I don't know if I'm helping or being annoying but I went back and worked through each example in the Python Programming Wikibook and tinkered with each one, seeing what variations did, so I still have no clue how to implement ungemmed's pseudocode yet (that's about as far as I got with my own) but at least I'm getting the idea of how to define variables and manipulate them.

I'm a lot like you, I think. This is my first non-HTML code because I self-taught in HTML by taking other people's source code and manipulating it to see how they'd done what they did. Hang in there a little longer and see if it clicks? If not, I don't mean to push you or frustrate you more.