I was given a bit of help on ubuntuforums.org. I did a walkthrough on configuring samba to share an external hard drive. It worked. Temporarily. I had access to one of the two hard drives i wanted to connect for about ten minutes. The main points:

-Both computers are running off of a wireless router
-Both computers are on the same network
-Both computers can see themselves on the network
-Neither computer can see the other computer.

The walkthrough had me set up a network drive, which is fine. If it stays, and it works, I don't care. The main problems

-I don't think I have the availability for a static ip, or I just don't know how to get one
-I don't know how to find the incoming IP because ifconfig shows no IP for "wifi0"
-I need instructions on adding a second drive with the same settings.

any help is definitely appreciated.