Finished up Hero Hours Contract -- only took a little bit more, as I thought.  It feels weird trying to give a full critique of a game that I'm associated with, so perhaps I ought not to.

Our Stardew Valley farm is going great!  We're in Summer year 2 and have just finished the community center, unlocking a bunch of new content, both in the main game and SDV expanded as well.  We're definitely past the point where we ever played before, and it has actually been pretty nice pacing in that things were just starting to get a little routine when suddenly even more content opened up.  Playing SDV is always a really interesting facsimile of patterns and habits in real life as you've got a combination of routine plus trying to expand / explore / do new things / work on projects on and around your farm.  There's only so many hours in a day so it's sometimes, somewhat strikingly, an exercise in trying to plan out routes and routines, scheduling whatever makes the most sense to accomplish in a day, and most importantly, to juggle countless numbers of improvement projects.  Anything from:

- Taking various items to the sewing machine in Emily's house to make new clothes out of
- Checking the shops for interesting wallpapers or floorings
- Upgrading equipment at the smith
- Dyeing clothes to make for nice outfits
- Diving into skull cavern for iridium ore
- Proceeding along whichever questline (mr qi stuff, etc)
- Tending to the greenhouse and gradually replacing all of the crops in there with Ancient Fruits
- Foraging and mining for raw materials (wood, coal, fiber, hardwood, ...)
- Expanding the fenced off area for the animals
- Crafting more kegs, preserve jars, tea saplings, etc.

The daily cycle and layout of things makes it so that you never are really just taking one thing until completion, or at least I'm not.  But maybe that's just a reflection of how I live life...

These more frequent blog updates feel good, as expected...