Everybody has collections of one kind or another. You start small collections as kids, maybe stamps, maybe rocks. As you grow older and have more money, you start collecting things like Lladro, or jewelry, or frogs, or angels. The questions arises in how many make a collection? Is it two, four, fifteen? Is it a collection when you start calling it that or when other people start calling it that? I have several collections already. Some, like stamp and coin collecting, did start when I was younger and relatives gave me stamps and coins from their travels. The first piece of jewelry my husband ever gave me was an opal so now I have a nice collection of opal jewelry. And I have collections of other oddities, like darning eggs. How that one got started, I'm not really sure since I have no clue how to darn anything.

Today I decided I was going to start a new collection because by my count, I am up to five . At least that's five according to what my travel guides have told me over the years. So I am collecting Techtonic Plates! Today I added two to my collection. In Iceland, I went to the location of the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate and the place where they are spreading apart to the tune of about 2 1/4 centimeters a year. It was a bit hard to understand the guide at times but I think I stood in a spot where one foot was on the American plate and one foot was on the Eurasian plate. So that is what I will collect, where I can stand with feet on different plates.

My earlier collection consisted of being in Djibuti where I stood with a food on the Somalia Plate and a foot on the African Plate. We also stood on the Saudi Plate. So that's five. I should look up and verify some of this because in the multimedia presentation today, there was no Somalia plate showing. I don't think it would have disappeared in the last couple of years so maybe it is a subplate but that's ok for my collection. I will also look up and see where else I can do this because my collection might stop abruptly at five if there aren't any other places where I can stand without getting burned by lava or drowned by sea water. Still, it's always fun to have collections.