When I broke my non-going-to-the-doctor streak a couple of years ago, it was a much healthier experience than when I ended my dentist office absence a couple of years earlier. I received a pretty much fully clean bill of health.

The one thing the doctor thought was worth mentioning was the fact that my Vitamin D levels were a little low.

(He did see fit to mention that, since it was mid-April in New England, this wasn't unusual. Vitamin D is related to getting sunlight...and that doesn't happen much between November and April in New England.)

Anyway, the doctor recommended I take some Vitamin D...so I do that now.

But that's not the New Thing.

The New Thing is that I just had to get a new bottle of Vitamin D vitamins. (Is that redundant? I don't mean it to be.) And it was right on schedule.

What do I mean by that?

Well, I like to play a little game with my vitamin bottle. The previous kind had 300 or so vitamins in it. I got it last May or so. And since I take one a day, I figured it would be around mid-March when I would need a new bottle.

See how that goes? It's like a math problem (at the beginning) and a memory test (at the end) wrapped into one.

(I play a similar game with the black garbage bags that I leave for the trash pickup. Our current pack had about 60 in it - which, depending on how many weeks we just use one and how many weeks are 2-baggers, will last us well into the summer..maybe even the fall.)

So the new bottle has just 100 vitamins in it. That means when it runs out, it will be close to my birthday.

And then I'll start a new game. Happy Birthday to Me.