This is really mostly my issue. She'll even get excited. But by the time I've explained the 15 pieces of background knowledge needed to understand what I mean

This is really mostly my issue. She'll even get excited. But by the time I've explained the 15 pieces of background knowledge needed to understand what I mean... I'm not even excited anymore. :D We've got a whole lot of common ground-- she's a mechanical engineer, and now we're both involved quite a bit in education and coaching. That stuff we can talk about. But late last night I came up with a clever trick to collapse some tedious keypad-scanning-code down into something surprisingly tidy, and in that moment all I could really say was "I got the keypad on those boards for the robotics kids working in a really nice way".