well...I gotta say, I'm pretty sure the problem is solved.
it was
fu*king hot today, and traffic was a bit worse than usual. 25 min on the road (at least in my car..a bit more if you count the bus trip to my car) to get to the daycare to pick up kiddos. As you can see from my link it was toasty. Generally I have to park the car, and pop the hood to let things cool down. Today, I skipped popping the hood, and intentionally spent as little time getting them out of there as I could. Back to car, load 'em up, hop in, twist key, pray.
She fired right up no questions asked.
So...for now, I'm gonna mark this fixed. Will report back if anything changes. Anyone else having this issue should really look into this. It's not hard at all to do, and for a pittance in time/money, you can fix it. Going to look into the more permanent 1/0 cable from battery to starter at some point, but that's a bit more involved of a project.