Excerpt or post summary on the stay theme

Hi, I am wanting my post to come up with post summaries or also known as exerpts. I have already read this page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt and cannot seem to find this in my site: <?php the_excerpt(); ?> to change it.

I also want to add, I am not a person that would know necessarily where to even find this.

I have done this: Dashboard › Settings › Reading , yet nothing has changed.

I can do the page break, but then the thumbnail photos does not show up. This is my site that I am working on.

http://keeleyrankin.com/category/blog/

Thanks!!