Thanksgiving in Florida.

I love Thanksgiving and I believe it may be my favorite holiday of all since the only thing that's ever been expected of me during this time is a healthy appetite. This will be the first Thanksgiving in over 50 years that will not be spent at my parents' home in western Pennsylvania.

I have to admit that if I'd been given the option of living anywhere in the US, Florida would have been at the very bottom of my list. And arriving here during a horribly sweltering August only reinforced my opinion.

But now that we've been here for a few months I've found my opinion has changed. I really don't need six months of lead gray skies, endlessly cold dreary dark days, and worrying about whether I'm going to have to dig my car out from under three feet of snow that playfully fell during the night.

Instead, I wake up to sunny blue skies, take Wilbur to the dog park nearly every day during the week where we've met tons of wonderful people and playful poochies, go on bike rides with Hans to the beach on the weekend, sit barefoot in my cockpit every evening reading a book until it's dark, and then grill our dinner.

Now, I'm not bragging here, it's just that I've found myself adjusting very well to our new surroundings and for that I'm very grateful. However that could very well change when hurricane season rolls around again.

And I think I've figured out something very interesting. I've always associated Thanksgiving and Christmas with wintry type weather (like I said, over 50 years! Really?!) and perhaps if we'd moved to a different city in the north, I'd be feeling homesick, but since I'm so far removed from all that, reality just hasn't kicked in.

It doesn't feel like Thanksgiving here at all and in my opinion it could very well be July right now.

After having my Halloween display vandalized I was unsure of what to do for Thanksgiving.

I still haven't bought any new plants but I did cover our dock box with a fall themed plastic table cloth and adorned my tacky pink flamingo with an Indian headdress.

I found some feathers at Michael's and fused them to a scrap of fabric with Wonder Under. I then hand sewed it to Pinky's head.

A bit of a closeup.

Maybe I'll be more creative at Christmas but only if I can figure out a vandal proof idea for my decorations.

I'm very happy to announce that this year Hans and I received an invitation to a Thanksgiving get together with a friend of Hans' from his college days at CMU in Pittsburgh. It's been several years (and possibly decades) since Hans has seen Mark but we're very much looking forward to celebrating this holiday with an old friend and his family, and tons of their friends.

Poor Wilbur. Visions of Sugar Plums may be dancing in his head but he will not be stealing and eating pumpkin pie, shrimp, or butterscotch creme pie this Thanksgiving.

But don't worry about the little man, I have a feeling he'll be treated to a big peanut butter and biscuit stuffed kong.

And as always we'll leave the NFL station on for him so he can keep track of the games while we're gone.