how do I get reminders to work between ical and google calendar

I have searched and searched, read dozens of posts, and still have found nothing that shows how to get reminders to work in ical. One post said to disable all event reminders in the google interface-did not make any difference; setting them up in google-did not work; etc etc

Specifically, I am on a macbook pro, snow leopard, ical 4.0.4; my wife is on the same system, but using an iMac.

since snow leopard does not support the cloud, and mobilme is gone, we were 'forced' to use google calendar to sync events between our two computers; that part seems to work fine; most of the time.

But neither of us can get a reminder to pop up in ical, when the event is one that goes to google; if the event is one that is "on my mac", then those kind of event reminders do work.

this is not about syncing reminders; it is about me tring to make a medical appt event remind me a few hours before, so I don't forget it, like happened last week!!

Mainly I am expecting anyone that responds to this post to say, yes you are right, there is no way to get a 'caldav' event reminder to work anymore.

If anyone says "I found a way..." I will be knocked over :-) (but overjoyed); I am happy to use terminal, plist editor, or anything else, if someone can fix this.