Who the Hell is Murphy?

A few weeks ago I woke up, stretched in my bed, smiled at the ceiling, and saw a line of what looked like leakage. The upstairs resident's kitchen is over my bedroom.  I know; a very weird apartment.  Very nice but difficult to live in.  Anyway. I stood up on my bed and touched the line in the ceiling.  It wasn't damp at all.  But it was definitely a stain.  I sent an email to the upstairs resident and she confirmed that her garbage disposal had leaked and was being replaced and she was very sorry, etc.etc.etc.  So I phoned Bob L., the remarkable "handy man" who is a true gift to a single woman.  (Stop it!!  That's NOT what we're talking about.  Besides, he prefers 30-something women which I most definitely am not.)  Bob came over later that day, told me he could repair the damage without having to paint the entire ceiling.  Not right away at any rate.  He'd let me know when he could come to do the work.  Okay.  The next day the kitchen faucet began to drip; a definite kind of WW II torture.  I started my list.  The bathtub began to drain verrrry slowly.  A variety of small annoyances.  Until today.

Today.  While my five year old granddaughter lulled in the bathtub, and my daughter (who had spent the evening before in the emergency room monitoring very high blood pressure) washed at the sink, water poured out from under the toilet.  The seal had broken.  Scooted the ladies out of the room; turned off the water at the source; flushed the last of it away; employed every towel I owned to mop it up.  And phoned Bob L.  He came over, checked it out (causing a second flood in his investigation) and called his plumber-buddy.  It being Saturday (the Saturday before Christmas no less) nothing could be done before Monday.  Okay.  I gratefully have a powder room upstairs.  Bob left and I mopped the water up again.  Now every towel I own was in the bathtub.  We had someplace to be so the gals got ready and I put a few of the towels in the washing machine (laundry room off the stricken bathroom) and we left.  I returned a few hours later and visited the bathroom expecting to put the towels into the dryer.  Well, for some reason yet to be discovered, the water that drained from the washer came out through the same broken area under the commode.  ???  Except it was so much water this time that it ran into the hallway and the room adjacent soaking the wall-to-wall carpeting.  Nothing to be done until Monday.  I mopped again; put two dehumidifiers in place to hopefully alleviate some of the carpet moisture; loaded all the wet towels still in the tub into big plastic bags and spent the evening at the local Laundromat.  

My landlord, who is my son, lives in California.  We spoke on the phone.  He understood the problem and all the worst possible scenarios.  Nothing to be done until Monday.  Fortunately the upstairs washroom isn't adding to the downstairs problem.  Today we are having a blizzard.  The real thing.  Christmas is Friday.  Saturday I'm to fly to San Jose to visit my west coast family.  I don't know this plumber or his phone number or if he'll even show up.  I am trying to stay in the moment since there is really no where else to stay.  But I do wonder who the hell Murphy was and why his law still more than occasionally prevails.  Not that it would change anything.  Nothing to be done until Monday.