So now that I turned off the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin because it was causing my excerpts on my category pages not to show - I now need some advice on how to solve a problem that Thumbnails for Excerpts was solving for me:

At the bottom of my front page (http://coloradoanimalwelfareleague.org) I have a News and Events section where I want to show excerpts for posts from the category "News and Events". I have this setup as a widget and am using the Recent Posts with Excerpts plugin. When I was using the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin the thumbnails showed up for the excerpts shown here, now they don't show and the plugin doesn't have any built-in thumbnail support.

Is there a way to use the built in Atahualpa excerpt functionality that uses the Featured Image for the thumbnail in this widget (or some other brilliant way that I haven't discovered yet)? I'm happy to put php code in the widget but I'm not sure what it would be.

Really - no ideas here at all?