And there ya go. it can stay within the KISS method!
Here the avenues run north/south and streets are east/west. As long as you are not in a curved part of an avenue it is pretty easy to judge north since a house is usually squared to the street it is on.

Phone or CW, it isn't very hard to do and it's a blast.

Modes really won't be a big concern. The rigs these days have all the conventional modes so you would have AM FM CW and SSB anyway. For digital modes you add a sound card interface and away you go, try a few and see what you like. For me it is just RTTY, I don't much care about the others. Maybe someday though.

http://www.rollanet.org/~n0klu/Ham_Radio/History%20of%20Ham%20Radio.pdf

...and probably the book "200 Meters and Down"

Chances are something other than the link above is out there as well that has that info in it already.

Trees don't matter much at all until you get up above 30MHz a ways.
They make good antenna supports!
I have a 102ft inverted V about 40ft up in a fir tree that is probably 80 or more feet tall. Trees like that are all over the place in this neighborhood!! I have 4 of them on my property all twice as tall as my 40ft tower.

The best key out there is the one YOU like.
Everybody likes something different in a key.
Many have several, I have six of them.
Two Iambic keys, single lever, hand key, touch key, and a double speed or "cootie" key.
I have had two Bencher BY-1 keys and sold them, I just didn't like them. It is a popular key though. Many buy it as a first key and never buy a different one. The MFJ copy (sort of) is pathetic.
The favorite is my Hamco Scotia, it's much the same as a Vibroplex Brass Racer.

Bencher and Kent keys are marketed widely so they have an advantage in becoming popular.

There should be some articles out there about building an amp like that.

If you happen to already have many of the parts or can get then at a very reasonable price you can do ok with an amp project.
If you have to chase all the parts down and buy them at retail and pay for shipping from different companies then building your own can be a pricey project, but a fun one none the less.

Many CB amps didn't have any manufacturer info on them. Many were made in fly by night sorts of shops, basements and garages. Usually they were poorly designed without any biasing etc. They all had warnings about use on CB but that is what the target market was. There are very few ham amplifiers that you cannot find info about on the internet.
The 6LQ6 is a sweep tube with 30 watts of plate dissipation and is not a good choice for a linear amplifier. They were however extremely cheap to purchase back then so if you wanted to keep costs down to maximize profits they were a good choice on only that dimension.
Good for a few parts but that is about it.

I would get a Pro 3 or forget it. I would want to get up to the newest most refined model of the series as I can get. I would rather wait until I could afford it or make a big effort to make it affordable i.e. sell some other gear, etc.

Look up the Koch method on the web.
Far better way of going about it.

In a word, no.
In several words, it actually never was!

I was there! I used the Ameco record which is probably the same. I got through it ok but didn't know any better at the time.
Back then we had to be able to write stuff down and focused far too much on that. We had to have 1 perfect continuous minute of hard copy SOMEWHERE inside of 5 minutes that was sent. Now you don't so I wouldn't want to learn it that way. I would want to learn it as just "head copy" and not written.
There are much better methods out there these days.

I still have what I copied on paper for my novice test...pretty scary looking!! 

Ok, I wasn't aware that it had that. 
There has been a couple questions on how to have a rigs LCD display show up on a computer monitor (without HRD) like can be done with a IC-7000 which has a video output so I thought it was going in that direction.

American Morse exclamation point, a Japanese Handakuten, and an International Morse exclamation point.

There may be other correct answers though since that doesn't make any sense as far as an actual message goes.

The pocket Morse reader has just an LCD display. It has no video output so it isn't going to happen.
The thing to do is get/make a soundcard interface to use with your rig and the laptop with a (free) program such as CwGet.
Then you would also be all set up to use the various digital modes as well.

Just use BG
...BIG GUN!