I am my father's daughter ...
I find it a little strange, but I seem to have grown up with more similarities to my father than I would have suspected.
My parents separated when I was 9, and I lived with my mother until I went to college. My dad had visitation rights, and we had weekends and little vacations, but he never actually had much of a relationship with us. With the benefit of hindsight, I can understand why a man who was shuffled from foster home to foster home, from neglected circumstances to worse, would have trouble having any idea how a father is supposed to relate to his children in a healthy family. He based his interactions with us on the premise that fear would cause obedience and he would not have to resort to physical discipline. This is a somewhat broken view of things, but I can respect what he was trying to do and trying to avoid, and he did have some measure of success. He'd yell and intimidate a bit, which was enough to keep us in line. (It also explains why people with physical presence, hot tempers, and a propensity to yell can still cow me completely until I recover myself.)
It took until I was out of college to have any real conversation with my father and longer still until I could relax and talk to him like a normal person, even teasing him on occasion. He's mellowed out a lot, and he's been trying to reach out to us kids over the past few years, calling us every few months just for 5 minutes or so to see what's going on and let us know that he does think of us. I'm really impressed by how far he's come.
With that background, I can't say that I ever had him as a role model or had much exposure to his thinking process or behavior. However, I have identified a few attributes that we share that came into sharper focus this weekend as I visited him in Vermont.
We both have a quick temper. We both enjoy physical labor, especially with respect to satisfaction with accomplishment and generally improving things. We both prefer to get an early start on the day and do work through the morning and afternoon, leaving the evenings free for relaxation. We both have a "place for everything and everything in its place" mentality, so I think that my mild OCD is directly from him (and probably my brother's ADHD symptoms, too). We both like fixing things and solving problems, although his solutions are more likely to be more purely mechanical like rerouting water drainage to adapt a section of land or release orchards to help feed wildlife in the winter. We both enjoy science fiction and reading. We both engage society on occasion but are more than happy to simply retreat for weeks at a time and occupy ourselves with other pursuits.
We also both make that "oip" noise, BTW. ;)
Don't get me wrong; we have plenty about us that we don't share. But, it's interesting to see what we have in common even having grown up largely removed from his influence.