Thanks again HackScribble and Minchinyon. Maybe my baud was too slow when I was originally trying this (57600). I'll scrap the byte array idea for now and give it a shot with loop and a flag. Might do a byte array in the off-chance I get an over-load on the serial buffer so I don't miss any data. Cross that bridge when it comes. It sounds like if I can get my coding up to par I should be able to do this then. If not I'll go by way of FRAM or SRAM. The 23LC512-I/P looks like an affordable 5V SRAM IC as well. Could be fun to do it that way anyways but hopefully uneccesary as waiting for componants to ship really slows down progress.
I'll update with progress or failure. Thanks again it means a lot.