Too bad he's on vacation

Here's the test that you get fj to take for you: The Hello Kitty Psychological Stress Test.

I'll have to check with Kelly, but I'm pretty sure that if you get your diagnosis from an animated character then it doesn't count.

(found via hrafn)

More blather about work

The co-worker with whom I've worked most closely over the almost 3 months I've been at this job left on Friday for vacation. He's going to China, and will be back sometime in September. He needs a vacation, so I'm happy for him.

On the other hand, I'm suddenly feeling a bit stressed. We spent a lot of time going over stuff before he left, which is good. But there hasn't been any real attempt to sit down and divide up the work he'd been doing. Because we were working together a lot, I have this feeling I'll be picking up a bunch of it by default. So I'm putting all kinds of unhealthy pressure on myself, to try and work faster and take on new stuff and not be intimidated by change. And that's all good. But it's not going to be good if I get fixated on trying to work hard enough to make up for us having one fewer person, because then I will drive myself nuts and nobody will enjoy working with me. So in between working faster and taking on new stuff, I'm trying to stay calm.

And, just in case I'm not challenging myself enough, my after-work project for the next few months may be applying to grad school. I hadn't realized until I looked yesterday that the program I'm interested in (a MS in CS at UMass Boston) takes applications for the spring semester too. So I'm trying to decide whether to apply for next spring or next fall.

Either way, I need to take the GRE before October because then they're going to cut out the analytical section. I got 100% on the online practice questions for the analytical section (which I took while listening to Kelly and her friend Amy talk about who might show up at their high school reunion this year) so I figure I might as well take the test now and make use of my strong points. Testing is relatively easy, but getting letters of recommendation is nervewracking as all hell.