You can take the pinoys out of the PI, but you can't take the PI out of the pinoys

All of my aunts and uncles are going on a cruise this friday, and they're going to meet at ivan-ravaged Pensacola on Wednesday, and party in Biloxi on Thursday before they board the ship at Mobile on Friday. This is exclusively a baby-boomer generation reunion, because all of my cousins and I are going to be stuck in the states. My cousin Maria and I talked about the injustice while I was in Oregon, and we both decided we should have our own family reunion without "the moms and dads" in Las Vegas, and we should leave the under 18 kids with them. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, we don't have the organizational qualities that our parents have.

Anyway. Everytime my family travels up to Chicago, all of the titos and titas get together and the play mahjong. Hours upon hours will pass by, and you can still hear those little plastic mahjong tiles coming from the other room. Whenever they "shuffle" the cards together to play a new game, it sounds like a little kid trying to put up his legos. When Ferdi's girlfriend Mary (now his wife) would visit his parents' house, they would be playing mahjong in the other room. Then one day, she made the comment to Ferdi: "Your family must really like popcorn. Whenever I come over they're always popping it in the other room." Of course, she is referring to the sound of the mahjong tiles.

The popularity of the game among the Diego clan is for the fact that it's a gambling game. My family loooooves gambling, especially since the elder Diegos are on a whole luckier than other families. Gambling may be a venial sin explicitly outlined in the Bible, but when it is done among family, and when the winnings are ultimately distributed to me and my cousins (and even during tithing collections in Mass) the lack of virtue in the act is compensated by the generous nature of the winner, if that makes any sense at all.

So, on our family message board (yes, the Diego family is online), my dad posted the necessary info, since he is the unofficial person in charge of this whole event. As a side note, let me just say that I've never seen my dad so excited that his siblings will all be visiting our Florida house (even if Pensacola is not at all recovered from Ivan, and is currently suffering from Tropical Depression Matthew). For the past 5 years he's been trying to get people to visit our house, because this house is truly something to be proud of (4 bed, 2.5 bath, and one huge back yard with an enclosed pool, worth roughly a quarter-mil). Sadly, people who will remain nameless will promise to visit and at the last minute find a reason to not go. So, now everyone is coming to visit at the same time, and I'm pretty sure my dad's heart is shouting for joy. Even though he can't take them to Pensacola Beach, which is currently closed off to its own residents because of the hurricane, I'm pretty sure he'd still take all the titos to the local strip club off Palafox St, and my titas and my mom will talk about all the family gossip, starting from after dinner until 7am. Then, they'd start cooking breakfast.

Okay, back to our Diego family Yahoo Group. Each passenger on the cruise is allowed to bring two carry-ons. Now, mind you, a cruise is bound to have nightly activities and so forth and so on. My Tita Carmen posted this question on the message board:
Who will bring the mah-jong set? Maybe we need two. Let us take a count of players. Brix will play and we can bring the mah-jong set if needed. Helene said we can use the recreation center to play the mah-jong.

My titas and titos are so funny.