That's much like the story of my professional life as well, save that I mostly deal in smallish projects which tend to be requested in PHP, so I say "I can do that faster, better, and cheaper in Perl" and they generally say "OK", so I rarely have to actually write/modify PHP code more often than once every couple months and can stick with Perl aside from that.
As for what I do with Perl...
- Web apps
- Logfile analysis
- Dynamic firewall rules based on what's found in those logfiles
- User accounting and workstation management for an internet cafe
- Web scraping
- Spam header analysis
- Scanning for "hidden messages" via equidistant letter spacing
- Automating system administration
- Fun
- Profit
- Impressing the hell out of
the ladies clients