Good show. Looking back, was it easier than you thought?
Looks a little light on the rub? Pork can take a lot.
You did hit a stall, just not a very hard one to push through. That is where most get into trouble. They see the temps go down or stop and crank all the vents open to get temps up. Its hard to recover from that.
The best thing I have done is kind of train myself to slap the meat on and walk away. I rarely take temps. Once the kettle is to temp, I let it chug along and perform a little coal management if needed. With a snake I rarely lift the lid.
Jimmy: It was weird. I was pissed that I wasn't encountering the problems that I had before, so I could show that I had the answer. Instead, I ran into problems that threw me for a loop. I didn't tinker with the dampers unless I saw a dramatic spike in temp, and that happened once or twice throughout the entire cook. Otherwise, I rode the roller coaster.
I was checking temps for two reasons: 1. I was using two different digital food thermometers, and I used a pocket digital for comparison. The Taylor unit, actually a digital cooking thermometer for the kitchen, was way off when compared to the RediChek or the Taylor pocket digital. Also, since one piece of meat was slightly smaller than the other, I wanted to see whether or not that small difference had any effect on when the pieces of meat reached the "done" temperature. As far as I am concerned, it didn't.
I guess that it turned out to be easier than my first outing. I'm a bit nerdy about this stuff, and my stress levels are more due to my nerdiness than due to any environmental issues (temp, wind, and so on). I was comparing the temp as shown in the dome thermometer to the RediChek, and to the Taylor pocket digital, and the Taylor digital unit, to see what the difference are/were, the idea being that at some point I may not need the RediChek, and just use the pocket digital to check temp at the 1/4 mark,1/2 mark, and so on.
Finally, regarding the rub, my only concern was that the marinade contained salt, and the rub contained salt, and I didn't want the salt to overpower any of the other ingredients. Also, when I was applying the rub, a lot of it was going all over the counter, and some onto the floor, and I was trying to avoid a row with SWMBO about the mess I was making. As it turned out, I worried for nothing.