Small update.. I PROMISE I will get to the rest of the stuff after this week.. but last night I drained what was in it.. the water came out medium brown in color - not as bad as I thought. So my heater core hose has a T-fitting with a cap half way to the firewall. I unscrewed that only to find it LOADED with gunk. I pulled off both hoses from the block and rinsed out some seriously nasty stuff. My guess is the Heater core was housing some of my problem. I ran a small bypass hose and am now running with no heater core.
So the test drive: It took a lot longer to warm up this time - I thought it was almost fixed til about 10 minutes in. then it got hot FAST. Like it hit a threshold. As I got home, the bypass hose that I made for the heater core was whistling, so I apparently did not get that tight enough.
more to come.