Creating a new account on blogger.com

In an earlier post, I mentioned wanting to create a blog for my wife... and based on a variety of great feedback through email and comments I decided to create an account on blogger.com, but I can't get it to work! I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, and they don't provide anyway to contact them... but I keep getting an error that the username is taken and I've tried so many possiblities, including adding random numbers to the end of the name ... I've stopped believing that the username really is taken and instead I think they are just having some other type of problem!

Yeesh.