Thanks, Sam that’s a good idea and might be the only way, unless there’s a way through another type of Cocoa declare to execute an action that is equivalent to losing focus to another app and then returning focus to mine?
Hide then show possibly, but that’ll cause your app to blink.
Thanks Tim. Yes I tried that and it works but does make it blink which is not the best solution. Would be good if there was another declare that did the same thing but without the UI blink! 
You could included a second application in your main application.
The first launches the second, which displays please wait for a moment or two and then quits, returning to the first.
Thanks but I think that’s probably overkill and that I’ll have to go with either your hide/show menuitem idea or Tim’s hide/show app blink In a world of imperfection sometimes art must imitate life…
Often in workarounds, there’s the ugly hack job, and then the ugly hack job’s elder sibling who fell out of the ugly tree hitting each branch on the way down.
Either way it ain’t pretty.