March 18, 2005 was my 40th Birthday

Wake up 612 a.m. by my watch to the bed rocking.
(Those who know the Grinch will surprised to know that he’s back into personal time management after 22 years consulting bank clocks and strangers in the street. A story for another day involving a $32,000 timepiece going cheap in Hanoi.)
Dawn wake-ups of this type are rarely bad news but in this case it kinda set the tone for the day. I’m alone and deep into the Mmmm part of REM and the bed is doing things one associates with rodeos and Hollywood.
Think Buffalo Bill and Linda Blair. Think Poltergeist. Bed’s hammering the ground, while the room's all floating walls and swinging picture frames, the white tiled floor pitching like a tugboat in high seas and me perched on the edge eying the walls for new cracks and evidence to support the “flight” messages being sent from some nerve bundle at the base of my skull. You know, the place that keeps you alive.
I check with the US Geological Survey website a bit later to find out it was a magnitude 6.1 earthquake located 55 kms off the coast of Banda Aceh. These aftershocks are getting closer and closer. Not as heavy as some in the early days after the tsunami, the ones that turned the streets into cartoons, so powerful they prevented those who slept or fell from standing up. But strong enough.
Frigid bucket bath because the shower is on the fritz, quick shave ahead of the morning press conference and wander into the kitchen to get the coffee pot going. Unplug the water-bottle dispenser, plug in the coffee-maker and take 220-volts through my shoulder for the seconds it takes me to pry my locked-up mummy-fingers off the plug. Damn, foul mood begins so take it out on the lovely and clueless Anim, busty proprietress of the home opposite BA’s Hero’s Cemetery where I now live.
Walk away massaging my arm, cursing. Brush teeth and return to the living-room to consider the latest issue of The New Yorker, and happy news from correspondent Michael Specter that we’re all going to die from some mutation of bird flu. Grand.
15 minutes later Anim has braved the fiery inner workings of the home’s electrical system to get the pot boiling so that at least when Iqbal arrives to take me to work my blue Ace Hardware ubermug is full to the cap with a solid litre of Aceh’s finest Arabica.
The kid with the rotten teeth who I usually buy the local paper “Serambi Indonesia” from on the way into work has vanished from his post inside the bus-stop near Iskandar Muda mosque, the one with the great, Disney-esque dome that’s meant to be a traditional Acehnese man’s wedding hat but comes off as a four-tiered wedding cake painted Rasta red, green and yellow. Seriously. It must be seen to be truly appreciated. Years ago, in happier times, I drifted into the same building on a cloud of local ganja courtesy of the guards outside the home of a senior local politician, and developed a serious case of the giggles.
Iqbal suggest that maybe the kid is in school but I have my doubts.
I’ve got a full calendar today. I’m to attend the Heads of Agencies Meeting at 8, a powwow with all the top brass from the major missions in Aceh. By 10 I’ve gotta be at the local Information Ministry offices to give my two cents worth at the joint UN press conference.
The agency heads are all atwitter about the government saying all foreigners have to be out of Aceh by the 26th to get new visas. We'll see. Government will cave and extend the deadline, methinks. (Four days later my prediction comes true)
dash back ot the office at 9:15. Of course, the fellow who is supposed to translate the press releases into Bahasa Indonesia has not so. Mum calls while I’m at the photocopier to say “I feel old”. Yeah, me too.
Did a dozen post-press conference interviews with everyone from a popular on-line service detik.com to Radio France Intl. No one is asking the right questions so I get out with my scalp intact.
At some point after I get back, the boss wanders into the closet I call an office, tosses a bag of addictive Vietnamese candies on the desk and says happy birthday. Vanishes. Later the birthday well wishes start to pour into my mailbox. Awww, you guys.
Lunch of rice and veg and chicken at my desk trying to make sense of the volumes of mail bearing a bewildering host of acronyms.
I’m besieged by requests for information, most of it from people internal. Some government bigwig needs to be wined and dined and convinced that the organization should remain in Aceh through the long-term. Fair enough but I’m not sure how a press folder is going to tip the scales.
Do best to fill it but the hard-drive crash that occurred while I was on RnR has taken with it all Indonesian language files so I’m scrambling to get the package finished for his 5 pm meeting. At some point my new printer, a Canon iP1000 attempts to eat my scarf, sucking it into the guts of the machine. Thankfully adulthood has mellowed me somewhat so it actually takes me 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5) to rip the bloody thing out, taking with it half a dozen of the teeth that are used to secure the paper. Still works. Good Canon. Nice Canon.
At the same time juggling face-to-face interviews with Daily Telegraph, Christian Science Monitor and a host of others. Things start to blur.
I stagger out of the office at 7:30, into the gloom. It’s a wordless drive home. I’m knackered. Pour a long cold Jaimeson and the phone rings with Pat. 15 minutes later he’s over and reclined and his good humor is infectious. His wife Karen appears with another product of the Canadian foreign service in tow and a bottle of Bushmills.
I talk to J back in Jakarta and the peripherals start to get warm and fuzzy. We sit up deconstructing Canadian and Australian immigration policy before moving over to wannabe Nazi Ernst Zundel and Freedom of Speech until the midnight curfew looms. By the time they pull out of the driveway it’s after 12 and I’m officially 24 hours into my 41st year.