With the help of much Web advice, I managed to get a custom cursor working on the parent site, http://attadipa.org. For any other interested newbies, I made the new .cur file in freeware (thanks!) RealWorld Cursor Editor, http://www.rw-designer.com. Put a new file called styles.css in the parent directory (using just the cPanel editor) with this content:
body {cursor: url(enso2.cur), default;}
a {cursor: url(enso2.cur), pointer;}
li {cursor: url(enso2.cur), crosshair;}
p {cursor: url(enso2.cur), text;}
.class1 {cursor: url(enso2.cur), move;}
and added this line to the index.html file
<link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
above </head>.
Haven't figured out where in Atahualpa to put the same or similar code to get the custom cursor into the blog itself (http://metanoia.attadipa.org). Advice appreciated. I'd prefer to have the custom cursor appear only in the sidebars and center column, but that's not critical.
Thanks-
scrib