Ok so I had some food, and looked at some examples a little more carefully and figured out that the answers to my two questions are:

1. No
2. Yes

I guess if I want to put something in the higher block, I have to put it in a separate .hex file and write to that block. Of course I had totally forgotten that my bootstrap loader resides in block 1, so I'm going to mess that up by writing my settings there.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I should just give up on this thing and save everything hard coded, or if I should continue to pursue it.

I'm thinking maybe if I put the settings in block 1, spaced 64 bytes apart, and then point to each absolute address when I'm doing the reprogramming... Perhaps that would work.

Of course I'd still have to reprogram my bootstrap loader everytime I wanted to reprogram my code.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for alternate solutions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks.