I dont want anything to get in the way of receiving the serail data. If I interrupt to a timer, I may miss a character comming into the serial buffer. I have determined the serial data is more important then the data that will be recorded when the 30 second interval(or whenever) happens.
Also, I dont know assembly.

If I were to enable the timer1 and set it up to overflow every 30 seconds, (if possible), In order for it to not jump to the interrupt, I would set the PIE bit to 0 but check for the PIR bit to be 1? correct?