Ok, this is weird...I just logged into my Google webmaster tools and saw a new message from Google.

The message was titled: (exclamation point symbol) [mysite.com...] Possible Outages
It says

Dear owner or webmaster of [mysite.com...]

While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2010-09-25 04:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:

a list of pages followed...all related to my blog.

After checking those pages, they all seem fine.

I have never received a message from Google trying to notify me of an outage of my server and I know there have been no outages of my server today. I think the outage was with Google and considering all the other oddball things going on , I think that is somewhat telling of the condition of their search engine....it's FUBAR!