One of our prerequisites on our recent apartment search was dog-friendliness. Since moving, we had discussed several times the idea of getting a beagle dog, since we had such an enjoyable experience being roommates with Roscoe Domenichetti in 2008. I doubted we would get serious about looking for one for quite a while yet, but the other day Lauren came across a Craigslist deal too good to pass up, and before you knew it, we had adopted an 18-week old beagle pup previously named Dago. (Lauren quickly discovered that Dago was a racial slur for an Italian, and decided we didn’t want to go yelling that at local dog parks… what with Austin’s booming Italian population and all.)

I arrived home from work Thursday and was greeted by the little critter, who wasn’t the slightest bit shy, pouncing about and squealing with delight. And I greeted him back and played with him for a few minutes. Now some of you may think I’m not much of an animal person. Growing up I had no interest in playing with the farm dogs, and even when they had tiny puppies I’d just talk to them in a very serious monotonous voice. “Hi, dog. Would you like this stick?” But living with Roscoe really opened up my soft side for canines. I became obsessed with feeding Sarah’s beagle. He wanted to eat so bad and when I fed him he was so happy, which in turn made me happy. Sarah quickly put a halt to that, but Roscoe continued to flip out every time he saw me over the next couple years. I decided that given the right circumstances, I might like to one day own a small breed of dog.

We all seemed to hit it off right away. Lauren quickly began calling him Baxter, probably because that’s the name of Ron Burgundy’s dog in Anchorman, one of her all-time favorites. Lauren will be able to spend virtually every waking second with Baxter for a while until she finds employment, and she is already off to a great start training him. He seems to be responding very well to the “sit” command. We saw the amazing tricks Sarah was able to teach Roscoe over time; he would stand on his hind legs and beg for treats, roll over, etc. Baxter has a ways to go, but he has learned a lot in 48 hours. He was undoubtedly the hit of the dog park Saturday morning downtown, sniffing the butts of other small-breed dogs, then invoking some chases which all ended in dramatic spills and tumbles.

Baxter P. Glanzer, the new family pooch hound dog.

In other news, we managed to finish off Cheers late Saturday night. We started watching it on Netflix Instant on the PS3 in April before our trip to Boston and got through about 60% of the series before I moved to Austin. During those 50 or so days apart we didn’t watch any Cheers, but once Lauren arrived in Austin we picked it back up and plowed right on through to the end. It certainly helped speed things along considering we don’t get cable and the Twins aren’t worth watching even though I’m an MLB.TV subscriber. The Cheers finale was pretty good in my opinion… your typical sitcom finale where several of the main characters move on to other things and you get some sense of closure. Obviously that aired 18 years ago and was watched by over 100,000,000 Americans in first-run, so the odds are 50% of the country has already seen “One for the Road.”

The whole series of 11 seasons was brilliant, but my favorites were still the first five seasons with Diane. The back-and-forth romance with Sam and Diane has to be the sitcom romance against which all other sitcom romances are judged. Other than Diane, I really took to Frasier and Lilith, probably due to the fact that I’ve seen almost all of spin-off Frasier and enjoyed going back in time and watching the character develop. It still amazes me that Kelsey Grammer made a 20-year career out of playing that character that, when created, probably wasn’t intended to last more than an episode or two on Cheers.

At the office, I am amazed at how busy I’ve been the last week or so. I am now in charge of creating the Shop.CallawayGolf.com e-mail that goes out to a quarter million people each week, which is basically a full-time job in itself once I go back and forth with a dozen or so people on revisions. I’m also in charge of adding all the new products to the website and maintaining the day-to-day merchandising of the Shop website. In two weeks it’s the company golf tournament and I’ve signed up to play. It’s a best-ball tourney, four players to a team, with each team consisting of four players of varying skill levels. I’ve volunteered to be a D-level player. They’ll have to use at least a few of my swings.

And lastly tonight, I must remark on how odd it is here in Austin compared to anywhere I’ve been before when it comes to male-female ratios. I am so used to going to parties or hanging out with groups of 80% dudes all the time. We were at a friend’s house playing board games last week and the men were outnumbered. I can count on one hand the number of parties I’ve been to since 2001 where there were more females than males. It’s bizarre. And having a considerable number of women at work is so unusual too! At MB it was literally a 40-to-3 male-to-female ratio.