I’m still working through some technical issues with the website, for which I apologize. I am hoping to have them fixed once and for all early next week, but we’ll see.

We’re in the midst of a rainy February weekend and let me say this about that: Good! First, as you’ve heard a jillion times already just today, “We need the rain.” And that’s true, as this recent OPB story explains.

Second, we’ve reached February, and I know some of you lament that it’s a dreary and cloudy month. To which I say: You’ve likely never lived in a place with real winters. Out here, February feels like the month when the world springs back to life. You can already see daffodils, those bright brave presages of spring, pop out their little green shoots. And you finally can sense that the Earth is tilting back our way, even if just for a few minutes each day.

Yes, February can be cloudy and wet. But you know what they say: We need the rain.

Calendar aside, this was a busy week. Let’s get to the news:

Back when Frank Morse and other first-rate legislators were pitching the idea of a shorter legislative session during even-numbered years, I was fully on board: It seemed to me that governing Oregon had become sufficiently complicated that it made sense to bring legislators back for 35-day sessions to make necessary course corrections before the longer session held in odd-numbered years.

I still think that’s probably true. But I worry about the trend to cram increasingly complicated business into the short session.

And this session, which began Monday — and which already is essentially 20% finished — may turn out to be a good example of that tendency. The first day of the session offered a preview of the potentially divisive issues legislators hope to tackle.

Democratic legislators are hoping to spend time during the session working on bills aimed to insulate Oregon, to the extent possible, from actions taken by the Trump administration — in particular, how to deal with big cutbacks in federal funding for the state and and ways to respond to immigration enforcement actions. But Gov. Tina Kotek and 31 Oregon mayors struck first, with a letter to the administration urging a pause to all immigration enforcement activity in Oregon. In the mid-valley, mayors who signed the letter included Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson and Philomath Mayor Christopher McMorran. Mayors who didn’t sign the letter include Corvallis Mayor Charles Maughan, who said he would have signed it had he known about it in time, and Albany Mayor Alex Johnson II, who said he feared the letter was needlessly inflammatory.

Isabel Funk at The Oregonian/OregonLive has a lovely story about Penny, the Doberman pinscher who earned best of show honors this week at the Westminster Dog Show. Actually, the story is more about Andy Linton, who lives near Vancouver and who was Penny’s handler. Now that Penny is officially top dog, Linton has returned her to her owners in Toronto — and he misses her. Linton was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a couple of years ago, and said he’s received widespread support from people in the dog-show community. On Tuesday night in Madison Square Garden, that support also came from Penny, who he said was on top of her game. (I also was happy to learn that the dog show paid tribute to Catherine O’Hara, the ace comic actress who starred in “Best of Show.”)

Corvallis leaders are again floating the idea of creating an urban renewal district for the downtown area. Jackson Rickert, writing in the Gazette-Times, does a nice job of describing how the district would work and the tax-increment funding it would use. Corvallis voters unwisely rejected a similar proposal in 2009, and current Councilor Jim Moorefield put his finger this week on one of the reasons why: It was not clear then what sort of projects the district would fund. But, you know, it wasn’t entirely clear how Albany’s downtown renewal efforts would work out, and the verdict there has been positive. The upshot here is that Corvallis probably missed an opportunity in 2009 — but what’s another lost two decades or so?

This was a bad week for The Washington Post, which is to say it was a bad week for journalism in the United States. Among the hundreds of reporters laid off by the Post was Martin Weil, who’s worked on the paper’s local desk for 60 years. (The local-news desk is among the Post areas hardest-hit by the cuts, along with the paper’s international reporting and sports coverage.) Erik Wemple, who worked at the Post before wisely decamping for The New York Times, offered this depressing but still rollicking story about Weil’s career.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who owns the Post, used to say that his ownership of the paper would be among the things he would be most proud of when he turned 90. These days, as Nieman Lab reports, Bezos isn’t saying much of anything about the Post. Laura Hazard Owen of Nieman also compiled a thick list of the numerous suggestions about what went wrong at the Post, and what can be done to fix it.

Apparently, this is Super Bowl weekend, and I suspect many of you will be watching primarily for the ads. For you folks, Mike Hale at the Times has ranked this year’s commercials — at least the ones he’s seen thus far. As a bonus, the story contains a very funny (and probably unfair) shot at the director Yorgos Lanthimos and his muse, Emma Stone.

Some of you will be watching the Super Bowl for Bad Bunny’s halftime show. It’s been a good week for the Puerto Rican superstar, who also won the Grammy Award for album of the year at last Sunday’s ceremony. Others of you, who might be watching for the ads and possibly the game itself, might find yourself asking: Who is this Bad Bunny fellow, other than the co-star in “Happy Gilmore 2?” Again, the Times is coming to our rescue, with this story about what is likely to be an unusually fraught cultural, political — and (who knows?) even musical — performance.

And still some of you may well be asking yourself this question: What’s the deal with Puerto Rico? For example, you might have known that people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens, but if you had asked me last week, I would have been stumped. But that was before I read this piece from our friends at the Pew Research Center.

That Grammy-winning album, though? It’s pretty good.

That’s it for this this weekend. As I finish writing, it appears to be raining. Let’s say it in unison: “We do need the rain.”