Skippy the Wonder Chicken says Good Night

Tea: Blood Orange

Music: Del Amitri, "Always the Last to Know"

Time: Night.

Remember that stretchy (but non-rubber) chicken from the other night?

It's finally gone.

The final roster of meals to which it contributed:

Thursday lunch: Dirty rice for one

Thursday dinner: Roast chicken and vegetables for five

Friday lunch: Leftover roast chicken for two

Friday supper: Sausage and cabbage soup (with the leftover vegetables and a chicken stock base) for four (I was at First Friday.)

Saturday lunch: Soup for four (One of the kids had a scenery-building workday at school.)

Saturday dinner: Spinach salad with chopped chicken for five

Saturday late night snack: Soup (with the leftover chopped chicken added) for one

Sunday supper: Soup for four (One was tired of soup and had a sandwich.)

I'd say it's fitting that the last meal came on a Sunday. Church and thankfulness for blessings and all that. But I'm trying to make every day a day of gratitude, of awareness, of stewardship.

Heh ... guess this lesson tasted like chicken.

I know I slacked last night and didn't post a scary story. So tonight, here are two.

Thomas Peckett Prest, "The Demon of the Hartz"

Horacio Quiroga, "The Feather Pillow"

Instant Gratification Overload

Tea: Lapsang Vanilla

Music: Wild Cherry, "Play That Funky Music"

Time: Night

So I've sent out ... (counting) ... 32 e-mails so far today and tonight to artists and gallery directors. (Yeah, I'm a bit behind on my correspondence. I'm trying to do something about it, at least.) Out of those 32 recipients, two have replied as of this writing.

Considering it's the weekend, that's not a bad number. Given the way communications used to be ... it's nothing short of phenomenal.

Say it's 1860, and I want to send a letter from St. Joseph to Sacramento. Enter the Pony Express, which -- if nobody gets popped out of the saddle -- will get the missive from point A to Point B in ten days. That's considered fast.

It took weeks, sometimes, for my father's letters to get home from the Pacific Theater during World War II.

Now, I can get calls from England in real time. I can send out almost three dozen notes in the span of several hours, and know they've all arrived safely in their destined in-boxes.

And you know what? I'm spoiled. We all are, I think.

It's easy to take quick communication for granted, even for those of us (yes, we dinosaurs do still roam the earth) who remember the days when hitting "send" meant licking a stamp and dropping a letter in a slot.

We take it as a given that people will be reachable -- by e-mail, by cell phone, by instant message. It's not a far leap to expecting them to be reachable at our convenience, not theirs, no matter the circumstances at the receiving end. Let a call go to voice mail? How dare she?

It's a symptom, I think, of a larger malady. Things -- long-distance conversations, fast transportation, putting food on the table -- are too easy for us, and as a consequence, we don't appreciate them as much as we should.

Shutting off our cell phones and unplugging our computers for a week would help us grow a bit fonder of instant communication, perhaps. But that's about as likely to happen as -- oh, I don't know -- an election in which looks don't matter and no cards get played.

Oops, got to go. I have a call coming in.

A Pleasant Reminder

Tea: Lapsang Vanilla

Music: Pink Floyd, "Learning to Fly"

Time: Night.

This will be short. First Friday has worn me out a bit. It was good, though. Got to see some people I hadn't seen in a while, found a few new (to me) spaces ... and as always, the art reminded me just how good Kansas City's creative community is.

The weather was gorgeous, the music (inside and outside) worth hearing ... in short, an affirmation of some wise words I've heard recently:

"I'd rather be poor and healthy than rich and sick."

Amen to that.

Tonight's story: Jessie Middleton, "The Ghost That Grinned"

Stretching a Non-Rubber Chicken

Tea: Blueberry

Music: Beastie Boys, "Sabotage"

Time: Night

So how do you feed five people -- three of them teenagers -- on one non-giant chicken?

Quite well, I'm finding out. And with the economy the way it is, anything that stretches out the food budget is a good thing.

The process started last night. I took out the giblets, butterflied the bird and set aside the backbone. (I know the link says to discard it. I can't afford to discard anything, right now.) Then I peeled back the skin on the breasts and thighs, rubbed some smoked paprika on the exposed meat and put the skin back. A dusting of smoked paprika and kosher salt on the skin, and the bird went into the fridge.

But wait, there's more. I browned the backbone and the neck and put them into a pot of boiling water, to make stock. I put the liver and gizzards into another pan of water and cooked them. After a while, I took out the neck and back (while they still had some flavor in the bits of meat attached to them) and put them in a baggie with the giblets.

The neck and back meat and the giblets were part of my lunch today. I made dirty rice, using the stock to cook the grains. With a few drops of hot sauce completing the assembly, lunch was served -- and enjoyed.

For dinner, I roasted the chicken, along with some vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onions and celery) tossed in olive oil and dusted with poultry seasoning, salt and pepper. On the side, iceberg salad. Now, in the past I've regarded two pieces of chicken as a snack and three as something of a divine right. But tonight, we all made do with slices from the breasts, and nobody complained of being hungry. (My stomach is shrinking, I think.)

I boned out the rest of the chicken, saving some for Mrs. Steep's lunch tomorrow. (I did save out the flat portions and the tips of the wings. Those are going to be my lunch.) The rest of the meat will go on a salad, most likely.

Done? Not yet. I make a stock out of the bones. That will be a base for soup, using the leftover roast veggies, the cabbage in the fridge and three jalapeno bratwursts (bought on sale for 60 cents each). With any luck, there will be leftovers of that, too.

Please don't take this as bragging. Take it, if anything, as an expression of gratitude for Providence and provision, and of regret for past waste -- and a determination not to take a full belly for granted.

Tonight's scary story: Algernon Blackwood, "The Lease"

The Horror! The Horror!

Tea: Lemon

Music: Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out"

Time: Night.

It's October again, kiddies. You know what that means. Time for scary stuff (BWAH hah hah hah haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) ...

So here you go.

Oh ... not up for real-life creepiness? Fine. But I have to warn you ... measured against the indoctrination of kids into a cult of personality, this is kind of tame.

Here you go: We lead off the month with Elliot O'Donnell's "The Two Ghost Houses of Red Lion Square."

Enjoy.

Pot Training

Tea: Yunnan Gold

Music: Weezer, "Buddy Holly"

Time: Night

I'd been putting off this talk with my youngest daughter. I don't know why. She's been old enough for a while now.

Her 17-year-old sister has shown no interest in the subject whatsoever. In fact, it repels her. Their brother, almost 16, has tried it. He can take it or leave it. But at 14, the youngest can't get enough. She has whole bags of the stuff.

I guess I finally figured out that I have two choices: Let her work things out on her own, finding her own way by trial and error, or give her some fatherly guidance.

So today ... I taught her how to run the coffee maker.

She chose caramel, one of 12 flavors she got as a gift. I showed her how to put in the filter, measure out the coffee, fill the pot with water and pour it into the machine.

Then she flipped the switch, and the running commentary began.

"How long is this going to take?"

"It's taking too long."

"Is it done yet?"

"How can I tell when it's done?"

(No, she hadn't been hitting the caffeine before that. She just has little patience when she wants something.)

Finally, the pot was done, and she got down her gigantic mug from Alice's Tea Cup in New York. (We've both been there, but she likes to gloat about being first by several months.) This is her mug. She doesn't share. She has the youngest child's ethic -- she might have had to share her living space all her life, but her stuff is sacrosanct.

She filled the mug, got out the milk and then stopped short.

"If I put milk in now, it's going to go all over the place," she said. "You want some of this coffee, Dad?

"You sure? It's your coffee."

"Yeah."

"Can I wait until you're done, wash out your mug and then use it?"

Her eyes narrowed, and she clutched the cup to her chest.

"My mug. Get your own."

I got out another mug, poured some of her coffee into it, and sipped. Could have been stronger. Couldn't have been more pleasurable.

"Thanks for sharing."

"You're welcome."

As Hallmark moments go, it was pretty darn good.

Next week, maybe the week after that, I'll get out my ibrik and show her how to cook up the hard stuff.

Who knows? Maybe I'll even let her use one of my little cups.

A Little Common Sense, Please?

Tea: Apricot

Music: Potato Moon, "Ghost Man"

Time: Night.

So the president's bailout plan went down in flames, and fingers are pointing every which way. The way I see it, though, it's a chance for Congress to do the right thing (for once).

I didn't come up with this idea, but it's brilliant:

Instead of bailing out the big lenders, use that $700 billion to pay off the home loans themselves. Then let homeowners pay the government back, as they can. If it takes a while, it takes a while -- but people don't have to worry about losing their homes, which lessens a huge stressor on the middle class.

Obvious benefit: People who aren't desperate are less likely to do desperate things. As home foreclosures soar, watch for the crime rate to shoot up, too.

Okay, so maybe expecting that many people to do the right thing for the right reason is unrealistic. So put it to them as Bill Murray might have phrased it in Ghostbusters:

"If this works, you will have saved the homes of millions of registered voters."