My very first post was a tribute to my Molly. It is important to pay tribute to my Brandy, as well.
Brandy is one of those friends where both of your souls are connected for eternity.
Bob and I are a blended family and that included pets. The dog he brought to the family was a silver gray toy poodle named Nikki. She was wonderful and became very attached to me – always by my side. One horrible day, a freak incident occurred at the stables where we boarded at the time and we lost little Nik. We had my Cocker Spaniel Shauna (quite old by now) and our yellow Lab Cara but losing Nik was really, really hard. I literally cried every day and after two weeks of that I told Bob I needed to fill the hole in my heart. We were set to get a yellow Lab puppy in early December but this was early September and I couldn’t do this for two + months!
Nikki
We looked in the paper and found someone with a large litter of chocolate Labs and headed to the foothills to see them. I selected the smallest female and we brought her home, sleeping on my lap the whole way. We put her down in the living room floor and she just sort of lay there…spread-eagled, Labrador style…and my first thought was ‘what did we get?’ I expected puppy play and she was blah. She had had her shots that day which I guess made her a bit lethargic.
The next day? Different story. Totally came alive and was absolutely adorable! Cara enjoyed her and they played constantly. I was loving, doting and devoted and Brandy connected to me, definitely becoming my dog. She was unusual, too, in that she didn’t chew carpets, rugs, shoes – like many Labs do. But, as she got bigger she did chew everything and anything on the workbench in the garage! [We lived in town then…uugh.] Well, I guess ‘chew’ is a bit extreme but she literally took everything that was on that bench – we’re talking boxes of nails, screws, hammers, screw drivers, wood..whatever!…and proceeded to strew it all in the side and back yard (using the doggie door as her portal)! Every day when I got home from work our yard looked like a junk yard!. And every day I’d have to pick it all up. Oh, we tried to put it higher or make it unreachable in whatever fashion but Brandy always got to it anyway! We have no clue how! One night we came home and found the cable out. I hate cable service and this one was always screwy anyway. I had picked up the phone to call them when Bob told me to stand by. 
He went outside and found that Brandy had chewed the cable wire out of the side of the house, for heaven’s sake! The good news was that Bob was able to fix it so we didn’t have thirteen hundred thousand days without t.v. waiting for the stupid cable people to get there. (Did I tell you I hate cable?)
And this is just the beginning of the life and times of this remarkable friend.