Out of Time!
Well, I discovered that a major part of the problem was due to looping through the # of bullets and blitting them every loop. This resulted in a drop of 7fps. I'll go fix it by having it draw when truly necessary, and hopefully it will up the fps to 33fps.
With this in mind, I don't think I can finish adding enemies or items. I guess I'll have to cut my losses and stick with what I have... climbing a glacier and shooting at icy boulders falling down ;-).
My development is being interrupted by life and I won't have enough time to add extra features in during the next two days. I'll just make a very cool menu with a fancy ui, tweak the graphics, and do other small optimizations. The game is highly configurable at this point, and I think this will contribute to its fun factor :-)