Styling search form

Hello. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

I have a K2 blog at http://halcyonrealms.com

I have been trying to style my search form such that
it blends in with my background colour, and appear only as
a box with white border and white text. ( right now the background is white with black text )

I have tried inserting style attributes in #s in my style.css ie color: #000; but it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

Also, everytime when I refresh ( please refresh your browser to check this ) my blog a default search button pops out below the searchbox, which is quite an eyesore. How may I remove this default search button when its not showing when I do not refresh my page ?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you !