Anyone have a good explanation as to what is actually happening when the block is " processing "?
I obviously am not trying to outdo our Hero Members' amazing sense of humor

, however the 'dry' explanation is that once the block is found by the pool, the individual rewards are calculated based on the shares contributed by each member (applying in our case Slush's unique exponential decay algorithm to calculate the 'score' of each contributor). The output of this 'processing' is your individual share and reward that is added to your 'confirmed reward' and eventually sent to your wallet once you cross your payout threshold.
Cheers