BTW, loving your photos of one of my favorite parts of the state.

Cheers.

How do I nudge my menu items to the right so they are truly centered?

It looks truly centered to me right now. Maybe it looks off-center to you because the text inside the header image is not perfectly centered and makes the menu feel off-centered to you in comparison?

You can shift the menu over anyway if you'd like. To do it, find the "#access ul.menu,#access div.menu > ul" block in your Appearance → Custom Design → CSS page, and add a negative right margin like this:

margin-right: -100px;

Adjust the number as necessary.

how do I make short notes to myself that don't affect the code?

Comments are stripped out by our CSS parser right now, but it's a planned future update to fix that.

how do I increase the space between the search bar (now located in the sidebar) and the header?

:)

One way would be to add some padding to the top of the sidebar. Give this a try:

#secondary {
	padding-top: 22px;
}

#branding {
	padding: 0;
}

To tighten up the spacing above the content itself, you can reduce the padding on #main like this:

#main {
	padding-top: 20px;
}

Adjust the numbers as necessary.

If you are up for one more: I have modified the height of the navbar, as I want it narrow and the fonts small. But how do I now eliminate the gap I created between the navbar and the main content body?

How do I center the text elements inside the navbar?

The text inside each menu item is already centered. To center the entire navbar menu list, give this a try:

#access div {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
}

#access ul.menu, #access div.menu > ul {
	display: inline-block;
	width: auto;
}

I menat that I moved the search box out of the navbar and now would like to center the menu text in the navbar.

I have moved the navbar out of the menu, not liking the look. This prompts a follow-up question, if you dont mind: how do I center the text elements inside the navbar? I have tired CSS schemes I have found here but I have been unsuccessful.

-- addition of links to navbar beyond "home" and "about"

You can use the custom menu feature for that:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/

-- choice and size of font

You can change the font family and size for the site title, headings, and body text from the Appearance → Custom Design → Fonts page. If you need to change something more specific, post back with a description of exactly which fonts you're looking to change.

-- height dimension of the navbar

I checked http://thebluetimes.com/ and the navbar looks pretty snug already. Here is an example for making it as small as possible. You can try adjusting the numbers to your liking:

#access {
	height: 31px;
	min-height: 31px;
	padding-top: 0px;
}

Newsy is a premium theme and we Volunteers answering questions on this forum have no access to premium themes and no knowledge of how they are designed to operate.

Read-access to the premium themes forum is now open to all users.
http://premium-themes.forums.wordpress.com/

I also checked the forum threads and could not locate an answer for you in them > http://en.forums.wordpress.com/tags/newsy But don't despair, as there is Staff surpport for the custom design upgrade and they will help you.

-- height dimension of the navbar
-- choice and size of font
-- addition of links to navbar beyond "home" and "about"

The answers may be obvious, but after a dozen attempts based on examples I have found, I have failed.