Christmas Day Crisis

I haven't attended a Catholic mass in some time. But my girlfriend Meg is a tremendous musician and has been playing gigs over the holidays as a classical percussionist. She lives in St. Louis where Catholic churches are on nearly every street corner. We both were raised in the Catholic faith, but being scientists and freethinkers, we haven't exactly ascribed to the ways of religion. Anyway, I found myself at mass, supporting her musical passion, and couldn't help but think of something I heard my favorite folk singer say the last time I saw him in concert. He said, "I have been thoroughly churched out as a child." But that is really here nor there.
We were looking forward to cuddling up with a movie before we had to attend the usual family Christmas dinner. I went to use the bathroom before laying down to relax when disaster struck. The toilet reservoir wasn't filling up with water after flushing so I removed the lid to manually depress the flapper. Instead of placing the lid on the floor, I rested it on the edge of the toilet reservoir and stuck my hand in to fix the flapper. That is when the porcelain lid fell behind the toilet and shattered into pieces. But that wasn't the disaster. The water input line to the toilet was poorly constructed and consisted of 3 inches of PVC pipe sticking out of the wall. The lid hit this pipe and broke it completely off. Immediately water began pouring out of the wall. Imagine a garden hose on full blast. This was the amount of water spilling out onto the bathroom floor. I reached behind the toilet to turn off the shutoff valve, but the valve was in between the toilet and the broken pipe and not in between the broken pipe and the wall. I called out for Meg and she ran into the basement to find and turn off the main water valve to the house. While she was doing this, a major amount of water was shooting out of the wall and running into the hallway, flowing down the basement stairs and into a floor vent nearby. While she acted fairly quickly, the 5-8 minutes to took to locate the main water pipe was long enough to release a substantial amount of water. I had tried to put some towels over the pipe and even grabbed a pot from the kitchen in a vain attempt to catch the water and dump it into the bathtub. The only pot that would fit behind the toilet was so small that it hardly mattered. We went into the basement and water was dripping from the ceiling and even through the light fixtures. Once the water was turned off, the crisis was over, but only after was several minutes of sheer panic. To wrap up the story, her dad came over and helped me locate the pipe to the toilet in the basement rafters. Being Christmas Day, we couldn't find any stores open so we cut the PVC pipe and stuffed it with a random lawnmower axle bolt and copious amounts of epoxy. This temporary fix held and we were able to restore water flow to the rest of the house and began mopping up the water in the basement. This fiasco took the rest of the afternoon. I went on to the party and had the best possible time I could have with lots relatives I wasn't related to. The bottle of Jack Daniels her brother-in-law received for Christmas helped me put the past behind me. Luckily, Meg's roommate and owner of the fairly old house was very understanding and mentioned she planned to remodel that bathroom for some time. Now that time has come.