I recently sent some Bitcoins from my local wallet, to agora. I am checking the block chain, and it has been over an hour without a single confirmation. Does this happen often? I have not experienced it before and am curious as to what is taking so long for a single confirmation to appear, much less the 3 required.
Well, I think you're an experienced user, so I'm going to assume you included miner's fees. Otherwise, it can remain unconfirmed for over 24 hours.
If you had the fees, then it's just caused by the mathematics behind block confirmation. This is oversimplifying, but miners have to solve cryptographic "puzzles" by guesswork basically. Sometimes they guess correctly quickly -- new block confirmed within 2 minutes. Sometimes it takes a lot longer for the correct guess. That's what's happening here.
The difficulty is adjusted so that on average, 6 blocks should be confirmed each hour. But just due to probability, it varies... 1 block/hr, 12 blocks/hr, etc.