FYI: Excerpt from a letter to be read at all Sacrament Meetings next Sunday
". . . immediately at the conclusion of the two-hour block.
The second change is that a third counselor will be added to all Elders Quorum and Relief Society Presidencies. The 3rd counselor will have only one responsibility - to organize and implement all moves of members in and out of homes and apartments in the Ward. High Priests will continue to be excused from moving responsibilities. Assisting members to move serves two main purposes. First, it provides an opportunity for service for all Ward members. Second, it helps rid members of the sin of pride in their possessions.
David talked of this principle in the Old Testament:
Ps. 55: 22 Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall always help the brighteous to be moved
The New Testament mentions this service opportunity too:
Matt. 21: 10 And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved. . .
Helaman talks of it in the Book of Mormon:
Helaman 12:13 Yea, and if he say unto the earth—Move—it is moved
And finally, the importance of helping each other was reaffirmed in this dispensation:
D&C 124:45 And if my people will hearken unto my voice, and unto the voice of my aservants whom I have appointed to lead my people, behold, verily I say unto you, they shall be moved out of their place.
Some members may object to having Ward Members help them move, citing possible damage to their possessions. However, we are commanded to avoid the sin of pride, and allowing untrained amateurs to handle our most delicate items is a positive thing. To help kick off this new program, anyone helping in a move will be excused from their normal Home Teaching and Visiting Teaching responsibilities for that month. This policy will expire in 12 months from now.
The third change is that the three-fold mission of the Church has been revised. Effective immediately, the mission is now to proclaim the gospel, redeem the dead, and move the saints.
The fourth and final change involves tithing. Up to now, tithing has always been defined as ten percent of one's increase. However, effective immediately . . . "

UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROLS

A friend of ours recently had his 90-year old mother in town for a visit. Everything went fine except that after a few days he had to hide the remote controls for the television. In his house, you have to turn everything on using the silver remote control, then use the black remote to change channels and adjust the volume. It seems that no matter how often he explained that to his mother, she couldn't get the TV to work. Out of frustration, she would start randomly pushing buttons on both remotes until nothing worked at all. Even our friend, who is pretty good with technology, couldn't figure out how to restore the TV to working condition. They had to wait for their 7-year old son to get home from school, and he would get everything working again. This incident is more than just another cute example of an older person trying to cope with modern technology; this is an indictment of the remote control industry. What good is all of our fancy technology if we can't get it to work?
Our main floor entertainment center has 5 remotes: one for the TV, one for the blu ray player, one for the DVD/VCR combo player, one for the cable box and one for the receiver. For awhile we tried to use our equipment by grabbing the appropriate remote. This actually isn't that easy because the remotes aren't labeled "TV', "Cable Box", etc. Instead we had to check the brand of the equipment we wanted to use and then look for the remote with that brand name on it. That worked OK, except both our TV and DVD/VCR player are Sony's so there was an additional step of determining which Sony remote to use. It was very frustrating.
You can imagine how excited we were to see an advertisement for a Universal Remote Control. "Tired of having five remotes in your family room?" the ad said. "Our Universal Remote makes it so you only need one. Works with all brands!" We bought it and have to admit that things are better. Now, instead of having five remotes that we don't know how to use, we only have ONE remote that we don't know how to use.
I should have known the universal remote wasn't going to be that easy when the ad said that the remote control was developed using technology from our Apollo lunar space program. The advertisement failed to mention that it actually was easier to put a man on the moon than to get the universal remote to work properly.
You can't just buy the remote at the store and bring it home and start using it. You have to have a guy from the store come to your house with a laptop and special software to customize the remote to your setup. I've had it a couple of weeks now and it works OK except that sometimes pushing the "Off" button doesn't turn everything off. Usually pushing the "Off" button again turns the other stuff off, but not always. Then I push the "On" button a few times and then the "Off" button again. Holding my right leg in the air while I push buttons seems to help a little too.
We also bought a Universal Remote for our basement entertainment center. The remote works exactly the same as the upstairs one except it uses radio waves since a lot of the equipment is behind a door. It was working better than the upstairs universal remote except that sometimes it would randomly change the channel or fast forward through a movie we were watching. We called the store and they said we probably had a neighbor with a radio wave remote and his was interfering with ours. They said there really wasn't anything we could do about it.
I confronted our neighbor on the North side of our house and, sure enough, he also had a radio wave remote. Apparently we had dueling remotes that sometimes battled over who would get the final change. We were unable to work out a compromise so we ended up in arbitration. The Judge awarded us use of the remote on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays while our neighbor gets to use his on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We trade off on alternate Sundays.
I thought we were done with the radio wave problems but we were visiting with our neighbor on the South side of our house and they mentioned that lately their Microwave Oven was randomly turning off and on. I was going to ask them if this was happening on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays and alternate Sundays but decided not to get involved. If any Toyota executives are reading this, I recommend that the next time there is a case of sudden acceleration in a car of yours, check to see if there was anyone in the area using a Universal Remote.
David LeSueur lives in Littleton with his wife Mary. Please don't call us on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays because we are busy using our remote control.

The dinner table is a good place to teach children about life and to discuss important philosophical questions. After all, they have to sit there or they won’t get anything to eat! Last week we delved into religion. The question we discussed was: where do dogs go after they die?
Most theologians think that this question was definitively settled by the Don Bluth animated movie “All Dogs Go to Heaven.” However, I am sure there is at least one dog that won’t make the cut.
When our kids started begging for a dog, we tried to make them happy with some low-maintenance alternatives instead. I wanted a pet that I could leave at home while I went on vacation for three weeks and when I came back he wouldn’t even notice I was gone. We started with goldfish and those miniature turtles, but I wasn’t a very good pet owner. I had to look in the Goldfish Owners Manual (the “Troubleshooting” section) to see what it meant when the goldfish is floating at the top of the water. It also took me three turtles before I learned that they lived longer if you put those fake plastic palm trees into the aquarium with them. I guess it makes them believe they are on an island and might be rescued any minute.
Between the ages of 9 and 11 our boys always wanted lizards or snakes. But our girls always wanted hamsters or gerbils or white rats. I thought it odd that 11-year old girls were attracted to rodents. My wife claims it is God’s way of preparing them to be attracted to 12-year old boys. I used to be a 12-year old boy myself, so I know she is right.
Like most parents, we finally caved in and got a dog. We have owned four during the last 30 years and we had a lively discussion about their eternal reward. We all agreed that if any dogs go to heaven then our Maltese “Nikki” would go there. He was fun and obedient, and he always said please and thank you. He even entertained us by singing when I played the piano. That ability might come in handy in heaven if they have Talent Shows or Heaven’s Funniest Home Videos. I said that our Cocker Spaniel “Dusty” should definitely not go to heaven. He had a bad habit of biting people. This was not good for neighbor relations or homeowner premiums. I know some people say there is no such thing as a bad dog – just a bad dog owner. If that is the case, then maybe I shouldn’t go heaven. I am OK with that as long as Dusty isn’t with me.
If you have similar questions about animals in the afterlife, I recommend you see all three cartoons Don Bluth made on the subject. The first was, of course, “All Dogs Go to Heaven.” The other two are “No Mosquitoes Go to Heaven” and “Cats Go Wherever They Want.”
David LeSueur lives in Littleton with his wife Mary and their dog Colby. The jury is still out on whether Colby will go to heaven.

I am not normally a risk taker, so I am a little embarrassed to admit what I did last month. First, I had a headache and took a Tylenol, then operated some heavy machinery. A few days later, I bought a new DVD player and installed it without first reading all of the safety instructions. Then last week, for the first time since September 1971, I didn’t balance my checkbook.
My bank reconciliation rebellion didn’t happen overnight. There have been signs of an internal struggle for several months now.
For example, you know how when you write out the amount of the check (“thirty-six and 35/100”) you draw a squiggly line to the end of the blank space? That prevents the person you write the check to from writing in “and one million dollars” in the empty space. Last month I stopped drawing that squiggly line. It suddenly seemed pointless. Besides, I don’t have a million dollars in my checking account.
I also stopped using ATMs. This angers my bank because fees are a major profit source. But I decided to boycott cash machines after getting frustrated once when I went to use my card at a different bank’s ATM. A little message came on the screen saying that my card wouldn’t work at that machine. Then the next month I saw that my bank charged me $5 for trying to use my card. Great - it costs me money to find out they won’t give me any money. I was going to call and complain but I’m sure there is a fee for that too.
Then I became disillusioned with our interest-earning checking account. Currently, the interest rate I get is .0000013%, compounded monthly. We earned $1.27 in interest last year. For this privilege, I pay $2 per month.
I made the actual decision to renounce reconciling last week. I was concerned about our spending and decided to look at our monthly budget for 2007. I use Quicken to track our finances and reconcile our bank statement. When I enter a check into the computer, I specify what kind of expense it is out of over 100 categories. Unfortunately, I have gotten lazy because the only budget categories that showed in the 2007 budget were House Payments and Miscellaneous Expenses. I printed a copy of the report to discuss with my wife.
“Look, honey,” I said. “We need to be careful. Let’s see if we can stay within our budget this month.”
“Sure,” she replied. “What have we been spending too much money on?”
With great solemnity I announced “We need to cut back on Miscellaneous Expenses!”
So I no longer will use Quicken to do my budget or to reconcile my monthly bank statement. I know that the only way to be sure you don’t bounce a check is to always reconcile your account and record all of the checks you write. But I am going to try a new approach. I won’t reconcile my checking account, but I will keep a higher balance to make bouncing checks less likely. And most importantly, I will never write a check for more than $1,000,000.
David LeSueur lives with his wife in Littleton.

My wife has been in 3 or 4 book clubs over the last 25 years and she has always enjoyed them. They are especially fun when the members have diverse backgrounds and opinions. Her clubs have had representatives from a wide variety of religions, political parties, ethnicities, and lifestyles. But there is one group that has been conspicuously absent from her clubs – men. So when we had the opportunity to be in a book club with four other married couples, we jumped at the chance.
The club has been going for almost a year and I now realize why men don’t join book clubs. When you are in a book club, you have to read books! To accommodate the men in our club we try to pick books that have come out on tape or have a good movie version. Our last book was 550 pages long and two hours before our meeting I had only read 53 pages. I came up with a great solution that I call the Gallup Reading Method. Gallup Polls tell us what 100 million Americans are thinking by talking to 1000 carefully selected people. Why not read just enough pages of the book to have an idea of what is going on? I decided to skip from page 53 to 60. Then I read all of the pages ending in zero. I was finished in an hour and a half.
I think I understood the book pretty well. The name of the book is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The main character’s name is Liesel and she is a book thief. I am not sure if she really stole books or if that was symbolic of something. The narrator of the book was Death, which probably was very meaningful. Rudy was in the book too and he was either Liesel’s brother or a boy friend. It is also possible he was her father, I am not sure. But they talked a lot. They lived in Germany and it talked about Hitler so it must have been in the 1930s or 1940s. So the novel was set in a real place and time, but the characters were fictional. Actually, it is possible it was a true story. Liesel was either Jewish or a Communist and that caused a lot of conflict for the book’s characters. Death made some profound statements about humanity on the last page. It sounded like Liesel was grown up and most of the other characters were dead. Or maybe they had just moved to New Jersey. The author didn’t make it very clear.
There were five men at book club. Two had read the book the old fashioned way. One listened to it on tape. One read the first 38 pages. People seemed to be impressed with my knowledge of the book so I felt comfortable confessing that I had only read the first 53 pages and all of the others ending in zero.
The discussion was lively and at the end the 38-pages-guy pointed out that he had made the highest number of comments per page read of anyone in the group. I said that it seemed like a very good book. One of the women suggested I should go back and read all of the pages that ended in 1. Everyone laughed. Ha ha. Very funny. I make an effort to read some of the book and all I get is ridicule.
Besides, I don’t have time to go back and read The Book Thief because I have to get started on the next book. It is 336 pages long, and I only have 3 months to read it. So 38-pages-guy and I made a secret pact. He is going to read the odd-numbered pages and I will read the even ones. Then we will get together for lunch on the day of our next book club and try to put it all together. It will be a little extra work, but at least I don’t have to read the whole book.
David LeSueur lives in Littleton and is currently reading the even-numbered pages of Arabian Jazz by Diana Abu Jaber.