Jarhead:
Welcome aboard and HOWDY NEIGHTBOR - I'm in Lakehurst, not sure WHERE you are but Central NJ tells me you can't be too far away.
Glad (really glad) the forums have inspired you enough to get into the hobby. It really is a great support structure for all new comers to the hobby.
The best feature of a forum (any forum) is ideas and personal experiences shared. What works for me, may not work for someone else, so they share what they did and so on. Before you know it, you have a dozen or two experiences to draw from and at least one - or a combination of many turns a light-bulb on in your head and you get the Beekeeping bug - with a degree of assurance, not a curse of reluctance.
You'll enjoy this hobby, I'm sure you will - even when people have bad experiences, they never say I hate beekeeping, instead, they take what went wrong and learn from it - often returning to try again and again.
Best wishes and again welcome.