Dog Daze

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Orion, the puppy, has seen his privileges increase a lot this past week, because he has mostly stopped trying to detach the rear legs from Lody, our elderly Collie. Considering how worried I was that she might hurt him when he joined our household, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time protecting a sixty pound Collie from a puppy less than one fourth her mass. Increased privileges means he is spending most of the daylight hours in the house rather than in his pen.  When the weather is nice, we leave the door open between the house and the mudroom, and there is a dog door from the mudroom to the dog run.

I finally had to take all of the remaining plush toys and put them away. Lily, the Golden Retriever, kept stealing them and eviscerating them, producing a blizzard of plush toy guts.  Not only did I object to the destructiveness, I didn’t want any of the dogs to swallow the guts and risk an impaction. The latex toys and rope toys seem less prone to destruction, though they do keep ending up outside in the dog run.

Lily’s favorite activity is to retrieve tennis balls. While she is doing so, Orion follows her back and forth with a ball in his mouth, and Lightning, the Sheltie, tries to get the ball before Lily so he can play keep away. Lody just watches, apparently impressed by the useless expenditure of all that energy.

Brunch

Jack and I had been wanting to go out to eat to celebrate my birthday, but we were having schedule conflicts. (Our birthdays and anniversary all take place between June 3 and June 13, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but makes it difficult to schedule three separate celebrations.) While I was researching what was available in Monument, the town to north of us, I came across the Mozaic Restaurant, and remembered seeing it on the side of the road going toward Palmer Lake.

I don’t normally do buffets, because it seems like too much food, but I do like brunch occasionally. Jack doesn’t like brunch, because he sees no point in getting up in the morning on a weekend unless he is going to play golf. However, since it was my birthday, he agreed to brunch this morning.

The Mozaic has a fabulous view of the Front Range, looking south toward Cheyenne Mountain. On the opposite side the hill slopes up to the Santa Fe trail and the red rock formations which common to the Palmer Divide area.

The dining room took full advantage of the view and had what our server called a water feature.  I would have called it a fountain, myself.

The food lives up to the setting, and there was, of course, too much of it. It had both breakfast and luncheon items, including sliced prime rib, Belgian waffles, and cooked to order omelettes. I had a hard time deciding what I liked best, though the salmon frittata and cheeze blintz were both very good. The bison short ribs were also excellent. Jack made a strategic error and got an omelette. This left him too full to try much from the luncheon selections.  Poor Jack.