Life

2+ Months In Seattle

Greg Cowan

May 23, 2021 • 3 min read

We're more than two months into living in Seattle, and it's been enough for us to settle in, develop some routines, and get to know the place a little. Mostly though, we got a dog! Max is our goofy 11 month old Plott Hound mix rescue puppy with a friendly and stubborn personality.

Max loves to: meet people and get pet by them, chase balls, thrash and squeak toys, do tricks for treats, cuddle us, sniff for interesting smells (trash is full of interesting smells btw), chew on bones, tear up cardboard, nap, and just generally be goofy. He's overall a pretty good boy, though he definitely can be stubborn, and likes to do things his way. He's clever and a quick learner, which he sometimes uses to extract more treats from us, until we catch on.

As usual for puppies it's hard to for him to sit still for photos.

Apparently Plott Hounds were bred for hunting bears in North Carolina by an immagrant in 1750! While we don't plan on doing any bear hunting with him, Max should make a good on-leash hiking dog once he heals up. Currently an unknown injury in his left front wrist is preventing him from walking much. We're going to see a vetrinary orthopedic doctor soon who can hopefully figure out what's wrong and help him heal. In the mean time Max likes socializing at our local small-area dog park to keep him from being too bored hanging out in the apartment all day.

We've shown Max around some of the local parks, which have lots of interesting people, dogs, geese, and smells.

We adopted Max two weeks after getting to Seattle, and a week before our stuff got here on the moving truck, so he had a bed in the apartment before we did!

Besides adopting Max, training him, and integrating him into our daily lives, we've also started biking! We were planning on biking from Seattle to Portland over 2 days in September, but our training plan got derailed by a knee injury I got from incorectly setting up my clipless right shoe. Anyways we're finding road / gravel biking a fun way to get around the city and explore the surrounding areas.

We biked past some beautiful cherry blossoms and flowers on a quiet street in Ballard.

Now that we aren't on such a strict training plan to bike to Portland, we plan to do some more hiking this summer, get back into climbing, and learn big mountain skills.

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