Love/Hate relationship

with this beautiful Northern Flicker.He is bigger than a blackbird, has beautiful colors and a long strong beak as he belongs to the family of the woodpeckers. But when I try to take a picture of him, he disappears within seconds. Skip once portrayed him beautifully. Photographing birds takes way more patience than I have. I love his beauty and hate his shyness.
CONTINUATION to yesterday's'  blip:
Isn’t it the same with all things in life?  Everything good also has a downside? That was another thing that I learned in this marriage. There is no light without a shadow and it would have been hard to find a man at my age who hasn’t had a wife before me. The thing that I did not know when we got married was how much this ex-wife was going to influence our marriage. 50/50 custody for a child causes the child to constantly change between two houses. When I came here, the kid changed houses  daily.
In the attempt to create something like an educational surrounding and to give the son the possibility to feel more at home where ever he was, we had to find regulations and  behaviors that we all could agree upon. More than a year of discussions and tensions followed.  During that time I often had the feeling that this woman was somewhere in our house, so present she was. (She had lived in this house before me) It took me two years of remodeling, reshaping, recreating this house, before it felt like “ours”.
Now the boy is off to college and he has grown into a very nice young man. The ex-wife found a new husband and is not living around the corner anymore, not even in this town.

Thank you for visiting and your so kind feed back!
I am posting this from my IPad and there is no app for that yet. After 8 weeks. When I go into the internet here, I have no chance to create a link or to change letters into bold or cursive. What a pain!