You're excitement is definitely contagious! I'm always wondering what people do with these things though? What kind of projects? Just getting started with electronics myself and not quite sure what to make of microcontrollers yet.
Thank you for the kind words, reading your message made me smile :)
I think the most interesting and quickest to explain thing I've done with these chips (the ESP8266) was a chain of temperature/humidity sensors packed in my office building.
I only ended up building out a couple (soldering by hand on prototype boards) but I used a ESP8266 + 1200mAh battery pack + DHT22 sensors to make small modules we could put in different corners of the building. We had A/C issues during hot summers and it's a lot easier to report them to the building management by saying "4 conference rooms have been above 80 degrees all day". The modules woke themselves up every 30 min, waited until a stable recording was captured, then POST'd their hardcoded label (like "Corner office"), the temperature, the humidity, and the time to a Heroku server (which when loaded in a browser simply spat out all records).
At home, the one semi-recent project I've been most proud of was a remote trigger for my A/C. I used a Raspberry Pi with both an IR emitter and a IR sensor attached, taught it my cheap window A/C unit's remote's codes, then emulated them to turn the A/C on and off based on a server and small app that did geofencing. My apartment didn't have built-in A/C, but it started cooling off the second I walked out of my office at around 6 PM on a weekday :)
If you're interested in building things, you should get a Raspberry Pi 3 or one of these chips (and a pack of sensors/inputs) well before you have an idea. I set them up with access on my WiFi then just leave them in a corner for months (sometimes years) before I use them for anything, but I think the most important part is having the smallest barrier from "ooh! what if!" to initial prototype.
In that project they ran for less than a minute once every 30 min, on my 1200mAh they lasted around 2 weeks if I remember correctly. There's a lot of reading material online about sending the ESP8266 into standby mode.
