Do you have a specialty at the Library?
I license and maintain all of our electronic resources and I especially love all the new streaming services we've been able to add this year. When I first started working at ECU I used to manage the slide collection - we had over 140,000 slides mostly focused on art + design of the 20th century. We still have about 90,000 slides, no one teaches with them now, though they are a curiosity to some.

How long have you been at ECU?
Since 1986. This is my last year at Emily Carr, what a year to end off during the pandemic.

Tell us a bit about the pictures of yourself!
I miss my friend and colleague Michael Clark a lot (who retired in 2009 and recently passed away). He was very camera shy and this is one rare photo of the two of us back in the early 2000s on the Granville Island campus. The other photo of me is with the famous mammoth of Bowen Island. Climbing up to see it was a major hike.

What do you miss about being on campus all the time?
Seeing my workmates and all the other folks I would run into around campus. The hum of students around campus and seeing all their work hanging on the walls. I also really miss looking after the library plants and watching them grow and being in the library on a sunny day, the light in there is just so perfect and I can practically see the plants growing. I also miss being able to run over to the stacks and look something up in a book or periodical. I also miss celebrating everyone's birthdays, we would always get cakes, cookies, samosas, ice cream or other good things to celebrate a coworker's birthday.

What do you like about working from home?
Not commuting. I have to get up really early, like 5:30am, to get to campus by 8am and I don't miss that one bit. But I do miss stopping at Parallel 49 on Thurlow & West Georgia to get a cafe & something delicious to eat on my way to work. I love the feeling of getting off the bus at Georgia & Burrard and walking around downtown and heading to the skytrain station in the dark at 7am in the winter months. There is something really satisfying about that especially if it's raining. I look forward to staff meetings on Zoom and for an ice-breaker we often have different themes for our backgrounds. I'm always intrigued by what my coworkers pick. We couldn't do that in person. Hanging out with my cat George, he's 16 and last summer he was so sick I thought he was going to die but he recovered and is living his good life.

What has gotten you through this past year?
Meditation, yoga, perfecting pizza dough, gardening, taking an online Polish film history course, drinking a lot of coffee, watching the fledgling robin outside my window being fed salmon berries by its parents.

If you could go back in time to the start of the pandemic, what would you tell yourself?
You are going to like shopping online for groceries and having them delivered to your door. Funny things can happen when you order groceries online. For example, I ordered 2 pounds of yams and look what I got - see the photo of the 2+ pound yam. Another time, I thought I was ordering 300 grams of brussel sprouts, instead I got 3 brussel sprouts in the bottom of a brown paper bag, how could the shopper have thought that's what I wanted? On the other hand, they must have thought I was nuts for ordering 3 brussel sprouts.

What could you talk about for a half hour straight, with no prep?
Too many things and yet I can't think of one right now.

Do you have a personal art practice/creative hobby you'd like to share?
Well, I haven't been painting or drawing, though I made this painting last winter.

Lately I've been growing a lot of vegetables and herbs. I was really inspired this spring by germinating all of my seeds, these are photos of tomato and cucumber seeds that I germinated.

It's so satisfying seeing plants that were grown from seed and I got to grow varieties that I don't find in nurseries. I also like to pick up the giant slugs out of my garden and fling them into the forest, these three were feasting on the cilantro. These are tomatoes I grew last summer.

What are you watching lately?
TV series: Signs, Transparent, The Kominsky Method. Films: Weiner Dog, State Funeral (of Joseph Stalin) and over the winter I must have watched 20 Polish films from the 1950s to the present day. Films by Agnieszka Holland, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Pawel Pawlikowski are some of my favourites. It helps to understand Polish a bit but I would be lost without the subtitles.

What are you reading lately?
Not reading right now, too much other stuff to do outside. Watching a lot of gardening videos on YouTube on how to grow vegetables upward instead of outward.

Do you have a favourite book or magazine?
No favourites.

What's a prized possession you have?
I got my 1984 Peugeot refurbished 2 years ago, it's a bit rusty but still rides like a dream.

What do you do if you can't sleep?
Listen to podcasts, this sometimes works but sometimes they keep me awake. If I'm really having trouble sleeping I take a gravol.

What's the strangest thing you've eaten?
White paste when I was in elementary school. All the kids all had little glass jars filled with white paste that came with tiny plastic spatulas and we used to eat it for fun while gluing our art projects together.