I do not have twitters, but my dad definitely broke out the graph paper and mechanical pencils to create a to-scale drawing of our dining room and kitchen so he could map out seating for Christmas Eve when one year we had like 30 people coming.

Oh man. Dads, am I right?

My Dad, every summer, sends my sister and I videos of the sunset in my parent's backyard, complete with soundtrack, provided by his voice. It sounds very much like he's trying to imitate an orchestra of some kind, replete with cymbal crashes and a choir (I think). He normally starts it off with "Da da daaaaaaa!" and then it dissolves into giggles, but then he collects himself and it frequently ends with the Star Wars theme.

This is one of my favorite parts of summer and I save each and every one of those videos. I also unabashedly show them to everyone I know.

The meal my dad was having just before his first seizure was nachos. He was at a folk festival at the time.

He got air-lifted by a helicopter and later in the hospital he was upset because he hadn't got to finish them.

'I had extra refried beans' he said.

When I was a kid I convinced my dad to take my tamagotchi with him to work for the day because they'd finally banned them at school. In the middle of a meeting it went off, much to my dad's dismay, and he had to fish it out of his bag, whereupon the two guys he was having the meeting with whipped out their own kids' tamagotchis and all three of them sat there frantically pushing buttons trying to get them to turn off.

Crying in my office at other people's Dads.
My dad is a bit crap, but he does go on wonderfully predictable rants about how class inequality is destroying the country. He used to email ONLY IN CAPS, but managed to figure out the shift key in 2007.

One year for Christmas, my stepdad got everyone in the family a "car emergency tool" that was a combo flashlight (both regular white light and a flashing red light), seatbelt-cutter, and window-smasher. You know, for when we are inevitably trapped in our cars underwater.

Not gonna lie, Twitter Dad stories was probably my favorite part of the week. DADS

Even now that I'm 30 and my siblings are also adults, my dad will still slide us each a 1-dollar bill if we order water in a restaurant instead of soda. It's like a reverse soda tax.

My dad is a Midwestern strong, silent type but he called me every day while I was interning in a visitor center at a national park in Alaska to ask what kind of wildlife I saw that day.

When avian flu was a big story he got us all Tamiflu from....somewhere and made us carry it around on our person at all times, in case of sudden avian flu incidents in New England.

Before I read the rest of these, my dad:

-When I was 15 and dating a boy named Duncan, my dad would call me to the phone by yelling "It's Hunky Dunkie on the phone!" without covering the receiver.

-Made up a knock knock joke to mock my childhood lack of coordination

-Nicknamed me Toadface

-When I was one of 3 winners in a statewide competition in college, patted me on the shoulder & said "pretty good" or something to that effect

I am really going to out myself here, but my dad has always been fond of old country western stuff. Wayyyy back when, we recorded the Disney cartoon of Pecos Bill (featuring Roy Rogers! And The Sons of the Pioneers!), which is sort of epic in its cowboy-ish-ness. When I went to college, to remind me of home, he left me a voicemail on my cell phone of the entire show. I still wish I had that.

ETA - this is in reply to paisleyLo's story of her dad's video "soundtracks". Dads are pretty awesome sometimes.

On long road trips, my dad will drive an additional 85 miles using back roads in order to avoid paying $3 in tolls.

My stepdad is flying on Friday for the first time since the 90s. He borrowed my roller bag and asked if he could put sandwiches in it. Then he made me show him how to turn off his cell phone. To close, we practiced going through security scanners. Then he gave me a pumpkin and sent me on my way.

Oh, I'm so happy these are all together somewhere. I nearly responded: "Drinks probably 3 glasses of alcohol a week, max. Has 200+ bottles of homemade wine stored in the basement 'just in case.'"

But my Twitter name is my real name, and if my dad ever found out I'd let the Internet at large trace his precious wine stash, he'd have a fit.

The thing that makes me happiest is the sheer number of dads who foist $20 bills on their children when they leave from a visit (mine does it too). Is there some kind of dad memo that gets passed around telling them to do this? Is it written entirely in bad puns?

My family talks to each other in basically a distinct dialect of verbal tics, nicknames, and inside jokes we've built up over many years, so there are many stories, but my dad has this recurring bit where if you call home and you're talking to him and my mom wants to say something, he'll pretend like she's forcibly taking the phone away from him. ("Noooooo she's taking it away from me don't take it away from me nooooooo AHHHHHH....." trailing off into silence.)

I always laugh, but my mother does not think it is funny.

My dad still refers to several of my friends by Roles They Played In Shows We Did Together In High School.... which was 12 years ago.

DAD: Who is coming to this thing?
ME: Joey. Joey, dad. You've known him for years. You talked to him about playing the bass.
DAD: ........
ME: .....................
DAD: Oh, the Major General!!!

ETA: he will actually call them these in human conversation. As in, a friend walks into my parents' house 12 years after playing Harold Hill, and he still says "Well, look who it is - the music man!"

My dad told us that the speedbumps in parking lots were animate aliens called Dilepticons. Very big ones were Trilepticons. Still warns us (and we warn each other) of large speed bumps with "Watch out, big Dilepticons in this lot!"

I also have a hilarious story of a pre-Actual Being a Dad story involving the purchase of a white Speedo.

Growing up, my sisters and I had a Disney tape that included the song "I'm My Own Grandpa". We listened to it so much, my dad made us sit down one night and diagram the family tree from that song. He didn't believe that the singer could REALLY be his own grandpa. We never listened to that song again.

My dad and I sometimes run road races together. When race course volunteers direct us which way to go, he likes to run the opposite way and shout "I'm delusional!" while waving his arms, as if he's been running for so long that he has no concept of space or direction.

He also loves to run past race spectators holding coffee and say "oh thank you so much, I need this" and try to grab their drinks.

I think it's a tie between the time that he cut up a whole bunch of tomatoes to teach me geography and the time that he came spluttering in with a condom he found in my car (I was 18, and had been stuck at home looking for a job/apartment for a couple of months).
"I think we need to talk."
"Dad, my boyfriend's been staying in my room for a week. I lost my virginity 2 years ago. I get tested for STDs annually. We do NOT need to have that talk. Oh, and isn't it so much better that I've been having safe sex than the alternative?"
Dad: *blush*, *mutter something unintelligible*, *exit stage left*.

I think it's important to point out that we never had a sex talk (birds and the bees, NOTHING) before this, so I am pretty sure that in his Dad mind he figured that I wouldn't have sex ever because we never talked about it.

In 1988, my zydeco/blues-listening dad took two of my friends and me to a New Kids On The Block concert.

(I had a lot more to say about this, but then realized, eh, that kind of sums it up.)

I posted this in another thread, but I got the most Dad email ever a few weeks ago. In its entirety:

Subject: Ken Burns Roosevelt PBS series fascinating to me.
Body: dad

When we were teenagers on Sunday mornings Dad would go to the grocery store and buy ALL of the marked down "day old" baked goods. ALL. My boyfriend (now husband) used to love to come over because it was the first time in his life he could have all of the cake/cookies/pie/coffee cake/pastries he had ever dreamed of eating. His mom never bought treats(healthy food dictator) so my dad's philosophy of "more is more" food shopping was a revelation.

My dad nicknamed my sister's high school boyfriend "the Gorilla". It was not an affectionate nickname.

When he first met my husband, my dad glared. It took a long time for him to warm up to "that guy who was kissing my daughter".

My dad's default Christmas gift is an umbrella. The last one he got me had wind-resistant flaps and came with a lifetime warranty. "Everyone always needs an umbrella," he always says.

Once on a family vacation we were all out to breakfast and just sitting quietly enjoying the view of the beach or whatever, and my dad takes a long sip of coffee, goes "ahhhh" and declares to nobody in particular, "god, I love coffee."

Also a couple years ago my stepmom sent him to the store to buy parsley, and he came back with cilantro. His defense was "it's basically the same thing."

Oh and one time, one of my friends asked my Dad if he liked the guy I was dating at the time. He looked startled at the idea, and said, "Have you ever seen the film the Big Red One? Lee Marvin says, 'Don't ever get to know the privates. They all die eventually'."

I loved the Twitter posts and I'm loving the comments here. I lost my dad four years ago suddenly, and I miss so many of his Dad-isms. I still have hanging on my fridge the last thing he mailed me: a Far Side cartoon that he wrote, "Enjoy some dreaded Tofudebeast on your birthday," on. Calling vegetarian food "the flesh of the dreaded Tofudebeast" was his favorite joke. That and telling us, "They invented language for a reason," when we would point to stuff at the dinner table. "One grunt: salt. Two grunts: more lima beans." And then he would laugh. Every single time. It stopped being funny for awhile during my teen years and college (probably because I was a little shit head), but then it got funny again. Oh, and his favorite song used to be Smash Mouth's "All Star". I remember once laughing about it, and he got very serious. "It's an inspiring song, [my first name]. It's about going out there and trying your best." OH, DAD.

I'm locked on twitter, so I couldn't send my Dadecdotes directly to Mallory, but here is my dad being the most dad:

- he puts the time at the end of every text message, and always signs it dad
- he sends me pictures of the cormorants that live at the local reservoir, and asks me to confirm that 'it's definitely a different one'
- I recently found out that he'd stashed little yokes that you use to check tire pressures in different places in my flat. I have maybe four of these things and I have no idea how to use them, but my dad is so proud of me for thinking that I can I can't tell him.
- this Easter I overheard my mother telling him that maybe he didn't need to organise an easter egg hunt for me this year. He sounded surprised and asked why. 'Because she's 29.'
- he offered to have someone who was making me sad killed for me, but because he's a #dad he planned to pay the assassin with a cheque

Also any dude who replied to Mallory with 'the most dad thing my dad's ever done is have a kid with my mum' - you will perish in flames.

My dad built a hydroponic gardening system out of rubbermaid tubs and PVC pipe to grow tomatoes in the backyard. The plants are truly impressive but you can't get too close because he keeps a circle of mousetraps on the ground around the system, and monitors them obsessively to see what he catches.

When I was in high school he took the giganitc jar of change that I had been saving since early childhood and used it to buy himself a recumbent bicycle. He said that "if you found those coins in the couch cushions they were mine anyway."

Last night I talked to my mom on the phone and she said that they just went to a wedding reception where he struck up a conversation with another gentleman about Civil War archaeology which somehow devolved into a loud and embarrassing dispute.