You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.

I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.

That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.

Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/

So again, not fun. My heart is pounding pretty hard right now and I'm considering just packing my bags and finding someplace else to stay so that I don't have a run-in with some local officer or thug who is part of a shakedown racket, but it's already 9:00 p.m. at night.

Airbnb seems to be on my side in this and and saying they'll handle it in my favor, but in the meantime I've got some angry woman in Germany telling me in no uncertain terms that they're going to send someone around in the morning to collect cash from me and will sick the Greek police on me.

It appears to be some sort of government "durability" environmental fee and this does appear to actually exist, but all other listers bake it into the price and again AirBNB majorly frowns at this sort of thing, but even if they ban the account, they probably just set it up under a new email address and start the thing over again.

Well this is not fun. I think the apartment I'm in is running a sort of Airbnb scam, where they make lowball price listing on a low review count property, and then several days after you've been there, try to shake you down for a fees paid in cash. AirBNB basically has a "price transparency" policy where all fees have to be disclosed in advance and these very clearly weren't.

So, in France, during the last week of the recent heatwave, 2000 more people than normal died than normally die during that week. That figure is also based only on electronic death records, which account for less than half of those normally logged, so we're talking 4,000+ people. This is a disaster on the scale of the Venezuela earthquakes, only all the buildings are intact and the people inside have been roasted to death instead.

Fuel crisis in Chita, Russia.

Found some information about the church. The two Theodores in question are Saints Theodore Tyro and Theodore Stratelates. The church was first built as a cathedral in 1124, then destroyed in the Fourth Crusade. The present structure was built in 1221 and was hit hard during the Vulcan wars of the early 20th century and required rebuilding yet again, with a long period of rebuilding from 1938 to 1959.

For now, we rest and do laundry and hydrate and pull clingers of clothing.

...and a few other places on the way home. Too many steps. Too much heat. Hard to stop myself with something interesting to see and read about every few blocks. Think I'll try and do the mosques and the museum tomorrow and see if Saints Theodore might be open. Grounds were locked up when I visited. Looks like they have a bunch of Roman era stonework sitting scattered around the grounds.

Stopped at the Byzantine church of the Saints Theodore...

There's really a lot more up there to be found than I think most people know about or explore. I'm going to have to search online and see if I can find a formal archaeological site plan of the hill to get a better idea of the outline of walls, towers, gates and other major structures.

My socks are covered in prickly plant bits and so are my boots and pants and I've picked up a few more scrapes on my legs, but I managed to go see some more of the fortifications of the acropolis up close.

From the path you can also make out the Byzantine metropolitan cathedral. It's dedicated to the Saints Theodore (plural).

There's a stone path off the hill on the far side of the church. There are cliffs here too and some really substantial tower remnants. It's really clear to me that the whole hillside was actually pretty well fortified at some point and that maybe fortifications were picked apart during the Ottoman era for building material.

This is the Church of Saint Nicholas of Serres. It was locked up tight, so the best I could do was get a picture of the interior through dirty glass. It looks like they still have regular services here on Thursdays and on Sundays.

I'm on my way to check out one other thing on the hillside before heading down. I do not want to have to climb this hill again some other day.

Here's a bit of remnant stonework well outside the defined boundaries of the citadel. It shows that there wasn't so much larger fortified perimeter. It also shows why you don't want to ever build with river rock. More than ever gets a real solid grip on smooth rounded rocks, and they tend to fall to pieces over time.

If you're careful, you can make your way from the far side of the restaurant down around the edge of the tower and along the north wall. I frightened the castle cat when I came around the corner and surprised it.

"What are you doing here?"

The main structure of interest at the citadel is the "Tower of the King" or "Tower of Orestis Koulas." Close examination reveals a very interesting and at times questionable history of revision and repair. We've got some very large blocks adjacent to the tower which probably dates to antiquity or the very early Byzantine period.

The south wall, built atop the cliff, is pretty ragged, but is still there in places. Standing atop it you get a great view of Serres. You can see some of the city's mosques and churches well. So many people come up and stand atop it for the view that the rocks are worn slippery smooth.