First of all good luck with this.
Reaching 1k is probably the best feeling for a beginning player.

I wont comment on the hands because I'm not exactly a cash game expert, but with regards to choosing cash over sng's:

I think it might be best to be bored for a while and grind your roll up to 1k playing sng's, and then make the switch to cash at the $50NL level.
Many may disagree with this but I think that the style of play you need to beat the $20NL games isn't really teaching you good poker in general. You'll learn how to set mine and play big pairs, but all the smaller aspects will generally go unseen.

Plus it's probably safer and lower variance to play the lower level sng's.

Just my two cents.