It all started … last year … on August 18th … almost a year ago. Me. A Camera. And the personalized license plates of the state.

I did a tongue-in-cheek blog entry about it with “I’m a stalker, I’m a stalker” and the game process began.

I continued the tongue-in-cheek commentary about my new pastime with the blog entry “OK, I confess, I shot him”.

It started to get out of hand … or at least it started to make me wonder … by the end of November with the post “Hobby or Addiction?” on the twentieth.

If you type about Hobby in the blog posts here, the nice folks from WordPress suggest you might want to use the following pictures.

Cruel, if you ask me. For those of you who don’t know, I have been trying to capture a picture of the Red-Tailed Hawk that lives around here … or the Pileated Woodpecker … with no success.

But as I mentioned in the other blog entry, when you get a public license plate there is no reasonable assurance of privacy … so that means I can take pictures.

As I did this more and more … and my friends realized what I was doing more and more … they started to capture pictures themselves for me. Pictures of personalized license plates from other areas and other states.

Once I alluded to a daily Happy Holly Project Blog entry … about License Plates … specifically those having to do with Occupations and Hobbies. But there was no final product.

What can I say? Life happened.

I have mentioned my hobby a few times in other posts as well. Once was on February 20th when my cute little shiny red Nikon camera used specifically for blog pictures and capturing license plates disappeared.

I have yet to find a good replacement.

And then the worst happened. I lost the folder where all the hundreds of pictures were stored.

But thanks to Renee Undeleter, Private Eye, I recovered most, if not all of the pictures.

So now I am at the point that I want to start sharing these pictures with you, my loyal readers.

It also makes for some pretty cool blog entries that I can prepare in advance and schedule to be released when I am busy doing something else … not that I have ever done that … for four or five days recently … or anything.

With a little luck and some advanced preparation, there will soon be blog posts on the license plates I have “captured”. With running commentary.

At least that is the plan.