I'll start with your second question:

.dimmed {
color: #F00;
}

You must be missing a </div> tag right before the beginning of the sidebar. You should check out the web developer extension for firefox

http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

It will make these things easier for you to track down.

It was actually rather retarded...I had deleted a bunch of garbage posts which caused there to be nothing to hold that div to the right.