The leap year does an amazing thing for us — it gives us extra time. Every four years, we get an entire extra day to work, play, shop — or do nothing at all.

On Leap Day, Feb. 29, our reporters observed — for just a minute — how some in our community spent their extra time. 

Nothing but routine at the bus station

Inside the Lewiston bus station, it’s the usual shuffling routine. Men and women doze on their duffel bags, rousing only occasionally when an interesting stranger passes through.

A woman in a pink coat gets up, examines the vending machine for 10 seconds and sits back down again.

A scruffy young man with a blue knit cap pulled over his brow shuffles into the station. He mumbles something incoherent and walks back out again.

Other than the muttering and mumbling, not a word is spoken inside the station. The travelers here are too tired, too weary from the road for the toil of conversation.

“That’s why I sit out here,” said Charles Irish, a 33-year-old Auburn man waiting on a bench outside for a bus to take him to work. “It’s hard to get people to talk to you in there. They’ve all got their own things going on, I guess.”

Irish sits, smoking and fiddling with his phone. He moved here from Bridgton in September, he said, leaving a job installing boat docks to take work at the bottling plant in Lewiston.

So far, so good, he said.

On this extra day of the year, however, Irish is just following the routine.

“Just an ordinary day,” he said. “I’m going to work.”

— Mark LaFlamme

Tobacco sales and sandwiches will wait another day

Any other month, Victor News would be slammed at 12:30 p.m.

It’s lunchtime on a Monday, of course — but it’s also the day after Feb. 28, which normally means March 1. The first of the month is usually the day all the regular customers come in to buy their tobacco and papers for the next month.

“But I wonder how many people got fooled by Leap Day?” Kristen Bisson said from behind the counter of the store’s deli. “When I came in today, my co-worker said to get ready, it’s the first of the month. It’s always busy, but I knew she forgot about Leap Day.”

Bisson busily crafts a combo Italian for Argo employee Nicholas Garcia’s lunch: ham and salami but no cheese.

“He’s a regular — my ‘no cheese’ guy,” Bisson said.

Bisson said the day has been especially quiet; she hasn’t even made that many sandwiches. In addition to the tobacco buyers, the store usually gets troops of customers from the nearby courthouse, buying their lunches alongside Argo’s staff.

“But once the first starts, you wouldn’t believe the lines,” she said. “We get all the people we haven’t seen for the month.”

— Scott Taylor

What goes up . . .

Putting an official end to the holiday season on a fittingly balmy day, Public Works highway workers Nick Poland and Don Gilks perched in cherrypickers 45 feet in the air off Lisbon Street and freed strands of Christmas lights from downtown trees, cutting zip ties with tin snips.

It was the first day of the annual duty. At 12:30 p.m., they finished the fifth tree of the day.

Each tree has six to eight 25-foot strands of lights that gently rained down onto the bare sidewalk below as they were freed.

They still had the rest of the left side of Lisbon Street, the right side of Lisbon Street, Main Street and Kennedy Park to go.

Co-worker Phil Couillard stayed on the ground, gathering up the lights and tossing them into totes.

“That’s a rainy-day project where they take them out, untangle them” and wind them back up for next year, Couillard said.

Which is — hmm — just a mere nine months away.

— Kathryn Skelton

Sophie goes home

In the parking lot of the Greater Androscoggin Humane Society, Sophie, a rescue dog from the South, was carried into the front seat by her new owners.

The small, 18-month-old rescue was going home after being adopted on Leap Day by Eugene and Kathryn Roddy.

“She’s from Alabama,” Eugene said. “A year and a half old, a Jack Russell/terrier mix.” 

Sophie will soon rove the country.

“We’re full-time RVers,” Kathryn said. “She’ll get to travel.” 

Five years ago, the couple sold their Topsham home.

“Now we go where we want,” he said.

They return to Maine often to visit family.

The couple has had dogs in the past and had to put them down.

“It broke our hearts,” she said.

After having a dog for 10 or 12 years, losing them was very hard, he said. “At the time, I said, ‘I’m not going to do it again.'”

Then they met Sophie.

“It’s time,” he said.

Soon Eugene, Kathryn and Sophie will be on the road to Florida, then out West. Happy tails.

— Bonnie Washuk

Waiting on court

Four people talked with each other Monday as they sat on three benches in the lobby of Farmington District Court.

One of them, a woman, had her left foot in a soft walking cast, resting on a bench as the two couples discussed health matters.

A younger man wearing a baseball cap sat alone quietly on a bench a little farther down.

People came in and sat down or stood and perused the list of names for those scheduled to appear posted on the bulletin board.

The unified court had arraignments scheduled for 1 p.m. The judge would also be listening to bail discussions for people in custody at the jail by video conference.

A man walked in the court door with a handful of money. He went up to the court window to wait behind another gentleman. When it was his turn, he told the Clerk of Courts Laurie Pratt that he needed to pay a fine.

Another person stood behind him in line.

The buzz of conversation increased as more people came through the door. Some opted to stand and while others took a seat to wait.

— Donna M. Perry

Lunch and banter at Ron’s Market 

Saw you last night on “North Woods Law,” a customer teased Jon Bubier, owner of Ron’s Market in Farmington, as he pays for a beverage on Monday.

“That was two years ago — they keep repeating it,” Bubier said of the Maine game warden show and their questions for Bubier about a deer. “A couple others have commented today.”

A little friendly banter exchanged between customers, owner and staff as “Baby, Hold On to Me” plays from a radio set on local station, WKTJ.

There are brief pauses between customers until a few form a line to pay for sandwiches, beverages, 99-cent slices of pizza, lottery tickets and liquors.

Deb Haines, cashier, greets each one and waits patiently for a pocket coin search. 

Roger Begin starts eating his sandwich as he talks with Bubier. 

“No evidence,” another customer says about his beverage purchase as he sees the camera.

“There is a memorable moment here every day,” Bubier said of the 12 years he and wife, Lois, have owned the High Street market. “It is a wonderful business, love the community, love the customers.”

Twenty-five years ago, when Farmington Shoe Shop was open, there would have been two long lines here waiting at lunchtime to check out, Haines said.

— Ann Bryant

Biological warfare afoot in the greenhouse 

War was declared on greenhouse insect pests on Monday.

Robin Jordan, owner of Robin’s Flower Pot in Farmington, was seen checking one of the biological control methods she uses.

Inside a small greenhouse, several large pots are filled with slender grass-like plants. A wire cage in each keeps the plants growing upright. 

A bright yellow card, smeared with black specks, is clipped to a metal plant stake. About a foot above the plants, several spotlights shine down. 

The wheat and barley is inoculated with cereal oat aphids. Aphids are one insect pest that eats greenhouse vegetation.

In a few weeks, aphidius wasps will be introduced to lay their eggs in those aphids. As the eggs develop and hatch out, the aphids are killed off. This method not only helps destroy a major greenhouse pest, it also produces another generation of predator wasps.

Jordan said she seeds new grains every two weeks to have fresh plants to inoculate. She uses at least 10 different biological controls. Some, like the wasp, are parasitic. Others are predatory and eat the unwanted insects.

Last winter, 200 large pepper plants became infected. Instead of spraying a chemical, Lacewing larvae were introduced and within two weeks, the aphids were gone.

— Pam Harnden

Vets helping vets

The men stood huddled together speaking in quiet tones at the State House. They gestured toward one another or pointed toward a paper from which one of the men was reading. 

The frosted glass panel on the closed door behind them read, “Joint Standing Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs.” 

Two of the men in the group of five wore the decorative caps of their American Legion and VFW posts — one cap, snow white; the other, a Navy blue. Another man had a ball cap decorated a the Marine Corps globe and anchor patch.

Lying at the feet of one of the younger men in the group was a medium-sized, mixed-breed dog with a camouflage vest, identifying it as a “service animal.”

The dog’s owner wore a faded blue Boston Red Sox baseball cap, his sunglasses propped above the bill.

The conversation was around a bill now before the Maine Legislature that’s meant to better help homeless veterans in the state.

The men said later they were members of local veterans organizations.

Adrian Cole, the one with the Red Sox cap and dog, is a Thompson resident and former Army captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq.

Cole, now district vice commander for the Veterans of Foreign Wars and an American Legion post commander in Thompson, said he also served on a recent commission that was set up to review the state’s Bureau of Veterans Services.

Cole said part of their discussion Monday was how to better serve veterans who leave the service with so-called “bad paper” discharges, or discharges that are under less-than-honorable conditions.

He said these veterans, who are sometimes unfairly stigmatized, are often the most likely to become homeless.

“They are quite often forgotten about,” Cole said. “Because they tend to be viewed in a negative light, (they) are underrepresented, even though when you further peel back that onion, they are actually the ones that probably need the most help.”

—  Scott Thistle

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