Smokin' and solderin'

We had purchased a 13.3 pound package of pork shoulder at US Foods ChefStore in Newport, Oregon on Monday to smoke to make pulled pork...

We had put rub on it Thursday night, and started the smoker on Friday morning. We learned a lesson though... the smoker wasn't up to temperature when we put the meat on. The chill of the meat made the temperature probe in the smoker think that the fire had stopped so the oven threw an error. We had to take the meat out and let the oven come up to temperature -- so this picture was taken when we had taken the grill grate and meat out and were "patiently" waiting for the oven to come up to temperature. We eventually got it on at about 10:30am. It smoked for about 4 hours and then Carl raised the temperature and it cooked for another 3 hours to get up to 204-205F. We let it "rest" for almost two hours and pulled the pork (getting the remaining fat separated from the meat). We weighed the final resulting meat -- about 7 pounds of pulled pork from 13.3 pounds of raw meat!

While that was going on, Carl was completing a wiring project on ambient lights inside Gracie. He had gotten wire connectors that were supposed to enable quick connections between two of these tiny 5-conductor wires, but, they didn't work - the metal spades just weren't positioned appropriately to puncture all 5 of the conductor wires. So, the 5-tiny conductors had to be hand soldered, and there were two places where wires had to be joined. He put heat-shrink tubing over the soldered joints. What a job that turned out to be!

The final product is really nice though, providing gentle light when we don't need bright lights on in the rig. We can change the color of the lights (and the ones on the left are, right now, the same pure blue color and the ones on the right, we're not sure why the picture makes it look different).

Meanwhile, I was taking an online driver safety course to reduce our auto (RV) insurance rates. Carl had remembered that the course took him about 45 minutes when he took it 3 years ago. When I got signed up, the online course materials said that the state of Texas requires that you spend at least 4.5 hours (maybe it said 5 hours?) taking the course. I am sure I've already spent at least that much time, and I'm only halfway through!!! But... it is good information, and I'm sure I'll gain value from it.