Kat was the last person to move out of the old wondergeek apartment last December. She called me up at home as she was preparing to go through what was left in the kitchen: "Do you want to come over here and take a look at this stuff to see if there's anything you can use?"

Later that afternoon, I came home with several bags full of an odd assortment of bottles and jars and frozen odds and ends. There was literally a bit of everything: pork, salmon, ketchup, extra-chunky marmalade, frozen blueberries. Every food group you could think of, and probably one or two you'd managed to forget.

Since that day, I've been trying to find the shelves in my fridge. They've been covered over with strange and unusual ingredients that don't match my usual round of recipes, and I've hesitated to buy much of anything new until I used up the freebies I had received from Kat.

Before I forget, I did at least want to weigh in once again on my February 12 entry Oscar, the little punk. I finally got around to seeing In The Bedroom, and what I saw merits some restatement.

New music: John Mayer's album, Room For Squares. After hearing a song of his on Radio Paradise, I went digging, first for mp3s and then for a copy of the album. David Gray meets Dave Matthews, I think, but with a nice little touch of local Georgia music scene.I listened to it today while working on getting the CDs ripped—at last, at last, they are all ripped!

What I know is so much smaller than what I don't know.

She was a teenager when she married. From her pictures, she was never a particularly pretty girl. I know nothing of what her personality was like. I only knew her later, after years and circumstances had had their way with her.

Because of family disagreements and her death during my childhood, I never knew her well. To say that she never got along with my mother would have been a bit of an understatement; the knowledge that they never agreed on much of anything was common, yet unspoken, knowledge—even to me, the youngest—when I was a child.

You face right, I face left.

You have your pile of CDs and I have mine. I am staring squarely at the cover to Leftfield's Rhythm and Stealth while you rip a compilation Gipsy Kings album. We've joked so long about doing this that it seems almost a little strange that at last, we're making good on our promise of finally taking our CD collection and ripping the songs to mp3.

"Ok, listen to this. See if you can't tell me who this is."

Courtesy of Heather and fridayfive.org: