This is blind Helen, doing what she does best: sleeping with her tongue out. I saw her lying on the floor of the "people wing" of the house the other day, and it looked like her tongue had been glued to the floor. When Helen is sleeping, about half the time she has her tongue out. I'm not sure why, and while we occasionally see other dogs sleeping with their tongues hanging out, with Helen it's a very common occurrence.
Yes, that's our living room … not much there, a couple of chairs, an end table or two, and then dog beds and laundry basket-beds taking up most of the floor space. It's hard to tell from this photo, but Helen had been on a tan West Paw bed just behind her but had gotten off to sleep on the hard floor. Why? Well, your guess is as good as ours. That's in the same category as the tongue. It's for dogs to do and people to wonder why.
And as for the floor … you can see from the multitude of scratches in front of Helen that a wood floor is not exactly the ideal surface for a place with this many dogs. Not only are their doggie toenails hard on it, but the seams between the planks are a real problem for cleaning when one of them has an accident. (Toothpick, anyone?) So somewhere on our long list of things to do in the future is a floor project to sand them down and then provide a protective coating of some sort.
That thing you see hanging on the door to the basement is a pine-cone wreath made from a straw hat. It was there when we bought the place, and I had planned to take it down and get rid of it when I first moved in back in May. Alas, I didn't act fast enough: When Alayne arrived, she immediately saw rustic charm in it. So while I say it goes, she says it stays … and there's no doubt who wins this one, eh?
Enough of the questionable furnishings, back to Helen: She is now on a new chemotherapy drug called chlorambucil, which the oncologist at Washington State University switched her to after Helen's nearly fatal gastric hemorrhaging last December. Following that episode, we gave Helen a "chemo holiday" of several months before resuming treatment, and so far she's doing fine on it. No side effects at all.
If Helen could see, however, I have no doubt she would agree with me on the pine-cone-hat thing.
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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