My life: The present

My life seems to be at a bit of a nexus right now. Just finished a whirlwind of a trip to LA; now I'm back in Sydney; and then... well, I don't know what happens then. I used my last post to tackle the (very immediate) past. Now up: my present circumstances.

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The week in LA is over.

Last Wednesday morning, after a nice flight on V Australia (had a whole row to myself!), I arrived back in Sydney. Eager to get a move on things, I jumped off the plane, darted through customs, grabbed my luggage and ran out of the airport so that I could get back to... well, yeeeeaaaaaahhhhh. There actually wasn't anything to get back to. For I am still sans job. It sucks.

This sucktitude really took hold of me sometime in early March, when, after over a month of searching for work day after day, it became apparent that the GFC was in full effect. There are hardly any jobs out there, and when one becomes available, dozens of qualified applicants flock. Yeah, it sucks. And it began to get me down.

Clearly, I needed to recharge my batteries. And with Sam, Sarah and Robert visiting for two weeks, followed by my trip to LA, I had the opportunity to do just that. The time from mid March to last Wednesday was fantastic.

Back in Sydney and refreshed -- and that includes defying jet lag yet again! -- I'm determined to renew and redouble my efforts to locate a job. So no stone goes unturned! I'm calling in all favors from anyone I know, reaching out to friends of friends of friends, calling up every Penn alum in Australia and hanging out at traffic intersections with cardboard signs that profess my desire to work. If there's an opportunity out there, I'll locate it. And then beg for the job.

But here's the thing: I can't keep on doing this in perpetuity. Amazingly, we're looking at 87 days of unemployment and counting. 87 freaking days. Nearly three months. To me, that's a staggering number, one that I never dreamed of encountering.

As much as I love Sydney, love the people, love the weather, I can't continue to go on, day by day, without any purpose or income. Something needs to change. So as much as it pains me to do so, I've given myself until May 8 to locate a job. That's four work weeks after I first arrived back in Sydney. If I don't find a job by this deadline? Well, my (potential) future awaits. And we'll tackle that last topic next.

Getting back to the basics

I'm a broken record. The rationalization and impetus for seemingly every one of my posts in the last month has had something to do with my (and my roommates') unemployment. So what the hell... here's one more.

Recently, we've been dedicating ourselves to the simple things in life. Specifically, we're starting to make things from scratch. Because (a) we have the time and (b) it's cheaper. A win-win! (And according to this article, we're apparently not the only ones who feel this way. Stupid GFC.) Here's what we've been up to:

Brewing beer

I covered most of this in this post from a few weeks ago. And Little Bear Brewery is still going strong! We just bottled our fourth batch of beer -- modeled after Newcastle Brown Ale -- and are about to start work on a ginger beer. To the left is our wheat beer, nicknamed Wheat Bear. It has a really great aroma and nice initial taste, but the aftertaste is currently a bit bitter. We're hoping that this gets better with more time for maturation.

Even more exciting is the stash of beer that we're starting to build up. Behold (part of) our stockpile, currently at 114 bottles!!


That's 85.5 liters (22.5 gallons) of beer!!

Growing vegetables

This has mostly been Shorty's labor of love. On our balcony, we now are growing the following: tomatoes, roma tomatoes, basil, coriander, peppermint, spring onions and lettuce. They all still need some time to grow, but once they're ready, we can cross those items off the weekly shopping list!

Some tomatoes and herbs.

Lettuce.

In the works for the future is some rocket (arugula), chili and a lemon tree.

Baking bread

Shorty's girlfriend was kind enough to give us her family's bread machine, which had been collecting dust in their garage for the last few years. Our apartment, on the other hand... we're putting it to extreme use.

After starting off with some basic white breads, we're starting to spread our wings a bit. Recent experiments have included French bread (as seen to the left), cajun jalapeno bread, pesto and pinenut bread, banana bread and herb bread. There's another thing to cross off the shopping list... although now we're buying a lot of flour.

Homemade pasta

The beautiful thing about the bread maker is that it does so much more than make bread! For example, it makes pasta dough. Taking advantage of that, I made some ravioli the other day. This was a brutally long and painstakingly monotonous process -- it takes forever to flatten the dough, make the filling, drop it onto the dough and then seal the dough around it -- but the result was very nice.

Below is a picture of some ravioli (with much pasta sauce on top) and homemade bread with garlic and cheese. Good stuff.


I also made some linguine (or something resembling it) last night, which was much easier to do. Maybe I'll just stick to that in the future.

Homemade pizza

Another use for the bread maker: pizza dough! Short took the lead on this one, and created several different pizzas the other night. Here's a sequence of pictures of him making it:

Spreading out the sauce -- in this case, barbecue -- on the dough.

Adding some cheese.

The toppings: chicken, onion, red pepper, hot pepper, etc.

Some more cheese!

The final product.

Coffee

And lastly, Short surprised us last week with a cappuccino/espresso maker! So now we're making ourselves fresh lattes and cappuccinos and whatnot.


A return to the basics! We clearly have the time. It's saving us money. The perfect win-win.

Home brew: it gives my life meaning!

So. Unemployment is really starting to hit home. I have no solid leads for a new job, and there's seemingly nothing on the horizon. I'm progressively sleeping in later. I'm running out of things to do, and the fact that Sydney's been hit with an awful week of weather has not helped the cause. I've officially lost track of what day it is. The money is dwindling, day by excruciating day. And my potential DOD (day of deportation) just lingers over me.

Of course, I'm not alone. For I currently live in an apartment full of unemployeds. On the weekends last year, I'd sleep in and wake up to an apartment full of people. Now, I do that on a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. Or, well, every day. So we're all very much in this together.

We needed something to do, clearly. To keep us occupied, keep us motivated, keep us sane. The main caveat, of course, was that this activity couldn't be expensive.

And that's when one of Maz's friends introduced us to the world of home brewing. At first, I think we were all skeptical, and had many questions. That would be a really time consuming, right? Isn't it a complicated process? And doesn't it take forever to yield something that's not only alcoholic but actually tastes good?

Quickly, these concerns were put to rest. Yes, there'd be some work, although it wouldn't be nearly as much as we first imagined. (But would it have been a bad thing if it was that labor-intensive?? We have nothing but time!) And the actual process, after you get past what can look like a daunting set of instructions, only has to be as complicated as you want it to be. And it doesn't take long at all; on the shorter end, you can have a quality beer ready to drink within two weeks!

So, to recap: a cheap task that will keep us occupied... and that task involves producing alcohol??!?* Ummmmm, where do we sign up???

*Yeah, we might currently be in a reduced-spending mode, but you know that we're not sacrificing alcohol. God forbid.

Maz and Short bravely did the first few batches: first an Australian-style lager, then a European-style lager, then an India Pale Ale. Each beer was surprisingly good, and each one seemed to improve upon the last.

Yogi and I, encouraged by the results, teamed up to have a crack as well. But before starting, there were a few matters to attend to. First was our "brewery's" name. And for that we decided on Little Bear Brewery, which is derived from parts of each of our names. In German, Klein means small or little. And Yogi's name is like, well, Yogi Bear. So Little Bear it was! Simple, straightforward, catchy. A logo is very slowly in the works.

The second matter to attend to before starting was collecting bottles in which to bottle the beer. Because while Maz and Short bottled their beer in plastic bottles that they simply bought, we decided to bottle our beer in glass bottles. This, however, posed the challenge of acquiring said bottles. And as far as we were concerned, there was only one way to do that: drink ourselves silly! So for the next several weeks, just about every time we bought beer, whether it was to casually drink at our apartment or to rambunctiously drink at a house party, we'd buy 750 ml (25 fl oz) long necks of Cooper's Pale Ale. Why Cooper's? Well, it's a solid beer, the bottles' brown glass is good for keeping light out, and the tops aren't twist off. (This last point was important because our cap press can't put bottle caps on twist tops.) And why 750 ml bottles? Well, each batch of home brew nets about 23 liters of beer. (For the metric system-challenged, that's roughly equivalent to six gallons. Let me repeat that: SIX GALLONS OF BEER!!!) So we could either collect 60 regular-sized bottles or 30 long necks. And after a few weeks of calculations, we concluded that 30 bottles is precisely two times more manageable than 60. We're still not sure if that's purely coincidental or not.

For about a month we drank those long necks, slowly accumulating our stock. And finally, after a big Australia Day Weekend in late January to cap off this monstrous month of long neck after long neck, we reached our goal. Our hearts were content. Our livers were furious. We were ready to start brewing.

We made a trip to Dave's Home Brew in North Sydney, consulted with Dave himself on our first beer and settled on modeling it after an Australian pale ale called Little Creatures.

Yogi and I came back to the apartment, cleaned and sterilized all our materials, mixed up the various ingredients (boiling water, liquid malt extract, brewing sugar, hops, yeast and enough cool water to get to 23 liters) and then... well, we let it sit for a week to allow for the mixture to get its fermentation on. Then we cleaned and sterilized our 30 bottles, filled each one with our precious beer, added carbonation drops, capped the bottles and then... well, we let it sit for another week to carbonate and mature.

And that's it! That's it! One week after bottling, Yogi and I had our first sips of what we had come to call Bears and Creatures Pale Ale.* A week probably didn't give the beer quite enough time to mature -- it's generally recommended that you wait at least two weeks -- but our curiosity got the best of us. And you know what? It was still great! Fantastic! I couldn't have been much more pleased. A really rich, hoppy flavor and a great amber color. The head left a little to be desired, but we're hoping that that develops a little more in the coming weeks.

Now we're on to our second batch, which is a wheat bear. Tentatively we're calling it Wheat Bear,** and we just bottled it this morning.

*The origins of this name are fairly straightforward. Our "brewery" is Little Bear. And the beer we modeled this batch after was Little Creatures Pale Ale. So knock off the "Little" from each name and you have Bears and Creatures Pale Ale.

**Really hope I don't need to explain this name!

Maz and Shorty bottled their fourth batch the other day, and they've recently dedicated themselves to glass bottles as well. However, this poses our next challenge: accumulating more bottles! But this time, we've spared our livers and have purchased 84 empty Cooper's long necks on eBay. That will bring our bottle collection to 140, which is enough for five batches of beer. So I'm hoping that's all the bottles we'll ever need. But if it isn't, well, that just means that we'd have 105 liters (NEARLY 28 GALLONS!) of beer. And that should hold us over for a while. I think.

Throwin' some Kleinballs in the GFC

Sorry for the mini hiatus. That post on the Ascoto's didn't just write itself, you know. It was draining! So I needed to take some time off, take a deep breath and regroup. And now that the batteries are recharged, what better way to come back than by throwin' a couple of Kleinballs editions at you over the next week! It's been a while since we've done even one of these; brace yourselves.

Now, I've heard all sorts of reports of doom and gloom out of the States about the global financial crisis (henceforth to be known on this blog as the GFC), but what's happening with myself and many of my other friends here... well, in the words of Luke Wilson's newscaster character in Anchorman, this getting to be ri-God-damn-diculous.

Currently, my entire apartment is unemployed. As we all know, I was laid off almost three weeks ago. Another one of us was let go a week later. Another was going to start a job this month... until the employer called to say they were postponing his start date by six months. And the last, knowing that his old company would shortly be letting people go, left his job a few months ago and went to grad school.

An entire apartment of unemployeds. Fun. But that's not all! For if you count our group of 12 friends that live within a three block radius of each other here, EIGHT of us are unemployed. That's right: our unemployment rate is 67%! Ummmm, yikes.

Below is a lovely illustration of exactly how much havoc the GFC has wrecked upon banks.* Big ups to Santander (whoever those guys are) and JP Morgan for managing to retain at least half of their market cap from a mere 18 months ago. Can't really say the same for Citigroup and RBS. Yeah. Yikes.


*Okay, after uploading that picture, I see it's pretty much impossible to make out a lot of the writing. To view it at a much larger and more legible size, you can click on it. But the point is that those big blue circles -- representing each bank's market cap from Q2 2007 -- absolutely dwarfs the small green circles, which represent each bank's current market cap.

And just to really depress the shit out of everyone (in case I haven't sufficiently done so yet), there's a KFC near our apartment that has had "Now hiring" on its marquee* for at least six years, ever since I first came to Sydney. This has been an ongoing joke among some of my friends, as if KFC can never hold on to employees long enough to stop hiring new ones. Well, guess what? It's down now, my friends. It's down now.

*Can you call those signs outside of fast food joints a "marquee"? Or should usage of that term really be limited to big signs at Madison Square Garden or The Mirage or grandiose places like that? Well, you know what I mean by the term, right? Like those McDonald's signs that say "Billions and billions served"?**

**Remember when McDonald's actually gave a precise number of billions of people served? Like "87 billion served"? Why don't they still do that? Has it become too hard to count? But who would call them on that if they just made a guesstimation? Anyway.

You may remember this video, titled "Where the Hell is Matt?", which I included in this Kleinballs entry way back in June. Well, after watching the below video, in which the folks at First Round Capital stole the idea and had the people in all their offices dance around like a bunch of idiots, I'm fairly confident that if you played that song over a video of a monkey taking a crap, you'd still consider it to be the most profound and uplifting thing you've ever seen. My God, the music!

Just got access to Season 5 of Entourage a few days ago and have blown through it. I've come away with two thoughts. First, before this past week, how come only one person told me there was a character named Andrew Klein on the show, when those episodes aired in the US three months ago??!!?!? Come on, people! And second, the scene at the end of Episode 7, where Ari tells Vince that he's been offered the studio head job, killed me. Killed me. Maybe Adrian Grenier can't act worth a lick, but Jeremy Piven, in the most beautifully subtle way possible, absolutely nailed that scene. And when Vince closes the window shade on Ari, who was helplessly looking to him from outside for any sign of encouragement, well, it was for moments like that that the term "cold blooded" was invented.

At 3pm last Wednesday, I received a call from an agency I had sent my resume to. They asked me to come in at 8am the next morning, and I responded as enthusiastically as anyone could when asked if they'd like to go to an 8am interview, epecially when the rest of their day is wide open. And then the kicker from the agency: "Can you please put together a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates your viewpoint on the customer life cycle with a credit card?" So of course, I responded as enthusiastically as anyone could when faced with the task of preparing a presentation on the customer life cycle with a credit card in 17 hours. And then, this unemployed guy came damn near close to pulling my first all-nighter since college. Ahhh, the things we do for the GFC...

Today was a good day

There's no better way to put it.

Woke up to a beautiful, sunny morning. Went for a run along the water. Watched the Red Sox win the World Series. Won money at the casino. And received notification that my work visa has been approved!

The trifecta has been accomplished. Job? Check. Place to live? Check. Work visa? Check!

Work begins tomorrow. And with that, my unemployment officially ends at 102 days.

My boring life

God, I wish I had something exciting to say about my life from the last few days, but it's actually been overwhelmingly and surprisingly mundane.

My last day of work was on July 20, and the 67 days since then have been fantastic. But now that I've actually started to look for work, I think the unemployment bug has finally caught up to me. And being in a new city and country doesn't seem to make it any better. I guess that the monotony of jumping through the same hoops for different headhunters every day can only be so fulfilling, regardless of where you are.

My one constant source of entertainment? The vicious Portuguese Chicken War being waged in my neighborhood. But it's late and I'm tired, so an explanation of that will have to wait for another time.