And it sort of worked on this page:
http://susanjcunningham.com/2011/12/13/blackberrys-days-in-thailand-are-numbered/

At least bold does work now. The spacing issue continues.
Here you can see the problem of paragraphs too close together:

http://susanjcunningham.com/2012/07/18/indonesia-hotels-and-middle-class/

On this and other pages I have tried inserting <P> pairs, single <P> and
. Page looks OK. Save. Then a few minutes later or, occasionally, the next day, the paragraphs are squished together again and the code has disappeared. I tried putting them inside and outside the <H3> brackets.

I somehow succeeded in getting some of the spacing to stick on this homepage:

http://susanjcunningham.com/ Actually, there are too many spaces between some paragraphs but better that than too close together. I was able to insert spaces on this page with single <P> but the effect only lasted a few hours. As for the current state (which might change) … there now no <P> or anything else in the code. I guess I just clicked "Enter" from the visual view and some of them stuck this time.

Inserting
on this page:

http://susanjcunningham.com/2011/12/13/blackberrys-days-in-thailand-are-numbered/

sort of worked. It lasedt for a whole day but a slash mark ( / ) was also visible on the page. I deleted those slash marks and I’m back to square one. Some things do remain in the code, though: I thought for a moment that “ ” without the quote marks or “<H3></H3>” were adding a space. Nope, the one correctly spaced part (after the 3rd paragraph) now doesn’t have a code there at all.

Maybe I could insert spacing some how in the CSS? Along with the body font instruction? Should I just give up on this theme?
Surely someone else has encountered this problem before?

Tnx

After I shifted to the Beach theme from the theme you now see, I wanted cleaner fonts and I wanted to have boldface in the parts you see now.

You will probably note that in the current state/theme of my blog, I have changed the font by hand--paragraph by paragraph. But when I ported it over to the Beach theme, I stripped all that out on my homepage, went back to default and then I added boldface in places.

I also found the paragraphs in Beach were too close together, so I inserted paragraph breaks. It looked fine. I press save and--the boldface and the extra spacing all disappear! It's just a slab of text.

Perhaps I can fix all this with CSS? I'm a novice with it, so I haven't even tried. But if it's possible, I will give it a try. Would also like to know if there are other themes with problems similar to Beach that I should avoid.

Thank you!