Newbie Cider Help

Hey all, my first post.

I'm a *complete* noob in regards to brewing anything. I'm excited to learn though, and during the past few days have read through this entire thread and a lot of other material online. I'd like to start with cider and maybe eventually move to mead or MORE CIDER!

I'm getting familiar with all the terms you guys use and think I understand the basic concept. What I need help with for my very first batch is how to do it exactly - there's a lot of different ways to do stuff! Here's what's in my head:

1) Buy some stoppers and airlocks
2) Buy some cider in gallon jugs (with no preservatives)
3) Buy some yeast like Nottingham, S04 (or natural wild yeast?)
4) Use Campden stuff?
5) Wait a day, put yeast in
6) Measure SG until it gets to 1.010 or whatever tastes good
7) Put in fridge to cold crash?
8) Rack it to a sanitized gallon jug?
9) Wait a few days, bottle, put in fridge?

As you can see from the question marks everywhere, I'm just not sure what to do and when.

I'd like to be natural and easy at first (wild yeast sounds cool). I'd also like to avoid exploding bottles and yet still have something sweet that lasts for awhile. Maybe that's too much to ask

Thanks for any advice!

Hi BH. The one piece of information we need that is missing is whether you want your cider to be sparkling or still. You imply sparkling, but i just want to make sure. Cider making is really easy, frankly - its hard to screw it up. I'll check back to see whether you want bubbly or still cider.

Thanks! Yes, sweet and sparkling is great. My wife and I both love Woodchuck, and dark thick cider and apple juice and everything in between! So nothing too dry but sweet and sparkling is more than I could ask for!