Karma

Could there be a karmic balance to the universe?  Is too much good karma necessarily followed by a little bad karma to keep the universe in balance?  I had an incredible kayaking trip to Cape Lookout National Seashore last week followed by a really productive weekend working on the new kayak.  And then this week, every machine I touch seems to malfunction.  I also seem to be making very stupid and time consuming mistakes on the new kayak, but fortunately, nothing that I can not fix. 

Last week was my first time to Cape Lookout National Seashore.  I've been looking at it on Google Earth for over a decade wondering what it was like.  I was hoping to have the new kayak done by June 1st so that I could take it for a test run in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) of northern Minnesota, but when that did not happen, I changed my plans at the last minute.  I have two friends who live in the southern states.  We were all going to meet up in or around Duluth, MN on June 1st.  It seemed like a better plan to kayak Cape Lookout instead of the BWCA. 

Not only was Cape Lookout a beautiful and challenging place to kayak, it could possibly have been even more remote than the BWCA.  There were nights that we camped on the beach and I doubt there was another person within about 4 miles of us.  I love watching the tide.  We had one afternoon where we were stuck on a tidal flat for three hours waiting for the tide to come in.  Once it did, the water rose quickly lifting us and carrying us down to our next campsite. 

OK so now on to the bad karma.  I broke two lawn mowers recently along with my band saw.  This evening, I fixed two separate problems with my band saw only to realize after I spent a couple hours cutting out parts that I used plywood of the wrong thickness.  Yeah, I know, this is really stupid.  I might be able to plane it down to a thinner thickness, but I'm not going to attempt that while I'm feeling the bad karma coursing through the universe.  I'll do that tomorrow night. 

As for the weight of the new kayak, I can easily lift both the hull and deck.  I did not weight it, but it will be very portagable when finished.  I'm designing the cockpit shape so that it will rest on my shoulders without needing a portage yoke.