The Bug of the Day Club

I'm wondering how a lone (I hope!!) leaf cutter ant found his way into the house during today's rainstorm.

But he wasn't alone. I found this beautiful grasshopper-type guy in a folded tablecloth on the patio.
It turns out he had quite a grip and it took a flick of the dustpan to convince him to move on.

I didn't give ol' leaf cutter the option. I'm becoming quite merciless. The rules are quite simple. If they bite, they die. If they're not biters, they are still food for creepy crawlies that do bite, so they have to move on or die.

I found out too late that my husband gave this scorpion
a second chance by releasing him in a grassy area about a hundred feet from the house. If he shows up again, he will meet with a harsher fate.

Pura Vida

Standing Room Only

Esquipulas Bus

My plan was to talk about cooking in the next blog post, but today I've got mass transit on my mind. Food will just have to wait for another day.

We had to take an early bus into San Ramon this morning for a routine medical test. By early, I mean we left the house at 6:25 a.m. to catch the 6:30 bus, which is the second bus of the day on this route.

We're used to riding in standing-room-only buses. It's the norm. Even though there seems to be an endless supply of cars, trucks, and SUVs on Costa Rica roads, in reality car ownership is a luxury reserved for a small percentage of the population. Most take the bus or a taxi - just like we do. Consequently, it is a rare occasion for a bus to complete its route without at least a few people making the ride on their feet.

But, holy cow, was this bus full! I've estimated that there are about 40 seats on the bus that services our area. And this morning, by the time we were half-way to town (and a quarter of a mile before the elementary school where a dozen children and a few parents off-loaded) there were so many people standing in the aisle that the driver could barely close the front door!

Contrast this with a bus we noticed in Phoenix when we were back there this winter. It was rush hour. We were driving home from running errands and looked over to see that we were passing a Phoenix Metro bus. There was one lone passenger riding about two-third of the way toward the back of the bus.

Okay... Maybe there had been a dozen more people on that same bus a few minutes earlier. We'll never know. But we were not nearing the end of some obscure route. This was on a major surface street, like Bell Road, although the exact location escapes me at present. And while I'm not much of a gambler, I'd bet at least a few colones that it was ever close to full capacity.

Too bad.

Pura Vida

Floors Need Mopped Even in Paradise

Unidentified Flowers


When we first announced our plans to move to Costa Rica, a dear friend asked us what we were going to do there. How were we going to spend our time?

It was an obvious and important question, and while we didn’t have a crystal clear understanding about how our daily routine would unfold, we did have some general sense that it would likely not be that much different than it was in Arizona. We spend a lot of time on our computers – for business, fun and communication with our large family. We have hobbies. The house would still need to be cleaned. We knew for sure that the laundry and shopping would take a bigger piece of our time than we were accustomed to, simply because we lacked both an automatic dryer and a car.

While we weren’t too far off on the cleaning part, we did run into a few surprises - most particularly, the amount of time we would spend mopping floors. In fact, mopping our nearly 2,000 square feet of them (1,300 sf of tile in the house and another 600 on the adjoining terrace) is typically how we start our day. And yes…that would be virtually every..single..day.

Lots and lots of tile. This photo was taken before we moved into the house. Tico houses almost never have carpet - unless it's an area rug.

Ahhh. You’re probably conjuring up pictures of lush green trees, vivid flowers, and grassy parks and imagining a damp climate with little dust. Don’t be fooled. All of that vegetation has two things in common: bugs and dirt.

In a culture where people live with their doors and windows open and spend more time outdoors than in, our tile will always come in a distant second.

During the dry season, the dirt blows in as dust and grit and gets tracked in on our shoes. Then, when the rainy season arrives, we add mud to the mix. The bugs… well, they don’t actually have a season. They fly (and crawl) in and out all day long all year long. Some stick around, but mostly they leave the same way they came in. The ones that stay generally end up as little dead dots on the floor. Sometimes they die from natural causes.. Sometimes they have a little help.


More tile -- surrounded by nature's bug habitat.

Either way, each morning we start our day by running a broom or dust mop around the floors to gather them up, along with the previous day’s accumulation of dirt, for an unapologetic and unceremonious dump in the wastebasket. Would that this would be enough, but no.

It only took a day or two of living here before that “ah ha moment” slapped us upside the head. We’d been noticing that Tica housewives mop their floors - and patios (!!) - every single day. Now we knew why. It was time to rethink our floor strategy. Surely we could come up with something better than that!

On to Plan B: Indoor shoes and outdoor shoes. Indoor shoes would get worn on the patio and in the house. Outdoor shoes get worn, well, everywhere else. Right. Like that’s going to work when the patio performs perfectly as the ultimate dust magnet and all that dirt patiently waits for us to track it inside on those “indoor” shoes!

After a few unsuccessful attempts to refine the rules, we moved on to Plan C – adding a barely wet mop, swished around everywhere that does not involve moving large furniture, after the bug removal, to the morning routine. This is followed by a leisurely third cup of coffee while we wait the floors dry. The indoor/outdoor shoe policy still stands, of course!

Not so bad. It's a quick mop and, like anything else that becomes part of your routine, you end up doing it without giving it much thought. But then there are those other 1,000 square feet or so of tile in the workshop and carport that get really, really dirty. Needless to say, we don’t worry too much about footprints in those areas, but they, too, need cleaned at least weekly to keep the dirt from abrading the surface.

And even more tile on the sub-level.


And so goes life in paradise. What do we do here? We mop the floors. (And cook, too, but that’s another topic for another day.)

Pura Vida

Bananas growing in our front yard

Another Day (Week) in Paradise

What a week!

It started with a minor complication with the bed frame we are having made - and an opportunity to learn how a sticky situation with custom-made furniture is resolved here - and went downhill from there with no looking back.

I guess you could say it was a week of confronting the reality that "We're not in Kansas, anymore, Toto."

After a couple of days of digestion and a bit of Internet research, the information our neighbor shared about the local wildlife - coral snakes, constrictors, scorpions, and big black ants - probably won't keep me awake at night. Truth be told, lots of folks in the U.S. deal with those nuisances and more! We lived in scorpion country, ourselves, for about twenty years. How we managed to never encounter one in or around our home amazes me, but I won't let that history lull me into a false sense of security.

Just as the week was about to end - on Friday, May 13, I might add - we experienced our first "real" earthquake. It measured a solid 6.0 on the Richter scale and was centered about 13 miles from here. Luckily, it was also about 70 km (about 43 miles) deep! Our new block-construction home rocked and rolled for what felt like about 10-15 seconds, though it might have been less. By the time we made our way outside, the tremblor ended and we hit the Internet in search of details. Amazingly, reports started to trickle out within fifteen minutes, although it took until this morning for the facts to stop shifting.

And then finally, on the day when we were set to teach our Costa Rican friends how to make America's favorite - pecan pie - the water went out. Completely out.

We soon learned that the entire town of Palmares had been without water since early Friday. We, like many residents here, have a backup tank that keeps the wet stuff flowing during the periodic outages. As luck would have it, the landscaper was installing sod in our yard yesterday and this morning and drained the tank!

So for now, we're pulling the water jugs from the freezer for drinking and washing dishes and hauling the big backup jugs from storage to use for flushing.

We can't wait to see what next week has in store for us!

Pura Vida


One of our local squirley friends trying to outsmart Vic and his old "hang the plantains in a tree for the birds" trick.

It's a Bug's Life

With the onset of the rainy season, I find myself noting the difference in climate between the new house in Buenos Aires and our apartment in Esquipulas. In fact, it's hard to believe that they are separated by a mere one mile, as the proverbial crow flies, and a valley with what we presume to be a small river at the bottom (as we've yet to set eyes upon it).

The apartment sits on ridge of somewhat rural land - pastures and small garden plots separated by clusters of homes. We occupied a second story apartment that afforded us constant breezes and pleasant morning sun that helped to chase away the dampness from the previous night's rain or morning dew.

The new house, sits on the opposite ridge of the same valley, but instead of open pastures, we are surrounded by dense, natural forest that holds the moisture and shields us from some of the air movement we enjoyed in Esquipulas. It is also block construction, and therefore, lacks the natural ventilation we had in our log-cabin apartment.

The bottom line, is that we notice that we sweat more, the laundry dries more slowly, we have had to change some of our habits to prevent mold, and -- this is the big one -- we have way more bugs!

In addition to some our bug-of-the-day photos I've included here, there was the two-inch spider I found in our bedroom that I refused to let Vic photograph before unceremoniously escorting back to nature, the bazillion May beetles that have put a temporary end to our evenings outside, the black ants that periodically launch a midnight expedition through the downstairs, and a plethora of miscellaneous creepy crawlies that I dispense with on the basis of my perception of the threat they present. Some of them are just downright cool. Others ... well, they simply have to go right now!








In my previous life, I would have been far more alarmed by them. But this is Costa Rica. They come with the territory - and lots of birds in our little forest to help keep the ick population under control.



Pura Vida