Cakes and curious cats

Do you assume everyone else knows what you know?

This week my son and I baked two cakes for his birthday party at his kindy.

Side note: I love that they don't have those ridiculous wooden cakes in Korea like they do in Australia... or offer those ridiculous fruit pizzas instead of cake. How to ruin a birthday party in 5 seconds flat. Also, Korean kids don't seem to have allergies or food intolerances, either, so I didn't have to worry about baking a cake with gluten, dairy, eggs or nuts in it.

People in Korea don't bake. They buy cakes. We had to buy an oven for our apartment. It sits on top of the kitchen bench. Korean apartments don't come with an oven. We even had to buy a stove for our apartment, too. Not uncommon.

I love baking. It's the only form of cooking I enjoy. But I digress...

My mother-in-law, an absolute whiz in the kitchen and former restaurant owner, lent us a hand. But here's the thing, she wanted to put the decorations on the cake BEFORE it went into the oven. Now, this woman is an absolute genius at whipping up the most delicious meals in minutes. But baking? No idea.

Last weekend, my brother-in-law, his wife, and daughter came to visit and we baked cupcakes. My sister-in-law wanted to put the decorations on the cake before they went into the oven, too. So it's not an isolated incident.

This got me thinking about how much of our knowledge we take for granted.

Even what you might think is the most obvious bit of information, the knowledge you take for granted, might not be so obvious to everyone else.

So get out there and share your knowledge. Don't assume that everyone knows as much as you do about a topic because chances are, they too think the decorations go on the cake before you put it in the oven.

Curiosity killed the cat

The Korean Government uses cell broadcasts to warn anyone with a phone within range of a cell tower about potential disasters.

We've received cell broadcasts warning about:

• typhoons, flooding and other extreme weather events
• going outdoors because the air quality is so poor
• emergency air raid drills.
  

We once received a cell broadcast during an earthquake! Our building was still shaking when we received the message telling us what was happening.

I think they're brilliant.

This week, we received a cell broadcast of a different kind. A puma had escaped from her enclosure at a local zoo at O World, an amusement park we frequent, and authorities were worried she had fled to the nearby mountains.

Later that evening we received another cell broadcast telling us the threat was over. The puma had been found within the O World grounds and shot at with a tranquiliser gun, but the shots missed and the puma fled. The zoo then followed their emergency management procedures and shot the puma dead when she found several hours later, still in the O World grounds.

The poor critter. The zookeeper failed to lock her cage and in this instance, curiosity killed cat.

On my bookshelf

This week I read 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher. (Note: this is an affiliate link to Amazon.Com)

You might have heard about this book and the Netflix series of the same title.

It covers a topic we need to talk about more: suicide. In this book, specifically teen suicide.

Did I love it? No. Did I hate it? No.

I don't want to give the book a free pass because it tackles such an important topic. The story is flawed. I didn't connect with Hannah, the girl who suicides and who tells her story through cassette tapes.

But I like that it looks at the snowball effect of a single action and the brutal consequences it takes. It delves into sexual assault and the harm of gossip.

If the book gets people, especially young people talking about suicide, I think that's a good thing.

Project update

This week I'm well into the discovery phase on the new federal government project. I've been working on a project plan, project management plan and project communications plan and also reading the background documents.

I love that this organisation is across the problems with their current website and governance model (or rather, their lack of a governance model). This means we can move past problem identification - they've been heavily documented. We can get to solution mode much quicker.

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Posted from my blog.