Blog | Strategic Living

CBD Dosing: How Much CBD Should I Take?

Using CBD oil as an over the counter remedy has gone mainstream. Alas, from some of the feedback I have received, success using CBD is either boom or bust. Digging further into how those in the “CBD is a bust” camp are using CBD, I have come to believe that the issue is dosing.

Part of the blame sits on the shoulders of CBD vendors for providing unclear dosing instructions and confusing labeling. Additional confusion comes from the fact that each of our bodies is unique in the way CBD is metabolized. All of this is very sad because CBD can be very effective in providing relief from anxiety, sleeplessness, and pain.

In this article, I address the question of “How much CBD should I take?”.

Gratitude and Thankfulness

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Gratitude does not come naturally to me which makes Thanksgiving especially challenging. The reasons are many and they are very personal but lest you are curious, I will simply say that I have been a silent warrior for most of life. Fighting, be it for fairness, justice, acceptance or simply to get by, has defined me. It lead me into the life I live now and to what I like to call a “strategic life”.

That being said, it is my opinion that these days we take gratitude and thankfulness for granted. I blame it on the clutter and proliferation of minutia of our lives. Work, chores, social media, and keeping up with the events of the day (whether real or fake), can be overwhelming. Does that sound like you?

But I digress. In this week of giving thanks, it is important that we take time to think about the blessings on our life, and enumerate those things for which we are both grateful and thankful. I will start us off.

I, Gaye Levy, am grateful for many things: my husband, my brother and his family, my home, and the blessing of good health I am grateful that I have saved enough to carry me through (I hope) retirement and that I am well-prepared for disruptive events. Not to be omitted, I am extremely grateful to have been born in and to live in the USA.

Now it is your turn. What are you grateful for?

Easy Homemade Melt & Pour Soaps: Interview with Jan Berry

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When I become passionate about something, be it prepping, essential oils, CBD, adult coloring or ballroom dancing, I go all in.

By that I mean I spend hours embracing my new passion, learning as much as I can about it, and spending hours practicing and enjoying my craft. Reading between the lines here at Strategic Living, you know that my latest passion is soap making. Hot process, cold process, rebatch, and melt and pour, I do it all. It is the latter that I do when time is short and I don’t want to mess with lye and the associated safety precautions and cleanup.

Melt and Pour soap takes a lot of the work out of soap making. Because it starts with a premade base, you can focus on your inner creative self by customizing your soap with colorants, fragrance, additives, swirls, and fancy shapes.

For those of you that are new to the soap making world, there is one name that stands out as somewhat of a legend when it comes to making soap naturally. Her name is Jan Berry and she is a prolific do-it-yourselfer when it comes to DIY body care projects. When I learned that she was coming out with a book on Melt and Pour Soaps I knew I just had to have it and let me tell you, if there is such a thing as an MP bible (MP is the acronym for Melt and Pour), this is it.

Today I am thrilled to share a brief review and interview with Jan and, in my usual Book Festival style, offer up a print copy of her new book, Easy Homemade Melt & Pour Soaps, in a giveaway.

Who Is Samantha Biggers and Why Should You Care?

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For those of you that don’t know, Samantha Biggers is the editor in chief at Backdoor Survival. We became friendly shortly after new ownership took over and did my best to mentor her relative to the ins and outs of full-time blogging. Since then, I have grown to respect her opinions and her lifestyle which are both pretty remarkable given that she is a millennial. You know, a member of the younger generation that is not known for independence, belief in free speech, and the other rights us “grays” hold near and dear to our hearts.

A few months back I asked Samantha if she would be willing to subject herself to an interview and she agreed. It has taken me a while to post this, not through any fault of Samantha, but because of the personal funk I have experienced as I watch the degradation of what I perceive as the erosion of our freedom. You may recall I recently wrote about that in Is American Freedom Under Siege?. A must-read if I do say so myself.

More to the point, you should care about Samantha Biggers because she represents forward-thinking while at the same time embracing a traditional lifestyle of homesteading and preparedness. While I do not always agree with her, she represents our future and that gives me optimism.

Why Food Storage is Not Dead

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There was a time in early 2017 that preparedness bloggers were asking: is prepping dead? Shortly thereafter, a lot of sites went dark and emergency food and other supplies started showing up at deep discounts on eBay, Craigslist, and other outlets. That was a shame, really, because the reasons we prepare have never gone away.

Mother Nature continues to wreak havoc, unexpected repairs or medical bills can decimate the family budget, people change careers and must start over, and, perhaps most insidious, governments, large corporations, and even the mainstream media attempt to instill influence and control over our daily lives.

For these reasons and more, I continue to champion preparedness to anyone that will listen. And while it is nice to have the latest and greatest survival doo-dad in our prepping arsenal, the fact remains that food typically takes a prominent place in our preparedness efforts.

So, as I do from time to time, I am offering my eBook, The Prepper’s Guide to Food Storage, for free for a limited time starting October 31 and running through November 4th. But first, a few things need to be said that reflect my current thoughts on the importance of food storage.