Writing frustratingly similar C programs to fiddle with flat-file databases, and composing tortuous awk scripts.

I do miss writing in C -- there's nothing like writing a blindingly fast piece of code, but it does take some doing to get it right. Perl has utterly spoiled me from going back. And awk was a lot of fun ("Wow! This is *so* cool!") to learn, but it quickly became limiting -- like wanting to put the entire program into the BEGIN block because I didn't actually want to process any lines of input, just do other stuff.