I tried changing the 60 to 70 to make the thumbnails larger and immediately my sidebars moved themselves down under the content area...it's as though they didn't have room to be there anymore for some reason. Perhaps because there was a thumbnail in one of them due to the news widget. So I switched the code back to 60, but the change appears to be permanent. Even uploading the original functions.php file didn't change anything.
The only way I've found to get the sidebars back up to the right is to delete all thumbnails from the content section. I can't for the life of me figure out what happened to cause this. The site is at http://www.realfreshblog.com; perhaps someone out there can assist. Or maybe I do a conmplete reinstall and start the whole thing over again.
I do wish there was a custom.css file and a customfunctions.php file, like with the Thesis theme, that would allow me to make changes without affecting the original files in this theme.