Or Firefox? It usually retains the text box contents when you click 'back'.
As said last time this happened, John; good idea to do Ctrl + A then Ctrl + C before clicking submit - you never know when something's going to silently time out on you!
Forgive me for stating the obvious, type the blog into a word processor first (with autosave on at 5 minute intervals ), then just copy and paste. Much less chance of lost work.
Use your favourite word processor, then select all, copy, open a text document, paste, then select all in the text document, copy, paste into blog with no formatting whatever. Sounds long winded but isn't really. See what you think!
I use this to remove problem formatting from text I want to paste into web forms and such, as formatting can be a real pain there.