Ellen might have a hard time around here, what with Dollivers and the Kennels, and the Tinies, and Elton belting out tunes, when she's trying to get on with her legislative planning work.
So she's ensconced in the little rocker one floor away from the noisy group, and is quite pleased with her new jacket and dress outfit, suitable for office wear.
She plans on not following the Westminster AKC Dog Show. Such a workaholic. She wasn't even keen on spending time on the fitting of the jacket and posing for the photoshoot. The Dollivers are baffled.
The agility section got off to a wonderful start -- did you see the beagle? great at actual agility but saw no reason not to look around now and then, and stop at the top of the climber to wag at the crowd, and down on the rug to do a quick cleaning job...he was as star turn. I wonder if there is a trophy for Funniest Hound? typical beagle ham. Pretends he can't do the weave, runs off. Then comes back and does a weave a border collie would be proud of. We need dogs in our lives!
So Ellen, the new arrival, spent her first night with the Dollivers, and that may have been a mistake. She's already demanded to get out of the costume I kitted her in for her debut, and into some decent working gear. They must have been working on her.
Anyway, I found some blue silk yarn, and got to work in bed last night, listening to a Miss Read audiobook, read by Gwen Watford. She played a wonderful Dolly Bantry in a couple of Miss Marple television movies, perfect delivery. But I find her a bit hard to follow in audio, since I must have been lipreading a lot of the movie dialog. She swallows syllables in true southern Brit style.
And this morning as Ellen nagged at me in a tiny, firm Yorkshire voice, I finished the dress, but she wanted it sleeveless, and a jacket and hat to go with. So she's got the dress and a nice scarf tucked in at the neck and the jacket and hat are promised. Clearly she's a quick study. She's a little over six inches tall, much smaller than the Ds, which they are glad about, since she can't wear their clothes. We have lost the pin she wore the other day, and I have a bad feeling I may find it with a bare foot at some point, pun intended.
Last evening I was wondering what to choose between doing fed taxes and knitting doll dresses, decisions, decisions. And it will be no surprise to blogistas to hear I did both. When in doubt, just do everything, lifelong mantra. For better or worse.
So taxes are done, and they owe me a bit, and state taxes now to do, and maybe they'll owe me a bit, too. It's annoying to have to file, since I only do it to reclaim taxes paid directly on account of withdrawals from IRA. Income doesn't reach taxable threshold. But a little bit will arrive in my bank soon, I hope. Always welcome.
So here's Ellen on her way to being once again a busy working Parliamentary woman. I expect she'll want a briefcase, but the Ds are unlikely to think of that, they being more along the lines of more and better jewelry. She is probably not into jewelry, nor into taking over a dog from the Dolliver Kennels, who are about to come into their own again, with the Westminster AKC Dog Show coming up.
We have a Whippet, a Wirehaired Terrier and an Irish Setter in the kennels, plus a shaggy mixed breed, who didn't get in on account of not agile enough for the agility section. The first year of our Kennels, a Wirehaired Terrier won, so there was a general barkup at the Kennels, complete with eggcup standing in for the big trophy. And Wrangler NameMe in pole position.
So today, I wrote a little list of all the things I have to attend to, in order to stop having to think about them all at the same time. And making the doll was on there.
So I thought, fine, let's see if my thumb's up to it. And took a closer look at the doll parts and realized I'd done the hardest sewing back when I knitted them. All the parts complete and only needing to be stuffed and joined up.
The funny thing about doll making is that a personality emerges whether you want it to or not. It did with the Dollivers, and this little doll, half their size, starting out from a Duchess Kate pattern, suddenly turned into Ellen Wilkinson, and if you don't know about her, go here.
She was a powerful orator, a tiny redhaired woman, my mom's heroine in politics, our local MP as well as a national dynamo. So when she started showing up, I had to card some red handspun yard, for red hair, and I couldn't resist giving her suffragist type clothes and posing her with my Hillary ballot. I think she would have approved. She usually wore a two piece skirt suit, as far as I know, not a snappy dresser, too busy doing her job, really.
Not so surprising that she emerged, perhaps, since I was making the doll while live tweeting and hearing the proceedings of the dramatic court proceedings this afternoon in the SF federal circuit court hearing on the Trump immigration ban. When the moment is right, the doll appears.
What a time to be alive. Powerful women lawyers commenting and explaining throughout, via Twitter, powerful female federal judge on the panel examining the case. I was engrossed even in the machinery of the law, where they were arguing whether a stay or a writ of mandamus would have been correct, and who had standing and how, and so on.
And when the DOJ lawyer complained that things were moving so fast, the judge shot back, well, it was the government who forced the speed by filing the emergency request. In other words, a different way of appealing it would have allowed the court to keep the stay until full deliberations were completed, giving lawyers time to prepare. The government shot itself in the legal foot by its dramatic reaction. Couldn't help feeling that the DOJ was not very well served by its lawyers. And the other side was stronger. But we'll see how this comes out.
Rapidly developing into a shade tree lawyer here!
