Things as They Are on 3/28/21

Last Wednesday or so Governor Useless, excuse me, Governor Ducey, lifted Arizona's mask mandate.  He also further stipulated that a city or county can not contradict his lifting of it.  He is allowing individual businesses to require masks if they want to, but from what I have observed since then I'm not seeing any businesses enforcing it.  Quik Trip still has signs up saying it's a county thing, and Safeway is asking that people wear masks.  But I'm seeing some customers not bothering with them and I think the percentage of those not wearing will go up.

Meanwhile, Mayor Regina Romero of Tucson is upset about this, and is insisting that Tucson's mask mandate is still in place.  The thing of it is, that her enforcement of it is limited.  The Tucson Police Department is short at least 150 officers and they are losing ten officers per month.  Morale within TPD isn't the greatest.  We are thinking more and more that we're going to leave Tucson in a few years and either end up outside city limits or in Marana.  I love this city and have loved living here, but I'm thinking that a major change will be made.

I can tell you that my job is continuing to go well, in spite of our program headcount being one third of what it should be.  The customer has been slow in approving funding and I've heard some chatter that their customer is not happy about it.  We haven't laid off anybody aside from four or five being terminated for performance issues and others leaving for reasons I'm not aware of.  We have open reqs and I see my department expanding.  I'll eventually have anywhere from six to nine engineers supporting me, but until then I'm a one man army when it comes to my program's test organization.  

I don't have too much else except some sinus issues and so I'm going to make this entry short.