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I flew in to Raleigh Durham airport last night after a lovely weekend visit to San Francisco to see my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.  They are all fine, I am happy to report.  Samuel, now seven, has become a fanatic baseball enthusiast, totally wrapped up in the fate of the SF Giants.  When I was a boy, I was a Dodgers fan and the Giants were our rivals [nobody liked the Yankees, who wore pinstripes and were essentially corporate executives.]  But my duties as a grandfather take precedence over boyhood loyalties, so I am now rooting for the Giants as well.  On Sunday, we watched an "old time baseball game" played by two amateur teams in a league that plays in San Francisco all Spring.  It turns out that Old Time Baseball has a number of rules that differ from the modern version.  The players do not wear baseball mitts.  Instead they wear simple leather gloves.  The batter gets seven balls, not four, for a walk, and if hit, does not take First Base.  Batters get to tell the umpire whether they want a low or a high strike zone.  Samuel was in seventh heaven, and even got to run down and return several foul balls hit over the backstop fence.

I spent a good deal of time organizing my published and unpublished papers into subject groupings, preparatory to developing three or four volumes of them for publication as e-books on Amazon.com. 

The thoughts I posted under the title "I've been thinking" have generated some very suggestive comments, and in the next day or so I shall try to respond to at least some of them.  Coincidentally, I spent time on the plane reading an interesting new book by Gar Alperovitz entitled "What Then Must We Do?" which speaks directly to the themes I sketched in my post.  As soon as I have finished it, I shall write about it to let everyone know what he has to say.  He is a great deal more optimistic than I am about possibilities for the future, and as an incurable optimist, I am always pleased to be told that all is not lost.