#thebookofme What Do You Collect?

I know, it's March already, but I'm going to catch up on The Book of Me by posting my response to the last two of the February prompts today.  I've been really busy!

So -- What do I collect?

Dust.  Not much of a joke.  We have a lot of dust in our house.  I keep telling my husband it's his powder, a necessity in this humid climate, but he insists it isn't.  I keep thinking I oughta spend some money and take a sample to a lab for analysis.

Frogs.  Ever since I was a little girl, I have collected frogs.  Only then, in my childhood, I collected real frogs!  I would gather tadpoles (which actually turned out to be toads, not frogs) in a nearby stream and watch them turn into frogs.  It was fascinating.  That is one of the things that has sparked my lifelong lay person's interest in science.  Once the tadpoles metamorphosed, I would liberate them in the back yard, where they were happy in the damp patches in the lawn.  After I grew up, I collected ceramic frogs and wooden frogs and plushy frogs.  I have quite a collection now.  My grandson has inventoried them.  He even made frogs for me in art camp.  Here is one of them.  You can tell that the art camp was at a museum of modern art!

Books.  Well, I would not really call myself a book collector.  I don't collect first editions or rare books or anything like that.  I can't afford that indulgence.  I collect books in the sense of having a houseful!  I have had to classify them by the Dewey Decimal System!  My studies as a historian has prompted me to build quite a library of books on Spain and Spanish colonial Florida. 

At one time, I had quite a collection of Star Trek memorabilia, but I have had to pare that down.  My three categories of collecting are "Necessary, Nice, and Nuts."  When I divested myself of many of my Star Trek items, my priority became the "Nuts" items.  They're just such fun.

State Universities (of Florida).  I joke that I am collecting state universities, having attended three different institutions in the state university system of Florida.  In the 1960s, I attended Florida State University, earning a bachelor's degree in Government and a master's in library science.  I worked as a librarian for a while, and enjoyed it.  That dried up in the recesion of the early 1970s.  After a lifetime of doing this and that while concentrating on raising a family, I finally went back to college at the age of 60, at the University of North Florida.  After that, I went for another master's degree at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.  Not sure if I'm going to be adding to this collection.

And, of course, as a genealogist, I collect dead relatives!  Only, these days, as I study the families of St. Augustine, Florida, during the second period of Spanish possession, I'm collecting a whale of a lot of other people's relatives, while neglecting my own.  Kinda like the shoemaker whose kids go without shoes.