MistyLook »   Excerpts on custom homepage

Thank you Sadish, for your theme - I tweaked it a bit: www.defrostingcoldcases.com

As found on the forum here, I created a custom home page, which I made static. The idea is, to have some welcome note on it, under which excerpts of the posts are displayed (in random order, they might even 'rotate' each time you revisit the page/site).
In my posts I inserted the 'More' tag - it works great here: http://www.defrostingcoldcases.com/cold-cases/ - posts are exactly cut (at different spots).

How do I get the above excerpts on that static home page? I have been battling with it for hours now, trying several 'solutions': http://www.cameraontheroad.com/?p=437, http://www.cameraontheroad.com/?p=732, installed this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-excerpt/faq/ , but I can't get it to work.

I understand I have to run The Loop and change 'the_conctent' with 'the_excerpt'. I tried the code from the Misty Look archives.php (although it uses its own excerpt length, not the one I set per post), I add it to the Home page (in HTML), yet all I get is some part of the PhP code, as it is not rendered as PhP, but as text within HTML (it being completely 'misinterpreted').

There is no physical home.php page, so I can't add it there either.

Thanks in advance (and happy TG!)