Right now I'm using this forum primarily to ask questions.  So I thought it would be a good idea to "give back," and mention a couple of awesome modeling tips that other newbies might find useful.

1)  Hiding part of the mesh.  When I was confronted with the challenge of fitting a couple of eyeballs into a head, I realized that I needed to hide part of the mesh in order to be able to see the edges of the eyelids from the right angle.  Well, this is incredibly easy.  In edit mode just select the vertices you want to hide, and then hit the letter H!  To show all the mesh again, press Alt H.  To hide the de-selected vertices, press Shift H.

2)  Controlling the lighting for modeling.  The lights that illuminate the mesh for modeling are the Solid Open GL Lights.  They can be adjusted in the System & Open GL panel.  This panel is one of the tabs of the Info Window, and the instructions for opening it are here:  http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Interface/Configuration .

Say for instance I want to look at something that is on the dark side of the mesh.  I just open the Info Window and adjust the GL lights so that the bottom side has some light on it.

Hope that was helpful...