Just Call Me Mrs. Gadget

I'm really not a "gadget" person by any stretch of the imagination but I did find two nifty items this week that make life a whole lot easier...well one of them does anyway.

I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to look for a lampshade for my new reindeer lamp (I didn't find one by the way) but I came across a gadget that I had to have. You may have seen these already but they were new to me. Remote controls for your Christmas lights outside/inside. It came with two separate plug-ins that you put right into an outlet, then you plug your lights directly into that. There was one for outside use and one for inside the house. We put the outside adapter plug on the side of the house so that we don't have to go into the backyard, late at night, with a flashlight, to unplug Christmas lights. We just use the remote and it works like a charm. Believe it or not, we can stand in our bedroom and aim it towards the plug outside and it shuts the lights off! Howard and I just laughed and laughed over that one...after all these years of traipsing into the backyard to unplug lights! We can even turn them off while we're in the bathroom for pete's sake!

The other adapter plug I'm using for the Christmas tree lights. You can't beat it. Here's a picture of what the package looks like in case your interested in picking some up for yourself...


And here's the cute little remote that is now our new best friend...


The other gadget didn't work good for what I intended to use it for but it still works excellent on other things. Take a look at what this looks like...


It's a dual magnetic wreath holder. My thought was to use these on my front doors to hold my wreaths but it didn't work well on the doors for some reason. The idea is to place one part of the magnetic wreath holder outside on your front door and then on the inside of the door you match up the other magnetic piece so that both magnets are attracting each other. It didn't work so good on my doors but it works great on glass. You could use these on glass doors or windows easily. I used it to hang a wreath from one of the glass panes of my china cabinet. Easy as pie.

Have you ever seen either of these gadgets before? Do you have them?