Don't take fudge from politicians

I was fast asleep. I sleep at night. It's this crazy thing I like to do. It's cool at night (sometimes downright cold) and it's not particularly safe to go outside, so it's better for sleeping than for working.

That's my opinion. Some people disagree, especially those with indoor hobbies. Not that farming is a hobby; not for Beru. But she likes to tend her plants in the dead of night. Or "early morning," as she likes to call it. She starts her day several hours before sunsup and retires shortly after sunsdown. Owen goes to bed later in the evening and gets up with the suns do, same as me. Luke goes to bed as late as he can stand to and gets up only when his uncle drags him out of bed, same as most kids.

Some of their plants grow underground, and others grow in the greyhouse. (It's like a greenhouse, except shaded slightly, so the suns don't burn the plants.) Despite the shading, the greyhouse gets very hot during the day, and it's coolest in the last hours before dawn.

Which, as I may have mentioned before, is what I consider the best time to sleep. And that's what I was doing, very soundly I might add, dreaming about a terrible thunderstorm that scared the poodoo out of me when I was little, back when I was on Naboo and had a different name and no idea of what was ahead of me. I thought what was ahead of me at that time was that I was going to be dead very soon. A bolt of lightning had just split our cottage open, or so I thought. I opened my eyes a few minutes later and saw everything intact and the rest of my family shaking.

It was a tremendous storm. We get tremendous storms here too, but only rarely. I knew I was dreaming this time because we didn't really have a singing Gungan sprouting out of smoldering flowerpot, and we didn't have a row of line-dancing droids, and my grandfather certainly wouldn't have tried to teach them the Hustle even if we had. Especially since he was already dead at the time of the storm. Nor did the then-Mayor Palpatine ever offer me a piece of fudge which looked suspiciously like a stick of butter covered in brown dust.

The crashing sounds in my dream went on and on, and the clumsy droids' stomping got louder and louder, and soon there was a lot of yelling too, distant yelling, which I assumed were the firefighters trying to get us to open the door to buy cakes from them, until one of them called, "Sandstormer!"

Then I woke up just enough to put some lights on and stumble to the door. I wasn't sure I wasn't still dreaming, but even half-asleep I know better than to open the door in the middle of the night without knowing who's on the other side.

"It's us!" a muffled voice called unhelpfully. That was enough to prove it wasn't a Tusken Raider, so I opened the door, and Luke and the Larses spilled through in an untidy heap, Owen slamming the door behind them and looking for the repulsor field controls.

"Accident... Sandpeople!" Luke squeaked.

The kid's no good in an emergency, but I understood enough to turn the repulsor field to its highest setting. It's not great at the best of times, but it had a full charge and my door is pretty sturdy, even after a beating like the one it had just received.

"Just two," Beru explained, and I still wasn't lucid enough to follow, but when I saw the blood-soaked rag wrapped around her hand, I snapped to full wakefulness and activated One-Onegee.

I hate to cut this short, but I need to stop typing. I'll finish later. The important thing is that Beru is okay now, there's no infection, the Sandpeople apparently decided to bother someone else, and Owen's finally agreed to order some new equipment.