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Talk of the bay: Read local stories of juggling life

In Chicken Soup for the Working Mom's Soul, released Oct. 15, two women with ties to the Tampa Bay area muse on adventures in juggling career and family.

By Times Staff
Published November 4, 2007

Read local stories of juggling life

In Chicken Soup for the Working Mom's Soul, released Oct. 15, two women with ties to the Tampa Bay area muse on adventures in juggling career and family. Miriam Hill, a retired teacher from Clearwater, writes about how her daughter, an aerospace engineer in the Washington, D.C. area, talked to her own daughter, then a kindergartener, about scaling back her work commitments. Hill taught at Sandy Lane Elementary School; she and her husband, Jim, have three adult children. Jo Webnar writes about how she took her sons out of school for a "make a memory" day. Webnar, the mother of four adult children, is a freelance writer who lives with her husband, John, aboard their 36-foot trawler; they spend winters in the Keys and hurricane seasons in Manatee County. Her second book, Saving Tampa, about an FBI agent and a psychic working to prevent a terrorist attack on the Tampa Bay area, will be published in 2008.

Walter, Tech Data lauded for Web

Walter Industries of Tampa and Tech Data Corp. of Clearwater win kudos from a new investment Web site for their efforts to reach out to investors and the public. Walter scores a 9.5 and Tech Data a 9.2 on a 10-point scale on the "Investor Awareness Index," which evaluates companies based on analyst and media coverage, Web presence and public relations and investor relations initiatives. Go to www.investorawareness.comto find out how other companies scored.

Frustrated by insurance? He is

After searching for home-owners insurance and finding himself at the same dead end many others had found, Michael Letcher started Home Insurance Buyer's Guide LLC. A former Bank of America executive whose office is in Lake Worth, Letcher says the new site (www.homeinsurancebuyers.org) lists the companies writing policies in a given county, the company's background and what a typical premium would be. For $19.99, a buyer gets access to one county for two weeks. Letcher says that out of more than 200 companies that do business in the state, he has found 32 that write new policies. Letcher's main competition? The Florida Department of Insurance Regulation, and it's free at thewww.ShopandCompareRates.com Web site. Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty touts the state site, saying availability and underwriting guidelines "are business decisions that are in flux all the time. There isn't any way to have real time knowledge of who's writing unless you're the company that's making those decisions."

[Last modified November 2, 2007, 21:36:30]