Well, the notepad on which I'm keeping track of what I did in the GIS program has a long list of things on it.

The very last thing? "SUCCESS!"

I was able to get it to do what I wanted it to do. This is no small feat for me.

I now have a map of the range limits, corrected for county area, with a grid imposed on them based on the county centroids, with the longitude and latitude of those centroids used as x and y values in an interpolation, where the z value is the number of species ending their range in that county (or the same corrected for area), contours generated based on these results, ANNNNND (mirabile dictu) the contours "clipped" to the shape of the state so they look nice and neat.

Dayum. Now all that remains is to contemplate various environmental factors (I already have some in mind) to see how they relate to the range-limit maps, and write the rest of this bad boy.

I really did not expect to have the near-immediate success I had with being able to make those maps. I anticipated two or three days of blundering around, trying to remember what I needed to do.

"I love it when a plan comes together."