Thing # 7...Goggle's not just for searching

My family is used to using Google tools for everything from Google Alerts to Google Calendars. My husband uses the alerts to keep up with football drafts, stock prices, and everything Texas Tech football. I took a workshop last year for using Picasa Web Albums but didn't really use it much because I use a couple of other programs for photo editing that I find to be more creative.
For my two Google resources, I chose a Google calendar and Google Alerts. (I can see using the alerts often just to remind me of special occations and birthdays but I am not ready to use the online calendar for my daily obligations because I just like having a hard copy in front of me everywhere I go.)

For school, I would like to try using the Google Alerts to remind me of faculty and student library helper's birthdays. Every year I make it a goal to remember these birthdays with a simple card or message but very often I forget to check my birthday calendar and I don't get the cards out in time. If I had these plugged into the Google Alert system I won't miss these important days. I will problably have the Google Alert set up at my home address a day earlier than the actual birthdates because I probably won't use it at school due to the password override needed to access the account. Actually, the best solution would be to set it up to alert my cell phone. I need to learn more about this service and figure out which alert system will work best for me at school.
I am going to also choose the Google calendar although I don't see using it in place of my hard copy calendar. I think having the calendar just for special events in the library would be very helpful.
While learning to use these Google tools, I had a very hard time getting my calendar on to my blog page. At first the calendar was so big that it didn't show all of it. I work for what seems forever trying to figure out how to get it to look right. Finally, I found out that I can select the size I want to display and once I knocked down the width, it fit properly on my page. I made the calendar public but I am not sure exactly how I will use it in my library. I did read something along my journey concerning how to get the Google Alerts delivered to my cell phone. I will work on that some more later.