It was not empty in Ambrosia this afternoon, but it wasn’t packed, either. The atmosphere was more relaxed than it’s been in a while.

Campus had a similar feel. Fairly empty at 9 when I got there, but enough people around when I left the office around 12.30 for it not to be a ghost town. The library was empty this morning but (to my surprise) most of the computers in the Science Library on the third floor of the Undergrad were occupied when I passed by this afternoon.

By lunch Liberty was fairly crowded with pedestrians. Again, not the usual weekday school year level, but not depopulated, either. Borders was doing brisk foot traffic.

Curiously, the morning 6 Ellsworth bus was more crowded this morning than it usually is during the school year. Mostly working-class folks on their way to jobs.

The State Street corridor had some vehicular traffic on it, but nothing comapred with the standard weekday (or weekend) school year traffic.

Also, the houses along State above Packard were nearly evacuated. There was one house this morning that had a handful of party-hearty holdouts drinking beer on the lawn at 9.00, but other than that it was dead. A couple of overflowing garbage cans on one lawn. A big stack of red plastic cups for keggers sitting on the porch rail of another house. A carpet-cleaning truck had a hose running into another presumably liquor-soaked domicile. The scary-looking box on the corner of State and Stimson had a pleading, neatly processor-printed sign on butcher paper on the front of it from Oppenheimer Properties reading “WOW! 2BR APTS $745.” Yeah, wow.

There were at least four moving trucks within the environs of our complex this afternoon.