In order to earn his keep around here while he visits we’ve been known to force my dad to perform certain tasks.  This time around?  He has to make ribs for us.  I’m a beef rib girl myself but the rest of the family prefer pork ribs.  But since it’s my house and I am a kind and generous soul I allowed my father to make pork ribs for everyone else as long as I get beef ribs.  Yah huh.  I did.

We were at the grocery store and I saw the cart full of beef ribs and I saw him looking wistfully at the baby back ribs in the butchers case.  It melted my stone cold heart just enough for me to say fine, okay.  You can have your stinking baby back ribs.

I digress… this rib night has been perfectly planned.  I’m making beans with lime and green chiles, my mom is making her amazing potato salad and my dad is cooking up the ribs.  We selected a date be paying close attention to the weather.  We made sure it was a night that Mike and I had no meetings, that my brother and sadimac were able to come over.  All is well in the land of rib cooking.

Except that it’s currently raining.  Buckets.  Cats AND dogs.  And it’s supposed to keep it up all day.  Guess who has two thumbs and gets to go put up a BBQ tent in the pouring rain?

Yeah.  This girl.  But I’m making my daddy help me.

9:03 AM Update: It turns out that one of our existing sun umbrellas was enough to keep the rain off the smoker, alas we haven’t used it all winter so dad and I had to clean out the BBQ chamber and the smoke chamber (No those are probably not the technical terms).  There was  fair amount of nasty wet sludge (yes that is the technical term) for us to scoop out.  I think it was successful though because my dad is out there right now lighting it up to get everything cleaned off a bit.  I can taste those ribs already.

Maybe I should stop that, raw ribs are probably not good for me.