TwentyTen Theme Functions Question

So, I’m 0 for 2 on finding answers on the forum, and 2 for 2 on just screwing with everything seeing what it does and accidentally figuring it out the hard way…but this one is frustrating and it’s just a simple little change, not like overhauling the whole theme. It’d be nice if there could be comments in the structure pages in layman’s terms. Not all of us are coders or know squat about php…so instead of endwhiles and erstwhiles, maybe something like “this changes the title color” or “leave this alone” or “this is the 2nd link on the right” ;-p

Anyway, the “Continue Reading” link – all I want to do is change the text to “Read More” so I found it in functions.php and changed that text but nothing happens, it doesn’t change on the page at all. I refreshed and cleared cache and nothing changes.

Now, before last night’s “updates” I had managed to find and change it, but didn’t note what or where I did it…and after the updates it totally reset everything on that theme back to black and white.

Why? Was that necessary? Are we going to have to redo every theme in a network every time there’s an update?

The actual question though (even though if the above is the case I might just go back to HTML pages and leave wp for good, that’s too much nonsense to deal with and didn’t happen in 2.9) is how and where do I go to change the text label itself? Did I miss something?

ETA: I know somebody’s going to say “um, back up your files” and I would but I just got into modifying it and wasn’t ready. Is this backup link an automatic thing or is it so convoluted I need a computer engineering degree to handle it? If it’s automatic and an update resets everything, how, exactly would I restore it to the previous version? Thanks!