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.

This weekend my parents were down here for a visit, and I decided to introduce them to the magical world of the car show “Top Gear”, which airs on the BBC America network.

On this particular episode the three hosts were each required to acquire a car, saw it in half, and then transform it into their own, unique version of a limousine.

As we watched the men gleefully cut into their cars with varying degrees of success and the occasional electrical fire my dad said, “You know, my cousin and I did that once when we were growing up.”

My mom: “You sawed a car in half?”

My dad: “Yes. We did it to my grandfather’s old car after he died.”

My mom: “And how did you get permission to do something like that?”

My dad: “Well, he and I never really went the route of asking for permission.”

Me: “As in, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission?”

My dad: “Exactly. My grandmother was not pleased.”

Last weekend my husband and I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law as part of the official start of our summer vacation. They both have their own laptops, but apparently my brother insists on keeping his in its virginal, pristine condition by refusing to allow anyone to download anything onto it from the Internet. So anytime this need appears, my sister-in-law’s computer is pressed into service.

It’s a good thing they’d told me about this on an earlier visit. Because otherwise, the conversation I overheard between them would’ve been even more disconcerting than it already was:

My sister-in-law: “So, where’s ‘The Whore’?”

My brother (looking around, completely unconcerned): “Um, I think she’s in the bedroom.”

This past weekend my mother celebrated her 60th birthday. My parents threw a huge party that included relatives from both sides of the family, lots of friends, and members of the families that my brother and I married into.

At some point during the party my dad looked down and happened to notice that the pants he was wearing had acquired some tears and frayed edges, so he started joking about taking up a “love offering” from the guests in order to cover the cost of some new clothes.

(For those of you who are not recovering Baptists, a “love offering” is a special, voluntary collection taken up whenever a guest pastor or visiting musical group participates in a church’s worship service.)

My sister-in-law and her fiance were among the first guests to leave, and as they were making their way to the door my dad caught up with them, huddled them together over in a corner of the kitchen, and with an absolutely straight face told them that he was giving all of the party guests an opportunity to contribute to his special “love offering”.

My sister-in-law’s fiance immediately jumped back about 3 feet, with a look of absolute horror on his face.

“Oh, I guess you’ve never been to a Baptist church,” my mom said, puzzled by his reaction.

“No, I’m Catholic,” he said.

So we explained to him our idea of a “love offering”, and he relaxed a bit.

“Never sneak up on me again and start whispering about a ‘love offering’,” he said, shaking his head. “For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to do something I’d have to repent of later.”

when this story that you’ve heard for years from a relative around the holiday dinner table

“…So they were sitting on the couch, smoking, and then they would turn around and blow smoke at the cat who was sitting on the back of the couch, and then eventually the cat just fell on the floor…”

is finally told in its “adult” version in front of you at Christmas dinner.

“…So they were sitting on the couch rolling joints, and then they would turn around and blow the smoke at the cat who was sitting on the back of the couch, and then eventually the cat fell off the couch because it was stoned.”

My Grandmother (to my uncle): Do I have all of these figures in the right place?

My Uncle: Um, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

My husband and I are in charge of cooking the turkey this year for Christmas. We brine it before we bake it, so I emailed the recipe to my mom so that she could buy the brine ingredients ahead of time.

When we arrived at my parents’ house yesterday they took us out to lunch, and in the car on the way home the talk turned to turkey.

“I got a 10-pound bag of ice. Is that enough?” asked my mom.

“Well let’s see. It’s a math problem,” responded my husband.

“Aaarrrggghhh!!!” I yelled, grabbing my head in agony.

“A pint’s a pound the word around,” began my husband.

“Yep, there went my frontal lobe,” I announced.

Eventually-and a long and painful eventually it was-they reached the point in their conversions that they’d been aiming for all along: how many ounces are in a gallon?

“I thought there were 16 ounces in a gallon,” said the accountant.

“No, there are 64 ounces in a gallon,” said the math teacher.

“No-oo,” there are 128 ounces in a gallon,” said the engineer.

“And there goes the temporal lobe. Damn math!”

So we’re back from the wedding, which was wonderful, and OF COURSE I have things to blog about!

All of the relatives who stayed in Raleigh last night met for breakfast this morning in the lobby of our hotel. Of course there was much rehashing of the previous day’s events and comparing of notes since we had all left the reception at different times.

There were lots of questions like, “Were you here for the circle dance?”, or, “Were you here when they brought in the second meal?”, but by far the best question of all was, “Were you here for the fire?” (One of the centerpieces went up in flames.)

Then it was time to leave for the restaurant, but before we did we wanted to make sure that we had made a reservation for the correct number of people. My mom couldn’t figure out why the actual number of people there did not match the number of people on her list, so my husband went over to help her. He discovered that the discrepancy was due to 2 people having been left off the list: namely, he and I.

“Oh. Then I’m sorry I showed that to you then,” my mom said, because she didn’t want our feelings to be hurt. (They weren’t).

Then my aunt (her sister) piped up. “Notice that she didn’t say she was sorry she left you off the list, only sorry that she showed you the list!”

1. On Christmas Eve as we were all sitting around the fireplace, in that nice, mellow, semi-hypnotic stupor that comes from knowing that there is nothing left to prepare for the next day, and that all of your loved ones are together in one place, my mother-in-law turned to my husband and said, “So, what do you think about cremation?”

2. Christmas Eve is also my husband’s birthday, so my family and his family got together for brunch to celebrate with him. As I was walking back to the table from the restroom I heard someone say, “Well, for that you really need your own bazooka.”

3. A new acquaintance explaining their entry into the world: “I wasn’t born. I was gifted down to people from the gods.”

We’re pretty excited here in blog land because this is our very first post that we’ve ever done from a remote location, and not sitting at home in our office. But despite my new feelings of technological mastery I clearly have some more work to do before I reach the levels at which my husband and father-in-law are currently residing.

Here is the conversation that my mother-in-law and I were having on the way home from dinner:

My MIL: See how they’ve decorated all the lamp posts in town with those white lights.
Me: That’s really pretty. Remember when they used to have those really big multi-colored lights? I really miss those.

Here is the conversation between my husband and my father-in-law

My husband: Tonight after the movie we need to get started on that black belt level Sudoku puzzle.
My FIL: What we really need is a copier so we have enough sheets to try out different possibilities.
My husband: We could generate a spread sheet in Excel to do that for us.
My FIL: I bet we could even create it so that it checked to make sure that all of our totals were correct.
My husband: What is the total?
My FIL: What’s 9 factorial? Is that it?
My husband: No, 9 factorial is huge.
My FIL: Oh, you’re right. What was I thinking?
(Snorts and chortling laughter as they realize their mathematical gaffe.)

Clearly, I cannot start drinking eggnog soon enough.