I think I may have overextended my tech-brain (I'm a mid-level noob).
In a nutshell, I activated my multi-site network capabilities and installed a second blog as a subdomain of my original. (Not sure if I said all that right...like I said, late night coding might have fritzed out something important.)
The original blog is working like a charm (http://www.thediviningwomen.com) . I'm still tweaking style stuff on the second blog, but I'm running into a problem when it comes to setting permalinks. If I change the permalink style from default, I get pretty permalinks for everything (pages, posts, categories, etc) but the homepage (http://thediviningwomen.com/cookiewitch/). My home page becomes a "not found" page. In fact, even adding a "new" home page and redirecting it with the "Page Links To" plugin does the same thing.
I'm back to the default permalinks setting, but I don't like the looks of the page_id=3 mess and can't figure out why this is happening. Does anybody have any ideas? (Sorry--forgot to add that on the original blog, the pretty permalinks are all working.)