[gandalf44]

Thanks whpalmer4, that actually helped. Not so muddy, I guess I needed someone else to jsut say it, so it was clear to me. I needed to realize the triggers for the notifications happen when, well, the trigger is hit :-). If I set a task ahead of it, it won't show.
Hence Brian's example in a different thread to set a task with start/due dates 2 min ahead, so you can watch the Growl notifications to see them work.
Thanks again.