Two things:
Repeating events. Seems like lots of people are having trouble with repeating events in Google Calendar. If you go into the When section of the event details, there's a "Repeats:" select box. Options are "every month", "every week" and so on. Beneath that, there's a "Repeats every:" section. In it, you can basically customize the event to be exactly how you want it. If you have MONTH in the "Repeats" box, you can choose anything from 1 to 14 for the "Repeats every" box. If you have WEEK in the "Repeats" box, you can make the event repeat on any specific days you want.

As for the reminders: According to the google help page:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=37244
reminders are only available for your main calendar. Is it just me or is this bizarre?

Yeah the repeat functionality is very good in my opinion. The reminders thing is biazarre though!