Woke up yesterday and went to sign in to the blog. Got a really counterintuitive and funky error message.
Contacted my hosting service and was told that they had upgraded to php 5.4 and sql 5.5 that morning.
I have been running the same version of blog software for more than ten years. I was using 3.15 and they are now at 6.something.
Got the blog upgraded and am proceeding to bring it up to the current version. Posting will be minimal for today and tomorrow.