Can any of you expert GLD miners answer a couple of ? Am trying to immerse myself in the machinations of mining and am learning a lot, but still am not certain of some things.

I have been GPU mining on a low end rig on 2 diff pools now for nearly a week. Getting around 275 H/s and I finally saw where I have a pending payout of 0.7 GLD this morning from the latest one. That is after 2 days on it. The first showed zip after 4+ days.

I have CPU mined another coin that is 1/5 the market cap and about 10% of the circulating supply of GLD and have received over 10 coins in my wallet. Nearly identical in price. Same time frame.

I opened a GLD node and have been running it steady since about 36 hours and last I checked see block 43440/43894 as accepted. (I guess that means about a 10% rejection rate?)

So, I guess my questions are:
1. Is there any flag that I can append to my node conf that will enable me to mine from there and forgo the pool? Or,
2. If I would be better off with going to another coin to GPU mine, take some extra receipts with it and  then buy GLD on an exchange?
(Power consumption is an issue here as well)

I don't expect to be hand held with this, just need some direction on what's going on so I can decide how best to use resources.
Advice?