My dad is a weird character, as far as I can tell he spent his entire 20's bumming around, couch surfing and theoretically studying for a PHD which he never bothered to write. And than in his 30's he managed to walk into a well paying job and transition into a nice middle class existence. I kinda like this because its legitimizing my own bumbling, non-committal twenties.

Introduced me to Monty Python and The Beatles. Hard to beat(le) that!

When I was a kid we used to have a minivan and my parents were terrible at maintaining it. My dad was driving it down the road one day at about 30 mph and his front tire fell off. Just completely off.

It managed to slowly roll itself through a gas station parking lot, opened the sliding doors, bumped a fridge and came to rest in the middle of the store. My dad walked in, said, "Excuse me, that's mine" and calmly walked out of the store with his tire.

lol.

He was extremely OCD and used to count things. One thing he loved counting were how many Mexicans he saw on his drive to his dart game every week, and he'd constantly report to me the numbers. I'd be in the middle of work and he'd call me just to tell me he saw 137 Mexicans in Target. "Dad, why would I care and how do you know you didn't double count them?"

"Oh, trust me, I didn't double count."

I can just picture him wandering around the target, perhaps with a notepad in his hand, counting Mexicans. Lol. I got annoyed and told him it seemed a little bigoted so he switched to counting fat people. He loved IHOP because "It was a gold mine for fat people."


Oh my god, the random calls I used to get. He'd call me and sound really flustered, or panicky, with some random trivia question he could probably look up himself and he was either too lazy or didn't know how. "Wait, Chris, sorry to bother you but how do you spell Wednesday? Oh, ok. That's what I thought."

"Sorry to bug you but what day of the month is it??? The 4th? Oh damn, I thought it was the 9th. Thanks."

"Chris, how old is Kobe Bryant? Oh wow, that's older than I thought he was. Wow. Ok bye."

He thought smart phones were the most miraculous invention of all time, and was amazed how I could look stuff up in seconds. Always would ask me to look something up, very hesitantly, like it would be a massive chore to look up what Tiger Woods scored that day. "If you get a chance, I know it's a pain in the ass, could you tell me how Tiger did today?"

"Yea just a sec... Uh he shot 71."

"Wow! Technology......."


The man had no sense of style or decorating, I used to find the most random **** in his apartment. One day I saw his dresser lined with Fiji Bottles stuffed full of pistachio shells. I was like WTF do you have all this trash laying around?

He simply responded, "It's art. It's supposed to be weird."


lol. ****in guy.

My dad once asked me how to rewind a DVD and if The Who was the band George Michael was in.

Pretty awesome in his own way though probably not what the thread was intended for.

This was great. Made me

My Dad was the smartest man I have ever known. He had a great career/job and in 1985 decided to start his own solo business because he didn't want a boss. In the first year he made like $2000. He kept at it though and when he died (rip Dad) he was raking in the money. He died on 3/26/10. He was always there for everything important to me. Sports, exams, you name it.

Anyway, I miss him like crazy.

Glad you bumped. I want to know how happy your dad was about that Man City league title.

this is kind of an odd story but when i was ~18 years old i raced cars. one saturday morning at about 9am my dad was replacing the string on his bow, and the string snapped and cut his thumb off. he and my mom went to the hospital to get it reattached, and after surgery he went home, took a shower, then drove 45 minutes to get to the track to watch me race.

lol that's awesome. certifiable badass

But how much did he lose?

No spectacular stories, really. My dad is just a great guy. One example of him teaching me right from wrong:

When I was a kid, I was with a friend and saw a newspaper box outside a store. I wanted a paper, so I inserted a quarter and opened the door. I had never used one of these things before, so I was amazed that there was just a stack of newspapers sitting there, that it didn't dispense one at a time. Thinking, for some reason, that I could just take as many as I wanted, I took an extra for my friend. When I got home and bragged about it to my dad, he got mad at me and immediately took me back to the machine to put in another quarter, open the door, and shut it.

He's a total goofball who thinks his stupid jokes are hilarious. He cracks himself up to the point of tears, which in turn makes everyone around him crack up to the point of tears.

He and my mom came to just about every sporting event of my childhood. He always encouraged me and helped me, but never put pressure on me.

The rare occasions that he made my school lunch instead of my mom were the best because he put a ton of jelly in my PB&J.

My taught taught both my brother and me how to work with tools, which is really cool because a lot of daughters get left out of that. He's an incredible artist who designed the house I grew up in. Strangers come to our door and say how cool and unique the house is. He has some absurdly complicated corporate job that I just can't believe any one human could do, but he pulls it off under immense pressure.

Today, he and I were at an art exhibit in a garden, and I passed a wind chime. I wondered aloud if there was a "Picasso of windchimes"-- that sounds weird, and it kind of is super random, but without skipping a beat, he said, "Paolo Soleri." Because, you know, who doesn't know the Pablo Picasso of wind chimes off the top of their head??

Sometimes, I feel like he knows everyone in Texas. All these artists and politicians I respect, he's met somewhere or another. And they REMEMBER him, which is just nuts to me. He's no one famous, but all these people are friendly with him and remember his name.

Also, he's been married to and supportive of my mother, which I don't think anyone else in the world could do.

my dad is awesome and incredibly intelligent. went to uoft as an undergrad for 1 year, took the ddac early (the test you take to get into dental school after 4 years of undergrad) and did historically well, got into harvard + went to UNC, the whole shabang.

i thank him for good genes. plus, he works incredibly hard so that i can go to school

Ha! His brother is a season ticket holder but he is not now. After setting a budget of £600 he couldnt get a ticket. After 89 minutes of the match he'd given up, paused sky and planned to watch later. He came bk and watched the rest, screaming whilst calling me. He couldn't formulate words properly. He's actually a bigger lancashire cricket fan. When they won the title last year, he somehow got in the middle of the players' huddle and got covered in champagne.

I remember when he picked me up from a house party when i was 15. I asked if hed let some of my drunk friends catch a ride as it was freezing. 5 of them! So 7 of us squeezed in and he drove everyone home whilst horrendous garage music was pumping out on full volume!

after my sister was born (3rd kid) dad went to law school while working 50 hour weeks because he wanted us to be able to do whatever we want when we got older.

Been nothing but supportive even after i've failed and messed time and time again. In first year of college at age 21/22 and is behind me 100%

When we were young anytime anything was wrong with the house or there was a project he'd go to the library get a book and figure out how to do it. He has done the plumbing, electricity, built a 2nd story deck, built bunk beds with me and my brother when we were little (we thought we did everything but ultimately don't think we really did anything useful, but went around telling everyone that we made our own beds)

This year was supposed to be in europe for 2 weeks for some court hearing, but ended up being post poned. We had had made plans to drive down to france with my girlfriend to some winemakers where he had been going every year when we lived in belgium on the weekend inbetween when he didn't have anything. He thought I wasn't super interested and had agreed just kind of to humor him. When he said he wasn't coming and i said that was too bad we'd all been looking forward to it, we'd have to do it another time. He instantly bought a plane ticket (before the company was going to pay the flight) out of his own pocket, and flew to europe for thursday-> sunday just to see me.

Says "if you need to have safety guard/protection on tools you shouldn't be using them. And first thing he does when buys some new saw/electric tool is take off the safety guards because they "just get in the way"