Reading scale degrees

I have been having a very rewarding week as far as music theory awareness and depth of music reading skills go, but I haven't been playing a lot of piano. Though I've been good about practicing my sight reading daily, that's been about all the time I've spent at the piano.

But meanwhile, I've been playing my late-beginner repertoire CDs and following along on the score, but all of a sudden there's a new dimension of depth, because my brain has figured out how to see each note's scale degree based on the way the notes of the key's tonic triad line up on the staff (i.e. the way they alternate being line-line-line space-space-space line-line-line space-space-space as the eye travels up the staff or ledger lines.

This new "x-ray vision" is, I think, a result of the time I've spent trying to make myself read intervalically when sight reading, helped along by some odd little flash cards I made to help me develop an eye for where the tonic triads of each key lie on the treble or bass clef.

It feels like I'm doing a bit of math when I look at the notes on the staff and figure out the scale degree -- I'm not conscious of doing the calculation, but it doesn't happen quite instantaneously.  But it's clear that practice will improve velocity, so I've continued to quiz myself with my flash cards, and work on recognizing chord patterns in the sheet music as I listen along.