Started new blog but WP quirks are killing me!

I've built several websites over the years. Thought doing the WordPress thing for a blog would be easier but man those templates! The inconsistency from one to another in what they do is maddening!

It took me 2 months to find one I liked that was easy enough to work with and the widgets worked like they were supposed to and the last month I've been tweaking and getting content ready.

I deleted spam the other day. Checked a couple boxes in "Discussion" to try and avoid it. Now it seems I have no comment section at all. I have these boxes checked under discussion:
Allow people to post comments on new articles
(These settings may be overridden for individual articles.)
Plus I have it checked in the template itself.

Did I override something somehow like it says above? Not that I see where that can be done in the composing section of the posts. Am I just not seeing it?

Argh!! Looks better in firebox too. My boxes are all in an up and down skinny row on explorer While the first four in firefox are side by side. My slide show seems to be out of sink too. Sigh........

It's not ready yet to be official but here is the link.
I just want to get the comment section back. Any help would be appreciated.

Well problem sort of solved. It's a glitch in the theme. (Most likely something I did.) I did a "preview" of other templates I had downloaded and there was the comment box! So I'm switching themes. Something more old worldly graphic background wise. Ya know, me being a historian and all. And based on the preview there should be only a few things to re-upload.

I will let you know how I make out. Again, thank you all for your help. Hopefully I don't mess something up in the comment section.

Well the new theme works great BUT the slide show doesn't seem to work in IE9. I use firefox and it looks fine. Guess I can email the template folks and see if there's a fix. If anyone looks I'd appreciate it if you could tell me if you can see it.

Thanks for letting me know Meowzbark.

Some one else mentioned this too Julianne. I have to add a plugin because it's self hosted. Then a notice goes to your email.

Still have to fix the share buttons. Probably going to have to fuss with code. If they don't work I'll remove the ones for the template and use a plug in. If you look at my page you can see I'm experimenting with that.

So I put in a plugin for the share buttons so they work and deleted the none working button codes from the template. (Saved it in a text file just in case.)

Julianne, I added a follow button. It's self-hosted WordPress though, so blog post notifications will go to your email if you choose to follow. Thanks for mentioning that.