For anyone else who has noticed that the site is suddenly taking an extra long time — a good 30 seconds or so — to load, I thought I would mention that I aware of it and am researching the cause. It seems to be more noticable in Firefox than in IE, for whatever reason. I recently added a Petfinder ‘Featured Pet’ block to the sidebar and thought that might be the cause, but when I remove it, it doesn’t load any faster.

Anyway, I *am* aware of it and looking into the cause. When I get a chance I am going to upgrade WordPress from 2.1 to 2.2 and see if that helps, but first I have to back everything up and make sure all my plugins are compatible with 2.2.