But first, we’ll have a look at the house:

View from the kitchen window:

Some weeks ago, after renovating their beach house, friend Vik (she of the witty comments at the end of my posts) remarked that she and her husband, Gordon (you’ve read about him, too) were of one mind when working on projects. So work progresses smoothly, and those of you lucky enough to have seen the result of their synchronic brains, will know what a good thing that collaboration is.

Larry and I? Not so much. We spoke of this last night, resting after an afternoon in the tansy fields. We are so often polar in our view of what’s happening, which way we should turn, the optimal solution to a problem. This might sound like a bad thing, but honestly, it isn’t. Somehow it works to have two options, and I couldn’t say if one or the other of us generally “wins.” And sometimes, it’s just funny. And then I get blog material. Read on.

So we’re marching along, checking the hundreds of tansy plants for the elusive cinnabar caterpillar. Larry gathers a cluster of stems which I whack off with the loppers and he deposits in a yard clipping bag. The sun shines, we hear the carpenters at work and overhead the cries of our resident red-tail.

Paradise, except for the ants on the tansy. They torment Larry, crawling up his arms. He has taken off his shirt to catch some Vit. D, but the ant situation would be worse if they were crawling up sleeves. So he swats, sweats, swears and the work gets done.

We stop to load the bag into Bob-the-Truck. The ants are crawling on Larry’s arms, even though they no longer are, and I suggest that I can pour water from the cooler on his itchy skin. Great idea, and he gets immediate relief. We do both arms, and then he turns his back and curls his shoulders. I take this as the indication that he’d like me to do his back. (See second paragraph.) Oh, God. Ice water on the back, when unexpected, is quite a shock. He reacted. I laughed and couldn’t stop. He still doesn’t think it was all that funny. But why did he turn his back? Unexplained.

About those ants. We learned that they eat the caterpillars which are supposed to be eating the tansy. From the abundance of ants and the paucity of caterpillars, we conclude that the ants have won The Great Tansy War of 2015. But we’re careful and when we accidentally clip a plant with the little fellows on board, we carefully move them to a living stalk. One caterpillar equals one moth, which equals three hundred eggs. Okay, maybe we’ll spray next year.

Speaking of spraying, Jarod, of F&W, sent us names of contractors his agency uses. Thistles! Blackberries! Apparently, there’s also the rent-a-goat option, but for now, we’ll just go the hard- core, get-it-done route. An advantage to the slow walk among the tansy is the opportunity to get a micro view of the land. Right now, it’s pretty shocking to see the hard use the animals have imposed, reinforcing our determination to utilize rotational grazing. If we use grazing at all.

Back again on Saturday to resume the tansy attack. Then it’s off to Camp Estrogen in Manzanita with the girlfriends. Laughs, good food, Cheetos, philosophy, People Magazine? You know. Fun!