Some of you might think I'm weird for including this on my loves list, but this is seriously one of my all time favorite things to do/read/collect.
Folklore.
I took a few folklore classes at USU (as many as I could justify) and loved them all. I even tried to audit a class right after Megan was born, but it didn't work out. Reading intensive class+newborn+not much sleep≠conducive learning environment
I kept all my textbooks from those classes (including the class I ended up not auditing) and one summer I did a personal study class where I went down to Texas and collected Hispanic folklore from people I knew and complete strangers. I asked them about ghost stories they might have heard, monster stories, any kind of story and then analysed how many times similar stories came up and what their similarities and differences were. I loved doing it. And now a record of my project with all the stories is available in the Utah State University Special Collections and Archives! Wahoo!
Two of my favorite textbooks were The Vanishing Hitchhiker and I Heard the Old Fisherman Say. I think most people in my class didn't particuarly enjoy Fisherman, but I loved it. It was all folklore and superstitions of fisherman mostly in the Galveston, Texas area, which is of course 20 minutes from where I grew up. Hitchhiker was a lot like the Scary Stories to Read in the Dark books that everyone read in junior high school. They just had analyses of the stories and lore at the end of each chapter.
Anyway, this really is something I absolutly love and if I could have, I would have majored in folklore and for a living I would just read cool stories and study them.
