34th Birthday

Because my wife's with her family, I spent my birthday alone this year. Yes, very sad, but I made the most of it by eating lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings and perusing the next door Barnes & Noble.

I found out a while back that there was a 74-gun French ship of the line during the Napoleonic Wars called the Trente-et-un Mai (31st of May). It was named after the Mecklenburg Resolves of North Carolina, though it only kept the name for about a year.

The Trente-et-un Mai saw action at the Glorious First of June (1794) and the Battle of Trafalgar (after having been renamed the Mont Blanc), and was one of two French ships to escape unscathed, though the British captured it later.