Much Needed Win

This morning I had my first shower for about a week. I'd tried hard to avoid having such a gap; this isn't a PSA about the dangers of working exclusively from home. It's just that seeing our shower only has two temperatures - cold and scalding - most of the bathing I've done since moving here has been standing clear of the shower head, dipping one body part at a time under a cascade of freezing water.
A week is a long time to tolerate such a fault, but it seems a lot of things haven't been working lately and the shower found itself on a long list of things that don't work, next to internet, beds, shoulders, dishwashers, aerials, removalists, tyres and an HDMI cable I ordered from eBay.

Much of my manliness is staked on my ability to maintain a smooth, trouble-free environment, and I've found it quite frustrating to not be able rectify a lot of these problems on my own. After breakfast today I turned to Google to see if there were any plumbing forums that would help identify the cause of plumbing problems in the same way that programming forums help me with programming errors. And there were a lot! And I, The Plumber Detective of Sunday deduced almost by myself that the most common cause of a mixer tap problem was two water sources of different pressures. And even though I had no idea where our hot and cold water come from, and though it was never recommended anywhere on the Internet, I decided to experiment with running the bathroom sink at full blast on hot at the same time as the shower was running to see if that fixed it. And it worked! The shower's water didn't go cold but it's temperature dropped considerably. I was ecstatic. Vanessa was less impressed, as she was in the shower at the time.

After a lovely shower I felt a little bit better about myself and my ability to solve problems, and when we went to the hardware store later to pick up a few things I was able to look the floor staff in the eye without issues. Then this afternoon we had a power outage and our safety switch went up and I traced that down to a faulty stove and fixed that problem pretty quick too. So things are on a roll now!