"I keed."

People say it's always refreshing to meet old friends. Patrick is NOTHING like that. He's not a breath of fresh air. He's a bombardment of dense, suffocating, noxious gas. Green in color.

But, boy, did we miss this guy.

He's the only one who can make "nonentity" sound like a dirty word - who can make ANY word sound dirty. The only one who can talk about sleeping with his mags with a straight face.

A few years ago, Liz, Tago, and I were newbies with Patrick. Just a bunch of greenhorns (that term is just asking for it!). Our team shared more than bugs and enhancement requests. Patrick is one of the reasons that COMIS established itself as one of the closest teams in the company and it carried over to our succeeding projects. Good teammate he is; wholesome he is not. In fact, there are parts of this evening's loud conversation that I didn't get (and didn't want to get) and I concentrated on practicing my Swiss knife skills of paper cutting. And no, I didn't cut myself, surprisingly so.

Behind all those jokes - crass, vulgar, grossly politically incorrect jokes - he's a good guy. Deep inside. Deep, deep, deep, deep down inside (Hey, it was Liz who said he's "wide"!). Actually, he just wanted to ask how I was doing. I could understand his concern because the dominant mode of update we have of each other is through our online blogs. But in real life, I'm not always as glum as I am in my blogs. Although I am AS clumsy. When he was walking me home, I missed a step because my shirt sleeve caught a nail on a tree. Of course.

Next time we all meet up, you guys try to keep the sexual overtones to a minimum, ok? There is a limit to the number of discarded receipts that I can mutilate. :)