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?
If I’m by myself, I listen to the radio, flipping between stations as needed. If Dear Husband is there, it’s an opportunity for conversation. But if the kids are there, well, let’s hope they brought their doodle boards and don’t need to go to the bathroom.
2) Have you ever locked yourself out of your house? (And do you keep an extra key somewhere, just in case?)
I once locked myself out of my apartment in
But the worst, the absolute worst, was when I locked my keys in the car with DramaQueen, age 3, inside. Somehow I managed to coach her to flip the lock. In the old days that would have been easy—remember the cars with the locks that looked like golf tees sticking out of the door? I don’t know how she finally grasped which of the buttons to press where with me shouting and miming directions through the window. This was in
3) Have you ever cleared a hurdle? (And if you haven't flown over a material hurdle, feel free to take this one metaphorically.)
The mastectomy was a huge hurdle. Sometimes I forget what a big deal it was. Firecracker’s brain surgery was a hurdle. Her birth was a big hurdle. All my hurdles involve hospitals. I think we stumbled over them rather than cleared them, but they are at last behind us
4) What's your approach to a mental block?Read something fun and surf the web, maybe write a bit, watch the home improvement channel, go to the library. Watch Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time.
5) Suggest a caption for the picture above; there will be a prize for the funniest answer!
I’m no good at this sort of thing. They look like old-fashioned paper dolls merged with Legos.
Bless you, there have been more hurdles than any one person needs to clear!
ReplyDeleteI can imagine them saying
ReplyDelete"Let-go" (get it lego... let go). I thought it was punny.
Aggregator widget is now a part of blogger -- it's a selection in the layout section.
Go to layout and then "add" to the side bar.
Good luck!
BTW -- is your denominational office off either Sever or North Brown Road? If so, you work within shouting distance of the Loving Husband -- he works at Sage at North Brown.
ReplyDeleteRev Mom: Yep, I can see Sage from my window. I remember when there was just a vacant lot there. At least I think I do.
ReplyDeletehuge hurdles ...
ReplyDeleteGlad that P&P helps and the library too. You are my kind of gal.
BTW
I asked you something over at my blog ... Alice, I was asked to review it (Third Day book). Maybe I should add that to my post? Tell me, do you like their music? Have you ever been to one of their concerts?
swing back over and tell me more, won't you?
1. I read. I'm not a big talker, and if I'm with my dad and we get stuck somewhere, I have to have a book, otherwise I go insane. If I'm with my mother, we read our respective books. It's a better bonding experience than talking could ever be.
ReplyDelete2. It's a long story, but:
One Friday in the winter of my freshman year of high school, when my parents were away for the weekend and my siblings were all spending the night at a friend's house, I came home to find all the doors locked.
Since I had forgotten my key that morning, I went directly into the garage to get the spare one. It, however, was not there.
I decided not to panic and instead went across the street to ask my neighbor to use his phone. Neither he nor my other neighbors down the street were home. Since this was the township and the only other residence was the very dangerous trailer park down the street, I went back to the garage and looked high and low for the elusive spare key, all to no avail.
Now, it would be a gross understatement to say that winters where I come from are (for the most part) bitterly cold. Still, the weather in Ohio constantly changes. One day there can be relatively no snow and quite warm; the next day the only thing you can see is white and the temperature is below 0. On this particular day, the snow was very high, the wind was blowing fiercely and I was locked outside of my own home. Needless to say, I started to panic.
I got it together enough to take refuge in the garage. I was in there for almost two hours—two hours of pacing back and forth; reading from my textbooks; lamenting the fact I didn't have my worn-out copy of Heroes by Robert Cormier with me for once; using rags to warm my legs; singing songs; talking to myself about my day; watching as it started snowing again and again through the grimy little garage window—before I concocted a plan.
I dragged one of my dad's ladders to the window outside of the kitchen at the back of the house, and then went back for a broom and a large crow bar. My plan was to first get the screens off the windows and then use the crowbar to pry open whichever window was unlocked.
Getting the screens off was relatively easy; all I had to do was use the broom to poke a hole in them near the little latches that open from the inside. Prying open the windows, however, posed a challenge. I went through four of them before I realized I should check first to see which windows were unlocked through the glass panes.
The only window that happened to be unlocked was my brother's bedroom window, although that took ten minutes to pray open. All while I was doing this, the sky grew darker and snow began falling once more. By the time I crawled through the open window and went back outside through the front door to put everything away, it turned into a full-blown blizzard.
When I surveyed the damage, there were two broken windows—my brother’s and the kitchen’s, which I cracked with the broom.
I spent the rest of that night in agony. I was certain my parents (and my brother) were going to kill me when they found out, but I didn’t regret not freezing to death.
3. I took track in junior high and liked to jump over the hurdles when no one was looking. As for metaphorical hurdles, I'm still getting past the tough ones.
4. Writing. Unless I'm having writer's block, in which case I read.
5. Old-fashioned paper dolls merged with Lego indeed, Bad Alice.