at a keyboard and produce sounds from that immense beast. Dave, who has done it (though not at Royal Albert Hall), says it produces a real rush of power, which I can understand.

Anyway it was a fun night out and not something I would have ever thought to do on our own.

Before the show, I had dinner at the Zetland Arms, a pub near the Albert, where I had a hamburger and finally finished a New Yorker article I've been carrying around for about a week. It was excerpts from Joan Didion's papers about her therapy sessions, written in the form of letters to her husband John Gregory Dunne. Because I find both Didion and Dunne fascinating characters I wanted to finish it, even though it was awfully navel-gazey.

Meanwhile Dave -- who gets off work about an hour before me -- came home to let Olga out. He sat with her a while but said she refused to either go out or eat, maybe because I wasn't home. She usually waits for me to do both. This dog is so wedded to her routines. Anyway, he left her and she was fine until we got home last night, when she happily went outside and then devoured a bowl of food before we all fell into bed.

This is what I found when I walked Olga yesterday morning. Someone dumped this immense cardboard box next to the bench in the pocket park at the corner. I was amused by the instructions on the box: "Dispose the packaging properly." Pretty sure this is not proper. The inside of the box was stuffed with even more cardboard, including numerous pizza boxes. Recycling won't usually take such large boxes unless they're broken down and stuffed into a bin, so maybe that was the problem. DISPOSE THE PACKAGING PROPERLY, people!

Remember that ginger root I planted? Well, this is what it looks like, the leaves all twisted together. The last ginger I grew did the same thing. At the time, blogger Ellen called it "pig-tailing," and said it may be due to a nutrient deficiency or an infection. I've been reading about ginger and I think I may have it in too much sun, for one thing. I'm going to move it to a shadier spot and we'll see what happens.