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4 Things You Need To Help You Start Meal Prepping

Maria Loreto
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4 Things You Need To Help You Start Meal Prepping

Meal prepping sounds like something only really organized people can accomplish. The act of preparing meals days in advance sounds risky and like you’d have to spend an entire day cooking, which is often true. When done correctly, meal prepping saves tons of time and allows you to eat balanced meals throughout the week, something rare when you’re busy with work and life.

The process of meal prepping varies depending on the person. On average, meals shouldn’t be stored in the fridge for more than four days, but you can freeze proteins if you made a large batch. If you’re picky with how fresh your food is, you can prepare your protein and carbs ahead of time, store them, and pack fresh veggies the day of.

No matter the lifestyle, everyone can benefit from scheduling their cooking, avoiding the pain of having to prepare a meal with whatever’s left on the fridge. Check out some items that will help you ease your transition into meal prepping:

Pans with dividers

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RELATED: 5 Products That Can Help Boost Your Productivity

Instead of sweating over four different pans on the stove,  you can use a large pan with dividers that saves you some work. This pan is helpful for saving yourself some time while cooking, keeping foods separate from each-other, and narrowing your focus on one stove.

Instant Pot

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Instant Pots are amazing, allowing you to cook dishes over long periods of time. This device is programmable and can be left unattended while you sleep or are away from home. You only have to pack your food once you wake up, or eat once you get home.

Reusable food storage bags

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RELATED: 5 Tech Tricks For A More Productive 2019

Instead of wasting all of your savings on Ziploc bags, you can purchase reusable silicone bags, which are practical, easy to clean and good for the environment. Good quality storage bags will save you time and frustration, preventing meals from getting spoiled and preserving their taste.

Containers for storing meals

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If you’re planning on taking your food to work or to school, you need the appropriate container. You can buy disposable ones in bulk or buy a reusable one with dividers which you can reuse.

Make Your Own Marijuana-Infused Massage Oil Candles

Danielle Guercio
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Make Your Own Marijuana-Infused Massage Oil Candles

Valentine’s Day is a Christianized version of a pre-existing fertility festival called Lupercalia. It was a bloody, brutal marker of Spring in Roman times, shifting gears into a more playful party in later times. This was an easy fix for the church, eventually merging the observance of the martyr Saint Valentine with this Springtime baby making bacchanal.

Today’s Valentine’s Day is a pressure cooker of weird traditions and expectations, but it’s generally accepted that one is to give a gift to their significant other, so those sexual undertones are still going strong. If you are a cannabis lover or a new user, topical cannabis application is often a much more fun way to experiment with getting high. This makes it a dope gift, showing your loved one that you care without showing corporations that you care about them.

RELATED: 7 Reasons Valentine’s Day Is The Worst Holiday Ever

Making a candle is a little more complicated than a cookie recipe, but it’s a lot more romantic than a bottle of liquid or a tin of salve. Presentation can sometimes be everything!

Photos by Danielle Guercio

Weed Infused Massage Oil Candles

Danielle Guercio, 2017

  • Candle wicks
  • Double sided tape
  • Jars/tins/containers
  • Wooden skewers
  • Soy wax
  • Skin friendly oils
  • Cannabis Infused Coconut Oil*
  • Fragrance (optional)
Photos by Danielle Guercio

Your recipe should be determined by the size of the containers you use. Once you know their volume, calculate a 60% wax to 40% oil ratio. Depending on how strong you want the oil to be, make a percentage of that 40% an infused oil.

Photos by Danielle Guercio

Stick candle wicks to the bottom middle of your container. Twist the excess wick around a skewer, this will also keep the wick centered while you pour the melted wax.

Photos by Danielle Guercio

Prepare your workspace, when you’re dealing with hot stuff you don’t want to make a huge mess that isn’t contained. A paper lined baking pan works nicely here.

Photos by Danielle Guercio

Melt wax first in a heat safe measuring cup over a double boiler. Once the wax is melted, add oils, including weed oil. Last add fragrance, generally 20 total drops of essential oil per cup of liquid is a good measurement. You want to smell it, but not be overpowering to rub on the skin. A candle alone would be much stronger scented. I used Young Living Rose, Patchouli, and Sacred Frankincense, skin loving and sensual smelling.

Photos by Danielle Guercio

*Cannabis Coconut Oil

Decarboxylate 3.5g of finely ground cannabis at 225 degrees for 20 minutes in a tightly sealed, oven safe container. Put in lidded mason jar or vacuum sealed bag with cannabis 4 oz of coconut oil.

RELATED: How To Make The Best Vegan Cannabutter Ever In The Oven

Heat in water bath just under boiling for at least 1 hour. Strain and chill to use in recipes.

Photos by Danielle Guercio

To use the candle, trim the wicks, light for a few minutes at a time to soften some of the wax into an oil. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to scoop out a small amount to use topically, and avoid sticking your fingers in the hot wax.

Photos: Danielle Guercio

This Week’s Music: Vampire Weekend, Jenny Lewis And Unperfect Release New Songs

Maria Loreto
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This Week’s Music: Vampire Weekend, Jenny Lewis And Unperfect Release New Songs

This Week’s Music is a weekly column that discusses the weeks’ best, worst, and most interesting songs. We try to select songs of different artists and genres to keep things interesting and to please a variety of music fans.

This week’s column highlights the return of two eagerly awaited performers (Vampire Weekend and Jenny Lewis) and the introduction of the offbeat girl band Unperfect. Check out their songs:

Pop

Vampire Weekend – Harmony Hall

Vampire Weekend’s return to music finds them in a different place, more grown up but just as quirky. “Harmony Hall” is the band’s first single in six years, following “Modern Vampires Of The City,” an album that awarded them a Grammy. When founding member Rostam Batmanglij left the band in 2016, different album names and contributions were teased, until finally the band confirmed that a new record would be released in 2019. “Harmony Hall” proves that despite all of the changes and time that’s passed, there are still aspects of Vampire Weekend that stand unchanged; their irreverent sound, elaborate piano bits and complex layers of instruments are all there. Still, you can tell that the album will show us a different side of the band, one that’s more evolved and hopefully just as creative.

Rock

Jenny Lewis – Red Bull & Hennessy

RELATED: This Week’s Music: Ariana Grande, Lana Del Rey And The Chemical Brothers Release New Songs

Jenny Lewis has done a lot of interesting work throughout her career, playing vital roles in bands like Rilo Kiley and Jenny & Johnny. “Red Bull & Hennessy” is Lewis’ first single since her 2014 album, “The Voyager,” and it finds her continuing to explore country, pop and rock music in inventive ways. While Lewis’ work with Rilo Kiley was amazing and beloved by many fans, her solo work gives her the opportunity to be more indulgent with her music and vocals. “Red Bull & Hennessy” feels like a song pulled from a time machine, with a heavy Stevie Nicks influence and an awesome guitar solo. It’s a lead track that promises an amazing album.

Indie

Unperfect – Gots To Give The Girl

Despite the band’s preference for poorly spelled words, “Gots To Give The Girl” is an interesting song that stands out from the bulk — an achievement in today’s music industry. Despite the shoddy quality of the video and the strangely muted song, there’s something genuine about the band. Unperfect follows the formula of girl bands that sing empowering songs but they manage to feel more real and honest than their counterparts and predecessors. Hopefully, they can find the necessary impulse that’ll allow them to shape their voice accordingly.

Meme Of The Week: Couture Runway Dresses Have Embraced Memes

Maria Loreto
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Meme Of The Week: Couture Runway Dresses Have Embraced Memes

Memes have permeated a large part of our digital and real lives. People use them to make jokes and communicate, so it makes sense then that they would appear in the fashion world. Although memes have appeared on clothing before, immortalized in Forever 21 outfits, Viktor & Rolf became the first Haute Couture brand to use memes to their advantage, dramatically introducing them during Paris Fashion Week.

The dresses are gigantic and dramatic, with phrases like “NO” and “Sorry I’m late I didn’t want to come” stamped right in the middle of them. The fonts are large and impossible to ignore, making the dresses look a little silly and outrageous, just like everything else on the runway.

RELATED: Meme Of The Week: 2009 Vs 2019 Challenge Transforms Into A Way Better Meme

People have speculated about the inspiration behind the dresses, claiming that the designers intended to mock Instagram posts and our society’s current obsession with quotes and influencers. While most users have loved the designs, claiming that they’re a “mood” and inventive, a small group of critics have said that Viktor & Rolf is trying too hard. Both groups make valid points, but the truth is that, no matter the intent of the designers, the dresses are funny and make great memes. Check out some of our favorites:

 

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RELATED: Meme Of The Week: Marie Kondo’s Inspiring And Terrifying Netflix Show Leads To Hundreds Of Memes

Why Are Californians Buying Less Legal Marijuana Than Ever?

Mike Adams
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Why Are Californians Buying Less Legal Marijuana Than Ever?

California was predicted to become the rockstar state in the realm of legal cannabis, but the recreational pot sales have not quite taken off in the way that many had hoped since the market launched in 2018.

Some believe this lackluster beginning is due to over-regulation, high taxes and the ability of municipalities to bow out of legal sales altogether.

All of this has a more significant percentage of cannabis customers frequenting the black market, which is the exact opposite of the promises made by cannabis advocates back when they were pushing this reform. The fact remains that fewer Californians are buying legal weed than ever, and it is now up to the bumbling powers that be to determine what needs to be done to get everything on track.

RELATED: California’s Insane Cannabis Tax Could Cripple Legal Market

Early predictions showed that California would rake in around $1 billion in revenue during the first year of legal sales. Needless to say, the state has fallen short. California is now expected to generate around $471 million — $630 million less than what Governor Jerry Brown projected in his last budget.

This is mostly because the guts of Proposition 64 gave cities the right to ban pot sales in their neck of the woods. Many of them went for it. In fact, only around 20 percent of the cities in California allow marijuana sales in some form or fashion.

In Los Angeles County alone, 82 of its 88 towns still maintain a prohibition standard. Marijuana sales in those places are nonexistent. For example, pot sales are not legal in Compton or Beverly Hills.

Still, pot taxes in those jurisdictions allowing legal sales are compounding the problem by nickel and diming customers to death. There is a 15 percent excise tax, a 10 percent recreational marijuana tax, and a 9.5 percent city tax in Los Angeles. The black market doesn’t operate this way, and possession of the herb is no longer a crime, which makes it easy for citizens to use this illicit outlets without fear of legal repercussions.

Although legal marijuana sales really took off in states like Colorado and Washington after the market was launched, California’s market was already pretty much wide open before voters approved Proposition 64 back in 2016. There is so much marijuana being manufactured in the Golden State (15.5 million pounds) that the state now has far more surplus than it actually consumes (2.5 million pounds). Considering the state’s licensing problem – not even close to the 6,000 projected licensed cannabis shops — the black market is just stronger than the legal trade has been allowed to become.

Illegal operations have and are still taking full advantage of this situation, according to Tom Adams of cannabis market analysts BDS Analytics. “Regulators ignored that and thought they could go straight into an incredibly strict and high-tax environment,” he told the New York Times.

A lot of the weed being produced in California is being smuggled eastward to supply the black market in areas of prohibition. It’s been that way for years.

RELATED: California’s 5 Worst Counties for Recreational Marijuana

“It’s a very serious issue,” Governor Gavin Newsom said back in 2016 when he was serving as Brown’s lieutenant, “and it’s going to create a dynamic where the black market will likely persist in a very stubborn way.”

Although there is hope the market will eventually work itself out, cannabis advocates say it is not possible without a total revamp of the law.

“The cannabis industry is being choked by California’s penchant for over-regulation,” Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s impossible to solve all of the problems without a drastic rewrite of the law, which is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.”

OkCupid Says That People Are Prioritizing Politics Over Sex

Maria Loreto
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OkCupid Says That People Are Prioritizing Politics Over Sex

Since OkCupid‘s inception in 2004, the website has become one of the leading dating sites in the world, creating matches and gathering data on people’s dating habits. OkCupid works differently than most other dating apps, in that it relies on questionnaires to determine matches instead of swipes.

RELATED: Hate Dating? Here Are 5 Tips That Can Help You See Things In A Different Light

The company tells The Huffington Post that for the first time ever, users in cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles placed more value on compatible politics than great sex. This trend has doubled in women all over the country since 2016. “Without a doubt, the recent presidential election and current administration have driven young women in particular, but millennials of both genders, to say, ‘Swipe left if you support Trump,’ or ‘I don’t even want to see you as a match if you don’t vote,” says Melissa Hobley, chief marketing officer of OkCupid.

Before you use OkCupid, you must fill out a brief questionnaire that asks general questions about you, including your sexual and political preferences. The quiz is built with the input of experts and psychologists and it’s tinkered every once in a while to improve the odds of successful matches. It makes sense  that in our current political climate, users are valuing their politics now more than ever.

According to the app’s stats, conservative men have been having more trouble dating, which in turn has lead to claims of discrimination and a rise of right wing dating apps. OkCupid is not concerned with those who accuse them of making it harder to find matches though: “This is so counter to what previous generations did, or what your own parents told you: ‘Don’t talk politics or religion until you’ve been dating a while,’” says Hobley. “Not only are people not waiting till the third or fourth date ― people are saying, ‘I don’t even want to see you as a potential match if you don’t vote.’”

RELATED: Tinder For Tokers: Niche Dating Will Find Your Perfect Match

Millennials and Gen-Z members are valuing politics starting at a younger age, so this trend is unlikely to go away. Even though constant conversations about politics are draining, we could do worse than having a society that values the state of the world.

How Marijuana’s THC Breaks Down The Toxic Plaques Of Alzheimer’s Disease

Trey Reckling
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How Marijuana’s THC Breaks Down The Toxic Plaques Of Alzheimer’s Disease

In 1906, scientist Alois Alzheimer was the first to describe the toxic plaques he found in the microscopic spaces between nerve cells in the brain. More than a century later, we know his name because over five million Americans suffer from the disease named for him. It is expected to affect three times that many people within 50 years as a new case is identified every 68 seconds. 

Two abnormalities found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, or AD, are the existence of tangles of misfolded proteins and reduced connections between cells, causing diminished function and cell death. In advanced stages, the brain shrinks in affected areas.

RELATED: The Folks At Senior Centers Are Using A Lot Of Marijuana

A third abnormality is the build up of plaques, especially in the area of the brain regulating memory. Plaques are made up of peptides like amyloid-beta or Abeta. It is not yet known if  plaques could be helping to cause Alzheimer’s disease or whether they are one of the results of the condition.

There is no drug currently available that prevents or reverses AD. Some clinicians argue whether the efficacy of available prescription therapies are worth their high price. This opens the door to great hopes from some that cannabis may hold a better answer for these patients.  

In a 2006 study published in Molecular Pharmaceutics, researchers concluded “THC is a considerably superior inhibitor of Abeta aggregation” compared to currently available pharmaceuticals.  

Another study published July 2014 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease investigated whether THC could slow or halt the well-known symptoms of AD.

“These sets of data strongly suggest that THC could be a potential therapeutic treatment option for Alzheimer’s disease through multiple functions and pathways,” according to the study. 

In 2016, Salk Institute scientist David Schubert announced, “although other studies have offered evidence that cannabinoids might be neuroprotective against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, we believe our study is the first to demonstrate that cannabinoids affect both inflammation and amyloid beta accumulation in nerve cells.”

RELATED: Watch What Happens When This Parkinson’s Patient Smokes Marijuana 

Researchers in the Netherlands studied 50 patients with dementia, which is most often caused by AD. They found no therapeutic effect of cannabinoid therapy. A smaller study of 11 patients in Israel concluded that “delusions, agitation/aggression, irritability, apathy, sleep and caregiver distress” were all reduced with the help of cannabis. 

Cannabis will not be a panacea for all that ails us. There is some hope in these early studies of how cannabis may help patients with Alzheimer’s, but it is still too early to make promises. Possible connections between cannabis and AD are turning the heads of some of the finest researchers from Stanford to Tel Aviv University. That may be enough to inspire more studies and continued hope.

This Marijuana Company Will Give Free Weed To Government Workers Affected By Shutdown

Brendan Bures
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This Marijuana Company Will Give Free Weed To Government Workers Affected By Shutdown

Access to medical marijuana probably isn’t your most immediate thought when considering the negative impacts the government’s shutdown has on federal workers’ livelihood. But with 800,000 furloughed workers not getting paid anytime soon, one business in the cannabis industry wanted to help them out where they could—by giving them free weed.

BudTrader.com, one of the largest online cannabis marketplaces which bills itself as the “Craigslist of weed,” will donate free cannabis to federal workers struggling to pay for their medical marijuana, as The Hill first reported.

RELATED: Congressional ‘Green Tide’ Could Make 2019 Marijuana’s Best

“To any Federal Employee unable to pay for their medical cannabis due to the Government shutdown, BudTrader will donate to you the allowable, legal limit according to California adult use rules and regulations to help ease your suffering in this difficult time,” BudTrader wrote on the company’s Facebook account Monday.

BudTrader wants to make two important caveats clear: a) all communications through the company’s website will remain strictly confidential and b) they aren’t passing out charity weed to help unpaid federal workers chillax. Instead the company will aim to supply patients suffering from chronic pain or other illnesses who can’t currently afford to maintain their necessary medicine dosage.

“I don’t think federal employees are getting enough love and support,” Brad McLaughlin, the company’s CEO, said in a press release. “In these tough times, we want to extend the offer of a donation of medical cannabis to any federal worker affected by the shutdown.”

RELATED: The Battle Between Gun Ownership And Medical Marijuana In Conservative States

The company will donate the “maximum legal amount” to government employees. Bud Trader also told The Hill it’s working with an attorney to “ensure that all cannabis donations given to federal employees are confidential and compliant with California Cannabis adult use laws and regulations.”

Is It Possible Marijuana Makes People Smarter?

Mike Adams
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Is It Possible Marijuana Makes People Smarter?

It was once believed that marijuana was a gateway to idiocy. Some people were of the opinion that no matter how much potential a person had when he or she landed on this planet, smoking pot was the one sure-fire way to drag them down the burned-out rabbit hole where they would be doomed to spend the rest of their days acting like Beavis and/or Butthead.

But science has since proven that marijuana does not make people stupid. It actually does the complete opposite. Although it might be a bit controversial to say that marijuana makes people smarter, it does appear to increase awareness and open the doors of perception.

RELATED: Marijuana Too Moist? Here’s How You Can Dry It

Cannabis users are typically more health conscious than non-users. Many of them have used pot to lose weight, fight eating disorders and even unleash themselves from the grips of alcohol and drug addiction. But it goes deeper.

Some studies have shown that people living in legal states are now using pot as an alternative to prescription drugs. There is even evidence that the federal legalization of marijuana could help dig the United States out of the pits of opioid addiction – a scourge that is killing tens of thousands of people every year.

It stands to reason that if cannabis users are making better choices with respect to their overall health that they are first getting educated about the science of the plant. Although there is a limited amount of research out there proving that marijuana is a definitive treatment for all of the ailments that people purport it to be, there are a number of respected studies showing that cannabis has several therapeutic benefits.

One study published last year the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found evidence that cannabis could help with chronic pain and other conditions. Of course, it was soon after this research was published that data began to surface showing that prescription painkillers sales were down in states with medical marijuana laws on the books.

Even U.S Attorney General Jeff Sessions admits that marijuana may have some medicinal value. “There are credible scientific studies that show where medical marijuana is legal, opioid overdose deaths have gone down,” Sessions said earlier last week.

RELATED: 8 Facts You Need To Know When Talking To Your Parents About Cannabis

People interested in how cannabis might be able to improve their overall health and well being will also start looking in to why this plant is still mostly illegal in the United States. This means getting in touch with the history of marijuana prohibition. It is at this point that they will learn how it is one of the biggest scams in of the 20th Century – one that is racial charged and still contributing to hundreds of thousands of arrests every year. They’ll also see that very little is being done in Congress to change the situation.

Marijuana may not make people smarter, but it has never contributed to the dumbing down of society either. If this were the case, the herb would not have made the progress it has over the past few decades.

Chinese Companies Offering Dating Leave For Women

Amy Hansen
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Chinese Companies Offering Dating Leave For Women

Here’s a curious solution to the age old problem of how to get single ladies married already. There’s nothing  more depressing than having to be around spinsters, right?  What could be worse are Chinese companies offering dating leave for women who are single and under 30.

Two companies in China are giving their single “non-frontline” employees over the age of 30 an extra eight days of vacation over the Chinese New Year to to “go home and date”.  Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management, both located in Hangzhou in eastern China, are implementing this “dating leave” in hopes that it will give some of their more sheltered women workers a leg up on love, so to speak.

RELATED: Are You Sabotaging Your Love Life By Committing This Common Dating Sin?

“Female employees mostly work in internal functional departments, and some are show performers,” Huang Lei, a human resources manager at one of the firms, told a local publication.

“They have less contact with the outside world; thus we hope to give more leave to them to give them more time and opportunities to be in contact with the opposite sex.”

According to The Independent, this dating leave announcement come after a secondary school, also in Hangzhou,  introduced a new policy to give single, stressed-out teachers an extra two days off every month of “love leave” to relax and help lift staff morale.

Single women of a certain age in China (late 20s, early 30s) are considered undesirable. You can thank traditional beliefs for that ridiculousness. But in this day and age, many women are choosing to be single in favor of a career. But hey, an extra week of vacation just gives them more time to figure out how to take over their boss’s job.

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