you have a blown fuse in the amp meter if you have changed the leads to read amperage, and have put the meter inline between the strap and ground. flukes have two fuses, one for the 10amp circult and one for the 200ma circuit

 

If you like buying cool tools.... It only reads from 1a to 400a AC/DC so if you want to read lower like .089a you can hook up the ground wire with a hunk of 14g and loop it 15 times and clamp all 15 and read 1.335 or 20 and read 1.78. you can turn stuff on and off to the point of melting the wire

 

Unless the fuse fixed itself, I can't explain why it happened in my case.

 

Thermal self resetting fuse in the meter so that when load dropped it came back to life i.e. when interior lights went out ?

 

AFAIK my cheap meter doesn't have a thermal self resetting fuse. And I tried both 10 amp and the lower amperage connectors. Also, since my interior lights are all LED, the draw is pretty low. Anyway, I've had a few occasions where the multimeter would not seem to pass current, like is befuddling Wally, only to have it work later on.