When you power up you are buying vests. Currently 1 million vests equals a little over 490 steem power. When you power down you are exchanging your vests for steem. If you dont do anything else on steemit you will see you steem power go up slowly because your steem power is actually the amount of steem your vests are worth.
Hope that helps and I didnt make it more complicated.
Okay, so this was simply what happened when i converted anything in my account to steem power?
I had the idea that delegate meant something different in this case...no?
The way I understood this was the delegation was giving someone SP to use, in this case about 15 SP for voting and such...why would the steem platform delegate SP to me? or am I understanding incorrectly?
No you are right... Steemit delegates you 15 and that goes away as you get sp. That helps with your bandwidth (allowed activity on the blockchain) and upvoting