welcome home yogidmt. i think all of your questions/concerns have been addressed but one. you're worried about messing up and making a bad product and having a bad experience without a sitter, it sounds like to me. IMO...if you do the extraction by the teks and ask questions and follow advice, it's pretty much impossible to make a "bad" product. if you do it "wrong", it won't produce the end result that you'll see in pictures. so if you're worried about doing it wrong and hurting yourself, don't. you can post pics of the final product and people will know right away if it's what you want. it's quite the refined art around here and there are plenty of willing artists to check out your first masterpiece.
you'll probably find extracting to be a lot of fun, too. once you get started with an extraction...DO NOT throw it away until you see your finished product. you may think you f'd it up or got all the spice out when honestly there could be a lot more. so do your extraction, weigh your finished product. take pics of final product and post a thread listing the tek/recipe you used, final yield and post a pic or two (trust us...we love to see people's first time pics...brings back memories for us). keep the bark soup until you're certain you got it all out.
no matter how daunting it may seem, i promise...it's not. i found it to be a bigger headache to get all the glassware and chems and other supplies than it was to actually do the first extraction!
good luck and welcome to the nexus.
embrace your nothingness...it's all you are...