The geckos are a favorite of mine as well. They are a nice surprise to see when you move items such as a picture frame from the wall.

I have always been quite annoyed by the beetles you speak of. I guess during the day their drunken flying is pretty amusing, but at night the racket they make it awful to fall asleep to. I wonder how an animal so terrible at flying manages to not go extinct. iirc Darwin mentions that insects with broken wings often survive catastrophic wind events where all insects with proper flying mechanisms get blown out to sea. Perhaps their disoriented flying pattern gives them an unexpected survival advantage.

I learned from this that ants raise armies to kill bigger bugs. I've seen them carrying off corpses of praying manti etc. but until now I did not know that they were capable of committing the murder. I have a new respect for them, and I will permit the brave soldiers from foreign lands as guests in my house. However, I still would like to evict the freeloading queens.

The problem with living is that in general it'll proceed in some kind of a mess -- even in the relatively sterile dwellings among Euro "temperate" zone hills I didn't, for instance, sterilize the air. Sterilization is a complex topic, it's one thing to, for instance, kill all bacteria -- could be approached through all sorts of cheap and workable avenues, such as UV treatment, or ozone, etcetera. But what about killing all viruses ? Those aren't even alive to any sort of standard in the first place, if you separated all flu viri currently alive and well within the Pentagon you'd get a small jar of whitish biomatter about as inert as table salt, and just as "alive" -- until you ate some, at least.

My CR place has geckos, for instance. They cackle their way into conversation, run across the ceilings, occasionally cause near-death experiences by sheer unbridled cuteness. They'd qualify as an infestation anywhere else, but honestly I don't see it. That same place has a yearly problem with a sort of Carabidae, dubbed "the beeeeeetle shoooow!!!" ; this comes with being the preminent feature atop a hill, illuminated all night long in incandescent glory. The bugs themselves are perfectly harmless, neither their alimentary or reproductive cycle having anything in common with the inside of the dwelling ; but they're a nuisance through abundance and very poor flight skills -- you should see the damn things careen improbably bumping on everything around. One might even be funny, especially if the party's inebriated, finding its way from tit to cock...tail or whatever ; but by the hundredth...

There's also very occasionally ants ; they never did anything, and from what I can discern they're only there ever checking things out, but soon move out. In any case it never got to the point where I took any measures against them, and over years I didn't live to regret the stance.

Figuring out the partition, what to tolerate, what to ignore, what to attack is perhaps the most compressed summary of life available. Costa Rica is most peculiar among civilised man's experience in that very fundamental heuristics workable anywhere else ("if it moves, you should kill it") don't deliver much value. What can you do...

I looked around but was unable to find boric acid. The fumigation store I went to had their own bait solution with the active ingredient avermectin. I am waiting on the order of new screens + their installation before I attempt to feed the ants a feast they won't forget. That said I am curious to know what the ants may be eating / defending me from. Currently my list of approved animals inside the house consists of lizards and dragonflies. I am somewhat okay with spiders too as I believe they are doing the good work, but they don't make for a good aesthetic.

Looking into a powder for my skin and getting a dehumidifier is a good idea. The guitars are the only objects here that enjoy the humidity. The humidifier is not necessary for the dishes though, they are placed by the window and dry quickly.

You'll probably want to get in the habit of throwing some powder on to keep the moisture related skin irritation down. You may also need to re-evaluate how climate appropriate what you're wearing is. A dehumidifier may be a worthwhile thing to keep the humidity down. This will also help the dishes dry on a human timeline.

Anyways, it's nice to someone else coming to terms with being thousands of miles away from familiar supply lines.