Have you tried using the hardware USART?  It has a receive interrupt with a
buffer for the incoming byte.  It works very reliably.

Jen

In response to:

What i'd really like to do is use
some kind of interrupt, but i'm not sure how to go about that.  Is there a
buffer that could hold this serial information that I could just
periodically check instead of continuously polling the UART input pin?  I
appreciate any help that you can offer.  Thanks!

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