I'm in the same situation. It takes me about 3 months to mine 0.01btc. Solo mining would be excellent. I don't actually know how to go about it though. The core client doesn't let you just mine now.
Shouldn't setting up a bitcoin.conf file with rpcallowip etc. and pointing cgminer at the ip:port of the machine running bitcoind / bitcoin-qt suffice?
If it does, please tell me how I do all of that

I am mining on eligius with bfgminer on a windows machine. If I can switch this to solo that'd be great.