The dining room ceiling collapsed today. This is an 82-year-old plaster ceiling. What a fucking mess. There is dust everywhere. Some of my valuable collectibles got damaged: Chinese sculptor Hoo Rong made us an old man doing Tai-Chi out of clay--it was decapitated. The papier-mache hand-painted antique cabinet I picked up in Singapore? Dented. That's more than a hundred years old, and I cradled it in my lap for 25 hours' worth of flights without dinging it.

I'm not blaming Mr. Splitfoot for collapsing the ceiling; the dining room is beneath our bedroom, so yesterday's ambiguous little message might have been his attempt to warn us that we had a major plaster problem.