Aug 7, 2001

Dear Brieanna,

Not a lot has happened this week. We took a short vacation to Starvation Reservoir where we did some boating on the lake for a couple of days. Melanie wasn't able to go skiing since she is pregnant, but she was able to go swimming. Your brothers had a great time.

One of the hobbies that I have recently picked up is the Egyptian hieroglyphics. I've been teaching myself to read them, which is not as hard has you might think. The symbols are for the most part phonetic. For example, in English you might write the word "before" as a picture of a "bee" and the number "4". Egyptian is just like that. There are a couple hundred symbols that you need to learn, but only about 3 dozen that are very common. I'm slowly reading and translating the Book of the Dead which has been translated by many people. I also have ambitions to learn Coptic which is an ancient dialect of Egyptian which was around at the time of Christ. Many early Christian documents where written in Coptic. I'm very interested in ancient Egyptian religious texts because their beliefs closely parallel Christianity. I believe that they were in fact Christian, because of their strong belief in the literal resurrection. There are many analogs between the Egyptian gods such as Re, Osirus, Nut, and Isis, and God the father, Jesus Christ, Mary, Eve, etc. One of my ambitions in life is to spend some time in Egypt and to be able to read the hieroglyphics in the temples and tombs. I think that would be very cool - kind of like "Indiana Jones", without the violence.

I can monitor visitors on this web site and it looks like it's not getting any hits. This would suggest that you haven't found the web site yet. Oh well, God will lead you to it when you are ready. I've learned to be patient.

Love,

Daddy.