Yesterday, while Doolies spent time with her parents at their Buddhist retreat, I melted into the couch to enjoy Blue Dragon, my second JRPG. It reminds me of part anime, and part game. It has the wonderful character leveling, outfitting, and customizing that I love from RPGs, but does away with most of the action elements of the fighting. It's taken me a while to warm up to this genre. I started with Penny Arcade Adventures, and after receiving a copy of Blue Dragon for free at work, and seeing it on a list of underappreciated Xbox games, I decided to take the plunge. I think I'm glad I did. I'm not sure that Doolies agrees with my choice, however.

That's not what I want to write about. As I spent countless hours on the couch, the iggies were roaming outside. We've hit a bit of winter weather lately, and until yesterday, they've been hiding in the dog room when they weren't watching Battlestar Galactica with us on the couch. I took them to the dog park yesterday afternoon when the rain slowed, and by late afternoon the outside was cool and mostly dry. The iggies roamed our invisible-fence-protected gardens. I brought them onto the couch to sit with me a few times as I played, but they were restless, and I let them out. I watched them through the glass when I wasn't engrossed in the game.

The invisible fence works by way of a wire installed around the boundaries of our home. The dogs wear a collar with a shock device that has two metal prongs. When the collar approaches within four feet of the wire on either side, it beeps once. If the dog backs away then nothing happens. If the collar beeps a second time (there's about a second between beeps), then the collar gives a mild shock. The shock is set to low, and feels a bit stronger than a common static shock. It's not debilitating, at least for me. Our dogs are much smaller, however. The collar continues to beep a total of seven times, administering a small shock with each beep.

There are two places that the dogs usually tempt the invisible fence: the first is near our main entrance, which is to the side of the center door. The entrance leads through a breezeway between the front of our house and our driveway. The invisible fence extends to the edge of the breezeway so the dogs cannot enter the breezeway or, more importantly, the driveway.

When we come home or whenever anyone rings the doorbell, the dogs run to this line to bark. They sometimes step near it and beep, but we've never seen them push through the line. The most worrisome behavior, the invisible fence dog trainer told us, is when the dog pushes through the shocks and realizes that they end at some point. Whenever the dogs receive a shock, they usually freeze and sometimes try to scratch at the collar with their hind leg. They normally back away from the beep, especially when we say "no" when they receive the shock.

The other trouble area is the front steps. For aesthetic reasons, the wire was installed in the dirt at the bottom of the stairs, and up along the rocks that surround our front lawn. The dogs quickly discovered that they can go four steps down before hitting the boundary. When we first installed the fence, white flags marked its location. The dogs were trained to associate the white flags with the beeps and shocks to encourage them not to pass. After a month, you were allowed to remove the flags. Two white flags still remain at the edge of the fourth step, more for the people on the road than for the dogs. Or so we thought.

First, the mea culpa: besides the cost of the installation (which is not cheap), the collars use proprietary batteries that the Invisible Fence Co. sells. The batteries need replacing every three months, and the first year is free. I received the replacement batteries a couple of weeks ago. Since the green light on the collars still flashed, and the beep sounded strong, I decided to delay the replacement to save money. It wasn't until Ziggy broke through the steps invisible fence that I immediately replaced the batteries, and brought him to the front stairs to go through his training again with the stronger shocks.

With this experience in mind, I watched the iggies from the couch to ensure they weren't experimenting on the front stairs again. When they stood on the stairs looking out, I could see their backsides from my video game perch, and all was good with the world.

It's growing dark earlier in Seattle, and it was dusk when the phone started ringing. I checked the number and it wasn't familiar. Usually, I ignore such calls but I picked up hoping to hear from our real estate broker about the Castle (which, must to our growing chagrin, still hasn't sold). A lady sounding very worried was on the other side. She asked if I owned small dogs, and if I knew they were walking along East Mercer Way, the busy road in front of our house. I asked her if the dogs were on the road, or on the stairs leading to the road. She assured me, in a very judging voice, that they were indeed on the road, and they scared her when she drove past. At least one other person called, probably when I was outside grabbing the dogs and locking them in the dog room.

Clearly I'm a terrible dog owner. Our dogs were almost squished last night, pancaked into the road. While they are exceptionally fast for small dogs, they are no match for a speeding car rounding the curve of East Mercer Way. The dogs freedom has been restricted as we call on the Invisible Fence people to help us. Besides increasing the shock, we're also thinking of installing chicken wire along the bottom of our front gate and the nearby trees that make up our front fence. The dogs clearly can no longer be trusted on the stairs. And, clearly, I can no longer be trusted as good dog owner. Stupid Blue Dragons, and their gripping hold on my weak-willed addictions.