elinalives

[elinalives]

9/8/2025

Starting a bit later than usual with reading then going to work on my review until the evening.📚⏳🌞

[elinalives]

Look at my green onions!!!!! They've grown sm 😭😭 I'm a proud mum

I'm setting everything up for tomorrow's presentation. It's an international conference, and I already know this project from top to bottom backwards eyes closed sleep deprived handcuffed to a pole in siberia. But I feel like I need to study MOREMORE or else I'll just stand there 🧍‍♀️ and die or smt.

My thoughts don't make sense sometimes, it's just the anxiety talking. Lots of water, sleep and warm clothes and PRAYING PLZ FUCK that I don't lose my voice after 10min like the past... 3 times or so :)

I'LL BE FINE.

[elinalives]

sunday | august 3 51-58/100 dop

another weekend morning struggling with grad school essays in my favorite coffeeshop!

work this week was a mix of successes and failures, as usual – on monday i'll start trying to express my protein of interest, but i'm not expecting it to work on the first try.

[elinalives]

there is a co-worker here!

[elinalives]

monday | july 21 45/100 dop steps: 10.2k

the good news is that i know why 3/4 of my cloning attempts last week failed - the bad news is that it all came down to a single-nucleotide typo in my primer.

other than that, a pretty slow day. things are picking up later in the week so i spent most of my workday getting everything organized. ended the day by cleaning the kitchen & going for a walk!

[elinalives]

[elinalives]

Exam season is here and I have started cramming (and I have to finish another report)✨

why are exams in the middle of summer😭

[elinalives]

preparing for the exam 😓

[elinalives]

sunday | june 29 23/100 dop steps: 8.1k

sometimes it takes actually listing out everything i did over the course of the day for me to start feeling productive. i started the morning at a coffeeshop, spent a few hours on the phone catching up with friends, and made it to the lab to run a few (unsuccessful...) PCR reactions. throughout the day i managed a few hours of grad school research, journaling, and even a bit of meal prep for the week!

[elinalives]

6.29.25

Sunday cell care because I won’t be going in tomorrow

🧫 most of my new neurons are looking pretty good yay

🧪 DNA extraction from my neurons harvested last week. Sadly pretty low concentration, will have to plan how to improve next batch

🧬 split my Hek293T cells to prepare for plasmid transfection this week

📓 planned my day for tomorrow and started planning out the month since it is a very busy one

[elinalives]

20.6.25 (17/100 days of productivity)

starting to work through some of the maths summer revision sheets to prepare for second year. finished reading qos & started eos. also need to submit my DSA application & catch up on emails/newsletters i missed during exam period. the weather has been so good :)

[elinalives]

19.06.2025—studying from my mum’s office today!

[elinalives]

18 june 2025

my presentation went well, my advisor asked a lot of questions,, but I could answer most of them. he's given me some direction on what I should read next so I'm starting that :)

🎧 | flowering - lucy

[elinalives]

This weekend was disastrous. I wrote a 25 page report in a day and a half, followed by data analysis😭

at the end procrastination will be my downfall✨

[elinalives]

Bonfire again! This time with some chicken and pine nuts :)

I'm replacing reading on my phone with paper books again; so I bought some old ones, because it makes me feel more comfortable "ruining" them by taking notes and scribbling. I kind of love getting books that were clearly loved by someone, too; slightly yellowed pages and little notes taken by someone else.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray a few years ago, but re-read it now from the Oxford Bookworms collection (which is a shorter version; I bought it thinking it was the original but oh well). Finished in two days, and it made me remember how much I love, love reading. I used to binge-read series in under a week before, yk ... Gen Z's go-to phone addiction. I don't have that much time anymore, but I hope I can make reading paper books a habit again from now on.

[elinalives]

15 June 2025

Chem tech lab final went rather badly, so I made these chocolate-filled pastries to cheer myself up. Luckily it didn't affect my final grade much! I finished another batch of corrections for my thesis and sent it to my professor, can't wait for him to find even more things that need fixing... But in the meantime I have to focus on the next final: chem tech. Seems like the lecturer is cooking up something evil, so I really can't slack on this one. Some friends and I are hoping to take advantage of office hours next week but we're all kind of scared of the professor lol 💀

[elinalives]

14.06.2025—took the week off, so i don’t have many pictures to post, but enjoy this picture of the sunset & my new study space 🌅