Chicken and dumplings sounds wonnnnderful. Much better than canned soup. 

As for length of posts, please don't worry about that. The posts are going to be whatever length works for the moment and as you were stuck with the "get them to the stairs" bit, your post wasn't really needing to be much longer than it is. (Although, then I lost it in the stairs, but that was just because Venti is a chatty bugger, really it is.)