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Taidong Dec 1: First green firefly

Dec 5 Kaohsiung: Still wearing shorts.

Dec 11, Taidong: Ditto for Taidong, though track pants on in the evening. Just had my 5 family members come to visit and the weather was a pretty seamless transition from their summer in southern Aus. Usually there will be a gear change in the weather around mid nov but didn't eventuate this year. Fireflies continuing - not big numbers but a few around every night

Dec 15, Taidong: After earthquake clusters on Oct 26 and Nov 30, we had another on Dec 15 around 9.30pm - though this one took it to a whole new level. First came a jolt that was probably equal to the biggest quake of the Nov 30 series (already quite disturbing), but then came a much bigger one, just a few minutes later. Cupboards flung open, glasses flying out and smashing, things toppling in the house, hot water heater crashing down off its hooks onto the washing machine and smashing that, furniture moving a foot or two across the floor, a flash of green light in the sky, and the frightening sound of massive landslides in the mountain. It was 'only' a 5.2, but it must have run up a fault line very close to here coz it felt like we got every last decimal point of that. Strong aftershocks continued all night and not many people around here got much sleep. As this quake seems to be a sequential event, the worry is that we are not sure where we are in the sequence. In a normal earthquake that comes out of the blue, you at least have a sense when it's over. In Taidong city to the south and Dong He to the north, people said it was no big deal, so it was a very localized thing. Luckily no casualties but Tim's house was cracked to a point that makes it unsafe to live in and a huge crack opened up on the road down to Highway 11, just near where Romain and Lou used to live. Interestingly, if you look over the edge of the road where the crack is, there's a sheer drop off, which has always been there but i didn't realize how extreme it was. The drop-off is the edge of a large eroded crevice in which runs a small seasonal creek. I'd always assumed it was formed by some ancient massive rain typhoon, though i have never seen anything come remotely close to filling the capacity of the crevice. I now suspect it's a fault line and was in fact caused by a huge earthquake. There are a few of these in the Dulan area. Research shows that big earthquakes in Taidong do tend to be sequential events. Both the Hualien-Taidong quake of 1951 which ran up and down a fault line in the Rift Valley between Hualien and Taidong (12 6M+ quakes over a couple of months) and the Lanshu quake of 1978, involved a series of quakes or a period of significantly increased fore-shock activity. After a couple of days of quiet, we've had a couple of very faint quakes in the last few hours that didn't register on the CWB site, so i guess they are right under us.

Meanwhile, it's another beautiful day. Clear sunny skies, mid-twenties, and the forecast is for it to get even warmer. The rufous bird is back and spends half it's time fighting with its mirror image from the electric hot water system

Taidong Dec 31: Pretty sure that was the hottest year on record for Taiwan - monthly temps have been way above ave for several months and Dec was no exception. Had a mother duck appear with three ducklings in early Dec, but then a few days ago, another mother appeared with 19! No more earthquake activity thank God - totally quiet actually since the big one and it's aftershocks, though there has been activity on the border of Taidong and Jiayi