These are a few of my favorite things -- Ninja Ultima

Behold!  The mighty Ninja Ultima blender!  

Jamie bought this for me for my birthday (or was it our anniversary?) last year and I absolutely LOVE it.  There have been far more thorough reviews of this blender that determined it was as good as the Vitamix, but costs way less.  The most impressive thing I have to show is this video of me making the base of my green smoothies:

It would have gone a lot faster but I wanted to show what it could do even on lower levels.  I've actually never cranked it to it's max level.  Just never had the need!

This blender is absolutely amazing.  I make smoothies in it at least once a week and sometimes I throw in vegetables like carrots or beets and I only cut them as small as needed to make them fit (usually that means snapping a carrot into thirds or cutting a beet in half, just because I have so much already in the pitcher by that point).  The Ninja does the rest, completely pulverizing and smoothing out the veggies in no time.

You can even make individual smoothies by attaching one of the Ninja cups directly to the base, instead of the pitcher.

We lovingly named this one "Poopslide"
due to it's color.  Note: blueberries do
not turn smoothies blue.....

The only downside to making the individual ones is that you can't take advantage of the large tower of spinning blades, only the blades on the bottom, so it doesn't get as smooth.