Apple Support solved this for me. I'm a Mac novice so I may not say this in "mac-eese".
The first sequence of steps took about 5 or so minutes and it did nothing (that I know of), but follow along anyway - it's just a handful of minutes.
First they had me open Disk Utility and run a few checks. That did nothing, but just in case, you can run these steps:
Go to Applications/Utilites and select Disk Utility. Run Verify Disk and Disk Repair (if needed). Then run Verify Permissions and Repair Permissions. This took a fair amount of time and I received some kind of ACL issue and then it said it was repaired. As a side note, it wasn't because it also happened the second time I ran Repair Permissions.
Next came the steps that worked and I'm not sure if the previous steps are required or not. From the basic "home" screen without anything running other than Finder, select the "Go" command in the top row of your screen and select "Home" from the drop-down menu. A Finder window will open that should have a little house as the icon. Once that appears, press "Command i" (command button and the letter i). This brings up an Info window for Home. In the preview section of the Info window you should see the House icon. If you don't you are not in the right place. At the bottom of the Info winow select/highlight Computer Name (me); where Computer Name is whatever you named the computer. Regardless of the name, "(me)" will be next to it. To the right on that you should see read/write. If not, change it to read/write for that row only. At the bottom right, unlock the lock (click on it and you proably need your password to unlock). At this point the lock should be unlocked and your computer name is selected/highlighted. Click on the gear wheel and select the option "apply to enclosed items". It may take a short amount of time for the computer to repair or apply the setting to your items (which should be everything). After that, everything was back to normal. This second sequence of steps takes about one minute to do.