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.

I just realized something. My statement about cooking disasters in my previous post wasn't the funniest cooking disaster ever.

Date: March 1, 2001. That day's entry was entitled 'All your Pyrex are explode to us.' My favorite line: "I've destroyed a lot of kitchen things over the past two years, but I've never made a pan explode before."

I present four pictures from this horrific event, which quite frankly speak for themselves:

Courtesy of Heather, here's the latest round of the Friday Five.

Kat picked me up after her last class today, and we drove to the video store. Over the past month I've mostly exhausted the halfway-interesting selection at Movie Gallery, and now must move on to the higher-priced Hollywood Video.

I mentioned how many movies Jeff and I usually watch during a week. She was boggled until I reminded her that we do not watch much television. It's not that we're regimented; it's that not much interests both of us. Mondays were once busy viewing nights. Adding Robert Downey Jr. to Ally McBeal turned me into a mostly-loyal viewer for about a season. Then they axed him, and I decided it was more interesting to write or read during that time. I'd move from that show to Daria, on MTV, but MTV periodically removes the show from its lineup, and 'now' apparently falls under the category of 'periodically.' Perhaps it will return—it has before.

In semi-related news, I'm an idiot. You'd think that when I bought that last batch of Mason jars about a month ago that I'd have thought to check the sizes, to make sure they were what I needed.

They are, of course, too small—and I already had four cups of pitted and stemmed cherries waiting to go. At least I hadn't mashed the cherries yet; that would have been a royal mess. (The cherries certainly were yummy to snack on while watching Daria this evening, though.)Tomorrow: back to the store to get the correct size of jars. This time I'll read the labels a bit more carefully, to make sure I get the right ones.

The bags of cherries I bought today are large enough that I can get two batches of jam, if I so choose. I've only pitted half of the cherries; I'm going to wait to pit the others until I know that I like the jam recipe that I've got. If I don't like the jam recipe, it's cherry pie for everyone this week.

Today, a small bit of bravery, in the form of eight glass jars. Seven wholly filled, one halfway so.

Today, a small bit of bravery, in taking a small step and learning something new. The jars are filled with strawberry jam; the homemade kind that contains only three ingredients: strawberries, sugar, and enough pectin to make the first two ingredients hold together. I am a mere shadow of my grandmother—this, a frail and feeble attempt at preserving a stunning batch of strawberries, pales in comparison to the food preservation she did out of necessity. I wonder if she would cheer that I am learning such a basic skill or if she would feel somewhat disgusted that I am making a mockery of what was once, before, a basic skill for living.