All Good Things

  • June 3, 2026

It’s the end of my last day here. A slow one, where I walked to the mall to buy a few requested items and then spent the afternoon packing.

I blogged much more than I expected, and reading back through it just now some of these events (such as Vivid or Dubbo zoo) feel like they were months ago and not just over a week!

There’s the final bingo card for this portion of the trip. Chiko Rolls were spied more than once but I chose not to get one, and the pokie win never came despite a Herculean attempt! But ultimately the wombat can be blamed for my inability to get five lines, which is what was required for the maximum ‘prize’!

As always it’s been great staying with mum. This is my 20th trip back to Australia and tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to her for the 21st time. You think we’d be used to it by now, but it’s always emotional.

A very early start tomorrow for the second leg of this vacation. Where will that take me? No prizes for guessing 😉

The Other Op-Shop Jigsaw

  • June 3, 2026

This puzzle – purchased at an op-shop in Katoomba – depicts Monticello, a historic home in the USA once owned by Thomas Jefferson. 750 pieces is larger than I usually prefer, but the price was right and I felt confident I could complete it in time.

Unlike the circular one from a few days ago I was able to begin with the frame. Look closely and you’ll spy three absent pieces. I believed I was thorough in my searching for them, and by this point I assumed they would never turn up.

So far so good, and it wasn’t very difficult finishing the sections that were largely the same colour.

Pieces are still missing as you can see, and by this point I’d separated out all the blue ones so I was sure those two edge pieces weren’t going to turn up.

The cherry blossom sections were very challenging, especially when the branches were over the green grass. By the point of the above picture I’d spent maybe two hours on the puzzle, but that was probably only a third of the total time it took to complete.

Incidentally I’d never heard of Monticello. Seems like it would be an interesting place to visit!

And here’s the complete puzzle! Look closely and you’ll count seven missing pieces in total, one of which is a bit mysterious:

The piece was there, but the picture had fallen off! The only way I knew where it went without finishing the puzzle was that it was already connected to another piece when I opened the box!

In addition to the seven missing pieces, three others were in a state of disrepair and a few had the picture layer peeling off. This puzzle obviously came from a feral home, and shouldn’t have been sold at the op-shop in the first place.

If you’re keeping track, of the four op-shop puzzles I’ve made over the years only one had all of its pieces. But they’ve all still been fun to assemble 🙂

Antipodean Skullduggery

  • June 2, 2026

We went to Charlestown Square today, a lovely and gigantic shopping center beloved by all men. In certain circles however this is known as one of the blackest markets south of the equator, with a panoply of booty that would impress even the most weathered buccaneer.

I’m speaking, of course, of K-Pop Demon Hunters bootleg items. And today I could have filled a suitcase with them.

I’ve already done two posts about cards, but one stall today had all sorts of stationary items for sale. Stickers and cards are all entry level material, but as you can see the prices are low so they’re a good way for a beginner to invest in booty.

I’m not exactly sure what the above is, but they look like tiny acrylic standees? Maybe I should have purchased it for a closer look…

I’m impressed that the pirates have the decency to produce stickers of the ‘non-repetitive’ kind. Even on the high seas, there seems to be some integrity amongst rogues.

There were many different varieties of shoe charms (that you plug into Crocs) and the accuracy of the likenesses varied wildly. These were amongst the best and were only $2!

Blind boxes were also abundant, and very few of them had any indication of what exactly was inside. Once again I asked the girl what was in one and she didn’t know either. She actually laughed when I asked, and while an amateur may have interpreted her reaction as embarrassment for not knowing, I took it to be her mocking an amateur (me) for presuming a pirate cared about her plunder.

‘Hunters Girl’ it says. I believe this is a doll, but it was suspiciously lightweight. It also wasn’t very expensive. I wonder what it was?

A more traditional packaging of dolls, and I’ll let you decide how accurate they are to the characters. Since I was curious I hefted this item to gauge if the previous was about a third the weight and it didn’t seem to be.

I had a terrible suspicion the previous cylindrical package was largely empty, but it was a bit too expensive to buy to find out. 🙂

Here we have a full set of action figures, and it’s immediately evident these were manufactured by the most amoral of freebooters, since even someone who had never seen the film would gauge these as worthless trash. ‘Happy Eveny Day‘ indeed. Look at (best girl) Rumi’s figure:

I should have purchased all of them and destroyed them in a bonfire.

And then there’s this figure, done in the 3.75″ scale (like Star Wars action figures) albeit lacking some of the detail. This is strangely unboxed and clearly doesn’t stand: the photo was taken from above and the figure is lying down. This is, again, worthless trash.

Squishy things are hot here, so of course the pirates are making them. Here we have a K-Pop Demon Hunters example, specifically (second best girl) Zoey. This is a terrifying item to hold, squeeze and even look at, and since it was undoubtedly manufactured in a cave somewhere on the Barbary Coast it probably contains toxic chemicals.

It’s a shame I already own the world’s most fashionable bucket hat, since this one would have turned heads if I’d worn it walking down the streets of Tokyo.

I say again that these photos aren’t all the items I saw today, and had I been taking photos of everything since I arrived this post would have been three or four times longer. The sheer amount of K-Pop Demon Hunters bootlegs available here beggars belief, and I can only imagine Australians are the world’s most rabid fans of the film!

I’ll end today with this Kopp Domo Hneur bubble gun. There’s so much that can be said about this item, but this bag of chicken twisties in my lap ain’t gonna eat itself so I’ll let you imagine what I would have written 😉