The latter issue will be dealt with in short order: I'm going to eat leftovers from last night's dinner, which was crunchy chicken and seasoned potatos.
I bought a pound of small red potatos, scrubbed them clean and quartered them, and then tossed them with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Put 'em in a 13x9 pan, put some carrots on top, covered the pan with foil, baked for about an hour--tender and tasty.
Crunchy chicken is just two cups of deep fried onions (French's cheddar flavored) crushed and mixed with 2 TBSP of flour. Dip a boneless skinless chicken breast in beaten egg, dredge in the onion/flour mix, cook at 400 for about 20 minutes or until done. Makes two, and invariably comes out tender and juicy.
It didn't take long to make and the only processed stuff in the entire meal was the deep fried onions.
Whee!
* * *
My legs hurt from my hips to my ankles, and my feet hurt from ankles on down. That's probably why I was so tired last night that I napped from about 8 to 10:30; I couldn't keep my eyes open. This job isn't physically hard work or anything but I'm not used to standing all day. Besides, I have to use my brain a lot.
The job at Target was 95% motion, and I could think about other things while I worked, but that's not so with this job. It's probably 20% motion and 80% brainpower, and anyone who says that using your brain is not tiring has never been in a job where he had to think a lot. It's not physically tiring but it wears you out, and the result is a real feeling of physical fatigue.
Added to this is the fact that my computer repair and customer service skills are rusty. I knew, on some level, that they would be, but I hadn't realized to what extent they had atrophied until they were put to the test.
Still, it's not something you forget. It's like riding a bike or roller skating; once you've learned it, you might lose your edge but you won't lose the basic skills. It'll take you some practice to get back into form, but you don't have to start over from scratch and re-learn everything.
The important thing to bear in mind is that these are things I'm good at. I worked as an on-site computer technician for six years; near the end of that time I was my employer's go-to guy for difficult or complex repairs, and I rarely failed to satisfy a customer. My skills may be rusty, but they're not gone.
It's just that scraping the rust off is going to hurt a bit. Well, no pain, no gain, I suppose.
