Ok, now I am confused, where is my confusion as to your two previous statements
"I've decided that the firewall will not be active until the machine has been up for more than 5 minutes"
and later
"The firewall is always on"
but if some situation where you ". . . make some catastrophic mistake like blacklisting your entire network . . . " how will you just ". . . reboot the machine, log in, fix it, and that's it" ?