I have started logging my experiences with mining on my computers. My adventures with ALT coins and my earnings. If you are interested in reading, check out my blog.
MY BITCOIN LOGSA fun read. Always nice to follow a miner's experience through the different pools. I just had one comment, and that was related to one of your statements:
"After about 20 Hours (sleep for 8 hours and work for 12 hours) I came home to 0.0244958 BTC. That's pretty decent for my hardware, but I feel ready for some more regular small payments."
PPS is as regular as you could get for payments [paid for every share!], the limit being you can't continually withdraw extremely small amounts to your own wallet, which fits your statement. My only comment is you should be careful about pulling out significantly small amounts from pools as payments. This leads to a problem dubbed "bag of pennies", where you are unable to send your BTC anywhere without incurring above average fees.
With the way the bitcoin protocol works, the age and size of your coin inputs is what determines the fee. Being able to spend a 0.01 payout will take approximately 100 days to be able to send without a fee [according to default rules]. Multiple small payouts like this can induce even larger fees as the size of your transaction grows. On top of this, small transactions with many inputs tend to take longer to confirm, so spending your coins might take longer.