Thanks, Gigi. You are always at the ready with assistance. I managed to calm down and remember that if all else fails, shut everything down and reboot. That fixed the problem and I'm again cutting frantically.
I still have no idea what caused the whole kerfuffle, but I'm back in business. You know the depiction of the Silver Bullet that appears on the right-hand side of the screen in Scal? Normally it is in a horizontal position, but it switched to vertical and moved to the top right-hand side. Even though the test cut was at the point of origin that I set, the blade moved to different places to begin cutting. Crazy!!