I've got a really funny story about bringing plants to res (which you should definitely do!). In my first year, I lived in Hedden, and my room was next to a single in which an upper-year engineer lived. He had lots of plants, and was kinda famous for arranging his room in a really unique way (since in Hedden all the furniture is movable). He basically had his desk in the middle of the room (almost office-like), and rigged up some hanging overhead lights that he brought in and suspended them above it (that was the engineer in him coming out...).
Now, these lights were the kind that have a shiny, all-aluminum reflector around the bulb (they looked sort of like an upside-down stainless steel mixing bowl), and he hung them so they were fairly low over the desk. It was quite an impressive setup. Anyway, flash forward to just before the Christmas break when we all have to move out of res. As I said, he had a considerable number of plants, and didn't want to bring all of them home. So he watered them thoroughly, opened the curtains, and placed them up on his desk so that they'd get light from the window over the break (this is on the first floor, by the way).
Well, sometime over the holidays, a Mac security officer is walking by Hedden, sees the plants through the window, sees the industrial-looking lights hanging above them, and assumes that he's running a grow-op out of his res room
They report this to the Residence Manager because they want to enter the room to search it, and she's a tad skeptical of it all, considering whose room it is (he wasn't exactly the type to do something that stupid). So they go and take a look, and apparently decide that the mini botanical gardens on his desk is not, in fact, drug-related :p
Anyway, he didn't hear about all this until after he got back from the break and the Manager told him the story, which he thankfully found rather amusing. So, uh.....I guess the only practical lesson to take from this is that sometimes engineers are too clever for their own good :p
