Of course, you're more than welcome to shoot me an email if you ever get stuck.
Here is a far more forgiving reference to Common Lisp than the Hyperspec, though don't let the fancy TeX typesetting intimidate you.
http://clqr.berlios.de/clqr-a4-consec.pdf
In addition to that, I think you should dump yourself a nice image with ASDF and QL builtin, so you don't have to load them every time.