And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses

It was the color of money:

Caramel: It's the shade Marc and Kristina Weiss used to stain a 12-foot section of cedar fence at their Redmond [Washington] town home.

And it's a stain that proved impossible to get out, even after members of the town-home association's board insisted on piña colada.

The Weisses restained with Nantucket white, but they refused to repaint their fence piña colada.

The color war raged for months and finally landed in the hands of an arbitrator.

The result? Vindication for the Weisses and more than $85,000 in legal fees on the association's tab.

....Arbitrator Jerome O. Cohen ruled caramel was in fact an approved hue, and that the Weisses were never required to use the piña colada color.

He also found the shade resulting from the caramel-Nantucket white combination — dulce de leche, maybe? — was so close to piña colada that the two shades were indistinguishable under "reasonable observation."

Cohen ordered the Sammamish Forest Manors Homeowners Association to reimburse the Weisses' legal fees, which came to more than $39,000.

Together with its own legal fees, the town-home association will spend more than $85,000 on the color war.