A different kind of progress:

Spent most of the day looking up soil associations for Illinois prairie sites (this is for an ongoing project) using the online soil surveys. (There's also a supposedly-interactive tool that lets you plug in the section, township, and range numbers and then highlight the place you want to see, but it kept breaking....and it will only, apparently, work in IE, because they warn up front of a big bug when using Firefox. The interactive site was really nice for the two or three prairies it worked for, but then it went down so I spent the rest of the afternoon using the clickable online .pdf files).

My eyes kind of hurt from looking at a screen for so long but I'm probably 1/4 of the way through the task, which is a lot better than I thought I'd be when I began.

The only problem is not all counties (Cook is one) have online clickable surveys...I may need to see if I can find an "operative" with access to a university library in Illinois and fax them copies of my maps to see if they can find the info for me.

But still - a good day's work, for a change. (I'd been running into a brick wall about how to do this last week.)