This started on a post long ago in a galaxy far, far away…its most recent incarnation was in the form of 5 questions from Emily to Mysfit. As per the rules (explained below) I requested an interview and here are the 5 grueling questions that were posed to me and my insightful, earth-shattering answers:

1) What is your favorite movie of all time?

I like to bend the rules and will have to with this question. Amelie is my overall favorite. Jeunet was a favorite director before this came out and he really topped his previous work with this movie. I loved everything about it: the quirky dialogue, rich colors, magical music, the fantasy elements, the way it was filmed. The entire cast was terrific, most especially Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassovitz. It is a blissful romantic movie and it gets me every time.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is such a close second that it has to be a favorite as well. Every time I watch it I’m profoundly affected by it. The love for the story and the love of the craft of movie-making is so evident in every frame…this trilogy is just so incredible.

Lastly, the original Star Wars trilogy. These movies and the early novels are such a large part of who I am in regards to my love of space and science fiction. I remember the first time I saw the Millenium Falcon and how blown away that I was. The companionship of Han and Chewie also made a big impression on me as a child. (sorry for cheating Mysfit!)

2) Where did you get the title of your blog from?

The first non-Star Wars science fiction novel I remember reading was a book called The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, a loaner from my sci-fi loving uncle Dean . This trilogy chronicled the adventures of master-criminal-turned-reluctant-hero Slippery Jim DiGriz. It was funny and fast moving, filled with interstellar swash-buckling, chivalry and romance. It solidified my love of science fiction and is a series that I’ve returned to again and again. I signed up for a blog initially because I mistakingly thought I had to in order to comment on my friend Mosker‘s site. I had to pick a name and I thought that anything I could do to promote this wonderful classic science fiction series would be fun. I also figured that anything I wrote would have about the same innate value as a steaming pile of rat poop and thus Stainless Steel Droppings was born.

3) Should you always wait an hour after eating before going swimming? Why or why not?

Immediate swimming after dining is okay in all but one instance: if you’ve eaten Godiva chocolate truffles. If you’ve been lucky enough to consume even one of these delicacies then you must wait exactly 73.2 minutes before entering any container of water in which swimming could occur. If you do not wait you have a 97.352% chance of encountering the rare and terrifying Swinicus Trufflacticus, a trans-dimensional swine who can materialize instantly in any body of water considered a “swimming hole”. This “Chocolate Pig” enters the body of the truffle-eater through the left nostril and can reach truffle depth within a matter of seconds. Truffle-addicted swimmers enjoyed a brief respite from these attacks when they started wearing nose plugs into the pool, however these cunning porcine acquanauts soon learned that simply stuffing a hoof in the swimmer’s mouth would result in the rapid removal of the offending nose plugs. You’ve been warned!

4) How many fingers am I holding up?

6……..Six! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die…..

5) What moment in your life do you remember being most at peace with yourself?

There have been several peaceful, “life is good” moments but the one I recall in thinking about this question occurred on June 1st, 1992 when my daughter was born. We had not asked the sex of our child as we wanted to be surprised but more than anything I wanted a little girl. Several familial prognosticators bet the farm that we were having a boy and when the baby arrived and was pronounced a girl I swelled to near bursting! That night, knowing that I had a perfectly healthy baby girl and knowing that I was married to my absolute best friend, was about as close to nirvana as I’ve ever been.

Okay, here they are, The Official Interview Game Rules:
1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying “interview me.”

2. I will respond by asking you five questions – each person’s will be different.

3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

If you don’t have a blog I will still ask you 5 unique questions and you can post your answers here.

My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved… we should have a very bad time of it.
~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

16 years ago today, in what could only be described as a moment of sheer insanity, Mary Elizabeth Russell agreed before God and man to take me as her husband. What began at that moment was the only purpose and direction my life has ever had. On this Friday the 13th I feel, as I did then, that I am a very lucky man.

For me the loss of my heart came as the result of a blue chair, a whim, and some french fries shared in a college diner. I had met Mary Russell in 1988 after some confusion in which my roommate and I mistakingly thought that she was the girlfriend of a guy I worked with…thankfully he turned out to be her brother and thus she became “eligible” and “dateable”. My roommate attempted unsuccessfully to date her and through that brief time I came to be attracted to her. One night we were returning from somewhere and she had a blue metal folding chair that she had borrowed from a classroom. I offered to carry it back for her and took her down to The Depot and bought her some french fries. I was in love.

Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?
~Christopher Marlowe

A few weeks later on a late night walk I declared my affection for her at one of Tulsa’s spots for young lovers, The Bridge. She matter-of-factly informed me that she “liked me, but not in that way” and seemed rather surprised that I “liked her in that way”. Evidently following her around drooling and acting like a silly love sick pup had not clued her in to my intentions. Despite the ensuing heartbreak (man that was a long drive back to campus) I agreed to keep our “date” the following Wednesday to go see The Princess Bride. Let me tell you, The Princess Bride is an agonizing movie to sit through when you are head over heels with someone who thinks of you only as a “friend”. Soon after this Mary was overcome by my manly charms…or I wore her down with my persistence!….and she informed me that she actually did “like me in that way” and she also informed me that she had desperately wanted me to hold her hand during the movie but I, of course, was having none of that! I still had buck shot wounds from being shot down mere days before!

That Christmas we got engaged and on May 13th, 1989 at the ripe old age of 20 I committed my life to this incredible woman.

We were poor college students at the time and unfortunately didn’t have the money to have the type of wedding that I wish now we could have. Much of what we had was given to us by loving family and friends and unfortunately the good pictures of my wife and I post the “I do’s” were ruined when our photographer’s film unknowingly stripped out.

We were young and in love, however, and nothing was going to stop us from getting married. We were married in a small town here in Missouri and oddly enough ended up living just a few miles from there when we moved here to the Kansas City area 6 and a half years ago.

I can honestly say that I have no idea where the time has gone. It stupifies me to think that we’ve been married for 16 years and that we have a soon-to-be 13 year old daughter. (I also don’t know where my 110 lb body went!) I feel as young and as silly as I did way back then and any rough patches that we’ve had over the years seemed to have melted away into oblivion because all that my heart and mind recall with any clarity is the amazing companionship that this woman has given to me.

James once posted about best friends and I can say in all truth that Mary is indeed my best friend. No one “gets” me like she does and I’ve never met anyone who fits so perfectly with me. We have so many similar interests and passions and yet just enough differences to stay fascinated with each other. The best of my memories are times spent with her and I love her company, her wit, her charm, and the way that she makes me feel like I’m still the most important person in her life even after 16 years. She is more attractive to me now than she was when I first laid eyes on her and I consider myself a very blessed man.

I love you dearly, Mary. Thank you for saying “yes”, thank you for going through with it all after you said “yes”, and thank you for 16 years of loving commitment. You are the most amazing woman, companion, lover, and friend.

“He carried her to the window so that she, too, saw the view. They sank upon their knees, invisible from the road, they hoped, and began to whisper one another’s names. Ah! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamed…
They spoke of other things – the desultory talk of those who have been fighting to reach one another, and whose reward is to rest quietly in each other’s arms.”
~E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

Alternate Post Title: The Day I Saved My Mother From the Giant Bug.

After spending the evening with my brother and sister and their families, swapping funny stories from our childhood, my brother encouraged me to post this story on my blog. Since it involved my mother I agreed. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom….I’m sorry.

I was roughly 11 or 12 years old when I woke up one morning and walked into my parents’ bedroom. I don’t remember if my mother was already sitting up in bed or if she sat up as I came into the room. My mother was wearing her peach, silky pajamas which had a keyhole neckline (for those of you who don’t know this was a little oblong circle that buttoned at the top, located right in the middle of the neckline). As I looked at her I was taken aback to see a rather large bug in the center of her chest right smack dab in the keyhole of her nightgown. I cried out “there’s a big bug on you!” and rushed to her bedside. She looked frantically saying “where? where?” and I jumped into bed, brave young soul that I was, and proceeded to grab the bug rather forcefully in an attempt to wrest it from its death grip on my precious mother. It was at that instant that my mother cried out in pain. You see, her pajama top had shifted ever so slightly and the keyhole, which from my perspective was in the middle of her chest, had moved to the side thus exposing the bug…her nipple! Needless to say we were both quite embarrassed and yet we all laughed heartily…as we did tonight when I was recounting this tale.

I love you dearly, mom…you’re the best mother a boy and a man could ever have. And I love you Mary, mother of my child, as you continually prove your amazing talent in raising up our child.

“I did not bare myself deliberately, but I tell you, I wish now that I had! Because it is not me that has been exposed, but you! For I have seen the nipple on your soul!” ~Elaine Benes (Seinfeld)

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
~ Lope de Vega

A good deal later than I would have preferred we have started with our spring gardening. A trip to the nursery is an exciting and unfortunately expensive affair. Just as an arts supply store contains many of the tools of an artists’ trade, a nursery is a place filled with all the tools necessary to make a masterpiece…plants, flowers, containers of all shapes and sizes, borders, trellis, rocks, soil…it is all there and waiting merely for the creativity of the gardener to put it all together. I love the thrill of the first nursery trip of the season!

We began landscaping in earnest last year with a few small projects and this year will see a few more as well as an attempt to establish some lasting perrenials that we can enjoy each year. Today we started with flowers and herbs, the vegetables will begin later this week. We continued our tradition of planting Impatiens in pots on the front steps. We will add Frost Fire Dianthus

and Speedwell (Veronica ‘Waterperry’)

to the front beds. We like to do container gardening on the back deck and this will be our second year of growing herbs in pots there. We planted lemon balm and cilantro today but did not find parsely or lavendar so will have to make a trip to another nursery. The lemon balms smells fantastic! Tori picked out a beautiful orange/red flower for a deck pot, the Fiery Red Gazania.

In addition to these we planted an autumn fern and relocated some of our hosta to a bed we created last year around one of our Bradford Pear trees. Our Iris, planted a few years ago, are blooming and everything is so green and lush. It was a wonderful afternoon to dig in the earth and drink in the scents of spring. There is so much more to do but it was a good start and I’m excited to have flowers growing again.

He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul.
~ Celia Thaxter

If the smell of fresh air isn’t enough to inspire you to do a little gardening I would suggest the movie Greenfingers.

Greenfingers is a wonderful little movie that was given to me as a Christmas gift a few years ago (thanks Pat!). It is inspired by the true events of a prison program in England that uses gardening as a source of rehabilitation and therapy. The movie stars Clive Owen (Sin City, Closer, King Arthur) as a prisoner with no purpose who begins to see the seeds of a new life with a little help from David Kelly (Waking Ned Devine) and some gardening inspiration from Helen Mirren (Calendar Girls, Raising Helen). Despite beginning his love of flowers with a double violet it is a Primrose (Natasha Little) who captures his heart. All the cast in this movie are wonderful. Clive Owen is quickly becoming a favorite and it was refreshing to see Natasha Little as a female love interest who dresses modestly and wears little make-up and yet looks naturally beautiful. I really highly recommend this film. You can click on this link to watch a poorly done trailer for the movie.

Watch the movie and go do a little gardening.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
~ G.K. Chesterton