I'm sure I'm not alone here in my freakish obsessiveness while I refresh my forum screen every few minutes waiting for that announcement... My question is where do we normally see the info first?

http://www.bethblog.com/

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/skyrim

or the Steam 'tools' section itself?

Steam tools itself. Since you'll need to use that to download it. They might post an announcement on the blog first, but if it's not available on Steam tools in your region (because of mirroring or whatever) then any announcement is worthless.

I just reloaded Steam and the Creation Kit was in the Tools section. It's downloading now.

Close Steam. Open it again. Go to Tools, and it's under "Creation Kit".