I finally got the design to look like I wanted it to. I had to change a few details, such as the width of the containing div, and the spacing between some of the other elements, but over all, I'm happy with the way it turned out.
After playing with the divs for a few hours I realized that the mystical method of using the clear: both actually has some merit. It solved my problem.
I have three divs that are responsible for the structure of the content portion of the site: the container div, the side bar div, and the blog content div. The container was not stretching to fit the content of either of the two column divs (side and blog content). So, I created another div after the two column divs, clearfix, with the clear attribute set to both (clear:both;). Apparently, that makes the rest of the content of the container div remain in the normal flow of the document. It stretched the container div to the actual content.
I have to say that this method is completely non-intuitive. The content of the div should have been stretched to contain any content that was within any children.