My sister lives in the house from Lost. Sure, it's in inland California rather than in a state of non-Cartesian compliance in the South Pacific, but trust me when I say all of the layout, design and technical infrastructure in this duplex is straight out of a DHARMA orientation film.

Desmond's Hatch, not my sister's house -- I think.

Let's start with the æsthetic, which manages to combine precision 1970s technology with near-tropical levels of floral and faunal overgrowth in a manner unseen since the discovery of The Swan. Just like that (now imploded) research station, what characterizes my sister's house is the astounding level of attempted automation and design vision, which makes the ensuing decline of the property into a state of tropical semi-functionality all the more striking. A few examples:

The outside boasts all manner of ill-advised micro-scale Japanese garden accoutrements, including a great deal of deckwork which only advertises its decorative nature after you put your full weight on it. The resulting see-saw effect in miniature threatens to launch you back onto the suburban cul-de-sac whence you came, as an entire substructure of rotten and/or disconnected supports turns what you thought was a bridge into a deathtrap. This is all the more embarrassing because the wood is exactly four inches over the ground, a river-rock surface that neither myself or my sister has been able to figure out should have water in it or not.

If it's water you want, keep going around the side of the house, past where the ghostly imprints of ersatz Japanese-style light fixtures in the siding testify to prior lighting system, prior to their replacement by renter-friendly floodlights, to the backyard, where you'll find an entire pool and waterfall system partially installed. As far as we can tell, the concrete for this fishpond was poured, the drainage and pumping infrastructure was installed, but no actual water hookup or pump ever made its way to the site. There's something pretty creepy about abandoned swimming pools, but abandoned fish ponds have a decidedly less-threatening and more puzzling vibe. The Mosquito/Malaria Vector Control Patrol in this town, however, takes a dim view of standing water, meaning that any quick'n'dirty attempts to turn this into a reflecting pool won't fly -- there has to be recirculating flow, etc etc. Apparently my sister has conducted Schliemann-esque excavations into the soil, trying to find any kind of water hookup, but the results so far have had more in common with Geraldo's Vault than Lord Carnarvon.

Let's move indoors. Though the various research stations on the Oceanic 815 island may be linked by a closed-circuit television system, they have nothing on the 300Ω flat antenna wire that runs to every room in the house. Words cannot describe the range of emotions you go through when you think you've found a cable jack hiding behind a blank panel, only to discover after lots of effort undoing painted-over screws that you've actually got something more suited to Morse Code than HiDef. When the Wikipedia article says "However, for color television it has been largely replaced by..." you know you've got a problem.

But who really needs TV when you have the miracle of the tropics -- indoors? A BioDone before its time, this house has an interior, uh, dirt pit, in the middle of the living room. This "indoor garden" boasts a tree which, while probably quite charming in 1976, has spent the past 29 years growing just a little too tall for the living room. (For all I know, it started out life as a Bonsai.) Presently, it's more of a threat to the skylight than a comfort to any living creature under 8' tall. If the Dharma initiative was interested in flora instead of fauna, Jack might have been stumbled across this:

My favorite part is the water faucet on the wall, a few feet from the shag carpet. EZ rug shampooing! The wall behind the tree hides the central air conditioner, which gets a room of ones own on on a Being John Malkovich-esque floor of its own.

But the tree pit, despite its overgrown awesomeness, isn't the real reason for this post. That honor belongs to the other decorative abscess in the living room: the Fish Pond.

This aquatic artifact from the age of Aquarius contains the 3rd and 4th roommates, a non-negotiable part of the lease. If these Koi could talk.

The high-security device you see around the perimeter is an effort to protect the two residents of the Koi Initiative from the white-haired and terrible beast which roams the living room, my sister's cat.

When we first were helping my sister move in, there was an oddity which, even in this house full of wonders, stood out: the electrical cords draped across the living room floor to power the pool's recirculating pump:

Elegant this was not. We couldn't quite figure out why, in a house that had everything from a water faucet on the living-room wall to a pool in the floor, the designers would have forgotten to run an electrical outlet over to near the pool, where you'd surely need the juice to prevent the water feature from becoming an internal mosquito breeding ground.

So, taking my inspiration from Locke, I decided to do a little digging.

Sure enough, after pawing through a few inches of woodchips in the living room (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write) I discovered an ancient two-prong extension cord that had been entombed in the dirt a long time ago:

The actual head of the brown extension cord is caked in dirt, making it a bit difficult to discern. The cord disappears into a 1/2" PVC pipe that was embedded underneath a section of concrete flooring. Time to excavate the other edge of the path, in the hopes that the pipe goes straight through:

... and sure enough, there's the other end of the extension cord, terminating in an (unphotographed) two-prong, non-polarized plug. Which turns out to be the whole reason this electrical system was abandoned: at some point (in the what, eighties?) the pump was replaced with a newer, safer version that actually required a safer three-prong grounded connection. And the 1/2" PVC pipe just isn't big enough to allow a 3-prong plug to pass through.

...or is it? Though I'd never undertaken even the most basic of home wiring tasks before, I was sure we could re-use the original, DHARMA-era conduit for the new grounded power source.

This entailed a trip to the town's bizzaro Ace Hardware, which -- being in the middle of an agricultural college -- operates on a General Store model unseen since pioneer wagons last fought their way through Donner Pass. I have a feeling I could have gotten cattle feed and a bushel of oats with my electrical supplies, if I'd looked hard enough. But I walked out with only a "replacement power cord," designed to be used with tools that have lost their original connection (one hopes these aren't often sold to power-saw owners) and thus with a pre-made male connection at one end and a naked set of wires at the other:

This end, in all its unfinished glory, was small enough to inch through the original PVC pipe -- and luckily for us, we had the existing deprecated 2-prong cable there that we could use to pull it through. A quick (if nerve-wracking, despite the fact no electricity had touched this wire in decades) snip decapitated the old extension cord and some cheap masking tape from the move-in expertly (?) secured the new cord (left) to the retiree (right):

In this dramatic action shot, my sister pulls the new grounded wiring all the way through the conduit. Let me tell you, the atmosphere during this operation was as tense as a season finale:

Next to attach the female 3-prong plug to the newly-pulled cable.

Result: an electrical hydra:

... which, once assembled, successfully powers a test IKEA lamp:

After testing the new cord, we hooked up the pump and filter to their new, fully-grounded power source. The living room now has one fewer "death by electrocution/pond drowning" tripwire, but the æsthetics of the TV corner have been immeasurably improved.