Running 2 operations at once

I don't know it this will help you in any way, but you could take a look at Protothreads library. I just finished a Protothreads package to the Arduino IDE.

http://arduino.cc/pipermail/developers_arduino.cc/2009-January/000456.html

Protothreads will make you run two things at once (well kind of..)
Please also take a look at the authors website.

Regards
Benjamin