TODAY

Bugs are annoying and sometimes even dangerous to your food and your friends. To avoid those unwelcome insect visitors, you can use a variety of simple and homemade products around the area and directly on the food and drinks. These are some tips from Martha Stewart to ward off bugs when you’re hosting your next barbecue beach party or park picnic:

Make your garden work for you by keeping potted or planted herbs like basil and lemongrass or specific varieties of flowers nearby. The scents from these plants may be wonderful to humans, but the fragrances are terrible to bugs, so they act as natural repellents. You can also make your own insect repellent spray from products around the house.

Keep food a little fresher and a lot less buggy by covering it up. Make some crafty beverage covers from cupcake papers or food dish covers from kitchen strainers.

Get more ideas for specific products and scents that can protect the people and food at your outside gathering from pests.

See more tips here

Even when we know people’s names, why do we go for days without using them? By using someone’s name, you help them feel seen and acknowledged — and that’s an act of kindness. According to kindness.org’s research in collaboration with the University of Oxford, doing a kind act increases happiness, well-being, trust and compassion. And it can have the same powerful effect on those who receive the act. Try it, and put a smile on both your faces.

If you are working to lose weight, chances are you’ve heard that you should keep a record of what you ate. Chances are also good that you thought that was too much hassle.

The good news, according to a recent study, is that the amount of time it takes to write down everything you consume in a day is probably a lot less than you think. And the payoff is big.

It took just 15 minutes for people to write down their daily eating habits, once they started doing it regularly. The people who tracked what they ate the most, whether they used an app or just plain paper and pen, also lost the most weight. “The more consistent you are, the better,” a nutrition professor said.

Food journals help you see what you ate, adjust throughout the day and see patterns. Find out more about how, and why, tracking your diet can help with weight loss.