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.