yeh confirmations can take a while.
about the confirmations, how does that work? do they take hash power out of the pool to confirm these?
so do we actually lose a tiny bit of overhead by being in a pool?
No lol
Confirmations are just the blocks created AFTER the one that gave you these bitcoins
So if the pool now find a block and your share of the reward is 0.5bitcoin well, you have to wait until 100 more blocks are found (by all bitcoin, not the pool) before these bitcoins become Confirmed.
It's just a safety measure that slush use to make sure that when people move the bitcoins to their wallet, these bitcoins really exist.