Thanks for your response. The AnyEvent->idle is definitely an interesting one to explore when you want invoke callbacks while your event becomes idle.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I wasn't certain how it would relate to AnyEvent->timer though -- my understanding is that the watcher can legitimately go off when my event loop is doing tcp_connect (and it is taking a long time) -- and I wasn't certain how to have the Worker thread proceed onto the next host.