Welcome to the Home Spun Adventures of the Mauger (pronounced Major) boys.   This blog is going to chronicle the adventures I have as I try to learn a skill I have been interested in for somewhere close to nineteen years.  Fire spinning sparked (haha) my interest when I was sixteen and went to Victoria’s Illuminara Festival and watched a gentleman named Nick Woolsey perform with his poi.  He used the more traditional version of weighted (flaming) balls on a length of chain, and it looked amazing.  I had a chance to talk to him and he suggested I find a poi club here in town, unfortunately I have not found one, so instead I will be learning through a combination of web sites, youtube, reddit, and possibly a performer I am trying to make contact with  in Port Alberni.  Hence the inspiration for the name, going on an adventure nearly two decades in the making as I learn at home how to spin a staff.  Though the standard poi is an easier one to learn for most, my childhood love of Donatello (the Ninja Turtle) has inspired me to learn to work with a contact staff rather than dual chains.  Contact staves come with a steeper learning curve as they are much larger and heavier than other objects in the contact juggling world.  Step one will be the process of building a proper practice staff that does not light on fire and will (hopefully) not give myself or my kids a concussion along the way. For a decent idea of what I hope to learn, likely over more than three months,  follow this link:

There are certainly flashier videos I could have chosen, but this one slows things down to a realistic speed that I expect to achieve, it is also less dance oriented than most and he remains fairly stationary.  So this seems like a realistic depiction of where I can see myself going with this project eventually.  Am I in over my head with this project?  No, not really, but outside of playing pool and disc golf I am a few decades removed from having any form of regular agility based activity, unless you count crawling through attics and up ladders agility based.  I may be in a little over my head with parts of this course though, as I wound up creating two wordpress blogs before I was successful in creating one as an opened.ca blog.  Toss in a few other minor technological difficulties and I’ve definitely started to wonder why people I know come to me for tech help.  Maybe I just google things better than they do?

I do not really know what this blog will look like moving forward, but I hope it remains interesting for those of you who check in.  There will be some ups, some downs, and hopefully a few good laughs along the way.  Ideally with me and not at me, but that is up to me to define.  So if I share the unfortunate experience of hitting myself in the back of the head with a metal rod because I had no idea what I was doing, then I will qualify that as laughing with me rather than at me.