Welcome!
Be calm, everything will be ok, lol.
My steering is a bit heavier than I might expect, but my mechanic said there's nothing wrong with it. It feels awesome at speed, just a little heavy around the parking lot.
E-brake cables should be pretty easy to do, just a pain to get to. You have to take off the underbody panels (jack it up and support it . . . you don't want her falling on your head
). The cables are held in place at the rear caliper by a little peg with a clip through it (except mine, which has one peg, and one bolt, lol). Remove that, and the cables should be pretty easy to unhook everywhere else. There are little eyelets that the cables ride through from the lever to the calipers, these just kind of clip in. Just pop them out. The cables are secured to the lever with a small peg. There's a slot in the peg holder on the lever: with the cables loose, you can orient the cable to slide through the slot and out. It sounds complicated but it's pretty easy, once you get down there.
I realize there are mebbe more pressing matters, but this is the one I can help with right now, lol. I have the factory shop manuals, I'll check on the tie rods a little later. Mebbe I can email you some scans of some of this stuff . . .
Good luck!