Top 10 Uses for the Backyard at the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan

A lot of people have requested more info about home life at the House of Skills, so I decided to start a new series of articles on the various usages for the various parts of our humble abode.  I'll eventually try to write a top 10 for every room in the house with the exception of the bathroom... I don't think anyone wants to read that one.

But I'm going to start where I am right now.  I would think that more than any other segment of the House of Skills, the backyard really defines what this place is all about.  So, bearing in mind that I'm just randomly estimating what we actually spend more time doing, here is my educated estimation of the top 10 uses we get out of the backyard:

 #10 General Backyard Stuff  

I kind of had to have a category for stuff like laying out in the sun and reading a book or warming up for a jog.  While we do find some better uses for out backyard, a certain amount of the time we spend out here is for mundane stuff like mowing the grass, raking leaves or writing blogposts.

 #9 Setting Stuff on Fire  

I should start this off with the standard "DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME" warning, but several of us at the House of Skills are trained professionals in the arts of fire manipulation and we can't exactly practice fire poi, fire devil sticks, torch juggling or fire Myachi in the living room.  When we find the need to test the limits of our intelligence and start tempting fire to burn us, we always do it in the backyard.

 #8 Slack Lining  

The Slack-Line hasn't been up for a few days which means we really need to put it back up tomorrow.  We've had the badminton net up for too long now and I'd really like to move slack-lining up the list a bit.  Because it's still a pretty new skill toy for us, it hasn't managed to log enough time to be higher than 8th in my current estimation.

 #7 Practicing New Myachi Tricks  

For those of you wondering when Myachi was going to show up on this list, I should remind you that I'm going least to most.  Myachi will show up a few more times as we get closer to the top uses, but I feel like I have to include it here as well.  We practice new tricks in every part of the house, including both yards, so you'll see this one showing up on virtually every list in this forthcoming series.

The backyard is a particularly good spot for practicing new tricks since when one person starts practicing a new trick, everyone starts wanting to practice new tricks and most of the other spots we could practice would run out of room pretty quick.

 #6 Playing Net Games  

There are several net games we play here so this earns a spot pretty high on the list.  We play a lot of Myachi-Net (with and without paddles) but we also play a lot of badminton, takraw and footbag net.  We are also known to make up random games using whatever we have handy so sometimes we find novel uses for the net.

 #5 Playing Hacky Sack  

There's a limit to how many people can play hacky-sack in the living room (six, for the record) so whenever we have a few friends or other masters over, we often find the game getting too big to hold indoors.  Virtually everyone involved in Myachi has a pre-existing love for footbag when they got into the game so it's only natural that we would stay true to our roots.

 #4 Practicing With Skill Toys too Big for the Living Room  

Most of our stuff can be done with very little room.  There's no need to go outside to practice with juggling balls or Astrojax, but things like meteor, lasso and poi require a bit more free space than the living room offers.  For some tricks, devil sticks and diabolo insist on wide open spaces, as do the more complex tricks with juggling clubs.  To be fair, most of the time stuff that requires high throws gets practiced in the front yard, since a low hanging tree inhibits it in the back.

 #3 Playing Myachi Fu  

Of all the games in Myachi, the one that is fastest growing in popularity is Myachi Fu.  In the past year, this has gone from an obscure off shoot of the game to one of the games most popular and might even unseat MYACH as our most played variation.  To keep up with the kids that are getting scary good at it, the Myachi Masters often find themselves in the backyard training.

 #2 Improvised Sports  

I would not have been at all surprised if when I'd walked outside to write this I saw Monk and Maverick playing a game that involved a Nerf gun, a lacrosse stick, a juggling ring and the balance board.  One of our favorite pastimes here is inventing new games and random challenges so this might actually be the top use we find for the backyard.  There's really only one thing that could conceivably compete with it.

 #1 Playing MYACH

Fu might have the potential to bypass MYACH as the most popular game in the movement, but it hasn't gotten there yet.  Right now, MYACH is the number one way of pitting Myachi skill against Myachi skill and thus it is the most important one for the Masters to train in.  It is also something of a badge of honor for the younger Masters to defeat the veterans in games of MYACH