This is old news to most people, but a couple weeks ago I got a puppy. I’d been wanting one for a long time, and this ad popped up on Craigslist for a Dachsund puppy. I emailed the poster, asked a few questions, etc etc. After the first round of emails she sent some pictures, and upon looking at them, well… my heart grew three sizes that day.

And that’s how Hexl came into my life. So I’m just saying. If you’re coming over, I hope you’re cool with dying, because he is a level 30 Dark Master of Pai Mei’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.

Except he does it with his LETHAL CUTENESS. It’s like mind bullets, but, like, you know. He actually killed me. I’m actually dead as I type this.

In the meantime, school has begun again and I am taking it easy: just one class, a German review. In signing up, I was a little nervous: It’s been a while, and I’d gotten pretty good at skating through classes, which has been great for my grade-point, but terrible for my actual acquisition of knowledge. Fortunately, I’ve got two things going for me: my professor is a bit of a taskmaster, and I also have people to practice with now! My neighbors are film-makers from Austria with a couple kids. My Finnish art-director at the office used to be their nanny — so we already had a connection. But then I bought their Saarinen dining room set, and we’ve been fast friends since. So hopefully this will be a great semester.

Lately I have been consuming my fair share of media as well: I’m reading Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, and Rilke’s Letters on Life. I just saw Lars and the Real Girl and Hellboy: The Golden Army, both of which I enjoyed, albeit for very different reasons. And a couple weeks ago Josh and I ran up to Salt Lake to see Broken Social Scene, which was great, if not a little odd: who knew they were such a jam band? To quote Dirk, “I mean, 9 minutes a song and they were just really feeling it.”

In conclusion: I promise this won’t become a puppy blog, but Hex is asleep on my lap as I type this and he totally has the hiccups. Pretty much a megaton payload of adorable.