out here as it was s beautiful spring afternoon. Nice and sunny. I got to Corona and Tim’s for my coffee and headed over to the office. I met Gary having a smoke on the sidewalk outside. Nice fellow. I had a chat with him for about 10 minutes. He was concerned that JT hadn’t been in the office over the last couple of days. Next I went to the pharmacy and asked one of the pharmacists there about keeping my insulin pen cold as opposed to just keeping it out and he said it’s not a good idea but I could get an icepack and that would keep it cold for a few more hours, sounds good to me. So I’m going to try and go in for Thursday and Friday afternoon. I took the elevator upstairs to our 2nd floor office and met Rob as I came in and he mentioned about my lousy credit card bank last week. He also (for my benefit) said to Greg to talk about attendance. He Didn’t put up much of a fight with me. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why. We did CCSD and I had about $225 by break. Still no credit cards sales. Two weeks ago, I got 12, last week just 1. In the 2nd half we did Wheelchair Sports. Then about 8pm  Greg mentioned that it was about time I had a Review so he shut my dialer off and took me in the back room to show my stats on a print out. The last three months, I think my stats were something like 70% bank. Then he showed me the full year last year and I wrote $122,000 and banked $83,000. For that they paid me $11,000! That’s like an 8-1 ratio! Now I realized why Rob didn’t put up much of a fight with me on his way out. That made me very happy. I felt pretty good about myself after that. I ended up with $495 total by the end of the shift and still no credit cards sales.

I was glad to get out of the office and I caught the train home. There were extra cars on the train because of an event of some kind. I sat by myself and read from Elizabeth Bear’s “Undertow.” I read a bit at work as well but I decided to re read the 10 pages I’d already read because I like to take down notes and little tricks from each book I read so I can utilize them in my own work. Not read exactly but in my own words of course. Word/word is plagiarism.

Ok here’s my review of J Alan Erwine’s “Seedlings on the Solar Winds and other stories.”

The Skinny: This is obviously a Science Fiction anthology of J’s short story’s published mostly out of Sam Dot publication’s. There are 18 stories in this collection. There’s even a Cyber Punk story in here as well.

Pro’s: Interesting characters painted on intriguing landscapes. Each of these Stories except the last 2 were fast moving.

Con’s: I found the characters laughed way too much. Some last names of characters are used in more then one story in the book. The book is over priced for what you get.

Bottom line: This book was a positive reading experience, however none of the stories struck me to be overly memorable. I enjoyed “Opium of the People”, “The limit of Tolerance” the strongest of the stories in the collection and “On the word of the Ancients.” J has an Interesting writing style that makes you want to turn pages. Out of 18 stories, there were 3 Gems, 2 stories I thought were good and 11 of the stories were average and 2 stories just about put me to sleep. The last 2. This was my first POD book I had ever purchased and the experience was good even though I found the formatting to be problematic. On the top of each page goes the author’s name and the title of the story. This was absent from my copy. Would I recommend this book? Yes. This was a solid effort from the author and I’ll be waiting for a sequel. I give "Seedlings on the Solar Winds and other stories,” 5.5 e. Jim’s out of 10.

Anyway Bloggers, that’s all for now.

e. Jim