epilogue: (steffan may be guilty of prematurely crying "bs")

well, i'm just glad yesterday is over.

I got the car at three and took the battery in to Shucks. Ford said that it was cold cranking 11.9 volts at 100 amps, when it should be generating 12 volts at 300 amps. Shucks put a multimeter across the old battery and found the same thing. The guy at Shucks says that this is the kind of Voltage and Amperage that they see with a battery with one dead cell. Apparantly this is not an uncommon thing, even among new batteries. If so, why isn't a load test standard practice? In any case, I asked them to test the new battery. (That honestly didn't occur to the counterman, I mean we had one bad battery and they were going to give me another without taking a moment to put a meter on it.) Anyhow , It's fine. So now there are a few possibilities:

1. the aforementioned electrical system failure, which is draining batteries and blowing fuses
2. an unusual "comedy of errors" ... the earlier NAPA battery was drained by mystery's lunchtime uses of the car and AC (She ate her lunch in the car, while listening to the radio, to avoid the mindless tedium of her office. A few times, she left the lights on all morning. Mystery only began driving again recently.) Then the engine fuse blew or wore out, preventing the jump from working. I then went and purchased a battery with a dead cell, and replaced my old battery with it. The Ford folks replaced the fuse, but didn't put the new weak battery through a load test, because it (barely) had enough juice to turn the car over, so nothing appeared to be wrong. A few days later, the lame battery can no longer push enough amps to turn the car over, and i interpret this second failure as a reoccurance of the first issue.

So what will tell? A daily check of the battery Voltage and Amperage I guess, which I will do. If the battery appears to be rapidly loosing oomph, then we know there is a wiring fault somewhere.
Maybe it's time to buckle under, get a part time job, and invest in a new car. It has to be this year, cause after this, any finance check would uncover Mystery's impending Stafford Loans for Law School. Right now with our severance money, we could put $3000 down on a new $10,000 Civic easy. If we can scrape up a few more thousand for the initial down payment, plus whatever i'd get in trade for my beleagered Escort, then we could get a long term lease, so we don't have a huge required payment in case things get rough(er), but we could overpay and apply any excess towards the priciple and probably pay off the whole tab by next July, and then we would have a reliable vehicle while Mystery goes to Law School. Any other opinions? I'm open to suggestions...