I really, really, really hate reading manuals!! I could stress that more, but I don't have enought time.
Fair enough, but if you're not prepared to thoroughly learn about what you're thinking about doing, I'd recommend you don't do it. There are no halfway measures with security. You either know, to the best of your knowledge, that it's secure, or you have to assume it isn't secure. If it isn't secure, it'll be cracked sooner or later. I seem to remember reading that the average time between putting a box on the 'net and having the "door rattled" was about 12 hours. You'll be found.
Most have too much information that would apply on an enterprise level rather than a home user/newbie.
Is there a difference between enterprise level security and newbie security? It comes down the same thing I'd have thought: if you open something up to the outside, make sure it's secure. The only difference between enterprise level and home/newbie level it that in the enterprise you'll need to open more services up.
Is there a "crib notes" version that I can look at some where?
For what *you* need? No. There's probably some generic ones out there which you could gamble on telling you what you need to know.
I've always had a static IP, but no reason for anyone to look at it.
You wouldn't want that reason to be that you're running a porn or warez server would you? I've actually spent the last couple of days looking at my firewall setup and installing a SOCKS5 server. I had reason to browse through the logs, and saw all the script kiddy attempts, door rattlers and Windows malware crap the firewall was holding back for me. I also temporarily ran a web server a few weeks back so a friend could access some files. I ran it on a weird port number which only he knew about. It was still collecting uninvited hits within a week. It's ugly out there. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003