All About Pixar October 2019 Exercise Challenge

Congratulations to Twilight Sparkle for reaching Mike Wazowski Green and moving the team up to Lightning McQueen Red!

Occasionally Pixar changes movies for international audiences. For example, in Inside Out, Riley refuses to eat a vegetable. That vegetable originally was broccoli--but for Japan, it was changed to green peppers.

More Pixar trivia:

What was the first Pixar movie to be shown in 3-D?

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What does WALL-E stand for? How about EVE?

WALL-E stands for: Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth Class. The name "WALL-E" is also a tip of the hat to Walter Elias Disney.

EVE stands for: Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. Apple's Chief Design Officer Jonathan Ives helped design EVE.
 
Quick check in from London. So much walking. I feel like we're at WDW thanks to all the walking and queues. They even know how to hide queues - just like Disney. You think you're finally in, but no. But, it has been a blast so far - except for our cancelled flight from Charlotte to London which stole a day from our trip. Today we are heading to Windsor, Stonehenge, and Bath. I'll have to report back on previous activities when I have more time. Adding 870 more minutes. 2550/1860.

Thanks for letting us know how it's going! Too bad about the flight, but great that you're having a good trip otherwise.
 


For more about Pixar, check out The Pixar Story, a 2007 documentary directed by Leslie Iwerks (granddaughter of legendary Disney animator Ub Iwerks). It looks to be available on Netflix and other platforms. In a Hollywood Reporter article about the film, it says it took Iwerks six years to make the documentary as Pixar's story kept evolving as she worked.
i don't think i have ever seen it. I have to watch it.

I went for a run on tuesday so 30 minutes
wednesday i went for a 36 minute walk

Which seems to make my total for October 516 minutes
 


Happy Halloween! :maleficen :hmghost:

Congratulations to PollyannaMom for reaching Lotso (or Bing Bong) Pink!

To finish up our Pixar month, here's a timely story about Josh Sundquist, a motivational speaker and comedian who lost a leg to cancer as a child. At Halloween, he dresses up in ways that highlight his one-leggedness. This year, he's Luxo, Jr. with the Pixar logo!

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/one-legged-man-uses-disability-for-best-halloween-costumes/
I'll be back in the next few days to collect any last minutes. The team is only a few hundred minutes off of 100%, so report them if you have them!

Thanks for joining me this month.
 
We're back - complete with jet lag and asthma flare. Hope things are better tomorrow. 450 more minutes to finish the month. An even 3000/1860.

We were fortunate to have mostly nice weather so we walked a lot and climbed so many stairs. Clothes are baggy now, but unfortunately that probably won't last. The tube was fun, too, but it's surprising how much walking one does in London even with the tube system. Wish we had the tube system and a walkable environment here.

So my favorite thing the whole trip was Westminster Abbey. So, so beautiful and the history there is mind-boggling. Next favorite was St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and then the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula and St. John's Chapel at the Tower of London. Bath Abbey might have been a contender, too, but much of it was covered up with construction walls. I guess I really like ancient places of worship.

Stonehenge was cool, but I think it would have been best to experience it as the only person around. Likely that never, ever happens except maybe for a staff member or two, but that would be how I would prefer to spend time there. The zoo and the parks were great. We did afternoon tea a couple of times. Fortnum and Mason is my preferred department store to Harrods, though the Food Hall at Harrods was wonderful. We saw Wicked on our second to last night and now wish we had made time for at least one more West End show as this was the best showing of Wicked we've seen.

We didn't get to half of our list, but we so enjoyed the things we did manage to do and see. We definitely need a second trip over there, though I wish we could do a trans-atlantic cruise next time. We had the worst luck with flights. Completely cancelled and missed an entire day in London on the front end. Then coming home, we sat on the Heathrow tarmac for almost 3 hours while they repaired an engine. That was super comforting just before an 8.5 hour flight across the ocean. It also meant we had less than an hour to go through customs, back through security, change terminals, and speed walk to our gate before they stopped boarding our connecting flight home. We made it, but just barely. Had we not had global entry and gone carry-on only, we would have missed the connection.

Oops. Pressed post too soon.

So to sum up, we loved London, but we're not currently fans of American Airlines.

@sophy1996 , thanks for a great month! I will look for the documentary on Netflix.
 
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Also, if anyone is interested in the formula I used for calculating active minutes in London, I took the number of miles walked each day and assigned 30 minutes to each mile. Some walking was a lot faster than other times of walking, but I thought this would be a consistent way of assigning active minutes. So technically, we spent lots more time on our feet each day, but some of it was spent at museums and other points of interest so that was much slower paced but still counted in my miles walked each day. I don't know if it's a good formula or not, but it was easy to keep up with.
 
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@Twilight Sparkle, welcome back! Westminster Abbey is one of my favorites, too. If you like old churches, next time try to get to St. Bartholomew the Great (near the Museum of London and the Barbican), founded 1123. It's been in a bunch of films.

We saw Stonehenge on a special before-opening tour. That's the closest you can get to being there alone, I think. And you can wander among the stones, which doesn't happen during general hours either.
 
@Twilight Sparkle, welcome back! Westminster Abbey is one of my favorites, too. If you like old churches, next time try to get to St. Bartholomew the Great (near the Museum of London and the Barbican), founded 1123. It's been in a bunch of films.

We saw Stonehenge on a special before-opening tour. That's the closest you can get to being there alone, I think. And you can wander among the stones, which doesn't happen during general hours either.

Thank you! Will keep St. Bartholomew in mind for next time.

Your Stonehenge tour might be one that I looked into before the trip. It was a special access tour allowing you inside the stones, but I was informed it was closed for the season. Sounds like something we would have loved. We were alone at Woodhenge and able to walk all around, but I imagine that sort of experience would be even more impressive at Stonehenge.
 
Also, if anyone is interested in the formula I used for calculating active minutes in London, I took the number of miles walked each day and assigned 30 minutes to each mile...I don't know if it's a good formula or not, but it was easy to keep up with.

I think that's a really good formula! I'm a walker, not a runner, on the treadmill, and when I do a mile, it takes just about 30 minutes. :)


I haven't been to England in a long time, but I did see Stonehenge when I was there, and got a really cool, lucky-shot picture. I don't think I've ever scanned it (as it was back in my Kodak disc days :rotfl2:) but I will try to find it and share.
 
@softball chick, hoping you're having a great Wine & Dine weekend!

Thank you - I most certainly did! Had my slowest 10K time ever but I was 100% okay trading time for all of the characters I met and photo ops I stopped for. It was the most fun I've ever had doing Run Disney and I'm already counting down now until Princess Half Weekend!

Oh and MK changed from Halloween to Christmas while I was there...talk about achieving the ultimate bucket list item! :D
 
I haven't been to England in a long time, but I did see Stonehenge when I was there, and got a really cool, lucky-shot picture. I don't think I've ever scanned it (as it was back in my Kodak disc days :rotfl2:) but I will try to find it and share.

Here is the weird shot I mentioned above. Like I said, it's a grainy old disc print, but the light hit it just right, and I thought it was a fun effect:

451385
 

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