Lee Crashed My Party!

My birthday is next week. The one we all dread. The Big 4-0. So I knew I had to do something really special. After much deliberation and opinion gathering, I decided the easiest and most likely to be successful plan was to have an early evening until late night gathering at a centrally located bar -- tomorrow. There's this couple I'm friends with -- one works there, and the other insisted on cooking jambalaya for 50. Another friend was going to make my cake, Steve and I were going to pick up some finger sandwiches, and I was going to make my world famous guacamole and my new specialty, sun dried tomato & basil hummus. I was so very excited, I could hardly wait. And then that stupid Tropical Storm Lee developed and decided to rain on my parade. I awoke around 3 am to discover the power was off, and then an hour or so later, the first of three robo-calls announcing a tornado warning again woke me.

So after much deliberation and opinion gathering, I decided to cancel my party. I hope to reschedule it soon, but September is a very busy month, and it'd be a little anti-climactic to celebrate my birthday a month late. Things have kind of slowed down for now, but the storm isn't moving. It's just sitting there dropping rain all over the Gulf Coast. They promise much more over the next two days. Fortunately, I didn't get the finger sandwiches. But I did have 10 avocados ripening on the window sill. We polished off one batch of guacamole last night. Four more batches to go...

The silver lining, I guess, is that I got to finish up a few pieces of jewelry and even managed to photograph them in a brief sunny reprieve we had a couple of hours ago. Tonight, I'll be making a huge pot of Donald Link's Chicken & Rice with Mushrooms Soup. My mom gave everyone his cookbook a couple of Christmases ago, and I've made this soup quite a few times. It's easy and delicious, and will be the perfect antidote to all this howling wind and rain. I wonder if it pairs well with guacamole...