List of suggested things to be done at home for the ex-submariner that misses "the good old days on the boat". - a knol by Luis T. Puig
1. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Two to three hours after you fall asleep, have your wife whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble "Sorry, wrong rack".
2. Repeat back everything anyone says to you.
3. Spend as much time as possible indoors and avoid sunlight. Only view the world through the peephole on your front door.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Shower once a week. Use no more than 2 gallons of water per shower.
5. Buy a trash compactor and use it once a week. Store garbage in the other side of your bathtub.
6. Sit in your car for six hours a day with your hands on the wheel and the motor running, but don't go anywhere. Install 200 extra oil temperature gauges. Take logs on all gages and indicators every 30 minutes.
7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it to "High".
8. Watch only unknown movies with no major stars on TV and then, only at night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, and then watch a different one.
9. Don't do your wash at home. Pick the most crowded Laundromat you can find.
10. (Optional for Nukes and A-Div): Leave lawnmower running in your living room six hours a day for proper noise level.
11. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
12. Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
14. Invite guests, but don't have enough food for them.
15. Buy a broken exercise bicycle and strap it down to the floor in your kitchen.
16. Eat only food that you get out of a can or have to add water to.
17. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (Optional: cold beans and weenies, canned ravioli or soup).
18. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator.
19. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get dressed as fast as you can, then run to your kitchen with the garden hose while wearing a scuba mask.
20. Once a month take every major appliance completely apart and then put them back together. Ensure you have parts left over.
21. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for 5 or 6 hours before drinking. Never wash any coffee cups.
22. Invite at least 85 people you don't really like to come and visit for a couple of months. Limit showers to weekly for all guests. (Unless they are interested in electronics.... force those guests to shower three times daily and wear cologne from a stale bottle of cologne following each bathing).
23. Store your eggs in your garage for two months and then scramble a dozen each morning.
24. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
25. Check your refrigerator compressor for "sound shorts".
26. Put a complicated lock on your basement door and wear the key on a lanyard around your neck.
27. Lockwire the lugnuts on your car.
28. When making cakes, prop up one side of the pan while it is baking. Then spread icing really thick on one side to level off the top.
29. Every so often, yell "Emergency Deep", run into the kitchen, and sweep all pots/pans/dishes off of the counter onto the floor. Then, yell at your wife for not having the place "stowed for sea".
30. Put on the headphones from your stereo (don't plug them in). Go and stand in front of your stove. Say (to nobody in particular) "Stove manned and ready". Stand there for 3 or 4 hours. Say (once again to nobody in particular) "Stove secured". Roll up the headphone cord and put them away.
31.Tag out the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, transmission and cigarette lighter when you change the oil in your car.
32. Use kool aid on all your breakfast cereals for 2 months.
33. Fill laundry tubs with oil. Lay in them, on your back, and change the washers on the water spigots.
34. While doing laundry, replace liquid fabric softener with diesel Fuel... savor the “aroma” of AMR2LL.
35. Install more commodes in your bathroom. Serve many greasy meals and ensure the entire family goes to the bathroom together.
36. Buy bunk beds (3 high type) and convert the narrowest hallway in your home into a bedroom.
37. Just for fun, rig 700-PSI air to the bottom of all toilets. Hold a lottery to determine who gets to control the air valves.
38. Knock a glass of water out of someone's hand and yell 'SPILL'. Shout at them the entire time they clean it up, tell them how worthless they are, then do it again.
39. Give your wife more free time. All the ironing goes under the mattress.
40. Ask for “Permission to Enter” whenever you go into the kitchen.
41. At night, replace all light bulbs in the living room with red bulbs.
42. Buy all food in cases and line the floor with them.
43. Replace all doorways with windows so that you have to step up AND duck to go through them.
44. Rope off a small area of your living room, turn off the AC, put on a suit made of garbage bags and mill around inside the roped off area for an hour with a zip lock bag tied securely around your head.
45. Whenever someone enters a room you're cleaning, shout "Up and Over" at them so they'll go through the attic to get to the kitchen.
46. Tell your kids to "go find me a can of relative bearing grease".
47. Whenever the mailman steps onto your porch, shout "Postmaster General - Arriving" so that everyone in the house can hear you.
48. Paint the windshield of your car black. Make your wife stand up through the sunroof and give you directions on where to drive. Drive through as many big puddles as possible.
49. Have your kids stand at attention every time you enter the room and make them state quite loudly, "Attention on Deck” or "Make a Hole".
50. Start every story with "This is no-****".
51. Order a dozen foxtails and tell your family that there will be no liberty until every thing in the house passes the white glove test.
52. Tell your kids there will be a pressure test in the garage next Monday night. Kid who can take the most turns in the vise will get to stay out later Friday night.
53. Hookup your air compressor to the sewer line to the house and blow a **** geyser ten feet in the air. Come in side and tell you wife (calmly): “I forgot to shut the valve”.
54. Make her and the kids clean up the mess.
55. Install a Furnace and Air Conditioner that blows directly on you while you are sleeping. Have the controls so they will cycle to hot and cold in a matter of seconds. Also install a multi-channel entertainment system over your rack that doesn’t work.
56. Install the system above where it will cause a 6-inch vacuum in the bedroom.
57. Set an engine in the living room to run through all this. So when you secure from field day, run like a bat out of hell to shut down the engine.
58. Make you kids some Kool-Aid and add 5 times more sugar than normal and then set it out to get hot.
59. Raise hell with the old lady when she serves steak next time. When she says that the way it can from the store. You ask “BURNT?”.
60. Hire about 20 drunks to come into you house about 1 in the morning and start cooking.
61. Just have someone eat your ass over nothing, daily.
62. Go to the market and buy 100 quarts of milk. Pour them into a large white trash bag and secure. Put the bag into the refrigerator and rename it "The Cow." When it empties, yell, “The Cow is dead!” and have the wife replace it with another trash bag full of milk.
63. Remodel your house so as to rebuild your kitchen in the hall closet. Have your family meet there several times a day to walk around in the closet and bump into each other. Have someone shout: "Mill around in the after battery."
64. Post the Uniform Code of Military Justice on the wall across from your toilet. Highlight the parts that begin: "penetration however slight..."
65. Take the jack handle out of your trunk and install it in the ceiling over your stove. Several times a day, give it 112 turns and yell: "main induction secured."
66. Every Friday morning at 7:30, wake the whole house up and inform them someone is trying to steal the car, then make them clean the whole house for 3 hours, then serve them lunch with consists of 2 hamburgers that have enough grease in them to change the oil in the car for a year, buns that weigh more than a TDU weight, and French fries. Then run various drills in afternoon so that you have to burp into your scuba mask reliving the lunch.
67. Practice walking quickly with your back to the wall.
68. Rope off a small area of your living room, turn off the AC, put on a yellow suit and mill around inside the roped off area for an hour with a zip lock bag tied securely around your head. Insure the family critiques your actions afterwards.
69. Work at golf grouse maintenance so you can water golf cart batteries.
70. When your wife throws open the curtains in your closet make sure that the sewer vent is piped into your rack.
71. Cut a hole in the floor of your house and install some batteries. Go down there once a day and take specific gravities.
72. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor. Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your bunkmate's sock.
73. Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watch standers and night crew bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens, helicopter crash alarms, and a new wave rock band.
74. Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and wait two weeks before eating them.
75. Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everything in three minutes.
76. Periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting "FIRE, FIRE, FIRE…” and then restore power.
77. Remove all plants, pictures and decorations. Paint everything gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.
78. Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
79. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to simulate collision injuries sustained aboard Navy ships.
80. When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until it is hard and stale.
81. Every 10 weeks, simulate a visit to another port. Go directly to the city slums wearing your best clothes. Find the worst looking place, and ask for the most expensive beer that they carry. Drink as many as you can in four hours. Take a cab home taking the longest possible route. Tip the cabby after he charges you double because you dress funny and don't speak right.
82. Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.
83. Keep the bedroom thermostat at 2 deg C and use only a thin blanket for warmth.
84. Ensure that the water heater is connected to a device that provides water at a flow rate that varies from a fast drip to a weak trickily, with the temperature alternating rapidly from 2 to 95 deg F.
85. Use only spoons, which hold a minimum of 1/2 cup at a time.
86. Make sure every water valve in your home has two backups in line, which must all be operated to obtain water.
87. Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
88. Every four hours, check all the fluid levels in your car and log the readings. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tags on ignition stating "DANGER: Do Not Operate" while you perform these checks. Inform your neighbor as to placement of the red tags, the results of the checks, and have him repeat the checks because he did not see you perform them.
89. Lock all friends and family outside. Your only means of communication should be with letters that your neighbors have held for at least three weeks, discarding two of five.
90. Surround yourself with 125 people that you don't really know or like: people, who smoke, snore like Mack trucks going uphill, and use foul language.
91. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut you off from the outside world. Have a neighbor bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Naval Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
92. Monitor all home appliances hourly, recording on log sheets all vital information (i.e.: plugged in, lights come one when doors open, etc).
93. Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40 people using the same commode.
94. Lock the bathrooms twice a day for a four-hour period.
95. Practice taking a shower with a quart of water.
96. Work in 18 hour cycles, sleeping only four hours at a time, to ensure that your body neither knows nor cares if it day or night.
97. Listen to your favorite CD 6 times/day for two weeks, then play music that causes acute nausea until you are glad to get back to your favorite CD.
98. Make your family’s menu a week ahead without looking in the cabinets, cupboards, freezer or refrigerator.
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