My Foot Hurts

I don't know why. It's either foot cancer, or PMS.

Hey, I gotta say, I'm very excited about Barack Obama's plan to eliminate the 401(k) tax deferral for people who save and to eliminate the tax deduction to employers who contribute matching funds. Since those are the only two things that distinguish a 401(k) from a private investment account, that should pretty much kill off my alternative to social security. That should be very exciting depending upon the government to get a good return on my social security investments in order to have money to retire on rather than them just frittering it away on tax "rebates" for people who don't pay any taxes (aka, his welfare plan). Yes yes, every day it is clearer to me how the only reason not to support this guy is because my church told me not to.

If only I had a church.

But hey, I'm young. Why should I worry about the future when the government will do that for me?

On a lighter note, on Monday, our much-anticipated whole-house music system was professionally installed by the good proprietor of Home Smart Home, LLC. See, when we bought our fancy-pants house, I wasn't expecting to have to spread the wealth around, so we bought a nice place. It has 6 pairs of speakers installed into the walls/ceilings in various rooms about the house. The speaker wires all terminate in the cabinet under the TV in the family room, where the previous owners had a 12-channel amp and some misc. audio equipment, all of which they naturally took with them.

I didn't really know much about whole house audio, but my neighbor across the street was a bit of a hobbiest in the field. Until recently when he decided to supplement the income of his day job by opening up a business installing high-end A/V systems in houses, thus becoming the dreaded small business owner whose wealth needs to be spread around.

He set us up with a used 12-channel amp (at about half the price of new), plus a Sonos BU150 along with some accessories, for a very decent price. We the BU150, you get to run two zones independently, so we have the basement on its own zone player, allowing the kids to listen to kid music down there, where the kitchen, family room, living room, master bedroom, and deck are on another zone and driven by the 12-channel amp.

I decided to rip all our CDs on the PeeCee so that we can have access to all the songs from the Sonos without having to put a disc into the player. This has consumed almost all my free time since then. We own just over 300 CDs, I think, and it takes 5-10 minutes to rip each one. I think we've gotten through about 200 of them so far, but we did all The Mrs.'s and The Childrens's first, so we just really got into my collection today.

Last night, we had only gotten through the A's (my collection is alphabetical, cuz that's the kind of guy I am), so while I was in the basement playing Clue Jr. with MaxieC, we got to listen to tons of AC/DC and Aerosmith. Really more than I perhaps needed to listen to right then.

So I flipped over to the "Heroes of Guitar" streaming internet radio station. Little did I know this station plays music (almost?) exclusively from the Guitar Heroes game. But it was still good. MaxieC did air guitar to "I Love Rock'n'Roll". It's interesting that he has already developed the classic white guy dance moves at age four - namely, he stands pretty still and plays air guitar with his mouth wide open and his head thrown back.

I don't know where he got that. I don't do that. I dance like the village idiot.