Singalong
songbooks
now online

Price slashed on
easy sheet music
for 365 favorites

$24.95*

Plus electronic templates
for singalong lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for 365 oldtime favorites. Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences – and we're finding that a lot of folks want them for their own use at home.songbook(A great help for beginning piano students.)

(To see a sample song page, click here, then right-click on the sample (several times, if necessary) and ask to 'view image.')

We now market and distribute our songbook, Sing Along with Ease, exclusively online: You order online with a credit card and we send you the book online via email for you to print out at home. While that requires a little work on your part, it eliminates the delay in mail delivery (often a week or more) and cuts the price by about half.

And we continue to offer a 100 percent money-back guarantee as well as unlimited technical support via email. If you're not completely satisfied with what we've sent you or how we help you via email, we refund all your money promptly.

The songs have been collected and transcribed over the past 20 years by the Hat Band, a family foursome of string players and singers who for those two decades have held singalongs at area nursing homes and senior residences as volunteers.

Marketed for years in printed and bound form, the songbook is the same one that has been used by the Hat Band in its volunteer singalongs. Any additional songs the band adds to its collection – it does so slowly – are sent out free to those who already have the songbook.

We also send out electronic templates of words to more than 240 songs that can be formatted into lyrics sheets. For volunteer singalong leaders, it's a great way to get audiences involved. For home use, it's a great way to help your guests sing along as you sit at a piano or with a guitar playing an old favorite.

To order Sing Along with Ease, use the PayPal button below. As soon as we are notified of the order (usually within 24 hours), we'll email you the songbook and lyrics templates.

Our money-back guarantee is based on the same sales philosophy we used when we marketed the songbooks by regular mail. Please see our entry entitled We trust you. (And please note that our attitude toward online financial transactions has evolved. We've found that PayPal has a gold-edge reputation for security.)

For any questions or assistance, email our site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com.

* The old price of the songbook that we printed and shipped by regular mail was $39.95, and the shipping, because the book weighed about three pounds, was an additional $5.79 in the continental U.S., pushing the total price to $45.74.

(To Canada, limited to air mail only, shipping was $12.85, plus a $10 bank fee for processing international checks. That's a total of $62.80.)

The new price of $24.95 is complete, no extra charges.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

This site is owned by Readersandwritersblog LLC, which is solely responsible for its content.

Meta

A blog to remember

September 9, 2007

alzheimers

I never imagined there could be a lighter side to caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, and then Kathy Hatfield and her weblog, KnowItAlz, proved me uninformed.

Not that it’s all fun and games being primary caregiver for a 79-year-old man with severe memory loss, but what Hatfield’s blog demonstrates is that a tender and loving humor can considerably lighten the burden.

Truth be told, Hatfield is something of a smart aleck. And reading her blog makes it pretty clear where she inherited this trait:

On a road trip in April, she and her longtime boyfriend, David, are discussing with her father where to stop for lunch. Noting that her father always has fun at Hooters, she asks him, “How about some chicken wings at Hooters?” His reply: “I don’t really like the wings at Hooters, but I do like the breasts.”

And then there’s the trip May 14 when the three of them are driving to David’s first-ever colonoscopy:

There were a number of jokes made on the trip to the proctologist, but I will keep them to myself as they are not politically correct. Although, as we pulled into the medical plaza, there was a big sign that read ‘EXIT ONLY.’

My Dad looked at David and with a chuckle said, ‘Not today.’

As witty and sharp as her father is at times — for example, he remembers the exact amount of his first paycheck, $39.10 — he clearly has short-term memory loss and often is confused about the activities and realities of the present day, including all the correspondence she gets about Alzheimer’s disease. He wonders if he has Alzheimer’s, but she assures him it is just a random charity she raises money for, and in fact she enlists him to help stuff envelopes seeking donations:

Now we are getting the RSVPs back in the mail and the question came up again last night. He said, ‘I guess these checks are for me since I have Alzheimer’s.’ ‘Ha, ha,’ I laughed, ‘if you did have Alzheimer’s, the checks would be for me, the caregiver.’

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should have a party for people like you — that care for old people without Alzheimer’s.’

‘That sounds great, Dad. Who shall we invite?’

‘I’ll come,’ he said with a smile.

Hatfield, 36, lives with her father and David in suburban North Carolina where she has a well-paying job as well as a home office where she can work if caring for her father makes it too difficult for her to travel to her regular office. She is an active fund-raiser, and her blog passes on helpful information to others in similar or worse situations.

Her advice to others acknowledges the seriousness of full-time caregiving:

I have come across lots of sites that have a ‘caregiver stress’ or ‘caring for the caregiver’ section. I always just rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Not going to happen . . .’ It’s the whole ‘if the plane is crashing, give yourself oxygen first and then save the person you are caring for’ theory . . . Well, David and I are back from five days of real vacation (no internet and no phone) and all of those corny anecdotes are true!

So here is another corny anecdote: Take some time for yourself, and enjoy. You are not nearly as important as you think you are. (June 25)

Most times, the humor bubbles through the darkness. In her June 16 entry, Hatfield quotes an article she is reading: “While aging is still the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, a number of studies have pointed to stress as a contributing factor.”

Her conclusion: “I am so screwed.”

And then there is a joke a friend sent her in July:

At a Friday night dance at a senior center, a very elderly gentleman (90s), very well dressed, flower in his lapel, smelling slightly of aftershave, walks into the ‘cocktail lounge’ section of the center.

Seated at the bar is an attractive elderly looking lady (mid-80s). The gentleman walks over, sits alongside her, orders a drink, takes a sip, turns to her and says, ‘So tell me, do I come here often?’

We’re sure that others love their Alzheimer’s seniors as much as Hatfield does, but she is able to express that love so well that she speaks to us for all of them. And that’s why KnowItAlz is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

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