>From what I have read so far, the various vendors all have
>a collection of IP that has most of the 'common' blocks
>already defined.  I may out grow the CPLD's and need FPGA's
>but at this point I need to start the learning someplace

Note that http://www.opencores.org/ has lots of IP, and they have defined an 
internal bus that allows many of these IP bits to hook together. There are 
UART, I2C, Ethernet, USB, CAN, Microprocessor, Co-processor, and a heap of 
others. One of the Micro cores is a 16F84, but IIRC for the EEPROM it uses 
an external chip. 

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