The wedding festivities for my sister-in-law kicked off Friday morning with an event that can best be described as

Pre-Wedding Brunching With Engineers

It all started off innocently enough, with a brunch meant to welcome my husband’s uncle. He had recently arrived in town from Israel, which is the fourteenth country in which he’s lived.

He had called my sister-in-law earlier in the week to discuss his final travel arrangements, and she told him that at first she wasn’t sure she should take his call, since the number was so odd-looking on her caller ID.

Naturally this led right into a competition designed to see who could identify the most country codes, because if there is a better way to get into the mood for a wedding, I surely don’t know about it.

So different people (read: the three engineers) started calling out random questions for the rest of the group.

“What’s Israel’s country code?”

“What’s ours?”

“How about Italy’s?”

“Ah!” shouted The International Uncle, in the tone of someone who has just successfully squared the circle. “What’s Kosovo’s country code?!”

Shockingly, no one knew the answer to this question.

“Ha ha,” revealed The International Uncle, that trickster. “They don’t have one. They have to use Serbia’s. And, boy-are they miffed.”

(Yukking laughter from the three engineers, who frankly, could not possibly imagine anything more humorous than this.)

Me and the bride: (looking desperately at each other to communicate the urgent messages of “Please help me!”, and “How can we STOP THE INSANITY RIGHT NOW?!)

And so that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

Eventually we did make it through the rest of that day, until finally it was time for

The Wedding Rehearsal

In the spirit of celebration, as well as the spirit of, “Well, I might have to wear a tux tomorrow, but tonight I can wear whatever I want, mwa ha ha ha ha!” my father-in-law, who plays the bagpipes, decided to adorn himself in full, bag piping attire. When I tell you that he is over six feet tall and was wearing a kilt the color of pumpkins, you will understand why that caused such a big stir.

As the rehearsal was winding down he came over to talk to me and my husband, which gave me the opportunity to ask him why he appeared to have a small purse strapped around his midsection.

“Is that where you keep your flask in case all of this wedding stuff gets to be too much?” I joked.

It turns out that it is something called a “sporran”, and while I suppose you could use it to store your flask, he was using his to store his wallet and his keys.

“Now there are some sporrans that are encrusted with gems, or that are covered in goat hair,” my father-in-law informed us. “So technically, mine is not actually an evening sporran.”

I’m pretty sure he was able to slide by on that one.

Here’s what I mean.

This afternoon I went to Barnes & Noble to get a couple of books to read this weekend in between wedding festivities for my sister-in-law.

I put my choices down on the counter and smiled at the bookseller who I knew by sight, if not by name, owing to the fact that the bookstore is my second home. And here is how our conversation went.

Bookseller: “How are you doing today?”

Me: “Really well, thanks.”

Bookseller: “And did you find everything you were looking for?”

Me: “Oh, yes.”

Bookseller: “Actually, Tina…”

Me: WTF?!

Me: (noticing that he and I are the only two visible people at the counter.)

Me: (looking around surreptitiously to see if I had accidentally transported myself into a parallel universe where in fact I was Tina).

Bookseller: “…something like 80% of homicides are committed by men.”

Me: hoping, HOPING, that he’s not trying to send me some kind of message. Because, did I mention the fact that WE WERE ALONE?!

Me: (smiling, in an attempt to look as little like a potential homicide victim as possible.)

Bookseller: “And the rest are committed by women. Mostly as a result of infidelity.”

And this is why I spend my days with cats.

Where 798 pages of Facebook Applications and OCD meet.

A day in which you finally fix the four pieces of laundry you accidentally dyed red, only to discover that somehow during this process, ten entirely new pieces of laundry were mysteriously dyed blue.

A little while ago my husband and I played host to an out-of-town friend of ours. He had a layover in Atlanta, so we picked him up from the airport and hung out together for a few hours.

This friend has recently come out, and so we spent a lot of time talking about the issues he is facing, the effect all of this is having on his relationships, and how he appreciates having friends like us who are willing to talk about this with him.

After we’d hit all the relevant historical sites (read: IKEA) we were trying to decide where to go next.

“How about the Botanical Gardens?” suggested my husband.

“Ooh, great!” I agreed.

“Um, why are we going to a garden again,” asked our friend.

“Because we like to look at flowers,” I replied.

“Oh, geez!,” our friend retorted. “You guys are gay!”

Peace, love, and understanding, man. That’s what we are all about here.

Al Giordino: Hey, you know how it is when you see someone that you haven’t seen since high school, and they got some dead-end job, and they’re married to some woman that hates them, they got, like, three kids who think he’s a joke? Wasn’t there some point where he stood back and said, “Bob, don’t take that job! Bob, don’t marry that harpy!” You know?
Dirk Pitt: Your point?
Al Giordino: Well, we’re in the desert, looking for the source of a river pollutant, using as our map a cave drawing of a Civil War gunship, which is also in the desert. So I was just wondering when we’re gonna have to sit down and re-evaluate our decision-making paradigm?

-from the movie “Sahara”

Hopelessly addicted to Facebook, yet unbearably anxious and OCD whenever my total number of friends equals an odd, rather than an even, number.

So the other night we received a phone call from our next door neighbor at almost 10:00 at night.

“Do you have any idea why the police are walking around our neighborhood with dogs?” she asked.

We did not know, as a matter of fact, having been blissfully unaware of the presence of law enforcement on our quiet, weekday evening. But as it happens, we do know someone who could probably find out for us.

So we left our friend a voice mail asking, “Um, say, just hypothetically speaking, there were a bunch of police walking around our neighborhood at night with dogs. What might that be about?”

We heard back from our friend today. They haven’t yet found out the details of this specific incident, but they did pass on one little nugget of law enforcement wisdom:

“If the dogs come out, then someone’s getting bitten.”

Lovely.

So just go here and read this:

10 Most Bizarre Military Experiments

“When you think of spying, odds are you think of jamming a radio inside of a cat so it can listen in on stuff. And if you don’t, you really need to have a good, long think about what kind of person you are.”

Today I heard just about the best description ever of our volatile Southern weather, when my tutoring student arrived for her session and announced,

“I’ve decided that our weather is on its period!”