DAY 130: By the time I woke up in the morning in my Copacabana apartment, Terence, Mark and Paul had already arrived at JFK International in New York City. With my company gone, it was time to keep a promise I'd made to myself and my audience: to stay in all day and catch up on Blog duties.

It couldn't have been any better of a day to juts be a nerd on a laptop all day (picture above); outside it was pouring rain. The beach was empty and the clouds obstructed any of the views from the mountains. When Lara spent the last day with her friends from home, they pretty much just stayed indoors at shopping malls.

I spent a good nine hours straight sorting through photos, writing rough drafts and polishing them up. By around 6:30 I had only written up three entries -- four if you count Day 126 as two -- and my brain was totally fried. I went out to take a break by walking out in the rain -- only to end up at another computer to upload my homework at an internet cafe (or as pronounced in Portuguese, interneish cafe). However, there was one particular highlight of my one time out of the house: the news that Beija-Flor was the 2004 Rio de Janiero Carnaval winner was on the front page of every newspaper at every newsstand.

WOULDN'T YOU KNOW THAT THE ONE TIME I decided to go out was during the time that my roommate Lara came home to get me to come out drinking with her mates. I found this out around 1:30 in the morning when Lara came home drunker than I had ever seen her before -- this is probably because I was sober this time. In her inebriated stupor, she managed to make some ramen noodles and sat on the couch with me to, with really slurred speech, tell me about her day. She passed out in bed, leaving me to continue my work while watching The Food of The Gods, a so-cheesy-its-hilarious B-horror film about killer wasps and giant killer rats on the Retro channel.

A bad sci-fi movie after an entire day in front of a computer, living with someone who obviously had a much better night than I did. Could I have been any more of a nerd?