Hi,
Thanks again for the reply, Stefan! Yes, your understanding of intended behavior is exactly correct. I appreciate and will conisider your advice whlie working thorugh this. I particularly like having less convoluted steps for my brain to manage. The whole arduino experience so far has me realizing how complicated steps are that I prevoiusly thought would/should be simple. I've been tempted to try out a more visual interpreter or use tinkercad or whatever to get my code but I think once I can reliably understand coding directly it will be worth the struggle in the end. It's more that this is one of 3 ongoing arduino/halloween projects (but for some reason the hardest) and it's already Oct 10th! 