Of Kingdom Plantae, Liberal Venom, Curtains, and Leaf-Jumping

Greetings from the House of Green. It's Thursday, meaning that now that my Wildland Shrubs class--my one Thursday class--is over, I don't have diddily-squat going on today. It's reaaaal nice. Next month I may actually be spending Thursdays at Pearson, doing...what do you call it again...oh yeah, work. As for Wildland Shrubs, I'm going to miss that class. Good times were had in abundance, and I'm pretty sure I pulled an A, what with getting a 98% on the final. I wish I could say the same for my other botany class, Plant Biology, in which I think I'll be lucky to get a C. When it comes to identifying plants, I'm a rock star, but ask me how they transport sugars or, heaven help me, photosynthesize, and I'll try to distract you from the subject by doing a funky dance. Seriously. On the subject of biology, I'm in the process of applying for a $10,000 scholarship that's only available to biology and math education majors. The catch? I get to spend a year working in a--cough--NEEDY SCHOOL. Can you see me, Ben Green, trying to stop a hallway fight between gang members armed with plastic forks swiped from the lunch counter? I unfortunately cannot. So I'd better work on improving my gang negotiation skills right quick here.

Speaking of education, last week I wrote a letter to the Deseret News lambasting Thomas Sowell's October 8th column, in which he spent upwards of 800 words whining about how English teachers should not be allowed to require their students to write letters to celebrities. Here is my response letter, published by Deseret News on October 12th:
Oooh! Take that, Sowell! He'll think twice before he dares express his opinion in the newspaper again. On a humorous side note, when I got onto the Deseret News website to copy and paste the letter, a few people had written comments, and one of them, from a fellow appropriately calling himself "Ratman," said something to the effect of "Why do you have to drip your liberal venom all over everything?" Oh yeah, I'm a flaming liberal all right. Sssssss!
As for other malarkey that's happened lately, Tuesday night Alyssa and I attended "Curtains" at the Hale Center Theater, which was cheesy but fun. We didn't have the best seats in the house; this was exemplified during the last scene of the play, wherein the hero detective and his newfound love are standing together near the top of the seating rows, and a backdrop descends behind them, and we had no way of seeing what was on said backdrop. Parting words? A beautiful sunset? We may never know. Hopefully not anything important. But, for the most part, it was an enjoyable experience. Last night, Becca and Shawn went to the same play, leaving Brayden and McKell with us, and we had fun raking leaves and jumping in them, making chocolate-peanut butter eyeballs for Halloween, watching "Little Rascals," and Wii-ing it up like there was no tomorrow. Alyssa was so tired that she zonked out on the bed an hour before Becca even came back for the kids. Aww, poor little lamb.