JusClimb's Blog

Mmmmm, sun...

2007-07-12T18:38:00.000-05:00

Long Island has great beaches... I think. Not entirely sure though becuase I was too distracted by the wonderful company ;)

It was a very good visit!

The Marvelous Bex!

2007-06-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

Just couldn't resist sharing this very cute picture, AND the news that Rebecca is going to be moving to Lawrence in August to be near me and to study Massage Therapy at one of the schools in town. Hope everyone's Saturday is going as well as mine is! :)

Brief update

2007-06-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

I'm done with classes, (maybe permanently), Summer is in full swing, and things are busy as always. Last week I took a trip to Texas to visit my friend Dan and help him load up his moving van to move to North Carolina. Then for the weekend I was up in Nebraska for the wedding of my friends Adam and Meagan. All in all it was a great week! The rest of the summer is also going to be busy, with a trip home to NY in July to visit the family and girlfriend, and later on in July a trip to Germany for a conference. Should be lots of fun! Stay tuned, more news soon ;)

I'll be the last one standing

2007-04-20T11:01:00.000-05:00

Emerson Drive: Last One Standing

Queen of the night
Life of the party
It's all an illusion
You can't hide that big of heartache
So stop the delusion
Waitin' for someone's rescue
My arms are right here for you

(Chorus:)
Through the wind and the rain
Through the laughter and pain
Count on me
And when life isn't fair
And there's nobody there, I will be
In a world of pretenders
I am your defender
(I'll never surrender)
And when it all comes down
(Yeah, when it all comes down)
I'll be the last one standing

This is for life
Don't ever doubt it
I've already fallin'
Love is alive
So stand up and shout it
Cause destiny's calling
The others who stand behind me
They don't look nothing like me

(Chorus)

Waitin' for someone's rescue
My arms are right here for you

(Chorus)

And now, for the rest of the story...

2007-03-19T19:42:00.000-05:00

Journalist Elizabeth Horst has done a full writeup of what shall henceforth be referred to as "the incident".

Update 2007.05.24: Since the above link no longer works, I have reproduced the above article below for your enjoyment.

Kansas Man Brutally Assaulted by Guardrail on Way Home
Monday, March 19, 2007

Kansas resident Justin Rohrer was brutally assaulted by the one hundred feet of a guardrail on his way home from Florida. Rohrer’s 1998 Jeep Cherokee suffered extensive damage from the attack and may be pressing charges in the future.

Justin Rohrer, native to New York and currently a Kansas resident, experienced an unexpected beginning to the New Year 2007. After spending Christmas vacation with his family in New York, he drove down to Florida with a friend to visit his grandfather and attend the wedding of two other friends.

On Tuesday, January 2, 2007, Rohrer was traveling back to his home in Kansas when an unforeseen series of events occurred. He was toward the end of his four-thousand-mile journey when he was suddenly and viciously attacked by 100 feet of guardrail, which totaled his jeep in the most cruel and unnecessary fashion.

It is unknown at this time what caused the anger of the guardrail to attack Rohrer and his Jeep Cherokee. In considering the standoff between the vehicle and the angry guardrail, speculation causes the public to assume that when Rohrer was passing through, the guardrail became extremely violent and vengeful—again, for reasons unknown—and quickly attacked.

The initial blow caused serious damage to the front of the vehicle, completely demolishing the left headlight fixture, tearing off the license plate, and causing irreparable damage to one tire. However, that was not the end of the guardrail’s fury. Lashing around, it smashed the left rear lights of the Jeep, but was prevented from causing further damage as Rohrer was traveling at a fairly high rate of speed.

As mentioned before, this is pure speculation on the press’s part and the only definite information at this time regarding the incident is that the Jeep was able to carry Rohrer to safety away from the vicious guardrail. After stopping the vehicle and changing the front left tire, both Rohrer and the Jeep Cherokee arrived safely at home 200 miles later without further problems.

Justin Rohrer recently spoke on this disaster and in his own words: “Yeah, oops.” After a slight pause of reflection and regret, he continued. “So the bad news is that the Jeep is totaled. It did manage to get me the rest of the 200 miles home after the accident with just replacing one tire, which is fairly impressive. I imagine I'll be fixing this mess for some time to come. That was the bad news, otherwise the trip was quite good.”

After seeing the headlines in the news regarding the Jeep accident, Reporter Horst conducted a brief interview with Rohrer, asking quite bluntly, “How on earth did that happen?!” Rohrer replied, “A guardrail hit me!” While that may be astonishing to most people, the next question that naturally follows should be, How does one press charges against a guardrail?! Of course, in their right state of mind, guardrails do not and should not attack 1998 Jeep Cherokees. But that is besides the point.

Most certainly, Justin Rohrer will be taking it more carefully when he drives past guardrails in the future. And to be doubly sure, his Jeep will be extremely cautious not to make eye contact with guardrails ever again to avoid such further attacks.

Elizabeth Horst, Reporting
Chatham, New York

CORRECTION on 03-20-07:

In the article above, there are two errors. Please take careful note:
1. Rohrer was not traveling to Florida to "attend the wedding of two other friends," but rather to participate in the wedding of a friend as a groomsman.
2. While the guardrail was extremely violent and unnecessarily harsh toward the Jeep, it did not damage the front license plate. Kansas vehicles are not required to have a license plate on the front and therefore there was none to be damaged by the angry guardrail.

The author regrets the errors and apologizes for the carelessness regarding those details.

Holiday Travels (Travails?)

2007-01-04T15:06:00.000-06:00

So for my vacation we headed off to NY to visit the family for a week and have Christmas, then it was off to FL with Kenny and Ted for Ted & Becca's Wedding. Then New Year's with my Grandfather (also in FL) and back to KS by Tuesday 4,000 miles and 100 ft. of guardrail later...

Yeah, oops... So the bad news is that the Jeep is totaled. It did manage to get me the rest of the 200 miles home after the accident with just replacing one tire, which is fairly impressive. I imagine I'll be fixing this mess for some time to come. That was the bad news, otherwise the trip was quite good so I'll put some more details in another post.

Thoughts

2006-12-20T17:41:00.000-06:00

So this isn't so much of a Christmas post as it is a New Years post; thinking back over the events of the past year and so on. This next week or so is going to be crazy, so I don't know that I'll have much opportunity to reflect. The year certainly got off to a rocky start, feeling utterly betrayed by the person closest to me at the time. I can't say that I fully understand why this had to happen, or that anything good has come of it, but I believe that somehow it was a providential occurrence and maybe someday in the future the purpose will be made clear. Beyond that, and perhaps in part because of it, 2006 has been a year of changes. After 2.5 years in Kansas it really feels like home (Not to say that I don't miss my family in NY). I have made new friends here as well as deepened existing friendships, and have had a more active social calendar than ever before. I also acquired a new hobby (home-brewing) which is quite therapeutic. If that doesn't make sense, you have obviously never tried it, but I'll be happy to explain:-) My apartment is full to bursting, and has tried my patience (and gag reflex) as mentioned in a previous post, but is home for now and probably will be until I graduate. Which brings us to school.
The fall semester was insanely busy and I was definitely over committed with 3 classes (2 is a full load) and 2 research projects (technically you can only have 1). More than one professor told me I was crazy. Even so, the busyness was good, I felt very focused and productive and made it through with my GPA unscathed. Next semester is back to 2 classes and 1 project, but quite a bit of interesting research shaping up. This academic year marks my 20th as a student, however this is the first time I can honestly say that I am content in that role. High-school seemed like it would never end. College was some sort of bizarre torture designed to deprive me of sleep and sanity. My first two years at KU were much more pleasant but at that point the academics were overshadowed by life in general and just going through a major adjustment period in more ways than one. As of October I now have a new research project which is much more in line with the ideas I have floating around for a thesis topic, and I continue to have good faculty and colleagues to work with. Classes have also been good. This is not to say that I foresee becoming a professional student :-). I am still on track to graduate in 2009, but I am happy doing what I'm doing in the meantime.
So do I have any New Years resolutions? Nope; don't believe in them. Just going to keep taking each day as it comes and hopefully have some fun in the process :-)

Humor

2006-11-07T14:31:00.000-06:00

A few good lines from a former president.
The Wit of Ronald Reagan
The best one being: "If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."
--Ronald Reagan

The Great 2006 Blackout

2006-08-25T13:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday didn't really go as planned from about 11am on. That's when I got to work and found out that we'd been without power since 7am. It's really hard to get any work done in a computing research center without any electricity. It is rather funny to observe people wandering the halls like lost sheep saying things like "I can't even let people know the meeting is cancelled because email is down." Gives one pause to think about how dependent we are on computers. About 4pm we got a 2 megawatt diesel generator delivered (If that number doesn't mean anything to you, it's easily big enough to supply power to a neighborhood of 150 large family homes), and spent another couple hours connecting it to the building power feeds, which is an interesting process in itself if one happens to be a slightly nerdy electrical engineer... All that to say that we didn't have power until 6pm and then we spent another 4 hours getting critical services (Lights, HVAC, Email, and Internet, in that order) running again. I got home around 11pm. The generator isn't large enough to handle the main research computers, so we won't have those until main power is restored in about a week. So not an especially productive day, but certainly an interesting one :-)

I feel like a student again!

2006-08-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

First day of classes. I'm taking three this semester, so we'll see how it goes. Wireless Network Security, Information Retrieval, and Digital Image Processing.

And then the other shoe dropped...

2006-08-08T10:23:00.000-05:00

So I got home from GA around 10pm Saturday night to find that the septic line had backed up into my bathroom and flooded it with sewage.
Yep, it's nasty, so I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday morning cleaning, then headed out into the 100+ degree weather to go over to Kansas City in the evening for Church, only to find out that the A/C in the Jeep had stopped working. Won't know the cause of that for sure until I have a chance to look into it further. Then on Monday I went to visit that oh so efficient branch of the federal government, the US Postal Service. After waiting in line for 35 minutes and at the counter for another 10 I was informed that they didn't know where my mail from the past week was and had no record that it was being held there, so I would have to fill out a stop delivery form before I could restart delivery. The most helpful advice they could give me was "Did you look in your mailbox?". Um... yeah... hasn't exactly been my week.

All sorts of fun :-)

2006-08-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

I figure the events of the last week or so warrant a post. Actually, they warrant two posts, but I'll leave the bad news for the next one. Kate and I took the youth group (13 high-school guys & girls) to Lookout Mountain GA for the RYS convention at Covenant College. The 15 of us, along with assorted belongings piled into two large rented SUVs (a GMC Yukon XL and a Ford Expedition) bright and early on Saturday morning and set out. On the way down we stayed with friends in Louisville, KY for a couple days. The weather was great and we had a blast there swimming, watching movies into the wee hours, etc. We also took a peek at the Louisville Slugger factory and Churhill Downs before driving the rest of the way to Georgia. There were 600+ conventioneers there for the week, and other than a few administrative glitches a good time was had by all. We had a number of excellent speakers including Jason Tuinstra, Rip Pratt, and Jeremy Veldman leading sessions and workshops. On Thursday we had the day away activity which was whitewater rafting on the Ocoee River (Used for the Atlanta olympic kayaking events) and again were blessed with great weather for being on the water.
After eating lunch Friday and saying many goodbyes our group headed for Chatanooga to spend some time wandering the shops downtown, then drove on to Nashville and had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, then on to Louisville where we made it to the host family's house around midnight. Then an all day driving stint back to Kansas City on Saturday brought the trip to a close. All around I'd have to say this was the best group of young people I've had the pleasure of working with.

Eeeeewww...

2006-07-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

Finding deli sliced swiss cheese in the bottom of one's fridge dated "July 18 2005" ain't pretty. Not that anyone would think it would be pretty, but just so there isn't any confusion...
On a better note, the family came out to visit me for a few days and we all had a lovely time :-). Saw some sights, visited, etc. Unfortunately they had to start the drive home on Tuesday so they couldn't stay for the festivities on the 4th. Next it's my turn to go see them, so I need to figure out when I can make the trip to NY. Not going to wait so long this time either (It had been six months since I saw them last).

And now for something completely different...

2006-06-16T22:19:00.000-05:00

So the Jeep is eight years old with over 125k miles on it and that's starting to show. Mostly in the form of needing me to delve into it's bowels every week or two and fix something. Time for some backup transportation.

That's a 1988 Honda NT650, aka the Hawk GT; 50+ mpg, and a blast to ride. :-) I already took the motorcycle safety course and added the motorcycle endorcement to my drivers license, just need tags and it'll be ready to go!

Discoveries!

2006-05-19T18:41:00.000-05:00

Let me just say at the outset, this is going to be a geeky post. For some time I've been frustrated by having things on one computer but not another, or not having the same files at work as I have at home, etc. This is especially true of my calendar and bookmarked websites. Well now there's Google to the rescue! I just recently found the Google Calendar (iCal format!) and Bookmarks services which do exactly what I wanted! It's very exciting!

New phone

2006-05-06T09:31:00.000-05:00

Much as I hate herd mentality, I have had to agree with the majority concesus in selecting a replacement cellphone; the Motorola RAZR it is. And yes, I have more bars in more places!

What, where, why?

2006-05-02T12:00:00.000-05:00

A birthday gift from my family. Do they know me or what?

May 2nd

2006-05-02T10:58:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday dear Justin,
Happy Birthday to Me!

Only I was born in New York, so I actually turned 24 an hour ago...

Grrr...

2006-05-01T22:41:00.000-05:00

My laptop hard disk gave up the ghost. And at the tender age of nine months! What a way to start the week.

Another Song

2006-03-17T19:49:00.000-06:00

This one's by Rich Mullins, one of the few semi-contemporary Christian musicians I actually enjoy listening to.

Well, sometimes my life
Just don't make sense at all
When the mountains look so big
And my faith just seems so small

So hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf
You have been King of my glory
Won't You be my Prince of Peace

And I wake up in the night and feel the dark
It's so hot inside my soul
I swear there must be blisters on my heart

So hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf
You have been King of my glory
Won't You be my Prince of Peace

Surrender don't come natural to me
I'd rather fight You for something
I don't really want
Than to take what You give that I need
And I've beat my head against so many walls
Now I'm falling down, I'm falling on my knees

And this Salvation Army band
Is playing this hymn
And Your grace rings out so deep
It makes my resistance seem so thin

So hold me Jesus, 'cause I'm shaking like a leaf
You have been King of my glory
Won't You be my Prince of Peace

You have been King of my glory
Won't You be my Prince of Peace

Titled Hold Me Jesus, from the album Songs

Friends are a blessing...

2006-02-20T23:47:00.000-06:00

Yup, that about sums it up. Something I've been learning to appreciate more than ever before.

Country Music

2006-02-18T19:18:00.000-06:00

I like country music because I can identify with the lyrics in alot of the songs, unfortunately not always in a good way recently. Can't seem to turn on the radio these days without hearing the song "I Can't Unlove You" by Kenny Rogers. Gets me going every time...

Postcards and letters
And pictures made to last forever
To be boxed up and tossed away
Knickknacks and souvenirs
In an afternoon, they're out of here
They'll disappear without a trace
But what they mean to me
Can never be replaced

I can't unthink about you
I can't unfeel your touch
I can't unhear all the words
Unsay all the things
That used to mean so much
I wish I could unremember
Everything my heart's been through
And finding out it's impossible to do
Oh, it's no use
I can't unlove you

Intestates and old songs
Like time they go on and on
I guess I could learn to do the same
I could wake up without you
These two arms not around you
Tell myself it's meant to be this way
No matter how I try I can't change

I can't unthink about you
I can't unfeel your touch
I can't unhear all the words
Unsay all the things
That used to mean so much
I wish I could unremember
Everything my heart's been through
And finding out it's impossible to do
Oh, it's no use
I can't unlove you

I wish I could unremember
Everything my heart's been through
And finding out it's impossible to do
Oh, oh, it's no use
I can't unlove you

It's from the album Water and Bridges

Meetings shmeetings...

2006-02-16T21:23:00.000-06:00

Just got home from what was by far the worst group meeting since I started working on this project over a year ago. Had to listen to a co-worker who I respect be berated by a pompous jerk who just likes to hear himself talk. This went on for 1.5 hrs of what was supposed to be a 1/2 hr meeting. Actually technically, I just got home from Limerance, where some of us went after the meeting, but close enough.

Life Update

2006-01-23T18:25:00.000-06:00

I realize there haven't been any posts in a long time. For those of you who've been wondering where all the cheerful notes, pictures of Brittany, wedding info, etc. went, I've removed them. The short version is she called everything off right before the wedding and hasn't spoken to me since then. That's about as much of an explanation as I can provide.
Sometimes it is still difficult to believe that it's over after all the time together (2 years), plans we made, and everything else that goes into almost getting married. At the same time I'm trying to see this as God's will for my life and see what lessons can be learned through the situation.
The past month or so has been pretty rough, but at this point I'm doing my best to stay busy and focused on the tasks at hand. I might even get back to updating this on a more frequent basis.

Kanga & Roo are dead

2005-11-04T09:24:00.000-06:00

Eeyore got them... :'-(