Sortable portlets

I seem to have the delimma so many of us have with saving the state of
the sortables (portlets). Yes, I can use the toArray to save it to a
cookie, but then how do I load the array back?? There are no examples
of this that work with jQuery 1.3.1+.
Any ideas out there?
I must be able to save/restore the sortables sequence (two columns) to
cookies and just can't find anything that works....