ugh, cars

well i think we've finally reached the end of our car troubles from the past few days. technology continues to frustrate me (although i am sitting in bed on my computer posting my life on the internet for the world to see)...but anyway, just like computers, cars are great when they're working and beyond frustrating when they're not! you really don't realize how dependant you are until there's a problem. so a week or two ago, i put the key in the ignition and it wouldn't turn. totally stuck. after trying lots of stupid things and trying to jump it, later on that night it finally jumped and worked. then, this past sunday it happened again. good thing we know people at church or we would've been seriously stuck. so we come out after church and it happens again. only we can't wait for hours there because we had a wedding to get to. so dan gave us a ride to sam's and then we rode with sam and heidi to the wedding. came home and drove back to the church parking lot to try and jump it again...p.s- its pretty hard to jump a car when the key won't turn. so needless to say, it didn't work this time so we call aaa. over two hours later, (now that we're sitting in aaron's truck in the dark all alone in the church parking lot) we're told that we need a new battery cause its totally dead and un-jumpable. wonderful. so the next morning aaron gets rides everywhere he needs to go from his teammates (you know, like you did when you were 13) and i took his car to go to sears and buy a new car battery. pick him up and go there to install our new save-the-day car battery. after much wrestling with the old corroded battery, we finally get it installed (not that either of us had done that before and knew what we were doing or anything) so we go to put the key in again, and lo and behold, the key still won't turn! so the aaa guy was full of crap. apparently, the battery power was not what was locking up the ignition...but we now had a brand new battery...and a dead car. so aaron' goes home and does some research and finds out that the fabulous ford focus is notorious for this problem, and it has nothing to do with battery power. they just decided to install the worst quality ignition they could find and 75 pages worth of people on the internet had this same problem. but ford says not enough people have reported it to be considered a recall item. in the meantime i'm getting rides places and getting stuck at the y for hours because i can't get a ride so i just keep working out for lack of better things to do. walked around the shopping center across the street aimlessly for an hour...rented a movie i didn't want, just because i had too much time on my hands. anyway, so through those postings we learned to call a locksmith instead of towing it to the dealer or another car repair place. apparently, it would have cost hundreds of dollars to do it that way. so yesterday morning i call around a lot and talk to a locksmith. we meet him at the church parking lot at 12...and proceed to wait there for 3 and a half hours while he tries to fix it. after calling his partner, having another guy come out and help him, and lots of waiting around, he got a new ignition in it and got it started! so an unnecessary new battery, and slightly less than a few hundred dollars later...we have a crappy ford focus that now works again. all this just goes to add to my frustration in always owning the lowest possible level of fords ever made...it just might be time to look into something that doesn't fall into the toy car category!!!