In today's mail:

Yeah, Baby!

and thank you for not commenting on the Other Box.

So, as my kids have been furiously picking these off our bushes:

the first thing I made was this:

This is my sweet little wokerbee mixer On Steroids.

I feel so bad for my little mixer. She was, and is, a hard worker. I put her through her paces, and she always came back for more. She didn't even have a name, but I know she was a 'she'; no male could have blindly risen to the task (oops, no pun intended) every day as she has.

And now HE is here, dominating my kitchen. Telling ME what to do.

Just look at him, all businesslike.

She was all homey and sweet. He is just cold.

So I made friends with him today, over a blueberry cake.

And you know, he wasn't so bad. Turns out he can be very gentle when he wants to. He didn't crush any of the blueberries when mixing them into that very stiff cake batter.

He gets big points for that.

Ma would look at him and say, "Que Brute!", and she would be right.

So his name is Brutus.

I tested his mettle this afternoon, with a bottle of wine. (No, I did not challenge the machine to a drinking contest; I had the wine, he made bread.)

Brutus beat the tar out of 8 loaves of bread, without so much as breaking a sweat.

He didn't have a hair out of place, which is more than can be said of me when that bottle of wine was gone.

Those must be small bottles.

Brutus can make 3 batches of my Italian bread dough at once.

We are going to get along JUST FINE.