You know you're having a bad day when thieves walk off with your house in broad daylight.

Perhaps you saw Danielle Saudino's flyer on the Carnegie Mellon University campus last week, which began succinctly:

"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Saudino's cell phone number was at the bottom, with a plea to anyone who had her house, which is 4 inches tall and answers to the name "semester-long art project," to please return it, "no questions asked."

Recognizing teenaged angst when I see it, and remembering that messing with Carnegie Mellon University art projects is a spring tradition as old as the university itself (where have you gone, Lobster Boy?), I called Saudino and asked her to let me know when the thieves check in.

The call to Saudino came less than 48 hours after her little house vanished. It was about 6:10 a.m. Thursday and Saudino, 19, was awake when the phone rang. She hadn't slept.

The caller said he would leave her house on a shelf inside the doors at Cyert Hall by 10:30 a.m. He had seen enough movies to know what to say next.

"Don't come early. We'll be watching."

Saudino came through the doors and there was her house, sunning itself in the window. Then she called me and I grabbed a cab for the East End.

Wearing funky blue slippers and her hair dyed red, Saudino, 19, is the art student you'd get if you called central casting, and she has a winning way with a giggle. At no point in this caper did she not realize its absurdity, even if her grade point average hung in the balance. She apologized for her lack of sleep, but I assured her that only made her more quotable.

You're losing something because print is neither a visual nor a three-dimensional medium, but this hand-sized Cape Cod home looked as if it had been used as an ash tray or the centerpiece at a beer blast. It was mostly in one piece, except for a missing porch, and its general look of having been roughed up fit seamlessly with the theme of Saudino's work.

She'd modified this model railroad home by adding a porch and setting the front door ajar. Then, last Tuesday, she placed it against a building on a stretch of campus sidewalk known as "The Cut" and scattered feathers and splashed stage blood around it.

Whether the blood led to or from the house was open to interpretation but, for Saudino, the feathers represented purity and freedom, which had been taken away. She was trying to say something about broken families and stood briefly beside the piece with blood on her own hands and arms. Sometime after she walked away, the house was taken.

I told the story to Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum, and he told me of another public art piece, at which someone threw a brick. When the artist found out, he said, "Well, now it's complete."

Good art sets people off. Bad art bores them. When I faxed a photo of Little House on the Scary to Sokolowski, he called back to say it could be the dust jacket for "In Cold Blood."

He also thought the thief might have been more than a prankster. The juxtaposition of home and violence might have offended him. Or it could have hit too close to home.

Though the piece was only in place about five hours, everyone seemed to know about it. When Saudino and her friends began distributing her photocopied flyers -- one read "Toto, I don't think we're on campus anymore" -- several strangers volunteered to put them up.

She has removed the blood from the scene of the crime, but now she doesn't know where all the flyers are, so she hasn't been able to take them all down, and so her phone won't stop ringing, and, well, "This is a great way for me to end the year."

And she giggled. For a freshman, Saudino seems to have everything about being an artist nailed except the angst part. Her art professor, Jon Beckley, told me she's getting an A.