Lucky me: I have one of the potentially catastrophic iBook batteries, which is nice. I suspected as much when I heard about the Dell battery recall -- there have been a couple of times when my computer seemed to be way too hot.

What pissed me off a bit is that there are Apple stores all over the place here -- you would think they'd have set up some mechanism where you could take the faulty battery into the store and get a new one immediately. Nope. I still need to send in my battery exchange request and wait four to six weeks for a new battery. Damn.

In other news, it's apparently Wendy Week at Fiendish HQ -- we bonded over the latest ep of Project Runway (JEFFREY, YOU ASS!) and then spent an hour on the phone just chatting. This is a danger when you have two relatively solitary people who work from home -- we tend to get chatty when the opportunity presents itself.

One of the things we discussed is an unofficial requirement for being a writer is that you have loads of very odd friends from whom you can steal stuff to put in your books. I'm pretty much set on that front -- hell , some of them have blogs. The weird part is that Wendy and I qualify as each other's very odd friend, for the strangest reasons.

Wendy can't understand why I find growing up in a place where a friend of hers was moderately eaten by a bear, and where if you step off the path the ground could give way and you could find yourself lightly poached, to be odd or exotic. Dude -- it seems like every member of your family has a story of being menaced by some sort of rampaging ungulate. (If you ever get a chance, ask her dad about the time he encountered a pissed-off bison on cross-country skis.) (Mr. Despain was on skis, not the bison. Although that would be a story, too.) This alone gives you wacky-friend status.

But when I asked Wendy why I qualified for wacky-friend status, the answer surprised it. It's not the rampant geekery or many neuroses, nor the penchant for b-flicks or the time living overseas or even my tendency toward squalor. "You live in Chicago, and you like it," was her response.

I live in... that's all it takes? Of course I like it; Chicago rocks. How could you not like it?

Weird.

So, anyway, just to confirm the obvious: Anything you tell me may one day be warped and stretched and turned into an incident in a book. Hell, I used to say that the premise for my first book would be to marry a member of Jeremy's family to a member of Shannon's family, and see who survived. The mind reels.

(This is, of course, assuming I ever get off my butt and write a book. All evidence thus far suggests that your wacky stories are safe from wider publication. Alas.)