Try making the sidebar have a background color:

#sidebar {
background-color: #FFF;
}

Woo-hoo! That did it... :)

Now, is there any way to move the blog entries over a smidge so they aren't in the middle of the spiral?

And, how do I get rid of it from the bottom... looks like it's pushing the footer banner out of the way... (right now, I have the background image set as part of the "mainbar" class.... )

Make your mainbar style look like this:

#mainbar {
        margin-left: 40px;
	margin-right:295px;
	padding-right:35px;
 }

Get the image url out of there (you'r applying it to the content div instead) and add a left margin.

You are the BEST!! Thank you so much!