Well, it nearly took a month to recover from the setback caused by ESRI's "we won't let you save changes involving our proprietary data, and we won't tell you we're not letting you do it, either" loss-of-research, but FINALLY I have something somewhat like county centroids, and all the environmental data I could find entered, and I'm making contour maps.

I think I'm gonna hang it up for the day, soon, though: here's what I've done so far today:

got up around 6:30

mowed the lawn, front and back, including a double-pass (vertical and horizontal stripes) on the front lawn so it looks neater.

pulled all the vegetation growing in the sidewalk cracks (of which there are many - note to self: find out if you or the city are responsible for sidewalk repair. Note to self #2: find out this fall if the powerwasher will do this faster and better.)

trimmed some unwanted volunteer elms, mulberries, pecans (They're in too deep to pull out at this point)

went out to breakfast (a buffet, so it took little longer than it would for me to fix my own, plus it serves as both breakfast and lunch)

went to the field site, collected seed that was ready. Cursed the many mosquitoes.

went home, checked for ticks, changed clothes. (this is a three-shirt day: I also changed after mowing the lawn.)

came over here, entered data on precip, annual average high, low, average
temperatures as well as average July highs and January lows for the counties they were available for

resurrected my notes on what I did before

got contours of the range limits and some contours of heating degree day data (which, it doesn't look like growing season has anything to do with range limits, unlike other states. My money is on glacial history at this point, but I do still have to try precip and pan evaporation).

Watered the milkweeds growing in my research lab

So, I think I've earned an afternoon off. I will be able to get back to this on Monday, unless my co-worker wants to do our summer field sampling then. What remains mostly with the maps now is the kind of mechanical "interpolate grid, contour, clip, make contours different from each other, make map for publication" steps, which get to be pretty rote.