I also tend to access most of my Pi machines remotely using VNC.
Just SSH in then install tightvncserver (or any other VNC variant).
You then configure it to run a VNC server at startup.
There is a good tutorial on this here:
http://elinux.org/RPi_VNC_Server
Remember to run tightvncserver once to set the default password.
You can then access your Pi desktop from your main PC (laptop etc). That way you don't need to buy a new monitor (believe it or not, I didn't have a monitor lying around, so this was the easiest way to use the Pi...).
regards,
paul.