Android :: Moving Cursor Adapter Cursor Creation To Background Thread

The structure of some of my activities is a simple ListView with a custom CursorAdapter. The cursor is created in onCreate() on the activity from a SQLite database. The problem is that querying the SQLite database can be quite slow at times with lots of data (and let's assume I've already optimized the sql query as much as possible). Because it occurs in onCreate() on the UI thread, I get ugly black screens when opening the activity, which sometimes turn into ANRs, on a slow phone like the G1. I want to load the cursor in a background and show "Loading.." on screen while doing so. I saw AsyncQueryHandler used extensively in the framework, but this seems a solution geared more towards Content Providers and not application-local SQLite databases. I then thought of trying to load the cursor in a background thread, but realize that this might be problematic, as the CursorAdapter should be instantiated in onCreate() and should take a cursor as a parameter. The latest thought I had was to instantiate an empty MatrixCursor in onCreate() and pass that to the cursor adapter, while kicking off a thread/TimerTask to query the database. Then, on database cursor load, call cursorAdapter.change Cursor to the properly filled cursor. This doesn't seem very elegant and seems quite wasteful, however.