Something old, something new, something weird, and something demonic

I spent the entire weekend with the in-laws. I'm spending the entirety of next weekend with the in-laws. I am beyond delighted by this... I have clearly won the in-law lottery.

This weekend, the family got another degree more awesome when my sister-in-law got herself hitched in one seriously cool wedding. Though cool may be a poor choice of words considering the sunburn I've got going.

Earlier in the summer, I did some research on wedding traditions and found out about a chilling hidden danger to getting married. Evil spirits. Brides are like freaking crack to evil spirits - but don't worry; we've got rock solid defenses. To wit:

• Flowers: Yeah, turns out that flowers are surprisingly effective evil spirit repellents. Actually, herbs and garlic are the real evil spirit repellents - but apparently brides got tired of smelling like the Olive Garden and swapped the herbs for flowers. Who knew those kept evil spirits away too?
• There's a fantastic rumor floating around the Internet that brides carried flowers because nobody bathed so everyone smelled terrible. The problem with this logic is that, if nobody bathes, everybody smells, and nobody notices. Sort of like the old lady who has no idea that her apartment smells like her 25 cats have been painting the walls with their urine (I'm totally not that lady - I am well aware my apartment smells like 25 cats have been painting the walls with their urine).
• Wedding bells: This tradition comes from Ireland, where bells are well-known for their ability to scare off demons. Here in the US, we have inferior bells; that's why we used tin cans.
• Veils: Some say that brides wear veils over their faces so that their husbands-to-be won't see their faces and bolt. That's why Jeremy wore a veil at the wedding after all. But nope, the veil was there so that the evil spirits couldn't see the bride's face. I mean, you'd think spirits could deduce that the bride was the lady on the altar with a sheet over her face, but what do I know from evil spirits? I mean, aside from the evil spirits who live in my house and paint the walls with their urine.
• Throwing rice: The evil spirits eat the rice and it swells up in their stomachs and then their stomach explodes. No wait, that's birds. Also, that's not true either. Churches just got tired of scraping rice off their front steps. That's why people started throwing birdseed instead... until churches realized that scraping bird crap off the steps was not an improvement. So now it's bubbles, because obviously you can't just not throw things at the couple. That would be weird.

I took this! I rock so much! 

* Side Note: If you know me in person, you know that I don't own the most feminine of wardrobes, to say the least. This weekend was a good illustration of why - before the guests even began to arrive, I'd ruined my fingernails, my toenails, and broken my shoe. It's also possible that the big old rash I have on my face came from makeup I apparently purchased sometime during the Carter administration. I'm the reason I can't have nice things.