All's well that ends well, I suppose.

I just got this e-mail:

From: Dr. Rivka [my old hotmail blog address]
To: rivka@livejournal.com
Subject: Sorry about taking your blog. Here is the info you need.

Blogger:
user: password:

Hotmail
user: password:

Sorry for any grief I caused.

They had cleared out the changes they made to the blog and the hotmail account was empty. They even deleted the message they sent to me from sent mail.

I'm glad to have the blog back under my control, although it's too bad that the old Haloscan comments are permanently lost. I guess I'll never know what all of this was about - who they were, how they got hold of the blog and hotmail account, why they got hold of it instead of just creating their own new one. It's not like it was a particularly valuable piece of internet real estate, after being defunct for so long.

Thank you to everyone who helped me!