Fresh from having lived through a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the two boys from Petal, Miss., were perplexed by “Yankee food.”

Colby and Ryan Dayon arrived at their Aunt Linda Thornton’s house on Monday.

“We had American chop suey their first night here, and they didn’t know what it was, but they said they liked it,” Thornton said.

It’s been burgers and hot dogs since.

Breakfast in the household changed a bit, too.

Colby, 12, “has to have a sausage, egg and biscuit, so we stocked up on sausages,” Thornton said.

But Ryan, 9, “is a cereal guy,” so he fit right in with her three children.

Both boys like fish and fishing, although Maine fish are somewhat smaller than what they caught back home.

“Down there in Mississippi, I would catch bass, shark and tuna,” Colby Dayon said.

Tuesday, he caught three brook trout while fishing in a nearby brook.

“I caught one this big,” he said, grinning, his hands spread a foot apart, “and had it for lunch.”

“He was just as proud as could be,” Thornton said.

– Terry Karkos
Bring on Halloween!

The Dayon boys like school in western Maine. In their hometown of Petal, Miss., classes began on Aug. 1. They ended Aug. 26, three days before Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, along with their home, and family camp on the coast.

Colby, a sixth-grader, resumed school Wednesday in SAD 43’s Mountain Valley Middle School. He’s enjoying playing soccer in physical education class, learning how to run machines in wood shop class and making new friends.

School here “is a lot different than Petal,” he said.

“It’s a lot bigger, and we ain’t got no wood workshop, and that big of a PE, and we don’t get to play PE after lunch, and the buses here got a radio, the seats are bigger, and these buses are diesels. We got gas buses,” Colby Dayon said.

His brother has a simpler reason for staying.

Despite being scared to death by Katrina, getting chicken pox and having a severe asthma attack two days later, Ryan already is looking forward to Halloween.

“I hope I’m here for Halloween, because your costumes are awesome! They are much better than the ones in Petal,” he said.

– Terry Karkos
It’s all in the timing

Frank Norman, inventor of a fuel additive that he claims extends the efficiency of gas and heating oil, is on tenterhooks.

As gas prices top $3 per gallon, Norman – a chemist who founded Future Fuel Technologies in Lewiston – is waiting for the results from two new customers: the town of Mechanic Falls and the state Department of Transportation.

Both are using Norman’s product, FFT, in tests to see if their vehicles get increased mileage.

So far, the word from Mechanic Falls Town Manager Dana Lee is encouraging. Town crews used it in a 2003 GMC one-ton truck.

“We saw some pretty marked improvement in gas mileage,” said Lee, noting a 21-percent increase. “We noticed some increase in performance, as well, so I’d say the experiment thus far has gone well.”

Now the town is using it in other vehicles to test its efficiency. But the mother lode lies in Augusta where four cases of FFT are being tested in MDOT vehicles.

“They use three-and-a-half-million gallons of fuel a year,” said Norman, who believes FFT will increase the number of miles on a tank of gas by 10 to 20 percent. “At a minimal 10-percent savings, think of what that means for taxpayers.”

FFT received a U.S. patent last winter and was tested by the University of Southern Maine Manufacturing Applications Lab in Gorham, which showed an average gain of 9.4 percent in mileage. Curious fuel consumers can check out Norman’s Web site at www.futurefueltechnologies.com

– Carol Coultas

Lady Luck

Tracie and Travis Dubois still plan a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate their new selves. The Lewiston couple each had gastric bypass surgery last year. Together, they’ve lost more than 300 pounds.

While Nevada is still seven months off, their good luck has started already.

For the first season of Lewiston Maineiacs’ hockey, Tracie and Travis followed the away-game fan bus three times in their own vehicle. Bus seats were too uncomfortable, too small.

“We couldn’t have sat side by side,” Travis said.

By the end of the second season in March, on the last away-bus fan trip to Drummondville, they took a chance. They’d lost just enough weight to fit. And then they won a raffle for a season of free bus trips this year, worth at least $1,000.

What are the odds?

– Kathryn Skelton

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