It's not a colloquialism for something else. I mean "doing the dishes." I've take to nesting, so to speak over the past several months. This is most apparent in my inability to let a dish sit in the sink for longer than an hour. Tonight, I absolutely could not wait for a TV show to end...all I could think about was the small stack of 4 or 5 dishes that had been on the kitchen counter for 30 minutes.