Turns out my sister is getting married today, and after a few pulls of Jameson® I decided that in light of my monumentally successful live-blogging of my neighbor’s home birth that I should live-blog my sister’s wedding.

There are plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea: first, it’s 2am on the day of the actual wedding and I’m just getting started, the wedding is in a park and I won’t have computer or internet access, and worst of all, I’m actually in the wedding as a groomsman, and since it’s a medieval slash Lord of the Rings™-themed wedding it’s going to be a little challenging updating Twitter as I sashay down the aisle.

Yeah. About that. See, as my sister and her better half met online on a Tolkien™ message board, their wedding is Lord of the Rings™ themed. So, instead of just renting a tux, I had to build myself a medieval costume and pack a sword instead of heat. Luckily I had several months to prepare so I ignored it entirely until a few weeks before the wedding when I realized in a bit of a panic that the only part of my authentic Weta®-approved costume in my possession was black socks.

The internet is a wonderful thing, though, and in short order I found myself a tunic that looked like it was hacked from Maria von Trapp’s drapes by underage Chinese sweatshop slaves, leather dominatrix boots, black pants that predated the Reagan administration from a local Goodwill, and best of all, a licensed Lord of the Rings™ Uruk-hai™ scimitar™. In my mind, I would end up looking like this

But ended up looking a bit more like this.

Worst of all, when my sword is on my belt the spike keeps digging into the side of my leg. It’s almost as if it was specifically engineered to drive the wearer into a state of almost continual intense rage…actually that makes a lot of sense. Well played, Peter Jackson. Well played.

Part Two