If you get a fever within the next 24 hours, go to the doctor.

If a bullseye-like inflammation develops around the bite, go to the doctor.

If for the next 48 hours it becomes raised and inflamed and itchy and sometime painful, go to the doctor.

Ticks need to be attached for a 24 hour period to transmit diseases.

On Sunday, I had a tick attached to my leg for a maximum of three hours. Yesterday it was raised, inflamed, itchy, and bothersome. Today it hadn’t gotten any worse, but hadn’t really gotten any better. Mark took me to my doctor’s office during lunch and I was in and out within 20 minutes. I told her what happened, showed her the bite, and she prescribed a preventative antibiotic.

She told me about the 24 hour period for disease transmission, but she also said that little parts/pieces may remain inside you even after you’ve removed the tick (GROSS!) and it’s better to be safe than sorry. So I took her recommendation and got prescribed an antibiotic.

I’m no doctor (or nurse practitioner) but I googled that question last night and found no solid answer. However, I did find out the answer in the ER last night so I’m posting about it today.

Our good friends, A & M, are moving in to their new house this weekend, so they asked Mark to help move their couch to the street last night. We agree and head over. Well, they’re not ready to go and we have to take all this other crap out to the curb to make room in the apartment to move the couch out.

My husband and our friend A throw all this wooden furniture over A & M’s staircase — its a second floor apartment with a fire escape staircase up it. While the guys attempt to get the couch out the front door, I’m stuck outside because the couch is stuck in the front door and won’t budge. I decide to pick up all the crap they threw off the top of the stairs because I’m stuck outside anyways. Well, I was feeling lazy and I didn’t feel like picking up all these heavy wood pieces that were just getting thrown away. So, I decided to just drag them down to the curb.

I’m dragging everything, and it’s going fine, and then all of a sudden I drag this huge top to a wooden coffee table straight into my leg. The nail pops right in, and then I move, and I can feel it pop out. Straight puncture wound.

Now I have blood dripping down my leg & the couch is still stuck in the doorway. I crawl over the couch through the doorway to pour hydrogen peroxide straight into my leg. Well, they don’t have hydrogen peroxide because they’re moving. I walk home and stick like 8 Q-tips soaked in hydrogen peroxide in my leg (I don’t think anyone else should do that. I do not recommend and I do not think it’s a puncture wound best practice. Do Not Do the Q-tip Thing. Just rinse with water & go see a doctor). Less than 10 minutes later, Mark walks in the front door and tells me that they couldn’t get the f’ing couch out of the apartment, they need A & M’s neighbor to be home & open her door, so they can slide it in there and turn it, to then get it down the stairs.

Because it’s late at night, we go to the ER and I get my tetanus shot (after the mandatory 3.5 hour ER wait). After the shot, the doctor says to me, “did you know you can wait up to 72 hours after a puncture wound to get a tetanus shot?” and I’m like, “WTF?! of course not! Otherwise I wouldnt f’ing be here!!!!” Obviously, I said all that in my head and not aloud.

So today…. my right arm hurts so much from this tetanus shot, I wince every time I move my mouse. And I’m just dreading the text that’s coming later tonight from A & M asking for us to come back and help move that couch outside.

The moral of the story is to 1) stay up-to-date on your tetanus shots, 2) know that you have 72 hours after a puncture wound to get a tetanus shot, 3) keep hydrogen peroxide out while moving, and 4) get the tetanus shot in your non-dominant arm because it hurts like a bitch.

The important message was an email providing 4 steps to download & install an update. Thank the computer gods, this is what we’ve been waiting for people.

So it took Mark a day to get around to it, but he downloaded & installed it like the important message told us to do. Most notably, the update included an update to the interface. That was a HUGE step in the right direction. It’s much more intuitive and sleeker.

In terms of other aspects of the update–the email said the update “prevents content from temporarily disappearing until it is resynced.” We don’t sync our content with iTunes because we have too much music for that to make any sense (and take less than 5 days). But, we didn’t lose any content and it hasn’t been finicky at all since we installed the update.

Apple, please don’t wait another 3 years to have another AppleTV update. Those of us who have the AppleTV really need you to pay attention to this project and not just leave us hanging. I love Apple and I love non-finicky Apple products. Thanks much.

Well…I take it back.

Mark requested the DVD from Netflix that enables you to view your Instant Watch queue and watch Instant Watch movies on your PS3. He put in the request two weeks ago and last Wednesday it came in the mail. This past weekend I really got a chance to play around with it and check it out.

You just put in the Netflix DVD like any other DVD and it connects the Internet and brings up your Instant Watch queue. You can also browse the Instant Watch recently added DVDs and browse the Instant Watch movies by different genres. I’ve heard from many places (Mark, NPR, etc.) that Netflix is working on getting its ENTIRE collection available via Instant Watch. Very Smart.

But the Instant Watch on PS3 interface is super easy to navigate and understand. It’s not very fast to scroll through, but it’s about as fast as scrolling through the AppleTV. The playback doesn’t skip or cut out at all, and it will remember where you stopped the movie when you go back to play it again.

Apparently, Mark told me this, Netflix signed a contract with XBox360, but once that contract is up (sometime in the new year) then Netflix will provide an update and you won’t need the Netflix DVD for the PS3 anymore. It’ll just auto-connect when you turn on the PS3. Very, very awesome!

10 stars for the Netflix Instant Watch DVD & PS3!!!

BTW, yesterday Mark went out and bought the Snow Leopard update for our Mac Pro at home. I didn’t have time to check it out when I got off of work yesterday, but he said it’s quite sweet and everything is A LOT faster.

And DON’T TEXT WHILE YOU DRIVE, it’s a bad habit.

Well…my husband I have an Apple TV. Mark really got quite interested in it and then he got me hooked on it. It was a way for us to watch HD movies on our (then) new HDTV. We didn’t have a PS3 at that point to play BluRay DVDs and the AppleTV allowed us to rent movies and watch TV shows. We’ve had it for over a year now and some days it makes me quite angry, but over the past few months I’ve just come to be at peace with its many quirks and funky moods.

The downsides….well, it freezes if you change the channel while watching anything. And we’ve had some problems sometimes where we’ve rented a movie and when we press play, the screen goes white. A lot of time the screen flickers green when it’s restarting. One time it got so angry we had to do a factory restore. We lost everything that we had bought on it because it was too angry to sync it to our iTunes before the factory restore — the only option we had to save the thing was factory restore. I know that there are more things that it has done because it’s really quite quirky – I just can’t think of them at this point.

But the virtues of AppleTV is that you can rent all the new movies (and lots of older movies) from your couch. No car ride to Blockbuster. No waiting for Netflix to come in the mail. And no skipping movies like Netflix Instant Watch feature. The movies don’t stream; they are actually downloaded. Also, you can have your pictures in iPhoto play on your TV as a screensaver. It’s handy. You can buy a season pass for a TV show and then have all of the episodes automatically download when they air. This may not sound appealing to some, but we don’t subscribe for Cable and we don’t get any basic channels – so it’s extremely appealing to us.

Others have suggestions for the AppleTV, like What’s Next for Apple’s Living Room Strategy? and What features should the new Apple TV have?, but to me it seems like they really need to work out the bugs first. As much as I have come to love and appreciate our AppleTV, the thing is a special needs electronic device. Literally. We have it on it’s own switch because we don’t want to feed it power on a constant basis. That makes it too angry.

Mark and I are leaving tomorrow! Here we come Colorado! And then, here we come Samoa! Don’t expect to hear from me for atleast two weeks because that’s how long our vacation is and I’m going to check email as minimally as possible.