After staying out too late Tuesday night, then going to bed at 8:30pm last night, I finally had some free time after work tonight to play around with Drupal. I installed Drupal 7 on my MacBook, following these instructions. The only real trouble I had was in making sure that every host reference was set to 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost, or anything else.
Most of the obvious stuff seems to be working. I haven’t figured out clean URLs yet though.