"Mardi Gras": ""Fat Tuesday", reflecting the practice of the last night of eating rich, fatty foods before the ritual Lenten sacrifices and fasting of the Lenten season."

"uncanny valley": "a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. Examples of the phenomenon exist among robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls."

I am not going to do anything today other than our evening work at the diner. I have been doing things for days and I would like to not do things now. If Husband wants to do things, he can do them without me. Or perhaps he can do things for me.

Husband was not as much help with killing pigs and cows as he might have been had he gotten the sleep I suggested. After he finally did sleep he was busy with his crafting and his gathering. I needed to help gather since we did not have much time, even though I needed time myself to make the costumes.

Halloween seems to be similar to All Saints' Wake in Eorzea. It is the day before All Saints' Day, which is a holy day, and is the last chance before it that evil spirits can play. Husband compared it to something called Mardi Gras. What it seems to mean in this world is a time for children to put on costumes and beg or threaten for candy.

Since the picnic was the day before Halloween, the woman who hired us for the picnic, Adele Swanson, wanted us to dress in costume. Husband agreed to this, and then asked me to make the costumes while he made the food. I was annoyed unhappy annoyed that he was asking me to do this with so little time, but to be fair he was asking me to make two things while he made two hundred.

The costumes he proposed were "skeleton bodysuits". This got odd results in google.

"Husband, what is sexy about a skeleton bodysuit?"

"The idea of taking it off of you."

"How does that differ from other clothes?"

"Not at all. Far as I'm concerned, everything is sexy on you."

"Even the vanu vanu costume?"

"Especially the vanu vanu costume."

I may test him on that some day. But I will need a lot of feathers.

We looked at the site claiming to sell sexy skeleton bodysuits. I did not see anything sexy about them, though the site did have other clothes that Husband said counted as sexy. The bodysuits seemed to be made similarly to a hempen camise and tights, with cloth that fit tightly to the body, but we did not have recipes that covered as much of the body as the suits do.

We also did not have dye. We had found pigment in the Ozarks, but we did not think to gather much of it. So Husband and I went to a fabric store in Tulsa.

All of each kind of cloth we make with our recipes is one color. This store had cloth of different colors, some with lines or shapes. People were buying quantities of cloth that I assume they would craft things with. Our recipes take uncolored cloth, and then we dye the things we make of it. I had not thought of coloring the cloth first; I think this may be a use of Husband's "template recipes."

The store also had many colors of thread, many colors of dye, large spools of what Husband said was lace, packages of beads and other things that people apparently make clothing from. It looks at least as complicated as cooking in this world. Perhaps I will look for videos about what people do with it all. But we had come for dye. We bought black dye and white dye, though Husband also bought what looked like pens.

Dye is different here. In Eorzea we would make or buy dye by the pot, ready to apply. Dye here needs to be mixed with the water the cloth is in. Though Husband did say he once painted silk with dye, which involved brushes and something called "resist" that kept the dye from spreading. He also said it took days to do a single scarf. I did not have days.

I hardly had two days. A lot of Friday was spent at a farm on the way to Tulsa that claimed to have many different vegetables. We gathered spinach and leeks and pumpkins, and other things to fill our gathering logs, such as onions and carrots and popotos potatoes and at least one of everything we could find. Husband had not yet experienced gathering in an empty farm, so it was another thing I showed him we can do.

After the farm and the fabric store we Returned to Wyatt. Husband went straight to the workshop to make food. In the game I had found the Quick Synthesis button for crafting, so that with a single click I could make cause Rika to make ninety-nine hempen cloth. It was not quick for Rika, as she had to make each piece of cloth one by one, while I could sit and read. But there was no Quick Synthesis in Eorzea, and there is no Quick Synthesis here; Husband had to make everything one at a time.

I spent some time with him as I thought about my costume recipes, then went to the bar for my bouncer shift. When I was done he was still making food; I needed to insist he stop for the night and come home and sleep. He wanted to do "just a little bit more", but I reminded him of how well that worked with his first spinach pie, and he let me take him home.

He was sometimes stubborn like that in Eorzea, wanting to finish whatever he was doing. But in Eorzea we did not need sleep and we did not have times things were due; if he wanted to spend days doing something it was not a problem. If Esuna had worked on sleepiness here I wonder if he would ever come to bed.

I looked through my weaver and leatherworker recipes while at the bar. I had never seen a recipe that used dye, and was not sure how to write one. Eorzean dye seemed to know the difference between main cloth and trim; Earth dye wants to use all of the cloth at once. The idea of painting the cloth became more appealing, but Husband had made it sound like it would take time to learn.

Instead I decided to dye some cloth white and some cloth black and write a recipe that used black-dyed cloth and white-dyed cloth. The black cloth would cover the body, while the white cloth would be on the outside of it making the skeleton image. The bodysuits I saw online differed in the number of pieces: some were a single piece that covered one from head to toe, while others had separate top and bottom pieces. I designed the usual five-piece attire set of head, body, hands, legs and feet.

The first head I made had eyeholes like other cloth masks. Husband admitted it was practical, but thought it odd that a skeleton had eyes. He said that if the cloth was a loose-enough weave one can see through it, especially with good light. This meant making new cloth, dyeing the new cloth, testing to see if he was right (and he was), and making a new mask recipe. But I got it done late Saturday while Husband was bouncing at the bar.

The bar got very quiet when I walked in wearing the costume. The light in the bar was not strong, but through the cloth I could see Husband's smile as I came up and sat on a stool. He turned to Sam, who was staring at me, and said, "Now, wouldn't you agree this is a sexy skeleton bodysuit?"

"...I...sure would."

"Excellent. Mission accomplished, my love."

"Thank you, Husband. May I get a Coke, Sam? I need to work on his costume now."

We went in the morning to buy the insulated food carrier and some thin metal trays. We also bought bags of ice and packages of water and Coke; Mr. Hartman said he had plastic tubs we could use to put the drinks in.

We Returned to Wyatt and made a show of needing to struggle to put the food carrier in Mr. Hartman's truck, even though it contained no food; the food would stay fresher in our inventory. Mr. Hartman also had a foldable table to lend. We got everything loaded and were driven to the picnic site. Since we were an hour early we waited most of the hour before putting the food onto trays and the trays in the carrier.

We did not need to do more than put the trays on the table and see that they stayed filled, but Husband had an idea for how we would "perform": that we would not speak, and that we would move a little slower than usual. People sometimes asked us questions; we answered with gestures. We met their eyes, but our eyes did not show.

The people did not seem to know what to do with this. Some simply ignored us, some would look at us for a bit before trying to interact, some would laugh nervously. The smaller children stared at us. Only one man who smelled of beer tried to insist on talking with me, but someone else pulled him away.

Husband later called these reactions "uncanny valley", but wikipedia disagrees. Wikipedia says "uncanny valley" is people's reactions to not-real things that try to seem real; we were real things trying to seem not real. Google says this is being a "living statue" but does not give a word for people's reactions to it.

The people were happy with the food, whatever they thought of us. Many people took both the beef stew pie and the spinach pie, though one of either should have been enough for a meal. We had brought apple pies as well as the pumpkin pies; people mostly had one or the other.

After the picnic was done, Ms. Swanson came to us to talk, and seemed relieved when Husband took off his mask. She was pleased with our service, promised prompt payment, and found people to take the remaining food away. We folded the table and Returned to Wyatt when everyone had gone.

Husband liked the effect we had on the people enough that he proposed we wear the costumes that night as well for our diner shift. We got a big bag of candy from May and poured it into a mixing bowl on the counter. Husband played dramatic yet dreary music that he said was performed on a "pipe organ"; it made me think of the church in Ishgard.

Some of the diner children wore costumes; most did not. All of them took handfuls of candy. They all grinned at us when they saw us. More than usual ordered at the counter to interact with us. I sometimes heard giggling when I walked by them; it was only later that Husband reminded me our costumes were Eorzea gear, which left my tail visible. I was a cat skeleton. Or perhaps a skeleton cat.

It was fun entertaining the children and confusing the picnic people, but after three days of gathering and crafting and performing I would like to do no work today. Rika has crafting to learn; perhaps I will go to Tulsa and make her work for me. Tomorrow I will practice throwing men; that might be fun.

Husband is still asleep. I think I will wake him and demand an omelet. That sounds fun.