lock in, lock out 5

Today's Friday 5 from the RevGals is lock me out; lock me in and this one's from Songbird, whose intro includes:

For some reason, Blogger declared this blog possible SPAM and locked us down yesterday. This morning, we're free to post again, but there was a fair amount of excitement last night among our contributors, who found a dire notice on their Blogger dashboards threatening that this blog might be deleted in 20 days!

We requested a blog review, and I posted a request at the Blogger Help group, where I found we were not alone. Many other perfectly nourishing and cromulent blogs got the same notice last night...

For my intro I need to mention how excited I was when I realized this group of Jesus People had been flagged--I hoped just maybe it meant we're being appropriately subversive and counter-cultural?! Now, my responses to Songbird's 5...

1) In cases of road construction blocks, if they've let traffic go that far it's generally a simple Go Slow or otherwise not a long wait, so with resignation I trust I've not lost too much time and the dust and debris won't cause too much dirt or destruction.

2) Have I locked myself out of my house? Yes. Back in City of History when I was living in the parsonage (supposedly for 2 or 3 months while they got it ready for sale, but it turned out to be 18 months...) it was late at night and a neighbor helped me get in a window, though surprisingly, I don't recall how I happened to get locked out. Currently I'm in a condo complex, and my next-door neighbors have a key; I also carry an extra in my wallet.

3) Clearing a material or metaphorical hurdle...currently I'm amidst a huge one, as a long series of hopeful possibilities have started to open up and then shut down. Despite someone saying to me, "not a single door has been permanently closed," none have opened wider than a crack of space or longer than a fleeting slice of time and these days I wonder, truly I do.

4) When I get a mental block, if at all possible I'll switch to another task or take a short break, but when time and schedules loom, I just tough it out and hope the results won't be too terrible. Then again, I can't count the times I've told myself I'm tired and tomorrow will be different after I've had some sleep, but "tomorrow" has duplicated all of the near-fruitless yesterdays.

5) My caption for this picture: "Just walk away, Renée; we can't let you pass by here again."