Mining Primecoin with one server and no pool? Is it possible to mine with just one server (for learning about mining, not for making a living!) and one wallet?

I've configured a Ubuntu VPS on a server I had spare and run Primecoind. My primecoin.conf has a random RPC username and password that I generated but I haven't put server=1 in the configuration file. I'm not sure if I should/need to.

When viewing the information of the process running, I can see the following data:

Every 2.0s: primecoind listtransactions &amp; primecoind getmininginfo             

Thu Jul 11 22:43:27 2013
{
    "blocks" : 16149,
    "currentblocksize" : 1000,
    "currentblocktx" : 0,
    "errors" : "",
    "generate" : true,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "primespersec" : 7,
    "pooledtx" : 2,
    "testnet" : false
}
[
]


I'm confused by a couple of things.

Firstly, why does pooledtx fluxuate from 0 to 2 from time to time. Secondly, how would I now if I have successfully mined for the first time and if there was any balance at all?

I've got MultiBit setup on my Mac with a wallet ID available.

I'm just unsure on how it all fits together. Any pointers would be appreciated.
pooledtx is likely the number of transactions that are waiting to be confirmed by the next block. These transactions are broadcast to the network and the miners collect them to include them in a block. Since primecoin still has a really low amount of transactions and since your mining a reward transaction this will swing between 1 (just your reward transaction) and 2 (someone just made a transfer).

Since you have a fully fledged primecoin client on your system to be able to mine (primecoind) it will also generate new addresses on demand, and the balance will be credited to those addresses. with primecoind listtransactions you'll see which addresses received the mined amount. You can now use primecoin sendtoaddress &lt;primecoinaddress&gt; &lt;amount&gt; to send any amount to an external address, i.e. your multibit client.