Ok. I discovered that my ~/Library folder and all the folders under it had an extended security attribute the prevented everyone from deleting. I'm not really sure how I managed to get that set, but that's a worry for another day.
I discovered this by running:
ls -l /Users/<username>/Library
and is showed -rwx------+ for almost all the folders
Running the following:
ls -laed /Users
/<username>
/Library
resulted in '0: group:everyone deny delete' I'm pretty sure explicit deny permissions always override allow permissions so I removed this extended attribute by running:
chmod -RN /Users
/<username>
/Library
This command recursively(R) Removes(N) the extended security attributes. After this I opened iCal and got my Alerts. Then I Logged off and back on and opened iCal. No more old Alerts!!!! This also fixed my problem of not being able to reorder my dock icons and Finder Sidebar.
I hope this helps.