Dads. Lucky to be thankful for many things about mine!

I've been a bit cracked up for the past couple of days, wondering if I'm going to wash out of an MFA program. Don't get me wrong, I wanted a hard program, but I hate failure. It's been hard to think of what I'm thankful for. It's not that I'm not thankful. In truth, I was about list the stupid temporal distractions that give my sore brain a break, but someone posted the question, "How do I be dad to a girl?" And, then I knew.  Today's fifteen is all about great things my dad taught me, on purpose or by accident. Thanks, Pete, for being a great dad to lots of daughters.
For here are the lessons he taught, some of which I admit I resisted:

1. How to play chess, or rather to lose with face, at six
2. How to understand a solenoid in an alternator
3. How to ride a bike
4. How not to make dad do all the work on a tandem bike
5. Who Pinkfloyd was when I saw it graffiti-painted under that bridge near Foster Park (oh, and how to 'rebel' without rebeling by listening to them without really wanting to be them)
6. How and why to do algebra, trig and geometry
7. How read sin on a sound wave
8. How to appreciate the value of calculus,
9. Not to let a weird man make me feel uncomfortable, 
10. What teen boys are "thinking" and to avoid giving the wrong impression
11. That reading the funnies is important
12. How to crack lame punnies
13. The importance of carrying on family traditions, whether it be in pun form, prayer form, standing on the front porch and seeing off your kids and grandkids or praying prodigiously as well as serving God wherever, however, whenever He asks
14. How to sharpen one's wit and be a life-long learner
15. To google what you don't know if your Dad cannot do as the sign says "Ask Dad. He knows"

To be fair, my mom had a hand in some of these and I could go on and on and on. More will be forthcoming. Right now I'm bleary-eyed from reading, from staring at screen, from the late hour and most of all, thinking about my dad.

PS. Also, he taught me what a real hammer and a real power drill can do! Miraculous.