Even on a quick run to the store, their eyes scan the traffic, zeroing in on vanity plates with a hunger satiated only by BLIEV and U2SLO and BOB.

They joyfully snap photos with camera phones or giddily log those priceless plates in spiral-bound notebooks, on index cards, on slips of paper stashed in the car. They spend hours trying to decipher the most puzzling plates and remember their favorites for years.

They’re vanity plate junkies. And even if they don’t have a personalized plate of their own, they’re really happy that others do.

“I get so much pleasure out of them,” said Filomena Day of Lewiston, who’s kept a vanity plate log for 10 years.

Among her favorites: P8TRITS (Patriots), SOL2SOL (soul to soul), LAFOFTN (laugh often) and NOW&ZEN. Mostly, the plates are just fun, she said. Though sometimes they seem to be something more.

“They’re like a universal sign that I’m on the right path in life,” Day said. “Once I was saying, ‘Be happy,’ and along comes the plate BEHAPY.”

Rob Crosby of Turner started keeping track of vanity plates four or five years ago. For a while, he was so captivated by the mini-messages that he recorded the plates he saw – and the plates friends told him about – on 3X5 cards. After a year, he had a 2-inch stack of them.

“At one point I thought I could write a book with this stuff,” he said, and laughed. “I don’t know. I guess I’m a little spacey.”

Crosby’s favorites: BEHUUR (be who you are), BA10DA (bartender in a Maine accent) and variations of PB4UGO (pee before you go), a sentiment he could support as the father of young children.

A speech clinician, Crosby was most fascinated by the challenging plates, the ones that tested the bounds of the English language.

“The more obvious they are, the less fun they are to me,” he said.

For Shawn Honnick of Maryland, it doesn’t matter if the plates are cryptic or obvious, silly or serious, have a story behind them or are simply someone’s name. He’s posted over 1,800 photos of vanity plates on his Web site, many of them snapped on the road with his cell phone camera. He’s planning to soon start a podcast about life, vanity plates and the meanings behind them.

“I’m obsessive about it,” he said. “People who know me, that’s the first thing they think of.”

Honnick fell in love with personalized plates as a boy, when he and his father deciphered the ones they saw while traveling on the highway. Now Honnick records plates during his own drives, including trips to visit his father in Maine.

Among his favorites: GET ONE, a plate he once saw on a Corvette.

“It just seemed like a good idea,” Honnick said.

Although they love vanity plates, Crosby, Day and Honnick currently don’t have their own. They amassed plenty of great ideas. But that’s part of the problem.

“I just can’t make up my mind what to get,” Day said.

More online

Want to see Shawn Honnick’s vanity plate photo collection? Go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnblog/sets/72157594207324158/

Honnick’s podcast will originate from: www.plateshow.com