PolarVortex

I see, thanks. While we're on the topic of movies with the word "queen" in the title, I found a wonderful little video on YouTube that summarizes the entire movie "Queen of Outer Space" in about 2 minutes with carefully selected snippets. I thought it was a hoot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mc2B0wMmg0

lonetree: That movie ("The Queen of Spades") sounded really cool. IMDB summarized the plot as, "An elderly countess strikes a bargain with the devil and exchanges her soul for the ability to always win at cards." (In exchange for her soul, she could have mountains of gold and rule the entire planet... and she only wants to win at cards???) The movie wasn't on Netflix, but I got a partial match on "Queen of Outer Space," the 1958 camp flick with Zsa Zsa Gabor as the despotic alien. Saw that in the theater a few years ago and almost laughed my clothes off. So I headed over to Amazon, where I found "The Queen of Spades" on sale for $199.00 (used) or $399.00 (new). Where did you watch it?

Hummel, Hummel! Hold your fire... I am studying German from an elderly lady who grew up in Hamburg. She is the most wonderful person I have ever met. When I speak German in Germany, they know immediately that I'm an American, but they are highly puzzled by my Hamburg pronunciation. But I have hijacked Vaticanus's thread. Entschuldigung...

Certainly your experience with the Temple Square missionaries is a very interesting data point, but I wonder if it's the rule or the exception. I was inactive for many years and visited Temple Square twice, once last December and once last August. I wasn't specifically looking to engage anyone in deep discussions, but I wanted to get some ground truth for everying I had studied about the Church previously. In December I met two sister missionaries. After I returned home, they called me and emailed me periodically and texted me once. They were utterly charming and seemed just to be checking in with me to see where I was and whether they could answer any questions about the Church. (I did.) I didn't feel the slightest pressure to commit to anything. Their emails were long and rich, often with Scripture verses that they liked. I always enjoyed hearing from them. (But I got frustrated with their email software, which systematically deleted every link I included in my emails, even links to harmless newspaper articles and to photos of my pet cat.) In August I returned to Temple Square to see all the things I had missed the first time and to visit the renovated Ogden Temple during its open house. It was a nice trip, but there was no missionary follow-up at all. And yet I watched "The District" videos on YouTube (sort of a reality show about LDS missionaries) and I was struck by how quickly the missionaries pushed their investigators toward baptism. I suppose with 88,000 missionaries you're going to see some natural variation in their work style.

Recently I listened to a podcast about a woman who joined the LDS Church at a young age, then quit and had her name removed, and then she rejoined the Church and was rebaptized, and then she quit a 2nd time. I won't joke about this. My heart goes out to her and to all those with tortured souls.

I just finished watching "The Shoes of the Fisherman" with Anthony Quinn. He has short dark hair and a no-nonsense thug face, and for a while I thought it was the guy who played Sgt. Friday on "Dragnet." (Jack Webb?) Certainly an impressive movie. If you've ever been curious about life in the Vatican, you don't have to go to Rome... just watch this movie.

I listen to the Mormon Channel (the music-streaming radio thing) while I work, and it's suddenly become very Christmasy. I tuned in last night and was startled to hear "Winter Wonderland" by the Andrews Sisters.

I am headed to Berlin tomorrow, coincidentally. I'll be sure to greet this great city for you. I found an LDS church in Berlin (on Klingelhöferstraße, near the Siegessäule). I don't know if I'll visit it, my German isn't too good and I'm not sure I would understand very much. But welcome to the site.

I think you mean a "cereal killer"?

I tend to agree with omegaseamaster75 about not telling your wife. Like I said, it stopped at your lips and didn't go farther, and I'd put it more in the "dumb mistake" category than in the "grave sin" category. But I think confession (to a bishop) is good for your soul. And confessing too much can backfire badly. I don't want to make light of a serious situation here, but a few years ago I read about a husband who wanted to play a joke on his wife. He got his boss to call the wife on the phone while he secretly listened in. The boss told the wife that her husband had been fired from his job that morning after being discovered committing adultery with a coworker on a desk somewhere. The wife became very upset and then got angry and blurted out, "My husband actually did this? Now I don't feel so bad about sleeping with his brother."

Best defense I've found against recessions: diversify your portfolio and rebalance, rebalance, rebalance every year. I'm also a big fan of tangible assets, especially real estate. But I did blunder badly in the 1980s with tangible assets. I bought my grandfather's stamp collection from my grandmother. My grandfather had thousands of pristine stamps from the period 1910-1945, and I figured they would only appreciate over the years. I finally got them appraised and was horrified to learn that they had actually dropped in value. The dealer claimed that the Internet had totally disrupted the rare-coin and stamp business and turned it into a frictionless market where buyers and sellers could connect about 1000 times more easily than in pre-Internet days. On the other hand, I read that an original Apple computer will now sell for about $600K. Who knew?

It's your choice, of course. But I think your bishop is obligated to make sure you understand the consequences of your decision, at least from the Church's standpoint. If your letter is ambiguous or omits key information about the irreversibility of your decision, it might actually start a process by which a face-to-face conversation is needed. If you make it clear that your decision is final, that you understand the consequences, and that the only further contact you wish from the Church is a written letter stating your name has been removed, then it should be pretty straightforward. You will probably get a pamphlet in the mail from the First Presidency inviting you to reconsider your decision. Back when I was researching this (I pondered resignation many years ago but eventually changed my mind), I found web sites that claimed you could resign by email, but I think a paper document with your wet signature is a lot better. Keep a copy for your records.

If I had a profanity problem, the simple knowledge that God has forgiven me would give me the strength and will to stop swearing. Here's a trick that some smokers use to break their addiction to cigarettes. Every time they smoke, they mark it down. As long the trend is fewer and fewer cigarettes each day, they view themselves as successful. When they reach zero, they keep a card in their wallet or purse that says, "I have gone 1 day without smoking." On Day 2, they write, "I have gone 2 days without smoking." I just heard a podcast about someone who knows that he has gone something like 4154 days without smoking because writing it down each day gives him the strength to resist the temptation to smoke. It's a lot harder to stop smoking than to stop cussing.

You've answered your own question. If you "take full responsibility" for your actions, you have done something that you consider serious. What you have done is a sin. Therefore, you have committed a serious sin by your own standards. Certainly it's tempting to blow the whole thing off, but part of you can't do that or else you wouldn't be posting your question here. Answer to question #1: Yes, talk to the bishop. He will give you the answer to question #2, or will put you in touch with someone who can. But I think you're in good shape. Remorse and regret for past mistakes are the first tools we need to repair our lives. Be happy your mischief stopped with your lips.

I'm a big fan of speaking up and telling people what you need, so your email was very interesting. I am self-employed (software contractor) and my net profit isn't really known until the end of the year. Would my ward prefer that I make periodic "estimated tithe payments" with a final check each January that squares all the numbers? Or is it okay to write one whopper tithe check each year when I know the exact amount? I read somewhere that the Church doesn't frown on members who make one tithing payment per year, but some of my friends criticize this rather bitterly. Their argument is that we should be giving the first fruits of our labors to God as we receive them. (By the way, my business partner happens to be a gay man, and his own church has a real problem with its accounting software. The congregation has a lot of same-sex couples, and the yearly statements for married couples come out addressed to Mr. and Mrs. ---. They haven't figured out a way to fix this, so every January they get tons of angry calls.)

17 years ago I decided to remove my name from Church membership. I wrote a letter to my stake and it was completely ignored. No phone call, no reply, nothing. I didn't push it because I had many conflicted feelings about staying in the Church, and one part of me wanted to stay. I called Salt Lake City 2 years after I had sent my letter. They checked their computer and said I was still a member. The man who talked to me was really wonderful, he was happy to stay on the line for as long as I wanted and to talk about anything I wished. Letters are okay, I guess, but I would start with a personal contact with the bishop. If your experience is like mine, it's certainly nothing to be afraid of. Best wishes to you.

I think the most important thing is to keep talking to her as a loving spouse and to encourage her to explore her feelings without doing anything in the heat of battle. (Sounds like her parents and brother have kicked up a lot of dust, and that needs to settle before she can see and think more clearly.) I agree that "faking it" is not in her best interests. I would ask her to just let go for a few months and not try to make any decisions about the truth of the Church. Nobody is forcing her to make a decision in the next 24 hours. Get her out of the calling maybe and give her some space to think things through carefully. If she has already written her letter of resignation, urge her to sit on it for a few months. The LDS member records office will still be there in 2015 or 2016. All kinds of good and decent people go through the so-called "shaken-faith syndrome." I did, and I finally overcame it when I realized that the Church was centered on Christ and yet was filled with lots of imperfect and sinful people who actually confounded Heavenly Father's will (temporarily) by their own imperfections. It also helped when I concluded that God's inspiration and leading of the prophets is not like a boss dictating a letter to a secretary. It's more like an artist being inspired to create a work of art, and the prophets have a lot of wiggle room and ways to get their grimy, imperfect fingerprints on a lot of revelations. (Others here may disagree, of course.) If your wife still has a testimony of Christ, you've got a foundation for some repair. In fact, try to get her to stop with the binary thinking thing. Talk to her about the parts of the Church she thinks may have value and truth. Too many people treat the Church as nylon stockings... one little run and you have no choice to but to trash them angrily. I'd also recommend the Givens's new book called the Crucible of Doubt. Individual books, even good ones like this one, cannot heal a shaken-faith syndrome on first reading, but they're a good start. You might also want to talk to your bishop by yourself. Hope these ideas are helpful. Be strong, pray, and love your wife. And be grateful. I never married or had kids, and I'd trade places with you in a heartbeat.

Welcome... and Happy Thanksgiving!

The candle-and-flowerpot heater is sort of neat and I bet it would work in tightly sealed rooms where the outside temperature is only cool and not winter cold. I once had a tiny apartment in San Francisco that had no heat at all, and on cold nights I would close all the windows and light some candles. It didn't generate a blast of hot air like a furnace would, but it kept the place from getting too chilly. On really cold nights I would turn the burners of my stove on for five minutes, and that heated the whole place up. I also seem to recall some office in Minnesota or North Dakota that was specially designed to be heated by a single coffee pot. It was a big coffee pot, of course, and the room was totally sealed and had triple-pane glass. It may have been warm, but there was no air circulation and I bet it smelled like a gym locker. I love posts like these with novel ideas. LDS Hints from Heloise...

Phyllis Diller once wrote a riotously funny book called Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints. She had many zany tips, but my favorite was one for cleaning a horribly stained casserole dish. You simply bake something in the stained dish and give it to a neighbor, who will do anything to get the dish clean before returning it to you, even using acid and a blow torch if necessary.

I bet that's very convenient when you use your dining table for ordinary dining. You can put a box under the table and just push the dirty dishes into the hole. :) The hole and egg cartons are nice, but my metal muffin tin conducts heat away from the laptop like a champ.

I strongly "third" what Jane_Doe and MormonGator have said. You sound like an aunt of mine who needed a new car. She went to a dealership and couldn't decide which of two cars she really wanted. It never occurred to her that there were other dealerships in her town with other nice cars, and it never occurred to her that nothing was forcing her to buy a new car at that time. As I've said before on other posts, many decisions tend to make themselves if you keep gathering information and aren't afraid to live for a short time in uncertainty. Unless your hand is being forced (e.g., one of your lady friends wants marriage and is ordering you to launch or get off the pad), stay friends with both your lady friends and make some new friends in your local area. And most importantly, think with your brain, and not with some other part of your body.

Very nice. May I offer a suggestion for the reverse problem (sort of)? I had a problem with my laptop overheating. My friends suggested that I get a "chill mat" or "cooling pad," which were fairly expensive and came with all kinds of silly extras, like USB ports and fans and rubberized "ledges" and adjustable viewing angles. But an inverted muffin tin works perfectly, and I got one at a neighbor's garage sale for 25 cents. I crow and cackle every time I see it.

Probably. I'd be very happy to know that it's not that way all winter long. I went back to SLC last August, though, and the air and climate were insanely wonderful, like something from the Garden of Eden.

I have a wonderful cat. I can tell him repeatedly not to vomit on my carpet or not to claw my mattress or not to sleep on my clean towels from the dryer, but his instincts are powerful and he does what he wants. I've found that parents are often the same way. But cutting ties with a parent is a last resort. I would do almost anything to avoid it unless the parent is mentally ill or cruel. Only you can decide whether your mother has crossed that line. If I were you, I'd get family counseling and learn how to set limits, set rules, and set some sanity in the relationship with your mother. And I'd be open to the possibility that your mom isn't 100% wrong here and they her side of the story is important, too. I had a day of reckoning with my mom many years ago and forcefully renegotiated many of the rules that governed our relationship. We reconciled and we have a wonderful relationship now. I shudder when I think of how much poorer my life would be without having known her. Certainly you need to protect yourself and your children, but patience and forgiveness and consistent boundary-setting can be the "open sesame" to many wonderful things.