I’ve done it.
I’ve upgraded my WP to the latest version. Looks the same to you, right?

Only the dashboard looks somewhat better to me (anything new is always nice!
)
Took me a while to figure out all the steps (now I know why the other time I had trouble upgrading WP – I didn’t follow their upgrade instructions) but at least nothing’s lost this time. If you see less posts, that’s just because I’ve cleared them out.
Still in the midst of putting back those html written ones – work in progress.
Need a new layout – any volunteers?
And it looks like I have to painstakingly remove all the backward slashes out of my posts – why are they there? To make life even MORE difficult, no doubt.
