How to Simulate Shipboard Life
(Suggestions for the Ex-sailor who misses the Good Old Days)

1. Sleep on the shelf in your bedroom closet.

2. Replace the closet door with a curtain.

3. Four hours after you go to sleep, have your wife open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble,"time to relieve the watch", then say "whoops, wrong rack".

4. Build a wall in the middle of your bathtub, and lower the shower head to chest level.

5. While showering, have wife turn off water after you are soapy.

6. Put used lube oil in you humidifier and turn it on high, or recycle it in your hot water heater!

7. On TV watch only old movies in the middle of the night, have your family vote on the movie to watch, then tune in a different one.

8. (Mandatory for snipes) Leave the lawnmower running in the living room for 24 hours.

9. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.

10. Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, watch the soot land on your neighbor's car, laugh when he curses you.

11. Buy a trash compactor, use it once a week and store the trash in the other half of the bathtub.

12. Wake up at midnight, have peanut butter on stale bread.

13. Make up the family menu a month in advance without regard for the inventory on hand.

14. Set all alarms to go off at same time (after 2200 hours), when they go off, muster your family in the backyard, grab the garden hose and wet down your house. Or put on stereo headphones, stand in front of the kitchen stove and say to no one in particular, "manned and ready, sir".

15. Once a week take every major appliance apart, and put it back together whether it works or not!

16. Use 12 scoops of coffee grounds for 8 cups water. 16 scoops if it's after midnight.

17. Install a small fluorescent light under your coffee table, then lie under it and read a book.

18. Invite 85 people over to stay for 2 or 3 months.

19. Lockwire the lug nuts on your car.

20. When baking a cake: prop up 1 end of the pan,bake, then level it out with icing.

21. Twice a month, throw the cat in the pool, shout "man overboard", run into the kitchen and sweep all the dishes off the table and yell at your wife for not having the place stowed for sea.

22. Fill your basement half full of water, set the alarms again, muster, then get the bucket brigade going.