Vitamin D

    Yesterday, circumstances, mostly the cold weather, caused me to take my walk later than usual. So I got much more direct sunlight than I usually do. Possibly for this reason, I cheered up from my walk a lot more than I have in a long time.
    It occurs to me that when people say that Vitamin D depletion is causing wintertime depression, they probably are wrong. Apparently, all the sunshine you need to keep your Vitamin D stores up is the exposure you get driving around a half hour or so per day with your face and hands uncovered. However, your body needs a mechanism to keep you from letting your stores get too low, so you get depressed if you stay out of the sun for too much of the time.
    It wouldn't make sense as an adaptive response if you only got depressed when your Vitamin D levels got low enough to be life-threatening. It makes more sense if the depression were a leading indicator. Or so I say; I stress that I have no training in this area and am largely talking out my ass. That's what blogs are for, isn't it?
    Meanwhile, escapist dreams are reaching a new level. I dreamed last night that some (imaginary) woman had taken my body away and put me into a computer. I find this idea very appealing at the moment. In the dream, however, I was not best pleased. For some reason, I was equally upset to have lost my skeleton and my liver. Very attached to my liver in my sleep, apparently.