Bad Shower Week

On Monday I decided to color my hair to get rid of the grays that were starting to show. I gotta be young in my travel photos! So I got up early and put the color on. I ironed while I waited the 40 minutes or so for it to set and got ready for... the SHOWER. A shower, a HOT shower that is, is a critical part of the hair coloring process. It is the only way to get the color out before it burns your hair. Unfortunately and somewhat predictably, I had no hot water. I tried as hard as I could to stand the freezing cold to scalding hot cycle that is the procedure when the water won't work. Turn it all the way up to 9, wait for it to get warm, get under it until it's scalding, turn it down to 4, wait for it to cool back down enough to get under, stay under it until the water gets too freezing cold again and repeat. Unfortunately, the bearable periods of warmth were about 5 seconds long. Not nearly long enough to rinse out the color in a reasonable amount of time. Thus, I was forced to wrap myself in a towel and run downstairs to the kitchen sink to rinse. I couldn't quite stretch my body to adequately position my head under the water, so I cleared the counter and lay down with my head in the sink. More than once I filled my ears quite well with the warm water. But hey, at least I was rinsing the color out, right? I had a celebratory feeling of success until I realized I still had to condition my hair, so I squeezed out my hair as much as possible, still dripping as I ran back up the stairs to fetch the conditioner I'd forgotten in my panicked haste to get the color out. Then I applied the conditioner and let it sit a minute or two and ran back downstairs to rinse again, reassuming my extremely uncomfortable position on the kitchen counter. I'm thinking €200 for professional hair coloring doesn't sound so bad at this point!
I called my landlord and told him to fix it. "Today," I said, with obvious hostility. He stopped by later and removed the filter from the power shower. Not that it mattered, because of course when he showed up the darn shower worked perfectly. So he thinks I'm a stupid person who can't operate a shower. However, he told me he hoped that the filter removal would fix the problem and asked me to call him if I had more problems.
Tuesday came and I enjoyed a hot shower with no problems. Feeling like a million bucks, I wondered if maybe the problem was solved. Until Wednesday morning, when the shower was freezing cold AGAIN. I took a bath, because for some insane reason the bath tap is sourced from a different tank than the shower. Hot bath, soapy hair all day, another call to the landlord. Not surprisingly, he came back over and it worked fine for him again. This time he literally played with the dials a couple of times and told me it was sensitive and I shouldn't mess too much with the settings. Which, by the way, I only do because I don't like freezing cold showers. I'd leave it on the same setting all the time if only it would WORK!!!
This morning I had a nice hot shower again, but it's only a matter of time... probably tomorrow morning at 3:30 when I have to take a shower before I leave for Stockholm it will be like ice water again. I'll let you know when I get back.