Wow, had that exact same thing... very relaxing to play with and ended up working well for decades.
I have no idea what my first handheld was. I recall some crappy LCD games with a few different flashing lines to make it look like things were moving. When it comes to football though I recall "playing" with my father's electric football game which was one of these:
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I use the term "playing" very loosely as you'd set up the figures, turn on the power, and then complete madness would ensue:
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Garage sale? <scoff> I'd keep everything if I could. I've been forced (or just chose) to get rid of ton of stuff over the years for various reasons but between myself and some other family members we've still got a lot of great old stuff stored away. Despite not having done D&D type roleplaying games in decades, I still have my collection of Dragon magazines from when I was a kid and all my old books and manuals. My brother still has our entire collection of Nintendo Power, haha. Collections of action figures have sadly been largely gotten rid of but I've tried to keep some of my favorites at least. We still have a bunch of our old gaming/console systems as well and I hold a bit of grudge over ones family members sold or got rid of (despite the fact that they'd just be sitting in a box somewhere anyway).
When I started to get older and moved around more my physical hoarding tendencies transferred to digital hoarding and now I worry more about things like building the sufficient storage and backup systems and absolutely hate having to move from one system to another at this point. Looking at programs on old HDDs is painful as I wish I could just move some of the old or highly modified/customized games/apps onto a new system as they were and have them work as as they used to. Time and technological progress makes it so things can easily become outdated or unusable and old pictures/movies keep getting smaller as resolutions increase.

Digital music is one of the few things that so far has held up relatively well since the late 90s... except nowadays it's so convenient to just listen to almost any song online that my mp3 collection gets neglected and is rarely added to at this point.

I've been on a few interesting diets myself for health reasons (more often to either gain weight and energy or just get healthy after bouts of illness rather than losing weight) and could never do the vegan thing... I do eat some vegan and vegetarian stuff though as it can be delicious. Still, at this point in my life I need real treats to deal with stress, haha.
How is it that you two made a big deal out of not being around as much and I'm the one that didn't have time to check in for a week?

Kidding, glad to get the updates and sad to hear the real work starts so soon. Best of luck! The east coast will start emergency preparations for dealing with the looming threat of your arrival.