Weekender #255

🛒 Skip the scroll: these are the Labor Day sales that actually earned a spot in your cart.

📊 Perfect market timing beat investing immediately by just $15K over twenty years.

🕯 Intimate exhaustion is what a sexologist calls depletion masquerading as low libido.

💬 Ask permission before giving feedback when your friend’s relationship is setting off alarms.

My mom is convinced a natural disaster is always right around the corner. Earthquake, tsunami, war breaking out somewhere, honestly zombies if you let her keep talking. Her whole algorithm is doomsday planning and earthquake drills.

In her defense, she has a mobility disability, so in a real emergency she doesn’t feel like she has a lot of control over how she’d get herself out. When you think about it that way, the worry makes total sense.

And she’s not entirely off base, either. There have been a string of earthquakes near Venezuela and elsewhere lately, and AI data centers and strain on the grid is increasing, so concerns about power outages are rising too. El Niño is set to hit hard this fall, producing erratic weather globally.

So she’s been Amazon-delivering me the start of an emergency kit. Here’s the part that makes this worth your time even if you’re not the least bit paranoid about tornadoes, hurricanes, or the grid going down: almost all of it doubles as camping and road-trip gear. Prepared or just outdoorsy, same shopping cart.

Power for when the grid goes down

The big one is a Jackery portable generator. Joanna’s husband just got one (photobombed above with their babies, Tofu and Dino), and my dad actually bought me one back during COVID, when none of us knew what was coming. To give you an idea: it charges an iPhone 16 about 13 times, tops up a MacBook Air three and a half times, runs a TV for four hours or a projector for two and a half. It comes with a solar panel, so even off-grid you can get it back to 80% in about an hour. If that’s more firepower than you need, there’s a smaller $269 version that covers the basics.

Light and information

When the power’s out and your phone is rationed, you want a radio that doesn’t depend on either. This solar-powered emergency radio keeps you on top of news and weather alerts with nothing but sunlight.

For the office (or any hallway you’d have to feel your way down in the dark), there’s an emergency lighting station that switches on the second the power drops. The body is photoluminescent, so it glows in total darkness and you can actually find it, and it sits in a clear, tamper-proof case you mount right to the wall.

The stuff that costs almost nothing and matters most

Gear is the fun part. This next stuff is what actually saves you.

A stocked first aid kit: kept somewhere everyone in the house can find without asking.

Your medications. If you take anything daily, work a few days’ supply into your kit and keep a copy of your prescription list with it. A pharmacy might not be open or reachable right when you need a refill.

Water, more than you think. The standard is one gallon per person per day, and you want at least three days’ worth on hand. You can buy these pouches or tabs.

And a plan for when cell service goes down, because it will. Pick a spot where your family meets if you can’t call each other, and choose one out-of-town person everyone checks in with. Want it done in five minutes?

Ask ChatGPT: “Build me a one-page family emergency plan for a household of [X] in [my city], including a meeting spot and a no-cell-service communication plan.” Then print it and stick it on the fridge.

Start with a checklist

For the complete rundown, Ready.gov’s kit checklist is the official gold standard, and you can print REI’s version to take straight to the store.

You don’t have to go full doomsday prepper to be the person who’s ready, and preparing for a disaster doesn’t make you a pessimist weirdo.

Pick one thing off this list this week and start there. Then call your mom. Mine will be thrilled to hear you did.

Thania (TA Content Mgr)

58% Of You Said The Hardest Part Of Dinner Is Deciding

We asked what makes weeknight dinner hard: 58% of you said deciding what to even make. It’s 5:40pm, the fridge is open, and nobody has an answer.

HelloFresh sends the plan with the food. The new Quick & Easy and Low-Lift menus land dinner in 15 to 20 minutes, prep already done.

Code ASSIST10FRY gets you 10 free meals plus a Caraway Mini Fry Pan (worth $115) by your third box. Through 9/30, while supplies last.

👉 Claim your 10 free meals and a Caraway pan.

📚 Read: The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman

Two Radcliffe students in 1950s Cambridge get pulled into a secretive campus society of witches right as members start disappearing. It’s the Practical Magic author doing what she does best, atmospheric and a little eerie, with McCarthy-era paranoia raising the stakes underneath all the magic.

📺 Watch: Slow Horses Season 6 (Apple TV+)

Gary Oldman’s team of MI5 rejects gets pulled into Diana Taverner’s high-stakes revenge scheme and forced underground this season. Six seasons in, it’s still the sharpest, funniest spy show on TV, and it premieres September 16.

🎧 Listen: “Dandelion” by Ella Langley

Langley leans into slow-burn guitar and dandelion imagery to write about surviving hardship without losing herself in the process. It’s the title track that set up her album, and it climbed to No. 7 on the country charts with no feature behind it.

The skin around your eyes is up to five times thinner than the skin on the rest of your face. It’s the first place a short night shows up, and the first place fine lines settle in.

OS-01 EYE carries OneSkin’s highest concentration of OS-01, the peptide their four PhD scientists developed in-house after screening more than 900 candidates. It targets senescent cells, the damaged cells that speed up visible aging in that thin, delicate skin.

In peer-reviewed lab studies:

• Collagen up an average of 130%
• 100% of participants reported improved overall appearance
• 96% reported better hydration

This peptide doesn’t exist in any other skincare line.

This Labor Day (9/4 to 9/7): spend $145 and get a free full-size PREP Cleanser, or spend $215 and get PREP Cleanser plus Lip Mask. No code needed. New customers only.

👉 See the Labor Day bundles.

Upcoming Events

• Tue 9/8 @ 12PM PT: Coworking Session (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Tue 9/15 @ 11AM PT: Build Your Own AI Assistant: Live Co-Learning Session (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Thu 9/17 @ 10AM PT: Beyond the Brand with Laura Weldy (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri 9/18 @ 9AM PT: Part 2 of a 2-Part Investing Series with Tess Waresmith (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Thu 9/24 @ 9:30AM PT: Delegation, Reimagined: What Actually Belongs on Your Plate? with Bonnie Schutz (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

Logan was a rescue cat, and we refer to him as the King’s cat because he is so polished and poised. He sits like a sphinx, curling his tail around his paws. He thinks he is a puma and prowls around the yard with regal majesty. He is a total attention seeker with his own fan club in the neighborhood, and he wears a QR code collar so people can send us selfies with him.

Pssst…Lemonade Pet starts at $10/month and settles around half of eligible claims on the spot, right in the app. Add the wellness plan and vaccines, checkups, and dental cleanings come along too. Whatever’s left over from claims at the end of the year goes to a cause you pick.

👉 See your pet’s price in under a minute.

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