Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

Happy Monday, everybody!
Between the Datacenter shutdown Saturday afternoon and the Datacenter start-up on Sunday morning, it is almost as if the weekend never annoyed me at all with the customary feelings of "not being at work" and "relaxation" that I often mitigate through chemical means.
Needless to say, I'm totally on board with the whole "back to the cubicle, monkey" Monday tradition and I don't want to beat anyone at all to death with a loosely coiled CAT-5 cable.
On Sunday we attended the Awards Banquet for Gwynyth's swim team, since the season officially ended on Saturday.
I've got a question. I'm not a real big sports-type person, but what does "Awards Banquet" mean to you?
I was picturing more the slacks-and-button-down-shirt, room-full-of-people-eating-and-getting-up-to-make-short-acceptance-speeches, projected-PowerPoint-slideshow-with-a-pattern-of-pictures-following-the-format-three-serious-sports-pictures-then-one-goofy-swim-kid-picture-then-two-more-serious-sports-pictures-then-a-picture-of-the-crossing-guard-or-official-who-died-or-got-arrested-or-re-entered-rehab-mid-season-then-three-more-serious-sports-pictures-then-repeat kind of thing. You know. Like they do.
What we got was a mosquito-infested cook-out between the pool and the playground complete with flip-flops and styrofoam plates and an hour of speeches by the parents about how awesome some of the parents are and how much the rest of the parents need to do more. You know. Like they do.
After that, I'd been instructed by my manager to take my family to dinner in compensation for "Lost June Weekend '07". You are probably thinking the same thing I thought when presented with the possibility of dinner out on someone else's tab. "Now we can try that All-You-Can-Eat-Waffles place because waffles are awesome!"
Shana and Gwynyth had different ideas, so we went to one of those Japanese Hibachi places where they cook the food right in front of you and flip around the bladed utensils all ninja-like.
As I've said before, while I consider myself a manly-type man, I don't like to get stuff (especially goo) on me. And I don't like it to the point that the thought makes me hyperventilate a little bit.
What I learned last night was that even a completely uncoordinated I.T. geek can catch a piece of chicken flung across the restaurant in his mouth when the alternative is getting chicken juice on his face. Fear changes a man. Adrenaline sharpens the reflexes.
Gwynyth was impressed (She chose to bat the chicken away from her face, which was a perfectly reasonable response given that someone had just flung the chicken at her.) and noted what I believe she interpreted as "calm" following the chicken catch in her admittedly generally spastic father.
She did not correctly identify it as a paralysis brought on by my body's fear chemicals purging themselves and resetting my flight or fight or catch chicken response cortex. And for that, I'm grateful for hibachi mood lighting.