Tom, thanks for your quick reply. I don’t want the homepage to be the blog page, so I kept the Front page as a static page, and set the 2nd dropdown “Posts Page” to the “Blog” page, which worked great:
http://balancedschedule.thebumbershoot.com/community/blog/
(funny that in 5 years of WordPress development I never noticed the existence of that dropdown! I usually build my own templates, yours is the first one lean enough for my taste)
So now that just leaves the author page issue to figure out… the above link should allow you to click the author’s name to confirm the author url.