I think I fixed the car -- it turned out to be a bad battery and massively corrupted terminal cables. I wonder if having such bad cables could have helped the battery go bad since it was unable to ever fully charge..?  1:22:46 PM    

My wife's car is broken down, so today I'm going to do battle with it. The car is parked in a small town, quite a ways from my house, so I'm going to try and fix it exactly where it's at. I suspect it's the alternator. Reading the Hanes manual on the car it doesn't seem that difficult to replace, but we'll just have to see.  6:25:03 AM