Questions about Time, Distance, and Relativity

[Alex K]

Also, when they speak of the CMBR being observable in every direction that our telescopes point, I visualize it similarly to the "waves" of a smoke ring that dispense outward from the center of an explosion (as in the big bang, time, space, and matter expanding from the Singularity). Have I gotten this wrong? Is there a better way to visualize it?

I think it's not useful to think of the CMBR as coming from one point in space or time. It was produced everywhere simultaneously, going off in all directions from every point in space when the universe was 1/1100 the size it is today, hundreds if thousands of years after the (probably non existent) Singularity.