Loose almost blowing-up and related properties

It is shown that finitely-fixed processes have -metric versions of the almost blowing-up property, the approximate-match waiting-time property, and the strong form of extremality. The proofs make use of a new result that connects, in a local almost sure way, fixed-length blocks in a process with fixed-length blocks in an expansion of the process. Supported in part by joint NSF-Hungarian Academy grant INT-9515485.