duck-shaped pain

• Worked for my aunt on Saturday. I don't think I've mentioned this yet in the journal, but I've been working down at the family appliance store on Saturdays, a couple of hours each day. You see, the one thing my aunt hates to do more than anything else is data entry, and that happens to be one thing I'm accidentally good at. [1] I mentioned this to her once, and she decided that I should do hers, too. I'm not complaining -- I get paid pretty well and it's completely stress-free money, since I usually spend a lot of the time chatting and looking at catalogs instead of working. This is because they only have the one computer, and if someone else needs to use it, guess whose work has to cease?

• On the Real Job front, no news. I tried, but no news. I can handle whatever the answer is if there only was one. I hate waffling and evasion -- just say yes or no!

• I bought a scarf. I was much too excited about this. I love scarves, but seem to misplace them with some regularity. I hope that doesn't happen to this one. It's red, a nice dark shade of red, which is the best color for a scarf, as far as I'm concerned. It's wooly (although it didn't have a tag saying what it was made of) and has pockets on each end that you can warm your hands in. It was in a big bin of merchandise down at the weird sporting-goods store, a bunch of things they got sent by accident and couldn't return (not sure of the reason), so they were selling each item for cheap. A nice scarf for a dollar is a good thing, but now I wonder about its origins. Maybe it's a stolen, black-market scarf -- one that someone else misplaced and it became part of some underground scarf-trading ring.

• The library was having a mini book sale in its lobby when I went there today. Nothing great, but I picked up a bunch of recently published books to sell on half.com. I don't think I would read any of these books, which violates one of the few principles I have for book selling: only buy things I wouldn't mind having around the house. This is because I'm afraid of having an unwanted pile of crappy books in the office -- a small, inconsequential fear, and one I'm trying to get over. But anyway -- cheap books that look like they'll sell easily is a good thing.

• Made more Christmas cards. Maybe I'll even send them off tomorrow, if I get that motivated.

• Took a walk this afternoon. Even though it was cold and gloomy and freezing and unpleasant, I still took a talk. Which is good, because I've been seriously sloth-like in the last few weeks. I don't know if it's nerves or laziness that have caused me to sit around like I was dead, but I need to do something about it. Walking is a good start. We'll see if I can make it happen two days in a row, though.

• Sat around and listened to music. Today it was Mingus Ah Um sparring off against Monkey vs. Robot, and if there was a battle to the death between them, I'd have to call it a draw. One is a classic jazz masterpiece, the other has "Pizza Rocket" on it, so it's a difficult decision.

• Tonight for dinner: saag "paneer." I've never attempted to make it myself, so it'll be interesting to see what the results are. I use the quotation marks because it actually won't have paneer cheese in it -- there is none to be found for miles, and I don't have the patience to make it myself. Instead, I plan to use tofu -- same eerie off-white color, same creepy sponginess, and more readily available. It's a common substitute, which I found out when going through a bunch of recipes for it. But we'll see how it tastes -- most recipes that use the 'fu instead of the real thing make up for it by adding a bunch of other dairy products, so this whole production could end up being a mess.

[1] "Accidentally" as in I never planned to be good at it, but I am, and it seems to be in demand, so what the hell. It's my Find A Shitty Job Really Fast skill -- for some, it's retail, for others, it's waiting tables. For me, it's entering letters and numbers into hostile computers. In some ways it's ideal for me -- it's solitary, talking is usually discouraged, I'm quick and accurate, and I don't have to worry about it once I go home. On the negative side, it gets old pretty fast -- not a big deal when you do it for four hours once a week like I'm doing now, but 40 hours a week is a different story.

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