Lets see, 14th May, been awhile, not sure where we are up to, quick précis then. Dad is in full time nursing care, I am looking for work. The work search has become an issue, started by being forced into JSA a couple of weeks ago. and since the first meeting with my "Coach", who is a nice enough bloke, I find that although my outgoings are only about £400 a month, my income was about £400 a month, except that now it isn't it's less than half of that, quite how anyone, who has been caring for any length of time, financially you are stuffed, on top of which any skills you had have dissolved and have become a memory because you havn't had time to do anything more than read the occasional article. And your friends have their own lives, and you don't have the funds to see them more than once a semester.
The jobs I started looking at, though it took me four days to find the time to actually look, are all an hours drive away, the issue I mentioned earlier falls into place here, and the car insurance will be cancelled tomorrow evening as I cannot pay the direct, or any other kind of, debit.
The reason that I get so little time to do anything is that I am still trying to sort out the mess that my mum left their paperwork in, since my dad stopped doing it as his brain problems kicked in, though she couldn't see a problem, even though before I decided I would have to get them into some sort of semblance,  she sometimes searched for a few days for letters/documents, and never said if she found them, but she denies this, and doesn't remember, the searching she has done she blames me for, even though it involves files I haven’t got to yet.
The other bits have involved having to make all the decisions about her old car starting to become unreliable, and so getting a new car.
The new car, hmmm, another problematic area. all the controls are the same, same manufacturer. The big differences are; it has built in satnav and media centre, much more economic to run, frequently 70+ mpg on the motorway and fifty odd around town, and the gear ratios are different. The advice in the manuals is for the first 3500 miles don't go over 2500 rpm, mum seems to find that impossible, frequently changing gear at over 3000rpm saying that she lets the revs drop before putting in the next gear, doesn't work, damage is done! she also takes one hand off the steering wheel to put the indicator on and puts the main beam on, god knows what other drivers think, swerves across the lane/lanes when changing gear, its a lot like the new driver thing on BBC3 at the moment. everytime she goes out on her own or with friends I expect a copper to turn up/ phone asking if I can go and get her as she has had a small incident, though she is fine. I haven’t even mention the kitchen, she changes her mind every five minutes, but she doesn't seem to be able to visualise how the parts fit together, so I planned all that, and looking into wet underfloor heating to go with it. The kitchen currently has a tiled concrete floor, which is attached to the concrete garage floor, and during the winter we must lose tonnes of heat through it. Since mum spends a lot of time in the kitchen, the only room with a big enough table for her quilt making, it would mean just the UFH could be on instead of the whole house, hopefully saving her money. So I have been researching that and speaking to builders that do it, to get an idea of feasibility. There are the trips to places that she isn't sure about or that she can't drive at night etc
And at the end of all this, although I have said that the loss of the use of my car will mean it will be much more difficult to find a job, she has made no attempt to offer to help me paying for the insurance.

so, six weeks further on, which for a daily blog has something to be desired, and we are at a major juncture, I am a carer for about 13 and a half hours a day and eight hours off once a fortnight. My father is now at a stage where I am physically starting to struggle with him and my mother, who has him at night, just can't. The juncture we are now at is that we are going to be putting him into full time nursing care, and although we have generally spoken about this change, we're not sure whether he has understood what is going to happen.
This is going to be a big change for all of us, not just my father, my mother will be able to get on with her life, although she has been able to go out most days, she will now be able to go on holiday and have weekends away. I, will have to work out what I am going to do, much of what  did in my degree has gone, being unable to maintain the skills, so now I will have to relearn or re-skill not to mention find an income, since a carers income is so low as to move most into poverty. I have had to decide between visiting friends or buying a bag of ground coffee or a single item of budget clothing each month, pretty much a sad description of the way carers are treated.

Day n

How do I proceed with this?
I graduated at the start of the recession, couldn't  get anything and gradually drifted into caring for my dad, he gas a degenerative non communicative disease, and finally becoming his official carer.
It involves long hours, and the pay levels most people would associate with slave labour.
In some ways my mum is harder work.
My dad used to deal with pretty much all their finances, and when he stopped, and he didn't make a conscious  decision, he just started ignoring it and hiding the letters and bills, that we have gradually found here and there. I tried to let my mum take over, but over the last few years it has become very obvious that she doesn't understand a lot of it or know how to organise the filing. We have had numerous arguments over much of it. She couldn't work out where simple values had come from, leaving little scraps of paper with notes on, but not always with the original paperwork and sometimes notes on little scraps of paper with the right document and obviously what she had written during a conversation with a company, but apart from the name of whoever she spoke with the notes were a repeat of the document she hadn't understood.

So this is the ongoing situation, Dad is on a downhill slide of varying angle, and mum trying to manage something she only vaguely understood. I made her buy a cheap tablet so she could use the calendar to enter appointments and social events and I would know and vice versa for some of mine, this would allow avoidance of double booking etc. as she had previously used a wall calendar and a diary and hadn't always copied  between the two.

This is going to become a diary of the the day to day, boredom, of the 13ish hour day, for 13 days out of 14. Although Dad now stays in his chair without monitoring he hasn't always done, frequently standing up because he was uncomfortable or to get something, but he was falling more and more, on two occasions in particular he was injured, the earlier one he fell catching the glass tv stand and coming to rest on a decorated metal plant pot that, with a little more force would have split his skull open, and the most recent he fell on to his shoulder permanently disconnecting a ligament and tearing a piece of the bone off in the process, and such is his loss of speech that he said nothing about the pain he was in. We are now awaiting some physio sessions to improve the mobility in that arm.