Friday Five: Lock Me Out, Lock Me In

Over at RevGalBlogPals, Songbird writes:

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.

This turned out to be a very small barricade in our blogging community life, but it seemed appropriate to explore locks and blocks and other barriers this week. Also, I liked the picture of the security team above! Could they be Blogger's Spam Prevention Robots, working overtime?

In honor of their efforts, I bring you the "Lock Me Out, Lock Me In" Friday Five.

1) How do you amuse yourself when road construction blocks your travel? Not very well, I admit. Mudslides, on the other hand... we do all right with mudslides (as referenced in the final question of last week's FF).

2) Have you ever locked yourself out of your house? (And do you keep an extra key somewhere, just in case?) Yep. Shortly after we bought this house I had to drive home from the office to let The Alpha back in. We devised a key-hiding scheme, and also agreed that we would stop turning the lock on the knob of one of the three doors to the house, thus ensuring it could only be locked from the outside by turning a key in the deadbolt. It's worked quite well.

3) Have you ever cleared a hurdle? (And if you haven't flown over a material hurdle, feel free to take this one metaphorically.) I've cleared plenty of metaphorical ones... my problem is that when the same ones pop up again, I often get just as frustrated as I did before, instead of using what I've learned.

4) What's your approach to a mental block? I go accomplish some small thing I know I can do, then go back to The Block with a little more confidence and the reminder that I don't have as much time to complete the task as I did before I pussyfooted around (nothing like a looming deadline, huh?).

5) Suggest a caption for the picture above; there will be a prize for the funniest answer! Far too manly to cut simple paper dolls to entertain their toddlers, the construction crew decided to go with material more suited to Sawzall® use.