At the Tulsa, Oklahoma airport, the usual routine of southbound airliners was interrupted by a trio of F-16 jet fighters. One by one they roared down runway 18 Left, climbed a couple of hundred feet off the ground, climbed sharply into the sky, then performed an abrupt left turn to head northbound.

A group of passengers waiting to get onto a Southwest flight never noticed the unscheduled air show, but the author of this site certainly noted. One F-16 had taken off from Tulsa just as the author's flight from Denver pulled into the Tulsa gate, and the other fighters took off while the author was eating a chicken order at an airport sports bar.

Of course, the author likes air shows, so much that 24 hours before heading to Nan Desu Kan, we'd been in Terre Haute, Indiana for that town's annual air show (got to see Skip Stewart but missed Jurgis Kairys), and we'd gone to the Indianapolis air show one month earlier to watch the Blue Angels and a neat Sea Fury.

We still go to anime conventions, even if our strange work schedule limits us to a lot of Sunday-only trips such as the one we made to Colorado. We got lucky this time, because Nan Desu Kan was pleasantly busy on its final day – busier on Sunday than the Denver-area event had been on Saturdays when we first started attending that event. We were lucky enough to catch a group of costumers in the rarely-done Princess Tutu school uniforms, a couple of Dir en Grey groups and some people in Trinity Blood outfits, one who looked as if she had been painted in Henna by Jan Scott Frazier.

Jan mentioned, by he way, that she already had begun recruiting singers for a new “Voices for” album, including Carli Moser and Brett Weaver, You'll be able to see performances of some of the fresh songs at the Sugoicon convention in Kentucky in November, she said.

One of the artists at the Nan Desu Kan artists' alley noted that the Colorado convention was one of his best for sales, and we had to stop and think about that. The best reason we could find was that there aren't too many anime conventions around the continental divide, with the nearest comparable events in Nebraska and Utah, so anime fans might spend more at Nan Desu Kan than at other conventions in areas that have more then one show a year. The Colorado convention has a relatively small dealers' room by the standards of this era's anime conventions, and that plays into the hands of those dealers because there's less competition for fans' dollars. On the other hand, Nan Desu Kan seemed to have more room for the artists' alley, because the atrium area used for the artists was cleared out and leveled. We saw the area and thought there would have been plenty of room for one of our photo sales booths – and people asked us if we were going to do that again. We'll have to consider that move if there's enough time and room one day.

We won't have that kind of booth at Anime Weekend Atlanta because we'll be at that convention for only Sunday, and we won't have the opportunity if we get to Tsubasacon in October because it'll be another Sunday-only trip.

We finished our Colorado trip by sitting in on the convention's charity auction, which had plenty of Devil May Cry items from the anime series' director and character designer, who attended the event. The proceeds from the auction went to a pediatric asthma research fund in memory of a son of a convention volunteer who died from asthma a few months earlier.